This Week in Startups - Sora 2, Tilly Norwood, and the New Slop Era | E2187

Episode Date: October 2, 2025

Today’s show:Sora 2 will generate a video of whatever you like and respects no IP (unless they opt out)On a brand new TWiST, Jason and Alex check out Sora 2, the latest text-to-video app from TWiST 500 mainstays OpenAI, and look at some of the video videos that have already emerged from the TikTok-style scrolling video app. (TikSlop?)THEN we’re considering the case of “AI actress” Tilly Norwood, and whether her big debut is a legit shift in the world of entertainment or just a marketing gimmick-slash-sales pitch.PLUS Jason’s thoughts on the Wealthfront IPO, how Spotify shifted the entire music economy, Jason’s pitch for making bets with stock purchases, why Americans need more financial literacy, AND another check-in with the sharps over at Polymarket.Timestamps:(0:00) What does the government shutdown mean for startups? Not much?(04:21) Jason’s an investor in Wealthfront… hear his thoughts on their potential IPO(08:14) Why Jason thinks the death of Boomers will boost crypto(10:21) Northwest Registered Agent - Form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Get more privacy, more options, and more done—visit https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today!(17:26) Why is everyone so excited for Sora… but not Meta’s app?(19:49) CLA - Get started with CLA's CPAs, consultants, and wealth advisors now at https://claconnect.com/tech(28:38) Is Tilly Norwood just a gimmick or Hollywood’s next hot ingenue?(29:15) Perspective.ai - Real insights, straight from your customers, and your first two months are on us. Just go to getperspective.ai/twist.(35:58) POLYMARKET: When is OpenAI’s browser coming out?!(40:17) How Spotify changed the entire economy of music… and when a Founder/CEO should hang it up.(47:24) Why Jason thinks Americans need better financial education and literacy(49:39) Audience Q: What’s the best place to buy secondaries?(52:49) Why you should bet small while you’re learningSubscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.comCheck out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.comSubscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcpFollow Lon:X: https://x.com/lonsFollow Alex:X: https://x.com/alexLinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelmFollow Jason:X: https://twitter.com/JasonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanisThank you to our partners:Northwest Registered Agent - Form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Get more privacy, more options, and more done—visit https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today!CLA - Get started with CLA's CPAs, consultants, and wealth advisors now at https://claconnect.com/techPerspective.ai - Real insights, straight from your customers, and your first two months are on us. Just go to getperspective.ai/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.comSubscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

When Meta launched its vibes product, we all mocked it. It's another feed of videos generated by AI, everyone called Slop. But when it comes to Sora 2, everyone on X and even yourself are kind of demanding access to it, fighting for it. And so the question we had was, what's so different about Sora 2 from OpenAI versus vibes from meta? Curious what you think? Well, I think... This Week in Startups is brought to you by Perspective.AI. Surveys? They never capture what customers are really thinking. That's why we use Perspective

AI. The candor we get back is eye-opening. Real insights straight from your customers and the first two months are on us. Just go to getprospective.a.a innovation takes balance. Our CPAs, consultants, and wealth advisors can help you get from startup to where you want to end up. Get started now at C-L-A-Connect.com slash tech. And Northwest Registered Agent. Starting your business should be simple. With Northwest Registered Agent, you can form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes.

From LLCs to trademarks, domains to custom websites, they've got you covered. Get more privacy, more options, and more done. Visit Northwest Registeragent.com slash twist today. All right, everybody. Welcome back to this week. in startups. I'm Jason Callan Kahnich. You know me, Angel Investor, host of All In podcast. Maybe you know me from back in the day Silicon Alley Reporter or Weblogs Inc. Or Severian High School. Who knows for them. And with me, my co-host, Alex Wilhelm. How are you

doing, Alex? I'm doing fantastic, Jason. A couple of IPOs and some big government news. Lovely newsday for us. All right. Let's get started then. What's at the top of the dock? The top of the docket is what the government shutdown means for startups. Jason, I wanted to tell people out there who are building stuff, not to work. worry too much. There are a couple of things to keep in mind. For context, the U.S. government shut down at midnight after the two American political parties couldn't find common ground on how to keep the government running. Now, Jason, this is not really our domain, but I did find a couple of things that matter. So first of all, the IPO market is expected to stall or slow as the

SEC kind of slowly shuts down. The Department of Labor may stop processing certain things that you need for H-1B visas, so the immigration world could also slow down a little bit. Startups that sell to the government, defense tech. I'm thinking cybersecurity, companies like that may see slower procurement and slower payments, and also we're going to have less economic data. But I thought we'd take a moment and say, don't panic founders. Yeah. And if you look at the history of this, I think these typically get worked out in days, right?

I think the longest one, at least producer Claude is telling me this. Producer Claude says the longest one in U.S. history, 35 days from December 22nd, 2018, to January 25th, 2019, and that was an impasse over the border wall funding. I remember that one. A previous record to that, 21 days during the 1995-1996 budget standoff under President Clinton. And then there was a 17-day closure in 78 and a 16-day shut down in 2013. Yeah, I mean, this is part of our democratic process. It's messy. The media would make you think that, like, it's the end of the world. I guess if you work for the government, not getting paid could be the end of the world. But if you're a government employee, you anticipate this stuff, I think.

And it's not that they typically lose their jobs or lose that money. The money gets paid back. So a lot of them, I think, still come to work. At least that was my understanding. And then they just don't get paid for two weeks. And then that pressure causes folks to work it out. So I think it's great that we, I didn't know that about the SEC. I should have assumed that.

H-1B. So that's a really good catch. I guess if you were in the middle of something, you could experience a 10-day delay. Worst case, a 30-day delay. So if you just say, you know, a lot of times when I have to think about these things, I just prepare for double the last worst one. So if the last worst one was 35 days, I said, okay, I guess the worst possible case scenario would be 70 days, maybe double what the last one was. And then you just deal with that. Can you weather that storm? And clearly you can. 70 days would be a long time to sit here and listen to the debate about it. Next up on the docket, Jason, wealth front is going public. Now, Wellfront is a robo-advisor, very popular and well-known in the pre-Zzerp era, quieter since then, lots of venture capital backing, and the company's S-1 filing shows a company that's growing quickly, and it's quite a lot of profitability and is finding a foothold in

the Gen Z market. I'm very bullish on this, Jason. Your thoughts? I'm a shareholder. Andy Rackcliffe has been on this program, no less than $5. times. He was the co-founder of a benchmark. He teaches a product market fit class at Stanford. And he's really smart. And yeah, I became a shareholder. Maybe in year one or two, I've gotten all my family on wealth front. It's really a great way to build an optimized portfolio and pay the most

reasonable fees you could ever do. I think they charge 50 bips, 25 bips. It's something ridiculous. It's 25. Yeah. So, you know, if you have a money manager, it's typically one to one point five. Now, that doesn't seem like a lot. But if your returns are 4% a year after taxes and you're paying 1.5 to your money manager, guess what? Now you're, you know, giving a third of your profits every year to your money manager. And what they did was they said, well, you should make this robo advisor.

You say what your goals are. And then on a scale of 1 to 10, how much risk do you want to take. And they do a blended portfolio. They also do things like tax. loss harvesting, which rich people have access to, but poor people don't. What does that mean? They look at your portfolio. They individually trade stocks. If you lost a bunch of money on your Intel and made a bunch of money on your Nvidia, you could sell the Intel to get a loss to offset the gain, right? As you move your portfolio around, and they do that for you all the time.

Traders do that inherently, but most people don't have the time for it. And so, yeah, I've tried to get every family member I know using a money manager, and the money managers are annoying. They try to put you into products you shouldn't be in. And wealth front tries to put you into the most balanced, rigorous portfolio. It's kind of the opposite of Robin Hood, where people are day trading and doing, like, individual stuff. This is for people who, like, don't even want to look at it. Although Robin Hood does offer portfolios now, they offer everything. And I think they might have added crypto to a blended portfolio here, because I think that's the company. that's so much demand for that at wealthfront. I think that's becoming the standard everywhere.

But Jason, I think it's interesting to talk about the two parts of their business, because we discussed the bits they charge against your portfolio. But when you take a look at their actual income statement, what you see here is that their cash management business is actually quite a lot larger than their investment advisory business. Because no matter how big your AUM is, 25 basis points is 0.25%. It only scales so quickly. So what I find very interesting about Wellfront is that it's a very good company. It's profitable and it's growing and there's much to like here, but it is sensitive to interest rates. And so if we do see interest rates decline in the U.S. over the next, I mean, pick your number of quarters three, four, five, it could dramatically harm the company's ability to grow.

So keep in mind that the BIPs business is good, but the cash management business is better. Got it. Okay. So if they have cash and they're sweeping it around from different accounts, they make some sort of spread on it, I guess. Yeah. And this company's, been around for a while over 10 years, certainly. Fintech's a great category. We've done very well for it, you know, as an investor. So at our firm, Robin Hood, Wellfront, two great positions for us. And yeah, I had the opportunity to sell before the IPO. You know, there's always like these moments where you can sell. And I elected not to because I just think there are so few public companies and people really want to have access to fintech.

And with stable coins, new crypto regulations, with boomers, my thesis is boomers are going to die. I hate to be cruel about it, but everybody dies. It's true. And then those boomers are going to, you know, have their money sitting in some, I don't know, you know, what account, but, you know, some Goldman Sachs account, right? And grandma and grandpa die. and all of a sudden, $3 million goes down to their three kids, they each have a million dollars.

Are they going to keep it in Goldman? No, they're going to put it into the wealth front. They're going to put it into their Robinhood. They're going to put it into their Coinbase account. That's why I think these companies are doing so well is because there's just a generational shift. Most people don't want to use these old banks. They want to use the new banks. Most people don't want to use the last paradigm. They want to use the new paradigm. The interfaces on these are incredible. You know, if you open up your Bank of America, it's just disgratziad. when compared to using Venmo or using Robin Hood. It's so crazy to me that these big companies can't just hire elite designers to refresh their app. If you were working at Bank of America or any of these major banks, like literally just go find a design firm to tell you what to do. And just spend a million dollars having three different design firms, make you three different versions each. Now you get nine versions and just have the CEO or the president. president, whoever's got taste, say, this one is the best. And let's go with that. But it's always organized, this is the problem with committees and design. You never get great design with a committee,

period, full stop. You need to have an artist. You need to have somebody with taste and chat GPT and all due respect to LLMs. You know, they do interesting things, but they're not going to nail it. They're just not going to nail it on design. They're going to give you a lot of, you know, four, five, six, and sevens. They're never going to get you to a 10. You know, maybe we'll be here five years. it will. So I think they're great for mocking things up, Alex, but they're not great for the finished product. I like the idea of people playing and coming up with ideas, but then you've got to have a really great designer finish your album art and your podcast or your logo. Hey, listen, we meet a lot of early stage founders here at launch, my investment company, and some, they don't have a lot of traction

yet. They just have an idea. Maybe they haven't even finished their product. They've just got an MVP, but they still need investors and accelerators like ours to take them seriously. And, you You know what, we can't just wire money to your Gmail or your PayPal. That's not how it works, folks. We need to know that you're a legit and official business. We need to know your company is incorporated. That's why you need Northwest registered agent. It's the service that will help you run your business the right way from day one.

In 10 clicks and in under 10 minutes, you're going to file for your LLC or a C-Corp if you're a startup, get a domain name, launch your official website, claim your business email, and even fast track your trademark application, which some something. people forget to do. We're talking about more than just company formation. This is your entire identity as a business. Go to Northwest Registeredagent.com slash twist and show the world you're in business and make sure you use that URL slash twist so they know that we sent you. The generational point you may Jason is actually very salient because if you take a look at who is signing up for wealthfront and on the screen right now I have a chart that shows new clients by generation over a wealth front

going from 21 through 25, and there is a steady increase in the number of Gen Z customers that are signing up. So clearly they're the next generation of people that are saving money. Do they have boomers? They do. That's the lightest one at the top. Yes, up here at the top. Not really a big category for them, so Goldman's probably safe in the short term. I can tell you that's really matches mine because when I tried to get, you know, the boomers in my extended family like to get on this, they're like, I don't want to change. You know, people don't like change. And, you know, it's like, do you want to live in the same house you've always lived in? Or, you know, now that it's just two of you, would you like to be on a one level house that's new

and brand new and is built to your specification, your lifestyle? Maybe you want to live in an apartment where it has the concierge and a door person and everything. And so, nope, I want to stay in my rickety old house until I die. And that's, that will be me on my ranch. I'll be on my ranch with my chickens and my long horns and they'll just, they'll have to get past the chickens and the long horns and my bulldogs to get to me. Actually, it doesn't sound so bad. Jason, one more thing on this, on the venture capital front, there's a number of firms that own a lot of this company.

Tiger Global owns 22 million shares or about 20% of equity as far as we can tell. DAG ventures, nearly 14 million shares. Oh, Dad. Oh, sorry. Dagventures, my mistake. No, I think you can call them DAG. I call them, Dad. Keep going.

Index Ventures, 12.9 million. shares and Ribbett Capital, the well-known fintech-focused venture firm, 9.8 million shares. So here's hoping to prices well when it does trade, maybe after the government's done being shut down. And this is where having a theme-based firm like Ribbitt Capital has can pay dividends if you get it right. Now, if you went for climate, and we tried to do a climate practice here, actually with Molly Wood, we're very public about it. And, you know, the reason she's no longer here is because I had to shut down the climate business. It was a really hard decision for me because I just, you know, after over a year of doing it, I was like, none of these firms have the founders, or very few of them have the founder,

the dogged founders. They're all overpriced. Gosh, I mean, who's going to make money here? And I'm an LP in Chris Socker's lowercase carbon funds. I don't, you know, I don't know how they'll do. Hopefully they do great. But, you know, it's just a constant problem with certain verticals. Now, if you hit the vertical, like Fintech, and you hit it at the right time, these can be incredible.

But then sometimes you're in Fintech, let's say you have a vertical, but you hit all the, you know, C&D players. So you pick the right vertical, but you pick the wrong companies. And then, you know, some firms don't like to invest in, you know, competing products. So, you know, you might be in a, you know, whoever that, you know, you might be in Lyft as opposed to Uber or. or postmates as opposed to DoorDash, whatever it happens to be. Not that Lift and Postmates weren't great companies. They just weren't the big economic winner. Venture then is right theme, right companies, and right time.

So you have to kind of hit all three of those to have an outlier fund. Jason, why is FinTech having such an amazing year? We've had Klarna Circle, E. Toro, Chime, and now Wealthfront trying to list. That's at least five IPOs that we've talked about. Is this just these companies reaching maturity? Or is there something else going on here that I'm missing? I think it's the incompetence of the incumbents. I mean, the JP Morgan's, the city banks, the e-trade.

Oh, yeah. Even PayPal's an incumbent to Venmo, you know, and then just, yeah, I think the incumbents don't seem to have the product velocity of these new players. And, man, you watch Wealthfront ad features, Robin Hood ad features, coinbase ad features. And these are all founder-led companies. So I'd say it's both of those things. It's the legacy sucking and the founder-led companies. companies, you know, hitting their stride. This is why I tell all founders, if your product

velocity isn't high, then you're the problem, the CEO is the problem, the designer's the problem, the developer's the problem, everybody's the problem. You have to be shipping early and often. And I think for some of these companies, their product velocity while they hit scale is increasing. That makes you twice, that makes you doubly difficult to deal with. Like Google now, is releasing products at a pretty fast clip again. Sure. Sergei's back in the saddle, I notice, kind of correlates. So now, like, Chrome has a Google Assistant.

I think we're going to do a demo of it. All of these things keep happening, where if a company can release product at a fast pace and they have scale, right now, if Chrome, how many Chrome users are there, producer cloud? I'm going to guess there's 2 billion Chrome users globally. I think there's probably 5 billion people using browser,

So maybe they have 40% of the market. I'm just remembering probably old numbers, but that would be roughly 2 billion people using Chrome. If there are 2 billion people using Chrome, let that sink in. That means 2 billion people are going to have access to Google Gemini and be upsold on it. Jason, according to producer Klond, based on the latest data, approximately 3.98 billion people use Chrome. call it $4 billion, roughly half the planet, more, give or take. That's a lot of people regularly using the browser. But I think probably Android's market share around the world helps that, because Chrome, of course, is also on the Android operating system. If you want to use Claude like

we do, you can go to clod.a.a.com slash twist and save, I think, 50% off your first three months of a paid plan. We live and die by Claude here. 50%. That's a very generous deal. Thank you to our friends at Claude. Absolutely. What's next on the docket? Next on the docket is OpenAI, debuting SORA 2. OpenAI, of course, is the American Foundation AI model company. They released SORA a couple years ago, a video generation model, Jason, that had a lot of hype behind it, but didn't quite meet expectations. SORA 2, they say, is much, much, much better. And they're baking it into a new social app called SORA, which you can download over on iOS. If you were on X yesterday, you couldn't miss it. I mean, there was slop everywhere. And all of the slop seemed to be based upon

Sam Altman. So is that, is just like Sam the default character in SORA? I think what you're seeing there is that people in the technology world are trying to signal to one another that they're in the in crowd. So they're doing Sam Baldwin clips. It's an insider joke. Jason, I have a number of clips from SORA here that are non-SAM Altman if you'd like to take a sample. Okay, sure. Yeah, show us some slop. All right. Show us to Slam. From the Venture Twins, I give you a SORA generated video of, well, Jason, I think you can just see what this is in one second. Observe, my friends, Pikachu at D-Day. All right, that's IP.

That's somebody's IP. That's $250,000. You send it to the Venture Twins. And then we also have a series of interviews between different historical figures presented in a news format. Jason, take a look at this. Been treating you today. Ah, busy as ever, my lady.

Was up before the sun, mucked out the goat shed, fetched water from the well, then mended the cartwheel that split yester even. Sounds like a full day or a little. already. You've been in quite a few duels. How many victories are you up to now? 37. Each one witnessed. Each one alive in memory. And looking ahead, how many more do you expect to win? Every Jewelzer finds me until the Centurion. How long do you think? That's pretty good. Yeah, that's pretty good. Yeah, very creative. I wonder what the prompts are on these were. And they're, I'm noticing also these are longer. Is there an upper limit on the

number of seconds you can do? Is there a cost to this? Because my understanding of generating video is it's always been limited to like five seconds unless you're paying because you're basically like burning a hole in the ozone layer every time you make an hour of video. Maybe that's changing. I don't know what the one of the themes we talk about over and over again on this weekend startups is making sure you do your chores. I'm no expert on these things. I have some experience. Stephen Estes from CLA is an expert. Let's talk about being cash efficient. Tell us about efficiency and what you see in the in the top tier startups in your practice. We're seeing kind of an interesting trend out there

where companies aren't needing to raise quite as much as they had in the past. You really have to be careful as a founder to only take on as much money as you really need. You've got to do the forecast and you've got to do the modeling and you've got to dialed in and get it right. Otherwise, you're going to end up either not raising enough capital to get to where you're going and you're going to have to go get venture debt or go back, have an extended her to the round, or you're going to give up too much of the company because you just didn't recognize how much money actually needed. Yeah, very important to get the stuff right, folks.

And that's really a bummer when startups don't do things in a button-up way. I always have a great partner. A good partner to have on this adventure. While things change, my friend Stephen over at CLA, visit CLAConnect.com slash tech. And don't forget to mention that your boy, J-Kalcension. That's CLAConnect.com slash tech. Start today. So I think nearly every clip that we've seen has been nine or ten seconds.

I have one of Bob Ross painting a fake, Godzilla will be attacked by sticks. The Pikachu one was nine seconds. So in the case of the last one, I think what they did was they took them and then stitched them together to make it look like a longer overall video. So maybe nine seconds is the limit here. Yes. Free?

Or is it for only paid users? My understanding is that it's free. And I think that's probably why they're limiting how many people can go into it right now. Because remember when they launched the AI Studio Ghibli moment that we talked about on the show and they were melting their GPUs? I presume right now they're trying to keep demand at a moderate level to see what the load looks like. They should have just made it for paid users.

I don't know why they didn't do that because then it would, you know, it's fairer to the Open AI ecosystem and then we would have it right now because we pay for it. I pay for a corporate account. This is really infuriating. I don't. Somebody at Open AI, just think of how you, what you're signaling to us is like, if we pay you, we don't get it. And there was the same thing with Google.

They always give their free products to Gmail users as opposed to Google Docs users. These are two different namespaces. It's the exact opposite. If I'm paying for Google Docs, then give me the Gemini assistant in Chrome first because I'm paying you cash. Both of these companies have it backwards. I don't understand this philosophy. Reward the paid users. Do you think they're just fighting for overall mind share in the AI world?

So maybe Open AI here wants to attract the every man, the everyday person? In Google's case, I think it's a technical limitation. They have to go rewrite everything to go work in that other name space. And so that's what I think's happening. They make it for the big giant namespace. Then they eventually will bring it to Google Docs. I think they just got to figure out how to make it work in both places quickly and just give the paid people the first 60 days or six days or six hours or whatever it is. Anyway.

I think your enthusiasm here, Jason, actually underscores an interesting question that we had on the production team today, which is when meta launched its vibes product, we all mocked it. It's another feed of videos generated by AI, everyone called Slop. But when it comes to Sora 2, everyone on X and even yourself are kind of demanding access to it, fighting for it. And so the question we had was, what's so different about SORA 2 from OpenAI versus Vibes from meta? Curious what you think? Well, I think maybe the success of the first SORA makes a built-in audience for the second and Vibs is a first-time product. That would be, I think, why. People really want to see the sequel to Terminator versus whatever the new.

film is because they fell in love with the first one. That's probably as simple as that. But also the reputation of Zuckerberg and Facebook and meta is, you know, to just create consumer-based stuff. And the reputation of Open AI is to create industry leading stuff. So if Facebook releases something, it's typically not innovative. It's typically copied from somebody else. When Open AI releases something, you're going to assume, oh, this is the best of breed product. So I just assume SORA, if it's coming out of Sora, it's the best one. If it's coming out of GROC, it's the best one. If it's coming out of Anthropic, it's the best one.

If it's coming out of Gemini, it's the best one. If it's coming out of anyone else on the long tail, you know, mistral or, I don't know, the, what's the one in China? Deepseek or Meta, AI, or Apple or Microsoft or Amazon right now. I think they're behind. So I'm just like, okay, yeah, it's probably not going to be super impressive. It's pretty good. It's pretty good. I'm actually impressed with this, much more so that I was with SORA 1.

I think the consistency is pretty good. I think the fidelity of the physics representations are pretty good. And I got to think, Jason, studios are going to use this ad nauseum because it's got to cost, what, 1% of using human? Let me bring in producer, editorial director Lon for a second. Editorial director, Lon could one of these short videos, like three seconds clip, if you were to put it into one battle after another, Paul Thomas Anderson, we went to see as a group, would anybody in the audience notice it if there was like a five second or nine second clip of this? I don't think so. I think we're already at the point where you could slip in a few seconds of AI.

I mean, we saw it. There was that Eternot. We looked at that clip of that Argentine sci-fi series where they use AI for a little bit. I don't think people would have any idea if it was fast. Maybe you left it linger on screen long enough for people to notice glitchiness maybe. But three seconds, four seconds, no, I could already pass. You know, I can tell this because I was watching, re-watching Ashoka, the Ashoka Tano, Anakin Skywalker, aka Darth Raiders, Padawan.

But my daughter's last night, we watched the first episode, which was great. And I looked at it through the lens of AI. And she goes, like, into a temple and, you know, it's like some ancient Jedi ruins and et cetera. And I was like, yeah, this could have been done with AI. This feels AI-ish, and it is, it is, in fact, taped on those giant screens. Right. The volume. That's what they call.

The volume. It's got, it's not just, it's backlit, it's LED, and it's projection so that it matches. It gives it more of a 3D feel. So you can move the camera around and the background stays consistent, even though it's green, screen. Oh, this is so cool. When you see the volume set, somebody did a drone shot over it, it's literally like somebody's ranch or like a parking lot in, it looks like a parking lot in the valley somewhere with giant LED walls around it. And then the ground was made of sand like Tatooine. And they were showing like

somebody had gotten a shot of like what they were filming. And it's like, oh, they just do the ground and some, you know, whatever the plant or the, you know, broken down droid on the ground is. But the backdrop is this incredible high fidelity LED wall. And like Lon saying, you move the camera around in it, but it's fixed. Right. And the camera in the background are synced. So as you move, they're all moving in unison and it gives you this, this, it's 3D effect of the, the environment is real.

And I just dropped an image in twist taping if you take a look at that where you can see how they try to make it match the actual sky behind them. And so it gives you this really impressive three dimensional feeling, even though you're shooting a green screen. Hey, you know what? People absolutely love those shows. whatever they're doing, it's working really, really well. Shout out to them.

Except when you watch Andor. And then when you watch Andor and you see like true production value where they make giant sets and they spend real money, this is going to be the big question when the new, the Mandalorian and Grogu movie comes out next year, it looks like the volume, not like Andor. And the fan base now is involved in a big debate. And this is going to be a big debate that keeps going. do you want more of this IP, but that is made in, I wouldn't say slop, but more towards the slop side, or do you want the classic, you know, really refined sets and the classic CGI?

This will be the next big debate will be having. That feels like, I think we'll go into pop culture. They're going to look at Mandalorian and say, yeah, it feels a little sloppy. It looks like AI slop, and then they're going to be looking at Andor Rogue One and say, oh, yeah, that's got real production value. So here we are, folks. Yeah. Lon, stick around for a second because next up on the docket is our main character of the day, Jason. And in this case, it's a woman named Tilly Norwood. But she's not actually. Yeah, I remember. Not actually a person, actually a synthetic AI actress. And she's the creation of an AI talent studio called, and I'm guessing here a little bit, Zikoya. which is part of the Particle 6 group. The brain person in charge here is Eileen van der Velden.

Sorry, Elin, if I just ruined your name. But essentially, the gist is there is now an AI actress that is supposed to be signing a talent deal for representation and people are very, very unhappy. Lon, why are they unhappy? Shipping is so hard, but knowing what your customers want, that shouldn't be. And that's the magic of prospective AI.

Take it from the world's greatest moderator, our friends at Perspective AI have built the world's greatest AI interviewer. All you do is you type up a simple prompt for your potential customers. Maybe, hey, what are your thoughts on this new feature? Or maybe the specific pain points they're confronting in your service. Anything you want to know about. Doesn't matter if you're a hotel or if you're building a dating app. This product is so incredibly powerful.

Within just hours, you're going to start getting useful, high-level feedback with accurate emotional responses and instant summaries. all pulled together into research-grade reports. We've been using Perspective AI here at this week in startups, and it has been a game-changer. I got to tell you, speaking to the AI interviewer, people are more honest than they would be with a written survey, and that candor is more helpful.

You want to know the truth. So sign up today, get perspective.a.i slash twist to get two months free. To clarify first, we don't know for sure that she's definitely about to sign. that was this woman, Aline Vanderveldin, gave a presentation in Zurich where she showed off Tilly Norwood, her creation. And she said, I'm already talking to talent agencies who are very interested in signing her. We don't have actual confirmation. In fact, the only person we've heard from a major Hollywood talent agency so far, Leslie Siebert, the head of the Gersh agency, gave a quote where she said she thinks Tilly Norwood is frightening and vowed not to sign synthetic actresses. So this might just be hype or, you know, they're putting this out there.

Here's Tilly. She's not real. She is an entirely synthetic AI-created performer. Now, what I think is most interesting about this story is that a lot of actors thought after the 2023 actors and writers strike that one of the big things they were fighting for was protection from exactly this sort of thing. But as it turns out, Justin Bateman, several other people on social media are pointing out that actually,

2023 SAG-A-After agreement doesn't actually, it expressly permits studios to work with AI actors. It says, here's the rule. A synthetic performer created through generative artificial intelligence can be used provided. One, parties acknowledge the importance of human performance in motion pictures and the potential impact on employment. That's just literally an acknowledgement. And then two, notice to union and an opportunity to bargain in good faith over appropriate consideration, if any, if a synthetic performer is used in place of a performer who would have engaged under this agreement in a human role. So if they tell the union what they plan to do and agree to negotiate non-binding and they acknowledge that humans are good, they're actually allowed to

use AI actors in whatever capacity they please. So a studio could make a movie starring Tilly Norwood and there would be no recourse from any actors or guild. All right, do it. Stop talking about it and do it. No, the whole thing is this is all planted. The Gersh Agency, everybody's in on it. Gersh Agency probably has signed her already. They're going to do a whole announcement. Then they're going to announce her movie.

This is just silly. I mean, how does this relate to Yoda? How is Yoda any different? Well, you know, Frank Oz. Yoda's voice by Frank Oz, the memorable Muppet performer who used to use his hand to move Yoda around. Yes, but there were people who were like, oh, they don't. need an actor to do that. You don't need a little person to do it anymore with makeup. And there was like a whole brouhaha about that, right? Sure. I mean, we've gone through many different

versions of this. There's, of course, mocap where an actor can put all those sensors and then they can play an ape or themselves at age 10. And I think the interesting thing is that they were, what SAG was very focused on in 2023 during their AI negotiations was actually like, could I use Tom Cruz's AI likeness. Could I use a real actor? Like could I make a synthetic Angelina Jolie and put her in a movie? Yes, of course you can. Well, with that person's permission.

But they didn't really deal with this whole area of could we create a completely synthetic performer and begin casting them in movies? The answer is apparently yes. Yes, you can. There was a very interesting case of this, actually. Crispin Glover was in Back to the Future. future. Back to George McFly.

Yeah. Right. Right. Yeah. He wasn't in Back to the Future, too. He was in number one. He didn't like, for whatever reason, he didn't like the screenplay of number two. Yeah.

He didn't want to come back. And it wasn't that he didn't want to come back. He just had like, because he's like a pretty unique individual. Right. And they recast him in the film, but did somebody who looks exactly like him. Right. And the guy is doing an impression of him, too. he's speaking purposefully like him.

Oof. I would be very mad if I declined to do a movie and they found an Alex lookalike who talked just like me to replace me. That would feel scummy, I think. So they used makeup, camera angles, recycle footage to obscure the recast.

And they went to the Screen Guild and they changed the use of people's likeness and I think he got a huge settlement. It was settled in a collective bargaining agreement with the Screen Actors Guild. There are clauses now that forbid producers or actors from utilizing methods to replicate a performer's physical appearance if they're not in appearing in the film. So yeah, you couldn't create like a digital clone of Timothy Shalame and put him in your movie if the real Timothy Jalemay is not being compensated for being in your movie. Can I just ask who actually wants to see this Tilly Norwood in a film?

Because to me it's all a downside because people will boycott it because there's an AI character. everyone will complain. And is there anyone who has a positive feel about going to see that type of movie? Because to me, there's just no one who is more excited about a film because it has a fake person in it than they would be if there wasn't. I just don't see it. I think the idea is most people at this point probably would not care. And it's so much easier to make something with an AI person rather than a real one. Real actors, you know, get sick. They don't like the line. They don't like the costume. You know, like you just do it in an instant. So I don't think there's so much a desperation among audiences. members to see an AI movie. There's just most audience members might not care one way or the other, and it would be so much easier. Everybody could make their own movie if we could just do it with AI.

Wow. All right. Moving on. Today's Polymarket is all about OpenAI building a browser. The question Jason is, will OpenAI announce a browser in 2025? And the reason why I chose this Polymarket, I'm going to show you the chart right here is simple. There's a big jump at the end there.

And when I was looking through Polymark, through Polymarket picking out today's market. I wanted to figure out why. Why did the odds of Open AI dropping a browser? Well, let's pause for a second here. Is this they announced one or they release one? Because we have to look at how it resolves under rules, right? Because the title here is Open AI browser in 2025 question mark. So that's like very general. Anytime there's a general polymarket, you got to get into the details. And this one says, Releases a standalone web browser that is intended for general web browsing and is available for use by the public in at least one country or region by December 31 into the year.

Okay, so it's released, not announced. Got it. Sorry. If I said announced, I mean... He said announced, yeah. That's why I wanted to be like... Because I was like, did they announce it? I thought they may have announced they're working on one.

No. It's still roughly under wraps. As of July, we knew the code name for it, which is Aura, I believe. But no one's seen it yet. But the thing is, I saw this jump in probability. I know why jump. Should I guess? Did you guess?

I had a guess, but I was wrong. So I'm curious what you think. Well, the obvious guess is that Google released theirs and that puts pressure on them to release theirs because they've got to play ketchup, right? That's a much better idea than the one that I had. And it helps explain this. But I was thinking about there was no actual news

showing that Open AI had actually, you know, started to drop breadcrums or whatever. And so I was thinking, is this an example of polymarked being ahead of the news, being a little bit smarter than what people might know based on the headlines, because you always like to say the sharps are on polymarket, and it's a useful tool to figure out what's going on. I like your point, and it explains a bit of the mystery that I saw in the data.

Well, what we're doing here is now we're trying to figure out how to, you know, leverage prediction markets. And so looking at this, going to the news and looking for people, looking for a news story would change the odds, looking for a thread in a forum like, Reddit, Hacker News, Cora, that would be another way to do it. And then the other way to do it would be is if there were any breadcrumbs in the code of, say, a new product like SORA, then you would maybe even get more. So if Sora said open in the open-a-eye browser in the code base or in some notes somewhere, there are these people who study the code changes in the Tesla dashboard to look for the next car or the name of the next door or the code name. They look inside of Apple's products for new hints and breadcrumbs of, like, they'll be looking in some code base and then find something about Vision Pro 2 or something.

So very interesting. But this worked out because I had a question. I didn't have headlines to back it up. I brought it to conversation and I figured out what's driving it thanks to you with just the Google and competitive pressure pushing Open AI forward. And if you're curious, people now think there's about a 70% chance that OpenAI will release a browser by the end of this year, which would really, really shake up the market Jason. So big things to come. But it has to be open to the public, but that could be paid users, right? So it doesn't say if it's paid or not. So, but it can't be in beta, in a closed beta. So that does change my betting on this. I would have a hard time

making this. No, it says, oh yeah, a closed beta will not suffice. Yes. Close beta won't suffice. Because, you know, then the problem of close beta is, like, does the team trying it at Open AI, do they count? Is that count as a closed beta? No? Because it would be a closed beta would be the public, but in a closed fashion by invite only. Anyway, this is where it really, these prediction markets are going to be great, because you could create a second prediction market here.

Will they demo a browser before 2025, right? So I just love the fact that these exist. Well done to our friends at Polly Market. This one to me, I don't have enough insider clarity to place a wager. Well, we'll see if they're right by the end of the year. All right. So for everyone knows Spotify, it's the well-known global music streaming platform, pioneered the way that we now listen to music that has spread to Apple Music and YouTube

music, etc. Longtime CEO, one of Europe's, I think, most famous business executives, and he's not stepping away from the company entirely, Jason. he's handing off the CEO role to two lieutenants, and he's going to become executive chairman of the board, which he says in a note is a more active role than Americans are accustomed to. And he wants to go help build more big companies in Europe.

So good, and I'm glad he's doing that. Shout out to him, long tenure, well done. But what I wanted to ask about Jason is when is it time for a founder to either change their role or step back from a company? Because we don't see this often. We like to talk about founder-led businesses. Founders fund, of course,

likes to back companies that are only led by founders. and in this case, he decided it was time. So in your experience as an investor, when is it the right time for a founder to shake up or step back? Well, let's pull up Spotify stock chart just while I collect my thoughts here and take a look at the max chart here. This has been an incredibly successful company. But, you know, it took a long time.

I was on Spotify when it was not legal in the U.S. yet. Somebody had gotten me an account. I wouldn't say who. that I could use at my VPN. And it was a mind-blowing experience to have all you could eat streaming music for one price. And, man, there were like, I don't know, a dozen of us who had these hacked accounts.

We'd say how we got them, because I wouldn't get anybody in trouble, but statute of limitations. Or we might have had these act accounts. I don't know, allegedly we might have. Maybe I'm misremembering, actually, now that I think about it. It was actually my cat. My cat had the account.

Sure. Yeah, it was, we were hallucinating. And so then they had a great second act, which was adding podcasting. So really two great acts. And they bought a bunch of podcasting assets, did a great job on that. The amount of time, the amount of paid users, the amount of free users, the advertising base, really a revolutionary product. Some people don't like the product or the history of the company because, as Oasis was saying, you know, like people go out and buy two cups of coffee for 40 bucks in a cafe with a croissant. and they won't spend $10 on a CD and have it for life. It's very frustrating for musicians that that era ended, but it also, for the up-and-coming musicians who weren't accustomed to selling DVDs and having that revenue stream where, hey, a million people bought your CD and you got $4 as the musician, $3 net net at the end of the day as the musician,

it was like, okay, yeah, you just made $3 million bucks, where you sold $10 million, made $30 million. This was big money back in the day, especially for double albums. Brothers in Arms did incredibly well by Dyer Shre. It's with the CD Revolution, smashing pumpkins, infinite sadness, a double album, which then you make twice as much money on.

This was an incredible money printing machine, and it went down to a trickle. But for the next generation, they got incredible fame instantly. They could release a track on a Friday and then be headlighting a music festival three months later, like we saw at Chaparone, Pink Pony Club and these songs. She was singing Pink Pony Club two years before she was the second headliner at ACL, Austin City

Limits here. I saw it with my daughter and my wife was incredible. She was like literally playing malls two years earlier with the same song. So the velocity at which you can become Chapelerone went back. So there's that. It really did democratize being a musical story. and it changed how you make money. You had to be resilient.

You had to have some inner resources to say, okay, I'm not going to make money off the CDs, but for Chaparone, she never did. I'm going to make it touring, which is why Oasis just did a tour. And when they ended it at Wembley, Liam said, see you next year. Because he knows that if they want to make money,

they're not going to go into the studio and do an album. They're just going to show up next year and sell out Wembley for 10 shows and bag, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars, like the billions of dollars Taylor Swift did. Daniel Eck, if you look back on it, he basically reinvented two industries.

Podcasting also changed. If it wasn't for Spotify doing these huge money deals with Joe Rogan, Bill Simmons, buying up all this stuff, they really did popularize and maybe, you know, accelerate the podcasting space by 30%, 40%, perhaps, I would say something there. And the music initiative, they completely revolutionized. So what an incredible run. to impact two huge industries like that. Again, disruption never easy. But what an amazing career. When should you hang it up? You know, when you get to 50 years old or so, and you've got a ton of money in a bank account,

and you're like, what's the next 10 years of doing the same thing I've done for 10 years going to be like? and the answer is arduous or more of the same. And there's all these other opportunities. I respect somebody saying, you know what? Yeah, I'm good. Steve Jobs never did that. He worked until he died. But Bill Gates did.

Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos were like, you know what? There's a huge pile of money here. I can do interesting things with it. I'm going to start a space company. I'm going to start the Gates Foundation. I'm going to, you know. And valuation is, part of this. Net worth is part of it. It does screw with people's brains. So take a look at this.

When you look at that chart, I don't know what percentage of Spotify Daniel still owns. But by the way, this is a $143 billion company. He has to own 5% of it. He might own as much as 15% of it. But let's just say, like Larry and Sergey, he wound up with 10%. He's worth $10 billion. dollars. Yeah. Let him cook. Yeah, this all just has to do with really personal stuff. You know, maybe you get a divorce. Maybe, you know, you got a sick kid, God forbid. Maybe you've got exhaustion. Maybe you want to try a different career. You know, all these things can happen. So I see it happen with my friends. You know, Chimoth had his own venture firm. He had LP money. And then one day he was just like, I'm not enjoying this. I'm going to just invest

my own book. I own social capital of the brand. I think that's what went down. I don't know all the details. But anyway, he's like, yeah, no more partners. Just me. Everybody's out or, I mean, I kept some people, I guess, but he just changed the way of doing business. Sure. And I've looked at that myself. I'm like, I wonder if I would enjoy better. And I was looking at like how QSBS works, qualified small business stock. You know that rule where the first 10 million you invest as an angel investor. You don't have to do. Well, that got raised to 15 million. So I was looking at at my book of business and I'm like, wait a second, wonder if I should raise another fund or I should just do a stacked QSBS trust. You can make a trust for like each of your kids. So now let's say

you put $25,000 into Uber or let's say Robin Hood or like, I pick Open AI or something, right? You put 25K into Open AI when it was a $100 million evaluation. And you had a spouse and three kids. You put $5,000 in each one. The $5,000 turns into 15,000. you pay no tax on that $15,000 when each of the five different investments goes. And so they call it like a stackable trust. So things can change and people go, huh, maybe there's a better way to architect my life

and you should always think about that. You did that. You were working for people and he said, I want to work for myself. So you have two customers right now, yourself with your newsletter and then me with the podcast, right? I think. Those are your two.

You really need to have financial education at a young age, Kids Investment Club.com, if you pull it up. Anybody who wants to work on this with me, I'm looking to hire a full-time teacher. And I'm looking to hire a full-time teacher to work on curriculum for me, this being the tip of the spear. So I'm looking for a teacher who teaches, I don't know, what a teacher gets paid in Austin. Somebody asks producer Claude, what a teacher gets paid.

A high school science teacher, a high school math teacher. What is a high school math teacher? There's some award-winning high school math teacher. So I created Kids Investment Club.com. I had like 2,000 people sign up for this already. And so I want to hire a teacher who teaches math, finance, etc., who has a passion for this, and then start this as a rolling curriculum. Like, you know, maybe we'll just start with Mondays after school, but then do a second

cohort on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. So now I have five cohorts, 500 people in each, you know, and each parent pays $500 for a course or $100, but you teach kids on a Zoom call how to invest money and how to do personal finance. And, man, kids love money and they love investing. I think this could be a hit. This could be a hit of a startup. Do you want to grab a question from the audience before we go? Sure.

All right. Thank you, Brandon, Alex Medek, Henry, and other people for sending these in. Jason, I'm going to pick Brandon Buchanan from YouTube. He says, Jason, what platform is best for buying secondaries? Hmm. Which platform is best for brand secondaries? Which one currently advertises with us? I don't think we have one advertising with us.

And I don't buy secondaries. I'm a seller of secondaries. So I actually don't know. I apologize. I think there are things for you to look out for, which is the fees. Some of these are now being sold with five or 10%. So if you want to buy OpenAI, you might need or stripe, you know, you want to buy $100,000.

are worth. You have to pay 10,000 on the way in to the person who's selling it to you. And you don't know what class of shares you have. You're flying blind. You may love Stripe. You may think it's the greatest company in the world. But I think not having information is a big challenge in these investments, not knowing where you are on the preference stack. Man, it's very dangerous. It's a very dangerous game to play unless you really know the promoter, the person who's running the SPV, and you trust them, and they have access, they're an insider, so they know the Carlson brothers and they worked there or they were an early investor and they're clearing their position. Like, okay, there might be some mitigating service there.

I wouldn't get too involved in the secondary market unless you have an information edge. Yes. Information edge could come from knowing people who work at the company, being a venture capitalist, or knowing a bunch of venture capitalists who can advise you on the state of the company, knowing board members in the company, or being a user of the products in some deep and meaningful way. So if you really used Wealthfront, you had 10 people on it, and opportunity came up, you're like, I think Wealthfront's a sleeper, you know, okay, great.

I could see doing it in those circumstances, but I would rather see people invest in public market equities where the information is pretty crisp. clean and set it, forget it, or low, low, low, low fee index funds. You have to have an edge. And that's like, I think, the problem. So I started to bill my edge as a public market investor doing J-trading. But man, it's hard. It's hard to do these things. So you have to be really honest with yourself. Now, if you're learning and you want to come to angel.com, which I'm hosting in a week or so. Yeah, come to Angel University.

All the proceeds go to charity. You can learn about Angel investing. Read my book on Angel investing. You can read about venture capital. And there's like Bradfeld's got a good book on VC. You know, go do all those things and try to build an advantage and learn the discipline like I did with public markets. I started really reading about public markets, how people value companies, you know, over the

last two decades. And really in the last couple of years, really trying to sharpen my knife by doing it every day for half an hour, an hour here on the program and in other places. But bet small while you're learning. Bet small while you're learning. If you're learning to play PLO and you're Alex and you've been played no limit for 10 years and you want to learn PLO, you don't walk up to the highest stakes. You don't put 10 grand on the table. You go find a PLO tournament. That's $50. And that has a $50 rebuy and you just, you know, that's your entertainment budget for the weekend. That's it.

All right, everybody, another great episode. Go to This Weekend Startups.com slash docket. You can read The Docket. And you can follow us on Instagram, YouTube, and X.com slash TWA Startups, and it's TWA startups. Most platforms are just searched for This Week in Startups on the Instagram. Please do me a favor and just say, hey, J-Cow, in the comments. We are starting to do the docket, which we do publicly at This Weekend Startups.com

slash docket. We're taking the top stories in the docket, and we're doing a little storytelling experiment on Instagram. So we can pull that up for a second here. If somebody pulls up the Instagram account, this is like a little, I don't know, like a little way for us to communicate with you if you're part of the Instagram gang. You can go to our Instagram and you'll see us talking about what's going to be on the docket before it happens. So if we just pick one of those stories that relates to a story we did here, here's the Wealthfront IPO story. And it explains Wealthfront. And then if you go to the next story with that hour on the right, you can see, here's us talking about the SORA app.

You go to the next one. And we're just starting to do this last couple days. Here's the Polymarket CEO, my guy Shane Copeland, getting flipped off at a meeting with regulators. That one got 113 likes. So go ahead and just go over there and you'll be more informed. Here's the story about Daniel Eck, stepping aside as CEO of Spotify, all those stories we talked about today in real estate. time. We're putting them up on the TWA startups account on Instagram, but I just really want you

to say, hey, JCal, in that group there. And I'll reply to you if you do that. Okay, everybody, we will see you next time on this week in startups, which will be Friday. We'll see you Friday. Bye, everybody.