This Week in Startups
00:05:27 · Jason Calacanis, D.A. Wallach
[00:05:27] S0: You gotta read like five or six books. [00:05:30] S1: I mean, [00:05:31] S0: it's you to have two [00:05:31] S1: or Yeah. Now three the flip side, maybe why we're seeing the markets not be so negative even though that could really take the thunder out of AI is that Trump has been a chaos agent. And whether he likes that or it's just something he can't help but do, he sows this endless level of uncertainty. And capital markets do not like uncertainty. So I would maintain, we don't need to get too into macro. I would maintain what we've seen happen in long term interest rates over the past year has been much more about uncertainty and fiscal unsustainability than it has been about crowding out with AI borrowing or anything like that. And when the uncertainty around everything in macro goes up, markets just don't like that. So I think divided government, even if it means sclerosis, even if it means that nothing gets done in DC, what it does mean is that nothing crazy is likely to happen.
00:06:36 · Jason Calacanis
[00:06:36] S0: And that's good for good for business. It's like a little bit of indigestion there, and, you know, they're debating stuff endlessly in committee. It means they can't also start a war. It means they can't also start tariff chaos. Makes things a bit more predictable. Elana, one of the things that the Trump administration was great at the last few years was embracing the tech community, American dynamism, you know, defense tech, and supporting data centers, supporting the industry, perhaps even too much. At the expense of talking about, and optics do matter, the plight of the everyday American. Do you think will... How this might impact what you're doing in terms of defense tech, terms of American dynamism, robotics, the hardware? A lot of these things have government as customers and you might have a government that is less excited about having these founders to the White House.
00:07:40 · Elana Gold
[00:07:40] S2: Yeah, I think one of the biggest narratives that are happening right now is people are saying, Okay, no more build out of data centers. And I think it's going to be obviously a state issue now of, Hey, if you're building out data centers, are you going to be able to build them out nationally? And that's a really big question. But I think that still doesn't change the underlying fact that we don't have enough power right now. I think Elon just tweeted this past week saying like, We're gonna run out of power in 2026. So even if we were able to build out however much data centers that we wanna build out, we still need other forms of power. And so from a startup perspective, I think there's a lot of interesting things happening in the nuclear space. I mean, Panthalassa is putting nodes in the ocean. You're seeing more different types of chips being built that require new types of power. And so I don't think that changes. I think, sure, there's going be more regulatory rules and regulations around this, but you're still going to see startups continuously be like, okay, there are power constraints for amount of AI compute that's needed in these next two years, five years, ten years. And so what startups are gonna build to be like, hey, maybe we can't build out as much data centers, but maybe we're gonna build chips that don't require as much power. And so I'm seeing that a lot happening right now. And I think it's, this just shows that that's even more prevalent and more important as we continue to grow and build.
00:08:59 · Jason Calacanis
[00:08:59] S0: Yeah. Necessity, the mother of all invention. If you can't get power, well, maybe you could use less or maybe you can find new power sources or make the ones you have less wasteful, more efficient. Tomasz, who wins in all of this with the split? Government in the short and the long term? Let's assume the Dems then win in 2028. What does it look like for our industry? Because we had four years of no M and A under the wrath of Lina Khan. That is top of mind for me. Our industry was just stymied from a lot of acquisitions that made a lot of sense. Now, with the last two years with Trump, everybody's evaluating every possible acquisition, and we'll talk about some of those acquisitions. Maybe the next two years is the next eighteen months, maybe just the next twelve years, 2027 is the last year to get a big deal done. And then you could be looking at five years of no more M and A. Terrible for our industry if that happens.
00:10:02 · Thomas Tunguz
[00:10:02] S3: It would be really tough. I mean, we've seen Lina Khan come out, I think, proanthropic. That was an unusual position that she had when it came to, you know, protections around, civilians... Or sorry, citizens when it comes to what the AI models do. I think we may have six months here in the beginning of twenty seven because every, like, HSR process or any kind of DOJ or the FTC has an eighteen month approval process, and many of these acquisitions like we just saw with the, the ex JDS uniphase business that Marvell bought and what has tried to buy for might be the largest M and A ever in tech history. The long pole on the tenth there is actually Chinese approval rather than American approval. So if you really want a big acquisition, you probably have to get through you have to execute that transaction before June of July or next year, or you're probably within an eighteen month window where either The US, The EU, whose posture on acquisitions really hasn't changed, Draghi really has not changed its position on M and A, or China will become an important blocker or at least a constituent in that conversation.
00:11:04 · Jason Calacanis
[00:11:04] S0: Alright. Listen. If you are running a company and you're the founder, hey. You're going to have so much work to do. You gotta hire a team. You gotta build the product. You gotta do customer interviews and understand what your product or service is gonna do for your customer. Well, you're also gonna need to incorporate, and you're gonna have to do your taxes. You have so much work to do on payroll, benefits, taxes, banking, incorporation, and you need a partner. And that partner is Every has worked with over 1,000 startups. You're gonna make mistakes, and some of those mistakes are going to be costly. That's why you need a partner like Every. They're gonna handle your Delaware c corp, your EIN, and getting a registered agent with no legal fees and no delays. They're gonna get all that done for you. And if you're further along and you need to scale up your team, well, Every will help you hire contractors in over 200 countries and do it right. Tite is right. Plus, their banking platform keeps your funds board compliant while making it easy to collect receipts, pay reimbursements, and stay on top of your spending. So head over to every.io and stop wasting time on stuff that isn't growing your company. That's every.io. It is, to your point, D. A, shocking how big of an issue the data centers have become. I I don't know why we're here and how we got here exactly, but an NBC exit poll, and this seems farcical to even say this, but it apparently is true, found 56% of voters called AI in data centers a crucial or major factor in their vote. And Democrats spent more than 100,000,000 on ads tying Republicans to big tech and data centers per time. Doesn't feel like that is matching the reality of what data centers do. Data centers bring a ton of taxes. They don't ask for discounts or tax breaks from local communities anymore. And in fact, they'll guarantee that prices of electricity won't go up, but maybe it's just too late to change this narrative, as you said. Projected winner the governor of Texas, Gina, is not super pro data center. So this seems to be one of the big challenges, is turning this narrative around. I think it dovetails with jobs, as you mentioned there, D. A. Something I monitor because I have probably a dozen investments in autonomy, including my original one in Uber, or I still have a significant portion of that.