This Week in Startups
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
[00:24:12] S0: Here's a lesson for all you founders out there. Trust closes deals. You can have an amazing, incredible product. It solves every problem your customer has. But if your customers don't believe that it's completely secure and they can trust it, they're out. This is why you need Vanta. They're the number one security and trust platform that's going to get you compliant fast for all the major frameworks, from SOC two to HIPAA and beyond. Plus, Vanta is going to make sure you stay compliant by continuously monitoring your controls. And now you can interact with Vanta's agents wherever you're working, even if your team is knee deep in clawed or cursor. Having Vanta as a partner means your deals keep moving forward and your engineers can focus on building, not documentation. That's why Vanta is already trusted by more than 16,000 companies, including major names like Harvey, Ramp, and Rider. Prove to your customers that you're ready for business. Learn more at vanta.com/twist and get $1,000 off. That's vanta.com/twist for $1,000 off. D. A, what do you think? It's an interesting
00:25:20 · D.A. Wallach, Jason Calacanis
[00:25:20] S1: narrative. I think I I think there's the there's the digital domain, and then there's the physical real world. Right? And if I look at my monthly credit card bill or my bank statement, all the expensive stuff is basically physical stuff. It's my rent, it's healthcare, it's school, it's a babysitter, it's all that kind of stuff. It's a car. And there's this interesting moment we're at right now where it's like AI is here and it can solve a bunch of business problems for business people. But the question is, can it actually solve these problems that are material to an average person's life? And as I was just hearing you guys talk about this, what occurs to me is like, unfortunately the real problems that need to be solved in the average person's life are today largely problems that require public policy. And so I actually think the way that AI can be most helpful would be if it helps us as a society to be less partisan and more constructive in our politics. And I don't know that AI had anything to do with the election results yesterday, but just imagine that everyone going to the polling booth is, you know, gonna be using their AI assistant to help them understand what they're voting on and what would actually be good for them. I mean, fundamentally, the importance of this technology is that it should make you smarter. If you're not that smart, which, you know, I'll be the first to admit, I'm not that smart. I got it in math in high school. [00:27:03] S0: There's multiple types of intelligence as well. You have artistic, emotional, and pure IQ. Have all three.
00:27:03 · Jason Calacanis, D.A. Wallach
[00:27:03] S0: There's multiple types of intelligence as well. You have artistic, emotional, and pure IQ. Have all three. [00:27:09] S1: Well, keep it coming. Keep it coming, Jason. I like that. But here's what I would say. When I get the ballot, okay? It's impossible for me to manage this thing. Okay? It's like a 100 decisions. It's so complicated. Never heard any of these people. I get one sentence on each of them. So, of course, I went on, you know, Gemini in this case, and I just... Every single one, I typed in the candidates names. And I said, here's what I care about. Tell me who to vote for. [00:27:36] S0: Love