Tesla and Uber team up! Plus Weave Robotics’ Isaac and $OPEN bull Eric Jackson | E2180

I think the algorithm should break section 230 because it's an editorial decision that is more powerful than a human doing it. Because it's micro targeted and it never sleeps unless it breaks it. Unless you give consumer choice. So let that sink in. Just like the bundling of a search engine with a browser could create antitrust issues unless you give people a choice.

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All right everybody, welcome back to this week in Startups. I'm your host Jason Calacanis. I am wearing my chunky 1970s glasses. With me is Alex. We were talking before the show about Oliver. Well, producer Oliver, please, let's give him his title here. Producer Oliver this week in the past five days has gone from not only being like a drag on productivity where we have to train him, he hit not being a drag being neutral in the organization to now being adding value.

Net positive.

This point for young, He's a net positive. This is important for young people because what you have to realize we are having young people not getting hired. Right? We've covered this trend many times.

Times, Alex, many times. Many times.

And so you have to ask, well, why aren't people getting hired? It's because nobody wants to mentor people early in their career. It's the end of the apprenticeship. I'm taking a different approach. I'm saying I'm going to invest in folks and I'm going to give them a very rapid, very rapid career path. Because I'm becoming very peculiar in my old age. I'm getting weird. Elon can tell you because he's been with me for 20 years, like on and off for different projects. I'm now at the phase where I just want to see these young guns I hire out of school, how quickly I can make them into little samurai productive X Men. In my X Men, why, I actually made a list of things I enjoy and things I hate. I am deprecating everything I hate doing or that's not my highest order, but in the highest order is identifying talent and then nurturing talent. So I've really made my mission going into 2026 that I'm going to identify young talent, going to mentor them and then help them excel because I see it happen over and over again. I hired executive, our editorial director Lon out of a, out of a laser blazer laser disc store in la. I just saw that raw talent. It's like, man, this guy could do anything. He's just so smart and quick witted and fun to work with and yeah, he's just amazing. And we are investing in all these young people. But for a young person, the other side of the coin is Alex. You got to show up and you got to out hustle the people who are already there, which means just raw hours put in. You got to do more hours than your boss. Now that's not easy. When the leaders of the company, Jackie, who's been with me for 10 years, Lon, who's been on and off with me in different companies for 20 years, Kelly for seven or eight years, I think across two companies, you have to say, oh my God, they're putting in 50, 60 hours a week and they're really good at what they do. I gotta hit 60, 70 hours a week and I got to put in some weekend hours to refine my skill set. So for young folks, there's plenty of opportunity out there if you can prove that you're willing to put in the time. But if you don't and you don't know these AI tools, you're not willing to learn new skills. I'm super worried.

Yeah, the trend here is bad, Jason. So here's the Fred chart. This is unemployment, US 16 to 24. So that first kind of like first little bit of your career, this is 6.6% was the low point in unemployment for that cohort. It's now over 10, which is a negative and kind of scary trend as you can see here. So it's not going in the right direction.

And that trend I think has to do with large companies saying, if we're going to hire folks who need to be trained or whatever, why don't we just outsource it to the lowest commodity, you know, hardworking place in South America or Asia or India, Manila, you know, or even Portugal. A lot of, a lot of folks going to Portugal. This is something young people, and if you got kids, you're going to need to put that hustle in them. And the hustle means learning New skills and actually looking at the people around you and just saying, I'm going to work harder than the establishment at my company. Not an easy task.

Um, all right, can I start us with off with a startup story? Because I have one that I'm really excited about. Okay, so there is a company called, as I scroll through my notes, there's a company called Code Rabbit. Now this was a completely de novo company to me. I want to put it on the Twist 500. The company just raised a $60 million Series B, I believe at a $550 million round. So Jason, my question to you is, guess What? Its current ARR is at a $60 million round, $550 million valuation today.

Okay, and the startup does what, what's the really simple sentence here? What do they do? They're an AI company. What do they do? Do they have a product in the market?

They do. And what they do is they do code reviews automatically for developers. And the, the pitch that really got me interested was as developers produce more code using AI tools, basically doing code reviews becomes an enormous bottleneck. There's so much more code to go back through. So they built an AI tool that does the code reviews for you, which I think is a great idea.

I mean, if they were growing revenue the way sometimes an AI company can, which is 10x year over year, let's say they went from a half million to 5 million to 50 million, I could see it very easily sustaining a billion dollar valuation or a $500 million valuation in this climate. Because when you saw cursor get, I mean that was if you asked producer Claude to show the, the cursor revenue that was and lovable revenue, those two companies got to nine figures in revenue in like low single digit years. So you know, producer Cloud will give us some idea of that. And that's what people are banking on is replit cursor and lovable like growth. And yeah, it can get disconnected from reality because people aren't betting on last year's valuation or last year's revenue. They're not even looking at this year's.

Looking at.

They're going to look at next year's.

Yeah.

And then give you a multiple on next year. So in this scenario, 1 million to 10 million, they're going to look at next year being 100 million or 50 million, 5 to 10 times growth. If it's actually trending in that way, you could get a six hundred million. So I'm going to say this company has six million in revenue.

Oh, actually it's got more than that. Fifteen is the ARR number according to Tech Wrench and that's up 10x in the last year. So one and a half to 15. And then going by your 10 or 5x thing, Jason, that'd be about, about 75 million expected next year which makes it rather cheap at five hundred and fifty I think if it pulls that.

Off and I nailed it.

10 points.

It's a 10x growth company. So tell us the name of the company one more time.

Code rabbit. And it's growing 20% per month right now. That was the other stat that blew me away. Seen a YC style number attached to a company with an 8 figure revenue base. I love that. 8,000 customers scale Venture Partners led the round. Nvidia CRV Harmony Engineering Capital took part in it. So really, really cool one. I am a fan and I'm going to talk to Matty see if I can get them on the twist 500.

Let's do it. Let's do it. The twist 500.com where we are tracking the top 500 private companies and wow, thank you producer Claude for this great statistic. Cursor and lovable revenue. According to published reports these are private companies so it's hard to get to. But yeah, at some point the public reporting was that we got to 500 million for cursor and lovable as I mentioned had hit 100. So these are amazing.

And here's the chart folks. If you want to see what this looks like, you can see in 2023 very little revenue nigh 0. 2024. Cursor was getting big, Lovable was tiny. And then this year they've become absolute goliaths as Jason said, in the nine figure revenue range. So one of the fastest growing categories I think in the history of technology.

I love the fact that producer Claude from Anthropic is now producing beautiful output. The output not just being text. If you look at the screenshot the team made on cursor highlights and lovable highlights, this is research that would have taken an analyst a couple of hours to pull together. And here it is.

What's embarrassing Jason though is that this is actually better graphic design that I could do for you. So even if I could do it in the same amount of time, it would look worse, which is actually terrifying because I make my money on a person who collects and presents information well and that's.

We talked about it earlier at the top of the show. You have to kind of keep upping your game with analysis and having bring More to the table if the facts are so easily obtainable. But Cursor, founded in 2022. Wow. 500 million in revenue. They got to 500 million in under three years. They got a $10 billion valuation. And then the lovable highlights, man, 120 million in ARR. The question everybody has is the durability of this revenue, is this durable or is it brittle revenue. And that's what we'll find out over time. Hey, listen, we meet a lot of early stage founders here at Launch, my investment company. And some they don't have a lot of traction yet. They just have an idea. Maybe they haven't even finished their product, they've just got an mvp. But they still need investors and accelerators like ours to take them seriously. And you know what? We can't just wire money to your gmail or your PayPal. That's not how it works, folks. We need to know that you're a legit and official business. We need to know your company is incorporated. That's why you need Northwest Registered Agent. It's the service that will help you run your business the right way from day one. In 10 clicks and in under 10 minutes you're going to file for your LLC or a C corp. If you're a startup, get a domain name, launch your official website, claim your business email, and even fast track your trademark application, which some people, people forget to do. We're talking about more than just company formation. This is your entire identity as a business. Go to northwestregisteredagent.com twist and show the world you're in business. And make sure you use that URL twist so they know that we sent you. So I saw another robot folding laundry. People make fun of this. Knowing what I know about robotics, it's like one of the hardest tasks. Why? It takes a lot of dexterity to do it well. And clothes are incredibly variable. Here's your video of a robot folding laundry. Now, I've been watching these robots attempt to do this for a decade or more, but this one is getting it done. The number of people employed were spending their days folding clothes. Is the population of people who are not in college and throw their dryer stuff into a basket and then just pull it out of the dryer basket without folding it. But for everybody else, the other 90% of people, gosh, you know, they wear 10 outfits a week or so, 20 items of clothing. There's 20 items of clothing that need to be folded. And this robot is doing a bang up job of folding laundry. And we have the founder with us.

So we do. So please welcome everyone to the show. It's Khan Darushas. He is the CEO of Weave Robotics. It's based out of San Francisco in my old stomping grounds in the Soma neighborhood. And critically, Jason, this is not a humanoid robot. It's what I call a partial humanoid robot. It's got a base with wheels and then there's a stick and then there's arms. So we've taken away some of the complexity, abstracted it away, but it does fold laundry very quickly. Khan, welcome to the show.

Khan, you heard my little intro here about how hard it is to fold laundry. Maybe you could tell us why you picked this task for your startup and exactly how hard it was to do this 10 years ago and why it's gotten. I wouldn't say easy, but it's certainly easier. Take us through the startup and why you chose this vertical.

For sure. At Weave Robotics, we are building robots that we wanted to see in our homes, but for everyone. And the reason laundry is a core use case for us is because it is something that a lot of people have to spend time doing. It is linear time. It just like the more laundry you have, the more time it takes. And it's something that people have shied away from many years because it was hard. And the reason it's hard is fabrics are very challenging. It's very hard to simulate. They can be in infinitely many configurations. It's not like, you know, your phone where it's either upside down or topside down. It's. There's just so many intricacies of it. There's different fabrics, different patterns on it. And yeah, 10 years ago, this was much more challenging because we didn't have the backbone that's forming now. A lot of the architectures for robotic learning, things like BLMs that have been trained on Internet scale data, give us really good semantic information to build off of. And yeah, we built the first version of this robot just in our living room and trained it on our own architecture with data that we collected. Just when it was just Evan and I, my best friend, and we got it to fold T shirts for the first time. And ever since then, we've basically been very excited about. Sorry, we've been very excited about how much progress we've been able to make with latest methods.

So what will the cost of this be and when will it be available for purchase? Is what the audience is thinking about right now. And then take us through the second, third and fourth use cases that you're, you know, essentially what the only other category here is basically Roombas, I think for home robotics. So this is a really interesting second act. But there's nothing that says you couldn't put a Roomba as the base of this and have it clean the floors as it walks around and picks up your dirty laundry.

Yeah, great questions. Well, we opened up for pre orders last year. We opened up for a small cohort of 30. Those sold out pretty instantaneously. And as for the cost, this is first of its kind premium product that like nobody has really established this product category. So it's going to be in the tens of thousands of dollars for this first cohort of customers. And as we've in house much of our design, we've been able to kind of like take that price down as much as possible because the end goal is to not just ship 30 of these things, but hundreds and then thousands.

How far can you get that price down in the first couple of generations? Does it get down to single digit thousands or is it still going to.

Be eight figures in the first couple generations? There's definitely a path to single digits.

Okay, that's encouraging.

Right now you sold the first 30 for 15k or something crazy like that.

Well, our customers put down a reservation fee and the final price will be basically when they receive the robots. That's when it'll be.

Got it. So not announced yet, but you're saying tens of thousands. So it could be upwards of 20K for this robot to start.

Correct. Greater than 10K?

Greater than 10K. Okay. And take us through how it does, what it does when you design a product like this. Because we had Elon, who's working on Optimus obviously at the All In Summit last week and I had asked him like, how is it going? And he said he is like dealing with the actuators. I don't know if you saw his take on it, just how hard it was and finding these he has to build them. But are you building all these actuators or is it a more narrow set of constraints here because it has this more narrow purpose?

It's a great question. We've in house much of our design and to make sure that we don't get kind of like bottlenecked by different actuators, et cetera, we've made it so that it's as modular as possible. So we've actually dual source different actuators from different vendors. And at the same time we've established really good relationships with both of these vendors, such that we can actually customize the actuators for use cases. And yeah, this kind of allows us to focus on the portions of the design that really matter towards the product and build upon actuators that are already working really well.

But you're using essentially two finger actuators versus a full human hand. Is there a material downside in the laundry use case only having kind of grabbers?

Two good questions. Just to clarify one thing. So the grippers are our own design. That's one of the. I think that's our second iteration of the gripper that we've done done the motor that's driving that gripper, the actuator is the one that we. Off the shelves. Got it. As for grippers versus hands, I'll give you kind of like a secret that's in plain sight. If you watch a lot of the videos that have been done with hands, especially with folding laundry, it's usually they're doing this. The reason we started with grippers is to keep the complexity of the problem low so that we can focus on the portion of the problem that matters, which is being able to fold laundry. And as you can see in the video, we had to come up with a different protocol because we don't have all these different fingers on it. But at the same time, it works on any article. It generalizes to different fabrics, and this allows us to ship as opposed to, you know, kick the can down the road.

Super interesting. When you went to investors with this idea, you must have got a range of feedback. Many of them probably have scar tissue in robotics investments from the 90s and into the 2000s as venture firms. How did you convince them that this was a, you know, investment opportunity that was worth taking the risk on? Extremely high price point. Extremely small audience for that price point, but obviously so much great potential.

Yeah, for sure. I mean, people being excited by us having, I think the first public demo of T shirt folding that was out of the lab and then YC demo day definitely helped that they saw a path to it. But at the same time, yeah, like, robotics is hard. It's one of the hardest problem there is. Right. It's fully the entirety of the stack. So there's definitely skepticism. But at the same time, we told them the same thing that is true, which is we're going to work on this problem, we're going to solve it. This problem matters. We're not going to shy away from this. We're going to build the robots that everybody wants in their home and we're not going to like, oh, we'll do this other thing before because it sounds better on paper, etc.

And.

The investors that believed in us basically saw that we'll be able to do it.

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A version of this that you would sell to maybe a Laundromat as opposed to someone in their own home? Because I could see that customer base having access to more capital than your average family.

Yeah, also great question. I mean, one of the announcements that we very recently made just last Friday was we announced a partnership with Tumble, which is like a great end to end laundry service provider. Many different locations in the US they basically take your dirty laundry off of your doorstep and bring you back clean folded laundry to your doorstep. And our robots are now folding laundry for their customers. And we're really excited about that. Tumble is also really excited about it. And yeah, like there's definitely like a stepping stone there that happened that allows us to validate the entirety of our stack, our robots, while also providing real value in the meantime, as opposed to keeping the robots in the office and proving things out there.

I see.

Is this something that Alex.

No, no, please, Jason.

Well, earlier I'd asked in my barrage of questions for you because I'm so excited about your startup. Second, third, fourth things you could do, obviously going and finding the laundry, laying on the floor and bringing it to the laundry room should be possible. Sorting it. Whites, not colors. You got wheels on this thing. And opening and closing a dryer door seems beyond the capabilities of the pinchers. And those are kind of hard. But you could see a world where this pulls A bunch of dirty socks off the floor and dumps them into the washer and dryer eventually. So maybe what are the second and third applications people are asking you for that might be cards you turn over in the coming years.

Good questions. I wouldn't bet on not being able to open up a washer and dryer door. But as far as future use cases, as you mentioned, laundry is a huge set of things. Being able to sort it, being able to sort it by the different members of the household. We're definitely focused on making laundry as seamless as possible. And after that, there's a whole sleuth of like slew of tidy up tasks that we want to do. Picking up toys off the ground, pets, toys, socks, putting things into a hamper so that you don't have to do that too. And there's also just being your eyes and ears from in your home while you're away. Right. Like, did I leave the stove on? Can you turn it off? If that's the case, is the window open? Can you try to close it? If so, these are already things that we're building upon. We just haven't publicly shared too much on that yet. And at the same time, wiping surfaces is definitely on the roadmap as well.

Yes. Something my daughters, I make them do is, yeah, put stuff in the dishwasher, you got to wipe the table, somebody got to mop the floor. There's all those possibilities. Now. You must have done your competitive research. I remember seeing foldy mate, a very weird device. Maybe one of our producers could throw it up on the screen. This form factor was very interesting to me because you basically throw stuff into the top of it and then it does it and comes out in the bottom. Maybe talk about their approach versus yours, why you chose your approach versus theirs.

I mean, you know, one of the hardest portion of folding T shirts, long sleeves, anything, is getting it from this random state you pick it up from in a crumpled state into a flat state. We don't realize it as we're folding because we're really good at it. But it takes up most of the time and it takes up most of the thought. So devices like these basically make it so that that is not a problem because you have to pass your T shirts in that easy configuration one by one. At that point, it is still a linear time operation. It doesn't matter that it doesn't do the last portion of the fold for you because all that matters is you still have to sit there with a hamper in hand and feed the Thing T shirts. It's still helpful for some people to have some of these devices. But yeah, our robot does this end to end.

How do you train it? So everybody's house is significantly different, but computer vision is super robust now. And so doing computer vision or lidar or whatever it happens to be to organize, hey, this is what the house is. And then naming each room and then every time a piece of clothing comes up, being able to pull up an app and just say, that's dad, that's mom, that's daughter, that's little Johnny's. And this is their room, this is their draw. I have some very interesting security cameras that let you. It shows you faces and then you just put names on them. And then now when somebody comes to any of my properties, I get an alert, this person is at the door. Or a known person is at the door. Would you like to make them known? It's like, oh, yeah, that's the person who maintains the pool. So we put pool cleaner on it. And it even is now getting to the point of like license plates, you know, at the gate and these new gates controllers. Alex, if you have a gate at your house or ranch, can you can say, this license plate is allowed to come onto the property on this day, this hour or for the next six months and then it times out so you can get rid of people ringing the gate bell if it is in fact the license plate and the car model and the face of the person. So how do you do that piece, Khan, of training it, or is that something you're working on?

Yeah, that's a good question. I think sorting between different family members is definitely a longer term thing for us. I think initially we will rely a bit on our customers to make sure that whatever is in this hamper is whatever you want to be folded together at first. But at the same time, we haven't share too much publicly, but we have been working on kind of like the flow of interacting with the robot and what the app looks like, what onboarding is going to look like and how you're going to assign different articles of clothing to different people. We'll have more to share on that soon, but it's definitely on our minds. But we're starting with a more simplified version of the problem.

Here's the hamper. This is Johnny's hamper, this is Jane's hamper. This is dad's, this is Mom's. That just totally makes it easy. But of course, if it's in dad's hamper, then, you know, you Start to learn dad sizes, you learn his brands. So many different ways to just have this become automated. What a great idea. You've picked a really hard challenge, but an important one and we wish you great success with it. Thanks for coming on.

Thanks for having me.

Appreciate you.

And if you're listening to this and want to take a look at it, it's weaverobotics.com though Jason I have to say it'd be great.

We robotics.com if you want to put in a pre order or sign up for their list and people always ask me, how can you support a startup if you're not investing money in it? Yeah, just giving them a shout out on social media or signing up for their email list, giving feedback and then eventually buying the product. If you're a fan of startups and you want to see these things continue, that's why I always have no problem buying the 1.0 of a product, using it. And even if I don't wind up using it, I feel good that I contributed to the startups. You know, iteration the Roadster When Elon started selling the Roadster, he said, you know, if you buy this car, is it worth 150k? You have other options. You could buy two cars, but if you look at it as an investment in the future of Tesla and eventually getting to a Model 3, you can also feel proud about that.

Yeah, buy early, buy often, support your local startup, it doesn't hurt anybody and it helps the overall ecosystem.

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So I think probably the biggest news story out today is that it appears that TikTok is going to survive. We got a lot of notes recently about how this deal is coming together. So in the next 30 to 45 days, Jason, we're expecting to see a deal between China and the U.S. that will allow for TikTok to continue operating here in the States. It appears that Oracle, Silver Lake and Anderson Horowitz will end up with about 80% of the company. I presume Oracle will remain its kind of cloud host here in the United States. The interesting thing, the thing that surprised me, and I'd love to get your take on this, is that the algorithm is not being fully sold to the future US entity. It's going to remain in Chinese hands. Now, as I understand it, the US company is going to have some say how it's used, but there used to be a red line in which the algorithm had to be fully sold, and that does not appear to be the case in the final accounting. So your thoughts on this? Do we blink? Did we find the right deal here?

It has to get divested and the algorithm needs to be eventually replaced so that something this powerful in terms of influence has some accountability. I think we're going to look back on this era and look at algorithms as something we should have regulated. And I'm not a big, huge fan of regulation.

I know that's a big statement.

Yeah, I think they're so powerful and their ability to steer your belief systems. And that was my main objection to China owning this, is that if you want people to have a certain position on an international conflict, like Russia invading Ukraine or the tragic situation in Israel and Gaza, you could just, with the most convincing thing in the world. Short video clips, like video clips are incredibly persuasive. When you see a video clip, your mind, because we're visual beings, are incredibly influenced. This is why documentary films have been known, for better or worse, to be so influential they can change an entire society. Just people see a 60 Minutes piece or about the tobacco companies, which maybe the insider was based on, it could change how the entire country views the cigarette companies. And so who controls that algorithm and to what end? I think a lot of the political division we're seeing in our country today is because of social media and mainstream media. Mainstream media learned early on, if you pick a side, you lose half the audience. But the audience you gain can become so rabid that it's worth just picking half the audience. To get 80% of it C, MSNBC, Fox, NPR, or any of the classic GOP radio hosts. Russia, Limbach.

I was thinking Rush. Yeah.

So then you take it another step, which is we're just going to tickle your outrage and that to young people's brains. You could make them think anything. And in fact, adults could be swayed. Every time I watch a documentary, I just have a massive warning signal up where I'm like, this director is manipulating me to some end. They're either trying to make this incredibly entertaining, emotionally provocative, whatever it happens to be. And so I think algorithms should be removable, swappable and transparent.

There should be a required time series feed that you can opt into to avoid the algorithm feeding you things. But I think you make a great point on documentaries and their ability to influence. Because one thing that I've also seen that worries me in this broader vein is things that look like documentaries that aren't. My, my spouse is a huge fan of, of things on Netflix that explain a topic. And I had to be like, okay, but this was all approved by Billie Eilish's team. This is not a third party group going in to try to understand her. This is her presenting herself to you using clips and voiceover and things that make it look like Ken Burns was somewhere in the room. But it's not a documentary, it's a hagiography. Right. Which is different. So that's another thing that scares me. BS. In the case of TikTok though, I think that algorithmic transparency would be huge. So I'm hoping that, you know, Oracle, Andreessen and Silver Lake step up to the plate and build something that we can take a look at. And then I hope YouTube and X and Reddit and everyone else kind of follow suit. Transparency here would be huge.

X has already done that. They released their algorithm and did that.

Keep getting updated.

That's cool. Yeah, they released it just 10 days ago, I think. And when Elon released it and he open sourced it, he said, you know, I'm doing this because I think our algorithm kind of sucks and I want it to get better. And, you know, I've had conversations with him about, you know, publicly and he's talked about it. I mean, I've had these conversations literally on X of would be really great to byoa bring your own algorithm and then when you then have an algorithm store. So this is what I pitched the social media companies on is create an algorithm store where I can buy, you know, for five bucks or a dollar, just like I could buy an app or a ringtone, an algorithm. And I might want an algorithm that is world positive, that is fact checked. I might want one that's chaotic, I might want one that's the trending news. I want one that's the most engaged news, that doesn't have a lot of views. So lots of comments, lots of back and forth, but not a lot of views.

Right.

Those would be like emerging conversations, all kinds of interesting things you could do. But I think these things are evil as constructed today. I'll put them in the category of evil because I think the people making them and who are deploying them, the meta corporation across their different platforms and TikTok are doing it with absolutely no conscience. So anyway, it all comes back to these algorithms which are dangerous and I think they're polluting people's minds in a way that is super dangerous. We need to have a regulation that the algorithm breaks the 230 section 230 protections. Yes, I think the algorithm should break section 230 because it's an editorial decision that is more powerful than a human doing it. It because it's micro targeted and it never sleeps unless it breaks it, unless you give consumer choice. So let that sink in. Just like the bundling of a search engine with a browser could create antitrust issues unless you give people a choice. So when you load certain browsers they will say which search engine do you want to use? Or at least give you the ability to go into the settings and say I want bing, I want DuckDuckGo, I want Google, I want Perplexity, I'm going to pick it up. That's like a very common sense solution here, which is every 30 days it shows you your algorithm, it shows you, it gives you a report card of what the algorithm thinks you like, you like Corvettes, you like heavy metal, you like full self driving whatever, you like Sopranos clips. It should just tell you what it's doing and then they pretend like, oh, we can't tell you what it's doing. Of course you can, of course you can. That's where regulation, common sense regulation would be very helpful here.

Well, I hope we get some of that when the TikTok deal winds down. But Jason, we do have someone who's very good at taking advantage of social media algorithms to get attention to their efforts. So I want to bring up our next guest, I want to bring up Eric Jackson from EMJ Capital. Now we've talked about Opendoor on the show before, Jason, We've talked about so called meme stocks on the show before, I don't think we've yet had an activist investor perform their campaign in the streets. So Eric Jackson is here. He's protesting outside of Drake's house every morning, trying to get to the Canadian entrepreneur and rapper to buy a share of Open Door, talking his book in the best possible way. Eric, welcome to the show.

Hey guys, great to be with you.

Eric, how would you describe what you do for a living? This is a full time job. What do you do for a living? And I'm obviously running into you now on the socials because I YOLO'd into open and quite publicly did it. So tell us, what do you do for a living, who are you and how would you describe your job?

Well, I would describe myself as a hedge fund manager. So I kind of got my start 20 years ago with Terry Semmel at Yahoo. Basically I did a PhD at Columbia Business School in strategy and management. I decided I didn't want to be an academic. I got a job that was like during dot com. So I got a job offer to work at a software startup in Toronto in March 2000 and loved that for four years. Did management consulting after that. But I'd heard of activist investing when I was actually a PhD student and I kind of always been intrigued by it. And I was living down in Naples, Florida, living in this like condo and reading the Wall Street Journal one day and I read about this guy, Brad Gerlinghouse who wrote the Peanut Butter Manifesto and how Yahoo was so kind of screwed up. It was all these different directions and stuff. And I thought this would be a perfect company to do an activist campaign on. But I don't have an activist hedge fund, so. But, but this was 06 07. So like, you know, Facebook was just getting started, YouTube and blogging, you know, Web 2.0 and all the rest. And so, so I said, well, maybe I, as this retail shareholder, I could leverage social media and actually conduct my own activist campaign. And so I went to the Office Depot in North Naples. I bought a $35 webcam to stick into my brick of a laptop. And then I got up on a Sunday morning when my wife was still asleep because I was embarrassed she was going to catch me doing this. And on the guest bed recorded myself making a YouTube seven minute video, like my manifesto for turning around Yahoo, and uploaded it to YouTube. That was on a Sunday. And like by the Thursday, the New York Times had written an article about me. You know, basically saying this is like a man bites dog story, you know, and you know, everybody Loves a good, you know, topical company like Yahoo was, that was kind of like going after the Kardashians at the time in tech and so.

But did you wind up making money from that trade? Did you? Or did you just learn a hell of a lot?

I just. Well, it kind of became 10 years of my life because it went on and on. I mean, first I was like lobbying for them to accept the Microsoft deal, which they did.

$40 billion, right?

Oh, yes. And then, but then, you know, we went through like this cavalcade of CEOs, like there was Jerry Yang and Carol Bartz and then Scott Thompson, you remember him, you know, and like he got fired for fetching his computer science degree from Stone Hill College and all this kind of stuff. And then Dan Loeb, meanwhile, we get Carl Icahn, rides in to the rescue. Apparently the smart guy is going to figure it out. He failed and he was gone. Then Dan Loeb comes in, smart activist, smart money from Wall street, appoints Mercer mayor. Not the best choice. I mean, she was buzzy at the time, but obviously couldn't run a company.

She knew she had some ideas around product that she had learned at Google.

But yeah, which led to what was the big acquisition she did?

The Tumblr.

Tumblr, Yeah.

A couple of billion dollars. And then they told her, famously, a couple of like months into it, like, by the way, do you know this thing is filled with porn? She was like, what?

Right, turn that off.

And then they turned it off.

And then that was the end of Tumblr.

They're like, there's adult content on this.

Open publishing platform, shockingly enough. But if you don't know what happened there, here's a headline. How Tumblr went from a $1 billion Yahoo payday to a 3 million dollar fire sale, which is a 99.7%, I think, reduction in value.

What a disaster. So, okay, you learn a bunch there.

So I learned a lot. I had a friend in Naples who was like, he was a 51 year old retired hedge fund manager living in Naples at the time. And he said, you know why you got to start your own fund, here's how you do it, and so forth. And so I did, and friends and family and put a fund together, but I thinking I was going to do activism, but it's pretty tough to do activism with like a $2 million hedge fund or even a $20 million hedge fund, right? As I soon found out, because the press attention with Yahoo was as important as the dollars that were behind me at the Time. And so eventually I latched onto some guy in New York who had a smallish activity activist fund. And I did a kind of Yahoo round two with Marissa, 90 page, like PowerPoint, you know, kind of campaign against her and then one against Philippe Damon at Paramount. But then I kind of clashed with the New Yorker who didn't like the fact that I was getting asked to go on CNBC more than he was. And then I met a billionaire who had like I'd come to know through Yahoo. Like he wasn't a billionaire when I first met him, but he was like, Eric, I love what you're doing. You got some, got like an interesting point of view on public companies. How about I give you some money from my family office to manage? But just one request, can you not do the activism? Because what happens if some intrepid Wall Street Journal reporter figures out that I gave you money? And then Eric's coming out and saying Marissa is terrible as a CEO and it turns out I've got a partnership with Marissa. It's just a bad look. So how about you just do pure passive investing? So I, I said, great, give me the money, sign me up. And I started doing investing in the Twilios of the last decade and the Roku's and the Carvanas and every hot news tech startup that came public. I was in and I was shooting the lights out, killing it. And then 2021 comes along in 2022 and I realized that, oh, the macro is important. Oh, I guess it just doesn't go up forever. And I got my sort of head handed to me Cathie Wood style in those years and unfortunately the billionaire took his money out at the end of 22 and so he was like 99% of my AUM. So I was sort of figuring out, what am I going to do? I got four kids, I got two dogs, my wife to support and everything. What's going to happen? So I decided not to shut down my hedge fund though. So I had like lawyers and all these people I was paying telling me, eric, you got to shut it down. It's hopeless and stuff. And it's sort of, you built it, you paid for this infrastructure that you're supposed to be managing millions and hundreds of millions, not just like scraping by. But I didn't want to do that. I also had this up and down performance and they said the good way to get away from your choppy track record, you just shut your hedge fund down and then like six months from now, you know, start a new one. And then you don't have to show your track record and no one's the wiser. And that's what everybody does who's got like terrible performance and stuff. And I was like, ah, it doesn't feel right and so forth. And so I just sort of like I started building an AI team at my fund. I mean, it was started with one guy and then two guys and three guys. And I felt like, you know, eventually AI is going to revolutionize hedge funds, just like it's going to revolutionize every other industry. I might as well try to do something unique and different here on my little hedge fund and try to figure something out and then I'll market myself and so forth. But we had like, oh, ups and down months and you know, again like all these, the fund directors in the Cayman Islands were like, what is going on? You know, you're up 40% one month, you're down 60% one month, like what's the point, Eric? But I just sort of kept on, kept on. And then, you know, like my big hit was that I got into Carvana in May of 23 when it had gone from 400 bucks to $3.50 in December 22nd. And now it's come all the way back to 400.

What did you see there? Just concisely, what was the big insight of buying something that had lost 99% of its value and was in most people's minds circling the drainage.

But to be honest, when I was back as a PhD student at Columbia, I'd done this big study of corporate governance and at the time, McKinsey had paid my professor all this money to do a research because everyone at that time and still today says, oh, maybe diversity on the board is good, maybe having a younger board is good and linked to better performance, maybe having this type of background and that type of background is better and. But nobody had actually studied it and actually seen what is linked to better performance from a director's perspective.

You put directors on, what does that say about the culture of the company? Are they founders who have skin in the game or is it like some of these other ones where it's performative and they're getting what, 250k a year, 500k a year in cash comp, you know, and then they're just doing it for the money. I know those directors because they will ping me sometimes they want to be in a hot startups board and I'm like, what is this person actually adding to bringing to the table? So what are the reasons so McKinsey.

Gave me all this money. I hired like five Columbia College kids and they had. I had to send them down to the World Trade center to the SEC library. And they had to physically photocopy, like, the. The actual, you know, prospectuses from all these public companies. And we had to code all this data about their ages of the directors and comms and like, how did they get paid? Was it stock options? Was it in cash comp and all this kind of stuff. Anyway, the big net result was the only thing that mattered, none of this diversity stuff mattered. None of, you know, all these, like, common prescriptions. The only thing that mattered was skin in the game. And by skin in the game, I mean not RSUs given to people, not found money, but actually directors who dug into their own pocket with their own money after tax money and had actually bought stock. And it didn't. And it didn't matter. Sometimes it was a million dollars worth of stock, sometimes it was $100,000 worth of stock. But you just wanted to see evidence of interest and belief in that company through those share purchases. And so the one thing I saw at Carvana in 2022 is that on the way down from $400 down to $3.50, Ernie Garcia Jr. Who's, you know, he's wealthy, right? His dad was wealthy. He's wealthy, okay, now he was like born on second base or whatever, but. But he bought $70 million. 70 of Carvana stock on the way down in one tranche at 50 million at $50 a share in March of 22, and another tranche in June of 22 at $20 a share. And then the stock just kept dropping. It didn't stop until it was $3.50. The other thing that piqued my interest, which I never saw once in any of those SEC filings from 25 years ago, and I never saw have seen it today, is that I noticed this chief product officer for Carvana, a guy named Dan Gill, had bought $3 million of stock himself in Thanksgiving of 2022, when the stock was $7.50. And it just so happened that he followed me on Twitter. So I DMed him and I said, could I give you a call? I'd love to chat. And he said, sure. And I started talking to him. It turns out he's Canadian like me, but he lives in Santa Monica now. And so we're catching up about that. And then I said, I gotta tell you, I never see chief product officers spending $3 million. I said, like, I know if that was me, if I was in your shoes. And I came home and told my wife, you know, hey, honey, you know this company, Carvana, where I work, where like 90% of our wealth is tied up into in the stock price of Carvana and It's gone from 400 to $7.50. What I want to do is I want to take $3 million of our own money and put it in more Carvana shares. I honestly don't know if I would have won that argument with her. Especially like, you know, she probably said.

I don't want to diversify. I want to consolidate more. I want to be more concentrated in this one giant stock. So this is an incredible insight. So then that leads us to.

Well, and so he said, like, I really believe in Ernie. I know it's going to be tough. You know, it's not a layup that we're getting back to 400. You know, we have a lot of issues that we have to deal with. But, you know, we've known each other since Stanford. Everybody else on the team knows each other. When I heard him say that, I just said, it's going to happen for sure. For sure. These guys are going to come back. And all the hedge fund bros on Twitter, anonymous accounts, they were dancing on the grave of Carvana. These guys are a bunch of criminals and all this kind of stuff. Nobody said anything positive. I didn't see anything positive about Carvana until the thing was above $300 a share.

That's a great segue to Opendoor because I feel like for a long time people have been dancing on that grave. And you, on the other hand, had a very different thesis. So, Erica, why don't you tell us what caught your eye about it and when you bought in.

I think it's a very similar company. Carvana, like one's revolutionizing used cars, going direct, getting rid of the used car dealerships that you used to have to go to to buy and sell your used car. The other is obviously trying to disrupt the traditional agent and go direct to you. Both have needed a lot of debt to kind of build that. Both were encouraged by Wall street to kind of grow, grow, grow at all costs. Growth first, profits second. And then both got hit over the head when interest rates jacked up so much in 21 and 22. And then both got left for debt. And I just thought that both would eventually prove that they could be profitable with their direct approach, just like Uber. Jason, you would know this better than I do, but as recently as 22, three years ago, I remember it would be common you'd flip on CNBC and say, they'll never be profitable at this business. It's impossible to make money at rides.

So funny delivery. We, as the early investors in the company had had conversations about, okay, we're going to lose $3 a ride, $2 a ride. It's going to increase people's adoption of the technology and increase market share, and we're going to go quickly around the world. And if people can get a ride for five bucks and the subway is 250 or the bus is $3, wow. They can kind math in their head and give it a shot. And then once they've got it on their phone, okay, well, now you got a rainy day or you had a couple drinks after work and you're like, you know what? I just want to get home safely. I'm going to take an Uber. And I went on cnbc and Deirdre Bosa was coming at me so hard. And I said, deirdre, do you think anybody is going to stop using uber if their $12 ride is 14 or 15? And she was like, pause for a second. And she was like, maybe. And I was like, like, nobody, right? Nobody. Just like Nobody who paid $9 for Netflix is going to unsubscribe at $14. You have pricing power. If it's a great service, you can just add to it. And I said, if they did a billion rides on the CNBC. If they did a billion rides and they lost 2 billion, just do the math. They lost $2 per ride. Let's say they make. They add $2 to every ride. Now they're profitable at 2 billion. What do you think of the business? And it was at 20 bucks a share, 30 bucks a share. I bought more shares at 30, I bought more shares at 30, I bought more Robinhood at 12. And these weird dislocations do happen. So what's the state of it now? And what role does creating an army like an open army? And what's the difference between your approach and say, meme stocks, where AMC and Gamestop, you're like, well, wait a second, those seem like terrible businesses at their core that have been disrupted, Blockbuster, whatever, that they're just going to have a really hard time coming back. So what's the difference here with open?

Well, open had terrible management and kind of arguably a lackadaisical board, you know, a much worse management than Carvana did. And this stock hit an all time low at 51 cents on June 25th. So we're not even three months removed from this and the stock is now over 10 bucks today. So we've 20x in like less than three months. But it's not because the brilliant management, it's not. And there wasn't any buying. In fact it was the opposite. Everyone was RSU dumping. Carrie Wheeler, who was the former CEO was just constantly selling. She sold a big bunch of shares under a 10b51 plan at 56 cents a share. It was kind of disgusting. So anyway, I built, I did my analysis, I said, you know, obviously macro, you know, rate cuts are coming, that's going to help helped their business a lot. And they had indicated that they were about to have their first EBITDA positive quarter in the first time in three years. And so they got to get to steady state profitability. But I could see some things that were positive on the horizon. And unlike Carvana, they have no competition left nationally in iBuying. Redfin got out of it, Zillow got out of it. So think about Uber, if there was no lift and the potential pricing power there. Now obviously they can't just do iBuying. There has to be be something else as well. And so I was always a believer and I think this is true that like with Carvana, they don't make most of their money from the buying and selling of cars. It's finance and interest that like 80% of their EBITDA 20% margin comes from finance and interest. With Opendoor it could be mortgage and title. They've sort of made sort of half assed attempts at it before, but not really. And so I come out with this tweet on July 14 when it was like $0.88, I built my position maybe like 73, $0.74. I came out with this tweet storm that basically said, you know, here's my case for open. And I think three years from now they get back to steady state profitability, there'll be a re rating of the stock just like there has been with Carvana. On a forward price to sales basis, this thing should be $82 a share. And it was like, holy cow, $82 for an 88 cent stock that's about to risk being delisted on NASDAQ and so forth. It's just caused a huge buzz. People immediately sort of fixated on this odd number of 82. Like it just like, why 82? Why not 100? Why not 75? Like why don't explain this to me.

Yeah, you built a model and that's the number that came out of the model.

So anyway, and then it was a week. You know, the thing just sort of took off. And within 10 days, like, it hit 5 bucks. It got halted on the NASDAQ. There was like 2 billion shares traded one day. They only have 700 million shares. And this has become.

Because you have so many retail investors on Robinhood, this is like the Robinhood effect that people can just very quickly make.

There was that. And the Carvana angle, I think, was significant. And the fact that I had called Carvana, I think, definitely gave me credibility. And I heard from so many people, not just in the US that was the other shocking thing. Open doors only in the US I'd say 75% of the retail supporters are outside the US and they all said the same thing. They all said, I missed Carvana. I'm not going to miss this one.

One.

I'm not gonna. This is generational wealth opportunity, for sure.

Yeah. But one of the things that seems to happen when this FOMO occurs, and you've got a bunch of lunatics who. I watch them and I'm like, you know what? I actually know Keith Raboy. I know the business. I like the business. I've had the founders on before. I'm gonna yolo into this. And I think that there could be a turnaround here. And I was aware of your work, so I was like, yeah, sure. I now make bets to learn. It's a very strange thing to do. But when I was experimenting with prediction markets, I was like, let me just place some small bets on prediction markets to learn. And see, while I have skin in the game, now you have my attention. I think a lot of people have started doing this. They're like, I'll just buy $1,000 worth of something or $10,000 worth of something or 500, whatever they can do. That's de minimis. And then they have their attention. They watch it go up and down every day. And then something happened in the last couple of weeks where the fact that this started to turn around and there was some attention and enthusiasm on it. Essentially a dead brand. All the old investors and a new CEO emerged. And Keith Rapoia went on CNBC and he started talking about it. So maybe you could talk about what happens when you identify something and then people with gravitas get involved.

Well, the one thing I did learn from 10 years of beating my brain in with Yahoo is all the tricks that that board tried to play with me, and they tried to ostracize me and say, eric's just an idiot up In Canada. What does he know? He doesn't have the long term view. I was in the stock for 10 years and I didn't have the long term view on Yahoo. We have a plan. We know what we're doing. It's all part of a plan. The fact that our stock is doing nothing for. For seven years. And so I didn't want to repeat that same, you know, same stuff. And I knew Keith, you know, obviously wrote the business plan. I had enormous respect for him. You know, I never met him until a couple of weeks ago. But my dream of all dreams was that one day, you know, I could convince Keith to come back in and join the board of this company. Because I know that there are just certain people that have, you know, bring with them a certain magic pixie dust, and that gets sprinkled all over the company. And I knew that Keith could do that. I knew he would attract other talented people to the team and so forth. And I started to notice as I tweeted about it that Keith was liking my tweets and then saying supportive things. And so I just started getting more and more locked at the hip with Keith. And I knew that if that happened, then the open door would be flummoxed because they could no longer say, these guys don't get it. Keith Raboy doesn't get it because he's the guy who wrote the business plan. So they would have to hopefully come around. And that's what ended up happening. And Keith just got more and more energized. I had the chance to meet him just a couple weeks ago in New York and SoHo and just spend an hour with them and just hearing about, exchanging ideas about where we think the business can go and the possibilities, and it, you know, literally goosebumps. And so the fact then that suddenly he's back on the board, he's a chair. Eric Wu, a co founder, is back on the board, and immediately they bring in Kaz, who was the CEO of Shopify, to be the CEO. I don't think people, you know, I was in New York just a couple of nights ago, and I was at like some cocktail party, and all people go talk about is, can you believe they got Caz to run?

They got a significant CEO and then you architected, or they architected, I should say, I believe a deal for him that is reminiscent of, say, Elon's original deal with Tesla and now the new one, which is, hey, if the stock hits certain prices, you get certain compensation. So if you only win, if the.

Shareholders win, I Mean, it was mind blowing to me that anybody put up a fuss about Elon's thing in the first place, because I remember when that whole thing was up in the media, I could. I could pull a CNBC clip from the day that that deal was announced in 2018 or 19 or whatever it was. And there were these anchors in Davos, Switzerland that day talking about it, laughing, saying, there's no way he will ever achieve this. Of course, you know, and so that was the point of view at the time that he was given this comp. And then to go back later and try to say, like, oh, this is unfair. I mean, every.

This is like to your thesis of do the board members have skin in the game? It should be required that when you join the board of these companies, you have to pay for some shares and put some skin in the game. And if you don't, why are you here? You're some academic, I don't know, you check a box or something. It's just not.

Well, doesn't make any sense. I've had a conversation. I won't say his name here because he's a good guy, but I had a heated discussion with one of the directors of Opendoor who said, you say, I didn't buy shares. I bought shares in Opendoor. I said, when did you buy shares? I haven't seen the SEC filings that said that. It was in 2016 when it was private. You bought shares? Yeah. I said, no, I'm talking about when it's a public company. Well, my firm, my VC firm bought shares. I said, that's other people's money. That's not your money. Oh, have you seen my GP commit? Of course it's my. I said, it's not the same.

The GP commit might be low single digits of the fund. So there could be some millions of dollars they have. But I do think, yeah, if you.

Want your broker, just do 50,000, just do 100,000. Just show a face.

Just show the shareholders that you are.

At all these retail people, all they care about is this woman. Carrie was dumping shares at 56 cents a share to US retail. So let's see a little sign that you're on our side.

There was a moment where Dara bought, I think, $10 million in Uber shares. And it was probably in the 30s. And so you have to just wonder, like, okay, the CEO of the company believes that this is a good deal and he's going to double or triple his money. And then you look at his comp package, you like, oh, $8 million is a significant number for him of, as you said earlier, post tax dollars. And you know, that to me was another great sign. All right, listen, continued success with it. Ieo load into it. I went in and as I publicly said, I'm going to buy this thing. I know it's going to work. So I'm just going to sell a couple of shares as this thing pops in the next six months to cover my base, and then I'll have free shares. It happened in the next five years.

I appreciate that. You cranberry it in, I believe was.

Your words, a cranberry in Vegas.

It's 25k chip more request. And I said the same, I said the same to Keith.

I don't know if I'm joining the board.

We, we, we, we want Chamath back. Oh, bring him home. Bring him home. You know, bring him home. I don't know why he hasn't tweeted about it. He hasn't talked about it. A lot of people criticize him and say, oh, you know, IPOB or C or whatever it was, you know, he should have stuck around or whatever. I have the highest respect for him. Another, another bright Canadian, by the way, I'll point out. But I will say everybody loves the redemption arc. You can't tell me that Keith Rabois does not love the redemption arc going on right now. In some ways, I think Opendoor must be his favorite. Of all his private holdings, this has gotta be his most energizing. I think Chamath would find the same.

That would be very.

Put in a good word, put in.

A good work for me, continued success. And are you gonna do another one of these this year? I was looking at Nextdoor, which I had YOLO'd into like a year or two ago, and I'm like, God, I love that company. The founder's back. It was such a great product. Like, I just feel like Nextdoor has some of that potential.

I've, I've, I've been pitched on that next door. I get five pitches a day. Private DMs, people saying, hey, can you pump my bags in this?

Or pump my bags, but what's, what do you look at and go, well, no, that's a killer product?

I do, I do have an announcement. I think I'm going to be making it next week of my next hundred bagger. So, you know, watch for that and I'll, I'll DM it to you or whatever. So to make sure you see it, it's a good company. It's not a, it's not a screw up company where I'm going to be Marissa marrying the CEO or something like that. So I'm really, really excited about it. And my hope had been like find one of these once every six months. I mean it's obviously tough in the public markets to find 100 backers. Especially all these private companies stay private longer.

But I think there's a playbook emerging which is incompetent non skin in the game. Individuals running companies with no downside. They're basically got no downside. And if you can have people join these companies and say, hey, you do have some downside, we're asking you to put some millions of dollars in in your time. But the upside could be really great. That's actually a really good playbook. I think what you're doing is an important function in the market which is identifying people who are not aligned properly. All right, good luck with everything, Eric. Great, thanks for coming on the show. Thanks Eric.

Thank you.

All right, great job. Eric and I saw Waymo tap Lyft for their fleet management in New York City. Yeah, this is a really interesting one. There were two Uber stories back to back. Yesterday Uber and Tesla did a partnership for freight. So this is a very big story. Everybody said, oh, Tesla and Uber will never join forces. Well, there you have it. And then people thought Lyft was, you know, dead and circling the drain and they get Nashville. You can explain all of these things. When there is a big opportunity like autonomy and it's competitive. If I'm Waymo, I want to be on all platforms. Just like if I owned a hotel chain. If I own the W hotels, am I going to be on hotels.com and not Expedia or I'm going to be on Expedia and not this other platform hotel. Tonight I'm going to be on every platform and I'm going to try to negotiate the best possible deal. Conversely, if I'm Expedia, am I only taking, you know, Marriotts and I'm not taking Holiday Inns? Of course not. So what a lot of the the Tesla Q or Tesla Bulls or Waymo Bulls. Waymo people criticizing them. What they don't realize is it's a dynamic marketplace that is global with many different product offerings. Zoox will eventually be part of the Uber network and the Lyft network. Lyft will have Lucids and Neuro on it eventually. If you have one of these assets, you would want it to have full utilization. You wouldn't do an exclusive unless There was some incredible reason to do so. And exclusives very rarely exist. If you look at the DoorDash exclusives or Uber trying to do exclusives for food, eventually all these folks are like, yeah, you know, we did an exclusive for two years to get, I don't know, McDonald's or Starbucks on the platform, but I think you can get Starbucks on. On all the platforms now.

Yes. Yeah, I do recall there was a time you could only get Mission Chinese in San Francisco on Doordash. So I was an entirely Uber Eats guy. And then Doordash for that one restaurant. I remember hating them for that exclusive. But, yeah, super effective. So, Jason, this podcast, a lot of people watch it on YouTube. We do a live stream, of course, everywhere around the Internet. But people have really taken to video podcasts as kind of the new format. So audio is still quite big. But YouTube has noticed that people are doing this. I think they said that they got 100 million hours of podcasts consumed daily as of July over on YouTube. So not a huge surprise. YouTube is rolling out new tools and I think we might actually use these because they could help with some of our editing requirements. What they're going to roll out is an AI workspace that makes suggestions about clips to cut for social media, which is something that we've been talking about internally. Making better short clips. We talked about TikTok earlier on in the show and a feature that's gonna help audio podcasters make videos so they can be on YouTube in a more engaging format. So leveraging video and getting more video podcasts out. A great use of AI, I think.

Yeah. So a tool that let you take an audio only podcast like say Adam Curry's no Agenda, and then just create supplemental visuals based on what they're talking about or just something that looked good and had like a wave on it, you could very easily get those podcasts onto YouTube. I don't know what percentage of podcasts are just audio based still, but there's a number of them. And that would be like really amazing generative AI to make compelling graphics or just any kind of graphic. I mean, even if it was just a logo with a sound wave, that would be better than not having them on YouTube because YouTube is so ubiquitous and the algorithm's so good. I would love to make it my primary podcast player.

Did you ever see those lyric videos that bands with lower budgets put out when they drop an album so they can't make it a lot of music videos? I mean, just give me like a lyric video for a podcast Just put. Use the AI tools, transcribe it. Put that on the screen. I can read while I listen. I love that.

All right, everybody, it's been another amazing episode of this Week in Startups. You can sign up for our newsletter on substack. Just search for this week in Startups over there and then we go live there and there's a nice chat room. You can follow me on LinkedIn. We go live there and yeah, there's a subreddit. We don't really check it too often. We probably should, but we're going to start the discord up again and probably move from this week in startups Slack, which is just not the right software for this. I think everybody's kind of hanging out in Discord now. So we'll be over in Discord soon. For community stuff, we're hiring a Speaking of video editors, we need somebody in Austin. Don't have to have a college degree, do have to be creative, do need to know how to do cap cut. So if you email capcutaunch co and just send us some samples, we'll hire you in the office, eat some barbecue with us, hang out, make clips of the show and help us edit the show, produce the show. We're looking for somebody so. So we'll see you all next time on this Week in Service. Bye. Bye.

Bye.