This Week in Startups
00:17:14 · Elana Gold
[00:17:14] S2: Yeah, a few things there. And I know we were talking before the podcast about, okay, people who can't even drive cars, people who can't afford a car, well, suddenly now they could get somewhere so much cheaper, maybe even further away for less of the cost than they were before. And I think like that's a huge opportunity to be like, Hey, now they could go somewhere that's further away because they didn't have a car. They're not waiting for a bus that will take them two hours to get to the job site. It will take them twenty minutes by going and getting a robotaxi. So I think there are a lot of opportunities there. I don't think our country will go and look at China, look at other countries that are building and continue to go and really take in the technology that's being built and be like, nah, we're actually just slowing it down here. We'll let you guys have the self driving cars. We'll let you guys have the robots. But here in The US, we just wanna keep driving our own cars, not have robots even though that we have the technology to do so. I think as a country, we're scared of it. Like you always hear thought of AI is taking over, jobs are done, nobody's going to have anything to do anymore, and there will be no way to make money because AI and robots will be doing it all. And I think with all this, there are more opportunities. When horses stopped and cars came, opportunities came up too. And so I think it's scary. I think we're living in a world where AI agents are doing 50% of the jobs that were before and all the manual work you no longer need. But I think that there's still opportunities in there. Who's actually going and building the robots? And you're seeing blue collar jobs continue to grow and more and more is necessary. And so all in all, think like as a country, we probably need to change our sentiment around technology because we are gonna have to embrace it, and we're, as a country, I don't see us just watching other countries continue to succeed and not go and really embrace it here.
00:19:07 · Thomas Tunguz
[00:19:07] S3: Jason, you have an amazing perch. Like, who is telling the positive? Like, I remember going to Disneyland and seeing, the house of the future, right, like in the 1950s, right, and looked like the Jetsons. There was this view that we would be landing rockets and we would have Rosie who's a household... Like who? We have movie stars telling this positive story of AI. Have you seen anybody actually with that rosy scenario?
00:19:31 · Jason Calacanis
[00:19:31] S0: In America, I think if you look at Zuckerberg, as crazy as it seems, he created a program for Generation Tool Belt to train people for free to become plumbers, electricians, etcetera. So he's got such a bad... The corporate reputation at Meta is the worst of almost every company, right? And they have really good comms people there, who are like, how do we turn this around? And that was, I think, one of their efforts. And, they started that program. Then they're doing a lot on landing pages about data centers. So you constantly see them putting up these landing pages around, Hey, data centers are great. Look at the tax. Look at the short term jobs, the midterm jobs, the long term jobs. We're gonna have 4,000 people there building this data center in Waco, Texas or whatever, El Paso, and here's all the downstream effects, plus we're gonna pay for your kids' new soccer field or whatever it happens to be. And then Muse. I think the thing that's gonna turn this around as crazy as it seems is when the stay at home mom or dad, the teacher, everyday American starts using an agent, and the agent starts making their life better. And the agent says, you know what? I went through your emails. You're paying for Netflix twice. Can I unsubscribe from one of those? They're like, yeah, I don't have time to do that. It's done. And then they say, oh yeah, and by the way, you know, you have your small plumbing business. I went through all your emails. You missed these two quotes. Is one in your spam filter? And I took the time to write a quote to the person. Would you like me to send it on your behalf? And then, you know, Joe the plumber and, you know, Susan, with her small business, they start actually experiencing gains that we're all experiencing. I did a tweet earlier this week, I'm spending as a company $40,000 on Claude, on Grok, Cursor, Lovable, 11 limbs, this long tail of things. And I calculated I'm getting $2,000,000 in value. How did I calculated it? I looked at three different software projects we're doing internally. One to build essentially AngelList, Elana, for the syndicate. We left AngelList to do our own thing, we were a little bit too big for it. And now that platform, I always wanted to build. It would have taken four people, five people to build it in two years. And we built it in three months with no developers and no designers.
00:21:53 · Jason Calacanis
And it works. And it's getting better every day. We did the same thing for our programs and our accelerator, and we did the same thing for the podcast and the media business. Each of those would have been 12 full time employees at, call it, one hundred to one hundred and fifty ks each. Once that trickles down to not a 20 person venture capital firm, but a two person mom and pop shop, that's like, how do we make more money? And it says, Oh yeah, by the way, there's these three other services. I could take your inventory and the photos from your camera roll and put this stuff on eBay for you automatically. And then you'd have two ways to sell from your store. And do you know about Etsy? I could set up an Etsy store for you, and I'll manage the Shopify store for free. And you're currently paying $4,000 to some vendor to maintain your Shopify store. I can do that all for free. That's the kind of stuff that's gonna make people feel great about it. If their kids can get a job because their kids embrace the tool and the kid learns how to play guitar or be a plumber or be a ranch hand or be a chef because not just of YouTube, but their agents kind of help them fill in that knowledge. When everybody gets their own personal tutor, when the price of homes goes down significantly, when the price of health care goes down because AI is providing it, that's when I think we could turn this around. There's nobody leading that charge.
00:23:19 · Thomas Tunguz
[00:23:19] S3: No, nobody has that narrative. And I think this will happen much faster than we expect. I mean, you look at the Muse numbers, you have 10,000,000 people in the first quarter downloading it. Two and a half million people are daily active. You can imagine, okay, let's wake up in twenty four months, and now we actually have some meaningful fraction of Americans, three thirty million Americans. Let's say we have 30 or 40,000,000 people on Muse every day. All of a sudden, we're outstripped of capacity because even now, some of these systems are having problems. And then we are, in The US, a importer of tokens. I think one of the narratives that we need to start talking about is, just like oil, just like diesel, are we in that importer of tokens or are we in that exporter? And I wonder, you need that positive science fiction view of the world before you can actually have this conversation because there needs to be enough domestic demand and will for us to be producers of tokens to change this data center narrative, which is absolutely essential.
00:24:12 · Jason Calacanis
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