This Week in Startups - What we'll learn from Anthropic's $2-$3T IPO | E2325

Starting point is 00:00:00 All right, everybody, it's Twist. It's Friday. August 14th, Lon Harris is here. Follow him at L-O-N-S on Twitter. Here is media recommendations and Trump's Arrangement Syndrome. Just plenty of stuff there for you. And you can follow me on that. Jason, you can hear me intelligently dunking on Trump delightful syndrome.

Starting point is 00:00:20 No, Trump dedication syndrome. It's not a political show. But, you know, I've got to tell you, Lon, I got a couple things. It's enough already. Yeah. Somebody in the audience make a jingle. If you make a great jingle or a great interstitial with Jake, I'll say enough already or it's enough already, I'll send you like 100, 200 bucks in X money.

Starting point is 00:00:40 Make a jingle. Share it on TwitterX. At mention us because it's enough already. It's enough already with two things. I've had enough with transcribing everything. I was just on a board call. I had to go around the horn, six people on a call. Please certify that you're,

Starting point is 00:00:59 not using granola, Zoom notes, recording, notion recording, any of it. It's enough already with the transcripts. With the AI note taker, every meeting you have now, you've got eight AI note takers. It feels weird. It feels like you've got an audience, even when you're alone in the Zoom. Enough already. Enough already with the note takers. Second enough already. Is it back to back enough already? Because I like applaud. I got enough applaud. But I opened up Zon. I opened up Zoom today. Zoom, you're doing too much. Yeah. This is what my mom said to me when I was running marathons.

Starting point is 00:01:35 I'm going to school at night. I'm working three jobs. And you're doing too much. I had an Irish Jewish mother. Sure. You're doing too much. Look at this. Pop it up on the screen.

Starting point is 00:01:46 I just shared it in the Zoom chat. This is my message to Zoom. You're doing too much. I don't need slack in Zoom. I'm trying to get on a goddamn call, Zoom. I don't want to describe the agent I want to build. Yeah. What are we doing here?

Starting point is 00:02:01 Peding with my agents on, you know, Claude, Erme's OpenClaw, everybody wants an agent. Benioff wants me to use his agents and Slack. It's too much already. Where we just talked about this? Enough already. Like everybody wants to be notion now. You've got a notion and a slack inside literally everything. Like you go to-

Starting point is 00:02:21 Slack added notion. Yeah. You go right. You go to like buy hot sauce and it's like, why is there a notion and a slack inside this hot sauce store? Literally, I was at In-N-Out Burger, and after they gave me my number, and it was like, would you like to create an agent and transcribe this? And I'm like, no, I just wanted, I just wanted animal-style double-double.

Starting point is 00:02:39 That's all I want. This Weekend Startups is brought to you by Odu, the all-in-one business platform. Your first app is free. Get started today at ODO.com slash twist. CLA. Innovation takes balance. CLA's CPAs, consultants, and wealth advisors can help you get from startup to where you want to end up. Get started now at CLA connect.com slash with you and PayPal.

Starting point is 00:03:04 Pay zero processing fees on your first $100,000 in eligible PayPal payment volume. Learn more at PayPal.launch.com. So we got a full show. Oh, my gosh. We got more show than we got time for. You're doing too much and enough already. But there's a lot of news. Sometimes we like to start with whatever the biggest news story of the day is.

Starting point is 00:03:25 What's the biggest news story of the day here on a Friday? I'm going to tell you. I think it is Anthropics. Anthropics plans for their IPO. According to Financial Times, who spoke with a number of insiders, Anthropic plans to seek a valuation of $2 to $3 trillion for their October IPO. That would top the $1.7 trillion record set by SpaceX just a few short months ago. Only five companies in history have ever actually touched the $3 trillion valuation mark.

Starting point is 00:03:53 Investors are expecting Anthropics AR to hit $100 to $120 billion by the end of this year. 43.5% Jason of U.S. businesses currently paid anthropic for subscriptions or tokens in the last month according to new data we got in from Ramp, 39.7% for OpenAI and just 6.2%

Starting point is 00:04:12 for Google's suite of AI tools. So we've got some more anthropic news, but I feel like that's the big headline people want to hear you react to. Okay. Yeah. So it's going to go out at $3 trillion. They're sandbagging with the two trillion. It's going to go out of 30 times top line revenue. It's going to be awesome to look at the

Starting point is 00:04:32 books because we're going to understand their revenue ramp, the composure of their revenue, hopefully they might tell us, like, which are the biggest customers or something along the lines. We'll also get an idea of cost and profitability. They're going to be able to abstract some of that, but it would be interesting to understand, like, what do they spend on salary, stock-based comp as a percentage of that hundred, which is make it $100 billion by the time this thing goes out? what do they spend on compute to do $100 billion in revenue? What is the depreciation and how are they depreciating data centers if they're building them, renting them, or otherwise? And even chips?

Starting point is 00:05:09 I mean, we've been discussing how fast do these chips depreciate is like a huge story as well. Who knows if they're going to have that data in there or if they're just going to tell us, hey, we're renting this stuff. We don't have that. But it will also let us know. Impact is that on Amazon Web Services, Elon Web Services, where are they buying Crusoe Cloud, core weave, where is that money going? And we'll just uncover, like in poker, I kind of feel like we know our whole cards right now. People are using AI. It's incredibly effective. That's our

Starting point is 00:05:39 whole cards. And then an open AI that will unlock, you know, something slightly different than the enterprise-driven compute renting anthropic. Open AI is building data centers. They're making massive commitments. They didn't say we're going to rent from people, right, Lon? So then we'll see what a builder, because they're kind of like a core weave plus Crusoe Cloud plus Elon Web Services and a consumer AI business. So we're going to understand what the consumer is driving. They have a billion people, I guess, using OpenAI chat chippy T. Right.

Starting point is 00:06:14 Some number of those pay $20 a month, $250 a year. How many? Do they have 10 million subscribers? 20 million or 5 million? If they've got 20 million paid subscribers times $20, $20,000, $20,000, a month and they're making 400 a million a month from consumers, which is $5 billion a year. That's nice. It's nice.

Starting point is 00:06:33 But that's 5% of the enterprise-based business that Claude has, right? And we were sitting here 18 months ago and people were like, what's Claude? And boom, it went racing past it. Yeah. I will say on IPOs. Chat GPT was the iconic, like that's the one everybody got introduced to AI as a technology from. And so it's been an amazing shift over the last, I guess, 12, 18 months or so to see, you

Starting point is 00:06:56 Now, Claude is synonymous, and chat GPT is sort of the stepchild. Correct. So here we are, folks. Absolutely amazing to see these three cards. Your flop is SpaceX Anthropic in Q4 as soon as October. It's like eight weeks away, 10 weeks away. And they'll have the road show, so information will leak. It's a $3 billion IPO.

Starting point is 00:07:17 Do I suggest you buy shares at the IPO? I don't suggest you buy any IPO shares. I think, I mean, if you want to get a little tasty poo, but wait, because, in all cases, the bankers and the CEOs price IPOs to perfection, and typically they get a premium in a hot market. So whether it's Figma, whether it was Instacart, Reddit, SpaceX, pick the company. The pop happens, and then very quickly it comes back down to reality when institutions start buying. And so, you know, you could have bought SpaceX at 200 or Figma at some crazy evaluation, 50-60 billion. And then it comes back down to 30 billion, whatever it is. Same thing with,

Starting point is 00:08:00 I think, Instacart Maple Bear, that one went up and done down. So my best advice is own things for a 10-year window, slowly build a position. And I don't think in today's day and age you need to race into IPOs. Just my personal observation. I think the data is with me. You're waiting to get a good deal because you're trying to lock it in long term. We're not day trading here. It's like if you want to own it in 10 years. We're J-trading. We're J-trading. Exactly.

Starting point is 00:08:26 Do you want to hear some more anthropic news before we get to our first guest? Lightning round. So in other news, Anthropic is also in talks to acquire Israeli startup Descartes AI for around $6 billion. This would be their largest acquisition to date. Descartes makes software that helps chips run more efficiently so it would allow Anthropics infrastructure to absorb more demand. By some accounts, they boost throughput by up to 8x, according to some of their literature.

Starting point is 00:08:51 and it works across Nvidia chips, Amazon's Traneum, Google's TPUs, and so forth. They also make Lucy a real-time video generation and transformation model and Oasis, a world model for physics-accurate simulations. The price $6 billion represents a 50% premium over Descartes' prior valuation. So your thoughts on this deal? And is this purely about improving Anthropics margins ahead of this big IPO? All right. One percent of three trillion dollars, I believe, would be $30 billion. They're buying this for $6 billion.

Starting point is 00:09:30 Yeah. You know, so it's literally like 25 basis points of the company. One of the great things about having a public currency, and one of the reasons, in fact, to go public is so you have that currency in order to acquire customers. And President Donald J. Trump has done an exceptional job. As you bring up casually and frequently in our group chat. He's my favorite president, yeah. Yes, and he's done an amazing job with M&A.

Starting point is 00:09:59 M&A is back on the menu. You can buy things again. And these are tickey-tacky acquisitions. Any acquisition under $250 billion, under $100 billion, it's kind of tic-tackey-tacky in the age of trillion-dollar companies. So this is a great sign for liquidity for venture capital. Venture capital went through four or five years in the wilderness. You know, it was like the winter.

Starting point is 00:10:22 And now it's springtime for Trump and M&A. Springtime for Trump and M&A. One other famous world leader has springtime for him. But it's like, I don't know. Springtime for Trump and every day. It's so great. It's great. Founders, we've got a huge offer for you today from my firm launch and our friends at PayPal.

Starting point is 00:10:46 Eligible startups will pay zero PayPal processing fees on their first $100,000 in payment volume. That's right, $0 in fees. PayPal is, of course, an iconic brand. We all know that. We use it. We love it. But there is so much more than just that yellow button. They've built a global payment infrastructure that's designed to scale along with your company. And if you're an AI and SaaS startup, PayPal is already set up for the way you monetize. That means seats, subscriptions, credits, token usage, API consumption, and usage-based pricing. PayPal already works with all the leading billing platforms, and they offer complete flexibility so you can evolve your business model over time without constantly tearing apart your

Starting point is 00:11:28 entire revenue stack. So if you're just starting to build or you're already scaling up pay zero processing fees on your first $100,000 in eligible PayPal payment volume, to find out more, go to PayPal.com. You see how thrilled I am. Why? Because I was like, oh my God, I'm eventually. capitalist an era of no exits. Here we go, baby. Cursor got bought by Elon for $60 billion. This again bought for $6 billion.

Starting point is 00:11:56 Open AIs buying like Johnny Ives company. That's like a design studio for $5, $10 billion. They're buying a $5.10 billion. They're not even thinking about it. They're buying a $200 million podcast with, you know, 20,000 listeners. I mean, it's incredible what's going on here. So let the good times roll. Let the acquisitions happen.

Starting point is 00:12:15 Only one in 10 acquisitions. has to work. So when you see these acquisitions happen, just keep in your mind like a venture portfolio, if one in ten becomes Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp, Android, these were all purchased companies. We're back in the day, PowerPoint, and I think Excel were both purchased, and Word was built in-house for Microsoft. Any of these things can become super accretive to shareholders, and nine out of ten can be right off. So great job to Anthropic. Let's go to our first guest. Oh, and do I have to do a quick pause for the cost? Yeah, sure. Let's talk about row.co. Why not? Let's talk about row.

Starting point is 00:12:57 A little row.com. I am, today I saw 169 on my scale. Wow. At my peak caloric degeneracy, I saw 213. Between those two numbers is about 43, 44 pounds. Yeah. I feel great. And it's thanks to GLP's. You can get on a GLP and check if you can get your insurance to pick it up at row. dot co slash twist. They got an insurance checker. Amazing. Roe.co slash twist.

Starting point is 00:13:30 But something has happened. I have three or four people in my life who didn't like the concept of a shot. You know, I'm a tough guy. You know that one, big tough guy. Doesn't bother you. Yeah. Give me the thickest needle gauge. I don't care.

Starting point is 00:13:43 And so this, you know, even the Ozzypic and my genre, it was like the, the tiniest little thin needle, but it's still freight some people out. I'm not, I didn't like the idea of giving myself a shot every day. You know, it's all those after school specials. That's what I did. When I was growing up, that was like the steroid kids were the ones giving themselves shots in the locker room.

Starting point is 00:14:03 I just, I don't know. It made me, it made me feel a little uncomfortable. But you want to make the big announcement here. My brother, Jamie, lost 20 pounds. He started taking a pill that he got from row. Dotco slash twist. Road. Go slash twist is whether they're going to do the insurance checker.

Starting point is 00:14:16 and you can get this pill, which is, uh, what, once a day, you take a pill? You wake up, you wake up in the morning. You take, it's a tiny little pill. You take a pill. The only real rule, like the only like, you can't is you have to wait a half hour before you drink or eat anything, even water. They're like, don't drink too much water with the pill or it makes the pill not work. It's got to go into like an empty stomach.

Starting point is 00:14:42 So you wake up, so you wake up, you take the pill, you like shower, you start making coffee, you take the dog at whatever, 30 minutes you can have your coffee or whatever, and then you live the rest of the day, and that's it. Okay. Now, I put a contest here. I offered you and Jamie, my brother, uh, who works here at launch and the, and the podcast, $5,000 for each of three milestones. He had set 20 pounds as his first and he hit it. Yeah. I shipped him five dimes. Very quickly. And it was, we'll see if he hits his second and third. And everybody opted into this. There was no coercion except for $15,000. That was the only coercive mechanism. Which Juan doesn't need.

Starting point is 00:15:19 He's a trust fund baby. But tell us, Nepo baby. He's not true. It's not true. You started taking it last week. I did. Where are you at? I'm down.

Starting point is 00:15:28 I've taken it for six days. I started last Saturday. It is now Friday as we're recording this. So not even a full week. I'm down eight pounds so far, which is incredible. That's ridiculous. Look, this is a real photo from this morning. On the way to the studio.

Starting point is 00:15:44 We did ask you to put a shirt on for the show. Please, it's indecent, but, you know, I look good. I look good. I want to show up. But no, I, it looks like you feel good, too. I had not even, I didn't even want to weigh myself yet. I thought I would be discouraged if I weigh myself in the first week. You know, I won't have lost that much.

Starting point is 00:16:02 But my friend who's also done GLP1 says you lose a lot of weight sort of right away. And so I was amazed to take a look and see that I'm down eight pounds already. What's your first? 15. What's your first monster? 15 is my first tier. So look out. I didn't know what'd be this quick.

Starting point is 00:16:17 I didn't know if we're on an honor system here, so it could be honorable. I took photos of the scale, so we can. All right. I can demonstrate it with evidence. I don't want any wide shots of you on the scale buck. So you all, you're zooming it in. No, I'm zooming into just the digital readout, just the digital readout.

Starting point is 00:16:35 Please. You can have all kinds of things happen if you're on a wide shot. I'm very shy. Enough already. All right. There you go. So, thank you to Roe. Yeah, check out.

Starting point is 00:16:44 Road.co slash twist to get your free insurance check and see if it's right for you. It is very easy, by the way. You go and in 10 minutes, they're sending you your pills. It's a low, low impact sign-up procedure. So, road.com slash twist, check it out. All right. Let's bring in our very first guest. He is the CEO and co-founder of Wisewell.

Starting point is 00:17:06 They make a countertop water purification device. We will turn the camera. I have one right here with me in the studio so we can take a look. Fantastic. Sammy. He's Sammy Haraibi. Thanks for being here, Sammy. Great to be here.

Starting point is 00:17:21 Sammy's a friend of mine from the region. So when I go to the region, which is the Middle East, Sammy and I have dinner and we're friends. And he told me about this great idea, which was everybody loves filtered water. People drink a lot of water. They've got to drink more water, yada, yada. And I've been looking for a water system

Starting point is 00:17:42 because I use one of the pitchers. And it's a pain in the ass, but I have a pitcher-based system. Sammy, you created something new. Explain to us what you built and why. Yeah, thank you, Jason. It started Wisewell a few years ago because people in the U.S. and around the world have actually lost their faith in tap water, rightfully so. The average age of a pipe in the U.S. is around 78 years old.

Starting point is 00:18:08 And, you know, we don't expect them to get upgraded in our lifetime. So there's been huge growth in bottled water. also a choice that with the discoveries of microplastics and nanoplastics, have serious health implications and, of course, cost and sustainability issues as well. So started Wisewell to really try to create something which gets people comfortable with water purification, really leading to distributed water infrastructure and drinking water infrastructure. And so we've developed a set of products now that are taking tap water and converting it into premium mineralized water,

Starting point is 00:18:44 but letting you know how it's working and leveraging design that is a lot more aligned with the expectations of today's customer. Yeah, it's beautiful. We can see the system there to the right of lawn. It has an app, and, you know, it's got some science behind it. Explain to us what gets taken out, say, an American water system,

Starting point is 00:19:09 and then what gets put back in? mentioned minerals and everybody likes a little bit of bubbles in their water. And I, when I moved to Texas, started doing this Topichika, so delicious, lots of bubbles. And then everybody's got to break my heart and be like, yeah, don't use Topa Chica. It's got these chemicals in it or whatever, minerals. It's no bueno. So I, I'm always like, I need somebody to solve this problem for me. Tell me the science and how you solve this problem and how you know you solved it. Yeah. So, you know, Jason, what we've done is we've taken what you see in some of the really sophisticated large-scale purification plants and condensed it into something that could fit on your

Starting point is 00:19:46 countertop or as a floor standing unit. So we put a carbon filter, which is what you probably find in your picture, which gets rid of sediment. Some of the chlorine smells and basically a little bit of dirt that's in the water, but doesn't clean it all the way. Because what we're seeing in most taps today are PFA's, forever chemicals, and those require something as robust as reverse osmosis, which is our next step of filtration, that strips the water of everything. Makes it perfectly clean, but makes it flat. Getting great of, you know, the flavor and texture that we're used to with a lot of those delicious waters that you mentioned before. One of the themes we talk about over and over again on this weekend startups is making sure you do your chores. I'm no expert on these things.

Starting point is 00:20:31 I have some experience. Stephen Estes from CLA is an expert. Let's talk about being cash efficient. Tell us about efficiency and what you see in the top tier startups in your practice. We're seeing kind of an interesting trend out there where companies aren't needing to raise quite as much as they had in the past. You really have to be careful as a founder to only take on as much money as you really need. You've got to do the forecast and you've got to do the modeling and you've got to dialed in and get it right. Otherwise, you're going to end up either not raising enough capital to get to where you're going and you're going to have to go get venture debt or go back, have an extender to the round, or you're going to give up too much of the company because you

Starting point is 00:21:09 just didn't recognize how much money actually needed. Yeah, very important to get this stuff right, folks. And that's really a bummer when startups don't do things in a button up. I always have a great partner, a good partner to have on this adventure. While things change, my friend Stephen, over at CLA. So if you want a trusted advisor by your side, who will navigate you through taxes, accounting, and everything in between, it's time to take action. Visit cLA connect.com with you. And don't forget to drop a mention that your boy Jake Al sent you. That's cLacconnect.com slash with you. Start today. And so the last step, and this one was quite interesting, because we worked with a water Somali, who's on our team. There's 250 them in the world. And we really were trying

Starting point is 00:21:55 to find the best way in a sustainable and distributed manner to put the minerals back into the water that would be aligned with the expectations of the top flavors and textures of a premium water. And so we use a natural stone filter that actually distributes sodium, calcium, evenly back into the water, bringing it back to life, bringing the pH back up, all kind of on your countertop, which is the exciting part. Now, that in itself in terms of the filtration is great, but we thought that's not enough because we want to get people fully over the line to switch and understand what a brand led and a design led company focused on purification would look like. And that was really the ethos behind Wisewell. So we spent a lot of time

Starting point is 00:22:42 ensuring that we've got the right industrial design, something that you don't want to hide. You kind of want to point at. Took inspiration from Dyson, what he did with the vacuum and it and the blow dryer. We took inspiration from, and of course the fan, which you typically hide until you got one that had no blade on it. And then we took a lot of inspiration from Tesla because the electric car was a boring sustainability thing up until the Tesla came out. It was faster. It was in a much better cost than the alternatives that had the same kind of performance. And it was something that you wanted to kind of explain and show to your friends or anyone who kind of passes by in the early days. And we think that water was ready for that because it's a huge problem, whether in the U.S. or globally. And

Starting point is 00:23:25 that we're really focused on taking that on. This water sommelier, I can't let you get by without mentioning that this is not a joke. Here's a story from National Geographic in 2010. Martin Reese was, I think, the oldest one in our LLM research, who became one of these experts. And people really, as people get off of alcohol as like their primary beverage, go into mottails. This has become actually a thing where there's different waters that you can taste the difference from. I am able to taste the difference, I think, in multiple types of water. So I don't know if Wisewell does this, but is there a way to dial in a certain profile that would be like Fiji or Evian or Pellegrino?

Starting point is 00:24:12 Some people like, and do you do bubbles too? And how does that work? Yeah. So we just actually, you gentlemen are going to be trying the first. Lonets right behind it, our first sparkling product released in the U.S. And with that one, we did take a lot of different profiles of sparkling water. So what are the most popular brands of premium water globally? And in our research, what we wanted to do is really recreate the flavor and texture profile

Starting point is 00:24:39 or bubble profile, as you'll see with the sparkling option, of the most popular ones universally. So in the still water world, you would see that the aquapana as a premium water, the Tuscan spring water, is probably the most popular universal version of it. A lot of people love Evian, but a lot of people don't. So what we wanted to do was- What's the flavor profile there? What's the difference? What are they getting? Is it that Evian feels too mineralese?

Starting point is 00:25:12 Like you got a couple of rocks in your mouth? Exactly. That's it, right? So it's too minerally. It's a very high TDS water. And that means there's lots of minerals floating around in there. And you taste them. You feel them in your mouth, right?

Starting point is 00:25:25 Yes. And so Aquapana is actually a low TDS water. But if you give it to 100 people, even those who like everyone will like Aquapana. But vice versa, you wouldn't see as much. So we were really, really focused in the first couple years on flavored texture. And then if we zoom out a bit, the technology behind it. because we know exactly what's going on with each of our customers' water. So we've designed, we manufacture, and now we distribute the product as a subscription model

Starting point is 00:25:58 because we really want to be in charge of everything going on with our customers' water. We don't just want to sell them in it and hope they change their filters. We want to ensure it changed exactly when they need to be that if anything is happening with their tap water, it gets detected, we flag it to them. So we've got, machines are all connected to the internet or via Bluetooth. As you mentioned, there's an app, but I, like, I'm sure many other people are getting annoyed with having another app for something that I'm. Yeah. So we've now taken it on screen with the Sparkle.

Starting point is 00:26:30 So everything that you need can get messages over-the-air updates, again, inspired from the Teslas of this world. So, you know, my water purifier can now get more features, more functions over-the-air in terms of the different. different things that we're doing in the context of detection of different elements, but most importantly, ensuring that the water is always, most premium, the filters are robust. And as soon as you need, we automatically send you your next set of filters. With the sparkling, once you've done your first 180 liters of water, sparkling water will ship you the next two canisters. So really try to cover a system. You're going to subscribe. That's the business model, I think. And I got to tell you, lawn. I started out as a San Pellegrino guy. I was a Pelly Pell guy. I would just drink a glass bottle

Starting point is 00:27:16 of it straight. It's very good. Very easy, smooth bubbles. Yeah. But as time went on and my addiction to sparkling water grew, I got more aggressive. And then when I made it to Texas, that thick, ice cold, Coca-Cola-style bottle of Topa-Chica, that's aggressive bubbles. These are aggressive bubbles. I want to give a fair warning with love. This is... delivered with peace and love. If you're going to do Topa Chica, like you're going to have the wet part of the brisket, you and I go get that fatty

Starting point is 00:27:49 brisket or we have that fatty beef rib, it's very black, so we go to Salt Lake. You need something to cut through the fat, and that's where Topa Chica comes in. Yeah. That rips through your teeth like a diet cook. It's very crisp. It's going to rip it. It's going to rip that oil out,

Starting point is 00:28:05 oil that crease. So we've got the hard bubble setting for you, and that'll give you that that same kind of, you know, fizzing the mouth thing. Definitely break up, break up whatever fat you have in the barbecue. Where it gets in your nose is when you bring the, when you bring the glass up and you can it hits your nose, that's how you know. Yes.

Starting point is 00:28:22 It's got those heavy. This is true addiction. It's got those heavy bubbles. Yeah. Okay. So I was talking to you about this. This is a great business to be in. Because I'm full disclosure.

Starting point is 00:28:33 I'm negotiating a little slice for J Cal here. I'm going to place a little bet here on this company because Sam, you pitched me on it. I have machine number one. I told Sammy, I'm going to pay for. If you're going to bring this to America, if this comes to America, I want in. I need a taste. You've got to literally wet your beak on this one.

Starting point is 00:28:52 Jason, what we're doing is we're taking profitable consumer subscription business models, but having the same kind of retention rates as utilities. So if we take a look at our business, we're actually around a 2% attrition rate on our tens of thousands. of users are ready. And that's constantly getting better as we improve our product from container to container. And so what we really wanted to do was give that ease and that sense of a consumer business. But what we're doing is distributed drinking water infrastructure at the end of the day. So our average, you sign up to a two-year subscription. That's the commitment. We manage a machine.

Starting point is 00:29:34 Anything happens. We're on top of it. And actually we get to see things well in advance. very importantly, we're also seeing how our customer is reacting to the machine, right? Are they, did they suddenly drop off in usage? Is there any real spike in their tap water quality or spike in their tap water TDS, which means the quality is gone down? The input is, and by the way, here in Hill Country, where I live, in the Hill Country, outside of Austin, and in Austin, the water, you know, we don't have state taxes. Because waters can be challenging at times, man. You smell the minerals sometimes coming out of this water.

Starting point is 00:30:12 People do not drink from the tap in Austin. In Brooklyn, man, Brooklyn water, chef's kiss. It's got fluoride, a little fluoride in it, but Brooklyn water is like the best tap water. You wouldn't order bottle water in Brooklyn. You just order from that. Well, that's what they say about the bread,

Starting point is 00:30:27 why you're, you need your Philly cheese steaks and your New York subs. Or Brooklyn pizza. Right, because it's the bread. Bagels. You've got a company. You probably have a tool for invoicing and one for running your website. And then finally, you got one for your CRM, of course.

Starting point is 00:30:41 And somehow, even with all these time savers, you're still moving data around by yourself at 10 p.m? That's why, here at Twist, we recommend O-D-O-D-O-O, the all-in-one management software that's already serving 16 million users across more than 170,000 companies. Think about that. They're bringing everything you need into one platform. That means your CRM, your sales tools, accounting, manufacturing, your website, inventory and, of course, your point of sale, if you have a point of sale, all right where you need them. And they're all in constant communication with each other. No more logging every change order or new sale across three different apps. And the dreaded spreadsheet as a database. No,

Starting point is 00:31:18 you make a sale and your invoice gets created instantly while your inventory gets quickly updated. So if you're still cobbling together, your back office across five different tools and apps, get started today at odoo.com slash twist. And your first app is free. That's odio.com. I got to tell you something of Brooklyn Water and Toronto Water where I grew up. One issue is actually unfortunately the amount of chlorine they're putting in to keep it clean through the distribution networks. As I mentioned, the average pipe is 78 years old is really, really high. So we actually do a really interesting test and I think everyone trusts their dog. We pour tap water. We've done it in Toronto, we've done in Brooklyn, and we pour Wisewell water, and 10 times out of 10, your dog

Starting point is 00:32:04 will go to the ice well water. I'm testing this. Reason doing a... I tested out with Barry. They can smell the chlorine. They're a lot more sensitive than we are. And so, you know, a lot of the things that have been put into the water to keep it as clean as possible during distribution are what we're taking out.

Starting point is 00:32:24 And that's kind of the key. And we're not just taking it out and hoping that we know when to change a filter next. We're on top of it for you as a customer. And now with the sparkling water, we've actually seen, you know, an incredible reaction because water in itself is something which is absolutely essential. But sparkling is a luxury and a costly one for those who get hooked on it. So from a savings perspective, we provide huge savings to all of our subscribers from day one. So what I try to explain, you know, like literally, you know, I got people who work at the ranch.

Starting point is 00:32:55 And they show up with a bottle of, you know, giant water that they bought on the way to work or they got a Starbucks. I say, whoa, whoa, time out. I got double filtered water. I got my wise well. I make a fresh coffee, pot of coffee every morning. Please stop spending four or five or six bucks on your latte in the morning. Stop buying a three, four, five dollar bottle of water. It's ten bucks a day.

Starting point is 00:33:19 You're spending $4,000 in post-tax on beverages. That's D-U-M-B dumb. you need to dial in your coffee, your tea, your cold brew, and you know what the common denominator lawn is in terms of flavor is the quality of the water? It's a good while. You make cold brew, you make express, you make a tea, whatever you're down with, you've got to get the water proper.

Starting point is 00:33:44 It's got to be correct. So I'm super excited about all this. I need to ask you, it's a super important question here, Sammy. Alex Jones, who's always way ahead of the curve. You know who Alex Jones is? Yeah, I do. He's the guy who talks like this on InfoWor. He's always ahead of the car.

Starting point is 00:33:59 I found the Bohemian Club. And, you know, release the Bohemian files. He said that the water is making frogs gay. Yeah, the tap water. Can you can tap water is making frogs gay, Sammy. Is there any, have you determined if this is true? And then how do you ensure that Wisewell does not make make me gay from the water.

Starting point is 00:34:27 I'm joking, half joking. We've done a lot of research on it. We were focusing on the frogs, but actually we learned about humans. So we all have, if you drink bottled water, a teaspoon, so seven grams,

Starting point is 00:34:40 like a natural physical plastic teaspoon worth of plastic in our brains. And cadavers with dementia are 10xat. So that's a scary thing. It can make us create. You're talking about the microplastics. Yes. And just to be clear,

Starting point is 00:34:52 there's nothing wrong with being gay. There's nothing wrong with gay frogs or any amphibians as far as we're concerned here. Let the frogs live their life, Jason. Let them live. Let them live. I got many gay frog friends on my ranch. Frog love is frog love.

Starting point is 00:35:08 Period full stop. This took a real turn. It did. But no, no, this is the point. There's a lot of conspiracy there is whatever around water. Sure. For it in the water, I, RFK has gotten into this a bit. I thought, okay, that's a good idea.

Starting point is 00:35:21 Another guy who's got this voice on the other guy who talks like that. Why? What is it with guys not trusting water who talk like, they need more water? They do. They seem parched. They need a wipeout. I mean, I didn't know that there were so many jokes in water. We're doing all right.

Starting point is 00:35:39 We're doing okay. We're out there. But I... But what is the story with microplastics? Because I was talking to my friend Brian Johnson. He said his balls were filled, not just you telling me your brain, but he was telling me his testicles were filled with microplasticals. Now, listen, I'm past having kids, but I just don't like the idea of having, you know, testicular microplastics.

Starting point is 00:36:02 This is all, that's actually true. This is actually sure that microplastics are in the water supply. Also, I understand that in major cities in America where like a third of the population, in some cases are on pharmaceuticals, SSRIs, etc. That this, that gets into the water too. and that we now and this lot this is a true statement i believe literally heard that why am i still so you tell me sammy sammy of the wise man of water our wise man of water tell us birth control in the water ss in the water is any of this true we know plastics is true but

Starting point is 00:36:44 explain to us what's in our water supply it is it is very true and actually one of the first times I heard about it in the big public forum was on All In when it was a you had a science corner and Freiburg was talking about the study about nanoplastics. I remember this. And it went from the assumption that there's 10,000 units of nanoplastics per liter of bottled water to 240,000 microstics to nanoplastics. And that increase in number was not just learned. in the context of more but being there, it's the size of them because they can cross a blood

Starting point is 00:37:22 brain barrier. As I mentioned, it actually gets into your brain. Part plaque buildup and in our balls and reproductive organs, we're seeing a huge amount of instances where men with measurable amounts of plastic in their balls are much more likely to be infertile. And so male fertility has declined by around 30% and if you take a linear scale of plastic consumption, almost identical. So the signals are there. I wouldn't be surprised if we see a Surgeon General's

Starting point is 00:37:56 warning on a plastic bottle in the next decade. The first class action acts have gone out against bottled water companies. And we're just seeing it happen. Fiji, I believe. That's yeah, that's right. Fiji's one of, and we believe

Starting point is 00:38:10 that there's going to be a lot more over the coming decade as those signals become scientific studies that have actual outcomes. And just to be clear, they are finding all kinds of, you know, trace amounts in wastewater. So here, you know, many studies you can find online, antidepressants, emerging contaminants occurrence in wastewater treatment plants and surface waters in China. It's happening here in the U.S.

Starting point is 00:38:36 However, quote, if you were to drink two liters of water a day for 70 years, at the end of those 70 years, you would have taken 1% of the normal daily dose of someone has taken of prescribed medication. It's a very minor. It's a very, you're not, you still need your zol off. You're still going to need whatever you're taking, folks. I'm drinking all this tap water. I'm still miserable.

Starting point is 00:38:59 I could have told you that. I could have told you that. Lon's like, I'm on my 10th leader today, and I'm still sad. So that one's not bad, but the plastics are. Plastics are there for sure. And the PFA's. Yeah. So you've got a lot of stuff there.

Starting point is 00:39:12 I think this is great. What is it going to cost here in the U.S.? Tell us what this two-year commitment is because I could tell you, like, you know, I was spending, I don't know, Topa-Chika, it was like $2 a bottle. Even when I'm buying like the $6 or 12-pack, it was still like a buck-fifty-two bucks per sparkling.

Starting point is 00:39:31 Probably because I like glass bottles of that mountain. That's the mountain one. That's a flat water. I was getting that for a little while, Mountain Spring something. I don't know. That was also like $3 a liter. I mean, I was spending $100 a lot.

Starting point is 00:39:43 a month, thousands of dollars a year. Oh, Mountain Valley, I believe. Mountain Valley, it's a good. People say Mountain Valley is very good. You know, it's certainly good to the taste. But what's this going to cost versus, you know, a lunatic like me with, you know, three daughters who grab a top of chica and drink three sips. And then I find all the 50% open bottles in my house, which makes this down going crazy.

Starting point is 00:40:06 So we've got three product lines. And the, the nano, which is a small one, smaller household. is $29 a month. Unlimited water. We're on top of your filters. We just, we take care of everything. Dollar a day? That is, that is a month. And then actually, the one that's behind lawn, which is a sparkle, that's our flagship product, which even has wearable integration as well. We're going to Apple and Google Health and if, yeah, there's NFC technology in there. That goes for $89 a month for unlimited water, which comes hot, cold, room temperature. And you can select the amount you want. If you like green tea, you could have, you could exactly set your green tea level or if you like your water freezing, we could do the same. That goes for $89 a month with unlimited sparking water. So three bucks a day, easy, breezy. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, we're trying to keep it. I'm going to be able to take my whoop and NFC tap it that I drank my water is the goal. So actually, we're integrated into Apple and Google Health. So we will be able to, you're in, we're actually the first example where you've got an input as opposed to just, you know, your body sending signals. Because it is a really important thing. Our.

Starting point is 00:41:12 average wisewell is used 25 times. Sorry, it's used 15 times a day by our subscribers, which makes us the second most used device to the iPhone and household. So, you know, that screen becomes a very interesting place to learn maybe about new products, about partnerships, or even about your health and wellness from water. Yeah. See, this is critically important because if you can measure it, you can manage it. And one of the things, that was a big health breakthrough line, you got to get in on a whoop or an aura or an Apple Watch is, you know, I can take this. I, like if I do a meditation in a meditation app like calm or waking up, it automatically puts it into my whoop via Apple Health.

Starting point is 00:41:52 And then I want to record my water, but I forget to do that. And if it was a little simpler, because I am like a camel, I forget to drink water. And then I don't sleep well. And then if I drink like an extra, you know, I don't know how many ounces, like 30 ounces a day, my sleep scores and my recovery go up the next day. How do I know that? I started recording in my whoo. It's not a commercial for whoop, but it has a journal.

Starting point is 00:42:16 And when I put in my journal that I had electrolytes or creatine or I slept with a dog or I slept with an eye mask or I took a flight, it then tells you how that affects your recovery. Turns out like if I do a long walk, like a certain number of steps, if I drink my electrolyte drink, if I drink enough water, and if I use a, and eye masks, all of these things and warm bath. These are like plus four to plus 10% on my sleep and recovery scores. This is the future, folks. You're going to be able to understand this as well as with your blood works. Where can people learn more? And is it available in the U.S. yet or not?

Starting point is 00:42:54 So the Sparkle just came out for presale. So available in a very limited run. Full run is coming out in October. We also have our nano and model one, which are the floor standing and smaller unit already available for sale. And we're just very excited to be taking on this problem in the U.S. as well as the region. In the region.

Starting point is 00:43:15 Wisewell.com. Wisewell.com. No promo code. And I don't want a freebie. You can give a lot of freebie. I'm taking this one with me. I don't want a freebie. He's at.

Starting point is 00:43:24 Yeah. Keep it at the office. You can do whatever you want to do. No. It's coming home. I like you get. I like your new health thing. All right, Sammy.

Starting point is 00:43:31 Great job. Appreciate you. And everybody check out Wisewell. I'm not an investor yet. But you'll know I'm an investor. if you see me drinking out of this on All In and here on this week in Starzors, you see me drinking out of this bad boy. Oh, this, my wise will?

Starting point is 00:43:44 Oh. If I'm drinking out of a wise well, then you know I'm on the cap table. If you see me drinking out of this week on a business week. I'm the only one with a cup. There you go. If I'm drinking out of it this week in startups, Tumblr, I'm not an investor. So that'll be your tell. No, I always tell people if I'm doing it.

Starting point is 00:43:57 Sammy, great to see you. And I will see you when I'm in the region. Thanks, Sam. Long, Jason. Thank you, Jason. Thank you so much. All right. Take, my brother.

Starting point is 00:44:04 You know, it's like I collect people lawn. Sure. You get to meet a lot of people in my life. Of course. And I'm very good now of putting people into buckets of like, this person is like using me or has something they want to get from me. Right. This person is a flake.

Starting point is 00:44:24 This is just a good person. And then like there's like really good people who like you want to hang with. Like Sammy very quickly went from like an acquaintance to, hey, if I'm in the region, I'm having dinner with Sammy. He's going to introduce me a couple of interesting people. We're going to hang. You know, it's just like, is a good hang? Like, you're a good hang.

Starting point is 00:44:41 That's a thing I've heard, too, that in America, it's like you meet people and it's like, we should do business together. And then you become friendly. You're like, oh, you know what? There's a good guy like hanging out with him. We should go see a movie. In the region, they say you become friends first. And then it's like, you know what?

Starting point is 00:44:57 You're such a good friend. We should figure out a way to do business together. And what happened in the region I learned this is, everybody from America came with the American attitude, and they're like, I'm going to go to Abu Dhabi and Riyadh and Qatar, and I'm going to come back with like a couple of LPs. Yeah, make some deals. Yeah, I'll see you in year three.

Starting point is 00:45:17 Right. You know, like you literally got to go to the region, like, you know, five, six, seven times. Get some shwarma, you know, you got to shake some hands, you know. You haven't come with me. I took you to Tokyo for the first time, but I will take you for Mama Nora. Yeah. Mamanora. Man, this mama,

Starting point is 00:45:33 Nora and Saudi. My Greek brother, you're going to love it. Ismail was not impressed, but I'm going to, I want to go check it. He had a different Schwarma place. He's got like Schwama Kings, I think he likes. It's kind of like going into burger culture or like brisket culture here. All right. All right, we got to do a real quick interview.

Starting point is 00:45:49 Yes, well, one thing I wanted to give a quick shout out to our friends at Harmonic because it's so helpful in prepping for that last segment with Sammy. I actually looked up the total addressable market for home water filters. And I got a whole lot of really compelling information. I'll pull it up here very quickly so you can see. Now, people who don't know, Harmonic is like this great database of everything. But then, you know, of every transaction, every company in the world, and we use this for our research. And then we did a partnership with them because I was like, listen, I need my investment team to have access to Harmonic.

Starting point is 00:46:25 This is saving. Let me just say this. We have like 20,000 applications for funding. This is saving us one hour, one hour, not on the 20,000 people who applaud because a lot of those aren't like candidates, but of those we meet with the top 10%, top 20%, so like two, three, four thousand startups per year we're meeting with. Like some weeks we've done 140 meetings because it's like that many good companies, some weeks we do 30.

Starting point is 00:46:51 This is saving one hour of researcher time. I don't even want to tell Harmonic that they're saving me three or four. $4,000 a year at $30, $40, $50 a year because they're going to benchmark the savings and then whatever. But you did a quick one on the tam of home water filters. Can you close the left-hand bar so I don't see all your weird searches there? I don't want to know all my weird harmonic searches. I don't want to know what you're searching on for money. But here it is. Yeah. So I, I just what did you ask it? Well, we, yeah, we didn't get, yeah, we don't talk about water filtration companies that much on the show. So I just wanted to get some quick back.

Starting point is 00:47:30 So you can see, I ask, what are the most popular water filters and filtration systems on the market? And then what's the tam on home water filters? And, I mean, it gave me some, you know, here's a breakdown of the industry. Here are the most countertop, pitchers, under safe, gravity fed. You know, there's all these different kinds of water filters. Gravity fed, okay. So, yeah, like a whole house systems to get set up. And it gives you an idea.

Starting point is 00:47:52 I knew about that. How large all of these markets are. What are the biggest companies doing each of these different kinds? Like, obviously, if you want to pitch your Britta is sort of the market. market leader. And then I went down here and looked at me, a whole grid, the total addressable market by these different kinds of water filter systems or how you're choosing to do it, water treatment systems versus just point of use systems. And then it also gave me a bunch of just interesting facts. Like the Asia Pacific region dominates 60% of the total point of use water

Starting point is 00:48:23 filtration market, which when you think about it, it makes sense because of water quality concerns in places like rural India, China, Southeast Asia. Those are the hottest places on the planet for people worrying about water filtration. So just even a niche topic like that, so much interesting information. Try it yourself at harmonic.a.i. And this, just to give a shout out to Harmonic, they have like the database, they have their own proprietary data. Then they have their own proprietary LLM. You put that together. That research is not possible on like, you know, frontier models, whatever. No, you, if you, This is because of their...

Starting point is 00:48:58 It would guess, but it wouldn't nail it like that. Exactly. And this is where they really come in handy. I would say, actually, that research was beyond. I was just thinking we're going to get, like, here are the startups and here is what they're doing. This really gave you the Tam, Tam, Tam. Yeah. It went deep.

Starting point is 00:49:13 Like Tam's. Yeah. Big job. So, hey, listen, if you're, if you love Tamms, those are the cookies in... They're very good. Australia. Yeah. They're so good.

Starting point is 00:49:21 Do you know about Tam-Tams? I've had them, sure. They sell them in like, there are those novelty, like, you know, candy cookie from around the world. Here's the secret about Tam-Tams. This is what kids do with Tam-Tams in Australia. I learned this in my time in Sydney. You bite off both ends.

Starting point is 00:49:36 Okay. Then you put it in the glass of milk or coffee or whatever you're drinking. And you use it as a straw. Yes. Oh, my God. So delicious. All right, let's keep moving. I got another interview.

Starting point is 00:49:46 Yes, we got to keep moving. Before we go, we got one more interview. We're going to talk to Poonit Puri from Grit Robotics. They are, we talked about Grit a few weeks ago, you may recall. They have created AI infrastructure that automates the installation of solar panels with robot arms. Yes. I pointed this out to you. This was my find.

Starting point is 00:50:09 This was your find, this viral video you found of that they don't produce. These are off the shelf robotic arms. The team at Grit, they're making the AI software that you used to teach the robots how to do all of this specific work in the field. So Puneet, thanks so much for being here. Now, Puneet, hold on a second. I saw this and I said, okay, this is AI slop. Somebody is showing us. I'm dead serious.

Starting point is 00:50:35 When I sent it to Lott and I was like, is this AI slop, like, because this is what Elon's been talking about. Other people have been talking about for a long time, which is we're going to build solar farms like in an industrial way that, you know, out of the back of the factory and we just go on forever. Now, I'm looking at this. this is a very large solar farm. This is a real installation that you're doing at your company?

Starting point is 00:50:59 That is correct. Yes. Yes. And we actually have robots right now in Nevada, too, who are actually installing at this time. All right. So explain to us what we're seeing on the screen here, because this literally does not look real. Describe what we're seeing here.

Starting point is 00:51:15 Yeah. So I think what's happening in the solar industry, they've realized there's a huge labor shortage, right? It's 70% nutrition, 30% people can't even pass a drug test, and huge amount of these have to be built in, you know, and a record amount of time. And another shocking statistic, which I came across when we were starting the company was agriculture, retail, manufacturing, has seen a thousand percent productivity boost since 1965. Construction as a whole has seen a 46% decline since then. In other words, the crafts people, are high and they aren't trained and they quit according to what you just told us.

Starting point is 00:51:57 And skilled workforce, it's 41% of US skilled workforce will retire by 2031 in construction. This is crazy. And so what we're seeing there for people who are listening is there's like a tractor with an arm. It's picking up a solar panel with what looks like a suction or something. and it then places it on a rail. Then the rail, this other robot or another arm, comes in. It's got all kinds of lasers and whatever it has, and it's bolting it on to the framing, and there's a couple people watching it work,

Starting point is 00:52:36 and they're doing a little work alongside it. So there is a human in the loop here, and it's on a little bit of a fast pace, but it looks like it's installing a panel. I'm going to guess in 15 minutes per panel installed. What is the pace that is doing at? Because there's thousands of panels in this video. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:52:54 So there's actually a, this video has a collection of bunch of robotics companies installing, not just ours. Right. So Git Robotics is our company. I can talk a little bit more about that. Yeah. So typically what you're seeing, I can talk about numbers in the field right now. Typically, a group of eight would do 800 panels a day, right? A good group.

Starting point is 00:53:13 So you're doing one person is doing 100 panels a day if you're really solid. If you're like a weak crew would do 50 panels a day. What we are saying is once you let AI come into the field and actually boosts the productivity, you could see almost 3,000 to 4,000 of these panels being installed by the same crew of 8. And that's what you really need because so in our case, I think we can cycle time close to 19 seconds, 18 to 19 seconds, panel to panel to panel, which is pretty fast at this time. And then it's also solar site has a lot of other steps. You need to clear the side. You need to put the trackers on. You need to put the panels on.

Starting point is 00:53:52 You do electrical. Then you do, you know, in the end, you commission the plant. So there are a lot of steps in general. It's like 20% goes into labor, right? 8% is mechanical labor. We are saying, hey, let's just go for that 8% of the mechanical labor first. And then from there on, we can even encroach into the electrical neighbor and then start creating an impact. Great.

Starting point is 00:54:11 How long have you been doing this? How many solar installations are you up to now? And then what will it look like next year? Because there's a lot of data center demand. There's a lot of solar demand. Local communities are getting into it and here in the great state of Texas. Despite what people might think, we're the largest install base of solar. We're the biggest proponents of solar in America.

Starting point is 00:54:35 Great state of Texas. Yes, absolutely. I think one thing people don't realize is that every time we double the production of solar panels, the price of them comes down by 40. And it's happening every 18 months. It's almost following something like a moor's law because it's kind of based on silicon. There's a lot of those synergies there. And the biggest cost is the cost of installation, the people, right?

Starting point is 00:55:01 So if you can actually speed that up, suddenly now we as a civilization can print solar panels like a newspaper. There's a giant fusion reactor in the middle of the solar system. It never stops. And then we have plenty of land. It's an obvious energy source which we need to be tapping into. and the challenge is, can we do this work using automation in deserts of New Mexico, in the winter of Maine, in paddy fields of Texas, when it has rained last night, and it's eight inches of water, your vehicle is literally sinking as you're installing, right?

Starting point is 00:55:31 So what kind of intelligence do you need, which can understand these outdoor settings, construction settings, can work safely alongside people, right? And that's what at least we are focusing on. We are saying, hey, let's learn the representation of construction world. We say, hey, everyone wears a hard hat, people wear west, material comes on pallets, trenches are open. Can our model learn the representations of construction board? And then these representations go across different construction verticals. They're not just limited to solar, right?

Starting point is 00:55:59 And then solar is like a first starting point for us. As far as installations goes, we've done like seven sites until now. It's like 35,000 panels, but we're supposed to install close to six million panels in the coming 18 to two years. It's almost close to 2.8 gigawatts. That's the contract size we are on right now. And the demand is crazy. I'll give you an example. One of our customers, there's a big bank.

Starting point is 00:56:25 I won't name. They came to a customer saying, hey, by the way, I want you to build a 900 megawatt power plant. They said, how long will you take? And these guys have been building power plants in US for the longest time. They're probably one of the largest solar construction company. They're like, oh, you know, 300 megawatt plant takes a year and a half, 900, probably four years. those guys are like, no, I want it done in 18 months

Starting point is 00:56:44 because I have a data center to power. And then these guys are panicking. And then they said, okay, fine, now, I want you to build 1.8 gigawatts. My requirements went up because I would need to now build bigger data centers and can you do it and half the time. So it's like, I think there are no people. We have to build all this infrastructure.

Starting point is 00:57:00 And if he cannot have automation help us, like it helped us in manufacturing, it's going to be a struggle. Yeah, here's solar photovoltaic, POMUAL Prices versus Cumulative Capacity from our friends at our world and data, great website. And yeah, it's over time just plummeted from $100 all the way down. And you can find many of these charts. Here's solar panel prices from 100.

Starting point is 00:57:30 What is this one? In 1975, it was $128 per watt. Here we are, 24. When I was a kid. It's a kid. It's not even 26. Yeah, go ahead. I was just to say, when I was a kid, having solar panels on your roof was like a high status, like, oh, those are the rich people.

Starting point is 00:57:48 They're going to try to use solar for part of their power. It was like, because it was very, very expensive. That's just like why you always thought about using solar power is like, well, it's great, but it's going to cost you. Yeah. Yeah. So as utility scale solar in the end, once you're done, you're close to like 80 or 90 cents a watt, like fully built plant. At your home is typically two to three bucks. But just the panel prices now the new panels coming out, especially if you don't,

Starting point is 00:58:11 have like tarrished on them. In Australia, you could get it probably for 0.18, 18 cents. Like in US, we're getting it at 26 cents, 25 cents. Also, there's going to be a little bit of a revolution on how we install solar. Again, this is like at least our thesis, and we might be wrong, is we right now put solar panels on single access tracker. So we're tracking the sun, right? And we leave a lot of empty space in these sites.

Starting point is 00:58:34 You've seen the videos also. There's like, you know, why is there like land exposed when there's like sunlight falling, right? And the reason is because they're trying to extract the most amount of energy. in the day and the nighttime of the sun is at a high inclination. And that's where the power is most expensive. So that's how you build the plants. But once you have a good amount of storage, you don't care. You get power in the day.

Starting point is 00:58:51 You want to absorb the maximum amount of it. So last time we'll go by these mechanical assemblies on which you're tracking. Hopefully we'll go down and you'll have like fixed tilt. Panels become so cheap. Like the single access tracker, I think it's like 12 cents a watt, just the mechanical structure. The panel is 26 cents a watt. The new panels coming out of China.

Starting point is 00:59:10 I think they're like 14 cents a watt. And if you go fixed, that's like 0.2 cents of a watt. So imagine like from where you've gone so less. So you're like, I can just paint the floor, the solar panels with like some small piles. And robots can do that really well. And then now you can have crazy amount of energy all day long. And hopefully we get to a dream where energy is too cheap to meter, right?

Starting point is 00:59:30 Yeah. With the right amount of storage. Lon, I'm going to give you the last question here, Lange, because I know you care deeply about solar. I'll take it. Well, I'm interested in this case in the training. You're combining, you know, real footage. The robots are watching other robots or, you know, put together these solar products.

Starting point is 00:59:46 And you're also using world model, like simulated data. Can you tell us about how those two work together and like what, you know, what each version of what each kind of data is good for? Yeah. So we've spent a lot of effort creating huge AI simulation data pipelines at the back. We will look at a real site included into our simulation and then inject like synthetic SKUs onto them. And then from there on, we can start training them. actually have like reflections, heat, sorry, rain, mold, like a bunch of stuff which can happen on a site and then you train all that. There is a little bit more to it. It's also the

Starting point is 01:00:20 representation of the construction world. And if I can actually share like a quick thing if you guys are open to that. Let me see. Let's see. So what we're saying is look, there is a lot of common elements on these sites. Workers always wear west and come in a hard hat. Construction environments and get hammered with rain, snow, dust, right? You're picking up some eski. it could be cinderblock, it could be solar panel. And you have some tool, big robot, small robot, right? What you're saying is let's learn the representation of this construction world and create task-specific models, which can do different tasks.

Starting point is 01:00:50 You could put rails on. You could be putting links, you know, using the same construction tech, we eventually tie rebars. And then on the cinder block, there's huge sound barrier walls to be built alongside, you know, highways. So, like, essentially, you learn the representation of the chaos of an outdoor environment, and then you translate you to different construction verticals. And that's what allows you to eventually do it. Like, you know, we train a robot to like do rebar time.

Starting point is 01:01:17 We could just get it done up literally like two days. It's all it took us to get this robot to train on tying a rebar. We asked you to place in reblocks. It could get it done in a day. So what we're seeing, we're seeing, yeah, this actual footage of the robot arm going in and tying together these pieces of rebar before concrete is poured. It's fantastic. Absolutely fantastic.

Starting point is 01:01:36 Yeah. What you're doing is extraordinary. This company is a series A, series B company. How much of your race? Where are you based? Yeah, we based out of South San Francisco. Milbray. You're in the Milibre.

Starting point is 01:01:52 You're in the armpit of the peninsula, like between the city and Nilsborough at San Mateo. Your shadow joke is worse than downpard. We're in the South Central's-Coy industrial city. On the east side, where the 49ers Stadium was? Yeah, there's like a concrete plant right behind the facility at this time. So, yeah, it's like we'll be. I'm always fascinated by that area. Like you have these incredible places, you know, from San Mateo down to Redwood City,

Starting point is 01:02:19 down to Atherton and Palo Alto. You have San Francisco down to Noe Valley, all incredible. Then there's this chunk of the city, which is this industrial part, which nobody can seem to figure out like this area. And the reason is because all the airplanes coming out of SFO, fly over it. So if you have a home there, it shakes. It's a little bit of a problem for people. But that's where you're based. For us, it's awesome. For us, it's awesome. We can, so yeah, we recently closed our series around 26 million. We raised 32 million until longer, 18 months old, a pretty young company. Amazing. Well, I am enamored with what you're doing. Thank you so much

Starting point is 01:03:02 for sharing it. I think you're hiring, probably people in robotics. Yes, absolutely. If people want to come work on this brilliant vision of yours, where can they go to find out about careers? Yeah, just go to grit.a.i. You know, we have a GRI-T dot AI. You go there, you'll see the job openings. And we have a phenomenal team. The hardware team is all MIT. We joke around and call them the MIT Mafia. The robotics team. The robotics, robotics team is all Carnegie Well-trained Roboticist. Those are the two big ones. Rodney Brooks over at MIT. And then another field team is also kick-ass. because these guys are ex-marines.

Starting point is 01:03:39 They deployed robots in Afghanistan and Iraq. So they're like first-hand. So they are helping deploy a robot on the solar construction site and other construction verticals too. Rich robotics, folks. Get in there. Work. And if you're optimizing an ad network to get 10 basis points,

Starting point is 01:03:55 more clicks on nonsensical ad networks, I don't want to name out any specific companies. Just go north. Go work in this industrial area and do something incredible for, humanity. Puneit, thank you for sharing them. And I wish you great success because it's going to be the success of humanity if we can make this work. Good job. Great. Thank you. Thank you guys. I appreciate it. Great job. Punei. I mean, it's just amazing. Two great founders, back to back.

Starting point is 01:04:22 Just tackling big issues and Adams in the world. Shout out to my guy, Travis, T.K. and Adams. People are doing hard stuff with moats. Okay, I pushed my other interview back 10 minutes, just so you know. And so where do we want to go from here? Do you want to do the annotated update? Ladies' choice here, Lon. Ladies' choice. Let's go off-duty.

Starting point is 01:04:45 You can go news. And listen, you're getting so slim and you're working on your health. I am. You've got your look going. We should go off-duty, I think, because there were a few things here I wanted to run by. Specifically, did you see this New York Times article about emojis and how? how all of our emojis are making us look like boomers. I didn't, but I'm a little concerned here because I see in the notes that the one I use most often,

Starting point is 01:05:14 which is the crying laughing. Crying laughing, yeah. That is mine. They got a bunch of, Google sent them a bunch of data from Android phones. So this is not including iOS. This is all data taken from Android phones in 2025. But what they found is the number one most used emoji now is the crying face, not the left. crying, just the, like crying, tears pouring down.

Starting point is 01:05:39 And that is because they talked to, they had a whole team of New York Times analysts, emoji analysts break this down. Gen Z considers the crying, laughing emoji overused. It's for boomers. They don't use it anymore. They've switched up entirely to the tears stained with tears, cheek stained with tears version. That's then, as you can see here, those are declining and populated. Some other interesting insights from this article.

Starting point is 01:06:08 The skull, meaning I'm dead, had a brief moment. It had a brief moment in 2023, but it's now rapidly declined. Instead, the kids are using the tears instead to mean I'm dead. I know this because producer Nick, who worked here at Twist and then all in, and now he's already all in a corporation. I'll say he was using dead and then he went to full on crying. So when some thing's spicy. So this is incredibly important for me because people have called me out rightfully for using the crying emoji.

Starting point is 01:06:43 But I use the one where the two tears are coming off either side of the eye. That's the dated one they're saying. Laugh crying. That's the dated one. But I did that because my tweets are primarily non-serious laughing ones. And then somebody's like, you know, what that means is you laugh at your own jokes. And I was like, I'm trying to signal to people, this is satire, don't take life so serious. Right.

Starting point is 01:07:06 And, okay, so is there, is there an emoji listed here? Or is there emoji advice that you can give me in other unks? Because now I'm in my unk phase. Sure. Unk J-Cal. Un-Cal. What should I be using now? You know, I think, I don't think you should try to follow what everyone else is doing.

Starting point is 01:07:27 I think there are some emojis to avoid, obviously, that are going to tag you as a boomer. For example, they're saying teens prefer the fire emoji, whereas older people use the 100. So don't use that. I think it's more what to avoid. Teens prefer prayer hands instead of thumbs up. So I think it's more about it's use whichever ones you feel best about, but avoiding the the minefield of the ones that have been outlined for boomers. Like I'll give you an example.

Starting point is 01:07:55 Since moving to Texas, I really like the guy with the cowboy hat emoji. And I use that. Yehah. Yehaw. I use that in place of like thumbs up or fire. Anything I approve of, I'll just put cowboy guy on there. He's smiling. It communicates the same thing.

Starting point is 01:08:12 And I also like eyes, like the eyes looking in one direction. Like look at this. Like I'm taking note. I'm taking note. Right. Noting that Oliver, I think, is who got me started on that one. But I think that one's good too. As long as you're avoiding the pitfall, this one makes you look like a boomer one.

Starting point is 01:08:29 I think you're safe. I'm a salute guy. I'm a salute guy. Everybody knows that because I'm a yes-chef salute guy. Sure. From the great state of Texas. And people didn't know what the salute was. I just felt it was elegant and it was in my vibe.

Starting point is 01:08:42 So take from that what you will. I had a little something here that I'll share. You know, I love dictation. Sure. But, you know, I have studio mics like this one that I use. But sometimes I'm in the car. Sometimes I'm in a meeting. And I'm finding the fidelity.

Starting point is 01:09:01 When I'm whispering, I'm at this level, is not good enough to get picked up by dictation software. I like whisper, grammarly's got dictation. All of the LLMs have a dictation mode now built into them. The dictation is how you take your instructions, your agents, your interactions with large language models to the next level, because you can just talk and talk and talk and explain what you want. If you're writing one or two sentence per prompt, you're getting it wrong. What you want to do is spill your guts out, and you want to talk for two minutes, three minutes, and that's something you wouldn't bother typing out. And you can just go total stream of consciousness.

Starting point is 01:09:41 When you say it to the LLM, you're using like Claude Co-Work or, you know, perplexity computer, which I talk about, Hermes, Ermes, agent. I call it Hermes. You do, I know, but it's Hermes. It's like the Prada agent I use as well from Apple. Yeah. Anyway, it just does better. It does better.

Starting point is 01:10:03 And so I was sort of researching microphones in DGI. DGI. You can see here, I just bought this one with two microphones that clip-on. They have magnetic clip-ons. They have a standard clip-on. I clip this thing on. It lasts for hours. It's over Bluetooth.

Starting point is 01:10:20 Pull it up on the screen, guys. I think I shared it with it. Yeah, I will give me one moment. This is Jacob. Should be pulling this stuff up so we can keep you in the moment. I fully agree. I agree, but here we go. Yes.

Starting point is 01:10:32 So this one has a pack, as you can see. But what you can also do is, if you just want to get the DGI-Mike 3 transmitter for $84, it's the third one over in those chicklet squares under the price, you can just buy a solo dolo one here, Lon, for like $80. The thing's the size of a quarter, and it connects over Bluetooth. The fidelity is unbelievable. Yeah. And you do have to on your mobile phone kind of tweak it a bit because it's only a microphone.

Starting point is 01:11:04 It's not a speaker. And like getting that to work with individual software, you're going to have to get into the settings to make it work. But once you do, it's well worth the price you pay. DG is not a sponsor. This is off duty where we just. Yeah, we're just talking about stuff we like. Yeah. Absolutely.

Starting point is 01:11:23 It's interesting. DGI used to be like the influencer when I was first doing like, digital media. Everybody had their little DGI. That was like the go to, like, I'm going to go to an event and film myself and make a vlog out of it later. So look at the shout out to DGI. They're staying in the game.

Starting point is 01:11:39 Yes. I have one other recommendation. Please. Ted Lassow is back for season four. It is on Apple TV. This show is amazing. It's on Apple. And I think the first two episodes are out now.

Starting point is 01:11:54 And it's absolutely fantastic. Very basic premise, you know, if you watch season three, no spoilers here, but just generally you'll get this off of like the first five minutes of it. Ted Laso has gone home to take care of his kid. And then there's a big question. They want him to come and they want him to coach now the women's team and go back to England to coach the women's team. That's all I'll tell you. Mixing it up for season four.

Starting point is 01:12:23 I was like, what are they going to do here? And they nailed it. The first two episodes are dynamite. This has been a long time coming. And after season three, Siddakis and the creators were like, you know what, we're good, we're done, great run. We did everything we wanted to do. This is it for Ted Lassau. And it was really like the fans were just so, like people didn't want to say goodbye to these characters in this world.

Starting point is 01:12:45 So they sort of got cajoled into bringing it back for season four. It's just charming and lovely. And the actors are fantastic. Finally, Lanterns is coming to HBO. It is. This Sunday. The critics have seen the first six or so. I've heard a lot of good buzz from L.A. people I used to do videos with.

Starting point is 01:13:05 Now, this is critically important because they went to the guy who was doing all the D.C. stuff With Batman, what's his name? The Snyder cut or whatever. I think they went to Snyder to do this originally. He had his own vision for it. Yes, yes. Which I would have loved to seen. But that was going to be hardcore.

Starting point is 01:13:27 You know, like, superhero. Yes. They decided. It was very comic booky. He's, that's the Zach Snyder thing. Which is great.

Starting point is 01:13:35 Which is great. Make it look like the original, you know, make it like a comic book. Yeah. But here's the thing. It has now been shifted because they wanted something a little different. They wanted a series that could go on for a little bit.

Starting point is 01:13:47 People don't know this Green Lantern. One of my favorite characters. I think my favorite character in the DC universe is Green Lantern and the lanterns. On the other side, you know, that. Lanterns now is being done by the writers from Ozark, True Detective, and the showrunner is Lindolf. David Lindelof, who did. David Linne, who did, I mean, Watchmen, the leftovers. I love both of those. Lost. He and Carlton Cues were the co-creators of Lost. A big,

Starting point is 01:14:18 a big name in TV. It's also got they got Tom King working on it, who is a very well-regarded comic book writer. Like, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he, he wrote the comic book that that new Supergirl movie was based on, the woman of tomorrow. Yes, I didn't see that yet. But all I want to say is this is looking very promising. You know what it looks like to me? And I mean this in a good way. I mean this is the best way.

Starting point is 01:14:43 People have been saying that. And I see why they're saying that. To me, it looks like Taylor Sheridan. It looks like what if you took the, what if you took the landman? What if you took the mayor of Kingstown, the lioness vibe, but in a DC. world with the green lanterns. That's what it looks like to me. And I say, I'm all for it.

Starting point is 01:15:03 Let's do it. Yeah, fantastic. Anything else you want to add here as we wrap? You know, there's one more show I will point people to very quickly because I know you've got to go. It's on, it's on Hulu. You can also watch it on Disney Plus because that's how they do it now. It's called Furious.

Starting point is 01:15:16 It is loosely, it's loosely based on that 80s movie Black Widow. The basic setup is you're following two stories simultaneously. One is it's a woman who would. formerly human trafficked and she is now a serial killer who is taking revenge and then there is a different woman who is a young or a rookie FBI agent who is sort of on her trail and you're following both of those stories sort of a killing Eve kind of vibe to it but man they are they are very interesting characters these are really really good lead performances emmy rossum from shameless plays the FBI agent lola pedicrew you saw her right there is the serial killer it's a

Starting point is 01:15:57 really interesting cat and mouse thing where you're following this investigation. That's Scoot McNary as her, the cop is working with her. All right. I'll see your furious and I will raise you. I'm going to see your furious and I'm going to raise you a The Shards. I am a huge Breton, his podcast fan,

Starting point is 01:16:13 I'm a fan of his books. Of course. Psycho and. Luda Park. I really liked that. All this great stuff. And he decided four or five years ago during COVID to serialize a, novel, which is got his character himself as the protagonist, as you see there,

Starting point is 01:16:33 it's an incredible actor. Yeah. And it's kind of got euphoria vibes. It was going to be done on HBO. HBO fumbled. The guy who did Love Story. Brian Murphy. Ryan Murphy, who's great, has spent millions of dollars on these first two episodes

Starting point is 01:16:54 to make it an homage to the 80s. And it is unbelievable what's on the screen. There's two episodes out. I've only watched the first. And I was blown away because the first, I listened to the serialized version. He just did it on his podcast as like 20 minutes at the opening of each podcast, 30 minutes.

Starting point is 01:17:13 He serialized the book. And then his agent was like, hey, dumbass, I'm your book agent. You're Brett Fenn, Easton Ellis. You're an author. What are you doing, giving this away for free? It's fantastic. So then they produced it as a book.

Starting point is 01:17:28 HBO bought it. They fumbled. Now AMC did it. It's five years later. This is going to be, I think, like, euphoria level hit if they don't fumble it. Hmm. He did. There was that movie Rules of Attraction, too, that was a Brett Easton Ellis book.

Starting point is 01:17:45 It looks like it's a kind of similar world of like debauched teens and 20-somethings. Yeah. Nobody captures like the debauchery and the debauchery and the, the aesthetics. This is what I love about Brett Eastonel. He is a fan of aesthetics. And he will make something beautiful aesthetically and use everything from the cars to the clothes, to the food, to the mall, the gallery. You know, there's a Corvette in this. Like just driving up PCH, it's just an amazing bring you to the 80s. And the guy from Love Story, I saw that love story with J.F.K. Jr. Right. I was in New York at that time. And I was enthralled at Love Story. My wife and I watched it.

Starting point is 01:18:40 We both loved it because it's romantic and tragic and celebrity. But I was like, oh, that's Walker's. Oh, that's this place. Oh, that's the Odeon. He's always very good at that. That American crime story, when they did with O.J. Simpson, where they recreated L.A. in the mid-90s, I was already, I I was living around L.A. at that time, and it is like, it brings you right back. Like, I don't know. And in L.A., it's impossible to do that. Nothing looks like it looked in the 1990s anymore. It's a totally different city. You're going to love the first episode of the Shards because he goes to Westwood to go see the Shining. And like Westwood looks nothing today like it did when the shining came out, nothing.

Starting point is 01:19:17 And he goes to those two theaters on the caddy corners that was across from Stan's Don't know. It's the Fox and the Bruin is. Yeah, they're on a. He pulls up and his dad's convertible, Mercedes, like iconic, parks outside of their at a meter, walks up to buy a ticket. And then on the display, it's got the Kurosawa film Kurosaga or whatever from 1980s. Kagamusha. Kagumusha as like coming soon. And I'm like, the detail level here on this show is just like, it's Easter eggs in the same way comic book wants to do that. Another amazing episode here of Twist.

Starting point is 01:19:55 This is off duty. On Fridays, we'd like to go off duty. We'd like to prepare you for the weekend. These are the great. These are the great suggestions, whether it's a product, whether it's a movie, whether it's a service. You just got to get in there on Fridays for Off Duty with Lon Harris and your boy, J-Cal. We'll see you next time.

Starting point is 01:20:13 Bye-bye. Bye, everybody.

This Week in Startups - What we'll learn from Anthropic's $2-$3T IPO | E2325

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