This Week in Startups
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.
00:13:46 · Jason Calacanis
There's been a lot of hand wringing in the Northeast around these self driving cars, autonomous vehicles, robotaxis, Waymo's, Tesla, and then Zoox, Avride, etcetera. I think there's a a nonzero chance that we're gonna see a wave of anti self driving go across the country. And that we're gonna... And that's terrible because self driving saves a lot of lives. But if you're trying to save jobs, that's a place where I don't think you can win the argument, D. A, that there's some great benefit to self driving for employment.
00:14:22 · D.A. Wallach
[00:14:22] S1: Ultimately, we want every person doing something that is worth their precious life, right? And as soon as you can have a robot drive a car perfectly well, it's sort of a waste of time for a person to do that. Now, of course, realizing that also requires you to have a new job for them to do that's better than the job they were doing. And I think there's this interesting tension right now in that, you know, kind of like the Robin Hood bros are also Uber drivers. That's what they do at night. They do Postmates, they do Uber, they do whatever. And then they go on Robinhood and they trade Tesla stock and they trade Uber stock and they listen to All In. So it's like navigating all of these conflicting interests among these constituencies is gonna be really challenging for politicians. And I think the backdrop of it all, and you're seeing this play out in Europe in a big way is that the intergenerational war is the true winter that is coming. Winter is coming, the social security trust fund's gonna be insolvent in 2032. And the truth is that the people who own equities that are really gonna be the beneficiaries of Uber and Tesla and SpaceX and autonomy and data centers are old people. And those old people are not driving Uber. Okay. Those old people are chilling in Boca Raton and checking their Schwab account every day and feeling good about how great things are going. And meanwhile, the 22 year old Uber driver is looking out at a future where their job may be taken. They can't buy a house. It feels like everything's gotten more expensive. And that's why irrespective of whether they voted for Trump or Kamala last time, they turned out yesterday and they said, no, this isn't working for me. No one is out here actually giving a shit about me and my future.
00:16:23 · Jason Calacanis
[00:16:23] S0: Well said, intergenerational concerns here, Elana. And we have the M and A concern, jobs, data centers. This is just going to be a tough setup, I think, for the technology industry. I guess my question is, can the Dems actually find a middle ground here between being anti capitalist, anti progress, being D cells, and getting economic growth. Because if they do take this position that young people or socialists want them to take, well, we're getting into Ayn Rand kind of territory. We're getting into who's going to create these jobs? Where are they going to come from? If you slow things down too much, this could be quite problematic. So your thoughts there on Dems maybe finding a middle ground here?