This Week in Startups - What’s REALLY going on with those “ads” in ChatGPT | E2220

Episode Date: December 9, 2025

This Week In Startups is made possible by:Superhuman - https://superhuman.com/podcastSquarespace - https://squarespace.com/twistEnterpret - https://www.enterpret.com/dlp/this-week-in-startupsToday’s show: A screenshot showing a “Target Ad” in ChatGPT results went viral… over the weekend, but the OpenAI chatbot has NOT actually opened the advertising floodgates just yet.As ChatGPT staffers were quick to explain on social media, this was actually an invitation for a user to integrate their Target account into ChatGPT, for an easier agentic browsing and shopping experience.But it does prompt Jason and Alex to ask some intriguing questions… Is OpenAI just waiting for Google or someone else to launch AI ads first, and face the inevitable flood of backlash they’ll presumably receive? Is there someone at OpenAI already thinking DEEPLY about how these in-feed ads should work? And what does this mean for their wager on when ChatGPT is going to actually get ads? Is that already decided?These answers and more are coming your way on today’s action-packed TWiST… PLUS the latest on the Warner Bros Discovery-Netflix deal, PR guru Lulu Cheng Meservey’s new venture fund, and why Jason and Lon are obsessing about Apple TV’s “Pluribius.”Timestamps:(01:59) They put Target ads in ChatGPT? Or was it just an integration? Is there a difference?(5:24) Is someone at OpenAI really thinking deeply about how in-feed ads should work?(07:36) Is OpenAI just waiting for Google to start running ads to post their own? Jason has suspicions…(10:01) Why Jason thinks startup people have so much trouble communicating with normies(10:32) Superhuman - Get AI that works where you work. Unlock your Superhuman potential at http://superhuman.com/podcast(13:22) The insane competition now facing down OpenAI and Sam Altman(18:40) Why Jason will no longer use data from SaaS companies looking for a marketing win(19:52) Does this mean ChatGPT TECHNICALLY has ads? Does Alex win the bet?! What does Polymarket think?(20:36) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://squarespace.com/twist(25:17) Why Jason is already tired of the Netflix-Paramount-WBD story(30:06) Enterpret - Enterpret turns feedback noise into Customer Intelligence, so your team knows exactly what to fix and build next. Head to http://Enterpret.com/twist to book a demo and see it in action.(34:03) President Jason’s new proposal: A 60-day “pre-approval” antitrust window(47:29) Why Jason’s not interested in news commentary… just the facts.(51:40) Jason and Lon take a few moments to praise “Pluribus”(54:45) PR guru Lulu Cheng Meservey is starting a venture firm… here’s why she wants to start a “movement”(58:05) Why PR people hate but also respect JasonSubscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com/Check out the TWIST500: https://twist500.comSubscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp*Follow Lon:X: https://x.com/lons*Follow Alex:X: https://x.com/alexLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm/*Follow Jason:X: https://twitter.com/JasonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis/*Thank you to our partners:(10:32) Superhuman - Get AI that works where you work. Unlock your Superhuman potential at http://superhuman.com/podcast(20:36) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://squarespace.com/twist(30:06) Enterpret - Enterpret turns feedback noise into Customer Intelligence, so your team knows exactly what to fix and build next. Head to http://Enterpret.com/twist to book a demo and see it in action.

Oh, let me guess. Let me guess. Hit me. I have some concepts here because that ad is for Target. It's a generic ad. The copy up there was for some sort of technical memory. It went by pretty quick, but some memory technology, hardware, looked like discussion it was having with ChatGPT. So it's not a targeted ad.

It's an ad for Target. Kind of. Keep going. Okay. It says Shop at Target. So here's what I think happened. I think this person downloaded a Chrome extension or some other third-party app that was inserting ads covertly or sneakily and that they wound up conflating that with

Open AI doing it. And that's why it looks so weird. Now, that wouldn't look weird if you were looking at a, I don't know, the Drudge report and you start a target ad, you'd be like, fine. It doesn't make any sense. If it was an ad from Open AI, their idea is to look at the memory and what you've searched for over and over and over again. And it would be. hyper-target. This weekend startups is brought to you by Interpret. Interpret turns feedback noise into customer intelligence so your team knows exactly what to fix and build next.

Head to Interpret.com forward slash Twist to book a demo and see it in action. Squarespace. Turn your idea into a beautiful website. Go to www.squarespace.com forward slash twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code Twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. And superhuman. Get AI that works where you work.

Unlock your superhuman potential at superhuman.com forward slash podcast. All right, everybody, welcome back to this week in Starburst. Welcome back to Twist. I'm Jason Calcutt. He's Alex Wilhelm. And there is a, I guess, some big news out of OpenAI. They called a code red. And now there's been some discussion of advertising.

So listen, Alex. All right, so there was a viral screenshot of someone's chat GPT conversation. And Jason, I'm going to pull it up here on the screen. Take a look at this. Now, if you were just looking at this without any context, you would just see a normal chat conversation with an AI. And then at the bottom, there is a shop for home and groceries target module. Everyone thought, hey, this is an advertisement.

We're talking about OpenAI adding ads for some time now. And so this was criticized pretty heavily. It turns out, however, that that ad-looking module... Oh, let me guess. Let me guess. Hit me. I have some concepts here. because that ad is for Target. It's a generic ad.

The copy up there was for some sort of technical memory. It went by pretty quick, but some memory technology, hardware, it looked like discussion it was having with ChatGPT. So it's not a targeted ed. It's an ad for Target. Kind of. Keep going. Okay.

It says Shop at Target. So here's what I think happened. I think this person downloaded a Chrome extension or some other third-party app that was inserting ads covertly or sneakily and that they wound up conflating that with OpenAI doing it. And that's why it looks so weird. Now, that wouldn't look weird if you were looking at, I don't know, the Drudge Report and your start a target ad, you'd be like, fine. But it sticks out like a sort of them.

So I think that it doesn't make any sense. If it was an ad from Open AI, their idea is to look at the memory and what you've searched for over and over and over again, then tell the AI. given the history of Alex and everything he's talking about, you know, 20 different advertisements would you serve to him? And how would you make the message to him that would resonate? And it would be hyper-targeted. Okay, so tell me what happens. I love the hypothesis. Not entirely wrong. I can't give you full points. I'm going to show you a headline here, Jason, that helps explain what we're seeing here. Okay. This is from November 19, 2025, and it reads,

Open AI and Target Partner to Bring New AI-powered Experiences across retail. This is partially Open AI doing work for Target and also a target application that you can connect into inside of chat GPT. So as far as we can tell, this little module that you and I both think is an ad, turns out is actually an invitation to connect to Target inside of chat GPT. You can now argue that that's an advertisement, but OpenAI is taking the position that it's not. It's an ad. It's not a targeted ad. It's in-house promotion.

It's an in-house ad. So when you are working at the New York Times and they have some extra ad inventory, they might say, hey, check out our new podcast. Hey, you know, come to this Times discussion, whatever. And so those are in-house ads. So this is like an in-house ad. Yeah, it's somewhere in between the two. It wasn't a hacked ad. No.

Now, let's talk about what the company said really briefly. Nick Turley, he runs Chad GPT, says, quote, I'm seeing a lot of confusion about ads, rumors in chat GPT. There are no live tests for ads. And then also one of the companies execs said, you know, I agree that anything that feels like an ad needs to be handled with care and we fell short. Looping back Jason to your point about code red. He said we've turned off this kind of suggestion while we improved the model's precision. The code red that OpenAI called was to improve chat GPT and it pushed back things like advertising. So right now, we are not seeing ads in Open AI as we expected them to.

And I think that what they tried to do here was a partnership and a connection tool and it ended up just being sloppy and kind of gross, which doesn't give me a ton of confidence, Jason, in their product decisions, to be honest. This sounds to me like they don't have a person deputized to think about how advertising or in-house ads cross-promotion should exist inside of the product. So sometimes when you're running a company, there'll be like two outfielders, you know? And, you know, one person's in left field, one person's in center field, and there's a shortstop and whatever. The ball kind of is in between those three players, and it just drops in between all three and they all look at each other. And that's what happened here. And what they really need to do is say, hey, call it when it's in the

air. So when somebody said, hey, we're going to do this, we have to get this target promotion up for Christmas. We have an obligation to them. We sold it. Sam Altman said it. Somebody, you know, if left field was a tech team and if center field was the U.X team and the shortstop was the business team, somebody should have said, I got it, and they should have just shepherded at home full stop. Now what they're going to need to have is a partnerships coordinator who is just responsible for how this stuff looks in the end product. They're overreacting to all this. Every time you insert ads into a product on a site like X or Twitter or Reddit or Hacker News,

our industry is going to over respond and get all their hand-wringing, etc. It's coming, folks, and it's going to be awesome. and if you want free chat GPT and you want to burn, you know, an H100 to make your funny memes, somebody's got to pay for it and it's going to come from advertising. My belief is the 75% of the revenue at OpenAI that's coming from consumers is going to go down to, you know, at least 50% in the next two years. People are going to stop paying for these things. When Chat Chbett was one of one, people paid for it.

Of course. Now that you have Gemini, Grock, and everything in between, they're going to stop paying consumers are not going to pay for this. It doesn't provide so much value that an average consumer will pay for it. So then how will it be distributed? It will be distributed by advertising because of the code red they called because the LLM is falling behind Gemini and other Rock and Claude are making better products and leapfrogging open AI. They're in a panic mode because they realize they don't have a better mousetrap.

They have the same mousetrap as everybody else. Yeah. Everybody's mousetrap is getting 5% better every three months. And in a situation like that, they're going to need to actually get ads on faster. If I was Open AI, I would be working to get ads on there faster and have it ready to go. When they said they were pausing it or not focusing on it, I call BS. I call. I think they're tripling down on it and having it ready so that the second somebody else puts ads in, i.e. Google, they'll have it ready to go.

Because if they don't, man, it's going to be Netscape all over again. I brought up that analogy for the last couple of months. Can I ask a question about code reds and startups, Jason? Because we often think about startups as an idea. You build a product. You find product market fit. You grow like how eventually billions of dollars appear. How often do startups need to call a code red like this?

And is that a weakness or is that something that you should use tactically inside of a startup to ensure that you don't kind of like get too lazy? All right. You want the candid version or you want the real version? The candid, the real or the sugar-coded? I want you to give me the one you would tell a founder on a founder. phone call as 3 a.m. So the way founders use this is to shock the system, figure out who on the team is committed and who's not, and as a way to get results quickly. So if you call a code red and people

are like, oh, you know, I got a wedding this weekend. Oh, you know, I'm taking my kid to Little League. Oh, you know, I'm going to my aunt's funeral. And they consider all the things in their life, like a funeral, their children, their spouse, whatever it is, all of a sudden, you're like, okay, here's the people who are hardcore and here's the people who are going to their, you know, second cousin's funeral or whatever. So that is, and most people will consider this dark, there is like sort of a hardcore test implied in it, code red. Figure out who's hardcore, figure out who's not. And you don't have to say it. It's not like you have to be like, yeah, these three people, they're not bringing it. It's like, they're not here. This

weekend. Okay. Everybody knows who didn't show up this weekend during the code red. There's that piece to it. There's also the piece to it. Hey, you got competitors. You could get displaced. And you want to prove to the team that through deliberate hard work, everybody rowing in the right direction, we can fix a problem. And that builds confidence. So there's the confidence building aspect of this. There's the reality of competition aspect of this. And then there's the, are you actually hardcore. Are you in this like a Jedi or pick your analogy that no worldly possessions, relationships are more important than the mission of this company? Now, that is going to ring to a normal, well-adjusted person as insane. You know, like if AOC is hearing this and she's like, what?

Like, why would the union allow this? Like, this is like hardcore stuff. And that's what Sam's doing. He's trying to figure out who's hardcore and if this squad is actually going to get them there. We test out a ton of AI tools behind the scenes at my venture firm launch and a lot of them make big claims and they can't back it up. That's why I'm so enthusiastic about one of my favorite companies, Superhuman, their productivity suite combines three of the best tools on the market today, grammarly, which is your personal editor. Make sure writing crisp, clear, readable. It just makes you a perfect writer. Superhuman mail, which I love. It's the best email software in the world.

It's going to help you get to inbox zero. And finally, Coda, the all-in-one workspace for startups. These aren't standalone apps you have to copy and paste your work into. You don't have to worry about sculpting that perfect prompt. It's just going to do what you needed to do right there while you're working. Everyone at launch works with all of these apps and uses them daily. That helps us stay super organized. Hey, we get our chores done faster and with less mistakes.

So get the AI that works where you work and unlock your superhuman potential. Learn more at superhuman.com slash podcast. podcast. I didn't think Jason on this show you were going to point out that AOC is a is a normal and well-adjusted person, but I appreciate you pointing that out for everybody. No, no, I'm not saying she is. I'm just saying for people who like would represent, you know, normalcy. It's so hard to talk to like two groups of people, people who do startups or are in CLTM 6. Extreme athletes, like people that have a singular, singular focus people versus general focus people. Exactly. So I'm just saying AOC or like the union might be like, wait, we're coming in a, we're staying late on Saturday night to clean the Starbucks and make it spick and span. And we're going to have like a bond raising. Or in my case, every Wednesday night, I have management team dinner. And it starts at 5.30 p.m. Texas time. So at the end of our day, I bring in dinner. Bring in dinner. Bring on a nice sushi, whatever the team wants. We talk for two hours. It goes from 530 to 7. So hey, yeah, you're missing dinner with your family, your loved ones. You might give up yoga if you go to yoga.

work, whatever. It's like, don't work at a startup for, or a venture firm for a maniac who says, hey, yeah, every Wednesday, you got to give up that day. You got to be late. If you have something, you've got to tell me why you're missing, the management team meeting. It's like it should be a little intimidating for a person to like tell their boss, I'm going to go to yoga and miss the management team meeting. Like there's yoga classes all the time. I think also if you opt into being an executive at a startup by, you know, applying for the job and getting it, you are essentially seeding some of your personal life to that role. The only thing that I would throw in here is a caveat is I do always create an exception for people with kids who are sick or whatever.

But apart from that, I think that makes perfect sense. Sick kids make sense. Yeah. Yeah. And if it's a life event for a kid, like they're in the play, you've got to go to opening night of the play. Oh, for sure. But like I would put the taking care of your children's life events and in yoga entirely on different ends to barbell. Jason, I have the tweet here from Michael Burry about Open AI being the next Netscape, I think is worth reading just so everyone has to quote. Everyone that knows anything knows this. Open AI is the next Netscape doomed and hemorrhaging cash. Microsoft is trying to keep it afloat while keeping it off balance sheet and sucking out

the IP. Not wrong. So why did they keep getting funded? The whole industry needs a $500 billion IPO ASAP, essentially arguing, Jason, that there's been so much private capital put into this firm that if it goes down, then everyone's hosed, I think, is this point? I've got to think about that. If Open AI had their valuation stumble and was forced to do a down round at 250 billion, what would happen? I think it would be a shock to the system for short for three or four days. Stock market would go down 10%, 20%. And then I think what would happen is people would take out a chart. I made a chart. I had Kabir on my team make a chart of Open AI versus the world. Open AI versus the world in terms of market share. What people will realize is the first person, up the hill takes the arrows. And they will process in the, I would put this at a less than 10%

chance. So, and I'm not rooting for it. Less people think when I'm being critical of opening I, it's like I got some axe to grind or whatever. I'm friendly with Sam. I would consider him a friend. I mean, we don't go to like dinner socially, but we've known in general for 20 years. So I would consider us more than just acquaintances. I think we have like somewhere between an acquaintance and a friendship. What I would say is there's a 10% chance that could happen. They could stumble. And there's a 90% chance. They'll just keep soaring, and it could be flat or up. But the reality is, first person up the hill, takes the arrows.

When you have 100% of the market, the only way to grow. And when you have these competitors, the only place you can go is down. Let's go through the competitive set that they're facing. Elon Musk. It's not a competitor you want to have. That's like having a competitor, like Terminator 2, Arnold Schwarzenegger P. competitor. You don't want that competitor.

Trust me. Ask anybody who's had that competitor. It is the nightmare competitor. Then, by the way, you have Microsoft and Google as and Zuckerberg as competitors. So those three are the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Like, if you are Sam Walman, Elon, Satya, Sundar, Zuckerberg. This is like Dario. Well, yeah, and then let's add some others.

You got Dario from Anthropic. But I wouldn't say Dario has the reputation, the chip stack of those individuals, right? he's strong, but he would be peers with... Oh, I see your point. Yeah, okay. So I'm saying those four are like truly scary because they've built trillion-dollar companies. Those are the trillion-dollar competitors.

That's a very scary thing. Now, in what world do those four, and let's throw in Anthropic. Let's put those five up as your, those are your five competitors. In what world do those five get less than 10% of the market? No world that I've ever heard of or conceived of. Thank you. Now, let's pull up this chart we made.

Everybody's seen the like trending version of this chart, which showed, you know, three years ago. It was a stack bar chart and it showed all the different ribbons of, and I think it went to present. So you see the one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, eighth bar over as present day, right? With 32% of the market being other than chat GPT and 68% of the market being chat chbted. Now, if you go just to three years ago and two years ago and even 18 months ago, that was a market that was either 100% or 95% Open AI, chat GPT. Today, they have two thirds of the market. Pretty impressive, right, having two thirds of the market. So you have to ask you.

Incredibly impressive. Incredibly impressive. However, you yourself said those five competitors, there's no world in which they don't get 10% each. So if 10% each would be 50% of the market. So what I just did was that, okay, let's agree on that. and go to 2026, 2027, 2028, and 2029. I'm going to estimate in somewhere between 27 and 28, you will see chat GPT go to 45% to 55% to, in other words,

less than 50% of the market. This is percentages and market share. What this doesn't take into account is that the pie is growing rapidly. So even though they only have less than 50% of the market, they will still have a much larger business. These two things will be true at the same time. But what it means is the market when Chat Chippy T were to have a stumble or, you know, have headwinds where they were growing slowly, it's going to be a shock to the system until people go, oh, this is bigger than anything we've ever seen before. Okay, we're going to keep investing in this.

So I would say Michael Burry pointing out the Netscape analogy like I did, super valid. But it doesn't mean that Amazon, Google, Yahoo and Facebook and LinkedIn don't grow as well during that time period and the number of users online. All right, Justin, here's the charge you wanted. It shows generative AI traffic share over time starting 12 months ago working forward to today. As you kind of intimated, we do see a decline in OpenAI's market share. And the biggest growth here is from Gemini, which is done fantastically well. And we can also see a decline in Deep Seek's market share. But consistent erosion of Open AI's market leadership through a different lens.

All right. Very good. From some data provider online who I will mean, this is, this is with pace and love to all SaaS companies trying to slip in data to get customers. Your content marketing skills have no power here. Hey, you saw us like today. I took that to heart. I'm out of shooting stuff down left and right. This is what happens when you have a podcast. These PR people, content. marketing people are so good now. They're like, oh my God, we have an incredible data set. We want you to talk about us on your podcast and our SaaS product. I'm like, not going to fall for it, but we'll use your data. We have a bet here just to wrap this up. We have a bet that we put in place on August 15th, 2025, Open AI advertising launched in chat, TPD, 12 months less or more. I took the under, you took the over. What's interesting, though, is as we look at our bet with

this. Wait, wait, say it again. What was the, what was the date when Open AI would have ads? 15th was the start of the bet one year time window. Do they have ads before or after that 12 month reset? And I said it'll take less than a year for ads. You say it'll take more than a year for ads. We had this new news about the code red and so forth. So I thought for today's polymarket, we should look at what the market thinks about the chances of there being ads in chatyPD. You should be making an argument here. I mean, I sure counsel. That was an ad. It was an in-house ad, but it was an ad. But it's not. ads in chat GPT intellectually.

You know, Jason, the day I pick a fight with you, it's going to be over more than $100. I'll tell you. No, but I mean, it would be an angle shot for sure. But this is what people do in these prop bets. They're like, technically speaking, it is an ad. Did you see what happened to Alan Keating at the Hustler Live game with Senior itself? Yeah, he got up and left because they were being little, because they tried to angle shoot him on not turning his cards over during a prop bet.

And he did. Did you know Squarespace is our longest running sponsor in the history of this week startups. You can find episodes from more than a decade ago with me singing the praises of this wonderful platform Squarespace and how they're going to help you build an incredible website for your new business. That kind of longevity is no accident. Folks, Squarespace has been in the game for some time because there's no better, easier way or faster way to make your first website. And they're constantly upgrading and making their product better. They now have an AI-powered blueprint feature, which works right alongside you helping you upgrade your design game. And it was

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And hopefully we have this indeed mantra ones because those are all going to be coming to. And those are for big, big money. All right. So here's the latest from our friends over at Polly Market. And there's two ways to look at this date adjacent. There is, will there be ads in chat GPT by December 31st? The market has decided that that's not going to happen. Currently at 4% and dropping over $400,000.

in volume there. What is interesting, though, is the fact that they added this March 31st timeline. Now, there's not a lot of betting yet on the extended time frame for will there be ads in chat chit by then, the end of Q1. But still, not a lot of optimism here. People really don't think it's coming. So these folks think that it's going to be at least Q2 before we see advertisements in chat GPT.

And you always ask, what are the terms of resolution? And what matters is the market will resolve to, yes, if OpenAI integrates ads into any of their major GPTs, and that is made available by the date. And critically, this is what I wanted to check in on limited advertisement releases restricted to a specific region will qualify. So this is actually pretty, I would say, generous. Like if they launch ads in like, you know, Bangladesh, then that counts. Yeah.

So this is a really interesting market. I think the challenge is going to be, and this is like a game of chicken, whoever launches ads first also will take a bunch of heat for putting ads in their product. So if you add ads, the first person to put it on a website got a bunch of heat, I think it was wired, putting the ZMA ad up. A lot of people claim different ads first time on the internet, putting ads into RSS feeds, putting ads into podcasts. It was all very controversial. We put ads into blogs. We had the first ad in a podcast on the auto blog podcast.

People did do the hand-wringing. about earlier, but it does degrade the consumer experience marginally. So you have to give to get. So what they should say is, if you allow ads, you get deep research. You get unlimited searches. You get pro. You get pro if you turn on ads. And you just have to give something at that moment in time. So in this great game of chicken, we'll see what happens. I think if I am chat GPT, Claude, or even Google, when you do a deep research, you know how it says using deep research for this, come back in a minute, we'll send you a message. Like they'll even send you a notification on your phone.

That's a perfect time to say, and your deep research is being brought to you by, and then just put a little thing brought to you by your friends at LinkedIn jobs, Chipotle, click here to start an Uber Eats order, whatever it is, you know, DoorDash. And you can make that based upon previous searches. So that is what I think will be the winning one. This is called an interstitial in the business. So a lot of times you'll see websites now. You click on a link.

And before it lets you go to the link, it shows you a search. survey or like a box and then you have to hit the X or skip, those kind of interstitials force you to just consider the advertiser for a microsecond or in I guess YouTube's case it counts down from five seconds. That's what's coming folks. And why not? If you can get deep research for free, that's a, and it takes a couple of minutes anyway. It's kind of a win, win, win. The advertiser's not putting you out because you're getting the deep research for free. You know, they're going to make a nickel or a penny from Claude for they're going to be able to charge for that, et cetera. So I also think that the consumers are willing to take such an insane ad load

in general. Like if you think about the ad mix on professional sports, on Amazon's e-commerce marketplace, on YouTube streaming service, people take a lot of ads and they still use the product. So a lot of money on the floor there. Next up in the docket, we're going to talk about Warner Brothers Discovery, covered it on Friday. A lot of breaking news. I asked our dear friend Lon Harris editorial director here at launch to join us. Lon, where are you at? I'm right here. This is great. The deal is closed as It looks like Netflix won, and the deal is over. Everybody's very happy about it. The people who competed all said, hey, great competition.

You won. I congratulate you on the win. And Mausel Tov, good luck. We've moved the Stranger Things kids into the Water Tower next to the Animaniacs. We're all done. No, Alex didn't get that one. See, the Animaniacs on that old cartoon show, Alex, they lived in the WB Water Tower and the studio. So I'm joking.

I'm just old enough to recall animaniacs, but I wasn't allowed to watch a lot of TV growing up. It was more Jesus. I'm joking that now Netflix is going to jam the stranger things kids in there with the animaniacs because they're owned by the same cut. That might not work out because President Trump has weighed in. Yes, there's a lot of resistance going on. I mean, obviously from the public,

there was a lot of outcry. People are very worried. They're not going to be able to see their WB movies in theaters anymore. their Netflix is going to cancel theatrical distribution for all time. But it seems that some of these concerns are being shared by our wonderful, terrific, amazing, praiseworthy American president. Otis has jumped into the ring and said that he could share some of these antitrust concerns.

Here's the quote. I have a lot of respect for him. I think he's talking about Ted Sarandos. I have a lot of respect for him. He's a great person. He's done one of the greatest jobs in the history of movies and other things. But it is a big market share. There's no question about it.

could be a problem. And then another quote, they have a very big market share. And when they have Warner Brothers, that share goes up a lot. I'll be involved in the decision. That's the key part of the takeaway. He said that? Trump said specifically, I'll be involved in the decision. So he's putting himself in the middle of this negotiation.

A lot of people are reading that is very favorable to Paramount because, of course, the Ellison family sort of aligned themselves with Donald Trump. So people are saying if he's going to play favorites, he may just throw this to the Ellison's over at Paramount. However. However. As if things were complicated enough, there's also been some drama over the weekend

between our president and the people of Paramount. He's not happy with them over a 60 minutes segment that aired. He feels like the real problem with the show, however, wasn't the low IQ.

They had Marjorie Taylor Green on 60 minutes. Trump did not like that. So he's saying, but he's saying even the real problem with the show, however, wasn't the low IQ trader, Marjorie Taylor Green. It was the new ownership of 60 Minutes. Paramount would allow a show like this to air. All caps, they are no better than the old ownership,

who just paid me millions of dollars for fake reporting about your favorite president, me. Since they bought it, 60 Minutes has actually gotten worse. Oh, well, far worse things can happen. So now chaos. I mean, is Trump going to side with Netflix? Who he's praising is a great company? Wait, you forgot the critical last thing for Jason to respond to.

Paramount also today, Jason, launched a $30 per share all-cash offer for the whole company, not just the part that Netflix wants to buy. So we have a hostile bid. I was going to get that. They're offering a lot more money. Is it a lot more money? Explain to me like the difference in the deals if you can. It is more money.

It is more money. And they're willing to buy the cable assets. Correct. Here's the quote from Ellison. He told CNBC, we are offering shareholders $17.6 billion more. more cash than the deal they currently have signed up with Netflix. And we believe when they see what is currently on our offer, then that's what they'll vote for. And then, of course, they're also suggesting Paramount still believes they will have an easier time getting through these regulatory hurdles than Netflix will.

Because their businesses are more aligned and less directly competitive. Paramount Plus isn't the chief rival for Netflix the way HBO Max is. So that's kind of the overall argument. Got so much to unpack here. I know. To bring it all into the numbers, the Paramount offer $108.4 billion for all of WBD. The Netflix offer $82.7 billion just for the Warner Brothers film and TV studio.

And those are both enterprise valuations, not... All right. So number one, I'm an idiot because I j-traded Warner Brothers, lost a little bit of money, then sold it to bank the loss last year so that I could offset it against some gains I had. And I missed the Hail Mary, and it would have been, I think, a double up for me. me at the current share price. Could have 2x in three years. But I don't invest in companies for hell-marry outcomes. But here it is. There's a hell-marry outcome. If you're not listening to your customers and iterating based on their feedback, your startup will fail. So if you're

drowning in feedback from support, reviews, calls, it's time for Interpret. Interpret is the customer intelligence platform that helps you turn random comments and feedback into actionable insights that help grow your company. Their AI system is already trained on your business and your product. It then reads all your support tickets. It reads all your reviews, call transcripts, and surveys. Then their agents actually update your team in Jira, Linear, Zendesk, and Slack. So this feedback doesn't just sit in some email or messaging thread, but it actually helps keep your team moving the ball forward. Find out why Hanva, Notion, and Perplexity are already using Interpret to stay on top of what they need to fix or build next. So if you're ready to turn feedback chaos into

customer intelligence, head to interpret.com slash twist to book a demo and see it in action. That's E-N-T-R-P-R-E-T dot com slash twist. Putting me aside, there is a concept here of an auction, and what should happen next is there should be an auction. And the auction should go to, stick with me here, fellas, because it's going to get complex. The highest bidder. By definition, that means the person who puts the biggest, number up. So we've had a bunch of this back and forth. I'm tired of this story. And this is all

meaningless. It's meaningful to people who work in Hollywood who are directly impacted. I get it. But the truth is, you are all rearranging a bunch of deck chairs on the Titanic. Thank you. Or, you know, insert another analogy here, because total minutes on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, dwarf all of this nonsense. This is a bunch of rich people trading magazines 20 years ago. This is a bunch of rich nepo babies, and I don't mean that in a derogatory way. I mean, when I say nepo babies,

what I mean is people I'm extremely jealous of because I had to build this goddamn chip stack. If I could have started with a $100 billion, if I started with a $100 million chip stack like Trump or this Ellison kid, man, I would be a trillionaire. You weren't playing with Oracle's bankroll. Anyway, I'm extremely jealous of the chip stacks of nepo babies. But what I will say for the nepo baby crowd is, like, sure, this is exactly what happened.

The rich widows, the nepo babies, they all love to bid on the previous shiny objects. They love to own the Atlantic. They want to buy the Washington Post. Or actually, Bezos bought that. But you get my point. They love to buy the famous restaurant, the famous movie studio. they're always looking in the review mirror. Why?

We're all status-seeking creatures. Some of us seek status by being blue-collar hard workers who make it, like myself. Other ones are like, I'm going to go buy my daddy's or my mommy's love by buying the thing they love.

That's what's happening here, folks. I hate to get all Freudian on you. I do think there's one element we're overlooking, which is Netflix is a much healthier company in 2025. Paramount can make this deal, but they're basically just putting themselves in a very, very deep hole of debt, taking this money from, you know,

sovereign wealth funds and Red Point Capital anywhere they could get it. Whereas Netflix, I mean, they are also taking on loans and they've got banks on board to help them, but they're a company that can afford to just sort of... Exactly. So I do think that might be part of it. If you were Warner Brothers

and you were looking for who can support the long-term health of this TV and film studio, I do think there's an argument for Netflix over Paramount, which is just going to end up probably scrapping everything and selling it off for parts anyway. Here's what I'm going to say. From now on, there should be a 60-day pre-veting approval process for antitrust. This is when I'm President Jason, I run for president.

I like it. I'm going to lean a con. And what I'm going to say is, from now on, we're offering for the low. low price of $25 million, your ability to get your deals pre-vetted. So if you are Google and you want to buy YouTube, if you're Adobe and you want to buy Figma, if you're Adobe and you want to sell Photoshop, if you're Google and you want to sell YouTube, we will tell you who is going to trigger an antitrust deep review and who is not. And we were going to make it easier for these transactions to go through.

So you don't need breakup fees. You just need to pay the government to put people on it. And then what we'll do with the $25 million is we'll hire four independent, you know, assessors of this who will write four reports for $5 million each. We'll pull them from a pool of, you know, 50 possible intelligent people. We'll collate that. We'll share it with the public because it's got to be in the public expense interest. And Ernst & Young and McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group and whoever,

wants to write these reports, can write really thorough reports of what they predict will be in the best interest of consumers. This is a great idea. This is like it's TSA pre-check but for M&A deals. Yes, yes. I'm creating clear. Clear your deal. TSA pre-check for your deal.

Now what this will do is reduce drama and then it will take out the favoritism because the decision will be based upon a collection of reports by really intelligent people and based on a very simple test. What will be in the best interest of consumers and competition? That's it. That's it. And some smart person, McKinsey might say, you know what? When comparing the viewership of this to YouTube, TikTok, you do the full minutes consumed by generations, they'll say, listen, when these boomers are gone and these Gen Xers are gone, it's not going to look good for these companies. Like, this is not where the competition is. Here's where minutes are being spent. Okay. So that's fix is the regulatory thing. Which, and we're going to have an office.

And the auction will have terms to it. It'll go from five bidders to best three bidders to best two. And, you know, we're going to run an auction process. Winner wins. That's it. Who runs the auction in this model? On this model, you would hire Allen and company or some bank to run the auction on behalf of... Catalyst or whatever. Okay. You were like, we're going to have intelligent people, these five. And then you started listing off Ernst & Young and McKenzie. And that's where he lost me. I mean, that's giving consultants way too much credit. I just wanted to make a meet... No, no, no. He's consultants are actually very good at these kind of things. This is something where they do a great job because they can look historically and they know inside these businesses really well. Like they understand the nuances of these existing businesses. Where McKinsey or Boston Consulting Group might be have a more challenging time is what we do in Founderland. Like, hey, we're going to create this disruptive thing called Robin Hood and it's going to, you know,

destroy all these, you know, trading companies. They'll be like, wait a second. We don't have the date on that because it doesn't exist. You know, that's where venture capitalists have an advantage. They actually have an advantage on venture capitalists and folks like private equity people do because they understand existing assets so well because they probably have worked with them or in them. So somebody like BCG has probably been inside of Disney doing 27 different projects in the last 10 years. They've done 15 projects for Netflix.

They understand those kind of the mechanics. So that's where they would actually do a pretty good job. And then you could have futurists. You could say, hey, I'm going to hire Kevin Kelly, a futurist, and give him and his consulting group a million dollars to do their take on it. You can have a lot of fun with that and really do a thorough job that is, that takes away it's Lena Khan leaning people towards this or Biden or this, you know, combo of, you know, liberal lunatics, you know, who are biased.

Or it's Trump anointing people who, or it's Obama who gave people a Netflix deal. or this person gave Obama a $10 million podcast deal or a $20 million book deal, the Clinton's got this deal. Or, you know, everybody's getting these deals from the media companies. We need to make these groups more independent and we need to have them answer

not to the executive branch, but to the people. I'm Jason Calacanis. I'm running to be your president in 2028. I hope I have your vote. And I approve this message. There's only one thing left here. The final thing that's left here is President Trump's comments and trying to interpret them. He's going to comment on the failed news any chance he gets.

Let's take this 60 minutes. That's just him grinding 60 minutes and, you know, working the refs, whatever, like anybody else does. But he does particularly well and he does it in a pretty comical way. Let's put aside that. And let's go to just his very granular comments here, because I do think people don't give him enough credit for the things he says. And you have to get past some of your biases here or one's biases towards him that he's just riffing. He's not riffing.

There's a couple of things embedded here I noticed. I have a lot of respect for him, Ted Sarandos. He's a great person. He's done the greatest job. He's done one of the greatest jobs in the history of movies or other things. Praise a very influential media channel that he actually knows. is going to win this. So he's giving him his praise, giving him his flowers.

Why? Got to work with him. Hey, and Netflix is going to give him a documentary series when he gets out, just like they gave it to everybody else. Well, maybe Amazon. Melania's documentary is coming to Prime Video. So there's going to be some bidders. There's going to be some bidders.

I know, but what he's doing here is he's prepping Netflix to do a similar thing. Correct. Right? He wants to keep them in the game. Absolutely. Very smart. But it's big market share. There's no question about it.

It could be a problem. That's actually accurate. if you're not considering TikTok and YouTube. It is a lot of market share of the old thing, which represents like half the number of minutes now or a third of the number of minutes and some percentage of the revenue. Their share is going to go up a lot.

I'll be involved in this decision. This is the key. He's not supposed to be involved in the decision. Like that creates a legal out for anybody. Like if he were to give it to Paramount and he were involved in it, then you've got the lawsuit of all lawsuits. Netflix can come in and say,

listen, he said it right here. By the way, people aren't watching the lawfare going on, but he did a similar thing where he scuttled his own case against Comey and Letitia by saying, we're going to go after them. I don't know what his exact quote was there, but he basically said, we're going to do this. Now, there is a concept here that we can't have a prejudicial justice system. By saying those things, he's created the ultimate easy way to have a case dismissed. the president of the United States, the most powerful man in the world, directed the prosecution of Letitia James and Comey. I mean, if you're thinking of that tweet that he sent or that truth social message to Pam Bondi, there's ambiguity. Some people think that he did that accidentally and it was meant to be a direct message.

There are no accidents. There was further reporting law that it was actually a mistake. You mentioned it as a deal. Okay. I don't think it is. I don't believe. I'm by the minute. But I'll say there's no way he makes that mistake. Even if it was a mistake, he said plenty of other things about going after them. He said before the election, I'll be your retribution. We're going to put all these Democrats in jail. And that is why those cases recently got canceled. Like, it's the easiest out in the world. Or it's among the reasons these

things got canceled because he put it in a lawyer without having them approved properly or whatever. Oh, Lindsay Halligan. Yeah, it's a whole prejudicial kind of situation. I think he's doing that on purpose here. I think he just wants this thing to be over. He's saying he's going to be involved in it. That bakes and makes it like, okay, we just got to give this to Netflix. Get this thing done.

Boom. It's done. It's going to Netflix. There is a family, the Ellison family, who bought from the other family at that private transaction. That family got to make that decision because they were the primary shareholders. In this case, the private shareholder. In this case, the primary shareholders are not a family.

It's the public and pension funds, etc., which makes it super easy. High is bitter. Best offer. And that's what this is going to go to. Now, if the Ellison's have made the best offer, then this could get reconsidered, I guess. I don't know if this is locked up, but... The board opted to go for Netflix, but now Ellison is trying to basically do a hostile takeover, go directly to the shareholders.

You're getting screwed. You should go with my deal instead, and we will see what happened. The other possibility is Netflix made this offer. They got that $5.8 billion fee for the breakup. And maybe they realized, like, hey, okay, I guess we're not going to get through antitrust. Or maybe the chance we're not going to get through this antitrust. And so, yeah, let him outbid himself and overpay for the asset. There was a puck news piece that suggested that this is all elaborate game theory by Netflix.

They knew they were going to get rejected. They didn't think they were going to make the acquisition go through. But you tie up your main rival in the streaming marketplace for a year and a half, two years, while everything goes. They can't get acquired by anyone else. They can't acquire anyone else. You're sort of freezing them out for a year or two while you continue growing expanding. There are people in Hollywood who think that's what's going on. And this is just Netflix throwing a wrench in the work.

And if you happen to get it, great. Win, win. Yeah, you either pick up your chief rival or you tie them up for two years distracting everybody while you grow. Just a clarification, Netflix pays the $5.8 billion if the deal falls apart. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Like, so they may at some point want to, like, not have to deal with that. So they, in other words, in the game theory, they create chaos,

they get their top competitor distracted. Exactly. And if the other party wins, they don't have to pay the breakup fee. And if they win, they assume they soak up HBO Max, their chief rival. So it's win-win no matter what happens. They want HBO Max and they want the DC characters. That's my theory. That's the only Harry Potter.

There's a lot. There's a lot. Yeah, I mean, Harry Potter's nice, I guess. Yeah. And they're making that new HBO show, the Lone Sopranos. You know, that's a lot of stuff. Ted Serendos would like that. They did model, you could tell me if I'm wrong or not one.

Did they not model Netflix when they first went out as HBO prestige? Netflix would cite Casey Boy's stuff at HBO as like the North Star. And you could tell when you look at left like House of Cards, that initial pack of shows, Ozark, they were obviously basing it on prestige TV from HBO, places like AMC. You know, that was what they were aiming for. How did it become is that cake?

Like, have you seen that show when they have to guess if the thing is cake or not? How did we go? They figured out, and this is they brought in Bella Bajaria, who now runs content for Netflix. And she was like the real sort of, of figurehead behind this realization, a lot of people are putting on Netflix in the background while they're on their phone,

while they're cleaning, while they're doing other stuff, and that a lot of the stuff that does the best on Netflix is that kind of background viewing. It doesn't, not everything has to be Squid Game. Some things people just like to kind of leave on while they're doing other stuff. It's very low impact.

And those are a lot of the biggest shows. Emily and Perrie, Ginny and Georgia, even like Bridgeton, it's like pretty to look at. It's not hard to follow. You can check in and out. And I noticed, too, a lot of Netflix original movies and even stranger things started

doing this. They signpost constantly in the, so every time they get somewhere new, they're like, well, here we are, the state fair where we said we had to go investigate that clue you found because they know you're kind of checking in and out. You're on your phone. It's because of dual screen. Because of two screen viewing, people playing chess, which I find myself doing, a chess alert comes down.

Scrolling TikTok. I forget to pause. And then I was doing this with Landman last night. I was taking a bath. My back was hurt and I'm watching Landman. And I get a chess alert. And I move over and I'm like, oh my God,

what am I doing? Like, this is like such a great performance happening in this latest episode of Landman with that old guy, Sam Elliott. And I'm like, I'm missing the Sam Elliott performance of the season.

So I basically pulled it back 10 minutes, put my notifications off. I was like, I need to actually soak this in, so to speak. There's your explanation for like, that's why so much Netflix content is that kind of, is it cake stuff?

Oh, so annoying. Yeah. This is why I think they should have gotten CNN because you would keep, if you had CNN, they would have it running constantly. They just don't want to touch politics. News and politics. I think especially because the international, so much of their viewing is overseas all these different markets. I think they don't want to have to worry about customizing and individualizing that content for all these territory. That's already been done. So what they should do is they should figure out who was running CNN back in the day when it was just straight reporting. and they didn't have opinion stuff in roundtables. If they went to straight reportage, hey, we're here in Baghdad. Things are blowing up.

BBC has changed a lot, but this used to be BBC, too. In like the 90s, when you'd watch BBC news, it was very like, here's an anchor and here's the news, and here's another news story, and it was very matter of fact. There was nobody with an opinion. It's expensive to have, you need to have Middle East bureaus

and you need to have a bureau in Beirut, and you need to have stringers and camera crews. But you don't need, to give Anderson Cooper $25 million. That's true. Or keep sending Stanley Tucci to Italy to wander around for a few months. Well, no, but let's call it what it is. I think actually sometimes you've got a zig where people,

you got a zig and zag here. When I am running, Disney, I'll buy CNN or I'll launch a news network. Presidency first, studio ahead first or Disney head first? Yes, I'm going to do two jobs. Elon's got two jobs. You will own ABC News Studio when you have Disney. Perfect. I will make ABC News.

news, ABC News will be ABCN, ABCN will have gist reportage. Anybody has a personality, G-T-F-O. You could have a little personality. Yeah, we don't want to hear your opinions. You just want to hear the news. The most personality allow would be Alex, and you've got to be under Alex impersonality. I don't want any...

I'm the Mendoza line for commentary. Yes, yes. I would like them to have less personality than Alex as a rule. Oh, man. Van Jones, you're out the door, man. Sorry. No, Van Jones, forget it. Van Jones is out the door.

Enough. He's got insights. He's reconsidered things. I don't want anybody, your opinion is incredible for you to write down in your journal during the morning notes over coffee. And at night, you could namaste,

have your chamomile tea and write it down in your journal as well. When you're on ABCN, your job is to report a fact. I'm sorry. And if the fact changes, you report that fact. If anybody doesn't, and by the way, you're all getting paid the same goddamn salary.

Here's the salary structure. It's $150,000 a year, bust your ass. And every year you hear, you get 6% more. And that's it. If you don't like it, GTF. MS Now is death down the street. Go to MS now. But can you imagine how amazing would be to turn on news and just have them tell you what's happening?

And it's weird that every time a new person goes, into run a place like CNN or CBS news. They always say this is the plan. Like, we're going to get away from all this commentary and peace, talking heads, arguing, and we're going to get back to more like practical. Here's what's going on. Current events, news you could use. And then it never quite seems to happen.

It always just becomes a different person's opinionated perspective. In the same way, Lon, that I think Netflix ends up at, is this cake? I think CNN's obvious, you know, point of denouement is next. up on our CNN panel, right? It's because it's easy. It's cheap. There's no prep required. Their new show is Tony Shalube traveling around the world tasting bread.

This is true. Well, I mean, that's why we have HGTN. No, but Alex is right. If you get four talking heads with different opinions, you have them scream at each other, it used to get ratings. It was a good ratings playbook, and it was theoretically cheaper until Megan Kelly, Tucker, Anderson Cooper, these people became expensive. these people came $25 million a year.

I mean, Anderson Cooper, $20 million a year. Wolf Blitzer was 15. Jake Tapper, $8 million. I just asked producer Claude. No, I think they've all been run down now. He's not worth it, man. Aaron Burnett, $6 million. Yeah, I mean, she's famous.

I get, I get, I get. How about we get like, I don't know, the next Aaron Burnett, and if you're on air, you get paid $150,000 to your... And you're on for four minutes. You tell us the facts. And then you hand it up to the next person. Tell us the facts.

No, no. Sounds good. Lon, what are you watching? What's your favorite streamer show right now? Ooh. Wow. Tough, tough choice.

You know, I was, I've been enjoying the It show on HBO Max. Welcome to Derry. But I don't know. I feel like they might have lost me this week. It went pretty far outside the parameters. But I am loving Pluribus on Apple TV. The new Vince Gilling.

Well, yeah. In the new year, I asked Lon on the Friday show to come on. And we're going to do a little thing at the end of the show where we go off duty and we're going to give you our takes on great media things for your weekend. And Pluribus is my pick as well. Have you watched this now yet, Alex? Or you have to watch TV? No, no, I keep hearing about Pluribus. And so I'm actually, to hear law and recommended as well, it's high-bride. Jason, do you think that it is a metaphor for AI?

Because that's what a lot of people online. I think it is simultaneously. I know they said it isn't. It is a metaphor for AI, the singularity. Yeah. Socialism. democracy and the end of the American Empire. All of these things. Wow. Yeah. There's a lot going on. It's a really interesting perspective.

But once I started thinking about, is this an allegory for AI? A lot of stuff fits. Like the kind of the way that the humans talk to one another now has a very chat GPT kind of sensibility to it. Cicophantic. Right. They're always like, oh, Carol, we love you so much. That's such a great idea.

You want to help you. There's a great idea. Let's workshop it. Yeah. I mean, it's always the same, you know, AI. It's AI slop to its end. The world has become a form of AI slop in a way, yeah. It is AI slop.

And like one of the characters is living in the ultimate AI slop, right? In Vegas, it's unbelievable. But I would say the protagonist to me represents America. I have a slightly different thing. I think it represents personal freedom, American exceptionalism, self-determinism, and how messy it is. And then the collective represents. socialism. I think it's also, yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. I think in a lot of ways,

it's just about that feeling of feeling alone. The entire world is on board with something and you personally feel like you're not a part of it. I love that too. The rugged individualism of like, hey, I still want to read a book. I want to make my own breakfast. Yeah, but even in a way, like the feeling of being depressed or that feeling of being isolated where like the whole world is sort of feel right. Like it's a very human thing. And I think you could almost apply it to any scenario. It's just about that emotional state of feeling alienating. If they stick the landing in the next three weeks, I think this is going to be one of the top five shows of the New Century. It's been spectacular. And it's coming back. We already know it's coming back for season two.

Well, it has to come back. I mean, even if they fumbled it like lost it in the end, but it's kind of like a better version of lost in some ways. It's a more intellectually rigorous version of lost. Where lost, they were like, yeah, let's just do something weird. And they're like, it's a hit. We thought we were going to get canceled like everything else. They know the ending of this. This is going to be a four series, five series max arc. Yeah, I feel like Gilligan has an idea of where he's going.

Oh, he does. He's not winging it. No, no. I think last thing I wanted to talk about here that I think is kind of interesting is that a PR guru who I don't think I've ever had the pleasure of meeting, but she wrote the Go Direct manifesto, which I think actually I get credit for. but okay. I think she probably rewrote my ideas. I don't know when her, let's see when this manifesto came out about going direct because, yeah, 24, yeah. No, she gets no credit for that. Sorry. I created that going direct. Okay, but whatever. But explain to us what's going on here. A PR person, this, I do find this fascinating. A PR person is starting a venture firm. That's really fascinating. Lulu worked at a large, a number of large technology companies in a comm's role. She eventually left that, did a lot of talking in public, founded her own firm called Rostra,

which is named after a part of Rome where they stood on old bits of ships and talked to the public. And her big pitch has been, go direct, don't use intermediaries. Now, what she has done, as Jason just alluded to, is put together a firm, a $40 million vehicle to go along with that, essentially as far as I can tell, investing in the companies that she works with. And she told Axios, the quote, storytelling is alpha, investing, compliments, Rostra's work because narrative and capital both.

compound. And then she says this thing, which I've heard from a lot of other people will talk about in just a second. Right now, it's easier than ever to build new things and harder than ever to get people to care. So her argument is that building stuff a little bit easier than it was, you can code faster, I don't know, vibe code, whatever you want. No, you definitely build startups, but telling the story is like a big part of it, right? Yeah. So I was thinking about the story and I know a couple of other examples that come right to mind. First one is day one ventures. This is founded by Masha Boucher. Actually, I know her back from my San Francisco days. And she has put together a firm from her comms practice. So she runs her own venture firm and has raised not just one,

but two, but three funds, Jason, each of increasing size. 20 million, grant 52, and then 150. Amazing. Yeah, she was in True Bill at $15 million valuation, sold to Rocket for 1.3. So some success there. There's another firm, VSC Ventures. This is part of the, an arm of VSC, another comms shop. and they also, again, stress the importance of getting attention for products. So not the first, not the second, but the third time we've seen this trend of essentially service providers building venture capital funds. I like it. It's somewhat interesting.

I think it speaks to what we saw in journalism when a bunch of journalists, and specifically a bunch of tech crunch journalist or alma mater, we're like, wait, journalism is dying. You know, there's no more competition for our services and like, this pays better. and it's essentially the same job, which I think most people would agree I was the pioneer in that, but because I was the first to do it after Michael Moritz. So it was Michael Moritz, me, O'Mallek, M.G. Siegler. Yeah. It was like a, it was a good cohort. And that job is also, you know, trying to figure out what the reality or the story is. In the PR job, it's how to spin the story to get attention or how to massage the story or how to scale telling the story, all that kind of stuff.

if you were, I don't like PR, like PR people generally because it's just, you know, exhausting to deal with them. That being said, having one in the building who's really good, that makes sense to me. It makes a lot of sense to me. I have a lot of friends that work in and around the comms industry. And if I was ever in trouble, I know that they're my first call because they've been through it, man. They just know how to handle a crisis.

They also, back to your point earlier on the show about being able to do a code red, you know who's really good at fire drills? Coms people, the good ones. But this is the problem. As a former journalist, you became friends with PR people. This is always the trap. The PR people know how to ingratiate themselves and spend time with journalists, et cetera.

When I ran all of our pubs, we wouldn't talk to journalists. I ban the Engadgette reporters. Do not, from talking to PR people. Just do not talk to PR people. Just go to the subjects, talk to them directly. If PR people call you and want to talk to say, we don't talk to PR people. Same thing I do here at This Week in startups,

all in. PR people email us. have a little sentence. Thank you so much for your interest. We don't take pitches. Please remove us from your list. NPR people hate me, but they respect me because they know. And then I would always have like clever people, well, how do people do get on the show? I say, we pick them. How do you pick them? Well, I pick what I think is interesting. Oh, okay. Well, I'd love to tell you why this is interesting. I'm like, oh, no, we don't take pitches. I don't want you to tell me what I think is interesting. My job is to be informed. Yeah. And I made Molly, and I think I instructed you to do the same thing

with this week in startups. I hope I did at some point. Like just use this snippet. I want them to think there's no way to get on the show. And it's like a little uncomfortable at first to write that. I don't know if you found it uncomfortable. I've had to say it on a lot of phone calls. Like people like, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, how you doing?

I'm like, oh, good. They're like, hey, we got a guy. Well, when I first joined, everyone thought that I joined All-in. And so they're like, can we get on the show? And I'm like, I'm not on that. I don't even know. I'm sure, maybe you can, but not through me. And eventually people figured it out.

And then they stopped trying to, because I can. type saying things like, no, and we don't do that. And also, you don't, we don't want to fake interest in somebody, you know, like, I don't want to have someone come on the show and be like, I'm not compelled by this, Jason. Let's talk to them for 15 minutes. The only thing that can happen is sometimes, like, somebody's like, I do Michael Dell's book. And I'm like, well, Michael Del's a hero, whatever. And I'm like, yeah, just tell Michael to reach out. And they're like, okay, well, he doesn't do that. And then I just said, okay. And they're like, okay, so he's going to be on the show. I'm like, no. I just told you, if Michael Dell wants to come on the program,

tell him to ping me. He knows how to get me. And like, of course, like, what are we doing here? Like, if you're pitching me a friend of mine or somebody who's been on the show, like, you didn't even know they've been on the show or that we have a relationship? Like, what are you doing, PR people?

PR people are just 90% of them are just dumb. They're just low IQ, 90%. Alex is like, short. Well, I mean, I don't know. What am I going to interrogate that and argue that's 75? I mean, no matter what, I look like an asshole. I want to point out, though, that everything you're saying underscores Lulu's philosophy. She thinks that you should go around intermediaries, be they PR people.

She cribbed my go-directionality. Other notable venture capital firms started by non-traditional folks. Harry Stebbings and 20VC has invested in Pooleaside and merge.com. A couple of twist 500 companies. And then there's a lot of other smaller ones that I found. So WPP, the big advertising conglomer. Yeah, that's a corporate. It's adjacent, but that's like a corporate VC arm.

Yeah, yeah. But I was thinking... Corporate VC arm isn't like, I'm leaving PR, PR sucks, or I'm leaving this and going to that. But yeah, it's adjacent. It's adjacent. I found some, like, breadcrumbs about other PR firms, starting funds that didn't really kind of make it

and the websites weren't up anymore. And then if you want to go further, a field to non-traditional venture capital firm founders, there's a number of celebrities. Serena Williams, Ashton Cusher, Snoop Doc, and Kevin Durant come to mind. Yeah, that's another angle to get into VC, is to use a chain smokers,

to use your celebrity to get access to DL and then use your platform to then go promote stuff. And it can work. It's worked out for Serena, obviously, and Ashton. All right, everybody, thanks for tuning in to this week in startups. We'll be back on Wednesday. Bye-bye. All right, everybody, tomorrow on the show, Alex will interview on Tuesday,

a couple of Twist 500 companies coming at you. And Wednesday, I'll be back for the News Roundtable. Bye-bye.