This Week in Startups - The 5 Companies Apple Must Buy

Starting point is 00:00:00 I was talking about things Apple could buy under John Turnus, who is the new CEO. Obviously, Apple's philosophy of buying things is they like to buy back their own stock and technical teams, you know, a team that built Siri, you know, the team that built touch ID. They buy these like little tiny tuck-in acquisitions of technical teams that can be added to their existing product client, but not robust, full-on products. I believe John Turner should stop buying back the shares and should take massive. big swings. My way of looking at this is anything that the iPhone, your laptop, your watch, your AirPods, and their stores can integrate with on some level. That is the way I look at it. So I asked you if maybe we should play a game like Bill Simmons does. So explain the game. This week in startups is brought to you by Odu, the all-in-one business platform.

Starting point is 00:00:55 Your first app is free. Get started today at ODO.com slash twist. registered agent got a new business idea. Northwest registered agent helps you bring it to life. Get a free domain, email, phone number, and more with no purchase required. Learn more at www.w.w. Northwestregistered agent.com slash twist domain. PayPal is built for all business. Get started at PayPal.com slash business. Oh, well, they do, a lot of podcasts do the sort of the draft, where the idea is it's like

Starting point is 00:01:21 you take the rules the way of fantasy football or baseball draft would work, but you're applying it to any other thing. So, like, the Simmons podcast, I know, they do it with, like, action movies. Like, action heist movies, we're doing a draft, you know, and then my number one pick is heat. Your number one is Ocean's 11, and we go from sort of there. So I think that's the kind of core idea. We picked out the pool, which are all these potential companies that Apple maybe could buy, and then we'll go. I see this.

Starting point is 00:01:51 You got perplexity. You got Disney. You got Peloton. You got Wop. You got Sonos, Joe AI, Winavar Investments, ExoLAD, Robin, and tons of great choices. We based some of them on your pre-selected picks. I think, Jacob, correct me if I'm wrong, we did actually ask fans and viewers for their own submissions, I think. Did we do that?

Starting point is 00:02:09 I did see in some of the, the, oh, yeah, we've got some, we've, right, we've got some expert opinions from some of the viewers here so we can share those. And then, yeah, the idea would be, we'll each pick a roster of what are the five companies that we think Apple should. Let's do it. Are we playing those clips first, or are we going right into this? I think we should pick our five and then we'll see what the members of the public said. But yeah, do it in order. So the idea would be your first round pick. That's your best.

Starting point is 00:02:38 You're centering your team. Like a sports draft. Yeah, you're centering the team around the first round draft pick and the second round pick. Of course. So let's do a type in coin toss website. We'll do a coin toss to see who goes first. There are coin toss website. There are coin toss on Google.

Starting point is 00:02:55 Do it on perplexy, where we got there. a coin. Here we go. Call it Lon. All right. Flip. You got heads or tails? Oh, I'll take heads. Okay, I got towels. Let's see. And you go first. Man, that sucks. I know what you're going to do. Let's see. Who's your first choice?

Starting point is 00:03:13 Let's see. I'm looking over the list right now. Oh, one that immediately had stood out to me that I see right here in the center. I'm going with 11 labs. Put 11 labs. Interesting. What you're thinking? Obviously, I think with Siri running your life, running your phone voice mode is coming. Everybody is going to want to do that. I think the idea, especially you can think of driving where I still going home from work every day.

Starting point is 00:03:43 There's people like almost killing me doing this. If you could just have your phone in the car and you could just talk to it, you're texting people, you're sending memos, you're answering emails, your entire life. Fix Siri and then some. Great choice. Above and beyond fixing Siri, making your whole phone a voice commanded system, I think 11 Labs is the one. And 11 Labs, I think was last valued in maybe 5 to 10 billion range. This would be like a rounding era. It's nothing for it. It's table stakes for app. Now, this is going to be interesting because I am also enamored with what technology could do, what technology could do for these. And, you know, I would love to go with a Tesla, let's say, but it's too late.

Starting point is 00:04:28 They're in the Mac 7. They're too big. It's not possible. So I have to keep this realistic. But there is a big company, a big company that has a lot of shared fabric, and that would tuck in perfectly for everybody. And Apple has started to dip their toe in this. And in fact, they have gotten good at it the last two or three years specifically with Apple TV and a lot of great shows. merging there. So I'm not going with Netflix, but I am going with Disney. Disney is a large

Starting point is 00:05:02 company that if you were to have on your devices, every Disney show as part of your Apple One, you take your iPhone to the parks, you know, everything there, why not go big here? Why not take a really loved brand and make your devices very unique? And remember I said earlier, like, What happens in the stores? Imagine all those great Disney stores have some Apple products, like AirPods for kids that are Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, or a Star Wars laptop, you know, or a Disney Apple watch, right?

Starting point is 00:05:40 So I think they have done things with Disney for the watch faces already with Mickey, but you could start really doing interesting things with that IP. So I'm going to go big. I'm going to go with a curveball. I'm going with Disney as my first. I mean, you think about all the stuff Disney, tries to do at the, at the parks with the interactivity, you know, you put your, they give you the band and then you use that on the ride and then that's how you're interacting. Imagine what

Starting point is 00:06:03 you could do if you had like everything is on, you're already, everything in the park is on your phone, but if Apple and Disney were the same company, you know, unbelievable synergies to be unlocked there. For my, for my next one, I had thrown this out in the chat room. I think this is a really interesting. Like when this first came up, this was the first company I actually thought of. Sony. I'm picking Sony for number two. Again, a relative steel if you are Apple. I mean, a market cap you could, I think, easily afford it. The big one here is the PlayStation. I think Apple immediately gets another device that's in millions and millions of homes that people are obsessed with that they can take and make. I mean, they could keep it as the Apple PlayStation.

Starting point is 00:06:45 They could make it Apple gaming or the center of their new gaming sort of company. And, you know, I think incredible things they could do. Obviously, they also inherit a hell of a TV business. So Apple TV. Music. Could suddenly be. Sony Music group. Sony Pictures.

Starting point is 00:07:01 Sony Music. They've got a huge TV and film distribution channel. They've got a huge music distribution channel. And the last one, a lot of people might not realize Sony owns Crunchyroll, the number one anime owner and streaming system in the West, really not even just America. So, I mean, imagine the power of Apple exclusively. being the distributor for almost every popular anime series that comes out from Attack on Titan to Chainsaw Man and Beyond.

Starting point is 00:07:30 I think an unbelievable opportunity they could unlock to be at the center of all that. Disney's at 182 billion market cap right now. Sony's 135. Son is 134, yeah. You know, is Apple at $5 trillion? What is Apple at $4 trillion? Four trillion, maybe? Apple's at $4.96 trillion.

Starting point is 00:07:50 So $5. Five trillion, so one percent of five trillions, 50 billion. So this would do like three percent acquisitions, five percent acquisitions, crazy. My second choice is going to be a wild one. Now I'm going to go tech. I'm going tech. Now, it's very easy for me to pick Go AI, which is one of our or Exo Labs for local AI.

Starting point is 00:08:12 Yeah, yeah, you do great. Yeah, that would be, and I think it's interesting. But I have one that is a might as well skate to where the puck is going, which is Boston Dynamics. Boston Dynamics as an interim CEO, I interviewed her in July for the Allman interview show. And they have all types of robots there, but eventually Apple will have no choice but to have a robot. And they could have these be industrial, let the company run on its own. But then they could start working on the Apple A1 robot, you know.

Starting point is 00:08:41 And oh my Lord, people would trust an Apple robot, you know, and it could be extraordinary for Apple. Yeah, I think getting people to buy a robot, put it in their home is a huge trust thing. And Apple is the brand that could convince people like, all right, I'll let the Apple. And, you know, make a, what we should do is make a short video after we finish this draft of walking through the Apple store and seeing all this. So you see Lonz, you know, Apple PlayStation, you see Siri work. And we could literally make a movie of these acquisitions.

Starting point is 00:09:13 Let's keep going. What do you got? All right. I'm amazed you haven't chosen this one. I thought for sure I was not going to get this. Going in the third round, I'm really surprised. I'm going with perplexity. I think that you had mentioned this in your...

Starting point is 00:09:25 You had mentioned this in your tweet, and I was immediately like, that is the correct, that's actually the right answer. Because Apple, they're in this amazing position of not being invested in just one model or one family models. They can afford to be totally model agnostic,

Starting point is 00:09:40 and perplexity would be the perfect router and system that you could plug into your Apple device, and now you can use any model that you want and all of these great perplexity harnesses and products and agents, Right there, like so, you know, perplexity computer just coming on your MacBook air is like the solution to a million different, I think, problems. And so that, that's a gimmy, I think. This holiday season, don't miss your chance to turn just looking into just bought it.

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Starting point is 00:10:37 PayPal later data. Eight markets. March 2025 to February, 26. Repeat users defined as more than one pay later purchase in the past year. I was going with perplexity next. So you stole it off the board. And I think you have search, which is a huge franchise for them. They do a deal with Google for that, but having their own search as a default, maybe you can switch off Google and pick perplexity.

Starting point is 00:10:55 Eventually, when that deal runs out, they have their own search engine now, driven by perplexity. They have their own, you know, headless, harness, et cetera. And it would just put them on third base. Now it gets hard here. Yeah. Because you've got so many great choices here, you know, looking at something like Spotify, they already have Apple music. I don't think it's going to really help the situation. You look at something like Sonos, I think they could rebuild it.

Starting point is 00:11:19 It would be a tiny tuck-in, but it's not going to dramatically change the fortune of the company. I'm looking for things that could build a $100 billion, a $200 billion, a $500 billion revenue stream. In other words, like really figure out how to replace the iPhone's, you know, the iPhone dependency. So Disney, you got that entertainment parks, merchandise IP. Very good, right? Boston Dynamics is totally new category. What if it works? and you're selling 10, 100 million robots a year.

Starting point is 00:11:52 Okay, that could be transformative. Here's a wildcard transformative one. I'm going to go with DigitalOcean. DigitalOcean, cloud provider. There's no Amazon Web Services. There's no Azure. There's nothing at Apple for hosting their apps, hosting software. But there is trust.

Starting point is 00:12:10 They have a lot of developers who use MacBooks. Imagine your MacBook allows you to do hosting. And imagine you trust Apple. you maybe get automatically reviewed faster in the app store. Maybe you have some preference on the desktop. You have speed. You're in the data centers with Apple. And DigitalOcean is like $10, $15 billion, $20 billion, depending on when you would buy it.

Starting point is 00:12:31 You have to pay a premium. So you probably have to pay 50%. So it's a $25 billion acquisition. No problem. Easy, Peezy, Lime, Swizzy. Bang. Now they're in the game versus Elon Web Services, Azure, Google Cloud, and AWS. it could easily become a 50 or $100 billion revenue left.

Starting point is 00:12:49 Yeah, that's a good one. That's a good one. That gets really tough. There's a few on here I'd still like. But you know what I think would be an interesting one is etched. I think I'm going to go etched for number four. Well, if you think about it, I mean, Apple right now, they're entirely dependent on NVIDIA chips like everybody else.

Starting point is 00:13:08 Imagine owning their own chip company. And etched is exactly the kind of AI chip that Apple desperately needs. they're not training models. They're running inference constantly, especially now that they own perplexity, Jason. So I feel like, you know, Siri and Apple Intelligence are answering all of these requests, billions and billions of devices. That's the kind of job that Etch is building all of these chips for. And, you know, their server-side AI is currently running Apple Silicon, not really designed for this.

Starting point is 00:13:37 Etch gives them a totally new sort of option in terms of how to run this. And, you know, it bridges invidia-level talent. without having to buy a company that's Nvidia's size. So, I mean, it's an expensive one. I'll look up Etch's valuation. It's high. But let's say, $21 billion is what they're saying for Etch. So it's a chunk, but I mean, still less than a Sony level player.

Starting point is 00:14:01 And I think it opens up. I have $250 billion in cash right now. So it's like these are all less than their cash position. Correct. All right. I like it. It seems like an interesting one. Now it gets difficult.

Starting point is 00:14:12 I like to think big categories. So what's a big category that they can really sink their teeth into? I think it's transportation now. Obviously, Uber is first love here, $150 billion company. It's super cheap right now. It's not $200 billion anymore. Trust me, I know it. I still got some Uber shares left.

Starting point is 00:14:33 But then I think, hmm, maybe a Waymo, but Waymo's not available. And things like cursor, not available, right? So I am going to think from first principles, how could they have their own Robotaxy fleet or cars? How could they have their own car that you buy? You would buy a BMW not available or Mercedes not available. But two companies that could be available, Rivian and Lucid. I think Rivian is a San Francisco-based company with a loved car and it would easily tuck in. And then you have Lucid, which makes, I believe, a better product.

Starting point is 00:15:12 line. So it's a very big toss up for me. I'm going to give the edge to Lucid, because Lucid is reportedly working on a dedicated cyber cab. But it's a coin toss there. So we don't have Lucid, but we'll have them make a little image there. We'll throw Lucid in there. Yeah. Yeah. So Lucid is my number four. Yeah, I think that's a great pick. You know, for number five, I'm really, I'm really divided on number five. I had a pick that I thought was great. and now I'm now I'm hedging my bets, but I'll go with, okay. So I think what one thing that I think is interesting is there's a company on here that has been making sort of preferred niche versions of a lot of the things that Apple already does.

Starting point is 00:15:57 And by just buying the company out, Apple could like upgrade all of its products overnight and that's superhuman. So I think if you, if you imagine your your document writing, your emails, everything you're doing on the phone with words, with text, with writing, with productivity, all of these different apps that Apple sort of has been struggling to update or upgrade properly. Overnight, you get the superior, superhuman, grammarly versions of all of that productivity suite on everybody's phone, on everybody's laptop. It makes total sense to me that you would load up your MacBook Air and it would just have,

Starting point is 00:16:34 you know, superhuman Go is your mail client. Why am I messing around with this legacy 20-year-old male app? So yeah, I'm going superhuman number five. All right. So I now think I need to build a deep tech choice here. And so I was thinking about Higgsfield, you know, it's like a $5 billion private company and thinking XO Labs for putting Max together and creating local AI, runway, interesting, mid-jurney.

Starting point is 00:17:01 All these are super interesting. And I would have put perplexity in this lot. I also love the idea of health care. The challenge here is Peloton is like a two-trick pony, whoop. and ORA are great, but they kind of already have that sensor stuff handled inside of the Apple Watch. So it would create a little too much tension, I think, to have that come in. It wouldn't tuck in very well. Formula One is a crazy wildcard.

Starting point is 00:17:26 Nintendo crazy wild card. Yeah, Formula One was the one I was hedging on, actually, because it would be in there. I mean, if you think about it, like Apple having a huge presence, that's such an elite kind of event now that people are into. And it's just a huge growing business. But, yeah, I, I, you know, it's like to buy something like the NFL or the NBA is just not possible because it's a, you know, series of franchises. It just doesn't work. So I think local AI is the big winner. I'm going to take my chance and pick Go AI, one of our portfolio companies here, because I think local AI is the big winner.

Starting point is 00:18:02 Exo could have fit in here as well, but that's my five. There you go. Yeah, folks. Now, I guess the question is, we want you, the audience to post a comment here. What did we miss? And who did a better draft? Who would you rather see as the corporate development person at Apple? Me or Lon?

Starting point is 00:18:18 Who is going to win this, Lon? They're both very strong picks. They're both very strong picks. They're both. We fielded quality teams, I think. You didn't pick Netflix. I don't know for sure you would go Netflix. Yeah, well, you know, Sony, I feel like gets them.

Starting point is 00:18:30 I feel like Apple TV already is like they're better quality and consistency than Netflix. They're just not operating at that level and make at that scale. But with Sony, I think they could, essentially. They could become a Netflix rival. All right. There you go. There's your draft. If you have other ideas, post them in the comments.

Starting point is 00:18:52 We did get a few submissions, I believe, Jacob. Yeah, let's hear it. Yeah, let's hear from our audience. Who would they have picked to pick up? It's, I've been here. I think the next thing Apple should maybe be looking into is Boston Dynamics. Now, that might sound crazy, right? But Apple has spent decades of mastering personal computing, spatial computing, and they're trying now on-device AI.

Starting point is 00:19:15 But computing is changing shape, as we see it. The grand frontier in the future is not maybe on the desk or on your face or in your hands anymore, right? It's in motion, if you will. So by acquiring Boston Dynamics, Apple kind of merges the world's most advanced artificial brain with the world's advanced physical body. Right. We've seen the hardware that by. Boston. What's his name? Lance Seidman. Oh, yeah. I know that name.

Starting point is 00:19:41 Yeah, a super fan. We've seen him before. So yeah, that's, thank you to Lance. He picked Boston Dynamics. Regular listeners already know that if you've got a great idea for a new business, our friends at Northwest Registered Agent want to help you bring it to life. They're going to be the most amazing partner you've ever had. Even if you're not ready to form an LLC, you still need to take care of some basics. So Northwest Registered Agent is now offering free identity services. That means a free domain name, open source website hosting, a business email and a phone number, and everything else that's going to make your new startup look and feel like a professional company, all with no purchase required. And you know you can rely on Northwest

Starting point is 00:20:21 because they've been helping people like you start businesses for nearly 30 years. If you have an idea, you can't get out of your head. Or even if you're already building something amazing, you already got started, Northwest Registered Agent is the best way to establish your new company. Learn more at Northwest Registeredagent.com slash twist domain. Up next, I think we've got another friend of the show, David Rosenberg. What's David got? Apple has a pretty clear pattern with acquisitions. When a technology becomes important enough to experience, Apple eventually wants to own it.

Starting point is 00:20:53 So next gave them the operating system foundation that became MacOS and iOS. PA semi helped them build the silicon capability that eventually let them move off of Intel. And Prime Sense brought the 3D sensing technology that eventually fed into Face ID. So I think AI creates the same kind of moment because it's changing how we actually use computers. Right now, if I want to do something, I have to know how to do it. I have to open the apps, find the right information,

Starting point is 00:21:14 and actually perform the task. With an agent, I can just say what I want done and let the computer figure out how to do it. So for my three acquisitions, I would have perplexity at number one because it gives Apple an agent that can actually reach outside of Apple's own ecosystem so it can research the web,

Starting point is 00:21:28 use software en route between different models. And at number two, I would have world labs because they're building spatial intelligence. So if agents are eventually going to work through cameras, glasses, robotics, they need to understand the physical world as well. And for number three, I have Prism ML because they're figuring out how to shrink much larger models enough to run locally instead of constantly relying on somebody else's cloud. Where it's interesting, we're all kind of circling around similar ideas.

Starting point is 00:21:51 It's just like which company is the right one for the do the job. Interesting, though. Let's keep going. Yeah, do have another one. I believe we do. Up next, we've got a friend of the show. this is the same guy who called in to let us know that Grock is making money now, if you'll recall. When we did ask Jason, we were talking to our next guest about Grock being able to earn its own cash and what that means.

Starting point is 00:22:12 This is Michael Lee Jr. Here's Michael Lee Jr.'s pick. Hey, Jason, thanks for having me on and allowing me to respond to this question. So the question that came through that you raised was which suite of companies would make the most sense for Apple in terms of acquisitions. And I just think about AI voice. So I've tried almost every AI voice tool out there, and none of them work except for 11 labs. And 11 labs seems like so far ahead of everyone else when it comes to voice. So I'll say 11 labs, Jason. And also, don't forget, I've already told you this, but Grock has money.

Starting point is 00:22:51 This is a big story, Jason. So that was it, 11 labs. We had the same idea. I mean, it's so obvious. series still can't understand half the things I say. I'm like, give me, pull up the map. I want to go home and it calls my mom or so. It's crazy.

Starting point is 00:23:07 Eleven Labs the obvious like one-shot solution. Up next, we've got a Databricks cybersecurity expert and friend of the pod, Kristen Dahl. Here's her pick. Hi, folks. Kristen Dahl here, I wanted to chime in on the topic of Apple acquisitions. And so my line of thinking was how can we make Apple products more useful to customers throughout their day. And so the four that I landed on are Liquid AI, ORA, Sonos, and Kagi. Liquid AI I'm most interested in. So they actually built on-device local models that are designed

Starting point is 00:23:40 to run in environments where latency is a concern or you've got power constraints or compute constraints or where you don't have access to a network. And so I think if you combine that with Apple's engineering expertise and their OS expertise, you'd have a very compelling technical product fit. Number two is ORA. I could see this as being offered in conjunction to the Apple Watch for folks that don't necessarily want to invest in the Apple Watch or walk around with a screen on their wrist. It could be a good alternative. The third is Sonos. And so I could see, so historically, Apple's not done a great job of getting into people's homes. And so I could see a Sonas acquisition is providing a good jumping off point for tying together things like Apple Music,

Starting point is 00:24:31 Siri, Apple TV, and home automation. And then my fourth is Kagi, and they offer a premium subscription-based search service where privacy is kind of their number one selling point. And so Apple constantly talks about how they are privacy first. So I can't. I could see this, I could see them kind of offering this premium search functionality to, within their ecosystem, especially since I can almost guarantee like 99% of Apple users are still using Google. And that experience, we all know that experience has gone significantly downhill over the past number of years.

Starting point is 00:25:15 And so thanks for the time. Those are my four. Love it. Great job. All right. This was a big win. I like this exercise. This is a fun one.

Starting point is 00:25:25 And yeah, more to come on this week in startups. All right. Let's tee up our guest. All right. We're going to be talking to Stacey Salvy. She's the co-founder and CEO of the 90. They're a startup that has launched a wearable, Jason, that is built to track your skin's real UV exposure. It's a small pendant.

Starting point is 00:25:45 It uses built-in sensors to measure the actual UVA and UVB rays hitting your body in real time. Stacey, thanks so much for joining you. Thanks for having me. Great to see you. It looks like you're at a beautiful, you're on a beautiful deck there with some beautiful foliage. Where are you calling in from? I am actually at my house in the East Bay. Oh, okay.

Starting point is 00:26:08 Oh, the East Bay is gorgeous. Nice and worm over there. Tell us about what you built and why. Yeah, absolutely. So I have a deep background in wearables. I loved hearing what you had to say about the Plaid wearable. So I've worked at Fitbit for quite a long time, about eight years. through the Google acquisition.

Starting point is 00:26:26 And from there, ended up building a smart ring that was designed with women in mind. Who made the smart ring? That was... So it was a publicly traded company startup called Movano. Oh, cool. Yeah. So they developed a, you know, the smart ring technology, but the features were very specifically thinking of women. And we ended up winning 16 Best of CES awards there.

Starting point is 00:26:54 which was great. But then I got back together with my co-founder, and we started talking about what it might mean to measure UV, knowing at the time that 90% of photo aging that happens to the skin is due to UV exposure, hence the name the 90. So we kind of started on this journey about two and a half years ago and thinking about what the best form factor would be really kind of thinking about women first because anti-aging is important to us.

Starting point is 00:27:29 But as we went along, we discovered there's so much more to this than just anti-aging. Of course, the low-hanging fruit that we can think of is getting our vitamin D. You know, more than a billion people globally are deficient in vitamin D. Vitamin D serves as a hormone and it is a factor that goes into all sorts of things for our overall health. But it's so much more than that. It's circadian light. It's nitric oxide, mitochondrial health.

Starting point is 00:28:03 But nobody has really been able to make advancements in this because nobody has really measured at scale on the body. And this is in the form of a pendant that you're wearing. Yes. So I am wearing the pendant right now. You can see that it looks like you. The elegant. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:28:20 Thank you. Thank you very much. It's intended to be elegant because, you know, we deserve to wear something that looks nice. Yes. So the other kind of cool thing about the pendant is that it is modular, so I can take it out. And we will have a line of accessories coming so you can wear it on different parts of your body. Oh, so you can do like a bangle or something maybe. Absolutely.

Starting point is 00:28:46 Yeah. A clip. What are what people call a bracelet? That's it. I go bangle because I'm. I'm a fan of Wonder Woman, but I would like to bring the bangle back. I feel like the bangle, Stacey, would be an incredible smart device. Like, if I could have a thick bangle as a man, like who's, what would that be,

Starting point is 00:29:05 in pop culture? Like, a wrestler had those. I know the heavy metal people used to have the bangle. Where's a bangle? A bracer. I think you'd call it a bracer if he were a man. Or Mark Knopfler. What did Mark Knopfler wear? Those were like, he wore a headband and then a wristband for sweat.

Starting point is 00:29:22 For sweating. Those 80s wristbands. That was a little different. Yeah, you mean like the workout wristband for the 80s. Yeah, okay. When you're an early stage founder and you're just starting out, you're probably going to rely on a few different tools to run your business. And then you're going to try to duct tape them together. Yeah, and that might be a fine placeholder until you finish your MVP.

Starting point is 00:29:41 But this will get expensive and messy fast. When you're scaling, that's when you need, oh, do. O-D-O-O-O-O-D-O, O-D-O, O-D-O-D-O-D, the all-in-one. management software that already has 16 million users across more than 170,000 companies. Odu is bringing everything you need into one platform. That means your CRM, sales, your accounting, manufacturing, inventory, and of course point of sale if you have retail. All of that is right where you need them. And these tools are in constant communication with each other. So you don't have to log out of one system into another and then reconcile the information.

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Starting point is 00:30:44 So now this is tracking your exposure to sunlight. Correct, right. And there are two types of rays that come down to the earth, the UVA rays and UVB. We measure both on separate three-way photodiod sensor because each of those impacts our skin and our health differently. So UVA, for example, you need to accrue a certain amount of UVA throughout the day in order to release nitric oxide in your blood. The other piece is that this is individual to all of us. So my skin type is different than lawns. different than yours, Jason. So how our skin responds to the sun and what our family history

Starting point is 00:31:28 is all different. And we factor in all of that into our algorithms. And this is key because, you know, as an Irish, Swedish guy, Greek guy, like, I can get burned pretty quickly in the sun, 75% Irish and Swedish. I'm going to burn. But every day, I go for a little out, when I wake up, I get the coffee, I go up on the horse pitch, I get the nice view, I got the picnic table. And sometimes I'll hike around and take my shirt off and nobody needs to see that. I'm on the ranch. But you want to increase the amount of skin that's exposed to the sun. And I find, man, I wake up. My Fitbit. I'm not my Fitbit. My whoop doesn't record this. Correct.

Starting point is 00:32:05 And it's, you know, it's typically not seen or whatever. So this is a unique device. But can I get that data, I guess, into Apple Health Kit and then sync it with my, my whoop? And then how do you think about people owning multiple ones? because, you know, like people are team aura, whoop, Fitbit, which is now called Google something. What do they rename it? It's like Google Health. I think I lost all my data because I put my Fitbit scale on and it's like, oh, by the way, there's no more Fitbit. And I'm like, Google Health.

Starting point is 00:32:35 Fitbit is now Google health. Yeah, thanks, Google. And it's like, oh, you only have so many days to get my 20-year history of my weight. I'm like, come on. I don't know why they keep changing the naming. But talk to me about multiple devices in the ecosystem and then consult. consolidating the data in somewhere. Absolutely. So the intention of our system is to do what's called a bilateral API, not to be overly technical, but do a data exchange. So that way we can start to get

Starting point is 00:33:07 some of those insights. So some of our early testing is revealing that that circadian rhythm, which we know from research is a primary driver of sleep quality, when you actually get it and you track it, we can tell when you get deeper sleep, fewer awake moments over the course of the evening. So our data is really going to prove out that philosophy. But it doesn't stop there. There are so many other things. There are about 60 different health conditions that are impacted by sunlight, whether that's a skin condition like a vitiligo or eczema. Soraya says, of course, we know that, but also things like lupus. When you get an autoimmune condition like lupus, if you get too much sunlight, you can have a flare-up.

Starting point is 00:33:55 So these are things that we see our data as being that key external, environmental signal that's going to lead to real health intelligence down the line. And definitely sharing that data across platform is going to be really key. So I'm getting word that you have an actual, we can see some of the source. software, you've got it pulled up for us. Can we take a look at what we actually see if we were using our 9 dependent? I would be glad and honored to show you what we have. Now, you are getting a very early look. This is actually not out on the market just yet. So there's still probably some tweaks that we'll be doing. But let me share my screen. Yeah, we love it. As I always tell founder, Stacey, never apologize. Just release it. Every founder's like this. Literally, Yelan's like,

Starting point is 00:34:46 Oh my God, the new roads are coming out. I'm sorry, but it's not perfect. Just let it rip founders. Fair enough. Well, he said that's what Reed Hoffman said. If you're not embarrassed by your 1.0, you waited too long. You waited far too long. And, Lon, you know, I'm really fascinated by this opportunity here because a lot of this data doesn't exist for research.

Starting point is 00:35:10 And now if you had a thousand or 10,000 or 100,000 people with this data, and you know, their ethnicity, and you know their location, and, and, and, you know, their heart rate, you know, their weight, all of this data put together, their age, you put it all together, scientists are going to start to figure out something about, like, say, eczema. People have, like, this skin rashes. And I know somebody, a family member, an extended family member who had this, and this poor girl, you know, young girl, kept breaking out. And there's no solution. And she's on cortisones and creams and it's just like they're trying to figure it out. Yeah, very hard to figure out. Okay. Yeah. And that's, you know, in my own family, we have this exact issue with eczema. It's,

Starting point is 00:35:55 it's really quite debilitating for my son, in fact. And so, you know, part of the inspiration of getting to this deeper level and, and getting these measurements so that way we can actually provide guidance is really key. So let me talk about what we've built in the app, and I'll walk you all through it. What you see in the center now, you probably can tell from the lighting that it is quite cloudy. It's back to a bit cold and windy out here, but we are definitely still getting exposed to more UVA rays than UVB. And for those of us who are skin health enthusiasts, why that's important is that UVA is the aging UVB. And UVB is the burning UV.

Starting point is 00:36:44 What we have in the center is a proprietary number that's similar to what you might see in a weather forecast app as far as UV index. But it is actually a live reading of the UV. So we can really get a sense of what the risk is. Based on what the pendant is seeing. Based on exactly, exactly what the pendant is seeing. I'm a little bit occluded from the sun right now. Let me walk you through some of the key parts here, which I think. Well, yeah, I think this is cool where it says like 80% protection efficiency, long sleeve, long pants, SPF 40, sunscreen applied one hour and 37 minutes ago, 23 minutes left.

Starting point is 00:37:24 Like, this is really detailed in customizing it. Can I also ask you what does it say down there about vitamin D? Because that is my exact problem. That's why I was thinking I need one of these. I'm low on vitamin D too. Everybody's a little low on vitamin D. I actually take supplements. But that would be a great thing for me to be able to monitor is how much vitamin D have I gotten today.

Starting point is 00:37:45 Yes, absolutely. So Jason, you pointed out, I think, a really incredible feature that was recently built by our team, which is kind of what kind of protection do we have going right now? So this is really a blend because obviously when we think of sun protection, we might think of SPF. That's not the only sun protection we can have. We obviously have our clothes. we could have a hat. We can tell the system that I'm wearing a legionaire, for example.

Starting point is 00:38:14 What's a legionaire? I don't even know what that is. I think it's a type of hat. Oh, okay. Oh, I know it is. A legionaire is the hat with the back cover, like the neck cover maybe? Is that, is it a neck flap hat? Hang on, I don't think it.

Starting point is 00:38:27 There is a legionaire hat, but I'll look it up. And all of it highly relevant for keeping us and protected. You're right, Jason. It's the cap with the draped. down the side in the back. Yes. You are correct. I was mistaken.

Starting point is 00:38:42 This is, see, this is J-Cal, the magic of J-Cal. I did process of elimination. This is how I scored well on the SATs. I knew what wasn't the answer, that baseball cap, that Y-brim hat. So process of elimination, a Legionaire, we learned something new here. And this is a very critical thing,

Starting point is 00:38:57 when you don't know a word, a great sign of intellect, my grandfather told me this, is to ask, what does that word mean? And then over your lifetime, the number of words you don't know goes there. Sure, of course. I always look up for word.

Starting point is 00:39:12 I don't know. Genius. Look at this. And so tell us about this, the vitamin D. Because we've got a lawn looks like a ghost here. It's like zombie lawn. I would love to share the Sunscore. The Sunscore is the new feature that we're super excited about.

Starting point is 00:39:30 So we're not, I guess I would preface this with saying that we're not here to tell somebody precisely how much sun they need or they don't need. But what we're here to do is kind of help optimize and help educate. Because since so much of this hasn't really been research with on-body measurement in the past, you know, we're going to be learning along with our community. But what we did was we developed a sun score that really captured the amount of sun that you get. So here you see UVB burn, UV aging, and sun debt. Those things are if I get too much sun. Now, you can see that my sun debt is already a little bit yellow because I was at my

Starting point is 00:40:17 kids soccer games this past weekend and I didn't do a great job of reapplyming. I think one thing that sundet is really interesting and perhaps your audience would also find this interesting is that when we're exposed to a lot of sunlight on a particular day, Our skin is actually still processing that up to five days later, which is why it's so important to keep ourselves protected. But Jason, as you were saying, we also really need to get sun exposure. And so having ourselves exposed, you know, maybe we're taking our shirt off or we're wearing shorts, so that way we can accrue that vitamin D and nitric oxide is really also key to

Starting point is 00:41:02 keeping us healthy. So we have that. You can see that I've gotten some circadian light this morning. I'll go down to that portion. I missed a little bit of the window. So I got about 10 minutes of circadian light out of our 20. And it's not quite bright enough outside yet for me to get vitamin D, which is synthesis of UVB rays. So I'll make sure to come out later today to capture that light. you know, whether it's cool or warm, it's important for me to get that because I also am very low on vitamin D. Have you started to talk to the scientific research community? There are people who are running studies and I'm sure they have access to the same technology

Starting point is 00:41:49 as you, but they don't have it at scale. I think there are people who, you know, are big pharmaceutical companies, et cetera, or universities that would love to have this data all mass. Yes. In order to figure this out because these things, like we talked about, eczema, et cetera, and skin cancer, et cetera, there's no data. I think if you just get to like a thousand or 10,000 people with this, which maybe there's some study that would just underwrite that, aka pay you as a startup, man, they could just accelerate the understanding of all this. Have you started to talk to the community yet? Yeah, absolutely. And we are very like-minded in that. of that concept. So we're in the process now of building out our partnership ecosystem and being

Starting point is 00:42:39 able to make that data available. We've received inbound inquiries from some of these companies and research organizations. So we're very excited about possibly working with them because while maybe we started down the road of anti-aging, this has always been a health and wellness story and really better understanding that, which is also why we're so excited to have Dr. Richard Weller, who is our chief medical officer on board. So if you haven't heard of Dr. Weller, look up his work online. He is really incredible. So he is a dermatologist and a professor at the University of Edinburgh. And he's really the world's expert in how UV impact overall health. So he's one of the researchers who discovered that mortality related to

Starting point is 00:43:34 COVID was lower in areas that had higher UVI. So he's still using the UVI metric, which is relatively obtuse because it's very zip code level sunlight intensity. But he definitely is on board with us that the more we can measure by having these sensors on body, the higher fidelity of data and the richer the data sets going to get. This is great. How can people order one? I'm always like to give a founder a plug here. Are these available? And how much is this cost? What's the business model here? Yeah, so they are available. Okay. Yum. Yum. 90, the 90.com. We are selling them for 299 currently.

Starting point is 00:44:20 Okay. It's cheaper than like a pendant that would look this good if you were buying one for aesthetics only. Yeah. And, you know, it's also, you know, as I said earlier, it's modular. So if you wanted to get a pendant and swap it back and forth, I do that regularly, depending if I want to wear gold or silver. But really excited to also launch some accessories in the coming months. Just in case you don't feel like wearing it as a pendant or you want to wear different jewelry, then you can. A brooch. That's the word, right? Stacey. see a brooch? Yeah. Like one of those big things you wear here on your, on your jacket.

Starting point is 00:44:55 Yeah. Keep talking about women here. What about guys? Is there like, I mean, it's a little bit of a feminine design, but I'm into, I don't have any issues with it.

Starting point is 00:45:05 I think like a man could wear a brooch, if it was a masculine brooch, yeah. I kind of feel like if you put a Knicks logo on and I'd wear it. I mean, I mean, there's all sorts of customization that we can do for you, Jason.

Starting point is 00:45:20 But you're, I mean, you're absolutely right. I think when we initially started this, we were thinking anti-aging. And so we wanted to make a design that women would really like. So we started with the pendant. Of course, we made it modular, which was, you know, it's a hardware challenge to make something click in and out and give it that premium feel that you want. So that way we could, you know, appeal to somebody's versatile tastes. Listen, I'm going to allow it, Stacey. You went with like your ideal customer profile, was gender specific. We're not going to cancel you here. But if you saw clavikular clav, mug me and Chamath at the All In Summit this week, he was looks maxing us. That guy gets noticed on. And he gave me a 4.2.

Starting point is 00:46:09 You know, I'm a 55-year-old guy. I got like touch up my appearance on like 40% here. Gentlemen are very concerned with looks maxing now, Stacy. So you need to get a men's landing page here. Indeed. Yes. I'm confident we'll have something for the men and for everybody in good time. In good time.

Starting point is 00:46:31 I asked Claude Jason and he says broaches have no gender restriction. Men have wore them throughout history. Think cravat pins, tie pins, military medals, kill pins, ornate clasps on cloaks and doublets going back centuries. So, what, Stacey, any interest in making a cloak for Lon and I, we would like to wear cloaks with a broach, so we could be more like Dr. Strange. No, I think I got a killer idea for you, Stacey. Here's how you get not only men, but you go right to the like conservative MAGA group, which clearly if you're in the East Bay is top of mind for you. Of course. Is here in Texas.

Starting point is 00:47:10 Make a square one with the American flag on it. Oh. make a square one with the American flag. You're going to get J.D. Vans. I'm going to wear it. Trump's going to be where we're all going to be. We'll call it the American. It's going to be huge, okay? We're going to get endorsed by Donald Trump.

Starting point is 00:47:27 We're going to have incredible. The 90. His picture on it. Yeah. The USA 90. I mean, it's certainly, I love that idea. It's certainly very timely right now because it is a lot of distrust of sunscreens right now. And I don't know if you say more about that.

Starting point is 00:47:44 My wife's on this. Also my deodorant. She keeps going into my drug. She takes my aluminum perfect gel deodorant. And then she puts some fakaka crazy thing in there that doesn't work. It smells like eucalyptus. But the same thing with the sunscreen. She's doing that too.

Starting point is 00:48:02 I can't speak to your deodorant choices. Yes. But definitely, you know, there have been some research, you know, big, big research studies that have come out recently around, you know, people's distrust of sunscreen or really driving people's distrust of sunscreen, which, again, you know, we know that we don't want to get fried out there. We don't want to get heavily burned where we're peeling. That's really important. We know that that's linked to a higher incidence of melanoma. But to the extent somebody is not getting fried, you know, the 90 is not here to tell people this is the exact sunscreen that you should use. And

Starting point is 00:48:43 and here's, you know, and here's the exact steps. We're here to measure, inform, and provide insights into people's habits. So it's really important that we contextualize the data people are seeing so they can learn something about, you know, how sunlight impacts their overall health or how it's impacting their skin. Benzine and oxybenzone, Lon, these are the chemicals that I have been told. And we actually had a partner or sponsor in one of my events at Panapa who gave us like a more healthy version because my team was on to this like 10 years ago and we we actually bought it. It wasn't even a partner. We just bought small packets of it. I think we got a discount

Starting point is 00:49:22 because we bought it in bulk directly from this founder in the Bay Area paradoxically. This is critically important. Listen, continued success. Stacey, everybody go to the 90. This sounds like a great gift for the holiday season maybe. Yes, indeed. People need to measure their sunlight even in the winter. Now, $2.99 a year. Do I have to get, do I get hit up for a subscription in year two or this includes it? No, this includes what comes with the app experience, because we really want to just drive value and people learn along with us. Here's my other advice. You know, offer a $2.99, you know, subscription as long as you got it, dependent. But then offer like, you know, $10 a month, you know, subscription for three years and then see if that works, too.

Starting point is 00:50:07 You can always play with the pricing. Oh, yeah. Indeed. Everything's on the table. Yes, good luck, Stacey. Hardware previously was hard. Now hardware getting easier in the age of AI. So good luck, Stacey. We appreciate you. Thanks, Daisy. Appreciate it.

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