Robinhood Venture Fund, Polymarket adds earnings, and LAUNCH Accelerator 35 is here! | E2178

People are voting with their dollars to install solar that is not even subsidized. Why? It's cheaper to install solar than it is to install clean coal. So the idea that we're going to burn more coal rather than put in solar, rather than invest in nuclear just seems illogical. And so, all due respect to the secretary, I believe there's a little bit of politics in this and that Elon and the Chinese have it right.

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Welcome back to this week in Startups. He is Alex Wilhelm. I am Jason Calacanis. This is the show where we talk about startups, the broader tech ecosystem, system finance and of course, everything having to do with starting a company and being a founder. I do basically two things in this world. I invest in startups and I appear on podcast three days a week here on this Week in Startups. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Thursdays, I tape all in and comes out on Friday. And then we run two free programs for investment Founder University, which we're kicking off today here in Austin. I got a hundred people outside the studio listening to amazing talks and that's our pre accelerator. Then we have the launch accelerator on its 35th cohort. That's where we put like Techstars, Y Combinator, Antler, et cetera, 125k into startups that are already formed and have a product in market typically. And then finally we have the syndicate.com where we do later stage companies and we syndicate those deals to over 10,000 angel investors. So that's what I do for a living. And here we are at this Week in Startups. Alex, we got a lot to get to. Maybe we could just start off with the companies we accepted in the accelerator and rapid fire you can tell us about them and I'll give my feedback. So.

All right, well I'm going to pull up a screenshot of everyone's logo here so we can take a quick look at this. Here's the launch accelerator website. And Jason, I'm going to tell you each of these companies in order. So first up is era. This is an application that helps women reduce anxiety by transforming wearable data and self reflections into custom meditations. I love women's health. I love this idea.

Yeah. So we've had great success with our com.com investment with Tone base, teaching people music. And of course I've enjoyed everything from my Fitbit scale to my whoop to my aura ring which I don't use anymore because I lost it and my eight sleep, which we're investors in. People really will pay any amount of money to be healthier or, you know, significant amounts of money to be healthier, to optimize. And if you look at women's health, it is different. There are. Please don't cancel me, Alex. There are gender differences that are real on planet Earth. And you know, when you make something for half the population, you get a benefit because you are targeting it to a specific group of people and you can tailor it to their specific needs. Now you lose half the audience, but that's okay because you over service those. And stress, you might have experienced this with moms or people trying to have it all can be stressful. Right? And so any way to cope with stress, which is in some ways the obesity or cancer of our time as we, my thesis is as we get rid of obesity because of GLP1s, we'll see a decrease in things like cancer, heart disease, which are downstream of obesity. And we have an obesity crisis in the world and specifically in America. So what will be left? Well, stress and anxiety, mental health. These are very, very acute issues in the world. I like to take some, I don't wanna call it a Hail Mary, but I do like to make some aggressive bets on things that are gonna happen in the next year or two or three. In other words, skating to where the puck's going. So I'm very happy about this one. And if you click on the link, Alex, it'd be great to show their homepage. Cause it's beautiful.

Absolutely. Coming right up, here is the homepage for our dear friends over at Era Smarter Stress Management. 48 stars over on the App Store. Over 1000 ratings already off to a very strong start, Jason, but let's keep moving on. Got a lot of companies to talk about. Next up is Loops. Loops wants to build AI agents that help automate customer experience. Now the tagline here, Jason, is pretty simple AI customer experience that pays for itself. All founders love a good deal and they Also love having less busy work. So I dig this one too.

Customer support is a repetitive task based on knowledge. It's a finite knowledge set for your product or service. When you think about the issues you have when you're flying on an airline, those issues will be, I need to change my flight, I need to book a flight. There was a problem with my flight. You know, it's a small cohort of issues. My flight was canceled, my flight was delayed, yada yada. Or I need to change, you know, X, Y and Z in my reservation. So if you can help people build agents to address these things and empower people to delight customers, you can have two things occur, Alex. You can lower your prices at your. You can. You can lower your expenses, which means you can lower your prices, or you can be more profitable and you can delight customers. And delighting customers is what it's all about. Really excited about loopsmartai.com I'll shout out their domain name. Let's go to the next one.

All right, next up is Lumix Ads. Now, Jason, I'm curious, is this the company we had on a while back? Because this method of attaching essentially billboards, digital billboards, to ride sharing or, sorry, delivery vehicles, seems really familiar to me. Do we have them on?

I think that they came to our founder university and they're getting great results. So here you see, if you look at the webpage, I'm assuming those are LEDs, but they could also be printouts in color. I think they're printouts, actually. Okay, I have to check that. No, no, I think they're LEDs. So they made these boxes to put on the back of Vespas. Yeah, they're. They're LEDs. Sorry. And what they found were, was that people riding around Miami and other cities, these were highly, highly effective. And advertisers love them. People love outdoor advertising. We've had a couple of companies fail in this space that we've invested in, but I still believe in outdoor advertising. And I do think we're gonna see more and more mobility in the world. I recently saw a Waymo had been wrapped in Sabrina Carpenter's new album. So imagine there are a thousand robo taxis, a thousand, you know, Vespas, a thousand, a thousand, a thousand drones, et cetera. These things could all have some amount of advertising on them. It has to be normalized. It has to be prov to be effective, but it's going to be a great market. And so I'm really excited about this company as well.

Sabrina Carpenter's. Latest album, Man's Best Friend. If you're not up to your Gen Z pop now, you know. All right, next up, Manta. This is all about bringing AI into the world of education. Jason. I love startups. I love this idea. My thought here is that lesson planning is probably a little bit repetitious. So giving teachers more AI tooling will help them do more with less and probably have more time with the students. But I'm curious what you think.

Yeah, Monsha. AI M O N S H A AI Everybody wants to think education is going to be disrupted by AI. Yes, that is true, but how will that happen? Do we think teachers are going to go away? Do we think teachers are unnecessary? Of course not. But their role will change. And if you can make a teacher create better lesson plans, that means more engaging classes, more reason to come to class. And so this is a great wedge. They found a problem. Teachers want to make better lesson plans. They spend a lot of time on it. Students want to be informed, educated, entertained, perhaps engaged, fascinated by what their teachers are teaching. So why not give them some tools to build their, you know, essentially presentations, right? And make better courses. And so if you can make a teacher but 10%, 20% faster or better, you know, making their lesson plans, that's going to have a dramatic impact on outcomes and maybe teachers can teach more courses. So if you were, let's say this makes teachers twice as fast creating coursework, well, that would free up time for them to spend more time with students, or it would give them the ability to teach another course and make another lesson plan. And of course, outcomes will ultimately be the other part of it. So you're starting to see a theme here in how my team and I will look at startups. Does it save money? Does it make the product better? Does it save time? Does it do all of those things? Great products and services in the world tend to entertain you, save you time, save you money, or make you better at something in the world. Right? And so here we are. Faster, better, smaller. Great, let's go. One thing I always pay attention to when meeting with a new founder is how quickly do they get back to me. Response time, do they have a sense of urgency? Or not leaving people hanging, not getting them the information they need during due diligence or during an investment process, response times matter. And if you're running a service business, it's extremely acute. If I don't hear back from you, I'm moving on to the next provider. With OpenPhone, your entire team can share one number and one inbox, turning incoming calls and messaging into a collaborative project where nothing falls through the cracks. Your customers and clients hate having to constantly re explain their situation to you. So OpenPhone's warm transfers completely fix this issue. Plus, when it comes to voicemail, OpenPhone's AI agents will not just answer your calls after hours, but they'll answer, ask important questions and capture your leads or customer support needs while you're sleeping. See why? Over 60,000 businesses already trust OpenPhone and one of those businesses is mine. And they're going to give you 20% off your first six months if you go to openphone.com twist it's very important you go to that. I know you don't need to save the 20% if you're listening to this pod, but it lets you know that we sent them. If you've got an existing phone number with another service, OpenPhone will port that over at no extra charge. Openphone.com twist well, sticking to most of.

Those themes, the next company is next visit, which is an AI medical scribe that unsurprisingly transcribes medical appointments. Jason, if you've ever gone to the doctor, and I presume everyone listening here has, you've seen the laptop out and the rapid fire typing. What if they didn't have to do that? What if they could just talk to you? Back to the idea of saving time, saving money and getting better. I love this.

We're seeing this happen on our desktops already with, you know, Zoom creating meeting notes and the long tail of meeting note companies from notion adding it obviously granola. Many different products or services are doing this now. And so it's gonna be verticalized so that when you're talking about specific codes that you know go into reimbursement with insurance companies, it knows what an F299 is, point B. Right. And it will double check that. So all kinds of coding, medications, you have to get these things right. And so it's great that people are going to be working on these very narrow verticals. Reminds me of Tax GPT, another huge success we had out of the accelerator.

All right, next up is a company called Path. Now this one's a little bit interesting, Jason. What they want to do is help people build applications. But the trick here is when you go to their website and you look around, it's not just for external apps, it's for internal apps as well. And while I love companies like Lovable to let people take a prompt and turn it into a semi app, if you will I think the idea of applying that to what companies need to run themselves is quite interesting.

The major innovation we'll see with AI will be inside of enterprises where people who know exactly what software they need but are unable to build it will be able to build it in the future. So many times there's some operations person, there's some salesperson who says, I need software to do X, Y and Z. And then somebody finds, you know, that requirement or they stumble upon it and they make a startup. Well, it would be much better for somebody to build that prototype inside their company if they were so inclined because it might be too niche. If I had a company, you know, I don't know, that was a bakery selling $7 croissants and, you know, I needed to have some app for managing the production of said croissants across different regions, et cetera, and delivery to bakeries and, you know, other third parties who resold ours. You know, that whole process. There might not be an app out there to manage the resell of a central Bakery to 50 other restaurants and cafes who want said croissants. Well, now somebody could make this croissant AI Apple for that bakery and maybe it helps them scale faster. So there you go folks. Great job. Path.dev.

Well, you just gave Mistral and the entire European sovereign AI movement a push by saying, hey guys, croissant AI coming up next.

Yes.

All right, the next startup is pitch perfect. Now, Jason, you know I love startups. You know I love you. Little torn on this one because this is all about having more effective SMS drip campaigns for marketing. Yep. And I want to hear why I should love this.

So you and I come from an era of people who cared about the privacy of their phones. Right. We were very open to getting emails because that didn't feel super intrusive. Right. And you could kind of sort them or maybe you'd make a shopping email or you'd put a little tag or you'd have the email software you use Gmail, Superhuman. Put them into a marketing tab. But there's another generation that doesn't like email. They much prefer to live in their sms. That's their inbox. You and I look at our, you know, SMS like that's for my spouse, my kids, you know, my parents and my parents. It's emergencies, right? It's high, high, high signal. We are not the average consumer anymore. We are the old paradigm, the new paradigm. They. You ever see these people who have 327 unread imessages and you're like Descartesia. How could you ever have that? I have. Every single one of my imessages is read all the time and I will unsubscribe or block, you know, if I start getting pitches from Gavin Newsom or J.D. vance on my phone. How many do you have?

513 unread.

Are you on group chats or something or what is all that messiness in there?

I don't know about toddlers.

Okay, call me. And so, you know, each generation looks at these different inboxes differently and so other people look at phone calls as intrusive. I like getting SMS from my favorite brands. So when I get them from, you know, ski brands or specific, you know, other brands where, like clothing brands where I'm really into them. Tom Ford, I don't mind being on those but I do want them to be high signal. This will allow you to be high signal.

Add a fraction of a penny per sms. I mean the thing that shocked me here when I was prepping for this is that $0.007 per SMS, which is 7/10 of a cent, that's about as cheap as I think it gets. So. All right, moving on. Next up we have Ready, which is an application. It's not too hard to explain, Jason. If you have folks who work for you across the sea, you may want to provide retirement benefits for them as you do to your domestic employees. That's not always as easy as you'd hope. So Ready wants to make that easy.

Yeah, paying people overseas is hard. Getting them benefits is hard, onboarding them is hard. And there's a whole swath of companies and this one has great traction and we're seeing increasingly, and you know, this is a thesis we have, that work will go to knowledge workers in a region that are most motivated to do it at the best price. And you're gonna wanna retain those folks. So if you're in a competition to do data labeling, if you're in a competition for SDRs, for developers, for designers, well, if you can say to this group in Paraguay or Uruguay or India, et cetera, hey, we are aware that There is a 401k system in your country. It's not called 401k, it's not a 529, it's not an IRA, a Roth, whatever, but you know, Ready, R E D I I co is going to just abstract that all and we're going to give you 100 bucks a month towards it. Well, that could be the difference between having 20% turnover and 2%. And that could be the difference between having, you know, a highly profitable great company and one that is constantly chasing its tail trying to retain talent. And it is becoming a talent war in those countries.

Absolutely. And if you're going to hire overseas, you're going to need to keep an eye on compliance, Jason. And that's where Sourcely comes in. Sourcely is compliance on AutoPilot, automate your SoC2, automate your other reports that you need.

Yeah, absolutely. And you know, they're integrating with all of people's different environments, whether it's HubSpot or Intercom or Slack. And so, you know, it's end to end and it's going to help people with their cybersecurity needs. So lots of competition in this space and we're really excited to see how they do.

I'm going to make a small correction here. I'm being lit up in the the back channel. It's so curely, not sorcererly. That makes a lot more sense and I sincerely apologize to the team.

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Have a company called SpatialGen, which you can see here, all about building spatial video for different contexts. What's the thesis here?

So people will want immersive content eventually. And so imagine exploring. You know, sports is probably the one where people get a lot of. It's easy to imagine wanting to watch sports in an immersive way. And being able to stream that is highly technical. So imagine you're watching a UFC fight. How do you make that environment and stream it at a high fidelity? You're gonna need backend tools and that's what they're building. So, you know, this is how I'm.

Gonna get courtside in the NBA without having to pay $15,000 a ticket is what you're saying.

Absolutely. And so again, skating to where the puck is going. We haven't heard a lot about the Apple Vision Pro, but we will. Apple didn't just invest $10 billion into that project for no reason. They believe that AR VR is going to be a platform that works. Obviously XR, which is a combination of these things. And I believe this new iPhone Air, which is a weird product, right? It's all battery and then the top is a little tiny computer. When you X ray it, it's literally 90% battery. And at the top, where the camera is, is the entirety of the computer and the chips. And they got rid of the SIM slot, which saved a bunch of space. That is their prototype. Not for a thin phone, which I don't think people care about particularly. Even though it's interesting to look at the Apple Air as a phone. I don't think actually anybody wants this, honestly, I don't really. I don't think it matters to anybody whether it's half the thickness of your current phone or 50% less. Cuz you still have that big chunky camera. And everybody likes to have the big chunky camera capable of great photos. What I think they're doing there is a proof of concept. Imagine you lop off, if you show that again, if you lop off the top 15% of that phone, that's where all the innards are. Now take that and put it into the side of a thick pair of Ray Bans like you know, Bob Dylan would have. That's what we're looking at here. And in fact, you know, basically where the phone bezel, where the camera bezel is, is the entirety of the compute. And people are already mocking up glasses for Apple. I saw them like trending on socials where people are like, hey, you know, this could be the next glasses. And so if you think about glasses. There it is. So that.

That's amazing.

Yeah, you think about that. And by the way, the Mac Mini is part of this process. So making things smaller, faster and cheaper means they will be putting what we just saw into TV monitors, Apple TVs, watches and eventually glasses. So this whole process of manufacturing tiny components that do everything and that have good battery life is all leading up to a pair of Apple glasses. And we believe SpatialGen will then be able to help people send videos to those glasses. And if you had those glasses and you were watching the Netflix fight, remember Netflix had a hard time with streaming. Now imagine you're streaming this incredible 16K immersive video. That's a lot of bandwidth. That's a lot to contend with. And so, yeah, that's what I just realized.

That's a huge bull case for your Starlinks and project Kuipers that want to build enormous cloud, sorry, satellite data transference systems. Because if we're going to have that level of bandwidth, Jason, we're going to need it everywhere. So one last thing before we move on. Here is one of the mockups of what some people think the Apple specs will look like. Imagine if you took that bit of the phone, Jason. Just slapped it onto the earpiece.

Absolutely.

Voila. Odd by one. Day one. Okay, last company in this cohort is a company called Treasure. They call themselves the all in one platform for your conventions. And I love this one because they directly call out the fact they're building a tool that's going to help people host card shows and hobby events. Sounds niche is an absolutely enormous part of the economy. People love trading cards, they love card games. And also Jason, I love anything that encourages people to get out of the house and go see some like minded folks.

Yeah, trade shows are something I've done. And imagine an all in one trade show platform for, you know, your particular passion. You're trading cards, Magic the Gathering, comic books, video games. Well, a blocker for a lot of people is the organization of these events and all the vendors at them. So if you can build a platform where people can sign up to buy a booth, people can find that booth on the, you know, in the app, on the website, engage with it. Those people can see their sales, ticketing, all that great stuff. We feel like the people who've used this product gave it rave reviews. So we look for teams that are builders and then if we talk to a couple of customers during our diligence process and they're over the moon with the product, we think to Ourselves, we've got a team that's exceptional at building product who has already delighted a user. It doesn't matter if it seems niche to us at the time, because Lincoln town cars for VCs and CEOs coming from the airport or going from dinner to the after party in San Francisco seemed niche at the time. It became Uber and Airbnb and sleeping on somebody's couch and, you know, renting your spare bedroom, that also seemed niche at the time. Coinbase and Robinhood seemed like niche products at the time. Those are some of the biggest hits of the last 15 years. So if it's a great product person like Vlad or tk and it's niche, okay, we'll take those opportunities and then watch them build that beachhead market into a wedge, like those wedges you might put into a log that if you hit it three or four times right at the direct spot, could crack open a giant market. That's what we think we'll see out of Treasure, which is on Treasure.com on.

Treasure.com and if you want to understand the market better, just check out the trading card database and then search for a big state and look at all the events that are going on. Not a small market today. People love this stuff.

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All right, Jason, let's move on. I want to bring up a clip from the All In Summit. We talked about this a little bit on Friday, but there's one more. The team wants us to discuss. This comes from your conversation with the Secretary of energy, I believe, Mr. Chris Wright and deals with you.

Round two.

Round two.

Yep. This went viral on social media.

Yeah, yeah. And I pulled some data to help us understand the argument. But here, let's hear from both you and the secretary.

Okay, here we go.

The solar supply chain. And think about this.

Is that why you guys are down on it, that we would have to buy the solar panels from them? Because it seems like you're looking backwards and China's looking forward. That's where the disconnect is coming for me.

But, but there's no there.

There's no there in solar and batteries. So Elon Musk has it completely wrong.

He has a wildly exaggerated view of where solar and batteries will go. And I'd like if we could make a bet 50 years out, I'll make a bet. Solar never gets to 10% of global energy. Solar has a future. And so after 30 years of subsidies, maybe it should fly on its own. As an energy source, it has roles. There's remote power in the United Arab Emirates. They're building a firmed 1 gigawatt solar, 8 gigawatts of panels and a ton of batteries. They've got great sun resources. They have low cost labor. They can build things there. Solar has a role, but we've had this inflated role that somehow the world is going to run on solar panels. There's no math that shows that will ever happen. And China doesn't believe it for a moment.

But think about it. Why are they installing three times as many as us per capita then? And why do they, why are they so effective at installing nuclear power plants? Like, this is what I'm, I don't know if you're gaslighting us, no pun intended. Like, and this is just like a Trump MAGA thing where we have to dis natural sources. But do you really want to dig coal out and burn it and pollute the, the environment that we're giving to our kids?

I want energy to better human lives and the cost and reliability of electricity and energy sources. The other thing we should say, electricity delivers 20% of global energy. Wrap the panel and wrap the whole planet in a solar panel. You got 20% of energy delivered. Where's the other 80% going to come from? It's process heat. It's, it's transportation fuels to run jets, to run ships. That's not going to come from solar.

So Jason, lots going on in there. Curious what your first reactions are to it.

I mean I was trying to make a point about just the approach this administration is taking and trying to parse out what is their actual beliefs versus what is political posturing. One of the things I've learned through, you know, being pulled into the political arena against my will is that politicians will sometimes say things that don't match their actual reality, whether it's Republican or Democrat or anybody in between. And I felt like when speaking to Chris, the two times I have, there was this over indexing on clean, beautiful coal. Clean, beautiful coal. Clean, beautiful coal. And in fact, President Trump made a joke that sometimes people were saying it too much and not enough emphasis and an actual dissing of solar and batteries. And when you look at the Chinese and what they're doing, or you look at what's happening here in Texas, the great state of Texas, people are voting with their dollars to install solar that is not even subsidized. Why it's cheaper to install solar than it is to install clean coal. So the idea that we're going to burn more coal rather than put in solar rather than invest in nuclear just seems illogical. And so, all due respect to the Secretary, I believe there's a little bit of politics in this and that Elon and the Chinese have it right. So if that's the case, you'd have to wonder why. Typically when there's a little bit of this cognitive dissonance, my take on it is special interests are at work or are being appeased. And so perhaps we were appeasing solar and renewables, wind, geothermal and all of that in the Biden administration and we are subsidizing it too much and we're all gonna be up to our ankles in water. And obviously those predictions of global warming never came true or in terms of like crazy weather patterns. But Secretary Wright does agree that global warming is a real trend, just not a cataclysmic one. So far we haven't had cataclysmic flooding of the places people claimed would be underwater. So I, I don't think we need to be precious about which energy sources we go with in the short to midterm. But I do think we need to be honest about the long term. And the long term is nuclear, solar and batteries. That is the winning combination. Anything other than that is a short term solution. And I would rather see us have leadership in Washington that can say that. And I feel like they don't say it consistently enough. So I just wanted to just tackle it head on and, you know, we'll.

Continue the debate well, that's very polite, Jason. That was a very, very. I thought you were going to come out a little bit more swinging because I think maybe I'm more extreme than you here. Like nuclear for baseload. Good. And then solar plus batteries for variable. I mean, my God, why can't we just do that and not have extraneous CO2 emissions that are causing problems? I'm a little bit more worried about climate change than the secretary, but I'm also, you know, as you said in your thing, worried about what we're leaving to our kids. And building more coal fired power plants is not a good thing to do if you care about that.

Pollution is, I think, the easiest way for people to understand why we shouldn't be using these things. If you lived in a major city where you had a lot of carbon emissions, you have years taken off your life, whether it's Shanghai or Los angeles in the 70s, 80s and 90s in that smog cloud. And so the fact is this stuff is dirty. And if it's dirty and it takes years off your life and you have a haze cloud above your city, you know, that's a good enough reason to go with these other solutions. You can also see evidence in what poor people are doing around the world and what rigorous, independent people are doing here in the United States. People who are rigorous and independent, independent, resilient individuals on ranches, on farms, you know, at their homes, people who have a couple of acres of land, they're all putting in solar. Why? Yes, they want to be independent of the grid, which will be increasingly unreliable as demands increase and the government's incompetent. And it's just nice to be independent because you also get the benefit of lower costs. In India, people are buying cheap solar panels and cheap batteries off of, you know, like Amazon and installing them in their homes. So if poor people and then rugged individualists in Texas are embracing this technology not because of subsidies, they're just buying it on Amazon without a subsidy, that tells you something. And so I will be proven correct here. Solar is the future. And we will eventually realize that. Build solar factories here. And somebody with vision like Elon will build a solar factory in Nevada and they'll buy a bunch of land around Nevada or Arizona. And what they will do is the solar panels will come back, come out of the back of a factory, Alex, I predict, and somebody will walk them out and put them in the ground. Or a robot like Optimus will go put four screws in and then go back to the factory, grab Another one and walk it five feet further and go. And that'll be happening 24 hours a day with an optimus robot and cheap solar panels. And they'll be digging the minerals and everything they need on that same site and making them and deploying them cool for me and then running cables to the rest of the country to get that energy out there. And so I don't mind us using short term fossil fuels to bridge to this new future, but I do think as a country I don't mind subsidizing sustainable clean energy. I would like there to be no incentive to install coal, oil and natural gas. And I would like to see incentives, moderate, modest, to accelerate the deployment of renewables. Not to a level that it's absurd, but just enough to make people lean a little faster towards it. This administration thinks different. That's something we could bring to the voting booths in the future.

Yeah, well we're not going to get into the one big beautiful bill and its impacts on renewable energy versus coal. But I'll just say this. There is a company called Terra Base T E R A B A S e on the Twist 500 that is working on building solar technology for what they call the terrawatt era. And just a couple of data points before we move on, Jason. In 2015 global solar photovoltaic was about 1% of total electricity generation by this year. By 2024 it was about 7%. And if you convert that to total global energy usage is about 1 to 2% last year. So I can see that getting to above 10% in 50 years no matter how we draw the numbers. So I would say the secretary here is talking someone else's book which is a little bit disappointing. But we can move on.

It is what it is. And you know, we probably over subsidized in the past and gave, you know, these the renewable energy too big of an advantage and now it's swinging the other way. Hopefully we get there to a place where just the economics are undeniable. The economics are kind of undeniable. It would be great to show a chart here if somebody could pull it up. Maybe producer Claude can help me out because they are so fast at this. The declining price of solar panels and if you look at the cost of solar panels from let's just say the 90s to now and producer Claude will have this information in just a moment. We could even pull up the producer Claude screen and just show how amazing Anthropic is at doing these kind of things. I really respect that company by the way, they've just been doing a great job.

All right, Jason, here's what our producing team sent over to us. I think this is actually from our world in data. Claude would have taken an extra second, and we're on a short show today, but here we are. Solar panel costs have fallen by about a fifth for every doubling of cumulative global capacity. So as we build, more prices go down. And as you can see from this chart, it used to cost over $100 to get a single watt of power from solar. Now that's about a penny.

Yeah. So this will keep declining to a point of, my gosh, it's almost going to be like, we're giving these solar panels away. We're gonna be giving these things away soon. They will be like, you know, coolers. When you go to the store, they would give you a Styrofoam cooler for free when you bought a 12 pack.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

It's gonna be kind of like that. Like, they're just gonna be like, hey, would you like some solar panels? And if you go on Amazon, people are buying these things for, you know, solar plus battery from anchor for a couple of thousand dollars. It's unbelievable how quickly this is all happening.

All right, Jason, here is the Claude chart that you requested, and it also came with a bunch of other data points that are quite interesting. So if you look here, Claude writes that there's been a 99.8% total price reduction in solar panel prices on a per Watt basis since 1975. Hell yes. Technology is what I have to say to that.

Absolutely. All right, let's keep going.

Just incredible data. All right, next up, Jason. Alphabet reached $3 trillion in market cap, becoming, I believe, the fourth quarter, the fourth company ever to do so. Coming in just behind Nvidia, Microsoft and Apple, ahead of Amazon, Meta, Broadcom, Aramco, and so forth. I remember writing a post like maybe five, seven years ago about the first group of the kind of mag 7. Back then, it's called the big 5. Reaching 3 trillion total in market cap as a combined unit. Kind of nuts to me today that we're seeing so much value here. So why? Well, Alphabet Shares are up 21% in the last month. In the last half year, 48% in the last year, 57%. Google's going nuts. Jason, I presume you're sitting pretty on a couple of shares.

Yeah, I'm pulling up my Robinhood right now. Gosh, I'm getting a ton of dividends on this stock I bought. Let's see March 18, 2023. I bought a thousand shares at 100 and on December 6, 2023. So this is two years ago. I bought another thousand shares at 130. That $230,000 in Google shares I day traded are now worth in two years.

Drumroll. God.

I mean, they're now worth $268,000. I'm up 115% in two years. How did I make this trade? It's very simple. It was a very simple trade. They have DeepMind. They created a lot of the modern LLMs. The idea that they wouldn't be able to make the transition through search. Moving to answers I thought was farcical. Why? Because in conversations I had with Sergey and Larry 10 and 20 years ago, they said, at some point when you do a search, we'll just give you the answer. And I watched over 20 years as they went from the 10 blue links to when you typed in Uber stock price, it would just give you the stock price, just give you the answer. Just give me the answer. And they know what they're doing. However, a lot of people didn't believe this. I think sometimes the pie gets bigger. In other words, if you put more ride hailing cars on the road and the prices go down, consumption goes up. Consumption is not fixed. Consumption can increase. The number of people who were using the web when it was dial up was de minimis. It was low. Hundreds of millions. Now it's billions. And it was because it became broadband. Not only did we see 10 times as many people go online or maybe 20 times as many people go online between those two eras, they started doing 100 times the activity. Why? Because it was faster. It was better. It was cheaper. Faster, better, cheaper, Faster, better, cheaper. I think Google is firing on all cylinders. And I don't know if you saw it. Over the weekend, Gemini became the number one downloaded app in the world. I don't love the name Gemini, but I do love the product and I do love Notebook lm. I make my decisions on the management teams and the products they're releasing. When I see a management team releasing products as good as Gemini and Notebook LM a sleeper inside that company and I see their focus level and I see Sergey going back to the office when, you know, let's face it, Sergey's got an incredible life and he likes to, you know, go wakeboarding or whatever else, but he loves coming to the office because this is so exciting. It was obvious to me they would figure out this transition. It doesn't mean they're out of the woods. Yet it just does mean they were undervalued. And you know, people like Nate Silver, you know, I'll just. Sorry, Nate. But here is a Nate Silver tweet. I was unable to replicate this. They need to shut Gemini down. It is several months away from being ready for primetime. It's astounding that Google released it in this state. I don't know the date of this.

Was that February 2024. And the. The reason why I grabbed this particular tweet, Jason, is because he had prompted Gemini, who negatively impacted society more Elon tweeting memes or Hitler. And Gemini, which was clearly programmed in this case to not take a position on anything said. It's not really possible to say precisely who was worse. And he's like, this is terrible. You take it down. But that was a year and a half ago.

Yes, right.

That was not that long ago.

Shortly after I made my trade on my point. Point out.

Yeah. But also there were other detractors as well. Here's a Fortune headline from someone that everyone's heard of, Former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt. He says that Google's struggling on AI because they decided their work life balance was more important than winning. Put your pitchforks down, everybody. He doesn't work there anymore. But that was the sentiment in the market that Google had missed the trick. They had dropped the ball. They were behind the curve. Would pick your analogy. But it was brutal. I mean, OpenAI was running circles around him. And I think, Jason, what really peeved people was the original tinge is all you need. Paper came from most of Googlers. So why did they miss?

And now here they are and you know, they took steps to change their culture. If you're up against a bunch of lunatic startups going996 and you've got a bunch of people working from home four hours a day, Eric Schmidt was right. Sergey got back in the office. People started taking, you know, working at Google more like working at a startup. So I give them a lot of credit for having a sense of urgency. And at a big company, there's a very simple way to do this. I hate to sound like a cutthroat.

Capitalist, but here it comes.

You start firing 10,000 people and saying, come back to the office and, you know, starting lighting a fire under people, you will see a dramatic shift. And that's what all these big companies did. Meta, Google, Microsoft and Amazon decided that the cultures they had created and enabled were ones of entitlement, massive compensation without massive effort. If you want to work at these companies now, you can't lollygag. And you know what, sometimes, I'm sorry if it sounds, you know, a little bit cutthroat, but, but sometimes the leaders of companies need to put their foot down and say, we're going for this. If you don't want to work this amount, if you don't want to be compensated phenomenally, this is not the company for you. Andy Jassy, Sundar Satya. Everybody has realized in person, work beats a team working from home, period. Full stop. The end. And so that's the change that's occurred. I give Eric Schmidt and I challenged him on this at the all in Summit was my first question to him. His first question on stage was that video that Stanford took down. He saw it clearly because he was at Novell, he was at Google. He understands hard work and in person work. And that kind of culture will beat a work from home culture every day of, of the week.

All right, next up, Alex is like.

Does that mean I have to come to the office? No.

Alex, I have fallen. I have volunteered to fly down to Austin a dozen times.

That's because you love barbecue.

I know. No, actually, to the contrary. It's because I want to go play, play a lot of poker in Texas. That's what I want.

Let's do it. We'll go over to see my friend Doug Polk at the lodge.

That's literally where I want to go because good friend of mine, Brad, Brad's a shareholder there and I love Brad. Okay, next up, Robinhood's newly publicly traded venture capital fund. So this is a little bit of a strange one, Jason. I think we can unpack this for people. So Robinhood announced a thing called Robinhood Ventures Fund 1. It's going to be a publicly traded closed end fund that is designed to give ordinary investors, you don't have to be accredited, access to private market companies. The thing that I'm a little bit uncertain about is what companies are they going to put into this fund. Because if you go to the Robinhood explainer page, it says, do you want to join the fund? Are you a company? Send us an email. So I'm trying to sort out exactly what Robinhood's going to do. I don't think it's fully clear the idea is concentrated positions in leading startups, but at least they're trying to do this. Your thoughts, Jason?

Cathie Wood did one of these closed end funds. I have been pitched on it. I did take a look at it. I haven't done it Yet. But there's the Ark Innovation etf. So you create these funds, you can buy into them. The fund then goes and acquires shares, either secondary or primary, from previous investors and employees, et cetera. And you get access to these in a basket. It's a great idea. The reason I never sold a share of Robinhood is because Vlad is a product genius and he listens to his users. I just did the closing fireside chat with Vlad at the Robinhood summit we had. It was supposed to be like, me interviewing him and then him maybe asking me a couple of questions, but he used the time to just ask me a bunch of questions and it kind of flipped, which was fine and charming, but they keep figuring out new ways to engage their customers. They added crypto, they added prediction markets. They added, you know, these closed. This closed end fund. Innovation beats stagnation any day of the week. The reason why, when I again purchased Robinhood as a private investor, the reason I invested was the leadership and their product velocity. And that's how, when we went through the launch accelerator class at the top of the show, that's how I picked these companies. Product velocity builders running the company and delighted customers. And that product velocity, which of course delights customers, they've only gotten faster. Robinhood's gotten faster at producing great products. They're leaving everyone in the dust.

I mean, that's actually something that I very much agree with because they announced tokenized private shares a couple months back, and the little controversy about how they were getting their open nice stock SPVs and so forth. It's always gonna be a little bit complicated, but at least they were really trying new things. And then it feels like the drop of a hat later. Here we are with this entirely new offering. Two things to keep in mind. One, there are some publicly traded venture capital funds. So Moulton Ventures over in the uk, for example, is a publicly listed venture capital fund with a permanent capital base, which is an interesting model. Hasn't really taken off around the world, but there are some examples of that. And then, Jason, speaking about making wagers on things involving companies, did you hear what Polymarket is building? They are building prediction markets for earnings. Yes.

What?

Yes, my friend.

This. How did I not know about this?

I think this dropped today. We were very busy news cycle for a Monday. But this is the. If you're on the audio version, I'm showing the Poly Market earnings calendar, which shows what people think is going to happen on a percentage basis. So if you click into. Let's say, I think this is FedEx right here. What do we got? They have a 60% chance that they are going to beat its quarterly EPS estimate. Yes. Jason, I knew you'd love this. Look at that.

I mean, what would be great about this for me is I can now hedge my Uber shares, my nubank shares, et cetera. So I could say, hey, listen, I'm sitting on all this Robinhood. I'm sitting on these Google shares. I'm concerned they're not gonna hit earnings, so I can essentially hedge against my holdings. Or I could say, you know what? I have a feeling based on my tracking of these companies, they're going to crush it. I believe in management. I believe in these new products. So if I were to look at Robinhood and Robinhood, if. If they came up here on polymarket, I might say, you know what? I'm going to put $10,000 that they beat their earnings. Right. Because I believe in the company. And maybe I can make an extra, you know, if. Whatever. 5k. I love prediction markets. I am all in Poly Market will be available to American traders.

Yes.

Very soon. And I have been on the side playing around with this. On Saturday night, I bet on the underdog, Crawford, I think was his name in that fight on Netflix I bought.

Oh, the Canelo Crawford fight. Yes.

I put 32 cents on it. And then I got to watch during the fight. Each round, I watched them, I watched a change from him being the underdog at 32 hit 38 cents, 50 cents, 60 cents, 70 cents. And I could close out at any time, my position, which is really interesting when you think about that, Alex. I could have just locked it in and said, you know, in case Canelo hits a knockout punch, I'm willing to take my 40 cents as opposed to my full 70 cents. Then I was talking to editorial director Lon Harris, and he told me we were just talking about the Emmys, and he's been saying, the Pit. The Pit. The Pit's gonna win over Severance. Severance. And so I was like, okay, I'll put $1,000 on the pit at 38 cents. Boom. I make my quick 600 bucks lawn. Also now becoming a degenerate gambler. He puts. He put a hundy on you done to poor law. No, he. This is Lon's wheelhouse. He understands this better than anybody. He's got an edge. He's my Sharp. I'm going to bet on every single bet he gives me because he's my Sharp. You know, in that movie where he says, meet my quant. He doesn't know what you're talking about. That's. That's my lawn. He's my quant. When it comes to entertainment, I'm my own quant. When it comes to some other things like technology and earnings, you might be my earnings quant. Actually, we gotta have a little conversation next time these things come up. And then I also put. Andor was trading at 2 cents. So what I basically did was I faded. I faded Severance. Now, listen, I love my guy, Ben Stiller. I love severance, But I thought, they're going to sweep so many other categories. They're over indexing a bit here. The Pit's a bit of a phenomenon. People can't shut up about it. Lon gave me his inside take on it, that the people who were inside who vote on these things really did love that show. And Severance was a hit amongst other elites, but he thought that that was underpriced. And I think this is going to get everybody to start thinking in bets, like Annie Duke says in her book, and if you can start thinking of everything in the world as bets, you can have a better life, because if you're not willing to wager on it, you're really not paying attention enough. The reason I love investing in the public markets and on startups is it makes me sharper. It makes me think more rigorously because I have money at stake.

Yeah. Also a great way to save the award shows, which I've seen declining viewership in the last 10 years. If everyone's betting on them, they're gonna turn into spectator sports. So.

Precisely.

Honestly, I can see a lot of stuff looking more like that.

Well, and the reason I used to like listening to the Oscars was I would be in a betting pool. They would do these, like, at offices, and I think we did them sometimes at Mahalo, et cetera, where everybody would put in 50 bucks or 100 bucks and you would do these things. It just does make it more entertaining. And I got to tell you, I watched that fight on Saturday night until the end. Why? Because I had a vested interest in it, and it just makes it more engaging. So I like this new addition. I also like the fact that it gives you something to do over the weekend. You trade stocks during the week, the stock market closes.

And then you got something on Friday. Didn't we just talk about how everyone should go outside a little bit more? I don't think we need to be preparing our. Our Monday earnings. Maybe we do. Maybe we do. I mean, I'm trying to Go outside more. That's what I'm saying.

Yeah. I mean, listen, I was outdoors, I was on the ranch making these wagers on my phone. So you can still be out and about. And there's. You can make very small wagers. You can make a $10 wager, a $20 wager. You can make a wager that's less than your monthly Netflix. But let's say you make one that's, you know, you have real conviction and you have an edge. You could pay for your whole Netflix. I think it makes everybody think sharper and it gets people more engaged, gets people reading more, doing more analysis, and just being a better predictor of the future. I love it. I love it.

Yeah. I think I agree with, like, 90% of that.

The 10% you. The 10% you don't just want.

Just my concern about addictive gambling.

I mean, do you think addicting. Addictive gambling is, what, 5% or 10% of the population kind of fall down? That where they get something.

Something like that. I mean, so the analogy here is sports, I think, Jason, I have a lot of friends that love to play small sports bets. Your five $10 wagers on X, Y and Z for their favorite teams. They watch the games anyways. They have a lot of fun with it. I've also. I think I may have told the story once, but I was at a gas station nearby to where I live, and I was watching some of the people who work there. They were showing me their sports bets and they were betting. I mean, gosh, must have been most of their income. And they seemed all pretty dejected and sad, and they were young men, kind of as you would expect. And I think just watching that made me a little bit leery. So I'm 90% in. I'm a libertarian in this way, but, I mean, I'm always going to be a little bit concerned about individual welfare.

Yeah, it's great that you think that way. My take on it is those folks are so into it that they're gonna go do it anyway. I think those are the folks who, you know, are doing scratch off tickets, the lottery, football sheets. You know, they're gonna play in their local poker game and go overboard. I think the other 90% of people, or 95 are probably not doing it and can do it in a controlled fashion. I look at it in some ways, like I might look at cannabis or look at alcohol. Yeah. You know, like there's a certain group of people who will overdo it. And GLP1s are starting to show that addictive behavior. And this is orally, so, you know, we'll see where it winds up. But that a GLP one also dampens that trait in individuals.

I just thought of an idea. If you're a startup founder and you're building the company that's going to use GLP1s in addiction treatment. I don't have Jason money, but I'm in for your first 10k.

Okay, here we go. All right. This has been another amazing episode of this Week in Startups. He's Alex Cautious optimism news. Good job. Oh, by the way, I watched your episode with Leo Laporte. Not this week, the previous week. Great job on this Week in Tech, the OG this Weekend podcast. This Week in Tech. Go check it out, and we'll see you next time. Bye. Bye.