This Week in Startups

The Biggest Private Funding Round in History | E2256

80 min
Feb 28, 2026about 2 months ago
Listen to Episode
Summary

Jason Calacanis and Lon Harris discuss OpenAI's record-breaking $110 billion funding round, valuing the company at $730 billion. The episode features demos from three entrepreneurs building AI-powered businesses and explores the impact of AI on employment through Block's 40% layoff announcement.

Insights
  • AI companies may collectively invest $500 billion before achieving profitability, following a similar J-curve pattern to Tesla and Uber
  • Passionate but inexperienced employees often outperform experienced but dispassionate ones in startup environments
  • AI is enabling solo entrepreneurs to delay hiring by 6-12 months, handling tasks like legal, accounting, and operations independently
  • The hiring framework of qualified vs passionate creates four quadrants, with passionate newcomers ranking higher than experienced but uninterested candidates
  • AI-powered business creation tools are democratizing entrepreneurship globally, with developers in India building profitable SaaS businesses
Trends
Massive AI infrastructure investment creating unprecedented funding roundsAI-driven workforce reduction across tech companiesRise of AI-powered business creation platformsGlobal arbitrage in AI development talentAutonomous business operations through AI agentsDemocratization of website and business creation toolsShift from gradual to immediate workforce restructuringIntegration of multiple AI models for specialized tasksEmergence of disposable AI agents for temporary projectsRevenue-sharing models in AI-powered platforms
Companies
OpenAI
Raised record $110B funding round, now valued at $730B with Amazon, SoftBank, Nvidia investments
Block
Announced 40% staff cuts (4,000 people) citing AI capabilities reducing need for human workers
Amazon
Invested $50B in OpenAI with $15B upfront, $35B conditional on IPO or AGI achievement
Tesla
Used as example of J-curve economics, went $10B in debt before achieving profitability
Uber
Example of J-curve success, went $30B in debt, now generates $10B+ annual free cash flow
Microsoft
Existing OpenAI partnership remains unchanged despite new Amazon collaboration
Nvidia
Investing $30B in OpenAI funding round, will continue providing chips alongside Amazon
SoftBank
Contributing $30B to OpenAI's record funding round
Twitter
Referenced for Jack Dorsey's leadership and Elon Musk's hiring framework during takeover
Square
Block subsidiary mentioned in context of company restructuring and layoffs
People
Jack Dorsey
Block co-founder who announced 40% layoffs, praised for transparent and compassionate approach
Elon Musk
Referenced for hiring framework using qualified vs essential employee quadrants
Chris Everest
23-year-old Indian entrepreneur building Unloopa, AI website creation tool earning $100K ARR
Ben Broca
Creator of Pulsea, AI system that autonomously builds and runs companies for $49/month
Adi Gabrani
Vancouver-based entrepreneur offering OpenClaw hosting with 15-minute free trials
Scott Adams
Late Dilbert cartoonist whose AI avatar sparked legal debate over digital legacy rights
Quotes
"A significantly smaller team using the tools we're building can do more and do it better. Intelligence tool capabilities are compounding faster every week."
Jack Dorsey
"I think you can teach somebody, and I have. You can teach that stuff if they're smart and dedicated, but especially if they are passionate about the subject and can't wait to learn more."
Lon Harris
"We have achieved AGI in 50% plus of skills. We might be at 60 or 70. It's just not fully deployed and it's not fully executed on."
Jason Calacanis
"If you make $25,000 in US right now, compared to your friends, how would you be living? I'd be living like a king here."
Chris Everest
Full Transcript
10 Speakers
Speaker A

We gotta get out of here. This OpenAI funding situation has blown our minds. We're gonna be unemployed and I can't even pay for my damn rent anymore.

0:00

Speaker B

This is unedited. This is unfiltered. This is what's happening right now.

0:08

Speaker C

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0:12

Speaker B

All right, everybody, it's Twist. It's Friday. It's February 27th in the year of our Lord.

0:52

Speaker D

AO33. Jason AO33.

0:56

Speaker B

AO33. 33 days after Openclaw appeared on this program. And we're going to keep building replicants. We're going to keep building open claw agents. Yeah, we're going to. We're using like Slack bot 2% of the time. We're going to check out Notion's new one. We're going to keep track on all of these. We're going to rotate those into discussions. We do this week in startups on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I do all in on Thursday, but it comes out on Friday. Then we tape this weekend on Tuesday and we drop it Wednesday morning. So that's what you're getting from JCAL every week. Five. Five podcasts and we're gonna bring back two more. And we need a producer. We need a producer to work under Lawn and I please. Full time in Austin. Pays pretty good.

1:00

Speaker E

And you get to have a good time.

1:48

Speaker B

We need two things. One, you gotta be motivated by the topic.

1:50

Speaker E

Subject.

1:53

Speaker B

We need you. And this is how I hire now. You make four quadrants. Lon qualified.

1:54

Speaker E

Important, has the skills.

2:00

Speaker D

Got it. Got it.

2:02

Speaker E

And passion for the subject.

2:02

Speaker D

Yeah.

2:04

Speaker E

What's in the top right quadrant?

2:05

Speaker D

You're asking me? Yes.

2:08

Speaker E

What's in the top right quadrant?

2:10

Speaker D

So you know the most passionate and then the most experienced would be the very top.

2:11

Speaker E

Correct. What's in the bottom left?

2:16

Speaker D

Not experienced at all. And you're just looking for a gig. You don't really care about what we're doing.

2:20

Speaker E

Correct. So that's the easy box to get rid of right now. On the bottom right. What's on the bottom right? Building your mental model here.

2:25

Speaker D

You're Very passionate. But you're. You may not have the qualifications that we're looking for. You're. You're a newbie.

2:33

Speaker B

Correct.

2:41

Speaker E

Now do the top left.

2:41

Speaker D

You're extremely experienced. You've made tons of podcasts. You know it cold, but you prefer movies and TV or some other topic. That's not what we're talking about now.

2:43

Speaker E

It's easy to pick number one and number four. Number four. You don't want unqualified people who don't care about the topic. Okay, that's number four in the ranking. And then number one is really easy. Hey, you're super passionate and you're qualified.

2:56

Speaker B

Great.

3:07

Speaker E

Now, how do you rank 2 and 3? Lon, how do you think about 2 and 3? Would you rather have a passionate green person or an experienced person without passion?

3:08

Speaker B

What do you think?

3:18

Speaker D

You know, I go back and forth on this. When I was new on the scene, when I first started, I would have said experience that. I want people who know podcasting cold. They've done it a million times, and they can learn about tech, they can figure it out. But, but I think. I think I've switched. I think today I would say I want someone who lives and breathes startups, AI tech.

3:19

Speaker B

They're using all.

3:43

Speaker E

Why have you switched, by the way? You're correct.

3:44

Speaker B

You're correct.

3:46

Speaker D

Thank you.

3:47

Speaker E

So it's one and then the bottom right hand quadrant is number two, and the top left is number three.

3:48

Speaker D

Passion. Because I think you can teach somebody, and I have. I think that's what changed is the experience of showing a bunch of people how to do this job and how to make a podcast. And you can teach that stuff. Stuff if they're smart and dedicated, but especially if they are passionate about the subject and can't wait to learn more. I mean, we saw it with Oliver. Oliver came in not knowing anything about podcasting at all, really, but loved AI, loved startups, couldn't wait to dig in and learn how to use all these tools. And now he's off producing this week in AI.

3:54

Speaker E

And that does not. Tactical tip of the day. This is a tactical tip from Jake Allen Lawn. It's a tactical tip. It's a tt. It's a tactical tip for you to think about this weekend and bring to your startup on Mondays because a lot of people get caught up on this. And when you have a. You need to have a mental model, a framework, and you know how essential, you know is another vector you can do this on. When I was doing the Twitter, just, you know, lightly collaborating with Elon and Sachs and Antonio. On the Twitter takeover, Elon was like, okay, super qualified. And then who's essential, right? And that's who we need to keep. And if they're not qualified and they're not essential, well, obviously that's easy. And if they're not qualified, but they're essential, okay, we got to think about that. And then if they're super qualified but not essential, okay, we got to go through all these quadrants. So I just drew the four quadrants

4:28

Speaker B

on the board and it made it really easy to put people into buckets

5:23

Speaker E

and say, hey, here's where we're at. So take this with you. Talk to your co founder about it. It's a tactical tip from Twist. It's a twist tactical tip T3.

5:26

Speaker B

There you go.

5:36

Speaker E

And now we can go on to our first story.

5:36

Speaker D

That's a big one. It's the biggest private funding round in history. Some people are calling this Jason. OpenAI has raised $110 billion with a B. They're now valued at $730 billion with a B. Amazon putting in 50 billion. That's 15 billion up front. Another 35 when certain conditions are met. We don't yet know what those are. Softbank Nvidia going in for 30 billion each. The secondary big news here is that this is a larger scale collaboration between OpenAI and Amazon. OpenAI committing to using Amazon's Trainium semiconductors at its AWS data centers. They will continue to use Nvidia chips. On some level, we don't know exactly how this is all going to balance out. And they said that this new deal does nothing to, to change the ongoing OpenAI deal with Microsoft. So that's the huge story. I mean, and the interesting thing about this Amazon deal is so they're putting 15 billion up, they're holding back on 35 more billion that they are committing in the future. Information says that those conditions are either OpenAI goes IPO or they achieve AGI. So that's what we're still talking about. This like the deal changes if OpenAI reaches AGI. I mean, how far away do we really think that is now? Is this a real.

5:39

Speaker E

I've said this before, we've achieved AGI in 50% plus of skills. Artificial general intelligence basically means you can do any job a human can do better than a human. I think we're at the 50% mark minimum. We might be at 60 or 70. It's just not fully deployed and it's not fully executed on. So sometimes you'll have all the precursors. Precursors for, I don't know, sustainable energy. We have that right now. We don't need to burn carbon. We. We have all the precursors. We are a post carbon burning society. We have just not chosen to implement it. We could have a thousand nuclear power plants and we could have, you know, a project to just put solar everywhere and we would stop digging oil out of the ground. We have the technology. We have achieved sustainable energy forever in humanity. We have not applied the technology yet

7:00

Speaker B

because we already have the infrastructure for this oil.

7:59

Speaker E

And we're just deciding to use that

8:02

Speaker B

until such time as that's too expensive to pull out of the earth. Okay, fine.

8:05

Speaker E

Fair enough.

8:11

Speaker B

That's where we are with AGI. All the precursors are there. If you sit there Lon and you spend, I don't know, five hours with your replicant. I don't know.

8:12

Speaker E

Do you have a replicant yet?

8:21

Speaker B

Have you?

8:22

Speaker D

I don't. I don't have my. I do not have my own.

8:22

Speaker B

Don't have your.

8:24

Speaker D

I know the name. I'm going to call mine Gaff after. That's the Edward Almost character from Blade Runner. But he's not exist yet.

8:24

Speaker B

What? What? What does he say at the end when he gives?

8:32

Speaker D

Too bad she won't live. But then again.

8:35

Speaker B

She won't live.

8:38

Speaker D

But then again, who does? Who does?

8:40

Speaker F

Who does?

8:42

Speaker B

Shout out to Edward James Omos. Is that who it is?

8:43

Speaker D

Yes. The great Edward James Almost plays Gaff.

8:46

Speaker B

Incredible.

8:48

Speaker D

You had posted a tweet asking for a J curve based on.

8:49

Speaker E

Yes, I don't think anybody did it. Did anybody do it?

8:53

Speaker D

Kabir did it for you. Kabir from lunch has your J curve ready. Let's bring up the next.

8:56

Speaker E

It's not exactly a J curve.

9:01

Speaker D

Here's the next one.

9:02

Speaker E

Bar curve.

9:03

Speaker D

No, that's the Uber one. Open, Open. AI J curve. There we are.

9:03

Speaker E

Still not a J curve, but okay, so a J curve is when you just amount invested. Go find the J curve for Tesla and go find the J curve for Uber. And what it is, how much money you've invested.

9:07

Speaker D

Oh, I see it.

9:20

Speaker E

And you just keep adding that up. You keep adding it up and then you have your profit.

9:21

Speaker D

There you go.

9:26

Speaker E

Not your revenue, your profit. And then it starts going tick, tick,

9:27

Speaker B

tick, tick, tick, tick, tick up.

9:31

Speaker E

As an example, the free cash flow

9:32

Speaker B

from Uber in 2025 was 10 billion.

9:34

Speaker E

It'll be 13 billion in this year.

9:37

Speaker B

This is Uber's long road to profitability.

9:40

Speaker E

What you see there is just how

9:42

Speaker B

much money was lost to build.

9:44

Speaker E

I Don't know.

9:49

Speaker B

They're at like a quarter.

9:50

Speaker E

There are 250 million rides a day

9:52

Speaker B

globally in 10,000 cities. Like, to build that kind of footprint required buying companies, building infrastructure, the team spend, spend, spend. And they also spent money lon on subsidizing rides to build out the driver network and build out the habit. And so they went 30 billion in the hole. This chart is like ending in 24 when they had like couple of billion dollars in profit. So they went from like 32 to 30. We need to take this chart and put 10 billion which would make it skyrocket up and then put another 13 billion for 25 and 26. And what you'd see is 10 and 13 is 23 billion. You would go from negative 30 billion all the way up below that 5 billion line. It would shoot up like a rocket. That is the high art. So if we were to do this properly for. And I'll just have somebody else do it, get me somebody, one of the fans of the show. Build a J curve. There's been $250 billion. If we had a straight line down since ChatGPT came out, it was less than a billion dollars invested in the space. And then you get to about 250 billion invested including this 110 billion loan. Let's assume another 250 billion gets invested.

9:54

Speaker E

500 billion straight down. So this chart of Uber goes down 30 billion. And pull up the Tesla one as well, which you'll find very easily just by typing Tesla J curve chart in Google. Sorry to make this so complicated for my team. We've got a brand new partner here

11:13

Speaker B

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11:27

Speaker E

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11:29

Speaker G

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Speaker E

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11:40

Speaker G

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11:45

Speaker B

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Speaker G

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12:08

Speaker B

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12:20

Speaker G

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12:22

Speaker B

Also, I happen to be a shareholder in the company. I got very lucky.

12:36

Speaker G

They acquired one of my startups and I am stoked.

12:40

Speaker B

It's an amazing company.

12:43

Speaker E

Tesla J Curve is unbelievable. The amount of money invested in that was wild. Why? They had to build factories, they had to do all this stuff. Maybe you'll find it easier on Twitter because people talk about it a lot there. 500 billion invested is the equivalent of, of. I don't know, what is that, 12 times?

12:45

Speaker B

So here it is.

13:03

Speaker E

This is amazing. So this is free cash flow in the history of pure EV makers. And what you see is all the losses and you see that red spike going up.

13:03

Speaker B

That's the magic.

13:13

Speaker E

You struck oil. What did they have to do to get there? How many billions were they in the

13:14

Speaker B

hole at the peak? Tesla?

13:19

Speaker E

10 billion, negative. And then you go up and they start making money and all of a sudden turned a profit in year 11. And they've, you know, five years since

13:20

Speaker D

year 1718 of Tesla. I see, correct.

13:29

Speaker E

So now you have to do that for language models. For language models, they go 500 billion into debt. That's a big hole collectively. A lot of anthropic, Xai, a lot of chips, Mistral, anthropic, everybody. And then also the data center companies

13:32

Speaker B

I would include in there because they're directly, you know, associated with this effort.

13:50

Speaker E

You put all that together, you build a $500 billion hole, let's say in

13:55

Speaker B

2030, they throw off $10 billion collectively in profits. In other words, they throw off what Uber makes in year 14 or what

13:59

Speaker E

Tesla makes in year 16.

14:06

Speaker B

Then as a group, then let's say it grows 50% a year. So you go 10, 15, 22.5. You get the idea. Boom, boom, boom, boom.

14:09

Speaker E

You're talking about a 10 year, maybe a six year run to just get

14:17

Speaker B

out of the J Curve. That's my estimate.

14:22

Speaker D

A few months ago, people were really asking like, are there going to be customers for, like, is there going to be enough people who want to use AI to make the curve go up so, so sharply like there were for Tesla. And I think that there were a lot of reasons to be skeptical even a few months ago. Now with agents really doing all this stuff and so much evidence every day of what people are accomplishing, I Think it's harder to be skeptical. It was easier a few months ago.

14:24

Speaker B

All right, there it is, folks. Congratulations to the team at OpenAI. They're making 20 billion.

14:51

Speaker D

They're doing all right.

14:57

Speaker B

And I would say worth 7,800 billion, or maybe 8, maybe 800 billion post money. Add the cash, so they're 40 times top line revenue. It's absurd. But if they keep growing 50% a year, you know, if Codex 100% a

14:58

Speaker D

year, if Codex is driving everyone's AI agent, then yeah. There is chaos going on right now on the streets of Miami Beach. I don't know if you've heard about this. The crypto world is in absolute chaos. And we sent our roving. We sent our roving correspondent Nick o' Neill down to survey the damage. I feel like we should check in with him right now.

15:14

Speaker E

Live humanity.

15:35

Speaker D

Nick joining us for Ivy Beach. What's going on down there, Nick?

15:37

Speaker A

Chaos and confusion right now. I was just down there speaking with people on the streets of Miami to say what is going on here? My crypto portfolio is down awfully. They are completely panicking and they're saying that they're going to lose their jobs. With all of the money going to a place like OpenAI. I've never felt more depression. They said, nick, you're a voice of stability and reason. And I said, yes, I am, Nick.

15:41

Speaker E

It's imperative in an emergency situation like

16:07

Speaker B

this that broadcasters like ourselves maintain our cool.

16:11

Speaker E

Please take a moment to compose yourself. As hard as it is looking down

16:14

Speaker B

at Miami, explain the carnage. And we have children watching for parents. I'm going to ask you to please take children off the screen. This is unedited, this is unfiltered. This is what's happening right now in Miami.

16:19

Speaker A

I went down and I was speaking to the people at the pool. They were ripping their. All their stuff. They said, we got to get out of here. This OpenAI funding situation has blown our minds. We're going to be unemployed and I can't even pay for my damn rent anymore. This is a disaster. I've tried to have reasonable conversations, but I couldn't find a single person out there that could give me any sort of regular insight. Yeah, they basically said, I need someone to take care of all my stuff.

16:32

Speaker E

I don't want you to turn the camera too far because this could get graphic. But I understand the Block team, formerly Square, they were having their quarterly retreat in Miami.

17:03

Speaker D

Oh, God.

17:13

Speaker G

They.

17:14

Speaker E

Miami. And half of them, there's a. There's 400 people down there in the Streets who have been given 18 months severance, fully vested, and they have four job offers. Please explain what's happening with those 400 people.

17:15

Speaker A

I saw a literal parade of people being marched out of the office down in Brickell from my balcony here. And people were literally. Miami was not even ready for the moment that occurred. Right there I saw them and they were like, what's going on here? They were all carrying brown boxes out the doors, down the streets, and they were like, is this the end? I. I went down to get on this scene just to see what people were saying. They could not believe it. There were tears. There were people that thought that they were going to potentially lose relationships. Because let's be honest, down here in Miami, everyone's focused on can you afford the most expensive car around and the best clothes. Well, the block employees are no longer a reliable source for making those purchases, Jason.

17:28

Speaker E

It's really tragic. I can't imagine what's happening at Club 11. I mean, the trickle down effects.

18:17

Speaker D

It's a FEMA camp now, Jason. It's a female. FEMA has set up at Club 11. That's it. They're taking refugees at this point.

18:23

Speaker E

Pitbull taking refugees.

18:31

Speaker D

I heard Pitbull is down there volunteering. He's a great guy, very helpful.

18:34

Speaker E

Yeah, man. The brutality here. There's unconfirmed reports, Nick. I know that you've got sources, and we don't want to spread misinformation. However, there were boats landing from Cuba with refugees, obviously, and Haiti. Is it true that the block employees were taking the return trip to go to Cuba to get health care and for better job opportunities in Miami?

18:38

Speaker A

Look, I don't want to spread misinformation, Jason, but I did go and take a look at the port just to see what was going on. Because when these sorts of layoffs occur, you're well aware, you know this from your past years in journalism covering the text scene. The first place that you want to go are the ports to see where are they going, where are they departing to? Well, I did see. Only I did see a few people, but I don't want to spread rumors just yet about something like that. But I did some people carrying their bags, carrying the brown boxes, getting onto the boats, and that felt quite extreme, if I'm going to be honest. It's like, give. Maybe give it a few months with your severance, but I don't know.

19:03

Speaker E

Okay. Yeah, I mean, this is live, unconfirmed.

19:45

Speaker D

Clickbait.

19:48

Speaker E

I did. I did see pictures. I don't know if they're AI based, Nick, on social media, on TikTok of people with their Ariane chairs and their Mac studios. Getting on those. Those boats to. Yeah, those boats to Cuba.

19:49

Speaker D

Asking.

20:04

Speaker E

It's a tragic situation.

20:04

Speaker D

Asking their agent in real time for recommendations in Havana. That's on their. On the boats.

20:05

Speaker A

I heard open claws literally steering some of those boats.

20:10

Speaker D

Yeah.

20:13

Speaker E

Yes, that. So literally, the people who were shuttling the refugees, which is not a great paying job. This pays $7 an hour. They've lost their jobs as well.

20:14

Speaker D

Yeah. Get rid of Tragic.

20:23

Speaker A

They now have their agents.

20:25

Speaker D

Well, they. They're looking ahead. They were like, in five years, we won't need these boats anymore, so we might as well fight. Rip off the band aid now.

20:27

Speaker E

All right, Nick, I'm just going to say tremendous job here, please. On behalf of the Twist community and obviously I'm responsible for you and your family. I know that you've got 14 kids now, three wives. I know he's geographically monogamous. It's Miami, it's Palm beach and it's Fort Lauderdale. He is geographically monogamous in the state of Florida.

20:34

Speaker D

Within different parts of Florida. Within different parts of South Florida. Understood.

20:59

Speaker E

Like Alex Carr, thank you for your support.

21:03

Speaker A

Thank you.

21:08

Speaker D

Please, Nick, be safe. Be safe.

21:08

Speaker G

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21:10

Speaker B

And that's the key.

21:42

Speaker G

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21:43

Speaker E

It's above my pay grade.

22:19

Speaker D

Yeah, thank God. He's down there because I would not be going down there right now.

22:20

Speaker E

What's his Twitter stop being at Choose

22:24

Speaker D

Rich on X Instagram at Choose Rich if you you want to follow our good friend, our good friend and roving correspondent Nick o'.

22:27

Speaker H

Neill.

22:34

Speaker E

But that's a good segue into our next story.

22:34

Speaker D

Is it? Oh, Block layoffs at Block we should talk about. We'll talk about that one. So Block, you heard us mention Block, the parent company of Square Cash app and afterpay, of course, co founder and chairman Jack Dorsey of Twitter fame. They announced plans to cut their staff by 40%. Jason, that's around 4,000 people, leaving just under 6,000 remaining at the company. In an open letter that he also cross posted to X, Dorsey pretty much blames AI quote, a significantly smaller team using the tools we're building can do more and do it better. Intelligence tool capabilities are compounding faster every week. He added, I had two options. Cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it. Now I chose the latter. So you have been predicting this very thing on this program as well as the all in program for many months. Is this just the first of what you see as many of these announcements?

22:37

Speaker E

You know we're in a debate primarily Sachs and I, but other folks and people have called me names, a doomerist, a catastrophist. I'm always balls and strikes folks. I just look at the information. I look at what I see firsthand. I think from first principles. I talk to people. I come from a journalism background obviously. So when you see me forming an opinion, although Saxon is debate techniques like to make me into a libtard or use all his advanced debate techniques.

23:37

Speaker B

It's a hoax and his framing and all that stuff.

24:07

Speaker E

I can tell you straight, you've been

24:10

Speaker B

watching me long enough. I go research information, I learn and then I try to form an opinion. And when people correct me, typically fans of the show and friends, often I then change my opinion. Okay, so I have said what I'm seeing on the front lines is founders being able to not hire the first three or four people they would normally hire for their three person startup. In other words, the three co founders. Instead of having to hire three people in the first six months or year, say the first year, they want to get three more people in the building. Another developer, another designer and an ops person. Typically you get some combination of those or maybe even a salesperson. What I find is with these new tools they do founder led sales for six months or 12 months longer. They handle their own legal, accounting, etc. For the first six months. And then they pick, you know, whichever service provider they want. But they can do things on their own. So that was one piece of information I had in forming this opinion a year or two ago.

24:11

Speaker E

The second piece of information is I listened to the words that leaders say and I take them at their word or I handicap what they're trying to do. Andy Jassy, a year ago in the summer, wrote this memo that things were gonna change at Amazon and that they saw AI playing a bigger role. Then there was a leaked document from Amazon that said, we have like 900,000 jobs, 600,000 jobs we're not gonna hire for in the next decade because we predict they're gonna be robots. Is a New York Times story. You can say fake news all you want. The truth is, I would say, you know, 50% of the facts in the New York Times are rock solid. Then maybe 30 are debatable and 20 might be wrong. That's not because they're intentionally doing things wrong or whatever. It's just the nature of truth in the world. Right? They're, they're trying to pursue breaking news stories. So they have 5% of the information inside of Amazon. The other 95% is a black box. So they follow. They got this leak. It was so acute at Amazon that

25:09

Speaker B

they were preparing a PR campaign to

26:12

Speaker E

stop the bad PR they were going to get in the coming years.

26:17

Speaker B

From not hiring people and laying people

26:20

Speaker E

off to me again, I take people at their word. I've been in the startup business for

26:22

Speaker B

30 plus years now as an entrepreneur, journalist and investor and a podcaster, I know what people are doing. They're like, okay, around the corner, we're going to start replacing drivers and getting rid of factory workers, we're going to get rid of middle managers. There's not going to be as many developers. We need to give to Toys for Tots and when they put in, we should do local Toys for Tots. Things make the Amazon bad vibes go down. Okay, that's another check. Now we have to look at Block Block, like Jack's other company, Twitter. Jack is an invest in the future visionary product leader.

26:27

Speaker D

Right?

27:04

Speaker B

He goes big. There's very few entrepreneurs who have built 2212 billion dollar startups that were public. Steve Jobs built Apple and then he built Pixar. I don't think Pixar ever went public. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong. I don't remember seeing it trading now, but then it got bought by Disney. So he built $2 billion. I mean you have to have people build multiple unicorns. But there's two unicorns. One went public, one didn't. You have Elon. And he has Tesla, which is public. And he soon will have SpaceX. So he'll have two that have gone public.

27:05

Speaker E

Right.

27:39

Speaker B

It's a very small group. You know who already has two that went public? Jack. Jack Dorsey doesn't get enough credit.

27:39

Speaker D

That's true. Why?

27:45

Speaker B

Because he's quiet. He's an introvert. I've known Jack since, you know, the earliest days of Twitter. I was one of the first users.

27:45

Speaker D

Yeah, I feel like also he culturally, culturally tech is like no longer on his side. Like he's seen as like this woke lefty guy. It doesn't really meld with the current philosophy of the tech.

27:54

Speaker E

He's a lefty guy anyway.

28:05

Speaker D

Well, but that's the.

28:06

Speaker E

Did overbuild the staff, right?

28:07

Speaker D

Well that's. I was going to say that is a big thing on social media is saying that this is not really about AI that this is really like during the COVID era, square slash block, massively over hired and now they're sort of backing out of that. But they don't want. They want to save face so they're blaming AI at Bama Bonds. This guy will Slaughter had the big tweet about this unwinding less than half an insane Covid over hiring binge has much more to do with Jack Dorsey's managerial incompetence than whether AI is going to take your job. Dorsey then responded, yes, we overhire during COVID because I incorrectly built two separate company structures, Square and Cash App rather than one which we corrected mid 2024. But then he continues, we have and do run an efficient company better than most.

28:09

Speaker E

Okay, this is a very important follow up from Jack and let me just say it's hard. Being a leader is hard. You make mistakes. He did this so compassionately and so transparently in his piece he said, by the way, we're leaving comms open. You can say goodbye to everybody. We're giving you six months severance and then your stock.

28:54

Speaker D

You can keep your computer. You'll receive your salary for 20 plus one week of tenure equity vested through the end of May. Six months of healthcare, keep your corporate devices and five grand to put toward whatever you need to help you in this transition. That's very good.

29:16

Speaker E

I offered Lon today, said, hey, you saw the block deal. I'll take half of that. To get the fuck out of here. Lon was like, hey, can I get half that? That sounds pretty good.

29:30

Speaker D

We could negotiate. We could negotiate. That's even just a start. That's a start.

29:39

Speaker E

A good start point plus one week for every year you're there. If you're an eight year employee, get another eight weeks. Say you're sitting there, you're sitting pretty at 28 weeks.

29:44

Speaker D

That's a lot of time to figure out your next move.

29:50

Speaker E

It's a lot of time to figure it out. Anyway, he did it in the classiest, most transparent way I've ever seen. Full stop.

29:52

Speaker D

Can I just say one thing?

29:59

Speaker B

This is against the HR people's standard.

30:00

Speaker E

They say you have to turn everybody's accounts on.

30:04

Speaker D

Correct.

30:06

Speaker E

People are going to do crazy things.

30:07

Speaker B

People are going to delete files, people

30:08

Speaker E

are going to say things in the chat, they're going to hack things. You cannot do it this way.

30:10

Speaker B

There's even potential workplace violence. I don't bring that up. But, you know, there's like, somebody could go postal.

30:15

Speaker E

You got to lock the doors, all

30:20

Speaker B

this kind of stuff. X square people out of the building. You want to do it over the weekend so people don't show up on Monday.

30:21

Speaker E

These are best practices, right?

30:25

Speaker B

Yeah.

30:28

Speaker D

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

30:28

Speaker B

I mean, if we're sitting here saying his punctuation is the issue, that means

30:42

Speaker E

he did it right.

30:47

Speaker B

That's splitting hairs here.

30:47

Speaker D

Exactly.

30:49

Speaker G

Hey, listen, sometimes I'm thinking faster than

30:50

Speaker E

I can write everything down and I

30:53

Speaker G

found this amazing tool. I am obsessed with it. It's called Whisper Flow. W, I, S, P R Flow. All you have to do is talk. And Whisper Flow turns it into crisp, perfect writing instantly. Not just talking about dictation, but removing filler, fixing punctuation, and even formatting your text while you speak. It is mind blowing how good this is. It makes all the other dictation software look basic. And Whisper Flow matches your natural tone and speaking voice so the writing sounds like you actually wrote it yourself. And Whisper Flow works wherever you are.

30:55

Speaker E

I use it when I'm in Slack.

31:27

Speaker G

I'll use it when I'm in Superhuman, doing an email, doing a message. I'll jump into imessage and even when

31:29

Speaker E

I'm writing a document or I'll even use it when I'm talking to my

31:34

Speaker G

openclaw agent or finally someone I can

31:37

Speaker E

talk to who actually takes down everything I say, unlike maybe the interns I've got, they get like 6 out of every 10 instructions correct.

31:40

Speaker G

Whisper flow.

31:47

Speaker E

Everybody's going crazy about this product in Silicon Valley. Everybody in tech is using it.

31:49

Speaker G

Whisper flow, dot, AI slash twist. It's spelled W, I, S, P, R, F, L, O dot A, I slash twist.

31:53

Speaker E

Incredible product.

32:03

Speaker G

You have to try it.

32:04

Speaker D

Scott Adams, the Dilber cartoonist, the author, the podcaster, he talked on his show before his tragic recent death about a desire to live on as an AI powered representation of himself. Now, there's a lot of debate about as he got to the end of his life, whether he changed his mind about this. There's various public statements. We do not need to rehash this whole debate. One fan, John Arrow, actually made Scott's vision happen. He created I Scott Adams and it's a AI driven simulation of the old podcast featuring an animated avatar that is very convincing, looks a lot and sounds a lot like the real Scott Adams. Arrow has also created Abigail Adams, a young lady character that's inspired by Scott and his legacy. So Adams family and many of his fans very upset. They've made repeated requests now for Arrow to stop publishing his videos. On Thursday, the AI Scott Adams account posted that they intend to legally defend their right to keep making this content. Here's the quote from this project start. We attempted to have an amicable and collaborative conversation, but that wasn't reciprocated. Given that litigation seems certain, we are sending a global hold letter to anyone with relevant information. This is to ensure all pertinent materials are available to protect Scott's stated vision. So I mean the last thing I would note here, for all the debate that this is stirring up, the content itself is not really that popular. 3.4 thousand or 3.34 hundred followers on x 137 YouTube subscribers. Abigail is not doing better. So there, there, there does seem to be a disconnect between the interest that this project is generating and the actual fans who want to follow AI Scott Adams. So, so your your reaction?

32:05

Speaker E

I, you know, I'm starting getting DMs from like the Scott Adams stands. Like the real hardcore fans who know me because I was on his show one time debating January 6th and other stuff with him and they know me because I would listen to his show once in A while and say hi in the chat. Because he would mention all in, you know, probably like a dozen times over the years. He really loved sacks. He loved chamath. I think he liked me, even though I might.

33:51

Speaker D

I think you guys had a mutual appreciation going.

34:17

Speaker E

A mutual appreciation. And so, you know, they're very angry

34:19

Speaker B

at me for even platforming the creator of it.

34:24

Speaker D

Yeah.

34:29

Speaker E

For me retweeting it or giving my opinion.

34:29

Speaker D

Hey, yeah.

34:31

Speaker B

If you really are in the spirit of Scott Adams. He was for full contact debate and. And listen, and I'm no, like, close friend of Scott. We never met in person. We were digital friends, etc. We're obviously like micro celebrities. So micro celebrities have a secret chat room. But put that aside. You know, we have a secret society of your hand.

34:32

Speaker D

Your handshake. You have a secret.

34:54

Speaker G

Yeah, sure.

34:55

Speaker B

Everything. He was a self described narcissist. He was like, I love getting attention. I love when people say hi to me. A coffee. I love that people were inspired by what I said.

34:56

Speaker E

He would have.

35:08

Speaker B

In my estimation. It's just one person's opinion. Don't freak out. He would have loved AI Scott Adams. He would have loved this debate. He did say he wanted to. Those two things can be true at the same time. He did say he wanted people to create AI Scott Adams. And he did say that maybe I want to create a digital sun so that people close to me don't get hurt by seeing me online every day. Okay, so there's morals. There's. There's morals and ethics, and then there's the law.

35:11

Speaker I

Right.

35:40

Speaker B

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

35:41

Speaker D

Right.

36:09

Speaker E

Totally allowed. If somebody wanted to say, I am a JCAL disciple. I'm a Chamath disciple. I'm a Steve Jobs disciple, and I'm going to wear a Steve Jobs outfit every day like Elizabeth Holmes did.

36:09

Speaker D

Right.

36:23

Speaker E

And for a period of time, she was super inspiring.

36:24

Speaker D

Yeah, she. With the turtlenecks. Yeah, yeah.

36:26

Speaker E

With the turtleneck and the voice and the drama and everything. Shout out, Elizabeth. Come on the pod. Anytime.

36:28

Speaker D

Once. Once you're out of. Once you're out of prison.

36:34

Speaker E

No, I want to do it when she's in. So long story short. Yeah, long story Short. You could do that. Do your Steve Jobs impersonation every day. It's protected. So now you go to the moral, ethical thing, as I told the person doing this. Talk to the family, get permission to do it, or do the derivative, clearly not the same product, but inspired by the teachings. So here we are. That's what's going to happen. And the argument that technologists will use is this is inevitable. It's going to happen, yada yada. You know what? It's inevitable that piracy happens, but that doesn't mean that you can go sell Taylor Swift CDs on Canal Street. And we've proven that with Napster. You get a lawsuit. You can't, you know, restream MSG and

36:35

Speaker B

Knicks games without getting in trouble.

37:28

Speaker E

Do the Russians do it on their Russian streaming sites?

37:31

Speaker D

Yes.

37:33

Speaker E

Do the Chinese sell DVDs on every quarter?

37:34

Speaker B

Yes. Okay. Those are other countries who are not obeying law. You don't get to use that either.

37:36

Speaker D

Yeah.

37:43

Speaker B

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

37:43

Speaker D

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

37:44

Speaker E

Please?

38:11

Speaker D

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

38:12

Speaker B

So here is genius.

38:31

Speaker D

So here's Everest. He's in India, but he's focusing the tool on the Netherlands. So I. I like. We gotta. We gotta take a look.

38:32

Speaker B

Tell me your name again so I get the pronunciation right.

38:39

Speaker G

Sir.

38:41

Speaker I

Hi, my name's Chris.

38:41

Speaker B

Chris, Nice to meet you. Okay. And Chris, you're. We're in India. Are you. And how old are you?

38:43

Speaker I

I'm 23 and I'm in Hyderabad right now.

38:47

Speaker B

And are you in college or school?

38:50

Speaker I

No, no, I finished my college. Now I'm into AI.

38:52

Speaker D

Now he's into AI.

38:55

Speaker B

Did you go to these, like, technical schools? In India that are really hard to get into, or did you do that, like college course training where it's like, really intense and you go for six days a week? I've just heard about this online in

38:57

Speaker E

TV shows and media.

39:10

Speaker I

I didn't really go for the hard ones. I just went to a normal university. I mean, like you said, six days a week. I mean, pretty intense, but I got through it.

39:12

Speaker E

So you are monitoring this week in startups x.com and thinking about opportunities in Europe and America, even though you're living in India, Am I correct?

39:23

Speaker I

I mean, I just. A tweet of mine went viral. You guys reached out to me and so I wanted to be on the pod.

39:36

Speaker E

Great. Here we go. So show us what you built and I will give you some feedback. And this is a business lawn that I have seen before. Because with Squarespace, people started doing this is like they would build websites and they would knock on doors in America and say, hey, I built a website for you. Would you like it? You know what I thought was so asking for $500, like, the first question

39:45

Speaker D

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

40:05

Speaker E

Okay, here we go.

40:25

Speaker I

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

40:28

Speaker B

Okay, so you could do coffee cafes.

40:41

Speaker I

Yeah, Any niche.

40:45

Speaker D

Well, but, Jason, it's gonna. It's not only gonna find the businesses, it's actually gonna make the websites right now. Like, when we check back in, like, you'll see Crystal, show us. We're actually going to get finished websites already.

40:47

Speaker E

Genius.

40:58

Speaker I

Okay, let me show you a finished workflow.

40:58

Speaker E

Okay, so here's your workflow completed.

41:02

Speaker I

This was one me and Lon ran yesterday. I mean, he didn't see the results yet.

41:05

Speaker D

Yeah, I'm curious.

41:10

Speaker E

Scrape 100. Car detailing.

41:11

Speaker I

Yeah, car detailing.

41:14

Speaker E

Because, you know, Lon keeps his car very.

41:15

Speaker D

I do. I love my Prius C. It's got

41:17

Speaker E

all of the different websites. There's. And I assume we can click on one of them. Yeah, get all the data. Here's a website it built.

41:20

Speaker D

Look at this, Jason, look at this. And this is all based on this real car detailing place in Austin. Like you could go to them right now and say, hey, do you want to buy this beautiful website I made for you?

41:30

Speaker I

Yeah.

41:43

Speaker E

Okay, this is insane.

41:44

Speaker D

This is insane.

41:46

Speaker E

Now wait, you're also having it contact them. How does it do the contact in the outreach?

41:47

Speaker I

You can just connect your email. So it finds the emails and sends out the outreach through your email. So you can have like custom email template that it reaches out to them.

41:54

Speaker E

Chris, you have a job. Do you have a job in India?

42:09

Speaker I

No.

42:13

Speaker E

Okay, let me ask you. You can be honest because we're on this week in startups.

42:14

Speaker B

Okay?

42:17

Speaker E

You can always be honest here. You can always be honest with your uncle. Jcal.unk.jc if you have, if you got a job right now, what do you think your salary would be in India? If you got like a job, like an average job.

42:17

Speaker G

An average job?

42:32

Speaker B

Yeah.

42:33

Speaker E

Like US dollar. Well, in your dollars. And then we'll. We'll translate.

42:35

Speaker I

Yeah. 400amonth.

42:38

Speaker E

$400?

42:39

Speaker I

U.S. u.S.

42:41

Speaker E

Dollars?

42:43

Speaker I

Yes.

42:44

Speaker E

You make five grand a year?

42:44

Speaker I

Yeah.

42:46

Speaker E

Okay, five. Five grand a year. And you're a developer and you're smart.

42:47

Speaker D

Look at what he built.

42:54

Speaker E

Five grand.

42:56

Speaker D

I can hear the wheels turning.

42:57

Speaker E

If you made $25,000 in US right now, compared to your friends, how would you be living?

42:59

Speaker B

Like your apartment, going out to dinner, how would you be living in India?

43:06

Speaker I

I'd be living like a king here.

43:11

Speaker E

Living like a king.

43:14

Speaker D

He'll be with Nick on the balcony in Miami beach before we're done.

43:15

Speaker B

Okay, Chris, if you're this freaking smart, I'll pay you $25,000, you come work for me. Okay. How does it sound? I mean, you gotta be actually smart. This can't be like all a put on here. You gotta go through a proper job interview. But would you like to make $25,000 a year? Because that's like a third of what

43:18

Speaker E

people make in the U.S. don't tell him that, Jason.

43:41

Speaker B

No, I am, but I'm just trying to do arbitrage here. I'm just.

43:44

Speaker E

What would that be like if you

43:47

Speaker B

went to your friends and were like, I just got a $25,000 job offer. Is that like crazy or not? Or does that happen to some of your friends?

43:48

Speaker I

But I think I'll be making more with an Lupa.

43:55

Speaker D

Yeah, there you go.

43:59

Speaker B

I love it.

44:00

Speaker E

I love it. He's an entrepreneur.

44:01

Speaker B

It was a test. You passed the test. I need to start Founder University India. I need to talk to the government. I need to. I've never been to India.

44:02

Speaker E

I need to.

44:13

Speaker B

Unbelievable.

44:14

Speaker D

Let's go to Hyderabad. Jason, let's go.

44:15

Speaker E

I'm in.

44:17

Speaker B

All right, great job.

44:18

Speaker I

Tell you some exciting numbers.

44:20

Speaker E

Okay, here we go.

44:24

Speaker B

Yeah, tell us the exciting numbers. Maybe I need to be an investor in this company.

44:24

Speaker I

So I launched. Yeah, so I launched it in 24 hours. It was at thousand mrr, thousand USD.

44:28

Speaker B

Okay.

44:36

Speaker I

Just from a single Reddit post.

44:37

Speaker E

All right, that's it.

44:40

Speaker I

No, no, I think you'll be excited. And then last week I. I posted like three tweets and now an Lupa is over 8.5k. Mrr.

44:42

Speaker E

Because you're already. You're. What are you talking about? You're at 100k a year.

44:55

Speaker D

Yeah.

44:58

Speaker E

Look at you.

44:59

Speaker D

He doesn't need your 25k.

45:00

Speaker E

He's an entrepreneur. It was a test. I wanted to see what was going on here. Okay, here's the deal. I want you to come to Founder University and I want to invest $25,000 in this company. If you want to make it into a US based company, because I think

45:04

Speaker B

you're just brilliant and smart.

45:19

Speaker E

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

45:20

Speaker D

All right, Chris, hang out. We're going on to Ben.

45:33

Speaker B

Hang out with us.

45:35

Speaker D

We're going on to Ben Broca. He's the creator of Pulsea. It's an agentix system. It's not openclaw. It was built while Peter was off building openclaw. It's a separate agentix system, Jason, that helps businesses run their operations autonomously. Ben, thanks for.

45:36

Speaker E

Hey, Ben, how you doing? Where are you calling in from?

45:53

Speaker H

I'm good. I'm in San Francisco right now.

45:55

Speaker E

Oh, okay, great. I can tell because it's so sunny. Show us what you built. This is it demo or die. Show us what you built here on this week. In startups, you never know what you're going to see.

45:57

Speaker H

So actually this is a live dashboard that shows polsia in action working right now on like almost a thousand companies at the same time. So you can see that, like, actually recently we had a huge surge of, like, people starting to use the service, which is amazing. Right now you can see Polcia working on different tasks. It completed 3,000 tasks in the past 24 hours. Right now it's building a 2D property feed MVP for some user that's working on a specific company. This is a Twitter action where following up with 17 gallery pitches, you can see that a lot of users are creating new companies every minute. 700 companies will launch in the past 24 hours. So essentially Pulseia is an AI that builds and runs companies autonomously. So it wakes up every night, accomplishes tasks in the goal to create and run the company that the user sort of decided on.

46:07

Speaker E

Wow, this is incredible.

47:03

Speaker H

It can of course code push a production, launch a real website tweets. You can see here, those are real tweets that have been tweeted about. If I click on one of them, it's an actual real tweet. Most AI VRs cost $750 a month. They need a rev ops team. Leadforge finds your prospects. So this is a tweet that's promoting a company from a real user.

47:06

Speaker G

Right.

47:29

Speaker B

Wow.

47:30

Speaker H

So it can also send emails. So I give it access to an email address. So you can see that there's a bunch of emails that have been sent in the past five minutes. 4,000 emails in the past 24 hours. One of the things I launched about a week ago is now pulsea can run ads autonomously for companies, so it creates its own UGC ads. And then there's an AI that an AI agent that every day wakes up, looks at the performance of ads on meta and decides to either create a new one or pose an ad that would not be performing or create new ads. So you can see, I'm going to give you an example.

47:31

Speaker B

My buddies think I'm a genius for planning our trips. I just use fairway finder, 10 bucks, whole captain's packet done. I let him keep thinking it.

48:07

Speaker H

So this is just an example of like an AI generated ad that was created for a customer to promote their business on.

48:18

Speaker E

Paulsia says, why Combinator in a box? You're basically making unlimited number of startups.

48:24

Speaker J

You own all of them.

48:30

Speaker E

Or this is a game for people to play. They subscribe to your service Polcia.

48:33

Speaker H

So it is all users that are signing up to Pulse app, paying $49 a month to get an AI to run their idea. If you think about it, it's like one of the cheapest ways to get started. Of course you can go to Lovable, you can go to Cursor and set up your website, but you have to be prompting it. If you stop prompting it, it will not do stuff for you. Here it autonomously sort of decides every night what are the best things that it could do next based on the state of the business. If the MVP is not ready yet, it will do an engineering task. If the business is ready, maybe we'll start doing marketing, maybe we'll do some cold outreach, maybe we'll tweet, maybe we'll run ads.

48:38

Speaker B

Right.

49:18

Speaker H

And so the idea is really, I believe that the future of companies is that most companies will be 80% autonomous, meaning that the 20% is the human having taste, having creativity and a certain insight into a specific niche. However, 80% of the company could be completely autonomous. Essentially here the AI policy is giving that to people and essentially is doing the engineering work, fixing bugs, grinding every day, extending cold emails, tweeting, doing ads. The human doesn't have to do that. The human needs to give direction.

49:19

Speaker B

So great.

49:54

Speaker E

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

49:55

Speaker H

So I raised the pre seed last summer and right now, I mean SF actually to market it more and to now that I'm seeing great retention. Active users are sending 15 messages a day to their AI CEO to plan to discuss strategies, marketing strategies, what to do to grow the business. Around 20% of users are using the ad product, which is great because ads is a great way to actually generate revenue. And so I'm excited to get more users on the platform.

50:24

Speaker B

Incredible. Great job. A question from our audience, Lon.

50:53

Speaker D

Oh yeah, we've got from M. Solomon Bush. How can you afford this? Are customers paying for inference on top of their $50 per month?

50:59

Speaker H

It's a great question. Like actually I would love to make it more affordable. The reason it's $50 is because, yeah, as you said, it's expensive. Like it's a lot of inference because every day we. The AI thinks and acts every day. And that's of course using top models from Anthropic and OpenAI. And so the idea is that the subscription, I'm trying to break even on the subscriptions because the idea is like giving this tool to as many people as possible. But in exchange, we take at Pulse a 20% cut on revenue on essentially transaction on the platform. So if a user comes in for 50 bucks a month, they can get a company getting started, which is very, very affordable. But if down the line, they start making 100 bucks, 200 bucks a month with their business, we just take 20% and that's a way to being able to generate profit to continue growing the platform.

51:07

Speaker D

Got it, Got it.

51:56

Speaker H

We're very incentivized with our users on success.

51:57

Speaker B

This is amazing. Really well done. We should talk because I'm in the startup business and I think what's really

52:02

Speaker E

interesting about what you're doing is, I

52:08

Speaker B

mean, I'm sure when you raise your pre seed round, this came up with investors. Like, pretty great place for us to look for founders, right? You've basically got a little incubator here on your hands. Really inspiring, dude.

52:10

Speaker E

I love it.

52:22

Speaker B

Thank you. Any questions for me about startups and Startup Live? It seems like you already figured it out, to be honest.

52:22

Speaker H

I mean, listen, first of all, thank you for having me. I love to be able to share this to more people. And yeah, I mean, you have a ton of experience and would love to ask you, how do you see about scaling it? How do you think about how can I get this into more, you know,

52:28

Speaker B

so, you know, I love open source and I love more open platforms, and it's always great to enable people to make money. So let me just riff here, Lon.

52:45

Speaker D

Riff.

52:58

Speaker B

What you're doing is like ebay or Airbnb or Uber or many other marketplaces. Etsy in that this is kind of a marketplace where you're giving tools like you come for the tool and you stay for the marketplace. You've basically created a way for people to make a living. When you do that, you get love

52:58

Speaker E

from the entrepreneurs you're creating, just like Airbnb does.

53:23

Speaker I

Right.

53:27

Speaker E

Airbnb changed tens of thousands of people's lives who were probably, you know, making a wage and they became entrepreneurial. And eventually, if their Airbnb worked out, they got a second one or a third one. And then. And now they moved into the owner class from the salary class.

53:28

Speaker B

Beautiful.

53:45

Speaker E

So I think you're doing that and then the more you, the less you take and the more you give will be how you succeed. So Etsy and Airbnb take their 5 to 20% take rate, you take 500 flat rate. There's other services that you can upsell people on over time. So $50 for this package, 300 for the next package, 1000 for the next would be the next thing. I, if I was an investor in your company, I'd be sitting with you saying, what would people pay $1,000 a month for? And you could then, you know, start having that conversation. Maybe there's a human in the loop in the marketing function, right? You see, you have, like, you hire a growth hacker and you split the growth hacker, like rent a human style across the team anyway, all kinds of things like that. And your customers, if you talk to them and say, how can we be more helpful? They're going to tell you. And then it's your job to prioritize and experiment. There's also the possibility of adding to this the ability to invest in the companies or have ownership in them. So you could say, hey, we'd like to own 10% of your business,

53:46

Speaker I

or

54:58

Speaker E

we'd like to own 5% of your business. We'll give you the platform for free, for life. If we can own 5% and we get a 5% royalty, you know, we

54:58

Speaker B

get 1% of your profit.

55:07

Speaker E

So it could be, it could be $500 a month or $100 a month

55:09

Speaker B

and 5% of whatever your sales are, if you're tracking sales in here. So there's all kinds of ways you can kind of do future upsells. For now, just keep delighting customers, right? You're, you're, you should spend the first three years of any business just delighting customers and then you can figure out the revenue. The model is really simple here. A subscription plus a revenue share plus upsells. And as long as it's tiny like you're doing, you're going to be successful. You're going to figure this out. Great job. Okay, awesome. Let's do our third and final.

55:13

Speaker D

Well, first, first, I think we should, we should check out this poly market. So related.

55:45

Speaker B

I love the poly market.

55:50

Speaker D

Related to what we were talking about earlier, I found this one for OpenAI's closing market cap. So on the day that OpenAI, eventually IPOs, what will the market cap be at the 1.5 billion closing bell? So let's pull that, that poly market up.

55:51

Speaker E

It's 1.5. 1.5.

56:09

Speaker D

So the volume on this 1.4 million right now. So a lot of people right now, the number one, the top vote is no IPO by December 31, 2026. And then there's another version.

56:11

Speaker E

Okay.

56:23

Speaker D

And then there's another version for 2027. And the number one vote there no IPO by December 31, 2027. But, but if you go look at the individual numbers there, there is, there is some range.

56:24

Speaker E

So scroll down there because it's definitely going to be public by 2027. So that would include 2026.

56:36

Speaker D

No, this. Yeah, this is just the 2026 one. But Salah, if you see up there at the top, there's a choice. There's a button for December 31, 2027. Click that one.

56:42

Speaker E

I think we're on that.

56:50

Speaker D

No, we're on 2026. Here's 2027. So now scroll down.

56:51

Speaker E

No IPO is what?

56:54

Speaker D

So no IPO is F by 2027 is 37. 43% as of right now. But under that.

56:55

Speaker E

So that's the losing bet. They're going to IPO by 2027.

57:03

Speaker D

Under anything under 500 billion is currently at 26%.

57:06

Speaker B

That's wrong.

57:12

Speaker D

One point.

57:13

Speaker E

This is on the closing day.

57:13

Speaker D

This is of the IPO closing bell on the day that the company IPOs.

57:14

Speaker E

All right, I'm going to load into this one. Scroll down. I'm going to take 750 all the way to 1.5. So if you added those up, it looks like it's.

57:20

Speaker B

That's a little 65%.

57:29

Speaker D

Well, no, 750 billion to 1 trillion is 17%. 1.25 to 1.5 trillion.

57:30

Speaker E

No, it's got to be a trillion. So I'll go trillion. Trillion, five.

57:36

Speaker D

Okay, that's about. No, that's about 30, 31%.

57:39

Speaker B

No, no, I'll take from one trillion up.

57:42

Speaker E

So there's three categories there.

57:46

Speaker B

16, 15.

57:47

Speaker D

Oh, I see. I see what you're saying.

57:48

Speaker B

So that's 31.

57:49

Speaker E

That's exactly 50.

57:50

Speaker B

I think if you put 50% on there, that's the winning bet. It can't be under 1 trillion on the close.

57:51

Speaker D

I mean, that seems crazy that it would be under 1 trillion when it's already worth.

57:57

Speaker B

I think we should put a hundred. I think we should put a hundred thousand dollars on this. So we put 100,000, we make 50.

58:00

Speaker D

Yeah, right. That would be. Yes, you would make 50k from that because you're, you're betting it.

58:07

Speaker B

But wait a second. If I make 50k, I think that's a lock. If that's a lock for me. If I put the hundred K into Nvidia or Uber or other stock and I make 10% a year, I'll be at 110. Or if I put it into munis, I'll make 5% on the 100K I'll make 7500 versus 50.

58:11

Speaker D

The real money here, you got to think that through like 500 to 750 billion. But I don't think there's any chance that it's that low. That's the problem.

58:34

Speaker E

No, you can't take that long shot.

58:41

Speaker B

Those people are.

58:42

Speaker D

Yeah, yeah.

58:43

Speaker E

They're being silly retard as we say in French. Okay, there's polymarket. I love a polymarker. It got me thinking. Got me thinking.

58:45

Speaker D

We got, we got one more demo that I want to take a look at. Let's welcome Adi Gabrani. He's the creator ofMake My Claw.com. their website allows you to set up and deploy your own open claw bot in just 60. Here's my favorite part about this though. He's also got a free 15 minute trial offer like try out OpenClaw for 15 minutes for free of open source. I was fascinated by that. So welcome Adi, thanks for being here.

58:53

Speaker J

Thanks Ron. Hey Jason. Nice to be here.

59:20

Speaker E

All right. There's gotta be like 500 hosting options now. Why should people pick yours?

59:23

Speaker J

Yeah. So for me the goal was not to just make it easy to deploy but also to maintain it on ongoing basis. So I think and have it in such a way that you can go into the shell and manage it all by yourself even if you want to. So I don't want people to be sandboxed into something. But actually even in the FAQ of my site I say that if you're using openclaw make my claw beyond a certain day, you're doing it wrong. I would want you to come experience it, move on self hosted and have fun with it. That's kind of the, the goal for me.

59:28

Speaker E

What's your story? You're an entrepreneur. Where are you based?

1:00:05

Speaker J

Yeah, so I'm in Vancouver right now. This was a side project which actually came from getting. So I got involved with Open Club early January where I was building a bot of my own and then saw Peter building.

1:00:07

Speaker E

What's your background?

1:00:20

Speaker J

Tech background, the business school and ran

1:00:23

Speaker E

a company solo entrepreneur. Have you incorporated yet? You got a.

1:00:26

Speaker J

Not from make my Clothes so I have other company doing. Doing AI for mining sector actually.

1:00:30

Speaker E

Oh wow. So that's your day job. Is that your company? You own that one?

1:00:35

Speaker J

Yeah, that's my day job.

1:00:38

Speaker E

Side hustle.

1:00:39

Speaker J

This is a side hustle on the weekend.

1:00:40

Speaker E

How is the side hustle doing compared to your main.

1:00:41

Speaker J

That's a much bigger business. That's a much. That's a much more well established company. This is, this is. This came because I was playing with personal agents and wanted to get my friends involved.

1:00:45

Speaker E

Which job? When you wake up in the morning, which job are you more excited about?

1:00:56

Speaker J

Beyond. I'm more excited about this, but I cannot afford to do this before 6pm Got it.

1:01:00

Speaker E

Have you raised money for the other business?

1:01:07

Speaker J

No, that's bootstrapped. One good thing about mining companies is they pay really well.

1:01:09

Speaker E

Ah, got it. What's the footprint of that business? It makes millions of dollars, hundreds of thousands. How many years has it been around?

1:01:14

Speaker B

How many employees?

1:01:19

Speaker J

It's been around for around four years. In millions.

1:01:20

Speaker E

Yeah, got it.

1:01:23

Speaker B

All right.

1:01:24

Speaker E

Did you raise money for.

1:01:24

Speaker B

You're just a solo entrepreneur?

1:01:25

Speaker J

No, I founders, I have co founders. But bootstrap business.

1:01:26

Speaker E

Got it.

1:01:29

Speaker B

Awesome.

1:01:30

Speaker E

I mean I love the hosting business

1:01:31

Speaker B

because I think it could uncover other things. What are you charging for? What's like the minimum?

1:01:35

Speaker J

So it's 29 for. We give you the key. Very generous key. And 19 if you bring your own key.

1:01:41

Speaker B

Got it. Explain to people the difference between bringing your own key and you brought in the key.

1:01:48

Speaker J

Yeah. So bringing your own key is you can bring any provider you want and you can use whatever you like and

1:01:53

Speaker E

you pay for whatever language model you want.

1:02:00

Speaker J

Whatever language model you want and you pay for it. So that's why this is cheaper. We just host it. The kind of complexity that I'm trying to take away from people is upgrading their openclaw whenever the new one launches, making sure nothing breaks.

1:02:02

Speaker B

So what do you give people by default? Are you using Kimi or something? Or some cheap. Using Kimmy.

1:02:15

Speaker J

Using Kimmy right now.

1:02:20

Speaker B

Got it. And is Kimi good compared to Claude Opus or.

1:02:21

Speaker J

I think it's about 10% less in personality but about 10x less in cost. So personally for me it has been a great trade off. I've used my.

1:02:25

Speaker H

I have.

1:02:35

Speaker J

So the way I run it is I have Kimi as my main LLM, main language model and then for specialized task I create sub agents with Codex and Claude to do specialized jobs.

1:02:35

Speaker E

I love it. Super inspiring. Any questions for me? And by the way, Ben, if you've got a question for Adi, you can ask him. It's a little interactive here.

1:02:47

Speaker D

We try to keep.

1:02:57

Speaker E

I give you permission.

1:02:58

Speaker B

It's fun.

1:02:59

Speaker E

Keep it. Always keep it interactive. If you have any questions, I mean,

1:03:00

Speaker H

yeah, I think it's amazing. I think I love the 15 minutes, I love the free open call. I think that's genius. I mean I would love to hear about like what's your Conversion of people that try for 15 minutes and decide to actually pay.

1:03:03

Speaker J

Like, I just launched this and I haven't promoted it at all. So I just launched it and I need to promote it. But just based on some replies I did on Twitter, people were really excited about it. I think some guy mentioned that on Windows, he's been having a lot of trouble, you know, trying, trying openclaw and wanted a way to test it first with this telegram. So he was quite excited. Another use case that someone mentioned was that they opened the bot for 15 minutes. They were collaborating with a friend on a coding project and they just gave the bot the permission to do it and told the bot to shut off after 15 minutes. I think I'm now starting to lean into these disposable agents where a friend of mine came up with the idea of doing this for a weekend trip. So on a weekend trip we spin a bot for two weeks, for a week, for a weekend, it does its own thing and then it automatically self destructs. So and this is not a shared, this is not like a shared space. It's creating a virtual machine on the cloud. So it can do a lot of, it can do everything that OpenClaw can do for those for the weekend and then it automatically self destructs. So I think there can be a lot of cool use cases which can be built on top. I want makemyclaw to become the best place where you can use all the open source agents. So as you would have seen, Hermes, which is by this noose research lab they launched. So I'm integrating that into it. So now you can not only just do, now you can not just install openclaw but also Hermes. So you can choose whichever bot, whichever framework you like and you can easily install it.

1:03:19

Speaker B

This is amazing.

1:04:54

Speaker E

Well done. All right gentlemen, great job. I'm going to be hosting an OpenClaw launch festival Monday and Tuesday

1:04:55

Speaker B

on March 16th and 17th in San Francisco. You're both invited as my guests. Free ticket for each of you. And if you want to come. And the way we do this event, just so people know we only have 400 seats, we're giving 100 to our investor partners. We have 125 of our founders coming from Japan, around the world, Saudi et cetera, and our latest cohort of founder university companies in America, then we're going to invite 100 investors, which means that's like 250 of the tickets. Then we'll let 100 people who are founders from the public come for free. We always make it free for founders. When you buy a ticket, you pay 20 bucks. When you pick up your ticket, we refund the 20. Why do we do that? People will not cancel.

1:05:05

Speaker E

So you can buy the $20 ticket. If you have to cancel, you can cancel, but it's 20 bucks. Who cares? It's just a way for us to reduce the number and just make sure

1:05:52

Speaker B

we don't burn seats.

1:05:59

Speaker E

And if you want to buy a ticket, there's 50 VIP tickets available. If you buy a VIP ticket, lunch is on your own. For this event. You can just walk around San Francisco and get lunch. But I'm going to host a lunch for 50 people, and some of the speakers will come to that if they're around. And you can come to the lunch with me if you pay $1,000. So there's $50,000 in revenue for this event.

1:06:02

Speaker B

Lon is the way I do it. And that just pays for all the free founder tickets. And we can buy coffee and breakfast for.

1:06:21

Speaker D

And the. We can't talk about the guests yet, but I've seen the list they're working on, and it's amazing.

1:06:26

Speaker E

Like, some good keynotes, especially for a person event.

1:06:31

Speaker D

Some very.

1:06:34

Speaker B

My big hitters coming.

1:06:34

Speaker D

Some very cool.

1:06:36

Speaker E

Two big hitters already.

1:06:36

Speaker D

Some very cool people who people will want to hear from.

1:06:37

Speaker E

Okay, all right. Launch festival.com. thank you.

1:06:40

Speaker D

Thank you and. And thanks to AI and Ben for being here. I appreciate it, guys.

1:06:42

Speaker E

All right, get to get to work.

1:06:46

Speaker B

Go back to work, Ben. Love it. AI Love it.

1:06:48

Speaker E

I have ideas. I love both of these. I like both those and I like Chris. It's three great founders you found on.

1:06:52

Speaker B

This is exceptional.

1:06:57

Speaker E

This is what this week in startups is all about. I love First Amendment lunatics. These are people with no life.

1:06:58

Speaker D

Yes.

1:07:04

Speaker E

And then they go out. They carry pepper spray and they go and they film.

1:07:05

Speaker D

There is one of these guys in

1:07:11

Speaker E

this show and I just came across my feed because my feed is bulldogs and weird couples on Instagram now. There's all these weird couples who have the same account. So I've got like four of those weird couples I follow now. Yeah, of course, of course. As one does.

1:07:12

Speaker D

And

1:07:30

Speaker E

freaks and oddities and other things.

1:07:32

Speaker D

And First Amendment warriors.

1:07:34

Speaker E

And First Amendment warriors. And there's two groups. There's one. Well, there's actually like four subsections of this group of the genre. One they go to, like, when they get pulled over. They refuse to, you know, Fourth Amendment. They don't want to.

1:07:36

Speaker D

Oh, right, yeah.

1:07:53

Speaker E

Roll their window down. They want to know, am I being detained.

1:07:53

Speaker D

They know all the rules. They know all.

1:07:56

Speaker E

They know all the rules, and they like to mix it up. That one, it feels very dangerous. That's one genre. I'm not encouraging that. The second one, they go to public places and they just record. So they went to, like, you know, Tahoe, and they went to a local town that's near me, and they recorded on the street. Just like they're making B roll. And the guy's got, like, six cameras on his body.

1:07:58

Speaker B

And the guy comes out of the

1:08:19

Speaker E

store and he starts yelling at him. He's like, no, I'm just taking video. I'm just doing, you know, shots and whatever. He's like, you can't shoot into the store. He's like, well, actually, you know, freedom of speech.

1:08:20

Speaker B

I can't.

1:08:27

Speaker D

Public street. I'm looking this way. I was at the sidewalk.

1:08:27

Speaker E

So the guy comes and he pushes his camera.

1:08:29

Speaker B

The guy's got pepper spray, says if. Hey, if you hit me again, I'm going to pepper spray.

1:08:31

Speaker E

The guy pushes him again. He pepper sprays him.

1:08:34

Speaker B

Like, the guy's crying. Whatever.

1:08:36

Speaker E

Police come, hurts these First Amendment worries.

1:08:39

Speaker B

Show them the video.

1:08:41

Speaker E

The third genre, and perhaps the best

1:08:42

Speaker B

is in this show Neighbors, which is the beach line.

1:08:47

Speaker D

The beach. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

1:08:51

Speaker B

There was a beach called Carbon Beach. I had a couple friends who had houses on Carbon Beach. These are billionaires. And I would go stay, and, you know, you go on the beach, and then they would have a thing called squids or jellyfish. People who would be outside Geffen's house. Like, Geffen has one of these houses. Well known famous people have these houses. The guy who used to run Disney was the CEO Michael Eisner. Michael Iger Eisner had one of the most famous houses. This is all public knowledge because people would know, I'm gonna sit outside of Eisner's house. I'm gonna sit outside of this famous person's house, and people are just cool with it. But then there's like, some Karen in Laguna, and she puts ropes. And there's a rule. You can be 10ft from the high tide mark, Right? Anybody is allowed to be 10ft from the high tide mark, whether it's Florida, California, and then there's local rules. And then there's people who sell chairs or have private clubs, and they will start putting their chairs around it and creating formations. And then these warriors come out, and there's one on neighbors.

1:08:53

Speaker D

Yeah.

1:09:54

Speaker B

And they come out and they want to walk across it so they'll Walk through. Through the chairs for the hotel or whatever.

1:09:55

Speaker D

I had no idea about this whole subculture.

1:10:00

Speaker B

It's the greatest.

1:10:03

Speaker D

So, neighbor awesome. Every episode they pick two.

1:10:04

Speaker E

Where's the clip today? Oh, just doing a little beach vlog.

1:10:06

Speaker D

You hit Oyster Lake down there.

1:10:14

Speaker E

So when you say it's all private property. Here he goes. Don't take this the wrong way, please. That's the stupidest thing I've ever.

1:10:15

Speaker D

Ever heard me call.

1:10:24

Speaker E

This is not my first rodeo, my friend.

1:10:26

Speaker D

So this guy, he's fighting and you're

1:10:27

Speaker E

going to find out the hard way. Tell me I'm on private property and then I'll leave. But you're wrong, cuz I've looked it up. So he's a. Not so well for you did it Br. You think I'm trouble? Wait. I have a hundred of my friends out here on this beach.

1:10:29

Speaker D

I got my kids out here. So if you want to cuss and fight.

1:10:40

Speaker E

I don't care if your kids are out here.

1:10:44

Speaker B

Look,

1:10:45

Speaker D

that's.

1:10:47

Speaker I

That's.

1:10:48

Speaker E

So here's the thing.

1:10:48

Speaker D

That's a little tasty Cult news. Oh, he's a lunatic. So he's getting in the middle. It's not even his neighborhood. He's getting in the middle of this fight between the people who like to hang out on this beach and the homeowners. And there's a scene late in the show that's so great where the woman who's running the we want to sit on the beach group pulls him aside and is like, can you please stop doing this? You're making us look bad. This is exactly what we want to avoid. You're starting fights. You're making chaos. Now we're really going to get kicked off the beach.

1:10:49

Speaker B

Beach?

1:11:18

Speaker E

Yeah, the Laguna Beach. Karen was the other really great one. She is nuts. Let me play this.

1:11:21

Speaker D

But they. They find these. The whole show is just. They find these characters.

1:11:28

Speaker E

I love it. I love it. This is the genius of hbo. The hundred billion dollar thing is actually worth it. I retract my previous statement.

1:11:31

Speaker D

There's another one that's in Montana. It's these two neighbors who are fighting over this gate. A guy wants to put up on this road next to his property in Montana.

1:11:39

Speaker E

Look at this line. Let me show you this one. This has nothing to do with neighbors.

1:11:47

Speaker B

Watch this woman.

1:11:50

Speaker F

A couple of weeks ago, I featured a video of a woman, a beachfront property owner in Laguna beach, to be exact, who was screaming at a family of beachgoers to get off her property.

1:11:51

Speaker E

Frantically, she puts out every Day more

1:12:02

Speaker F

and more beach area in an attempt to cordon off what she said.

1:12:06

Speaker B

Here she goes.

1:12:10

Speaker D

Private property.

1:12:11

Speaker E

She's attacking.

1:12:12

Speaker F

You're the homeowner of a beach.

1:12:13

Speaker E

And she throws.

1:12:15

Speaker F

It's your responsibility to learn the laws and rules that govern your property. And the line.

1:12:16

Speaker B

So what happens here now is these lunatics do this. Then these Fourth amendment people are in groups, and they're in Facebook groups. There's an app then, as the guy said in Neighbors, they go swarm.

1:12:23

Speaker D

Yeah.

1:12:37

Speaker B

So whoever does, like, these shenanigans, then they do, like, let's have 100 people have a barbecue outside this woman's house. It's amazing. This is what, like, America's all about.

1:12:38

Speaker D

I love this kind of stuff.

1:12:48

Speaker B

It's crazy. This is why I got a, you know, dozens of acres on my race.

1:12:49

Speaker D

Yeah, that's true.

1:12:53

Speaker B

You got a private race, no neighbor bothering me.

1:12:54

Speaker D

Totally recommend neighbors. I would say that this Montana one, you go through most of the show, and you're like, this guy actually sounds pretty reasonably. Just wants his horse to be able to walk down this. And then at the very end, he's like, well, you know, we should be working together to fight against Q. And then all of a sudden, it takes this crazy turn, and he's like a wild conspiracy theorist. It's. It's unbelievable. The show is so good. It's Josh Safdie who did Marty Supreme. He.

1:12:57

Speaker B

Oh, yeah, of course.

1:13:19

Speaker D

He executive produces it. And it's. It's a terrific show. I highly recommend it.

1:13:20

Speaker B

All right.

1:13:24

Speaker E

You did a great job. I want to do some things that you wouldn't. This is.

1:13:24

Speaker B

These are things you can buy.

1:13:29

Speaker E

You know me, I like things on Amazon stuff.

1:13:30

Speaker D

Gadgets, bric A brac. Yeah, yeah.

1:13:33

Speaker E

I like a little bit of stuff once in a while. Let me see if I got the right window here.

1:13:36

Speaker D

People like bric a brac.

1:13:40

Speaker B

Okay, here we go. I'm gonna take you through a couple of things I'm obsessed with. I like a warm cup of coffee.

1:13:41

Speaker D

Who doesn't?

1:13:48

Speaker E

This mug warmer for $22.

1:13:48

Speaker B

I have it on my desk. You put your cup of coffee on. You see what I'm showing you?

1:13:52

Speaker D

I do.

1:13:56

Speaker B

You press a button. You can pick how. What the temperature is and how long it's on for. And it's got a little led.

1:13:57

Speaker D

I love this. So, like, you poured yourself a cup of coffee. Now you've got it on your desk. You might nurse it for a little while. It gets cold right away. This keeps it fresh and warm. That's brilliant.

1:14:02

Speaker B

130 degrees the whole time. If you want to go 178, you can pick in between for 23 bucks. The delight I get from this thing every day is extraordinary. I've talked about Anker before.

1:14:12

Speaker D

Sure.

1:14:26

Speaker B

And when you and I were in Japan, you probably saw me pull this out. This cost 120 bucks. It's an Anker laptop power back bank. 25,000.

1:14:27

Speaker E

It has two built in USB Cs

1:14:36

Speaker G

and it has pass through power.

1:14:39

Speaker E

So when you plug it in on your dash, you can plug it into your laptop. Or two other things, be charging the battery and charging your phone and your laptop at the same time. In other words, it's got pass through power and it's got these LED screens so you know what it's doing.

1:14:41

Speaker B

And then if you're a super nerd

1:14:56

Speaker E

like me, it'll tell you. Here, C1, C2, C3 and A.

1:14:57

Speaker B

It tells you what each of the port's doing.

1:15:02

Speaker D

Right.

1:15:04

Speaker E

So I like to know I'm on max charge for my laptop, whatever. And it gives you the battery health and all that stuff. So you can see the input, how much is left, how long it takes to charge the battery. Just keeps you informed because we're all dealing with this stuff now. When I'm on a flight, a lot of times I'm on a flight, you gotta find the plug. Even if you're in business that's hard to find, the plug falls out. I don't even worry about that. I just have it with me. I just zip it out.

1:15:05

Speaker B

Boom.

1:15:27

Speaker E

Or if I'm in an Uber, I'm getting driven somewhere, boom.

1:15:27

Speaker D

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

1:15:30

Speaker E

Anker also makes a new wall charger. Here it is. This one can flip over in any direction.

1:15:48

Speaker B

So if you have a weird plug,

1:15:54

Speaker E

it does this interesting thing. Let me see if I can find it.

1:15:57

Speaker D

Well, cause we all have 100 devices now. I just got the plod. I've been wearing the plod pin now.

1:15:59

Speaker B

Oh, you got that?

1:16:04

Speaker D

Yeah, you gotta charge that too. Like every time you get a new thing now it needs to be charged.

1:16:05

Speaker B

Now this one, this little cute Anker Nano USB C. I first saw it when I was in Japan and I went to that great camera store that you went to.

1:16:11

Speaker D

BIC camera. B I C Bic camera in Tokyo.

1:16:19

Speaker B

Amazing. There's another off camera thing. Incredible many floors. Anyway, they make these with matching colors for your phone. But it has a display. I've never seen this before. There's a little button on the top and you can cycle through it. See that little indentation?

1:16:21

Speaker H

Yeah. Yeah.

1:16:33

Speaker B

You cycle through it and then it tells you what you're charging. Somehow it knows through a proper USB C cable that you're on a iPhone 17 Pro. Max.

1:16:34

Speaker D

Yeah. Wow.

1:16:42

Speaker B

Then. So you see that fast charging, whatever. And it does fast charging, which really matters. They are fast and super fast. And you can tap it really quickly. Like if it's on your side table as you see here, turn it off. You can do the charger cooler. So if you don't want to. If you're doing it overnight, you don't need to high speed charge, which burns out batteries and does all this stuff and affects temperature. So you can go on the care version. This is getting incredibly sophisticated. And here is my favorite part. 180 Flexible for your ideal view. So depending on the plug you're using, if it's on top of the desk, on the side of the desk, whatever. Hotel plug, airplane plug, your office, you can move it to 0 degrees, 90 degrees or 180 degrees. The plug just flips around. Which you don't think is important until you get to a weird plug.

1:16:44

Speaker D

Right.

1:17:31

Speaker B

And what you want to pair with this is this $20 plug which is a six foot USB cable. Get it in white or black and you pair it. It's got 140 watt fast charging for your laptop. But it has dual USB C. So you plug this into something and you get two. Boom. With my daughters, I bought them each the $30 nano when we're traveling and for their rooms. And the double. We never have problems with fighting over plugs. And the battery. I gave my wife my battery. Give the kids one of those bulky batteries.

1:17:31

Speaker D

Yeah, they thought of everything.

1:18:07

Speaker B

Happy.

1:18:09

Speaker D

They thought of everything at Anchor. They figured it out. Yeah.

1:18:09

Speaker B

And Plaud, you got the plot pin?

1:18:12

Speaker D

I do. I'm not wearing it right now because we're on camera. But I have the pl.

1:18:14

Speaker E

When do we start the partnership with Plot? Do we have a partnership with them yet?

1:18:17

Speaker D

Monday, sir. Monday. Get ready.

1:18:20

Speaker E

Oh, has it been signed?

1:18:22

Speaker D

It's done.

1:18:23

Speaker B

It's.

1:18:23

Speaker D

We're happy. We will do our. We will do our first plot segment. Stay tuned for it on Monday show.

1:18:24

Speaker E

Okay, Monday show. Thanks, everybody. Thanks to our friends at Plot. I'm going to give away more plot.

1:18:30

Speaker D

They're great.

1:18:35

Speaker E

Applaud. I applaud the plod. This thing is so great. Just as a preview, you wear it. You press a button. When I was skiing and almost died, I was wearing it for those three days. I turned it on at the beginning of the day and I just let it record me all day. When you skiing down the mountain, I had a great idea. I said, oh, shoot, stop at the side of the mountain. I'm going to start talking. I start talking. I start talking. I start talking.

1:18:35

Speaker B

Boom.

1:18:57

Speaker E

I forgot I did it then I now have on my calendar every other day. Review your plod. Yeah, and now I review my plod and I see all the different ideas. I don't lose all my great ideas.

1:18:58

Speaker D

The great thing is it learns the voices of everyone around you. So I've already taught it everybody. So I could just record a conversation. It'll tell me who said what when. And you could search it. It's. It's crazy.

1:19:08

Speaker E

And. Yeah, so you can search it. And then there's a bunch of template lunatics who've made templates out of there. So one of them is perfect transcript. One of them is like meeting one of them's brainstorm. So you can pick what template you want to generate it. It stores it in the cloud. Here's the great thing. You can hit the send button and I can send applaud to you at a public URL. So if we did a talk. I did this with you when I was testing in Tokyo. I had breakfast with Amanda.

1:19:20

Speaker D

Right.

1:19:45

Speaker E

I had breakfast with Will. We were going to do a talk and we just decided, hey, let's do a like a best practices for startups. And I talked with the team and then I said, hey, make this into an agenda for a podcast episode and a live talk. Then I sent that to you, Lon.

1:19:45

Speaker D

You did.

1:20:00

Speaker E

And then you used that. So you started on second base. It didn't have to be transcribed. I didn't have to start anything. Boom. I just pressed my plot pin.

1:20:00

Speaker D

It was like I was at the conversation you guys had with.

1:20:08

Speaker B

Correct.

1:20:11

Speaker D

Exactly.

1:20:12

Speaker E

Plot.

1:20:12

Speaker B

Plot.

1:20:13

Speaker E

Plod.

1:20:13

Speaker B

I love plod.

1:20:14

Speaker E

Bye, everybody.

1:20:15

Speaker D

Bye. Bye.

1:20:16

Speaker E

Monday.

1:20:16