This Week in Startups
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.
00:18:21 · Lon Harris, Jason Calacanis
[00:18:21] S1: Countdown clock. I figured it out because I got so frustrated. We were doing... I had Grok Bot doing, like, a long form research project, and so I was running out of compute even before all of these changes just because it was combing YouTube and doing so much research for me. So I discovered you go to cursor.com/dashboard/spending. That's where you could actually keep a running eye on how much usage your Grok Bot has left before restarting the next week. I usually mostly use it up by the end of the week, but I'm gonna keep an eye on it now. But anyway, that's where to go. But I agree. Having it in Grok Bot itself so you could just monitor it more closely would be very helpful. I think people don't realize that if you do give it those long range assignments, it can suck up compute pretty quickly. [00:19:05] S0: I am on a, ultra plan, and it, yeah. I I don't know how I got my Ultra plan. It might be because I'm part of the all in organization and I have that icon next to my name. And so somebody's paying for my Ultra. I don't know what Ultra cost. I think that might be 2 or 3 or four. [00:19:26] S1: I think that's the 200. [00:19:27] S0: 200? Okay. I have Ultra. I'm at 51% weekly usage, and it resets on November 3. So they gotta just let everybody know what they're spending and don't make you search for it. This. [00:19:40] S1: Yeah. Cursor.com/dashboard/spending, folks. That's where to go.
00:19:44 · Jason Calacanis
[00:19:44] S0: And somewhere in there is like the bar chart I just shared that you could show. This needs to be on the top level. It should literally be part of the interface, just showing it to you. And that every single one of your jobs should give you a little piece of feedback at the end when it finishes its job. Point 7% of your weekly total, this many tokens. Just educate us in real time, and you could turn it off, I guess. But I think the reason people didn't have this on is they didn't want to give people compute anxiety. But if we're in this dance with the providers of this technology and we want to use it, I think we just have to be transparent about it. Which for a business, you kind of want to let somebody run out and then have to upgrade, like video games or whatever. I think in this case, got to switch it since it's a business case and just say, you really based on your work, you're at the $20 level. We highly recommend you go to this $100 level. It's gonna be this much more per year and you're worth it. You know what's even harder than writing great code? Consistently recruiting people who can write good code. And if you're working on a project and you need to hire great engineers, but you don't want to go through a painful, time consuming hiring process, G2i can help. G2i has a network of more than 8,000 pre vetted software engineers, the creme de la creme, all with more than five years of coding experience. These are the elite developers you need. And these aren't people who hack some automated coding test. The team at G2i puts engineers through live technical interviews to ensure these are folks who really know how to get their hands dirty building stuff. And the best part for founders, they make the entire process fast and easy. You get a dedicated Slack channel where you communicate directly with the G2i team so that you can share exactly what you need and start getting matched with engineers today. So go right now to g2i.co/twist and get $1,500 off your first hire. That's g2i.co/twist.
00:21:41 · Lon Harris, Jason Calacanis
[00:21:41] S1: I think it it stung a little bit maybe extra because it I I think a lot of people don't think of it as an enterprise application. It absolutely is. We use Grok Bot for our business every day. But it it also had a consumer friendly vibe, and I think that's what maybe people were like, oh, I've just been enjoying my Grok Bot, and now all of a sudden I have to pay more. But, for me, I would pay... I would happily pay more. It's it's worth it. Of things, I would pay more for but don't have to, Jason. You'll notice we're wearing our Plaud pins. I don't know if you have a Plaud pin on you. [00:22:12] S0: Well, I mean, have it right here on the charging station for a [00:22:15] S1: reason. Extremely useful. It [00:22:17] S0: on here. [00:22:17] S1: Record whatever you're talking about, whatever you're meeting about, whatever you need, it's gonna store it for later and not just record a transcript, but then you can apply that transcript, use it, reformat it, however you want to just sort of keep track of everything that was said in whatever format that you wanted to take away in. [00:22:36] S0: You know what we need to figure out by the next episode? Is there a connection between Grok Bot and Plaud? Alright. Good. Do that for the next episode, Lon. Do a little extra work here. Put a little extra work on you. Like, get that set up, and and show it next time, and show us some real world examples of how you got this work. Like, maybe it's giving you to do list ideas, and it sucked it out of your transcripts.
00:22:36 · Jason Calacanis, Lon Harris
[00:22:36] S0: You know what we need to figure out by the next episode? Is there a connection between Grok Bot and Plaud? Alright. Good. Do that for the next episode, Lon. Do a little extra work here. Put a little extra work on you. Like, get that set up, and and show it next time, and show us some real world examples of how you got this work. Like, maybe it's giving you to do list ideas, and it sucked it out of your transcripts. [00:22:56] S1: Know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna double up. I'm gonna use this for the show, and then I'll write about it on the This Week in a I newsletter. So that's it. We'll do [00:23:02] S0: for This Week in a I newsletter. Great one. [00:23:05] S1: Great one. If your work depends on conversations, interviews, meetings, or calls, or you have a Grok Bot and you want it to be able to listen in on your meetings, you could check out Plaud at plaud.ai/twist. That's blaud [00:23:17] S0: Don't wait. [00:23:18] S1: .Ai/twist. Use the code Twist, and they're gonna give you an extra 10% off on your Plaud. [00:23:23] S0: Do me a favor. Don't wait. Go buy one now. Tell them your boy, Jake Al, sent you. Okay. Let's keep going. [00:23:29] S1: We have a... We have an interview guest. Do you wanna bring in our guest? Yes. We do. [00:23:33] S0: Let's, let's, let's talk to our guests. Of course.