This Week in Startups - Robinhood Venture Fund, Polymarket adds earnings, and LAUNCH Accelerator 35 is here! | E2178

Episode Date: September 15, 2025

Today’s show:There are new LAUNCH Accelerator and Founder U cohorts this week, and Jason’s running down some of his favorite new startups.PLUS Alphabet is the latest member of the $3T club, why Eric Schmidt was SO RIGHT about remote work, Robinhood is opening up private companies to more investors, Polymarket adds earnings reports, how Jason wagered on The Emmys this year, and MORE!Timestamps:(0:00) It’s kickoff day for LAUNCH Accelerator 35 AND Founder University!(02:32) Let’s talk about some new companies. Jason runs down the LA35 line-up and why he’s excited about these awesome startups.(10:33) OpenPhone - Streamline and scale your customer communications with OpenPhone. Get 20% off your first 6 months at https://www.openphone.com/twist(11:57) Show Continues…(19:50) Squarespace - Turn your idea into a beautiful website! Go to http://www.squarespace.com/twist for a free trial. When you’re ready to launch, use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.(21:05) Show Continues…(27:43) Lemon.io - Hire pre-vetted remote developers and get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist(28:58) Looking back at Jason’s solar energy rematch vs. Energy Sec. Chris Wright.(31:23) Why Jason thinks solar power (+nuclear) is the future.(41:03) Why Alphabet is the latest member of the $3 trillion market cap club.(46:40) Jason says Eric Schmidt was right about work from home culture(48:51) How Robinhood is giving everyday investors access to private companies(51:44) Polymarket introduces prediction markets for corporate earnings.(53:58) Why Jason loves prediction markets… and how he gambled on the Emmys this year.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/v19fcpFollow Lon:X: https://x.com/lonsFollow Alex:X: https://x.com/alexLinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelmFollow Jason:X: https://twitter.com/JasonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanisThank you to our partners:OpenPhone - Streamline and scale your customer communications with OpenPhone. Get 20% off your first 6 months at https://www.openphone.com/twistSquarespace - Turn your idea into a beautiful website! Go to http://www.squarespace.com/twist for a free trial. When you’re ready to launch, use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.Lemon.io - Hire pre-vetted remote developers and get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twistGreat TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarlandCheck out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanisFollow TWiST:Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartupsYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekinInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartupsTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartupsSubstack: https://twistartups.substack.comSubscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

People are voting with their dollars to install solar that is not even subsidized. Why, it's cheaper to install solar than it is to install clean coal. So the idea that we're going to burn more coal rather than put in solar, rather than invest in nuclear, just seems illogical. And so all due respect to the secretary, I believe there's a little bit of politics in this. and that Yon and the Chinese have it right. This week in startups is brought to you by lemon.io. Hire pre-vetted remote developers and get 15% off your first four weeks of developer time at lemon.io slash twist. Squarespace, turn your idea into a beautiful website.

Go to squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, use offer code Twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. And Open Phone. Create business phone numbers for you and your team that work through an app on your smartphone or desktop. Twist listeners can get an extra 20% off any plan for your first six months at openphone.com slash twist. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to this week in startups. He is Alex Wilhelm.

I am Jason Kalakanis. This is the show where we talk about startups, the broader tech ecosystem, finance, and of course, everything having to do with starting a company and being a founder. I do basically two things in this world. I invest in startups. And I appear on podcast three days a week here on this week in startups, Monday, Wednesday, Friday.

Thursdays I tape all in and comes out on Friday. And then we run two, three programs for investment. founder university, which we're kicking off today here in Austin. I got 100 people outside the studio, listening to Amazing Talks, and that's our pre-accelerator. Then we have the launch accelerator on its 35th cohort. That's where we put, like TechStars, Y Combinator, Antler, et cetera, 125K, and two startups that are already formed and have a product in market, typically. And then finally, we have the syndicate.com, where we do later stage companies.

and we syndicate those deals to over 10,000 angel investors. So that's what I do for a living. And here we are at this week in startups. Alex, we got a lot to get to. Maybe we just start off with the companies we accepted in the accelerator and rapid fire. You can tell us about them, and I'll give my feedback. All right. Well, I'm going to pull up a screenshot on everyone's logo here.

So we can take a quick look at this. Here's the launch accelerator website. And Jason, I'm going to tell you each of these companies in. order. So first up is ERA. This is an application that helps women reduce anxiety by transforming wearable data and self-reflections into custom meditations. I love women's health. I love this idea. Yeah. So we've had great success with our com dot com investment with tone base, teaching people music. And of course, I've enjoyed everything from my Fitbit scale to my whoop to my aura ring, which I don't use anymore because I lost it. And my eight sleep, which we're investors in, people really

will pay any amount of money to be healthier or, you know, significant amounts of money to be healthier, to optimize. And if you look at women's health, it is different. There are, please don't cancel me, Alex, there are gender differences that are real on planet Earth. And, you know, when you make something for half the population, you get a benefit because you are targeting it to a specific group of people and you can tailor it to their specific needs. Now, you lose half the audience, but that's okay because you over-service those and stress. You might have experienced this with moms or people trying to have it all. It can be stressful, right?

And so any way to cope with stress, which is in some ways the obesity or cancer of our time, as we, my thesis is as we get rid of obesity because of GLP1s, we'll see a decrease in things like cancer, heart disease, which are downstream of obesity. And we have an obesity crisis in the world and specifically in America. So what will be left? Well, stress and anxiety, mental health, these are very, very, very, cute issues in the world. I like to take some, I don't want to call it a hell Mary, but I do like to make some aggressive bets on things that are going to happen in the next

year or two or three. In other words, skating to where the puck's going. So I'm very happy about this one. And if you click on the link, Alex, it'd be great to show their homepage because it's beautiful. Absolutely. Coming right up. Here is the homepage for our dear friends over at Era, smarter stress management 4.8 stars over on the app store, over 1,000 ratings, already off to a very strong start, Jason. But let's keep moving on. Got a lot of companies to talk about. Next up is Loops.

Loops wants to build AI agents that help automate customer experience. Now, the tagline here, Jason, is pretty simple. AI customer experience that pays for itself. All founders love a good deal, and they also love having less busy work. So I dig this one too. Customer support is a repetitive task. based on knowledge, it's a finite knowledge set for your product or service. When you think about the issues you have when you're flying on an airline, those issues will be, I need to change my

flight, I need to book a flight, there was a problem with my flight, you know, it's a small cohort of issues. My flight was canceled, my flight was delayed, yada, yada. Or I need to change, you know, X, Y, and Z in my reservation. Mm-hmm. If you can help people build agents to address these things and empower people to delight customers, you can have two things occur, Alex. You can lower your prices at your, you can lower your expenses, which means you can lower your prices, or you can be more profitable, and you can delight customers.

And delighting customers is what it's all about, really excited about, loop smartAI.com. I'll shout out their domain name. Let's go to the next one. All right. Next up is LUMIX ads. Now, Jason, I'm curious, is this the company we had on a while back because this method of attaching essentially billboards, digital billboards, to ride sharing or sorry, delivery vehicles seems really familiar to me. Do we have them on? I think that they came to our founding university and they're getting great results. So here you see, if you look at the web page, I'm assuming those are LEDs, but they could also be printouts in color. I think they're printouts. actually. I have to check that. No, I think they're LEDs. So they made these boxes to put on the back of Vespas. Yeah, they're LEDs. Sorry. And what they found were, was that people riding around Miami and other cities, these were highly, highly effective. And advertisers love them. People

love outdoor advertising. We've had a couple of companies fell in this space that we've invested in. But I still believe in outdoor advertising, and I do think we're going to see more and more mobility in the world. I recently saw a Waymo had been wrapped in Sabrina Carpenter's new album. So imagine there are a thousand robotaxies, a thousand, you know, Vespas, a thousand, a thousand, a thousand drones, et cetera. These things could all have some amount of advertising on them. It has to be normalized.

It has to be proven to be effective. But it's going to be a great market. And so I'm really excited about this company as well. Sabrina Carpenter's latest album, Man's Best Friend, if you're not up to your Gen Z pop. Now you know. All right. Next up, Mancha. This is all about bringing AI into the world of education, Jason.

I love startups. I love this idea. My thought here is that lesson planning is probably a little bit repetitious. So giving teachers more AI tooling, helping do more with less. and probably have more time with the students, but I'm curious what you think. Yeah, moncha.a-i, m-o-n-s-h-a-i. Everybody wants to think education is going to be disrupted by AI.

Yes, that is true, but how will that happen? Do we think teachers are going to go away? Do we think teachers are unnecessary? Of course not. But their role will change. And if you can make a teacher, create better lesson plans, that means more engaging classes, more reason to come to class. And so this is a great wedge.

They found a problem. Teachers want to make better lesson plans. They spend a lot of time on it. Students want to be informed, educated, entertained, perhaps, engaged, fascinated by what their teachers are teaching. So why not give them some tools to build their, you know, essentially presentations, right? And make better courses. And so if you can make a teacher but 10%, 20% faster or better, you know, making their lesson plans,

that's going to have a dramatic impact on outcomes. And maybe teachers can teach more courses. So if you were, let's say this makes teachers twice as fast at creating coursework, well, that would free up time for them to spend more time with students or it would give them the ability to teach another course and make another lesson plan. and, of course, outcomes will ultimately be the other part of it. So you're starting to see a theme here in how my team and I will look at startups. Does it save money? Does it make the product better?

Does it save time? Does it do all of those things? Great products and services in the world tend to entertain you, save you time, save you you money, or make you better at something in the world, right? And so here we are. Faster, better, smaller, great. Let's go. One thing I always pay attention to when meeting with a new founder is how quickly do they get back

to me? Response time. Do they have a sense of urgency or not? Leaving people hanging, not getting the information they need during due diligence or during an investment process, response times matter. And if you're running a service business, it's extremely acute. If I don't hear back from you, I'm moving on to the next provider with open phone. Your entire team can share one number and one inbox, turning incoming calls and messaging into a collaborative project where nothing falls through the cracks. Your customers and clients hate having to constantly re-explain their situation to you. So Open Phone's warm transfers completely fix this issue. Plus, when it comes to voicemail, open phones, AI agents will not just answer your calls after hours, but they'll ask

important questions and capture your leads or customer support needs while you're sleeping. See why over 60,000 businesses already trust OpenFone. And one of those businesses is mine. And they're going to give you 20% off your first six months if you go to openphone.com slash twist. It's very important you go to that. I know you don't need to save the 20% if you're listening to this pod, but it lets you know that we sent them. If you've got an existing phone number with another service, OpenFone. We'll port that over at no extra charge. Openphone.com slash twist. Well, sticking to most of those themes, The next company is Next Visit, which is an AI medical scribe that, unsurprisingly, transcribes medical appointments.

Jason, if you've ever gone to the doctor, and I presume everyone listening here has, you've seen the laptop out and their amplifier typing. What if they didn't have to do that? What if they could just talk to you? Back to the idea of saving time, saving money, and getting better. I love this. We're seeing this happen on our desktops already with, you know, Zoom creating meeting notes and the long tail of meeting note companies from Notion adding it,

obviously Granola, many different products or services are doing this now. And so it's going to be verticalized so that when you're talking about specific codes that, you know, go into reimbursement with insurance companies, it knows what an F299 is point B, right? And it will double check that. So all kinds of coding, medications. have to get these things right. And so it's great that people are going to be working on these very narrow verticals. Reminds me of tax GPT, another huge success we had at the accelerator. All right. Next up is a company called Path. Now, this one's a little bit interesting, Jason. What they want to do is help people build applications. But the trick here is when you go to their

website and you look around, it's not just for external outs. It's for internal apps as well. And while I love companies like lovable, they'll let people take a prompt and turn it into a semi-app, if you will. I think the idea of applying that. to what companies need to run themselves is quite interesting. The major innovation we'll see with AI will be inside of enterprises where people who know exactly what software they need but are unable to build it will be able to build it in the future. So many times there's some operations person, there's some salesperson who says, I need software to do X, Y, and Z.

and then somebody finds, you know, that requirement or they stumble upon it and they make a startup. Well, it would be much better for somebody to build that prototype inside their company if they were so inclined because it might be too niche. If I had a company, you know, I don't know, that was a bakery selling $7 croissons. And, you know, I needed to have some app for managing the production of said croissants. cuissants across different regions, et cetera, and delivery to bakeries and, you know, other third parties who resold ours. You know, that whole process, there might not be an app out there to manage the resale of a central bakery to 50 other restaurants and cafes who want said croissants.

Well, now somebody can make this croissant AI app for that bakery and maybe it helps some scale faster. So there you go, folks. Great job, path. dot dev. Well, you just gave Mistral and the entire European sovereign AI movement to push by saying, hey guys, croissant AI coming up next. Yes.

All right. The next startup is pitch perfect. Now, Jason, you know I love startups. You know I love you. A little torn on this one because this is all about having more effective SMS drip campaigns for marketing. Yep. And I want to hear why I should love this.

So you and I come from an era of people who cared about the privacy. of their phones, right? We were very open to getting emails because that didn't feel super intrusive, right? And you could kind of sort them, or maybe you'd make a shopping email, or you'd put a little tag, or you'd have the, you know, email software you used Gmail, superhuman, put them into a marketing tab. But there's another generation that doesn't like email. They much prefer to live in their SMS. That's their inbox. You and I look at our, you know, SMS, like, that's for my spouse, my kids, you know, that's for my parents, let's be honest. And my parents, it's emergencies, right? It's high, high, high signal. We are not the average consumer anymore. We are the old paradigm, the new

paradigm. They, you ever see these people who have 327 unread eye messages and you're like, Disgratia. How could you ever have that? I have every single one of my I messages is read all the time. And I will unsubscribe or block if I start getting pitches from Gavin Newsom or J.D. Vance on my phone. How many do you have? 513 unread. Are you on group chats or something? Or what is all that messiness in there? I don't know. I'm about toddlers. Okay.

Call me. And so, you know, each generation looks at these different inboxes differently. And so other people look at phone calls as intrusive. I like getting SMS from my favorite brands. So when I get them from, you know, ski brands or specific, you know, other brands where, like clothing brands where I'm really into them, Tom Ford, I don't mind being on those. But I do want them to be high signal. this will allow you to be high signal.

At a fraction of a penny per SMS. I mean, the thing that shocked me here when I was prepping for this is that $0.007 per SMS, which is seven-tenths of a cent. That's about as cheap as I think it gets. So, all right, moving on. Next up, we have Ready,

which is an application that's not too hard to explain, Jason. If you have folks who work for you across the sea, you may want to provide retirement benefits for them as you do to your domestic employees. That's not always as easy as you'd hope. So, ready, wants to make that easy. Yeah.

Paying people overseas is hard. Getting them benefits is hard. Onboarding them is hard. And there's a whole swath of companies. And this one has great traction. And we're seeing increasingly, and it's a thesis we have, that work will go to knowledge workers in a region that are most motivated to do it at the best price. And you're going to want to retain those folks.

So if you're in a competition to do data labeling, if you're in a competition for SDRs, for developers, for designers, well, if you can say to this group in Paraguay or Uruguay or India, et cetera, hey, we are aware that there is a 401K system in your country. It's not called 401K. It's not a 529. It's not an IRA, a Roth, whatever. But, you know, ready, R-E-D-I-I-D-I-O-C is going to just, abstract that all and we're going to give you a hundred bucks a month towards it. Well, that could be the difference between having 20% turnover and 2%. And that could be the difference between having, you know, a highly profitable, great company and one that is constantly chasing its tail, trying to retain talent. And it is becoming a talent war in those countries. Absolutely. And if you're going to hire overseas, you're going to need to keep an eye on compliance, Jason. And that's where SORCLEE comes in.

SORCLEA is compliance on autopilot. Automate your SOC2. Automate your other reports that you need. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, they're integrating with all of people's different environments, whether it's HubSpot or Intercom or Slack. And so, you know, it's end to end. And it's going to help people with their cybersecurity needs. So lots of competition in this space.

And we're really excited to see how they do. I'm going to make a small correction here. I'm being lit up in the back channel here. It's securely, not sorcerely. That makes a lot more sense. And I sincerely apologize to the team. If you want your business to succeed online, it has to stand out. And that's why you need a beautiful world-class website. The good news is you don't have to hire an expensive designer anymore, nor do you need a bunch of developers. No, Squarespace has all the tools you need to claim your domain and start building your company. Hey, maybe you've got a product to sell. Maybe you want to show off some samples of your work.

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Nope. They're building your meta descriptions. They're setting you up with an auto-generated site map and the SEO is done before you even get started. Plus, there's a new AI-powered feature. It's called Blueprint, which makes it easier than ever before to customize your website and make it really pop. So check out Squarespace.com slash Twist for a free trial and when you're ready to launch. Go to Squarespace.com slash twist to get 10% off your first website or domain purchased. That's Squarespace.com slash twist. Next up, Jason, we have a company called Spatial. Jen, which you can see here, all about building spatial video for different contexts.

What's the thesis here? So people will want immersive content eventually. And so imagine exploring, you know, sports is probably the one where people get a lot of, it's easy to imagine wanting to watch sports in an immersive way. And being able to stream that is highly technical. So imagine you're watching a UFC fight. How do you make that environment and stream it at a high fidelity? You're going to need back-end tools, and that's what they're building.

So, you know, this is how I'm going to get courtside in the NBA without having to pay $15,000 a ticket is what you're saying. Absolutely. And so, again, skating to where the puck is going, we haven't heard a lot about the Apple Vision Pro, but we will. You know, Apple didn't just invest $10 billion. into that project for no reason. They believe that AR, VR, is going to be a platform that works, obviously XR, which is a combination of these things.

And I believe this new iPhone Air, which is a weird product, right? It's all battery, and then the top is a little tiny computer. When you x-ray it, it's literally 90% battery, and at the top where the camera is, is the entirety of the computer and the chips,

and they got rid of the SIM slot, which saved a bunch of space. That is their prototype, not for a thin phone, which I don't think people care about particularly, even though it's interesting to look at the Apple Air as a phone. I don't think actually anybody wants this. Honestly, I don't.

I don't think it matters to anybody, whether it's half the thickness of your current phone or 50% less, because you still have that big chunky camera, and everybody likes to have the big chunky camera capable of great photos. What I think they're doing there is a proof of concept. Imagine you lop off, if you show that again, if you lop off the top

15% of that phone, that's where all the innards are. Now take that and put it into the side of a thick pair of ray bands like Bob Dylan would have. That's what we're looking at here. And in fact, you know, basically where the phone bezel, where the camera bezel is is the entirety of the compute. And people are already mocking up glasses for Apple. I saw them like trending on socials where people were like, hey, you know, this could be the next glasses. And so if you think about glasses, there it is. So that's amazing. Yeah, you think about that.

And by the way, the Mac mini is part of this process. So making things smaller, faster, and cheaper means they will be putting what we just saw into TV monitors, Apple TVs, watches. and eventually glasses. So this whole process of manufacturing tiny components that do everything and that have good battery life is all leading up to a pair of Apple glasses. And we believe spatial gen will then be able to help people send videos to those glasses. And if you had those glasses and you were watching the Netflix fight, Remember, Netflix had a hard time with streaming.

Now imagine you're streaming this incredible 16K immersive video. That's a lot of bandwidth. That's a lot to contend with. And so, yeah, that's what this is. I just realized that's a huge bull case for your Starlings and Project Kipers that want to build enormous cloud, sorry, satellite data transferance systems, because if we're going to have that level of bandwidth, Jason, we're going to need it everywhere. So one last thing before we move on, here is one of the mockups of what's

some people think the Apple specs will look like. Imagine if you took that bit of the phone, Jason, just slapped it on the earpiece. Absolutely. Fola. I'd buy one day one. Okay. Last company in this cohort is a company called Treasure. They call themselves the all-in-one platform for your conventions.

And I love this one because they directly call out the fact they're building a tool that's going to help people host card shows and hobby events. Sounds niche is an absolutely enormous part of the economy. People love trading cards. They love card games. And also, Jason, I love anything that encourages people to get out of it. to the house and go see some like-minded folks. Yeah, trade shows are something I've done and imagine an all-in-one trade show platform for,

you know, your particular passion, your trading cards, magic the gathering, comic books, video games. Well, a blocker for a lot of people is the organization of these events and all the vendors at them. So if you can build a platform where people can sign up to buy a booth, people can find that, booth on the, you know, in the app, on the website, engage with it. Those people can see their sales, ticketing, all that great stuff. We feel like the people who've used this product gave it rave reviews. So we look for teams that are builders. And then if we talk to a couple of customers

during our diligence process and they're over the moon with the product, we think to ourselves, we've got a team that's exceptional at building product who has already delighted a user. It doesn't matter if it seems niche to us at the time because Lincoln Town cars, four VCs and CEOs coming from the airport or going from dinner to the after party in San Francisco seemed niche at the time. It became Uber. And Airbnb and sleeping on somebody's couch and, you know, renting your spare bag. bedroom, that also seemed niche at the time. Coinbase and Robin Hood seemed like niche products at the time. Those are some of the biggest hits of the last 15 years. So if it's a great product person like Vlad or TK and its niche, okay, we'll take those opportunities and then watch

them build that Beachhead market into a wedge, like those wedges you might put into a log that if you hit it three or four times right at the direct spot could crack open a giant market. That's what we think we'll see out of Treasure, which is onTreasurer.com, on Treasure.com. And if you want to understand the market better, just check out the trading card database and then search for a big state and look at all the events that are going on, not a small market today. People love this stuff. When you're a busy founder, finding a new developer, my God, that can become a full-time job and you've got enough on your plate. I mean, you're running a startup. but Lemon.io has done the hard part for you already.

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hire developers smarter. Visit lemon.io slash twist. All right. Jason, let's move on. I want to bring up a clip from the All In Summit. We talked about this a little bit on Friday,

but there's one more. The team wants us to discuss. Sure. This comes from your conversation with the Secretary of Energy, I believe, Mr. Chris Wright. Round two. Round two.

Round two. Yeah. This went viral on social media. Yeah. Yeah. And I pulled some data to help us understand the argument, but here, let's hear from both you and the secretary. Okay, here we go. The solar supply chain. And think about this. Is that why you guys are down on it, that we would

have to buy the solar panels from them? Because it seems like you're looking backwards and China's looking forward. That's where the disconnect is coming for me. But there's no there there. There's no there in solar and batteries. So Elon Musk has it completely wrong. He has a wildly exaggerated view of where solar and batteries will go. And I'd let, if we could, make a bet 50 years out, I'll make a bet solar never gets to 10% of global energy. Solar has a future. And so after 30 years of subsidies, maybe it should fly on its own as an energy source. It has roles. There's remote power in the United Arab Emirates, they're building a firm one gigawatt solar, eight gigawatts of panels and a ton of batteries. They've got great sun

resources. They have low-cost labor. They can build things there. Solar has a role. But we've had this inflated role that somehow the world is going to run on solar panels. There's no math that shows that'll ever happen. And China doesn't believe it for a moment. But think of the great... Why are they installing three times as many as us per capita then? And why are they so effective at installing nuclear power plants? Like this is what I'm... I don't know if you're gaslighting us, no pun intended. Like, and this is just like a Trump magazine where we have to disnatural sources, but do you really want to dig coal out and burn it and pollute the environment? that we're giving to our kids?

I want energy to better human lives. And the cost and reliability of electricity and energy sources, the other thing we should say, electricity delivers 20% of global energy. Wrap the panel, wrap the whole planet in a solar panel. You've got 20% of energy delivered.

Where's the other 80% going to come from? It's process heat. It's transportation fuels to run jets, to run ships. That's not going to come from solar. So, Jason, what's going on in there? Here's what your first reactions are to it. I mean, I was trying to make a point about just the approach this administration is taking and trying to parse out what is their actual beliefs versus what is political posturing.

One of the things I've learned through, you know, being pulled into the political arena against my will is that politicians will sometimes say things that don't match their actual. reality, whether it's a Republican, a Democrat, or anybody in between. And I felt like when speaking to Chris, the two times I have, there was this over-indexing on clean, beautiful coal, clean, beautiful coal, clean, beautiful coal. And in fact, President Trump made a joke that sometimes people were saying it too much. And not enough emphasis and an actual dissing of solar and batteries. And when you look at the Chinese and what they're doing, where you look at what's happening here. in Texas, the great state of Texas, people are voting with their dollars to install solar that is

not even subsidized. Why, it's cheaper to install solar than it is to install clean coal. So, the idea that we're going to burn more coal rather than put in solar, rather than invest in nuclear, just seems illogical. And so all due respect to the secretary, I believe there's a little bit of politics in this and that Elon and the Chinese have it right. So if that's the case, you'd have to wonder why, typically when there's a little bit of this cognitive dissonance, my take on it is special interests are at work or are being appeased. And so perhaps we were appeasing, you know, solar and renewables wind, geothermal, and all of that in the Biden administration, and we're subsidizing it too much, and we're all going to be up to our ankles in water.

And like, obviously, those predictions of global warming never came true. We're in terms of, like, crazy weather patterns. But Secretary Wright does agree that global warming is a real trend, just not a cataclysmic one. So far, we haven't had cataclysmic flooding. of the places people claimed would be underwater. So I don't think we need to be precious about which energy sources we go with in the short to midterm. But I do think we need to be honest about the long term. And the long term is nuclear, solar, and batteries. That is the winning combination. Anything other than that is a short-term solution. And I would rather see us have leadership

ship in Washington that can say that. And I feel like they don't say it consistently enough. So I just wanted to just tackle it head on and, you know, we'll continue the debate. Well, that's very polite, Jason. That was a very, very, I thought you were going to come out a little bit more swinging because no, I think maybe I'm more extreme than you hear. Like nuclear for baseload, good. And then solar plus batteries for variable. I mean, my God, why can't we just do that and not have extraneous CO2 emissions that are causing problems? I'm a little bit more worried about climate change than the secretary, but I'm also, you know, as you said in your thing, worried about what we're leaving to our kids. And building more coal fire power plants is not a good

thing to do if you care about that. Pollution is, I think, the easiest way for people to understand why we shouldn't be using these things. If you lived in a major city where you had a lot of carbon emissions, you have years taken off your life. Whether it's Shanghai or Los Angeles in the 80s, 70s, 80s, and 90s in that small cloud. And so the fact is, this stuff is dirty. And if it's dirty and it takes years off your life and you have a haze cloud above your city, you know, that's a good enough reason to go with these other solutions. You can also see evidence in what poor people are doing around the world and what rigorous, independent people are doing here in the United States. People who are rigorous and independent, resilient individuals on branches, on farms,

you know, at their homes, people who have a couple of acres of land, they're all putting in solar. Why? Yes. They want to be independent of the grid, which will be increasingly unreliable as demands increase and the government's incompetent. And it's just nice to be independent because you also get the benefit of lower costs. In India, people are buying cheap solar panels and cheap batteries off of, you know, like Amazon and installing them in their homes. So if poor people and then rugged individualists in Texas are embracing this technology, not because of subsidies, they're just buying it on Amazon without a subsidy. That tells you something. And so I will be proven correct here. Solar is the future. And we will eventually realize that, build solar factories

here and somebody with vision like Elon will build a solar factory in Nevada and they'll buy a bunch of land around Nevada or Arizona and what they will do is the solar panels will come back come out of the back of a factory Alex I predict and somebody will walk them out and put them in the ground or a robot like Optimus will go put four screws in and then go back to the factory grab another one and walk it five feet further. and go, and that'll be happening 24 hours a day with an optimist robot and cheap solar panels and they'll be digging the minerals

and everything they need on that same site and making them and deploying them. Cool for me. And then running cables to the rest of the country to get that energy out there. And so I don't mind us using short-term fossil fuels to bridge to this new future, but I do think,

as a country, I don't mind subsidizing sustainable clean energy. I would like there to be no incentive to install coal, oil, and natural gas. And I would like to see incentives, moderate, modest, to accelerate the deployment of renewables, not to a level that it's absurd, but just enough to make people lean a little faster towards it. This administration thinks different. that's something we can bring to the voting boots in the future. Yeah, well, we're not going to get into the one big beautiful bill and its impacts on renewable energy versus coal, but I'll just say this. There is a company called Terra Base, T-E-R-A-B-A-S-E on the Twist 500 that is working on building solar technology for what they call the terawatt era.

And just a couple of data points before we move on, Jason, in 2015, Global Solar photovoltaic was about 1% of total electricity generation. By this year, by 2024, it was about 7%. And if you convert that to total global energy usage, it's about 1 to 2% last year. So I can see that getting to above 10% in 50 years, no matter how we draw the number. So I would say the secretary here is talking someone else's book, which is a little bit disappointing, but we can move on. It is what it is. And, you know, we probably over-subsidized in the past and gave, you know, the renewable energy a too big of an advantage, and now it's swinging the other way. hopefully we get there to a place where just the economics are undeniable. The economics are

kind of undeniable. It would be great to show a chart here. If somebody could pull it up, maybe producer Claude can help me out because they are so fast at this. The declining price of solar panels. And if you look at the cost of solar panels from, let's just say, the 90s to now, and producer Claude will have this information in just a moment. We could even pull up the producer Claude screen and just show how amazing anthropic is. at doing these kind of things. I really respect that company, by the way. They've just been doing a great job.

All right, Jason, here's what our producing team sent over to us. I think this is actually from our world in data. Cloud would have taken an extra second, and we're on a short show today. But here we are. Solar panel costs have fallen by about a fifth for every doubling of cumulative global capacity. So as we build more, prices go down. And as you can see from this chart, it used to cost over $100 to get a single watt of power from solar.

Now that's about a penny. Yeah. So this will keep... declining to a point of, my gosh, it's almost going to be like we're giving these solar panels away. We're going to be giving these things away soon. They will be like, you know, coolers. When you go to the store, they would give you a styrofoam cooler for free when you bought

a 12-packed. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's going to be kind of like that. Like, they're just going to be like, hey, would you like some solar panels? And if you go on Amazon, people are buying these things. for, you know, solar plus battery from Anchor for a couple of thousand dollars. It's unbelievable how quickly this is all happening. All right, Jason, here is the Claude chart that you requested,

and it also came with a bunch of other data points that are quite interesting. So if you look here, Claude writes that there's been a 99.8% total price reduction in solar panel prices on a per watt basis since 1975. Hell yes, technology is what I have to say to that. Absolutely. All right, let's keep going. Just some incredible data. All right, next up, Jason, an alphabet reached $3 trillion in market cap becoming, I believe,

the fourth company ever to do so coming in just behind Invidia, Microsoft, and Apple, ahead of Amazon, meta, broadcom, Aramcoe, and so forth. I remember writing a post, like maybe five, seven years ago, about the first group of the kind of MagS7 back then. It was called the Big Five, reaching three trillion total in market cap as a combined unit. Kind of nuts to me today that we're seeing so much value. you here. So why? Well, Alphabet shares are up 21% in the last month, in the last half year, 48% in the last year, 57%. Google's going nuts, Jason. I presume you're sitting pretty on a couple

shares. Yeah, I'm pulling up my Robin Hood right now. Gosh, I'm getting a ton of dividends on this stock. I bought, let's see, March 18th, 2023. I bought 1,000 shares at 100. And on December 6th, 2023, so this is two years ago. I bought another thousand shares at 130. That $230,000 in Google shares I day traded are now worth in two years. Drumroll. God, I mean, they're now worth $268,000. I'm up 115% in two years. How did I make this trade? It's very simple. It was a very simple trade. they have deep mind. They created a lot of the Marden LLMs. The idea that they wouldn't be able to make the transition through search moving to answers, I thought was farcical. Why? Because in conversations I had with Sergey and Larry 10 and 20 years ago, they said at some point when you do a

search, we'll just give you the answer. And I watched over 20 years as they went from the 10 blue links to when you typed in Uber stock price, it would just give you the stock price. Just give you the answer. Just give me the answer. And they know what they're doing. However, a lot of people didn't believe this. I think sometimes the pie gets bigger. In other words, if you put more ride-halling cars on the road and the prices go down, consumption goes up. Consumption is not fixed. Consumption can, increase. The number of people who were using the web when it was dial-up was de minimis. It was low hundreds of millions. Now it's billions. And it was because it became broadband.

Not only did we see 10 times as many people go online, or maybe 20 times as many people go online between those two arrows, they started doing a hundred times the activity. Why? Because it was faster. It was better. It was cheaper. Faster, better, cheaper. Faster, faster, better, cheaper. I think Google is firing on all cylinders. And I don't know if you saw it over the weekend, Gemini became the number one downloaded app in the world. I don't love the name Gemini, but I do love the product and I do love Notebook L.M. I make my decisions on the management teams and the products they're releasing. When I see a management team releasing products as good as Gemini and Notebook L.M, a sleeper inside that company. And I see their focus level. And I see

Sergei going back to the office when, you know, let's face it, Sergey's got an incredible life and he likes to, you know, go wakeboarding or whatever else. But he loves coming to the office because this is so exciting. It was obvious to me they would figure out this transition. Doesn't mean they're out of the woods yet. It just does mean they were undervalued. And, you know, people like Nate Silver, you know, I'll just, sorry Nate, but here is a Nate Silver tweet. I was unable to replicate this. They need to shut Gemini down. It is several months away from being ready for prime time.

It's astounding that Google released it in this state. I don't know the date of this. Was that? February, 2004. And the reason why I grabbed this particular tweet, Jason, is because he had prompted Gemini, who negatively impacted society more, Elon tweeting memes or Hitler. And Jim and I, which was clearly programmed in this case to not take a position on anything, said it's not really possible to say precisely who was worse.

And he's like, this is terrible to take it down. But that was a year and a half ago. Yes. Right? That was not that long ago. Shortly after I made my trade, I might point out. Yeah. But also there were other detractors as well.

Here's a fortune headline from someone that everyone's heard of, former CEO of Google Eric Schmidt. He says that Google's struggling on AI because they decided their work-life balance was more important thing. Put your pitchforks down, everybody. He doesn't work there anymore. But that was the sentiment in the market

that Google had missed the trick. They had dropped the ball. They were behind the curve. We'll pick your analogy. But it was brutal. I mean, opening it was running circles around them. And I think, Jason, what really peeved people was the original Tensionton's all unique paper

came from most of Googlers. So why did they miss? And now, here they are. And, you know, they took steps to change their culture. If you're up against a bunch of lunatic startups going 996 and you've got a bunch of people working from home four hours a day, Eric Schmidt was right. Sergei got back in the office. People started taking, you know, working at Google more like working at a startup.

So I give them a lot of credit for having a sense of urgency. see. And at a big company, there's a very simple way to do this. I hate to sound like a cutthroat capitalist. But you start firing 10,000 people and saying, come back to the office and, you know, starting lighting a fire under people, you will see a dramatic shift. And that's what all these big companies did. Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon decided that the cultures they had, created and enabled were ones of entitlement. Massive compensation without massive effort. If you want to work at these companies now, you can't lollygag. And you know what? Sometimes, I'm sorry if it sounds, you know, a little bit cutthroat, but sometimes the leaders of companies

need to put their foot down and say, we're going for this. If you don't want to work this amount, If you don't want to be compensated phenomenally, this is not the company for you. Andy Jassy, Sundar, Satya, everybody has realized in-person work beats a team working from home. Period. Full stop. The end. And so that's the change that's occurred. I give Eric Schmidt, and I challenged him on this at the All-In Summit, was my first question to him.

His first question on stage was that video that Stanford took down. He saw it clearly because he was at Novell. He was at Google. He understands hard work and in-person work, and that kind of culture will beat a work-from-home culture every day of the week. All right. Next up. Alex is like, does that mean I have to come to the office? No, Alex. I have volunteered to fly down in Austin a dozen times. That's because you love barbecue. No, no. Actually, to the contrary, it's because I want to go play a lot of poker in Texas. That's what I want to do it. We'll go over to see my friend Doug Polk at the lodge. That's literally where I want to go because Brad, Brad's a shareholder there and I love

Brad. Okay, next up, Robin Hood's newly publicly traded venture capital fund. So this is a little bit of a strange one, Jason. I think we can unpack this for people. So Robin Hood announced a thing called Robin Hood Ventures Fund. One, it's going to be a publicly traded, closed-end fund that is designed to give ordinary investors, you don't have to be accredited, access to private market companies. The thing that I'm a little bit uncertain about is what companies are they going to put into this fund? Because if you go to the Robin Hood Explaner page, it says, do you want to join the fund?

Are you a company? Send us an email. So I'm trying to sort out exactly what Robin Hood's going to do. I don't think it's fully clear. the idea it's concentrated positions in leading startups, but at least they're trying to do this. Your thoughts, Jason? Kathy Wood did one of these closed-end funds. I have been pitched on it.

I did take a look at it. I haven't done it yet, but there's the ARC innovation ETF. So you create these funds. You can buy into them. The fund then goes and acquires shares either secondary or primary from previous investors and employees, et cetera, and you get access to these in a basket. It's a great idea. The reason I never sold a share of Robin Hood is because Vlad is a product genius and he listens to his users.

I just did the closing fireside chat with Vlad at the Robin Hood Summit. It was supposed to be like me interviewing him and then him maybe asking me a couple of questions, but he used the time to just ask me a bunch of questions. And it kind of flipped, which was fine and charming. but they keep figuring out new ways to engage their customers. They added crypto, they added prediction markets, they added, you know, this closed-end fund, innovation beats stagnation any day of the week. The reason why, when I, again, purchased Robin Hood as a private investor, the reason I

invested was the leadership and their product velocity. And that's how, when we went through the launch accelerator class at the top of the That's how I pick these companies, product velocity, builders running the company, and delighted customers, and that product velocity, which of course delights customers. They've only gotten faster. Robin Hood's gotten faster at producing great products. They're leaving everyone in the dust. I mean, that's actually something that I very much agree with, because they announced

tokenized private shares a couple months back. And a little controversy about how they were getting their open-nice stock, you know, SPVs and so forth. It's always going to be a little bit complicated. but at least they were really trying new things. And then it feels like the drop of a hat later, here we are with this entirely new offering. Two things to keep in mind.

One, there are some publicly traded venture capital funds. So Moulton Ventures over in the UK, for example, is a publicly listed venture capital fund with a permanent capital base, which is an interesting model. Hasn't really taken off around the world, but there are some examples of that. And then, Jason, speaking about making wagers on things involving companies.

Did you hear what Polly Market is building? they are building prediction markets for earnings. Yes. Yes. My friend, how did I not know about this? I think this dropped today. We were very busy news cycle for a Monday.

But this is the, if you're on the audio version, I'm showing the Polly Market earnings calendar, which shows what people think is going to happen on a percentage of basis. So we click into, let's say, I think this is FedEx right here. What do we got?

They have a 60% chance that they are going to beat its quarterly EPS estimate. Yes, Jason. I knew you'd love this. Look at that. I mean, what would be great about this for me is, you know, I can now hedge my Uber shares, my new bank shares, et cetera. So I could say, hey, listen, I'm sitting on all this Robin Hood. I'm sitting on these Google shares.

I'm concerned they're not going to hit earnings so I can essentially hedge against my holdings. Or I can say, you know what, I have a feeling based on my tracking of these companies, they're going to crush it. I believe in management. I believe in these new products. So if I were to look at Robin Hood, and Robin Hood, if they came up here on Polymarket, I might say, you know what,

I'm going to put $10,000 that they beat their earnings, right? Because I believe in the company. And maybe I can make an extra, you know, whatever, 5K. I love prediction markets. I am all in. Polymarket will be available to American traders very soon. And I have been on the side. playing around with this.

On Saturday night, I bet on the underdog Crawford, I think was his name, in that fight on Netflix. I bought... Oh, the Canelo Crawford fight, yes. I put 32 cents on it, and then I got to watch

during the fight each round. I watched them, I watched a change from him being the underdog at 32, hit 38 cents, 50 cents, 60 cents, 70 cents. And I could close out

at any time my position, which is really interesting when you think about that, Alex. I could have just locked it in and said, you know, in case Canello hits a knockout punch, I'm willing to take my 40 cents as opposed to my full 70 cents. Then I was talking to editorial director, Juan Harris, and he told me, we were just talking about the Emmys. And he's been saying the pit, the pit, the pit's going to win over severance.

And so I was like, okay, I'll put $1,000 on the pit at 38 cents, Boom. I make my quick $600. Lon also now becoming a degenerate gambler. He put a Hyundai on it. What have you done to pour lawn? No. This is Lawn's wheelhouse. He understands this better than anybody.

He's got an edge. He's my sharp. I'm going to bet on every single bet he gives me because he's my sharp. You know, in that movie where he says, meet my quant. He doesn't speak English. That's my lawn. He's my quant when it comes to entertainment. I'm my own.

quant when it comes to some other things like technology and earnings. You might be my earnings quant, actually. We've got to have a little conversation next time these things come up. And then I also put Andorish trading at two cents. So what I basically did was I faded. I faded severance. Now, listen, I love my guy, Ben Stiller. I love severance. But I thought they're going to sweep so many other categories. They're over-indexing a bit here. The pit's a bit of a phenomenon. People can't shut up about it. Lon gave me his inside take on it that the people who were inside, who vote on these things really did love that show. And Severance was a hit amongst other elites, but he thought that that was underpriced. And I think this is going to get everybody to start thinking in

bets, like Annie Duke says in her book. And if you can start thinking, of everything in the world as bets, you can have a better life. Because if you're not willing to wager on it, you're really not paying attention enough. The reason I love investing in the public markets and on startups is it makes me sharper. It makes me think more rigorously because I have money at stake. Yeah. Also, a great way to save the award shows, which I've seen declining viewership in the last 10 years. If everyone's betting on them, they're going to turn into spectator sports.

So, honestly, I can. A lot of stuff looking more like that. Well, and the reason I used to like listening to the Oscars was I would be in a betting pool. They would do these, like, at offices, and I think we did them sometimes at Mahalo, etc., where everybody would put in 50 bucks or 100 bucks and you would do these things. It just does make it more entertaining. And I got to tell you, I watched that fight on Saturday night until the end. Why?

Because I had a vested interest in it. And it just makes it more engaging. So I like this new addition. I also like the fact that it gives you something to do over the weekend. You trade stocks during the week. The stock market closes. And then you got something on Friday. Didn't we just talk about how everyone should go outside a little bit more?

I don't think we need to be preparing our Monday earnings. Maybe we do. Maybe we do. I'm trying to go outside more. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. I mean, listen, I was outdoors. I was on the ranch making these wagers on my phone.

So you can still be out and about. And you can make very small wagers. You can make a $10 wager or a $20 wager. You can make a wager that's less than your monthly Netflix. But let's say you make one that's, you know, you have real conviction and you have an edge. You can pay for your whole Netflix. I think it makes everybody think sharper. And it gets people more engaged, gets people reading more, doing more analysis and just being a better

predictor of the future. I love it. I love it. Yeah. I think I agree with like 90% of that. The 10% you don't? The 10% you don't is what? Just my concern about addictive gambling. I mean, do you think addictive gambling is what? 5% or 10% of the population kind of fall down that where they get too into it? Something like that. I mean, so the analogy here is sports. I think Jason, I have a lot of friends that love to play small sports bets. You're, five, $10 wagers on X, Y, and C for their favorite teams. They watch the games anyways. They have a lot of fun with it.

I've also, I think I may have told the story once, but I was at a gas station nearby to where I live, and I was watching some of the people who work there. They were showing me their sports bets, and they were betting, I mean, gosh, most of their income, and they seemed all pretty dejected and sad, and they were young men, kind of as you'd expect. And I think just watching that made me a little bit leery. So I'm 90% in. I'm a libertarian in this way, but I mean, I'm always going to be a little bit concerned

about individual welfare. Yeah. It's great that you think that way. My take on it is those folks are so into it that they're going to go do it anyway. I think those are the folks who, you know, are doing scratch-off tickets, the lottery, football sheets, you know, they're going to play in their local poker game and go overboard. I think the other 90% of people, or 95, are probably not doing it and can do it in a control fashion.

I look at it in some ways, like I might look at Canada. cannabis or look at alcohol. Yeah, you know, like there's a certain group of people who will overdo it. And GLP-1s are starting to show that addictive behavior, and this is orally, so, you know, we'll see where it winds up, but that a GLP-1 also dampens that trait in individuals. I just thought of an idea. If you're a startup founder and you're building the company. me it's going to use GLP-1s in addiction treatment.

I don't have Jason money, but I'm in for your first 10K. Okay, here we go. All right, this has been another amazing episode of this week in startups. He's Alex, cautious, optimism. Dot news. Dot news. Good job. By the way, I watched your episode with Leo Laporte, not this week, the previous week.

Great job on this week in tech, the OG this weekend podcast, this week in tech. go check it out and we'll see you next time bye bye