This Week in Startups
00:10:31 · Jason Calacanis
[00:10:31] S0: And very Parisian and very Japanese. Thank When you're building a startup, your legal paperwork is spread out all over the place. Entity formation here, fundraising over there, cap tables, contracts. It's endless. But Paper finally has a solution that's going to save you so much time and so many headaches. Paper's introducing smart entities. Here's how it works. You tell Paper what you need to do, and their pre built agent takes care of all of it. That's it. This is not some chatbot you need to provide with a ton of context. Nope. Paper is an AI native platform that's going to manage all of your startup's legal work. That means no more switching between disconnected tools, keeping track of hundreds of documents, and way less busy work for you to stay on top of. That's why Paper is already the legal backbone for thousands of startups and funds. Right now, founders using my link, getpaper.aitwist, get their cap table free for one year. What an amazing deal. Or two years if you're switching from Carta. If you're building a venture backed company, it's time to build your smart entity on paper. You know, I would have needed to put somebody on this or hire somebody. So I would have spent one hundred hours on this. Instead, I spent fifteen minutes. And I got a better product. So saving $100 an hour... And developers get paid $75 an hour if you take their salary. 75 times two thousand hours a year is $150,000 A clerical worker, an Athena assistant might be $10 an hour. A clerical worker in The United States might be $20.25, at a school might be $30 an hour, whatever it is. College educated kid, $40 an hour or something like that. You could actually put a price on these things. I started putting a price on it and I realized most of the companies on $20.30 dollars a month subscriptions. Some of us are on $200 And we're probably only spending $40,000 But I looked at the amount of software we're creating. We would need five or six developers and two full time designers and two project managers. So it's nine full time positions that would have averaged a 100 k each or more, if it was developers, but I'll just put it at a 100. That's like a million dollars right there. Yeah. Then you look at what happened to producing podcasts, making clips. It's a similar thing. We would need three more people right now to do what we're doing. Two, maybe three.
00:12:51 · Lon Harris
[00:12:51] S1: At least two, if not three. I mean, even just, like, if you're thinking about the content alone, the amount of writing, the amount of research, like, not even getting into the editing and post production and everything. Yeah, it would need to be a two or three person team larger.
00:13:05 · Jason Calacanis
[00:13:05] S0: I'm to say three. So now we're at 12, 13, 14 people in the company. And there are things we're doing now that we just couldn't have done. There's software we're making that is growing the business. You put all that together, I think we're getting about $2,000,000 in value and $40,000 in spend. So now you kind of do some math there. You're talking about 50 times the value. So for every dollar we spend, we're getting $50 out. So I want to just let that sink in. A dollar invested in AI today, if you're doing it properly, is $50 of output. Now, can you monetize that? Is it profitable? Or are you just spinning your wheels? Well, that's up to you to define the goal, right, Lon? And what we've done now is we've defined the goal. We're hiring for 10 positions here at the company. You say, wait a second, why aren't you just automating them? Well, things are growing so fast. There are things that are uniquely human, like being on air. Video editing, still uniquely human. Having taste, running a community, running events. That's in the real world. You still need somebody to go to the venue and greet people and all that stuff. So what we're hiring for are uniquely human people. But I have to say this technology since the bots came out and in the last ninety days... I believe the last ninety days are the equivalent of the first two years of using this software. That much has changed because we were trying to do this stuff with OpenClaw. Then I tried to do a Perplexity computer, and I tried to do a cloud co work and projects. We tried to do it originally with ChatGPT. I mean, we've been down this road, you know, Slackbot, everything.
00:14:41 · Lon Harris, Jason Calacanis
[00:14:41] S1: It's the... I mean, people say it's the agents, and I think that that could... Sometimes gets considered as agents are inherently more powerful or whatever. It's that the agents have context and access. That's that's what... OpenClaw, the promise was you're gonna have this agent that act independently and is smart and can do things. And it's true. I don't mean to say it's not true, but it was very difficult, especially if it was in a virtual server somewhere, for it to get into Slack, get into Notion, get into email, get into your calendar, get into your message. [00:15:10] S0: Did that happen? Well, one, all the services out there built connectivity. Right? The second thing that happened in all this is that they put a virtual computer inside of Muse and inside of Grok Bot. I think Claude might have it. Claude hasn't released their agent technology [00:15:28] S1: that you can hook it into your Google Chrome, and then it can look at everything in your browser. [00:15:32] S0: It's No. But they're adding the virtual [00:15:34] S1: Right. [00:15:34] S0: They're gonna machine that the agent can use. Once you do that, and I've gotten comfortable with it inside of Grok, I don't know if you've seen this, there's a vault. Have you started using the vault yet? [00:15:43] S1: Absolutely, 100%.
00:15:43 · Lon Harris, Jason Calacanis
[00:15:43] S1: Absolutely, 100%. [00:15:45] S0: Okay, so there's a vault. So booking flights is also another one of these things that is a back and forth, back and forth. You're giving it to a human, etcetera. It's just hard scheduling another one of these. So what I'm doing now is I'm having my Athena assistants use Grok Bot. I got them... I have two Athena assistants. They're going use the same instance. And then I'm having them do every task they do. They have to build a Grok Bot for it. So now I sucked in all the Notion pages of my travel preferences, my miles, numbers, whatever. And I just started giving it goals. Now they're using that too. Boom. This stuff is all just getting done and it actually finishes the task. And that was the problem previously. It didn't finish the task. People didn't know how to give it goals. It wasn't connected. There wasn't a computer. [00:16:35] S1: Would time out and get confused. And then you'd like, What happened to that? And be like, Oh, you're right. I didn't run that. I'm sorry.
00:16:42 · Jason Calacanis
[00:16:42] S0: It was brittle to use a Chamath term that he likes to use. There was a brittleness to it. And now it's not brittle. It's the opposite. And so my advice for everybody with the Grok Bot is you're going to need to do the assessment like I did. If Grok Bot was a thousand dollars a month and I think we've got four or five people on it and don't clip this and send it to Elon, but if it was a thousand dollars a month of the four people I have using it, I probably would have three of the four keep using it for a thousand dollars a month. Because even then, my $40,000 a year bill went to $200,000 it would be 10 to one. So every dollar I spend, I get 10. So I think what's going to happen is this is kind of like Uber and Lyft when they were discounting rides to get people to use the software. They're going to start boiling the frog. They're to start raising the prices and take the losses out. Elon's just the type of person who will tell you that's what he's doing. Claude, and I haven't heard Dario just come out and be like, by the way, we're losing money on this. It's not sustainable. It's growing too fast. We need to change the price a little bit. We got to change the deal. Elon's just upfront about it. Anybody who's complaining, look at what you're getting out of it. Please go do some simple math. Are you getting $50.30, $20 for every dollar you spend? Just increase your spend. Just go to the ultra plan, go to the $100 plan. And you really want this to... I do think some people felt rug pulled because their browsers, their bots stopped working, they might've been dependent on that. This is why you need to give everybody the status bar that shows usage. I agree. Agree.