This Week in Startups - Stability AI's $1B+ valuation, why you should start or join a startup, Roblox jumps 20% | E1589

Episode Date: October 18, 2022

First up, J+M cover Stability AI's new billion-dollar valuation (2:45) before Jason runs through a presentation and a manifesto. (15:33) Then, J+M break down Roblox's stock popping 20% on Monday (33:02), and another excellent WLITF segment featuring Joby Aviation! (42:57) (0:00) J+M tee up today's news topics! (2:45) Stable Diffusion-maker Stability AI raises at a $1B valuation! (14:05) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://Squarespace.com/TWIST (15:33) Jason runs through his talk: "Why you should build -- or join -- a startup" and his document on goals at LAUNCH (24:59) Embroker - Use code TWIST to get an extra 10% off insurance at https://Embroker.com/twist  (26:10) J+M discuss the expectations at LAUNCH vs most other venture firms (33:02) Roblox stock popped 20% on Monday after a strong metrics report (37:32) Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub - Apply in 5 minutes, no funding required, sign up at http://aka.ms/thisweekinstartups (39:01) Metaverse-winning pair trade, discussion on getting back to work (42:57) Delta invests $60M into eVTOL-maker Joby Aviation and plans to eventually offer Joby trips to and from airports starting in NY and LA 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

All right, everybody. Welcome to Tuesday. We've got some amazing news stories for you today. Right up off the bat. You're not going to believe it, Molly, but there's another billion dollar, $100 million, I believe pre-revenue startup funding that's occurred. It might be pre-revenue. You're right. Holy cow. It's a seed round. Yeah, it's, and yet, we're not sure we hate it. I think we want in. Stay tuned for that. Exactly. Then we just get a little bit of a treat. Jason, some impromptu presentations and readings from some top secret material. You are going to get life lessons delivered to you, children. Today is the day. Gather around, children. It's story time. I did a presentation this weekend at a hackathon. I just share that hackathon. And then I wrote a little introduction for our culture handbook. So I thought I would share it with folks and get some feedback.

And then in all this crazy down market with stocks collapsing left and right, one stock jumped 20%. 20% following its metrics report. We'll talk about what that stock is and how that company might be the Lego of the digital generation. Then we wrap covering some news from last week where Delta invested $60 million in Jobi Aviation, the E-V-Tol maker trying to make aviation bearable. That's fantastic. I really am excited about our V-Tol future. And this is a real investment, $60 million in cash, no joke, in Jobi Aviation.

I feel a little bit of a J-Trade coming on. He's got the it. Right, stick with us. Oh, no. What are we saying? What's it? What's it? It's going to be a great show.

That's it. Stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website. Go to Squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code Twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. In Brokers, Startup Insurance Program helps startups secure the most important types of insurance at a lower cost and with less hassle. Save up to 20% off of traditional insurance today at

embroker.com slash twist. While you're there, get an extra 10% off using offer code twist. And the Microsoft for Startup's Founders Hub helps all founders build a better startup at a lower cost from day one. Open to anyone with an idea, you'll get up to $150,000 in Azure credits, technical advisory, access to mentors and experts, free dev tools, and so much more. There is no funding requirement, and it only takes minutes to join. Sign up today at aka.m.s. This week in startups. All right, everybody, it's Tuesday.

We got a bunch of news for you. What's in the news, Molly? Got a bunch of news. Turns out that whole AI art thing, marginal cost of creation going to zero, all the different versions of creation tools that are coming out. Big business, turns out. Big startup news that broke after we taped yesterday, Monday. Stable diffusion maker, Stability AI,

raised a $101 million seed round. Okay, seed and name only. That valued the company at a billion dollars. Okay. So I'm clear. Dolly is an open source project. You talk to it. It makes stuff.

Yeah. Stable diffusion. is similar? I've never used stable diffusion. It's sort of like that, but what people like about stable diffusion is that it includes an editing tool. So you would generate an image, but then you can apply filters and you can fuzz it. This is the one that people are using to create those like incredible, like, fantasy scenes that look like they were ripped from one of the last two episodes of Lord of the Rings that were amazing and crazy. So here it is. You tell what you want to make, and then you can edit the changes on it, right? So you can

Yeah. Yeah, we can really mess with it. Its open source software is also, by the way, available to the public, letting users build on its code. So it's sort of like the Roblox of AI generation. Users can build on its code to make apps that are related to design, film, AR, video games, ads, and e-commerce. So it's kind of this like enabling platform for a suite of dev tools, it sounds like.

According to Bloomberg, CEO Imad Mostok claims stable diffusion has more than 10 million daily users across all channels. And its web app Dream Studio has more than 1.5 million users. I haven't yet gotten to the part where they make enough money to justify a billion dollar valuation. But maybe we just don't care anymore because the world is being changed in front of our eyes. This is a big bet. I mean, if they have 10 million people and they have a billion dollar evaluation,

that would be $100 per user. So they're valuing each user, free user, because it's currently free, I believe. There's no paid version, correct? I think, yeah. So that would make it $100 per person. And you'd have to wonder what eventually is the business model? The business model was SaaS, and it was $10 a month, $25 a month, which is what Canva cost, right? Something in that range, Photoshop, Adobe Suite.

And you had a million people paying $25 bucks a month. $20 bucks a month seems very reasonable for something this powerful. It's a quarter billion dollars a year. So could they convert 5% or 10% of people eventually? or why not? So it is definitely giving them a lot of credit ahead of time as a valuation. But this is the type of situation that happens when there's a new technology, somebody's clearly in the lead commercially, and there's competition. So in order to see something in outlier like this, Molly, there has to be competition. So there must have been 10 VC firms looking at this and five

who were competing for the deal. I could see that. Yeah, definitely. Well, and I suppose if they also have this plugin model and apps that can layer on top of it model, they could take a cut from that. Yeah, I mean, a million different ways to do it. A million different ways to monetize. It doesn't even have to just be charging a single user $10 a month, right? It could be a B2B model or some sort of an enterprise or an app store. A million different ways to give people like, say, a light version. And then if you wanted to do high res, if you wanted filters and libraries, they could charge extra for that I would think an app store would come in handy here where if you want to build an app for it, like let's say I am a famous artist and I said, I am going to make my own collection.

And this is where copyright is going to become the major issue for these products. And it's really unknown law of how this is going to come out. There's one theory that, hey, you know, this is a tool like a paintbrush. And you can just, you know, whoever paints with it, you know, it's up to them to respect copyright. So if I were to paint, I don't know, a Marvel character, Wolverine using this, and then I sell that Wolverine print, okay, yeah, maybe Marvel and Disney wouldn't have a problem with it. Now, if this thing points its AI at a known artist today, and then I guess there's an argument that maybe the platform that trained an AI on an existing data set that was copyrighted would have a problem. And this falls under the concept of fair use and derivative work, which, as you know, since you've been covered with fraudulent explaining for the audience, is a multi-layer test. And our government and our legal system essentially leaves it up to the people who are feel infringed to then take action, right? So there's not like you can go to the court and say, hey, I made this tool. Am I breaking the law? As we saw with cryptover at large, you know, you should be thinking about the law and interpreting it. And so I think, it's a very interesting moment in time

because a lot of people are going to think there's no copyright issues here because the AI did stuff, but who trained the AI? What data set was it trained on? And then if you do the four-part test, does it confuse the public? And so if you took somebody's fantasy work and you based this on the Lord of the Rings

or a specific Lord of the Rings, like the one owned by HBO, New Line, and you trained it on that, and then I start making my own paintings based on that, well, you have the celebrities who were in there, the movie studio, and you have token who tokens estate that might have a problem with that. Right, right.

It is clear, however, that everybody, that full steam ahead. I just looked up a story related to other companies in this field that have been raising. So there's, so obviously stable diffusion valuation of a billion dollars. There's a company called Hugging Face, which is a developer platform like GitHub that hosts pre-trained models, including, by the way, the one evidently that stable diffusion uses, or at least one of the models that Stable Diffusion uses, that was valued at $2 billion earlier this year after raising money from Lux Capital and Sequoia.

And then there's Open AI, which is the one that's the most well-known, which has gotten over a billion dollars in funding for Microsoft and Coastal Ventures. Yeah. So clearly, everyone's making the same bet here, which is this is the future of everything. Well, what is it going to... I wonder what the business model is for the people using these tools. is this eventually going to be how editorial is made for magazines or websites for movies?

Is AI eventually going to make these things? I think that's what people are betting is that there's some commercial use case here. It's not just a bunch of us, you know, playing with the tool to make things that make us happy, but that there's actually a business model here at some point where people doing commercial art. Actually, I'm making a billboard for the new iPhone, and I'm the designer, and I decide, hey, I want people dancing. and I want them to, you know, evoke, I don't know, the 1950s, but with, you know, this style and all of a sudden it makes something. And yeah, it's super fascinating to me. I know.

This article, the CNBC article I just found says the same thing that you just said, which is like right now, there's not an obvious profitable use. It's just kind of free or low-cost experimentation, people having a lot of fun with it. I mean, presumably you could start to use it for modeling one imagines, you know, you can. could use it, not modeling like the people on Instagram, but like, what will this look like this concept if we were to try to build it? You could do it for prototyping. Yeah. But yeah, it's, I mean, it's sort of- Words we mentioned before in a previous discussion, right? Yeah, exactly. But yes, copyright, obviously going to be an issue. Labor, like when you just start getting rid of jobs wholesale because the cost of creation is zero. It's just a bit, but it feels like

a turn to-you-thing just gets rid of. I mean, graphic designers, like anybody, like illustrators, gone. You got it. Yeah. So I guess then the question becomes, what is the role of an illustrator? I was thinking like, just really simply, remember logos? You used to hire a, when you started a company, part of the process, you'd get servers in the internet business, you'd get an office space.

You know, and then instead of getting services, use AWS. Instead of getting an office space, you use WeWork or people who work from home. You'd buy a software platform. You buy Oracle databases. Now you just use some open source software. All of those things have been abstracted away, but the world keeps on spinning. and life is still great, right? So we wiped out a lot of jobs there, theoretically,

but then we created so much more because so many more startups and creative projects were launched, even though you didn't have to hire a sysadmin for every startup, right? The sysadmin job, the server group, the people who managed the server room went away. So here, I was thinking about logos.

It used to be you were to spend $5,000 on a logo when you're doing a startup, some in that range. Sometimes you'd put 10, and somebody would come to your office. I don't know if you've ever been involved these discussions I've seen at when they were making new projects or whatever. I mean, logo redesigns, like months, they will be in months, a years-long project. They will cost hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars.

And now the idea that you could have one of these generative AIs just turn out a hundred options. Immediately. A minute. I mean, just immediately, you can just be like, hey, I want a logo that reminds you of Apple computers and Nike, but that is somehow around dolphins. And then all of a sudden it's like, britt, here are like dolphin Nike-esque logos that, you know, have swooshes in it or whatever. And so that goes away or the person who does logos can now make instead of a logo a week and doing 50 clients a year can do 50 clients a week, right? So you just, you 50X there,

because they might still want to polish it, right? You might still want to have the AI tweak it and make something and then they tweak it and make all the different versions of it. So I kind of see it like that. There's still sysadmins to the example of servers. They just don't rack servers. Yep. They do other settings on the servers.

They move up the stack a bit or whatever. And it's much more complicated to be, you know, like managing servers at that level is much more complicated because it's so much more scale. So the job actually took on some technical overtone. So then you could imagine an illustrator here becomes a curator. The human eye gets used as the final word on something. So you have like one art.

director maybe instead of a stable of illustrators and creators. Apparently, the CEO said that other practical uses down the road could be making Metaverse apps and creating PowerPoints. I like those two back to back. I did a PowerPoint this weekend. Oh, it's a nightmare. You did it yourself? I just did a text-based one where I said, I can run you through it at the end of the episode if you want. It might be a fun thing to do. But I just said, here's why you should start a startup. And I gave that to the cowhawks people. In fact, maybe I'll pull it up and do it at the end of the startup. But I put any images in it. Because once you start putting images, you start doing stuff, I find like then I'm relying on the images, not the text and the message. And I'm not trying

to get points for doing something funny or creative that way. I wanted to just do that. But yeah, I could see that. Right. I want to do a slide deck. I would like this slide to have people climbing a mountain to hit a certain goal and, you know, make the mountain made out of the logos of startups that have become unicorns. Boom. Boom. Like pretty cool. I should totally do that. Yeah. Listen, Squarespace is the platform where you can build or sell anything. And you all know, I've talked about it forever. I've been talking about Squarespace for a decade. We love it here.

We use it for all of our websites. It's beautiful. It's responsive. They have 24-hour, seven-day-a-week, 365 day a year, amazing support. And you know, they have these beautiful templates. So your website looks like you spent a quarter million dollars on it. They've also added all this powerful e-commerce functionality. And what is saying that e-commerce functionality?

the inventory management APIs, advanced analytics. Now they have the ability to sell content and membership. This is critical. So for example, maybe you're a piano teacher or you're a chef. You want to sell cooking lessons. You can do that. All of that is built into Squarespace. And this is why Squarespace is such a brilliant company.

The team sits there. They study the customers. They talk to the customers. They say, hey, what can we build for you to make your life better and easier? And they just include it in the product. You can add online booking and scheduling too now. Think about that. You've got classes or maybe you're a hairdresser.

your tennis teacher. How you got booking and scheduling built right in? Your clients can see your availability, right? And you don't have to worry about coordinating calendars. It's all just done easy, peasy, lemon, squeezy right inside there. Head to Squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. And when you have friends in your life, well, like, I need to build a website. You don't need to hire a developer.

Just go to Squarespace.com slash twist and tell your friends, start a free trial. When you're ready to check out and you're going to use it, use the offer code Twist. You get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. You want to, Nick is saying in the chat, he's like, do you want to just do that right now? Yeah, pull it up. I'll run your thread. Let's do it. This was just something where I was kind of begging people, please don't go work at a big

company. If you're thinking about doing a startup, please do it. Mm-hmm. And my justification for that to these 2,000 developers who are from Berkeley and everywhere else. Amazing. I'll ring you through it real quick. I'll do like four or five slides that you have a question.

I love it. Why you should build or join a startup. Do not join a big company with rare exceptions. Next slide. Startups hire one person to do five jobs. Big companies hire five people to do one job. I talk about this all the time. So you're going to get a lot more experience if you go to a startup.

Don't fall into the big salary money honey trap. This is one of the reasons people lose a decade of their life. Big companies offer them all kinds of salary and options and, of course, all these perks. There's a reason why big companies want to do your laundry and your mom and dad don't want to do it anymore. They want to see you be independent. The big company does not want you to be independent. The big company wants to breed dependency with you so that you don't then go on and compete against them. We're not use your talents inside of their money printing machine.

Big companies are filled with BS. So if you do go to one, be prepared. Politics, pecking orders, and mediocrity is what you're going to deal with every single day of your life. If that's something that's interesting to you and some people are interested in politics, by all means, you can go to Washington and you'll see a lot of mediocrity and peck news and politics, go to work for government. But big companies are just below that in terms of dealing with this kind of nonsense. Next slide. Big companies fight innovation startups breed it. So if you have a big public company, the public shareholders are going to fight you to milk every last sweet drop of juice

out of that orange. They are not going to want you to do new projects. And startups are required to build a new product in order to exist. So if you don't innovate as a startup, you go away. And if you're in a big company and you innovate, you get attacked by all of your shareholders, as we're seeing with meta. They decided they wanted to innovate. Their stock price got knocked by, you know,

by less than, you know, knocked in half. Keep your burn extremely low and your options open. And this is, you know, it's intended for young people, you know, no families, no, this was people in college. This is a life lesson. This is keep your life burn extremely low in your options open? Pretty much. Yeah. I mean, keep your burn extremely low and your options open, overhead kills options. Now, if you get ahead of your skis and you get a big mortgage payment, you got two car payments, you go to private school. I don't know, you go on fancy vacations. And instead of getting like a studio, you get the two bedroom and just stretch yourself. Now you're dependent on that big company salary. So don't spend up to the salary. Spend the minimum and then put your time into your career and your experiences with your friends. Much better option, I believe. Next slide. Joining a one-year startup is your best first option.

starting a company is very hard, but joining a company that's already at Techstars, Y Combinator, launch accelerator, super easy. Join a company that's raised a seed round, a series A. And just don't worry about your salary. Don't overthink it. Worry about how much you're going to learn and how fast you're going to learn it. How cool is the idea? How smart are the founders?

And you can always quit and go back to the big companies. It's always going to be there. But now it's the best time ever to build a startup. Why? Well, because everybody's scared and talents abundant or the absurd salary packages are getting pulled from the big companies. Ash is sitting on the sidelines waiting to fund your startup. Work hard and learn everything you can. Something we talk about here internally, we focus on professional development. Just learn

everything you can. When you work at a company, they're paying you. And people can get a little bit, you know, oh my God, I'm working these hours. I'm not getting paid for them. I work 12 hours. Well, if you're working on something wrote, okay, I get it. If you're just pushing boulders up a hill, I get it. But if you learn some new skill today, by the way, that accrues to you more than it accrues to the company. Because you get that skill for life. The company gets it for whatever number of hours you work a week and however long you stay there and they pay you for it. But you get it for free. You get it for free. They paid you to learn something. And you want to specialize, learn very specific tools, but you also want to generalize. You want to learn how to

sell. Learn how to do operations. Learn basic legal concepts. Learn how to do project management. Next slide. Yep. Equity equals destiny. Power, freedom and money are driven by equity or in venture carry. This is how you can uncap your earning potential. So make sure that you have some ability to eventually in your life. It doesn't happen to happen immediately, but to get equity, to get carry. You know, again, it doesn't have to happen year one, but you do want to have it happen in decade one, because if you do hit, my lord, you have power and freedom to do whatever you want

and shape the world however you want. Next slide. The days are long, but the years are short. One day you're going to wake up. You're going to be 30, 40, and then 50, and one day you're not going to wake up. Do not waste 20 years at one of these big companies. Yeah. Or 30 years, Molly.

You understand what I'm saying? I do. It went by fast. Did it not? So fast. It goes by real fast. Next slide. Come to founding university.

Starts in November 14. Take a screenshot. Oh, my God. Next slide. You're going to die. You should come to founder university. It's like the best pitch ever. I love that.

Also, I have two podcasts. Life is short. And two podcasts. Look at your QR codes. Look to the lion in the middle of the All-in one. That's delightful. Well, that was brave. I was using the brave browser and it has a thing where you can go on a website and just

hit right mouse click on. And just create it. That's so cool. Yeah. I love life. That's my quick talk. What do you think? I think that we should get some merch made that says life is short, start a company.

Yeah. It's a good one. It's like so great. Right. It's just like. Yeah. Life is short and start a company. Exactly.

Life is short. Start a company. So that was my little diversion this week. And I told them, you know, one of the, they're going to send me the 10 winners of the hackathon from yesterday from this hackathon that want to create companies. I'm going to send me an email. I'm going to meet with all 10. Maybe you'll join me for some of them.

And I said, we'll accept one of them either into the accelerator or we'll have them go to founding universe and give them 20. Amazing. So that's going to be my new schick. After we close this new fund is like maybe going to some of these hackathons and then picking somebody from it. If they start a company, like not just going to give it to 25K prize, but if they want to start a company, we'll give them the seed funding, you know, after we talk to

them soon. Anyway, I just a little idea. Talk to a founder today. I mean, this is such a, like, this is the time. if you are one of those people who's in one of those big companies and like your options aren't worth as much right now like it's not going to be fun at all for the duration of this downturn right it's just going to be nothing but paying layoffs and cut projects and this and that now is the moment i literally talked to a founder today who was like i had my soul sucked out of me by a burp company

and i took my money from my options and i've been bootstrapping a new company because i used my time at burp company to figure out a hole in their product offerings so many of you who've feel trapped at those big companies are in literally the perfect position right now. Yeah, and they're always going to be there. They're always going to be there. I mean, I just every day I wake up and I talk to my team at inside.com, I talk to my team at launch, and I watch people's careers. And actually today, I was writing, because we have our management meeting this week.

I wanted to share with you guys my thinking on mentoring people to become world-class investors. So I kind of wrote my little missive here. Amazing. Yeah, I wrote a myth. Amazing. Should I read it? Since we're, since we're, since we're. I'm just going into my docs and I'm reading him today.

I mean, maybe after the meeting, like, you don't want to spoil it for all of us. What do you think? I don't know. It's so good. You're like, no, I want to. It's so good. It's so good. It's a little crazy if I'm being honest.

Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Like, I can be at times. Where is my... So the question is, are you going to try it out in public or in private? I'm assuming in public. That's just what we do here. It's just the introduction.

I don't... It doesn't have the detail. So, okay, I'll read it. Give us the intro. Give us the intro. Introduction. Our goal at launch, I literally have not read it, I just wrote it today. Our goal at launch is to have a rapid, transparent, and supportive career path for driven and hardworking individuals. We believe that being a world-class investor requires the same amount of time and effort that becoming a world-class founder requires massive. As a firm, we have decided to spend the majority of our effort developing emerging talent, not recruiting existing investors with track records. The strategy requires us to provide mentorship and professional development, and for you to provide discipline, execution, and enthusiasm over a sustained period of time. We recognize our goal is to be the most successful and supportive venture firm in the world is very bold, and it's

certainly not for everyone. In fact, it's not for most individuals in venture capital based on what I've experienced. It's kind of like a personal letter for me to the person considering working here. I may make this actually like a public thing, like they have culture documents like Netflix says. Yeah. Many of the individuals I've met in our field are excited about the perks, compensation, and leisurely lifestyle that venture capital affords. They take long vacations, work short hours, and rely on founders to do the heavy lifting in their portfolios, we are here to match the Herculean effort of our founders. This means being available to our founders,

24 hours a day, seven days a week, to get the job done literally. This means coming to every meeting with a founder with a prepared mind, relentless positivity, and deep curiosity about their vision. If you're looking for a 9-to-5 job with balance, where you can turn it off on weekends

and take long vacations, this is not the firm for you. If you want to cut years out of your career path, be challenged constantly, and be of true service to founders, you were in the right place. That's my little introduction. I love it. I'm going to quickly explain

one of the crucial types of insurance that every startup needs. It's cyber insurance. Obviously, this covers hacks, which happened more than you think. The world is crazy right now. We all know that cyber hacks are happening constantly.

So if you don't have business insurance, you failed. One of the first steps of being a founder. And even startups need to get this insurance in place early because crazy things happen. It's not that expensive, and it doesn't take a lot of time thanks to our friends at Embroker. Their technology saves you so much time, so much money, because prices are 20% lower and you get better coverage than the incumbents. You go from sign up to quote and purchase in just 10 minutes. Think about that. When you work with

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I'm not a maniac, but we deal with maniac founders who do set quite a pace, right? Not all of them, but hopefully they do. I don't understand. I mean, granted, I'm new here. But like, I don't understand how you would do this job without that, some version of that expectation. Yeah. I mean, I guess if you didn't, maybe if they were later in their careers, I don't know how you could do early stage venture without that, right? Like, it's a very, it's a high touch operation. Well, imagine you didn't have founding university or you didn't have an accelerator.

Now you take like whatever half the effort we do. Now imagine you just did seed investments and you just did big ones and you didn't worry about follow. on and you didn't join the board. Now, of a sudden, you'd free up another 20% of your time. And let's say you didn't feel the need to, you would tell founders like, hey, we'll invest when there's up around, but that's it. And we're not going to provide any, we don't need to read your monthly updates. Like, a lot of VCs kind of takes that approach, right? So, you know, what we do is just different. Now, I know there are firms that actually do work as hard as we do. And those are the ones that have, you know, names that are, you know, legendary. And so I'm

trying to build something legendary and just means like a certain, I don't want to be maniacal. Everybody here takes vacations, but I think also everybody here works really hard and takes to work seriously. So I'd like to sort out people who are lifestyle based, if that makes sense. It's a type. Look, first of all, I like the, I like any kind of intentional workplace. Like, this is who we are and this is what we're trying to accomplish and this is what it will take. Because that is a clear expectation that if you, if you came in expecting something else, that's actually on you. And it's a type. Like, I sort of talk all the time about workers and what they want and what they should get. And no,

they don't want to be treated like crap and whatever. But like, I don't have no chill. I personally have no chill. When I accidentally wake up too early on a weekend, I'm like, oh, I can't get some work done. Like, it's a, it's a personality. It takes a certain personality to be a founder. It takes a certain personality, just want to work all the time because you feel so fulfilled and excited by it. And then it doesn't become work. It's just a passion. And it really is like, I think when things become a vocation, you know, like a priest or a Jedi, you know, or a coach in some cases, they don't wake up and they're like, oh my God, time to make the donuts. They're like, hmm, donuts. You know, like, just wake up. Like, this is what I do. I make donuts. Donuts are my life. Donuts are

life. We bought his life. Well, I mean, you look at somebody like Kobe, rest in peace. And and Michael Jordan, the effort those people put into their careers, like, it was even compared to their contemporaries insane. You know, I don't know if you watch that, uh, redeemed team. I'd sort of watching the redeemed team dog. I haven't watched that one yet, but a lot of people have been talking about it. I watched a couple of clips and now I'm pulled in, but, you know, this Kobe is going to the gym at five in the morning. And he's in the lobby in this hotel in China and like, uh, or wherever it was. And maybe that wasn't when they were in America training, uh, for it. And Carmelo Anthony and LeBron and Dwayne way come in.

and their young upstarts in the league. And Kobe's like, hey, you guys go to the gym? And they're like, we just got back from the club. And he's like, all right, I'll be in the gym. And it's 5.30. And so then the next day, like at seven, they came to the gym, the next day, 6.30. You know, and he did three workouts a day.

I've been reading about him. And truly unique individual in terms of the effort he put in, was just different, just very different. Anyway, I think that's my opening salvo for this. I just, this is one of the reasons I haven't. hired a lot of people with too much experience in venture because in a lot of cases, the people who are available in venture are the ones who are not at a top firm because they're at a top firm.

Right. So then you're getting the people who are available who probably got bounced from a mid-tier firm. And I'll be totally honest, I look at their Instagram and I'm like, does this person work? Or like, you're having way too much fun. Well, I mean, listen, again, I skied 40 days last year, but I skied two hours a day. And I people saw me on, you know, I was doing me. meetings at 9 o'clock at night after I put my daughters to bed and checking my email. So I think

just really, to your point, being intentional about mentoring people and what we want to do here. And cultivating, right, and hiring for what you want. I just think I think that's, that's what's all about. I'm also trying to figure out how to define what is success. One of the things that remote has taught me is that as a manager, you have to really understand what people are doing or what they need to do in order to be successful, as opposed to just getting people to show up at an office and work, right? In the previous modality, it was like, did I get 20 people to come to this office and did we all move the company forward? Now you're like, if that person's at home, I don't know exactly what they're doing. I'm not over their shoulder. I'm not recording their screen. You know, they're not like a call

center employee. Okay. So what does it mean to be a successful venture capital? Okay, a capitalist. To be a successful investor, you need deal flow. Okay. What is deal flow? Okay, deal flow is inbound and hunting stuff. Okay. And you've watched me now this year with Mike and our new president and everybody on the team and yourself included just iterating on what defines somebody who wins in venture. Is it doing 20 meetings a week that are inbound or is it doing five that were hunted? You know, like that's a question I don't have the answer to. Yeah. I don't have the answer yet. Or does it come from emailing your 10 venture capital friends every week or 10 different ones every week saying, hey, anything interesting?

Or does it come from reading news articles or going to, you know, websites where developers are hanging out or going to hackathons? I don't have all the answers. But I'm trying to build a process for that. Yeah. It's fun to be on the journey, isn't it? That's awesome. Anything else in the news?

Oh, can I tell you one thing about that previous story? Oh, yeah. This would be an interesting time because this is like WordPress. There was WordPress.org and then Matt made WordPress.com. There were 20 other businesses that became very significant that used the WordPress open source project. Yep. So if you're part of the stable diffusion community, you're within your right, obviously, to fork it and do different things with it. So stable diffusion, the company, the dot com, they probably don't own the IP around this. So you could do diffusionable, you know, or something else. I'm not saying compete with them directly, but you could say, you know what? I think that the business here is going to be turning these into NFTs and having that toolkit. I think the business here is going to be storyboarding and for Hollywood. So I'm going to take stable diffusion and make the Hollywood. version of it. So I do

want to encourage people when they see something big like this happen, if you're a founder and you're into this and it's your jam, don't feel dissuaded or demoralized. It's an open source project. Feel inspired. If there's a billion dollar company already, that means there's going to be 10 more. Right. And there are three

billion dollar companies. One of them is a $2 billion company. So yeah, draft off of this, get into this space. And then it's so interesting, this leads perfectly into our next story, which is also about a platform for creation. that has done really well. So Roblox shares jumped on Monday 20% after,

I think in large part because there had been a lot of like nervous mumbling about its earnings and people saying like, oh, Roblox isn't doing well. And its stock price was sort of tanking. So Roblox did this September 2020 metrics report. It was not an official earnings report that they put out this metrics report. And they showed that daily active users were up 23% year over year. Roblox peaked at a $78 billion market cap back in November 2021. It's down 67 and a half percent since then, which compared to some tech stocks is actually not that bad.

They're not in that 80 to 90 percent club. They were cut two thirds, right? They were cut two thirds. I mean, it was bad, but it could have been a lot worse. But what's so interesting about Roblox is that a lot of people in response to the conversations about the Metaverse have been saying, look, this already exists, right? That platform exists in some way. It's already being built on and it's Roblox. and also it's sort of similar to our conversation about stable diffusion

and the one that's more like a GitHub where it's like they're becoming the enabling layer for people to create on top of it. And in gaming, Roblox is still Godzilla. Yeah, I didn't Jade trade this, but we Jade traded it. It turned out Jade loved this company. And she put shares in out the IPL, yeah. She knows what's all.

And so she's written it up and now. So there's an official Jade trade in here. Okay, Jade trading. is amazing. I want to see your portfolios side by side. I have a feeling she'd beat me. So it's great to see them growing again. I think this is part of this bottoming out process. And one of the reasons I started jay trading is I think we're going to see during every one of these storms and everything's collapsing. Well, somebody's obsessed with their customers and their customers are delighted. Do the kids playing Roblox care about the stock market, Ukraine, Taiwan, Xi Jinping, Iran, bonds, the deficit, no. What do they care about? They just want to play games with their friends.

Exactly. And so there are going to be businesses that grow through the storm. Now, this is hard for people to understand because it's so scary right now, right? I mean, so many companies going out of business, hiring freezes, layoffs, stock market turmoil, the geopolitical issues are feel insurmountable and overwhelming at times. a sense of dread when you open up your feed. But pause for a second. People stop eating hamburgers? No, Mr. Beast's going to be okay.

People stop watching Mr. Beast. People stop buying iPhones, maybe. Anyway, it's going to be a mixed bag. And here we see some people are going to grow coming out of this, right? Yeah. So congrats to the team. The platform, they're like the digital version of Lego. Like the thing that lets you build and build and build and build and build and, I mean,

think about the enduring legacy of that. So yeah, congratulations to them. And smart to put out this. know how regularly they put out this metrics report, but I think it was really smart of them to get ahead of these kind of rumors and this like market negativity and the CNBC bitching. Sorry, pardon my language. And just be like, actually, we're killing it. Yeah, you put the I and J.

It's okay. I think you can use it with the ING. Thank you. I mean, it's still kind of a swear, but I don't know if it's going to go to the E. I think it's kind of you're talking like it's gender neutral. It's complaining. Anybody can be complaining. I'm not worried about the gender thing.

I'm worried about getting me. I'm just very sensing to this. I know, look at you. But I mean, the number of hours of engagement is crazy. And I also think the number of daily active users is bonkers. In the Q2, they had 52.2.2 million people using the product every day. That's Dow is for people new to the startup game. Daily active users, monthly active users, and there's all kinds of other things we look at.

And you can divide the daily active users into the monthly active users to get a ratio, right? There's all kinds of interesting things here. but 11.3 billion hours? Went up in September. Went to school. That school started, exactly. That daily active user number went up, which makes me wonder if their schools building program, right?

There might be educational games being built on top of this. And they had four billion hours engaged. I'd love to interview the CEO of this company, David. I know some people who invest it. We got to get in touch with David. All right, everybody. I'm here today. with Obie Akputa. He is the program manager at Microsoft for startups. Welcome to the program,

Obie. I appreciate you, Jason. Thanks for having me. Tell me a little bit about why you're choosing to give such a huge number of Azure credits to startups because I see a lot of them taking advantage of it now. 1,000%. Microsoft startups, we're on a mission, help all founders grow, innovate, no matter their background, progress or location. So really trying to close any type of inequality gap, any type of wealth location or access gap. We know it starts with the resources. And so that's what we're starting with, you know, a plethora of resources starting out with Azure credits. It's a very nuanced thing there. It's these kind of credits from other companies in the industry have been limited.

They're only available to people who maybe went to the most elite programs or, you know, as a kind of an insider's club, you'll give these credits to any startup anywhere that wants to change the world and build a great product, correct? 1,000%. I think the biggest thing we pride ourselves on is creating an ecosystem that doesn't require startups to be investor back or to be validated, if you will, by any third party. And we say for all, we truly mean for all. So that's one thing we're really proud to say.

All right. Thanks so much, Obie. Microsoft for Startup Founders Hub has no fundraising requirements as we discussed. It's open to anybody. And it only takes five minutes to apply. You can get up to six figures and benefits as we talked about. Well done, Obie. Sign up for the Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub today at AKA.m.

slash this week in startups. AKA.m.S. slash this week in startups. Obie's waiting for you. My guy's going to take care of you. So the thing I think is going to be very interesting in all of this that people are probably not thinking about. And this could be a pair trade, as Jemoff likes to talk about. Roblox and Apple to win the Metaverse minus.

And you short the Facebook. I think Roblox is not going to align themselves with Facebook. Anybody who would partner with Zuckerberg is crazy. Anybody who partners with Apple is brilliant. Because you know what Apple's going to do? Apple's not creating a Roblox competitor. or going to try to buy the company. They're going to try to find a thousand different developers to make Roblox-like experiences for their headset.

And they're going to make $800 every time they sell a headset like they do with their laptops and phones. So they have it. They absolutely are. Nick. Nick traded meta. Oh, he might not have traded. I think it's not a bad one. I don't think it is too cheap.

They're trading at a very low P.E. It is really cheap. I think that they're going to do some riffs or do some gentlemen's layoffs kind of situation, come back to the office or whatever. I would like to also get an update, Molly, on maybe one of our readers or some Apple insiders can tell us. Remember we talked about Apple going back to the office and then people were quitting? What happened with that?

Are they actually in the office three days a week? Did they actually, were they actually able to execute on that? And then how many people quit? So if you work at Apple, somebody slide into our DMs and just tell us what the vibe is in in Cupertino. Are people going to the office or not? or at mention us on your burner account? I even think the quitting was probably overstated.

Like, I mean, maybe some did, but I didn't hear a massive. No, no wishing sound. There was no wishing sound. One of our Nottie says, yes, literally here. At Apple, maybe. I'm going to need you to clarify, Nottie friend. I think that I think there. I know, I know plenty of people who were really upset about having to go back to the office.

and now that they're back in the office, they like it fine, right? Like, we all act like, the way we're going to feel right now is the way we're going to feel forever. I'm excited to go back to the office on Wednesday. Commuting back to the office and they're like, I thought it was to be horrible, but it's actually kind of a nice break to get away from the house. I mean, when I was just at this like living the digital nomad life, which I had not done before. Yeah. Oh, my God. I was so productive.

I could tell. I saw your email and your Slack messages going up. You seemed a little more chipper. I'm not saying you're not always chipper. But you seem chippy ear. I think there was probably partly that, right? It was like getting away from my, but it was getting away from my environment and away from my routine. I feel like I'm trapped in this like my house.

And I'm like, I'm not technically trapped, but I don't have a reason to leave. Yeah, I'm about to rejoin. Like, I used to belong to this like sort of swim in tennis club that's around the corner from my house. Now, I want to be clear that I have a pool and a home like at least like a bike and workout gear, you know, like you just want to see humans. I just want to see humans. Yeah, no, it's nice to see humans. I agree. I'm going to go there and work in their little clubhouse and not have a dog stare at me and not feel like I might want to do the dishes and not to, you know, it's like all the work is still happening.

But it happens in such a focused way when you're in a different location that it's actually really nice. I could get back into like a one day a week thing. I'm not going to mandate it just for anybody on my team who's like worried. I'm not going to mandate it. But we're having an offside meeting on Wednesday at the old office. So I'm stoked. We'll see, you know, then I'm excited to time out the commute. See, you know, just see.

Just see. Just say. I mean, it might be nice to do it. Wouldn't it be nice maybe to do one episode in person a week or something? Or maybe do like a, if we did like a Monday night live or something or Friday night live, I'm not saying every Friday. But imagine if we had like a space where we could let people come and you and I would just put on a show once a week and interview somebody important. Thursdays. I choose Thursdays.

That's a great day for that. And then you kind of like you roll out to like dinner in the city. Perfect. Love it. Yeah. Okay. I'm into it. I'm into it.

Hey, there was a we live in the future I wanted to cover here. There was. Good. Great. This has been kicking around and we've been, we've just, this is like one of Jason's favorite industry, VTALs. It's probably one of my most favoriteest topics because it's like electric flight machines and also efficiency. Delta is making a $60 million investment in Joby Aviation.

Okay. Which we'd been a little worried about if I'm being honest. And we'll buy 2% of the company. And what's super interesting about this is that, Delta is hoping it broke late last week. Delta is hoping to have Joe B be an add-on that you could book along with your flight for transportation to and from the airport. Yes, please. Flying taxi to the airport. This was a very, this makes total sense. So good. It's a great investment. Now, I was fascinated by helicopter travel when I was a kid. And I'm reticent to bring this up. But this is,

Not without precedent. There was a building in New York called the Pan Am building. It still exists. And the top floor of the Pan Am building was the Pan Am Club. And on the top of the Pan Am Club, they had giant helicopters that were military-grade helicopters. And when you were in the age of, you know, when traveling was a beautiful thing and, you know, it was a more refined thing. You could dress up. It was like going to church kind of situation when you took flight.

You smoke. You smoke the whole thing. You know, every seat was like first class. The food was great. the wheel of card around, you know, everybody's dressed up. It's kind of like a little bit like going to the club or something, or to Coco Cabana. I always,

so anyway, they had these chinooks. These are like the two helicopters, the two things on the helicopters. And the Pan Am building is where Grand Central is. So your thing, if you were New Yorker was, you go over there.

And they give you a meal, you check in, and then you get in one of these Chinooks. And they take you, I think I'm pronouncing incorrect. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong. You fly to the top of the Pan Am building in the middle of Manhattan.

And this was like a glorious thing to do. Until one of the struts on a landing broke, it tipped over, blades went flying, somebody died on the waiting for the next helicopter and then people also,

somebody on the street, tragically died. But I mean, look at this picture of the plane landing on the top of the Pan Am building, the second one down. You see it right there. Oh, that is amazing.

How amazing is that? And what you see there that little strip along the top if you're watching YouTube.com slash this weekend, hit the subscribe button and the alert. That little, there's the landing,

but the windows below that of the Pan Am club, which then later my uncle John McCabe, he became a private club for like, you know, Wall Street dudes and he was a member of it. But it was like a very elite club with incredible views. So it was just amazing. You just get off at Grand Central, go up to the top of the Pan Am building. They would have like a beautiful lounge and then you get on this thing. And that's what this is going to be. Now, of course, there's the Uber of helicopters, Blade, that is doing a similar service. And they went public too. I think Blade went public. But I think This is the game changer is Joby.

I think it is. It's so much safer. It's so, and there are, you know, the biggest problem with anything like this is the million regulations that stand between you and not having to drive yourself to the airport or getting car sick in the back of an Uber. But in this case, some of those regulations about flight in particular and overhead are related to noise. And these things are silent.

Like, no, there's the underestimated and undervalued part, I think of electric flight is, it is silent. And so it won't necessarily be that disruptive. I mean, I'm sure there will be a big lung fight to get this done, but I want it. This is going to be better. Right now, New York has a big problem with tourist helicopters flying over Central Park and hovering, and it makes a shi a ton of noise on the weekends and people are complaining. And we had it when I lived in Brentwood in L.A., the 405, like, all these helicopters would go and be like,

there's traffic on the 405 and the 10. And it's like, there's traffic in the 405 of 10 every evening. You don't need to send four helicopters over. our homes to show how bad the traffic is. We know the traffic's bad, and you also have cameras already there that you have access to. The CalTransCat. I mean, you can pull the traffic cameras up on the web browser.

It's so wasteful and stupid and loud and annoying. It was so dumb. But here's the good news. These things are going to be safer because you have multiple blades. They're going to be more environmentally correct, and you're going to be able to drive them places where noise is a bit of a problem. This is going to change the world.

And when you see a $60 million investment Now remember, we talked about the letters of intent, L-O-I's, which I refer to as the L-O-N's, letters of nothing. The letters of nothing, that means you convince somebody, and in the meeting you said, hey, Delta, listen, we're going to give you some free stock options, give you some warrants, you tell everybody you're signing for a hundred of these things. And here's the contract. And, yeah, yeah, of course, your lawyers put in here. We can cancel at any time. And there's like 17 other things.

And here's your payment terms. And, you know, that's what the guy who just went to jail or who's guilty, Trevor from. Trevor Milton. Milton from Nicola. You know, he was talking these letters of intent right here on this weekend startups. And I was trying to get the information on it. I was pumping him for a little bit of information on that. It was hard to get.

This is $60 million of cash. And I don't know how good Delft is doing. But that's a big check to write. There's no gravy train in the words of Trell. ever melt in the gravy train. That was amazing. There's no badger. This is legit.

I mean, $60 million, you have to, I mean, the board has massive skin in the name. And it can be up to $200 million if Joby hits their milestones, according to the news that we've read. So, congratulations to J-B. I'm hovering around the J-trade on this one. Oh, really? Yeah, I got it, though. I got it. I got the plan.

I got it. I got it. I've heard it as hoovering, and then I got distracted. by thinking about vacuuming. It didn't land. Oh, my God. I'm such a slow burn. We cannot do it.

This is just embarrassing. This is embarrassing. It's like dawn comes to Mountainhead over here. I love this. This is like the world I want to live in. All right. And I love seeing these airlines, by the way, make the leap, right? Like make these investments.

Think about making our experience better after just abusing us for someone. United Airlines invested in an Eve Airman. mobility and is also looking at its flying taxi. He's like, let's go, everybody. Make it better. Make it better. You know, I think it's close. I think it's really close.

I've been using the full self-driving beta and that's getting close. You know, it's, it actually works. Now, it's a little jittery. The number one problem with full self-driving right now is drivers driving like humans. Because this thing drives like a computer. Yeah. And then people run stop signs in my neighborhood. like in the peninsula, as I've said before,

a stop sign is kind of a suggestion in California. They're like, stop if you want. And I'm like, it's red. And it says stop. And people go through it like it's a yield sign. I like can't even with California driving right now. I mean, I understand that this is like, I don't know, it's some weird post-pandemic.

There aren't any rules. It's like Mad Max everywhere. But I mean, every speed is represented on a single stretch of freeway at any given time. from 120 to 35. Like in any lane you want, it's just. What about the people who are playing Fast and Furious? And they're like, I don't know, you have this a lot out there because of the Fast and Furious influence, inspiring a lot of young people.

But where they travel like in a little train and they're weaving around us with our kids in the car and it's like, Zoom, a person cuts you off. You're like, oh, my God. And then Zoom, Zoom, two more of following them. Because they start racing each other. One of them sees one doing it. And then they start racing and it's a whole, I know. I just, I like.

I mean, they have to impound those cars. I don't know what's going on with CHP, but we have to take that seriously because they don't take it seriously, do they? CHP is quiet quitting. Cops are quiet quitting in Oakland. Yeah, they're quiet quitting in California. This is what happens when you, you know, go after the police. They quiet quit, you know, and they're like, okay. You want to, okay, yeah.

You pull them over. You think I say, you think I say bad words on this show. You should hear me in the car. When you're driving and people do that. I mean, I'm just always just concerned about my children in the car. I understand you want to race, but there's racetracks. God bless you, go to the racetrack. Just don't do it on the 580 and the 280.

They don't do it on the 280. It's the 101, the 580. I got a couple of highways. I see them doing it on regularly. 280's like, that's my grandma highway. That's like the Tesla BMW highway. It's delightful. I love it.

I take the 280. I get smiles. I take the 280, even though it takes four or five extra minutes. That's my luxury. That's my little. like cheat code. I'm like, oh, I can get there in six minutes less if I take the 101. I'm sticking with the 280. It's a quality of life situation.

Yeah. Yeah. Driving the 280's like driving. It's like literally driving through the Alps. I feel like I'm, you know, like some Swede. I'm in Norway driving for the fjords. It is lovely. It is lovely.

All right, everybody. That was a great show. Hopefully you enjoyed the life lessons, the top secret Jason presentation. Even our management team hasn't seen this yet. There you go. And now my whole company is going to be buzzing about it tonight. Sneak peek. Did you see the show?

I'm going to be on Slack tonight. I'll be on Slack tonight. All right. Tomorrow next unicorns, okay? At a new format, we're going to check in on the next unicorns that we've previously covered. And what have we learned in that period of time? It's going to be a great week on this week in startups. That's right.

Stick with us all week.