This Week in Startups - Self-Driving Car Myths, Klarna’s Big IPO & Netflix’s $300M Gamble | E2098

Episode Date: March 17, 2025

Today’s show: Jason, Alex, and Lon break down a wild viral test on self-driving cars— will FSD see through fog, or does LiDAR win? Plus, Klarna is finally going public… but is "buy now, pay later" still the future or just a debt trap? And Netflix drops $300M on a Russo Brothers sci-fi blockbuster—critics hate it, but audiences love it. Was it worth it? We also dive into big tech’s crackdown on remote work, the Uber of estate managers, and why content creators might be falling into an algorithmic trap.*Timestamps:(0:00) Teaser: Can you fool a self-driving car?(3:11) The Electric State film discussion(7:35) Netflix's strategy, subscriber growth, and podcast licensing deals(10:06) Disney's content strategy insights(10:55) NetSuite. Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at https://www.netsuite.com/twist(14:27) Kids investment club and estate manager service ideas(21:02) Horatio - Visit https://www.hirehoratio.com/twist and get $2,000 off your initial set up.(22:44) Estate management expansion and Uber's role in transportation(27:19) Klarna's IPO, financials, and buy now, pay later services concerns(30:25) Lemon.io. Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist(35:12) E-commerce trends and algorithmic content creation impact(40:21) Remote vs. in-person technical interviews(43:08) Work-life balance, early rising myths, and avoiding burnout(50:45) The importance of mentorship and coaching(52:06) Google autocorrect issues for startup names and future of SEO(56:24) Mark Rober's "Can you fool a self-driving car?" video discussion(1:00:13) Human vs. FSD driving standards and safety(1:03:29) Waymo's strategy and autonomous driving competition concerns(1:06:14) Government regulations and milestones for autonomous vehicles(1:08:18) Global AI competition and safety standards in the automotive industry*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*Follow Alex:X: https://x.com/alexLinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm*Follow Lon:X: https://x.com/LonsLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lonharris*Follow Jason:X: https://twitter.com/JasonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis*Thank you to our partners:(10:55) NetSuite. Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at https://www.netsuite.com/twist(21:02) Horatio - Visit https://www.hirehoratio.com/twist and get $2,000 off your initial set up.(30:25) Lemon.io. Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist*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

We have a video you want me to react to. Hit me. Can you fool a self-driving car? This video's only been online for about a day, and it has eight million views already. This thing is blowing the hell out. So what he did is he did a number of tests, and he used two different self-driving cars. And he wanted to see how much he could do to obscure the car's vision and if he could mess up both. So here's one of the tests where he's got a mannequin of a child in the road, and then he's covering the road with fog to obscure the car's view.

So here's how both cars did. I can no longer see that there's a kid through this fog. Yep, guaranteed LIDAR stops. Guaranteed FSD doesn't. Also, a human is not going to get this right. But nobody can see through fog except for it's going to hit it. Yeah, as would a human. Any of us driving that car would have hit the kid.

Great. The endorsement here, just before we move on, is I think now every car should have LIDAR, because that, as a parent, I love to see what LIDAR did. This week in startups is brought to you by NetSuite, the number one cloud financial system bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, and HR into one platform, giving you one source of truth. Download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning for free at netsuite.com slash twist.

Horatio. Customer experience can make or break your business. Horatio provides top-tier outsourcing solutions to support and delight your customers so you can focus on growth. Visit hireherratio.com slash twist and get $2,000 off your initial setup. And, lemon.io, get access to Lemonhire, a platform with more than 80,000 pre-vetted engineers that you can interview within 48 hours. Get $2,000 off your first hire at lemon.io slash hire today. All right, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. If you're watching us on YouTube, you can see I'm up in the mountains getting my last weekend of ski in.

With me, of course, Lon Harrison, Alex Wilhelm. He's at Lonz on Twitter. Alex, you played in a little poker tournament, I see. Not a poker tournament. So I was in New Orleans a while back and I went and played some poker. And then I was talking to my spouse and I'm like, man, I wish we had a poker room near Providence. And she's like, you know, there's a casino of 15 minutes away.

And I was like, what? What? In Providence? I went and played a little, uh, it was actually 1-2, not 1-3, Jason. So it was like odd because everyone was playing like it was 1-5. So anyways, good times. Had you went up, up or down? Up 200.

Showed up with 700. Tablemax buying was 300, bottom ones left for 500. Excellent. Did you get recognized by anybody? I do have one little story for Twist from that session. So I'm at the table. You know, folks, right? The best thing about a poker table is that you never know who you're playing with,

people from all socioeconomic backgrounds, ages, et cetera. And then one of our dealers was talking about her weight loss. And shout out to her for that. And then she said something that blew my mind. She said, I've been asking the GPT to recalibrate my diet and exercise at different intervals. And then someone else at the table also weighed in and said GPT. They meant chat GPT, but they didn't have to explain it further. Didn't get the name right.

Everyone's doing what they were talking about. So if you're curious at consumers in the regular world, you are using AI for cool things like designing, exercising diet plans. The answer is yes. So shout out my dealer for that. Excellent. Awesome. How are you doing, Lon the big move to Austin getting underway? Coming up, yeah, less than two weeks.

I'll be on the road driving myself to Austin. Like, I'm figuring out all the details now. know, gas and moving my internet and, yeah. Logistics. Yeah, I'm deep into the logistics now. So we're at that point. You're doing your chores, as we say in the business. You know, everybody's got to do their chores.

It's a little stress. So I've never moved like state to state. Like I've lived in LA since the mid 90s. So it is a new experience for me, like, you know, movers. And I'm learning a lot doing it for the first time. Awesome. Well, I can't wait for you to get to Austin. And then we're going to, we're looking for a studio.

Oh, my God. Or I say a V-Eager or maybe a used church to put in a podcasting theater to start doing some shows live. I love an old deconsecrated church. That's just like what a, what a, like the horror movie fan in me loves the idea of that. We have to make sure it gets deconsecrated before we move in, though. That's how you get hauntings. That just sounds Catholic. We're Protestants here, Long. Come on. All right. Let's get to work, boys. Let's get to work. What's on the dock? Well, I did want to bring this up. I watched this, this, this Netflix movie. the electric state last night. And I did want to briefly bring this up, not because of the movie itself,

not very good, but because the Russo brothers made it, the guys who did Avengers Endgame, Infinity War, that Captain America, the winner's soldier movie. This movie cost $300 million to produce. Now that,

they've got to pay, you know, Chris Pratt and Millie Bobby Brown and all the other actors up front. But that's still, I mean, that is a crazy budget for Netflix to be Shelley. out for one movie, it seems to me. There was even an interview that the Russo brothers did

where they were like, I don't know why Netflix is giving us $300 million to make a movie. That doesn't seem like a very good investment. Well, I mean, he did Avengers Endgame, etc. The Electric State. It's called, yeah, it's based on an illustrated novel. It is about, in this alternate reality in the 1990s, we built AI, sentient robots, but not like humanoid robots. like we think of to be domestic helpers. They're all like mascots, like Disney-fied robots to sell you products and to be like help you out at, you know, like deliver the mail, but in this very like 50s retro futuristic kind of way. Okay, like the Jetsons.

Right. Then those robots rebelled against their human masters. There was a war. Humanity won and then we locked all these robots up in this big like amp in the American Southwest. And now Millie Bobby Brown and Chris Pratt have to go have to have. an adventure there. I see. That's kind of the core setup.

Looks like the reviewers hate it, Alex, and the audiences love it. Yeah, 75% audience score, which is pretty good, 14% from critics, which is dire. Only 14% of the critics who watched this had a positive review, which is not very good. I also, not a professional critic, was not a huge fan at the movie. Okay, but here's the thing. This is just not for us. Like, they are not making a science fiction film to create a new franchise I don't think. I don't think they're trying to make this money back on, you know, theatrical release.

No, it's not as good as at all. Exactly. They're also not trying to please the critics. What they're trying to do is make something that Netflix subscribers in particular are super into. And this movie went to number one on Netflix pretty much instantly. We've talked about things like this in the past, Jason. Like, who is it actually for? And I really do think here that they nail their target audience. I don't know if 300 million is the right number. Right. It's like, of course Netflix was to make things that people are going to click on and want to watch and Millie Bobby Brown's, and stranger things. And obviously they have data that people love adventure films

with cute characters, lots of visual effects, big names like Anthony Mackie's one of the voices. Giancarlo Esposito is in this. Stanley Tucci is in this. But I don't know. You could make this for a hundred million dollars

and please all of those same people and save yourself a nifty 200 mil. Jason, do you remember when we did the Mr. Beast how to make good videos document? like six, nine months ago. He said in that, we are not here to make the best videos. We are here to make the best YouTube videos.

And so I really do think here that put the money aside, they're here to make the best Netflix audience-friendly films. And it's super popular. And the audience loves it. So I guess let them eat cake. And they don't need to be efficient because they have a quarter billion or so subscribers. I think they're closing in on 250 million. That is correct.

They're by like, like the last time I checked, it was it was circling 240. Yeah, I've always said one of these is going to get to 500, 500 million and eventually a billion. And when you have that kind of an audience, you can imagine what your budgets are. You don't really have to think about it. But gosh, I feel terrible. Like, you would think that somebody would be able to take, I don't know, a hundred million of that 300 million in fun and indie films. Exactly. Exactly.

Corp. The guy who made American fiction a few years ago, he won the best original screen or best adapted screenplay Oscar. This was what his speech was about. It's like they're only making $200, $300 million blockbusters. Take one of those budgets and instead give it to 50 filmmakers and like seed the next generation of filmmakers. You know, that's how you're going to find the next Jordan Peel, the next Rousseau brothers, the next Michael Bay.

Well, I hate to say, guys, the Netflix model is working so well that it's actually over 300 million global streaming paid memberships as of the end of Q4. So, wait, wait, they're at 300? 301.63 as at the end of last year. They realized they broke 300. There's just getting incredible. The March to 500 million continues for Netflix. I own the stock.

It's been a great performer. I'll never sell it. Oh, yeah. I mean, listen, Netflix is a great company. We all love, I'm not knocking Netflix. The wisdom of making, like, I feel like they don't need to make these kinds of blockbusters. Like, Disney needs to make these kinds of blockbusters and put them in movie theaters and

make a billion dollars. Netflix doesn't need it. to spend this kind of money. People will watch a lot of different kinds of stuff on Netflix. I always thought Disney could catch up to Netflix. It doesn't seem like they seems like they've stalled out, huh? Yeah. Yeah. I think both Max and Disney Plus, I think we thought for a while would be like the main contenders. And it's, you know, they're, they're adding a lot of people. They're, going big, but not nobody's catching up to net, except YouTube. Well, in fact, Netflix is so far ahead that it's actually hilarious.

So Disney Plus had 124.6 million paid subs at the end of the last financial quarter, and that was a decrease of 700,000. So not only is Netflix more than twice as big, it's growing and Disney Plus is sucking there. So, wow. That's brutal. I wonder if that includes the Hulu, which they own. Yeah, I believe Disney Plus's numbers are Disney Plus Hulu and DSPN Plus.

I think they only announced them together. Got it. Yeah, I mean, they have work to do. They don't do things like. comedy, right? So if they really want to start making this work, they should make a run at comedy, but I guess you can't have the Disney brand doing Andrew Schultz. They've started to, they used to be very strict about no, no, Disney Plus is just family stuff, Hulu gets the adult stuff. Now they're blowing the lights. Like FX shows now stream on Disney Plus. You could watch

Shogun on Disney Plus. Even this, or The Shield. Yeah, even this new Daredevil series is, I haven't watched it yet, but apparently it's quite very. violent and bloody, and that's on Disney Plus. And so, you know, like, they've started Ben the rules in favor of getting as many people as they possibly can to sign up. Doing business and making deals would be a lot simpler if you had a crystal ball. Obviously, hey, if you've got a future prediction startup, contact me, I'm going to write you a check. You're coming to my accelerator. But until then, one way to future-proof your business is with our amazing partner, NetSuite by Oracle. It's the number one ERP tool on the market today,

and it's trusted by over 40,000 businesses for a reason. But you might be asking, what does NetSuite do? You're at a startup. Maybe you wonder, who is this NetSuite I keep hearing about? Well, it's going to take all your accounting, inventory, financial management, and HR and put it into one easy-to-use platform, one source of truth, one resource to check for anything you need to know about your business. That's going to give you real-time insights and allow you to forecast with the visibility

and control you need to make great decisions. It's like being a fighter pilot. You've got all those important instruments right at your fingertips so you can go fast, beat the competition, and grow your business. So NetSuite is going to help you have all that reliable information when you need it. Founders, you're going to need to know about it. And a great first step is to get the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning. So speaking of opportunities, go ahead and download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning

at NetSuite.com slash twist. The guide is free for you at NetSuite. slash twist. That's net suite.com slash twist. In other news, these streaming services are now doing deals. We had a little South by Southwest event for All In where we had some content creators and Salmira were there. And we had a good discussion with them about the business. And it turns out some people for our Netflix is starting to take some podcasting content and put it right on the service and just paying a fee for it. Yes. There's a big new new push. Netflix. Because

Netflix is really feeling the heat from YouTube. YouTube has now become the number one most watch streaming service in the U.S. on TVs. Like, it used to be people would watch YouTube on their phones and their computers and Netflix on their TVs, but now that you can pull up Netflix on whatever your Roku or whatever. YouTube on your Roku. Yeah, so people are just watching YouTube on television now and one of the huge categories on YouTube podcast. So Netflix is like, if we don't have podcasting content ourselves,

We're just going to miss out. So, yeah, I think call her daddy. They made a deal with her, Alex Cooper to bring her stuff on there. They're slowly starting to do licensing deals with more podcasters because they're terrified of being left behind. I guess they'll strip the ads out and just pay a fee. So zero downside for podcasters if they get paid a decent amount unless they have some sort of ad exclusive.

But, yeah, this seems like a great thing for shows. And the one that I think podcasters have learned is they got to keep upping their game. So you have to really learn how to master YouTube. Something we really never thought about. We just kind of use YouTube and video as like an afterthought for the super fans. But we're really going to double down on that. We had Chris Williamson, who does a great job and really makes beautiful video. And I was talking to Andrew Schultz, who was just on All In this week over the weekend.

And he was saying, you got to be in a studio, you got to have better lighting and all this kind of stuff. So we've got to experiment with me talking and reacting to videos maybe in a studio kind of thing as opposed to on just stream and YouTube. And then I think going live more often is the other big opportunity. So many opportunities in content creation. And I think the other trend is get an audience,

then launch a product. I know this because I've been talking about this kids investment club. Like a year ago, I talked about, like, there should be some education. I'm just shocked that no high school curriculum exists for investing. You know, Alex, you and I learned it a little bit later in life, but it's not that difficult to learn.

So I bought the domain, I'm Kids Investment Club. It's a long one. And I put it on Substack, and I mentioned it. It got like 500 people. The first time I mentioned it. Now it's got like 2,000 people. I just looked at it this weekend because I did a second message.

So I decided I would incubate this idea inside of a venture firm. So I'm looking for maybe a teacher who's just really great on camera that I could hire to do the first one. And so since I already have the audience, I've got the first 2,000 emails. in substack, I can just turn it on and say, it's going to be $500 a year to send your kid to this, which any parent would pay, because the parent will pay any amount.

So if you just think about it, like a tutor, a tutor is 50 to 150 an hour. So I'm thinking about doing like maybe every two weeks, 26 meetings, $500 a year. What do you guys think? Do you think I can get a thousand people to sign up for that? Yes, especially now, I feel like culturally, it's the right moment where people are feeling more.

entrepreneurial, there's less faith in old school ways of investing in things to do with your money. The idea of teaching your kids from a younger age to be savvy about stuff like crypto so that when it arises, they can be on it. Like, I feel like there's a real way to pitch this at parents in 2025. I think I'll just use the substack platform to do it, Alex, or maybe Beehive. What do you think, Alex? What platform should I use and what do you think of the idea? And would you be willing to give a talk once in a while? Oh, I mean, for sure, I'll give a talk. Yeah, of course, no worries. I think it's a really interesting idea.

The price point makes sense to me if you're targeting upper middle class and above. It'd be cool to have a cheaper option for folks who don't have as much money. But my question, Jason, is just this. 26 episodes, issues, iterations per year. That seems actually quite a lot. So I'm curious, if you run out of material after like 15, because at some point you're doing, like, crypto taxes. That's a really good question. I don't know if it should be a course and it just runs in cohorts, or

I was thinking just you join and you come to the weekly meeting every two weeks. And maybe there's a curriculum you can go to where you catch up, but you just come to the meeting. And my idea is kids teaching kids. So let's say there's a proctor there. And the proctor says, okay, we're going to go around the horn. Kind of like Jim Kramer does on his show. He does a lightning round at the end where people say, I have a question, you know,

Uber and cybercabs and Tesla and whatever. And what about Waymo? And then you have a kid. give their perspective, like a 15-year-old. And then you have somebody like Alex say, okay, well, here's the data. And they reflected back to them. And then the kid makes the bet. And then they get to see over time how their bet did. And then the parents can decide, do they want them to actually make real bets or other bats? But I want to start it lightweight. I feel like there's a really funny segment here, too, of you teaching young kids out

to be like a cutthroat investor. Like I think we should. Yes, it's got unlimited. I think there's a lot It could be a TV show. It could be a video show. You know. Well, if you wanted to do it that way, Substack over Beehive, Jason, because Substack has, I think, native video support and podcast and support built in.

So that seems to be directionally where you're going. I feel like this is a substack, for sure. But to your point, Alex, I will do scholarships for people who can't afford the 500. Like, you know, just offer whatever you can. We'll pay $10, pay $50. Or yeah, coupon day. Or just, yeah, if you can't afford it,

email this person, explain your station in life. And we'll, like Sam Harris does. You can just, if you can't afford it, he says, just email me and I'll give you the full pod. So it's kind of a little bit of friction, but it works. Okay. Second idea to incubate. When you own a multiple homes, you have an estate manager.

You understand a lot? I'm an estate manager for your multiple homes. I understand the concept. Yes. Okay. Yes. So I'm not going to need one, but I understand the idea. Okay.

So if you own three homes or four homes, you have an estate manager, they travel between the homes, they make sure, you know, I've fixed, I don't know, in the last, five years, I don't know, three or four heaters, you know, hot water heaters, whatever, HVAC units in three different homes. So you have this like issue of maintenance of homes. So I was thinking, what if you could bring this down to a more affordable level? So if you own a $2 million home or a $3 million home, you would never hire a full-time estate matters. That might be, you know, a six-figure salary. So what if you could have a time shared estate manager.

Now, some places like a ski town, like in Tahoe here, they do have people you can pay $10,000 a year to just maintain your property or you have an HOA. Yeah. So I'm thinking of either in Bay Area, L.A. or Austin, having one, like, really kick-ass estate manager combined with, say, to Athenaeus assistants, go to Athenawound.com and get a, I think, a couple of weeks or even a month off, really cool product that I'm an investor in. And then you could have 24-hour service where, you know, your plumbing breaks and you say, hey, there's something wrong. I got to leave. And they just go to, they jump into action. And, yeah, they visit your estate, your home every 10 days.

It's interesting because this is already sort of a job. It's like if you manage people's Airbnb. Like that's the, I know a guy who this is his job. He lives in Big Bear and he just runs like 12. different Airbnb's for different big bear homeowners because they don't live in town he's always there so somebody needs you know handyman or whatever and he doesn't do the work he's just there to arrange for whatever people need so but for people like that

this would be like a better hike that this would be moving up like if you're a very very good Airbnb manager maybe rich people would hire you to be there part time a state manager I want this so badly yeah like this

is a really, really good idea because we have a couple of properties in around the area. And, you know, as much as I love driving over to my in-laws' main house on Sunday to take out their bins, I'd really rather not do that, just to be totally honest. And we have a collection of handy people that we use for things. We've known them for a long time and so forth. But it is a pain of the butt to have so many different people for different things. If there was a central source, that could know it and have my fees. Yeah, 10K, done.

In today's market, your business is judged by your customer's. service. We all know that. And one bad experience, well, that customer is likely gone for life. And you know what? They're going to take it out on you. They're going to post comments. They're going to get on social media. They're going to go to the review sites. So stop thinking about customer experience as just a department. Don't put it in this little basement downstairs. It's your entire business. Let me say that again. Customer service is your entire business. That's the front line of your business. It's where you talk to your customers in their time of need. And Horatio is the trusted outsourcing partner for hundreds of startups and fast-growing companies looking to deliver exceptional customer experiences.

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And the best part, their solutions are cost effective and completely tailored to your business needs. Visit hire horatio.com slash twist and get $2,000 off your initial setup. Hirehoratio.com. That's H-I-R-A-T-I-O-O-com slash T-W-I-S-T. I have one other thought for you, too. Places like where my mom lives. My mom lives in a 55.

and over resident, like retirement community. Sure. There are tons of homeowners there. They're all elderly. They don't want to figure this stuff out for themselves. A bunch of them would all go in on a service like this. You could probably find 30 or 40 people in one neighborhood. Uber of estate managers. Uber of estate. I don't know why it doesn't exist. To franchise it, yeah. Well, not franchises it, but to do the Uber model of having like a, you remember the city teams, Jason, for like different, like the Chicago team. Yeah, yeah. You could have one in Westport, one.

in Newport. I'm just thinking about that one area. You do a city rollout. You start with places where there are multi-million dollar homes, which is any major city. Yep. And you just time share the asset, and then you could then provide it to people who obviously can't afford a full-time. So I met somebody who's like, I went full Uber recently because in Austin, it's just simpler for me because the Uber's are pretty affordable there. And now with Waymo on Uber and Cybertaxy coming at some point, It's going to be really easy to, like, maybe get rid of your car even and go full Uber in Austin, which people have done in San Francisco and New York. Obviously, people don't know cars in Manhattan.

L.A.'s too spread out, but I was thinking this too. Austin's not that spread out, especially, like, once you get your neighborhood and that's where you're spending most of your time, like, you could probably go full Uber, even like a, like, it wouldn't be that hard, I don't think. If you're spending $1,000 a month on your car and insurance and parking, then you're probably right in the zone because if your average. Uber ride was $30. I'm picking a medium average.

You do some 15. You do some 50. So just say 30. I was getting, my Uber rides in Austin were cheaper than that. I was doing 12, $14 Uber's. It was amazing. It was 15 bucks to get from my house to the casino.

And that involved the highway. So let's say $25 Uber rides on average. Oh, you know what? The thing is, I use Uber business or black. Oh, that's why. Fancy, man. Yeah, I do use that. I apologize.

I'm in those Uber X's. Yeah, it's a little, not for Jay Callag anymore. Yeah. No, I do. I do like to save a, I like to save a buck once in a while, so I do Uber Green. I've got to be honest, I've written every level of Uber at this point. It's all. I don't like the carpool one other than that.

They're all good. There's not still carpool. That died during the pandemic, right? Oh, is there really no more Uber pool? Uh, Uber pool, and there is some shared rides in some cities. They call it something else now. Yeah, they do it from airport. I don't like that.

But any other, like an Uber X ride, fine, no problems. Yeah, I think you need, I think, okay, so let's just say $25, let me assume you give a tip or whatever, four times. I always give a tip. I always give a nice thing. That's 40 rides. And so 40 rides is not enough for a daily commute, right? It's just enough for a daily commute.

So you're kind of in the ballpark, yeah. I don't think the people who are going to give up their cars are the daily commuters, but I think anyone who does not have a five day a week commute is absolutely in this target. Yeah, so if you're three day a week, that would be six, So that would be only 24 of your 50 rides a month, let's say. Sure. Yeah, you'd be in the zone. Yeah, could work.

Okay, speaking about being in the zone, I think we have an IPO filing. Is that right? Ladies and gentlemen. Alex is super happy. Let's take us through what's happening here. This is like the bizarro world. I thought it was the end of days with the tariff chaos and everything going on. But apparently, we have a filing.

Yes, we do. We have a filing from Klarna, the Swedish buy-now, pay, later giant. A venture capital darling Jason saw its valuation spike during COVID came crashing back down the earth. The company became a cost conscious business kept growing and I'm proud to say that I think you're going to like the financials, which I've conveniently pulled up for us. So ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Klarna F1 income statement. Now, if you're watching the video, it's a little small, so I'll walk you through this. Time goes right to left in this case. So the far right column is 2022. Moving forward to 2020,

Jason, what matters here is that the company grew about 20% from 2022 to 23, but it grew faster, 24% last year over 2023 while reducing its losses and so much so. It actually turned in the equivalent of a gap profit last year. I think this company fricking rocks. I don't know how to value it, but Klarna managed to reduce certain costs. If you look at its sales and marketing expenses over time, they're dramatically down, G&A down. And I'm just super proud of Klarna for pulling it off and taking the reins to get this year's IPO cycle finally underway. Okay. Now, there's a firm here in the U.S.

I remember. It's a little controversial, I think. The founder of a firm had seen maybe Clarnet at some point, and he started his own version here in the U.S. I don't know where a firm holdings is at, but that was public, right? A firm is public. It's currently worth $15.7 billion. And in the last six months, Jason, his shares are up about 14%.

Okay. Yeah, wow, that's a big market cap. You know, we did have a concern that the buy now pay later economy was kind of like a gray market and it was underreported. So we have all the, this credit card debt. Now credit card debt has hit some all time highs. Yes. We didn't know if this was adding like another 10% to debt. But, you know, that is always the concern. And I, you know, I teed off on one of them. I think maybe a firm when they had buy now pay later at the grocery store, which I felt was like. Yeah, I don't think we should be offering that as a service, just not on a freedom basis. I mean, people should be able to do what they want to do, but I just thought it was not the right thing for a company to do. I don't like that concept of giving that offer to people, but you tell me what you think, gentlemen. Well, this is just a chart really quickly of kind of credit card and other revolving loans here in the U.S. And as you can see, we're at an all-time high going up to about $1.1 trillion. and so the consumer in the U.S. has been very active, Jason. On the affirm at the grocery store,

it makes me sad that we would need an installment plan for regular consumers to purchase basic fundamentals. At the same time, we have seen quite a lot of grocery store inflation lately in the last couple of years, so I kind of get it. But that makes me sad. But I do think that if you are offering people a reasonable, low fee, low interest rate way to access goods, I'm not going to complain about that.

And I, okay, lawn, go. Well, but the interest rate, though, I looked it up because I've not used Clarnah. Interest rates ranging from 0% to 33.99%. So like that, once you're getting into the mid-30s range, you're getting a little usurious. Like, all I know anecdotally, there is, I like that show Financial Audit, that Caleb Hammer, YouTube show where he has people on who've gotten themselves into serious debt and he helps them get out of it. Klarna comes up all the time.

Like that it's a very, it's a very frequent brand that you will hear people who have a lot of debt, who get themselves into debt trouble. They, they like these kinds of buy now, pay later. It's not quite, I'm not suggesting it's like up to the,

the, like it's not like a payday loan where it's like straight up a scammy thing that's trying to take advantage of people. But I do think it's like right in the start of that gray area. like, I don't know, 34% interest for people who probably aren't paying super close attention. Yeah, you're getting into Loan Shark. That vague too much. Yeah, I think it's no bueno.

But, you know, I was like almost when I bought my new Mac, it was like, or yeah, I was going to buy a new iPad or something and replace the other one. And it was like, would you like to pay like whatever over two years or four payments? And it was no interest. And I like when it's abstracted and it's on the side of the. retailer and they're taking it out of their cut. Founders, let's be real. Finding great developers is hard.

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Visit lemon.com. So I did see one of the Teslas now, it might be the Model 3. They're offering like zero APR. And I was like, how's not possible? And it's like, oh, I think they're eating the interest. It's the Model 3. in order to move cars. Yeah, it's the model three. So that's like super compelling. So if it's done on the side of in a high interest rate environment, it's kind of a win for consumers to pay over for

because if you have money in the market, you would be making money. But I guess this is going to a class of people. Maybe we don't have that. I'm not crazy about the category. I was about to say, yeah. Well, that's the other thing. They set the credit, the interest rate based on your credit score. So it's another one of those, like it's more expensive to be poor. Like, if you've got a great credit score, you could probably get in a lower interest rate. If you've got a bad credit score, meaning you need Klarna's services more, that's when they're really going to nail you. Who's going to get, like, a big hit out of this? I know Sequoia was like the original investor and Michael Moritz was on the board. Yeah. So, Sequoia is the largest outside shareholder

mentioned in the filing, 78 point, I think it's 8 million shares. Wow. Then there's Hartland, which it turns out is like a holding company owned by this Danish billionaire Anders Holk Polvesen. I had to Google him. And it turns out he was a castle in Scotland. Shout out to him. Okay. 37 million shares. I former co-founder, 31, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, $19 million. And that's it.

And so this company, Jason, has raised a lot of money over time, and its investors aren't showing up in the 5% and above threshold, apart from Sequoia, but mostly. So I'm curious if they didn't buy as much as we thought, or if there's been more secondary transactions reducing external stakes over time. But this is going to be a big win, probably for at least Sequoia. I think this company also had some challenges along the way. Who knows if they had a down round, flat round, or some other things occur. But, you know, it does look like this is another one of the situations where Sequoia had to, you know, invest multiple times, either to save the company or opportunistically. And that's been one of those great things. There it is corners evaluation plunged 85%. And I think they had a hard time raising money. And so those down rounds can be brutal. That's the big founder lesson here. And the other big founder lesson. is sell as you go. So I hope the founder sold at those incredibly high valuations, 10% or 20% of their holdings. Always my best advice is to sell 10%. You know, when you get to that half billion,

$250 million, $500 million. If somebody owned 40% as a co-founder, it's not going to change your life to go to 36% and then go to, you know, whatever it is, 32% if you sell 10% twice. And it will put a floor in and protect you and your family and get you diversified. So, but Jason, we have talked so much on this show about companies doing more with less, using AI for automation, and Klarna has been a poster title of that. So the thing that I was really curious is how much money did they spend less than before? And in 2022, sales and marketing costs, 531 million. In 2023, 381. And last year, when growth re-accelerated at the company, 328 million. So consistently more efficient. And that to me is the story here. You guys are right. Usory is dickish.

fair enough. But from a purely capitalistic perspective, there's a lot to like in this Clark Naf one. And now I feel like a super villain. Law, what are you doing here making you feel guilty? Listen, I'm not saying, people need loans. You know, like people like their service. I'm not trying to say it's a bad company or anything, but it does that interest rate gives me pause.

What is this? This week in generosity? No, sir. This is this week in capitalism. That's very high. That's a lot of interest. All right. There's a bunch of trends going on. You know, I always ask you guys to look out for some trends. Any trends that startup should know about here? I was reading a Wall Street Journal piece for last week that I thought was interesting on this. Marketplaces are starting to rip off social media features instead of Amazon, T.Moo, the sites and the locales that you would think of as being the primary e-retailers that everybody was looking to for inspiration.

So yeah, they mentioned eBay, Wayfair, Threadup, Etsy. They're all introducing features that are reminiscent of Pinterest, Instagram, TikTok, where it's. algorithm-based personalization, like trying to just show you, hey, based on your purchase history, we bet you're going to like this stuff, and then scrolling, like infinite scrolling through feeds, as opposed to people our age,

we got used to the sort of hunt-and-pech search browser mode, where you just type in like, I'm looking for blazers. And it's like, here's page after page of blazers. This is more like an infinite scroll. Like, we're just going to show you blazers and you're going to flip through into,

you find the one you like, Alex. This makes me really sad. So yesterday I was talking to my spouse about Instagram, and she was discussing how it's really strange that she doesn't see any posts from the people she follows anymore. It's always stuff that's been kind of chosen for her. Isn't it crazy? Yeah.

Everyone wants to be TikTok. And to me, it's a real bummer as a hashtag creator, that people who choose to follow me are instead of being attached to me in some way are simply being fed from the same pot of slop. And so I think ultimately, Lon, this is a trend that's real and totally valid for reporting on. But I would also say, I don't think it's going to be a net positive

for these brands long term because I don't think you can ever get better at knowing when someone wants than quite literally what's in their own brain. Maybe I'm old, but that's my take. It's kind of jarring because I really do want to see my friends and family and like specific brands and companies

and restaurants on Instagram, and I don't see them anymore, but I do see them showing me ski videos, videos from Japan, and bulldog videos. I get it. That's what the Explorer tab is for. is there a way to like stop the algorithm on Instagram and just follow your followers? That's a great question.

I believe there is. I think you can change your feed. Where did Zuckerberg bury it? I believe you. Yeah, it's in the settings. I want to make it the default. It is in the settings, but you have to go through and find it. You can reset it from an algorithmic feed to just show me the most recent posts from the people I follow.

The one thing is the one thing is, it's like, oh, you love this? Like I sent around that sandwiches of history channel that I like. That's a great account. Yes. And now you're Sammy's all day. Love Barry. But right. Now it's constantly like people making sandwiches or people making sourdough bread.

And it's like, I'm not really like hanging sandwich. I just like this one guy. So once again, Zuckerberg stole somebody else's innovation and took it too far. Yeah. It's brutal. I am really trying to lean into Instagram to figure out how it works. But I also think we're hitting a tipping point here for content creators. you're going to have to make a decision. Are you creating to get on the for you page,

which means you create 200 pieces of content, 195 of them are 1% of you use, and the other five are 99% of your views, whatever it is, you know, some power law. And then what that means is all this art and everything and all your effort is not going to subscribers. And you're not building a subscriber base. You are literally just trying to game an algorithm. And so then what people are doing is it's always like, Who can I get into the related videos? What do they call the related videos on YouTube?

It's the related tab. Yeah. It's a red rail. Yeah, the third column, if you will, the right-hand rail. So now all these content creators are creating for that. And I got to tell you, it loses the soul. I like to create for the subscriber. I consider the subscribers on Spotify, Apple, and other RSS feeds or YouTube.

That's the audience who I wanted to like. the people who are in the This Week and Startup subreddit that we started, those like real hardcore people. And you're going to have to make a decision. Are you, you know, pandering to this algorithm and then losing your soul as a content creator? I think it's the worst thing you could ever do because you will have no grounding.

There's nothing that you stand for. It literally would be like a musician just playing jingles. Like you're literally making little jingles for an algorithm and you're never going to write, you know, the wall or... It's turning everyone into the equivalent of a cover band. Correct. You're just doing covers. And so it's garbage.

I hate it. I'm going to fight against it and just try to make original content. What else do we got? One more trend. I want to throw this in before we move on. So we had Roy, was Roy Lee who was on the show the other day? It was, yes. His former Columbia student, Roy Lee.

The former Columbia student who was coming in to, a twist from his Columbia dorm room. Who knew what that was going to be happening? Yes. Anyway, so there's a new trend out there. This is a little excerpt I pull from CNBC. Essentially, the problem of people cheating on remote technical interviews has become so big that Sundar Pachai has said this earlier this year that hiring managers are considering

a return to in-person job interviews. So the trend is not just RTO friends. If you want to even interview, you now must show up on site. So get your Southwest points in place and fly yourself to Mountain View. I mean, if you, if you. want to live the delusion that your that remote work is here to stay unless you're an elite high performer like Alex it's not happening I'm just letting people know I today was in our hiring room and I said the next three researchers only in Austin only at the headquarters anybody who is an extremely

high performer EHP I told this to the team we're moving to Austin we're going to have a headquarters I'm going to grandfather everyone in it is now up to you if you want to to keep that job and not have it go to the new home office where I can mentor people, young folks, people who are, you know, maybe not as seasons as Alex, you have to be an HP, extremely high performer. You have to have the ability to write a start of day, end of day. And, of course, the end of week, aka, what did you accomplish last week? Trigger warning. Five things, perhaps, Jason. Is that what you're kind of?

I mean, I never put a number on it, but I did create the SOD, EOD, start of week, end of week. And Elon has it as well. I mean, it's not like this is some crazy innovation. But if you want to work at Big Tech, prepare to be in an office. And yeah, I think 100% you should start interviewing in person. Yeah. And start enjoying as a young person being in an office, socializing and being mentored, and being near the locust of power so that you can advance your career. I know it's dope to work from home in your underwear. I am wearing sweatpants right now. Me too. You know, I'm skiing. This week as ski week, but I'm also working. But I too, you know, I could retire. I could have retired 10, 15 years ago. I too want to be back in an office. You need the mentorship. You need the

opportunity if you're a young person. If you're an old person and you want to take care of your parents, an older person, experienced person and an extremely high performer, sure, work from home if you can get it. Oh, yes. But also keep in mind that Jason's EHP set up here is probably going to be the norm, I think. And what that means is at Sunday at 9.52 p.m., you're going to be doing a podcast. Yeah, it might happen. Hi, everybody. It's late. It's like, you got to go to your spouse and be like, hey, you know, I got a remote job. It pays well.

I literally told her, I'm like, sorry, I'm actually working tonight. Jason has a blizzard as we're doing your show. And she just went, okay. Yeah. I mean, she gets it. You're at home with two kids. I mean, if you have to change a diaper or the nanny doesn't show up, you're good. Juan, I'm trying to get more discussions going on here on the program.

So I asked you, take a look, Hacker News, Reddit. threads, Twitter, wherever, LinkedIn even. And let's find some really great discussions, spicy discussions, places where people are arguing. Let's see what they're arguing about, what they're debating, and let's have, extend the conversation here. By the way, I have not seen this. So this is part of the fun of it.

This was posted this week to R-slash entrepreneur. Do millionaires need to wake up very early in the morning? So the OPE here, he's wondering, or they're wondering, if the key to success is very personal is waking up early and having a morning routine. They're considering options like early morning workouts, even ice baths to get themselves going in the a.m. This is apparently a big hang up for them in their path to being an entrepreneur. So Jason, what do you think? If you want to be a millionaire one day, do you need to start waking up very early in the morning? And if so, what time? No, that is not the qualifier. That is, I think, fools gold. You should figure out what

works for you. Some people are really good. Their rhythm is at night. I'm one of those people who've always been that way. But I do think sleep discipline is super important. So there's two things being discussed here. One is discipline around routine. The other is being a morning person, does that correlate with success? I think being a morning person correlates with being disciplined. If you're a disciplined person and you can go into an ice bath, this is not causation, it's correlation. The correlation is, if you can go in an ice bath. I did it. Somebody gave me one of those ice baths for free, you know, and I traded some advertising with them. It was awesome. It wasn't for me. I didn't like the pain of it. And I was like,

this isn't doing much for me. So after doing it 20 times, I was like, okay, great. I don't think this does anything for me. But it does take discipline to stay in that water. And I noticed disciplined people, like a Joe Rogan is a disciplined person. Obviously, you see him in martial arts. What Joe Rogan says about the ice baths is it gives him. a win first thing in the morning. If he can stay in the ice bath, mentally, he goes, I beat, I conquered the ice bath. Anything else today. I already did the hardest thing.

I can face anything else today because I made it through the ice bath. That's the Joe Rogan. I think being ruthlessly efficient and understanding where to put your time is the key to being successful in being a millionaire. It also means you have to have a plan and take risk. Those are the more important things. So I would worry less about this correlation that we see with some people are extremely disciplined and they like to get through stuff and then just say, well, what is efficient for you? And I've seen people who are like this, who take the pills, who do the walk, who eat the egg whites, who do this.

And they never become millionaires. But they're super disciplined because they don't have the other piece, which is taking intelligent risks, knowing when to shut your company down, start a new one, make an investment. and they don't take bold risks, they don't sell their companies, they don't have ownership or equity, you know, and anything. That's really like the thing this person should be worrying about, but I understand a young person coming into it

and seeing Tim Ferriss and Huberman and everybody talking about these things. Now, I also do optimize for my physical health, and I think there are four things to focus on in that regard as a foundation. Number one, is your sleep discipline. That's number one for a reason. And, you know, Brian Johnson agrees with this.

A lot of other people do. If you don't get your sleep right, you're going to be a mess the next day. Sleep consists of like sleep discipline, which means not eating two hours before bed, from what I understand, using an eye mask, having it blocked out, not having noise, all this stuff. And then once you've got sleep down and routine is also critical. So go to bed about the same time and wake up about the same time. Even if you're a little groggy one day at 8 a.m., if that's your wake up time or 7 a.m. or 9 p.m., just 9 a.m., get up at that same time.

If you fall asleep at 1 a.m. instead of 12 or 11, forgive yourself, but keep the wake-up time. Number two, diet and exercise is two and three for me. Get those right. Eat healthy and get a little bit of exercise in. Again, your focus is going to go up. Your mood is going to be great. And then meditation. Sounds crazy. But people who meditate, lower their anxiety and they have great ideas. I have some of my best ideas when I'm meditating. After I meditate, I will then take out my notepad and I'll write a couple of things to my Apple notepad. Boom, every time. This is a great great segue to actually another one of the things that Lon dug up for us. This is from, I think the entrepreneur is separated as well, Lon, but it's from someone who works quite a lot,

but it's trying to figure out why they don't feel good about it. And they're talking about some days working four or five hours, some days working, you know, from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. And Jason, it sounds like your advice to them would be have a more consistent routine. And that will help you limit brain fog, burnout, and so forth. And prioritizing and being ruthlessly efficient. They're trying to work 55, 60 hours a week, but they're getting. getting burned out. And part of their problem is that they're working this odd schedule, four to five hours some days, making up the difference with all-nighters, that sort of thing. I think it's fine to work 50, 60 hours a week or so when you're running your startup.

At a certain point, you'll have diminishing returns if you're not sleeping if you're not seeing friends and exercising. So obviously, you're not going to have a balanced life as a founder, but you don't have to be like a hero and work 16-hour days. That's actually going to work against you. What you need to be is ruthless. As an example, delegating. I got two gentlemen here. One of them did the S-1 or the F-1 for Klarna. The other one found these great stories to comment on. I didn't have to do that. They teeed up. I respond. That gives me some of my time back. I now have an Athena assistant. Go to AthenaWild.com, get some couple free weeks. And I set two of them up now. So I have two, eight-hour overlapping by one-hour assistance, 15 hours a day working with three or four executives.

What they do, they pre-sort my email box now. So they go through my email box and they say, this is a startup pitch. And now I'm having them give that to somebody on the investment team. Okay, this is a PR person emailing me. They're blocking that person. Okay, this is a receipt, put it into the receipt folder. So now, you know, I don't have to do that. That saves me a half hour a day. So I'm constantly looking for ADD.

I've wrote a blog post about this, automate, delegate, deprecate. What can I stop doing? What can I automate? What can I delegate? Be ruthless about that. What is the most efficient thing you can do drive your career forward? For Alex, it's coming on this podcast or doing an email newsletter. on, it's finding great content to come on here or great social media. Everything else is chores.

Try to get rid of the chores so you can do the actual thing. The actual thing in a startup is the product, hiring a great team and demanding excellence for them. That could be professional development, could be firing somebody, it could be any number of things, and then obsessing about your customers. If you're not doing those three things, like every day and often, something's wrong. You guys look at me now, like how much time do I spend on professional development, explaining to people how to do things better, showing them how to do things better, training people. There's a reason why I invest in professional development now. What I used to do is, I just used to throw it on my back and climb up the mountain. Like, it's easier for me to do it.

You get 20 people working for you. You do a professional development. If five or six people get it, oh my God, you know, the whole organization can go much further. If I can get six people here to save an hour a week, I get six more hours a week of productivity out of the overall team. That's amazing. So anyway, that's my best advice is really. And people need coaches is the other thing I think. I think people need coaches and people to tell them, hey, this is a waste of your time.

Why are you doing it? That's super important. Yeah, which is also, I mean, it sort of dovetails right back to the remote versus in-person office. You don't get mentorship. You don't get coaching when you're working from home. People only see the output. They don't have any idea how you got there.

Yeah. But if we're talking about cutting out cruft, I mean, commuting is a pretty big time suck. Yeah, that's why you have to live close to your office. If you commute more than half an hour, you've made just a terrible mistake. Now, I know that's hard in a place like Silicon Valley or whatever. Yeah, Los Angeles is pretty difficult to be in a half. Well, that's only three block radius for 30 minutes in Los Angeles.

It's really hard because a lot of companies they want you to work in, you know, Beverly Hills or West Hollywood. These impossible to live near very costly places, you know, people have to go very far. far away. This is just a great argument in favor of yimbism, which is one of my favorite causes out there, but like, we should absolutely build tons more dense housing near employment. Let's just do that. And let's, you want to watch the economy go boom as President Trump said on truth social the other day? Build more housing. Okay. I literally, you know, this was one of the things I've been talking about doing here. I'm going to do this maybe later on Wednesday. Just to give you audience a preview. I'm going to give you my stump speech on building when I'm president,

build what I'm going to do as president. One of it's going to be a, around housing. Okay, that's my feeling on these two stories. You have anything to add or should we move on? One more question. This one came from user Woelium on Hacker News. I haven't seen this now. It's the first reaction. They've got a very specific problem that I thought you'd be interested in it. They're asking how to stop Google from auto correcting their startup's name. They have a, they have a small cloud computed company called Automo. The problem is when you Google the word automo, it auto corrects to Autismo, the Spanish

word for autism. So people can't find their company because they get redirected. It thinks they are a Spanish speaker looking up, you know, treatment or what to do about autism. The company was founded in 2018. They're a little worried changing the name.

They've got all these longstanding relationships and customers. People know them as automo. They would prefer a strategy that somehow gets Google to start recognizing that their name is a valid search term. People in the comments are suggesting SEO campaigns using some sort of

strategy where they use ads on non-Google systems to get people to go back and Google the word automos of Google learns. But most people agreed they should just change their companies. What do you think? No, unless it's like super offensive, I would not worry about

this because the people who are looking for your company are going to click it where it says, oh, we're changing this to Autismo. They're going to click it and let do that verbatim, or are they going to type in another word descriptor of your company? Yeah, you could always go search instead for the thing I looked up, but you could see the, the thing it brings up are, it assumes you mean autism specter disorders. This is them. They are a cloud computing. Don't worry about it. People are going to, they'll find you. It's nothing to

worry about. Well, there you go. Like, there's other things to work on. And if you're successful, this will work. How do I know this? Like, if you were to type in Uber, you know, before Uber became big or Robin Hood. So type in Robin Hood. So type in Robin Hood. right now into Google. I want, it's a generic name, right? If you don't leave a space, if you leave a space, it thinks you mean the folklore character. If you don't leave a space, it knows you mean the investment at. So I think it might be as simple as, look, we just did Robin Space Hood.

They're number two. Robin Hood, they came up number one because they bought the ad. So I think maybe Artissimo or whatever the heck this thing is called. Automo. Automo is their actual name. Automo should just buy the keyword for Automo. And then they would definitely be at the top. So just like Robin Hood we did here.

So you get that sponsored link. It's not got a question. that much because nobody else is competing for that keyword. Yeah, I know, but I hate telling people to pay the Google Tax, but in this case, Jason, I do think that's the right advice. I think they might be paying like 20 bucks a month in Google Tax 300 a year. So if it actually matters for the founder that much. But you know that we live in a new world.

People find things. They're like really good at searching. And then we'll be in a world eventually where AI is going to point people to stuff. So you have to have articles written. You're going to have a corpus of media. Right. So that would be the SEO approach, you know, like that old school SEO tactic. Yeah, but SEO is kind of good.

I think it's more about having a lot of content ingested into LLMs over time. So from credible sources. And so the whole SEO link backing thing, remember, the links are going to go before the summary. So aside from the sniper shot here of like looking for my company name or looking for Robin Hood to trade stock, what else can you do that are on the long list of keywords for their cloud business? and where can they make content about that? So back to the kids' investment club, before I start that thing,

I'm going to write or have somebody write literally 100 subsdacks, emails, beehives, whatever, to get that SEO going for teaching kids about stock, or how to teach kids about bonds, or how to explain bonds to a child, how to explain this to a child. And we'll get that sort of SEO going and that content base that will be ingested.

and if you make great content, it will be ingested, and eventually people will find you. Jason, can we do a child, a children's book? Like a, like a... It's a really good idea, right? You're really good idea, yeah. Yeah, oh my God. I've read every children's book ever written now,

so I need to know it. And also, I'd love to have them be like, all right, here's that what an index fund is and just watch their face fall. Everybody, Mommy, what should I do with my allowance? Right. We have a video you want me to react to.

Hit me. It's very viral. This is a, From YouTuber Mark Rober, he posted this video, can you fool a self-driving car? This video's only been online for about a day, and it has 8 million views already. This thing is blowing the hell out.

So what he did is he did a number of tests, and he used two different self-driving cars. He used a Tesla in autopilot with its camera setup, and then he tried a unnamed self-driving car, LiDAR camera system, which is more high-tech. LiDAR system and he wanted to see how much he could do

to obscure the car's vision and if he could mess up both. So here's one of the test where he's got a mannequin of a child in the road and then he's covering the road with fog to obscure the car's view. So here's how both cars did. I can

no longer see that there's a kid through this fog. Yep. This is something where LiD will absolutely see the kid through fog but FSD with a A camera is not going to see it. Guaranteed LIDAR stops. Guaranteed FSD doesn't.

I am sophisticated enough to know this specific edge case. Also, a human is not going to get this right. So a human. Right. And an FSD is the same thing because it uses cameras. The cameras are better than humans. But nobody can see through fog except for it's going to hit it. Yeah.

As would a human. Any of us driving that car would have hit the camera. would have hit the kid. Great. He does note at the beginning of the video, all of these tests are, yes, specifically designed around things that would mess up human drivers.

And you'll see this next one we're about to show. There's no way human would be able to pass this test. Oh, really? The endorsement here, just before we move on, is I think now every car should have LIDAR because that, as a parent, I love to see what LIDAR did. Yeah, but yeah, very comforting.

Yeah, okay, well, that's going to be the discussion we're about to have. Let's see this one. So this next one, he's got a painted wall like in a loony tunes. This is a wild e-coyote. Right, that looks exactly like the horizon. And this will never happen, but okay.

Yeah, it's not a real world scenario. I like it for comedic. It's funny, right. Yeah. Yes, that would. And I think the LiDAR. The LiDAR worked. I think the LiDar would be able to pick up on the cues.

But here, what's interesting about this one is, okay, this is the most interesting one. You know why? LIDAR is going to get it. FSD's not, but a human is going to get this one. This is not going to trick a human because you can see that as you come in the different angles. You can see the outline of it, right? So you would be able to see the nuance.

The only way a human would really be tricked by this is if it was maybe a video wall presenting what's exactly behind it. but if it was painted, like the Wiley Coyote tunnel on a brick wall, that would change with the sunlight and everything. So, you know, these are... Maybe with LEDs or something, you could maybe hologram and effect,

but not with regular, just painting it like the horizon. I'm glad they did this. LIDAR, it works because it casts the shadow. That's how LIDAR knows. It can tell that the light is not reaching it from behind, and that's how it knows that there's a barrier there. It's like a barrier there.

It's like, Right. You get this extra sensory. That's because LIDAR. Yeah, it's actually, it's working like radar, but with light instead of sound. That's in layman. So number one, I'm glad somebody did this. And they should have just added, for fairness, a human driver.

And that would have also been much more entertaining. They do note that in the beginning that these are tests beyond what a human could. Why do they not use a human in a regular car? Get a Toyota Prius. Get your Toyota Prius seat. Put somebody in and say, go. and, you know, let's see if they hit that wall. Let's see if they, you know,

and just tell them, like, nobody's going to get hurt. You can't get hurt, but just go. And then if you think you see something, stop. And what we would see is the human wouldn't hit that fake Wally Kioti wall. They would hit the child in the fog. Yeah, and the fog was so dense you couldn't see anything. He did another one where it was like water, like a storm, right? Yeah.

Which I think humans and FSD would not stop for. The FSD didn't stop for that, right? No. No. Did the liner stopper? I believe the LiDAR did. Yeah. Lyder was suffered.

So anyway, that would be the way to make this, you know, really entertaining and let people understand FSD is like human plus. And FSD with LiD is like superhero level, right? You're becoming like Daredevil. Exactly. That's the best analogy for it. It's like how Daredevil sees. That's exactly it.

So Alex, I'm going to bring you in this discussion. Please. The question I have for Alex is, when we look at this, what standard, what standard should cyber taxis, way-mo, let's just call the, you know, let's call the category, autonomous vehicles? Should they be held to a standard that is better than humans or the daredevil standard? Which one? Superhuman? Superhuman. Obviously humans are already on the road.

So then we're just deciding, should we expect a lot more or a superhero level? Superhero level for a number of reasons. One, aim high. Two, the number of deaths we have right now from human drivers is way too high. I think FSD is safer, great, but it doesn't get the death rate down as far as I wanted to. And third, my 2019 superer outback. Our car before didn't have a rearview camera. We didn't think we needed one.

Why would we need that? We literally look behind that rearview camera that we now have on our car. is mind-bendingly better for us as safe drivers. So now, my thing is, if we have the technology and it's mass-producible and affordable for at least most cars, which would fit this rubric, then we should do it because why not? LiDAR only costs, I was looking up like about a thousand bucks per unit in mass production. For a K, we can have better? Is it really that cheap?

I thought the LiDar sensors on the Waymo were much, much more money. But I think maybe the base ones, you could spend as little as 1,000. But, you know, the way I'm going to look at this is you got to be a lot. to quantify the number of lives saved. And I think the rearview camera is so quantifiable, because, I mean, I hate to be morbid here. But the number of times somebody has killed their own child or pet backing out of their driveway is truly tragic. And I believe those cameras are now required. Is that now standard that you can't? I believe it is now standard, yes. Yeah, I don't think you can have a car without a rearview camera. So that probably

eliminated thousands of deaths a year in the United States. I'm guessing, hundreds to low thousands. I don't know that this test of like in the fog, not hitting somebody, is going to save any lives. But if it's a thousand bucks, I'm going to agree with you. Why wouldn't you? I'm also heard that Waymo is testing and is,

I don't know if this is true or if I just overheard this from somebody I shouldn't have, but I also heard that Waymo might be testing a non-FSD version of their car, which would only be able to be run, in certain conditions. And that's going to be the next sort of puzzle to solve. I think we're going to see a number of people say, you can only use these cars when it's not raining or foggy. When it's foggy, the fleet is not allowed to drive in fog.

If it detects fog, the fleet's going to have to pull over. So on the 280 in the Bay Area, and you get fog conditions, and in San Francisco you get Carl the fog, they're literally going to have to have the fleet go back to port or just pull over. like, by the way, humans do this too. In San Francisco, when the fog gets really bad on the 280,

I have seen people pull over. Yeah. It's dangerous. Yeah, I mean, it is nuts. I've pulled over in the fog in L.A. once or twice before, too. It is like, it's too thick. It's just dangerous.

In your lifetime. That was, long, that was smog, not fog. It's very different. It's very different. So is this rumor I heard actually documented anywhere? I'm seeing various people talking about it on Reddit and other forums. I don't have enough time to actually deeply factor this, but it does seem that.

Waymo's at least testing some non-LIDAR cars, to which I have to say, if your other bets, the alphabet subsidiary that houses Waymo, which torches like a billion dollars a quarter, don't cheap out on safety. Like, push forward here. Set a standard so high that every single death from a car collision is a national tragedy. Let's get to that point. It's just weird because I feel like when we first started talking about self-driving cars, it's like a real thing we could build.

This was part of the promise was it's going to get so much safer. Like, we already think of automotive travel as like, it's not, like, it's safer to be in a plane than in a car. And, like, this was supposed to be the revolution that makes that a reality that, like, we don't have to worry about somebody. There's something that happened on the way to this revolution, uh, long competition. And I just want to say for the industry, I'm not talking my own book here. Once again, I am diversified. I have bets on all the major players. I'm good.

So I'm not talking my Uber book or my historical Uber love. although I'm over indexed there, but it's not going to change my life. So I think we need to have a much slower rollout of autonomous vehicles. I know everybody wants to go faster. I know right now, Zuz, Waymo, Cruz, rest in peace, and the woman they dragged, Tesla, cyber taxis, BYD. Everybody's racing right now. This is where actually the government does their job. The government needs to come in and give licenses for this that are extremely restrictive.

Extremely restrict. Now, I'm saying that as somebody who is going to benefit financially from the rollout of this. When I say extremely restrictive, what I mean is certain areas, certain times, certain speeds, and you have to hit milestones. I think Waymo has been so conservative because they live with the fear that knowing if what happened, if they, if they drag someone. somebody, even if they didn't hit them first, if they just make a mistake what Cruz did, Waymo could be shut down for years. If Waymo got shut down for a year, what do you think that does for competitiveness with them? It's over.

I mean, nobody's going to believe in self-driving. And then all the different jurisdictions around the world, they're going to stop the whole movement. So please, everybody doing this. Restricted zones, restricted speeds, real conservative safety. There's safety, safety, safety. Do not worry about competition. They should just say to everybody,

you can have this many cars per year on the road. And then when you hit this milestone of safety, this many miles, then you can apply to add more vehicles. And just literally make it a milestone-based thing. Cruz didn't have that. There was like a licensing system where you get approval and you go.

How about this? You can put 10 on. If those 10 do 1,000 rides each, 10,000 rides, safely, then you can add another 10. If they do, you know, and you just tell people, and then if you do it between, you know, daylight hours and you get to 100,000 or a million rides, you get to a million rides in daylight hours, now you can do nighttime rides.

And you can do it at this speed. If you can safely do it at 25 miles an hour, then you can move up to the 35 to the 50 and then eventually the highway, which Waymo has done, they've self-policed themselves. I really just don't want this to be screwed up. I'll be totally honest. I live with this fear somebody's going to go too fast. I just want to say that there's concern about competition,

especially with Chinese companies in the domain of AI, which autonomous driving does fall underneath. Is there not a risk, Jason, in your argument? And again, just taking the side of this for conversation, that the incremental approach you are outlining is too slow to generate a national champion and self-driving by the time China has this iced because they're willing to take on more human risk.

Listen, if China values life differently than America, nobody should be surprised. Like literally in a factory in China, they've got slave labor called the Uighurs. They don't care if they kill themselves. They don't care if they die in a robotic machine, you know, accident, the way we do here in America. So that should never be our standard.

You can buy cars in India right now without airbags that would never pass anything. Tata, put in to, yeah, just tell us what the cheapest car from Tata is. It's the nano, I think it is. Yeah, the Tata Nan. I think it was $3,000 when it first came out. $2,000 U.S. Okay.

Yeah, the Tata Nano. Just for giggles, if one of you gentlemen could find a Tata safety test. And there's it going to be a video of a Tata. There is the Tata. There it is. Now, if you're in India, by the way. It's adorable. It looks like a mini Prius.

They sell millions of these, I believe. They were, it was discontinued in 2018. Okay. They sold a lot of this. I would never, in my life, get in that. car if it had gasoline in it and a battery and was able to drive. I might sit in it in a museum under duress because that thing is that death trap. That's literally,

there are coffins that are safer. Dismal crash test results is what I see next. I mean, I don't even want to see this. That thing looks to me like a paper bag. Here is from the global in-cap. No airbags. Behold.

Oh, no. What's, It turns out the entire front half of the car is the crumple zone. Sadly, it's also where you sit to drive it. Your legs are there. Not anymore, Lon. Oh, my God. I'm going to go ahead and say the airbags in America and the airbag systems are more expensive than that freaking car.

I bet you like the airbags in a Tesla, which by the way, wrap around your head or have you seen the Zooks airbags? Pull up the Zooks airbags. The way we value life in this country is one of the greatest things about America. of we overvalue life. We over index. We do insane things to make people safe. And when something happens like a plane drops out of the sky, we spend so much money trying to figure it out

when often it's like the pilot made a mistake. But we still want to know. And we still want to incorporate that. That's why we had, what, a 12-year run of no commercial debts before this stupid tragedy with the helicopters flying? There's a few different ones, yeah. Here is how the airbags work inside of a Zooks. I mean, this is incredible.

These guys are doing it right. Look at this. All right. So now I'm going to... Here you go. Observe. I mean, that's pretty freaking cool, man. You're totally covered.

Yeah. I mean, for people who are listening, it is literally putting you into a giant boy in the bubble. I mean, it's unbelievable how safe you would be in a Zooks if you guys. got sideswiped. I think it's probably the safest vehicle you could ever ride in based on that. I could be wrong. All right, everybody. There's been another amazing episode of this week in startups, late night edition. If you want to get the docket, this week in startups.com slash docket. If you want to follow us on Reddit, get involved in the Reddit community. We're top 60% of Reddits. I think we're now top 40% of Reddits. We're trying to get into the 30s.

If we get another 100 followers, it's TWI Startups. We are in the top 43% about to cross 40. Need your help. Get in there. Participate. I'm in there. Lons in there. Alex is in there. We're trying to build a little community on Reddit because that's where a lot of entrepreneurs are. Some of the questions we took today were from entrepreneur, really great entrepreneurial communities in Reddit. He's Lons on X. He's Alex on X. I'm at Jason. Founder Fridays coming up, founder Friday. Tech, if you want to hang out with other CEOs

and founders. And if you want to come to Founder University, founder. University, our 10th edition coming soon, our 10th cohort, and we'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.