The Biggest Private Funding Round in History | E2256

Summary

The episode opens with the massive news that OpenAI raised $110 billion in the largest private funding round in history, with Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank betting on ChatGPT’s now 900 million weekly active users and 50 million paying subscribers. Jason breaks down why he is anticipating the wildest J-Curve swing of all time and argues that we have already hit AGI — it is just not fully implemented yet. The concept of the LLM J-Curve gets special attention as Jason explains why massive current spending will lead to exponential returns.

A live report from Nick O’Neill covers the “Crypto Chaos” at a conference in Miami Beach, followed by discussion of mass layoffs at Block (formerly Square). The episode also covers the ongoing saga of “AI Scott Adams” and features three demos from young founders: Everest Chris with Unloopa (making URLs for local businesses), Ben Broca with Polsia (renting AI agents to run your company), and Adi Gabrani with MakeMyClaw (deploying agent swarms in 60 seconds). The show closes with lighter fare including LaunchFest announcements, TV recommendations, and Jason’s favorite chargers.

Highlights

OpenAI’s $110 Billion Round

“OpenAI raised $110 billion — the biggest private funding round in history. Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank placed their bets.” — Jason Calacanis, 4:49

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Understanding the LLM J-Curve

“Understanding the LLM J-Curve — why massive spending now leads to exponential returns.” — Jason Calacanis, 7:53

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Crypto Chaos in Miami Beach

“Crypto Chaos in Miami Beach! Our roving correspondent Nick O’Neill checks in.” — Jason Calacanis, 14:15

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Mass Layoffs at Block

“Mass layoffs at Block — what’s happening at Jack Dorsey’s company.” — Jason Calacanis, 21:42

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Deploy Agent Swarms in 60 Seconds

“Deploy swarms of AI agents in 60 seconds with MakeMyClaw.” — Adi Gabrani, 58:08

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Key Points

• New producer hiring (0:00) - TWiST is hiring a new producer for the show
• OpenAI $110B raise (4:49) - Largest private funding round in history, backed by Amazon, Nvidia, SoftBank
• 900M weekly users (4:49) - ChatGPT now has 900 million weekly active users and 50 million subscribers
• LLM J-Curve (7:53) - Jason explains why current AI spending will produce exponential returns
• AGI already here (7:53) - Jason argues AGI has already been achieved, it just needs full implementation
• Crypto chaos Miami (14:15) - Nick O’Neill reports from a crypto conference in Miami Beach
• Block layoffs (21:42) - Mass layoffs at Block (formerly Square), Jack Dorsey’s company
• AI Scott Adams saga (31:12) - Continuing saga of AI-generated Scott Adams content
• Unloopa demo (37:17) - Everest Chris makes URLs and web presence for local businesses with OpenClaw
• Polsia demo (44:44) - Ben Broca demonstrates renting AI agents to run company operations
• MakeMyClaw demo (58:08) - Adi Gabrani deploys agent swarms in 60 seconds
• LaunchFest SF (1:04:13) - LaunchFest is coming to San Francisco
• Knight of the 7 Kingdoms (1:06:05) - Lon’s recommendation for the new Game of Thrones spinoff
• Paramount-WBD deal (55:02) - Discussion of potential Paramount acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery

Mentions

Companies

• OpenAI (4:49) - Raised $110 billion, largest private funding round in history
• Amazon (4:49) - Major investor in OpenAI’s record round
• Nvidia (4:49) - Investor in OpenAI’s record round
• SoftBank (4:49) - Investor in OpenAI’s record round
• Block/Square (21:42) - Mass layoffs at Jack Dorsey’s company
• Unloopa (37:17) - Everest Chris’s tool for creating local business web presence
• Polsia (44:44) - Ben Broca’s AI agent rental platform
• MakeMyClaw (58:08) - Adi Gabrani’s tool for deploying agent swarms in 60 seconds
• Paramount (55:02) - Potential acquirer of Warner Bros. Discovery
• Luma AI (29:58) - Sponsor, text-to-video platform

Products & Technologies

• ChatGPT (4:49) - OpenAI’s flagship product with 900M weekly active users
• OpenClaw (37:17) - Open-source AI agent framework used in all three demos
• Dream Machine (29:58) - Luma AI’s text-to-video platform

People

• Nick O’Neill (14:15) - TWiST roving correspondent at Miami crypto conference
• Everest Chris (37:17) - Founder of Unloopa
• Ben Broca (44:44) - Founder of Polsia
• Adi Gabrani (58:08) - Founder of MakeMyClaw
• Jack Dorsey (21:42) - CEO of Block, overseeing mass layoffs
• Lon Harris (1:06:05) - TWiST co-host

Surprising Quotes

“We’ve already hit AGI — it’s just not implemented yet.” — Jason Calacanis, 7:53

“$110 billion buys you 15% of OpenAI. That’s the wildest J-Curve swing of all time.” — Jason Calacanis, 4:49

“Deploy swarms of AI agents in 60 seconds — the future of work is here.” — Adi Gabrani, 58:08

Transcript

Jason Calacanis: 0:00 All right everybody, it’s Twist, it’s Friday, it’s February 27th in the year of our Lord AO…

Lon Harris: 0:05 33, Jason. AO 33.

Jason Calacanis: 0:07 AO 33. 33 days after Open Claw 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 Week in AI on Tuesday and we drop it Wednesday morning. So that’s what you’re getting from J-Cal every week. Five, five podcasts.

Lon Harris: 0:44 Slam!

Jason Calacanis: 0:46 And we’re going to bring back two more. And we need a producer. We need a producer to work under Lon and I full-time in Austin. Pays pretty good and you get to have a good time.

Lon Harris: 0:54 Please.

Jason Calacanis: 0:55 We need two things. One, you’ve got to be motivated by the topic subject. We need you, and this is how I hire now. You make four quadrants, Lon.

Lon Harris: 1:01 Qualified. Important. Has the skills. Got to be qualified.

Jason Calacanis: 1:04 And passion for the subject. Yes. What’s in the top-right quadrant?

Lon Harris: 1:08 Are you asking me?

Jason Calacanis: 1:10 Yes! What’s in the top-right quadrant?

Lon Harris: 1:12 So, you know, the most passionate and then the most experienced would be the very top.

Jason Calacanis: 1:17 Correct. What’s in the bottom-left?

Lon Harris: 1:19 Not experienced at all and you’re just looking for a gig, you don’t really care about what we’re doing.

Jason Calacanis: 1:24 Correct. So that’s the easy box to get rid of.

Lon Harris: 1:27 Right.

Jason Calacanis: 1:28 Now, on the bottom-right. What’s on the bottom-right? Building your mental model here.

Lon Harris: 1:33 You’re very passionate, but you may not have the qualifications that we’re looking for. You’re a newbie.

Jason Calacanis: 1:40 Correct. Now do the top-left.

Lon Harris: 1:42 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.

Jason Calacanis: 1:52 Now, 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’s really easy. Hey, you’re super passionate and you’re qualified. Great. Now, how do you rank two and three, Lon? How do you think about two and three? Would you rather have a passionate green person or an experienced person without passion? What do you think?

Lon Harris: 2:12 Yeah. I… 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 I think… I think I’ve switched. I think today I would say I want someone who lives and breathes startups, AI, tech, they’re using all these tools.

Jason Calacanis: 2:36 Why? Why have you switched? And by the way, you’re correct. You’re correct.

Lon Harris: 2:45 Thanks.

Jason Calacanis: 2:47 So it’s one, and then the bottom right-hand quadrant… is number two and the top left is number three. 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, if they’re smart and dedicated, but especially if they’re 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.

Lon Harris: 3:22 Yes.

Jason Calacanis: 3:22 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, designed for superpowers. And that is your tactical tip of the day. This is a tactical tip from J-Cal and Lon. 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 Sacks and Antonio on the Twitter takeover, Elon was like, okay, who’s super qualified and then who’s essential?

Lon Harris: 4:14 Right.

Jason Calacanis: 4:15 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 gotta think about that.

Lon Harris: 4:21 Right.

Jason Calacanis: 4:22 And then if they’re super qualified but not essential, okay, we gotta go through all these quadrants. So I just drew the four quadrants on the board, and it made it really easy to put people into buckets 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. There you go.

Lon Harris: 4:38 And now we can go on to our first story. It’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 upfront, 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 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 committed in the future. Information says that those conditions are either OpenAI goes IPO or they achieve AGI. So that’s what we’re still looking at. Talking about this like, the the deal changes if OpenAI reaches AGI. I mean, how far away do we really think that is now? Is this a reality?

Jason Calacanis: 6:08 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 for, I don’t know, sustainable energy. We have that right now. We don’t need to burn carbon. 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, because we already have the infrastructure for this oil and we’re just deciding to use that, you know, until such time as that’s too expensive to pull out of the earth. Okay, fair enough. 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, do you have a replicant yet?

Lon Harris: 7:31 I don’t have my—I do not have my own yet. I know the name, I’m going to call mine Gaff after that’s the Edward James Olmos character from Blade Runner, but he does not exist yet.

Jason Calacanis: 7:42 What, what does he say at the end when he gives him the unicorn?

Lon Harris: 7:44 It’s too bad she won’t live, but then again who does?

Jason Calacanis: 7:46 It’s too bad she won’t live. But then again, who does? Who does? Who does? Shout out to Edward James Olmos. Is that who it is?

Lon Harris: 7:57 Yes, the great Edward James Olmos plays Gaff.

Jason Calacanis: 7:58 Incredible.

Lon Harris: 8:00 You had posted a tweet, asking for a J-curve based on LLMs.

Jason Calacanis: 8:03 Yes. I don’t think anybody did it. Did anybody do it?

Lon Harris: 8:05 Kabir did it for you. Kabir from Launch has your J-curve ready. Let’s bring up the next one.

Jason Calacanis: 8:10 It’s not exactly a J-curve, but okay.

Lon Harris: 8:11 It’s a bar curve. No, that’s the Uber one. OpenAI J-curve. There we are.

Jason Calacanis: 8:17 Still not a J-curve, but okay. All right. 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 is how much money you’ve invested and you just keep adding that up, you keep adding it up. And then you have your profit. Not your revenue, your profit. And then it starts going tick, tick, tick, tick, tick up. As an example, the free cash flow from Uber in 2025 was 10 billion, it’ll be 13 billion in this year. This is Uber’s long road to profitability. What you see there is just how much money was lost to build—I don’t know, they’re at like a quarter… There are 250 million rides a day 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,

Lon Harris: 9:15 Sure.

Jason Calacanis: 9:16 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 a couple of billion dollars in profit, so they went from like 30 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 the 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, 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.

Jason Calacanis: 11:52 Tesla J-curve is unbelievable. The amount of money invested in that was wild. Why? They had to build factories, they had to…

Lon Harris: 12:00 Put all this up. Maybe you’ll find it easier on on Twitter because people talk about it a lot there.

Jason Calacanis: 12:05 500 billion invested is the equivalent of, I don’t know, what is that? 12 times? So here it is. This is amazing.

Lon Harris: 12:11 There it is.

Jason Calacanis: 12:12 So this is free cash flow in the history of pure EV makers. And what you see is all the losses, then you see that red spike going up?

Lon Harris: 12:21 Yes.

Jason Calacanis: 12:22 That’s the magic. You struck oil.

Lon Harris: 12:23 What did they have to do to get there? How many billions were they in the hole at the peak, Tesla?

Jason Calacanis: 12:28 10 billion negative! And then you go up and they start making money and all of a sudden turned to profit in year 11. And they’ve, you know, in the five years since…

Lon Harris: 12:39 Right, it’s year 17, 18 of Tesla. I see.

Jason Calacanis: 12:41 Correct.

Lon Harris: 12:42 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. Anthropic, xAI, Mistral, Anthropic, everybody, and then also the data center companies I would include in that because they’re directly, you know, associated with this effort. You put all that together, you build a 500 billion dollar hole. Let’s say in 2030 they throw off 10 billion dollars collectively in profits. In other words, they throw off what Uber makes in year 14 or what Tesla makes in year 16. 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. You’re talking about a ten-year, maybe a six-year run to just get out of the J-curve. That’s my estimate.

Jason Calacanis: 13:29 Right.

Lon Harris: 13:31 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 sharply like there were for Tesla? Uh, 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.

Jason Calacanis: 13:59 All right. There it is folks. Congratulations to the team at OpenAI. They’re making 20 billion. They’re doing all right.

Lon Harris: 14:07 Yeah. And I would say they’re worth 700, 800 billion, or maybe 800 billion post money. You add the cash to the thing…

Jason Calacanis: 14:14 Yeah. Right. Probably about that.

Lon Harris: 14:15 So they’re 40 times top line revenue? It’s absurd, but if they keep growing 50% a year, you know, or 100% a year…

Jason Calacanis: 14:22 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. Live from Miami Beach. What’s going on down there, Nick?

Nick O’Neill: 14:48 It’s 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… They’re completely panicking and they’re saying that they’re going to lose their jobs with all 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.’

Jason Calacanis: 15:13 Nick, it’s imperative in an emergency situation like this that broadcasters like ourselves maintain our cool. Please take a moment to compose yourself. As hard as it is looking down at Miami, explain the carnage because we have children watching. For parents, I’m going to ask you to please take children away from the screen. This is unedited, this is unfiltered, this is what’s happening right now in Miami.

Nick O’Neill: 15:41 I went down and I was speaking to the people at the pool. They were ripping their vestments, all their stuff. They said, ‘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.’ This is a disaster. I- 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.’

Jason Calacanis: 16:10 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.

Nick O’Neill: 16:23 Oh, the humanity! Oh, the humanity!

Jason Calacanis: 16:26 They were in Miami, and half of them- there’s 400 people down there in the streets who have been given 18 months of severance, fully vested, and they have four job offers. Please, explain what’s happening with those 400.

Nick O’Neill: 16:37 I saw a literal parade of people being marched out of the office down in Brickell from my balcony here. And people were- Miami was not even ready for the moment that occurred right there. I saw them and they were like, ‘What is going on here?’ They were all carrying brown boxes out the doors, down the streets. And they were like, ‘Is this the end?’ I went down to get on the scene just to see what people were saying. They could not believe it. There were tears. There were people that thought 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.

Jason Calacanis: 17:25 It’s really tragic. I can’t imagine what’s happening at Club 11. I mean, the trickle-down effect-

Nick O’Neill: 17:31 It’s a FEMA camp now, Jason! It’s a FEMA-

Lon Harris: 17:33 They- FEMA has set up at Club 11. That’s it.

Everest Chris: 17:36 They’re taking refugees at this point.

Ben Broca: 17:39 Pitbull?

Adi Gabrani: 17:40 I heard- I heard Pitbull was down there volunteering.

Lon Harris: 17:43 He’s a great guy, very helpful.

Nick O’Neill: 17:45 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 17:46 Man, the brutality here. Yeah. There are 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 healthcare and for better job opportunities in Miami?

Nick O’Neill: 18:11 I don’t- 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 tech scene, the first place that you want to go are the ports to see where they’re going, where they’re 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 see 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 because like, give maybe give it a few months with your severance, but I don’t know.

Jason Calacanis: 18:53 Okay, yeah. I mean, this is live, unconfirmed clickbait. 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 Aeron chairs and their Mac Studios getting on those boats to- those boats to Cuba. It’s a tragic situation.

Everest Chris: 19:13 Asking their agent in real-time for recommendations in Havana, that’s- on the- on the boat.

Nick O’Neill: 19:18 I heard OpenCall is literally steering some of those boats.

Everest Chris: 19:21 Yeah, well-

Jason Calacanis: 19:21 OpenCall, yes. The- so literally the people who were shuttling the refugees, which is not a great-paying job, this pays seven dollars an hour, they’ve lost their jobs as well.

Lon Harris: 19:31 Yeah.

Ben Broca: 19:32 That’s tragic.

Jason Calacanis: 19:33 Get rid of ‘em.

Adi Gabrani: 19:34 They now have their agent.

Jason Calacanis: 19:35 Well, they- they- they- were looking ahead. They were like, in five years, we won’t need these boats anymore, so we might as well fire- rip off the Band-Aid now. That’s what they did. All right, Nick, um, I’m just going to say, um, tremendous job here. Please, on behalf of the Twist community, and obviously, I- I’m responsible for you and your family. I know that you’ve got 14 kids now, and three wives.

Everest Chris: 19:54 Oh wow.

Jason Calacanis: 19:55 I know he’s- he’s geographically monogamous. It’s Miami.

Everest Chris: 19:59 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 19:59 It’s Palm Beach. And it’s Fort Lauderdale. He is geographically monogamous in the state of Florida.

Everest Chris: 20:03 Within different parts of Florida. Within different parts of South Florida. Understood. Okay.

Jason Calacanis: 20:07 Yes, like Alex Karp.

Everest Chris: 20:08 Oh boy.

Nick O’Neill: 20:08 Thank you for your support, Jason. Thank you.

Everest Chris: 20:10 Please, Nick, be safe. Be safe.

Lon Harris: 21:28 It’s above my paygrade.

Jason Calacanis: 21:29 Yeah, thank God he’s down there because I would not be going down there right now.

Lon Harris: 21:33 And what’s his Twitter? @stopbeingpoor?

Jason Calacanis: 21:34 @choose_rich on X or Instagram @choose_rich if you want to follow our good friend, our good friend and roving correspondent Nick O’Neill.

Lon Harris: 21:42 Oof, but that’s a good segue into our next story. Block. Layoffs at Block. We should talk about that in all seriousness. So 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?

Jason Calacanis: 22:43 Um, you know, we’re in a debate, primarily Sacks 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 Sacks’s debate techniques like to make me into a libtard or use all his advanced debate techniques—it’s a hoax and it’s framing and all this stuff—I can tell you straight, you’ve been watching me long enough: I go research information, I learn, and then I try to form an opinion. And when people correct me—

Lon Harris: 23:29 Often.

Jason Calacanis: 23:30 —typically fans of the show and friends, 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 a 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 sales person—what I find is with these new tools, they do far more— …sales for 6 months or 12 months longer. They handle their own legal, accounting, etc. for the first 6 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 informing this opinion a year or two ago. The second piece of information is I listen 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 going to change at Amazon and that they saw AI playing a bigger role.

Lon Harris: 24:30 Right.

Jason Calacanis: 24:31 Then there was a leaked document from Amazon that said we have like 900,000 jobs, 600,000 jobs we’re not going to hire for in the next decade because we predict they’re going to be robots as 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 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 they were preparing a PR campaign to stop the bad PR they were going to get in the coming years from not hiring people and laying people off. To me, again, I take people at their word. I’ve been in the startup business for 30 plus years now as an entrepreneur, journalist, investor, and 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.

Lon Harris: 25:54 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 25:55 And when they put in, ‘we should do local Toys for Tots things’ to 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.

Lon Harris: 26:18 Right.

Jason Calacanis: 26:19 He goes big. There’s very few entrepreneurs who have built two, one, two 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 even remember seeing it trading.

Lon Harris: 26:30 No.

Jason Calacanis: 26:31 But then it got bought by Disney. So he built two billion-dollar… I mean you 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, right? It’s a very small group. You know who already has two that went public? Jack.

Lon Harris: 26:51 Jack Dorsey.

Jason Calacanis: 26:52 Doesn’t get enough credit.

Lon Harris: 26:52 That’s true.

Jason Calacanis: 26:53 Why? 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…

Everest Chris: 27:00 Yeah. I feel like also he 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 industry.

Jason Calacanis: 27:12 Is he not a lefty guy anyway? Well, but he did overbuild the staff.

Nick O’Neill: 27:16 Right. 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 to— they want to save face, so they’re blaming AI. @BambaBons, 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 over-hired 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.’

Jason Calacanis: 28:03 Okay. This is a very important follow-up from Jack. And let me just say, it’s hard. Being a leader’s 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, you can keep your computer.’

Everest Chris: 28:21 It’s, ‘You’ll receive your salary for 20 weeks plus one week of tenure, equity vested through the end of May, six months of healthcare, keep your corporate devices, and 5 grand to put toward whatever you need to help you in this transition.’ That’s very generous.

Jason Calacanis: 28:38 I offered Lon half— Lon today, said, ‘Hey, you saw the the Block deal? I’ll take half of that to get the fuck out of here.’ Lon’s like, ‘Hey, can I get half that? That’s not pretty good.’

Lon Harris: 28:46 We could negotiate. We could negotiate. That’s even just a start.

Ben Broca: 28:48 That’s a starting point.

Nick O’Neill: 28:50 Yeah. Plus one week for every year you’re there. If you’re an eight-year employee, get another eight weeks, so you’re sitting there, you’re sitting pretty at 28 weeks.

Lon Harris: 28:57 That’s a lot of time to figure out your next move.

Everest Chris: 28:59 It’s a lot of time to figure it out.

Jason Calacanis: 29:01 Anyway. He did it in the classiest most transparent way I’ve ever seen full stop.

Adi Gabrani: 29:07 Can I just say one thing? This is against the HR people’s standard. They say you— you have to turn everybody’s accounts off, people are going to do crazy things, people are going to delete files, people are going to save things in the chat, they’re going to hack things, you cannot do it this way. There’s even potential workplace violence, I don’t want to bring that up, but you know there’s like somebody could go postal, you gotta lock the doors, all this kind of stuff.

Lon Harris: 29:29 There are escort people out of the building. You want to do it over the weekend so people don’t show up on Monday. These are best practices.

Adi Gabrani: 29:35 Right.

Everest Chris: 29:37 Yeah, I was just gonna say the one thing I— 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 precious to me, but otherwise I think he handled this in the best…

Jason Calacanis: 29:51 I mean if we’re sitting here saying his punctuation is the issue, that means he did it right. Okay. If we’re splitting hairs here.

Everest Chris: 29:57 Exactly.

Adi Gabrani: 29:58 Hey listen, sometimes I’m thinking please…

Lon Harris: 31:14 Scott Adams, the Dilbert 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 @AIScottAdams, and it’s an 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’s 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 3,000… 3,400 followers on X, 137 YouTube subscribers. Abigail is not doing better. So, 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, your reaction?

Jason Calacanis: 33:00 I’m starting to get DMs from like the Scott Adams fans, 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 politically be…

Lon Harris: 33:24 I think you guys had a mutual appreciation going.

Jason Calacanis: 33:26 Mutual appreciation. And so, you know, they are very angry at me for even platforming the creator of it…

Lon Harris: 33:33 Yeah, word.

Jason Calacanis: 33:34 …and for me retweeting it or giving my opinion. Hey, if you really are in the spirit of Scott Adams, he was for full contact debate.

Lon Harris: 33:41 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 33:42 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…

Lon Harris: 33:58 You have a secret society of micro-celebrities.

Jason Calacanis: 34:00 Yeah.

Lon Harris: 34:00 Your handshake, you have a secret handshake.

Jason Calacanis: 34:01 Sure, everything. He was a self-described narcissist. He was like, “I love getting attention. I love when people say hi to me at coffee. I love that people were inspired by what I said.” He would have, 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— these 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 son so that people close to me don’t get hurt by seeing me online every day. Okay, so, there’s morals, there’s morals and ethics, and then there’s the law.

Lon Harris: 34:50 Right.

Jason Calacanis: 34:51 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 non-profit use, you know, in this kind of way. So legally they lose. You could make a derivative product that you say, “Hey, I’ve made this Abigail, she’s inspired by the teachings of Scott Adams.” Totally allowed. If somebody wanted to say, “I am a J-Cal disciple, I’m a Chamath disciple, I’m a Steve Jobs disciple,” and I’m going to wear a Steve Jobs outfit every day—

Lon Harris: 35:29 Like Elizabeth Holmes.

Jason Calacanis: 35:30 Right.

Lon Harris: 35:32 And for a period of time, she was super inspired by Steve. She went with the turtleneck…

Jason Calacanis: 35:35 Yeah, yeah.

Lon Harris: 35:36 …with the turtleneck and the voice and the drama and everything. Shout out Elizabeth, come on the pod any time.

Jason Calacanis: 35:44 Once you’re out of prison.

Lon Harris: 35:45 No, I want to do it when she’s in.

Jason Calacanis: 35:46 Whoa, that would be amazing. Long story short, yeah, long story short, you could do that. You could do your Steve Jobs impersonation every day, it’s protected. You know, so now you go to the moral ethical thing… 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 go. 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, re-stream MSG and Knicks games without getting in trouble. Do the Russians do it on their Russian streaming sites? Yes. Do the Chinese sell DVDs on every corner? Yes. Okay, those are other countries not obeying law. You don’t get to use that either. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Lon Harris: 36:51 Yeah, it’s just weird that it’s like 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 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. Um, should we do some- should we do some demos?

Jason Calacanis: 37:28 Please.

Lon Harris: 37:28 Alright, our first demo, let’s bring on Everest Chris. He’s the creator of Unlupa, Jason. Unlupa allows- and 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. So here’s-

Jason Calacanis: 37:46 Genius.

Lon Harris: 37:47 -so here’s Everest. He’s in India, but he’s focusing the tool on the Netherlands. Uh, so I- I- I like- we got to- we got to take a look at this.

Jason Calacanis: 37:49 Tell me your name again so I get the pronunciation right, sir.

Everest Chris: 37:52 Hi, my name is Chris. Nice to meet you.

Jason Calacanis: 37:55 Chris. Okay. And Chris, you’re at- where in India are you and how old are you?

Everest Chris: 37:59 I’m 23 and I’m in Hyderabad right now.

Jason Calacanis: 38:04 And are you in college or school?

Everest Chris: 38:07 No, no. I finished my college, now I’m into AI.

Jason Calacanis: 38:10 Now he’s into the AI. 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 and TV shows and media.

Everest Chris: 38:22 I didn’t really go for the hard ones. I just went to a normal university but, I mean, like you said, six days a week. I mean, it’s pretty intense, but I got through it.

Jason Calacanis: 38:32 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?

Everest Chris: 38:44 I mean, I just- a tweet of mine went viral. You guys reached out to me and then- so I wanted to be on the pod.

Jason Calacanis: 38:53 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, uh- seen before because with Squarespace people started doing this. 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, asking for $500.

Lon Harris: 39:03 Right. This is… this is like… what I thought was so… like the first question 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 clever.

Jason Calacanis: 39:32 Genius. Okay. Here we go.

Everest Chris: 39:36 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.

Jason Calacanis: 39:49 Okay, so you could do coffee, cafes in Austin?

Everest Chris: 39:54 Yeah, any niche in any city. Yeah.

Lon Harris: 39:55 Well, but Jason, it’s not only going to find the businesses, it’s actually going to make the websites right now. Like when we check back in, like you’ll see, Chris will show us, we’re actually going to get finished websites already.

Jason Calacanis: 40:05 Genius. Okay. Here we go.

Everest Chris: 40:07 Let me show you a finished workflow.

Jason Calacanis: 40:09 Okay. So here’s your workflow completed.

Everest Chris: 40:13 Yeah, so this was one me and Lon ran yesterday. I mean, he didn’t see the results yet.

Lon Harris: 40:18 Yeah, I’m… I’m curious.

Jason Calacanis: 40:21 Okay. Scraped 100 car detailing… car detailing business. ‘Cause you know Lon keeps his car very…

Lon Harris: 40:26 I do! I… I love my… I love my Prius C.

Jason Calacanis: 40:30 It’s got all of the different websites there, and I assume we can click on one of them.

Everest Chris: 40:35 Yeah. So let me show you… let me show you a website that it built.

Lon Harris: 40:39 Look at this! Oh my god. Look at this! It’s got data.

Jason Calacanis: 40:42 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?”

Everest Chris: 40:49 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 40:50 Okay, this is insane.

Lon Harris: 40:52 It’s insane.

Jason Calacanis: 40:54 Now wait, you’re also having it contact them? How does it do the contact and the outreach?

Everest Chris: 41:00 Uh, you can just connect your email. So it finds their emails and uh sends out the outreach through your email. So you can have like a custom email template that it reaches out to them personally.

Jason Calacanis: 41:16 Chris, do you have a job? Do you have a job in India?

Everest Chris: 41:19 Uh, no.

Jason Calacanis: 41:20 Okay, let me ask you… and you can be honest ‘cause we’re on This Week in Startups, okay? You can always be honest here. And you can always be honest with your Uncle JCal. Unk, JCal. If you had… if you got a job right now, what do you think your salary would be in India if you got like a job, you know?

Everest Chris: 41:32 Like an average job?

Jason Calacanis: 41:35 An average job, yeah. In US dollars? Well, in your dollars, and then we’ll… we’ll translate.

Everest Chris: 41:40 Yeah. 400 a month.

Jason Calacanis: 41:46 400 dollars? US dollars?

Everest Chris: 41:52 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 41:55 You’d make 5 grand a year.

Everest Chris: 41:57 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 41:58 Okay, 5 grand a year. And you’re a developer. And you’re smart. Look at what he built. Five grand…

Lon Harris: 42:04 I can hear the wheels turning.

Jason Calacanis: 42:07 If you made $25,000 in US right now compared to your friends, how would you be living? Like, your apartment? Would you be going out to dinner? How would you be living in India?

Everest Chris: 42:19 Uh, I’d be living like a king here.

Jason Calacanis: 42:22 Living like a king.

Lon Harris: 42:23 He’ll be with Nick on the balcony in Miami Beach before we’re done.

Jason Calacanis: 42:27 Okay. Chris. If you’re this freaking smart, I’ll pay you $25,000, you come work for me, okay? How does that 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 people make in the US.

Lon Harris: 42:51 Don’t tell him that, Jason!

Jason Calacanis: 42:53 No, I am, but I’m just trying to do arbitrage here. I’m just… what would that be like? If you 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?

Everest Chris: 43:03 It’s crazy, but I think I’ll be making more with Unloopa.

Jason Calacanis: 43:07 There you go! I love it, I love it! He’s an entrepreneur! It was a test!

Nick O’Neill: 43:11 You passed the test!

Jason Calacanis: 43:12 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. I need to… this is unbelievable.

Nick O’Neill: 43:23 Let’s go! Let’s go to Hyderabad, Jason.

Jason Calacanis: 43:25 I’m in! Alright, great job. Stay…

Adi Gabrani: 43:29 Tell you some exciting numbers about Unloopa.

Jason Calacanis: 43:32 Okay, here we go. Yeah, tell us the exciting numbers. Maybe I need to be an investor in this company. We need to make a C-Corp.

Adi Gabrani: 43:38 So I launched it, in 24 hours it was at 1,000 MRR, 1,000 USD.

Jason Calacanis: 43:45 Okay.

Adi Gabrani: 43:46 Just from a single Reddit post.

Jason Calacanis: 43:48 Alright, that’s it.

Adi Gabrani: 43:49 No, no, I think you’ll be excited for this. Keep going. And then last week I posted like three tweets, and now Unloopa is over 8.5k MRR.

Jason Calacanis: 44:03 You’re already… what are you talking about? You’re at 100k a year! Look at you!

Lon Harris: 44:08 He doesn’t need your 25k, J-Cal! Step down!

Jason Calacanis: 44:11 F J-Cal! 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 you’re just brilliant and smart. If you want to pursue that, you gotta go through diligence, we gotta make sure you’re not a criminal, we gotta 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.

Lon Harris: 44:41 Alright Chris, hang out. We’re going on to Ben Broca. He’s the creator of Pulsia. It’s an agentic system. It’s not OpenClaw. It was built while Peter was off building OpenClaw. It’s a separate agentic system, Jason, that helps businesses run their operations autonomously.

Jason Calacanis: 45:00 Ben, thanks for joining us. Ben, how you doing? Where you calling in from?

Ben Broca: 45:04 I’m good. I’m from, I mean San Francisco right now.

Jason Calacanis: 45:06 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 gonna see.

Ben Broca: 45:15 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 a huge surge of like people starting to use the service.

Lon Harris: 45:29 Mhm, amazing.

Ben Broca: 45:31 And so right now you can see Polsia working on different tasks. So it completed 3,000 tasks in the past 24 hours. Right now it’s building a 3D property feed MVP for some user that’s like working on specific company. This is like a Twitter action where like it’s following up with 17 gallery pitches. And so you can see that like, you know, a lot of users are creating new companies every minute, right? 700 companies launched in the past 24 hours. So essentially Polsia is an AI that builds and runs companies autonomously. So it wakes up every night, accomplishes the tasks, in the goal to to create and run the company that the user sort of like decided on.

Jason Calacanis: 46:08 Wow. This is incredible.

Ben Broca: 46:10 And it can build, it can like of course, code, push to production, launch a real website, tweet. You can see here these are real tweets that have been tweeted about, you know, if I click on one of them it’s an actual real tweet. Most AI agents cost 750 a month and need an ops team. Lead Forge finds your prospects.

Nick O’Neill: 46:30 Wow.

Ben Broca: 46:31 So this is a tweet that’s promoting a company for a real user, right?

Adi Gabrani: 46:38 Wow.

Ben Broca: 46:39 Um so it can also send emails. So I gave it access to an email address. So you can see that like there’s a bunch of emails that has been sent in the past 5 minutes. 4,000 emails in the past 24 hours. One other thing I launched about a week ago is now Polsia 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 every day wakes up looks at the performance of ads on Meta and decides to either, you know, create a new one or like pause an ad that would not be performing or create new ads. So you can see I’m going to give you an example. This is…

Everest Chris: 47:18 Everybody thinks I’m a genius for planning our trips. I just use Fairway Finder. 10 bucks, whole captain’s pack done. I let them keep thinking it.

Ben Broca: 47:27 So this is just an example of like an AI generated ad that was created for a customer to promote their business on Polsia.

Jason Calacanis: 47:33 This is Y Combinator in a box. You’re basically making unlimited number of startups. You own all of them? Or this is a game for people to play? They subscribe to your service, Polsia?

Ben Broca: 47:46 So it is all users that are signing up to Polsia, 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 love of… 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 like 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 it will start doing marketing, maybe it will do some cold outreach, maybe it will tweet, maybe it will run ads, right? And so the idea is like really, I believe that the future of companies is that most companies will be 80% autonomous, meaning like that the 20% is the human sort of like having taste, having creativity, and like a certain insight into a specific niche. However, 80% of the company could be completely autonomous. Essentially here, the AI Pulsar is giving that to people and it essentially is doing the engineering work, fixing bugs, grinding every day, sending cold emails, tweeting, doing ads. The human doesn’t have to do that. The human needs to give direction.

Jason Calacanis: 48:59 So great. 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. And 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 Founder University in a box and here you are, you’ve built it. Is this going to be… did you raise money? Are you going to build a business here? What’s the story?

Ben Broca: 49:33 So I raised a pre-seed last summer. And and right now I’m in SF actually to to market it more and to because now I’m seeing great retention. You know, active users are sending 15 messages a day to their AI CEO to like plan, to discuss strategies, marketing strategies, what to do to grow the business. Around, you know, 20% of users are 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 and

Jason Calacanis: 50:06 Incredible. Great job. Uh, question from our audience.

Lon Harris: 50:08 Lon. 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?

Ben Broca: 50:16 It’s a great question. Like the re- actually I would love to make it more affordable. The reason it’s 50 dollars is because yeah, as as you said, it’s expensive. Like it’s a lot of inference because every day the AI al- you know, thinks and acts every day. And that’s… I’m of course using top models from Anthropic and and and OpenAI. And so the idea is that the subscri- 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 Pulsar 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

Lon Harris: 51:00 …as a way to to be able to generate profit to continue growing the platform.

Jason Calacanis: 51:04 Got it, got it.

Lon Harris: 51:05 We’re very incentivized with our users on success.

Jason Calacanis: 51:10 This is amazing. Really well done. Um, we should talk because I’m in the startup business and I think what’s really interesting about what you’re doing is, um, and 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. I love it.

Lon Harris: 51:31 Thank you.

Jason Calacanis: 51:32 Any questions for me? About startups and startup life? It seems like you already figured it out to be honest.

Lon Harris: 51:34 I mean, listen, first of all, thank you for having me. I’d love that 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, like, how do you see about scaling it? How do you think about how can I get this into more, you know…

Jason Calacanis: 51:52 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. Riff. What you’re doing is like eBay or Airbnb or Uber, um, 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 from the entrepreneurs you’re creating. Just like Airbnb does, right? 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 now they moved into the owner class from the salary class. Beautiful. 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 percent take rate. You take 500 flat rate. Um, there’s other services that you can upsell people on over time. So $50 for this package, 300 for the next package, 1,000 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? So 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. Um, 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, uh, invest in the companies or have ownership in them. So you could say, hey, please We’d like to own 10% of your business, um, or I’d we’d like to own 5% of your business. We’ll give you the platform for free for life. Um, if we can own 5% and we get a 5% royalty, you know, or we get 1% of your profit. So it could be 50, it could be $500 a month or $100 a month and 5% of whatever your sales are if you’re tracking sales in your so there’s all kinds of ways you can kind of do future upsells. For now, just keep delighting customers, right? Your you’re you should spend the first three years of any business just delighting customers and then you can figure out the revenue. Um, the model’s 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.

Lon Harris: 54:52 Okay, awesome, let’s do our third and final demo of this lighting round. Well, first first I think we should uh we should check out this polymarket uh so related 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 closing bell?

Jason Calacanis: 55:14 1.5 billion! 1.5 billion.

Lon Harris: 55:17 Uh 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 for Oh, okay. And then there’s another version for 2027 and the number one vote there, no IPO by December 31, 2027. But if but if you go look at the individual numbers, there there is there is some range. So scroll down there because it’s definitely going to be public by 2027. So that would include 2026?

Jason Calacanis: 55:45 No, this is just the 2026 one but uh Salif, you see up there at the top there’s a choice there’s a button for December 31, 2027, click that one. I think we’re on that, yeah.

Lon Harris: 55:59 No, we’re on 2026. Here’s 2027. So now scroll down again. So no IPO is what? So no IPO is f- by 2027 is 37, 43% as of right now, but under that,

Jason Calacanis: 56:11 so that’s the losing bet. They’re going to IPO by 2027. So anything under 500 billion is currently at 26%.

Lon Harris: 56:17 That’s wrong.

Jason Calacanis: 56:18 This is on the closing day? Of the IPO? Closing bell on the day that the company IPOs.

Lon Harris: 56:27 All right, I’m going to load into this one. Uh scroll down? I’m going to take 750 all the way to 1.5. So if you add those up, it looks like it’s about 65%— well no, 750 billion to 1 trillion is 17%, 1.25 to 1.5 trillion—

Jason Calacanis: 56:44 no, it’s got to be a trillion. So I’ll go trillion to 1.5. That’s about… no, that’s about 30, 31%.

Lon Harris: 56:51 No, no, I’ll take from 1 trillion up. So there’s three categories, there’s 16, 15, 19. So that’s 31, that’s exactly 50%. I think if you—

Ben Broca: 57:00 Put 50% on there, that’s the winning bet. It can’t be under 1 trillion on the close, to me.

Jason Calacanis: 57:04 I mean that seems crazy that it would be under 1 trillion when it’s already worth 750.

Nick O’Neill: 57:08 I think we should put, I think we should put $100,000 on there.

Everest Chris: 57:12 Well so if we put 100,000 we make 50?

Lon Harris: 57:15 Yes, right. That would be yes, you would make 50k from that because you’re betting at about 50.

Everest Chris: 57:20 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 100k 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 7,500 versus 50. Gotta think that through.

Ben Broca: 57:41 The real money here would be like 500 to 750 billion, but I don’t think there’s any chance that it’s that low. That’s the problem.

Jason Calacanis: 57:49 No, you can’t take that long shot.

Nick O’Neill: 57:51 Those people are being…

Lon Harris: 57:52 Ray-tard-ay as we say in France.

Jason Calacanis: 57:54 Okay, let’s keep going. Thank you PolyMarket, I love a PolyMarket. Got me thinking.

Lon Harris: 57:58 Got me thinking. We got, we got one more demo that I want to take a look at. Let’s welcome Adi Gabrani. He’s the creator of make-my-claw.com. Their website allows you to set up and deploy your own open claw bot in just 60 seconds. Love it. Here’s, 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. I was… I was fascinated by that. So welcome Adi, thanks for being here.

Adi Gabrani: 58:26 Thanks Lon, hey Jason, nice to be here.

Jason Calacanis: 58:28 All right. There’s, there’s gotta be like 500 hosting options now. Why should people pick yours?

Adi Gabrani: 58:34 Yeah so um, for me the goal was not to just make it easy to deploy but also to maintain it on ongoing basis.

Jason Calacanis: 58:43 Okay.

Adi Gabrani: 58:44 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 make my claw beyond a certain day you’re doing it wrong. I would want you to come, experience it, move on, self-host it and have fun with it. That’s kind of like the goal for me.

Jason Calacanis: 59:13 What’s your story? You’re an entrepreneur. Where you based?

Adi Gabrani: 59:16 Yeah so I’m in Vancouver right now. This was a side project which actually came from getting my… so I got involved with OpenClaw early January where I was building a bot of my own and then saw Peter building…

Jason Calacanis: 59:30 What’s your background? Tech background, business school, ran a company, solo entrepreneur, have you incorporated yet? You got a partner?

Adi Gabrani: 59:37 Not for make my claw, so I have other company doing AI for mining sector actually.

Jason Calacanis: 59:44 Oh wow. So that’s your day job? Is that your company, you own that one?

Adi Gabrani: 59:48 Yeah, that’s my day job.

Jason Calacanis: 59:49 This is a side hustle. This is a side hustle on the weekend. How is the side hustle doing compared to your main job?

Adi Gabrani: 59:54 Oh that’s a much bigger business. That’s a much more well-established company. This is, this came because… I was playing with personal agents and wanted to get my friends involved.

Jason Calacanis: 1:00:03 Which job when you wake up in the morning, which job are you more excited about? Be honest.

Adi Gabrani: 1:00:08 This… I’m more excited about this but I cannot afford to do this before 6 PM.

Jason Calacanis: 1:00:13 Got it. The other—have you raised money for the other business? You bootstrap the other?

Adi Gabrani: 1:00:15 No that’s bootstrapped. One good thing about mining companies is they pay really well.

Jason Calacanis: 1:00:22 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? How many employees? How many customers?

Adi Gabrani: 1:00:27 It’s been around for around four years, in millions, yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 1:00:32 Got it. All right. Did you raise money for it? Or you’re just a solo entrepreneur?

Adi Gabrani: 1:00:33 No I have co-founders but bootstrapped business.

Jason Calacanis: 1:00:38 Got it. Awesome. I mean, I—I love the hosting business because I think it could uncover other things. What are you charging for—what’s like the minimum?

Adi Gabrani: 1:00:51 So—so it’s 29 for—we give you the key, very generous key, and 19 if you bring your own key.

Jason Calacanis: 1:00:57 Got it. Explain to people the difference between bringing your own key and you providing the key.

Adi Gabrani: 1:00:59 Yeah, so bringing your own key is you can bring any provider you want and you can—you can use whatever—whatever you like and you pay for it.

Jason Calacanis: 1:01:07 Whatever language model you want.

Adi Gabrani: 1:01:08 Whatever language model you want and—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 OpenClaude whenever the new one launches, making sure nothing breaks.

Jason Calacanis: 1:01:23 So what do you give people by default? Are you using Kimi or something? Or some cheap model? You’re using Kimi?

Adi Gabrani: 1:01:28 Using Kimi right now.

Jason Calacanis: 1:01:30 Got it. And is Kimi good compared to Claude Opus or—

Adi Gabrani: 1:01:33 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 have used—I have—so the way I run it is I have Kimi as my main LLM, main language model, and then for specialized tasks I create sub-agents with Codex and Claude to do specialized jobs.

Jason Calacanis: 1:02:02 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.

Lon Harris: 1:02:11 We try to keep it—I give you permission. It’s fun. We always keep it interactive. If you have any questions.

Ben Broca: 1:02:18 I mean, yeah, I think it’s amazing. I think I love the 15 minutes of free OpenClaude, 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? Like I would—

Adi Gabrani: 1:02:28 I just—I just launched this and I haven’t promoted it at all, so I just launched it and I need to promote it. But people—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 OpenClaude and wanted a way to test it first with his Telegram, so he was quite excited. Another use case that someone mentioned was that they—they opened the bot for 15 minutes, they were collaborating with a friend on a coding project, and they just—

Ben Broca: 1:03:00 Give the bot the permission to do it, so they… and told the bot to shut off after 15 minutes, and they… so so 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 up a bot for a week, for a weekend, it does its own thing and then it automatically self-destructs. 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 make my Claw 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 Nous Research Lab, they launched. So I’m integrating that into it. So now you… 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.

Jason Calacanis: 1:04:01 This is amazing. Well done. All right, gentlemen, great job. I’m going to be hosting an OpenClaw launch festival Monday and Tuesday, March 16th and 17th in San Francisco. You’re both invited as my guest, 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, etc., 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? Man, people… people will not cancel. 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 we don’t burn seats. 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 the lunch for 50 people and some of the speakers will come to that if they’re available, 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, 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 the guests.

Lon Harris: 1:05:32 And again, we can’t talk about the guests yet, but I’ve seen the list they’re working on it, it’s amazing. Like…

Jason Calacanis: 1:05:39 Some good keynotes.

Lon Harris: 1:05:40 Especially for a 400 person event.

Jason Calacanis: 1:05:41 Some of my big hitters are coming. Two big hitters already. Some very cool people who people will want to hear from. Okay, launchfestival.com. Thank you.

Lon Harris: 1:05:51 There you go.

Jason Calacanis: 1:05:52 And thanks to Adi and Ben for being here. Appreciate it guys.

Adi Gabrani: 1:05:54 All right.

Jason Calacanis: 1:05:55 Get to work. Go back to work, gentlemen.

Ben Broca: 1:05:56 Thank you.

Jason Calacanis: 1:05:57 Ben, love it. Adi, love it. I have…

Lon Harris: 1:06:00 My ideas. I love both of these. I like both those founders. And I like Chris. It’s three great founders you’ve found. This is exceptional. This is what This Week in Startups is all about.

Jason Calacanis: 1:06:08 I love first amendment lunatics. These are people with no life.

Lon Harris: 1:06:11 Yes.

Jason Calacanis: 1:06:12 And then they go out, they carry pepper spray.

Lon Harris: 1:06:15 Mh-hm.

Jason Calacanis: 1:06:18 And they go and they film.

Lon Harris: 1:06:19 There is one of these guys in this show.

Jason Calacanis: 1:06:21 And I just came across my feed because my feed is bulldogs and, uh, 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.

Lon Harris: 1:06:27 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 1:06:28 Of course, as one does. Uh, and freaks and oddities and other things in my feed.

Lon Harris: 1:06:43 And first amendment warriors.

Jason Calacanis: 1:06:44 And first amendment warriors. And there’s a— there’s two groups. Well, there’s— no, there’s actually like four subsections of this group, of this genre. One, they go to like when they get pulled over, they refuse to, you know, fourth amendment, they don’t want to roll their window down, they want to know, ‘am I being detained?’

Lon Harris: 1:06:59 Oh right, yeah. They know all the rules. They know all the rules.

Jason Calacanis: 1:07:04 They know all the rules.

Lon Harris: 1:07:05 And they like to mix it up.

Jason Calacanis: 1:07:07 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 and the guy comes out of the store and he starts yelling at him, he’s like ‘no, I’m just taking video and I’m just doing shots or whatever’. He says ‘you can’t shoot into the store’. He’s like ‘well actually, you know, freedom of speech I can’.

Lon Harris: 1:07:34 Come on. Public street, I’m looking this way, I’m at the sidewalk.

Jason Calacanis: 1:07:38 Exactly. So the guy comes and he pushes this camera. The guy’s got pepper spray, he says ‘hey, if you hit me again I’m going to pepper spray you’. The guy pushes him again, he pepper sprays him like—

Lon Harris: 1:07:46 Yeah, that hurts.

Jason Calacanis: 1:07:47 The guy’s crying whatever. Police come. These first amendment warriors show them the video. The third genre and perhaps the best is in this show Neighbors, which is the beach line.

Lon Harris: 1:07:57 The beach line.

Jason Calacanis: 1:07:58 The beach line. Oh my god. In LA, 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.

Lon Harris: 1:08:22 Michael Eisner.

Jason Calacanis: 1:08:23 Eisner. Eisner had one of the most famous houses. This is all public knowledge because people would know ‘I’m going to sit outside of Eisner’s house, I’m going to sit outside of this famous person’s house’. And, you know, 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 10 feet from the high tide mark.

Lon Harris: 1:08:44 Right.

Jason Calacanis: 1:08:46 Anybody is allowed to be 10 feet 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 people will sit in the chairs.

Lon Harris: 1:08:59 And they’ll move them back. Neighbors come out and there’s one on neighbors —

Jason Calacanis: 1:09:02 Yeah.

Lon Harris: 1:09:03 — and they come out and they want to walk across it. So they’ll walk through the chairs for the hotel or whatever.

Jason Calacanis: 1:09:08 I had no idea about this whole subculture.

Lon Harris: 1:09:11 It’s the greatest.

Adi Gabrani: 1:09:12 It’s awesome.

Lon Harris: 1:09:13 But so, Neighbors… every episode they pick two —

Jason Calacanis: 1:09:15 Where’s the clip?

Everest Chris: 1:09:16 So here’s Colton today. Oh, he’s doing a little beach vlog. It’s all private property to see how people react down there. So when you say it’s all private property… Oh, here he goes. Don’t take this the wrong way, please. That’s the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard. Do you want me to call the police? This is not my first rodeo, my friend. So this guy, he’s fighting with Colton. He’s been paid by the homeowners to personally tell me I’m on private property and then I’ll leave. But you’re wrong because I’ve looked it up. So he’s a Karen. ‘Didn’t work out so well for you, did it Brent?’ You think I’m trouble? Wait till I have 100 of my friends out here on this beach. I got my kids out here, so if you want to cuss and fight… I don’t care if your kids are out here. I’m out here too. Look at this guy.

Jason Calacanis: 1:09:54 Alright. That’s… that’s a little taste of Colton news.

Lon Harris: 1:09:58 Oh.

Jason Calacanis: 1:09:59 He’s a lunatic. So it’s — 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.’

Lon Harris: 1:10:17 Um, yeah. The Laguna Beach Karen was the other really great one. She is nuts. Let me play you this.

Ben Broca: 1:10:23 She is nuts.

Jason Calacanis: 1:10:29 But they find these… the whole show is just they find these characters. I love it, I love it. This is the genius of HBO. The 100 billion dollar thing is actually worth it. I retract my previous statements. 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. Look at this Lon, let me show you this one. This has nothing to do with neighbors.

Nick O’Neill: 1:10:57 Watch this woman.

Everest Chris: 1:10:58 Watch this woman. 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. She’s constantly deploying more and more rope lines to more and more beach area in an attempt to cordon off what she says is her private property.

Jason Calacanis: 1:11:13 Here she goes, Lon. She’s attacking. She’s got a spool of rope and she throws — she throws the spool!

Everest Chris: 1:11:19 If you’re the homeowner of a beachfront property, which must be nice, it’s your responsibility to learn the laws and rules that govern your property and the lines.

Lon Harris: 1:11:32 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.

Jason Calacanis: 1:11:45 Yeah.

Lon Harris: 1:11:46 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. I love this stuff. It’s crazy. This is why I gotta, you know. dozens of acres on my ranch.

Jason Calacanis: 1:12:01 Yeah, that’s true. You got a private ranch.

Lon Harris: 1:12:02 Ain’t no neighbor bothering me. 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 reasonable, he just wants his horses 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 un- it’s unbelievable. The show is so good. It’s Josh Safdie who did Marty Supreme, he ex- executive produced it, and it’s a terrific show. I highly recommend it.

Jason Calacanis: 1:12:31 All right, well you did a great job. I wanted to do some things that you wouldn’t… these are things you can buy. You know me, I like things on Amazon.

Lon Harris: 1:12:41 Stuff, gadgets, bric-a-brac, yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 1:12:43 Yeah, I like a little bit of stuff once in a while. Let me see if I got the right window here.

Lon Harris: 1:12:49 People like bric-a-brac.

Jason Calacanis: 1:12:51 Okay, here we go. I’m going to take you through a couple of things I’m obsessed with. All right. I like a warm cup of coffee.

Lon Harris: 1:12:57 Who doesn’t?

Jason Calacanis: 1:12:58 This mug warmer for 22 dollars. I have it on my desk. You put your cup of coffee on, you see what I’m showing you?

Lon Harris: 1:13:05 I do.

Jason Calacanis: 1:13:06 You press a button, you can pick what the temperature is and how long it’s on for and it’s got a little LED display.

Lon Harris: 1:13:12 Oh, 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.

Jason Calacanis: 1:13:23 130 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. Um, I’ve talked about Anker before.

Lon Harris: 1:13:37 Sure.

Jason Calacanis: 1:13:38 Uh, and when you and I were in Japan you probably saw me pull this out. This costs 120 bucks. It’s an Anker laptop power bank 25,000, it has two built-in USB-C and it has pass-through power. So when you plug it in on your desk 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. And then if you’re a super nerd like me, it’ll tell you here C1, C2, C3, and A. It tells you what each of the ports is doing. 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, it 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 it’s hard to find the plug falls out…

Lon Harris: 1:14:32 Exactly.

Jason Calacanis: 1:14:33 I don’t even worry about that, I just have it with me, I just zip it out, boom. Or if I’m in a Uber, I’m getting driven somewhere, boom, I have it with me.

Lon Harris: 1:14:41 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 that 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.

Jason Calacanis: 1:14:59 Anker also makes a new wall charger. Here it is. This is… One can flip over in any direction, so if you have a weird plug, it does this interesting thing. Let me see if I can find it.

Lon Harris: 1:15:04 Right, yeah. Well, because we all have a hundred devices now. I just got the Plaud, I’ve been wearing the Plaud pin now.

Jason Calacanis: 1:15:13 Oh, you got that? Yeah.

Lon Harris: 1:15:14 So you’ve got to charge that too. Like every time you get a new thing now, it needs to be charged.

Jason Calacanis: 1:15:18 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.

Lon Harris: 1:15:26 Bic Camera, B-I-C.

Jason Calacanis: 1:15:28 Bic Camera in Tokyo, amazing. There’s another one—

Lon Harris: 1:15:30 Incredible. Many floors.

Jason Calacanis: 1:15:31 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? 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 15—iPhone 15 Pro Max.

Lon Harris: 1:15:41 Yeah. Wow.

Jason Calacanis: 1:15:43 Um, then, so see that fast charging whatever, and it does fast charging, which really matters.

Lon Harris: 1:15:49 They are fast.

Jason Calacanis: 1:15:51 Super fast. Um, and you can tap it really quickly like if it’s on your side table as you see here, turn it off. You can, um, 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, airport plug, your office, you can move it to zero 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. 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.

Lon Harris: 1:16:21 Geez.

Jason Calacanis: 1:16:22 With my daughters, I bought them each the $30 Nano when we’re traveling and for their room, and the double, we never have problems with fighting over plugs and the battery. I give my wife my battery, give the kids one of those bulky batteries, everybody’s happy.

Lon Harris: 1:17:17 They thought of everything. They thought of everything at Anker. They figured it out. Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 1:17:18 And Plaud, you’ve got the Plaud pin.

Lon Harris: 1:17:19 I do. I’m not wearing it right now because we’re on camera, but I have the Plaud pin.

Jason Calacanis: 1:17:25 When did we start the partnership with Plaud? Do we have a partnership with them yet?

Lon Harris: 1:17:30 Monday, sir. Monday. Get ready.

Jason Calacanis: 1:17:33 Oh, has it been signed?

Lon Harris: 1:17:35 It’s done. It’s—we’re happy—we will do our first Plaud segment, stay tuned for it on Monday’s show.

Jason Calacanis: 1:17:39 Okay, Monday’s show. Thanks everybody, thanks to our friends at Plaud. I’m gonna give away more Plaud. The Plaud, I applaud the Plaud. This thing is so great, just as a preview. You wear it, you press a button. When I was skiing and I 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. I’m skiing down the mountain, I had a great—

Nick O’Neill: 1:18:00 great idea is oh shoot stop at the side of the mountain I’m gonna start talking I start talking I start talking I start talking boom I forgot I did it then I now have on my calendar every other day review your plod.

Jason Calacanis: 1:18:11 Yeah.

Nick O’Neill: 1:18:12 And now I review my plod and I see all the different ideas I don’t lose all my great ideas.

Jason Calacanis: 1:18:16 And 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 what and you can search it it’s crazy.

Nick O’Neill: 1:18:27 Oh and in 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 is brainstorm so you can pick what template you want to generate it stores it in the cloud here’s the great thing you can hit the send button and I can send a plod 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 right I had breakfast with Will we were gonna 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 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 plod pen.

Lon Harris: 1:19:21 It was like I was at the conversation you guys had without being there.

Nick O’Neill: 1:19:24 Correct.

Jason Calacanis: 1:19:25 Plod plod plod. I love plod. Bye everybody.

Lon Harris: 1:19:27 Bye-bye. See you Monday.