This Week in Startups
01:10:06 · Lon Harris
[01:10:06] S1: You have to treat... Retrain your brain. As a nondeveloper, I think you have to re... Because for me, I don't think about, like, new products, like... Because I never had the ability to build them. So I have to, like Right. I have to retrain myself to, like, if something's not working, maybe you can fix. Maybe you and Claude can fix it. Like, just tell Claude what you want. And, like, I don't even have those ideas, but now I have to start because everybody can be a hacker and a developer now. You just have a a friend who can just do it for you.
01:10:39 · Jason Calacanis, Lon Harris
[01:10:39] S0: I did another thing. I went through my entire d... I had d... I have DMs open on x. I said, and I never go through them. I said, tell me who, you know, the most followed people are who have DMed me that I missed. Oh, yeah. And then anybody who's a founder, tell them you can apply to our programs here, here, and here. So it brings me up the list. And then like a very famous basketball player, a DM me in August and said, hey. I'm in Austin. Want to get a cup of coffee. I didn't see it. Oh, man. So I just DM'd them and said, like, yeah, Nick's in five, and here's my phone number so you have it. And, yeah, let me know next time you're in town. Sorry. Missed this. And then it sent 500 people from the last couple of months a DM that said, hey, this is Jason's bot. I always have it do that. Here, you can apply to Founder University, Launch Accelerator, or here if you want to engage with our firm. And then half the people were like, No, no, I want to talk directly to you about this. All of them started talking to my bot. They're like, Tell Jason I have this incredible thing. Tell Jason I want him to come speak at my vet. It didn't exactly get the response, I was like, better they get something [01:11:42] S1: than neuro. Exactly.
01:11:42 · Lon Harris, Jason Calacanis
[01:11:42] S1: than neuro. Exactly. [01:11:44] S0: So here we are in LinkedIn, I can't do that unfortunately. LinkedIn is not letting automation of... So this is a message to LinkedIn. Let me use my bot to DM people, but charge me $05 $0.25 every time I do it to throttle it, so not everybody does it. And limit me to 10 times a day or 100 times a day. I don't care what you charge me for the in mails, but since you are letting people pay you to do intros or to DM people who are on the system, why not let my bot do it? Charge me double when my bot does it. Or make a bot yourself. Yeah. Just have agent mail and just be like, hey, this is Jason's agent. Because people are already doing this with other tools that are hacker like tools. Just incorporate it into the platform, throttle the number of people. And if people complain about it, just give the power to those people. On the bottom of it, just say, never want to hear from this again. Or, and then you never hear from that person again. [01:12:45] S1: I I feel like all these platforms that are being so bot and agent hostile, like, it's a losing fight. Like, you you... It's it's over. Like, are gonna have agents. They're gonna have bots. They're gonna wanna access your Reddits or your hacker news or your LinkedIns. Like, there's there's nothing you [01:13:00] S0: can do. You [01:13:01] S1: just... There's... I don't think there's any stock in it. You can become irrelevant or you can let people's agents in. Those are your two choices.
01:13:01 · Lon Harris, Jason Calacanis
[01:13:01] S1: just... There's... I don't think there's any stock in it. You can become irrelevant or you can let people's agents in. Those are your two choices. [01:13:08] S0: Alright. So tell me. What's going on with space? I know Google and Planet Labs are doing an experiment together, and then NVIDIA and SpaceX have their own plans, but they're all going up on SpaceX for rockets, which tries to be neutral about who can use the rockets. [01:13:23] S1: We're talking about Google had the big breakthrough. Their first data center in space is now up and running. It's a prototype satellite from project Suncatcher built by Planet Labs, as you said, carrying four of Google's TPU AI chips. It launched on a SpaceX Falcon nine earlier this month. This is the, the first test that Google did to make sure things were working in space. They asked Gemma four, that's the model running on board, to write a haiku about being in space, and here it is. Blue marble below. Data streams in silent grace. Starlight feeds my core. So it's working. You got the syllables right. [01:14:03] S0: Right. So it's like a hello world. The new hello world is pop... Make a poem.
01:14:03 · Jason Calacanis, Lon Harris
[01:14:03] S0: Right. So it's like a hello world. The new hello world is pop... Make a poem. [01:14:07] S1: Right. Right. A haiku for us. Yeah. And so there are real limits. Only one of the four chips can run at a time, and it only runs for about twenty minutes before it runs out of power. They've got two more satellites with more advanced chips planned for 2027. Google is aiming for space data centers that make economic sense in the twenty thirties. So we were just talking about how much Americans hate data centers. They don't want data centers around. Is this a viable option? Can we just blast them into low orbit instead?
01:14:35 · Jason Calacanis
[01:14:35] S0: Absolute... Absolutely viable after three or four iterations. The same way Internet via satellite was viable, but we spent ten years in the wilderness with slow Internet. You know, if you were on a ranch somewhere, you could have a very expensive Internet connection via satellite. It was originally giant satellites, then medium sized, then smaller, huge satellites, whatever they were. And, you know, sometimes I'd rent an Airbnb, you know, somewhere on the edge where they didn't have broadband. And they would give it to you, but, you know, you'd watch one Netflix movie, it would time out and say you hit your limit. Yeah. So they had it, like, limited by a certain amount of bandwidth, and they charge. It wasn't unlimited. So that all changed. And now we sit here with Starlink, and we're like, this is the greatest thing since sliced bread. And it is. And and there'll be three competitors. Amazon's got LEO, I guess. Mhmm. They're low Earth orbit satellites. It's gonna be a same similar timeline here. We might spend a decade, you know, making proof of concepts and things that can lightly do this stuff, but it really is all based on Starship. Starship has a massive amount of payload. I don't know if it's 10 or 20 times the previous falcons, but it's significantly more. I I actually have been inside that. When they were first making them, I was at Starbase with Elon, and we were standing inside of it, the first prototype that was, like, hand welded together. I mean, and you look up, it's like you're looking into a small office tower. I know how to explain it, but you're looking into a payload that could be 200 people in seats. Yeah. Know? You're looking into a Boeing.