How to Raise a Seed Round in 2026: Ask Jason | E2294

People in our secret group chat have questions for me. Some might be spicy.

What do you think, uh, founders should be doing to try to sort of give themselves a little bit of moat against OpenAI?

There's always going to be a feature set that the interface of the large language model is not going to add.

Out of all the people in Silicon Valley, who's the one person you really don't like the most and why?

Some people have damaged the reputation of the industry and the user base, and then some people have just maybe screwed over friends of mine. I've been a consistent critic of. Every time he had a chance to do the right thing for humanity, he picked his own self-interest.

It's a level of selfishness in decision-making that— and cutthroatness— that I understand, but I wouldn't do, and I think has damaged the reputation of the tech industry. The two people I'm talking about are two of the most successful people ever in the history of business.

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All right, Lon Harris is here. I'm Jason Calacanis.

Uh, people in our secret group chat on X, formerly known as Twitter, have questions for me. I'm going to answer them. Lon is going to give me these questions. He's vetted. Some might be spicy. Could be political, it could be, uh, technical, it could be startup related, it could be life, it could be health. Could be dating, can be anything. I'll answer any question for our community if they have it. If you wanna join our community, x.com/twistartups, that's our handle. If you DM that handle, we know that you listen to the pod and we will add you to that group. The group's got 400 people in it or so, and it's quite a nice little group talking about the topics of This Week in Startups, of TWiST. Let's get started.

Yeah.

Uh, I would add, if you're very active in the group and participating and sharing great stuff, there's even a higher level insiders group.

Maybe you can add that one. That's very rarefied. We don't, we don't just let anybody into that one.

It's a funnel. We have everybody following the account, then we have 400 or 500 people in this crazy group chat.

And then I think we have 10 people who are like the best people in the group chat who we know are good actors that we're filtering into like just a small group. So, uh, it's, I don't know exactly how to build community these day, this day and age, but I'm going to start doing more dinners and live shows. Since people want to get together in person. And a lot of people, Lon, are sad and lonely and staying at their ranch, smoking cigars, sitting on a bench, and want to see more humans.

Get out in the world.

Yeah, that's what I want to do. I need to get out in the world more. So yeah, more dinners, more hanging out, more live shows.

So first question comes from Richard Corral of Quanto. It is an accounting firm in the age of AI.

Here, I'll share their website.

They're basically— he describes it as an AI-powered wealth management platform. And so here, here is his question. We have a $10 trillion AUM lead interested in us as clients and investors. They gave never-seen-something-like-this-before level feedback, but then ultimately told the company they're too early for now, but they want to stay updated. So Richard wants to know your advice on how to combat the challenges facing startups with that early stage status, even when their tech is advanced and innovative and looking forward?

Sure. Um, each investor has a different area of specialty, and you should look at what stage of a startup they invest in most. And whatever they tell you is not as important as what they do, right? So If you were looking at a person and trying to judge them, the best way to judge a person is to look at their previous behavior or to watch them doing the job you're asking them to do. This is first principles thinking. If you go to a family office and you are in year zero of your startup, you are not incorporated yet. You have a, you know, a demo, a product. They're not going to invest. Unless they have a history of investing in entrepreneurs who are not yet incorporated and who don't have a product in market yet.

Now you have to divorce what people say in social settings, especially investors, from their behavior. If you look at my firm, Founder University is designed as a product occurring in 3 different geographies, 3 different continents around the world, twice a year each, 6 cohorts a year, Riyadh, Tokyo, and in the US.

And we explicitly ask people to come who have 2 or 3 founders, and you don't need to be incorporated, you don't need to have customers yet. We want to meet you in year zero, and then the accelerator, we want to invest and, um, we, want you to be incorporated at that point. Now, if you go to a family office and they've invested in 7 things in the last 5 years, and all of those things are private equity deals that their friends brought them, and they put $30 million into each deal, how on earth are they going to put $125K or $250K or what you're looking for in your seed?

They're not.

But you got introduced to them, they took the meeting, they're going to say nice things. You have to divorce the nice things they're saying from the reality of what they do.

That's all you have now.

Somebody who likes you.

Okay, great.

But they say that to everybody. What you want to look at is, uh, do they actually invest in your stage of startup?

The answer is probably no.

Therefore, who does invest? Y Combinator, Techstars, Antler, A16z, Pear has a great summer program. Sequoia has ARC. I have Founder University Launch Accelerator.

Go to those programs first. Get your $125K, your $25K check, your $250K check.

Get your first 5 customers and then you can go back to them and they might be a greater later stage. And in terms of numbers, in order to get a seed round today, you need to contact 150 seed funds, get 50 meetings with seed funds to get 20 second meetings to get 2 to give you a term sheet. That's the funnel today. Yeah. If you're not doing that, You're, you're just not playing the game on the field. You may hear of people who get funded, you know, they take a meeting and they instantly get funded and they weren't even looking for funding.

Yeah.

Those are memorable stories because they are not the norm, right? They're notable because it's not the norm. That's why you're hearing those stories. The norm that we see on the field is emailing and trying to get in touch with 150 different investors, getting on the radar and getting a quick Zoom call with 50, getting 10 or 20 of those. In other words, 10%. Of your initial target list to take a second meeting. 150 targets, 15 second meetings— that would be a reasonable goal.

Yeah.

If people are not willing to take a second meeting, you're not really, um, you should really only judge second meetings. People are not obligated to take a second meeting, therefore a second meeting is notable. Okay, I hope that helps.

Yeah, I think that's— it's interesting, it's how, how many different sort of fields and kinds of work that's applicable to— like, people think to become a content creator, you just create like 2 or 3 videos and then one goes viral and now you're MrBeast. And it's like, no, it's hitting it every single day.

It's doing it hundreds of times until you find your voice and refine everything, and then you start actually growing.

And I think it's kind of the same across just about any discipline.

All right.

Speaking of Founder University, @onprotons on X had a pitch for you for what they call Founder Community College. So their question is, why is there no Founder Community College to go alongside Founder University? It would help with the coming wave of $500K to $5 million AI-driven single-person owner-operated companies. So you're not worried about fundraising, you're not worried about board seats, you're not worried about cap tables. It's just focused on tools and building great products. What do you think? Is there— can you see a level between, uh, you know, Founder University that's for, you know, people who are even earlier.

So funny they mentioned this. I literally this weekend was asking about the accreditation laws and how I could give a degree. I was asking this because we have an associate in training program for the venture side of our business. We're hiring 6 people in June to be part of that. They start as researchers, they become analysts, then they become associates. It's basically a 3-year program to go through each of those titles. $60,000, $70,000, $80,000, $90,000. Is like sort of the career path in terms of salary. So instead of paying for a degree in venture capital, we pay you is the way I tell people to look at it. And we hire twice as many people, really 3 times as many people as we need because we think 1 or 2 of them are gonna opt out. It will be like not the career for them.

1 or 2 of them we will not continue on with. In other words, we don't think they have what it takes.

And then 1/3 we're gonna keep and they're gonna become all-stars in our firm.

Uh, and we want to replenish that. But I had so many people say to me, I would like to send my child to that. Can you charge me $60K a year for 2 years and I'll pay you $120K to teach them how to be a venture capitalist? 'Cause there is no course in that. There's like, right. Can you education? It turns out I'm not legally allowed to give a degree. Mm-hmm.

In being a founder or a degree in being, um, a venture capitalist.

I could give a certificate, right? But not a degree. When you're a founder and you're moving fast and you want to close a big deal, a traditional bank can kill your momentum. Long approval processes, clunky outdated systems, not intuitive. I mean, some of these systems look like they were made in the 1970s and have never been updated. Not all banks are designed to work for startups. We all know that. And that's exactly why Grasshopper Bank was created. Grasshopper is a real federally chartered bank, but with the kind of financial tech stack that you'd build for yourself.

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And so that's what I think a lot of people do with these continuing ed certificates, etc. So I would have to partner with a local university, uh, in the U.S. to do this, and there are some that do this, but you can give certificates or a diploma but you cannot give a degree. That's the word that I think gets you in trouble. Now, outside the US, there are some universities, uh, in the UK that will let you use their programs to do a UK-accredited degree.

Okay.

And then there are islands— like, there were some islands people would go get degrees in medical practices. Sure.

Yeah, I mean, I know that's a big, like, Central American thing.

People go down there to get their degrees, right?

And like dentistry and other things. And It does somehow work in the United States. I don't know about those. They, it seems fugazi, fugazi.

Yeah.

But I have been thinking about this because I do think college is broken. So next year I told my team, I want the associate in training program that we start in the summers to be so good this time. And you and I were talking with Jackie about it. We're gonna have like a Monday morning session and a Friday end of the week session where we do professional training, and then in between they work at one of the business units. Yeah. Inside the company. The goal I think is for that training program, those two 2-hour sessions that bookmark the week to be so good that next summer when we do it, we could literally charge for it and literally say, for $50,000, you can come work here for 9 months out of the year, take your summers off, or 10 months.

And for 2 years, and then take on Kauffman Fellows. There's a program called Kauffman Fellows. You can pull it up on the screen.

Kauffman Fellows charges, I believe, $80,000 or $90,000 for 2 years.

Somebody look up the price. It was extraordinary. And then they were like, oh, well, that's for people who are already in it. So Kauffman Fellows is this, um, program that people do, and you can see it's incredibly diverse. Uh, they have like scholarships and stuff like that because our industry, the venture industry, was known for being maybe 10 years ago, a little too, uh, dare I say, male and white and Ivy League.

Sure.

Uh, but they've had 1,000 fellows. Some of them you might know. Uh, there's, uh, Jenny Fieldling. I know her. Um, and I don't know which one of these peoples are, are paying for it. There's Monique Woodard. I'm, um, I'm an LP in her, uh, fund. So I don't think there's anything wrong with this program. Necessarily, there's Mamoon, but I do think it's a bit of an elitist group and it's, I think, $90,000 a year.

I don't know if— no, Jacob looked at—

producer Jacob looked it up for us.

The Kaufman Fellows 2-year program tuition is $80,000, application fee of $100 if submitted by the early deadline.

If you miss that, it's a $300 application before the actual end of time deadline.

So I think I could have 10 people in this program, charge them $50K each, that'd be $500K. Then I could hire 2 full-time people to work on it.

Yeah.

And create a program. And I think it would be better than— I know it would be better than Kauffman Fellows cuz you get to come with me to Saudi, come with me to Tokyo.

Sure.

See those programs and interview companies. And I think they're not even in office for that much. I don't, I don't think that this, I think this program is all virtual. I think they maybe spend a couple weeks together.

Yes.

Zoom meetings probably mostly.

But I wonder like what the actual curriculum is. If somebody could send me the curriculum or send me like the agenda and what it is, I would love to study what Kaufman has done. I don't know if it's public, but anyways, I'm not, um, dissing them for having an incredibly overpriced elitist program. Yeah, well, I am thinking on a competitive basis, like, maybe I could create a better program. And then for Founder University, I would be fine with partnering with a university that wanted to give a Founder University degree and make it a 2-year program and it just teaches you how to be a founder and embed you in companies. I mean, sure, why not?

There's probably some young people that would be interested, that are interested in entrepreneurship but wouldn't even know where to get started.

I feel like that's what Founder University is good for.

Like, here are the 10 terms you don't know.

Here are the concepts everybody's talking about that you're not familiar with. Like, that's where I think we can really help young—

or maybe you put the two together and it's just company building and you have two tracks, the Founder University track and the associate, right?

The Venture University track. You have the two tracks.

Mm-hmm.

And you major in one, minor in the other, but you learn both sides of the table.

And I mean, we are also, I bet you Kauffman Fellows is not doing media training.

You'd also come out of this knowing how to make a newsletter, knowing how to do social media, knowing how to make a podcast.

You know, like all those communication skills that you wouldn't get that are so important in this field. I mean, we talk about it all the time because we're constantly booking investors and venture capitalists and founders. As guests, but there are a lot of brilliant founders with great companies or brilliant investors with great portfolios, but they are dead air on a podcast.

You can't book them on things.

Yeah, for sure.

And so like we, we also help with those skills that are important as well.

Yeah. Now unfortunately, because some idiot started a podcast about startups 16 years ago, and now every venture capitalist has to have a podcast.

Yeah.

Geez.

Those 4 billionaires got together to do shit through COVID and now we're all—

Especially since one of 'em's not a billionaire.

Yeah.

I actually think 3 of them are not really married.

That's breaking news. Huge if true.

Yeah, I don't think Friedberg's a billionaire. Maybe on paper with a hollow stock. People, I mean, people refer— I don't think Chamath's a billionaire.

I don't know.

People just refer to you all as billionaires.

I just assumed. I've just been guided.

This might be a billionaire.

I don't know. I feel like, yeah, Sacks and Chamath may be pretty close. Maybe Chamath after that Grok deal.

Come on.

I think he probably owned 10, 20%.

Yeah, and maybe like obviously not liquid, but I, I feel like he's probably—

yeah, I mean, that's always the thing is like, and then who cares?

Yeah, like honestly I—

the more I look at wealth, uh, wealth creation, once you get past like this basic $10 million mark, you're—

you have the F.U.

money, you have the fun, right? Uh, and once you have fun, it doesn't matter. You could ski, you could podcast, you could do whatever you want, and it's exactly $10 million. I think that's exactly the F.U.M. Number. FOMO starts at $10 million. Once you have that, you make 5% on your money, which is $500,000 a year, which means, you know, after taxes, $400,000 or $500,000 a year. You can just exist.

Yeah, I'd be back in Florence right now.

You'd be back. How was your trip, by the way? I didn't have a good time.

Amazing trip. I had a great time.

Yeah, Rome, Rome.

How many days did I give you off?

It was—

you kept saying 22. It was technically 19 days off, and a lot of those were weekends. So it was like— okay, I think it was like 14 work days off total.

It felt like you were gone for 2 months. My God, you definitely have job security. I was like, I'm CCing Lon, and I'm like, Jesus, when is this guy going to be back? All right, give me another question.

All right, let's go into number 3. This is from Surge Dog, also on X. Uh, if you could—

love Surge—

if you compare early-stage startups today to 10 years ago, what has changed the most in how you evaluate them? And in particular, he's interested in what do investors overvalue, do you think, from the like old-school conventional wisdom playbook? What traditional must-haves have become optional and what expectations are now table stakes?

Like, how, how has the landscape shifted for you as an investor in early stage?

Yeah, I mean, the number one thing is the amount of capital it takes to get a product to market and to the amount of time it takes to get product-market fit, um, that is dramatically decreased. So over time, we, with Vibe Coding or the no-code revolution, we had these moments where it seemed like Really, no-code was one, cloud, the cloud era was another, where the cost of running a startup went down 10x. Used to be $3 million, then it went to $300 million.

And when that happened, because of WeWork outsourced accounting and legal and not having to stand up your own data center, it used to take 20, 30 people and $3 to $5 million to get your product to market. That was in the Web 1.0 era. Yeah. The '90s. Seed round would be $3 million. It would take 12 months to get your product ready to go to market. And you had all of these expenses which were considered non-negotiable and you had to do them. You had to have a PR firm, $10K a month for 18 months, $180K. You had to get an office for $25K a month. You had to put a $250K letter of credit down. So that was another $300,000 a year for 2 years, $600,000, $250K letter of credit. It was basically $1 million to set up your office. You had to put $500,000 into servers. Now you're at $1.5 million. You had to spend $100K on legal, $1.6 million. You had to hire an HR person, an accountant, uh, and a lawyer, another $250K. Now you're at $1.8, $1.9 million. You get the idea.

Yeah.

Then you hired a couple of product people, developers. You're at $3 million. You finally get the product launch and you figure out if you're gonna win or not.

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Then the Y Combinator era, the cloud computing era meant you work at home, 3 people, you eat ramen for $300K. You could stand up a startup in under 6 months. Now it, then it went to like $30K just paying for some servers, but maybe you got free credits and you and your partners never met in person and you just shipped and you vibe coded stuff and you got your first customer. Then you applied to Y Combinator or Techstars or Antler or one of these incredible programs, Launch Accelerator. Now it's kind of like. I built a, I vibe coded a product. I got to $100K in revenue and then I applied to Y Combinator. Then I applied to Launch Accelerator. So that's what we're seeing. And so the time from idea to first customer and first customer is light product market fit. You can convince people to pay for anything, but let's just say some level of product market fit. That's down to weeks. It's down to a weekend. Yeah.

I was going to say it's not just because we've seen companies on the last few months of the show that are literally like, oh, I built this 14 days ago, and we're talking to them on the show about all of their hundreds of customers.

Our bounties program is a perfect example of that. We have two bounties out this week in startups.com/bounties or bounty. And the one for the fact checker, real-time fact checker, we have 15 people and I think 3 of them are really good. Yeah, that was like in under 30 days. And then we're doing another one, another $5,000 bounty for annotated What I'd like to do with one of those companies is actually make it a startup. Um, so I'll give them the prize, but then I want to hire them and incubate the startup. So that's my hope, is that the real-time fact-checker becomes an actual startup company, or Annotated becomes a real startup. So I'm hoping to find a founder or two I can hire and put into like a, a startup or a company.

Yeah.

And by the time this airs on VOD, we'll have already picked a winner for our Sidecast, uh, —or live producers.

—winners.

Or multiple winners.

You never know. We've seen some amazing submissions.

There are really some great submissions. All right.

Next question from Founder University vet Mehika Golani of a company called Treya. She wants to know, how should startups think about differentiating when frontier labs release products in the same vertical that they're building in?

Of course, this is a huge story. People are always worried about, are they going to get death by Clauded? And is Anthropic going to just take over their business?

So what do you think founders should be doing to try to sort of early differentiate, give themselves a little bit of moat against OpenAI, Anthropic, and others?

Absolutely. So there's always gonna be a feature set that the interface of the large language model is not gonna add because of clutter and confusion. So let's take travel. We had a great startup, Roam, and they, I think, were built on like the preview, like the 2.5 of, and you can look up Roam and we, we probably have it in our database here. I think they wound up giving the money back to investors. Because in ChatGPT 2.5, they, that was like an API. And then they were letting you put in, I want a 3-day trip. I want to go to Italy. I have 3 weeks. My boss gave me 19 days to be out of the office.

That was great.

What should I do over my 19 days? Because my boss is so goddamn accommodating. And Rome was like one of the best previews I've ever seen. It's in our database. It's not public because it shut down, but let's take that one as a travel.

Example, you can ask all these travel questions inside of ChatGPT and people do. But if you were to build an interface around it and features around it, and you're constantly adding features and then building a community around it, the community, the support, these extra features, they're not what ChatGPT is gonna work on. They're just gonna— ChatGPT, X, they're gonna just give you your basic output. But what if you want, when you get the basic output, you want to play multiplayer mode? So you and I and Amanda and William and Bianca are doing our next trip to Tokyo. And we're like, hey, let's do this as a group. Let's, uh, all research where we want to go for 3 days on a bullet train. Let's all research where we want to go for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and shopping. And then we all do our research, but we're watching each other do the research. And then we click and we vote and we add it to an agenda. And then we finalize the agenda. All that stuff, roam around with the company, that's not gonna be done by ChatGPT. So you can build all that around it. And then you could build the concept of a virtual travel agency, somebody who uses AI and does all this itinerary with them and you pay them per hour to do it. And, or you pay them for ground support when you're on the ground in Tokyo, they match you with a local guide. Those things will not be done by ChatGPT, if that makes sense, right?

So that's, I think, the differentiator you can do.

TaxGPT, another example of it.

I was just gonna say, having just planned a trip, you do look things up on AI. It's natural.

I use it in place of a search engine at this point.

But then there's also Viador and TripAdvisor and all these other platforms, and it's using both. It's not one or the other.

Like, I think a lot of people think it's sort of, you know, you layer these different tools on top of one another to get the best result.

So I think there's truth in that. I think community, multiplayer mode, support services around those things, they're just not going to do that. They're not going to create a marketplace with local guides. One of the things I want to do when I go to Japan next time is there are now food guides who have come out. Yes. And you know, one of the things is, uh, because of social media, everybody goes and you know, does a video of the memorable stuff, right? And then all the influencers go there. But it turns out, like, unless you speak Japanese and you know the surrounding area, those places are targeting American tourists. But there's 20 other places with pancakes that are just as good or better that don't have a line. And you can hire— there's one guy who's a bit robust, and his thing is like, he's I don't know if he uses the term fat or, you know, whatever.

He's your jolly fat guy who takes you on tour.

That's amazing.

And I guess there was a movie.

Yeah, there was a movie about like Brendan Fraser was in about like Rental Family. Yes.

And the concept is he's an American actor and he's hired to pretend to be like a surrogate father in this family that doesn't have a dad around. And apparently this is I mean, the story behind the movie is that this is a real service in Japan that you can like rent a fake family member for occasions or for times where you are particularly missing having like a dad around.

And then he becomes, of course, bonded with the family and it becomes a sweet story like that.

You could also do rent an old guy for fun. Yes. So that is a thing. There's a rent an old guy, boyfriend, rent a girlfriend services.

Those get talked about a lot. And it's not a sex worker thing. It's just like I want somebody to go to this ballgame with, you know, like it's that kind of thing.

Yeah. But the, the renting a food thing is like, that's even better. So let's say you have this idea for an AI planner, but then the AI planner has to result in something like you're on the ground. Okay. So you get the basic ChatGPT features for free, but we could also connect you with somebody who books this. Yes. Or gets in line for you, brings you, translates it, sits with you. Gives you the backstory, takes you in, arranges for you to go in the back and make the ramen, you know, between, you know, lunch and dinner service. Yeah. Yeah.

In Rome, we booked one of those golf cart tours where the guys drive you around in the golf cart. We got to go into a bunch of crypts and stuff under the churches because he like would get— he would give the nuns like €5. He knew where to go and like who to talk to.

So we got to see like the tomb of Saint Cecilia and all this sort of aqueduct under the Trevi Fountain stuff that most tourists don't get into, which is cool. So yeah, I think that's it.

Yeah, there's, there's a, there's a service there if you can find your sort of spot in the stack. Yeah, for sure. So from TryParadot on X, they are a dating app for serious daters.

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Okay. So there are investors who— investors have all different sets of signal and processes in which they invest. I have a friend who's an investor at True Ventures. He only invests on things that come through his network. He's an older guy. Mm-hmm. He's probably 60 now. And he basically looked at his career of 40 years and said, or 30 years and said, you know what? All the great investments came when one of my friends told me about a company. Mm-hmm. Therefore, I'm not taking any emails. People can email me all they want. The only way I'm taking a meeting is if another venture capitalist or a portfolio founder tells me I should meet with it.

And he, and he just uses that as his filter.

And I think it works for him. Then there are people like Y Combinator or us. You come to launch.co/apply. We meet with 10% of the companies that apply every week. So some weeks we get 200 people applying, sometimes 500. We meet with 10%. 25 people a week now. We were meeting with 140. That was too much. Um, so we meet with those 25 at the end of the year, you know, all said and done, we've done 3, 4, 5,000 meetings and we've invested in 100 companies, called down from 10,000 to 20,000 applications.

You get the idea.

But we don't invest in biotech or military tech right now. We're looking at military. We actually started with military tech. Um, but we didn't do biotech. We didn't previously do biotech. You know, and, and everybody's got a different preference. So figuring that out is hard and it's work. And I think the best thing to do is to study what people have already done. You get a Crunchbase account or any of those things. You start following on social media, the different firms, and figure out 150 different firms that invest at your stage and have invested in similar companies. So if you're a marketplace and they did Uber or Thumbtack, like I did, Uh, or they're doing fintech, like I did Wealthfront and Robinhood. You can know that when you come to me, we share that.

So if you're doing a fintech marketplace, you can be like, hey, Jake Al, you did Thumbtack and you also did Robinhood. We're doing a marketplace for financial advisors and you pay financial advisors by the hour instead of 1% of your net worth, uh, or your portfolio size. And I'd be like, oh yeah, that's a really good idea. I would love to hear that pitch. Yes. So that's your job. And you have realized now as an investor that this is not a clean, easy to navigate marketplace. It's a bit bespoke and underground. We have a product called Whisper Network for our founders where they get to go in and search through and put in their materials, ask us for an introduction. And even with that tool, it's still hard. You're hunting, you're pecking, you're doing research. I think AI will make it a little bit better. But it's your job. It's tedious. It's a full-time job. Treat it as such. That's why if you have 3, 3, 3 co-founders in a company, one of them can focus on the product, one can focus on sales, and one can focus on corporate development. Corporate development is another fancy way of saying raising money. Yeah. And that's what you need to do. You have to look at fundraising as a full-time job. You have to collect investors and build deep, meaningful relationships with them over time. Sort of the same.

Less is more.

Number one, like it's just, it's about legwork and putting in the hours and, you know, shoes on the pavement, as they say. You know, it's like about just hitting the streets and hearing the sales funnel.

You have to qualify each sale. Are you qualifying each investor? Do they invest? Have they invested in your stage? Are they actively investing or is their fund in maintenance mode and they're in between funds? What check size do they do? Do they lead a deal or do they follow a deal? Are they like my friend and they only take intros from existing founders. Okay, then you have to do the work to meet one of their founders, then in order to meet them. Okay, are you willing to do that work? So if you have 10 great VCs you want to meet with, maybe your best strategy is reaching out to 5 of their founders, meeting 2 of them, and then using those 2 founders to get one of them to introduce you to a partner over there. Now you're talking about sending 50 emails to founders. To get 20 meetings to maybe get on the radar of those 10 venture firms, maybe get on the radar of 3 or 4 of them. So again, that's the sales funnel.

Yeah, it's like, it's like you have to treat us— it's like when you're applying for your summer jobs as a teen and, you know, like at first you're like, I filled out 3 applications, I went to the ice cream store and the bookstore and, and it's like, no, no, you got to fill out 100 applications to get that one interview and to get that job. It's the same kind of story.

Oh, and you know, you can be creative about it. Like, uh, there was somebody I saw who went to San Francisco and put the pitch— you can, somebody can look it up here in the producing team— they put the pitch for their startup on the back of their laptop and they just sat there in a cafe in South Park, I believe, which is not South Park the TV show, but a little park in San Francisco where there's a couple of cafes and there's VCs tend to be around that park, or there's some number of VCs. And they just said, I'm going to sit here and run into some people. The, and there was a Paul Graham quote or a video clip that went viral recently. It turns out San Francisco and the Bay Area are very unique in that the startup culture there is to help people without an expectation of short-term rewards. And everybody helps everybody.

This podcast was my way to give back, and that's why I've done 2,000 episodes of it. People tell me all the time, oh my God, you really helped me. I'm like, okay, I've never met you. They're like, oh no, I listened to your podcast. It inspired me to start a company. Then I started my second, then I, I met somebody who was on your podcast because I emailed them and told them about the podcast. That helping people without expectations of return is a unique part of the tech industry and Bay Area culture.

You can only experience that by going to the Bay Area and meeting people.

We found this post, the guy who put a sign on his laptop.

I'm going to, I'm going to share it right now. Thanks to producer Jacob, who dug that up.

Uh, yeah, a guy put a sign on his laptop. AI B2B startup raising pre-seed. Product is live. Come say hi. A few investors came up to him. No cold emails, no pitch deck, no intro, just visibility in the right place.

So your laptop as a billboard would sort of be the concept there. There you go.

Yeah. All right. People see you coding. We got a—

we got a— what do you want to do? One or two more? Are you—

you're— you're— sure. Keep going.

We got a— we got a— my energy is good. Good question in from one of the live viewers right here on this very livestream we're doing right now from @yadon9884. What's the best path for a bootstrap hardware founder once the prototype is real? And nearing profitability, would you stay lean and grind revenue or start bringing in strategic people before you scale up?

Yeah, I think you should get investors if you're at that point. And investors have totally 180'd their position on hardware. It used to be hardware is hard, I don't want any part of it. Now it's hardware is, is the only one of the only moats left. I love hardware. Plaud is doing a great job with that. We just had on the program somebody made a bookmark that goes into your book and then you can scan it. And Alex was like over the moon with this product. And I was like, Why do I need that? Different strokes for different folks, but hardware is now a way to get lock-in. Whoop as a hardware product, you know, has some amount of lock-in. My Eight Sleep, all of this now has become a moat and a way to increase the fidelity and the usefulness of a product. So yeah, hardware is no longer a blocker with investors, which is really fascinating to me. I invested in many hardware companies, TerraCafe, CafeX. Uh, we had a, uh, Butterfly, which was a drop cam, you know, camera ring competitor. Didn't work out. We had a smoke detector back in the day before other people came out with smoke detectors. You know, most of these things fail and Eight Sleep succeeds. It's just, uh, Terra Cafe is succeeding really well. Cafe X is still going and be actually doing really well. But hardware is hard and it just takes a little more capital. So you're going to have to find people who are comfortable with investing the capital.

And there are now a large number of hardware companies. You can work backwards to them. Kickstarter is still like a very viable option, doing viral ads to get your first 1,000 customers to give you $1,000, and, you know, charging them 3 or 4 times what the retail product would be to go first. You get, you know, dummies like me who are like, yeah, I don't care about the price, I just want to be the first to have it. Yeah, great. You know, whether it's like the Tesla Roadster that I paid $150K for, or countless, uh, Kickstarters I've paid for, and you know, the boxes are in my closet unopened, or I used it once, it was like, oh, that's interesting, I learned something, and now I move on.

I wonder if robotics is going to really supercharge this whole thing. Like, you're already— you could drop a few grand and get a Chinese humanoid robot at this point. Like, soon that's going to be like its own hardware categories, people buying like weird little new robot designs for their house.

I think figuring out what to do with commoditized robots is going to be a very interesting business.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to that.

And I think they ultimately will be $1 or $2 an hour is my guess. Uh, so if you think about—

oh, you think it's gonna be like a robot as a service?

You don't shell out all the money for the hardware, you buy, you pay less, and then every month you got to pay your $12.99.

If I was making Optimus or Figure, I would go to Amazon and say What do you pay somebody to sort packages? They'd say it's $27 an hour. And then fully baked, it's $35 an hour. People sue us for workman's comp, insurance, all this other stuff. Right. And I'd say, okay, we'll give you a Figure robot. You're currently paying $30 an hour fully baked, you know, $20 to the person, $10 plus 50% for everything else. We'll give it to you for $4 an hour. And we'll have somebody on site who's maintaining them for you. And you'll have 100 robots here sorting packages. For $4 an hour. How does that sound? Yeah. And they say, great. $4 an hour times 8,000 hours a year. 4 times 8. Boom. Uh, it's gonna cost $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 a year to have these maintained and ready to go. But then when it goes to consumers, you could really abstract it like a lease, you know, so you'll just pay a $299 a month lease and that gives you 500 hours of your robot's time. If you go over, it's a dollar extra.

Like you lease a car, right? And you go over certain mileage, you pay 50 cents a mile. That will be a really good model for these eventually. And then there are going to be all kinds of applications.

Great acronym too, ASS, Automatons as a Service.

It's going to be great. Automatons as a Service.

ASS. ASS would be your acronym.

They'll cover your ass. Yeah. I think they're going to be great. I mean, we had a Security One Nightscope that had been at like TechCrunch 50 or one of the early launch festivals, one of the early ones. That was that weird looking robot that just drove around. Sure. Now there's many of those security robots, and I think they were taking the same approach, which is security guards, $20 an hour for them to pay— play Candy Crush and fall asleep. This thing never falls asleep, works 24 hours, and it's $10 an hour. And like, even if it was the same price, it does a better job because it never stops walking around. It's got 360-degree cameras recording everything, which a human's not capable of.

Accidentally shoot as many people, probably. Yeah. Hopefully as the human security guard.

But good luck with your hardware startup. You're in. It's good timing.

Yeah. All right. We got a lot of— we got a question from Jacob. We got a very spicy question that you're free to punt, or we can react to some videos.

What's your— what's your pleasure?

Give me the spicy and then we'll do a video. All right.

From Sean Sully, a.k.a.

Arugle on X.

Out of all the people in Silicon Valley, who's the one person you really don't like the most and why?

Who don't I like?

Yeah. One person you don't like. I think you could pick your reason. You, you disagree with them on things. It's a personality conflict, whichever. Yeah. You take your pick. I have some, I have some guesses, but I, I'd like to hear your pick.

Well, listen, I, I would say, you know, we all operate in the same ecosystem of users and some people I think have damaged the reputation of the industry and the user base. And then some people have just maybe screwed over friends of mine. So like Zuckerberg, I've been a consistent critic of— my number one personal— one guess, it's not personal, it's that every time he had a chance to do the right thing for humanity, he picked his own self-interest over that of humanity.

Whether it's teenage girls and like, or people's privacy, or how he worked with partners in his partner program and treated founders, every single time he seemed to make a decision that was not in the best interest of humans. That's it. And so I don't like the way he's behaved. It's not personal, right? Like, I'm— I, I don't— I haven't seen Zuckerberg in person in a decade. I mean, I might have been at a dinner and been in the same room as him, I'm sure, a couple of times, but haven't sat down and had a conversation with him. I'd be happy to do that. I'd be happy to interview him for a project or a product, but I think He is so obsessed with the growth of his companies, which has made him tremendously successful, that copying other people's ideas blatantly, screwing partners over in the partner program he had, not being thoughtful about teenagers using his product, not being thoughtful about, you know, all the reports that he had internally about teenagers and specifically teenage girls and how damaging, uh, Instagram was for them in terms of eating disorders and anxiety. And then optimizing all these platforms to keep you online is, it just, it's a level of selfishness in decision-making that, and cutthroatness that I understand, but that, you know, um, I wouldn't do. And I think has damaged the reputation of the tech industry. I think he actually has made people look at the tech industry and be like, ugh, you know? Well, I mean, we've seen, uh, Sam Altman I don't like because he screwed Elon and Elon's my friend and I watched it happen, but I, I, I kind of liked Sam, or I did like Sam interpersonally. We always had some like interesting things, but he, um, you know, he kind of shivved my friend, and I'm Team Elon, not cool to what he did to him. Um, and listen, I'm not the only person who thinks like, hey, maybe Sam should not behave this way on a business level. But again, it doesn't matter in business. You can be incredible. The two people I'm talking about are two of the most successful people ever in the history of business. Yeah, they're doing all right. So in some ways, being able to make self-interested decisions and not worry about what people think about you and not worry about losing and burning relationships is a quick path to extraordinary success. Yes.

I think being a, being a like high-level tech CEO definitely self-selects for some of those qualities that we would associate with, you know, like someone you might consider like a jerk or a not, not very nice person in your life.

I mean, the number of people who in that piece, um, in The New Yorker, which, you know, listen, I— these press pieces, like, it's probably, you know, 60% true, 40% true, 80%, who knows. And then people have agendas, so you have to sort that out. And the press doesn't care about sorting out the agendas. They care about, like, hey, is this piece gonna rip or not, right? So I don't— The New Yorker piece on Sam was brutal. And a number of people called his behavior sociopathic. I didn't call his behavior sociopathic. That's what, you know, Ronan Farrow and his collaborator— I didn't participate in that piece. They asked me to. I was like, you know, I don't really have any business interest with Sam, so like, I'm not qualified. And then number two, I don't talk to the press, so I'm good, thanks. But they were like, we had specific questions to ask you about Sam Waltman, about the Sequoia Scouts program. I was like, yeah, feel free to put them in writing.

And I'll consider. And they're like, we don't do that.

And I was like, just— I just didn't respond, right? I don't care.

Um, you know, I just was interested in what the questions were. I probably wasn't going to answer them anyway, but I was curious, like, what, what the question even was. Yeah.

Um, yeah, I mean, when you're writing a piece—

so anyway, that's the answer. There you go.

Fair enough. I think—

and it's not personal. Like, so I, you know, everybody wants to make it personal.

Like, I'll bring up maybe the guy with the raw— the guy in military tech, you know, like when I made— another one of my answers about him. Yeah. It's not that I dislike him. I just thought what he did was brain dead, like stupid, like to do covert stuff. Now, is the press story correct or not? I don't know if that press story was correct. And I did kind of pop off and I apologize to him because like, yeah, I look back on it and I was like, yeah, you know, maybe I was a little bit too hardcore in my answer. But if that story was true, I do think he did the wrong thing. But I didn't have to say it as brutally as I said it. And I did kick him when he was down. He got fired. I was kicking him. So I kind of looked at it and I was like, yeah, maybe, maybe that was not a classy or kind or Christian thing for me to do.

So I was like, yeah, okay, I take ownership of that.

Sure, I kicked the guy when he was down. When you podcast every day—

we shouldn't have done that—

when you podcast every single day, you're just reacting, you're doing hot takes, it can— you get caught up in the moment, I think.

Well, but you see how I do it? Like, we were doing a recording before this and people were asking me about a case and, you know, oh, Y Combinator and General Catalyst supporting a founder who allegedly did things that were unethical and copied another startup. And I went like, framed it like, if this is true, and we don't know if it's true, this would be maybe unethical but not illegal behavior. And maybe, you know, General Catalyst didn't know what this founder was doing, if it's even true, and maybe they're trying to clean it up right now. So I really think through, like, before I pop off, and I just don't trust the media or any report now.

And when you hear me on All In, you know, sometimes people just run with a Kane Koa the Great story or like some viral clip, and I'm like, Just so we know, that viral clip could be AI. It could be an old clip. Nobody knows. So this is alleged. And I kind of make a joke about it. Allegedly, perhaps. Yeah. Not confirmed. I put all those disclaimers on it because I'm old enough now to know, like, like, I don't know, some nonzero, like, low double-digit percentage of the time I'm reporting on a news story, it's not exactly accurate.

I think that's a good lesson for even if you're not hosting a podcast, even just in your everyday life in 2026, you got to take that beat.

It might be very satisfying to be like, oh, this, this idea, this story lines up with my personal biases. I can't wait to share it and prove how right I've been.

You always have to take that extra beat. Like, is this AI?

Is this true? Is there a community note? Is there some additional information?

Is this being framed in a certain way designed to provoke a reaction?

Because everything is. Elon, this was your first trip to Italy?

This was my first time ever in Italy.

Yes, that's true. Okay. So—

Greece, I went to Greece. Oh, you did? Went to Greece? I went to Santorini and Mykonos.

I visited Santorini and Mykonos.

Amazing. It was amazing. So give me your general impression of Greece and Italy. What were your favorite parts of it? What was extraordinary? And then what was underwhelming and didn't hit the notes as we go off duty here?

Yeah. So I went—

Because Lon off duty in Italy.

I went— I did a week in Rome. Me and a friend, we stayed in an Airbnb right by the Castel Sant'Angelo. Uh, right, right, it's sort of the middle of the city, right? You know, not far from Trastevere. The staying in the Airbnb was amazing. We're walking distance from the Vatican. It's a building from the 1600s where the Pope's staff used to live in like the Renaissance era. So it was an unbelievable place. The best thing we did, uh, was that crypt tour. We did a golf cart crypt tour and a guy took us to all sorts of like out of the way, you know, sort of like churches that had, you know, bone temples in the basement and all of this crazy art. That was amazing to see. We took a bullet train one day to Florence and to the Uffizi Gallery. We went to this amazing pasta restaurant called Osteria Pastella.

That was— I think I went to both of those.

That's great.

Yeah, they, they, they're one of the places they, they take a huge wheel of cheese and they pour brandy in it and then they light it on fire and then they mix your pasta. In the cheese bowl, and then they topped it with white truffles. It was incredible. And the Uffizi, you know, lots of great art. I will say a down thing: it's very, very crowded right now in Italy.

Lots and lots of tourists want to see Rome and Florence. I was not alone.

And one thing that really bugged me in all the art museums that we went to is people are standing in front of the paintings and the sculptures, and they're just snapping photos on their phone. And I mean, this is like Botticelli's Birth of Venus, Caravaggio's Medusa. Just go on Google Images. There's 100 beautiful, up-close, high-resolution photos of every— you can get the Birth of Venus on like a mouse pad.

Like, you don't need your own photo. I think this is a— this is a gripe. This is a gripe that's worth noting. Yeah. Like, just be in the moment, folks. Just be in the moment. And this— I'll tell you the thing that makes me crazy in these places. The selfie stick. That is— or the, the, or the i360 guy. You know the i360 guy with the stick? They're, they're all— and it goes up. Yeah. And he's got to walk around and he's got to have a 360 view that he's never going to look at. But the, the 360 guy is worse than the selfie guy. Yeah. The selfie guy's got his iPhone on the stick, whatever. These guys are walking through Vegas casinos and I'm like, what are you documenting? Your life is incredibly boring. You're the least important person within 100 miles of this place. This place has been documented, as you correctly point out, to the point of absurdity. And now everybody's got to be on your i360 and you're smacking people in the head. Nobody cares. You're never looking at these things. If you want to take a quick photo of yourself in front of your favorite piece, totally fine. Right.

And that's— I did. I posted a few of them to Twitter. I would take a picture of myself like, here I am, I'm in the Uffizi. I want to remember this moment. I'm not saying don't be a tourist, don't take a photo, don't take a selfie, but it's that— stay just, just taking it. And like, we went to a Rothko exhibit as well in Florence, like a modern museum. And it's like those paintings, it's being in the room with it. That's the point. It's overwhelming when you're standing in front of it.

You're not going to appreciate it on your phone.

What are you doing? So that—

that— here's my idea. Here's my idea for these museums. 24 hours and increase the price to go a little bit.

Yeah. So, or maybe like on the off hours you pay a premium.

Oh sure, I would like— because these all close at 6 o'clock, right?

They're done. Yeah, it's like Uffizi, I think, is— yeah, it's like 10 AM to like 4:30, but you have to get a time. They send you through in shifts, so when you buy your tickets they give you a time to show up and then you get in the line.

There's like a VIP line, you pay an extra couple of €10 or something. It's not expensive.

No, it was— I think it was like €30 a piece, but we also made those plans a little last minute. I bet if we got it earlier, we probably could have gotten a cheaper Oof-Easy Pass.

Here's my idea. Yeah, the place closes— like, the last entrance is 4:30, which means they're kicking you out at 6:00, right? 6:00 to 8:00, 8:00 to 10:00, 10:00 to 12:00, 12:00 to 2:00, 6:00 AM to 8:00 AM. I know maybe people don't want to work those Have a €100 experience. Now, €100, $100 experience per person sounds insane, but by the way, if you're an Uber driver or you are a housekeeper in New York, you're making $30, $40, $50 an hour already. Yeah. And that person might want to have an experience with 10% as many people there, or 20% as many people there.

Yeah. It would be a totally different experience to go and really like soak it in on your own and have the time. Yes. Instead of being pushed around and and everybody's trying to push in.

I would have loved, loved to go to dinner, and then I like to do my after-dinner walk because I'm old and I'm, you know, controlling my weight. row.co/twist. Um, I would love to do my 2-hour walk in the Louvre from, you know, 8 to 10 PM, or even 10 to midnight. How great would it be for us to be in the Louvre at 11 PM and see the Mona Lisa or the Venus de Milo with but a half dozen people there.

Yeah, because also I had—

yeah, in the British Museum too in London, I had the same experience where it's like, it's great, amazing to see that stuff, but you're, you're constantly in like this huge crowd and everybody wants to take their photos, and it's really—

did you go to the Florence gelato place that I told you about?

You know, I did. I went to a gelato place in Florence, but we were only there for 24 hours.

I ran out of time. I did not get it. I missed that. I missed that one.

One, but I did, uh, we did go, we got some incredible food the whole time. Rome too.

We went to some really amazing restaurants.

And then, uh, so that was week one. And then week two, we joined, uh, my dad and my uncle and his girlfriend Karen, uh, for a cruise. And that went to Santorini, Greece, Mykonos, Greece, and also a, a town named Kuşadası in Turkey where there, there, there's the ancient Greek ruins of Ephesus are there.

Yes.

And so we, we did a little quick tour of that.

Santorini, beautiful, right? Oh my gosh. That hillside with the Yeah. Did you get to go on the donkey ride? No.

Up and down the— I felt— I felt bad for the donkey. I didn't— I don't—

I don't want to subject a donkey to my 200 pounds. I felt like I'm not going to do that to that poor—

Well, this is why row.co/twist will get you down to 180 and you'll be fighting while you're going. No, I thought the donkey thing was a little bit extreme, too. But they have like this very steep hill.

It leaves you breathless.

You take a donkey ride up it.

Oia, the sort of— that it's the city when you think of Santorini and you see the Instagram posts with the white houses and the blue dome churches. That's Oia. And so we got to go check out the town. We took a bus to get there, and then we went to Fira as well, another town. And then we— they took us to one of those black sand beaches.

So we got to do a little beach time in Santorini. It was incredible. That was— that was—

I'm glad you got to take some time off. And this is where I don't have a problem with the Meta glasses. Actually, I'm okay. Sure. I have an exception for Meta glasses if you take them to dinner you're not invited to dinner, right? However, if you're in a museum and you want to put those on and record, go for it, go for it. It's better than the selfie stick everywhere.

I don't think— I still don't think you're really going to get a lot out of that after the fact, that part of being in the museum is you're there, you're in the museum, it's, it's, it's real. Like, you can look up art on the internet all the time. I do it all the time. Take 10 pictures. Okay, take 10 pictures. Yeah, yourself at the front, yourself in front of your favorite piece of art that you saw.

Okay, and nobody's at the cafe having a coffee and whatever.

Anti-selfie, I took a ton, but like, when you're standing in front of a Rothko, you don't need to have your camera out. It's just, it's just—

what are we doing, folks?

It's just lines on a canvas on a photo. You have to—

what are we doing? Yeah, yeah. All right, everybody, it's been another great— Twist is in the can. Bye-bye.