This Week in Startups
00:48:02 · Jake Newfield, Lon Harris, Jason Calacanis
[00:48:02] S2: It sounds like that's on the agenda. [00:48:04] S1: Pork buns. Steamed pork buns. That's what it's gonna take. More. Yeah. [00:48:07] S0: More more soup dumplings. Alright, Jake. We'll drop Jake off. [00:48:09] S1: Jake. [00:48:10] S0: Thank you. I have a wee bit more time here, Lonnie Ghani. I would like to get this annotated thing out of the way and give some prize money to people. [00:48:18] S1: We jump into that, do you wanna take a moment and talk about Founder University Japan and US? It's in here on a docket they want us to promote.
00:48:26 · Jason Calacanis
[00:48:26] S0: Alright. Very simple. Founder University. Founderuniversity..university..university. Go to the founder.university website. There's a button. It says apply. If you're a founder, you click the button apply. You apply. The cohort number 13, lucky number 13, is going to be early in 2027, basically end of January ish. Okay, that is Founder University that we're doing in The United States. On the Founder University website, we should have a link that you can click to go to Japan. But I'm guessing I can go founderuniversity.com/japan, and let's see if that works. Founder University... Okay, yeah. It's Japan. Founder. University. But if go to founder.universityjapan, it will also go there. So great job on my team of anticipating. Cohort three for Founder University Japan will be 30 companies, 10 finalists that come to The United States, twelve weeks. And you can see there, it's basically a boot camp in Japan. We do in person in Japan every week. We bring in four or five of the companies every week. All of them can come and they co work on Wednesdays. And this is a pre accelerator. And the concept of a pre accelerator is we will work with you for twelve weeks to build your company, get product market fit, refine your pitch, hiring, whatever you need to get done. But you don't have to take our money coming into the program. It's a much lighter touch, Lon. You can just join the program. We have like a little gentleman's agreement that we get to invest in future rounds, just a tiny amount if you do wind up raising. We just... Please let us know and we'll give you a quick answer. But it's really wonderful because we get to meet a large number of startups. We get to bond with them. And for over twelve weeks, each week they give an update on how they're doing. They fill out a form one on their progress. We study their progress. We try to get rid of blockers. We try to accelerate things with them. And then every week they can ask us, Hey, I'd a like 25 ks check, a 125 ks check, maybe I want to be syndicated, I got a lead investor, and then we'll evaluate them for investment. When we do the accelerator, only seven companies, Lon. Only seven companies, and we give you 125 ks on the way in, just like Y Combinator, TechCrunch, and all the other great programs in the world, 500 Global. So this is a lightweight way to spend twelve weeks with my team.
00:50:50 · Jason Calacanis, Lon Harris
We are massively thankful to have an incredible partner in Jetro in Japan to do this with. This is our third cohort in Japan, and you know I love Japan. [00:50:59] S1: Alright. Thank you for doing that. Now let's jump into our final round. We're announcing the winner, if you want to, today, of our annotated bounty copy. [00:51:07] S0: Final round. You're gonna rapid fire show me in order. Oh, just show me the the the final We've [00:51:13] S1: got we've got the final product. Finalists. One one of our finalists is left over. It was our favorite from round one, and then we have two new apps to show you, and then we will pick our top one. Of course, reminder for everybody watching, this is a competition. We are giving away $5 to whoever can build the best version of Jason's vision for the annotated app. It's basically an extension, a sidebar that could save any piece of media and then reshare it with some additional commentary to start a new conversation. That's the sort of rough concept. So let's take a look at demo [00:51:46] S0: number one. Go to annotated.com. And... Yeah. Or that's actually not where the... Where is the... Oh, there it is. Okay. Buildannotated.com win 5,000. That's at bounty. This week in startups.com. And this is the second bounty we're doing, so let's get started. [00:52:05] S1: Sure. So demo number one is from Will Flynn. We've got a... It's it's just... They're all called annotated, so I have no way to set them apart. But we've got a demo for each one. So here is the demo video submission from Will Flynn. Let's take a look
00:52:05 · Lon Harris, Jason Calacanis
[00:52:05] S1: Sure. So demo number one is from Will Flynn. We've got a... It's it's just... They're all called annotated, so I have no way to set them apart. But we've got a demo for each one. So here is the demo video submission from Will Flynn. Let's take a look [00:52:21] S0: at So this is willsannotated.com. [00:52:23] S1: This is will'sannotated.com, and you can see he's got it. We're here on LAUNCH. We're looking at a clip or a Twitter post from LAUNCH, and we're going to reshare it along with our highlighted. This is our favorite quote that we're pulling out, and you could see Jacob is leaving a comment on it, and now he's going to hit publish. I believe he will have to sign in after this step. [00:52:46] S0: Okay. And you can, put a clip there. He's gonna sign in with his Google account. Let that sign in. Yeah, love it. And this is actually built. You guys use this? Is this you doing it, our team, or he submitted this video? [00:52:57] S1: No, no. This is Jacob, our producer, using it. It is live. It exists on the internet right now.
00:52:57 · Lon Harris, Jason Calacanis
[00:52:57] S1: No, no. This is Jacob, our producer, using it. It is live. It exists on the internet right now. [00:53:03] S0: Okay. Now here, this is very important. Pause it here. Because he has the... Can you go back a little bit there and just pause it? Okay. So what's interesting here is when you find somebody else's annotated comment, say here on a specific tweet, or it could be a New York Times story, If you have the toolbar on, it highlights it in yellow. When you click on it, it gives you the annotation, and you can add to it and keep the story going. Now on Twitter, you already have the ability to talk to each other, so this is like a weird example. But if this was a New York Times story, it's not... You could highlight a paragraph in the Washington Post, the New York Times, I don't know, a wire cutter review, a consumer reports, a blog post, a sub stack, and then you can kinda hijack it, move it over to another discussion with your team privately or with yourself. I love this feature. [00:53:50] S1: Yeah. So I mean, yeah, he is still... I mean, we're still sort of taking this off of X, the everything app, and then it will move it over. As you could see, two annotated where there's now... It's a post. You've got the original context, and you've got Jacob's, new edition, and now there could be a new discussion thread purely for the annotated community based on what you're just sharing. Great. [00:54:11] S0: Alright. Got some
00:54:11 · Jason Calacanis, Lon Harris
[00:54:11] S0: Alright. Got some [00:54:12] S1: more examples. We've got one more... One or two more examples here from Will. Here's a... If you're on YouTube, you could take a clip. You wanna show off how cool these robot fingers work. You could actually tell it exactly what part of the clip you're commenting on. [00:54:28] S0: Oh, look at that. No. No. You could scrub it and record. Wow. [00:54:32] S1: Yeah. You could actually tell it, like, however you want to, you can actually move it around, choose exactly the right clip that you want from this YouTube, and then it'll move that as well over to annotated.com so you could sort of take it. [00:54:45] S0: Oh, look at that. And it added Gemini fact check there automatically, a little Gemini note. Interesting. Okay. Great. And then let's see where it goes from here. [00:54:55] S1: Let's keep going. [00:54:56] S0: Then... Oh, and it actually made a clip. So it cut the video and moved it over to the annotated servers. So if that YouTube video was taken down with fair use commentary, we took those two seconds. Here's a YouTube story going next. Okay. By the way, I like that. I like the idea of you could take up to twenty seconds of a video, thirty seconds of a video. That's fair use. I mean, if somebody did that to this video, I wouldn't be totally brokenhearted about it.