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Unknown A
Look at this, folks.
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Unknown B
There's no one in the driver's car.
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Unknown A
With a crazy spoiler. Obviously a lot inspired by Tesla from byd. They kind of steal everything, but watch that. What?
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Unknown B
It jumps. Also this, look.
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Unknown A
This is a.
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Unknown B
This. This is a McLaren, not a Tesla. Jason. This does solve the market hole for billionaires running from the cops who are on a poor road who need to jump over a pothole to prevent capture.
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Unknown A
Or the spike strip.
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Unknown B
Oh, the spike strip.
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Unknown A
If you're in a spike strip event, I like it. I'm punching it up. So, yes, that's what this is for. If you're running from the cops and a spike strip. No, this is like Batmobile level stuff. There's no functional use for this thing except for us to talk about it. Well played, byd. This is point of ces. Come out with the feature that we can't help but talk about.
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Unknown B
This Week in Startups is brought to you by Gusto. Gusto is easy online payroll, benefits and HR built for modern small businesses. Get three months free when you run your first payroll at gusto.com twist Oracle Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or OCI, is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development and AI needs. Save up to 50% on your cloud bill at oracle.com twist and Squarespace turn your idea into a new website. Go to squarespace.com twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.
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Unknown A
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to this Week in Startups. I am in a dark hotel room on in the SECO on Wednesday here at 10pm at night. Alex is in New York. It's, I guess 8am There. We're taping the show a little bit on an odd time for those of you who like to watch it live. This Week in startups is on YouTube and X. And we go live to my personal LinkedIn as well.
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Unknown B
Yep.
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Unknown A
But here we go. There's a lot of news going on. I am in Niseko, which is in Hokkaido, which is the northernmost part of Japan. And I am for a couple of days. Yeah. Where the greatest powder in the world exists. I left Niseko two years ago. It was covered in powder. I showed up again, Alex. It was dumping powder.
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Unknown B
Ah.
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Unknown A
And I was out there today and I did a couple hours, couple of runs. And then tomorrow I'm doing something very special. It's called cat skiing. So I'm going to be on a. A cat, which is that machine with the tractor wheels. And so it's very strange. And it turns out in Japan, they had many, many ski resorts. Those ski resorts, a lot of them shut down because of population decreasing and there not being a lot of families. And skiing is, like. It's a family activity as well as, like, for individuals. So one of these ski resorts that shut down, they have just one of the lift lines open. All the other lift lines are literally down. There's no lift cable, and it's just the lap jade. So it looks like something out of the Walking Dead, like an abandoned ski village. And so what they do is they just take eight people up.
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Unknown A
There's two cats. They take you up, you ski down, they take you back up, back down. But every time you go on a trail, you're the first person to touch it. We call that in the industry, in the business, first tracks.
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
People will line up for hours before the ski mountain opens to get first track. So you're basically guaranteed to get full tracks. So I am.
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Unknown B
I've been in those cats, but I've never. I've never done that type of skiing. But I just. We were talking, literally last show, I think, about the chaos and the crisis at Vail over their mismanagement, and then over in Japan, there's not enough people. I feel like there's a market opportunity here to take folks who.
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Unknown A
They're interesting. You say that the majority of people who are skiing here are Chinese and Australian and American.
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Unknown B
Yep.
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Unknown A
And it turns out during this time period, during the ski season, it's gotten so popular because it literally is the best snow in the world. The volume of the snow, Alex, is. Is, like 20 to 1 to the volume. If it was water in, like, other places, it might be 10 to 1, 15 to 1, 5 to 1. So it's, in other words, fluffier. Yeah, it's a very weird thing. You hit a foot or two of this powder, and your skis disappear, but nothing else changes. You're just floating on it. So it is, like, the most amazing experience I have, and I feel very privilege to be able to do it.
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Unknown B
Tell me the truth. How much did the Niseko Ski Tourism Advocacy Board slip you under the table for that? Because that's a real. You're making me want to go.
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Unknown A
I mean, I don't want to endorse it because I kind of want to gatekeep it, as the kids say these days. But I gotta be honest with the audience. It is, like, one of the wonderful things I get to do every couple of years. The second time I've done it and maybe I'll get to do it two years in a row. But yeah, it is just my passion and I really enjoy it and it gets me through the year. I just think about going for a week to Japan and doing this and now my daughters want to go because I've been skiing with my daughters a whole bunch in Tahoe and I'm really excited to take them to Japan someday. So anyway, this is all great, but you know, I felt really bad because I was started taking pictures of all this and then I saw Mark Suster, a friend of mine, venture capitalist, that he was like leaving his house and he was scared of this fire.
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Unknown A
And I'm like, what fire? I mean I was on a plane obviously and you know, wasn't up on what's happening in the Pacific Palisades in Malibu. I used to live in Brentwood. Brentwood's the town just east of Pacific Palisades. And there is a fire raging as we speak.
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
And a lot of homes have been lost and I think there's some deaths of people and property damage is colossal and you know, obviously animals and people's pets. So I just felt really, I don't know.
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Unknown B
Let's have some context here, Jason. So here is, here's a map of Los Angeles and here is Pacific Palisades up here. Now for those of, for those of people who are not in the U.S. i think they think of LA as kind of a monolith. Can you just, for just 10 seconds, just tell us about Palisade, Santa Monica and what this means in the LA context.
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Unknown A
Yeah, so when you live in la, you either live on the west side or the east side that's delineated by the 4 or 5 freeway. And then there's a 10 freeway north of the 10 south at 10. Okay, so you get those is like almost like a four quadrant. And in that top left quadrant is the, what I would say is the most, the best place to live, let's just put it that way. Santa Monica, a beach town. Many people have been there. And just north of that beach town is the town of Pacific Palisades. And then to the east of it you have Brentwood. And you know, the Getty center is up there on the hill. And when I lived in Brentwood in that area that you're just showing there, you know, and I lived in a corporate apartment in Santa Monica when I was doing Weblogs Inc.
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Unknown A
Back in the day, it's like a $2,000 a month apartment. I was negative $20,000 in my bank account before we sold it. And, you know, it was a great moment in my life in the early 2000s, living there. You know, they would. There would be fires once in a while in the hills, but they never made it to Brentwood. They never made it to Pacific Palisades. Really. They. They were something that happened way up in the hills or, you know, or more east, inside the inland. And over time, you know, I started hearing people talk about. Because I had a wood shake roof. Wood. Pieces of wood. Right. You know, and I didn't have a lot of money at the time. Was my first home. And I would. They would get dry and they would crack and I would have the roofer come and take like a fix it.
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Unknown A
Then they would just touch it up for me. I said, listen, you've been touching this thing up for a couple of years now. You can't. I can't work on it anymore because there's an ordinance because of the Brentwood fire. You can't have a shake roof. You can only repair up to 30% of it. And I've done that a number of times here. You got to get this done with composites and fake ones. And I wound up doing that. But I was kind of bummed because I just love the look of the wood shake roof. But I looked online at the Brentwood fire and this is something that happened many years ago. I don't know if it was the 40s or 50s, but it had gone down from the Santa Monica mountains and burned a bunch of houses. And gosh, who's this whole thing with Trump saying, you got to rake the leaves?
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Unknown A
He says things in a pretty bombastic way. And here we are a week or two away from him taking office again. He's not wrong.
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Unknown B
Forest management matters. My best friend was a professor of forestry at Oregon State growing up, and I learned a lot about this. Yeah, yeah.
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Unknown A
So this is like one of those instances where he says something and you're like, what, rake the forest? Like, is that going to stop a forest fire? Actually correct. And it turns out in LA they have this like tragedy of the commons where you know, there's a lot of land between people's homes and they don't really enforce enough people cleaning up the debris. And there's a lot of debris up in those hills. And then you have a Santa Ana winds, something, lights on fire, a couple of these. And then there was the other issue. The electric cables were above ground. So the housing prices went up and up and up. These houses became Worth a thousand dollars a square foot, then $2,000 a square foot. So these are five or $10 million houses we're talking about here. But, you know, they were saying this was going to happen at some point.
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Unknown A
You know, it was pretty well known that these mountains were not cleaned up all that often. And the power lines are above ground. Same thing we have in the, in the Bay Area or we have, you know, have had in the Bay Area. So it's just a real tragedy and I just hope everybody's safe and that they get this under control. But it's getting really, really bad because the winds are picking up even more. All right, you didn't start your company to run payroll, did you? Of course not. We all know that Gusto is here to help. Gusto is going to help you run your payroll and handle all your benefits, onboarding and HR all in one place. The market agrees 300,000 businesses trust Gusto today. And you can, too. As your startup scales, Gusto is going to grow with you. You got state and federal taxes handled for your staff around the country.
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Unknown A
Gusto does all that. And hey, maybe it's finally time for you to offer a 401k plan for your team, right? Gusto's got you on that. And, and you might need to get your compliance sorted, right? Well, three out of four employers say Gusto helps them be government compliant. And even better, Gusto is simple, easy to use software so you can focus on what matters building your startup. So here's your quick call to action. Do you want all Gusto has to offer with no hidden fees? Well, how about a discount? Try gusto and get three months free. Gusto.com twist that's G-U-S-T-O.com twist I mean.
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Unknown B
It'S funny how three of the major American economies, Texas, Florida and California are suffering from climate change related insurance issues. From different issues, you know, earthquakes and fires in California, hail in Texas and then of course, hurricanes and other sorts of wind and water in Florida.
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Unknown A
It should have same weather is a pattern. Yeah.
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Unknown B
Well, the thing that I learned about this, I forget which insurance executive I was talking to. I think this is back when I was covering a lot of the insurance companies, back when Lemonade and Metro Mile were kind of competing for market share. And he said the thing that's killing insurance companies in the, in the housing market is not just the super extreme stuff that makes all the headlines, it's the less bad stuff that's now coming at a higher intensity. So a big hailstorm for example, you don't read about a hailstorm on the news, but if it takes out, you know, 10,000 windshields and hurts, you know, 5,000 roofs, that takes a whole area of, of low risk insurance and really changes the economics of it. So it's, it's an issue all over the place.
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Unknown A
Yeah, yeah. Anyway, thoughts and prayers as you say. And hopefully, you know, better systems to help these things. I would, I did look at one time when these things were occurring in the North Bay for fire. I had seen they use these blankets to go over cars to put them out. If you ever seen these fire blankets and they, there's a, there's a thing called fire blankets. You can pull it up on YouTube and basically it's a, it's a fire resistant blanket. It has long cables on it. You and I were firefighters. There's a car on fire in the middle of Broadway. We unroll this thing. You take one end, I take the other. We're 30ft away from the, the fire and the car on fire from either side. And we drag it over the car, lay it over the car and it puts out the fire because no oxygen.
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Unknown A
It's like a weighted blanket. These things are incredibly, incredibly effective. And I said to myself, be really interesting a blanket like this to go on top of somebody's home. Ah. Because it wouldn't make economic sense, but here we go. That's like, looks like a Rivian here.
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
And these electrical ones are really important because those fires can take a lot of water. They don't work for water. But anyway, you see them running that blanket of this car.
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Unknown B
Brilliant. Because it'll cut the oxygen flows. Oh, and then it crimps.
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Unknown A
Ah, I love that you crimp it at the bottom. Yeah, it really works. These are fire blankets. I started looking for a fire blanket to go over houses, but I think we could also start think thinking about just like in Florida, they're weatherproofing some of these homes by having the first floor 10ft be like a pass through for water. And then you're basically live on. The first floor is essentially 10ft up so that there is a flood, you know, flooding, you can survive it.
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Unknown B
I'm going to have to do the thing that we do when we discuss something, but we have to anonymize it ever so slightly. I spend weekends by the coast often and on, on that particular drive there is a house that was built in the last 10 years. And unlike every other house in this region between Rhode island and Massachusetts, if you will, it's Jason, it looks like it's designed for the zombie apocalypse. Like it's, it's got these huge pillars and these stairs going up. And if there was a hurricane that pushed water up 40ft by the time we reached that elevation, and then the second floor of that house doesn't matter. So it's like bulletproof from a hurricane perspective, and I love it. But it does look a little dystopian in a way.
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Unknown A
It's not beautiful, it's not esthetically pleasing. What people have done for that issue is they, they actually close it off and you use it for storage or whatever, or garage or whatever. But it's made so that if the water does come up, the panels or some number of the panels can just break out and the water just flows through.
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Unknown B
Yeah. So they have wind breaking out in skyscrapers. They have floors that are designed just to let wind go through, right?
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Unknown A
Correct, yes. And so basically you have this, whatever kind of panel there, but the panels if pushed, you know, with your hand very hard or with water, they just pop off and then the water flows underneath. So there's a bunch of startup opportunities here as we talk about on this week in startups, you put your, put your mind to these and there were. When these fires were occurring, my house had a sprinkler system on top of the shape roof and it wasn't working. It had been disconnected by one of the owners. But at some point they had put literally a rooftop sprinkler system because after the Brentwood fire, whenever that was, they were scared and they put sprinklers on the roofs for the shake roofs. But then it turned out they got rid of the shake roofs. You didn't need to have that. But there could be other fire retardant stuff you could put in Tahoe and in the mountain regions where you're having all these fires.
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Unknown A
So there's a big opportunity, I think, for startup founders to start thinking about composite materials, fireproofing these things, floodproofing these things. And that's a way where you maybe don't need insurance because, hey, this thing can survive the major things. And maybe I have a high deductible or something. There's a lot going on in the news as well.
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Unknown B
Not kidding, though. One last thing on this, there's that Sauron system that's coming out. That's the new, like, security system for people. That's a. I think it's a startup. I wonder if we're going to see similar things like that. Like, you know, here's the Fire department in a box for your house type thing for certain higher end customers if you want. Anyways, yes, lots to talk about on the show. I want to start Jason with something from ces. We had a founder on the show a week or two ago, CEO of the company behind Codium. They built the Windsurf IDE that I tested with and built a little app. Well, they got a shout out from someone who we all know and I thought I would just play this because it's kind of a fun little shout out to a twist offender company. Here's Jensen.
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Unknown A
Really fantastic stuff, Codium. Every, every software engineer in the world, this is going to be the next giant AI application. Next giant AI service period is software coding. 30 million software engineers around the world, everybody is going to.
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Unknown B
That's enough of that. But it struck me as so fun to see. Yeah, you know, we just had them on and you know, no, no offense to us, I mean I like to think that our words carry a little bit of weight. But Jensen on stage in front of literally every single press in the world. Yeah, that's about as big of a shout out as you can get, I think, in technology today.
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Unknown A
Congratulations to that startup, if you can. And you know the number of developers in the world is 30 million. It's a very small number. There are cities in China that have 30 million people, like many of them. And so it's but 10% or less than 10% of the population of the United States are developers globally. So you know, being able to expand that number dramatically through software, through AI is going to have a profound impact, like super profound impact on the world. And that's I think going to be a very world positive one that's maybe being debated right now. That's world positive, I think is the announcement Zuck put out like a five minute video which I guess we gotta talk about here at the top of the show because we're gonna talk about it. Yeah. And I, maybe you could just cue it up for the audience if.
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Unknown A
Yeah, they've been under a rock and obviously this is close to your heart because you're a journalist. And I've been pretty vocal about this kind of stuff too. And it hits on so many different things from, you know, media fact checking, standards, misinformation, disinformation and of course something, you know, that's the number one item in our constitution. Free speech.
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
And so here we go. Zuckerberg, I guess is gone based. And he's gone, he's gone.
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Unknown B
Something I, I want to get to your tweet about it, but let's just break it down for people. So first of all, Facebook is moving away from third party fact checkers. They are moving towards the Community Notes model originally called Bird Watch. Back at Twitter, Community Notes under X and has, has very much become associated with the musk X era of social media, if you will. And what I thought was very important in Meta's commentary, the announcement of this, they didn't say, you know, we are looking at the market and learning. They just said X Community Notes. We like that, we're going to do it. And I thought that was kind of very clear and honest of them. They are also going to be allowing more total speech. They are changing their speech rules for their platform, making them more expansive. We can talk about what they've changed in detail, Jason, if you want, but the gist here is that automation and more moderation thereof haven't worked for Facebook and Meta the way they wanted them to.
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Unknown B
So they are going to essentially let people be a bit more freewheeling, a little bit more self policing starting in the US Other jurisdictions of course have different rules, but that is I think a fair top level summary of the changes. On the content moderation side.
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Unknown A
Yeah, it's, it is a. Let's start with Community Notes. It's a credible project, predates, you know, Twitter turning into X and it's, it's actually an open source project. So I don't know if you were aware of that. And it's. Which means anybody can use it. I'll just send you the link here. You can pull up the GitHub page or if you're typing GitHub community notes, anybody can go find it. And so I believe anybody can go take a license to this and use it. It's a very fascinating piece of software. And are you part of Community Notes by chance?
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Unknown B
I do not believe that I am.
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Unknown A
Okay, you can apply to be part of it. And what's really interesting about it is when you see a, you can go and like look at Community Notes yourself. Or when you're reading a tweet, if you see a proposed Community note, you can click on it and you can actually rate it. Hey everybody, it's 2025 and AI is officially everywhere from medicine to self driving cars. If AI hasn't hit your industry yet, well, you know, it's coming fast. But AI needs serious computing power, so how do you stay competitive without breaking the bank? And what if you could cut your cloud bill in half? That's right, 50%. Well, it's time to upgrade to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or OCI as we call it in the industry. OCI is blazing fast and, and it's a secure platform designed to handle everything your startup needs, including your infrastructure, databases, apps, and of course, AI and machine learning.
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Unknown A
And what about all these savings? Well, compared to other cloud providers, OCI costs 50% less for compute and 80% less for networking. And that's some serious savings. Thousands of businesses have already upgraded to oci, including Vodafone, Thomson Reuters and Suno AI, who we had in the pod last year. So here's your call to action. Oracle is offering to cut your current cloud bill in half if you move to OCI for new US customers with a minimum financial commitment. But act fast. This offer ends March 31, so see if your company qualifies@oracle.com twist that's oracle.com twist and what happens is people are rating each other. They've invited a small number of people into it, who they trust, who they know who they are. And when you look at one, you might say, I think that this is a good correction because it's easy to understand, it's factually correct and it's cite sources.
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Unknown A
So it's, it's kind of like inspired in some ways by what Wikipedia does. We have reputation and a community of people kind of debating stuff and these things get kind of voted up and down to which Community Note gets seen. So to game, it is extremely hard, just like gaming, the Wikipedia was extremely hard for a long period of time. Now you do have an issue with Wikipedia now because it's, there's a bunch of people who, you know, baked accounts for many years and then they do edits for pay, let's say. And you know, maybe Community Notes will have that issue down the road. It's, none of these systems are perfect, but it's, it's, it's really does pretty well. Community Notes, I think, whereas fact checking through multiple organizations, I think when they decided to do that, it was. And this is where like Zuckerberg's motivation comes into play here.
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Unknown A
And that's a really important thing to think about. Zuckerberg really cares about business, really cares about winning. I believe his primary directive is winning. He's got, I don't know, close to 3 billion people using these platforms. He was more than happy. And this is what I wrote here. You know, listen, Zuck kicked Trump off the largest platform in the world when that was the popular decision. This was my tweet, you know, when I was a little Jet lagged here. Now he's bending the knee and firing the sensors he enabled because that's the popular decision. He is the definition of a front runner of Kamala 1. He would be doubling down on censorship. I actually believe that. I believe, you know, he is. The motivation here, I think, is not that he wants to do the right thing or he's suddenly seen God or he's had an epiphany.
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Unknown A
Because the timing of all these things simply correlates with who's in office.
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Unknown B
Oh, absolutely. 2016 was when fact checking began on the platform after a wave of misinformation or disinformation or just crappy information. And then now with Trump coming back, and I'll say some pretty mean things. I mean, Trump threatened to put Zuckerberg in jail.
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Unknown A
Yeah. So back to, like, you know.
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Unknown B
I don't think we can say, you know, don't take him seriously. Literally threatening someone with life in prison. Jason's a big deal. Like, come on.
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Unknown A
Of course. But I will say, like, just for the sake of the next four years, like, he. I'm going to just say, like, he says bombastic stuff. He's not able to do that. But what he would be able to do is maybe break Facebook apart or pick the people in office that might have that. Just like Biden picked Lina Khan, who wanted to break things up in big tech and not do M and A. You know, he will have his chance to pick people like Brendan Carr or whatever who match his philosophy. So it might not be the God King comes down and Biden says, break up Google. It might be Biden picks Lina Khan. Lina Khan says we're breaking up Google. And the same thing goes for Trump. Right. That's kind of how our democracy works, for better or worse.
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Unknown B
I mean, can I quibble with that just a little bit? I think that having someone come in with a particular antitrust perspective is more meritorious than going in with a particular animus against one company or an executive. And Trump agrees.
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Unknown A
Totally fair. That's.
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Unknown B
Trump agrees that his threats were quoting from Politico. Incoming President Donald Trump said the new approach was, quote, probably due to threats he made against the technology mogul. So Trump thinks he got his pound of flesh here. And I think this sets the tone. Not even making a judgment here. I think this sets the tone for the next, at least year of Trump's administration because he'll have a grace period before presidents become less popular as the terms go on historically. So he'll have a period of time when Congress is under his party, he's a new newly elected president, not stuck with years of incumbency. And so I think during that period of time, we will see more of this. I just. That's disappointing to me as someone who likes the free market versus kings.
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Unknown A
Now, the good news here is I don't think they were actually using any of this fact checking for anything. It wasn't actually being implemented on the site in any major way. It was strictly a way for them to deflect or pretend they were doing something. What did matter was the decisions they made. And we talked about this on the program many years ago, was this oversight board, which you can go see@ oversightboard.com Zuck funded this, like to the tune of like 150 million. It was originally like 10 or 20 million. There's 150 million.
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Unknown B
280 is the latest number that I saw now.
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Unknown A
And that's probably the total over time.
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Unknown B
Once, but like a lot of money.
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Unknown A
A lot of money to put a bunch of like, let's face it, like very elite academic people into a group and say, hey, when we make decisions for these. What is it, almost 3 billion people using our platforms? Yeah, it's well over 2 billion. You know, we're going to let you adjudicate some of them and give, you know, your decision as opposed to us making the decision and fact checking, you know, is different than a terms of service. But let's pause for a second. These are all companies that get to choose how they operate them. Reddit is pseudo, anonymous. They. You don't have to use a real name. LinkedIn got to use a real name. Okay, yeah, one's a message port about video games and whatever. And the. Or, you know, originally it was a video game about like hobbies, passions. The other one was like a business network.
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Unknown A
Like business network. You got to have real names. Like, what's the point? And so you could have all these different things exist, but this is big because it is the largest. And if you were to look at Zuckerberg's decision making, he also. It's super important. Oh, here we go. Oh, my God. It's over 3 billion now.
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Unknown B
3.29 billion. This is a Q3 number and that was a 5% year over year. So we'll have to see what it is now at the end of 2024. But that's the latest from their earnings report. 3.29 billion people. Jason is more than. Well, there's about eight and a half billion people on the planet.
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Unknown A
Something like that. Yeah.
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Unknown B
If that number isn't right. I plead the fact that we are doing this nice and early.
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Unknown A
Well, anyway, I mean, it's literally there in the document. So over 3 billion people using this platform. He kicked the President off for the safety issue. The open bor. The oversight board said, hey, that was like a weird decision. Like, maybe in the short term, like, if you thought it was going to be another January 6th and, you know, maybe Trump would incite it, that was actually the common thinking then. I know that's not something people really want to talk about now. They kind of memory hole all that moment in time. But there was a moment in time Republicans and Democrats were in unison, like, hey, Trump might say something even crazier and caused like January 6times 10 or 100. There was like an actual fear from Republicans, from Democrats, both sides of the aisle, and the media, like, oh, my God, like, what do we do here if he tweets, like, everybody, instead of coming to the Capitol, everybody come to this location.
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Unknown A
Everybody come to that location. Let's give them hell here, let's give them hell there. It just felt like he was out of control at that time. I'm talking about Trump here. And that this could be crazy and maybe people got even more. People would get hurt or people could get killed. Right. Because he had so many followers. And that's when Twitter banned him, YouTube banned him. It was in unison. Everybody banned him. You know, at the same time, the oversight board then came and said, hey, we're going to overturn that. Basically, here's our advice. And then there was this whole thing, where is Zuck going to take their advice or not? I just want to put it out there so people are super, crystal clear. He's the God king. He has what's called super voting shares. He controls and rules this 3 billion person network with an iron fist.
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Unknown A
However, however, if but 10% of people were to stop posting because they disagree with his decisions.
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
He would change his decisions. He cares about winning. That's why the number is so big. That's why it's 3.29 billion.
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
Because he cares so much about that number going up. He's addicted to that stuff. I know him. I know how he thinks. And you don't need to be a genius. You don't. You know, I don't have a personal relationship. I don't overstate it here, but I know him since I. Since he started his career, you know, in fact, the first time I met him was when he. It was a private social network. He wanted to win. More than anything, he wants to be accepted, he wants to be popular, all this stuff. And the reason he has 3 billion people is because he's willing to do whatever it takes. So as an entrepreneur listening to this week in startups, he's like the perfect example of somebody who is win at all costs. And he sees now that winning at all costs meant to kick Trump off the platform because that was the popular decision.
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Unknown A
To censor people. That was the popular decision. Do not let people talk about issues that they can talk about on other platforms. Which is his right. It's his business. All right, founders, let's kick off the new year by talking about your website. If you're launching something new in 2025 or you need to refresh your brand, and I bet you do, you need to use Squarespace. Squarespace makes building a stunning professional website ridiculously easy. Whether you're selling products, offering services, or just sharing your ideas, Squarespace gives you the tools you need to make it happen. And you know Squarespace is at the cutting edge with AI tools that make building your site easier and faster than ever. For example, its design intelligence tool is just like having a world class designer at your fingertips. You ask it a few questions and their AI takes it from there.
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Unknown A
Building a fully customizable website that's perfectly tailored to your brand. In just minutes. We're talking professional layouts on brand visuals and premium content. All ready to go. Day one. So here's your call to action. Start the year Strong. Check out squarespace.com twist for a free trial. And when you're ready to Launch, go to squarespace.com/twist to get 10% off your first website or domain purchase. That's squarespace.com/twist if you own shares in it, you're along for the ride. Yes, but he's in control. But remember, as users, at any point in time, users could opt out of using that system.
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Unknown B
Yep.
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Unknown A
If you don't want him to be so powerful, all you have to do is do what I did. I don't go on Facebook but once every couple of months. In fact, I just had to reload it because they'll get into my Instagram. I had to do it because I was authenticating so we could stream to our. I try to get Restream to go to my Instagram and try to figure out doesn't work very well but we'll get there. You can just not use these products or services. And I don't and you don't. And you know what? I think there's going to be many people who just say, you know what, I just don't think I want to use his product or service. And then he would change his decisions if you don't like them. Or you can compete and make your own products. You know what, now we have Blue Sky.
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Unknown A
Now you have, you know, he created threads, you have Blue Sky. People can create any you have mastered on. I mean these things don't have insignificant number of people. And I just read that Blue skies racing at 700 million dollar valuation.
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Unknown B
Yes. So we'll talk about that in a second.
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Unknown A
But yeah, it's not as insurmountable to compete with Zuckerberg as you think. But there's a lot of things there for you to comment on. I'm sure you have some thoughts.
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Unknown B
I have so many thoughts. But like the thing, the thing that I, the thing that I don't like here is that I think that we're speaking occasionally in too broad of terms. Like for example, that Facebook is now a free speech. Haven't. It's absolutely not. So for example, you can't have female presenting nipples on Instagram. Now.
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Unknown A
Free the nipple was a whole movement.
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Unknown B
Right, right. And so I just, I just decided, I remembered that and so I went to the Facebook trend, sorry, the Meta Transparency center under the community standards section subsection, adult nudity and sexual activity. And they say we restrict that because some people in our community may be sensitive to this type of content, particularly due to cultural background or age. Fair enough. But that is making a value judgment that limits speech based on the corporation. And so to me, watching them say, and I went through this morning, the changes that Facebook made to its hate speech rules. You can now dump on trans people as much as you want.
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Unknown A
Okay?
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Unknown B
But you can't have nipples because one is politically expedient and the other is bad for business. And to me, this is not free speech. This is just a company following the trends, try to maximize income. I don't want to give them the moral imprimatur of free speech when they're not doing it.
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Unknown A
Absolutely. He cares. The reason there will not be a nipple on there, or a female nipple, I should say, is because it's not good for advertising.
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Unknown B
Exactly.
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Unknown A
Disney, Ivory Soap, Apple, they don't want to be near breasts. And so this is the reason. And other platforms like might have no problem with it. They get more traffic, they get less advertising. They make that decision. But I think it's super important for people to give him zero credit on a moral basis that he's making Some great moral judgment has nothing to do. This is just brass tacks, folks. He's just going with the crowd as to what is best for shareholders in business, which means you should buy the stock, you should own the stock. I own the stock. It's going to do phenomenal. I feel guilty owning it, but it's a great trade and it will keep growing and he'll, he'll always win because he's always going to do this. It has nothing to. If Democrats win next time and they say, you know what?
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Unknown A
We want to have this set of topics be the ones that we censor or we. Whatever they. What's it called when you deep promote something?
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Unknown B
Deboost. Shadow, Ban. Deprioritize.
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Unknown A
Deprioritize. There you go. That's the word. Yeah. We're going through all the ways to move stuff down your feed.
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Unknown B
It's early and late, guys. We're doing our best.
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Unknown A
Well, here's what I think. I think ultimately what we're going to see with social networks here is the idea that I think all the social networks are going to just start to move to. It's going to be more like Reddit, maybe 4chan, like X, where there's just a. You're going to have to, as a consumer understand it's the Wild West. These are these, this idea that it's going to be groomed and clean like LinkedIn or like Facebook used to be, where, you know, if you said something about the COVID vaccine, you might get kicked off or deprioritized or labeled. You know, all this kind of stuff is just, it's, it's going to lean towards free speech, which I like. You know, that's my personal belief. But I also believe people should be able to do what they want to do. I kind of, I kind of like having multiple choices.
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Unknown A
I like that LinkedIn doesn't have fake names and I like that they don't have nudity on LinkedIn or other, you know, like spicy content or whatever on LinkedIn because I'm there to do business. I also like that Reddit has pseudonyms because people, I feel, over time can be honest about their reviews of stuff and I can click on their profile and see what else they wrote. And yeah, I understand I might be getting duped. There might be somebody in there who is getting paid off by, I don't know, some movie to write something. But I don't take it all too seriously. It's like one little piece of information from your edit. You know, LinkedIn is one piece of information, and then I come to my own version of the truth. So you're gonna have to, like, lower your standards as to, like, how valid the information is on these.
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Unknown B
I just find the, and I know this is my boy Scoutness coming out, and we've talked about this before, but I do find the posturing annoying. Like, like adding Dana White to the, the, the Meta board is such a sop to Trump to try to buy favor with the incoming administration. It's just, it strikes me as a little bit gross. Like, for example, if Dana White savvy.
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Unknown A
I see it as I saw. And I was like, well, that's a savvy move. Now he's got like, what happened to merit?
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Unknown B
What happened to Merit? What happened to only hiring people who are good? If Dana White was a left board.
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Unknown A
For a board, it's just about access and power. And he gets more power and more access. Right. He's got a, He's. He had ground to make up here, just like Tim Cook's got ground to make up here. Right. So they're all giving a little donation here, inauguration, whatever it is. And in this case, you get Dana White on your board. Dana White's obviously good friends with Trump. Boom. And Trump probably prefers community notes. And he came out publicly talking about this. Hey, this is great. Look, I, you know, yeah, they said the Republican.
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Unknown B
They said the Republican on Fox to Fox and Friends to pitch this to Jump. It's a lit. To me. Business savvy should not be predicated on kissing political rings. And I think that, like, it's. I wrote about this. I'm like, this is probably a good business choice, but I do not like that our system, Our system is allowing this to be the business norm because I don't think it's healthy. And it. Boo, Jason. I say boo to it. But I will say Mark wins and Mark keeps winning. And Mark has all the shares. One last thing about this before we go. You said about owning Meta stock. Here's an example about how we all do. So I pulled up the Fidelity Total Market index fund, and if you look at its holdings here, you will see that 2% of it is in Meta only behind Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia and Apple.
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Unknown B
So if you buy the market, you're buying a lot of Zuckerberg. And I think that's. That's very interesting, by the way. Magnificent Seven, anybody? I mean, just, just look at this. It's crazy.
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Unknown A
It is crazy. Yeah, we were talking about that on all in or Chamath was talking about all in. And just what an amazing how weighted index funds are getting to the Mag 7. But these companies are getting wildly profitable and they're going to continue. You're wildly profitable because of AI, like we talked about here. So more to come on this decision. But it is his network. If you don't like it, create a competitor. Don't use his network. Stop complaining about it, everybody. I mean, listen. And the great part about this is like all these people went to like threads and they're like, Zuckerberg's got our back. You know, it's going to be better. And I'm like, no. Are you sure?
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Unknown B
The biggest lesson of Meta throughout all its iterations and histories is never trust. Trust it as a platform because they will never copy you.
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Unknown A
Zuck is a really good operating system.
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Unknown B
Unless you are the person who's running Reality Labs because then he has your back to the tune of do several billion dollars a quarter.
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Unknown A
He does believe in that one. Yeah.
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Unknown B
All right. Where do you want to go from here, Jason? We could talk about some Nvidia stuff. We can talk about some couple some funding rounds that are coming up. Anthropic blue sky. We got venture data.
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Unknown A
The Nvidia stuff was, was really interesting. There were, there were two pieces I thought were super interesting. One you made a Mac mini that cost $3,000, that's like absurdly powerful. And then the other one is, he seems to be making like real world models and simulations that I believe are open source. And this is something that could be incredibly beneficial for people building robots or self driving cars. If there was an open source way to understand the world, then collectively more people could build things that move around the world, whether it's a drone or a tiny robot, or a burrito delivery robot or a walking dog or whatever. So I think those two were the most interesting to me. I don't know if you had any other stuff that you thought was interesting.
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Unknown B
I want to talk about the, the project digits. And if you don't know what we're talking about here is Nvidia's latest toy that everyone's going to want. Forget the Apple Vision Pro. This is going to be awesome. So what they've done is taken a single Blackwell chip, their upcoming awesome AI supercomputer chip, and stuck it in a box that you can buy for your house. So instead of having to go to AWS or Azure and rent an instance and fire it up and pay them, you can for $3,000 get a Nvidia GB10 Grace Blackwell super chip, which has a petaflop of AI computing performance. Basically you can run a 200 billion parameter model at home for 3K. Now this is definitely going to be a bit of a gimmick and probably not going to change the world, but. But Jason, if you're a company that has developers working on AI, you're paying them 200, 250 a year.
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Unknown A
Probably, yes. So why would you give 1% or fraction of a percent to have this on their desk?
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Unknown B
Exactly.
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Unknown A
I'd say the thing that's really interesting about things that start as toys or as hobbies, this feels like the Raspberry PI. It feels like the PC. In the early days these things were toys and people were tinkering with them and then an application comes out and then people really want it and then everybody has to have it. The Palm Pilot, you know, and the general magic machines were like these little digital assistants. They were PDAs, personal visual assistants. They had a dictionary on them, a calendar on them. They weren't connected to the Internet. You have to plug them in with a, you know, a big fat cable into your computer to get the data to sync. It never worked. It took an hour, you know, and then all of a sudden now we all have iPhones and Android phones. In fact I got, by the way, I got The Google Pixel 9 fold.
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Unknown A
Uh huh. Have you used one of these foldable phones yet?
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Unknown B
My father in law has one. I don't know if I've actually taken it out of his hands and used it.
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Unknown A
It's incredible.
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Unknown B
Really. Oh, okay.
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Unknown A
I thought it was a gimmick, I thought it was stupid and now I have one. And the Google 9 integration with Gemini is like everything that Alexa and Siri should have been times 100. It actually works now. So you know, when we were like doing testing previously, we had Sunny on and we were like asking it to do certain tasks. It just wouldn't do it. Now I'm starting to ask tests like hey, open Google Play and download this app for me. And it did it. And I was like, whoa. Where it pulled up the page and I had still to click the install button.
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Unknown B
That's better than Siri, which would give you. Sorry, yeah, Siri should give you three Bing results.
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Unknown A
Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's like, I don't know, I'm gonna search the web maybe, but so it's actually understanding like the operating system and like jumping out and actually actually doing functional things for me. So. And then when you're using your phone and you're on the when it's closed, you have a screen and, you know, you could just use it like that. You answer the phone or you text, but then, you know, you're sitting in your bed or you're in line at Starbucks or you're having a Starbucks, or here I was having a coffee, you know. You know, after skiing a little bit, I open it up and I open slack and I start talking to you. I start talking to other people, and the keyboard splits and goes to either side and thumbing. And then I'm using speech to text, which kind of works now.
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Unknown A
And I got this screen that's kind of like. Remember the iPad mini that people kind of liked as like a big iPhone? And it's pretty great, but you couldn't carry an iPad mini with you because it didn't fold. And this thing folds and it folds and I don't feel like I'm going to break it. Feel sturdy now. The last one I saw, Marquez was just saying it was garbage. This works. The reason this relates to this Blackwell thing is I think, you know, putting out this little hardware as a 1.0 kind of play with it kind of thing. You might have people start playing with this and somebody builds an application that everybody's like, I gotta have that. I need that.
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Unknown B
Yes.
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Unknown A
And, you know, I don't know what that is, but $3,000 is a lot of money. But not for the hobbyist crowd. You know, the hobby people spend a lot of money on a lot of things. Like I ski. I spend thousands of dollars a year on skiing, cycling with traveling, cycling. People buy $10,000 bikes and they mod them. So I think this is kind of like reminds me of the muscle car or PC movements, if you remember. Like, people used to change their carburetor. They would put in better tires, they would change spark plugs. You do all this kind of fun stuff. In the PC era, people would add a hard drive, they would add memory chips to get more memory. This is all done by opening the computer up and putting in cards. And, you know, there was always very complicated in the 80s and 90s to do this stuff.
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Unknown A
I think that's what I see with this Blackwell. What are they calling this device?
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Unknown B
Project digits. And it's going to be made by third parties. So I think it's like the Microsoft model, like, oh, oh, yeah thing, and then have OEMs built.
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Unknown A
Oh, that's even better. So that. That's. That's kind of a shot across the bow of like the PC industry or whatever. Because what if this thing can it run Windows?
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Unknown B
If I recall the research I did, the answer is no. It sits next to your Mac or Windows PC. But back to your point about toys to tools. Gen 1, okay. Gen 2, if it runs Linux and I can, or Chrome OS or something.
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Unknown A
Or somebody puts in, you know, some other Raspberry PI like device, and it comes as one unit. Sure. And now you got a Mac Mini that can kind of do both. And you know these new Mac mini M4, as I was talking about them on the show, how incredible they are.
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Unknown B
Yeah, those.
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Unknown A
I saw somebody stacking those, connecting them together and then running LLMs on them.
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Unknown B
That's awesome.
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Unknown A
When you see this kind of hobby stuff going on.
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Unknown B
Oh, man.
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Unknown A
Get curious. Get curious. Very easy to dismiss, but get curious because somebody's going to take three or four of these things and put it in a car or do something with it and it's going to be magical. So, you know, like, if you put that $3,000 thing on, you know, a bicycle or a motorcycle or something, what's it going to be able to do? You put it on a drone, what's it going to be able to do? You put it on a boat. You know, I'm picking things that move around the real world. The robot. This. This could escalate quickly, folks. I think this is like Nvidia's at the top of their game with a lot of money being, having a lot of fun and running a lot of experiments. You know what? The same thing happened at Google with Project Loon, Google Fiber, Google City. Remember they did Google City?
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Unknown B
I do.
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Unknown A
Nobody remembers any of these projects anymore except you and I, who are passionate about these projects and covered them.
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
You know what? You know what? All those projects wound up being Waymo.
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
Forget every project. Google was Project Hex. What was the lab called? Google X. Right. And so Google Glass was in there. Project Loon. Project Loon was a balloon that would spread. WI fi. Didn't work. Starlink works better Wing. They had a drone delivery service. Hey, maybe that was too early.
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Unknown B
That's right. Yeah.
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Unknown A
Google Glass was too early. But these moonshots. If 19 of 20 didn't work and we don't even know what other ones were in there, you know, but let's assume there are 20 and Waymo works, which it is apparently working pretty well. Still got work to do. All worth it. That's what I'm. That's the vibes I'm getting from Nvidia and Jensen right now.
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Unknown B
I cannot agree more. I was blown away by the sheer scale of things they announced. I mean, we haven't even mentioned, for example, the foundation models. They put together, their computer vision stuff. They had autonomous driving announcements. They dropped an entire new line of PC gaming GPUs that I'm going to buy, by the way. I'm going to get one. But I do want to go back just for a second to the idea of the foldable phone, because I found something for you, Jason, that I think you're going to love. So Lenovo had a rollable laptop concept, and this year, I guess they announced that they are actually going to build it. It's going to launch this year for $3,500. And I have the video for you. And I think that you're going to.
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Unknown A
Love this because I. Rollable PC concept, dude, watch. And that's not standard laptop.
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Unknown B
Watch this. Look at that. Look at that.
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Unknown A
Oh, my God. For people who are watching.
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Unknown B
Thank you.
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Unknown A
The screen of a laptop is extending like a shade. You just press a button and it.
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Unknown B
Adds several inches to your laptop screen.
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Unknown A
Genius.
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Unknown B
So this is the type of thing that I'm sure Apple will eventually make in seven years after Android. But this does mean that eventually my MacBook Pro will have a screen that expands because do you recall back when Android phones were getting bigger and everyone called them phablets as a disk?
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Unknown A
Yes.
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Unknown B
And now my iPhone is the huge.
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Unknown A
The fact that Apple doesn't have a foldable phone, to me, it's crazy right now.
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Unknown B
Yes.
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Unknown A
They would make one that'd be extraordinary. It would sell like hotcakes. And I think maybe what they're doing is waiting for this to be a little more rugged. I think the issue is like, will they break or not?
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Unknown B
Yes, yes, yes.
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Unknown A
This second one feels super rugged. I've had it for a couple of weeks now, maybe two weeks, and it feels solid. I've opened and closed it, you know, 500 times. You know, I don't feel like it's. And I open it, close it all the time, 10 times a day, no problem. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And it's really nice. And you know what I. Silly stuff, but like watching a YouTube video or an NBA game, you know, I was on the plane, usually I would take out my laptop if I want to watch the next game or a movie, if I've downloaded something and then I have this, I open it up, I can watch the movie on it. It's really nice. So I.
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Unknown B
You just nailed it. If you. If Apple makes this, we don't need iPads anymore. Not that we need iPads now, but they go away. I want to make a quick technology point though, because you just reminded me of something. I had a moment when I was blown away by technology and I want to give a shout out to some, some stuff that doesn't get a lot of Love Slack and iOS. So I was, I think it was Monday night, I was taking care of the girls and I was talking to Bianca on the investment side because she's the local God king of software. And I had a question about Coda and we were going over this and I literally have a baby in a carrier. I'm sitting in the living room on the floor and I'm talking to Bianca on my phone and she screen shared into Coda and I just, I knew it, I knew it existed, but I hadn't had it shown to me as it was so slick, so fast, so high res.
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Unknown B
We were voice chat with video. It was just, I was like, okay.
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Unknown A
This is Slack has Zoom built in with huddles and huddles. You can do screen sharing. And you know what? Slack does a really bad. This is what happens when, when a startup gets bought by a company and they stop doing keynotes like Jensen's doing. You don't get this like fervor around a product anymore. And so these great product announcements, you just don't have them. This is why like independent companies can kind of thrive and they, they get more aggressive in releasing more innovative products. Whereas in a big company, like if I asked you who's the CEO who's running Slack, you wouldn't know. Nobody knows who's running Slack is.
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Unknown B
I read her name. I read an interview with her.
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Unknown A
Sure.
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Unknown B
A month or two ago.
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Unknown A
Yeah. And where is she doing a keynote where she releases 10 new features? No.
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Unknown B
Well, no, because Mark does the keynotes over there.
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Unknown A
There you go. Right. And so you really. It's very hard for companies to have 10 different products and have all of them really aggressively going after different markets. Like, but Zoom is, keeps adding a ton of features and you do see, you know, Zoom getting credit for them. You know, to a, to a larger extent they did add channels to Zoom to kind of like counter what Slack was doing. And they don't work. It's a janky bad product. The UX is terrible. Yeah, it just doesn't work. The calendar in there worked pretty good in Zoom. I find that. I find myself, I used to open my Google Calendar to get to Zoom. Now I go to Zoom, it's got my calendar in there and it kind of Worked pretty well. So sometimes like I'll find myself changing my behavior and going there. That's when you know, you have something.
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Unknown B
That, that's when I'm willing to actively change my behavior. By the way, one last thing from the previous segment. You said that you were using voice dictation inside of Slack.
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Unknown A
I'm using it generally on the operating system level. I think Apple's a solid and Google's is just transcendent.
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Unknown B
Like, okay, I don't, I don't think anyone should give you more tools to send Morris lock messages because I think, I think that's, that's, that's the crisis. One last thing on the Nvidia point though, because we have a couple of companies on the twist 500 etched rebellions, mythic Samba Nova that are building AI specific chips. And I was pretty excited about them because I thought, look, here's like so many different ways to go about this model of trying to have faster, more efficient, better AI crunching chips. And then Nvidia came out with their series of CES announcements and I just kind of sat back and I was like, good luck to the startups because this is a company that is really firing on nine out of eight cylinders right now. And I just, I hope someone can knock a piece off of them. But.
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Unknown A
Well, there are going to be cases where, you know, you can make unique silicon cheaper in a vertical and faster, cheaper, better, faster. So, you know, it's not like you're going to build 100,000 of, you know, one of these chips. But you know, for inference, you have Grok, which Sundee's working on, and they're starting to put in a lot of hardware. Now you've started to see them on their account, if you follow Sandeep. You know, you see them shipping a bunch of these things to different parts of the world and building data centers. And then in the Tesla's, they have their own card with their own chips on it. So you're starting to see people say, you know what, I don't want to give 50% of my margin to Nvidia if I build my own. Which by the way, is what Steve Jobs realized at a certain point.
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Unknown A
Hey, how much are we giving to Intel? How much are we given to Qualcomm? You know, some of these things are patents. You can't get away from them. But you know, the, the idea that Apple would make their own chips was kind of crazy. Yeah, there's Sandeep Mantra and he is shipping racks on racks, on racks of Grok Inference service. So when you ask a query, this makes it go really fast to have those when you build it. They're not for building a model, they're for inference.
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Unknown B
For inference. But, I mean, inference is going to be much bigger than the training market.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
So a lot going on. I did see BYD launched a Batmobile. Did you see that? It was in the thread that you shared with me. I showed up.
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Unknown B
Yes.
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Unknown A
Shout out to Alex and the team. Matty, everybody doing a great job. We try to get 10% better a week here. 2% better, 3% better every episode. Compounding three episodes a week, we could be 10% better. If each of these episodes is 3% better. Let me know how you think we could be better. Just add us and mention us. You know, if you want better show notes, you want better chapters, whatever it is, better topics. We always want to make it a little better for you to learn and just get an edge when you're building your startup. But this byd, I saw the show notes and have. What is happening here? Yeah, make it full screen. Look at this, folks.
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Unknown B
There's no one in the driver's car.
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Unknown A
With a crazy spoiler. Obviously, a lot inspired by Tesla from byd. They kind of steal everything, but watch that. What?
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Unknown B
It jumps. Also, this look. This is. This is a McLaren, not a Tesla.
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Unknown A
It looks like a McLaren. Right? I was looking at the interior.
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Unknown B
Oh, yeah. The interior's straight.
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Unknown A
Rip. Straight ripped of it. So just for those people who aren't watching, this thing looks like a McLaren. It's got a spoiler. Like an aftermarket spoiler. That's huge. So it looks kind of like a Batmobile. And I guess you press a button and it jumps up 2 or 3 inches off the ground.
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Unknown B
But because it's going so fast, a couple of inches of altitude gives you quite a lot of horizontal distance. So we can jump over potholes. Jason, this does solve the enormous market hole for billionaires running from the cops who are on a poor road who need to jump over a pothole to prevent capture.
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Unknown A
Or spike strip.
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Unknown B
Oh, the spikes trip if you're in a spike.
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Unknown A
I like it. I'm punching it up. So, yes, that's what this is for. If you're running from the cops and a spice. No, this is like Batmobile level stuff. There's no functional use for this thing except for us to talk about it. Well played, byd. This is the point of cs. Come out with the feature.
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Unknown B
Yes.
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Unknown A
That we can't help but talk about. Why do you need your car to jump 2 1/2 inches in the ground and then land properly. It doesn't make any sense. Why would you do that? Do you press a button on the steering wheel? I'm sweating my Subaru oil slicks and a machine gun. What is this Sky Hunter? It makes no sense to me, but I love it.
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Unknown B
I absolutely love it. And if you want to know what it is, it's the BYD supercar Yongwang U9. And it can jump, apparently, according to our notes, six meters forward on the show. Notes point though. You were talking about that when I was pulling up that video. We forgot to change the permissions on the second iteration of this so people could leave comments. And I know that because someone emailed in. So I think that people like it. So we are going to keep doing this. If you want to follow along. ThisBeaconStartups.com docket. We'll have the latest docket up top and we're going to have a historical archive of preceding dockets down below. So if you're watching an older show, once the effect chart data point, it'll be there. We're going to keep doing this. It's been. It's been good fun. Can I squeeze in one tiny note about a different story before we go?
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Unknown A
Yes. And then I want to tell you about the minivan in Japan that I'm losing my mind over, but go ahead.
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Unknown B
Okay, I can't wait for that. Really. Briefly, two things that came out from the world of AI economics that I think are worth discussing. One, anthropic is, according to reporting from the Journal, in talks to raise about 2 billion more from Lightspeed, $60 billion valuation company is on a roughly $875 million run rate. Why do we care? Because they raised 4 billion recently from Amazon. Well, the thing is, they have about a 69x run rate multiple, which is very, very expensive. And I wanted to Compare that to OpenAI $3.7 billion run rate, $157 billion valuation, 42x. So then I asked Jason, why is Anthropic being valued at a higher run rate multiple than OpenAI? My thought was anthropic makes most of its money B2B and OpenAI makes more.
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Unknown A
Sustainable than not up against Gemini and Grok.
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Unknown B
Precisely.
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Unknown A
And Zuckerberg, which we just mentioned, Kid likes to win. Oh, look at that. Wow. So Sam Altman tweeted, same thing. We're currently losing money on OpenAI process, which is people use it much more than expected.
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Unknown B
The 200 Flow is the $200 a month version of OpenAI that has more 01 access.
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Unknown A
So they're losing money hand over fist. And I guess people think they're making 6 billion this year or something, they're going to double it. I don't doubt those numbers. I do doubt that you're going to be able to charge for these things and make a profit off of them because I think people with existing businesses, franchises are just going to make them free. So Twitter will have it free. Apple will have it free. Google have it free. Google already makes it basically free. I pay for the $20 one, but $20 is close to free. It'll be free eventually. Microsoft will make it free. Somebody said that Sam, who's been tweeting about AGI, a whole bunch might be trying to raise that. 300 billion is the word on the street.
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Unknown B
Well, that would explain a lot of the hundred billion. Okay, so let's war game that if you buy into a company on the private markets at $300 billion, you're expecting at least a trillion dollar company.
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Unknown A
Yeah. Your money for sure. Yeah. If you put in 10 billion or 20 billion into it. Yeah.
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Unknown B
So a trilly.
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Unknown A
Yeah. Yeah. There's about 10 companies.
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Unknown B
Yeah. But I mean if, if, if not open AI in the AI game.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown B
Who would you put up there? Because. Because XI is worth crap. I forget 4050 anthropics worth 60.
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Unknown A
I mean, I mean, I just think we're losing the script a little bit on these valuations and people are withholding, you know, their disbelief and putting that on the side and saying, hey, we have preferred shares. We put 10 million into. The 10 billion into. This thing's not going to be worth less than 10 billion or whatever. The preference stack is now 50 billion. 30 maybe it's 30 billion things going to be worth more than 30 billion. We'll at least get our money back. We'll take a flyer.
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Unknown B
I do it. I do it. All right.
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Unknown A
Yeah, you might, you might.
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Unknown B
Japanese minivan. Would you like.
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Unknown A
I just sent you the link.
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Unknown B
I have it pulled up. Let's do it.
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Unknown A
You do? Okay, so I've been riding in these in Japan. Okay. It's called the Alford, like Alford, you're a butler kind of thing. It looks like a standard mom minivan. Soccer mom minivan, soccer dad minivan.
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Unknown B
I'm going to hit play on this while you talk.
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Unknown A
You don't need to have the sound on it. And it has the most comfortable seats in the back. So when you get in this thing and it's so easy to get in and out of it's. Where do you see the cabin? You basically have these incredibly luxurious seats that in a tray table. It's a basically like a first class seat in a minivan. And you're completely inconspicuous from the outside. On the inside, it looks like a private jet.
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Unknown B
I want this so much.
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Unknown A
You lay down in these seats. There's two seats, captain seats, and in the back there's a regular bench. There's two captain seats that have a control panel where you can with the led, you know, and you just set the heat. You can lay down in it. It is like the greatest first class seat on, you know, Emirates or, you know, whatever incredible international airline. And it's two hours from the airport to Naseko. I slept like a baby for an hour and a half. That never happens to me. I get carsick. I was playing chess and doing slack and tweeting nonsense about Zuckerberg and I didn't get motion sickness. So I'm trying to figure out how do I import one of these. This is my dream car. Why are they not selling this here? And I was looking at getting a sprinter van, like an executive coach to drive around it.
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Unknown A
You know what those go for?
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Unknown B
Actually, I don't.
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Unknown A
$250,000 because they're all custom made. They're not manufacturing. This thing's a minivan.
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
The totality of the genius is they just put two unbelievable seats in it. They go for $60,000. So I don't know who can get me one.
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Unknown B
Well, I know who's your ally in this. It's Eric Bond from Hustle Fund. Because I like Eric.
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Unknown A
He's smart.
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Unknown B
He's also the only guy I know who's a minivan enthusiast. And he. Every time you talk about how many kids you have, he's like, have you bought a minivan yet? He's insanely on point. And maybe he has a point. Maybe I've been wrong this whole time about minivans.
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Unknown A
Here's the thing. Minivans are very easy to get in and out of. Those sliding doors are everything. And having a work chair slash sleeper thing is extraordinary. This could would be an incredible seller here in the United States. And I like that. You wouldn't know. Here's the thing. Vans are smoother than SUVs.
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Unknown B
Oh, yeah.
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Unknown A
Vans are so smooth when you're just. They're buttery smooth on the road. Now, I don't know about safety, but anyway, shout out to our friends over at Toyota for making something unbelievably. Cool that I am loving. Oh, and it's. It's kind of like high and low. Shout out to Akira Kurosawa since I'm on my Japanese name. High, low, high end. Low end. Same time. Absolutely brilliant. We'll see you next time on this week in startups. I'll be back in a couple of weeks. I'll be going to the inauguration, not the actual inauguration, but I'll be doing a bunch of podcasting in the inauguration. We'll probably do this week in startups from there as well, so be prepared. And we are doing the show notes. If you want to see them this weekendstartups.com docket go there thisweekinstartus.com docket and you'll see what we're going to have on the show.
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Unknown A
And we start maybe six hours before then you can also see stuff in the show notes. You can see those show notes in the docket when you open up your app. If you're using a cool app, it has the notes there. The one thing I want to try to put in the notes as we get 10% better a week, 3% better an episode, 2 and a half percent better an episode is putting images into those. So there's some advanced things like we do chapters on this week in startups, but you need to have an advanced player that has chapters and you can also put unique album art. So I think you can do album art per episode. We got to figure that out and we got to figure out how to enhance those show notes inside of the podcast notes. But for now, thisweekinstartups.com docket get in on the doc, Tell us what you want us to talk about.
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Unknown A
Give us like little nooks and crannies. Check Maddie and the researchers team work. Maybe we missed a citation or you have better data for us. We'll see you all next time. Bye.