This Week in Startups - Travis’ Uber Comeback, AGI’s Stakes, Meta’s $100M AI Hires & Prediction Market Gold Rush | E2144

Episode Date: June 27, 2025

Today’s show:EVs are igniting a global tariff war, and Xiaomi’s shockingly cheap, high-quality electric cars threaten to obliterate Western automakers, sparking fears of a manufacturing wipeout. In today’s brand-new TWiST, Jason and Alex dive into the EV price war, Uber’s rumored plan to team up with Travis Kalanick on a self-driving takeover, and DoorDash’s mega-drones giving us a glimpse of the future of food delivery. Plus, Tesla’s cautious safety driver rollout shows we’re only in the early innings of the autonomous revolution, a consideration of Meta’s talent shopping spree, AND a new edition of Reddit Rapid Response. Don’t miss this deep dive into the future of cars, delivery, and AI.Timestamps:(02:24) Guess who’s BACK at Uber? On the Travis Kalahnik-Pony AI deal.(10:43) Superpower - Visit superpower.com/twist to get $50 off your membership. This offer is only for the first 100 twist listeners who sign up.(17:24) All the huge opportunities for Kalshi, PolyMarket and prediction markets(19:44) Lemon.io - Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist(25:37) TODAY’S POLYMARKET: How well will Apple’s “F1” do at the box office?(30:03) Pilot - Visit https://www.pilot.com/twist and get $1,200 off your first year.(31:58)What actually IS AGI? And why does it matter for the Microsoft-OpenAI negotiation?(45:57) Inside Meta’s massive Superintelligence shopping spree: maybe it’s not so crazy to pay AI experts $100M?(01:05:15) Reddit Rapid Response: Can you be a great founder if you hate doing cold sales?Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.comCheck out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.comSubscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcpFollow Lon:X: https://x.com/lonsFollow Alex:X: https://x.com/alexLinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelmFollow Jason:X: https://twitter.com/JasonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanisThank you to our partners:(10:43) Superpower - Visit superpower.com/twist to get $50 off your membership. This offer is only for the first 100 twist listeners who sign up.(19:44) Lemon.io - Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist(30:03) Pilot - Visit https://www.pilot.com/twist and get $1,200 off your first year.Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarlandCheck out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanisFollow TWiST:Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartupsYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekinInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartupsTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartupsSubstack: https://twistartups.substack.comSubscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

What you'll find is the build quality is pretty amazing. This is why the tariff wars are upon us. I think a lot of the EU, the United States, they're all like, yeah, you're not going to be able to sell this in America without a 100% tariff or a 50% tariff. Or it will wipe out. When I say wipe out, I mean wipe out all European car manufacturers, all American car manufacturers. It would be devastating. And that's why places like Korea don't allow these things to be imported. This weekend startups is brought to you by Superpower.

Visit superpower.com slash twist to get $50 off your membership. This offer is only for the first 100-pist listeners who sign up. Lemon.io. Hire pre-vetted remote developers, get 15% off your first four weeks of developer time at lemon. com at lemon.io slash twist. And Pilot. Focus on your product. Let Pilot handle your bookkeeping.

Pilot provides the most reliable accounting, CFO, and tax services for startups and small businesses. Head to pilot.com slash twist and get $1,200 off your first year. All right, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. I am your host, Jason Calacan. It's been doing this since 2010. Oh, my Lord. Holy crap.

Yeah, it's a long time. And my co-host Alex Wilhelm is here. How are you, Alex? I'm good. It wasn't 10,000 degrees today in the Northeast. It actually rained a little bit. So everyone's coming out of their hiding and, no, it's nice. We have, heat has been an issue in the country, but in Austin, we're having.

a very nice summer. It has not been hot for Austin standards. It's been in the 90s, which I love, but not over 100 because when you have Bulldogs. No Bueno when it hits 100. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Tough for them to stay cool. Don't they have to pant a lot to kind of like get rid of the heat? That's it. They have five ways to dissipate the heat, panting with their tongue and then their four paws. You never want to pour water over a bulldog because it will quickly, their fur will get hot, and then they're just wearing a hot, wet blanket. But if you pick them up, my understanding, you can check with your vet. If you put their feet in cold water,

their paws will cool them down quite quick. And I've done this a couple of times. When they get overheated, put a little ice in the bathtub, put a little water in the bathtub, just up to their ankles and put them in there, and then all of a sudden they're nice and cool. And eventually they lay down in the ice cold water. Cool them right down.

All right. There's your bulldog tip of today. And let's get into it. Lots in the news, including my captain, oh, captain, my captain. And my boy Travis is in the news. I want to start there. Yeah.

So this is a story that I did not see coming. My favorite type of news story. But for context, Travis Kalanick, former co-founder of Uber, former CEO of Uber, and left the company under slightly acrimonious terms around eight years ago. Well, now he might be teaming up with Uber yet again because Uber may help him purchase the U.S. arm of Chinese self-driving company pony. A.I. And I love this for like 17 different reasons. Before you talk, though, Jason, I want to say pony.aI stock did go up 12% on the news. And Uber picked up a couple points as well. So the stock

market seems to like it. What was your first thought? Well, you know, I've been speculating for a long time that Travis might come back and become the CEO of Uber. This speculation is just wishful thinking on my part. I have no inside information. Dar has done a fantastic job. so there's no dig to him. But eventually I think the founder should come back, Steve Jobs style. I obviously was the third or fourth investor in Uber and an investor in Cloud Kitchens.

And I have no insight information on this. This was a surprise to me as well. And I have not talked to Travis since. So lest you think any of this should inform your investing, don't because there's nothing here. But I will say it's anybody's game, the self-driving space. and if Travis has cloud kitchens cranking like he does, there is an opportunity here,

and the opportunity is fairly obvious to provide self-driving cars in order to deliver food directly from their kitchens. And DoorDash also has these aspirations. They're running their own drone delivery. Now, I don't know if that's public knowledge, but I've heard this over and over again. from multiple competitors. So maybe somebody could, producer Oliver,

that's where you have a chance to shine. So there have been reports that DoorDash wants to get into that business. It is public. Okay, great. They are indeed. And, yeah. So DoorDash is making their own drones, I understand.

And Zipline has their own relationships. We've talked about that countless times here. And in fact, I'm sure Zipline is in the Twist 500. We should have the founder back on the pod because I'm friendly with him. On the screen, If you're watching the video, that is the DoorDash drone, Jason. It is a beast.

I think that's because chicken sandwiches way quite a lot. And if you want to order 17, got to have a big drone. I love it. That's not the reason. It is, if you look at the zip line when it's smaller. I think the reason is they're probably envisioning a world in which groceries get delivered as well. And I think the DoorDash drone is going to be also for delivery of groceries. So you've got to keep that in mind.

Currently, Zipline, I believe, is 8 pounds, is their design. I'm not sure with that design, but it looks like more, right? So you have to think beyond just burritos and chicken sandwiches. You could actually get to the point where your milk, you know, your cookies, etc., like 10 items get delivered. And that's going to change the world. Most people live in a city and they'll get served by that serve robotics, which is a publicly traded company, I understand. And so that's the little four-wheel robot. Anyway, this is all coming fast and furious.

The future's coming. It's going to be here. And I think the, I think the Tesla rollout has answered a lot of questions. And I think the question was, how far behind are they? How far ahead are they? What's their timeline? And I think the timeline is what I've said here, which is no shame in, the safety monitor game. You should take six to 12 months in each city is having safety drivers.

So no shame in the safety driver game. I'd love, and I think we've seen now with the rollout in Austin that they're going to have safety drivers in there for some number of months, rides, etc. And that's the way it should be done because there's lots of edge cases. Twitter right now is filled with even the small test. The amount of scrutiny Tesla is under is absolutely fantastic. That kind of scrutiny from haters, Tesla Q, short sellers, that's what makes the team get really focused on the edge cases. So they're under a massive microscope. So be it, is it fair, is it unfair? Who cares? It is what it is. And I think what we're going to see is they'll iron out those features, but it's anybody's race right now. Volkswagen, pony, we ride, DoorDash, Zipline.

It's going to be 20 people. And it's going to take so long. for this to play out. I think we're in the second inning is, you know, it's not the first ending. The first ending was the last two or three years when people were preparing this technology. Supervised FSD, Waymo, you know, pilot cities. Now we're in the second inning, getting a little more serious, going to have an impact on revenues, not this year or next, but maybe in 20, 27. And that'll be like the third or fourth inning.

The end of this decade's the third or fourth inning when we actually will see the numbers become material to one of the players. Probably not Google, perhaps not Uber, definitely not Tesla. But they'll start to become material for maybe serve and Pony AI. We'll start to see those companies

reach some level of revenue that is decent. So you've touched on every angle of the story about the one that I was thinking about the most. And that is why Uber would put up, I presume, the capital for Travis to buy Pony.A.I's U.S. operations. Yeah.

is that a hedge? Is that them simply having something in their back pocket, Jason, in case their partnerships program don't work out? Are they worried about Tesla coming into the game and taking away their market share? Yeah, great question. And a couple of good theories, actually. Dara is a statesman. Dara's a statesman.

London was pretty pissed off at Uber, if you remember. And Uber was going to get kicked out of the UK. Somehow, he pulled a rabbit out of the house, smooth things over. Waymo was going to run over Uber. Somehow, he figured out how to make a partnership. Dara is the ultimate soft power partnership statesman. He could run for president. If he did, I would run the campaign.

Dara is an exceptional, exceptional executive in this regard. If Travis was going to go out and raise money, he can raise money from any number of sources. What this does is, it creates a deeper relationship. There already is a deep relationship between cloud kitchens and Uber. and what I would say is this sets up the eventual acquisition of Cloud Kitchens, pony and Uber, into one company. If that happens, now you've got a really great, formidable number one player by far. Yeah.

And DoorDash will be the loser in that one. So he'll, yeah, shout out to our immigrants. They do get the job done. And Dara is an immigrant, yeah. Yeah. Like many of our great founders here in the United States. So anyway, I'm really excited about it. incredibly smart move by Dara, if it's true. Maybe they pop in a quick 500 million into it,

maybe some sovereign wealth funds, maybe some other investors, private equity. They all get involved. And, you know, Travis is an exceptional executive. And he thinks very big. If you've built it, you know, what's now almost a $200 billion company, as you mentioned earlier, Uber is that it's all-time high. You know, he's thinking about the chess board and then the backgammon board and the tennis court and wakeboarding, all concurrently. He's not playing 4D, 5D chess. He's playing 20 different games at once. He's a master strategist and has a resiliency that is only matched or surpassed by Elon in my estimation in terms of resiliency and effort. These are just the two top executives pound for pound in the world right now.

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So there we go. Yeah. Yeah. This is a, and I did say countless times on this show that there'll be massive consolidation on the road to what I think is a $10 trillion prize. I think all of this put together is going to be, you know, somewhere in the order of $10 trillion, dollars, which would mean, you know, at three or four times sales, it's probably three or four billion dollars in market cap. So, or, yeah, so you could see, you know, an Apple, an Amazon, a meta, an

invidia level player in the space. And if you put DoorDash and Uber together, that's 300 billion, maybe. So that means there's a 10x, a 20x in the space. So you'll start to see some massive consolidation and it's going to be fragmented on the hardware side. You know what's really interesting about that, Jason, is if you add up the value of all non-Tesla automakers, the dollar amount's not that big, but our view is that the self-driving market is going to be that big. And I think that's the power of asset-like businesses that are less cyclical than literally stamping out doors and making F-150s. Yeah, I mean, the car business is a race to the bottom. The network-based marketplace business is, you know, two or three players and, you know, high margin.

So if you need to own some of the hardware in order to make it happen, so be it. But it will be commoditized. The commodification that's going on, I saw Xiaomi had a big launch, I think, today of one of their new car. Xiaomi is a handset manufacturer that decided to go into the car business and car affisitonados are freaking out. There are two things right now in the car industry that people are losing their minds over. a new Corvette Zora, which is like a ZR1X, I think, is the name of it.

It was codename Zora. It's a supercar. Hypercar is the category, 1,250 horsepower for 200K or something. That one is blowing people's minds. And the other one is Shao May. And I'm going to get that Zora, but I'm going to get myself a supercar, hypercar at some point here. Yeah, that's the other big one is Shao May. And I don't know if we have the brand name, but we can pull it out.

Yeah, it's the Y-U-7. And Jason, what I'm about to show is. is their page on Wibo, which is kind of like the Chinese Twitter, Chinese X, if you will. And this shows what I think is the most interesting milestone. They claim to have sold over 200,000 of these YU7 cars in three minutes. And then that number went up to nearly 300,000 in an hour.

Now, deposits versus purchases, I don't know. But demand for this thing is absolutely off the charts. I think it just goes to show that. YU7 is what it's called? Yes, sir. It would be good to show. Let's see if we have a picture of it because we did launch today. And the price has undercut the Tesla Model Y.

Yeah. So I guess this is not the super fancy hypercar. Not hypercar. They have one that is like a real sports car kind of competes with a Porsche or a Corvette. Yeah. It's called the SU7 Ultra. And that one just beat its own record around the Nureberg ring. And if you're not familiar with the Nureberg ring, it's a semi-open famous racetrack in Germany out in the

and it is long as hell and super technical and difficult. A great place to test road cars. Setting to record, there is kind of like the equivalent of Elm Arena, but for carmakers. I don't know what Elm Arena is, but it is the number one place where they do these, and I think the Model S Plaid hypercar is the current winner, and I think the Corvette's just beating it now,

like literally this week, it's on the track. So YU7 is the Model Y competitor. Let's see what that looks like. Okay, there's your Frunk, okay? Pretty big, yeah. It's got like an airport roller bag in there. Yeah. It's kind of good looking, Jason.

I think I like it. Yeah. Scroll ahead to the interface in the interior, because that's where these things really shine. It's got 400 miles of range, and it's $35,000. So it is priced very low. And you look, it's an exact rip-off.

In the interface is the exact rip-off of the Tesla, which is crazy when you think about it. Like, they literally copied exactly. Yeah. Beautiful Ingerio. Yeah. Let's take one more look at it. See what we can find that's different.

Just the screen here. Here we go. Like the cockpit. Yeah. Let's see the cockpit. Yeah. Here's a better shot of it. And then they're going to turn around here and show us the back, which looks fine.

Yeah. I could put two car seats in that. What you'll find is the build quality is pretty amazing. This is why the build quality is pretty amazing. This is why. the tariff wars are upon us, I think a lot of the EU, the United States, they're all like, yeah, you're not going to be able to sell this in America without a 100% tariff or a 50% tariff, or it will wipe out. When I say wipe out, I mean wipe out all European car manufacturers,

all American car manufacturers. It would be devastating. And that's why places like Korea don't allow these things to be imported. Just way too cheap. I also think there'll be some safety standards that they don't reach, build quality to start. But we said the same thing about the products coming out of Japan, and then eventually they exceeded. So, all right, they have the folks. A lot of big news going on. Yeah, Kia was a joke when it came out. Now it's not. All right, one of our favorite things in the world, Jason, is keeping track of what's happening. You and I both love a wager, a bet, a gamble, and that's why prediction markets have always been up on our list. There's some big news from both Kalshi and Polly Market that I want to touch on today. First of all,

Kalshi raised $185 million at a valuation of around $2 billion. That's an enormous amount of money at a very high valuation. And don't forget, they've also partnered with Robin Hood, so they're doing quite well as far as we can tell. And then the other item is that Polymarket, their arch competitor, is reported to be raising as much as $200 million at least a billion dollar valuation. And I believe Founders Fund is pipped as the lead investor there. So we're about to see this Uber Lyft kind of competition between these two well-known companies go in. insane because they're about to each have nine figures of extra cash on hand, which I think is going to lead to a lot of innovation and advertising. But I do worry about burn a little bit when I see two

competitors raise this much money so quickly. You know, we're in a different era. These are asset like businesses. I don't think they're trying to like do what Uber and DoorDash did or Lyft and DoorDash where they're losing money on every transaction. And I think the polymarket valuations misreported. I'll leave it at that. Yeah, I mean, a polymarket is a big company. it's um these things are becoming i think these things will replace in some ways expertise uh or augmented the idea of like listening to a journalist or a podcaster or a news reporter or a newspaper kind of predict the future or try to report the news there's a group of people who are going to just say like why would he even bother reading this story or listening to you know whatever

it is, Fox business, CNBC, I don't need to hear somebody pontificate on what's going to happen in this election, in this sports event. I can listen to it if I like the commentator. I'm just going to look at the polymarket. I'm just going to look at Calci. I'm just going to look at these prediction markets. And I'm going to start there. So starting with what the sharps, the most skin in the game individuals think will happen, is where people are going to start. So, these things are going to, you know, really change the world. When you're a busy founder, finding a new developer, my God, that can become a full-time job, and you've got enough on your plate.

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If anything goes wrong, Lemon will find you a replacement developer, ASAP. And many of our launch founders and Founder University companies have staffed up with Lemon. And we always get the best feedback. So go to lemon.io slash twist and find the perfect developer or even a tech team in less than 48 hours. And twist listeners get 15% off their first four weeks. Stop burning money. Higher developers smarter. Visit lemon.com slash twist. And there was one. If you look up in trade, the idea of a prediction market is 20 plus years old. In-trade was something that VCs used to share information on. Yes. It went away.

Maybe you have to look at the Wikipedia page, but it was a web-based trading exchange whose members traded contracts between each others on the probabilities of various events occurring. They had to exclude U.S. traders in 2012. They suspended all trading in March 2013. So this thing in the early 2000s, you know, and it started actually in 1999, I guess.

Maybe when did it start? Yeah, it says founded. According to intrade.com, it was 2001 that was founded in Dublin and did take part in the 2008, 2012 U.S. elections and was known for its accuracy in those events. Here's my question, though. We have a polymarket segment coming up, and I go through a polymarket on a daily basis to keep tabs of what people are interested in best. betting on predicting whatever phrase you want. Sometimes, though, I'm a little surprised that there's

analogs elsewhere in the market. We talked the other week about the NBA finals and how Polly Market was essentially handicapping that event. Well, we also have sports betting that has odds. There's things about the Fed and so forth. People are also making bets on Fed movement in other parts of the market. So what I kind of like about these isn't that they're always creating new territory of information, but they're bringing what you're bringing what you used to be relatively spread out information into a single location. I think that's great for people who don't have access to, you know, expensive financial information or every betting platform, for example.

Yeah, it's, uh, it's just the start. These things are going to get bigger and bigger. And they're kind of acting in real time now. So that is one of the nice things about them. Whatever's happening in the world, they will pop one up for. And, you know,

there are infinite applications. for these, from the entertainment value of them, to people who actually have skin in the game and need to hedge some outcomes. So if you lived, I don't know, somewhere during fire season, instead of buying insurance, you know, maybe you buy a contract. And, you know, what's the chances that there are huge fires in this area, Santa Rosa, right? Or, you know, Napa. Sure. The chances there's a major fire that burns over four. 500 acres in Napa, it's a, whatever it is, a 5% chance. Okay, your house is worth a million dollars. You decide, you know what? Every year, I'm just going to put $5,000 on that outcome

happening. Eventually, I might hit it. If I don't hit it, great. My house didn't burn down, and I just don't get insurance. So there's going to be really interesting concepts like that. Maybe you do this for your car. Maybe you do it for other situations like that, right? All these insurance concepts might be able to be done by prediction markets. And it's a really exciting future. Yeah. So prediction markets then become sports betting, economic markets, insurance replacements, and a way to get rid of CNBC all at once. How can you not love it? Yeah. I mean, we don't have to get rid of CNBC. It just becomes a tool for CNBC, right? And I think that's what you're starting to see is people mentioning it in news stories like we do here.

Right. In fact, that's why I wanted to do the deal we did with Polymarket. We have a deal with them here and then All In has a deal with them. And part of the deal is they'll pop up markets for us or we have a fast track to making markets with them. And that's really good for us. So we could create a market right now on the chance that, you know, who does the most rides in ride hailing, you know, or the chances that Travis buys Pony AI. We could literally make a prediction market for that. So you could bet on the public stock. Pony AI. You might be able to trade secondaries in cloud kitchens. I don't think they allow it, but theoretically you could. And you could create a polymarket. So imagine that. If you had three of those bets going, it's all different ways to hedge and understand the world better. I just love that this exists. What I really love about it for young people, for commentators, for journalists, for, you know, people who are hosts of shows is you have to up your game. You really have to be thinking in bets and understanding possible outcome.

So I just think everybody's going to get much smarter. I think it makes you smarter. I'm learning stuff from Polly Market. I picked a market for us today and I was trying to think what is something that Jason loves and I know you and Lawn,

producer Lahn, are big fans of movies and I'm a big fan of Formula One. And I happen to find a Polly Market that makes everyone happy. So if you take a look at this right here, people over on Polly Market are making bets about how well the upcoming F1 movie

with Brad Pitt is going to do in its opening weekend, not aggregate performance, not total box office, not lifetime sales, not ranking on rotten tomatoes. Just open weekend. Open weekend. Very simple, very easy to find out. And to my surprise, after I looked through this data, which if you can't see the video here,

there's currently a 52% chance that it opens and does more than 55 million in its first weekend. 35% people think 51 to 55 and then 11% 46 to 51 and then below that's a little bit lower. But what's interesting, Jason, is that this is constantly. contrary to what the market currently thinks. I looked into it, and according to reporting from variety, the insiders in the film industry think $30 to $40 million worth of ticket sales in the first weekend. Polymarket folks are saying, actually, it's going to be higher. So we're going to have a fun test year of who's right. But everyone's thinking this movie is going to do quite well. I pull the list of the largest opening weekends in the U.S. this year, and $55 million would put it

ranked at 7th. So, not bad. Yeah, I think this is where you can start to wonder why, right? Why does the film industry think it's going to do worse than this market and then how this reconcile? So there could be some reconciliation of this wager bet, prediction market that causes that kind of difference. And so it might be how they record the weekend, if they're including Thursday, Friday, Saturday, international versus domestic. Like, who knows. But that's the devil's in the details. You got to get into that.

I guess the box office has been terrible. People don't go to the movies anymore. But F1 is, you know, riding a really hot wave. So it has some sort of endemic audience. So that's, I guess, what you're betting here. I mean, if I was going to take this, I would go with, I think I'm taking the under. So I might take the first couple of categories, like under,

maybe I put the bet on. 51 million and under. So I would take like 51 and under. And I guess that takes you down to 47 and under. I would take some combination of the under. I don't think it's that strong. The odds are quite great because people only are giving it a 2% chance to come under a 43 million in the first weekend. There is, by the way, on the polymarket page, if you're curious, a lengthy rule section that breaks down the exact length of the weekend and so forth. If you want to get deep into it, I'm just glad that people are making wagers on my interest, very happy. It's kind of interesting when you look at it.

Minecraft movie, $162 million opening, Lilo and Stitch, which is IP, Captain America, IP, How to Train Your Dragon, IP, Thunderbarts, IP, Mission Impossible, IP, Final Destination Bloodlines, IP. So we take all those together, and everything is IP-based. IP-based as in like, you know, these are sequels or based on a video game, with a big following. Now, is F1 IP-based or not? I think it is, right? I think it is. Yeah, I think it falls under that bucket. Yeah, like Minecraft does, right? So it exists in the world

with a fan base. So that would argue that it's going to do well. I don't know how big it is. That actually might be how I back into this. How many Minecraft players are there versus how many people in America, how many people play Minecraft versus how many people watch F1 in America? and then you might be able to figure out how does those two things relate, right? That could be very interesting. And then you could do it with the Barbie movie, like how many people buy Barbies every year or have Barbies and Lesteries. There's some sharp person in the world who is doing this who works at a movie studio.

And then there's an even smarter person who works at home and hangs out on Reddit or in the Polymarket forums also doing this. So to the point, there's like a career of being a sharp person. here and figuring out what you could correlate with these things. Yeah. If you're a startup founder, you got a million things to worry about. You got hiring, product market fit, customers, investors, board meetings. It never ends. And that's where Pilot comes in. Pilot is the largest accounting firm built for startups. They know how high stakes your finances are, right? The book's got to be perfect. And that's why companies like Open AI, scale AI.

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focus on your product. Let Pilot handle your bookkeeping. This week in startup's listeners, get $1,200 off their first year. What a generous offer. Go to pilot.com slash twist. Great domain name. Even better product. Seeing some investors become the world's best investigative journalists. I mean, every short seller does reams of research, right? Hindenberg or someone else drops a report. It's in depth. And all that would go to making the prediction markets more accurate to give us a better view of what's going on in the world. So shout out, Polymarker for all that they do. We love taking a look. Jason, I want to talk a little bit about Open AI and Microsoft. They're in an interesting TIF right now, and I'm hoping to talk about what founders should think about

strategics. Just for folks who don't know, right now, Open AI, the famous AI Foundation model company, is trying to rejigger its corporate structure. Essentially, Jason, form a public benefit corporation so that way it can't eventually go public. There's a stumbling block called Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft. who not only wants a large equity chunk in that business, but also wants protections for his own company, not a surprise given the money he's put in. But the current sticking point is not so much the equity stake.

It's more about the definition of AGI. Now, that matters because in the initial OpenAI Microsoft contract, once AGI is reached by Open A.I. AGI being artificial general intelligence, then they don't have to get their technology to Microsoft anymore. Otherwise, they have to share it until 2030. And so as the two companies are trying to sort out this marital dispute, you might say, there's actually a really tough problem of figuring out what AGI is and when have you reached it.

And Jason, I don't think anyone has the perfect definition of what AGI is. Shouldn't that be in the contract? AGI is in the contract? The definition was sufficiently squishy that Microsoft was worried about that at the time. But they decided that one, they were behind enough in AI that they were just going to do the deal anyways. And also, keep in mind, a couple years ago, AGI wasn't this thing with a three to five-year timeline. It was, well, maybe in 2,200, we'll have it. So it's kind of bitten them a little bit in the backside.

Is the definition in the contract been released or discussed by anybody leaked? I have not seen any language leaked about the formal wording about a definition of AGI. But I do have some notes from Satya about how he thinks about it that might provide a little bit of context. So, I mean, human level intelligence and the ability to learn and understand as if you were human is what most people say. There's also super intelligence, which is like a new term people are throwing around. You know, this is going to be very easy for, I predict, depending on what's in the contract.

And if anybody has the contract, please send it to us or send it to me, Jason at calicanus.com. I'm curious what exactly it says in the contract, because the devil would be in the details here. And if it was, if it does come down to that definition, that would take years to litigate. That would be like an unprecedented legal case. So if that does happen, I think Microsoft can run out the clock here and cause massive damage to open eyes, ability to flip. And when they say public benefit corporation, which you want to make sure people are aware of that is. It's just, it's a corporation. It's not a nonprofit. It just means it has a stated mission and it's no different than a for-profit. Shares will trade, publicly trade it. It's essentially

a virtue signaling for profit. If you want a virtue signal, start a B corporation. You can look it up online, but essentially you state a mission, I don't know, to index the world's information to make it freely available to people. And then the board has to take that into consideration along with the shareholders. It means nothing. It was a clever way for, I think, open AI to put a little shine on this and maybe say, oh, well, we're still going to be a benefit corporation. We're not going to, you know, just like a nonprofit. A nonprofit is distinctly different than a for-profit or a benefit corporation. A benefit corporation is exactly the same as a for-profit with that little tiny nuance. It has nothing to do with a nonprofit. They have a certain amount of time to do this.

What happens if Open AI cannot flip to a for-profit? Because wasn't the Masadio somehow connected? Because he was going to invest some tens of billions of dollars that they need. But that would require them to be a for-profit. Yeah. So I think there's an enormous amount of pressure on the two companies to come to a deal. And look, there's been a lot of reporting about tensions between the two businesses already. This is just one layer on top of it. And by the way, Jason, the journal reports that to declare AGI, the Open AI board just has to do so in quote good faith. Now, Microsoft could respond with a suit, but there's not some like iced out formal definition that I can see from the reporting that would say, here's the definition

you have to meet. So this seems like a pretty big miss on Microsoft's part back at the negotiating table years ago. But if they don't let Open AI convert and if the relationship falls apart, then I guess Microsoft just gets access to their tech through 2030 and then they walk away from each other. They have access to the weights and the whole model so they don't need OpenAI. They get that. Oliver is saying here, the two companies report portally signed an agreement last year stating Open AI has only achieved AGI when it develops AIS systems that can generate at least the 100 billion in profits. Is that a quote, Oliver?

Or is that, hmm, that's a tech question? My understanding of that, there's a higher level of AGI called sufficient AGI. And that is predicated on the ability of the systems to generate enough money to essentially repay Microsoft, which is a slightly different point than the AGI point, which is the technology shifting points. There's actually two different competing definitions.

But we're not an AGI yet. I think the idea of having another layer above that is today about as far fetched as AGI I felt three or four years ago. So I open it in that book. Let's stick to my point here for a second. This is in that story from TechCrunch. This is what I was referring to.

Open AI can also declare a higher tier of AGI called sufficient AGI when its AI systems are financially capable of paying Microsoft to future profits to which it is entitled. That I believe is the same $100 billion milestone that TechCrunch is reporting. Okay. So Open AI can decide they hit AGI if they generate $100 billion in profits. They're at $10 billion in revenue. They're at zero billions in profit. To make $100 billion in profits would be,

they would probably need to have, I don't know, if they had a 50% margin, they would have to be at $200 billion, they'd be 20 times. They're not going to grow 20 times anytime soon. That's a colossal amount of revenue. Huge. So they're not going to hit that.

So then there's somewhere, which we don't have, another definition of AGI that's in that contract. Is that? am I correct in my understanding? Starting at the lower tier, OpenAI's board can say, we've reached AGI. The requirement is good faith, and at that point, they don't longer have to share technology with Microsoft.

The higher tier is when their systems are able to generate some enormous amount of money. Tech rents is $100 billion. The journal says the ability to repay Microsoft all of its future profits. Essentially, these are escape hatches for Open AI to break free from its ties to Redmond. But I don't think we're going to see either one. broached, breached, broken through. Because my guess here, Jason, is that this is a lot of spitting on each other in public to kick the tires on a deal they're going to land in private.

Like, do you actually think there's a chance that these two companies cannot find a deal that works for both sides? Well, Satya and Adela, he makes this point I see in the notes here. Us self-claiming some AGI milestone, that's just nonsensical benchmark hacking to me. The real benchmark is the world growing at 10%. So he's putting it on, and this was on the quantum. What podcast is this? I forget his name.

It's the Duarcash podcast. Duarcash podcast. So I guess he sees this coming and he is sort of getting ahead of this negotiation and saying that publicly. Wall Street Journal says, the contract only requires that open AI's board to clear AGI in good faith, though Microsoft could easily sue the company in response, risking a drawn-out go about it. Okay. So to be more clear here, I think the clearest way to say this is open AI can do it anytime they want. Good faith is a very squishy term. So they will probably

do that at some point and then Microsoft will sue them. There's also this nonsensical, massive amount of capital that could be a massive amount of profits that could also trigger it since that's not going to happen. This is going to come down to one person claiming it, the other person not claiming it. And based on what Satya Nadella has said here, he's not going for that definition. So he's going to wreak havoc on open AI, is my prediction. He's going to slow roll this.

He is going to scuttle them in order. This is what a cutthroat person would do. A cutthroat person would, and Satya is one of those, this is a pretty significant competitor they have. And he will make their lives miserable, sue them, block anybody from investing, claim all kinds of interference, and not allow them to get away with it. They will try to get away with it. And then the question is, does this become so distracting over the coming years that it will give Microsoft and consequently other competitors the ability

to beat OpenEI who has run away with it in terms of consumer adoption? So I think that's what's going on here. I would have bet you $100 you were going to say, look, they're going to sort it out. This is just them, you know, picking a fight in public. Okay, so that actually makes further interest. No, there's no upside to picking a fight in public. The upside is in winning the, whatever the AI race is worth. So if you put it through that lens, Microsoft's biggest competitor is Open AI. Microsoft's biggest competitor is Open AI.

Everybody's biggest competitor is Open AI. If everybody goes to Open AI to solve every business problem, every search, they're competing against Microsoft Office. They're competing against, uh, the hardware platform Apple has with their new Johnny Ive product. They're competing against every piece of SaaS software in the world. That's what AGI would do. Therefore, his most strategic mission is to win AI.

Therefore, he has to beat Open AI. What's the best way to beat Open AI is to have all their technology, build parallel technology. So you've got all their innovations, plus your own, then starve them from compute while you build up your compute, force them to try to raise money to keep up with the compute race, and then they can't keep up with the compute race because you just blocked Masa from investing. So what Microsoft should do is sue anybody who wants to invest in Open AI and say, this company is stealing from us, there did something, you know, untoward, and then that might scare Masa from investing in it, right?

I well that is very Machiavellian and Satya as a person that I have known historically a little bit always very nice in person I've never done a deal with him so I'm going to take your your word on that Jason but I want to loop this back to startups because I'm curious what the lesson here is because when they signed this deal it was strategic people were very excited about it do investments from strategic partners into startups often go wrong clearly on a lower scale but like Is this a common situation to be it? The only reason for a strategic to invest in a startup is to own their business eventually and because they see them as a threat.

Okay. That's it. People will delude themselves into thinking that there is some kumbaya, you know, future world in which everybody gets along and splits revenue as this contract tried to do. This was something Sam needed to do desperately to get. get money and to get compute power. He did it. It is a mess. And it's all, and then he did the same thing with the corporate structure. He needed bucket loads of money, so he did a nonprofit. So now he's got to fix that mess. He then had a mess of a board who was missionaries. And he had to get through

that and win a power struggle internally and all his co-founders left to start competing products. So he's got three battles he set up here. One, with the people who funded the nonprofit, one with the co-founders of the company and the board who wanted to do a mission-driven company, one with the state attorney generals to make this a for-profit, and then one with Microsoft. I mean, he's battling four or five things that rocked the foundation of this company. And at the same time, he's built this incredible skyscraper on top of this foundation. Now, does that mean the skyscraper is going to fall? It's quite possible that any of these could be I don't want to say like it would kill the company,

but it could make it impossible to flip into a for-profit. They might not be able to flip into a nonprofit or it might be massively costly. What if they have to give the nonprofit all the profits up until some grand number or they're in litigation with Microsoft and become so distracting that something comes out in discovery? I mean, it sounds crazy, but this is a distraction

that even Sam Altman, and this is an amount of convoluted structure that even Sam Altman might not be able to navigate. And he's really good at navigating these things. Clearly, he's a dealmaker. So, yeah. But then again, success tends to solve all problems, but it didn't for YouTube, right? YouTube had to sell. So you look at the YouTube situation. They had massive amounts of lawsuits. They were not able to get out from under those. They wound up selling the asset, and then it was Google's job to settle these. Maybe that's what happens here. I don't, there's not somebody who's capable of buying a $350 billion company right. now, maybe Apple, maybe Invidia, Microsoft.

Maybe they could. The top four or five companies. Yeah. Ah, see, I like that. That would be an audacious deal between two parties. By the way, great moment for a polymarket. Will Microsoft and Open AI resolve this deal before August 31st? I would take the other side of that one.

But on the point about there being quite a lot of competition in the space, we do have some news from the meta side of things. Meta, of course, a social network company and also owns now a VR business and an AI business. So meta is building a quote super intelligence team. Jason mentioned that term earlier in the show. And they are out into the world trying to hire people that are well-known AI researchers, the best of the best, essentially. Well, they have snagged three people from OpenAI's Zurich office. That's Lucas Bayer, Alexander Kolesnikov and Shahou Asai. And as far as I can tell just now, I was trying to really nail this down, but I'm like 90% sure. That's the entire Open AI Zurich office.

So they essentially just, they hired these three people. Originally, the three were from Google DeepMind. They stayed with Open AI for a bit. And now the three are going to their third company, Meta, to work on the superintelligence team. There's been a lot of speculation in the market about how much money Meta is willing to pay for this talent. And people were saying, hey, we've heard of this $100 million number. Maybe these guys got it.

Well, Lucas Baer did a tweet or an ex post, if you will. And he says, yes, we are joining Meta, but no, we did not get $100 million sign on. I'm sorry. I was hoping they were going to, but they have publicly confirmed the transfer of talent over to meta. Kind of a coup is my read, Jason. I think this is quite a good result for Zuck. Maybe. I guess the question is, are these truly A players or not?

And will they truly make a difference? It is talent. Talent is moving because talent might have been mispriced last year, given what Zuck is willing to pay now. So almost everybody's contract is mispriced right now. So that means either people have to renegotiate with their current employer or get a competing offer to do it. The question I would have is for these three individuals on their LinkedIn, when, how long

were they at deep C, deep mind at Google? That's their AI subsidiary. How long were that open AI? And then how long are they now that they're at Meta? that second piece of date is the key. Where that Open AI for a year, for five years, if it's four years, they're fully vested. You know, if it's two or three years, they're two thirds vested, et cetera. So looking at this, just looking at one of them, Alexander, was at Google for six years, eight months, obviously did really well.

He's a member of the technical staff, and he was a staff research scientist at Deep Mind. he's only been at Open A.I for seven months. Same thing with Lucas Baer, seven months, six years, four months at Google on the DeepMine team. So these people are moving. And what about the third person? I had not pulled them up yet. I'm on it. Is five months.

So this is super interesting. They all spend five, six, seven years at DeepMind. They've only been at Open AI for five months. And that is super interesting. They were, yeah, wow. Not much. Not much. And they came as a team.

They came as a group and they're leaving as a group. Interesting. They must be just besties over in Zurich. Just three nerds really good at AI and join chocolate. I guess, you know, this is the thing. Deep Mind was based in Europe and I think there were a lot of people. Yeah, based there. Interesting.

Interesting that Zai, Zhao, who is in Zurich now, went to Nanjing University and Peking University where he got his PhD. Too incredibly well-known and prestigious. That's like Harvard and Stanford if you need a comp. Chinese PhD, right?

And this is like, you know, what we need to keep in the United States. So this race is international, as you can see. And yeah, there's going to be a lot of talent moving around.

I wonder if there's like, this is like the world's smallest union because these three left deep mind to open AI together and they're leaving to, to, and now. Did they just have like a pact between the three of them? Like we only go as a group. If you want one, you get all three. They probably are working together on some projects. So if we were to look up

like their names in papers, that's, you know, I think what I heard Zuckerberg is doing. He's looking at people's research papers, finding people's name and research papers, getting the email addresses, contact information, WhatsApp, phone numbers, whatever, and he's personally reaching out to them to discuss these things. So we're talking about a small cohort of low hundreds of people who are in these research papers, who are leaders in this. All right, so you pulled up Lucas Baer, who got poached by OpenEI, spent five or six years at DeepMind, and this is Google Scholar that shows his citation. So what we can see here in the top right in this chart, if you're watching us, is how many times he was cited.

And you'll see who he was cited with. And if you look on the right underneath that graph, who are the top two people? The other two people that he's joining meta with, his besties. Yes. So Jay and Alexander are, I guess, the people who have collaborated with him a bunch. And what you're seeing here is he works in vision.

So these are vision, it looks like. everything he's done, lots of articles here and vision models. So this means this is the vision team from Open AI. They probably worked on what's the Open AI vision product? There's SORA and then they released their new studio Ghibli thing. Yeah. So this is SORA. This is probably members of the SORA team.

And so they have it, folks. If you want to understand where to find these people, go to Google Scholar, go to LinkedIn. You can see the background. This is what a recruiter is doing for Zuck. And Mira, who also was doing SORA, remember she left to do her own startup. There was just news she raised $2 billion at a $10 billion evaluation.

Is that right? Thinking machine labs. Yeah. Okay. So now you have her leaving. And this is an amazing way to frame all this, Alex. If you build a mental model. Okay.

$10 billion in market cap was just created by Mira. Right? Yep. Proplexity's got tens of billions of dollars in market cap. Meta has decided that their next trillion dollars in market cap is going to come from this. All of that opens up stock and future equity that people can start claiming now. So it's almost as if we went from, if you thought about it in a real estate way, okay, we had a certain number of acres in Manhattan.

Now, what if Manhattan became 10 times bigger? Now you've got 10 times as much land to divvy amongst a small group of people, these PhDs, who are extremely valuable. People are starting to realize the market opportunity is bigger than people anticipated. Zucks realized that. Miras realized that. Investors have realized that. Now, all that equities sitting on a cap table. So Mira's got to go, okay, what do I have to give these folks?

I'll give them 1% of her new company. What's her new company called? Thinking Machine Labs. Great. So this would be a good opportunity to pull it up if there's a web page. So if she's got Thinking Machine Labs, let's say she wants to give, she created a cap, in the cap table a 20% equity pool. Let's say she wants to get 10 of these great scientists here.

She might say, okay, 10% of the pool is going to go to the top 10 people I can find. That's $100 million in equity each. Each point is worth $100 million. What's XAI worth? They combined it with Twitter and they put it out $100 billion evaluations I think I read they were raising at. So if that's $100 billion, and half of it was Twitter and half of it was Twitter and half of was the new company, that's $60 billion. Each point of market cap, there is worth $600 billion. So maybe they're offering, I don't know, 20 bibs to everybody that equals $120 million in equity. So everybody in the space is worth $100 billion in equity. You know what? A hundred million in equity. You know what that meant? Like 10 years ago, you know what these people were worth? They were worth $1 million each. Now they're worth $100. X. It's an insane amount of money.

And it's predicated on everyone being right that these companies will all stay worth as much as they are because thinking machines is only a startup now with an illiquid stock. So its market cap is not the same. But I love your point. And I think it just goes to sure that meta's not nuts to go out there today and use all their capital to get these people. Not crazy at all. It makes total sense that we're living in a world where this small group of talent who can make an impact. You know, it reminds me of it's Hollywood.

If you go to Hollywood and this is. why Michael Ovitz was coveted by Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. When they started Andreessen Horowitz, they were thinking about developers and CEOs the way Ovidz thought about Stephen Spielberg, the director, Michael Crichton, the author, you know, and Tom Cruise and, you know, other actors, Tom Hanks, etc. They looked at them as like these incredible assets with a very small, finite number of them that could actually make Jurassic Park, that could actually make Mission Impossible, whatever movie it was. And that's what we're seeing in our industry. And that vision existed 10, 20 years ago for talent. But now I think it's manifesting because of this massive. And people

have to make a bet. Is this film that I'm doing that I have points in actually going to pay off? In the case of Jurassic Park, it did pay off. All those actors and screenplay writers, directors, they all had massive upside in the eventual product. One thing we've talked about, Jay is how we're going to have like the world's best driver and that's going to train the AI models and then everyone's going to have access to that best person. Just as kind of a corollary, I think we're seeing the individuals at the absolute furthest end of the talent and impact spectrum see their relative earnings compared to the top performers go up, which kind of feels like a similar thing, like a concentration of economic value at the apex

of labor and maybe less elsewhere on the curve. During this transition, definitely the concept of, of people who understand machine learning and who can build large language models and train them as a small number of people right now. That will not be a small number of people forever. If you are in computer science right now, you know what to study. Just get in there and start building because this is a 10-year story, folks. We'll be sitting here 10 years from now and there'll be a bunch of graduates going, man, I should have done that. Yeah, you should have. Do it now. Now is the time. If you want to stand out, internships are great, but everyone's competing for the

same thing. I think the best thing you can do to get a job right now is to somehow go viral on Twitter with an interesting project because every single potential employer will see you and they might reach out to you directly. You'll have access to the CEO versus the junior person on the you know, HR recruiting staff that doesn't even know your name. So don't go through the front door. These folks are not going to, yeah, if you've got this kind of skill level build products with your friends and start a company and email me and apply to Found University or Accelerator, that's the other thing that's great here is any of these people, those three people could have left and raised $50 million, $100 million with an idea.

So they probably explored that. Maybe they didn't want to be founders, and they just decided, and I've been meeting academics who are starting companies now, first-time founders who spent their time getting their PhDs and who are academics have no idea how to run a company. So we'll see. It's going to be very interesting to watch. It should be quite entertaining. I know this is going off base here from our last topic, but I was talking to

I'll keep this very generic. I was talking to the syndicate yesterday. I was the, I did a presentation for the meeting and such. Yeah. This is the syndicate.com for people who don't know. I have an angel syndicates. Got 11,000 members,

4,000 have done a deal. We've done 300 deals. We share our deal flow with them. And we're increasingly sharing their deal flow with each other. So it doesn't compete with Angelus, but it's just my little curated, a club of investors. One thing that surprised me was how much people wanted to talk about

improving the connection between academia and business. And I thought this has been, you know, we've been talking about companies coming out of Cambridge for so long now. You think that it would be a solved issue, but they talked a lot about the pipeline problems of getting people off of tenure track positions and so forth and end industry. So if you're seeing academics do more of this, maybe something's breaking loose. Maybe the ice is finally cracking a bit because I think we could use a lot more of our ivory tower talent out, you know, kind of fighting in the streets. This is the investors are interested in that talent because of this specific opportunity. We've seen it before. Nanotechnology, material science, 3D printing. We had a moment where investors were like, you know what? I want to invest in a 3D printing company. I want to invest in nanotechnology. Where are the nanotech founders? And it's like, yeah, there's like 50 people who have written papers about nanotechnology. And literally investors would go look at those papers and then go meet those people and say, hey, is there a commercial application for this? And they'd be like, I don't know.

I'm just writing papers, and then you have to make a decision. Do you want to leave, license it, etc.? All of these universities have IP departments that license out their innovations, and then they can make significant money on it. I'm curious what the largest amount of money, MIT or Stanford,

I wonder what the largest amount of money they made doing technology transfers, the category. There must have been some interesting technologies that came out of those labs, that wound up in a license that generated massive amounts. And usually they're licensed about 5, 10% for a royalty or something, as opposed to getting equity. So you negotiate a royalty.

So if the company's really successful, they just have to keep paying for that license indefinitely. And then, you know, the devil's in the details of how much you pay for that. You know, surprisingly, the answer to your question is not imminently findable. But I'm going to mark that down and bring that to us next time we do a show. because I want to know that, and I want to do that in detail, because I think that's a really interesting place. I think they're pretty promiscuous with it.

In other words, I don't think that they try to extract as much value as they probably could. If they were really trying to extract value, they would start their own venture firm or have some venture partners in there. But, you know, instead, the endowments partner with venture firms, give them money, and they probably have some connective tissue there, right? If Stanford's endowments in a dozen venture firms probably, they probably tee them. we'll do introductions between their top talent and those firms.

And then they make the money there because it's not their best skill set or use of time. I don't know, man. You Chicago, my alma mater has $10.4 billion. I think it could crack off a bit of that. And invest. They also have a business school and they have a great economic. I mean, come on. That does seem like a best opportunity.

They do. They invest in venture firms. So the question is, would they want to have a venture firm internally, that seeded things, et cetera? and I think they've made the decision. It's like it's too much in the weeds and they should just let the capital markets figure it out because they're more aggressive.

Ring ring, ring. Universities are lazy? Huh, news at 11. Like, come on now. I did a pitch competition at UChicago at Booth when I was an undergraduate and my team won. Good times. There are so many smart people.

And now it's easier to start a company. So I think even if that was the right perspective 10 years ago, Jason, missed opportunity if they're not doing this. The first university venture fund that's run by professionals and invest in their students is going to be...

Also creates a little bit of a problem if the venture firm actually hits a Google and then those venture capitalists make a billion dollars each. Everybody who gave them the money and seeded it is really upset. This is why corporate venture

has a problem. Like if you're in Intel, like you're getting a salary, why are these people getting all this upside? I'm not. That's why they tend to spin them out. But, you know, is what it is. All different ways to do things.

Do we have any founder questions for me? Yes, we do. We actually have one that I'm really excited to bring up because this one really resonates with me. All right, so pulling from our dear friends over on the entrepreneur subreddit Jason, this is a founder who has built a business that people want but is struggling with one key point.

I'm just going to read a little bit of this for everyone listening in. I have a killer business setup, but I hate sales, help desperately needed. I've been at this for two. years, I go to sleep every night beating up myself for not being capable of pushing myself to sell. My biz is in the payment processing niche. Every deal I make I can get between 100 bucks a month to 10,000 bucks a month. All I have to do is sell, sign, set it up, and boom. I make money.

My issues that I hate sales with a burning passion. I really hate cold sales. That's really like where you get the massive amount of rejection. That first email, that first phone call, yeah. So for this founder, how do you get over yourself, get over your anxiety? anxiety and go out there and be shameless. So founder-led sales are important early on because you learn about your product and how the market perceives it. Here, he seems to have product market fit already to some extent. If it was really strong product market fit, people would be ordering it online. If there was no product market fit, he would not have said this key sentence, I can make anywhere from $100 a month to $10,000 a month in just one deal. So obviously there is

some product market fit here. And he actually says that. All I have to do is, do is sell signs, set it up, and boom, I make money. But he hates the cold sales problem. That's because when you do cold sales, if you're not qualifying the leads or you're in that process, it's going to be nine out of ten people, 99 out of 100. Depending on how qualified they are, are going to be like, please stop bothering me. I don't want to do this. There are people who love that rejection. They take it as like a badge of honor. Now he says later in his thing here, I can sell warm leads easy. I have always worked those jobs. So what he needs to do is learn and take the same enthusiasm he had for creating his product to creating a replicable sales process. And that process

should be, here are the people who I have sold to go find me more like that. You can do that with an Athena system. Go to Athenawow.com, hire one, have them set up the leads. You could do that with AI. There's AI solutions to start doing this. Or you could hire a college grad for but 50K a year to sit next to you and do these first calls. You write them a script. You tell them what to do and you tell them, listen, it's going to suck. But every time you do sell somebody, I'm going to give you a $500 commission. Whatever the first month is, I'm going to give you the first month up to $1,000, whatever it is. And if they stayed a month six, you know, we'll have a customer support person and a customer success person, they get month six. So you get $1,000.

you sell it, they get $1,000 in month six. So you set up an incentive and then you see an outcome. So this person just needs to understand that their chores suck. Nobody likes doing chores. There's some dishes in my sink here. I got to put them in the dishwasher. Nobody likes doing that. It sucks. But eventually you train people, you know, maybe your kids or you get a, you know, a housekeeper and you teach them how to do it. And it's off your plate. So, so to speak. That's all they have to do here. a challenge, just like building your product was a challenge. Get people who really do a good job at it and move on. It's chores. It sucks. And you'll get through it. And just take yourself out of that product. Do the first 10 and you'll be fine. Hiring sucks. Salespeople are difficult people to manage.

At least the effective ones. No. No. Effective ones are a pain in the ass. Yeah. The more effective. So here's the correlation. The better you are at sales, the harder you are to manage. It's almost a perfect correlation. As the sales number comes up, the salesperson has more opinions. They have more hootspah. They have more dexterity. They have the better ability to communicate. They have a better ability to communicate with each other. Therefore, they're going to treat the customer in the same way they treat you as their boss. Why can't this be better? Don't you want the solution? Don't you want me to succeed? Don't you want this product? They're going to use that same chutzpah, that same zeal, that same convincing energy against you as the least.

of the company. So when you have one of these people and they're difficult, embrace it. Congratulations. You did it. You found a great salesperson. Go find two more. And then tell them upfront, my lord, you're so great at your job and you're so difficult to deal with. Isn't that funny? And then just laugh about it with them and go get a beer. Yeah. And just because the other option is they sell 10% as much, 20% as much, and they're easy to get along with. And then they're so easy to get along with. They don't want to bug the customers to, you know, sell them something. These are unique individuals in all the world. Learn to do this and you'll unlock it. And also, salespeople that are that good, full employment, any market, any economy, if you can

actually sell, I had a lot of friends that were working in tech sales back in the 14, 15, 16, and they did great. And it was lovely and fun to see them succeed. All right, everybody, this has been another amazing episode of this week in startups. this week in storeups.com slash docket if you want to see us building the docket follow us on TikTok, Twitter, all the other places and cautious optimism.com. Am I correct with the URL? Or cautious optimism.com news if you're so inclined. Oh, you have the dot news.

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