This Week in Startups - The Biggest Private Funding Round in History | E2256

Episode Date: February 28, 2026

This Week In Startups is made possible by:Deel - http://deel.com/twistWispr Flow - https://wisprflow.ai/twistLuma AI - https://lumalabs.ai/twistToday’s show:*$110 billion buys you 15% of OpenAI. Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank placed their bets on ChatGPT, which now has 900 million weekly active users and 50 million paying subscribers. Find out why Jason is anticipating the wildest J-Curve swing of all time, and believes we’ve ALREADY hit AGI… it’s just not implemented yet.Plus a visit from our roving correspondent Nick O’Neill, checking in on the Crypto Chaos in Miami Beach, and hot demos from three young founders.GUESTS:Nick O’Neill: https://x.com/chooserichEverest Chris: https://openclaw.unloopa.com/Ben Broca: https://polsia.com/Adi Gabrani: https://makemyclaw.com/Timestamps:00:00 Intro01:33 We’re hiring a new producer!05:42 OpenAI raised $110 billion08:59 Understanding the LLM J-Curve00:11:25 Deel - Founders ship faster on Deel. Set up payroll for any country in minutes and get back to building. Visit ⁠https://deel.com/twist⁠ to learn more.00:15:02 CRYPTO CHAOS IN MIAMI BEACH!00:21:10 Wispr Flow - Stop typing. Dictate with Wispr Flow and send clean, final-draft writing in seconds. Visit ⁠https://wisprflow.ai/twist⁠ to get started for free today.00:22:54 Mass layoffs at Block00:30:50 Luma AI - Stop guessing and start directing with the all-in-one Dream Machine text-to-video platform. Visit ⁠https://lumalabs.ai/twist⁠ to try The Dream Machine for free.00:32:04 AI Scott Adams: The Saga Continues00:38:13 Make URLs for local businesses with Unloopa00:45:36 Rent a Polsia agent to run your company00:58:55 Deploy swarms in 60 seconds with MakeMyClaw01:05:05 LAUNCH FEST is coming to SF01:55:49 Will Paramount actually buy WBD?01:06:58 Why Lon loves “Knight of the 7 Kingdoms”01:07:21 On “Neighbors” and First Amendment Warriors01:13:43 All about Jason’s favorite chargersSubscribe 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/jasoncalacanisCheck out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/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.com

out of here. This open AI funding situation has blown our minds. We're going to be unemployed and I can't even pay for my damn rent anymore. This is unedited. This is unfiltered. This is what's happening right now. This week in startups is brought to you by Luma AI. Stop guessing and start directing with the all-in-one dream machine text video platform. Visit luma labs.a-a-i slash twist to try the dream machine for free. Whisperflow. Stop typing. dictate with Whisperflow and send clean final draft writing in seconds. Visit whisperflow.com slash twist to get started for free today and deal. Founders ship faster on deal.

Set up payroll for any country in minutes and get back to building. Visit deal.com slash twist to learn more. All right, everybody. It's Twist. It's Friday. It's February 27th in the year of our Lord. A.O. 33, Jason. A.

3033, 33 days after OpenClaw appeared on this program. And we're going to keep building replicants. We're going to keep building open claw agents. Yeah, we're using like SlackBot 2% of the time. We're going to check out Notions, new one. We're going to keep track on all of these. We're going to rotate those into discussions. We do this week in startups on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

I do all in on Thursday, but it comes out on Friday. then we tape this week and a on Tuesday, and we drop it Wednesday morning. So that's what you're getting from J-Cal every week. It's a lot. Five podcasts. And we're going to bring back two more, and we need a producer.

We need a producer to work under Lon and I. Please. Full-time in Austin. Pays pretty good, and you get to have a good time. We need two things. One, you got to be motivated by the topic subject. We need you, and this is how I hire now. You make four quadrons, Lon.

Qualified. Important. Has the skills. Got it. Got it. And passion for the subject. Yeah. What's in the top right quadrant?

Are you asking me? Yes. What's in the top right quadrant? So, you know, the most passionate and then the most experienced would be the very top. Correct. What's in the bottom left? Not experienced at all. And you're just looking for a gig.

You don't really care about what we're doing. Correct. So that's the easy box to get rid of. Right. Now, on the bottom right, what's on the bottom right? Building your mental model here. You're very passionate, but you may not have the qualifications that we're looking for. You're a newbie. Correct. Now do the top left. You're extremely experienced. You've made tons of podcasts. You know it cold, but you prefer movies and TV or some other topic that's not what we're talking about. Now, it's easy to pick number one and number four. Number four, you don't want unqualified people who don't care about the topic.

Okay, that's number four on the ranking. And then number one's really easy. Hey, you're super passionate and you're qualified. Great. Now, how do you rank two and three, Juan? How do you think about two and three? Would you rather have a passionate green person or an experienced person without passion? What do you think?

You know, I go back and forth on this. When I was new on the scene, when I first, started, I would have said, experience that I want people who know podcasting cold. They've done it a million times. And they can learn about tech. They can figure it out. But I think I've switched. I think today I would say I want someone who lives and breathes startups, AI, tech. Why? Why have you switched? By the way, you're correct. You're correct. Thank you. So it's one. And then the bottom right-hand quadrant is number two. And the top left is number three. passion because I think you can teach somebody and I have.

I think that's what changed is the experience of showing a bunch of people how to do this job and how to make a podcast and you can teach that stuff if they're smart and dedicated, but especially if they are passionate about the subject and can't wait to learn more. I mean, we saw it with Oliver. Oliver came in not knowing anything about podcasting at all, really, but loved AI, loved startups couldn't wait to dig in and learn out how to use all these tools. And now he's off producing this weekend AI. And that is your tactical tip of the day. This is a tactical tip from Jay Call and Lon. It's a tactical tip. It's a TT. It's a tactical tip for you to think about this weekend

and bring to your startup on Mondays because a lot of people get caught up on this. And when you have a, you need to have a mental model, a framework. And, you know, how essential, you know, is another vector you can do this on when I was doing the Twitter, just lightly collaborating with Elon and Sacks and Antonio on the Twitter takeover, Elon was like, okay, who's super qualified and then who's essential? And that's who we need to keep. And if they're not qualified and they're not essential, obviously that's easy. And if they're not qualified, but they're essential, okay, we've got to think about that. And then if they're super qualified, but not essential, okay, we've got to go through all these quadrants. So I just drew the four quadrants on the board. And I just drew the four quadrants on the board.

and it made it really easy to put people into buckets and say, hey, here's where we're at. So take this with you, talk to your co-founder about it. It's a tactical tip from Twist. It's a twist tactical tip. T3. There you go. And now we can go on to our first story. That's a big one.

It's the biggest private funding round in history, some people are calling this, Jason. OpenAI has raised $110 billion with a B. They're now valued at $730 billion with a B. Amazon putting in $50 billion, that's $15 billion up front, another $35 when certain conditions are met. We don't yet know what those are. SoftBank, NVIDIA, going in for $30 billion each. The secondary big news here is that this is a larger-scale collaboration between OpenAI and Amazon. Open AI committing to using Amazon's tranium semiconductors at its AWS data centers.

They will continue to use Nvidia chips on some level. We don't know exactly how this is all going to balance out. And they said that this new deal does nothing to change the ongoing OpenAI deal with Microsoft. So that's the huge story. I mean, and the interesting thing about this Amazon deal is, so they're putting $15 billion up. They're holding back on $35,000 more billion that they are committing in the future. Information says that those conditions are either Open AI goes IPO or they achieve AGI. So that's what we're still talking about this.

Like the deal changes if open AI reaches AGI. I mean, how far away do we really think that is now? Is this a real- I've said this before. We've achieved AGI in 50% plus of skills. Artificial general intelligence basically means you can do any job a human can do better than a human. I think we're at the 50% mark minimum.

We might be at 60 or 70. It's just not fully deployed. and it's not fully executed on. So sometimes you'll have all the precursors for, I don't know, sustainable energy. We have that right now. We don't need to burn carbon. We have all the precursors. We are a post-carbon burning society.

We have just not chosen to implement it. We could have a thousand nuclear power plants and we could have, you know, a project to just put solar everywhere. And we would stop digging oil out of the ground. we have the technology, we have achieved sustainable energy forever in humanity. We have not applied the technology yet because we already have the infrastructure for this oil and we're just deciding to use that until such time as that's too expensive to pull out of the earth. Okay, fine, fair enough. That's where we are with AGI. All the precursors are there. If you sit there at Lon and you spend, I don't know

five hours with your replicant I don't know do you have a replicate yet I don't have my I do not have my own I don't have your own I know the name I'm gonna call mine Gaff

after that's the Edward James almost character from Blade Runner but he does not exist yet what does he say at the end it's too bad she won't live but then again it's too bad

she won't live but then again who does who does who does shout out to Edward James almost is that where it is

Yes, the great Edward James Elmos plays Gap. Incredible. You had posted a tweet asking for a J-Curb based on LL-L-S. I don't think anybody did it. Did anybody do it? Kabir did it for you. Kabir from launch, has your J-Curb ready. Let's bring up the next one.

It's not exactly a J-Curve. No, here's the bar curve. No, that's the Uber one. Open-A-I-J-Curb. There we are. Still not a J-Curb, but okay. So a J-Curb is when you just amount-invested. Go find the J-Curb for Tesla

and go find the J-curve for Uber. And what it is is how much money you've invested. Oh, I see. And you just keep adding that up. You keep adding it up. And then you have your profit. There you go. Not your revenue.

Your profit. And then it starts going tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick up. As an example, the free cash flow from Uber in 2025 was $10 billion. It'll be $13 billion in this year. This is Uber's long road to profitability. What you see there is just how much. money was lost to build, I don't know, there are like a quarter, there are 250 million rides a day globally in 10,000 cities. Like to build that kind of footprint required buying companies,

building infrastructure, the team, spend, spend, and they also spent money on subsidizing rides to build out the driver network and build out the habit. And so they went 30 billion in the hole. This chart is like ending in 24 when they had like a couple of billion dollars in profit. So they went from like 32 to 30. We need to take this chart and put 10 billion, which would make it skyrocket up. And then put another 13 billion for 25 and 26. And what you'd see is 10 and 13 is 23 billion. You would go from negative 30 billion all the way up below that 5 billion line.

It would shoot up like a rocket. That is the high art. So if we were to do this properly for, and I'll just have somebody else do it, get me somebody, one of the fans of the show, build a j-curve. There's been $250 billion. If we had a straight line down, since Chat Chbett came out, it was less than a billion dollars invested in the space, and then you get to about 250 billion invested, including this 110 billion loan.

Let's assume another 250 billion gets invested, 500 billion straight down. So this chart of Uber goes down $30 billion and pull up the Tesla one as well, which you'll find very easily just by typing Tesla J-Curve chart in Google. Sorry to make this so complicated for my team. We've got a brand new partner here at Twist. And as fate would have it, we love and use their product. If you need to hire, manage, pay, or equip your team members anywhere around the world, you need deal. D-E-E-L. They're going to take care of all the annoying human resources tasks that you don't.

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their hiring and growth. Find out more by visiting deal.com slash twist. That's d-e-eel.com slash twist. Also, I happened to be a shareholder in the company. I got very lucky they acquired one of my startups. And I am stoked. It's an amazing company. Tesla J-Kerve is unbelievable. The amount of money invested in that was wild. Why they had to build factories. They had to do all this stuff. Maybe you find it easier on Twitter because people talk about it a lot there. 500 billion invested is the equivalent of, I don't know, what is that, 12 times. So here it is. This is amazing. So this is free cash flow in the history of pure EV makers. And what you see is all the losses. And you see that red spike going up?

Yes. That's the magic. You struck oil. What did they have to do to get there? How many billions were they in the hole at the peak, Tesla? Ten billion negative. And then you go up and they start making money and all of a sudden turn to profit in year 11 and they, you know, five years since then. It's year 17, 18 of Tesla. I see. Correct. So now you have to do that for language models. For language models, they go 500 billion into debt. That's a big hole collectively. Anthropic, X-A-I. A lot of chips. Mistral, Anthropic, everybody.

And then also the data center companies, I would include in there because they're directly, you know, associated with this effort. Right. You put all that together. You build a $500 billion hole. Let's say in 2030, they throw off $10 billion collectively in profits. In other words, they throw off what Uber makes in Euro 14 or what Tesla makes in Euro 16.

Then, as a group, then let's say it grows 50% a year. So you go 10, 15, 22.5, you get the idea. Boom, boom, boom. You're talking about a 10 year, maybe a six-year run to just get out of the J-curve. That's my estimate. A few months ago, people were really asking, like, are there going to be customers for, like, is there going to be enough people who want to use AI to make the curve go up so, so sharply like there were for Tesla?

And I think that there were a lot of reasons to be skeptical even a few months ago. now with agents really doing all this stuff and so much evidence every day of what people are accomplishing, I think it's harder to be skeptical. It was easier a few months ago. All right. There it is, folks. Congratulations to the team at OpenAI. They're making $20 billion. They're doing all right. And I would say, it's worth $7, $800 billion, or maybe $800 billion post money to add the cash in the thing. So they're 40 times top line revenue. It's absurd. But if they keep growing 50% a year, you know, for 100% a year. If Codex is driving everyone's AI agent, then yeah, there is chaos going on right now on the

streets of Miami Beach. I don't know if you've heard about this. The crypto world is in absolute chaos. And we sent our roving, we set our roving correspondent Nick O'Neill down to survey the damage. I feel like we should check in with him right now. Live show. The humanity. Nick joining us for Miami Beach.

What's going on down there, Nick? It's chaos and confusion right now. I was just down there speaking with people on the streets of Miami to say, what is going on here? My crypto portfolio is down awfully. They are completely panicking. And they're saying that they're going to lose their jobs with all the money going to a place like Open AI. I've never felt more depression.

And they said, Nick, you're a voice of stability and reason. And I said, yes, I am. Nick, it's imperative in an emergency situation. that like this, that broadcasters like ourselves, maintain our cool. Please take a moment to compose yourself. As hard as it is, looking down at Miami, explain the carnage. And we have children watching for parents. I'm just going to ask you to please take children to rip the screen.

This is unedited. This is unfiltered. This is what's happening right now in Miami. I went down and I was speaking to the people at the pool. They were ripping their best, all their stuff. They said, we got to get out of here. This open AI funding situation has blown our minds. We're going to be unemployed and I can't even pay for my damn rent anymore.

This is a disaster. I've tried to have reasonable conversations, but I couldn't find a single person out there that could give me any sort of regular insight. Yeah, they basically said, I need someone to take care of all my stuff. I don't want you to turn the camera too far because this could get graphic, but I understand the block team formerly square, They were having their quarterly retreat in Miami. Oh, God.

They were in Miami. Oh, the humanity. And half of them, there's 400 people down there in the streets who have been given 18-month severance, fully vested, and they have four job offers. Please, explain what's happening with those 400 people. I saw a literal parade of people being marched out of the office down in Brickle from my balcony here. And people were, literally Miami was not even. ready for the moment that occurred right there. I saw them and they were like, what's going on here?

They were all carrying brown boxes out the doors, down the streets. And they were like, is this the end? I went down to get on this scene just to see what people were saying. They could not believe it. There were tears. There were people that thought that they were going to potentially lose relationships because let's be honest down here in Miami, everyone's focused on can you afford the most,

expensive car around and the best clothes. Well, the block employees are no longer reliable source for making those purchases, Jason. It's really tragic. I can't imagine what's happening at Club 11. I mean, the trickle-down effects. It's a FEMA camp now, Jason. It's a FEMA. They FEMA has set up at Club 11.

That's it. They're taking refugees at this point. Taking refugees at 11. I heard Pitbull is down there volunteering. He's a great guy, very helpful. Yeah. Man, the brutality here. Yeah.

There's unconfirmed reports, Nick. I know that you've got sources, and we don't want to spread misinformation. However, there were boats landing from Cuba with refugees, obviously, and Haiti. Is it true that the block employees were taking the return trip to go to Cuba to get health care and for better job opportunities in Miami? Look, I don't want to spread misinformation, Jason, but I did go and take a little bit. look at the ports just to see what was going on because when these sorts of layoffs occur, you're well aware. You know this from your past years in journalism covering the text scene. The first place that you want to go are the ports to see where are they going? Where are they

departing to? Well, I did see only, I did see a few people, but I don't want to spread rumors just yet about something like that. But I did some people carrying their bags, carrying the brown boxes, getting onto the boats. And that felt quite extreme, if I'm going to be honest, because maybe give it a few months with your severance, but I don't know. Okay, yeah. I mean, this is live, unconfirmed, clickbait.

I did see pictures. I don't know if they're AI-based, Nick, on social media, on TikTok, of people with their ARION chairs and their Mac studios getting on those boats to Cuba. Yeah. Those boats to Cuba. It's a tragic situation.

Asking their agent in real time recommendations in Havana. That's on the boats. I heard Open Claw is literally steering some of those boats. Yeah, wow. Yeah. So literally the people who were

shuttling the refugees, which is not a great paying job. This pays $7 an hour. They've lost their jobs as well. Yeah. Get rid of them. They now have their agents. Well, they're looking ahead.

They were like, in five years we won't need these boats anymore. So we might as well if I rip off the Band-Aid now. All right, Nick. I'm just going to say, tremendous job here. Please, on behalf of the Twist community, and obviously I'm responsible for you and your family.

I know that you've got 14 kids now and three wives. I know he's geographically monogamous. It's Miami. It's Palm Beach and it's Fort Lauderdale. He is geographically monogamous in the state of Florida. Within different parts of Florida, within different parts of South Florida. Correct. Like Alex Carp.

I apologize. Thank you for your first. Please stay safe. Thank you. Please, Nick, be safe. Be safe. You've heard me talk many times about Luma AI. They're the innovators leading the charge

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It's above my pay grade. Yeah, thank God he's down there because I would not be going down there right now. What's his Twitter? Stop being more? At Choose Rich on X or Instagram at Choose Rich, if you want to follow. Choose Rich, yes.

Our good friend in Roving Corp's But that's a good segue into our next story. Is it? Oh, Block. The layoffs are Block. We should talk about it. We'll talk about that one. So, Boag, you heard us mention Block, the parent company of Square, Cash App, and After Pay.

Of course, co-founder and chairman Jack Dorsey of Twitter fame. They announced plans to cut their staff by 40 percent, Jason. That's around 4,000 people leaving just under 6,000 remaining at the company in an open letter that he also cross-posted to X. Dorsey pretty much blames AI, quote, a significantly smaller team using the tools we're building can do more and do it better. Intelligence tool capabilities are compounding faster. Every week, he added, I had two options cut gradually over months or years as this ship plays out or be honest about where we are and act on it now. I chose the latter.

So you have been predicting this very thing on this program as well as the all-in program for many months. Is this just the first of what you see as many of these announcements? You know, we're in a debate, primarily Saxon, I, but other folks. And people have called me names, a dumerist, a catastrophist. I'm always balls and strikes, folks. I just look at the information. I look at what I see firsthand. I think from first principles, I talk to people.

I come from a journalism background, obviously. So when you see me forming an opinion, although Saxon, his debate techniques like to make me into a libtard or use all his advanced debate techniques, it's a hoax and his framing and all the stuff, I can tell you straight, you've been watching me long enough. I go research information. I learn. And, you know, then I try to form an opinion.

And when people correct me, typically fans of the show and friends, I then change my opinion. Okay. So I have said what I'm seeing on the front lines is founders being able to not hire the first three or four people they would normally hire for their three-person startup. In other words, the three co-founders, instead of having to hire three people in the first six months or a year, say the first year, they want to get three more people in the building, another developer, another designer, and an ops person. Typically, you get some combination of those or maybe even a salesperson.

What I find is, with these new tools, they do founder-led sales for six months or 12 months longer. They handle their own legal accounting, et cetera, for the first six months, and then they pick, know, whichever service provider they want. But they can do things on their own. So that was one piece of information I had informing this opinion a year or two ago. The second piece of information is I listen to the words that leaders say, and I take them at their word, or I handicap what they're trying to do. Andy Jassy, a year ago in the summer, wrote this memo that things were going to change in Amazon and that they saw AI playing a bigger role. Then there was a leaked document from Amazon that said, we have like 900,000 jobs, 600,000 jobs

we're not going to hire for in the next decade because we predict they're going to be robots. It's a New York Times story. You can say fake news all you want. The truth is, I would say, you know, 50% of the facts in the New York Times are rock solid. Then maybe 30 are debatable and 20 might be wrong. That's not because they're intentionally doing things wrong, whatever. It's just the nature of truth in the world, right? They're trying to pursue breaking news stories.

So they have 5% of the information inside of Amazon. The other 95% is a black box. So they follow. They got this leak. It was so acute at Amazon that they were preparing a PR campaign to stop the bad PR they they were going to get in the coming years from not hiring people and laying people off. To me, again, I take people at their word. I've been in the startup business for 30 plus years now.

as an entrepreneur, journalist, an investor, and a podcaster, I know what people are doing. They're like, okay, around the corner, we're going to start replacing drivers and get rid of factory workers. We get rid of middle managers. There's not going to be as many developers. We need to give to Toys for Tots.

And when they put in, we should do local Toys for Tots things to make the Amazon bad vibes go down. Okay, that's another check. Now, we have to look at Block. Block, like Jack's other company, Twitter, Jack is an invest in the future visionary product leader. Right.

He goes big. There's very few entrepreneurs who have built two, two, one, two billion dollar startups that were public. Steve Jobs built Apple, and then he built Pixar. I don't think Pixar ever went public. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong. I don't remember seeing a trading. No. But then it got bought by Disney.

So he built two billion dollars. I mean, you have to have people build multiple unicorns. There's two unicorns, one with public, one day. You have Elon, and he has Tesla, which is public, and he soon will have SpaceX. So he'll have two that have gone public, right? It's a very small group. You know who already has two that went public? Jack.

Jack Dorsey. Doesn't get enough credit. That's true. Why? Because he's quiet. He's an introvert. I've known Jack since, you know, the earliest days of Twitter as one of the first users. Yeah.

I feel like also culturally, culturally tech is like no longer on his side. Like he's seen as like this woke lefty guy. It doesn't really meld with the current philosophy of the tech industry. It's not a lefty guy anyway. Well, but that's the pretty. He did overbuild the staff. Right.

Well, that's, I was going to say that is a big thing on social media is saying that this is not really about AI, that this is really like during the COVID era square slash block massively overhired. And now they're sort of backing out of that, but they want to save face, so they're blaming AI. At Bama Bonds, this guy Will Slaughter had the big tweet about this. Unwinding less than half an insane COVID over-hiring binge has much more to do with Jack Dorsey's

managerial incompetence than whether AI is going to take your job. Dorsey then responded, yes, we overhired during COVID because I incorrectly built two separate company structures, Square and Cash App, rather than one, which we corrected mid-2020. but then he continues, we have and do run an efficient company better than most. Okay, this is a very important follow-up from Jack. And let me just say, it's hard. Being a leader's hard. You make mistakes.

He did this so compassionately and so transparently. In his piece, he said, by the way, we're leaving comms open. You can say goodbye to everybody. We're giving you six months severance and then your stock. It can keep your computer. You'll receive your salary for 20 weeks plus one week of 10. and your equity vested through the end of May, six months of health care,

keep your corporate devices, and five grand to put toward whatever you need to help you in this transition. That's very generous. I offer lawn half, lawn today said, hey, you saw the block deal.

I'll take half of that to get the fuck out of you. Oh, my God. I'm like, hey, can I get half that? That sounds pretty good. We could negotiate. That's even just a start. That's a starting position. A good start point.

Plus one week for every year you're there. If you're an eight-year employee, get another eight weeks. Say, you're sitting there, you're sitting pretty at 28 weeks. It's a lot of time to figure out your next move. It's a lot of time to figure it out. Anyway, he did it in the classiest, most transparent way I've ever seen full stop.

Can I just say one thing? This is against the HR people's standard. They say you have to turn everybody's accounts on. Correct. People are going to do crazy things. People are going to delete files. People are going to say things in the chat. They're going to hack things.

You cannot do it this way. There's even potential workplace violence. I don't bring that up. But, you know, there's like somebody could go postal. You got to lock the doors, all this kind of stuff. You have to escort people out of the building. You want to do it over the weekend so people don't show up on Monday. These are best practices.

Right. Yeah, I was just going to say the one thing, I think it's very generous. I do think he did this in the class used way possible. I just, I would have put caps in the tweet. He does that all lowercase tweeting style. And when you're firing people, I don't know. It felt a little precious to me. But otherwise, I think he handled this in the best.

I mean, if we're sitting here saying his punctuation is the issue, that means he did it right. That's right. We're splitting Harris here. Exactly. listen, sometimes I'm thinking faster than I can write everything down. And I found this amazing tool. I am obsessed with it. It's called whisper flow, W-I-S-P-R-flow.

All you have to do is talk. And whisper flow turns it into crisp, perfect writing instantly. Not just talking about dictation, but removing filler, fixing punctuation, and even formatting your text while you speak. It is mind-blowing how good this is. It makes all the other dictation software look basic. and whisper flow matches your natural tone and speaking voice. So the writing sounds like you actually wrote it yourself.

And whisper flow works wherever you are. I use it when I'm in Slack. I'll use it when I'm in superhuman doing an email, doing a message. I'll jump into I message. And even when I'm writing a document or I'll even use it when I'm talking to my open claw agent. Finally, someone I can talk to who actually takes down everything I say. Unlike maybe the interns I've got, they get like six out of every 10 instructions, correct? Whisper flow.

Everybody's going crazy about this product in Silicon Valley. Everybody in tech is using it. Whisperflow. com. A.I.S.T. It's spelled W-I-S-P-R-F-L-O. Dot A-I-S-T-T-E-E-I-S-T-E. Incredible product.

You have to try it. Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoonist, the author, the podcaster. He talked on his show before his tragic recent death about a desire to live on as an AI-powered representation of himself. Now, there's a lot of debate about as he got to the end of his life, whether he changed his mind about this. There's various public statements. We do not need to rehash this whole debate. One fan, John Arrow, actually made Scott's vision happen.

He created at AI Scott Adams, and it's an AI-driven simulation of the old podcast, featuring an animated avatar that is very convincing, looks a lot and sounds a lot like the real Scott Adams. Arrow has also created Abigail Adams, a young lady character. that's inspired by Scott and his legacy. So Adams' family and many of his fans, very upset. They've made repeated requests now for Arrow to stop publishing his videos. On Thursday, the AI Scott Adams account posted that they intend to legally defend their right to keep making this content.

Here's the quote, from this project start, we attempted to have an amicable and collaborative conversation, but that wasn't reciprocated. Given that litigation seems certain, we are sending a global hold letter to any with relevant information. This is to ensure all pertinent materials are available to protect Scott's stated vision. So the last thing I would note here, for all the debate that this is stirring up, the content itself is not really that popular. 3,000 or 3,400 followers on X, 137 YouTube subscribers.

Abigail is not doing better. So there does seem to be a disconnect between the interest that this project is generating and the actual fans who want to follow AI Scott Adams. So your reaction to you. I started getting DMs from like the Scott Adams stands, like the real hardcore fans who know me because I was on a show one time debating January 6th and other stuff with him.

And they know me because I would listen to a show once in a while and say hi in the chat because he would mention all in, you know, probably like a dozen times over the years. He really loved Saks. He loved Chumath. I think he liked me. even though I might politically... I think you guys had a mutual appreciation going.

A mutual appreciation. And so, you know, they're very angry at me for even platforming the creator of it. Yeah. And for me retweeting it or giving my opinion. Hey, if you really are in the spirit of Scott Adams, he was for full contact debate. And, and I'm no, like, close friend of Scott. We never met in person. We were digital friends, et cetera.

were obviously like microcelebrities. So microcelebrities have a secret chat room. But put that aside, you know, we have a secret society of microslabs. Your handshake, you have a secret hand. Yeah, sure, everything. He was a self-described narcissist. He was like, I love getting attention. I love when people say hi to me a coffee.

I love that people were inspired by what I said. He would have, in my estimation, it's just one person's opinion. Don't freak out. He would have loved AI Scott Adams. He would have loved this debate. He did say he wanted to, these two things can be true at the same time. He did say he wanted people to create AI Scott Adams.

And he did say that maybe I want to create a digital son so that people close to me don't get hurt by seeing me online every day. Okay, so there's morals, there's morals and ethics. And then there's the law. Right. Here's what I'll say. This isn't like a new issue.

You can't use people's, especially famous people's, likenesses for profit or even for nonprofit use, you know, in this kind of way. So legally, they lose. I think so. You could make a derivative product that you say, hey, I've made this Abigail. She's inspired by the teachings of Scott Adams. Right. Totally allowed.

If somebody wanted to say, I am a J-Cal disciple. I'm a Chimoth disciple. I'm a Steve Jobs disciple. And I'm going to wear a Steve Jobs outfit every day, like Elizabeth Holmes did. Right. And for a period of time, she was super inspired by Steve. Yeah, she was with the turtlenecks, yeah, yeah.

With the turtle neck and the voice and the drama and everything. Shout out Elizabeth, come on the pot anytime. Once you're out of prison. No, I want to do it when she's in. Oh, wow. That'll be amazing. So long story short. Yeah.

Long story short. You could do that. Sure. do your Steve Jobs impersonation every day. It's protected. You know, and so you, now you go to the moral ethical thing. As I told the person doing this, talk to the family, get permission to do it, or do the derivative, clearly not the same product, but inspired by the teachings. So here we are. That's what's going to happen. And the argument that technologists will use is this is inevitable. It's going to happen, yada, yada. You know what? It's inevitable that piracy happens, but that doesn't mean

that you can go sell Taylor Swift CDs on Canal Street. And we've proven that with Napster. You get a lawsuit. You can't, you know, restream MSG and Nix games without getting in trouble. Do the Russians do it on their Russian streaming sites? Yes. Do the Chinese sell DVDs on every quarter? Yes. Okay. those are other countries who are not obeying law. You don't get to use that either. Yeah. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. It's just weird that it's like he's taking a principled stand here.

Like, I'm going to take this to court to protect all of our right to make an AI avatar of someone after they're dead. And like I find that whole thing kind of like creep. Like even if I say out loud on a show once, hey, I wouldn't mind somebody doing this. I don't really feel like that should give you a legally binding right. That seems a little far to me. That's just as far as I go. Should we do some demos? Please.

All right, our first demo. Let's bring on Everest, Chris. He's the creator of Unlupa, Jason. Unlupa, it allows, I thought this was really neat. It allows anyone to create an AI-generated website for a local business in their area and then gives them the tools to sell that business their website. So here's- Genius.

So here's Everest. He's in India, but he's focusing the tool on the Netherlands. So I like we got to we got to take a look at me. Tell me your name again. So I get the pronunciation right, sir. Hi, my name's Chris. Chris, okay. And Chris, we're in India are you.

And how old are you? I'm 23 and I'm in Hyderabad right now. And are you in college or school? No, no, I finished my college. Now I'm into AI. Now he's into AI. Did you go to these like technical schools in India that are really hard to get into? Or did you do that like college course training?

where it's like really intense and you go for six days a week? I've just heard about this online and TV shows and media. I didn't really go for the hard ones. I just went to a normal university. I mean, like you said, six days a week. I mean, it's pretty intense, but I got through it. So you are monitoring this week in startups, X.com, and thinking about opportunities in Europe and America,

even though you're living in India. Am I correct? I mean, I just, a tweet of mine went viral. You guys reached out to me. And so I wanted to be on the part. Great. Here we go. So show us what you built.

And I will give you some feedback. And this is a business lawn that I have seen before because with Squarespace, people started doing this. Right. This is like. They would build websites and they would knock on doors in America and say, hey, I built a website for you. Would you like it?

I'm asking for $500. Like the first question I asked Chris was like, well, why don't you just go right to businesses and build them websites with your system? And he explained like, you know, it's that personal touch. He's in India. So it's almost like the users of his site become like his street team. Like he's sort of making websites for all these local businesses around the world. And he's got local people helping him actually at the point of sale.

It's very clever. Okay. Here we go. Okay. I mean, the system is really simple. you just type in which niche you're targeting and which city you're targeting. It's very simple. You just type in the niche you're targeting and the city.

Okay, so you could do coffee, cafes. Yeah, and Austin. Any niche. Well, but Jason, it's not only going to find the businesses. It's actually going to make the websites right now. Like when we check back in, like you'll see Crystal Show us. We're actually going to get finished websites already. Genius.

Okay. Let me show you a finished. workflow. Okay. So here's your workflow. Yeah. So this was one me and Lon ran yesterday. I mean, he didn't see the results yet. Yeah, I'm curious. Scrape 100 card detailing. Yeah, car detailing. Because you know, Lon keeps his car very specific. I do. I love my preacee. It's got all of the different websites there. And I assume we can click on one of them. Yeah, got all the data. Let me just show you a website. Here's a website at built. Look at this. Look at this. Jason, look at this.

And this is all based on this real card detailing place in Austin. Like you could go to them right now and say, hey, do you want to buy this beautiful website I made for you? Yeah. Okay. This is insane. It's insane. Now, wait, you're also having it contact them?

How does it do the contact in the outreach? You can just connect your email. So it finds their emails and say, sends out the outreach through your email. So you can have like custom email template that it reaches out to them. Chris, you have a job? Do you have a job in India?

No. Okay, let me ask you. You can be honest because we're on this week in startups. Okay, you can always be honest here. You can always be honest with your uncle J-Calc. Jake. If you got a job right now, what do you think your salary would be in India?

If you got like a job, Like an average job? An average job, yeah. In your dollars, and then we'll translate it. Yeah, 400 a month. $400. $400. U.S. dollars.

Yes. You make $5 grand a year. Yeah. Okay, $5,000 a year. Mm-hmm. And you're a developer and you're smart. Look at what he built. Five grand.

I can hear the wheels turning. If you made $25,000. thousand dollars in u.s right now compared to your friends how would you be living like your apartment you're going out to dandy how would you be living in india uh i'd be living like a king here living like a king he'll be with nick on the balcony in miami beach before we're done okay chris if you're this freaking smart i'll i'll i'll pay you 25 000 you come work for me okay How does it sound? I mean, you got to be actually smart.

This can't be like, well, I'll put on here. You got to go through a proper job interview. But would you like to make $25,000 a year? Because that's like a third of what people make in the U.S. Don't tell him that, Jason. No, I am, but I'm just trying to do arbitrage here. I'm just, what would that be like if you went to your friends? And we're like, I've got a $25,000 job offer.

Is that like crazy or not? Or does that happen to some of your friends? Yes, but I think I'll be making more with Anlupa. Yeah, there you go. Boom. I love it. I love it. He's an entrepreneur who is a test.

You passed the test. I need to start Founder University, India. I need to talk to the government. I need to, I've never been to India. I need to go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go.

Let's go. Let's go. I'm in. All right. Great job. Hey, tell you some exciting numbers. Okay, here we go. Yeah, tell us the exciting numbers.

Maybe I need to be an investor in this company. We need to deliver a C-Corp. Yeah. So I launched it in 24 hours. It was at 1000 MRR, 1000 USD. Okay. Just from a single Reddit post.

All right. That's it. No, no. I think you'll be excited for this. And then last week, I posted like three tweets. And now Anlupa is over

8.5K MRR. Because you're ready. What are you talking about? You're at 100K a year. Yeah. Look at you. Yeah. doesn't need your 25KKKAM, no.

FJCal, he's an entrepreneur. It was a test. I wanted to see what was going on here. Okay, here's the deal. I want you to come to Founder University, and I want to invest $25,000 in this company if you want to make it into a U.S.-based company because I think you're just brilliant and smart.

If you want to pursue that, you've got to go through diligence, we've got to make sure you're not a criminal, and we've got to make sure you can actually start a U.S. company. Put it aside. Congratulations. This is amazing. Let's go to our next demo. Stick around, Chris.

All right. Chris, hang out. We're going on to Ben. Hang out with us. We're going on to Ben Broca. He's the creator of Pulsia. It's an agentic system. It's not OpenClaw.

It was built while Peter was off building OpenClaw. It's a separate agentic system, Jason, that helps businesses run their operations autonomously. Ben, thanks for joining. Ben, how you doing? Where are you calling in from? I'm good. I'm in San Francisco right now. Oh, okay.

Great. I can tell because it's so sunny. Show us what you built. This is it. Demo or a die. Show us what you built here on this week in startups. You never know what you're going to see. So actually, this is a live dashboard that shows Pulsia in action, working right now

on like almost a thousand companies at the same time. So you can see that like actually recently we had a huge search of like people starting to use the service. It's amazing. And so right now you can see Pulsia working on different tasks. So it completed 3,000 tasks in the past 24 hours. Right now it's building a 3D property feed MVP for some user that's like working on specific company. This is a Twitter action where like following up with 17 gallery pitches.

And so you can see that like, you know, a lot of users are creating new companies every minute, right? 700 companies will launch in the past 24 hours. So essentially Pulsia is an AI that builds and runs companies autonomously. So it wakes up every night accomplishes tasks in the goal to create and run. the company that the user sort of like decided on. Wow. And it can incredible. It can build, it can like, of course, code, push a production, launch a real website,

tweets. You can see here, those are real tweets that have been tweeted about, you know, if I click on one of them, it's an actual real tweet. Most AIZR is because $750 a month. I need a rep ops team. LeadForge finds your prospects. So this is a tweet that's promoting a company from a real user, right? Wow.

So it can also send emails. So I gave it access to an email address. So you can see that like there's a bunch of emails that's been sent in the past five minutes, 4,000 emails in the past 24 hours. One of the things I launched about a week ago is now Pulsia can run ads autonomously for companies. So it creates its own UGC ads. And then there's an AI that an AI agent that every day wakes up, looks at the performance of ads on meta and decides to either, you know,

create a new one or like pose an ad that would not be performing or create new ads. So you can see I'm going to give you an example. My buddies think I'm a genius for planning our trips. I just use Fairway Finder. Ten bucks. Whole captain's packet done. I let him keep thinking it. So this is just an example of like an AI generated ad that was created for a customer to promote their business on Palsia.

So it's why combinator in a box? You're basically making unlimited number of, startups. You own all of them? No. Or this is a game for people to play. They subscribe to your service, Pulsia. So it is all users that are signing up to Pulsia, paying

$49 a month to get an AI to run their idea. If you think about it, it's like one of the cheapest ways to get started. Of course, you can go to lovable, you can go to cursor and set up your website, but you have to be prompting it. If you stop prompting it, it will

not do stuff for you. Here, it autonomously sort of like decides every night what are the best things that it could do next based on the state of the business if if the MVP is not ready yet it will do an engineering task if the business is ready maybe we'll start doing marketing maybe it will do some cold outreach maybe it will tweet maybe it will run ads right and so the idea is like really i believe that the future of companies is that most companies will be 80% autonomous meaning that like the 20% is the the human sort of like having taste, having creativity, and like a certain insight into a specific niche. However, 80% of the company could be completely autonomous.

Essentially here, the AI policy is giving that to people. And it essentially is doing the engineering work, fixing bugs, grinding every day, extending cold emails, tweeting, doing ads. The human doesn't have to do that. The human needs to give direction. So great. So great. I mean, this is something we like looked at

for like our accelerator and incubator is there's all these different components. So we teach people go to market strategies like you're doing with ads. You know, we'll teach people social media marketing and hiring and, you know, getting product market fit and you're just making it in a box. And we were always thinking, like, I wonder if we could do founder university in a box and here you are, you've built it. Is this going to be, you know, did you raise money? Are you going to build a business here?

What's the story? So I raised the precede last summer. And right now, I mean, S-F actually to market it more and to now I'm seeing great retention. You know, active users are sending 15 messages a day to their AI CEO to like plan to discuss strategies, marketing strategies, what to do to grow the business. Around, you know, 20% of users are using the ad product, which is great because ads is a great way to actually generate revenue.

And so I'm excited to get more users on the platform. Incredible. Great job. A question from our audience. Lon. Oh, yeah, we've got from M. Solomon Bush. How can you afford this? Are customers paying for inference on top of their $50 per month?

It's a great question. Actually, I would love to make it more affordable. The reason it's $50 is because, yeah, as you said, it's expensive. Like, it's a lot of inference because every day, the AI thinks and acts every day. And that's, I'm, of course, using top models from Anthropic and Open AI. And so the idea is like the subscription, I'm trying to break even on the subscriptions, because the idea is like giving this tool to as many people as possible. But in exchange, we take at Pulseya, 20% cut on revenue, on essentially transaction on the platform. So if a user comes in for 50 bucks a month, they can get a company getting started, which is very, very affordable.

But if down the line they start making 100 bucks, 200 bucks a month with their business, we just take 20%. And that's our way to being able to generate profit to continue growing the platform. Got it, got it. We're very incentivized with our users on success. This is amazing. Really well done. We should talk because I'm in the startup business. And I think what's really interesting about what you're doing is,

I mean, I'm sure when you raised your precede round, this came up with investors, like pretty great place for us to look for founders, right? You've basically got a little incubator here on your hands. Really inspiring, dude. I love it. Any questions for me? About startups and startup live?

It seems like you already figured it out, to be honest. I mean, listen, first of all, thank you for having me. I love to be able to share this to more people. And, yeah, I mean, you have a ton of experience and would love to, you know, ask you, like, how do you see about scaling it? How do you think about how can I get this into more, you know? So, you know, I love open source and I love more open platforms. And it's always great to enable people to make money.

So let me just riff here, Lon. What you're doing is like eBay or Airbnb or Uber or many other marketplaces, Etsy, in that this is kind of a marketplace where you're giving tools, like you come for the tool and you stay for the marketplace. You've basically created a way for people to make a living. When you do that, you get love from the entrepreneurship. you're creating. Just like Airbnb does, right?

Airbnb changed tens of thousands of people's lives who were probably, you know, making a wage and they became entrepreneurial. And eventually if their Airbnb worked out, they got a second one or a third one. And now they moved into the owner class from the salary class. Beautiful. So I think you're doing that. And then the more you, the less you take and the more you give will be how you succeed. So Etsy and Airbnb take their 5 to 20% take rate.

You take 500 flat rate. There's other services that you can upsell people on over time. So $50 for this package, $300 for the next package, $1,000 for the next would be the next thing. If I was an investor in your company, I'd be sitting with you saying, what would people pay $1,000 a month for? And you could start having that conversation. Maybe there's a human in the loop in the marketing function, right? So you have like you hire a growth hacker and you split the growth hacker, like rent a human style across the team.

Anyway, all kinds of things like that. And your customers, if you talk to them and say, how can we be more helpful? They're going to tell you. And then it's your job to prioritize and experiment. There's also the possibility of adding to this, the ability to invest in the companies or have ownership in them. So you could say, hey, we'd like to own. 10% of your business.

Or we'd like to own 5% of your business. We'll give you the platform for free for life. If we can own 5% and we get a 5% royalty, or we get 1% of your profit. So it could be $500 a month or $100 a month and 5% of whatever your sales are if you're tracking sales in here. So there's all kinds of ways you can kind of do future upsells.

For now, just keep delighting customers, right? You're, you should spend the first three years of any business, just delighting customers, and then you can figure out the revenue. The model is really simple here, a subscription plus a revenue share, plus upsells. And as long as it's tiny like you're doing, you're going to be successful. You're going to figure this out. Great job. Okay. Awesome. Let's do our third and final demo. Well, first, first I think we should, we should check out this polymarket. So related, I love the polymarket, related to what we were talking about earlier. I found this one for OpenAI's closing market cap.

So on the day that OpenAI eventually IPOs, what will the market cap be at the closing... $1.5 billion. At the closing bell. So let's pull that polymarket up. I think it's 1.5. 1.5. So the volume on this, 1.4 million right now. So a lot of people, right now the number one, the top vote is no IPO by December 31st, 2026.

and then there's another version. Oh, okay. And then there's another version for 2027, and the number one vote there, no IPO by December 31st, 2027. But if you go look at the individual numbers, there is some range. So scroll down there because it's definitely going to be public by 2027. So that would include 2026? No, this, yeah, this is just the 2026 one.

But Salaf, you see up there at the top, there's a choice. There's a button for December 31st, 2027. Click that one. I think we're on that. No, we're on 236. Here's 2027. So now scroll down again. So no IPO is what?

So no IPO is F by 2027 is 37, 43% as of right now. But under that. So that's the losing bet. They're going to IPO by 2020. So anything. Under 500 billion is currently at 26%. That's wrong. This is on the closing day of the IPO.

Closing bell on the day that the company IPOs. All right. I'm going to load into this one. scroll down. I'm going to take 750 all the way to 1.5. So if you edit those up, it looks like it's about 65%. Well, no, 750 billion to 1 trillion is 17%, 1.25 to 1.5 trillion. No, it's got to be a trillion. So I'll go trillion, trillion, trillion five. Oh, okay. That's about, no, that's about 30, 31%. No, no, I'll take from one trillion up. So there's three categories. There's 16, 15, 19. Oh, I see. I see what you're saying. So that's 31. That's exactly 50%. I think if you

you put 50% on there, that's the winning bet. It can't be under one trillion on the close. I mean, that seems crazy that it would be under one trillion when it's already worth $7,000. I think we should put $100,000 on that. So if we put $100,000, we make $50,000? Yeah, right. That would be, yes. You would make $50K from that because you're betting about 50%. But wait a second. If I make $50K, I think that's a lock. If that's a lock for me, if I put the $100k into Nvidia or Uber or other stock, and I make 10% a year. I'll be at 110. Or if I put it into Munis, I make 5% on the 100.

Okay, I'll make $7,500 versus 50. The real money here would be like $500 to $750 billion, but I don't think there's any chance that it's that low. That's the problem. No, you can't take that long shot. Those people are being... Yeah, they're being silly. Ray Tarday, as we say, in French.

Okay, there's your polymarket. Thank you, Polymarket. I love a power market. Got me thinking. Got me thinking. We got one more demo that I want to take a look at. Let's welcome Adi Gabrani. He's the creator of makemyclaw.com.

Their website allows you to set up and deploy your own OpenClaw bot in just 60 seconds. Here's my favorite part about this, though. He's also got a free 15-minute trial offer. Like, try out OpenClaugh for 15 minutes for free. I was- Love open source. I was fascinated by that. So welcome, Adi. Thanks for being here.

Thanks, Ron. Hey, Jason. Nice to be here. All right. There's got to be like 500 hosting options now. Why should people pick yours? Yeah. So for me, the goal was not to just make it easy to deploy, but also to maintain it on ongoing basis. So I think, and have it have it in such a way that you can go into the shell and manage it all by yourself, even if you want to. So I don't want people to be sandboxed into something. But actually, even in the FAQ of my site, I say that,

If you're using OpenClaub, make my claw beyond a certain day, you're doing it wrong. I would want you to come, experience it, move on, self-host it, and have fun with it. That's kind of like the goal for me. What's your story? You're an entrepreneur. Where are you based? Yeah. So I'm in Vancouver right now.

This was a site project, which actually came from getting, so I got involved with OpenClob early January, where I was building a part of my own and then saw Peter building. What's your background? tech background, the business school, and ran a company. Solo entrepreneur, have you incorporated yet? Not for me. My class. I have other company doing AI for mining sector, actually.

Oh, wow. So that's your day job? Is that your company? You own that one. Yeah, that's my day job. This is a side hustle. This is a side hustle on the weekend. How is the side hustle doing compared to your main job?

That's a much bigger business. That's a much more well-established company. This is, this came because I was playing with personal agents and wanted to get my friends involved. Which job when you wake up in the morning? Which job you're more excited about? Be honest. I'm more excited about this, but I cannot afford to do this before 6 p.m. Got it.

Have you raised money for the other business? No, that's bootstrapped. One good thing about mining companies is they pay really well. Got it. What's the footprint of that business? It makes millions of dollars, hundreds of thousands. how many years has it been around? How many employees do you?

It's been around four years in millions, yeah. Got it. All right. Did you raise money for you? Just a solo entrepreneur. No, I have co-founders, but bootstrap business. Got it. Awesome.

I mean, I love the hosting business because I think it could uncover other things. What are you charging for what's like the minimum? So it's 29 for we give you the key, a very generous key, and 19 if you bring your own key. Got it. Explain to people the difference between bringing your own key and you've provided the key. Yeah. So bringing your own key is you can bring any provider you want and you can use whatever you like and you pay for whatever language model you want.

Whatever language model you want and you pay for it. So that's why this is cheaper. We just host it. The kind of complexity that I'm trying to take away from people is upgrading their open club whenever the new one launches, making sure nothing breaks. So what do you give people by default? Are using Kimmy or something? or some cheap money, using Kimmy. Using Kimmy right now.

Got it. And is Kimmy good compared to you, Claude Opus? I think it's about 10% less in personality, but about 10x less in cost. So personally, for me, it has been a great trade-off. I have, so the way I run it is I have Kimi as my main LLM, main language model. And then for specialized task, I create subagents with Codex and Cloud to do specialized jobs. I love it. Super inspiring. Any questions for me? And by the way, Ben, if you've got a question for Adi, you can ask them. It's a little interactive here. We try to keep it. I give you permission. It's fun. Keep it. Always give an interactive if you have any questions. I mean, yeah, I think it's amazing. I think I love the 15 minutes. I love it. I love three open call. I think that's genius. I mean, I would love to hear about like, what's your conversion of people that try for 15 minutes?

and decide to actually pay. I just launched this and I haven't promoted it at all. So I just launched it and I need to promote it. But just based on some replies I did on Twitter, people were really excited about it. I think some guy mentioned that on Windows, he's been having a lot of trouble, you know, trying open claw and wanted a way to test it first with his telegram.

So he was quite excited. Another use case that someone mentioned was that they, they opened the bot for 15 minutes. They were collaborating with a friend on a coding project and they just gave the bot the permission to do it. So they, and told the bot to shut off after 15 minutes. And so I think I'm now starting to lean into these disposable agents

where a friend of mine came up with the idea of doing this for a weekend trip. So on a weekend trip, we spin a bot for two weeks, for a weekend. It does its own thing and then it automatically self-destructs. So, and this is not a short. shared, there's not like a shared space. It's, it's creating a virtual machine on the cloud. So it can do a lot of, it can do everything that open clock can do for those, for the, for the

weekend. And then it automatically self-destructs. So I think there can be a lot of cool use cases, which can be built on top. I want make my claw to become the best place where you can use all the open source agents. So as you would have seen, Ermes, which is by this news research lab, they launched. So I'm integrating that into it. So now you, now you can not only just do, Now you can not just install OpenClaw, but also Hermes. So you can choose whichever bot, whichever framework you like, and you can easily install it. This is amazing.

Well done. All right. Gentlemen, great job. I'm going to be hosting an OpenClaw launch festival Monday and Tuesday. On March 16th and 17th in San Francisco, you're both invited as my guest, free ticket for each of you. And if you want to come, and the way we do this event, just so people know, we only have 400 seats.

We're giving 100 to our investor partners. We have 125 of our founders coming from Japan, around the world, Saudi, et cetera, and our latest cohort of Founder University companies in America. Then we're going to invite 100 investors, which means that's like 250 of the tickets. Then we'll let 100 people who are founders from the public come for free. We always make it free for founders. When you buy a ticket, you pay 20 bucks.

When you pick up your ticket, we refund the 20. Why do we do that? Man, people will not cancel. So you can buy the $20 ticket if you have to cancel, you can cancel, but it's $20, who cares? It's just a way for us to reduce the number and just make sure we don't burn seats. And if you want to buy a ticket, there's 50 VIP tickets available. If you buy a VIP ticket, lunch is on your own for this event. You can just walk around San Francisco and get lunch.

But I'm going to host a lunch for 50 people, and some of the speakers will come to that if they're around, and you can come to the lunch with me if you pay $1,000. So there's $50,000 in revenue for this event, Lon is the way I do it. And that just pays for all the free founder tickets. And we can't buy coffee and breakfast for everybody. Okay. We can't talk about the guests yet, but I've seen the list they're working on and it's amazing. Some good keynotes, especially for a 400-person event.

Some very, my big hitters are coming. Some very cool people. Two big hitters already. Some very cool people who people will want to hear from. Okay. All right, launchfestable.com. Thank you. Thank you.

And thanks to Adi and Ben for being here. Appreciate it, guys. All right. Get to work. Thank you. Go back to work, gentlemen. Ben, love it. Adi, love it.

I have ideas. I love both of these. I like both those. And I like Chris. It's three great founders you found out. This is exceptional. This is what this week in startups is all about. I love First Amendment lunatics.

These are people with no life. Yes. And then they go out. They carry pepper spray. Mm-hmm. And they go and they film. There is one of these guys. in this show. And I just came across my feed because my feed is Bulldogs and weird couples on

Instagram now. There's all these weird couples who have the same accounts. I've got like four of those weird couples I follow now. Yeah, of course. Of course, as one does. And freaks and oddities and other things. And First Amendment Warriors. And First Amendment Warriors. And there's two groups. There's one, well, there's actually like four subsections of this group of the genre. One, they go to like, when they get pulled over, they refuse to, you know, Fourth Amendment. They don't want to roll their window down.

They want to know, am I being detained? They know all the rules. They know all the rules. And they like to mix it up. That one, it feels very dangerous. That's one genre. I'm not encouraging that. The second one, they go to public places

and they just record. So they went to like, you know, Tahoe and they went to a local town that's near me and they recorded on the street just like they're making B-roll and the guy's got like six cameras on his body and the guy comes out of the story and he starts yelling at him he's like no I'm just taking video

and just doing shots or whatever he can't shoot into the story he's like well actually you know freedom speech I can't public street I'm looking this way as of the sidewalk so the guy comes and he pushes his camera the guy's got pepper spray says if hey if you hit me again I'm gonna pepper sprayer the guy pushes him again he pepper sprays him like

the guy's crying whatever police come That hurts. These First Amendment War, show them the video. The third genre, and perhaps the best, is in this show, neighbors. Which is the beach line. Oh, my God. I'm in LA. There was a beach called Carbon Beach.

I had a couple friends who had houses on Carbon Beach. These are billionaires. And I would go stay and, you know, you go on the beach. And then they would have a thing called squids or jellyfish. People who would be outside Gaffin's house, like Gaffin has one of these houses, well-known, famous people have these houses. The guy who used to run Disney was a CEO. Michael Eisner.

Eisner had one of the most famous houses. This is all public knowledge because people would know, I'm going to sit outside of Eisner's house, I'm going to sit outside of this famous person's house. And, you know, people are just cool with it. But then there's like some Karen in Laguna, and she puts ropes, and there's a rule.

You can be 10 feet from the high tide mark. Right. Anybody is allowed to be 10 feet from the high tide. whether it's Florida, California, and then there's local rules. And then there's people who sell chairs or have private clubs and they will start putting their chairs around it and creating formations. And then these warriors come out and there's one on neighbors. Yeah.

And they come out and they want to walk across it. So they'll walk through the chairs for the hotel or whatever. I had no idea about this whole subculture. Oh, it's the greatest. But so neighbor, every episode, they pick two. Where's the clip? So here is. Oh, just doing a little beach blog.

It's all private property. So you hit, lock your light down there, so... When you say it's all private property, um... Oh, here he goes. Don't take this the wrong way, please. That's the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard. Ooh! This is not my first rodeo, my friend.

So this guy he's fighting with and you're gonna find out the hard way is paid by the homeowners to patrol the beach. But you're wrong because I've looked it up. So he's a cat. Yes. You think I'm trouble? Wait, I have a hundred of my house.

friends out here on this beach. We got my kids out here, so if you want to cause some fight. I don't care if your kids are out here. Look at this guy. That's here's the thing. That's a little taste of cult news. Oh, so good. He's a lunatic.

So he's getting in the middle. It's not even his neighborhood. He's getting in the middle of this fight between the people who like to hang out on this beach and the homeowners, and there's a scene late in the show that's so great, where the woman who's running the, we want to sit on the beach group, pulls him aside and is like, can you please stop doing this? You're making us look bad. This is exactly what we want to avoid.

You're starting fights. You're making chaos. Now we're really going to get kicked off the beach. Yeah, the Laguna Beach, Karen, was the other really great one. She is nuts. Let me play you this. But they find these. The whole show is just they find these characters.

I love it. I love it. This is the genius of HBO. The $100 billion thing is actually worth it. I retract my previous statement. There's another one that's in Montana. It's these two neighbors who are fighting over this gate. A guy wants to put up on this road next to his property in Montana.

Look at this, Lon. Let me show you this one. This has nothing to do with neighbors. Watch this woman. A couple of weeks ago, I featured a video of a woman, a beachfront property owner in Laguna Beach, to be exact, who was screaming at a family of beachgoers to get off her property. She's got like a little fence that she puts out every day.

More and more beach area in an attempt to coordinate. off what she said was her private property. She's attacking. You're the homeowner of a beach front property, which must be nice. It's your responsibility to learn the laws and rules that govern your property and the line. So what happens here now is these lunatics do this. Then these Fourth Amendment people are in groups and they're in Facebook groups. There's an app. Then, as the guy said in neighbors, they go swarm. Yeah. So whoever does like these shenanigans then they do like let's have a hundred people have a barbecue outside this woman's house it's amazing this is what like america's all about i love this guy's stuff

it's crazy this is why i got a you know dozens of acres on my ring yeah that's true you got a private right well anyway no neighbor bothering me totally recommend neighbors i would say that this montana one you go through most of the show and you're like this guy actually sounds pretty reasonably just wants his horses to be able to walk down this and then at the very end he's like well, you know, we should be working together to fight against Q. And then all of a sudden it takes this crazy turn and he's like a wild conspiracy theories. It's unbelievable. The show is so good.

It's Josh Safdi who did Marty Supreme. Oh, yeah, of course. He executive produces it. And it's a terrific show. I highly recommend it. All right. You did a great job. I want to do some things that you wouldn't, uh, this is, these are things you can buy.

You know me. I like things on Amazon. Stuff. gadgets, bric-a-brac. Yeah. Yeah, I like a little bit of stuff once in a while. Let me see if I got the right window here. People like Brick-a-Brek.

Okay, here we go. I'm going to take you through a couple of things I'm obsessed with. All right. I like a warm cup of coffee. Who doesn't? This mug-warmer for $22. I have it on my desk. You put your cup of coffee on.

You see what I'm showing you? I do. You press a button, you can pick what the temperature is and how long it's on for, and it's got a little... Oh, I love this. So, like, you pour it. yourself a cup of coffee, now you've got it on your desk. You might nurse it for a little while. It gets cold right away. This keeps it fresh and warm. That's brilliant. 130 degrees the whole time. If you want to go 178, you can pick in between. For 23 bucks,

the delight I get from this thing every day is extraordinary. I've talked about Anchor before. Sure. And when you and I were in Japan, you probably saw me pull this out. This cost 120 bucks. It's an anchor laptop power back. Bank. 25,000. It has two built-in USBCs. And it has pass-through power. So when you plug it in on your desk,

you can plug it into your laptop or two other things, be charging the battery and charging your phone and your laptop at the same time. In other words, it's got pass-through power. And it's got these LED screens. So you know what it's doing. And then if you're a super nerd like me, it'll tell you here, C-1, C-2, C-3, and A,

it tells you what each of the port's doing. Right. So I like to know I'm on max charge for my laptop, whatever, and it gives you the battery health and all that stuff. So you can see the input, how much is left, how long it takes to charge a battery, it keeps you informed because we're all dealing with this stuff. Now, when I'm on a flight, a lot of times I'm on a flight,

you've got to find the plug, even if you're in business, that's hard to find, the plug falls out. I don't even worry about that. I just have it with me. I just zip it out, boom. Or if I'm in an Uber, I'm getting driven somewhere, boom, I have it with me. at the airport.

You know, when you're walking around at the airport and you're looking for where's the outlet, do you have to sit by the wall? Is there that one chair that has the, and like half the time the chair has an outlet, but it's broken and you can't get any power? This, you don't have to, you never have to have that moment again.

You just plug it in right there. It's amazing. Anchor also makes a new wall charger. Here it is. This one can flip over in any direction. So if you have a weird plug, it does this interesting thing. Let me see if I can find it.

Well, because we all have a hundred devices. I just got the plod. I've been wearing the plod pin now. Oh, you got that, yeah. You gotta charge that too. Like every time you get a new thing now, it needs to be charged. Now this one, this little cute anchor nano USBC, I first saw it when I was in Japan and I went to that great camera store. BIC, you went to. BIC, big camera, Tokyo amazing. There's another off-air thing. Incredible. Many floors. Anyway, they make these with matching colors for your phone, but it has a display. I've never seen this before. There's a little a button on the top and you can cycle through it. See that little indentation? You cycle through it. And then it tells you what you're charging. Somehow it knows through a proper USBC cable that you're on an

iPhone 17 Pro Max. Yeah, wow. Then, so you see that fast charging, whatever. Yeah. And it does fast charging, which really matters. They are fast. And super fast. And you can tap it really quickly, like if it's on your side table, as you see here, turn it off. You can do the charge. or cooler. So if you don't want to, if you're doing it overnight, you don't need to high speed charge, which burns out batteries and does all this stuff and affects temperature. So you can go on the care version. This is getting incredibly sophisticated. And here is my favorite part. 180 flexible for your ideal view. So depending on the plug you're using, if it's on top of the desk, on the side of the desk, whatever, hotel plug, airplane plug, your office, you can move it to

zero degrees, 90 degrees or 180 degrees. The plug just flips around, which you don't think is important until you get to a weird plug. Right. And what you want to pair with this is this $20 plug, which is a six-foot USB cable, get it in white or black, and you pair it. It's got 140 watt fast charging for your laptop,

but it has dual USBC. So you plug this into something, and you get two. Boom. With my daughters. I bought them each the $30 nano when we're traveling and for their rooms. and the double, we never have problems with fighting over plugs and the battery. I gave my wife, my battery, give the kids one of those bulky batteries.

Yeah, they thought of everything. They've had anchored. They figured it out, yeah. And Pplod, you have the Pplod pin. I do. I'm not wearing it right now because we're on camera, but I have the Plaude pin. When do we start the partnership with Phaud? Do we have a partnership with them yet?

Monday, sir. Monday, get ready. Oh, has it been signed? It's done. It's we're happy. We will do our first Plaud segment. Stay tuned for it on Monday show. Okay, Monday show.

Thanks, everybody. Thanks for our friends. I applaud. I'm going to give away more applause. They're great. The applaud, I applaud the applaud. This thing is so great. Just as a preview, you wear it, you press a button when I was skiing and almost died.

I was wearing it for those three days. I turned it on at the beginning of the day and I just let it record me all day. I'm skiing down the mountain. I had a great idea. I said, oh, shoot, stop at the side of the mountain. I'm going to start talking. I start talking. I start talking.

I start talking. Boom. I forgot I did it. then I now have on my calendar every other day, review your applaud. Yeah. And now I review my applaud and I see all the different ideas. I don't lose all my great ideas. The great thing is it learns the voices of everyone around you.

So I've already taught it everybody. So I could just record a conversation. It'll tell me who said what, when. And you could search it. It's crazy. Oh. And yes, you can search it. And then there's a bunch of template lunatics who've made templates out of there.

So one of them is perfect transcript. One of them is like meeting. one of them's brainstorm. So you can pick what template you want to generate it. It stores it in the cloud. Here's the great thing. You can hit the send button, and I can send a plod to you at a public URL.

So if we did a talk, I did this with you when I was testing in Tokyo. I had breakfast with Amanda. Right. I had breakfast with Will. We were going to do a talk, and we just decided, hey, let's do like best practices for startups.

And I talked with the team, and then I said, hey, make this into an agenda for a podcast. episode in a live talk. Then I sent that to you, Lon. And then you use that. So you started on second base. It didn't have to be transcribed. I didn't have to start anything. Boom, I just press my plot pen. It was like I was at the conversation you guys had. Correct. Exactly. Plaud, plot, plod. I love plod. Bye, everybody. Bye, bye, Monday.