This Week in Startups
00:00:00 · Jason Calacanis, Lon Harris
[00:00:00] S0: Alright. It's twist for Monday, 11/02/2026. There's snow in Tahoe. Oh. I'm going to Japan and Davos in January. Things are about to heat up. Cool down. And the most exciting thing is Grok Bot. Grok Bot is the most exciting thing right now. What's going on with Grok Bot this week? Because all I did all weekend when I wasn't with the family and going to a Halloween party was just hanging out with my Grok Bot. I'm so addicted. [00:00:31] S1: Yeah. I... It's a it's a very compelling piece of software. So Grok Bot users spent the weekend complaining that they were burning through their weekly usage limits in just a few days, Jason. Elon Musk responded on x. The cost of serving Grok Bot was unsustainably high relative to revenue. He did not give any specifics on cost or whether the limits were cut or by how much. This comes two weeks after SpaceX's earnings call where Elon called Grok Bot the fastest growing product he'd ever seen. SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell said it hit 800,000 paid weekly users more than doubling in a month. Grok Bot starts with a $30 a month premium plan. The $102,100 dollar plans get higher limits. And you posted last night that Launch currently spends under 40 k a year on AI tools, including Grok Bot, and gets, in your opinion, 2,000,000 plus in value. So is this just a people need to suck it up and spend a little bit more to keep in touch with their Grok Bot?
00:00:31 · Lon Harris, Jason Calacanis
[00:00:31] S1: Yeah. I... It's a it's a very compelling piece of software. So Grok Bot users spent the weekend complaining that they were burning through their weekly usage limits in just a few days, Jason. Elon Musk responded on x. The cost of serving Grok Bot was unsustainably high relative to revenue. He did not give any specifics on cost or whether the limits were cut or by how much. This comes two weeks after SpaceX's earnings call where Elon called Grok Bot the fastest growing product he'd ever seen. SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell said it hit 800,000 paid weekly users more than doubling in a month. Grok Bot starts with a $30 a month premium plan. The $102,100 dollar plans get higher limits. And you posted last night that Launch currently spends under 40 k a year on AI tools, including Grok Bot, and gets, in your opinion, 2,000,000 plus in value. So is this just a people need to suck it up and spend a little bit more to keep in touch with their Grok Bot? [00:01:30] S0: I think this product is so addictive, obviously, and you get so much value out of it that, the usage limit you're gonna quickly get to. And it doesn't kind of keep you informed of your limit. You have to go kind of hunt and peck to find that. I think what they need to do is put a bar on the top of the apps. And every time you're using it, it should just show that bar and give you just a little bit of an idea of what you're consuming because I agree. I have ultra. Ultra. [00:02:07] S1: I'm on premium still. [00:02:09] S0: Which is 200 a month?
00:02:09 · Jason Calacanis, Lon Harris
[00:02:09] S0: Which is 200 a month? [00:02:11] S1: No. Well, I I signed up for premium, which is only 30 a month, and that's what I was using. But then the team, you know, we started adding other members of our team. Uh-huh. So then it bumped me up so I get the 200 a month plan just for myself, and then every other team member gets their $30. [00:02:28] S0: By doing that as the team manager Yes. They give it to you for free? [00:02:32] S1: I mean, I don't know. It it told me that my premium usage, I was getting an increase because I'm the team manager or whatever. And so [00:02:41] S0: I Awesome. [00:02:42] S1: I don't run out as much or as quickly. I've only used 9% with only four days to go this week, and I have not adjusted my Grok Bot usage. So
00:02:42 · Lon Harris, Jason Calacanis
[00:02:42] S1: I don't run out as much or as quickly. I've only used 9% with only four days to go this week, and I have not adjusted my Grok Bot usage. So [00:02:50] S0: So that that is one issue is... And Perplexity does a great job of this. I've stopped using Perplexity as much because all the stuff I was building with Perplexity Computer, I'm now using a bot interface to do. The bot interface is more pleasing and more efficient. And now that I have a 100 different bots, I'm starting to put bots together. So I have a bot that is good for making videos. I have a bot that's good for doing research. I have a LinkedIn bot. I've got an HTML webpage creating bot. And over this weekend, for the first time had it, I gave it my credit card, had it register a domain name for me, and had it published to the web for me some content. We were gonna do... We're we're gonna buy jackets. Right? So I just wanna give people an example here. We're going to buy jackets. Right? And you can pull up my... A tweet from this weekend.
00:03:45 · Lon Harris, Jason Calacanis
[00:03:45] S1: Right. So that... Yeah. This was this was Jason's response that we sort of quoted before. He's saying, I'm spending about 40 k a year on tokens and subscriptions from Anthropic, Lovable, Grok Bot, ElevenLabs, long tail of other products, and getting about 2,000,000 plus in value for launch and This Week in Startups. We've automated at least seven full time jobs at this point while becoming a 100% faster at the average task that we do. If you haven't used the last ninety days worth of products for at least thirty hours a week, you have no idea how profound the software is. The last ninety days, things have changed more than in the last two years. Many of the things I spent hours on last year not take minutes, and the results are mind blowing. You know, I really agree. I think a lot of people got fixed in time in, like, 2023, 2024. Like, this is what chatbots are, and this is how AI works. And they're still relying on those tropes of, oh, it hallucinates, and you can't trust it. And it's, doesn't have any context, and it forgets things. And it's like, hey. Grok Bot's a new world, man. You gotta you gotta plug in. [00:04:46] S0: Correct.
00:04:46 · Jason Calacanis, Lon Harris
[00:04:46] S0: Correct. [00:04:46] S1: Because, like, I... Teaming them up is where it gets, I think, really powerful as well. Like, I have my sub stack analytics bot that is looking every day at what's happening on sub stack and posting in Slack, but now I have that bot talk to all the other bots that help me research those sub stacks. So now they learn what works and what doesn't and refine their recommendations based on the analytics and the readership we're getting in Substack. And, like, that's how they... It can make smart decisions about what to write about without me because it's already there. The last time we did a post like this with this kind of title that we could do again, it did really well. The open rates were 6% higher. Like, woah, man. That's like a full time analyst looking at our stats that's just working for me now. That's pretty incredible. [00:05:32] S0: Yeah. So what I did was we were gonna make a jacket. Right? We wanted to make a jacket. So Not like this, but [00:05:40] S1: a cool jacket. Like a cool jacket.