This Week in Startups - Tesla and Uber team up! Plus Weave Robotics’ Isaac and $OPEN bull Eric Jackson | E2180

Episode Date: September 17, 2025

Today’s show:Hear why Eric Jackson thinks Opendoor is the new Carvana, and how he’s planning to bring Drake on board as an investor (plus Jason’s Bestie Chamath).On a brand-new TWiST, Jason and Alex are chatting with Jackson of EMJ Capital about his hunt for elusive 100 baggers (stocks that return 100-to-1).PLUS we’re chatting with Weave Robotics’ Kaan Doğrusöz about designing practical domestic robots RIGHT NOW, rather than prototypes for 2030. Hear about how they got Isaac to fold laundry like a pro.All that and… how Jason would turn around TechCrunch, why board members should always have skin in the game, that Waymo motorcycle accident, AND Uber and Tesla’s first team-up to haul freight!Timestamps:(0:00) Jason is worried about the next generation facing the end of apprenticeship; here’s his advice for young workers(10:24) Northwest Registered Agent - Form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Get more privacy, more options, and more done—visit https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today!(11:30) Kaan Doğrusöz of Weave Robotics joins to talk about getting his laundry-folding robot, Isaac, into customer’s homes(18:01) Isaac doesn’t have hands; here’s how Weave makes it work with grippers(20:44) Stripe Startups - Stripe Startups offers early-stage, venture-backed startups access to Stripe fee credits and more. Apply today on stripe.com/startups.(21:48) Show Continues…(24:51) Checking out some of Weave’s competitors… how did they settle on Isaac’s design?(30:01) Miro - Help your teams get great done with Miro. Check out miro.com to find out how!(31:10) What’s going on with TikTok?(36:15) Jason’s pitch is “BOYA”: Bring Your Own Algorithm(38:54) Eric Jackson of EMJ Capital stops by to talk up $OPEN and why he wants Drake to invest(40:14) Eric’s early YouTube career as an activist Yahoo! Investor(44:42) Lessons Eric learned from Carvana and how that informed his $OPEN bet(01:00:30) Why bringing Keith Rabois back was Eric’s ultimate dream for Opendoor(01:03:02) Why board members should always have “skin in the game” and why $OPEN wants Chamath back(01:07:26) Tesla and Uber are finally working together… They said it was impossible!(01:09:31) A look at YouTube’s new AI podcasting featuresSubscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.comCheck out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.comSubscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcpFollow Lon:X: https://x.com/lonsFollow Alex:X: https://x.com/alexLinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelmFollow Jason:X: https://twitter.com/JasonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanisThank you to our partners:Northwest Registered Agent - Form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Get more privacy, more options, and more done—visit https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist today!Stripe Startups - Stripe Startups offers early-stage, venture-backed startups access to Stripe fee credits and more. Apply today on stripe.com/startups.Miro - Help your teams get great done with Miro. Check out miro.com to find out how!Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarlandCheck out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanisFollow TWiST:Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartupsYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekinInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartupsTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartupsSubstack: https://twistartups.substack.comSubscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

I think the algorithm should break Section 230 because it's an editorial decision that is more powerful than a human doing it because it's micro-targeted and it never sleeps, unless it breaks it unless you give consumer choice. So let that sink in. Just like the bundling of a search engine with a browser could create antitrust issues unless you give people a choice. This Weekend Startups is brought to you by Miro. Help your teams get great done with Miro.

Check out Miro.com to find out how. Stripe Startups. Stripe Startups offers early stage venture-backed startups access to Stripe fee credits, expert insights, and a focused community of builders. Apply today on Stripe.com slash startups. And Northwest Registered Agent. Starting your business should be simple. With Northwest Registered Agent, you can form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes.

From LLCs to trademarks, domains to custom websites, they've got you covered. Get more privacy, more options, and more done. Visit northwestregisteragent.com slash twist today.

All right, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. I'm your host, Jason Calcanus. I am wearing my chunky 1970s glasses with me as Alex. We were talking before the show

about... Oliver. Well, producer Oliver. Please, let's give him his title here. Producer Oliver. This week in the past five days has gone from not only being like a drag on productivity where we have to train him. He hit not being a drag, being neutral in the organization to now being adding value. Net positive.

This is important for young people. This is important for young people because which you have to realize we are having young people not getting hired. Right? We've covered this trend many times. Many times. And so you have to ask, well, why aren't people getting hired? It's because nobody wants to mentor people early in their career. It's the end of the apprenticeship. I'm taking a different approach. I'm saying I'm going to invest in folks and I'm going to give them a very rapid, very rapid career path because I'm becoming very peculiar in my old age. I'm getting weird. Alon can tell you, because it's been with me for 20 years, like on and off for different projects. I'm now at the phase where I just want to see these young guns I hire out of school, how quickly I can make them into little, you know, samurai, productive X-Men in my X-Men. Why?

I actually made a list of things I enjoy and things I hate. I am deprecating everything I hate doing or that's not my. highest order. But in the highest order is identifying talent and then nurturing talent. So I've, you know, really made my mission going into 2026 that I'm going to identify young talent, going to mentor them, and then help them excel because I see it happen over and over again. I hired executive or editorial director Lon out of a, out of a laser blazer laser disc store in L.A. I just saw that raw talent. It's like, man, this guy could do anything. He's so smart and quick-witted and fun to work with.

And, yeah, he's just amazing. And we are, yeah, investing in all these young people. But for a young person, the other side of the coin is, Alex, you got to show up and you got to out-hustle the people who are already there, which means just raw hours put in. You've got to do more hours than your boss. Now, that's not easy when the leaders of the company, Jackie, who's been with me for 10 years long, who's been on and off and many different companies for 20 years,

Kelly for seven or eight years, I think, across two companies. You have to, like, say, oh my God, they're putting a 50, 60 hours a week and they're really good at what they do. I got to hit 60, 70 hours a week, and I've got to put in some weekend hours to refine my skill set.

So for young folks, there's plenty of opportunity out there if you can prove that you're willing to put in the time. But if you don't, and you don't know these AI tools, you're not willing to learn your skills, I'm super worried. Yeah.

The trend here's bad, Jason. So here's the Fred chart. This is unemployment US 16 to 24, so that first kind of like first little bit of your career. This is 6.6% was the low point in unemployment for that cohort. It's now over 10, which is a negative and kind of scary trend, as you can see here. So it's not going in the right direction. And that trend, I think, has to do with large companies saying, if we're going to hire folks who need to be trained or whatever, why don't we just outsource it to the lowest

commodity, you know, hardworking place in South America or Asia or India, Manila, you know, or even Portugal, a lot of folks going to Portugal. This is something young people, and if you've got kids, you're going to need to put that hustle in them. And the hustle means learning new skills and actually looking at the people around you and just saying, I'm going to work harder than the establishment at my company. Not an easy task. All right. Can I start us with off for the startup story? Because I have one that I'm really excited about. Okay. So there is a company called, as I scroll to my notes, there's a company called Code Rabbit. Now, this was a completely de novo company to me. I want to put it on the Twist 500. The company just raised a $60 million series B,

I believe, at a $550 million round. So Jason, my question to you is guess what its current ARR is at a $60 million round, $550 million evaluation today. Okay. And the startup does what? What's the really simple sentence here? What do they do? They're an AI company. What do they do?

Do they have a product in the market? They do. And what they do is they do code reviews automatically for developers. And the pitch that really got me interested in was, as developers produce more code using AI tools, basically doing code reviews becomes an enormous bottleneck. There's so much more code to go back through. So they built an AI tool that does. does the code reviews for you, which I think is a great idea. I mean, if they were growing revenue,

the way sometimes an AI company can, which is 10x year over year, let's say they went from a half million to five million to 50 million, I could see it very easily sustaining a billion dollar valuation or a $500 million valuation in this climate. Because when you saw a cursor get, I mean, that was, if you asked producer Claude to show the, the cursor revenue, that was, and lovable revenue. Those two companies got to nine figures in revenue in like low single digit years. So, you know, producer cloud will give us some idea of that. And that's what people are banking on is.

Yeah. Replit, cursor, and lovable like growth. And, yeah, it can get disconnected from reality because people aren't betting on last year's valuation or last year's revenue, they're not even looking at this year's. They're going to look at next years and then give you a multiple in next year. So in this scenario, $1 million to $10 million, they're going to look at next year being $100 million or $50 million, $5 to 10 times growth. If it's actually trending in that way, you could get a $600 million.

So I'm going to see this company has $6 million in revenue. Oh, actually, it's got more than that. 15 is the ARR number, according to Tech Wrench. And that's up 10x in the last year. So 1.5 to 15. And then going by your 10 or 5X thing, Jason, that'd be about 75 million expected next year, which makes it rather cheap at 550, I think, if it pulls that off. And I nailed it.

Yeah, 10 points. It's a 10x growth company. So tell us the name of the company one more time. Code Rabbit. And it's growing 20% per month right now. That was the other stat that blew me away. So you know, YC style number attached to a company with an eight-figure revenue base. I love that.

8,000 customers, scale of venture partners, led the round, NVIDIA, CRV, Harmony, engineering capital, took part in it. So really, really cool one. I am a fan, and I'm going to talk to Maddie, see if I can get them on the Twist 500. Let's do it, let's do it. The Twist500.com, where we are tracking the top 500 private companies. And, wow, thank you, producer Claude for this great statistic. Cursor and lovable revenue.

according to published reports. These are private companies, so it's hard to get to. But at some point, the public reporting was that we got to $500 million for Cursor and Loveable, as I mentioned, had hit 100. So these are amazing. And here's the chart, folks. If you want to see what this looks like, you can see in 2023, very little revenue, nigh zero. In 2024, Cursor was getting big. Lovable was tiny.

And then this year, they've become absolute Goliaths, as Jason said, in the 9. figure revenue range. So one of the fastest growing categories, I think, in the history of technology. I love the fact that producer Claude from Anthropic is now producing like beautiful output, you know, the output not just being text. If you look at the screenshot the team made on cursor highlights and lovable highlights, this is research that would have taken an analyst a couple of hours to pull together and here it is. What's embarrassing, Jason, though, is that this is actually better graphic design that I could do for you. So even if I could do it in the same amount of time, it would look worse,

which is actually terrifying because I make my money on a person who collects and presents information. Well, and that's, we talked about it earlier at the top of the show. You have to kind of keep upping your game with analysis and having bring more to the table if the facts are so easily obtainable. But Cursor founded in 2022, wow, 500 million in revenue. They got to 500 million in under three years. They got a $10 billion valuation. and then the lovable highlights. Man, 120 million in ARR. The question everybody has is the durability of this revenue.

Is this durable or is it brittle revenue? And that's what we'll find out over time. Hey, listen, we meet a lot of early stage founders here at launch, my investment company, and some, they don't have a lot of traction yet. They just have an idea. Maybe they haven't even finished their product. They've just got an MVP. but they still need investors and accelerators like ours to take them seriously.

And you know what, we can't just wire money to your Gmail or your PayPal. That's not how it works, folks. We need to know that you're a legit and official business. We need to know your company is incorporated. That's why you need Northwest registered agent. It's the service that will help you run your business the right way from day one. In 10 clicks and in under 10 minutes, you're going to file for your LLC or a C corp if you're a startup. get a domain name, launch your official website, claim your business email, and even fast track your

trademark application, which some people forget to do. We're talking about more than just company formation. This is your entire identity as a business. Go to Northwest Registeredagent.com slash twist and show the world you're in business. And make sure you use that URL slash twist so they know that we sent you. So I saw another robot folding laundry. Mm-hmm. People make fun of this. Knowing what I know about robotics, it's like one of the hardest tasks. Why?

It takes a lot of dexterity to do it well, and clothes are incredibly variable. Here's your video of a robot folding laundry. Now, I've been watching these robots attempt to do this for a decade or more, but this one is getting it done. the number of people employed or spending their days folding clothes is the population of people who are not in college and throw their dryer stuff into a basket and then just pull it out of the dryer basket without folding it. But for everybody else, the other 90% of people, gosh, you know, they wear 10 outfits a week or so, 20 items of clothing.

There's 20 items of clothing that need to be folded. And this robot is doing a bang-up job of folding laundry. have the founder with us. We do. So please welcome everyone to the show. It's Khan Derushes. He is the CEO of Weave Robotics. It's based out of San Francisco in my old stomping grounds in the Soma neighborhood.

And critically, Jason, this is not a humanoid robot. It's what I call a partial humanoid robot. It's got a base with wheels. And then there's a stick. And then there's arms. So we've taken away some of the complexity, abstracted it away, but it does fold laundry very quickly. Con, welcome to the show.

Con, you heard my little intro here about how hard it is to fold laundry. Maybe you could tell us why you picked this task for your startup and exactly how hard it was to do this 10 years ago and why it's gotten, I wouldn't say easy, but it's certainly easier. Take us through the startup and why you chose this vertical. For sure. At Weave Robotics, we are building robots that we wanted to see in our homes, but for everyone. And the reason laundry is a core use case for us is because it is something that a lot of people have to spend time doing. It is linear time. It just, like, the more laundry you have, the more time it takes. And it's something that people have shied away from many years because it was hard.

And the reason it's hard is fabrics are very challenging. It's very hard to simulate. They can be in infinitely many configurations. It's not like, you know, your phone where it's either upside down. or topside down. There's just so many intricacies of it. There's different fabrics, different patterns on it. And yeah, 10 years ago, this was much more challenging

because we didn't have like the backbone that's forming now a lot of the architectures for robotic learning, things like BLMs that have been trained on Internet scale data, give us really good semantic information to build off of. And yeah, we built the first version of this robot, just in our living room and trained it on our own architecture with data that we collected just when it was just Evan and I, my best friend. And we got a default t-shirts for the first time. And ever since then, we've basically been very excited about, sorry, we've been

very excited about how much progress we've been able to make with latest methods. So what will the cost of this be? And when will it be available for purchase is what the audience is thinking about right now. And then take us through the second, third, and fourth use cases that you're, you know, essentially what the only other category here is basically Roombas, I think, for home robotics. So this is a really interesting second act. But there's nothing that says you couldn't put a Roomba as the base of this and have it clean the floors as it walks around and picks up your dirty laundry.

Yeah, great questions. Well, we opened up for pre-orders last year. We opened up for a small cohort of 30. Those sold out pretty instantaneously. And as for the cost, this is first of its kind premium product that like nobody has really established this product category. So it's going to be in the tens of thousands of dollars for this first cohort of customers. And as we've in-house much of our design, we've, we've been able to kind of like take that price down as much as possible because the end goal is to not just ship 30 of these things, but hundreds and then thousands. How far can you get that price down in the first couple of generations? Does it get under single digit thousands or is it still going to be eight figures? In the first couple generations, there's definitely a path to single digits. Okay. That's encouraging.

So right now, you sold the first 30 for 15K or something crazy like that? Well, our customers put down a reservation fee and the final. final price will be basically when they receive the robots. That's when it'll be concrete. Got it. So not announced yet, but you're saying tens of thousands. So it could be upwards of 20K for this robot to start. Correct.

Greater than 10K. Greater than 10K. Okay. And take us through how it does what it does when you design a product like this. Because we had Elon, who's working on Optimus, obviously. at the All In Summit last week, and I had asked him, like, how is it going? And he said he is, like, dealing with the actuators. I don't know if you saw his take on it, just how hard it was. And, you know, finding these. He has to build them. But are you building all these actuators? Or is it a more

narrow set of constraints here because it has this, you know, more narrow purpose? It's a great question. We've in-house much of our design. And, um, To make sure that we don't get kind of like bottlenecked by different actuators, et cetera, we've made it so that it's as modular as possible. So we've actually dual-source different actuators from different vendors. And at the same time, we've established really good relationships with both of these vendors, such that we can actually customize the actuators for our use cases. And, yeah, this kind of allows us to focus on the portions of the design that really matter

towards the product and build up on actuators that are already working really well. But you're using essentially two-finger actuators versus a full human hand. What's the, is there a material downside in the laundry use case only having kind of grabbers? Two good questions. Just to clarify one thing. So the grippers are our own design. That's one of the, I think that's our second iteration of the gripper that we've done. The motor that's driving that gripper, the actuator is the one that we off the show.

Got it. As for grippers versus hands, I'll give you kind of like a secret that's in plain sight. If you watch a lot of the videos that have been done with hands, especially with folding laundry, it's usually they're doing this. The reason we started with grippers is to keep the complexity of the problem low so that we can focus on the portion of the problem that matters, which is being able to fold laundry. And as you can see in the video, you know, we had to come up with a different protocol because we don't have like all these different fingers on it. But at the same time, it works on any article.

It generalizes to different fabrics. And this allows us to ship as opposed to, you know, kick the can down the road. Super interesting. When you went to investors with this idea, you must have got a range. of feedback. Many of them probably have scar tissue in robotics investments from the 90s and into the 2000s as venture firms. How did you convince them that this was a, you know, investment opportunity that was worth taking the risk on. Extremely high price point, extremely small audience for that price point, but obviously so much great potential. Yeah, for sure. I mean, people being excited by us

having, I think, the first, like, public demo of T-shirt folding that was out of the lab, and then YC Demote definitely helped that they saw a path to it. But at the same time, yeah, like robotics is hard. It's one of the hardest problem there is, right? It's fully the entirety of the stack. So there's definitely skepticism, but at the same time, we told them the same thing that is true, which is we're going to work on this problem, we're going to solve it, this problem matters, we're not going to shy away from this, we're going to build the robots that everybody wants

in their home, and we're not going to, you know, like, oh, we'll do this other thing before because it sounds better on paper, et cetera. And the investors that believed in us basically saw that we'll be able to do it. Everything is moving so fast at early stage startups today. It's amazing what I'm seeing people get done. Founders need, solutions that can live in the background and solve their problems, right? Well, now they're Stripe startups. Their startup program now offers a ton of benefits for your business. And this is when you know when a business like Stripe specifically creates something for startups, you know they really care about founders. So you get Stripe-free credits, you get a unified dashboard where you can track your

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Con, is there a version of this that you would sell to maybe a laundromat as opposed to someone in their own home? because I could see that customer base having access to more capital than your average family. Yeah, also a great question. I mean, one of the announcements that we very recently made just last Friday was we announced a partnership with Tumble, which is like a great end-to-end laundry service provider, many different locations in the U.S. They basically take your dirty laundry off of your doorstep and bring you back clean, folded laundry to your doorstep.

and our robots are now folding laundry for their customers. And we're really excited about that. Tompill is also really excited about it. And yeah, like there's definitely like a stepping stone there that happened that allows us to validate the entirety of our stack, our robots, while also providing real value in the meantime, as opposed to keeping the robots in the office and like proving things out there. I see.

Is this something that's... Go ahead. No, no, please, Jason. Well, earlier I'd asked in my barrage of questions for you because I'm so excited about your startup. Second, third, fourth things you could do. Obviously, going and finding the laundry, laying on the floor and bringing it to the laundry room, should be possible. Sorting it. Whites, not colors.

You got wheels on this thing. And opening and closing, a dryer door seems beyond the capability. of the pinchers, and those are kind of hard. But you could see a world where this pulls a bunch of dirty socks off the floor and dumps them into the washer and dryer eventually. So maybe what are the second and third applications people are asking you for or that might be cards you turn over in the coming years? Good questions. We, I wouldn't bet on not being able to open up a washer and dryer door. But as far as future use cases, like as you mentioned, like laundry is a huge set of things, like being able to sort it, being able to sort it by the different members of the

household. We're definitely focused on making laundry as seamless as possible. And after that, there's a whole sleuth of like a slew of tidy up tasks that we want to do, picking up toys off the ground, pets, toys, socks, putting things into a hamper so that you don't have to do that, too. And there's also just being your eyes and ears from in your home while you're away, right? Like, did I leave the stove on? Can you turn it off? If that's the case, is the window open? Can you try to close it? If so, these are already things that we were building upon.

We just haven't publicly shared too much on that yet. And at the same time, wiping surfaces is definitely on the roadmap as well. Something my daughters, I make them do is, yeah, get to put something in the dishwasher, you've got to wipe the table, somebody got to mop the floor, there's all those possibilities. Now, you must have done your competitive research. I remember seeing a foldy mate, a very weird device. Maybe one of our producers could throw it up on the screen.

This form factor was very interesting to me because you basically throw stuff into the top of it and then it does it and comes out in the bottom. Let me talk about, their approach versus yours while you chose your approach versus theirs. Yeah. I mean, you know, one of the, the hardest portion of folding, t-shirts, long sleeves, anything is getting it from this random state that you pick it up from in a crumpled state

into a flat state. We don't realize it as we're folding because we're really good at it. But it takes up most of the time and it takes up most of the thought. So devices like these basically make it so that that is not a problem because you have to pass your t-shirts in that easy configuration one by one. At that point, it is still a linear time operation. It doesn't matter that it doesn't do the last portion of the fault for you because all that matters is you still have to sit there with like a hamper in hand

and like feed the thing t-shirts. It's still helpful for some people to have some of these devices, but yeah, our robot does a cent-end. How do you train it? So, you know, everybody's house is significantly different, but computer vision is super robust now. And so, you know, doing computer vision or LIDAR or whatever it happens to be to organize,

hey, this is what the house is, and then naming each room. And then every time a piece of clothing comes up, you know, being able to pull up an app and just say, that's dad, that's mom, that's daughter, that's little Johnny's, and, you know, this is their room, this is their draw. I have, like, some very interesting security cameras that let you, it shows you faces, and then you just put names on them.

And then now when somebody comes to any of my properties, it's, I get an alert. This person is at the door, or a known person is at the door, would you like to make them known? It's like, oh, yeah, that's the person who maintains the pool. so we put pull cleaner on it and it even is now getting to the point of like license plates you know at the gate

and these new gates controllers, Alex, if you have a gate at your house or ranch, you can say this license plate is allowed to come onto the property on this day, this hour, or for the next six months

and then it times out. So you can get rid of people ringing the gate bell if it is in fact the license plate and the car model end the face of the person. So how do you do that piece, Khan, of, you know, training it, or is that something you're working on? Yeah, that's a good question. I think sorting between different family members is definitely a longer-term thing for us. I think initially we will kind of rely a bit on our

customers to kind of like make sure that like whatever is in this hamper is whatever you want to be folded together at first. But at the same time, we haven't shared too much publicly, but we have been working on kind of like the flow of interacting what the robot and what the app looks like, what onboarding is going to look like, and how you're going to assign different articles of clothing to different people. We'll have more to share on that soon, but it's definitely on our minds. But we're starting with a more simplified version of the problem. Yeah, here's the hamper. This is Johnny's hamper. This is Jane's hamper.

this is dads, this is moms. That just totally makes it easy. But of course, if it's in Dad's Hamper, then you start to learn dad's sizes, you learn his brands, so many different ways to just have this become automated. What a great idea. You've picked a really hard challenge,

but an important one, and we wish you great success with it. Thanks for coming on the program. Thanks, God. Thank you for having me. Appreciate you. And if you're listening to this, we want to take a look at it.

It's weave robotics.com. Though, Jason, I have to say, It'd be great if you want to put in a pre-order or sign up for their email list. And people always ask me, how can you support a startup if you're not investing money in it? Yeah, just giving them a shout out on social media or signing up for their email list, giving feedback, and then eventually buying the product if you're a fan of startups and you want to see these things continue. That's why I always have no problem buying, you know, the one point of a product using it. And even if I don't wind up using it, I feel good that I contributed to the startups.

you know, iteration. The Roadster, when Elon started selling the Roadster, he said, you know, if you buy this car, is it worth $150K? You have other options. You could buy two cars. But if you look at it as an investment in the future of Tesla and eventually getting to a Model 3, you can also feel proud about that. Yeah.

Buy early, buy often. Support your local startup and doesn't hurt anybody. And it helps the overall ecosystem. Obviously, lots of people are worried about AI coming from. for their jobs. And, you know, it's not entirely unreasonable, but that's not the only story. For some people, hey, AI is going to make them a lot better at their jobs. And these individuals are the ones who are going to thrive in the next wave. And they 10x their productivity. Enter Mero's Innovation Workspace. From a company that's been helping teams collaborate and brainstorm

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So I think probably the biggest news story out today is that it appears that TikTok is going to survive. We got a lot of notes recently about how this deal is coming together. So in the next 30 to 45 days, Jason, we're expecting to see a deal between China and the U.S. that will allow for TikTok

to continue operating here in the States. It appears that Oracle, Silver Lake, and Anderson Horowitz will end up with about 80% of the company. I presume Oracle will be remain its kind of cloud host here in the United States. The interesting thing, the thing that surprised me and I'd love to get your take on this is that the algorithm is not being fully sold to the future US entity. It's going to remain in Chinese hands. Now, as I understand it, the US company is going to

have some saying how it's used, but there used to be a red line in which the algorithm had to be fully sold, and it does not appear to be the case in the final accounting. So your thoughts on this, Do we blink? Did we find the right deal here? It has to get divested, and the algorithm needs to be eventually replaced so that something this powerful in terms of influence has some accountability. I think we're going to look back on this era, look at algorithms as something we should have regulated.

And I'm not a big, huge fan of regulation. I know. That's a big statement. Yeah, I think they're so powerful and their ability to steer your belief systems. And that was my main objection to China owning this, is that if you want people to have a certain position on an international conflict like Russia invading Ukraine or the tragic situation in Israel and Gaza, you could just with, The most convincing thing in the world, short video clips. Like video clips are incredibly persuasive. When you see a video clip, your mind, because we're visual beings, are incredibly influenced. This is why documentary films have been known for better or worse to be so influential.

They can change an entire society. Just people see a 60 minutes piece or about, you know, the tobacco, companies, which maybe the insider was based on, you know, could change how the entire country views the cigarette companies. And so who controls that algorithm and to what end? I think a lot of the political division we're seeing in our country today is because of social media and mainstream media. Mainstream media learned early on.

If you pick aside, you lose half the audience, but the audience you gain can become so rabid that it's worth, you know, just picking half the audience to get 80% of it. See MSNBC, Fox, NPR, or, you know, any of the classic GOP, you know, radio hosts, Rush Limbaugh. I was thinking Rush, yeah. Yeah. So then you take it another step, which is we're just going to tickle your outrage. and that to young people's brains, you could make them think anything. And in fact, adults could be swayed.

Every time I watch a documentary, I just have like a massive warning signal up where I'm like, this director is manipulating me to some end. They're either trying to make this incredibly entertaining, emotionally provocative, whatever it happens to be. And so I think algorithms should be removable, swappable, and transparent. There should be a required time series feed that you can opt into as to avoid the algorithm and feeding you things. But I think you make a great point on documentaries and their ability to influence because

one thing that I've also seen that worries me in this broader vein is things that look like documentaries that aren't. My spouse is a huge fan of things on Netflix that explain a topic. and I had to be like, okay, but this was all approved by Billy Elish's team. This is not a third party group going in to try to understand her. This is her presenting herself to you using clips and voiceover and things that make it look like Ken Burns was somewhere in the room. But it's not a documentary. It's a hagiography, right, which is different.

So that's another thing that scares me. In the case of TikTok, though, I think that algorithm of transparency would be huge. So I'm hoping that, you know, Oracle, Andreessen and Silver Lake step up to the plate and build something that would, we can take a look at and then I hope YouTube and X and Reddit and everyone else kind of follows soon. Transparency here will be huge. X has already done that. They released their algorithm and did they keep getting updated? That's cool. Yeah, they released it just 10 days ago, I think. And when Elon released it and he open sourced it, he said, you know, I'm doing this because I think our algorithm kind of sucks. And I want it to get better. And, you know, I've had conversations with him about,

publicly, and he's talked about it. I mean, I've had these conversations literally on X. Would be really great to B-Y-O-A. Bring your own algorithm. And then when you then have an algorithm store. So this is what I pitched the social media companies on, is create an algorithm store where I can buy, you know, for five bucks or a dollar,

just like I can buy an app or a ringtone, an algorithm. And I might want an algorithm that is world positive, that is fact-checked. I might want one that's chaotic. I might want one that's the trending news. I want one that's the most engaged news that doesn't have a lot of views. So lots of comments, lots of back and forth, but not a lot of views, right? Those would be like emerging conversations, all kinds of interesting things you could do. But I think these things are evil as constructed today. I'll put them in the category of evil. Because I think the people making, them and who are deploying them, the meta corporation across their different platforms and

TikTok are doing it with absolutely no conscience. So anyway, it all comes back to these algorithms, which are dangerous. And I think they're polluting people's minds in a way that is super dangerous. We need to have a regulation that the algorithm breaks the 230. Section 230 protections. Yes. I think the algorithm should break Section 230 because it's an editorial decision that is more powerful than a human doing it because it's micro-targeted and it never sleeps. Unless it breaks it unless you give consumer choice. So let that sink in. Just like the bundling of a search engine with a browser could create antitrust issues unless you give people a choice. So when you load certain browsers, they will say which search engine. do you want to use, or at least give you the ability to go into the settings and say, I want bang, I want duck, duck, go, I want Google, I want perplexity, I'm going to pick it. That's like a very common sense solution here, which is every 30 days, it shows you your algorithm,

it shows you how, what the, what the, it gives you a report card of what the algorithm thinks you like. You like Corvettes, you like heavy metal, you like full self-driving, you know, whatever, you like soprano slips. It should just tell you what it's doing. And then they pretend like, oh, we can't tell you what it's doing. Of course you can. Of course you can.

That's where regulation, common sense regulation, would be very helpful here. Well, I hope we get some of that when the TikTok deal winds down. But Jason, we do have someone who's very good at taking advantage of social media algorithms to get attention to their efforts. So I want to bring up our next guest. I want to bring up Eric Jackson from EMJ Capital. Now, we've talked about Open Door on the show before, Jason. We've talked about so-called meme stocks on the show before.

I don't think we've yet had an activist investor perform their campaign in the streets. So Eric Jackson is here. He's protesting outside of Drake's house every morning trying to get to the Canadian entrepreneur and rapper to buy a share of Open Door, talking his book in the best possible way. Eric, welcome to the show. Hey, guys. Great to be with you.

Eric, how would you describe what you do for a living? This is a full-time job. What do you do for a living? and, you know, I'm obviously running into you now on the socials because I yoloed into Open and quite publicly did it. So tell us, what do you do for a living? Who are you? And how would you describe your job? Well, I would describe myself as a hedgeman manager.

So I kind of got my start 20 years ago with Terry Semmel at Yahoo. Basically, I had been, I did a PhD at Columbia. business school and strategy and management. I decided I didn't want to be an academic. I got a job. That was like during dot com, so I got a job offer to work at a software startup in Toronto, like in March 2000, and loved that for four years, did management consulting after that. But I'd heard of activist investing when I was actually a PhD student.

And I kind of always been intrigued by it. And I was living down in Naples, Florida. living in this like condo and reading the Wall Street Journal one day and I read about this guy Brad Garlinghouse who wrote the peanut butter manifesto and how Yahoo was so kind of screwed up it was all these different directions and stuff and I thought this would be a perfect company to do an activist campaign on but I don't have an activist hedge fund so but this was 06 oh7 so like you know Facebook was just getting started YouTube and blogging you know web 2.0 and all the rest and so I said well maybe you know like I is this like retail shareholder I could start I could

leverage social media and actually conduct my own activist campaign and so I went to the office depot in North Naples I bought it like a $35 web cam to stick into my like brick of a laptop and then I got up on a Sunday morning when my wife was still asleep because I was embarrassed she was going to catch me doing this and like on the guest bed like recorded myself making a YouTube seven-minute video like my manifesto for turning around Yahoo and uploaded it to YouTube. That was on a Sunday. And like by the Thursday, the New York Times had written an article about me, you know, basically saying this is like a man bites dog story, you know,

and, you know, everybody loves a good, you know, topical, uh, company like Yahoo was. I was kind of like going after the Kardashians at the time in tech. And so. But did you wind up making money from that trade? Did you, or did you just learn a hell of a lot? I just, well, it kind of became 10 years of my life because it went on and on. I mean, first I was, like, lobbying for them to accept the Microsoft deal, which they did. $40 billion, right? Yes. Yes.

And then, but then, you know, we went through like this cavalcade of CEOs, like there was Jerry Yang and Carol Bartz and then Scott Thompson. You remember him? You know, and like he got fired for fetching his computer science degree from Stonehill College and all this kind of stuff. And then Dan Lowe, you know, and meanwhile, we get Carl E. On rides in to the rescue. Apparently the smart guy is going to figure it out.

He failed. and he was gone. Then Dan Loeb comes in, smart activist, smart money, you know, from Wall Street. Yeah. Hired appoints Mercer Mayor. Not the best choice. I mean, she was like buzzy at the time, but obviously couldn't run a company. She knew, she had some ideas around product that she had learned at Google. But yeah. Which led to what was the big acquisition she did? The Tumblr. Tumblr. Yeah. A couple of billion dollars. And then they told her famously a couple of, like, months into it, like, by the way, do you know this thing is filled with porn? She was like, what?

Right. Turn that off. And then they turned it off. And then that was the end of Tumblr. They're like, there's a dull content on this open publishing platform. Shockingly enough. But if you don't know what happened there, here's a headline. How Tumblr went from a $1 billion Yahoo payday to a $3 million fire sale, which is a 99.7%, I think,

reduction in value. What a disaster. So, okay, you learn a bunch there. So I learned a lot. I had a friend in Naples who was like. He was a 51-year-old retired hedge fund manager living in Naples at the time. And he said, you know, you've got to start your own fund. You know, here's how you do it and so forth.

And so I did. And friends and family and put a fund together. But I thinking I was going to do activism, but it's pretty tough to do activism with like a $2 million hedge fund or a 20, even a $20 million hedge fund, right? As I soon found out, because the press attention with Yahoo was as important as the dollars that were behind me at the time. And so I eventually like I latched on to some guy in New York who had like a smallish activist fund and did a kind of Yahoo round two with Marissa 90 page like PowerPoint, you know, kind of campaign against her and then one against Philippe Damon at Paramount. But then I kind of clashed with the New Yorker who didn't like the fact that I was getting asked to go on CNBC more than he was. And then I met a billionaire who had, like, I'd come to know through Yahoo. Like, he wasn't a billionaire when I first met him.

But he was like, Eric, I love what you're doing. You got like an interesting point of view on a couple of companies. How about I give you some money from my family office to manage? But just one request, like, can you not do the activism? Because, you know, what happens if some intrepid, like Wall Street Journal reporter figures out that I gave you money? And then Eric's coming out and saying, like, Marissa is terrible as a CEO. and it turns out I've got a partnership with Marissa.

It's just a bad look. So how about you just do pure passive investing? So I said, great, giving the money, sign me up. And I started doing, you know, investing in the Twilios of like the last decade and the Roku's and the Carvongas and every hot news, you know, tech startup that came public. You know, I was in and I was shooting the lights out, killing it. And then 2021 comes along in 2022. And I realized that the, oh, the macro is important.

Oh, I guess like Twiloh, it just doesn't go up forever. And I got my sort of head handed to me, Kathy Woodstile, in those years. And unfortunately, the billionaire took his money out at the end of 22. And so he was like 99% of my AEM. So like I was sort of figuring out what am I going to do. I got four kids. I got two dogs. I got, you know, my wife does support and everything.

What's going to happen? So I decided not to shut down my hedge fund, though. So I had like lawyers and all these people I was paying telling me, Eric, you know, you got to shut it down. It's hopeless and stuff. And, you know, it's sort of, you built it. You paid for this infrastructure that you're supposed to be managing millions and hundreds of millions, not just like scraping by. But I didn't want to do that. I also had this like up and down performance.

And they said, you know, you know, the good way to, you know, get away from your, you know, choppy track record, you just shut your hedge fund down. And then like six months from now, you know, start a new one. And then you don't have to show your track record. And no one's the wiser. And that's what everybody does who's got like terrible performance and stuff. And I was like, ah, it doesn't feel right and so forth. And so I just sort of like, I built, I started building an AI team at my fund. I mean, it was started with one guy and then two guys and three guys.

And I felt like, you know, eventually AI is going to, you know, revolutionize hedge funds, just like it's going to revolutionize every other industry. I might as well try to do something unique and different here on my little hedge fund. try to figure something out. And then I'll market myself and so forth. And but we had like, oh, ups and down months. And, you know, again, like all these, the fund directors and the Cayman Islands were like, what is going on? You know, you're up 40% one month. You're down 60% one month. Like, what's the point, Eric? But I just sort of kept on, kept on. And then, you know, like my big hit was that I got into Carvana in May of 23 when it went, it had gone from

$400 to $3.50 in December. 22, and now it's come all the way back to 400. And I... What did you see there? Like, just concisely, what was the big insight of buying something that had lost 99% of its value and was in most people's mind circling the drain? To be honest, when I was back as a PhD student at Columbia, I'd done this big study of corporate governance. And all, you know, at the time, McKinsey had paid my professor all this money to do a research because everyone at that time and still today says, oh, you know, maybe diversity on the board is good.

Maybe having a younger board is good and linked to better performance. Maybe having, you know, this type of background and that type of background is better. And but nobody had actually studied it and actually seen what is linked to better performance, you know, upper, you know, from a, you know, a director's perspective. You put directors on what does that say about the culture. of the company? Are they founders who have skin in the game? Or is it like some of these other ones where it's performative and they're getting, what, 250K a year, 500K a year in cash comp? And then they're just doing it for the money. I know those directors because they will ping me

sometimes. They want to be in a hot startups board. And I'm like, what is this person actually adding to? So what did the research show? So McKinsey gave me all this money. I hired like five Columbia College kids. And they had to send them down to the World Trade Center to, the SEC library and they had to physically photocopy like the actual, you know, prospectuses from all these public companies. And we had to code all this data about their ages of the directors in comp and, like, how did they get paid? Was it in stock options? Was it in cash comp and all this kind of stuff? Anyway, the big net result was the only thing that mattered. None of this diversity stuff mattered. None of, you know, all these like common prescriptions. The only thing that mattered was skin in the

game. And by skin in the game, I mean not RSU's given. to people, not found money, but actually directors who dug into their own pocket with their own money after tax money and it had actually bought stock. And it didn't matter. No, sometimes it was a million dollars worth of stock. Sometimes it was $100,000 worth of stock. But you just wanted to see evidence of interest and belief in that company through those share purchases. And so the one thing I saw at Carvona in 2022 is that on the way down from $400 down to $3.50, Ernie Garcia Jr. Who's, you know, he's wealthy, right?

His dad was wealthy. He's wealthy. Okay. He was like born on second base or whatever. But he bought $70 million, $7.0 of Carvana stock on the way down in one tranche at $50 million at $50 a share in March of 22. And another tranche in June of $22 at $20 a share. And then the stock just kept dropping. Like it didn't stop until it was $3.50.

The other thing that piqued my interest, which I never saw once in any of those SEC filings from 25 years ago, and I never have seen it today, is that I noticed this chief product officer for Carvana, a guy named Dan Gill, had bought $3 million of stock himself in Thanksgiving of 2022, when the stock was $7.50. And it just so happened that he followed me on Twitter. So I DMed him. And I said, could I give you a call? I'd love to chat.

And he said, sure. And I started talking to him. It turns out he's Canadian like me. But he lives in Santa Monica now. And so we're catching up about that. And then I said, I got to tell you, I never see chief product officers spending $3 million. I said, like, I know if that was me, if I was in your shoes and I came home and told my wife, you know, hey, honey, you know this company, Carbana where I work, where like 90% of our wealth is tied up in the stock price of Carbana. and it's gone from $400 to $7.50.

What I want to do is I want to take $3 million of our own money and put it in more Carvana ships. I honestly don't know if I would have won that argument with her. Especially like, you know, she probably said. I don't want to diversify. I want to consolidate more. I want to be more concentrated in this one giant stock. So this is an incredible insight.

So then that leads us to. And so he said, like, I really believe in Ernie. I know it's going to be tough. You know, it's not a layup that we're getting back to four. You know, we have a lot of issues, but we have to deal with. But, you know, we've known each other since Stanford. Everybody else on the team knows each other. When I heard him say that, I just said, it's going to happen for sure.

For sure, these guys are going to come back. And all the hedge fund bros on Twitter, anonymous accounts, they were dancing on the grave of Carvana. Like, these guys are a bunch of criminals and all this kind of stuff. Nobody said anything positive. I didn't see anything positive about Carvana until the thing was above $300 this year. That's a great segue to Open Door, because I feel like for a long time, people have been dancing on that grave and you, on the other hand, have a very different thesis. So, Eric,

why don't you tell us what caught your eye about it and when you bought it in? I think it's a very similar company Carvana. Like, one's revolutionizing used car is going direct, getting rid of the used car car dealerships that you used to have to go to to buy and sell your used car. The other is obviously trying to disrupt the traditional agent and go direct to you. Both have you needed a lot of debt to kind of build that. Both were encouraged by Wall Street to kind of grow, grow, grow, you know, at all costs, you know, growth first, profits second. And then both got hit over the head when interest rates jacked up so much in, you know, 21 and 22. And so, and then both got left for debt. And I just thought that both would

eventually prove that they could be profitable with their direct approach. Just like, just like Uber. I mean, I mean, Jason, you would know this better than I do. But I mean, as recently as like 22, you know, three years ago, I remember it would be common. You'd flip on CNBC and say, they'll never be profitable at this business. It's impossible to make money at ride here. It's so funny because we, you know, as the early investors in the company had had conversations about, okay, we're going to lose $3 or $2 a ride. It's going to increase people's, you know, adoption of the technology and increase

market share. And we're going to go quickly around the world. and if people can get a ride for five bucks and the subway is $250 or the bus is $3, wow, they can kind of do that math in their head and give it a shot. And then once I've got it on their phone, okay, well, you know, now you've got a rainy day or you've had a couple of drinks and after work and you're like, you know what, I just want to get home safely. I'm going to take an Uber.

And I went on CNBC and Deirdre Bosa was coming out of me so hard. And I said, Deirdre, do you think anybody is going to stop using Uber if their $12 ride is $14? or 15. And she was like, pause for a second. And she was like, maybe. And I was like, nobody. Right. Nobody. Just like nobody who paid $9 for Netflix is going to unsubscribe at $14. You can, you have pricing power. If it's a great service, you can just add to it. And I said, if they did a billion rides on the CNBCA, if they did a billion rides and they lost $2 billion, just do the math. They'll less $2 per ride. Let's say they make, they add $2 to every ride. Now they're profitable at $2 billion.

What do you think of the business? And it was at $20 a share, $30 a share? I bought more shares at $30. Right. I bought more shares at $30. I bought more Robinhood at $12. And, you know, these weird dislocations do happen. So what's the state of it now?

And what role does creating like an army, like an open army, you know, and what's the difference? between your approach and say meme stocks where AMC and GameStop, you're like, well, wait a second, those seem like terrible businesses at their core that have been disrupted, blockbuster or whatever, that they're just going to have a really hard time coming back. So what's the difference here with Open? Well, Open had terrible management and kind of arguably a lackadaisical board, a much worse management than Carvana did. And this stock hit an all-time low at 51 cents on June 25th. So we're not even three months removed from this. And the stock is now over 10 bucks today.

So we've 20xed in less than three months. But it's not because of brilliant management. It's not, and there wasn't any buying. In fact, it was the opposite. Everyone was RSU dumping. Carrie Wheeler, who was the former CEO, was just constantly selling. She sold a big bunch of shares under a 10B-5-1 plan at 56 cents a share. It was kind of disgusting. So anyway, I built, I did my analysis. I said, you know, obviously macro, you know, rate cuts are coming. That's going to help their business a lot. And they had indicated that they were about to have their first EBITDA positive quarter in the first time in three years. And so that's, they got to get to steady state profitability. But I could see some like things that were positive on the horizon. And they, unlike Carvana, they have no competition left nationally in eye buying. Redfin got out of it. Zillow got out of it.

So think about Uber if there was no lift, you know, and the potential pricing power there. Now, obviously, they can't just do eye buying. There has to be something else as well. And so I was always a believer. And I think this is true that, like with Carvana, they don't make most of their money from the buying and selling of cars. It's finance and interest. Like 80% of their EBITDA 20% margin, it comes from finance and interest.

With Open Door, it could be mortgage and title. You know, they've sort of made sort of half-assed attempts at it before, but not really. And so I come out with this, like, tweet on July 14th when it was like 80s. I built my position maybe like 73, 74 cents. I came out with this tweet storm that basically said, you know, here's my case for Open. And I think three years from now, they get back to steady state profitability, there'll be a re-rating of the stock, just like there has been with Carvana on a forward price to sales basis. This thing should be $82 a share.

And it was like, holy cow, $82 for an $88 stock that's about to, you know, risk being delisted on NASDAQ and so forth. It's just caused a huge buzz. people immediately sort of fixated on this odd number of 82. Like it just, like, why 82? Why not 100? Why not 75? Like, why?

I just don't explain this to me. Yeah, but you built a model and that's the number that came out of the model. Yeah. So anyway, but and then it was a week, you know, the thing just sort of took off. And within 10 days, like it hit five bucks. It, you know, got halted on the NASDAQ. There was like two billion shares traded one day. They only have 700 million shares.

And this is because you have so many retail investors on Robin Hood. This is like the Robin Hood effect that people. can just very quickly make. There was that and the Carvana angle, I think, was significant. And the fact that I had called Carvana, I think definitely gave me credibility. And I heard from so many people, not just in the U.S., that was the other shocking thing. Open doors only in the U.S. I'd say 75% of the retail supporters are outside the U.S.

And they all said the same thing. They all said, I missed Carvana. I'm not going to miss this one. I'm not going to, this is generational wealth opportunity. For sure. Yeah. For sure. But one of the things that seems to happen,

happen when this FOMO occurs and you've got a bunch of lunatics who I watch them and I'm like, you know what, I actually know Keith. Well, boy, I know the business. I like the business. I've had the founders on before. I'm going to yolo into this and I think that there could be a turnaround here. And I was aware of your work. So I was like, yeah, sure. I'll, I, I now make bets to learn. It's a very strange thing to do. But like when I was experimenting with prediction markets, I was like, let me just place some small bets on prediction markets to learn. and see, while I have skin in the game, now you have my attention. I think a lot of people have started doing this.

They're like, I'll just buy $1,000 worth of something or $10,000 worth of something or $500, whatever they can do. That's de minimis. And then they have their attention. They watch it go up and down every day. And then something happened in the last couple of weeks where the fact that this started to turn around and there was some attention and enthusiasm on it, essentially a dead brand, all the old investors and a new CEO emerged and Keith Rupoy went on CNBC and he started talking about it.

So maybe you'd talk about what happens when you identify something and then, you know, people with Gravitas get involved. Well, the one thing I did learn from 10 years of, you know, beating my brain in with Yahoo is all the tricks that that board tried to play with me. And they tried to ostracize me and say, Eric's just an idiot up in Canada. What does he know? he doesn't have the long-term view. Like, I was in the stock for 10 years, and I didn't have the long-term view on Yahoo. You know, like, we have a plan.

We know what we're doing. It's all part of a plan, the fact that our stock is, like, doing nothing for seven years. And so I didn't want to repeat that same, you know, same stuff. And I knew Keith, you know, obviously he wrote the business plan. I had enormous respect for him. You know, I'd never met him until a couple of weeks ago. But my dream of all dreams was that one day, you know,

I could convince Keith to come back in and join the board of this company. Because I know that there are just certain people that have, you know, bring with them a certain magic, pixie dust, and that gets sprinkled over the company. And I knew that Keith could do that. I knew he would attract other talented, you know, people to the team and so forth. And they started to notice as I tweeted about it that Keith was liking my tweets and then saying supportive things. And so I, you know, just started getting more and more locked at the hip with Keith. And I knew that if that happened, the open door would be flummoxed because they could no longer say,

these guys don't get it. Keith Rboy doesn't get it because he's the guy who wrote the business plan. So they would, you know, have to hopefully come around. And, you know, that's what ended up happening. And Keith just got more and more energized. I had the chance to meet him just a couple weeks ago in New York and Soho. And just spent an hour with them and just hearing about, you know, exchanging ideas about where we think the business can go. in the possibilities, and it, you know, literally goosebumps.

And so the fact then that suddenly he's back on the board, he's a chair, Eric Wu, a co-founder is back on the board. And immediately they bring in Kaz, who was the CEO-o of Shopify to be the CEO. I don't think people, you know, I was in New York just a couple of nights ago, and I was at like some cocktail party. And all people go talk about is, can you believe they got Kaz to run this company? They got a significant CEO. And then you architected, or they architected, I should say,

I believe a deal for him that is reminiscent of, say, Elon's original deal with Tesla and now the new one, which is, hey, if the stock hits certain prices, you get certain compensation. So you only win if the shareholders win. I mean, it was mind-blowing to me that anybody put up a fuss about Elon's thing in the first place. Because I remember when that whole thing was up in the media, I could pull a CNBC clip from the day that that deal was announced in 2018 or 19 or whatever. And there were these anchors in Davos, Switzerland that day talking about it, laughing, saying there's no way he will ever achieve this, of course, you know. And so that was the point of view at the time that he was given this call. And then to go back later and try to say like, oh, this is unfair. I mean, every, this is like to your thesis of do the board members have skin in the game, it should be required that when you join the board of these companies, you have to pay for some shares and put some skin in the game.

And if you don't, like, why are you here? you're some academic or you're, you know, I don't know, you check a box or something. It's just not it doesn't make any sense. I've had a conversation. I won't say his name here because I, you know, he's a good guy. But I had a, you know, heated discussion with, with one of the directors of Open Door who said, you say I didn't buy shares. I bought shares in Open Door. I said, when did you buy shares? I didn't, I didn't, I didn't see the SEC filings that said that. Oh, it was in 2016. When it was private, you bought shares? Yeah. I said, no, I'm talking about when it's a public company. Well, my firm, my firm, my VC firm, you know, botches. I said, that's other people's money.

That's not your money. Oh, have you seen my GP commit? Of course it's my, you know, I had to, I had to buy. I said, it's not the same. I mean, GP commit might be low single digits of the fund. So they could be some millions of dollars they have. But I do think, yeah, if you want your board to be. Just do 50,000, just 200,000. Just show faith. Just show the shareholders that you are at all, everybody, all the all these retail people, all they care about is this woman, Carrie, was dumping shares at 56 cents a share to us retail. So let's see a little sign that you're on our side. There was a moment where Dara bought, I think, $10 million in Uber shares, and it was probably in the 30s. And so you have to just wonder, like, okay, the CEO, the company believes that this is a good deal and he's going to

double or triple his money. And then you look at his comp package, you know, like, oh, $8 million is a significant number for him of, as you said earlier, post-tax dollars. And, you know, that to me was another great sign. All right, listen, continued success with it. I yield load into it. I went in, and as I publicly said, I'm going to buy this thing. I know it's going to work. So I'm just going to sell a couple of shares as this thing pops in the next six months to cover my base and then I'll have free shares. It happened in the next five days. I appreciate that. You cranberryed in. I believe was your words. A cranberry. In Vegas, it's 25K ships. I have. I have, I have, I have, I have, one more request, and I said the same to Keith. I don't know if I'm joining the board.

We want Shamath back. Oh. Bring him home. Best he's seen. Bring him home. You know, bring him home. I don't know why. He hasn't tweeted about it. He hasn't talked about it. A lot of people criticize him and say, oh, you know, IPOB or C or whatever it was. You know, he should have stuck around or whatever. I have the highest respect for him, another bright Canadian, by the way, I'll point out. But I will say, everybody loves the redemption arc. You can't tell me that Keith Ravoy does not love their redemption arc going on right now. In some ways, I think Open Door must be his favorite.

Of all his private holdings, this has got to be his most energizing. I think Shemoth would find the same. That would be very interesting. Put in a good word. Put in a good word for me. Continued success. And are you going to do another one of these this year? I was looking at Nextdoor, which I had Yolod into like a year or two ago.

And I'm like, God, I love that company. The founder's back. It's such a great product. Like, I just feel like next door has some of that potential. I've been pitched on next door. I get five pitches a day at private DMs, people saying, hey, can you pump my bags in this or pump my bags in that? You're not pumping bags, but what do you look at and go,

that's a killer product? I do have an announcement. I think I'm going to be making it next week of my next 100 bagger. So, you know, watch for that and I'll DM it to you or whatever, so to make sure you to see it. It's a good company. It's not a screw-up company where I, I'm going to be Mercer marrying the CEO or something like that.

So I'm really excited about it. And my health had been like to find one of these, you know, once every six months. I mean, that's obviously tough in the public markets to find 100 backers, especially all these private companies stay private longer. I think there's a playbook emerging, which is incompetent, non-skin-in-the-game individuals running companies with, you know, no downside. They're basically got no downside. And if you can, you know, have people join these companies and say, hey, you do have some downside.

You're asking you to put some millions of dollars in in your time. But the upside could be really great. That's actually a really good playbook. I think what you're doing is an important function in the market, which is identifying people who are not aligned properly. All right. Good luck with everything. Eric. Thank you.

Thank you. All right. Great job. Eric. and I saw Waymo tap Lyft for their fleet management in New City. Yeah, this is a really interesting one. There were two Uber stories back to back. Yesterday, Uber and Tesla did a partnership for freight.

So this is a very big story. Everybody said, oh, Tesla and Uber will never join force as well. There you have it. And then people thought Lyft was, you know, dead and circling the drain. And they get Nashville. You can explain all of these things. when there is a big opportunity, like autonomy, and it's competitive, if I'm Waymo, I want to be on all platforms. Just like if I owned a hotel chain, if I own the W hotels, am I going to be on Hotels.com

and not Expedia, or I'm going to be on Expedia and not this other platform hotel tonight? I'm going to be on every platform, and I'm going to try to negotiate the best possible deal. Conversely, if I'm Expedia, am I only taking, you know, Marriott's and I'm not taking holiday in? of course not. So what a lot of the, you know, Tesla Q or, you know, Tesla Bulls or Waymo Bulls, Waymo people criticizing them, what they don't realize is it's a dynamic marketplace that is global with many different product offerings. Zooks will eventually be part of the Uber network and the Lyft network. Lyft will have, you know, lucids and neuro on it eventually. If you have,

if you have one of these assets, you would want it to have full utilization. You wouldn't do an exclusive unless there was some incredible reason to do so. And exclusives very rarely exist. If you look at the DoorDash exclusives or Uber trying to do exclusives for food, eventually all these folks are like, yeah, you know, we did an exclusive for two years to get, I don't know, McDonald's or Starbucks on a platform. But I think you can get Starbucks on all the platforms now. Yes.

Yeah, I do recall there was a time you could only get. mission Chinese in San Francisco on DoorDash. So I was an entirely Uber-Eats guy, and then DoorDash for that one restaurant. I remember hating them for that exclusive. But yeah, super effective. So, Jason, this podcast, a lot of people watch it on YouTube. We do a live stream, of course, everywhere around the internet. But people have really taken to video podcasts as kind of the new format.

So audio is still quite big, but YouTube has noticed that people are doing this. I think they said that they got 100 million hours of podcasts consumed daily as of July over on YouTube. So not a huge surprise. YouTube is rolling out new tools. And I think we might actually use these because they can help with some of our editing requirements. What they're going to roll out is an AI workspace that makes suggestions about clips to cut for social media, which is something that we've been talking about internally, making better short clips. We talked about TikTok earlier on in the show. Yeah. And a feature that's going to help audio podcasters make videos so they can be on YouTube in a more engaging format. So

leveraging video and getting more video podcasts out, a great use. of AI, I think. Yeah, so a tool that let you take an audio-only podcast, like say Adam Curry's No Agenda, and then just create supplemental visuals based on what they're talking about, or just something that looked good and had like a wave on it. You could very easily get those podcasts onto YouTube. I don't know what percentage of podcasts are just audio-based still, but there's a number of them, and that would be like really amazing, generative AI to make compelling graphics or just any kind of graphic. I mean, even if it was just a logo with a sound wave, that would be better than not having them on YouTube because YouTube is so ubiquitous

and the algorithm's so good. I would love to make it my primary podcast player. Did you ever see those lyric videos that bands with lower budgets put out when they drop an album so they can't make it a lot of music videos? I mean, just give me a like a lyric video for a podcast. Just put, use the AI tools, transcribe it, put that on the screen. I can read while I listen. I love that. All right, everybody. It's been another amazing episode of This Week in Startups. You can sign up for our newsletter on Substact. Just search for This Week in Startups over there. And then we go live there. There's a nice chat room. You can follow me on LinkedIn. We go live there. And yeah, there's a subreddit. We don't really check it too often. We probably should. But we're going to start the Discord up again. Oh, good. probably move from this week in startup Slack, which is just not the right software for this. I think everybody's kind of hanging out in Discord now.

So we'll be over in Discord soon for community stuff. We're hiring a, picking a video editors, we need somebody in Austin. Don't have to have a college degree. Do you have to be creative. Do need to know how to do Capcut. So if you email Capcut at launch.com and just send us some samples, you know, we'll hire you in the office, eat some barbecue with us, hang out, make clips of the show. and help us edit the show, produce the show.

We're looking for somebody. So we'll see you all next time on this week and start-ups. Bye-bye. Bye.