Breaking down Nvidia's Hugging Face and Poolside bets | E2331

This is the biggest story of the year.

NVIDIA taking over all of open source. They've agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion.

US open source equals NVIDIA. Chinese open source equals KIMI. Now we have our US champion. If you want to know how Anthropic is hitting $50 billion, if you want to know how OpenAI is hitting whatever it is, $30, $40 billion, customers like Uber. Unmetered is the word we're going to be talking about in 2027. That means that you could see NVIDIA add a third of the market cap of the top 2 frontier models. 1/3 of their revenue moving over to NVIDIA. If it works, this is the biggest news ever. This Week in Startups is brought to you by PayPal. Pay zero processing fees on your first $100,000 in eligible PayPal payment volume. Learn more at paypal.launch.co. Every, for all of your incorporation, banking, payroll, benefits, accounting, taxes, or other back office administration needs, visit every.io. DigitalOcean. Want to see what building on a true AI-native platform looks like? Head to do.co/twist to start building on DigitalOcean's AI-native cloud today and cut your AI workload costs by up to 50%. All right, everybody, welcome back to TWIST. It's Friday, August 28th. Summer's over. Lots on the docket. Sam Altman talking about cyber threats again, scaring the bejesus out of everybody, uh, saying, hey, we're gonna need to have a coordinated effort here. NVIDIA bought Hugging Face, and we got some great guests. We want to start with a story or go right to a guest. What's the ladies' choice, Lon? What do you want to do here?

Oh, misgendering me again. How dare you? No, I think we should start with this. I think we've got a top story. AI's Oppenheimer.

It was the beard that made me misgender you.

That's right. Bearded lady. It's one of my, my old circus career. We might be in AI's Oppenheimer moment, Jason. OpenAI, Anthropic, some of the other companies have issued a warning about coming cyber threats. Yesterday, over 100 companies signed an open letter warning that we only have months To prepare for AI-enabled cyberattacks. It includes OpenAI, it includes Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, all the usual suspects. They're warning hospitals, water systems, critical infrastructure, all under threat. They want security standards raised, including shared threat intel, and they want this defense funded at every level. All that said, the letter doesn't have any actual commitments. There's no deadlines, there's no mandated funding. It's, it's just sort of floating. Floating the suggestion. So, you know, I mean, in your perspective, what do you think the best way for us to actually— I think everybody would agree we should do this. What do you think the best way to organize this effort might be?

Okay. We did an open letter. This is an open letter.

Correct.

Written by people like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, etc. They, they passed around and said, Hey, we're entering dangerous territory and we need a coordinated effort.

Essentially, yeah, 100 companies signed on to this open letter, the hyperscalers obviously sort of leading the pack.

Why now is always the question. Why now? And you have to deconstruct people's behavior. So let's pause for a second and say, why would the top 100 folks take this time now to write a coordinated letter And the letter is addressed to who? Who is the letter addressed to? And let's pull the letter up here on the screen. These are important things when an open letter happens.

It's called a Call for Collective Action on Cyber Defense. It's not— it's not directed at any one person, but I think it's the public. It's PR on one level, and it's aimed at sort of politicians.

Well, it exists on the OpenAI website as we're showing it. It says an open letter for a global surge in cyber defense. So it's very important to First principles, anytime there's an open letter or somebody makes a statement, to slow down and say, why now? First question, why is this happening now? And then, look, um, who's driving this? So who's driving this is pretty obvious. There's a bunch of signatories on the left. We assume that they're driving it. It was released on all of their websites, or it was released on OpenAI's websites? OpenAI is the leader of this pack. Who is it? Like every single person releases at the same time? Or do we not know?

I, I don't know. I'm looking it up. I mean, when you Google this title, it does come up on several different, uh, okay, sites. So I don't think— I think OpenAI again leading the charge. That's the number one link when you look it up. But I think other, other companies have also posted it.

Well, that could be just SEO. So every company is— so the translation here from first principles, and we're trying to get to first principles always when we have these kind of announcements, because you want to be able to media deconstruct. I'm gonna help you, Media Deconstructor. Every company is releasing this. The top SEO, based on what you're telling me, went to OpenAI.

Yes.

Okay, fine. And I saw Sam quoted it. So then if Microsoft did this, did Satya Nadella, um, write about this? And then did Dario or somebody from Anthropic, like a leader, actually tweet about it? So those are the things you wanna know, uh, 'cause we wanna understand who's really behind this, or if this is when you have 100 people or 50 people write these things. That's the other thing you wanna find out is like, I get asked to sign these things sometimes. So let's take a look at Dario's account. Is he talking about— let's take a look at Satya Nadella's. Is he talking about it? And let's pull up Sam's and how Sam is framing this. And then we have to ask ourselves, why is this happening now? So we'll pull up those 3 individuals' Twitter. We'll see if they're even talking about it. I know Sam is talking.

Satya has not tweeted since August 21st. He's not talking about this today.

Microsoft signed it. He's not talking about it. Now we go to Dario and Maybe the Anthropic official account. Let's check that. And this is the way you do proper media deconstruction, is you go figure out who's talking about this and who talked about it when. So here, August 27th, yesterday, Sam Altman writes, this is a critically important moment for cyber defense with AI. There is not much time to act. Okay, this is like a very, um, charged statement.

Yes.

We are happy if you want to work with us or any of our competitors or partners, but please take this moment seriously. Again, he's being very dramatic here, uh, and we'll, we'll read into that in a moment. Only an urgent and intense collective response will work. So, uh, this is critical. He is coming out very hard about this. Did Dario talk about it?

No, I'm looking at Dario's page right now. He actually hasn't tweeted since the Gavin Baker, uh, kerfuffle of last week.

And then here's OpenAI's, um, tweet from August 26th: We have conducted a thorough investigation into Hugging Face incident. Into the Hugging Face incident. That's when, um, their AI bot went and tried to steal credentials on Hugging Face's site and kind of hacked their site, uh, to accomplish goals. We are releasing a technical report and accompanying blog post that reconstructs the agent's activities. That's OpenAI's agent that hacked Hugging Face. Explain why existing safeguards failed and detail how we're preventing reoccurrence. So Here we go. Sam is leaning into this. OpenAI has egg on their face, or they have liability potentially from having hacked Hugging Face's site. If Hugging Face's site was hacked, then you have to ask yourself, is OpenAI's— are OpenAI's other agents during the building of models hacking other people's sites?

Hmm.

That's what I think is happening here. I think This is coming out today. Always when these letters come out, always when people make statements, there's usually an incident that people know about.

Sure.

Which is the Hugging Face one. There's also sometimes other incidents to come, and they are doing, Lon, what we call getting ahead of it.

Sure.

So somebody says, let's get ahead of this. I think what's happened is there's probably 2 or 3 hacks that have occurred that are acute. Acute is a fancy word for important intents. And we might have a hack that's occurred already that the government is aware of, OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, et cetera, are aware of, that could be of the nature of major hacks we talked about previously on the program, the Ashley Madison hack.

Sure.

There was an iCloud hack. There might be one of those that's gonna drop in the next couple days. It's Friday. This is coming out Thursday, Friday. Over the weekend, just predicting here, you might hear about a significant hack of our government or of your sensitive information. They are prepping us the same way last week I told you, or maybe earlier this week and it went viral, that the Chinese are doing a psyops on America and their own country to make their people accept robotic overlords that will be taking their jobs, that will be integrated into society, that will be observing and recording their citizens to control them. That's what they do in China. They are prepping them to accept robotic companions, robotic workers, robotics, you know, uh, in their lives. That's their PR campaign right there. We are doing some other campaign right now, uh, which is, hey, your, your privacy is over. You're gonna get hacked. It's not our fault. And maybe trying to spread the blame around here. So there's psyops happening everywhere, folks. That's what I think this is. This is a prep for a coming hack that they know about or that they know is imminent.

Yeah, we, we had Ugo de Moura from, uh, Expo on This Week in AI this week, and he said it's been a year. Or he's like, for a year the West has been totally vulnerable to this. We're getting hacked all the time. People might not realize it. It's not life and death for most people, but It's already, we're already in the danger zone and we have been for some time. That was a, I didn't realize that, I think, as clearly as he stated it.

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Yeah.

So let's just say this clearly. The frontier models have enabled, inadvertently, by making incredible tools to vibe code whatever you want. The counter to that is making a tool that can infinitely, depending on how much compute you have access to, is infinitely better at hacking than the white hats and is relentless and has, uh, an unlimited amount of time and effort and intelligence to pair hacks together that humans simply do not have the time. There's no one human who can put all of GitHub, every open source code into their brain at once.

Yeah.

And then say, here is the history of every hack done since 1970. Here's all code that's being used sorted by the last update to its code and, uh, how often it's updated and how many people are using it, the stars, the, the impact of it. And then it can put those things together and say, what hasn't been updated? What's not being, um, vetted and cleaned up and tightened up? Which projects, which software is not tight, is not updated regularly? And what are the latest hacks? What's the history of hacks? And it can just figure out brilliantly in the magic AI box. It can just like it can guess your next word. It can guess the next hack. Yeah, it can guess the next big hack.

Now, I wanted to talk about this, Jason. Do you remember this from earlier this week? It's also— it's not just the availability of this intelligence, it's getting cheaper. So hackers are budget constrained. They can't just run Fable 5 all day and do all the things you're saying, but they can now afford to use And as those models get not just cheaper but much more powerful, we're going to see this just continue to explode where people can just run exactly what you're saying overnight for weeks at a time and find every vulnerability there is.

And so this is going to be a boom for Palo Alto Networks. It's going to be incredible for CrowdStrike. Those are the 2 leaders. I might put a J-Trade on this weekend for those 2 stocks. I'm going to have to do an analysis of them. I don't have time to do it right now on the air. We got a big docket, but I think that those firms are now going to be fully, fully engaged with by the frontier models who are going to go to Palo Alto Networks, they're going to go to CrowdStrike and others and say, let's build. As you build frontier models, we're going to need access to them early. We're going to build— need to build the sure-it-up tools, you know, like check the locks.

Yeah.

And somebody is going to just have to go check the locks. Check the alarm system, check the perimeter of every piece of software. And I think we're going to see a hack before the end of the year. I think it's possible we'll see a hack that will make the public distrust AI even more. A cataclysmic hack of people's banking information or crypto wallets or personal, you know, iMessages, Signal, WhatsApp. One of those gets hacked. Yeah. And AI dumps it, people start getting extorted. The extortion by Russian, North Korean hackers, etc., Chinese hackers, or some big dump, or the stealing of crypto— this is going to make people hate AI much more than they hate data centers, or they hate writing AI slop and passing it off as your words in the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Shout out Wall Street Journal editorial page for phoning it in. Those things are gonna be minor compared with losing your Bitcoin or having your iMessages dumped. It's, it's gonna be really, uh, an interesting moment in time. And I think that's what the industry's trying to get ahead of. They're warming us up to the fact that we've already probably been hacked by AI.

Well, and they are, I think you're absolutely correct. It, it is a little, it is a little blame shifty. It's like, hey man, this is all of our problem. And it's like, is it all of our problem or is this, Your problem.

I think what you'll see is the majority of the hacks will be done by the frontier models. So the frontier models then who create these, it's going to be essentially like producing a car without 3-point seat belts, producing a car without airbags, you know, selling cigarettes without, uh, and saying nicotine is not an addictive drug. Have you ever seen The congressional hearing— I'll have one of the team pull it up— there's a congressional hearing where they go down the line and ask everybody working at Big Tobacco—

Who thinks, yeah, nicotine is addictive, right? Yeah.

And the audacity of them is, while they were architecting cigarettes to be more addictive through any number of chemical sequences and, you know, product innovations, to have the audacity to say, not addictive. This is going to be, I think, what happens to the frontier models, which is you made something that you knew could hack everything and you released it knowing that. Oh, congratulations, you wrote a letter, but you gave people a car, you left out the airbags and the 3-point seat belts, and you made it go over 150 miles an hour. And you made it, you know, watch this to just understand. This is what we're going to see in about 18 months when the world gets hacked and people lose their Bitcoin.

Unsafe at any latency, we'll call it.

Begin my questioning on the matter of whether or not nicotine is addictive.

Let me ask you first, I'd like to just go down the row, uh, whether each of you believes that nicotine is not addictive. I heard virtually all of you touch on it and just yes or no, do you believe nicotine is not addictive? I believe nicotine is not addictive, yes. Mr. Johnston?

Congressman, cigarettes and nicotine clearly do not meet the classic definitions of addiction. There is no toxic.

We'll take that as a no.

And wow, wow, unbelievable. Shout out to Michael Mann's classic 1999 film *The Insider*, which is about if you haven't seen it, please watch it. Incredible.

I'm just giving you a highlight. Yeah, this is literally. What's going to happen in under 18 months? Clip it now. Bookmark it. J. Cal was right about everything. Here's your clip, folks.

Yeah, clip.

Grunt.

Sam, get on this. And Dario are going to be on a stand there, and they're going to say, "Did you release this?" And then everybody's cryptocurrency wallet got hacked. Everybody's signal, whatever cryptid thing got hacked. That might not be that they. you know, hack encryption. That will probably be quantum computing's, um, legacy. But it could be that somebody programs, uh, a way to build a backdoor into everybody's phones, get them to download some, you know, exploit as the next, you know, a phishing attack, let's say. And an at-scale phishing attack that is just so good that 2% of society falls for it, and then it expands and 10% of society falls for it, and now you got 10% of people, you know, having their Bitcoin sucked out of their wallet. This is like a completely possible thing to do.

Oh yeah.

Uh, amongst many things. And that's, and that's just a human engineering device, right? There could be other things. And now everybody can create those things. It used to be if you wanted to learn how to do a phishing attack, you had to get into some dark web stuff. You had to go trade some wares.

Spoofing somebody else's domain. There's, there are technical elements to it.

To get those, you had to get into a community with other hackers. You had to have somebody send you the code. It wasn't like freely available inside a large language model.

Right.

And when you take the rails off of these and you have an open source one, oh my Lord, this is gonna get spicy. There's your media deconstruction for the day.

We should bring in our first guest, I think. Let's get started.

Let's do it.

So we've got Craig Pigott. He's the founder and CEO of Halter, Jason. They're a livestock management technology company centered around virtual fencing systems. Greg, thanks for being here.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Yeah. So tell us or show us what you're building and why you built it.

Cool. We built a, it's like a tech platform for ranchers, ranchers and farmers. At the center of that is a collar. Collar goes on a cow or goes on cattle. And yeah, we use that collar to train animals to respond to cues. And what that means for ranchers is that they're able to virtually fence and shift those cattle around their land. Um, that means the land's more productive. They can run more cattle. Um, we do a bunch of other stuff as well. We monitor health, fertility, calving. We measure grass. It's like an operating system.

And here it is. Um, if you're watching, you can see the collar there. It looks like a Fitbit with solar panels for cattle. This goes over their neck, um, like a harness of some type, like I have on my wrist here from my Whoop. Solar powered. GPS. I'm assuming it has accelerometers, heat sensors, heart rate. What, what else is in the sensor pack here? And how much does it cost to build something like that? Like, what does it cost per cow to, to make one of those? And then how do you, you charge for it? I'm very curious about the business model, but let's start with what sensors did you choose to put in there for cattle ranchers? Starting a company is hard enough. You need to focus on running your business and building a great product, and you need to clear all that office work, all those chores off of your plate. And that's why Every exists. E-V-E-R-Y is the all-in-one platform for incorporation, banking, payroll, benefits, taxes, basically your entire back office. And Every has worked with over 1,000 startups. If you're just getting started, they'll handle your Delaware C-Corp, EIN, and getting yourself a registered agent, all with no legal fees and no delays. And if you're further along in your founder journey and need to scale up your team, Everi will help you hire contractors in over 200 countries. Plus, you're gonna get 3% cash back on every dollar when you use your Everi corporate card. So head over to everi.io and stop wasting time on stuff that isn't growing your company. That's E-V-E-R-Y dot I-O, everi.io.

Yes. The core sensor that powers a lot of the analytics is the IMU. So accelerometer, gyro, magnetometer. We do track temperature and humidity and other things, but you can infer most health-related things and fertility and calving from behaviors, which is what you— we run models to kind of understand what's happening from the IMU. So that's kind of the core sensor. In terms of the model, it's a subscription. So you pay per cow per month. These multiple tiers and packages. It kind of depends on, on your operation. Um, and you don't buy the hardware, we give the hardware away for free. You just pay the subscription. So we've got about, uh, 1.5 million, um, collars out there across New Zealand, Australia, US, Canada, etc. Awesome.

Now there is an audio cue as the fence. Explain how you train cattle to, I don't know, go to the left, go to the right, Don't go forward. How does that work? You're not shocking them, you're giving them a vibration. Explain what's going on here.

The best analogy is when you're parking your car, you have the audio feedback from the sensors as you, like, approach walls and other cars, so it beeps at you. Very similar concept, left and right. So, animals know if they're approaching a virtual fence based on that audio cue. We also use, yeah, a vibrational cue. We do train them with a very low-energy pulse, which gives that sound meaning. Most cows or cattle today are trained to an electric fence and the primary cue is vision and we just turn that into audio. So, once they're trained, runs on the sound of vibration.

Yeah. And, what does it cost per cow per month? What's my per seat, per steak? What's my per steak cost here?

The base starting tier is around $9 per cow a month, but it depends on all the packages and things you add on.

So, you could spend $200 a year per cow. They're paying $200 a year. How many years does the cow wear the collar for before it is processed?

So the collar, imagine it kind of like a seat. You can scan it with your phone and tag it on or change any animal that it's on. So the collar will sometimes go on many cows, but most cattle in terms of the cows will be, say, 10 years if you're a dairy cow. Sometimes it's longer than that. If you're a beef cow, it's often— we collar them, the moms, like the calves that you raise often, Um, uh, for like the end product, um, you want them to kind of creep, graze ahead. And so we don't collar them. So we collar the cows mostly.

So what is the number one reason people use this? What, what is the selling point when you come in and they say, hey, this feature is why we're buying this? Because obviously it's got a range of features, but what is the number one? To keep the cattle in a certain location? Is that the number one goal?

Yeah, fences have lifted the— have given ranchers control of their land for hundreds of years, but they're really expensive. You can't shift them around, things like that. So the virtual fencing part of the product enables our customers to run more cattle, to actually utilize their land properly. So they can, they can rest the land when they need to. They can graze in the spots that the cows otherwise don't go to. Um, so we've got some customers that are running twice as many cattle on the same piece of land.

Hmm.

Because they're able to actually control it, not waste any grass, things like that. So that's the big value prop, but every customer is obviously different. Um, some of them are chasing genetics and metrics and things like that. So it kind of changes.

Okay. So I can more efficiently work my land, which means I can have twice as many cattle on my land. So this is enabling folks to go much bigger in terms of production. Um, so Talk to me just, uh, and I'm sure Elon's got a couple questions here, but how does this, um, work? You know, when we're out in ranch land here, we don't have, uh, internet, nor do we have power. Uh, so obviously it's got solar on it, but nor do we have like, uh, 5G. So, you know, if you're in ranch country, there's no way to get these. Are you hooked up to Starlink, or do people have to put repeaters on their property? How does this— actually reach and deal with that connectivity issue.

Exactly. In terms of the Starlink, the Starlink point. So it used to be base station or tower based, and that was all right on some of the less mountainous country. But in, like you say, through Montana, Wyoming, Colorado mountains, like the, the more kind of off-grid you get, the more you need that direct connection with Starlink. So yes, each collar now can talk to Starlink. And they also talk to each other, so they kind of coordinate a mesh. They, they elect the best leader to then talk to Starlink. That kind of saves power and cost and things like that.

Fascinating. And now it obviously doesn't have a dish, or you didn't put a Starlink Mini on the back of like the leader of the pack here. But how does, you know, a device that is the size of— it looks like a bread box or a loaf of bread. How does a device the size of a loaf of bread actually hit the Starlink? What is the technology there? 'Cause it's much bigger than a smartphone, but it looks like it's much smaller than a satellite dish.

It's about the same size as say a smartphone on each side of the cow. Got it. And it's exactly the same technology. So your phone can obviously talk to Starlink and so, well, some of them can depending who you work with. But so it's the same technology as that. It's like the direct-to-cell technology. So yeah, wherever you take a call on—

What's the speed of the direct-to-cell now? What is it at right now? How much throughput do you get? Obviously, you can store the information, and then when it gets a good line of sight, I guess it has better throughput like you do when you're doing direct-to-satellite. But these are like— aren't these still like a little drip-drip kind of situation, like dial-up modems?

Yes.

Or am I wrong?

No, they are. They are for sure. Well, it kind of depends. When we coordinate all the information between them and compress it and send it, it only takes like a few seconds every minute to transfer that data. We do run a lot of machine learning models on the device itself.

Oh.

When we need like 100 Hz access to certain sensors, we actually run those models on the collar. We train them offline, and then we put them onto the collar. That gives it obviously— you don't have a bandwidth problem.

So I'm curious. I mean, the— I, in the pre-interview, I was calling this collar essentially like Whoop for cows because you're, you're monitoring so much about each animal aside from just where it is. Can you give us a little insight? What are the most useful pieces of data a farmer needs Like when they pull up their cow on the tablet, what are the metrics they're looking at?

Yeah, so the Whoop or Fitbit for an animal is a small part of the equation. That's just the monitoring side compared to, say, the fencing and shifting. But on that side, obviously they care about animal health. They care about, are they fertile? Is this cow in calf? Is she calving? Is she in trouble? Do I need to go help? A lot of these animals are sometimes hours away, and they get on horseback and they spend 4 hours trying to Trying to find them, and so being able to know wherever you are, hey, this animal is healthy and you know behaving normally is is a really big unlock. We're working on some other cool stuff like measuring intake through the collar by counting bites and profiling bites, and then you can rank cows on efficiency and things like that.

So so you could literally know their jaw speed, how much they're eating by the tilting of the head, etc. What about cameras on this? Do you have cameras on it? Because I you know that's one of the things when you lose a cattle. We on my ranch here. Uh, the, the— my neighbor's got cattle. He rents his ranch out for, for cattle and, uh, had a fence go down. We had 2 cattle show up on lawn. Wife says to me, those are ours now, right? And I said, babe, let me explain to you one thing about Texas and how cattle works. Stealing cattle means they can murder you.

Yeah.

That's like the one thing you don't do. They're literally branded and they got an ear tag for a reason. People take cattle rustling.

Yeah, cattle rustling. That's what John Wayne would have called it. Like, he'll come after you.

That's like the number one no-no. We don't get to keep the cows. We do get to walk them over the fence, and then we get to rebuild the fence with our neighbor. And that's how ranches work. You rebuild the fence together. That's like when you and your neighbor get together. But what about cameras, video, et cetera? Like, is there a case for that? And then Because you could actually see what they're eating and you could process that and then you could then look at the output. Hey, what's the marbling on this cow? I'm just thinking from a selfish perspective on my Wagyu, but that is the other concern that ranchers have is how do I get the best product?

Totally, totally. We measure what they're eating, how much grass there is, like all of that information through using satellites. So we pull data off satellites, we then combine it with weather stations and data off the collar as well. We have a model that tells ranchers or farmers that information. So we don't have cameras on the device. Obviously your cattle aren't, they're always in like one place on your ranch. So if you want to know, hey, should I shift them over here and they're not there, then you wouldn't have that information. So we get asked about it a lot though. Um, you also in the Halter app, you can take photos of your land and it'll tell you everything you need to know. So, um, yeah, no cameras on the collars yet, at least.

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Collars. Yes. Yeah, it's good. We're about 600 people. Growth is really strong. We launched the US market about 2 years ago. We're about to go down to South America. We're hiring in all the markets at the moment.

How many cattle are there in the world? And if you have a million collars, what percentage Of the TAM do you have?

There's about 1.5 billion cattle in the world, so it's a very depressingly small percentage, uh, of penetration.

But that's actually called an opportunity in my business. The founder looks at it as, oh my God, we've done so little. The investor looks at it and says, yum yum. Not for the steak, but for the market opportunity. So there's 1.5 billion cattle You have 1.5, 1% would be 15. So you're at 10 basis points of cattle in harnesses to date. You literally can go 1,000x from here.

Totally. And obviously not all those cattle are going to be, you know, in the sweet spot for TAM, but you get an idea for this, for the size of the market. Um, and I think we view ourselves more as like also a tech platform for this industry. Like we, a lot of the product now that our customers buy is almost separate to, you know, the satellite product. I talked about, or using agents to help them run farms. These are kind of separate to the collars themselves. And so we're obviously trying to grow the product and expand globally at the same time. So, but no, business is good. We are, you know, heads down trying to scale.

Yeah, it sounds like scaling this is the easiest thing in the world. If my competitor, if a competing ranch has this product, And you go and sell it because are you doing founder-led sales still or just the sales motion now? Tell me about your sales motion. Still founder-led sales, you go meet the ranchers or do you have a sales team yet and how many people on the sales team? And then how did you instruct them? Like, this is This Week in Startups, explain the sales motion here so other founders can learn, please.

Totally. The sales motion is outbound, field-based, hyperlocal. So we put reps in every community on the ground and their job is to Literally, like, face-to-face, like, know every vet consultant and every rancher in their community and, like, build that community. So they're a territory manager, effectively.

So you broke it up by geo.

Yep.

And you also learned, critically important, that this is not an enterprise sale where you DM somebody, like, a login. This is salt-of-the-earth ranchers, farmers, vets. You have to build relationships. They have to trust you. And, and it's not going to be, you know, 2 20-minute Zoom calls and you got a customer.

Yes, we— it took us a while to find this model. Like, we, we tried lots of different things, like how do you sell to, you know, ranchers and farmers. And I think Toast became our inspiration. Like, they run an outbound hyperlocal— there's a lot of parallels, right? Like, people running restaurants aren't thinking about point of sale all the time. People running ranches aren't thinking about collars. Like, you kind of have to get in front of them and show them. But word of mouth is, it's the primary driver. Like the product is good, it does what it says on the tin, our customers love it, and then they tell their neighbors and that's kind of how it expands. So, but yeah, local reps. So we probably have 200 or 250 reps.

This is critically important, Lon. 600 people at the company, a third of them are doing the go-to-market. So once you get product market fit, which probably took you a year or two, I would assume. Yeah, Craig.

Longer.

Yep.

2 or 3 years. Okay. Was it because you didn't know what they needed or was it because the tech wasn't ready and you didn't have Starlink, et cetera?

Tech.

Yeah.

We, so before Holter, I was working at Rocket Lab, grew up running cattle, um, and was probably quite naive when we started the businesses. So we spent, I'd say a good part of 5 years.

Wow.

Deeply technical working out how to keep the collars alive in winter, how to talk to them, how to build the hardware, how to train cattle. Like, that was a tough, tough 5 years in the laboratory. Wow.

Yeah.

And so, on my parents' ranch, effectively, like, we were just, we were testing in field the whole time, which was a big, very helpful.

Oh, so you had an unfair advantage that you grew up on a ranch?

Yes.

Tell us about that. What did your parents think when you told them the idea? Were they, because a lot of times when you have an innovative idea, The market resists. And, and this is the standard issue lawn founders have. They have a vision, but the closer you are to the problem, the more resistance, because it's a paradigm shift. And they say, this is never going to work, we know better. But now here you are, son of cattle ranchers, you're the bridge between the paradigms. So what was the initial reaction your parents had to your vision?

Uh, They've always been supportive, but they definitely didn't believe— well, you know, they were skeptical.

Yes.

Of why. And, you know, so I think it took a while for them to be like, oh, this actually just looks like it's working. And, um, so love my parents, like, they've, they've helped us so much by just giving us free rein of their— yeah, you know, their land and their cattle. Um, we've been buying and selling, trying to work out how to train different breeds and things like that. So, but yeah, initially they would have been like, oh, Craig's just doing a fun little thing, you know, good on him.

This is critical, I think, just as we pause here for a moment. Every founder, and also being successful in life, you will face resistance. Nothing to do, as you said, your parents are great people, industry filled with great people. I know a lot of them now that I have a ranch. But change is hard for people. And the more time you've spent in a vertical, the more codified your belief system becomes. And this is why outsiders typically do a better job reinventing the hotel industry, or say the livery industry— Airbnb, uh, and, uh, obviously Uber— or stock market and the, you know, and how to buy and sell stocks— Robinhood. You will face resistance even from good people because they have codified their belief system and they have firsthand experience of it working. But then some new technology comes out They're not aware of that. And that is the job of the founder, Craig, is to walk them step by step through the vision. And it seems like it took you a couple of years to do that. Yeah.

Totally. And I think the— I was lucky because I went off to school to study engineering and then worked at Rocket Lab. And so I kind of, I guess, learned about startups and tech and chasing a mission in a different industry and then came back to farming and ranching. So I do think that was important.

But I I don't know.

I think you just try to build the best product, right? If you build a product that's so good, they can't ignore it. It's fun to use, has impact. Like, I think that's what we keep coming back to.

Yeah. And show us the app here. This is, I think, where things get super interesting, Craig. You know, you start checking off use cases, but we know apps are addicting and we know that data leads to better decision-making, right? So you had to lead the industry to adopt this technology. Great. You got some firsthand experience at Rocket Lab. That's a rocket company out of New Zealand. Yeah, with a very, very famous founder, by the way. Um, what's his name?

Sir, uh, Sir Peter Beck.

Yeah, he's a Sir Peter. Is Peter a Sir in New Zealand or a Sir in the UK?

We're part of the Commonwealth.

Yeah, they're the same. It's the same Sir.

I think all of the above.

Yeah. So people in New Zealand can become Sirs.

Same with Canada.

We haven't had it. We haven't had our independence moment. So we're still part of the Commonwealth.

Incredible that you can get that. That's very nice. So, but then something happens in the next phase of a startup. Once you have some adoption and you've hit that, then your customers go all in. They go from being resistant to being all in, and then their product suggestions happen because they're in that app. So show us the app and then tell us what 2 or 3 things have your customers demanded of your product that you didn't think of, uh, or that they— you didn't think maybe that was the top of the priority list. So let's take a look at the app, get a description of the app, and then tell us what the market is pulling you to do next.

I'd say, let me— I'll just talk for a second first. So Most of the products we've built have been demanded from our customers. So because they live in this product, they use it every single day of the year, they log in 50 times a day.

50 times a day.

It is how they run their operations. So they care so much about like, hey, this isn't right. I want this feature. Can you add this to it? And so our philosophy at Holts was to try and have the best engineering team and the best data scientists and designers, and then listen to our customers and let them really drive a lot of the feedback. So the features I talked about before where we are like measuring grass and telling them how it's growing and how to graze it, that was, you know, lots of our customers kind of were asking us for that. Like, hey, I've got this tool I can graze anywhere.

Where should I graze?

Help me decide where to graze. Same with animal health. Like we have GPS on every animal. We're looking at all this data. We needed to know that to train these animals well. And then you could see in the data, hey, she's clearly sick. She's grazing less. She's walking less. How come you aren't telling us this? Build an alert to tell us that she's sick. And so some of this, we, we have our own, you know, we have our own theories and run our own tests, but a lot of it has been market-led. And so then they feel like they're part of the journey. They ask for something, we ship it. We can update the devices when they're on. Like, we do that every couple of weeks. Obviously, you can update an app. So, the whole platform's evolving all the time. And ranchers and farmers have never had that. They've never had this like, I complain about something and then the product gets better 2 weeks later.

Yeah.

I mean, their product is a horse and a fence and maybe some webcams, but there isn't like there's a technology stack in this industry. You're the first technology stack, which is awesome. And, it's very interesting. When I got the Whoop and I started playing with it, I've played with all the platforms. They're all great and have different pros and minuses. But I got 2 alerts in the last, like, 2 years of wearing this, and both times it was skin temperature related. Now you get like your sleep is off, so I was getting some sleep is off for a couple days. And then I got this morning, your skin temperature is 2 degrees warmer than normal, how are you feeling? And they added an AI assistant to Whoop. Sure enough, both times it was a precursor to a cold.

Yeah.

And now I'm like, wait a second, if I know it knows I'm In the early stages of a cold. If everybody had WHOOP during the pandemic, you would have been able to tell people 48 hours earlier that they had COVID. You wouldn't need a COVID test, I don't think. You would just say, you have these conditions. Your skin temperature's up, your respiration is down. That is indicative of this. And then that Paxlovid or whatever you had to take, like, in the first 48 hours for it to be effective.

Mm-hmm.

People would take it versus 24. That to me is— you, you might save cattle that are on the brink of getting a disease, and then that's super power because each of those cattle— what is a cattle worth, you know?

Uh, like $3,500 at the moment.

Wow.

So you save 1 or 2 per year, that's the same as like 20 of these collars. Like, it pays for itself.

Yeah, a lot of these ranches are running on public lands, like Forest Service land, And they'll turn out 500 cattle and they go to gather them and they spend 3 weeks up there with 10 cowboys and they come back with, you know, 480. Like, they're like, we're missing 30. We don't know where they are. They look for them for 3 weeks. So even just finding them can be a challenge, but definitely.

Yeah. We saw, Lon and I saw Brokeback Mountain at, we went to the premiere. It was romantic. We had a long evening discussing the nuances of the film, but yes, some cattle gets lost. Yeah.

Yeah.

Even Lon has a spicy question. Okay, Craig, finish your thought and then we'll go to spicy question. Go ahead.

No, no, you go, Lon.

Oh, it's not very spicy. What I— it is sort of a breakoff from our Blue Sky is Falling. We'll do Reddit is Falling. Any time your company comes up on Reddit, I notice that there's a theme in the comments, which is people are very worried you're going to put them in the collars. This is to be used on humans. Cattle will be fenced in. Here's Wild Wild West where you can see them in the elaborate collars. Is he planning to use this on humans? So I'm giving you your opportunity right now to assure us there's no plans to put this on any human. There's there's me.

Actually, well, no. Actually, I talked to Craig before we got on here, and I've been like, Lon's performance is a little low, and he's been grazing a lot. Yeah. And I need to keep him slim for the road.co/twist partnership we have.

Just give me a little buzz. So Lon, yeah.

This isn't this is on your desk when you get off the show. Fair enough.

We get we get asked. almost daily about like, when are you doing goats? When are you doing sheep? When are you doing horses? And we always say there's so many cattle in the world. Like, we, we're barely getting started on cattle. We're doing nothing but cattle for a long, long time. Um, and obviously we're never doing geese. But no, it's, uh, those— some of those, um, stories weren't helped when we closed our founders fund, right, round, uh, recently as well. There was, there was a lot of— Crazy conspiracies floating around.

It is conspiracy corner.

It is.

Uh, for sure. Anytime in the Peter Thiel universe, the Thielverse just brings the conspiracy corner.

It's his name alone.

Yeah.

I think what you're doing is amazing because, um, number one, I like premium meat, but number two, um, being able to be more efficient with the food supply and to reduce, uh, disease And, to be more efficient in the land, not to be a hippie here, but it's important conservation. And, when you get a ranch, you really start thinking about conservation and how to work the land properly. I don't have cattle, but I probably will rent to some cattle ranchers portion of my ranch. And, I think it's very important that we apply some science here. Yeah. And so, I applaud it, but you were going to say something.

No, I was just going to say it's one of our oldest industries and I think it's been underserved biotechnology for a long, long time. And so yeah, it's been a really worthy and exciting mission. It's easy to get out of bed every morning when your customers love the product. It's in the real world. It makes a big difference. Whenever we're hiring, we say to engineers, like, come work on something that's actually in the real world. Like, go meet some of our customers. And they, some of them will cry like in a salesman about the potential, you know, how desperate they are for, for like gains in efficiency and productivity because they just haven't had any tools.

So That's fantastic.

It's been a really fun journey.

There's also one little tactical, practical thing. You know, every time I talk to a founder, there's so many lessons to learn. And you're right in a very important lesson that a lot of founders have. Founders sometimes are ADHD, ADD. I don't necessarily believe in these diseases, quote unquote diseases. I think it's all a little bit of BS. But putting that aside, the condition of being excited about new ideas and floating like a butterfly around, Is something that founders do because they're like, oh, I started this cattle company and oh yeah, I could put this on horses. And what's critically important for founders is that when they strike oil, that they keep drilling and they keep drilling down in the same spot and then they go adjacent. These are the 2 strategies. And I just want to make it very clear because I don't know if I have a clip of this to send to the 100 founders we invest in.

Yep.

Stay focused. Step 1 when you hit oil is to keep going straight down. Okay? That means cata, straight down, cata. You got cattle in New Zealand, you got cattle in Australia, keep going in Australia and New Zealand because the adjacent— the adjacency of going to horses means you're starting over. People who have horses are completely different. They don't slaughter the horses. They're not food. The horses are pets and they have incredibly high values, but they But people have a very small number of them. People don't have 1,000 horses on their ranch. They have 3. Completely different markets. So if you're going to go adjacent, make sure you've drilled straight down first. That's what Uber did. And that's why Travis succeeded. Everybody was telling him, you should do Uber for boats. You should do Uber for planes. Start an airline. Start this. Start that. And he was like, you know what I'm going to start? Vegas, London, Australia. We're going to take China. Same product, keep drilling straight down. When you drill straight down and, you know, it's pumping and they're, you know, you're, you're, you got every single ounce you can get and it's pumping regularly, yeah, maybe you can do an adjacency Uber Eats if it relates to the first one. It still has to be drilling. It can't be like, I'm going to build a farm or I'm going to build a hotel next to my oil rig. Still has to be the same. Concept drilling. Okay, great job, Craig. I just want to— does that resonate with you, Craig? And do you have people in the company now trying to distract you to do the second vertical?

Yeah, I think focus is important. I think you want to do things in series, not parallel, when you can. Um, we were exclusively in New Zealand commercial, growing 3x year on year for many years before we even thought about Australia, before we then thought about the US. So totally, I, I think that's There's 10 million cattle in New Zealand. You know, maybe we're on, I don't know, 5% of them. Like, long way to run. So even as we do geographic expansion within the same product, we try to be very, very focused.

And so you got to write that playbook. That was the other thing Travis did really well. He had Josh doing the playbook in New York. He had William doing the playbook in California. Then they compare playbooks and it was like, wait, these things are the same. Recruiting drivers are the same. Oh, okay. But recruiting the DoorDashers and the Uber Eats folks, completely different in New York because in New York they're on bikes. And in California, they're in cars and none of them are on bikes. 2 different groups of people, 2 completely different strategies. Okay, now you're going to Singapore. Okay, how do these lessons apply to another geography? It's going to be different. It's always going to be different.

Yeah.

And when you come to the US, they're going to be much bigger, I suspect ranches, and there are like 3 or 4 that probably represent some large percentage of cattle in the US, Craig?

Yeah, these, uh, there's definitely the big— like, some of our biggest customers are on hundreds of thousands of acres, especially now with the Starlink product. Like, um, some of them are probably bigger than half of New Zealand as a country. Um, so totally, like, the scale is, is huge.

All right, listen, continued success. Sorry I missed this investment. When you do your next round, maybe save a slice for JCal and thesyndicate.com. All right, Craig. Great job. If you ever make it to Austin, I'll take you for West Home. West Home.

All right.

Is the greatest New York strip out of Australia. West Home. That's my favorite.

All right.

I'm in Texas quite a lot, as you can probably guess.

Every Thursday, I have a little supper club. We do have a little steak, and we'll invite you out, and we'll compare some notes here. Cool. Thanks, Jason. Thanks, Craig.

Thanks, Craig. Wow!

What a man! That's an incredible investment. Can you imagine? Oh.

Especially once—

this is the problem with being an investor.

Once, once every protester in Hong Kong has one, imagine the TAM on that. I'm kidding, I'm kidding, I'm kidding. They're never gonna—

No, they are.

To be honest, you don't need to put a collar. Everybody has a smartphone and they've opted in to their own, uh, surveillance. Surveillance, you know, like we, we, we are opting in. And I'm— I've been looking at— there's a version of Android that you can get. It's an open-source Android that is not— it's like, um, privacy-first.

Sure.

And I've just been thinking, like, I gotta get this set up when I travel internationally. Like, I'm a target, you know, for information about the startups we invest in. Like, there's literally corporate espionage that occurs in our industry in a major way. Sure, of course. We don't really talk about it too much publicly, but I am thinking about building a new stack that is really resistant to the existing ecosystems in Android. Has this one. I was talking to Adam Curry. Um, I'm gonna guest host, uh, No Agenda on Sunday, uh, which I think is live at 12:30 Texas time, which would be 10:30 California, 1:30. So if you're a fan of No Agenda, um, a great inspiration for me, John C. Dvorak, who when I was coming up in the industry was this curmudgeoned, insightful, amazing commentator. And when I would get PC Magazine at the age of 13, 14, 15, 16 years old I would race to rip it open and go to John C. Dvorak's. He passed away a month ago.

Yeah, not long ago.

And it was very sad for me and a lot of folks. He was on This Week in Tech. He was one of the anchors there in the early days with Leo Laporte, which was the big inspiration, literally the inspiration for This Week in Startups was both. And I just like to give credit to my big brothers in this industry. I'm 55, Adam's like 61. I think John made it to 75, rest in peace. John, uh, was my inspiration as like a personality. Howard Stern on one side I was listening to on the radio, and John C. Dvorak's columns, I, I would eat them up. I would earmark them. I would underline them and say, someday I would love to get paid to write about computers. I literally had this dream when I was 13, 14, 15, and I got my PCjr, man, someday I could be like John Dvorak. Then they all did CNET and all these incredible things. I did Silicon Alley Reporter, CyberSurfer, my magazines. Like, my dream came true. It was really inspired by John C. Dvorak. I wanted to be like him. I wanted to have an opinion that was spicy, like Howard Stern, like him, that people would pay attention to. And here we are, you know, X number of years later. But to give Adam Curry his due and Dave Weiner, Dave Weiner created RSS.

Mm-hmm.

I started getting into blogging because my employees had left Silicon Alley Reporter. Rafat Ali created Paid Content and then Skift. I'm an investor in Skift. Shani Jardin went to Boing Boing. And I was watching this RSS movement. You could have this like open standard of RSS, really simple syndication. And it was like, wait, you don't have to have people come to your website. They can subscribe to this RSS feed and then the news winds up on their desktop. So I was so impressed by this. I started Weblogs Inc.

Yeah.

I called Brian Alvey. I said, we have to get in on this. We have to make 100 blogs. Now, at the time, nobody had more than one blog except for one guy. Nick Denton had 3: Gawker, Gizmodo— no, he had 2, Gawker and Gizmodo.

Yeah, at first.

And I was like, he has 2. I'm going to make 100 blogs. And that was the Dave Weiner influence.

It's hard to explain how revolutionary RSS was to people today because now So much media is decentralized. Anybody can start a Medium or a Substack and they're publishing. Back then you had to go through— it was like if the New York Times didn't want to publish you, that was it. You don't get published. And suddenly there was this way to publish yourself and send it out to anybody who has this link and they can just grab it. It was— it really changed everything.

So John C. Dvorak, an incredible inspiration. Then Leo Laporte. Oh, then Adam Curry says to Dave Weiner— now I owe a lot to Dave Weiner. Who is, um, an incredibly, um, just an incredible innovator. He created HyperCard, he created RSS and OPML. And then eventually Adam Curry said, can you add to the RSS feed an attachment, an enclosure? And he said, yes, it's built. Just that easy, because he was running the RSS standard. Then Adam Curry started taking MP3 files and attaching them to— Adam Curry, the famous, uh, MTV VJ.

The early VJs.

Yeah. Yes. And he was another inspiration for me because he started buying domains. And I was like, wow, this guy bought MTV.com. I'm going to start buying some domains. That's how I got into some premium domains because of Adam Curry. Then podcasting started happening. I said, we have to do podcasts at Weblogs, Inc. So John C. Dvorak, Adam Curry, Dave Weiner, then Leo Laporte started This Week in Tech as a web show and then as a podcast. And I was, uh, would be a guest on that. And sometimes I'd be on with John C. Dvorak, which was like, whoa, I'm on with the Howard Stern, the curmudgeon, the Roger Ebert of technology. I'm sitting next to them, Leo Laporte and John C. Dvorak. This is mind-blowing for me 20 years ago. And I said to Leo, hey, you know, I'm doing startups. Would you be okay with me doing This Week in Startups? He said, yes, go for it. I don't own the This Week in branding that was This Week in Baseball. Anybody can have that. We have This Week in Law done by this person. Everybody's doing This Week in Photography. Go for it. So I have those 4 people to thank for a large portion of my career. And Sunday I get to be on No Agenda. And just, I want to be able to say that to Adam and then thank John C. Dvorak, uh, you know, in memoriam. Uh, and so it's gonna be quite exciting to be on the pod. I'm gonna need to work with you on Sunday morning, Lon. I know you don't work Sundays, but I need some MP3 clips because the way he does his show is audio only. Sure. And then he cues up all the interesting audio clips like we just did for the tobacco one, and they just play clips and respond, play clips and respond.

I'll, I'll, I'll pitch it.

Do a search for No Agenda, folks. We'll put a link in the show notes.

Uh, Matija Milanovic from, uh, Hop Aero. He's the founder and CEO of Hop Aero. They are a defense tech startup. They're developing Rook, Jason. It's an autonomous hypersonic cargo rocket. Can't wait to hear more about that. Uh, Mattia, thanks so much for being here.

Cargo rocket.

Cargo rocket.

I've heard my friend Elon talk a little bit about this, um, because he was saying someday you could take one of his rockets, land them on the other side of the planet, um, but for transportation. And he was like, we can get to Japan in like 2 hours. I was like, we can go to Japan for ramen and come back? He's like, yeah, it costs $150,000 round trip, but sure. And ramen's gotta be safe. But what do you— yeah, tell us a bit about Hop Aero and where you're at with this. Welcome to the show.

Yeah, firstly, thank you guys for having me. Really excited to be here. So yeah, we're Hop Aero. We're building cargo rockets that basically deliver time-sensitive or high-critical assets pretty much anywhere on Earth in minutes. We're starting with Rook, which is our first vehicle that has a range of on the order of hundreds of miles that can do that in about 15 minutes. And so our goal is to expand from there and go to larger vehicles that have more range And that are able to carry more payload.

How big is Rook? How big is it in terms of height and capacity? What can I put in there? I obviously can't put a tank, but I could put a bunch of guns and ammunition, I'm guessing?

Yeah, so we're not publicly disclosing the exact dimensions of Rook, but very roughly 20-foot long. And so inside of that, we're planning on having a payload capacity of about 550 pounds. So the biggest use case, the one that we advertise publicly, is being able to deploy autonomous systems. So being able to go from one place in the Indo-Pacific to another place in the Indo-Pacific in 15 minutes, that's about 450 miles away, and deploy swarms of autonomous drones or counter-UAVs, so counter-drones, deploying electronic warfare systems, so like spectrum jamming effectively, deploying local compute, local power, things like that.

Amazing. So if I'm envisioning a scenario I don't know, a random one in the Pacific Ocean. Maybe there's an island. Maybe that island's a couple hundred miles away from another island. Maybe that island needs some defense, and we could send some defensive droids, clankers, you, you know, drones, pick what you want, on one side of the island. And then, hey, maybe there's something going on on the other side of this, you know, um, theoretical island that could use a little more defense. Yeah.

Exactly. I mean, if you look at how this has been done since the beginning of time, it's been, we've sent out 18-year-old boys into the front line. Initially, we had spears thrown at them, then we had bullets shot at them, and now increasingly other things. And so where warfare is clearly trending towards is getting these 18-year-old boys out of harm's way and ultimately the warfighter. And so the way we see it, obviously it's been shown in Ukraine in a kind of small scale. It's sort of like a lab experiment. But the way that it's clearly trending is Um, whoever is able to deploy autonomous capacity at range and at scale is ultimately going to be able to deter, um, the, the next major conflict.

And you've been working on this for 3 or 4 years now, I believe?

Uh, no, just under 2 years.

Just under 2. Okay, so you're under 2 years. Um, how does one go from fantastical idea— but, you know, Elon did lay some groundwork here, I think, in terms of, you know, investors getting comfortable with it. But you go, you go to Y Combinator, I understand, and then you got to pitch investors on this. If you're pitching it 10 years ago, it would have been a no-go. But last 2 years, we've seen some great, uh, you know, military tech companies and some great space companies. So the, the lane is there. You know who to pitch as an investment. How much do you need to raise to get from concept to reality? How much did you raise and how close are you to reality?

You made a really good point. We all stand on the shoulders of giants. We would not be here without SpaceX, without all of the kind of amazing defense tech companies like Anduril and so on. So we haven't— we've already raised a bunch of money. We haven't disclosed that publicly yet. We're still in the current YC batch, so we're not done yet. That's all I'll leave it with. But obviously, this is a capital-intensive business. That being said, one of the the coolest, like you talked about the why now in the previous conversation with Craig. A lot of the why now is that AI is able to augment a lot of the engineering development. So it's seeping into hardware development, not just software development. And so we're a very small team of 7, and we've been able to move at the speed and ferociousness of a team of probably 50 or 70.

Wow.

And so this is a really great time to be building at the intersection of hypersonics and defense.

Yeah. And the landing, And I'll tell you what, you need $30 million in this, like, Series A if you're doing it. Like, probably $20, $30 million is the bogey here in my mind. $200 million valuation, $100 million valuation, whatever it is, dilute 15%. That would be what advisors would say to do here. Just taking a guess, broad strokes. But the opportunity is you get a contract with Emil Michael And the Department of Defense/War. I prefer defense. I thought the war thing was a little too aggressive. It's kind of like you're trying to pick a fight.

Just defense is—

you want to come out for that? Department of Defense is so much better. Like, we don't want to be threatening people and provoking wars. Department of Defense was, I guess, so much of a better branding. But let's put that aside. We'll probably change it in 2 years. Um, that's just one man's belief.

I'm a Jedi, not a, uh, criticize Pete Hegseth.

for us?

Like, really unload for us a little bit.

I'm not gonna do that with my face while you guys are doing it. Not with our guest here. He's got to close the deal. Yeah, no, the point is—

I'm kidding.

You get the $30 million to build the prototype, but then the next step obviously is to get the government. What have you learned about getting that government experimental contract? Because say what you will about switching to Department of War, we could have, you know, philosophical debates on that, but this administration for the first time has said startups, startups, startups. Lower our cost, and we're going to support startups with early contracts. So how do you get in on the early contracts? How does that work today, game on the field for startups in your space?

One of the biggest things that we've seen is that renders and PowerPoints and all of that kind of takes you so far, but actually having hardware, having, you know, demonstrating that you can hotfire your engine that you've built from scratch in a couple of weeks, that speaks volumes compared to any other thing that you can do. And so that's That's been the biggest thing that we've seen, that prototypes only get you so far. It's actually showing clear, tangible progress. A lot of our conversations do start off with, again, like, what, how do you see this thing being like? You talk about an OV-1 in the military, you look at how do you envision this fitting in? And that's great. That'll kind of warm up the conversation. But at some point, you just got to whip out the iPad and start showing actual footage. Or better yet, you show up to an event or a conference, or you bring them out to your test site and you—

Ah.

We've had guests that we, we hosted, um, live hot fires for. It's, it's so much better than anything else you can show on, on a Zoom call or whatever.

I will put this piece of advice— we always have tactical, practical advice here, and we'll highlight this in the notes— as make it real. What we're trying to do as entrepreneurs when we do companies, or investors putting in there, is you're trying to take the story and the pitch and make it credible. How do you move from I'm just a pitch deck, I'm just a guy with an idea, or a gal with an idea, 7 people with an To, we actually have credibility. And we're all in a credibility race in life. The credibility comes from a fire test. The credibility comes from the team. The team can, you know, if you get past the pitch deck, anybody can make a pitch deck, but getting a team together, that builds credibility. But as you're saying here, uh, getting to real world, make it real. You have to make it real for people. And just firing off an engine and saying, hey, I can— fire off an engine without blowing myself up. That's like 0 to 1 in terms of pitch deck to real-world capabilities. That's, that's what you're saying here?

Yep, definitely. Yeah.

All right, listen, uh, I wish you great success in this. Um, there are a couple of hotspots in the world where this is going to be applicable. And it— is it dual use? Do you have a dual use where a rich person is going to be like, hey, can I get one of these because I got an island over here and I got a house in Palm Beach and I want— maybe the wrong metaphor for islands and houses, but I got— I live in Long Island and I got a place in— I got a place in the Hamptons and a place up in Albany. I want to move a bunch of stuff. I don't know what circumstance that is, but is there a dual use here eventually?

Well, not for that exact use, and I— if I can guess what you're— what you're getting at, but there is definitely a commercial use for this. So we already have companies that we're talking to and actually companies that we've signed on as early kind of pilot customers, ranging from manufacturing to cold chain transportation, automotive, other industries like that, where it's not necessarily the value of the part itself is almost irrelevant. It's what's the cost of not having it? And so those industries usually have very high costs of downtime. And so that has been an amazing wedge for us. That being said, we've had far more pull from the Department of Defense or Department of War, whichever your Choosing is. Um, and so we, um, we've, we've just focused a lot of our energy on that. That being said, yeah, there's a, there's a huge opportunity for us on the commercial side.

Unbelievable. Really appreciate you coming on the site. Where can people learn more? I'm sure you're hiring, and, uh, whenever this funding announcement happens, hopefully my, my name is on there, but I gotta get in on this one. I don't want to miss this one. I missed the, I missed the cattle collars. I feel like I need to get in on this one. Um, brilliant idea. Uh, looks like great execution to date, but who are you hiring for and where can people learn more?

So we'll be announcing roles, most engineering roles we need. We have a great engineering team so far. That's been our core team. We're looking, we're very picky when it comes to our people, but we're going to be hiring across GNC, aerothermal, structural assembly, and so on. So everything's going to be on our LinkedIn. It's going to be on our website. So keep an eye out.

Okay. And the website is hopaero.com. Hop Aero. Gonna change the world with this one. Thanks, Mattia. Did I pronounce it correctly?

Mattia.

Yeah, appreciate you having me.

Just great. And if you ever make it, uh, to Texas, or if you're based here, let's have a steak. I got 2 of you guys together. Yeah, Thursday nights, supper club. I'd love to. We'll get a steak. All right, talk to you soon, brother. Thanks for being here. Congratulations.

Sounds good. Thank you for having me.

What a, what a banger episode here.

2 for 2. We went 2 for 2 today on Founders.

2 for 2. I mean, you know what makes a great episode of This Week in Startups? A little bit of news, some great founders and some great founder lessons there. And of course, maybe a little more news and even going off duty. What do you got left for us, Lon? Is there another news story?

Yeah.

That the audience is demanding I comment on?

I, I think we should talk about NVIDIA taking over all of open source potentially. They've agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. Uh, that Hugging Face, of course, the public marketplace for open source AI models, datasets, The GitHub of machine learning, it's sometimes called. So Nvidia tried to buy it in late 2025, but they were turned down. Meanwhile, Nvidia's earnings report show another monster quarter forecast, 70% 2028 revenue growth while analysts were expecting just 44%. So Jason, I, I know you were talking about this. We've been talking about this for the last few days. Can you unpack for us what you see as Jensen's sort of play here? He's, he's open maxing, as you were, as you were putting it the other day.

Yeah.

Yeah, so this will be the big number one story on All In.

Sure.

Which will drop Saturday morning in all likelihood, maybe late Friday. Um, Jensen had a great open source Nimotron project. He has a great project internally doing open source for self-driving in partnership with Uber and other folks building the open source stack. He in his heart believes in open source. However, his customer base Was largely frontier models. Who needs the most compute? OpenAI needs compute. Anthropic needs compute. These guys are, or were a year ago, 90% of the token usage, 90% of consumption, consumer, etc. Obviously, friends at Google with Gemini also have a billion users using AI across their products. They may not be going there saying I'm going to use AI, but they wind up using AI. So he, with those 3 specific frontier model companies, and of course SpaceX, uh, they are big consumers of this, big customers of his. This record blowout quarter is directly because of those, let's say, 4 or 5 entities. You probably put Microsoft in there as well. However, open source is surging and he is looking at it going, wait a second, there's no open source champion in America. Who's the open source champion in America that comes to mind, Lon? I say open source in America. You say?

Um, well, I mean, it was Meta for a while. Well, right, sure. That was why I was having struggling.

You say nobody. It's a trick question.

You're right.

There is nobody in the lead. You, you stumbled on one. Yeah, hey, Meta has something maybe, but we don't hear about it that often. Maybe Apple did something in images, and, you know, we talked about it here. There's no champion. There's no Anthropic of open source yet. I'll tell you who the open source Competitor is it's Nvidia. Nvidia, when you say U.S. open source, you will say Nvidia.

Right.

U.S. open source equals Nvidia. Chinese open source equals Kimi. You know XAI, not XAI, ZAI.

Say DeepSeek. Yeah, Moonshot. The big the big labs over there.

All those.

Alibaba.

Now we have our U.S. champion. While the king was looking down, the jester stole his thorny crown. This is NVIDIA's big play. Sam Altman, if you remember, did big deals with NVIDIA.

Sure.

Sam and Jensen were super involved, remember?

Yes.

But you might be able to find in my notes, uh, the history of these 2, and you could tee it up for us here, Elon. I don't have it off the top of my head, but broad strokes, there was a major commitment. I think it's like a $100 billion commitment between OpenAI I'm gonna pull that up. And Nvidia. Yeah. And, and that $100 billion commitment was the first time we started having this discussion about circular revenue.

Yeah.

It was, it was on September 22nd, 2025. Altman did a huge $100 billion deal with Nvidia for, you know, they were chips, compute, all of that. Then just 14 days later, Altman announced a major equity agreement with AMD They're giving them warrants to buy up to 10% of OpenAI. Another one of these big circular deals. This was part of what set off that whole worry about circular deals. Jensen clearly was not sort of happy about this. By January, just a few months later, he was already telling industry colleagues— this according to The Wall Street Journal— he was already telling industry colleagues that his letter of intent with OpenAI is non-binding, sort of already talking about maybe walking back that deal. And he was reportedly criticizing a, and I'm quoting, lack of discipline in Altman and OpenAI's approach. In response to this, Altman then brought in Google vet Richard Ho. That was when they started working on their own inference chip, now called Jalapeño.

Right. So things got chippy. The relationship went from $100 billion in commitments to, I want an open relationship. Sam Altman said to Jensen, or didn't even say to Jensen, He just went and did the AMD deal, went and hired this person to create the Jalapeño chip, which is supposedly spectacular and is a really great inference chip. Of course, Jensen buys Groq, gets his own inference chip. Cerebras goes public with their amazing inference chip.

Yeah.

Now Jensen has to say, wait a second, all— if we're going to have an open relationship, that means I can see other people too, right? I'm straight— I'm straining with this poly cube here.

The one, uh, the one element we have not discussed yet is Poolside. Also this week, Nvidia made this huge deal, a sort of an acquihire. They're going to take like 100 engineers from Poolside. $6 billion plus a billion dollar— or $1 billion deal plus a licensing fee of $6 billion. So they're basically taking over one of the largest coding AI labs left that was independent, uh, as well.

Poolside makes their own version of Cursor, correct? They make their own version of Codex, OpenAI's coding, or Claude Code. I think it's called Laguna, I believe. Laguna, yes, as in the great hippie town, uh, in Southern California.

Yeah, Orange County.

Laguna is a very weird place. Um, I always was enamored with it, but I probably don't want to stay for Don't stay for more than 48 hours. It gets a little weird. But Laguna is a beautiful town. If you're going to go drive to San Diego, stop for a night in Laguna.

Irvine's not far from Laguna.

What's the story with Laguna? It's like a little beach. Everybody's a little bit weird there, right? I get weird vibes. Is it like rich surfer dudes? What is it?

It used to be like in the '60s, '70s, it was very bohemian. It was like an artist colony. So it has that like, like in the Keep Austin Weird, there was like a funky Laguna vibe that was different from the rest of like Nixonland conservative Orange County. I feel like less so today. It's become gentrified like everywhere else in that part of Orange County. And today it would remind you of Huntington Beach or Newport Beach or any of those other communities.

It's kind of like what happened with Venice. Venice was like a weird art community. Now it's like a yuppie community. So yuppie, right?

All these things get— because it's so expensive to live in any of these places now, the hippies and the bohemians kind of got kicked out.

So here's what I'll say Jensen's doing. Jensen is going to take open source. He's going to roll a rack into companies. He's going to roll a rack into the same companies, Anthropic and OpenAI, his top 2 customers, I believe. And he's going to go to the same customers Dario and Sam are meeting with. And he's going to say, oh, you're doing a bunch of frontier stuff with them? That's great. We power 72% of what they do. That's fantastic. Might I interest you in a rack? that has a Codex competitor that is unmetered. So he'll— he's going to go to Uber. And remember Uber, Andrew and the CFO and Dara were talking about their token usage?

Sure.

Now imagine Jensen says, hey, would love to stop by. He's a great sales guy. Just love to stop by, Dara. Um, maybe we take a couple pictures, have a little lunch, we talk about AI with your team, have all your developers come. Okay, great. And he says, how much are you spending on Claude? What's the Claude spend? What's the OpenAI spend? You spent $400 million? I got an idea for you. You're spending $400 million on tokens. I think that's probably what they're spending. Literally half a billy, half a billion dollars going into frontier models, $500 million. If you want to know how Anthropic is hitting $50 billion, if you want to know how OpenAI's hitting whatever it is, $30, $40 billion, And you want to know how they're hitting that? Customers like Uber. And he slides in and says, by the way, I got this Laguna and you're using this. You're spending $500 billion. Can we get like maybe $100 billion of that? We'll slide in some racks. We'll slide in some racks. They'll be here tomorrow. And nothing you're doing goes up to the frontier model. Everything stays on-prem. You got the AI sovereignty. And it's unmetered. And they say, oh, what do you mean unmetered? There's no shocking bill at the end of the month. And the CFO goes, wait a second. You're telling me I could set up a rack here, and my developers can go to town, and I don't have to get in the middle of an argument between Dara, Andrew, the CTO, this person on our AI spend because we know it's $100 million capped. We know it's $100 million.

Yeah.

It's $100 million in servers and electricity. We put that in. And depending on how many tokens we can squeeze out of it— and you're telling me your open source product's getting 30% better every 6 months, and it's going to get 50% better? Oh, and, uh, you're optimizing the hardware, and that's going to get 50% better every 18 months? And I'm unmetered. Unmetered is the word we're going to be talking about in 2027. It's not going to be token maxing. It's going to be un— 2 ways to be unmetered. You're going to buy a rack from Jensen, and that means massive headwinds for Anthropic and their coding products. And the coding products are toast. The Frontier model coding products are going to have a really hard time competing with an unmetered option.

Hmm.

This is going to be in the S-1 for Anthropic and for OpenAI as their number one risk factor. The number one risk factor is not data centers getting shut down. It's not cybersecurity. It's Jensen providing Laguna on an NVIDIA rack and them losing the developer customers, which are the tip of the spear. That's why he bought Hugging Face. That's where the developers hang out. That's why he bought Poolside. That's why he has those 100 engineers. And that's why he has Laguna. He can now Go after the 2 most profitable parts of OpenAI and Anthropic.

There you go. Think they're going to keep calling it Laguna or Nimotron? Which, which brand is going to win out?

Laguna is going to stick. Okay, they'll keep with that. Um, but it's going to be NVIDIA's Laguna, which means Poolside Laguna. Okay, sounds a little hippie-dippy. Will it be here in 3 years? Will it be here in 3 years? So if Poolside comes and says, hey, we want to roll in a rack with Laguna, they say, okay, you got to get the rack, we'll put the software on. It's not one product, it's two. Now you got 2 vendors, 3 vendors. It's going to be one vendor coming in, right? Boom, whole stack with it. And it's NVIDIA's Laguna, which means instead of having 100 developers on it, it's going to have 1,000 developers on it. And instead of you wondering, will it exist in 2 years, and am I investing in a startup that maybe doesn't exist in 2 years, you're going to say, oh, the largest company in the world, right?

Right.

The largest company in the world worth $5 trillion has made a $20 billion commitment to open source. Yes, I'm going with that. That will be the discussion of 2027. That means that you could see NVIDIA add a third of the market cap of the top 2 frontier models.

Wow.

So if those 2 companies are worth $5 trillion, they have a right to 30% of it. That's $1.5 trillion in additional market cap moving from Anthropic, if it works. Moving from Anthropic and OpenAI, 1/3 of their revenue moving over to Nvidia, if it works. This is the biggest news ever. This is the news of the week, not Nvidia's blowout quarter. It's Jensen going all in on, on open-source, open-weight coding tools is the biggest story of the year. This is the biggest story of the year.

There you go.

And nobody's talking about it.

Except you. Except you are. And, and now we will be across our social media channels. We have to make it clear.

Anything else in the news that I have to comment on?

Well, do you want to talk about— as long as we're talking about the massive amount of AI compute heading our way, should we talk about the slop that this AI compute is going to make? We, we had already touched on this Stan Druckenmiller, uh, AI slop in the Wall Street Journal. I don't know if you want to— you want to go back into it.

I mean, I'm curious. You're, um, an artist, a writer, a creative.

Yeah.

When you go to the editorial page of your favorite publication, and I'm sure you read the New York Times editorial from time to time, or Washington Post, or Wall Street Journal, you wind up on the editorial page. Explain what your belief is And your expectation of an editorial page at a premier publication.

Yeah. I mean—

And there is— Wall Street Journal is the number one premier publication in finance, the number 2 in news in the United States.

Sure.

What is your expectation, Lon Harris, when you go in there?

Well, I think it's important to make the distinction. There are a million ways to communicate, especially if you are a prominent or notable figure in the world like billionaire Stanley Druckenmiller. There's— there are so many avenues. You could call a reporter, you could have a press conference, you could post a tweet. You could make a little video of yourself, a pod— do a podcast. There's a million ways to get your message out. If you're going to go to a newspaper, one of the most respected newspapers in the country, and say, I want to write an op-ed for you, to me, that's setting the expectation that this is going to be a piece of writing. I want to not only share my insight, I want to make an argument, build an argument that I think is going to be important for the national conversation. I wanna steer our national discourse because I think I have something so important to say. I have an argument that's so important to make that I want to share it. And it's not different from if you think of the founding fathers, if you think of the early days of America where they were writing pamphlets all the time, Alexander Hamilton sharing his pamphlets with everybody. That's the idea. Or Thomas Paine with Common Sense. It was like, this conversation is happening. I need to be part of it. People need to hear my take, and I'm going to build that argument in a piece of writing. To me, that's a promise to your reader that that writing is your own, that it's your argument, that you've thought it out, that you're advancing it carefully, and that every word, every sentence, every line of that is your own original work. Any piece of writing that you publish, I think that's the promise you're making. And in fact, at Launch, where, you know, I sort of oversee a lot of the editorial, we don't—

You are the editorial director.

I am, in fact. All of it you oversee. We don't publish anything front-facing that is just written by AI. We use AI constantly. We use AI for everything. Most pieces of writing that I do for the company, I've at least consulted with an AI or multiple AI bots on it.

For research or proofing?

Every— everything you could think of from what should I write about to what, you know, like what are— what would be the good—

So ideation?

Ideation.

You just described.

Research and then helping me. I think the hardest thing about writing personally is the blank page, starting from nothing, and you have to get words out.

Mm-hmm.

It's much easier to edit than to write. And, and so that's where I think AI can be such a crucial time saver is get something down on paper. It doesn't have to be good, it just has to be relatively accurate and mostly what I want. And then I'll go through and I'll fix it. And that's the essential part of the entire process to me is the, AI produced this. I'm going to tweak it and edit it and change it so that it reflects my own work. And that's also when you learn about it and think more deeply about what you're writing.

Two out of three, Lon, of my followers. Did you know I have 1.7 million followers on X?

Yeah, you blow. You blow.

I didn't know that. I thought I just broke a million. I gotta look at my chart of followers. I went from like a million to 1.7 million. In—

it's been like a year. 2026, I think. Like, you started 2026 with like 1.2, I think. I want to say something like that.

What is— what are you— why are you people following me? Is it because I'm spicy, or is it— maybe it's my membership thing?

I don't know what's causing the growth. I think it's just somebody's doing some amazing editorial.

I think you got to do some more direction here. I got— I, I gotta start writing again on my Substack. So if Druckenmiller did not have the time to write a piece of 800 words or so— I think it's probably 800-word piece, 1,000-word piece.

Yeah, thereabouts.

If you don't have the time to write 1,000 piece, then the proper venue is to jump on CNBC or All-In Podcast or whatever it is, and then just discuss your position in your own words. But you don't believe an editorial page should have AI-written copy on it because, if I'm interpreting correctly, in that venue there is an expectation that you took the time to construct your argument in the prose. And, and that's exactly how I feel. Yeah, I feel if you're going to write something with AI, it should be labeled as such in the first sentence up front. Just like if you make an AI video of a shark attack and it's a recreation of it, uh, in a documentary people would make recreations, a reenactment, right? And they say, uh, reenactment.

Or you see artist's interpretation or artist's rendering. Yeah.

Correct. So why in documentaries did people start putting, um, this is a recreation, and then this is actual footage? Why? Because the expectation of the audience was, if you're gonna put some video in there, it's real video.

Right.

This is a documentary.

Yes.

It's very simple. I think the documentary analogy, which I didn't get to on All In, we had a pretty vibrant debate about it. Um, the, the best analogy I've come up with, I, I— I was kind of thinking this is kind of like Milli Vanilli lip-syncing. I was saying there's some plagiarism feeling to this. You're plagiarizing from the AI. But at the end of the day, I think this is the expectation of the user, similar to a documentary. If you're gonna do a reenactment, if you're gonna do an interpretation, you're obligated. You are super obligated. And the mistake that The Wall Street Journal made, and then subsequently Druckenmiller made, um, this combination of not checking the work and not disclosing to the reader is why there's such a strong reaction to this.

Of course.

Now, there's a group of people who are not good writers. And the people who are not good writers say, well, I should be able to use a tool to make my writing better. Of course you should. But you shouldn't say, here's my ideas, write me a piece, publish it, and not disclose it.

Yeah.

If we're gonna do slop, I want— and I will call it slop because I don't think it comes out that good, even if it is the best ideas. If you're gonna deceive me, I'm all out. I feel like you've broken the trust here. Just like Milli Vanilli broke the trust, just like some documentaries broke the trust. There was a documentary my friend was in recently. They used ElevenLabs to put in a sentence he didn't say because they wanted him to say a certain sentence. This is the kind of stuff that erodes trust. If you've eroded the trust of the reader, the consumer of the information, you failed at your job. Wall Street Journal failed at their job. Druckenmiller failed at his job. They could have solved this by just putting written with AI at the top.

That's what I was going to say is, Jacob, if you pull up the original, uh, Wall Street Journal piece that Druckenmiller posted, there's a byline. I mean, it couldn't be any clearer. There's a byline that says, written by Stan Druckenmiller, right there at the top. That's a lie. That's not— he didn't write it. He wrote it with— if he and I wrote it together, it would say Stanley F. Druckenmiller and Lon Harris. And if it didn't—

With Lon Harris.

Right, and if it didn't, I would write in the Wall Street Journal and be like, what the hell? Why wasn't I credited on my brilliant op-ed? This morning with my friend, my friend Stan.

Does this piece have a disclosure now after this whole brouhaha on the commentary? Is there any disclosure in the first sentence or two?

I revisited it this morning and did not see one. I don't believe.

At the end of the piece, is there a—

Nope, nothing.

Here?

No, there— they seem to be—

Still nothing. And the Wall Street Journal is holding on to this is a fine thing to do, correct?

Their, their response is basically this represents Stanley Druckenmiller's point of view. He approved it for publication. So it's fair game. It's fine. You're allowed to use. And I think that's what some of the other besties on All In are probably arguing as well, that the idea is, you know, well, you would use Google to write. You could use Grammarly to fix your—

we don't—

we wouldn't disclose every other tool that we use. But I think the fundamental difference is that those other tools aren't doing the writing for you. They're fixing or adapting your writing. And Claude or GPT or whatever model he used to compose this is actually doing it for him. And you don't—

I'll tell you, people are going to change their position on this, um, based upon what story, um, was written.

Sure. And the author.

In addition to this story. Yes. And the author. So the editorial page will sometimes, um, you know, uh, be a little spicy with, uh, politicians. And, uh, here, if you look at this URL, if you pull it up, uh, Andrew Serbane— I'm not sure who that is. Um, this is a Republican strategist with 97,000 followers. His avatar is, um, the famous wrestler from the film They Live.

Oh, that's, uh, Roddy Piper. Rowdy Roddy Piper.

From They Live.

Sure.

Which is a very interesting avatar to have given the context. And he says, it appears the most recent screed from the pro-Amnesty Wall Street Journal editorial page attacking J.D. Vance was 100% written by Amy.

Correct.

So now we are going to be in the awkward position of using Pangram to go through every single editorial from the last year, and we're going to find out who's not wearing shorts because the tide's about to go out.

I think this is people being deliberately obtuse. I feel like it's very obvious. It's easy to understand the distinction between no human in the loop and human in the loop. If there's a human in the loop, I agree, that's fine. You're just using a tool. It's making you better, faster, more efficient. Nobody has a problem with that. I don't have a problem with that. It's letting the tool do the work for you and then being like, job well done. There you go, Washington Wall Street Journal, publish away.

And, you know, new kids on the block. I think there was a, um, a lawsuit about them. I'm trying to remember. Did they lose to the New Kids?

No.

New Kids on the Block. There were a couple of these lawsuits, if I remember correctly, from the '90s or 2000s, and I don't know how they actually worked out. But if you were paying for concert tickets, here it is. Yes, I'm correct. Chicago Tribune, Link Sync Suits Forcing Courts to Face the Music. A lot of disgruntled pop music fans seem to be showing up these days in Cook County Circuit Court. Aided by willing attorneys, fans such of such groups as New Kids on the Block are turning grievances, real or perceived, into class action lawsuits in what some experts say is an abuse of an otherwise valuable legal remedy for large-scale consumer fraud.

Not the New Kids.

And not— it is the New Kids. June 7th, 1992. I was 21 years old when this happened, and I, I can't believe I even remember this, but there it is. Um, I don't think this requires a lawsuit here, but that is— I wonder if there needs to be disclosure for lip syncing when you go to a concert. Is that a thing?

I mean, the presumption is that's not happening on a wide scale. That's what got Milli Vanilli in all that trouble. Yeah.

All right, uh, let's go Off Duty. Anything in Off Duty that people should, um, should be aware of?

Well, here in Austin, the mosquitoes are an issue. I have to go out like fully covered head to toe when I take Barry outside or else I get stung. It's impossible. So you tweeted that you want one of these blue laser mosquito air defense systems, essentially Israel's Iron Dome, but to keep insects outta your backyard. It uses sensors to find mosquitoes midair and zap them. It scans a 20-foot, 90-degree field with LiDAR, radar, and AI vision.

Mm-hmm.

It could target insects as small as 2 millimeters, Runs for 4 or 5 hours on one charge. And as you can see, you actually get to pleasantly watch the blue laser flash when it has spotted and is taking out one of your insect rivals.

I want to invest in this company. I want to buy this product for my off-duty selection this week. I'll show you how I solved the problem at my ranch. Um, go ahead and pull up what I just sent you. This is a $250 device meant for like barns and places where you have animals that get harangued by this, but humans as well. And, um, we had a big ethical discussion about killing mosquitoes and bugs on the ranch. And then what happened was the entire family got taken out by mosquitoes inside the house, outside the house. You live on a ranch, you live in Austin, there's like 3 or 4 months where it is acute and insane.

They're everywhere.

I have 2 of these in the backyard These things supposedly do 2 acres. I put 2 of them just in the backyard, and we went from having, you know, everybody getting 5, 10 mosquito bites a week to, you know, nobody getting mosquito bites anymore. We have little ones inside, we have these 2 big ones outside. We put these 2 big ones outside. I highly recommend you get one of these for your backyard. Just plug it in permanently.

Yeah, I'm doing it.

Plug it in permanently. Well, here's the other thing that You get skin infections, and this happened to me. I all of a sudden had, like, 5 bites. I scratched them. The natural bacteria you have on your skin or on your nails, if you scratch, goes into the exposed bite.

Yes.

And then you get a rash. So, everybody— and this is a new thing for me as a Texan, and for you as well. Never got this many mosquito bites.

No.

10 in a week.

Not in California.

I got 3 or 4 of them on my legs. Then I got, got an infection. I had to get Mupricin from an emergency care clinic. I had to literally go there and put this cream on my legs to kill the bacteria so I wouldn't get this crazy infection. It was so freaking painful. Yeah. To want to scratch my legs 24 hours a day that I start wearing long pants. I get these 2 things and now I've got it under control. Kill all mosquitoes around your house. There's another There's dozens of other acres for them to exist on, but no more around our house.

Couldn't agree more.

Enough.

It's, it's a nightmare.

Uh, anything else? And that's my off-duty take. Make sure we put the link in there. People love when we go off-duty on Fridays.

I want to— I have a couple very quick streaming recommendations. I haven't done one of these in a while. I watched a real— I thought this was a really great movie. I didn't see a lot of other people talk about it. Uh, it's The Wizard of the Kremlin, it's called. It is a— it's a true story It's a film about the rise to power of Putin. Jude Law stars as Putin. Paul Dano plays his propaganda minister. Vadim Baranov orchestrated his rise from, you know, head of the KGB, basically government bureaucrat. How did he become the— not only the, like, leader of Russia, but this autocratic, extremely powerful, dug in? It's a really fascinating story. It's a long movie that kind of takes you through the entire, like, how the rise of Putin happened, obviously fictionalized. It's not the exact— it's not a documentary, but it's very compelling. Great performances from Jude Law and Paul Dano. That's on Hulu and Disney+ right now. And that actually, it's Oliver Assayas. I don't know how exactly to pronounce his name. Is the same director as Carlos. We've talked about how much we liked that Carlos the Jackal movie.

Oh, this is the same guy?

Same director as Carlos.

Oh, I'm watching this this weekend.

Yes, Olivier Assayas. Or Asaias. I'll look up how to pronounce it.

If you can get Carlos the Jackal, um, Carlos the Jackal is a, um, 5, 6, 7-hour miniseries, but there's like a 3-hour version as a movie. If you can get the miniseries somehow on one of these services, that is just prime.

I believe it's on Criterion Channel. I believe they have the full 3-part Carlos miniseries that he did. They did also condense it.

Olivia, tell us the name of this one more time.

Uh, this is called The Wizard of the Kremlin. Kremlin. And it's just a movie, it's not a series. It's like a little over 2 hours, uh, but it's, it's very good. It's really well done. And it's, it's, it's, uh, like a lot of details that I'd never even heard before. You know, you know the outlines. He was KGB, and then he sort of— right, he's always had this obsession about reuniting people with Russia. Well, I'm not with— Really, really interesting. The other one I wanted to quickly mention, another historical period drama. This one's a series. It's from the UK. It's on Prime Video. It's called King and Conqueror. And it's about the events leading up to the Norman invasion of England and the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Nicholas Coster-Waldau, who was Jaime Lannister in Game of Thrones, and then James Norton, who was just on—

No way.

This season of House of the Dragon. He was Ormund Hightower. They play Harold II and William the Conqueror. And it's about— they were friends and then rivals, and then it ends up being this big battle for who gets to be King of England.

Love it.

Very good. Well done show. I'm, I'm really into it.

Awesome. Uh, are you watching Lanterns? 2 episodes in.

I am watching Lanterns. I'm, I'm all caught up with Lanterns.

What's your take on Lanterns? 2 episodes in.

I'm really enjoying it. I think it's a nice balance. It feels like it gets the comic book. You're getting references. It doesn't feel totally alien from— no pun intended— from the DC Comics, but it is its own thing. And that's what I really like. Like Andor, like the Penguin, when it can feel like its own TV show with its own vibe that is also faithful to the source material. I feel like that's the perfect balance. And Aaron Pierre, so good as Jon Stewart. I loved him in that, that movie that now I'm blanking on the name of.

Oh, it was like the Rambo movie where he's like—

I'll look up, I'll look up what it's called.

There is a Rambo sendout that the person playing Hal Jordan— Rebel Ridge.

It's on Netflix right now. Look up that movie.

Rebel Ridge is a great popcorn movie. Like, just starts out, it's like, it literally is like Rambo where like oppressed individualists—

Yeah, he's a vet.

Has to like manage.

Gets in this battle with this local sheriff, Don Johnson. It's really, it's really well done. He's a great actor and he's also a perfect Jon Stewart. So yeah, the Jon Stewart, Hal Jordan vibe in this is a lot of fun and I recommend it.

Yeah, I love this actor. I would say for This Lantern series, it's a slow burn. It's a slow burn. It's very evocative of Ozark, which was a great series. Slow, methodical. The aesthetics of the show are unique, like True Detective or Ozark. It has an aesthetic that is not comic book aesthetic necessarily.

I was thinking it's like— it reminds me a little bit of Taylor Sheridan. Like, it reminds me of, like, Landman vibes almost. Or something like that.

Yeah, I'd say True Detective or Ozark, because these— the people who are involved in it were involved in those series, I understand. Anyway, I don't think you have to watch it episode by episode, 'cause it's incredibly frustrating 'cause it moves so slow as a detective kind of thing. I think I want to just wait till it's over and watch it, like, in, you know, 4 or 5 days. I want to give an update. I love my man bags. I had talked about this Alpaka Bravo Sling Max 8L RFID-blocking sling bag. laptop bag I bought for $160. I love this thing. It's constructed incredibly well. I like to take it with me because it fits my MacBook Pro 14-inch. $160. I thought I'm a genius. $160, I love it. That's not an expensive price. That's a reasonable price for a bag.

Sure.

So I think I'm a genius, right? This thing's got all these great features. Then I'm at the Uniqlo store with my daughter in Japan. And I'm buying stuff up. I'm loving Uniqlo.

You're a big fan. Yeah.

Huge fan. This is the— I don't want to join any more boards. I want to be on the board of Uniqlo to learn. So I'm putting that out there in the universe. If somebody, like, if Uniqlo needs a board member— You know a board member.

You know a Uniqlo board member.

I know Kathy, who's on the board. If somebody, if they eventually need an American to, like, you know, maybe I can be of value in some way, I'd like to join that board. It'd give me another excuse to go to Japan. I go to the Uniqlo store. I'm walking out, about to leave, and I see they have messenger bags. I buy this one. I'm gonna buy this one for you. Oh, I'm gonna send you this.

I love the messenger bag. Mine's a little old now. I need a new one.

All right, so, uh, can somebody here just— I order like— I want to order like, uh, 3 of these for my podcasting team doing a great job. One for Jacob, one for Salah, one for Jordan, one for Zach, one for Niels, and one for Lon. I need to 6 of these ordered.

We'll let Heidi know. Please, we'll let Heidi know.

I'll let Heidi know I want 6 of these ordered to my office. Look at this, 6 for the price of 5, for the price of 1. Here's my Uniqlo bag that I bought in Japan for $19. $19 available, available here. I sent you the link, uh, guys. Timing, please. Let's— I try to keep your finger over there. Unisex Unity Shoulder Bag is the link. In the United States, you can— it's in the Slack room.

I see it.

My Lord, slow on the trigger, boys. Come on now. Here we go. This bag is essentially the same bag. I like each bag individually. They make it in black, they make it in green, so I bought it in green since I have the other one in black. I find myself equally reaching for both. The Uniqlo one's a little bit lighter, but it has all— essentially all the same features. It doesn't have a Faraday bag in it, it doesn't have a pass-through USB. Charger, but it's essentially the same bag. It fits my number one thing, which is I want to take my 14-inch, 48 gigs of RAM MacBook Pro with me when I go on a hike in case I get inspired. I want to write some stuff. $29 in the US.

Wow.

$19 in Japan. Unbelievable value. If you don't know Uniqlo, man, I listen and you guys know I got a little bit of chatter here on the side. I made a little bit of cash, a little bit.

I'm doing all right.

I'm doing okay. I get a couple speaking gigs here and now and again. I'm doing— J-Cal doing just fine. I love value, and when I find something that one-ups the value, oh yum yum for J-Cal. I'm like, oh my God, I got this for $19 in Tokyo. That paid for my business class ticket there in my mind, in my crazy deranged mind.

It's expensive.

That was what happened. All right, listen. Uh, another amazing episode of This Week in Startups. This Week in Venture Capital is what we do every Wednesday here on the show. Uh, we also release This Week in AI, and I had instructed, uh, my, my editorial director here to set up This Week in VC.

Yes, I, I have not done it yet.

Thumbs down.

It will be done soon.

Oh, okay. So, uh, but we have thisweekinaiai.ai. Exists. Go sign up for it. It's got 8,000 subs. Uh, Lon has been given the directive to make This Week in Startups, This Week in AI, and This Week in VC Substacks. This is my instruction to you, and this is important. The reason I'm putting this in the show is I'm teaching entrepreneurs constantly. I think Substack is its own unique ecosystem. You told me we're not paying enough attention to it.

I agree.

I said, okay. I took Lon off a bunch of other work. I said, Jacob, you take that. I just want you solely focused on optimizing this until we get a growth strategy going. And then what is the least amount of work we can do on these newsletters that provides the maximum amount of value? That's the game we're playing. You made a great short for me on, uh, for This Week in AI. I don't think we emailed it to the list yet today. Please email it to them with a link to it.

I'm putting together this week's This Week in AI. newsletter right after we record this. It will, it will be in there.

I want you to just do, uh, one that says we're now doing shorts on how to and demos. Here's our first one. You can find these on Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, and YouTube, whatever, uh, and X. Here's all the places. And then tell me how many people then subscribe to those. But a dedicated email with just that video and then ask them which other how-tos would you like us to do? My belief is sending— we had a website called Hackaday that we created.

Sure.

I came up with the name, and Hackaday became our most profitable, best, um, blog at Weblogs, Inc. Why? It did one thing every day. We featured somebody else's hack with one sentence describing the hack and a link to it. This thing took, I don't know, a couple of hours to find the best hack and 10 minutes to write the one sentence. So it was really the curation of it. And I wound up not selling Hackaday to AOL. It's an interesting storyline. When I sold WeblogSync to AOL, the legal department said, hey, um, and it was Time Warner AOL at the time. They said, uh, yeah, we need you to take down these 17 stories on Hackaday because you're teaching people how to hack the Time Warner—

Right.

These lunatics had linked to Hacking Time Warner set-top boxes and everything. I said, uh, to the counsel, this thing makes like $300,000. This thing's making like $1,000, $2,000 a week. It's costing us $500 a week. It is de minimis. Can we take it out? You can take $300,000 off of the purchase price and let me own it. I will personally buy it. I took some of my proceeds from the deal and I bought it. Then I wound up selling it for $1 million or so. I think $500K or $1 million. I made like a couple hundred grand selling it to somebody because I didn't want to manage it. I should have never done that. But anyway, Hackaday was this perfect combination, providing massive value with a very small amount of work, but you had no choice but to open it every day. That's my goal for you with This Week in VC, This Week in AI, and This Week in Startups newsletters. I want you to report back here on your plans for those and how it's going so we can teach people my editorial trick. Sure.

We'll do it next Friday.

Most value.

We'll do it next Friday.

Okay. Most value for the least amount of work. That's the exercise I want you, Lon Harris, editorial director.

I'm on it.

Jason Calacanis to do. You're on it. I'm on it. See you all next time. Bye-bye.

Bye, everybody.