This Week in Startups - Student Roy Lee Hacks Amazon, SBF's Jailhouse Chat + more! | E2095

Episode Date: March 11, 2025

Timestamps:(0:00) Roy Lee's hack and Amazon's reaction(3:03) MicroStrategy's Bitcoin strategy(4:29) Market reactions to Trump's policies(6:33) Creating value in current market conditions(8:00) South by Southwest highlights(10:19) Coda. Empower your startup with Coda’s Team plan for free—get 6 months at https://www.Coda.io/twist(12:03) The $20,000 electric car concept(16:18) Electric unicycles as a startup category(19:12) Vanta. TWiST listeners automate your SOC2 and get $1,000 off at http://www.vanta.com/twist(20:31) Electric unicycles trend discussion(21:31) Guest introduction: Roy Lee(23:32) Roy Lee's background and startup idea(25:41) Technical coding tests and InterviewCoder(30:14) LinkedIn Jobs. Post your first job for free at https://www.linkedin.com/twist(32:01) Amazon's reaction to InterviewCoder and Columbia's actions(37:03) Roy Lee's future and startup funding discussion(41:19) Hiring, revenue, and fundraising strategies(44:37) Venture capital dynamics and maintaining company control(47:52) Capturing audience before investment and SBF's legal issues(57:57) ServiceNow acquires Moveworks(1:00:00) Impact of Tiger's peak valuations on LPs and IRR calculations*Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.comCheck out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.comSubscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp*Follow Roy:X: https://x.com/im_roy_leeLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roy-lee-goat/*Follow Alex:X: https://x.com/alexLinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm*Follow Jason:X: https://twitter.com/JasonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis*Thank you to our partners:(10:19) Coda. Empower your startup with Coda’s Team plan for free—get 6 months at https://www.Coda.io/twist(19:12) Vanta. TWiST listeners automate your SOC2 and get $1,000 off at http://www.vanta.com/twist(30:14) LinkedIn Jobs. Post your first job for free at https://www.linkedin.com/twist*Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland*Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis*Follow TWiST:Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartupsYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekinInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartupsTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartupsSubstack: https://twistartups.substack.com*Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

I have all the offers from Capital One, TikTok meta, but those are all like practice for the big one, which I knew was going to be Amazon because that's like the thing that everybody knows. The technology is really not rocket science here. Like I'm putting together two concepts that have existed before in the past. It's just LOMs kind of make everything hackable. So you ended up using this service called IntrubuCoder and got an offer from Amazon. And then instead of accepting it,

you posted a video on YouTube of the actual process of using your tool. Oh, yeah. To hoodwink the Amazon guys, and then someone snitched and then everything kind of exploded. Did you leak it yourself or did you get snitched on? Someone saw the video when it was at about like 20,000 views. Some Amazon executive saw the video and then they reported it to Columbia. And all they did was post the letter that they sent to Columbia. So they, wait a second, Amazon's a rat?

Amazon's a cheese eater? They ate cheese on you? They ratted you out to the university. That's exactly what happened. This weekend startups is brought to you by, Coda. Cota empowers your startup by bringing words, tables, and teams together. Strategize plan and track goals effectively with all your valuable data in one place. Go to coda.io slash twist to get started for free and get six free months of the team plan.

Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a sock to report fast. Twist listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com slash twist. And LinkedIn Jobs. A business is only as strong as its people and every hire matters. Go to LinkedIn.com slash twist to post your first job for free. Terms and conditions apply. All right, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups.

It is Monday. It is March 10th. There's a lot going on, including here in Austin, Texas, South by Southwest. With me again. Alex, Wilhelm, how you doing, Alex? I'm doing fantastically. Spring is in the air. There's a spring in my step.

I didn't realize how sad I was, but now I'm happy again. Great. I'm taking my daughter skiing next week, so I'm very excited to get my last week of two final weeks of skiing in to try to hit my stretch goal of 41 days to skiing. I'm at 24. So I got a little ways to go here, but I might get it done. If not, I got to go to New Zealand. It won't be, or somewhere. I don't know, South America somewhere. If you want to follow along on this week and startups, go to this week and startups.com slash docket. You'll see the docket. We go live, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 12 p.m. Texas time. 1 p.m. Right coast. 10 a.m.

left coast and about 80% of the show winds up in the podcast feed. Well, you can watch it on your favorite podcast player or YouTube, but you get a little extra show, 20% more show, some call-ins and some fun and some banter if you follow us there. He's at Alex on TwitterX. I'm at Jason on TwitterX. Some community news. We have a twist subreddit, R-TWI startups. We have a Twitter community.

It's in the docket if you want to go there. You also have the twist ticker. This is where we talk about startup news. and the Twist 500, the 500 top private companies that we're trying to get on the program this year. And you can subscribe to the Twist ticker at this week in startups.com slash ticker. Jason, before we do any serious news, though, can I bring up the fact that micro strategy has put together a, quote, sales agreement to which they're going to put out $21 billion worth of stock to buy more Bitcoin? Wow. That's, that's wow. We've had a big couple of weeks in

crypto. Obviously, the president said he would be the crypto president, and he is starting to do just that. There was a crypto summit on Friday, and David Sachs, who is the crypto czar, of course, came on all in and did a brief discussion with me over kind of, I call him the wolf of the White House, just kind of cleaning up the mess and the things that are getting knocked over sometimes when Trump tweets something early or they do something interesting in crypto and being trying to be a little generous here. of the sort of captain chaos that can happen with Trump. You know, he says a lot of stuff and people take it seriously.

Always remember, Jake Howe's 72-hour rule of Trump, wait 72 hours before reacting. It's hard to do. I try to apply that because I think it's actually pretty good advice to not lose my mind every time Trump is like, we're going to buy Greenland and put it into South America. Yeah. But the problem with that applied to the tariffs issue in particular is that it feels like the winds can shift like, there's never a point in which there's a decision or a thing. and then you can wait and then seeks, it changes so much in between.

Yeah, I mean, if you were a day trader, you know, you got to trade on the Trump news all the time because it does impact markets. But if you're a civilian and you got your money in the, you know, stock market, you got a long-term outlook. Yeah. I think it applies. But, you know, the stock market's got to get used to this as well because the stock market does react in real time. They don't pay attention to my 72-hour rule. And, you know, you're just going to have an easier, better life if you deploy the 72-hour rule. So for micro strategies, they have 400,000 Bitcoin or 500,000 Bitcoin.

It's somewhere in there. But the shares of that company are off 14.4% today. Now, there is a sell-off, Jason, but like that's still a brute. No matter what happens in the world, you don't want to lose one-seventh of your market cap in a single day. Yeah, it's going to have severe volatility. Obviously, the markets right now are down 1.5% for the Dow 30, almost 3.7% for NASDAQ.

So this is pretty significant sell-off. obviously the tariff stuff and, you know, fears of a recession, stagnation, just a lot of fear and uncertainty out there. Fear uncertainty and doubt. No, bueno for markets. Great opportunity to buy the dip, obviously, if you have any cash laying around in my mind. If I did, if I was doing a lot of ton of cash, you know, I'd probably be selectively nibbling on stuff.

But, you know, I think the, the net asset value of micro strategies and the valuation are obviously going to, at some point, crossover. just like, you know, any inevitability, Trump's popularity rating went like 10 pips over, you know, to disapproval. It took Biden seven months to get there. It took Trump seven weeks. So the honeymoon is clearly over now. And here we are into what people forgot, which was, you know, there is a chaos trade. There is a captain chaos, as I call the president's alter ego. He can create a lot of chaos in markets. what's important for founders and market participants, I think, is to focus on creating value, right? And so we're going to do that here on the show. I'm going to just create a ton of value, value for value. If you tune in, maybe you go to some of the advertisers and, you know,

use their services if they're appropriate, and then we provide them value by bringing the audience together. And there's just a ton of docket to get through. Yes, sir. Micro strategies will trade, I predict, at less to their net asset value. So if they have 400,000 Bitcoin, or let's say they have 500,000, which makes them, I think, the number one owner of Bitcoin now. Maybe the government, U.S. government is the other. 500,000 times $8.40 billion.

What's the market cap? So, I mean, they should trade at, I think, 80% of $40 billion would be what I would say is fair market, $32 billion. Well, now they're at $62. After losing 14. Now, 6.5% today. So still a little spicy for our tastes. but they are going to buy a lot more Bitcoin. So I think people that are hopeful that this will...

If people will give them money, right? That requires cash, right? So this is an offering. It's true. They're not the market offering over time. So they won't be $21 billion in one day. But it does seem that they are still without slowing down, perhaps even speeding up, Jason, still going forward with this strategy.

So you got to give Michael points, Michael Siler. He believes it. He's invited on the program anytime to discuss the strategy. I think he should trade at below the net. that value he believes he should trade at above. Right now, it's trading at a 50% premium, I believe. So maybe it's 1.5 times, 1.4 times. This is a bunch of websites that will help you track that. I will say it's pretty interesting. South by Southwest is back in a major way. I think I have five speaking gigs events this week. I did opening keynote with Bill Gurley on

Friday where he interviewed me, which is kind of weird, since he's always been a mentor toward me, to me, and from him to interview me, he's felt a little bit weird, but that was quite a fun. We did a full hour and, you know, the room was like giant room, two-thirds full, which, you know, it's the first day, so the people are still getting here. Saturday, Dignation. I got to hang out with the boys from Dignation, Alex, and Kevin Rose. If you don't know, Dignation was like a podcast or a web show before podcasting existed. They rewatch Digg onstage. Dig.com is coming, so there'll be another Reddit. So we'll probably participate in that. I'm an advisor to the firm. I haven't signed the paper or whatever, but I told them,

be an advisor. It was fun. Chris Sacco is there. Tim Ferriss interviewed Ev Williams about his new app. Have you tried his new app yet? This is the private social network if memory serves. It is called uh, Mosey, as in Mosey on along, M-O-Z-I. It's kind of four square-ish. It's beautifully designed simple app. You upload your address book and then it finds your friends, and then you can put in your trips. But it doesn't just like sync your calendar or anything crazy like that. It's quite manual. You hit the plus key. You sit. where you're going or a local plan or a trip. And if it's like firm or not,

I mean, then you could share the plan with people. And it was quite nice to use it during South by because I found out about two or three events I would not have known about. So here we are back to the future. I love this. I also love that the latest update to Mosey has brought in local plans for people that aren't always on a plane.

Yes. You can definitely tell though who is behind this. It's people who fly a whole lot like Ev does, I'm sure. And like yourself, frankly. But for those of us who stay put, it's for the executive class, I think probably in the nomadic class. Interestingly, at the event,

I always try to check the TikTok to see what the kids are up to. Rivian is underwriting the whole event, by the way. Super interesting to see Rivian. They've had a little bit of a tough time. I see that they're doing some commercial business, which is interesting. They launched today a Ben and Jerry's collaboration.

So I think people don't know, but Rivian. Do they build the trucks for Amazon as well? Yes, that was their kind of keystone partnerships through the IPO. And if I recall, now they're also selling these vehicles to other people, not just Amazon. Founders, I know you're swamped. You got a ton of stuff to do on your plate. You know, there's a lot of chores. You got to juggle your priorities.

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That's coda.orgia.com slash twist to get started for free and get six months of the team plan. Really interesting to see Rivian here kind of showing off. They're doing, and this is, I think, a trend, which I want to start with it and propose here, which is the 20K new car. The 20K new car is my new trend. 20K all day. I think that's what we'll call it. Here's Rivian. That's their truck. You can see that's the very iconic, similar-looking truck, the Amazon trucks you see in your neighborhood.

So this kind of truck is called a Sprinter or like a Ford Transit. It's a specific type of utility truck. Typically they have, and you can see you can use it for a mobile ice cream, like a kind of situation. So kind of interesting. That to me is smart for Rivian because those corporate customers will be consistent in a market where, you know, maybe we're going to see a 20K car. So this is like a new trend.

You know, you come here and you hear trends. We've been talking about BID a whole bunch. We've been talking about the Robo Taxi being built for the Ewan said he can get it down to 35K or something 30K. Pretty typical to buy a 10 to 20K car in China right now. In the Middle East, in South America, you know, Indonesia, Singapore, all over Asia. You're going to start seeing 20K, 30K new cars. And some of them might have self-driving on them. They'll be battery powered.

So here it is. Rivian. Heck will be available to everyone in Volkswagen's latest EV. So this is, I think, a sign that maybe Rivian is having some challenges. They got to get some partnerships going. They need money. Other people have needs like drive trains or technology. So very interesting trend. What do you think of that? This is what it looks like from the front, from the side, from the back, from this. And let me tell you, Jason, this is precisely and exactly what I have wanted. Look at this thing. Why is this between? Because I live in a town that was designed for horses.

And if you live in Dallas or Houston, you live in a town designed for cars. Big wide streets, good turning radius. But here in Providence, if you drive a full-size American pickup, you're essentially driving a tank through town. So I need a car that is electric, because I want to go electric, is small and is fancy. And those are actually hard to find because everyone wants to sell you a more expensive vehicle. So I love this. This looks perfect for me.

I always felt like being. M.W made a mistake with the mini Cooper, which I don't know what the entry price is for the mini Cooper, but I felt they should have got that like down to 20K. And I think they probably start more like in the 3540. I guess they're going for like a luxury small car with that hatchback version. But I do believe these cars could get young people into car ownership again at a time when, well, think about it. Is there anything like desirable at, by driving, no offense to like a Honda fit, I think? What would have like the entry, level 25K cars, like the Honda fit.

Like these little gas powered, I don't know what the entry level Toyota is. It's not the Camry or the Honda record. It's kind of like the Honda Fit and there's a Toyota one. They're like ringy-ding cars. They feel cheap. They're not sexy in any way. But I do think a sexy fun Volkswagen bug type car, which this kind of feels like. Yeah, Mitsubishi Mirage, 2.5.

Cheapest cars. The number one got a 2.5 out of 10. Hmm. Is it 17K? I look at 18K for a Nissan Versa. Wow. That's cheap. Not bad.

And the Mitchimich, Mirage G4, the Centra, and then the electrical launcher. So there's cheap stuff out there, but not really in the electric departments. Here's the question that I have, though. $20,000 electric cars, if they become popular, and let's say the big three likes to sell you a truck for 80, does that collapse the total value of North American car shipments? because that could impact Tesla, Rivian. Yeah, I think this is just going to be a very interesting confluence of, like, a lot of different trends. You got the tariff trend, you got the EV trend, you got the self-driving trend, you've got the going full Uber trend, like, why should I own a car?

And so to every action, there's a reaction. And so in this like startup landscape, what we're seeing is car company saying, we hear you. You are a young person. You don't think you need a car because of a lift. Uber and Waymo and soon robotaxis from Tesla. You're commitment phobic. What if we lowered it down to 20? And it was an EV.

And it was kind of sexy. And end, and, and. So that's what I think's happening here. And one of the great things about capitalism, your cup is going to run it over. Young people are zipping around on these, I'm getting obsessed with this other startup category. All right.

So there's a really interesting person making these electric unicycles. Electric Unicycles is the category. In Motion is the company. This is the state-of-the-art one. It's the in-motion V-13 Pro. Ooh. 3299. And look at how sexy this thing is.

It's gorgeous. Oh, going downstairs. That's bold. Yeah, these things, like, you're watching it. See how it's got. I mean, this is like the biggest state-of-the-art one, but this guy's going probably 50, 60 miles an hour on it. There's like a 35-mile an hour one, but it can go up curbs.

So, and it's got a handle. and you can walk it in restaurants or whatever and you can pick it up. So these things are going to change the world, I think. This is what a segue should have been. Okay. And there's like a model from like maybe 1,000 all the way up to like I said, 3,500,

different speeds, different battery lives, different power profiles, different acceleration. You got to wear a helmet with it. But there's a guy zipping around Austin and he is cleaning up because he doesn't need to park a car or lock a bike. He is, I follow him on YouTube and TikTok. He'll go drive in, pick up the burrito and get it to your place.

And he doesn't have to stop. Look at how cool these things are. How cool of a world would this be if they were everywhere? You just got to wear, you know, like segways. My wife was on a Segway. We went on a Segway tour in Paris. It's like a great speed to go out. I think you're going like, I don't know, 8, 9, 10 miles an hour on a Segway.

Maybe up 12, these things can go 20 or 30. But you don't fall off. on them as easily now because they have the gyros in them. They help you not fall and they can go on bumps. But here's like the Segway tour in Paris. And we were riding on this thing. It's like the great speed to go around. They have these tours all over Europe. The problem was my wife was like talking to somebody and she just the wheel hit like a little piece of stone that was like attached to a turn or something like a wall. And boom, she went flying off of it. She was fine. You know, She had the elbow pads on and the wrist guards, but you could break your wrist, but see how

they're driving along on Bridge, and we just, she kind of just clipped onto a little lamppost or something like the edge of one of those walls. I think that's, like, to be interesting future. What do you think, Alex? You ride one of those around P-Town? Is this a P-town kind of thing? I would, because I'm married and have children. So the dweeb factor doesn't, doesn't impact me.

The thing that I'll say is, I have, in San Francisco, they've had earlier versions of these for some time. And they have acquired to them a certain reputation for dwebery. And so as we look to save the birth rate crisis in North America, perhaps we should get back to muscle cars before unicycles. Well, yeah, that's what I want to get is that new Corvette ZR1. The CR1, I'm drooling over it. Nailing product market fit is every founder's top priority. But once you've got your product dialed in, you need to focus on selling it, especially to big customers. You know, we call them lighthouse customers. Some people call them whales. To land those deals, your security compliance has to be rock solid.

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Simplify compliance and get $1,000 off at vanta.com slash twist. That's V-A-N-T-A-com slash T-W-I-S-T. I know this sounds stupid that a unicycle would actually become like a winning format, but these electric unicycles are really going to change things because you can drive them indoors. And then they also are kind of like off-road vehicles, so people are really getting into these. You can spend between 1,000 and like 3,000 on these,

and they look really sharp. These are like something out of Blade Runner. So look for this as a trend. Electric unicycles are coming. So I want to meet one of the startup founders. These things are all the rage in Hong Kong and China. Why are they the rage? Well, because you can drive them right into your apartment.

People are in Austin driving into restaurants, picking up the to-go orders, and then riding to people's apartments, driving into the lobbies or they have a handle on them. So when you get in the lobby, if the door person's like, hey, no, no, bueno. Right. You just pick it up. You just pick it up.

Speaking about young people, zipping around and doing things, we have a guest today, Jason, that is a student still or was a student and recently found fame for essentially hacking the big technology technical interview game. Now, if you've ever applied for a job at a fame company as a developer, I'm sure you're familiar with the technical interview. I don't know, binary trees, inverted link lists. I don't know. There's buzzwords out there about how these go.

But one guy, Roy Lee from Columbia, made a system to hack around it, posted the video online, got snitched on, got in trouble with Columbia, got his Amazon offer, yon't. But he turned it into a product, and we love founder hackers here. So please welcome to the show. It's Roy Lee. Hey, Roy. What's up guys? Hey, Roy. Looks like you're the main character.

Thank you. Yes. So before they come in and arrest you, uh, for crimes against interviewing. Where are you from? Sawani, Georgia. Okay, you grew up in Georgia. I guess you were a hacker kid.

You've been on the internet since day one, yeah? Something like that, yeah. And when did you learn to become a developer? Honestly, I don't know. I wasn't really interested in programming until after high school. And to be honest, like, I started learning when I was 19. So it was for Silicon Valley, that's like 65. Yeah, exactly.

You're so far behind the curve, yeah. Yeah, and transparently in high school, I thought it was going to be an investment banker or for Golden Sacks, which is like the craziest thing ever, right? Yeah, I mean, listen, it's an interesting job, but what you're doing is you're just moving numbers around on a spreadsheet. It's not actually fun. It just happens to pay well at the start because it takes your soul and it erases years of your life. So if you'd like to give up 10 years of your life and then at the end of it, be like, what just happened? That's what it's like. So you're at Columbia.

What year are you in? Yes. I'm a sophomore right now. You're a sophomore. Okay. So you were there during all those crazy protests last year, huh? I was not, actually. I transferred in here last semester.

So last year, I was at community college. And then I just transferred into Columbia. And now this is like my first and a half semester. So you got to Columbia and then immediately just threw a grenade behind you as you were walking in. I mean, I got to Columbia. And like the first thing I just knew I wasn't going to be here to graduation. So I went and I talked to 50, 50 people who seemed smart. And I asked every single one of them, hey, do you want to start company with me?

And the one guy that said yes is the guy that I ended up doing all the interview code or stuff with. Got it. All right. So tell us what, what's the idea for this startup? And then tell me about the event. Let's talk about the event. Oh, yeah. So, yeah, this is the website.

I mean, the thesis is very simple for Gleco. We could style technical interviews have been around for something like 20 years. I don't know a single developer that likes them. And I myself went through the Gno Outlet. I did about like 600 questions, which is definitely, like I'd say probably standard deviation or two above the average, but I'm a bit of a perfectionist, so I felt like I had to get it right. But it was just not a fun time.

I love programming when I started because it's exciting to build things. This doesn't really teach you how to build things at all. It's just like a massive piece of time. So I thought, what is the most viral stunt I can do to get rid of this? Because, of course, you need to be famous on Twitter if you want to be a founder. And also you have to get the audience first. So explain to people what these coding tests are and why they exist in your mind. Yeah, I'll sit you down.

Imagine you're like an 18-year-old freshman at the University of Minnesota, and I'm some big, bad Amazon exec. And I'll ask you, hey, can you find me all the inverse palindromic subsequences of even length while doing a handstand and 10 jump-a-jacks? And essentially, it'll ask you some insane riddle-esque question that really, even if you were Albert Einstein, you wouldn't be able to solve this. So the challenge here is, have you seen this problem before, solved it, memorize the solution, and can you regurgitate the memorized solution without acting like you've seen the problem before? And that's the challenge. Got it.

So it's a bit performative in your mind because, you know, like it's not actually testing how hard you work, your grit, well, how good of a teammate you'll be, you know, in what maybe it should be. It's just testing on your feet. Have you seen the question before? Kind of like the SATs in some ways, right? Like, have you seen these SATs before? Very similar. My mom does an SAT

Preparatory Academy, so I'm very aware. So tell me about interview coder itself and how you built it and then actually used it to go through the Amazon process. And what was the screen we showed before, just so we can explain it to the... Yeah. That was Roy's LeetCode profile showing off all of his work in LeetCode. LeetCode is a place where people go and do these tests. Just so we explain it to the audience.

Yeah, yeah. It's like an agglomeration of all the problems that you might encounter. you can like go through the problems and you can you can train yourself it's like a little training camp for technology so this is like um Kaplan SAT prep in a way exactly exactly in a website it's uh it's a it's an independent company right it's not an open source project yeah independent company it's an independent company i guess you pay for it they got a premium version or something that's how they make money yeah yeah yeah okay so yeah show us what you did and um how you hacked the system as it were essentially I used pretty much all of the fall recruiting cycle as like practice grounds for testing the product.

I have all the offers from Capital One TikTok meta, but those are all like practice for the big one, which I knew was going to be Amazon because that's like the thing that everybody knows. And the product was developed throughout the recruiting cycle, but the core product really only took me about four days to make. It's a very simple electron app with a React front end, and the back end is some serverless functions that we host on Rucel. essentially, I mean, it's really simple, right? All you're going to do is, like, take a screenshot of the screen and then ask to have your petite to solve the problem. The only thing that's hard is making it invisible.

But electron actually comes with a lot of native built-ins. Like, the technology is really not rocket science here. Like, I'm putting together two concepts that have existed before in the past. It's just LOMs kind of make everything hackable. When you have to take the test with an Amazon, they're doing it over Zoom, I assume, or some sort of service. They have like a custom. screen sharing thing called, they use Amazon Chime. But a lot of the interviews from what I hear

from like my friends who are people who are using the product. Like sometimes they'll ask you to screen share. Sometimes they don't. So they want to watch you code. How long did these interviews typically take today? The interview might be somewhere like 45 minutes to an hour, but they shave off 15 minutes for just talking time. Got it. So you got a half hour of practically writing code in front of them, answering their questions, showing that you can't, you qualify for the job. And how long does it take to get one of these, you know, for the average person right now? Because we've heard about static team size. They're not hiring a lot of people. People think, well, my developers are getting 20, 30 percent faster every year. So why would I hire more developers? I can just cut the weak ones

and make the best ones 20 percent stronger. So what's it like out there on the streets trying to get a developer job? Yeah, I mean, hiring market, well, to be honest, I've heard that the hiring market is brutal, but like I'm a sophomore. I don't really know what it was like two years ago. So I really couldn't tell you, but I've just heard that's very far. Yeah, that tracks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very few jobs. So it's getting, they, they can demand more of everybody applying as a, I guess, a simple way to say it. So in the old days, if you had four or five job offers, getting people to go on for two or three hours and do two or three interviews and code so much, maybe they wouldn't do it because they got a job offer so quick. Yeah, yeah. But now things

are quite different. And so you ended up using this service called interview coder and got an offer from Amazon and then instead of accepting it, you posted a video on YouTube of the actual process of using your tool to hoodwink the Amazon guys and then someone snitched and then everything kind of exploded. Did you leak it yourself or did you get snitched on? Well, someone saw the video when it was at about like 20,000 views. Some Amazon executive saw the video and then they reported it to Columbia and all I did was post the letter that they sent to Columbia. So they, wait a second. Amazon's a rat? Amazon's a cheese eater? They ate cheese on you?

They ratted you out to the university. That's exactly what happened. Do we have the letter? I can see this. So now what's going on with your mom? Does your mom know yet? My mom learned about this like three days ago, a couple days ago. Oh, man.

You're screwed, dude. What did she say to you? Honestly, she's been pretty cool about it. Like, surprisingly, extremely cool about it. She knows I'm doing something palsy and knows I'm making a lot more money off this than it would have over a summer at Amazon. So she'd be happy. So she's actually happy. She's a Gen Xer.

Maybe she's a little punk rock your mom. What's the story? No, not at all. She's about as Korean as it gets. Oh, I'm Korean, as you can tell. My wife's Korean. I'm deep in Korean culture. I get it.

All right. We all know if you're a founder, or even if you're on a small business, you're thinking about your company 24-7, 365 days a year. That's the life of a founder. This is not clock in, clock out, 9-to-5 gig for you as the business.

business owner. So when you're hiring, you want a partner that's as equally as committed as you are. And that's, of course, LinkedIn jobs. LinkedIn jobs is like your co-founder. They're going to make it so simple for you to post your jobs for free on LinkedIn where there are one billion members. You're going to be able to share what you're posting and actually keep all the promising candidates organized in one place. And also, LinkedIn is going to help you quickly write a job and get it in front of the right people, whether you want to post for free or use some promotion to get it in front of even more qualified applicants. So do me a favor. Don't take my word for it. I mean, you should. I know what I'm talking about is where I find my great people, but just understand

that 72% of small businesses using LinkedIn said that it helped them find the best candidates. So find out why more than 2.5 million small businesses already use LinkedIn for hiring. So here's call to action post your job for free. Why wouldn't you do it? It's free. F-R-E. That's a good price. LinkedIn.com slash T-W-I-S-T. Once again, that's LinkedIn.com slash T-W-I-S-T to post your job for free. Terms and conditions do apply. I can't find the actual letter from Amazon on your Twitter, Roy, but I've, I'm seeing repeated letters from Columbia University to you that you have posted, which is hilarious. And if I recall correctly, you're supposed to go in front of a a probationary board or something tomorrow.

Are you going to go? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm already on probation, but I'm supposed to, there's like another disciplinary hearing that I'm supposed to go on tomorrow. And actually tomorrow is because they're mad that I leaked all the documents.

So that's when I'm getting into trouble. All right. So you're fried. You're fried. You're a barbecue sauce, man. You're, listen, you're going to, right. You're Korean barbecue right now, my friend.

You're the guy I'll be in this. No, but it's just a buggy. I got to say, I really, I really disagree. because like, I mean, this is actually a little bit punk rock. It's a little bit hacky. And I feel like we've lost that vibe in Silicon Valley. And so I, he's barbecue sauce.

I'll tell you what's going to happen here. Columbia, they need to have good relations with the hiring people. Somebody comes in and breaks this. I think you're done. I think they're kicking you out, bro. Man, it's possible as possible. Isn't that the idea, though? Because Roy, you said in an interview with Gizmoto, quote, most human intelligence work is going

to be obsolete in two years. So I have two years to make something happen. So I presume that you didn't really. intend to stay at Columbia and you just wanted to make a big splash, build something, and make a lot of money off of it. I mean, Viva. Yeah, yeah. I mean, as soon as I got here, I sort of knew that I wouldn't be able to see myself through graduation. I knew that I'd drop out eventually, but it would be really funny if I got picked out. Just because, I mean, like, AI is growing so much faster than, like, everybody realizes, I mean, if you're on Twitter,

then I think you're pretty early. If you know what Claude Code is, you're pretty early. But the rest of the world hasn't caught up. And as soon as the rest of the world catches up and realizes is how unintelligent you have to be or how not competent at programming you can be and still make a really cool app. Like, there's probably, like, every CS major in the world could probably have figured out interview coder if they just hacked away at cursor for long enough.

So when you're using interview coder, you basically start doing a coding test, and is it doing the typing for you and faking the typing? Or is it just in one screen showing you the answer while you're in the other screen doing the other thing, or you put it on your phone on your desk, and you look down at your phone in the cradle? What's the best practice?

It's like a desktop application that opens up. You can't have it do the typing for you because a lot of the, a, it's very hard to randomize typing speed because the browsers will detect what what sort of things that you're clicking. And B, a lot of these things that are that are typed for you, they do the key down correctly, but they never get the key up right, which the browser all logs and that's all suspicious, suspicious activity. The best way to do it is just to show you the answer,

have a movable overlay that you can put right on top of your coders, so your eyes are like shifting, making it look like you look at a different screen. Got it. So you do a little, I understand. Let me tell you what I used to do. Yeah, yeah. I had the best hack.

When I was in Severian high school, we would do a vocabulary test. So I was obsessed with cheating like you. I didn't consider it cheating, but I considered it like an interesting way to understand things. And when I figured out was if you took a yellow legal pad, an empty one, and then you put a piece of cardboard

under the first piece of paper, right? then you put a piece of paper on that top piece of paper. Then I would take a pen or a pencil, and I would write nice and heavy what the vocabulary words were, and then I would say a word that would remind me of the definition. So I would go down that vocabulary list. Then I would take the top sheet, throw it in the garbage.

Then I would take the cardboard underneath the first sheet, and it would be blank. But if I looked at it from an angle, I could see the indentations. Right. Certainly if I took my pencil and I, you know, did it from the side, it would fill it in and it would reveal it. But I never needed to reveal it. I kid you not, I would do this for four pages down in my yellow legal pad. I would have four pages of notes about every definition, everything history. So when I was taking my notes in history class, I was doing this technique, four pages deep. Sometimes I would do it from the back of the legal pad. So if they came and they, you know, somebody needed an extra piece of paper, they would never know. It was on the back one. So I just flip it, whatever. The interesting thing about this hack was the nature of doing the hack and taking the notes meant I didn't need to use the notes. Because you actually did the work. Because I did the work.

But I was obsessed with how cheating occurs. And you came up with something really good was you figured out the eye contact was super important. And that's a tab. Right? So you figured, hey, if I transparency layer this, they'll never going to find it, right? Exactly. Super smart. I immediately thought you put it on your phone.

So if I'm looking at eyesight here and I look down on my keyboard, down on my keyboard, I could have my phone down. I could have my phone down here mirroring my desktop. Yeah. I have the Amazon letter here. And you'll note that it says do not distribute, but too late. You can't read this. I'm going to read the highlighted sections for you. Okay.

Discussing Roy, quote, his performance was spectacular. And then, quote, soon after I, the Amazon guy, received a link to a YouTube video created by Roy in which he showed himself using an invisible cheating tool to gain an unfair and unapproved advantage during the interview process. Later on, we trust in Columbia to take proper action with regards to this. student. So Amazon. This is Amazon. Yeah, bro. What's up with this? Man, what a bunch of cheese eaters at Amazon? I mean, if Amazon could do this in a business process, they would get a high five

and a promotion. I mean, all right. So let's talk, let's talk brass tacks. You come from an independently wealthy family or, you know, they got like the 50K, 100K to spot you to do the startup or no? Not very wealthy, no. Middle class. Yeah, I mean, I would say middle top or middle class. Okay, good. Same as me. I was like lower middle glass, but yeah, same, same zone. All right, listen, you're going to get kicked out tomorrow, but if not, you're going to leave anyway. So I like the punk rock nature of this. You haven't raised money yet, right? You're not even incorporated. Are you incorporated? Yeah, yeah. We incorporated a few weeks ago when we saw the Stripe Graf move, and we were worried about taxes. And did you take that angel check yet? You got a first investor yet? Oh, you got a check. Yeah, I mean, we did the Z Fellows program. So shout on Z-Fellows. This was a lot. is a great program. So we have a couple thousand dollars. What's Z fellows? How does that work?

Oh, it's like a one week while Corey's going to love this. Yeah. Yeah, this is like a one week in cubitor. It's like your first one week 10K. Yeah, it's like your first check into Silicon Valley. Yeah. And they just get a bunch of a bunch of young kids together for a week and you just talk and then Corey writes to your first check. And so what do they get for that? One percent or something? It's an equity check? It's at a billion dollar post money valuation. So essentially it's a free 10,000. thousand dollars. Oh, but it converts at the next round. It's probably a billion dollar cap, but it converts at the next round. So you do Y Combinator or something or you do our accelerate convert. All right. You have customers for this product or no? Yeah. Well, yeah, yeah.

I mean, for interview code, we have many customers, but we're thinking, I think that the underlying technology can be expanded into many different verticals. And that's, that's what I'm, what I'm thinking, tackling next. There's not much money in technical recruiting and interviews. And there's even less money when you're on the side of the interduee. Yeah, that's true, right? You're not getting the 10K for placing the person. But, I mean, listen, if you're smart enough to figure that part out, you can figure everything out. You can figure out the countermeasures, so you're an arms dealer.

Now you can figure out actually a better way. Possible. Listen, sometimes you sell, you know, F-15s to one side and then, oh, other side bought F-16s. They paid a higher price. They're a little bit faster. They got a 10-per-edge. Maybe the other side should upgrade. You know, maybe they want to go to F-18s.

I don't know. How many customers do you have now? And how fast is that growing? Because you say it's a small market, but I also saw you guys added Hindi. So I presume that you have people demanding access to this product in their native language too. Yeah, yeah. We have like outside of America, India and China are probably obviously like our biggest customers.

But it's really largely Americans. I think it's probably 75% Americans. Like literally yesterday last night, we just crossed the $1 million run rate. Oh, this has become like a real startup here. Okay, so you're way past even needing funding. Oh, then don't take any money from anybody. Just build this thing off of revenue. Don't sell any shares to anybody ever.

You're like the, you guys could be like the, you know, two or three million dollars per employee. Right now you have two people working on it. So you're half million per employee? Yeah, something like that. Yeah. So just keep going that way. Don't take anybody's money.

Just add a zero, be a $5 million. Own the company. Sweep like $5 million in profits, two or three million dollars each every year. You make $30 million over those years. You hired three or four people to do the work for you. And when you sell the company, if you ever do, you're going to own 90% of it. It's a much better thing to do.

I've been telling people this is going to happen. Because look, I'm the early stage investor there is, and I miss this, right? So you don't need me. You don't need anybody. I think it's really funny how much power that letter made it seem that Columbia and Amazon have, but over Roy, they have none. I mean, I like people, heavy agency. How are you thinking about fundraising and running the company?

Tell me your vision for this. What are the vibes? InterviewCoder itself is probably not going to get me to where I would like to be later in life. But I think we've uncovered some really key UX assumptions here. And I think we're first to market for this. I don't think anybody else has figured this out because nobody else has been trying to desperately to come up with the most undetectable, invisible overlay. But because I have, I think it's uncomfortable.

cover like something very big. And I think I'm onto something really big here. There's a couple of people I'd like to hire. And I don't think our current revenue is going to be enough. Okay. So you're thinking about doing a small race. What are you thinking about raising? Not sure.

Not exactly sure right now. Not exactly sure. Now we're still working out the details. A couple of people. They're going to cost $10K a month or something. They aren't sure. They're offshore. They're work from home.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's a couple other expenses. But I don't want to give too much away. But we're going to launch in about a week. and a half. And it'll be like the most ambitious version of interview cutter you could imagine. Love it.

So what do you think you want to raise? What's the, I'll give you some advice to the extent that you give a shit. But apparently you're so punk rock, it doesn't matter. So what is your plan in terms of race? What are you thinking? Just a small raise. I don't even know how much I'm allowed to say.

Like, isn't it like public solicitation or something? No, if you're not raising, it's fine. If I asked you theoretically, what are you thinking of raising? Like, if you had your druthers, what would your dream be? What do you think? I'm not asking you to, like, show like a business plan and a term sheet on the screen. If you just directionally, you want to raise a million, a half million, three million. The directionally be something like three to five, probably.

Oh, you want to go right for a series A essentially, yeah. Okay. Well, I mean, listen, you got everybody's attention and you're at like a pretty sick run rate. So you're possible you could do it. Yeah. And then you have somebody join the board. Awesome. Next week you're going to watch something new, huh?

Or in two weeks? Very similar. Something very similar. Something in the space. Yeah. I think we've cracked some things. Got it. Yeah.

I mean, if you've figured out some things about how AI lives on your desktop or lives with you, it seems like, that could be very powerful. I think that's a pretty interesting concept. You know, there's a couple of people who are watching your entire desktop or watching your entire browser. So, yeah, most people don't understand that this is the next level, is the AI is living on your desktop and is watching what you're doing and, you know, going to start giving you suggestions. It's kind of scary, right, for privacy reasons and for like, what if this thing decides it wants to go buy a bunch of coffee for you? It could get weird.

Possibly, yeah. But, I mean, I just think it's crazy to think that in even two years, everybody will still be on trashypt.com or perplexity of the whole. Like using a chat button in your face. Like that's definitely not where the feature's headed, right? No, it's going to be persistent, right? It's going to be in your ear talking to you the entire time. It's going to be living on your desk type. Exactly, exactly.

Roy, an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on. And when you do drop whatever it is in a week and a half and you take the rappers off of it, let me know, because we are watching your career with great interest. And hats off to Columbia. You guys really got a great one. And I'm unsodastic. He's barbecue tomorrow.

You know, secretly record. Here's what you do. Secretly record tomorrow and then get banned for life. You got to, you're barbecued already. Good luck in your thing tomorrow. For sure, get a pair of glasses and secretly record it, release the transcript. I don't know, stream it in real time, whatever you've got to do because you're going to wind up on like Johnny Carson. You're going to literally be on Bill Maher this weekend if you can record that.

That's my best advice. Covertly record tomorrow. That's the idea. Good luck. Thanks for you. Talk to you, I'm brother. Thank you guys.

Wow. See, this is the future of venture capital. You just saw it, folks. Humiliating defeat for venture capitalists. These young kids, these whippersnapper, they've basically got the ability now. Like, this kid gets it.

He's 21. He got the company to a million. I said this before. Like, what leverage does a VC have now? He's like, yeah, I'll race three to five, maybe. But he's like a Pegasus. And I talked about this concept of a Pegasus with com.com. They went from a $5 million valuation right to a $250.

I was able to invest at the $5 million when they needed my help. But after that, they didn't really need help. So the next stop, you know, it was an express train right to $250. That means like, you know, everybody in between wasn't able to secure a position in a high-growth company in between because they didn't need you to do it. So look, Roy doesn't need me. He doesn't need Y Combinator. He doesn't need tech stars. He got that 10K check, gave him a little bit of confidence from whatever that thing was, kind of like our founding university where we give 20.

But it's got me thinking, like, maybe I just kind of give people 10K as they come into. Maybe I have to give them 10K on the way into Founder University. Give them a 10K option, a 25K option. As an investor, if you pick a team, you got to just make the bet early as what I'm learning. What does you think of that interaction? Well, it's very interesting because you raise a point that I don't have a dispute to. What do you offer someone who can show up with the little tool and make a lot of money really quickly? And what I like about Roy is that he didn't say we've invented something that's brand new.

we're going to change the world with our new technology. He took off-the-shelf parts and built something awesome that people wanted. And that's really encouraging to me. It feels like the old days are like putting together your own circuit boards, you know? Like here is a time in which technology exists out there in disparate Lego pieces that you can put together to build something people want. That's so empowering to people. It doesn't fit neatly into the venture model, Jason.

But maybe I could see if I could slide 250 in at like a $5 million dollar evaluation and just say, hey, listen, I'll do this real quick. and then I'll get you into the, I'll get your tickets to all the all-in summits and I'll get you backstate, right? Like, I got to use intangibles and pot sweeteners now to get in this round. Yeah.

I mean, how am I going to get a slice of this? I mean... It's funny, though, how much on the same page we are, in my notes, prepping, you know, our sent notes for this chat. I literally wrote at the bottom, someone should invest

$500K into this kiddo now. And it turns out I was too small and too late. There's a great lesson here for founders. If you get an audience, first like he did with like a stunt like this, then you get customers in revenue, then you get venture capital, or you get investment.

Most people do the opposite. They get money, they get a product, then they get attention. Flip it. Figure out how to get attention first. Now you've captured the world's attention and Twitter is where old VCs like myself

live all day long. If you can capture attention there with some punk rock thing, you've kind of proven like you're a rule break or great, You're kind of like Steve Jobs. You're like Zuck. You're like Travis. You're like Elon.

Okay. You know, don't go too far. Don't go SBF. You know, don't steal something from Columbia. Get kicked out. Okay. But don't do fake blood test. Don't theranos this.

Don't sbf it. You know, there's a real lesson here. Get audience first. Mr. Beas got a huge audience. Then he got the business. I have a huge audience. You know, then I invest in your company, hopefully. And I can use that audience to help you magnify your voice.

So here we are. Well done to him. And speaking of SBF, yes. Hey, speaking of criminal behavior and punk rock and the difference

between the two, here's what, you know, our previous guest doesn't want to do. You don't want to end up being in Rikers, Roy. It's fun to do,

like, you know, break some rules at Columbia. Just don't get into actual crimes. You know, in ethics or whatever sanction is no big deal. Look at this. SBF was on the Tucker show.

Yes, he was. I saw somebody tweet. I don't know if it's real or not. I always give the caveat. If it's real that he put into this document of how to rebound his image, one of the things he said in terms of how he wanted to rebound his image

and one of these court documents that got seized was a Google doc where he said, go on Tucker and go right wing to get a pardon from Trump, I guess, as part of his master plan. Here's the court document that Jason's referencing just because everyone wants to take a look. This is from courtlistener.com.

And if you scroll down, This is pulled from a Google doc that he had put together. And right here, part three is go on Tucker Carlson, come out as Republican, and then essentially come out, quote, against the woke agenda. So here is the result of that policy. And we have a couple of clips here, Jason. I want to start with the one digging into how he communicated during the actual unfolding of the crisis itself. Let's take a listen here to our dear friend and everyone's favorite jailbird podcaster. Mr. SBAF.

I've had a lot of time to reflect on how to communicate. And in retrospect, you know, I was, I think I was not effective at communicating, especially when the crisis first hit. And, you know, in the months thereafter, I made a mistake I often make. I get swapped up in details and forget to me, Kate, the bigger picture. You seem like you were just flying high on Adderall every time I saw you on TV. You don't seem that way now. Were you?

No, I wasn't, but I was, my mind was phrasing because there were, you know, a billion things to keep track of. I think he's lying. I'll be honest. He was on this patch, E-M-S-A-M-S-A-M-Sam patch. From what I understand, you know, Adderall's one level, this thing is like a patch that gives you a consistent high. So he was on a lot of stuff. Here, for example, is an art. article from Slate, discussing exactly this.

Sam Bagman-free confirmed he, where is it named Sampatch? What is that? So I think right there we've determined, Jason, there might be a slight credibility gap. Although you could argue that SBF was correct. He was not high off flying high, quote off Adderall. He may have been flying higher off of an Monson patch. Yeah, this is where like, you know, listen, Tucker's a great broadcaster, obviously, very dramatic. So he's got the bravery to ask him if he was on it.

But I would have said, hey, where are you on stimulants? Were you on sleeping pills? Legal prescription? Otherwise, you know, what's the real deal here? Because you have, you know, admitted to using these other things, because he did admit to using these things. But hey, listen, I think like half the country, all these young people are on some sort of a stimulant. We've got an Adderall shortage, right? Wasn't there a shortage in the press last year? So so many people are on this thing, they can't make enough of it, apparently. So there's no shame in the medication game, I guess, unless you commit crimes. This is SBF talking about Trump's crypto approach, because the context here is people are kind of thinking that SBF is handing it up for a pardon. There was rumors about a Biden pardon.

That never came to be. But he now wants a Trump pardon. So here is Tucker and SBF talking about Trump and crypto. You look at what the Trump administration said, you know, going into office, there are a lot of good things. There are a lot of things that were very different from the stance that the Biden administration took that. that, you know, Gensner and the SEC took. Obviously, the follow-through is what matters. And that's the stage that we're at now, which is what will come of this. Not surprisingly, changing the guard helps. But financial regulators, they're big giant bureaucracies in the federal

government. They're not used to change it overnight. They have been playing a really obstructive role for, you know, a decade in crypto. You know, the U.S. it's 30% of the world's financed. It was about 5% of the world's crypto. And the reason it's entirely regulatory. It's just the U.S. was unique in its difficulty to work with. I think the big question is, when rubber meets the road, like, will the administration do what needs to be done? I was expecting him to say, listen, I would have been not guilty if they, you know, if they were pro-regulation at a different time, I should have been innocent. If I was him and I was doing his defense, I'd be like, Listen, I'm like a 2010

cannabis dealer in Santa Monica who got arrested. And now in 2025, you can just walk in with a driver's license and buy, you know, a pound of cannabis and nobody cares. That's his best defense in terms of getting a pardon. I wouldn't buy it because he committed crimes.

Yes. But he might be able to work that angle. Anyway. The lesson here for founders, though, apart from not doing fraud, if you do do fraud and get put in prison, make sure you get permission from the Bureau of Prisons for doing an interview

because SBF gone to Trouple for doing this from jail. And I got to say, going on Tucker looking for a pardon and instead getting your wings clip inside of prison is a pretty big self-owned. I mean, did he say what he was doing from prison is illegal? Like, how did he do that? I'm not sure about the technical details, but the Bureau of Prisons apparently put him into solitary.

I mean, worth it then. I mean, worth it to get your word out. Yeah, that is a weird thing to do. I got to find out technically how he did this because my understanding is I've been pitched on this and it's kind of a human rights issue. There are these companies that let you do video conference from prison

so you can talk to your family if you're in jail, you're incarcerated. They charge like a dollar a minute. It's some ungodly amount that they're charging prisoners you just talk to their families. I'll tell you what. It should be free to talk to your family

or close to free. It should be $1 an hour to talk to your family. Why? If people could talk to their family and people outside of prison, you know, obviously they got to record it, transcribe it and make sure they're not doing deals, you know, code words or something. I understand that there needs to be a little bit more infrastructure here because people from prison could be doing all kinds of nefarious stuff. But the more you could talk to your family, the better that probably is. And I just hate the idea that they're abusing these prisoners.

And I hate the idea of solitary. That is literally torture. It is inhumane. I cannot underscore all that. F-Jas in solitary is torture. It should not be used ever. Profiteering off of prisoners is exceptionally gross. This is the basis of my view about private prisons in general. But the good news, the bit of sunshine we can throw here on people is that there's a startup called Emilio, A M-E-E-E-L-I-O, and they are a nonprofit startup trying to bring free video calling service to

inmates to build connections and prevent recidivism. Recidivism. Thank you. That word. I knew I can read it. Never said it out loud before. There you go. Yeah. My, you know, it's a very weird thing about my dyslexia. Like, sometimes I just nail long words and other times I'm just, can't even say short ones. It's a... As long as the two of us together can say the words, we're in good shape. I can understand solitary, like a short period of times if somebody is like beating or murdering somebody, maybe, but like, you know, because of like safety issues, right, for the, for everybody. But, but... Short of physical violence, you should not be tortured mentally. That's just, it's just like, what are we doing here? They're good guys. How you treat the most vulnerable people is how you can really judge a society.

I've always felt that. How you treat the most vulnerable, a homeless person, a prisoner, somebody who's flat broke, somebody who's down on their knees, you know, somebody who's handicapped in some way. You know, it doesn't need to be a literal handicap. It could be anything, emotional mental, whatever. On that regards, with our prison system and our penal system in this country, we fail greatly. Oh, man. I would love for there to be a private prison, because I, too, I'm against private prisons,

that ran an experiment of they got paid a fee. I don't know. $300 a month. For every month, the person stayed out of prison and was productive. So you get $50K a year to run the prison. And then when the person leaves, if they pay their taxes, if they pass a drug test, if they show up for work, you get paid a residual. for five years of $5,000 a year for five years. You get an extra $25K for them to stay out

because the cost of keeping them in prison is $50K a year. So if you came up with a $50K, $5-year plan or $25K, $10 year plan, whatever it is, to get paid a bonus for them staying out of jail, man, that would be an incredibly interesting concept. I know it's weird, but... No.

If you show me an incentive, I will show you an outcome. And the incentive right now is to get them back in prison so you can make $50K. Right. But if the profit, margin was 20% and you're making 10K a year for each one, if we made the profit margin 10% for keeping them out, that would be even better. Oh, yeah, because it's total profit.

Also, what this would do is it would incentivize investment into prisons for education, for fitness, for anything that helps build mental and physical health. And they could essentially expect those costs to be recouped later on when people stay out of prison. So it would encourage better prison conditions. So, I mean, I know that we have a model, an economic and mental and business model we used and it doesn't fit on everything. But in this case, I think incentives would actually help.

And anything to reduce our present population would be lovely. Jason, before we go, can we do a little startup acquisition story? Sure. What else is on the docket here? Yeah. Well, I want to get into this quickly. Service Now, a company we've all heard of, is buying Moveworks for $2.85 billion. And I had entirely forgotten what MoveWorks is and was.

So MoveWorks is a company started back in 16. it was building a chatbot, AI chatbot for like IT. It's expanded greatly to more parts of business. Essentially, you can use it to answer internal questions for your company and it has an agentic AI element to it. Okay, sounds generic enough at this point in time. Yeah.

But back in 2021, it raised a $200 million series C at a $2.1 billion valuation. Okay. Led half by Tiger. So this should be an implosion. But, yeah, the Tiger, the Tiger Cubs. that came out of that peak ZERP era. They've all had a problem getting to their previous high watermark.

So this money was raised 2021, you said? Yep, at a 2.1. And it's sold for drum roll please, 2.85. Okay, so they made a little bit of a modest profit maybe. If they put that money in the market for three or four years, it probably would have been similar. So it's a save, but really those tiger evaluations were typically two, three, four times reality. And so there's just a lot of catch up to do. If those tiger and peak valuations wind up being but a push, in other words, you know, the LPs put in $5 billion and they get $5 billion back,

I think people will look at it. And this is like perverse and crazy, I know. But the way LPs will look at it was no risk, no reward. Yes. No gamble, no future. Fortune favors the bowl. So that's how the market looks at Masayoshi-san, took big swings, did the vision fund. Should he be able to raise a second vision fund? Yes. Should it be the same size? Probably no. But those bets that were made at peak Zerp, if they wind up simply returning the capital that was put in 1-X, no profit, you would have made double if you put your money in the market, so be it.

You placed a bet, you took a shot. What you don't want to see is losing half your money. That's when LPs can get a bit persnickety. If they come out par plus or minus 20, like in this situation, they'll be fine with it. So interesting. We have a little bit more. Two things. One, I knew you're going to bring up the rate of returns.

So I chat GPT that before we got on. The IR of 2.1 to 2.85 from June of 21 to March of 25 is 10.5%. Not bad. I mean, you know, it's not the 35% they said I've returned, you know, were 40% Pelosi returns, but it is what it is. So great job today. We'll see you all next time on this being a startup.