This Week in Startups - Slack CEO departs Salesforce, Circle cancels SPAC, SBF's links with media & regulators | E1628

Episode Date: December 6, 2022

J+M start the show with some BREAKING NEWS: Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield is leaving Salesforce! (5:09) Then, they cover Circle canceling its SPAC (26:06), SBF's interactions with regulators and the media (40:29), and a Startup of the Day! (57:50) (0:00) Molly tees up today's news topics! (1:48) J+M catch up from the weekend (5:09) BREAKING: Slack Founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield is leaving Salesforce two years after the Slack acquisition was announced (12:49) Mixpanel - Apply for $50K in credits at https://mixpanel.com/startups  (14:14) Is this a Salesforce issue or a Slack issue? Is Salesforce's Co-CEO leaving last week just a coincidence? (24:43) Crowdbotics - Get a free scoping session for your next big app idea at crowdbotics.com/twist (26:06) Circle cancels its SPAC over missed regulatory deadlines (39:11) Fitbod - Get 25% off at https://fitbod.me/twist  (40:29) SBF and Maxine Waters, Semafor's potential illicit funds from SBF (57:50) Startup of the Day! Loft Dynamics is building a VR helicopter flight simulator for ~95% cheaper than traditional simulators FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood Subscribe to our YouTube to watch all full episodes: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkkhmBWfS7pILYIk0izkc3A?sub_confirmation=1

Hey, everybody. It is Monday. We have a big show for you today. Don't worry, we're both here. I'm just doing the intro by myself, but Jason will be here in one second to talk about breaking news. Stuart Butterfield, Slack founder and CEO is leaving Salesforce two years to the day after Salesforce bought his company Slack. We're going to talk about what that means for him, for Salesforce, and for founders who get acquired. We will also then break down Circle canceling its SPAC, how that relates to, lawlessness in crypto and SPACs and FTX and what more regulation might mean for people who are trying to be legit. And then finally, we have a super cool startup of the day. We're talking about VR helicopter pilot training and the idea that soon all knowledge will be available to us in one way or another, including virtual reality. It's going to be a great show. Stick with us.

This weekend startups is brought to you by Mix Panel helps startups find product market fit faster by offering powerful self-serve product analytics. Apply today to join MixPanel's startup program and get $50,000 in credits at Mixpanel.com slash startups. CrowdBotics. Great ideas can change the world. And crowdbotics is the fastest way to turn those ideas into code. Get a free scoping session for your next big app idea at crowdbotics.com slash twist.

And FitBod. Tired of doing the same workouts at the gym? FitBod will build you personalized workouts that help you progress with every set. Get 25% off your subscription or try out the app for free when you sign up now at FitBod. me slash twist. All right, Molly, happy Monday. Here we go again. Let's see if this news week.

Let's see if this news week slows down or and just keeps the day. alluge of just crazy news happening. It's crazy over the weekend now. I don't even get a break because, of course, the all-in pod drops on Saturday. Shout out to producer Nick, who gives up every Friday night to

Oh my gosh, bless him. By the way, and shout out to Rachel, too, for giving him his flowers on Twitter this weekend. She was like, I want everyone to know how hard Nick works. It was awesome.

It was not weird. Thank you, Rachel. But that was super uncomfortable for me. You guys can talk about how hard you work all the time. It's not me. It's not changing my. opinion. Everybody work harder. I get a lot of weird questions asking me. They're like, so what is it like on the all end pot? And I'm like, that's a great question. You're like,

I don't know. There was a very funny comment. Freberg replied to you and said something nice, but he said something like I was a hero or something ridiculous. And someone replied to him. It was like, oh, it's nice that you support your friend, but hero's a little much. And I was like, I agree. Yeah, man, social media. Nick's like, I agree, but also shut up guy. Reply guy in social media. Reply guy is the reply guy. I got a lot of reply guys. I, uh, yeah, a lot of reply guys in my replies these days.

You have some reply guys. I got a lot of reply guys who just feel like, look, there's a certain type of reply guy who's policing speech, but on a very grammatical level, you know? Oh, yes. So. The reply guy pedant. Yeah, like that's a, oh, you're a hero. And they're like, well, technically a hero.

Oh, actually. You know, hardworking, but hero might be a little hard. You wish you're probably looking for as dedicated, you know, and they're just, policing your the the style of the writing or the word choice that I like to call the literal net reply guy who've never heard a joke before yes they cannot detect sarcasm those are my favorite those are my favorite I mean I'm like dude that sarcasm was a nine on the Richter scale and you didn't even pick it up it did not even register and they're like I get a lot of those but sometimes they're reply gals and not just guys they get a lot of reply gals who are like literal

net they got a little bit of the literal net and I'm just I have a gender in you know uh not specific i have a incredible gif of superman flying and it's i think it's from like superman three or four like one of the terrible christopher reeves superman's like the first two are amazing it's superman flying and he's like disoriented and he's looking around like this yeah uh you know and just like then somebody writes the joke and they have the word the joke bounce around the screen yes where superman is looking around and i believe i have seen that one the joke. And that's my,

for reply gals and girls who don't get the joke, I also put a hilarious laughing, rolling on the floor laughing emoji to indicate jokes now on social. I think that's wise. We used to call it the, I mean,

this is as far back as the buzz out loud days, right? Like when Twitter was new when you were discovering the literal net, we invented this concept called the Sarkmark. Like, we need a mark

to indicate sarcasm similar to the TM or the copyright or the registered, the Sarkmark. I mean, that is amazing, by the way, that's supermanic. It's just great. He's just like, what, there's a joke here? I can't get the joke.

That's awesome. That's awesome. All right. So, you know, founders leave companies once in a while when they get bought by big companies. It tends to be, paradoxically, Molly, on exactly calendar years. So weird. For some reason.

But Slack got bought exactly two years ago. by Salesforce. Day, I believe. Today, to the day, December 5th. And interestingly, there were some breaking news this morning. There was Slack CEO and co-founder Stuart Butterfield is leaving Salesforce. Two years to the day after the purchase, which itself is interesting and we will dissect. And it is combined with another interesting nugget, which is that he will be replaced not by a Slack team.

or a Slack executive, but by a Salesforce executive. So kind of a couple things happening here. One, let's talk about why these founders who get acquired by big companies tend to leave. And we did say this is Stuart Butterfield, right?

Yeah, Stuart Butterfield. Big deal. Like, the guy's a big deal. I mean, you know, he's like a renowned tech founder. It's a big story that he is leaving Salesforce two years to the day after the acquisition, which we can assume means some vesting. that's exactly what it means.

The retention bonuses were paid. Retention bonuses, sometimes like a CEO type, they will give cash bonuses, stock bonuses to. This wouldn't be a vesting type situation because it was an acquisition, right? So it's not like the early days of a company

or you hired a new CEO. This is the existing CEO who was probably what's called fully vested. In other words, they had earned all their shares over the first four years. Although it probably was a Sometimes retention bonuses are timed though, right?

Is that what I was thinking of our time? Yes. So that's what I was thinking of our besting is right. It's definitely a retention bonus. Yeah. Got it. Yeah. Anyway, yeah, super creative founder.

He is credited with the consumerization of SaaS by, let's see, Jason. Among other folks. Yeah, sure. Yeah, we'll give it to you because, you know, that's what Nick said. And I trust everything Nick tells me. But yeah, he is moving on. He is going to be replaced by Lydiaan Jones, who's currently an executive VP. and general manager in Salesforce's cloud segment.

And we'll take over a CEO of Slack, which I think we can assume means that Slack is headed for some greater integration, shall we say? Possibly. Yeah, I mean, you could sometimes the, if an internal person takes something over, they might not be as precious about integrations or changes to the product. You know, the original philosophy of the product.

project and the product and the founding team is gone. So, you know, if, for example, they had some sacred cows, you know, they always want it to be playful. They never want to do annoying things. They never want to force products down your throat, whatever it is. Or we're about text, not video. Whatever those sacred cows are, they, when a lot of times acquiring companies want to get rid of the founder, you know, and that is the, that becomes the delicate balance.

You want the founder there for their creativity, for the spirit of the company, for culture, but sometimes the founder can be a blocker, right, because you want to do things like you're saying, integrate the product more deeply into other products. So what if all of a sudden Slack, every contact you mention, it creates a Salesforce record in their CRM system or something, right? Right. Or you have to log in with a Salesforce ID. brilliant.

Oh, you know. Right. Like those kind of features would be annoying to some OG Slack users and they might be delightful for some Salesforce users, but somebody like, Stuart might be like, no way, not on my watch. Well, this watch is over. Well, and it's, I mean, this is, there, it's so nuanced whenever there's a big acquisition and whenever, you know, a found, a really founder driven company gets acquired like that because you have a bunch of things happen at once.

One, users worry about what will happen under the new. regime. We're seeing that with Figma right now, actually, after Figma was acquired by Adobe for $20 billion, you know, freaked out saying, you know, Figma's going to get rolled into the Adobe suite. And it, you know, and their CEO, Dillon Field came out and said, oh, no, it'll remain independent. But then a couple of things always happen, right? Product velocity slows down usually when a company is acquired by a bigger company because there's just not the same level of urgency around keeping the product going. And I think you could argue that we saw that with Slack. It sort of stagnated for a long time. And then like huddles were the big innovation, which is great. But I think we could agree

there could still be other product features that could have been developed if it were independent. And then also eventually, I mean, we were trying to think of examples where founders have stayed past, let's say, the retention bonus period. Yeah. And there aren't that many examples. It depends on the company acquiring them. Most companies in the old days when they acquire them, try to get rid of the management team as quick as possible, take it over and, you know, make it integrated into the larger stack, right?

Because when you're acquiring these things, you have some concept of what you want to do. YouTube would be a great example. YouTube, the founders left very quickly. I don't know the exact number of days, but Google quickly put somebody in charge of it, and they had a very specific goal in mind. Put it on the infrastructure of Google, right,

the search engine infrastructure, and integrate the ad, networks. Both of those things were done incredibly quickly, like under a year or two. And then once they did, all of the scaling issues with YouTube went away. You didn't see a lot of change in the front end interface because they spent all their time just trying to make it work in 150, 60, 70, 80 countries. And they really wanted you to, when you were logging into your AdSense account and buying search ads, be able to also see your campaigns on YouTube. And then maybe, you know, you could have a campaign to sell, you know, your ember mug or your athletic greens, you know, on YouTube

with a video and with search ads and be able to see the relative performance of both of those in one interface. So that happened very quickly. Which was genius, by the way, right? And YouTube is a little bit like Craigslist in the sense that its interface hasn't actually involved that much at all. Like all the technology innovation is in the back end. It's in the ad serving. It's in the recommendations algorithm. It's in just keeping that sucker uproof. right under the crushing weight of the millions of videos that are uploaded every minute. The paradox of interface changes is, you know, a better interface that looks better is more modern can actually reduce usage and consumption of the product because consumers are such

creatures of habits. You know, you change a remote control. Think about like how in your mind you probably had some remote control your whole life. It could have been like for your cable company or direct TV. Like I knew the direct TV remote control since I had it for over 10 years. without looking at it. I could like put my finger over it. So that's the same kind of thing that happens with Craigslist. You know where, you know,

your casual encounters, where your couch surfing, whatever you're into, you know where that is. And, you know, the same thing for Amazon, right? Like, I can get to the orders page on Amazon without even knowing

how to get there. I know I'm clicking on my profile and there's an orders tab. Like, I just get to it very quickly. Right. It's terrible, but it's familiar. Correct. You just learn it.

and then you don't want to relearn something. Two things we always want to talk about on this show. Number one, how to build the best product possible. And number two, how to find product market fit faster. These things usually go hand in hand. But relying on your gut is not good enough. Many VCs aren't willing to wait around for you to figure it out based on your instincts. No.

Investors are looking for founders that can use data-driven solutions to find product market fit more efficiently. So you have to check out Mix Panel right now. And they'll give you $50,000 in credits when you join their startup program. Mix Panel helps startups find product market fit faster by offering powerful self-serve product analytics. You can get insights in real time with the help of MixPanels pre-built templates. And this is critically important. Startups I've invested in, they've been trying to figure out what their customers are actually doing in the product.

Well, if you don't have Mix Panel set up, you don't have cohort data, you don't have the features designed, to see, hey, you know, maybe you spent 100 hours on a feature and 10% of your users actually use that feature. How do you know? Well, you have to have the right analytics stack. And that is MixPanel. Apply today to claim your $50,000 in credits at Mixpanel.com slash startups. And then I will say another thing. So there's why they're giving you 50 dimes. That's M-I-X-P-A-N-E-L.com slash startups. And that's startups with an S, okay, plural. And then I will say another thing. There's a lot of like interesting kind of founder and culture and product questions here. But also, I mean, so Salesforce's co-CEO, Brett Taylor, just announced that he's leaving.

Yep. To do a startup. I think that was the news. He just said to go back to his entrepreneurial roots. There was no specific announcement of a startup at all. Entrepreneurale endeavors means investing in companies or finding a new, becoming CEO of an existing company. So I would say at his level. I heard some rumors about that, actually.

Yeah, there's some company that needs adult supervision that's probably made him an offer, and it's like an offer that's too good to refuse. You know, they give them 5 or 10% of a company that's a rocket chip. Yeah, I'm not buying that entrepreneur. I mean, that was like, that was like the business version of spending time with your family. I'm just saying it wasn't like he was going to start a startup. You know, it was like something. Not a blank sheet of paper, no.

And also, it's the second co-CEO to leave Salesforce in three years. And, I mean, it is all, it is totally possible that Butterfield is leaving because it's the two years to the day, that's the most likely scenario under Occam's Razor. But it also just makes me wonder, because he also could have stayed, right? Like, it just makes me wonder if something's going on as sales force. Or if it's just one of those times where, like, things are changing. The economies, you know, it's like everything's been awesome. There could be an abrupt shift to not awesome internally happening.

But it's two really big departures in a week. He was probably, I would say these are probably not related, uh, because, It's exactly two years for Stuart. And then I'm guessing, given the market conditions and Salesforce is constricting, like any other SaaS product, you have been talking about this, SACS has been talking about it. You know, SaaS, everybody's tight in their belt. I just looked at our MailChimp bill as but one example. And I was like, wait a second. MailChimp is super expensive.

And we're not using our lists. And then I was like, oh, wait, review on Twitter and substack are free. And then I looked at the size of some of our email list. they were giant and immediately I took them down this weekend. And the mail chip bill went from 2000 to 800. And I was like, okay, well, that's, you know, over $10,000 a year. So I'm going through every SaaS bill in every company. And our SaaS bills were probably 2% of our revenue, like one or 2%.

It's not like we were spending 20% of our revenue on this. But if I can take 2% and make it 1%, why wouldn't I do that in a constricting market? And so the belt tightening's happening. And so in a belt tightening, environment, if it was the days of, you know, milk and honey here, maybe they would have made Stewart some incredible offer to stay, or they would have some new project that they would want him to spearhead and they make him some unbelievable offer. But in a constricting environment, maybe those offers aren't available.

And same thing for the CEO, maybe the CEO, the co-CEO who left, just had some better offer. And he was looking at sales force and saying, oh, I'm going to have to do potentially layoffs. I'm going to have to deal with like this crazy war the company is going to constrict. It'd be more fun to be a startup. I mean, it's just legitimately not as fun. Yeah, exactly.

He might be like, I'm ready for a new thing. And, you know, Benioff might be like coming in, like I need to get way more involved in this and that. Sure. And then also back to Butterfield, that's exactly the time when you would imagine efficiencies start to be top of mind for a CEO. So it's very possible that Salesforce is now pressuring Slack even more

to integrate with the core. product, to, you know, it's like, and to eliminate duplications. Yeah, raise prices. Like, all of the things that would make it not as fun for Butterfield to want to be there. Yeah, maybe, maybe they want to lay people off, you know, you never know. They could have said cut the team in half. And that seems highly likely, right? If Slack has been operating really as a, as a separate division, and they're like,

okay, wait a second, just as a matter of pure mercenary efficiency. Yeah. We can fold this thing into Salesforce's offerings, lay off most of the people. people who are working on it because you know there's duplication. Yep. That's exactly the point at which the founder is going to go, this is no longer my product amount. The founder, rightfully so, would fight for every person on their team with the exception of maybe the 5% of underperformers on any team.

So just super pragmatically, if you're the founder and you get acquired and you're like, I have a thousand people, they'd be like, hey, you need to do a riff. It's like, yeah, these 50 people, yeah, these are the low performers. I'm like, yeah, you got to do a little more. And they're like, okay. And these 50 people, yeah, we could, there might be a duplicative position. So here's my 10% riff. And they're like, yeah, we would like you to triple that.

You know, get rid of 30%. And they'd be like, yeah, I can't. Whereas the new manager is like, oh, I can, you know, this person who's coming in from Salesforce. So they might, you have no problem doing a rift. So again, it's- Absolutely. Don't get too comfy with Slack, everybody. Now you're going to be a Salesforce customer.

I'm fine. I'm being a Salesforce customer. I love Slack. I think they've been a good steward of it, so to speak, so far. And just the same way. am I right? Thank you. Thank you.

A good steward of it so far. This has become what Silicon Valley is very good at now. Amazon bought Ring and Zappos, rest of peace, Tony Shea, one of the greats. And those two companies really kept their culture and they kept their founders. In fact, it was Tony who stepped away from Zappos, not he wasn't like pushed out or whatever, but he stayed there for like a decade after they sold it. Not, you know, who's not. good at this would be Facebook.

Facebook bounces the founders pretty quick, right? Yeah. And the founders wind up hating Zuckerberg afterwards. So it's a little more hardcore about it. Sister stayed around for quite a while. Yeah. But then left angry. Like five or six years, I think.

But then by the time he left, did not seem. Like, it was very clear that Instagram had been starved compared to the big blue. my understanding was they forced the stories down Cisterham's throat. You know, he just told him, do it. I don't care about what other ideas you have. This is the number one priority. We are going to own stories.

We're going to kill Snap. And, you know, Cistern is like a stand-up guy who probably had his own creative ideas of where to take Instagram. And that's where the founder can be a blocker. Because in that case, I think stories became more popular on the Facebook collection of apps than it was on Snap. So that was an instance where Zuckerberg, you know, I don't want to say did the right thing, but he did the pragmatic thing that, you know, staved off Snap.

Snap. Snap was considered like TikTok at the time. Snap was going to kill Facebook. And he, he neutralized that threat. He hasn't been able to neutralize the TikTok threat, maybe too late for that. Yeah. No, he definitely did. It was interesting, though, like Sarah Fryer's book about Facebook talked a lot about how

Instagram, other than, it was like. They were starved for resources because they didn't want to cannibalize newsfeed and Facebook proper for years and years and years. And then all of a sudden we're like, do the stories thing, which people, you know, of course, felt was not innovative. But so it was a weird. It was like a right and wrong kind of thing. It's just the kind of thing that sucks for founders, right? Like if you're the founder and you love the product, I mean, it's just a different. That's when you get acquired, you get a new boss.

When you get billions of dollars, you don't get control of your asset anymore. Exactly. You sold the home. It's not your house anymore. You sold your house anymore. You can drive by it, but you're no longer allowed to come inside. The end. So it's like a good note for founders, which is like getting acquired is great.

That's your exit. Yeah. But be aware of the hard realities. And then, yes, if you're a fan of Figma and you see it get acquired by Adobe, like, don't assume that it's going to stay independent forever. Why would it? Or it will until there's a downturn. Whatever they tell you in the acquiring company,

is true until it's not. So they could make you all the promises you want, even in writing. But at the end of the day, it's an at-will kind of thing, and your contract, even if it's a two-year contract, four-year contract,

even if they tell you you're going to have control, they can just change their mind, right? And they could just fire you because it's an at-will thing, and they just have to pay you off. It's whatever the price is to pay you off. But I drive by my old house in L.A. I get very emotional. I think about my, you know,

my first daughter, you know, and bring her home from the hospital and playing basketball in the driveway, and it's my first house I ever owned. And I'm always, like, tempted to ring the bell and, you know, say hi. And I'm just like, yeah, I wouldn't want people doing that at my current house. You know, like, you just have to let it go, right? You have to let it go.

You sell the company. It's not yours. You move on to the next adventure. But be very careful because, you know, you might really like that house. You want to keep it till you're gone. And so these are hard decisions for our founders to make. Even going public, you're making this to a certain degree. You're, you know, beholden to shareholders.

Absolutely. Yeah. It's going to change your relationships across the board. I am very curious to see what Stuart Butterfield does next though. Really, really, really, really creative guy. Like, respected founder. I'm pretty sure if I were, I don't remember. I mean, Flickr was a big success. This is a big success. Yeah. Like, go do something. And both of them started as video games. So come to climate. No, he's going to start a video game and then pivot to climate. So if history is any, if history is any indicator, Stuart will be starting a video game company. He'll get it. large, like the all video games, you know, it's, it's a hit space business. You have to get really lucky to have it, you know, resonate. Like, it's like one in 20 video games or 30 or 40 kind of resonate. And so, yeah, maybe he'll do a video game. And this time will become the breakout that he always wanted to have in video games. He's like, no, it's, he hasn't had that.

He wants to do a video game company? The last two times they did a video game. It was like never ending something game. And yeah, they were trying to do a game. both times. Both times they got very low on money. And then when the game never ending was the first one, I think. Oh, that's the second one maybe.

Anyway, both times they were trying to make games. And Slack was an internal tool that they were using for the game. And then the first time that they were using to help program the game and, you know, do collaboration. And then they just released it on the world. And Flickr was funny. I'm totally missing. Yeah.

Flickr was like, oh, we can't share our photos. Here's a way to do it. So. That has a huge hole in my lore. right there, my Butterfield lore. Yeah. If you want to build an app, you want to build a startup, you want to build a website, a service, a marketplace, any of these things, well, you're going to need to have a really good plan.

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going to build your app for you quick and they're going to spec it out perfectly. So if you're not sure where to start, CrowdBotics also offers professional scoping. Now this is going to help you flesh out your project, they're going to ask you the important questions. They're going to help you flesh out the features maybe you haven't thought of, right? I want you to talk to the folks at CrowdBotics and let them show you how good they are at what they do. They will schedule a free scoping session with you and get you a detailed build plan at CrowdBotics.com slash Twist. That's CrowdBOTICS.com slash Twist. Try Crawobotics and see what they can do for you in their scoping session. You got nothing to lose. So in other news, the speculative asset

bubble continues to claim victims. Obviously, SPACs have been, you know, hundreds of SPACs are orphaned out there and will probably be wound down. We've seen that happen already. And then obviously, crypto, huge speculative asset bubble. And this next story, the company fits in both, correct? This is like a, this is a double bubble. This is a double bubble story. Yeah, sure. Circle creators of the USDC stable coin has canceled its SPAC with

Concord Acquisition Group. and said that it did not complete SEC qualification in time. Circle announced its SPAC merger back in July 2021, which was 16 months ago, so it's already taken a minute. Obviously, that was peak bubble, if not, you know, very, very close to it.

And now they have just called off the whole thing kind of at a moment when both like, as you just said, double bubble, right? Double bubble pop. Yeah. I mean, there's no market. Yeah.

There's no market for SPACs right now, right? The public, a lot of the SPAC action was speculative, new market entrance, what they call retail. So think Robin Hood traders who weren't trading stocks previously, crypto traders. So this would have been a darling in 2021 or even 2020, 2020, because you had crypto, plus you had a really great existing founder. This would have been an amazing, amazing offering. because Jeremy Allaire is quite respected having done Coalfusion and other companies that have done pretty well. But he's been trying to do, we had him on the pod back on episode 1307,

he was doing the regulated crypto exchange. Remember, they have that stable coin that's like tether or I guess FTT was, I don't think FTT was a stable coin exactly, but no, it wasn't. But when I had interviewed Sam Beckman-Fried in that private setting, I'd ask me if you consider a stable coin and he said actually that's something he was talking about. So, USDC

as a dollar-pegged. Yeah, that's dollar-pegged to stable-coin. One coin always equals one dollar no matter what happens. They actually built up and were the first company to do like audits on this stuff and have some big accounting firm

confirm you do have the money and they didn't have it like in what's called Chinese paper. Remember that whole tether issue? Tether, if you remember, had commercial paper. Those are business loans in China. and they didn't deny that, but they would never detail it. So USDC was designed Molly, if you remember, to be like the antithesis of that.

We're going to do it in the United States. We're going to do it regulated. We're going to audit it. And Tether, in fairness to them, has quickly tried to catch up. I don't buy their audits because I don't think they're actually audits. I think they're like attestation still. But I still think something's funky over Tether and Circle. I think it's pretty buttoned up.

It is buttoned up. And Nick made the point, producer Nick, that this question of, like, we don't know what the issue was around SEC compliance. We don't know what it was that they didn't get done. SEC qualification. We don't know if that was related to crypto regulations, exchange regulations, or, you know, SPAC regulations. Like, we know that there has been increased scrutiny around both of those things.

And so it's not clear. And the SEC hasn't confirmed anything. And the Circle didn't offer any details other than saying did not complete SEC qualification. so it's unclear what was the blocker but there is a question if the blockers were related to trying to be the up and up

crypto company it's almost like it's almost like legal marijuana I know this is going to feel like a stretch but like I know some people who have a big cannabis farm had it for a long time since the before times and have tried to have converted it

to legal business and the cost and complexity associated with that is in the like millions of dollars a year. So much so that they're selling it. And you almost wonder if that's this messy middle where there's a lot more regulation around crypto is going to create a situation like that where it's frankly just faster and easier to operate like SBF. Go to the mamas, do whatever the hell you want, break all the rules, pick up the pieces after.

Yeah. It is correct that there is a messy process going on. and certainly what's happened with Luna FTX and every other crypto implosion probably, probably, had something to do with this because the SEC, Jeremy O'Lear tweeted, from my perspective, I believe the SEC has been rigorous and thorough in understanding our business and many novel aspects of this industry, referring to crypto, obviously, this kind of review is necessary to ultimately provide trust, transparency, and accountability for major companies in crypto.

So I think he's tipping his cards there in the second tweet in his tweet storm. And I think it's that the SEC is probably like, holy cow, we don't want this to blow up in our laps. That's what I read it. And they're saying, you know what? Let's take an extra six months

to make sure all of these ducks are in a row. Not your fault, not our fault. We just need to get this right. And this is what's happened, you know, in crypto, Molly, I think, because the stakes became so high and because of all of the absolute corruption, fraud, incompetence and combinations of those things, now the industry is like, you know what, we have no choice but to take legal actions against the, you know, folks in this industry, and we're going to have to set regulations really tightly and clearly. Yeah. They should have done the regulations earlier.

I think the SEC is to blame for some of this and not giving clear enough regulations. They should have just said all the existing rules apply. You're breaking them. They could have done that five, six years ago. They didn't. They wanted to have their cake and eat it too, which is they didn't want to have to explicitly say you're breaking the law. And now it's clear that people are breaking the law.

And so now they have to go take action. That's kind of how America works. We want people to be innovative. We want them to be creative. But there's no process of certify. hey, like, you're in compliance here if you're doing something completely novel. And so it's up to you to work with attorneys to make sure you're not committing fraud. And you're, you know, obeying the regulations.

Well, people could be obeying the regulations and committing fraud. They could be not doing the regulations and not doing fraud. There could be any combination of those, that four by four quadrant, right? Are they complying with regulations yes or no? And are they committing fraud or being shady, yes or no? Right. And I think you had many people offshore not complying and being shady. Oh, absolutely.

And then as a result. And complying. Right. And it's, it's very likely. Again, we don't know. It's very likely that circle is compliant and not shady and now is caught in the backwash.

Correct. Of all of the other behavior, which I think we can expect to probably be the case, right? It's like the bad apples ruin it for everybody else. That will be the case for a little while going forward. And it's going to be tough going. It does make me wonder, though, what took 16 months? Because back in July 2021, there wasn't like so much scrutiny on SPACs and on crypto.

So like, what took them 16 months in the first place? Maybe the SEC really has been that disorganized, that they were actually really trying to make sure that they were doing this in a super buttoned up way. And there just wasn't enough, like, there weren't enough guidelines to follow. They were having to make it up all along. But I do wonder what happened in the intervening time. time there. I think the SPAC market and how SPACs were constructed could have been buttoned up a little bit more, I guess, in terms of the presentations of the assets being bought. And I think the SEC

has tightened that up a little bit. We still want people to be able to do SPACs, I think. We want different ways for companies to go public. So you don't want to get rid of that innovation. But since people did get hurt, you know, the SEC tends to react by tightening things up in you know, a show of good faith to the public, hey, you know, we're going to try to avoid this problem in the future. But now you think about any venture firm investing in crypto, they're going to be putting governance in place. They're no longer going to subject themselves to what happened with FTX. And so you saw, you know, venture firms now explaining themselves, explaining their diligence process, talking about how they're going to change it in the future.

A number of VC firms are completely silent on their investments, which is weird. So I'm not going to mention specific names here. I don't want to like paint with too wide of a brush here, but you can be certain that the next FTX or circle, you know, bad actors, good actors, I would say, Jeremy's a great actor. I've known him for a long time for 20 years. There's absolutely no chance I think he would ever do anything that is,

like on the level of FTX at all. I mean, he's so buttoned up. I don't think he would even bend the rules. Right. He's gone above and beyond. Yeah. If anything, he's gone. far above and beyond that it's now, you know, torpedoed the IPO potentially for now.

For now, yeah, delayed it, I would say. Delayed it, I would say. He could have done all this offshore and already, you know, flipped his bag. He could have found bagholders. And so we want to reward the people doing it right, not penalized, which I think goes to your earlier point. The people trying to do it right are going to get penalized. The person who's growing cannabis illegally and not going through the process is going to have a higher profit margin. And if there's no enforcement, Oh my God, this sends the wrong message to the market, which is, hey, we're not enforcing anything. So go ahead and go crazy and flip your bag.

Or, hey, we are enforcing. If you do go through the enforcement process, we're going to delay your IPO. Right, exactly. The enforcement process, what happens in the sort of messy middle where we are now is that the enforcement process itself becomes punitive. Yes. Because there's been so much profit and harm before. and then you have this real question and this is, I think, what is the big chilling?

We're going to have a cryptocurrency roundtable later this week actually and we should talk about this. Because I do think that this raises the question of how much of a chilling effect it is. Like if the enforcement, there's a lack of trust, there's a lack of investment and the enforcement itself is so punitive that it can cause you to have to sell your cannabis farm, then what is the incentive to be in this space right now?

And the SPAC changes to so people understand them. The SEC has been proposing these is maybe additional disclosures from the SPAC sponsors and any conflicts of interests and then really understanding the projections made by the SPACs

and their target companies because these are private companies, they can kind of, if you're acquiring a private company, whatever projections they have are not the same as like a company that's going through the IPO process, right? You're basically saying,

I'm going to trust the sponsor to find a great target, to buy it. I'm going to trust that the private companies, projections or whatever, are fair and balanced and, you know, represent reality. And I'm going to be involved in a very adult way. This is a very, like, sophisticated investors way.

Hey, I'm giving some sponsor money to go buy an asset. I have to trust that the sponsor is going to buy a good asset, right? You don't even know what asset they're going to buy. You're giving them money to buy an asset that is not yet disclosed. anybody participating in something like that has to have a really large amount of trust in the sponsor and say, okay, I know the sponsor's in it for the long term.

So I think the amount of time they hold their securities would be like the big fix for me. If the sponsors had to hold their securities for five years, three years, something like that, they could do that voluntarily. They wouldn't need an SEC regulation to do that.

And boy, that would that give the people buying the SPAC a lot more comfort. Oh, I can sell my shares, six months after it goes public, the sponsors have to hold for four years. So I have three and a half year window to liquidate my position before the sponsors. Now, most sponsors would like to have the flexibility

to sell their shares, especially if things go well. So that's why the SEC probably has to step in. If you don't regulate yourself, you will be regulated. It will be regulated. The blocker officially, I should clarify,

was the SEC's S4 form, which covers, quote, information regarding the terms of the transaction, risk factors, ratios, pro forma financial information and material contracts with the company being acquired. That registration statement was not declared effective yet. So the spec was canceled. Still pretty broad.

Yeah, that's super broad. It's like anything. Exactly. So it could be anything. Again, could be crypto, could be spec. Totally unclear. Okay. You know I've been on a health kick over the past year or so.

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the tremendous benefit of the doubt. I cannot wait to talk about this because this is not how I read this tweet at all. So let's go. Okay, great. So, you know, I, when I see these Sam Bankman-Fried the apology to our end or people going to bat for him,

I just replace him with Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos or Bernie Madoff and whatever Madoff's company was called. It was made off something. Anyway, I just look at that and I just swap out the words and I'm wondering, you know, how history will look at it. And we don't have complete information here, but boy, does it look really bad. So anyway, let's see up this story and we'll see where this one falls. So on, I'm not sure, on December 2nd, which was what, Friday?

Yep. Maxine Waters tweeted jointly with the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services, quote, at SBFX, we appreciate that you've been candid in your discussions about what happened at FTX. Your willingness to talk to the public will help the company's customers, investors, and others. To that end, we would welcome your participation in our hearing on the 13th. Okay, so the kind interpretation of this is she's setting a, she's politely setting up an opportunity for him to explain himself knowing that if we, if you believe he is involved in fraud, this is a polite way of loring him in. Yeah. Before you subpoena him.

Okay. Like, everybody's invited to, right? Like, if you look at the January 6th. committee or any like committee. Everyone is invited to participate until they are no longer invited. So it's better if you come in because if you if you have to subpoena someone, it's like a fight. You know, they might get a lawyer like they might. It delays the process. The best possible scenario is that you be really nice to and flatter this strange young man who seems to want to incriminate himself constantly in public and you extend him a nice invitation to come and do that before

your house financial services committee like frankly that is exactly how i would approach this which is like please come and chat with you're doing great come and talk to us okay i i can appreciate the bejesus out of yourself i can appreciate that i you know why i think this is a cany lady like i was just like what is wrong with everybody taking this so literally like she's being nice to him okay yeah i think if she's spinning a trap and this is a web the one piece of evidence i have that this could be correct is that she used the joint tweet feature, which nobody has used in a long time. Exactly. The fact that she figured out, somebody on our staff figured out how to jointly tweet with

the House Committee on Financial Services makes this a little suss in my mind. Like, yeah, maybe it is a trap. This is a trap. Here's the problem. So many Democrats and politicians, Republicans as well. And Republicans, exactly. I don't know, yeah. I'm so over this like narrative, but yes, go, go, go, go.

Well, no, I don't know. There's, it's unclear what the actual donations have been. Because this guy is such a lying, deceiving, manipulative schengali. Yeah. It's completely possible that he dollar for dollared, you know, Republicans and Democrats, or he was a little more to the left. We'll find out. Which we should say, he said he did.

Now, he is a liar. We know that. Well, actually, we don't know that. I think we know. assuming that he's lying in many ways, we don't know all the things he's lying about. Yes. But he said, like, this isn't just like we're kind of guessing. He said he gave as much money to Republicans as he did to Democrats, but that he was

louder about it with Democrats because it would be favorable to him and get him favorable coverage. That is cynical. We don't have these exact. The numbers we have, I guess, from reporting still show more to the left. So anyway, we'll take. Because it was like dark money, right. He claims he did these like dark money.

He did, if he did do that, he did it covertly, which is even weirder because then I guess he was trying to make Democrats think he was on their side while winking to the Republicans and secretly backing them. Yeah. And letting them know he was also on their side. All reporters are liberal and therefore they would freak out over contributions to the Republicans and he didn't want to have the fight. Ah, who knows? Okay. Who knows? Those are, this is again, the words of Sam Bankman.

I mean, I just, I would, I just would say like, let. I'm going to let this one play out and say, I mean, don't get me wrong. He's getting a freaking pass. I think there's all kinds of sexism involved in here. I think he's probably right. He was off. If he actually did dark money donate to Republicans and then be really loud about the Democrats, he played that perfectly.

Of course the media was going to end up in his pocket over that one. Like, brilliant. Bravo, sir. Like, bravo. Yeah. But I do not think that this tweet is, I think this interpretation was so just like, there's this assumption that everybody is dumber than you are. on Twitter, right?

Like, Maxine Waters, her staff, the members of the House Financial Services Committee, and all of the lawyers who surround them are not idiots. They're not idiots, no. Like, come on Twitter. Well, let's play the replace game. We'll do a little bad lips here.

Okay. Elizabeth Holmes, we appreciate you've been candid in your discussions about what happened at Theranos. Your willingness to talk to the public will help companies, customers, investors, and others. To that end, we'd welcome to participate our hearing on the 13th. Bernie Madoff. We would appreciate, we appreciate,

that you've been candid any discussions about what happened at Madoff, Associates, whatever it was called, your willingness to talk publicly, I mean, if it's a trap, then it's how it always starts.

Yeah. And Elizabeth Holmes wouldn't talk to anybody. I mean, if you have a guy, it's like you work with the witness you have. If you have a guy who literally is out here, just like that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, then you be very nice to that guy and he will come and tell you whatever you need,

the end. I'm, yeah. And so to that extent, somebody wrote, Lord Vader, we appreciate you've been candid about your discussions about what happened at the Death Star. Your willingness to vote. I mean, it's kind of funny.

That was hilarious. That was hilarious. That was hilarious. It could be. Listen, it could be. But I also was just like, maybe consider the possibility that like. Some of the replies pointed out, obviously, that SPF and his co-founders at FTCS gave $300,000 to nine members of the House Financial Services Committee, which means they're going

to be harder on him, actually, I think. I think so. And I think that these tend to be. if they if they if they're direct discussion if they're direct um donations they tend to be on the smaller side it's those those

packs that tend to be the big ones right and uh yeah so the and the access he had to the White House and to politicians if you're donating money you get pictures and so of course there's a picture of him with Maxine Waters smiling and that one's been circulating on the internet um but just so you know

it's about about 25 grand to get a picture with the president of the United States. You get a picture with Maxine Waters is probably five grand. Yeah. You give any donation. You go to any dinner, you get a picture. So when you see those pictures, just understand, like, they're available for purchase at the gift shop.

And if you want to go to the White House, go into the White House. If you were, like some people in our industry were bundlers, they call them. And so people kept trying to bundle me. So if I gave 25K and you got nine other people to do that, Molly, and you gave 25K and you gave $275,000 to Trump or Obama or Biden or whoever, whatever presidential candidate, you too would be invited to the inauguration and or or, and going to the White House and taking a photo in the Oval Office or in the Rose Garden or whatever. So just so everybody understands exactly how cynical and corrupt are. that is the larger point. Like, shocker. Yeah, you can buy these people off.

Politicians can be bought. What? Like, the clutching of the pearls over this. Like, it's the first time it's ever happened is hilarious, first of all. If you would like them to come to your house. And, you know, I've had many people ask me to host stuff at my house. And if you'd like to have your house, the deal is you pay for everything. So if you have 100 people over your house and you spend $300 a person, you spend $30,000 on having a really fancy dinner party at your house.

and you agree to raise a minimum of, if it's a presidential candidate, $250,500K, $1,000,000, probably a million if to have it at your house. And if it's a senator, a congressperson, whatever, you know, local politician, maybe it's 100 to $200 to $250K, which is pretty easy to do.

If you have 100 people in the each donate $2,500, and I get offered all the time to host of things. I never have hosted them. I've considered it. And I'm like, you know what, I just don't care. I would rather give my money to my daughters in their trust funds.

or to start business or invested in companies. It's just more, or gamble or buy new skis. Like I have other things I'd like to put my money towards. Maybe somebody will fall in love with that like perfect politician, but yeah, enough for you. But see, that's like, but that's a really important behind the scenes about how influence works. And clearly, SBF understood surprisingly, to a surprising degree, how influence works and he used it to his advantage.

And that is 100% true. When it comes to this tweet specifically, I was like, y'all are not seeing this. There's another way to look at this. and it could be wrong, but I will wait for history to be our guide on that one. Yeah,

I'm really interested to see the media stuff. I've been talking to some people in the media. I won't say who, but like, what's that new publication, a semipore? Is that it's a metaphor? Yeah.

Semaphore raised $25 million. That's a large amount of money to raise for a media property. And it's because the, you know, and they didn't even have a plan. I mean, there were like a million articles where they would ask these two guys, like, what's your plan?

So what's the plan? And they'd just be like, But these are, you know, Ben, the former media person from... Yeah, Ben Smith and aren't they both named Smith? Justin Smith, the Bloomberg guy. I mean, Ben Smith, you know, had a pretty high-profile position at the New York Times covering media, which was previously David Carr's, I guess, and rest of peace. And then before that, he was at BuzzFeed.

It was the editor-in-chief or something. Yeah. So, Ben is a pretty big deal. They weren't like nobody's, but they also raised a lot of money in a really hard space without much of a plan. You would normally see $5 million. You might see 10. You'd never see 25. So they haven't been clear about how much money SBF put in.

I have told them publicly, this is a big mistake that you have not said how much he invested. No matter how hard your coverage is, if you don't disclose the number that he invested, and they tried to say like, oh, he wasn't an investor in the company. He owns no shares in the company. It's like, because he signed a convertible note or a safe. It's literally in the name, future equity. Like, this is a device designed to get future equity. It is not a loan.

It's only a loan, as we've explained countless times, and every VC can tell you, because it just makes the transaction go quicker and is less legal bills. That's why we constructed this in Silicon Valley. It is a loan only as a mechanism in order to save time and money in getting money into a startup. I'm going to guess the reason they haven't said anything is because it's not a 250k or a 50K angel investment. If it was a $25 million round, if that's in fact true, I just saw that on crutch base. If it was $25 million, and that's a fact, I'm going to guess the way Sam Bankman was throwing money, it's a seven-figure investment.

In other words, it might be $5 million. If it's $5 million, giving it back is painful. They may not have the wherewithal to give it back. And they're certainly not going to be able to swap that $5 million out with some other rich crypto kid or another investor, in which case, if they've already spent 10 of their 25 million or seven of their 25 million and they have 20 left or 15 left

could be a third of their cash reserves or something like that. Or who knows? Did he put 10 million of the 25 million in? Maybe he went for it because he gave 5 million, I think, to ProPublica. So I think 5 million was a slug size. So if it was a $5 million

dollar slug size, you know, like the bet size that people use typically is a cult slug, maybe he put 5 million into like five publications and just had 25 million. That's a lot of influence. is a disproportionate amount of influence. Yeah.

And that's where Ben is making a huge mistake. This is like why if you want to understand why people don't trust politicians or the media or anybody who is involved in conflicts of interest, this is a massive conflict. And no amount of hard reporting or disclosures will overcome it. You just have to give the money back. Every politician has to give the money back. Right. Unless you had disclosed on literally every single article.

Even still. happen and how much and then even still people are not going to buy it. Because you don't see the articles that were killed, right? Like, you know, like, what was left out? Right, exactly. You have to prove a negative. Yeah. It's just, everybody has to give the money back.

And especially because the money in all likelihood is stolen. This is not his salary. He didn't make some salary and give this money. The money he bought homes with or donated with, um, that money is stolen money. If you are, if you are in receipt of stolen money, you must give it back. So for semaphore, you know, semifor is, yeah, I think the name of it, is there an R at the end? Semaphore. Yeah, if Semaphore or Maxime Waters or Politico or pick the person he tried to run the scam on has this money, even if they've spent it, I think they're required to give it back.

Even if you spent it. If it's like proven to be stolen, I mean, this is still a lest. This is all still alleged. Yes. Which means you should come out now. If I had it to give back, I would go ahead and give it back before. Yeah. If you spent it, you could say, listen, they gave us a donation.

We gave it to save the whales. And we saved a well. We don't have the money to give back. So we can't give it back. If we did have it, we would give it back. If we are forced to give it back, we will run a fundraiser and we'll try to make people whole. Please give us five years to raise money to save the wells and then give $20. 20% of our, you know, money to make those people whole.

That's the proper way to address it. That's what these, you know, political should be doing. They should be saying, hey, listen, we did spend that on journalism. We don't have the money here. We don't want to have to fire our staff. So we will go on a payment plan with the government for 10 years to make the people this was stolen from home. Just like if you, if you buy a stolen car. But you can't do that preemptively.

Nobody's been convicted here. No, but if you do want to care about your reputation, you should just make a state. I'm just saying make the statement. That says if it's proven, but it wasn't so, like, ill-gotten. If it was ill-gotten, what I would just say is,

if these are, in fact, consumer deposits. Right, right. We are 100% committed to giving them back. We have $5 million. If it turns out it's Sam Bankman-Fried's money, we're not giving it back. And if people sue him,

you know, and they wind up owning the shares in the company they will own the shares in the company if they successfully have a judgment against them

and we'll work with a bankruptcy judge there. If that $5 million was stolen from consumers' accounts were committed to making sure we give it back,

just let us know where to send it government when you have it. That's the way to say it but you have to put the number on it and every politician should just take that money and put it in escrow.

Like, just like if you, if somebody sold you a stolen bicycle, like you give the bike back. It seems like they did something along this lines, Justin Smith. He did put out a statement. He did put out a statement saying the asset will revert to its proper owner, which will not be SBF.

But if he returns money to SBF now, it may never find its rival owner. Yeah. So they did make a statement. They just never, they're refusing to say how much money to have. Right. Which is like makes this really fishy. Don't nickel and dime this, if you will, as a metaphor. Like just own it all up front because it's going to come out.

Yeah. Yeah. That's the mistake. That's the mistake. You want to own it completely. Yeah. And I think it's probably because the number is so large, it's embarrassing. How much money they do?

You're probably right. I mean, I could be wrong. Could be 250. But if it slugs, if you get five minutes to Politico, maybe. If it was, you'd say so. Right? Yeah. That's some pretty good logic.

It was 250, you would say so, I think. If you're breaking down the hand, you would say, because they did try to, you know, contain this by saying he doesn't even own equity yet. It's just on a save. So they already are trying to spin this. Yeah. So if the spinning is going in one direction, but it doesn't include the number,

it's because the number's high. I think would be, if you're breaking down the hand of poker and you're trying to figure out what the person has, the person has $5 million, is my guess. If you had to pick $5 million or $250, I'd pick $5 million.

I might even pick $10 because, yeah. Okay. All right, let's do our startup of the day. This one has got some friends of mine in it. It does. Who are they? This is a loft dynamics, raising $20 million to tackle the helicopter pilot shortage with VR training,

trying to make training 95% cheaper, as I understand it, much more accessible to people for commonly flown helicopters. Who are the guys? Well, I see my friend, Guy Dayton, who's a close friend of mine, and he was a serial entrepreneur from the Earthlink days. If you remember Earthlink or if you've ever used Boingo Wi-Fi, he created those two companies. and Kraft Ventures is obviously David Sacks. A little bit of fact, Guy Dayton is in fact a pilot himself and a good friend of mine.

And when he first was getting his pilot's license 20 years ago, I went with him on like one of his first discovery flights in a Cirrus. We flew into Vegas and a little bit of turbulence, but yeah, because Vegas is terrifying. Those little Cirrus planes with the parachute in them, like the turbo props. It was quite fun.

And he's got a passion. for that, so I'm sure he came upon this in his pursuit of being a pilot. It's a very cool idea here, because remember we've said, every time we talk about meta, we're like, the consumer stuff here seems not so great, but the boy, does the AR or VR for education seem like a slam dunk? Because anybody in the world can put on a headset and start learning. Or in this case, I think it's a little bit more than just a headset. It's a a whole device. It's a simulator. Yeah. I think we can pull it up, right? Have we already? Yeah, there it is. You actually sit inside.

You know, it's funny last summer. No, summer before last when I was still journalisming, I visited a gold mine and they train drivers to drive the huge haulers. Like, it's like a truck the size of a building in these VR rigs. That's a simulator and you sit in there. I can only, I manage like 25 seconds. And then I was like, I'm going to barf. That's not true. I manage like. a minute. Yeah. But these are increasingly popular. I mean, this is the use case for VR. And if it can cut off that much time and expense for a thing that is a legitimate, you know, I mean, helicopters are like used in life-saving and hospitals. I mean, this is a really, really good use case. Well, and think about what came before this. These simulators before this cost five to $15 million.

That simulator's got to cost, you know, like a couple of hundred grand. So if you look, this is the size of the previous versions. And as you can see, see, they are on, you know, stilts and stuff like that. They move around. They, you know, they can give you the full simulations. And then here's a quick 30-second video, I guess, of what it looks like inside when you were in the VR headsets. You can see, it looks like maybe multiple scripts. Oh, I see.

Okay. So you are seeing the view of yourself as the pilot. Mm-hmm. Oh, my God, this would make me just too far. But it's awesome. I mean, it's literally like, it's just simulating the inside of a helicopter cockpit. Yeah, you have the whole helicopter cockpit there. Mm-hmm.

that's probably cost 100, 200 grand. But instead of having all the monitors around you, which is what those simulators do, they kind of project it onto a giant screen. You just put the headset on and you get the view. And what's great about these is you can simulate, obviously really dire situations that you would not want to simulate in an actual helicopter.

So when you do your training in these things, they do turn off the engines, they have you restart them. They do a bunch of high-risk stuff, but they can't do the most risky stuff. And so you can practice crash, landings on this thing that you would not be able to practice otherwise. So super cool concept.

And this is a hardware-enabled SaaS, I'm sure. So hardware as a service, as we've talked about, you know, you take the cost of the hardware and you can spread that out over time, charge people. You can even charge people per license to use this. So if you charge per hour. But you could put this thing. It's so small. It's a certain.

Yeah. This could, you could put the simulator. Up in Alaska, you could put it in, you know, in a country in South America, you could put it in a, you know, in India, places where maybe you would have to have the pilots travel to a major city in another country to get access to the $15 million simulator. Here, if it is 95, you could have 20 simulators for the cost of one. That means you could have the simulators everywhere. And it's a much smaller simulator that doesn't look like it needs a massive amount of construction. so the simplicity of being able to put this, you know, in every country, you know, in every military. It's just could be world-changing, right?

And I'm sure you could actually do this simulator at home. So if you didn't have, eventually this simulator will become a home simulator. I don't know if you've seen the people who are doing these, have you seen the flight simulators at home, Molly? Oh, yeah. Some people build them. And then some people pick, pill truck simulators at home. I mean, flight simulators, I think we even talked about it on the show.

like flight simulator. Wasn't that the number one game last year, the Microsoft flight simulator? Like people love this stuff. They spend tons of money on it. It's like a fascinating world. Yeah, I mean, just but for one thing we could pull up here, I just typed in flight simulator at home.

And this is the first thing that came up on Google shopping. But look at this TR 120 flight simulator, 900 bucks, basically. And you get like a full cockpit. Molly here, you can see, for a thousand bucks. that looks not much different than, you know, the one we were just looking at. So these things are available.

Oh, yeah, increasingly. And this is all part of the like degradation. This is all part of the increasing accessibility and decentralization of expertise. Yes, the distribution of it. It goes right along with chat GPT. All expertise is going to become available. We're basically like on a treadmill toward becoming Neo in the Matrix.

Like we just, if you think about all the things you can learn on YouTube, like teach yourself. If you think about the things that you're going to be able to buy a simulator for or ask chat GPT for, like, we're just jacking in and learning skills. You might even say the commodification of expertise. Yes. Might be a way to say it as we try to, as we try to spin that correctly and positively. I think, yeah, commodification. I don't see what's wrong with Neo and the Matrix. That's sick.

If Neurlink works, which it seems to be pretty close to working. Yes, right. Like, that is the type of thing where, yes, that's the ultimate Neo and the Matrix. That's when we're actually there. Yeah. The modification of expertise is coming. Yes.

It's kind of here, actually, I think. It's here. I mean, it really is. Like, there's almost nothing that you cannot learn on YouTube at this point. I'm like, mm-mm, YouTube. Well, I mean, if you took GPT3 or, you know, other AI engines, and you took this simulator and you connected them, and you said to the simulator,

here, watch humans fly helicopters in the simulator. and then if you went to all the helicopters and you would put a little, took the flight data recorder and you just put some cameras as well on the outside, you could take every helicopter flight, record every helicopter flight, you know,

every day, put it into a neural net and say, wait the helicopter pilot in terms of safety. And in real time, we could be saying these pilots are unsafe, these pilots are extremely safe, and these pilots are somewhere in the middle. You could literally be,

doing that. I know in the Tesla they had the safety score now. And the safety score is not very prominent, but it was how you got into full self-driving beta. The safety score made me a much better driver because it was telling me like I was making my turns too tight or something. So my turning was too aggressive. And then I realized, oh, that's my wife. I was like, I don't think I'm like, and then I looked at it by day. And it literally told me by day. And I'm like, hey, Mario And Dreddy, can we maybe on the turns? Yeah, maybe dial it in a little bit. And, and, I have been trying to make my score higher and I stopped

I increased the distance between me and other cars deliberately and so I think these AI should be telling you as you're driving, hey, you seem a little bit tired, you're weaving in and out of the lanes or your lane accuracy is 62% are you tired? Hey, you're following a little close to the cars in front of you, you probably want to just add 10 feet of distance. Would you like me to remind you?

That's what these things should be doing. If they shouldn't just be replacing you, they should be coaching you. Based on driver, exactly. If you could have a motor for that, like, oh, my 16 year old is the one in the car here. So turn on all the tips, all the nannying. I want it on. Well, and you could do that from the camera inside the cabin. So in the latest FSD, I got two strikes.

Both of the strikes I got were because I was using the navigation. I was either changing the music, I was using the display, and it knew I was looking at it, and it said, eyes on the road, and I thought it was telling me to, you know, move the steering wheel a little bit, which it tells you to do. And so I moved the steering wheel a little bit,

and then it still gave me a warning, and then I realized, oh, it said, keep your eyes on the road. So it's now watching your eyes, and it knows where your pupils are, and it knew my pupils were looking too much at the dash. I didn't know I was doing that. Yeah.

I just assumed I was driving perfectly. So the coaching aspect of this could be amazing. Okay. I think that's the show. I think so. Delightful. Congratulations to LofDynamics. Raised $20 million from Craft Ventures, Guy Dayton, and Up Ventures. Congrats. And I, for one, welcome our Neo and the Matrix Future. Let's go. I want to jack in and learn the things. Commodification. Bye, everybody.