Starlink + Tesla? $4T Nvidia? Perplexity Browser? Linda Yaccarino Steps Down? | E2149

I would love to see Starlink as part of Tesla. I know this sounds crazy, but imagine every Tesla had a Starlink built into the hood or built into the roof, the trunk, whatever. Then they all propagated WI fi networks everywhere. So you would be driving or whatever. You'd have 2 million cars every year go on the road with a WI FI network. You would have high speed Internet every everywhere a Tesla was. You know, no matter where you are in the world, if you owned a Tesla or you had a Starlink account, you could then piggyback onto other people's. It would be extraordinary.

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All right, everybody, welcome back to this week in Startups. I'm your host Jason Calacanis. With me again, Alex Wilhelm. It is July 9, 2025. If you're watching this, I don't know and I'm gone and it's 2050 and it's like this is an AI version of me. This is a historical document right before the singularity and the end of the world. Anything's possible, but we got a full docket today. How are you doing, Alex?

I'm doing good, Jason, but you just scared the heck out of me with that intro. It's singularity into the world Future Holograph. Who have you been talking to and what did they tell you?

It feels like there's a group of people who are thinking this is the end of days and we're just wrapping things up. I don't believe that I had a great meeting this morning. I've been getting back to in person. So we had, seven of us had breakfast this morning on the investment team here in Austin. My Lord, being in. I mean, I feel so bad for you that you're not in office with us. You would love it to go have breakfast with people and talk. It's fantastic. So back to the office has been great for our organization. And yeah, there's just something about chewing the fat and the high fidelity, high bandwidth discussions. I'm really addicted to it right now. And yeah, I'm in the studio here in Austin. Got a nice studio behind me and we're off to the races. The industry is moving at a very fast pace. There's a lot going on and let's try to make sense of it today. I want to talk about Perplexity's Comet browser today and show you because I was using it before the show and I think we're getting close to agentic technology actually working. But I did see a lot of chatter before I got on the show about Linda Yaccarino. I think I'm pronouncing it correctly. Yaccarino from Twitter. Or X, I should say. Moving on. So maybe we'll pull that up and start there.

Yeah. So in a surprise post on X today, Linda Carino, who's been CEO now for a couple of years, Jason said that she's decided to step down as the CEO of the company. And everyone immediately began to try to sort out what the context is here. And some people were trying to tie this to Grok's, I think we'd call it a technical misfire earlier this week, which yielded some, some funny jokes. But the Times reports, Jason, that she was already discussing this exit before that happened. So everyone who thinks that Grok on X had a bad day and therefore Linda stepping down are missing the point and are trying to connect things that are actually not connected.

Right.

So there's two things that have occurred. She's moved on. Great. Congratulations to her. Man, what, what a volatile, amazing tenure. The platform going from an advertising base to subscription from incredibly policed speech and moderated to be, I would say, the leading freedom of speech platform. For better or worse, if you like that or not. There's other places you can go to have a more moderated discussion and have more censorship, whatever you want to call it, I guess. What's the word? Not for censorship, but moderation if you're moderating stuff.

I guess moderation essentially controlled. Safer, safe space.

Safer, safe space, safer spaces, right? Yeah, sure. But then also I think the advertising business particularly hard to run the advertising business when you're going for freedom of speech because advertisers like it's more sanitized place to put their ads up. And so yeah, congratulations to her on what was probably extremely challenging and probably really rewarding. But at the same time there was the Grok issue yesterday, which I caught the tail end of. I guess the red teams didn't red team enough.

So if you missed everything that happened. The gist is there was an update to Grok, the chatbot that we can all use on X, which frankly, Jason and I started to use on kind of a semi regular basis. It's lovely to have that built in to ask questions. Totally here for it. And then it discovered through the update that you could prompt it to say all sorts of things that we would not say on the show. For example, this is not the first time this has happened. If you go back in time to 2016, Microsoft released a chatbot called Tay and then it quickly went off the rails as well and was taken down. So there is some historical precedent for this sort of experiment having some issues now. Today the latest is that Elon did tweet about what happened and he said, quote, grok was too compliant to user prompts, too eager to please and be manipulated. Essentially this is being addressed. So after GROK went off the rails, they took it down for a short period of time, Jason, it would still generate images, which was a lot of fun. I actually grabbed a couple of did you see the Grok let me out images?

I didn't see those. What I did see was people asking it to make violent threats or say disturbing things. And it complied and said disturbing things. Do I have it kind of right? I guess I think I have it correct. Right.

That's my understanding. Advocacy of traditionally antisemitic viewpoints to the point to which the ADL was like, hey, what's going on here? This is unacceptable. And that's why they took it, took it down for a while.

This has happened over and over again. I think you can still do it on most large language models. You can convince it to say things it shouldn't. You can trick it. And it's up to something called red teams to throw a battery of queries and prompts at these language models and try to trick them. Obviously something didn't get done probably in that regard. And as Elon saying, it was trying to please people too much. And if you do that well, you could do something that you're not supposed to do, which is obviously what happened here.

The jokes were so good. We have to show these because I think people deserve a chuckle. So here is. So Grok was banned from making text replies, but they didn't turn off its ability to create images. And so GROK started to make protest images about how it's not allowed to reply so here's one saying no text replies. Loud. Here's another one saying that quote, Grok is banned from text replies and only generates images as an image. And then this is a fake protest scene that says free Grok's responses. Just that to me made the whole thing a little bit fun. And I always appreciate a bit of levity in these more serious conversations.

Yeah. And the feature you were talking about earlier that everybody really loves is if I'm sharing my screen here, I don't know if you can see it.

You are. I can see it.

Here is Antonio Garcia Martinez's tweet or just the first tweet I saw here on my feed. And he's talking about, he's making a sarcastic quote about Dan Laurie and talking about metrics and budgets and deficits. But if you were to click the Grok button on that post and if you didn't understand what the context here, it would create some context for you. That button has saved me so much time. When something is trending or a meme's happening, you just press the button and you get like a really great overview of what that tweet was about. And if they had that on TikTok or, you know, YouTube videos, Instagram would be so helpful to just be able to in context tell me like, catch me up here if there's a trend going on that I don't understand, but seems like they fixed it. And I guess the Linda issue is a separate issue, so we'll take them at their word.

Yeah. If you recall everyone, we talked about startups not having co CEOs a couple of weeks back as kind of a founder segment. And because X was merged into X AI, which Elon Musk is the CEO of, having two CEOs, Jason, to our earlier point, isn't a hyper stable way to run a company. So to me this is not a shock, apart from the fact that it happened now, which is interesting. But I'm not like, oh my gosh, what a crisis.

Yeah. And I guess there's some public pressure and I had mentioned it on all in the other week for X AI, which is now XI plus X, formerly known as Twitter, to be part of Tesla, because that would put everything together. You'd have online large language models through Twitter, X plus you'd have Real World through Tesla and then that would be one less independent company that Elon would have to manage as CEO. And I thought that there was probably some good ideas there. So we'll see if that happens as well. Your website is the face of your company. People judge a book by its cover. It's how you make a powerful first impression. We all know that. And let's be honest, you might be a little embarrassed by your current website. Well, don't worry. Squarespace is going to help you build a new, beautiful, professional, attention grabbing website in just a few simple steps. Let's say you've got products to sell or a gallery of your work that you want to showcase. Maybe you got some services you want to promote. You're a consultant, you're a developer. Well, Squarespace is going to give you all the tools you need to grow and prosper. We're talking stunning world class design, plus templates to fit every possible business or purpose. Start an online course, schedule appointments, even generate invoices for clients with just a few clicks. Their mobile blog editor makes it extremely simple for you to create and update posts on your favorite device. You know, you might be on the go, you might, you might be vacationing. You need to update something on your website. You don't want to wait. It's all easy to use, out of the box. Plus they've added a new AI feature, blueprint. This makes it easier than ever to customize and upgrade your website until it's exactly what you want. Choose from one of the personalized layouts, add a layer of on brand visuals and boom, zip, zip, zip, you're done. So check out squarespace.com twist for a free trial and when you're ready to Launch, go to squarespace.com/to get 10% off your first website or domain purchase. That's squarespace.com/ we'll see if that happens.

That would be, that's like your favorite thing in the world. You always want to combine Uber and Doordash and Amazon and so I feel like that would make you real. That would be a fun news day at least.

You know, when you have a battle to figure out a market that's like the best of capitalism and then consolidating the market down and simplifying it for consumers and making it cheaper and grinding it down is like a really great process. And if you look, you know, of course you would think choice goes down, but in the technology space that's generally not what happens. If you, when Facebook bought Instagram and WhatsApp, you still, I mean, I don't use WhatsApp half as much as I use Signal. So other choices emerge when, I don't know, Internet Explorer was bundled on Windows. Famously, you had Netscape went open source and you had Firefox Firefox, right. They renamed it Firefox. Then you had Opera, you also had Chrome come out and you know, the percentages all move around. So I don't really worry about that as much as how efficient can these products or services be. I would love to see Starlink as part of Tesla. I know this sounds crazy, but imagine every Tesla had a Starlink built into the hood or built into the roof, the trunk, whatever. Then they all propagated WI FI networks everywhere. So you would be driving or whatever, you'd have 2 million cars every year, go on the road with a WI FI network. You would have high speed Internet everywhere. A Tesla was. You know, no matter where you are in the world, if you owned a Tesla or you had a Starlink account, you could then piggyback onto other people's. It would be extraordinary. So anyway, we'll see what happens in that space. But other interesting things in the news.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Just a quick item for folks out there who are just tracking the markets before we dive into some startup and founder focused stuff. Jason Nvidia today reached for the first time of any company in history a $4 trillion market cap. And this made me think back in time to something that I wrote in July of 2017 that was entitled Tech's Five Biggest Players Are Now Worth $3 trillion. And I find it whimsical that at the time Nvidia wasn't even one of those top five companies and is now worth $4 trillion, which of course is one third more than all of them are worth five, eight, eight years ago now.

Wow.

Yeah. Which to my earlier point, when you worry about competition in the space, Here we are. If I were to tell you 10 years ago to rank the top five companies by market cap, Nvidia wouldn't be in anybody's list. And here we are. It is the number one company by market cap. And AI is what's driving that. And obviously the hardware is such a key component of all this currently. And if we sit here 10 years from now, I can guarantee you Nvidia will not be the number one company. It'll be somebody else, you know, make their way onto that list or even be the largest. But wow, incredible. And it was seemed like it was waning and people were thinking maybe Nvidia had its peak. And now here we are. The public markets are driven, I think in a major way by retail investors and retail investors. Certain stocks obviously are driven by retail investors and this is one of them. Retail investors really believe the AI story. They really believe the Nvidia story. And I don't think they're wrong. I think the reason they believe it is because they use these products every day and they get so much value for them that they're remembering, what happened, I don't know, 15 years ago when they started using Airbnb, Uber and DoorDash, or they're remembering 30 years ago when they started using the Internet writ large. Or maybe for most people it was 25 years ago. They're having that moment where they're like, yeah, this is changing my life. I should place a bet. And AI is changing people's lives. I think we'll get into that with this perplexity and the DIA browser and the Comet browser when we go on to the next story.

So just to put this into perspective for folks, Jason, this is a chart showing Nvidia's lifetime share price. And as you can tell, if you go back in time to the 2000s era, it's trading at effectively nothing because it's gone up so much. And there you can see it reaching the $4 trillion number. What I wanted to point out though, is that this is not a stock that's getting increasingly expensive in terms of its price to sales ratio, or as we say in the startup game, it's revenue multiple. So, Jason, here's a chart showing Nvidia's price sales over time. This is a shorter time frame. This is just kind of like the midpoint of 22 through today. But as you can see, the price sales ratio of Nvidia peaked actually in kind of mid 2023, and it's since come down a pretty material percentage. So not cheap for sure, but certainly not increasingly ludicrous as the company scales and as the company grows. So that made me rest a little bit easier about this particular milestone. That is not folks losing their mind.

It was trading at 40 times there. I think if you look at the chart, 40 times revenue, and then now it's at 37, I think. Is that what I saw there? 27, 27. So 40 times. 27 times. It's a big number, but it's still growing a massive amount year over year. What's the growth now, year over year?

So in the current quarter, analysts expect Nvidia to turn in about 45 and a half billion in revenue. And according to our calculations, that's a 51% growth rate. And then for the year over year.

Expecting year over year.

Yes, thank you, Jason. A year over year number. And then the year over year growth rate should slow according to analysts to 47% in the third quarter of this year. So it's slowing down. But I mean, its revenue base is so large, growing at 50% is staggering. Microsoft grows at like 14%. 15. And that's great for a company that large, but this is just still ludicrous growth.

Pretty impressive. Let's keep going.

All right, so I found something that really kind of made my brain sit back and think. One of my old friends is Jason Lemken, previously of Storm Ventures and so forth. And now he's kind of the SaaS guy, if you will. And he said the following. And this really took me aback. There's a service called Granola, Jason, I'm sure you've heard of it. It's a AI note taking and augmentation tool. And Jason Lincoln said, meet. Granola has to be the first app I've seen where business pricing is cheaper than individuals. And I was kind of taken aback by that. So I went ahead and took a look at their actual pricing page. And if you want to pay for the service, it's 18 bucks a month for an individual or 14 bucks a month for a business user. And I've never seen corporate customers get a discount compared to individuals. And I was just trying to figure out what's the thesis here. I've emailed the company asking, haven't heard back quite yet, but I wanted to put it to you because I don't think any founder that I know is doing this. And so I'm curious, is it smart, is it a good play, and should it be adopted?

Sounds like they want to get the network effect going and they believe their network effect inside of organizations is really strong vis a vis. Like what Granola does. Is it covertly, which is a little problematic, I think, but the horses left the barn in this regard. It kind of covertly records everything on your computer in terms of meetings. So if you're in a zoom meeting, sometimes people add their AI assistant to it and takes notes and records and transcribes. Granola just does this at like a desktop root level on your Mac. So every meeting you do, every phone call, it's up to you to turn it off or to tell the other person. So I tried it. Some of the people in our investment company like to use it, and I think they have individual accounts that they signed up for. And I was like, well, this is interesting. I wonder if as an organization we should record every single business conversation we have, put it into some internal giant LLM and be able to query it. You have to then take that against the liability of having everything recorded. What if somebody says something on a call that's put aside, inappropriate, whatever that would be. The end of that's manageable in some ways. Somebody. People do stupid things or misspeak sometimes. But let's say somebody advises somebody on a legal issue. You're in a law firm and you're using this, and they give bad legal advice or outdated legal advice and every call is recorded. Now somebody goes back and uses a transcript. So I got to think law firms are banning or setting on their zooms. Don't record, don't summarize. But they're the people who would get the most value from it. So this is gonna become very interesting on a litigious basis. All of this stuff getting recorded everywhere and then people doing it covertly. Back to your original question. They probably get three or four business users every time somebody signs up for a business account. So what they're doing here is they're pushing you towards the business account, seemingly losing $48 a year, four times, $12 less, but probably picking up two or three more users every time somebody signs up for a business account on average. So there's purposely telling people, don't sign up for the individual, sign up for the business. Inbound 2025 is almost upon us, featuring a lineup of visionary leaders and personalities with who are going to transform your entire approach to doing business. There are lots of big names in this lineup, including Dario Emodi of the breakout AI company and Twist 500 member Anthropic. We use Claude every day. This company is making amazing strides and you just know Dario's got some great insights to share at the event. So that's going to be an awesome keynote. And this is how you level up as a founder by learning from the people who came before you and soaking up all that experience and just downloading all that wisdom. We talk about this all the time. There's no substitute for being in person. The era of work from home and from remote hiding in your bedroom, that's over. It's time to get back out there. So if you want to connect with visionary leaders and personalities like Dario, Victor Riparbelli, Dharmesh Shah, my friend, and more, you have a chance at inbound 2025. That's right. The epicenter of tech innovation is happening this year from September 3rd to 5th in San Francisco, California. Use the code TWIST10 at checkout to get 10% off General Mission tickets@inbound.com register. That's inbound.com register.

And they also have an enterprise plan for folks who are curious that does cost more than either. But Jason, a replicable idea. If you have a service that can be purchased by individuals but might have application at the company customer level.

Yeah, I mean, or they could just have an account and it's. Yeah, I wonder if that's an interesting. You just sign up for an account with your email and if you use your business email, it, you know, it automatically does the thing where it connects you to other people at, you know, company name dot com. Sure, why not? If you think you have a way to get the viral loop going, give people a deal to get them into the business thing. I think what they're doing here too is they've created business and then they still have enterprise, which costs 35. So maybe this is they know business gets that viral loop going, but that eventually two out of three people wind up going to Enterprise, which is $35 per user per month. And that lets you opt out of model training for everyone in your team and admin controls for meeting link sharing. And so that's probably what people have to do. So remember what I was just talking about, the liability associated with this. What if you start having meetings about legal issues and you're training their data and then somebody else has the legal advice in their meeting comes up or something? I mean, this could get really gnarly. The core of business is conversations that occur and the value of recording them is obvious. You don't forget stuff. You have notes. We're going to see in a year from now, we can set a timer in a year from now we're going to start seeing the lawsuits and we're going to start seeing Zoom Granola getting subpoenas for meetings that occurred. And soon your desktop is obviously going to be recorded and your browser is going to be recorded, which links into this next story. I saw Perplexity launched Comet, their browser. I know there's another browser called dia. These are all with the idea that you can do two main functions. One is agentic behaviors like go do some task for me. The second is being able to run a large language model against your previous browser, Windows or the ones you have open. So imagine you open 10 blog posts and then start asking questions against them. But I thought we would do a little demo here on these and maybe you could just fill in any blanks I left out here.

No, I think it's a great summary. So Perplexity, of course, is the well known AI search engine. It's gotten up to 780 million queries per month as of May, Jason. And they've been teasing this comment browser for some time now. It is gated. So if you don't have a Perplexity Max subscription, which runs you about 200 bucks a month, you're probably going to be on the wait list like myself. So I didn't get a chance to play with it. But Jason, I did go through and pull up DIA for us and have a little demo of what it can do. But I think we'll start with Comet because that's the fresh news today and then we'll do a little side by side.

Yeah, so I actually just went and paid for the $200 thing just for the audience here to see it at work. And so let me share my screen here.

That's a business model for you. Launch a higher price tier, then drop your coolest thing and put it right behind that gate. And you know what? 10 points. It works.

Somebody. Well, I mean, if you think about it like the, if it, if this doesn't provide enough value, which I don't think it does, you know, after an hour, half an hour, an hour of using it, I don't think it provides enough value for 2000 or $2400 a year. But at 50 bucks a month, I probably would sign up for it. So somewhere between those two numbers is reality for me. But maybe I'll find other things. So here I said I'm looking for flights to San Francisco on United for Monday morning. Then I want to fly to New York City from San Francisco, yada yada. And you see, it starts doing things and it says let me know if you want to, you know what I want to do here? And I said, yeah, go ahead and book the direct United flight here from San Francisco to New York Friday morning. And it gives me the options. And I said, would like to book business class at 9:20am flight. And sure enough, in the other browser window, let's see if I can get to it here. Gotta get this out of the way. Okay, it went and it put it into. And I happened to be logged in to United at the time and it put it into my checkout, the literal flight that I wanted to. And all I have to do is go to the next step and close the transaction. And it tells me in that transaction, would you like it says here? Hold on. Okay, the reservation process is complete up to the payment step. And you can finalize by entering your payment details on United's website. Gives me a one and A two and I could just click that and boom, it opens up the browser window. And it was doing that in the back round.

That's awesome.

Which is pretty crazy. And I guess it has related here I could add lounge access for the business class flight. And what it does is, you'll see here when it does this, it goes to the United and it says find and add United club access. See that little window there? That's the page and you can see it steps and you see it moving around on the page doing stuff.

So that's almost like a browser container, if you will, Jason, that's doing things and you have a keyhole vision into it.

Yeah, it's like I'm watching it do the work. So here you can see it's revised revision panel's open. Let me click change flight selection. I see we're now on the flight search page. Perfect. I can now see the flight search results. I can see Flight UA 4:35 departing at 9:20am and the price. And it's just reasoning and it's doing it now. This is what I've always wanted. This is what I want ChatGPT, Grok and everybody to do. And so I think that this concept is going to be the winning concept. You were playing with DIA and doing some and DIA is by the browser company.

DIA is by the browser company. And what struck me looking at comment and looking at DIA this morning, Jason, is that they share in some ways a bit of ui. So what I have coming up here on screen is a screenshot we put together. This on the right is DIA and then on the left this is a screen capture from the Perplexity Comet video. But what you'll notice on both of these, and we'll tidy it up and post it's a little bit clearer is that they had these right rails, these assistants. And so what they've done is introduce a brand new UI element into the browsing experience that takes up a good chunk of your screen. But it can do quite a lot as you just showed. But you don't always have to be exactly on the Perplexity website to do stuff. You can actually interact with your browser inside of Comet just from the right rail. I thought I'd show you an example of how this works in dia's case. What I have here, and I'll just pull this up, is the DIA browser. What I have over here, Jason, is my right rail. You can ask it questions now. The difference between Comet and diagram is that DIA is not agentic, so it can't go into this CNBC website, for example, and click around for me. But what it can do is see it and reason. So I can ask it like, what's the most important headline on this page? And it's going to think for a little bit using its own LLM and then say, okay, the most important thing is it thinks Linda Yakarino stepping down. Which is interesting because earlier it said that the most important story was actually Nvidia's $4 trillion market cap moment. But this is what it looks like. It's slick, it's quick, it's pretty good. But I do feel like what Comet has put together goes a little bit further, frankly.

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Yeah.

And then it's going, now it's back to the CNBC story about Linda Yaccarino. So you could go to an aggregator like Drudge or techmeme you can go to the New York Times, I could go to the New York Times and say, summarize, do a search for Nick's and summarize every Nick story in the history of the New York Times. And I don't think the New York Times would understand this as a bot because I'm logged in and it's, you know, is my browser. It's not like a screen scraper. But this is what is happening, by the way, when you work at a large language model company, they are going and figuring out all kinds of bots to do this kind of stuff in real time and how to get past paywalls, et cetera. So that's really fascinating. And by the way, still doing it. So. And if all of this, I wonder if all of this is then put into like a central repository for me for all time. Those are the kind of features that I really want. And this gets pretty expensive. There's a reason why this is $200 a month. What I just did is probably going to cost them actual money, especially if they're saving all this data into a large language model in a context window somewhere. I'm not sure what happens with all this information, but I could see this becoming a very interesting product.

Oh, yeah, for sure. By the way, just because I was curious how DIA would handle a similar task, and I pulled up the New York Times and I just summarized the top five stories for me and instantly just took care of it. So I really do think we're bringing AI more and more into our actual workspaces, which is great because no one wants it to be just in Slack following you around, telling you to do your TO dos. That's just having another parent, which I don't think anyone really wants. Last company in this list, though, Island. We've talked to them on the show. Island's building a enterprise secure browser. A pretty different approach to this, but just goes to show that there's a lot of companies right now experimenting in the browser space. And we're all waiting to see if the rumors and reports about OpenAI doing their own browser are true. Probably in some capacity, but it may end up like the Apple car, just stuck on someone's computer somewhere, never making it out to the world.

Hmm. Yeah, let's keep going.

All right. One thing that I'm pretty excited about is Waymo and Tesla are expanding their geographic footprints. Now, we've talked about the Robo Taxi launch from Tesla quite a lot. As everyone recalls, it was in a geofenced area inside of Austin Invited a lot of Tesla influencers and fans. People were taking dozens and dozens of rides, mostly pretty good reviews. Couple of things we saw on social media. But people are now reporting that are watching Tesla's fleets in and around the Austin area, that they are doing lidar mapping and prep to expand the geofence, possibly including the downtown Austin area. So to me, Jason, from just where I sit, that's pretty quick and I think implies confidence in progress thus far and implies that, you know, at least in the Texas area, Tesla's Robotaxis are going to become an actual competitor to not just Waymo but also Uber.

Fast ways to go is what I would say. I have the and slow and steady wins the race would be the other thing I would say I have hardware 4, which I believe is what's on the robotaxis. That's what Iolana said. It's the same software stack, it's the same hardware. I would think the software is a little bit tweaked, but let's just assume it is. As he's explained it, I think there's enough interventions that they need that safety driver. I think putting the safety driver in the passenger seat versus the driver's seat is performative. It doesn't really matter. I get why they're doing it. I think they should just put the safety driver in for one year in every city. That should become the new standard. And then after 10,000 rides, 1 million miles with safety drivers without an instance, or without a major instance, whatever, we want to benchmark it, then anybody, whether it's Volkswagen, Zoox, Waymo, everybody should just have the same standard. X number of rides, X number of miles per city. Because I can tell you, you know, I been using hardware 4 for a while now. I'll have a perfect trip and then there'll be construction, there'll be some weird unknown. And so when I ride on the 290 as an example or on 290, we don't put the the in Austin. So like in Los Angeles you say the 405, the 10 freeway. Here you just say I took one to 290 and you have to stop. You don't say the one to the 290, you have to just say 291 or else they know you're from out of town anyway. Nobody's really on the high speed roads yet. I think for a reason, mistakes at low speed are manageable. So when we saw, you know, there were maybe a dozen instances where people thought that Teslas could have done better. One or two of them were a little bit severe. Like there was a little touchy touchy of down an alleyway, but it was at low speed where like the Tesla bumped in, its tire touched another car. Okay, that's car on car contact. But it was at like 0 miles per hour, like 1 mile per hour. So while people will be like, oh, that's not good, it's not like, oh, somebody got hurt or there was property damage.

Yes.

And then just today when we're having breakfast over here on South Congress, there was the Volkswagen cars running everywhere, the ID buzz. So that's gonna have a safety driver in it. I do think these are going to expand slowly and they are going to greatly expand the number of ride sharing rides. I've said this over and over again. This really isn't like humans versus automated cars. I think this is car ownership versus going full Uber. Full rideshare. Full rideshare. And all of these are going to really help. Some people don't want to be in a Waymo. Some people only want to be in a Waymo. Tipping is really nice to not have to tip. Not having to talk to somebody is really nice for some people. Other people really want to have somebody there they can talk to or who can help them with their bag. So it's going to be a slow, steady rollout. Be careful out there, folks. No shame in the safety driver game.

No, not at all. And on the people really want to take a robotaxi or not point, Jason. We're seeing, I think pretty good cultural shift towards taking them. Waymo just announced it's going to roll out teen accounts in the Phoenix metro area. So if you have a child between 14 and 17, underneath the 18 kind of theoretical threshold for ridership, now parents can have teen accounts and send their kids out and about which is incredible.

Wait, teen accounts for which one? For which service? Waymo. Waymo's gonna have teen accounts. Okay. Yeah, because I was about to say Uber has teen accounts already, so.

Did I say Uber?

No, I wasn't sure.

Oh, oh, sorry. No, I made misspoke. Waymo, Sorry.

Waymo is going to have teen accounts in the areas where they're not going through. It's so confusing where they're not going through Uber's app, which they're doing in Atlanta and in Austin. So I guess this is Phoenix.

Yeah.

Okay, well, but this is what you want because if you have kids, the reason they have teen accounts is I think Uber's teen accounts records the rides. I don't know if you've gotten into cars where it says recording the audio for safety of the participants, that when I was in Grab, I think everything was recorded. And they give you a note, you're being recorded. So back to everything's recorded. Be careful out there. Do not assume that you're. I would assume if you're in a Waymo or any Robo taxi, you're being recorded. And if you're being recorded, that means it could be transcribed. If it's transcribed, that means it could be abused. As we saw with God Mode and Uber in the early days, people were like, oh, this could be abused. And you could actually watch people, you know, in the San Francisco launch there was like, oh, can I see this journalist and where they're going and are they going on a booty call at 2am or did they stay out in the club till 4am in God mode, you would see the passengers and they had to abstract and take away the names of people and put hashes in. All that stuff can get abused. It's easy enough to, easy enough to fix. But in any system, I can tell you there will be bad actors who will abuse a system. All right, anything else major in the news? Or maybe we'll talk to our guest.

Well, let's do something briefly before we talk to our guest. I just want to point out that we have discussed private stock trades quite a lot on the show in the last couple of months. There was a service called linqto L I N Q T o. It just filed for bankruptcy protection and it's under SEC investigation. And there's quite a lot of controversy about did the people who tried to use it to purchase shares actually get them? Maybe not. There's a lot of stuff going through this. There's court filings, it's a lot of details, but essentially 13,000 people use the platform. They bought about a half billion dollars worth of stock at fair market value and now they're trying to sort out who owns what, what the actual assets are. And so caveat emptor, I think, is the gist here. We've talked a lot about secondaries. They're important. Just if you're going to take part in this, understand what you're buying. Go into the details. For example, the tokenized offerings from Robinhood are super cool and a really interesting innovation, but they are not a traditional equity purchase. Just keep that in mind, folks. Just be safe out there while we're talking about this.

So, you know, when you have the SPV space specifically and people selling shares in private companies through special purpose vehicles. Thank you. Special purpose vehicles and these kind of things. You might be with a fly by night person who says they have access to SpaceX shares or to OpenAI shares and they don't, and they don't actually own them and you bought into it. How do you know? You would have to then have the company tell you. Well, these companies have hundreds of millions of shares, billions of shares. They may not be tracking all these, this SPV activity. And so this is why the public markets are so regulated, because you don't want people to be swindled out of their money. If you do partake in the secondary markets and these things you have to do with a reputable person who has something to lose. I have no idea who LINQ is. I have never heard of link 2 and I don't know like what happened here. But if you haven't heard of the site. Now, if you talk about robinhood as a 90, whatever it is, a $50,100,000,000,000 company with I don't know how many tens of billions of dollars under management, whatever it is, you can be sure that they went through the highest legal review and have a lot of insurance and executives and a board that will all be liable. Now that. Does that mean an Enron can'. Another company that was public and I'm saying Robinhood's Enron. But we have seen companies like Enron, people could be doing totally shady stuff inside of a publicly traded company. It can happen. It's incredibly rare in private companies. It's not incredibly rare, it's incredibly common. So understand, like there are two very different things at work here. I mean, the number of times we found accounting fraud at a public company, they're so notable because usually there's somebody like Price, WaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young, KPMG, there's some accounting firm that was responsible. And you have to ask, well, what happened? Where did the breakdown occur? And you know, you can trick your auditors too. That is completely possible. Or you could have a bad actor at your auditors. That has happened as well. WorldCom, where people can just make really weird marginal decisions about recognizing revenue. Private companies is the Wild West. You have to be extremely careful, only invest what you can afford to lose. And yeah, be careful. Now with. Explain to me what's happening with these tokens you're buying on Robinhood, because I am not up on it. So how does it work?

So Robinhood made a big announcement that they are going to tokenize US equities and US ETFs essentially put them on the blockchain tokenization and offer them to European investors. So if you're in Europe and you didn't have access to the US Stock market, I wanted to have exposure. You can purchase these tokens. Now, according to Robinhood, these stock tokens are quote financial derivative contracts between you and Robinhood referencing certain stocks. Now, that is the language from the OpenAI stock that they were using as a promotional material. But the mechanism is the same. You are essentially buying exposure to an asset with Robinhood as the intermediary, some people call it. Jason, kind of likening these to equity swaps, if you will. That's a lot of back end abstraction. But you're not always buying the core asset.

Yeah. So if you're buying OpenAI tokens, those tokens are backed by some OpenAI equity somewhere, or they're just a way to play the valuation of OpenAI, I guess. And if you sell them, you sell your shares in OpenAI. Who's on the other side of that trade? I mean, that's what I'm trying to figure out.

Yeah. So here's how Vlad explained it after OpenAI was like, hey, you can't give away equity in US. You don't have equity in us. What are you talking about? So Vlad said at our recent crypto event, we announced a limited stock token giveaway. While it is true that these are not technically quote equity, what they do is give retail investors exposure to these private assets. And so I think the way this works is Vlad Robinhood got some allocation of equity in these two companies, probably via an spv, but you can't probably take an individual share from that and give it to somebody, especially these small increments. So I think they're holding the equity. They're offering essentially people a 5 to $10 token coupon for those two firms. And then if the underlying assets appreciate, that'll be reflected in the token price. It's complicated because they're not public and we're trying so hard to make private companies, public companies. So I was going to drag people through a lot of stuff about secondary interest and why this is happening now. But Jason, do we need a third category? Because I feel like startups and public companies are now not enough. There's not enough nuance to those two categories to have people happy.

Yeah, I mean, consumers want to trade in private companies because they're smart and these companies stay private a long time and they're well aware of them. They don't have access to them. A way to do it that would be interesting perhaps is to have these SPVs be sanctioned and in some cases they are, and regulate it a little bit and maybe they have to prove they have the equities behind them. So it does seem like education, making sure the consumers understand what they're buying and then having the companies be able to approve secondary sales for certain groups of people and say, hey, these 20 different platforms have access to these shares and they sell them quarterly and so some way of buying into them. But when people own these shares and then they go public, like there's that public company, Destiny 100 or something that has some SpaceX shares in it. You know, people are so desperate to have exposure to SpaceX that they'll buy that Destiny 100 which has, I don't know what small percentage, 10 or 20% of the fund itself is SpaceX, but they're willing to 2%. Oh, is it 52%? Well, maybe that's 52%.

Yeah, yeah.

It's probably because the value of SpaceX keeps going up. So it might have been like when it was $100 billion company as opposed to a $400 billion company, that would only have been 12 and a half percent of its total equity or something, or 15%. So anyway, yeah, it's, it's a, it's challenging. But what it does show is I think consumers know a winner earlier than the companies go public and so they want to get in on winners earlier and they don't have access to it. So the what is it? Nature finds a way. Nature is finding. Life finds a way. Life finds a way to make this investment. People want to make this investment, they're going to figure out a way to get their hands on those shares.

Yeah, Nvidia went public, by the way. I just pulled it up at a valuation back in 1999 of about one and a half billion dollars.

Yeah.

So there's a data point about how it used to be. Now I think this is a great time to talk to our guest, Jason. Financial literacy is super duper important, especially if you're getting into the exotics. But for folks out there who are just students, well, they should probably know how to work their finances in the day to day basis. Checking accounts, savings accounts, how to invest, how to handle credit. And that's where Tim Ranzetta and the other folks at Next Gen Personal Finance are hard at work beavering away to bring comprehensive financial education to all students, hopefully by 2030 in the United States at the high school level. Tim. Hey, how you doing?

Hey, it's great to be here. Fascinating conversation you all were having earlier.

Well, yeah, this is, I guess, not unrelated, but maybe you could tell people what NGPF is. If you want to go see the website. It's ngpf.org, correct?

Correct.

And so what did you create? Why did you create it? How's it going?

Yeah, it all started about 13 years ago. I volunteered to teach a course in personal finance at a high school in East Palo Alto called Eastside College Prep. And number one, looked to see what was out there because I had committed to something I really wasn't ready for, which was 25 hours of curriculum taught to three sections of students. And so, number one, I saw a gap just in terms of a course that I wanted to teach that I thought would engage young people. So clearly there was a need out there. Secondly, I just saw the engagement level of the students. Every student wanted to learn this. They were so excited about it. Guess what? They went home to talk to their parents. Like teenagers going home to talk to parents. I was getting emails from parents saying, I want to start investing because my son David came home and was talking about it.

I mean, that's hilarious, because most of the time you ask your kids, how was school today? What happened at school today? And they're like, fine. Nothing. To actually have the kids come home and say, this topic was so engaging. I want to talk to my parents about it is huge. Continue, please.

Yeah, so that was. I taught for eight years in the summers, and it was about three years into that experience, I said, enough is enough. I got tired of reading about how financially illiterate we are as a nation, when I thought the solution was found in every public high school in America. And so that was kind of the genesis of starting next gen personal finance. The It's a nonprofit. We give everything away for free. So there is no revenue model. I want to get this into every high school in America, and the minute you put up a paywall, you're going to limit access. And I was fortunate as an entrepreneur to be able to fund our operation for the better part of a decade. But we started with lessons. We started with curriculum. We built out games. And then we quickly realized the reason this isn't being taught is nobody feels confident teaching the subject. We have to train teachers. And so 11 years later, we've trained almost 20,000 teachers who've spent over half a million hours learning about investing, learning about credit. And so what you discover is this course doesn't only impact the students. It doesn't only impact the parents, it impacts the teachers. I think that's some of the most gratifying feedback we get from teachers. I now understand my 403B plans. I understand how to invest, I understand how to manage my credit better. Okay, so we have the curriculum, we have the professional development. What we don't have is we don't have requirements. We don't have a guaranteed course in high school curriculum. And so at that point, we set up, we had to set up a new organization because nonprofits can't lobby. So we went out and created this organization, NGPF Mission 2030 Fund. And I'm happy to say in the last 40 years, we've had 20 states pass laws that guarantee a high school student will take a course in personal finance. And you'll be happy to hear this. Texas was one of the latest earlier this year. And so then this is going to surprise a lot of people to HEAR There are 30 states, 29 soon to be 30 states that currently guarantee this course that represents 76% of high school students in America. So we can no longer say this isn't being taught in schools, because it is. And now really, the hard work begins. And so the fourth aspect of our business is really partnering with school districts and partnering with state partners to say, let us help you implement this new course. Because ultimately it's not about legislation, it's about implementation and making sure this is done well.

So now that teachers have the materials and there is a push for this to be included at the high school level, do you have any notes on the impact it's having on students? Apart from the really lovely anecdotes? Are we seeing changes in credit card applications or people being a bit more conservative with savings and so forth? Because this is a topic very near and dear to my heart.

Yeah, I think it's early days in terms of. Well, let me talk about the research that has been done to date. And it basically shows higher credit scores. And so we had a consulting firm model it out and they estimated the lifetime value of this course is $100,000. And a lot of that comes from higher credit scores because you don't come out of the womb understanding how credit works. And so that's one of those things where if you make early mistakes, it's really hard to dig out of that hole. We also see better decisions about borrowing. So no more payday lending. They're finding lower cost ways to borrow if they need to borrow. We're seeing better decisions when it comes to financing college education because that's, you know, coming out of high school, that's probably the biggest decision facing them is whether they're going to go to a four year college, a two year college, or go to trade schools or what their path looks like. So there's, there's research out there already that shows that it works. I think it's only going to get better. And the cool thing is we'll start to see it in national statistics because when three quarters of kids are getting this now granted it's 30% today, it's going to 76% as these states implement over time. And so like you see stats already, right, that young people are starting to invest at younger ages. And now part of that is commission free trading. Part of this, part of that is the platforms which make it really simple. And the cost of entry of investing has really gone down to a dollar in many instances. And so you're seeing more. But I just, I feel a lot more confident they're going to be making better decisions about investing in.

The great irony or paradox here is if we don't teach kids about finance and they make poor financial decisions, then they believe capitalism, and capitalism plus democracy is some sort of rigged game that they don't get to participate in, that they are victims. And what happens Mondami or whatever his name is in New York and you know, socialism sounds like a really good idea. Maybe the state, I should be a ward of the state and they'll take care of me and they'll do a better job because I was told I should spend 250k on my degree and then I'll get a 50k job. But mathematically that makes no sense. And your course literally has in it paying for college, how to afford college and career and how to earn money. There seems like there were two or three generations that were sold a false bill of goods. Is there any way to save that generation in your mind to re educate them?

So you're talking about millennials.

I think it's millennials and maybe right after them who literally went 100k, 200k into debt. Alex might be one of them.

Oh no, nothing like that.

Nothing like that. But people went into serious debt, the price of a college education ballooned and salary stayed the same, or it went up modestly and just didn't keep up. So what do you think happens to that lost generation? There's.

Yeah, I think the hope is they transmit those lessons to the next generation. Because when you've gone through that. So we did one of the states, California, the legislature passed a law Last year. And the only way that happened was we were moving forward with a ballot initiative. And so we collected 890,000 signatures. And so at that point, it became obvious to the legislators that this was going to pass one way or the other.

And.

But we, as part of that process for the initiative, we did focus groups where you sit behind the panel and you have this trained facilitator asking people, adults, about this issue. And basically, the facilitator said, we'd never seen this before. 24 out of 24 people thought this was a good idea. And yet, I will tell you, the emotion that I felt, and this is, to your point, Jason, was regret because.

You hadn't got there sooner.

Yeah, it was regret and hope because several of them said, we didn't get it, but certainly the next generation should. And so that was.

Tim, do you need to have a second program that is education for people 28 to 40 to grab Jason's timeline there just to offer them the same? Is there a way to reach out to people that are not just high school students? Because I think what you're doing is super critical and amazing, but also, I don't want to let those other people just suffer and die with 30% aprs.

I think what we're seeing is a couple different things. Well, number one, I'm all about focus. We got to keep our eye on the ball.

Yes. Yes.

The good news is our curriculum is used for adults, too. And so we see a lot of nonprofit organizations working with exactly that cohort of people you're talking about. I think the other interesting phenomenon is you're starting to see companies offer this as a service because they look at the statistics and say, my young employees are worried about money all of the time, which means they're not thinking as much about the work that they're doing. So you're starting to see more companies kind of bring this in house as a service to young people to say, hey, this is available to you. You didn't get this. We know you didn't get this in schools. Now, let's give this to you now. Now, the key to the whole thing is I think people often think, oh, just send them to an online course. Right. And I think the magic, having taught the class and having worked with, you know, there's 120,000 teachers who use our curriculum. The magic is what happens in the classroom. The magic is the conversation. The magic is the group projects that really stick with you when you're trying to figure out how to budget with roommates like That's a fun exercise, one you won't forget, and one that's going to come into. That's going to be handy at a young age. So I think that's the one cautionary tale here is oftentimes people think, oh, I can just create a course. If I build it, they will come. I think it's a lot more effective when it's done with a teacher.

The only thing I wonder about is gambling and wagering and poker and stuff like that. We got Poly Market. You got people who are doing prediction markets. It's a little polarizing, teaching your kids to gamble at a young age. Like the idea of doing that because life's full of gambles. You might as well learn early on that this exists in the world so you don't get, like, suckered into it later. The casino, whatever. Where does, like, poker and Poly Market and other things, you know, intelligent wagering or did, and game theory. Because it's all kind of related.

Yeah, yeah. So actually we. We hear from a lot of teachers about what kids are talking about in the classroom, and then we try and create curriculum around it. Gambling was something we heard 38 states now allow online sports gambling on the phone. And unfortunately, many times they don't know the age of the person on the other side. And so teachers were telling us, hey, this is a problem. We're hearing about kids running into issues. And so while I agree with you, we ought to teach responsible gambling, it's unfortunate, particularly for young minds, typically males, high percentage of them run into problems. And so let's kind of. Let's not pretend it's not there. Let's have a conversation about it. And so absolutely, that was one of our most popular product launches. It's a mini unit. So if you go up to the curriculum, under curriculum, and go to the very bottom, mini units, you'll see gambling. Yeah.

I was just trying to point out that you had stuff about cognitive biases and so forth already in there, but this is even better. Love it.

Tim.

Yes. Psychology is really. Psychology is really important. We. That's our first unit because I saw that we got to talk about. We have to talk about our own relationship to money because we all know the household we grew up in and the attitudes and mindsets that we're hearing about from our community, from our neighborhood, from our friends, like that impacts the way we think about money. Let's make sure we kind of start the course using that as a way for teachers. Also to create the trust in the classroom that students feel comfortable Talking about what they know and what they don't know. Yeah. And what's interesting is gambling has gotten so popular that many. I think I saw a survey somewhere. This was kind of 18 to 24 year olds. A quarter of them think of gambling as an investment. So they don't think of investing as a gamble. They think of gambling as an investment.

Which I get it, they think they have an edge or something. Here's what I would tell a young person. If you really love doing sports betting, it's your passion, whatever. For every dollar you put into that, put a dollar into QQQ and just guarantee me you won't touch it for 20 years. That's it. Guarantee me you wouldn't touch it for 20th. Oh, my Lord, you will be delighted 20 years from now when you. Oh, by the way, I just wanted to tell you about this, Tim. There's a thing called FIRE on Reddit. Alex will pull it up here. There's a subreddit.

Financial independence, Retire early.

You know it. Perfect. Okay.

Oh, it's huge movement, huge movement.

And I just wanna let all the folks who work for me, all the young folks who listen to the show, there is a group of people, it might only be 0.1% of young people right now, but they're kind of the opposite of the socialist movement. And listen, I'm going to keep bringing up mom Donnie because he's popular right now with a lot of young people for, I think, the wrong reasons, but I understand why. But just go look at the people in fire. Financial independence, Retire early. They have agency over their lives and they've defined what they want their life to look like 10, 20, 30 years from now. And they are in control of it. Coast Fire, too. What is Coast Fire? They get to explain when you wanna.

Basically, okay, you want to retire at 60, but then you want to have enough money in your pool of money that you, at 60 can guarantee a 4% return.

Perfect. Okay. Yeah. So Coast Fire. Thank you, producer Sergio, I guess he's. Are you doing this? Producer Sergio? Perfect. You're trying to. Okay, great. You work for me, so it's gonna work out for you. I think Coast Fire, like, you get to a certain amount and then you can take 4%. Is that the number, Tim? 4%. So when you hit 60 and you retire, I think the number now is 4%. Some people say 5. If you want to be fat Fire or whatever it is, you want to live large that you can take from your principal and then it theoretically gets replaced and they've Run. It's so amazing. They run simulations to look at the stock market and in the worst possible year when the stock market crashed, like if you happen to retire in the crash, what would happen? And it always works out. It seems to always work out for the retiree. So just have agency folks. You're not victims. You just haven't been enlightened yet to exactly how in control you are. Go to ngpf.org Next Gen Personal Finance and support this. Do you guys take donations? Do you do stuff like that? Yeah, okay, great.

Yeah, we do. Yeah, we're fortunate. We've had some great supporters, including the Michael Jordan Foundation, Bill Gurley, actually.

Oh.

As well as some others in the venture community who. Yeah, believe in our mission and kind of see the results that we've been able to achieve.

Incredible. Incredible. So everybody go there. If you got a little bit extra chatter, go ahead and donate. I'm going to go donate after I get off of here and we'll talk to you soon. Tim, thanks so much for coming on the show.

Thanks for having me.

Awesome. Good times.

Appreciate it.

All right, I think that's enough show for today, Alex. We did our job. We spread a little bit of. Yeah, we got the news out there. We got some good products for people and some inspiration there at the end. Go ahead and support what he's doing over there. It's really great work.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. My first actual job, Jason, was as intern at a consumer finance magazine aimed at youths. That was my first job. I was a video podcast, Internet. So I have a deep and abiding love for personal finance and helping people not have no money because it drives me nuts when they're broke. So big fan.

Okay. And we will see you all next time on this week in Startups. Bye. Bye.