00:26:15 · Lon Harris, Jason Calacanis
[00:26:15] S1: That's that's the answer for [00:26:16] S0: Those were always my last things. I know it's gonna come back to me like, I don't know if that's like a terrible service. I know Grok will do it in ten seconds, but Yeah. I started making Chrome extensions for myself. It's [00:26:26] S1: like great idea. Well, that reminds me of the the vibe code thing that people are doing now, which I'm gonna try this weekend, I think. They're hooking their clawed, up via Wi Fi to their smart TVs, and you could vibe code your smart TV interface and remove ads, make it faster. What? You like... You know? Because that. Like, my Amazon Fire TV, when I load it up, the operating system takes a few seconds, and it's showing me ads on the screen. [00:26:49] S0: I want Apple to make a TV or some TV provider to just make a dumb television that's just a passive monitor? Like when I buy extra monitors for my computers, does it come with anything? No. It's just a blank canvas. And there's a high profile founder who also believes this, who has tweeted it a whole bunch, [00:27:11] S1: but I [00:27:11] S0: don't want to say his name, but it's like evoking Beetlejuice. Let's not do it. Okay, let's keep going. [00:27:17] S1: All right. Well, we do have a guest I want to get to, but before we do By the way,
00:27:22 · Jason Calacanis
[00:27:22] S0: you know, I just realized there's so much good content here. I wanna put my plug pin on. We had the same- You know, I wear some nice clothing here. You know, I pay for my own clothing here. I don't have a wardrobe budget like you, buddy. I have to press the button here. And I put my little claw pin on, and now I'm recording my side of the conversation. And, you know, I can take notes. So when I'm sitting here talking to you, I might mute, and I might be like... And when you see me doing that, it's I'm giving an instruction to my plot so I don't forget it. You're going have inspiration anytime. You want to use your plot pen. Or I love, I love the note product. And this might be my Christmas gift to everybody. Let me see here. Dollars 189 for the plon to go in the back. Would I send people the plon? Hey, can we make a note? I want to send like a 100 of these as Christmas gifts or holiday gifts. Tell me a a gifts. Yeah, need to get a discount code and buy a 100 and send it to people. Miss a thing in 2027 from your boy, Jake Al. There you go. Hey, if people are listening to the program and want to try this product, which I give my full endorsement to because I'm addicted to it, and want to have it by ski season so they can record everything they talk to themselves while they're on lift lines and everything like a sociopath like myself, what can they do? I mean, you imagine when they connect this to my Claude and I start telling it in real time? I'm gonna... Oh, I'm gonna build software to connect this in real time to my Grok bot.
00:28:55 · Lon Harris, Jason Calacanis
[00:28:55] S1: When Claude met Claude and Grok bot. Yeah. I think you could... I mean, I bet you could already just tell Grok bot you wanna do that. Connect the pod web app to your pod. [00:29:04] S0: That's what... That's the way to do it. Let's do that. Let's do that. Let's create that. That's easy. Isn't it crazy that we can just do this stuff now? [00:29:10] S1: No, it is. When I read about... I read a tutorial that's like, Lon, here's how you can connect Claude from your laptop to your smart TV over Wi Fi. It's like, I can code things like, I'm a No. No. I want the... [00:29:23] S0: I'm gonna have my I'm gonna have my Grok bot ping this all the time, and then look for me. And when I say Grok bot, it just knows. When I say Grok bot, it knows. Alright. Give them the code. Let's get let's get the code. [00:29:36] S1: Check it out, you wanna go to applaud.ai/twist. And if you use the code twist, you're gonna get 10% off. So if this is your Christmas shopping, you're gonna save a bundle thanks to your your friends at This Week at Startups. So plaud.ai/twist, and use the code twist to get your 10% off. [00:29:53] S0: Alright. Fantastic. Let's keep moving. I got I got a haircut and a meeting. [00:29:57] S1: I got [00:29:57] S0: I got some oysters I gotta eat. [00:29:58] S1: We're gonna knock this out. We got [00:30:00] S0: I'm gonna meet with my CFO. I got a lot going on today.
00:30:00 · Jason Calacanis, Lon Harris, Jake Newfield
[00:30:00] S0: I'm gonna meet with my CFO. I got a lot going on today. [00:30:03] S1: Oh, yeah. Very busy. Well, let's get you to your plans. But before we do that, our next guest won the LAUNCH pitch competition, and he won it again the following week. He's Jake Newfield, the co founder and CEO of Hermetiq, which builds an AI build engineer. It's named Barn Owl. Jake, the floor is yours. We can't wait to hear your pitch. Welcome to the show. [00:30:25] S2: Yeah. Hey, Lon. Jason, good to see you guys. [00:30:27] S0: Good to see you. Now for people who don't know, you're in the Launch Accelerator class thirty seventh, our thirty seventh cohort. Been doing this for over ten years now. And every week, we have a handful of investors come. They hear your pitch. You're in week, I don't know, five or six right now. And you pitch for two minutes. They give you feedback, but we ask all the investors. Pick your number one, your number two, and you can give an honorable mention. First place gets two points. Second place gets one point. Third place gets a half point line. You add all that up every week, and then we keep those scores for the whole twelve weeks. Then we do these, intensive weeks like we had last week in San Francisco. How many VC firms and investors did we take you to see last week, Jake? [00:31:10] S2: It was like three per day. 15? Pretty much, yeah.
00:31:10 · Jake Newfield, Jason Calacanis
[00:31:10] S2: It was like three per day. 15? Pretty much, yeah. [00:31:14] S0: Yeah. And then we're going to do a New York tour, a track. So we did the LA, we did the San Francisco track, went to New York track. So instead of, you know, a demo day with a bunch of dentists who put twenty five, fifty k checks, what we do is we go to the early stage funds. We say, Hey, I got a proposition for you. What if we brought our top seven companies to your office? They pitch for two minutes each in, you know, ninety minutes soup to nuts. You're in and out, you meet seven companies. We're like, Oh, usually that takes us, you know, ninety minutes per company. And these are pre sorted by Jake Al and his team. Okay, that's really a great value for those folks. And so I think this time we're going to bring you to 20 or 30 different VC firms and just put you in their office. And what that does is, Lon, this is my strategy, I always try to do a little bit better for our founders. Now when the founder follows up with them, Hey, I don't know, Fred Wilson, I was at your office on this date. I met with your partner. This person wanted to give you an update on our business if you were willing to look at it. I loved your podcast about X, Y, and Z. Boom. So you're building that relationship fabric. You're getting anointed to a certain extent. And then whoever's first place gets super anointed. Jake, congratulations on being first place this past week. You have two minutes on the clock. Three, two, go.
00:32:31 · Jake Newfield
[00:32:31] S2: Hi, I'm Jake Newfield, co founder and CEO at Hermetiq. Because of agentic coding, tools like Claude, Cursor, and Codex, coding and creating code is no longer the bottleneck that it was a couple of years ago for companies. The bottleneck is now the build process, which is the process of compiling, verifying, and testing code. And this is a massive problem, right? Because every company from the AI labs down to AI native startups, that is becoming the bottleneck for their software development process. And we are solving this today for one of the top AI labs who's paying us $2.40 ks to provide analysis into their over 2,000,000 builds per day that they run, which is 4,000,000,000 build events. And we're solving this at the protocol level, the protocol being the RBE protocol, which is implemented by Bazel. So we're doing to Bazel what Databricks has done with Apache Spark, thus becoming the data layer between builds and the AI agents themselves. So the data that these AI agents can use to automate builds. My co founder and I worked together previously. So Tim was a senior engineer at Apple, leading a team over there. He was the chief architect at Lucidworks. My background is more sales product, Columbia Business School MBA, sales at Salesforce and Cloudera, and product management at Akamai. And we're taking on a big market. We see a $25,000,000,000 market opportunity that we aim to tackle. We've raised $2,200,000 to date, including Launch dot co and Niranjan Tulpule, who's a VP of Developer AI Google and Gokul Rajaram, and several other partners. And that is the under two minute pitch.