Jason’s H-1B pitch, the latest on the TikTok deal, and Howie’s first ad | E2182

Zuckerberg and his family will control Meta and their billions of user for all eternity. That's the company that you have to be worried about. This company, you will not need to because the original owners are going to keep their stakes. So, Jeff Yass, I think my friend Brad Gerstner, Altimeter has a very public position in the company. I don't know how large it is. So this cap table is going to have, it looks like, you know, dozens of people on it. It will be a fully diversified company and then a large amount of the shares will be floated publicly, which is why all these people are making this investment. They're not making this investment to control the asset. They're making it because it's a great business deal. This is the one company that challenges Meta's supremacy and will continue to do so. YouTube would be the other. Right. Just as the world moves to video and shorts. And so the you have to ask who loses here? The big loser in all of this is Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg now has a viable, scary competitor.

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All right, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. With me, my co host for today, our editorial director, Lon Harris. Welcome to the show, Lon. All right, what's our top story here? Lon, what's our top story?

I think we should definitely talk about Trump's H1B visa concept and where he might have gotten the idea.

Oh, really? Here we go. Followed by Lutnick and J.D. vance. I got a couple of followers, a couple people in the administration know Jayco got some connections.

You've even had friends for the Oval Office, I've heard.

I did actually. I was there. You didn't notice it, but I was holding the camera. The cameraman got sick. He suddenly had food poisoning. So I was like, don't worry guys, I'll just hold the camera. And you know, I was quiet. I was quiet.

I didn't ask, can I can I just say personal? I watched that video go viral in waves. Like I saw when, when All in first posted. I'm talking about there's a video of David Sacks, Chamath, Polyhap, Tia, Dave Friedberg, Jason's besties from All In Touring. The Trump is giving them a tour of the new Oval Office with all the gold fixtures and appointments. And so at first it went viral from Trump fans and all in fans. Look at, look at the Our boys got this exclusive White House tour and then it died down for a few days and now we're in the second wave of blue sky, discovering it. Like look at the oh, Marie Antoinette dining while the people starve in their golden Oval Office.

The Golden Age, folks.

We're in the Gilded Age. Like a whole second wave now of people criticizing it.

Gilded and golden, two different things. We are in both. In fact, there is a Gilded Age occurring. There are people with incredible wealth who are living a lifestyle. And of course, I'm talking about myself today. So I'm out of here from your Manchester retirement show. But the Golden Age is worth taking a moment on. We are still, even though unemployment ticked up just a wee bit like 5% or something, we're still at an all time low of unemployment for our lifetime. It's not evenly distributed. And the stock market at an all time high. And America's competitiveness in the globe also at an all time high. I think despite maybe some of the foreign relations stuff people might not agree with and the tariffs and how we're doing foreign policy, you put all that together still, people want to park their money in America and people still want to climb over the fences and take boats and swim here. I mean, we literally have so many people who want to come to America and it's pretty far away from any other landmass. And one of the ways they want to do that is the H1B correct. Now, I have been on H1BS for decades. Why the H1B program I saw up close and personal when I was an IT guy in 1990, 1995 period, right as I was starting my magazines and getting out of corporate it. They always said the same thing. Lon. We can get people from India for 50% less, for 25% less. And we can lord over them the fact that, that we can bounce them in 30 days from the country and they have their families with them. So these typically it was Indian guys back then. I think today it's a range of folks. You might have people from South Africa as well.

I looked up the stats today. It is still majority, less of a majority than it once was. But you're still talking between 65 and 70% of the people on H1B visas are Indian.

Okay, so here's what it is. India is now the most populous country in the world. 1.4x billion people. They just eclipsed by like 10 million people. And you know, who knows if these numbers, numbers are exactly correct. China, and they don't have enough jobs there. And so there's a big exporting of talent from India to MENA and the United States, even Japan has a big program now to bring in doctors, nurses and healthcare folks because you just can't staff these positions. And Indian people have a great education system, an incredible work ethic, honor detail oriented executive function like I talked about before on the show, like, they're known for being incredibly industrious individuals. And so I'm making a sweeping generalization here about a group of people, but it's warranted.

So it's a compliment and it's a nice one. It's a positive one. Those are elaborate.

It's a positive one. Yeah. I hate to tell you, but overperforming versus peers would be the way to say it. And it is a competition between nations where what that's led to is so many of them want to come to America to make a Better Life. The H1B visa program has been abused. The salaries are the lowest of the people working at these companies. It is not for high skilled immigration. In the majority of cases. It's an abuse system to get cheap labor and then not hire Americans, who I can tell you from being inside corporate America my whole life, the way leadership looks at it is Americans are lazy. This is what they say. This is not my opinion. Americans are lazy and they don't perform as well as their Indian counterparts. So if I can hire somebody from India for 25 or 50% and they'll put in more hours, they'll work more diligently, they're more affable and more respectful and they want to work harder. This is what I've been told, Lon from the inside. Therefore, I proposed for the last decade on CNBC and on this very podcast, there's a simple way to stop this abuse, which is charge 10, $20,000 a year per year to have an H1B visa. Now, that would close the gap of trying to give these jobs to foreigners that are not skilled.

We have this clip. It was. We have a clip from a recent one episode 2170. It's from less than a month ago, August 27th of this show. I have the clip ready if you want me to share that. I will share my screen now.

By all means. Yeah.

And we can take a look at exactly what you said less than a month ago. Here we go.

Okay, here we go. What did I say? Pay. The difference between what the person would get paid as an American and what would they get paid as an H1B and they should get audited for that. What are you paying the equivalent people at your company? And by the way, there's a 10k, 20k fee for each of these. Not one time, Alex. Per year. So then if it is truly a person of unique skill, Colin, this is some AI researcher, got a PhD from Oxford and whatever, and you, you got to have them. There's only 20 of them on the planet. Great. Then you don't mind paying 20,000 a year. They're getting paid 200. It's 220. It's 10% more. You just said you can't find the person, so pay up. Oh, I was angry.

Yeah. A little fired up. Well, we had a guest who was complaining specifically about H1B abuse. And so that, that's kind of the angle that we were talking about it from. And you were saying you were going to send this exact proposal to Vice President J.D. vance, your good friend.

I did. I did. I tweeted him. I actually. And we'll send this clip, too.

They're paying attention because on Friday, President Trump announced plans to impose a $100,000 fee on H1B visas. There's been some back and forth about the rules. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick originally claimed this was going to be just as you proposed, an annual fee. But then the following day, White House Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt clarified. It is not. It is a one time fee. It only applies to new H1B applicants, not renewals.

Got it.

Not current visa holders. And it only applies to next year's lottery cycle. 20, 25 recipients. They're free. They're. They're using the old rules. This is only going to start next year. And the $100,000, it's about 6k times the previous cost. So they're definitely making it more. You know, the companies have to go a lot further. They have to really want these people in order to pay. JP Morgan stated bluntly that the move, quote, prices out the utility of H1BS as a source of labor supply.

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It'S no longer reason you would no longer bother hiring somebody. They're making it too expensive for this to be good. Actionable is what JP Morgan is good.

That's a good thing because now American companies will be forced to train people and create training programs. When I was coming up in the industry, when I was an IT guy, they gave you a training budget. They trained Americans for these jobs. And so there is a failure in our education system in preparing people for work in America. Our education system is completely descritiad. I've said this many times. So then corporations need to pick up this slack. They need to have training programs. I created one in our venture fund, the Launch fund where we train researchers. And if they get to 5001000 meetings with founders and they work hard, put in 50, 60 hours a week, then they become an analyst. If they do really well there, do another 500 to 1,000 meeting with founders, they get their. Essentially, if you think about Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours, you probably don't need 10,000 hours of anything to become an expert. What you need is really focused, concentrated effort and studied effort and mentored effort. And so if you mentor people, they will hit these notes, but you have to have intense mentorship. Just like if you want to get good at basketball, you can just go play at the YMCA. Or after 1,000 hours of playing at the YMCA, if you did 100 hours with an actual coach, that would be more than the thousand. So this is awesome. What they should add to this, and I'm going to add another wrinkle to this, is they should also have a parallel auction. They should auction off 10,000 of these a year. Each company should put in how many they want and how much they're willing to pay. So if you're OpenAI, your grok, your Geminis, DeepMind group, whatever it is, you say, you know what? I'm willing to pay 250,000 to get a thousand of these. So I'll give you $250 million. Right now, all these companies are sitting on all this cash. They're not paying taxes. There's all kinds of tax loopholes for corporations. They have money offshore that they haven't domesticated. That's sitting in bank accounts over there. The tax hasn't been paid out. That's another issue. You just tell them, listen, you can take your foreign money from your, you know, subsidiary in Ireland that owns the IP for Facebook. Chamath always tells that story. Whatever it is, you can take that foreign money and you can use that to, to pay for this. What does it do? This is Trump's genius. I always call Boston Strikes. I didn't like what happened to Jimmy Kimmel and how that went down with the fcc. I had a big, big discussion. We'll get to that in a moment on all in. We can debrief about that.

Sure.

But Trump does have a certain genius in saying this has value. Pay for it. And he uncaps it. So every time I come up with something, I said, they should sell citizenship. And I think I said, you sell citizenship for a million dollars. He made it five.

Five million? Yeah. The trump card. The gold. The gold card.

The gold card. That was my idea. And then I had this idea. 20K.

You have this opening to the administration. It's not that crazy that they might be lifting some of these ideas. I wouldn't say it's impossible.

Listen, it is what it is, folks. I don't care if my idea is like the 20th time they've heard it. You have a nice Chorus here. This is one of the things I do like about this administration. You guys will hear me call balls and strikes all day long. Politics is a little bit outside the. What is that word per view?

Remit, remit works, purview works either way.

Remit, purview. I'm working on my vocabulary with AI. The remit or purview of this show is startups. Well, this is something that directly impacts big tech and little tech for small tech companies. I think every small tech company, a company under a hundred should get one H1B for about 10,000. So every small company gets one of these one time one. But for 10, anybody over 100 employees, you've obviously got enough revenue. You've got 10 million in expenses, 20 million in expenses already. Then you should just be part of the strict lottery system. And this is, you know, or the auction rather. I like the auction or lining up and paying us. And I like the idea of people saying I will by a thousand a year for five years and I'll give you 1.25 billion and you can take that 1.25 billion right to the bank and cut down our deficit or put it towards education.

I mean, that is a great. I think that what you just added, I think so many of these revenue generating proposals from the Trump administration would go over better with a mainstream audience if they had that. Where is this money going to go? Because we don't really have. We're collecting this revenue but they're not really telling us what they're going to then use it for. And I think that's a, that's a big part of the equation. How is this going to benefit the American workers that are being crowded out by H1B visas? Are we going to put this into job training? Are we going to put this into unemployment systems? What are we doing with this revenue?

I think the, you know, the thing we have to really start thinking about is for one year after college having skills training available to any American in some format. So we already have like in most, I think states, Pre K through 12, which means you're paying for 14 years of education. When I run for president, I'm going to. When president. Your presidentjason.com I have the domain name, your favorite president, your favorite president to vote. When I run for president, you can clip this. When I'm in office, you could put it in my face, take ownership of what I say and do in the world. As we saw this weekend. I can get to that too.

It's on the docket.

It's on the.

I got it.

Very simple. You got it on the docket. Very simple. Instead of paying for 14 years, we're going to pay for 16. Actually, we're going to pay for 18. Two years of nursery school that's enriched like Montessori level nursery school is going to be available for free to all Americans who make under $200,000 in household income. Easy, easy breezy. Then we're going to have trade schools. The trade schools will be run as a new organization and each one of them will have a five. It's called $10,000 a year budget. Actually, 15,000 is, I guess, what you pay for on average in the United States per year of education. So you can make it. It doesn't need to be as much because it's trade school. And it could be like three days a week of school, two days a week of apprenticeship. We just have to come up with that trade school policy that is run by states, funded by the federal government and is available to anybody under, again, 250k in household income. And if you make above that, you just pay whatever the cost is. It's 15k. You pay the 15k.

There is that idea of the gap year after you get between high school.

And college, everybody's taking it.

Or after college, you take a year off to travel. It would be like, I don't know why we don't use that concept. Like take a year off after college before, you know, and like, or not before college, after high school, take a year off and study something that's not connected to what you thought your career goal was going to be. Maybe you'll like it. Like learn a trade, learn a skill. Just take that year. If you still want to go to college after that, great. But maybe you'll have found something. You may be able to start working somewhere. Maybe you'll have found a new trade or something that you could, you know, like, we don't give people that chance. Like I was 25 before I was just like done with school and out on my own and like, hey, what do you want to do now? And like, that's too old. You should have given me a chance when I was 17 to ask, ask myself those questions.

I got. I'm going to write this up as like a little.

I think this is a good idea.

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One more thing I want to add before we move off H1B visas. There there was a viral tweet from this University of Michigan econ professor Justin Wolfers. I've got it here. I will share it with you.

This is an academic elite.

It's an, it's an academic. But he raises, I think, an interesting point. He looked at the I'll decide on.

I'll decide on how I frame him if I agree with this point.

Fair enough.

Go ahead.

So he found a subsection on the official White House, you know, announcement of the visa program. Here's what it says. The restriction imposed pursuant to subsections A and B of the section shall not apply to any individual alien. All aliens working for a company. All aliens in an industry. If the Secretary of Homeland Security determines in the secretary's discretion that the hiring of such aliens to be employed as H1B is in the national interest and does not pose a threat to, to the security of welfare of the United States. So they've basically written themselves a loophole that says the Department of Homeland Security can waive the 100,000 if they decide this is a special scenario. Is this, as Professor Wolfers asks, is this an opportunity for Trump to basically do what he always does, hold court, get people to come visit him and give him little treats and bribes.

Consolidate more executive power, I guess would be the accurate way to say it. Right? Just like tariffs.

Right? Right. Like, like he's the only way to get out of this. So if you want to not have to pay your H1B employees 100k or want to have to pay 100k to hire them, you could go to Trump and do him a favor.

Very, very simple way to mitigate this is to have some transparency in the process. When somebody does not get their visa, it should be like, there should be an official process, and it should be transparent. Then if there was abuse of this, you would have that. But Homeland Security, there needs to be some executive power, make changes that keep the country competitive. And so what I like about even just having this upfront is we do have issues with spies. There were spies inside of Twitter from the Middle East. There have been spies inside of Google from China and other countries, Russia, et cetera. So you do have to be thoughtful about this. And there are multiple agencies that look into this. I'm glad that there's a professor reading all these documentations and building these concerns. And sunlight is the best disinfectant in almost all of these. So that's what I just like to see is a little more sunlight on the process, which is, you know, was my point with the FCC and Brendan Carr, which is an issue that we talked about on the all in podcast. It got a little spicy. But, you know, I think right now, Glenn Greenwald, Joe Rogan, myself, Ted Cruz.

Karl Rove seems like Rand Paul Rove.

Lots of people have spoken the Wall Street Journal. This is not an issue where it's like, JCAL is a lib. And I don't understand how people still try to box me into being a lib. I think it comes from Sachs constantly saying, I'm a lib. I'm an independent moderate. If you don't believe me, what state do I live in? What do I carry on my hip every day? And just look at my tweets. I'm as moderate. And even this week, I talked about my faith, which I literally never talked about because, I don't know, I was, like, personal and have, you know, struggled with it. As somebody who grew up Catholic, and I'm no longer Catholic, but I am Christian, and I. I happen to tell people I'm a Christian. This has freaked people out in a way that I didn't think I, you know, would ever experience. But it's gotten kind of weird that people are like, you're a Christian? And I'm like, yes. Is that a bad thing? Sorry. I kind of dig Christ, and I just like the learnings. I grew up with it. I mean, am I not allowed to dig Christ? I'm not putting on anybody else. I'm not lecturing anybody else about it.

You know, I only draw the line at the Tucker Carlson, you believe in angels and demons. That, that would take me aback. Other than that, I think it's fine.

I mean that's part of. And I'll just unpack it here for a second since everybody's asking me about this. I grew up Catholic.

Sure.

I was a practicing Catholic. I used to go to church every Saturday and every Sunday at 6am with my grandfather at St. Anselm's Church.

Catholic or Greek Orthodox? You were just Catholic.

I was Catholic.

Interesting.

I did go to Greek Orthodox sometimes with my grandfather on the other side. So my Greek grandfather, Greek Orthodox.

Oh, I see.

Was the Irish family Catholic? So, you know, Ty goes to the mom, I guess. And these.

Well, in Judaism for sure, yeah, the ties go to the mom.

Thai goes to the mom. But my dad was running a bar and playing backgammon and poker and having a pretty non religious life in Brooklyn. So anyway, I grew up Catholic. I didn't like the Catholic church. I elected to not be confirmed because I had problems with it. Gay rights, females rights, women's rights. It just didn't speak to me.

You and I are of an age where the sudden discovery that so much child sexual abuse was going on in the Catholic Church. Right. In our lifetime. I mean.

Correct.

When, when I was young, that was not a thing you ever heard about at all. That was not discussed. I had no idea, not being a Catholic.

So that, that, that interestingly, growing up in the 80s, they told us stay away from this priest and this brother specifically because they knew that those folks were predators. And I was like, well, why are we going to church if there's predators here? And they were like, don't go to the rectory. Stay away from this priest. But it was, it was very odd.

Thing for younger people. They might not realize like how short a timeline that like it was only the 90s when that movie sleepers came out and we started hearing about the Magdalena laundry stuff in Ireland. It's very recent. It's very.

Anyway, anyway, I'm a Christian. Sure, there it is. I mean I don't. Christians who are like, you won't talk about it. And I'm like, am I, am I obligated to? I mean I don't go to church, but I consider myself a Christian. I abide by Christian. It's a technology pocket. Okay, let's keep going.

All right. Okay, we've got some great questions from the audience about H1BS. So here s from SK H Y D C Hyde. I don't know that's. It's SK H Y D. They say each H1 has contributed millions to Social Security from every paycheck. What happens to that money?

Okay, there is people who have H1BS pay taxes and they pay into Social Security. That is a rare win for our government in retirement accounts. This also happens, I think, with illegal aliens pay into undocumented illegal. They pay into it. So sometimes you pay into something because that's the rules of the country and you don't get the benefit unless at some point you become a citizen.

Yeah.

Move back. Some number of people become citizens. The problem with the H1B visa, and I think Lutnick brought this up or JD brought this up and again, balls and strikes. Like they're going to get some things right here, folks, even if you didn't vote for them. The thing they, they realize is people who are coming on H1B visas, some of them were getting government subsidies. Like, you know, I'm not sure which ones. I don't know if it was food stamps or whatever it happens to be, but if they were getting paid such a low salary and then they were essentially getting put on the dole as well, shouldn't that be the company that, you know, pays for it? And this is the problem with the low wage hack people were doing.

So you also hear a lot from the left, you know, that companies like Walmart, McDonald's that are paying subsistence wages and then a lot of their employees end up using food stamps, you know, other kind of welfare benefits. And it's like, well, why we should just make McDonald's pay people more so that we don't have to subsidize their employees.

It's going to be a big part of my presidential platform as well, which is we're going to add $1 to the federal minimum wage for like, I don't know, the eight years of my presidency and get it up to 15. Globally, other people have 15, 20 an hour minimum wages and they have McDonald's and Starbucks. And when you get to 15 to bucks an hour, you're not raising a family on it, but you're also probably not going and getting food stamps. We saw this in, I think Seattle, New York and San Francisco, I think all have minimum wages in the high teens, teens to high teens. Now possible they did it over time. Yeah, what's that?

It's impossible to live in those cities unless you make, you know, 15 plus an hour. Like you're going to die.

So. Yeah, yeah, literally would be close to homelessness if you had a 2,000amonth apartment.

It's not possible.

Yeah, yeah. It says the Math doesn't math. So I think that just the federal minimum wage would be like a nice thing and if you really want it to be smart, this would be something Trump would actually go after for his third term. You should just say I'm going to raise the minimum WAGRE in my third term and just, just trolling. Fucking a joke.

We got one more. One more question or actually I think this is more a. This is a comment, not a question from ronak S on YouTube. They agree about the 10-20k payout that you suggested instead of 100k which they feel is too much. They also suggest we should scrutinize consulting firms applying for multiple H1B visas and prioritize international students. That would fix most issues. That's what Ronak thinks.

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That was a big, that was a big argument. I saw about the President's proposal with the 100K. Is that, well, isn't it possible these companies will just give up having US headquarters? They'll just Go somewhere else where you can give up on us cheaper.

No, they need, these jobs need to be on US soil in many cases. But some of the work that doesn't need to be will be there already. You know, a lot of times when you call it support in a company, it routes to the office in Manila or in India, wherever it happens to be. South America also coming on strong there, same time zone. So yeah, these are all important details and it's great that we're addressing them because for too long we weren't addressing these and it built up more and more abuse in the system and more and more resentment. And I think removing the abuse, creating transparency and making it a revenue generating arm of the government is long overdue. What else is on the docket here?

You want to talk about this Fox Tick Tock deal?

I think it's important because we're starting to get the contours of the deal, right?

Yeah, we're getting, we're getting more details. So on Sunday, President Trump was speaking to Fox News and he suggested that Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, the leaders of Fox News Corp. It used to be News Corp, now it's Fox. They may end up being among the investors in the new US based TikTok entity. Trump listed the Murdochs along with other people he said would quote, probably be involved in the deal. That includes Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison and another new name, Dell founder Michael Dell. So the White House, the White House is now suggesting that the TikTok deal, it's going to be an executive order. That's how we're going to push it through and it should be coming as soon as the next few days. The current plan, ByteDance is going to create a duplicate copy of the TikTok algorithm which they will then lease to this US venture that's coming together to sort of own it US users. In contrast to original reports, it seems like we won't need to download a brand new app. It's going to work with the TikTok app we already have on our phones. And the US government is not going to have an equity stake in the new company like they do with intel, even though they've sort of helped broker the deal. The government is not going to be a co owner of TikTok. So I think the big thing that the Internet is discussing based on this is that it does seem like the lineup of TikTok owners is a bit of a who's who of Trump allies. That includes the Ellison family, now the Murdoch family and Fox News. Marc Andreessen It's a lot. It doesn't seem like a very balanced collective in terms of their political side of the aisle. Does that raise free speech or bias concerns for you?

No, because every single Democrat and former Democrat is now engaged, with the exception of maybe Reid Hoffman in supporting the Republican Party. And so I've talked about this countless times, but Mark Cuban, Mark Cuban as well. Yeah, that's true. And he's not included here. But it seems like nine out of 10 business leaders are engaged with the Trump administration. The Trump administration has gone to great lengths to court the business community and to listen to their needs. And that's something, as I said on Jesse Waters show, the Democrats had the opportunity to do, and Obama and Bill Clinton used to do so. The moderate Democratic Party, which I kind of say Clinton was the pinnacle of, and Obama was adjacent to, and Biden went fully left or further left, they were super engaged with commerce. And so the Democrats during the last four years could have invited all these same people to the White House and had those kind of dinners and listened to their concerns and redid the crypto regulations and thought about all these things. And by the way, the Murdochs have been quite anti Trump. That's been a big point of contention between Trump and Rupert Murdoch. So I would put him in the bucket of anti Trump people or no longer fully throated Trump supporters. No, they've been, been very critical of him.

They had at times. I mean, I wouldn't say Fox News today is anti Trump, but.

No, not Fox News. I'm talking about the Murdochs themselves.

Well, that's the, there, that is them, that's the Wall Street Journal, one of their properties, you know, but the Wall.

Street Journal is like, if you, if you were to, if you were to look at Trump statements, he really has been down on Fox News and on the Wall Street Journal, two major profits.

I mean, the Wall Street Journal is the one that was publishing, you know, that birthday book and you know, all this other stuff. So, so they are, it's not a binary. It's not a one to one. Rupert Murdoch's a complicated guy.

So. Yeah. And Mark Andreessen I think was formerly, you know, Democratic and his partner Ben Horowitz was donating to Kamala very recently. So what's happened here is, so I don't, I don't have that concern. What I do like about this is it's a consortium. So if it's a bunch of people putting in 5 billion, 1 billion, 10 billion, whatever the numbers are, there's actually not one owner. It's going to be a fully diversified organization and company run by a board of directors. So in fact, there's going to be no God King. And if you want to talk about God kings, you can look at Larry and Sergey and Zuckerberg. They have super voting shares and they control their company. So if you want to know who can act unilaterally, it's people with super voting shares, different classes of shares where they get 10 or 100 votes. Zuckerberg and his family will control Meta and their billions of user for all eternity. That's the company that you have to be worried about. This company, you will not need to because the original owners are going to keep their stakes. So, Jeff Yass, I think my friend Brad Gerstner, Altimeter has a very public position in the company. I don't know how large it is. So this cap table is going to have, it looks like dozens of people on it. It will be a fully diversified company and then a large amount of the shares will be floated publicly, which why all these people are making this investment. They're not making this investment to control the asset. They're making it because it's a great business deal. This is the one company that challenges Meta's supremacy and will continue to do so. YouTube would be the other. Right. Just as the world moves to video and shorts. And so you have to ask who loses here? The big loser in all of this is Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg now has a viable, scary competitor. The competitor known as Snapchat has never really had any kind of impact on Meta's supremacy here. So this actually, if you just look at it from a cap table perspective, which is all you have to do. Even if Oracle and Dell have been seen at the White House or making donations, et cetera, everybody's doing that. So that's like 95 plus percent of the industry. And this will be a very diverse cap table. So not worried about it.

All right, fair enough. Yeah, we got, we got a pair of EU stories. You want to, you want to jump over to Europe and talk about what's going on in the eu?

Absolutely. What's going on in the eu?

So Bloomberg had. Oh, go ahead.

Yeah, no, no, it's, you know, it's one of these things that we don't talk about that often because they have so little impact.

That's why I thought.

Except when it comes to. The only thing that really comes to mind is the, the only thing that they ever really have an impact is the Nordic countries releasing great companies and Then everybody trying to regulate companies. So that's their impact on tech. Today is regulation in the north.

And just Friday we had Anton from Lovable talking about Stockholm being such a great. So that's what inspired me when I saw two big Europe tech stories. I was like, we gotta talk about it. Just because this is an ongoing theme of the show. So first up, Bloomberg has an interesting report on the rising demand for compute and power in Scandinavia. Data center power demand in the Nordic countries is expected to increase by 4x by 2032. By that point, data centers could account for 6 to 9% of total demand in Scandinavia for power. The reason is major players like Alphabet, Microsoft and Meta are expanding their footprints in the region. And the reason for that? Lower energy prices. Power in Nordic countries averages 60% cheaper than the rest of Europe. Parts of Norway and Sweden, it's as low as 80, 90% cheaper. All that on top of ample land availability and naturally cooler weather. We do have a graphic here if you want to look at how much cheaper power is.

Yeah, let me. Super interesting that power has become. Yeah, you can show that while I'm talking. Yeah, the. It's very interesting how power has become the vector of success for this. So in the Middle east they're going to have a lot of data, data centers. China using nuclear and the Nordics, you know, do have a cooler temperature on average.

Plus geothermal power is very big. Geothermal hydroelectric power. They've got a lot of alternate energy.

Sources, a lot of fiawards, a lot of water flowing around. Exactly. And then Norway has some of the biggest oil reserves, even though they're not pulling them out of the sea. Norway has the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world. So you have rich countries, they're smaller countries, but they have great land mass. It's cool. This makes total sense. And this is going to give them a huge advantage because this means compute will be cheaper and cheaper for the startups there and they'll be adjacent to it. And when you're adjacent to something, the collaboration goes up. This is what you see with the collisions that occur in Silicon Valley, Austin, Miami, New York, Los Angeles. Being in proximity to a resource can increase the collaboration with that resource, whether it's Hollywood or it's the finance district or the tourism or media stuff in New York. So yeah, this is going to be significant. They have to be somewhere there. And I would think France has an advantage here as well because they have such a pro nuclear approach and they have no problem building nuclear there. This is an opportunity for France to actually they have a lot of land mass and they have a lot of nukes. So why aren't they, I wonder, playing a bigger role here? They should be putting data centers near their nuclear facilities. And man, that could be such a huge win for France. Maybe they don't have the wherewithal as a government to take advantage of the opportunity. I know they've been in a bit of a chaotic state.

We were, we were joking about it. The French government actually collapsed while you guys were on stage at the all in summit.

Yeah. So there it is folks. I mean what a fumble by France and Germany which turned off, I think all six of their nuclear reactors were turned off because they were so overjoyed with their pipeline from Russia. And now that's gone too. So what a self own by Germany and France to not be collecting this. But this is where high functioning governments can do well, small governments. Norway is what, 5, 10 million people and Sweden is like 10. I mean the whole group is like 50 million people. And they have high functioning governments that represent the will of the people very well. And that's something. The United States is at a disadvantage because we have 50 different unions, such a large landmass and such a disparity in how people look at the world. You have rural America, you have ranches, you got people who live in cities. United States is very diverse.

We come back to this a lot. The 50 state thing makes some stuff real difficult. All of a sudden now you're dealing with 50 different bureaucracies, 50 different ways of seeing. It's very hard to do something nationwide. Whereas in a country like Norway, 5.5 million people, pretty centralized, much easier to do, say here's the new rule and everybody gets on board. I did ask Claude, why doesn't France have more data centers near their nuclear facilities? I got a really good answer. France is actually beginning to build data centers near nuclear power. But this is a recent development. French utility EDF is in discussions with three data center providers about supplying power for up to three 1 GW data center projects in France. And French Data Center Operator Data4 signed a 12 year supply deal with EDF making it the first data center operator in the country to sign a nuclear production allocation contract.

So there you go, there's a blocker here. The privacy regulations and the red tape in a place like France are extremely high. So if you were to put a data center there, you then have to, in all likelihood you buy into their privacy regulations, which are significant. And when you try to hold on to data For a long time France has been known to like with the telecom companies. I don't think they're allowed to keep your phone records for past a year or two. You can ask producer Claude to check on that. But I remember reading that headline like, like 20 years ago where the people in France were like, well, why do you keep my text messages? And you have my log of my phone calls. They have my lover on my phone. I don't want that to save. Why don't you get. I'm going into my Italian accent.

But they really care about privacy back and forth.

And here's the thing with the privacy concerns, there a very simple way to do this. If you look at the uae, which is incredibly savage, like one of the most savvy and Singapore, these are incredibly savvy governments and they will create a zone. So there's a media zone, a finance zone, there's a wagering gambling zone now in the UAE where they will say if you are in that zone, you do not have to obey the UAE's laws. So obviously, you know, gambling, alcohol may be against certain traditions in certain regions. So they just say, yeah, in this 10 by 10 mil you'll have a casino. And they're in fact building. You can ask producer Claude to pull this up as well. This amazing casino in one of the, I believe there's seven emirates that make up the United Arab Emirates, you know, Dubai and Abu Dhabi, but there's five other ones. And one of the other five ones, which is about, I think an hour and a half, two hours from Dubai, is going to specialize in having a casino. And I don't know if it's the Wynn or Caesars, but it's a major project that's opening next year.

Thanks to producer Claude, we have the answer. It's the Wynn. Al Marjan island is going to be the UAE's first casino. Wynn Resort secured a gaming license in the UAE in 2024. It's under construction now. It will be the first casino resort in the UAE. 5.1 billion dollar resort they're building on Al Marjan island in the Ras Al Kame Ras Al Khaimah Emirate.

It's going to be gorgeous, by the way.

Look out for that. It's coming in 2027. So if you are ready to level up your AI collaborations as you saw we just did, I want you to go to Claude AI slash Twist. You cannot do everything we just did without a paid plan. But Twist listeners get 50% off their first three months of generous Claude AI slash twist to get started.

Started Claude AI twist. Great. Thank you to them for sponsoring the show. Great.

And I use Claude every single day.

Deep, deep research. And it's getting faster and faster. It used to be like the deep research. You do it and go get a cup of coffee. Now you do it and it's like, here it is. Correct.

When I first start, I'll tell, I'll tell the story. When I first started using producer Claude for the show chat, GPT was much faster. And I would have to tell the host, I would tell Jason, give me an extra second or two. Claude takes a little while. It'll be a great answer. But it takes a little while. I don't have to take that time. As you saw, it's right away now it's much faster.

So here's what France should do. France should say in the 100 mile radius of the nuclear power plants, they are going to do an economic development free speech zone and that their laws will not impact the data centers located there. So if on those data centers the team at OpenAI wants to keep, you know, the memory of, you know, Your searches for 10 years indefinitely, and you've agreed to that, that would trump the local laws. That's how they can probably unlock this whole thing. So somebody send this to somebody in France. It's not a big deal. You just tell the French people, do you want to get a lot of jobs and a lot of income and then just charge a tax for that? If you want to be in the non restricted zone for AI, you just pay this certain minimum fee. It could be based on the number of GPUs. It's, you know, small tax, 1% of the cost of it or something de minimis. But that, you know, the savings is so great. People can't do that. But you would never do this in a place like the UK because you know, the government would then use it as a cudgel to try and get you to behave a certain way. I mean, they're knocking on people's doors in the uk, asking them about their social media posts and if they would like to apologize and you're like, what?

Things have gone, Things have gone pretty far, pretty weird.

And that makes them a no go for entrepreneurs. If any entrepreneur came to me and said, what country should I put my European outpost in? I'd be like, I can tell you which ones not to. Definitely don't go to Germany, don't. You would definitely want to go to Stockholm.

Yeah, that's why the number one would be Stockholm. I think.

Yeah, I think so. One more.

One more Euro story while we're. While we're on the continent. The European Commission is considering amending the 2009 e Privacy Directive. This was the rule that forced websites to get your consent before loading cookies. You know how every time you go on a website now, no matter where it is, you get that lower third, like, hey, do you accept cookies? Are you. And you have to accept all or reject. You know what I'm talking about? So this is all because the European Commission had this rule in 2009, and now it's basically polluted the entire Internet. Everybody's sick of it. Nobody reads those things anymore. So they're revisiting this rule. They're going to come up with a different way. You can either opt out of it or just approve. You accept cookies once in your browser, and then every website you go to doesn't have to like, hey, can you please consent to us leaving cookies in your browser?

That is so annoying that. Well, this is the thing about regulations. You know, you make these regulations and then if you make them beyond what users actually want, they will get annoyed. And conversely, if you do things that annoy users and you have dark patterns like, like I always tell the story about the Wall Street Journal, like, they're happy to take your money on their website and your credit card, but they won't let you cancel on their website. And I'm like, okay. And when I asked the woman on the phone why is that? And she said, well, we don't. We're concerned about fraud, I'm like, well, the fraud would be when I purchased it, not when I saw. Yeah, nobody's like, you're saving me money.

A fraudster canceled my Wall Street Journal subscription for me. That doesn't happen.

That doesn't. That's not a thing.

They don't make money that way. That's not a good fraud.

So this is, I think what the. The European Union's going to have to learn is if you overregulate, people are going to opt out. I said, Figma should make it so their product is not available in the uk. We don't sell into the uk. We don't have employees in the uk and we ban UK users from using our product because of what they did to them in terms of their sale. Just. Just Give up the UK who cares? It's probably less than 2% of their revenue and they're causing them headaches. So this is a natural process where you deregulate, you regulate, and the users eventually have a say. And users very much underestimate their power in this equation. I saw a movement over the weekend where. And I got lots of these where people were saying, I am unsubscribing high profile people from Hulu and Disney because of the Jimmy Kimmel thing. Now, I don't know if that's going to be a million people or 100,000 people, but that's a very interesting wrinkle in this debate.

And then just last night, they were supposed to have a carpet for this new Lilith Fair documentary that's coming out on Hulu and jewel and Sarah McLachlan were supposed to perform and they both canceled in protest. Kimmel. Yeah. So they. Disney ended up canceling the entire red carpet because talent was pulling out.

Man, talk about a rock and a hard place. I would not want to be Bob Iger right now.

They can't do anything.

You got the affiliates, you got the administration, you've got celebrities and consumers.

People are mad at them because of Gina Carano. They're mad at them because of Jimmy Kimmel. They're getting it from.

She had such a great character too. Hey, I just have an idea here. Can we just let artists be artists and. And like, just leave that out of the political discussion? Like, I love Gina. When she was on Mandalorian, I thought.

That they had that whole show planned. They were going to do a whole show about her. And then they, when they fired her, that, yeah, there were Rangers of the New Republic, I think it was called. It was going to be about her and all the other, you know, they have all those like X Wing pilots in the Mandalorian, like they're putting together. It was going to be about them, like the New Republic and their reassembling.

That would have been brilliant. And she was so iconic.

She was going to stare at. It was her spin off from the Mandalorian.

And then, I hate to give more advice.

Cara Dune is the name of that character, folks.

Cara Dune. I hate to give more advice. However, Bob Iger, very simple. You take Gina to lunch, you give her the VIP tour access, you give her a Club 33 membership. You say, listen, we made a mistake. In hindsight, it was a mistake. We'd like to reboot your show. Like to reboot your show in the spirit of things. And then they go back to Jimmy Kimmel and they say, Jimmy, hey, you know, comments felt a little insensitive. Some people were upset. Let's find a path to you coming back.

And Kimmel has basically he wants to come Back there. Basically, I'm piecing this together. It's rumors, but what it seems to be is that Kimmel will only come back if Disney's like, you can say what? He's got a bunch of other Trump jokes he wants to tell. He's got a bunch of other stuff. And he's like, I'll only come back if you let me say whatever I want on the show. And they're like, no. So that's the back and forth that's happening right now. They do. Kimmel does want to come back.

Here's the solutions to these problems. He's got X amount of time left on his contract.

Yeah.

May 2026. Perfect. Say, hey, we'll let you come back until 2026. We're obviously going to renegotiate. The show's a little bit underwater. You can go out in a flaming ball of glory or whatever, but if the affiliates don't want you and they do drop you, we're gonna have to change your pay scale and the budget of the show to reflect that. And then we're fine with you being online or something. But give him, like, a path to coming back. But he has to also recognize.

Yeah.

I mean, legally, their own.

They're tied to this contract. I don't think they can change.

Well, they just pay it off. Right. It's not a big deal. But I think, you know, in terms of this reconciliation and trying to bury the hatchet in this country, which some people want to do, some people don't want to do. I get it. It's all very emotional right now. You bring Gina back strategically. So that would be making amends, because I don't think she should have been canceled. I don't know. I don't remember exactly what her tweet was, but I don't think any artist should really be canceled for their tweets, unless it's like, hate speech or something. Really.

I believe it was about trans people. And it was an ongoing string. It wasn't just one.

I mean, people.

But. But I'm not. I'm not. I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm just saying that it was.

Artists can have opinions. Like, by the way, I'm not looking to Disney characters for my morality. I'm not looking to comedians for my point of view on the world. I'm looking for them to be entertaining what they do in their own time. If they love Trump, they hate Trump. They love what the situation in Gaza is. They don't love it. I mean, I'M I'm fine with people having differences of opinions and maybe we can get back to a place in America and in the media sphere where people can have opinions on their own and they can do art and we can kind of put those two things, you know, in two different boxes. Unless they're criminal behavior or something, I don't know. Let's keep going.

All right, let's move on. We got, well, we got one more big tech news story about OpenAI and Nvidia. Or we can move on to some startup stuff. Whatever you want.

I mean the Nvidia stuff I can just tell you. I saw the announcement and I saw the interview with them.

OpenAI, Nvidia announced a strategic partnership. They're going to deploy 10 gigawatts to Nvidia systems. Yeah, that's roughly 2% of total U.S. electricity consumption. It's basically the entire state of Florida's annual electricity use.

So what's happening here is, you know, they are trying to catch up to Colossus, you know, Grok and Xai, you know, they're building something very big. And I think people are starting to realize you need to build big things in order to, you gotta have these big data centers in order to maybe solve the next cohort of problems like curing cancer. Understanding the universe, everything we've seen up until now, as impressive as it is, is not typically a new innovation. Not original thought. Sometimes on the margins you can interpret a breakthrough. It's hard to know if that was random or brute force. But there's going to be another layer of this, of super intelligence, not just general intelligence. So this is all the super intelligence play. The theory is we're going to write better code, we're going to have better training data, but we're going to just put so much behind this that essentially everybody in the world is going to have an H100 representing them in the world, which means a billion, 5 billion H1 hundreds. That's a way to conceptualize this, is that every human is going to need to have a super intelligence partner and they will. This is all incremental revenue to everything Nvidia has done to date. And Nvidia is making a big investment as part of this. And then over the weekend I saw Jensen was in the UK and he made a huge investment in a self driving car company. I think it was Wade Wave, which is UK based. So the real story here is Nvidia wins again.

W A Y V E Wave is.

The company and this company's doing incredible and they're using that Thor architecture we talked about. So you have Waymo building a hardware stack, you have Elon and Tesla building a hardware stack and then you have a hardware stack by Nvidia at the same time. So Nvidia isn't just content enough to give the back end servers 2 people pursuing self driving, they're building another set of hardware and sensors just specifically for mobility. And that's the big news here is Jensen wants to facilitate more customers. It benefits Jensen if there are many players in a space competing, not one. Why? Well, because then they're not dependent on anyone company. And as we saw Microsoft had been like I don't know if it was 15 or 20% of their revenue. Everybody was speculating who's like there were.

Those three companies that are like half of their revenue and everybody was trying to guess what those three Alphabet or.

Meta or you know, pretty Clearly Microsoft. Microsoft OpenAI is the big fish because that represented two players. But now you have OpenAI and Nvidia collaborating directly to build data centers. That's a little bit of the fractioning of the relationship with Microsoft, I think and them going it on their own with their own compute that they don't have to go to Microsoft to get at Azure. Okay, fair enough. And Microsoft. Fair enough is working on their own large language models as well.

So.

The investments occurring here are significant. The wave one I believe was 500 million. And did they say what this Nvidia and OpenAI latest round would be?

Let me pull it. Yeah, it's $100 billion. Strategic partnership is what they're calling it. And yes, half a billion was the WA deal. Nvidia intends to invest up to 100 billion in OpenAI progressively as each gigawatt is developed. The first gigawatt of Nvidia systems will be deployed in the second half of 2026. So it's 100 billion over an extended period of time.

So what's very interesting about this and is going to become the next big debate is is this round tripping where I give you an investment and then you spend it with me? Correct. So the accountants are going to be all over this. Jensen is very smart, he knows this. But this could lead the sec. I'm sure the SEC has already asked them about it and I'm sure they've buttoned it up. But I'm giving you a billion this year. You're buying 2 billion worth of H1 hundreds. This is going to have to face some pretty significant scrutiny. The problem is when the investment and the round Tripping is not justifiable. So OpenAI has got to buy these anyway. It's pretty clear. And Nvidia's got a bunch of cash to invest, so they're going to own a significant amount. They're going to own 10% or 20% if it was $100 billion. This doesn't make sense to me. These numbers need to be clarified, and we'll do that in an upcoming episode. But. But if they were putting 100 billion into the company and they just did a secondary of 500 billion, doesn't take a genius to figure out that's like 20%. Yeah. A huge investment. But I think they're blending numbers here, probably.

I mean, it's also what the US Government does when we sell weapons to allies. We sometimes, like, loan them the money that they then use to buy the weapons from us. Like, that's what Israel does a lot.

You know, it's called a loan lease. It happened in World War II, where the US wasn't in the ultimate strong position. So they said to the allies, hey, you can buy weapons from us, but we need them back. And then typically, with the situation in Ukraine, you can have the option to get the rebuild contracts. So when you talk about the war machine and you want to be cynical, it's like, we're giving you weapons. You owe us the money for the weapons, and then we get to rebuild the bridges and the hospitals. Correct.

And get your rare minerals as well.

While we're at it. I mean, it's almost like there's people who want to see wars in the world. I don't want to go full conspiracy theory here.

It's not almost like that, but. Okay, well, we'll. We'll save that for another.

Benefits from all of this. It's above my pay grade. I'm just an angel investor podcaster.

Yeah, we'll do that in our next show, Conspiracy Corner. We've spent a lot of time this episode on Big Tech. We've got a ton of startup news and little smaller stories. We only have like one or time for one or two stories, so I'll give you some choices. We could talk about Bill Gates's daughter's new startup. We could talk about Blue sky getting more intense with moderation. We could talk about Howie releasing their first ad.

And closer to Hit me with Howie.

Howie. All right, so Austin Petersmith, friend of the show, his AI secretary or AI executive assistant, Startup Howie made a few big announcements. They're now available to the general public. They've finished their $6 million seed round. And they have a brand new website, howie.com, which I'm going to pull up for you right now. Show it off. Off the people's secretary, they call it.

Amazing. Amazing. I should have had him come on. He had texted me. We. We seed invested this. I guess we seeded it. I think we were the first. You.

You are listed among the seed investors here, correct? On. On the website.

I think we were the first. We. We. You know, he came to me with the idea that he had a general AI idea around productivity. And I said, you know, I think I gave him 500k or 250k. And I just said, okay, great. Because I had worked with him on Inside before. So I was just like, go for it. We'll seed it. And so we don't usually do that unless we know the founder. And they made a great. I love these launch videos.

That was high production value. If you want to take a look at the.

Let's play it. Let's play it for. Yeah. And Howie is just so people understand. It's like it does meeting scheduling, like, much better than calendly, let's say where people report that. And I have Athena assistants. So I'm thinking about getting my Athena assistants, Howie, so that they can be more productive. Because a lot of what they do is scheduling. And what you do is you just say, hey, Howie, and you CC it on your email and it just finds times and books.

And what I have noticed, because a lot of the founders we book on the show use Howie. And what I found is a lot of people don't know that it's an AI. It's so natural. It's so good at using natural language. It's so efficient. A lot of people. I'll see these email threads and people will be like, thanks a lot, Howie. Like, they believe they're talking to a real human personal system, which does not happen all the time. So that's a. That's a mark in their favor. So here's. Here's the ad they put up for today's launch video.

It's time to bring back the secretary.

What?

Hold on, hear me out. We're bringing back the secretary.

I like the.

Not the job title, not the rest.

Yeah, I like the 1950s boulder.

Yeah.

But the poise, precision, the prestige. Someone else is managing my calendar.

You get a secretary. You get a secretary.

You get a secretary. No, I don't have a pen. I have a pencil. No more triple bookings or battling for bio breaks. We're not scheduling meetings to schedule Meetings about meetings that are soon to be scheduled. Hi, I'm calling about the meeting for the meeting. Thanks for setting the meeting. It's a secretary for all of us.

Yeah.

Even secretaries meet Howie. The return of the secretary. Things got a little crazy back there, didn't they?

Hmm. There you go, Howie. That come. It's a little spicy on the gender thing. The throwback. People don't like the term secretary anymore. Like executive assistant. Executive assistant secretary went out, so they're kind of being playful. I like it. I wonder if this was shot or was AI that was the first thing that came to mind because everybody shooting these.

That's a really good.

That looked like it was shot.

That's. That's definitely a real lady.

That's an actor.

Yeah, that's an actress. This is a set, I believe this is real.

Man. What did this cost, you think? Because, you know, making a spot like this back in the day, there was that guy, sandwich media, I think. Remember that guy who was in all the commercials and he was charging like quarter million dollars at the peak, I think maybe a hundred thousand.

Yeah. I feel like.

What do you put this at? Now, today's.

I feel like this. It's gotta be a few hundred K. I mean, just to pay the whole crew that had to be there. The editor, the director.

I'm not sure. I think this is done for 10k now.

10K. Wow. That would be very.

I think so. Yeah. I think there. This set exists somewhere in Hollywood. The actress, I think. Yeah, but you gotta pay.

You gotta rent this set. They probably needed two days to shoot this whole thing. There's a lot of setups.

I wonder. I wonder. I don't know.

It's pretty tight production, as a rule. Like, you gotta remember, like, every time they have to tear down and like reset up for a new shot, that's 20, 30 minutes to get all the lighting replaced and move the cameras. And there's like three different teams. I don't know. I mean, I don't know. I'd be interested to ask out Austin.

And I also wonder because I see people doing it themselves now. Like, a lot of founders are just shooting them themselves because the cameras are so good.

Did that really good one that we liked, where it was just him at his desk in his leather jacket, remember?

So there's that one. But that's not like a produced concept with an actor. Right. It's like him.

No, that was just. That was just him talking about his startup.

Yeah. I just feel like everybody knows production now. Like the. The Mystery of how do you make a great shot has gone down. And I could see like some of these cut shots eventually could be done by AI. Right. And so I think we're close to having, I think within a year or two of. I'll say within two years you can do this level of production with AI. Yeah.

If a human is doing all the creative and it's just the production part that's leave to AI. Yeah. I mean, probably pretty soon I don't.

Think it's going to write it or come up with the concept. I'm saying you get a smart person who writes it and has the concept and says, I need the pencil being sharpened, I need the clock ticking, I need this sound, I need the cup of coffee. You could probably already do it like this.

You could probably do that already and it would just look a little janky around the margins. We're like a year or two away from it being super polished.

Yeah, I love it. I think it's great. And I wonder if these launch videos actually pay for themselves. And I think that's to just give some startup advice here. Be open to any possible experiment in terms of marketing your product, especially if you have product market fits. You got to remember how he's been around, I think for two years and he did it very slow, like Superhuman. He was very influenced, Austin, by the Superhuman experience and he really onboarded people thoughtfully, made sure the product did one thing better than anybody else. He achieved that and then whatever. I don't know. Two years after founding the company, here he is actually doing the launch video and promoting it. So that's something to think about. Are you doing something very narrow that solves a deep problem that people have fallen in love with that has product market fit that gives you the right to then go spend 50,000 on this and then spend $50,000 marketing it, whatever it happens to be. So I do think like be creative folks. And Cluly did a really good job with this. Just getting far too much attention. And I think I don't know if their product like how the product's doing exactly. I don't hear people talking about using their product, but I hear people, people talking about their company. So I think sometimes like the company promotion can exceed the product. I don't know if that's the case include because I don't know the user base. But like I said, I hear people all the time using Howie. And then the marketing comes after all that's been built up so that people who are using it get to feel like, ooh, they were part of something. Right. As opposed to spending all this marketing dollars before you have product market fit. Make sure you have product market fit first, folks. That's my best advice.

Yeah, I think that's a thing comes up a lot in founder U pods and our Portco pods is people who, like, they're. All their ideas are about the marketing. And it's like your product's not really ready for that yet. You know, like, I feel like that cart before the horse sort of situation comes up a lot. Do you want to do one more?

Another one?

Oh, go ahead.

Well, you know, there was another video from one of our portfolio companies that I haven't seen. Let's play it here.

You want to check this one out?

Yeah.

All right.

I didn't know they did a launch video. Let's play it here.

I'll give you right now. Here we go.

You'll get my. My raw reaction to this. Have you seen it?

No.

Weekend was just within reach. But the asks don't care what time it is.

Okay, guys, pounding his keyboard. It's shaking. Room's on fire.

It's time to introduce a new way to work. Meet Aragon, the AI operating system for enterprise. A context engine that understands. Understands your business, learns over time and delivers the insights leaders need to make better decisions.

Love it. Can you send that to the management team?

I'm on it.

It's not just automation. It's enterprise reasoning at scale.

Okay. Enterprise reasoning at scale. So you know, that doesn't have the production value of Howie's got the room.

Being lit on fire. That's some VFX that probably cost him. You know, that was a little bit time to put together.

No, I think was literally. I bet you that one was done for low thousands of dollars and was done in house. I don't think that was done out of house. That's my guess. But I need to know the price, so let's find out.

I think they probably got a VFX company to do the room being lit on fire part. Otherwise, I don't think they.

Well, it's the founder. That's the founder doing it. So I think that's his actual office and they lit it. But. Yeah, I wonder if that's just. Cause it looks like it's cut. That could just be a stock image of something on fire, but good job.

I mean, that looks like vf. I think they had a guy who knows that.

I think AI could do that maybe. I think AI is capable of doing that right now. And the Thing with the backgrounds is when you see a set. Now, I get fooled sometimes when I see people's zoom backgrounds. So even zoom sometimes at first glance, I'm like, are you in an office or you take a picture of your office? I have a friend who has a perfectly shot picture of his office that he uses as his background. And then people assume he's in his office, and I know he's not. A lot of people have that because I know he's traveling because I'm traveling with them. And I'm like, well, that's interesting. All right, great show, everybody, and thank you to our partners. And just quick shout out to our friends at Athena as well, who provide me with my executive assistance. Go to athena wow athenow.com and they'll give you a couple weeks off and just tell them your boy jcal sent you. But you got to go to athenawow.com to get my discount, which is the best disc can get, you know, wow.com I have two assistants and I'm going to give them Howie, I think this week so that they can be even faster. And those two assistants, I, I have them working staggered schedule. So when you and I were working on the weekend, we had an AI project we dumped to them. And you know, it's like nice on a Saturday, Sunday to have support to just, hey, do some projects. And then I have them backfill have projects they can do without asking anybody. I'll just have, I have some research projects I have them do for the sales team, like SDR kind of stuff. And they do a great job of that too, when there's no work to be done. Okay, we'll see everybody next time on this week in startups. Bye.

Bye. Bye, folks.

Sam.