The Browser Wars heat up! PLUS, Khan on The Bulwark, rules for great domain names, and Polymarket returns | E2174

Remember, there is an attack vector for these LLMs. They record everything you do. And when the police come or a civil case comes, whatever it is, they dump your information. They use your information, they're looking at your information. Sam Altman said this. Now what if Brave took their same privacy approach to browsing where they remove ads, they remove cookies, they they make your searches private, all that good stuff. And that's their commitment. I think they even have a VPN built in or you can pay like 10 bucks a year. It's de minimis. I think they should just do 100% VPN so they don't even know where you're coming from. Unless you want to disclose your city maybe and then make all your AI absolutely anonymous. And this is where I think Apple should buy Brave and duckduckgo maybe. Perplexity.

This week in startups is brought to you by public. You take investing seriously. Public does too. Build a multi asset portfolio and earn an industry leading 4.1% APY on your cash with no fees or minimums. Learn more at public.com/cla Innovation takes balance. Our CPAs, consultants and wealth advisors can help you get from startup to where you want to end up. Get started now@clA connect.com Tech and Sentry. Your team should be focused on shipping features, not chasing down bugs. New users get 3 months free of the business plan which covers 150,000 errors. Go to Sentry IO Twist and use the code Twist.

All right, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. I'm your host Jason Calacanis with me, air editorial director Lon Harris. Give me a salute then. Yes, sir. Sir. Yes, sir. And of course, yes, chef Alex Wilhelm. How you doing, boys?

I'm really good. I have a new light set up and I didn't have a producer help me and I think I'm going to go blind by the end of the show, but I hope my lights look good. Now, Jason, I hope you're happy because.

I did it for you. I saw your TikTok and it was literally like you were in an interrogation. Where were you on the 5th? Alex Wilhelm, it turns out. Do you have any contacts within the party?

Sadly, no.

We need to see your papers. All right, listen, enough with the nonsense. I got 16 different things. I got literally notions AI taker. I got the Zoom AI taker. And now I got granola AI taker. It's just three. That's two too many. I'm going to retire one, I think.

Well, I mean, what if they reply with very different notes. I mean, you want one of them to be fact checking the other.

What am I, the king of France over here? I need multiple people taking notes. It's just all meshuggah. Am I. Am I getting it right, Michigan.

You got that? That was correct. You were. You're used to get meshuguna and mishigas mixed up, but I think we've.

Mishigash is the person. Meshuggahna is the behavior.

Meshuggah is the person. Mishigas is like. It's a chaotic situation that's out of control.

The mishigas on this program's out of control.

There you go. Because Alex is a meshuggah.

Just. Just to be clear. And meshuggah is. Is the progressive heavy metal band that's famous for its instrumental and percussive music.

There we go. Well, there you go. This week in heavy metal, we're expanding the network, everybody.

Nice.

You know, Lon, we had this debate on the zombie K pop. What is it? Zombie apocalypse called?

Demon hunters. They're talking about demon hunters.

Jason. Okay, right? I'm okay. Boomer. What was interesting about this story to all of us, and my daughters were thrilled that we discussed it, by the way, because they've watched it 17 times, I'm sure. But Sony had this incredible IP. Correct. They left it on the doorstep of Netflix. Sony Pictures as a beautiful baby.

Yeah. Sony Pictures had this deal with Netflix during the pandemic. If Netflix refunds the production budget for the movie plus a $20 million sweetener, Netflix gets the movie outright. And so this was one of the movies that was produced under that deal. So naturally, people are like, well, this, this. This is the biggest movie phenomenon of the summer. They released the sing along version in theaters. That was a smash hit. The soundtrack is a smash. It. They're making a sequel already. This could have been a huge new Sony franchise that they're a company that's desperate for new franchises, and they left that on the table. Well, now their CEO, Sony Pictures CEO, kind of defending their decision in Variety today, which I thought was interesting.

Really? What defense does this dipshit have for giving away Harry Potter? Because this is why when people email me, hey, I want you to invest in my film, I immediately reply back, thanks so much for thinking of me. I like money, so I don't invest in movies because these people are sharks. When. When they would offer me to invest in these Sundance movies, I was like, oh, maybe I'll get in on this. You know, drop 50 dimes, 100 dimes, 250 dimes. Maybe I put my name up there in lights. They're like, yeah, you can get back up to 100% of your investment. And I'm like, so I put in 250. The most I can make is 500. Why don't I invest in 5 startups, give them 50k each and have unlimited upside. They literally put caps on this.

Yeah, there's. No, it's not. People do not get into producing films because they want to make a ton of money. It's like some that has happened to people. But no, no, it's because exactly what you said. It's. They want to be in the movie business.

All right, so what is, what's this guy's. What's this guy's excuse?

Ravi Ahuja. He says that the deal with Netflix made sense and that the big issue is there's no guarantee that this movie would have been a hit in theaters just because it was a hit on Netflix. Here's the quote. It started out on Netflix and then word of mouth made it grow in theatrical. That's a lot harder to do. It's hard to sustain momentum theatrically. So I think it was in the right home. I would say our mission is to make great content and find the right home. And I think K Pop Demon Hunter's right home was Netflix. But it's an interesting question he's leaving open. It's. It's theoretical.

We.

We can't really know. But his suggestion is being on Netflix is what made this a hit and that it would have maybe gotten lost in the shuffle if you'd released it to movie theaters.

I don't, I don't agree with that at all. But I do like the idea that streaming platforms could be a good way to give a show a longer chance at finding its audience. Because the theatrical window line's pretty short, whereas on streaming it's, I mean, effectively infinite. But in reality, it's until the next major release.

Well, what we're seeing now is that's even condensing more. It used to be a movie would have maybe two, three weeks, and then that first weekend became all important. Now, some movies we're seeing, the drop off on week two is massive. Like, this was the big issue with Fantastic Four this summer had a huge opening weekend, but week two, it had major drop off. And so what that means is all the, you know, the Marvel fandom has shrunk. Those guys are crazy. They'll go out first weekend for everything. But the rest of America the world not as into it anymore and the drop off is pretty severe. So yeah, you really get one big shot at it in theaters that if you don't capture everybody's imagination right away, it's hard.

All right. He's just doing cya. He's, he's getting the screws turned to him. There's somebody in Tokyo right now who's like a boss. What's going on? You know, there are, there are hardcore investors there and they bought Columbia and all this stuff. TriStar, TriStar, they got, they had a lot of assets there. And to give away upside just for $20 million. $20 million don't move the needle for anybody. They're making a really stupid decision.

20 million is so small that it' even a, even one big weekend. You would have covered more than 20 million, let alone like if this had played for a month or two.

We'll give it to you. Cost plus 25%. 50. 50 partners. Yes or no? We're going to Hulu next. We're going to Disney next. We're going to Amazon next. Let us know. Yes or no? He could have done that deal. He would have got that deal, right. They would have given him instead of 40 million, they would have given the 20 million in production costs and then he gets 50, another 5 million for, you know, whatever the. A little profit, a little, a little margin and then we own 5050. We'll be partners together. On exploiting this.

It does seem like not asking for, well, if this breaks records, if this is 100 million view kind of thing, like you got it. You got to have some sort of structure to that deal. Just giving it to them for 20 million, no matter how many people watch it, even if it's the biggest movie of the year, like that's crazy.

You only do that if you think you have crap content that's not going to make money.

Right?

And Sony Pictures Animation has had a string of hits. They do the across the Spider Verse movies. They did the Machines, which is a big hit on Netflix. Like they've had some. They did that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. They've had some big hits.

Gotta read this book. Something like an autobiography by Akira Kurosawa. Kurosawa bought this used copy of the original version from. From a library. The library. Thank you. To St. Louis Community College. That's where I got my original copy. Here's the thing. Toho Studios, they owned everything. They hired the actors, they hired the writers, they had the sets. They had a full stack. Just like Elon's got a full stack. So the lesson here for entrepreneurs is entrepreneurship and business in general is never limit your upside, control your destiny. Go full stack. Own as much as you can of the process. Barry Diller must have read this biography or just studied it, because when he did Movie of the Week, he said, you know what? He had all these deals from movie studios, Lon, hey, we'll make the movies for you. We take it, you give us money, and then you can put it on ABC and then we get it afterwards. And he was like, nope, we're going to do it all ourselves. And they're like, well, you can't be involved in it. You're just a studio. You don't. You're just like a TV network. You don't get to do this. We do this. The creatives do it. And he was like, nope, I'm going to do it. Which is really what Netflix has done. They own all their IP for all time. And that's what makes it brilliant. Someday I'll be a studio head. If I get to live another 50 years or 100 years, I'll carve out 10 years to be a studio head. That's what I was meant to do, among other things. Man, I would have loved that job. All right, thanks so much for the update, Lon. Very important update there from Holly, from. From Hollywood.

From the Hollywood part of Austin, Texas.

Yes, absolutely. Well, there's also. They're building a lot of studios here, Ashraf. They're building some studios. Yeah, it's moving here.

Rodriguez has got his whole operation out of Austin.

Sure. This is it. Comedy, technology, music and film. It's all happening, folks, in Central Texas. Central Texas. All right. The little drop of blue making a purple little city we got here called Austin. All right, thanks, Lonnie. Donnie, when your website or your app goes down, you don't want to hear a bunch of excuses and you don't want to waste your time. You just want the problem fixed fast. And that's where Sentry comes in. They're handling all the real time error monitoring and tracing, so the moment something breaks, you know exactly what happened and why. They've also got Sir S E, an AI powered debugging agent that can sniff out the root causes of your problems 94% of the time and growing. And like all great startups, Sentry is constantly shipping new features, bells and whistles and updates. They just added AI agent monitoring to the platform. When your LLM agent starts hallucinating, Sentry traces the entire timeline to find out what went wrong and take the guesswork out of it. Plus it's built into the same system that your team is already using and relying on. So try it out for yourself. Go to Sentry IO Twist and actually start making sense of what your agents are doing. That's Sentry IO Twist. You know, I saw that Leena Khan was on the Bulwark. My guy Tim Miller had her on and he confronted her about my sort of statements about the wrath of Khan and how she iced the industry. And she didn't exactly put up a great defense for it. And you know, one of my core premises was work on the stuff like right to repair or dark patterns where you can never unsubscribe to stuff. All that stuff. Bundling, that's like the classic law we have here in the United States. You don't need to make up. You can predict the future as some 30something, you know, Yale, I don't know what Ivy League school she went to, has no job experience or. And it was obviously political. She was very clear in the Tim Bulwark on Tim's podcast the Bulwark, you know, that she was a Democrat and they didn't like, you know, large businesses, I'll leave it at that. And Google was the obvious case because we all sat here and we're like, you know, Google's got a lot of challenges. They may have a search monopoly for the past 20 years. Okay, nobody's gonna deny that, but they don't have a browser monopoly, they don't have a Google Docs monopoly, they don't have an Android monopoly. We talked on the last episode that they're down to 40 something percent to Apple's almost 60% market share here in the United States. So the market fixes these things. We don't need some 30 something elitist predicting the future because I can't predict the future and I do it for a living and I do it goddamn well. I mean, I hit some grand slams here, folks. Grand slams, Robinhood, Uber. I hit the grand wealth front. I've hit a lot of grand slams and I can't tell you which one's going to be the grand slam.

I think it's a really interesting point because I've been wrestling with this, Jason, and the context folks is that this week the judge laid out the remedies in the Google Sear monopoly case. And it did not go as far, Jason, as many people thought. And honestly, the reason behind that kind of limited reach at the end was the rise of generative AI and AI search as a concept and frankly a rising market category. So I agree with you that we are seeing the fruits of competition and the results of private market investment and things are going well. I use GPT5 50 times as much as Google now, so it's worked for me. Here's the question though, that I don't know the answer to this. What do we do for the 20 years in which Google did have a monopoly and did get to operate with impunity? Because I don't think really divesting Chrome right now would solve anything. But I do also think that if you act in a monopoly fashion, a monopolist fashion for that amount of time in contravention of the general rules of the American marketplace, there should be some punishment for it. And I don't know if the remedies element of this case was the right place to do it, but it does feel like they got called out from a monopolist for a long time and then they just got their earlobe flicked and it just feels like an encouragement for other companies to do the same thing.

Lina Khan makes this point. Hey, poor people. And you know the rank and file when they do a speeding ticket or they commit a crime, you know they get taken to the shed, right? Yeah. And they get raked over the call. So big companies should also pay a price. So there is something to that. And the answer to that would be if you were on your game and you were actually watching what they were doing, it was very clear that they were doing really hardcore exclusive deals with Mozilla and Firefox and Safari and search on iPhones and their browser over at Apple. Those things would be technically or they could be anti competitive, therefore you would just go right after that and you'd give them the speeding ticket for that. Hey, you did this, you can no longer do it. Here's the fine. But there was like a vindictive ness to this and we have to like take down this kingdom. We have to break them up. You don't have to break them up, man. What you have to do is say these are the rules. You break the rules, you get a penalty. What happens in, you know, football if you grab somebody's face mask, you'll lose 15 yards. Right. And you lose a down. I think I don't watch football anymore.

But face masks are still very, very stark punishments because of the potential for neck and head injuries. So yeah, yeah.

So you know, and this probably, maybe this is face masking or maybe it's offsides, I don't know. We'll come to a decision as a society, but you give the penalty and then you get the hell off the court and you let the people play the game and the winner wins. You don't need to get this up in, you know, you're not a player on the field. And I think that's the problem is when the referees think they're the show. And you see this happen in any number of sports where the rep. There's a referee who's like, there was one who kept giving Rasheed Wallace technicals like crazy. And he gave a technical to Rasheed Wallace for staring at him. I don't know if you remember that moment. And he's like, Everybody's like, what? And I think this might have been for me to like a playoff game. And he was like. He was intimidating me. It's like, okay, well, grow up.

You know, this is the NBA for folks who are outside.

Yes. And this one, you know, referee thought he was the show. I think that was the problem. So based on the remedies, the judge said, hey, no more. This is the quote. Google will be barred from entering or maintaining any exclusive contract relating to the distribution of Google Search, Chrome Assistant, or Gemini. Great. Love it. Good for the industry. Now, that means when you're Apple, you can say to Google, hey, we'd love to give you an exclusive deal, but we'll give you 50% of the searches coming in or it's an auction. You know, if Yahoo or Bing From Microsoft or DuckDuckGo, if they want to get a certain number of searches this month, they raised some money, they can insert themselves into there. Imagine how the world would be different if DuckDuckGo said, hey to a bunch of venture capitalists. You know, we got a better mousetrap here. Can we get $10 billion to buy half of the search deal from Apple? And I think we can make it back. Great, great. What else, you know, wound up happening here?

So Google will not have to divest Chrome, which I thought was a pretty important point. And we're going to get to how that's impacting the news already, Jason, in just a moment. They're also not barred from making payments, as you mentioned. They're going to share some data with competitors. Essentially, the argument was that because Google would buy market share, they would therefore get more search volume and therefore they would get more data, and then they can make a better product. And there was a flywheel of essential unfairness. So they're trying to break that to some degree. Now, people are a bit split on how effective that will be, we'll have to see. And then finally they won't have to do a ballot screen essentially on Android to let you pick a search provider. So really it's not much other than a forced end of exclusives and we could end up in a world in which Gemini wins, Jason. And we kind of maintain Google's monopoly status for a longer time in the Genai search era. But I don't think that's going to be the case. I think opening AI is big enough now to really be a real competitor. I just think we need a better, faster mechanism to punish companies that are being anti competitive in the moment. And I don't think we know what that would be.

So disappointing. So I did see speaking of browsers that the browser company sold to Atlassian, one of my favorite companies shout out to Scott, one of the co founders of along with Mike of Atlassian from down under. You know, they make Jira and a bunch of other cool products. They're buying it.

Yep, $610 million in cash off the balance sheet. Less of course, whatever cash the company had on hand. And deal is expected to close in the second quarter of Atlassian's fiscal 26. And if you want to know what that means, it means Q4 of calendar this year. So basically by the end of 2025 and the whole team's going to move over and they're going to be treated as a separate entity. Now Jason, you and I both know that acquisitions are often pitched to companies that are purchased as don't worry, come over, be a startup. And this is one of those cases. We'll see how long they stay independent. Over at Atlassian, a $44 or $45 billion company, it's huge. But I thought this was a kind of bold move by Atlassian, a surprise one, but I think if you want to consider the future of work in a agentic AI perspective or era, this is a really smart move because dia their browser is relatively AI forward. So cool. I'm here for it.

Well, I talked a little bit about the Comet browser having a pretty good experience there. And then of course Claude is coming out with their own browser.

Yeah, over Anthropic they made a Chrome extension. OpenAI is theoretically making their own browser, I think is the split.

So you know, this idea of like the browsers where work gets done, it's the portal to, you know, on the desktop to the extent that, you know, when Google wanted to take some market share, they created the Chromebook. They named it after the browser and Essentially their thesis was if we just make a really fast, lightweight operating system that works on any computer, even one with very meager specs, you can use everything through a browser. Now you can use Slack through a browser. You could use Notion through a browser. So you don't have to download the apps, you don't have to make a unique app. We'll just do it that way. That's been a relatively good success for them, especially in education. One of the themes we talk about over and over again on this week in startups is making sure you do your chores. I'm no expert on these things. I have some experience. Stephen Estes from CLA is an expert. Let's talk about being cash efficient. Tell us about efficiency and what you see in the, in the top tier startups in your practice. We're seeing kind of an interesting trend out there where companies aren't needing to raise quite as much as they had in the past. You really have to be careful as a founder to only take on as.

Much money as you really need.

You've got to do the forecast and you've got to do the modeling and you got it dialed in and get it right. Otherwise you're going to end up either not raising enough capital to get to.

Where you're going and you're going to.

Have to go get venture debt or go back, have an extender to the round or you're going to give up too much of the company because you just didn't recognize how much money you actually needed. Yeah, very important to get this stuff right folks. And that's really a bummer when startups don't do things in a button up way. Always have a great partner, a good partner to have on this adventure while things change. My friend Stephen over at CLA. Visit claconnect.com tech and don't forget to mention that your boy J. Cal sent you. That's CLA Connect start today. So this makes a lot of sense to me. The price they have cash companies worth $45 billion or so. So this is like 11 point X percent of the market cap.

Yeah, it's not much. It's very much.

And if, man, if they figure something out, this could be Yum yum. I think this is a great acquisition and this is the type. Back to our first story of mid market acquisition. You got a $44 billion company buying a $600 million company. Let's go. Let's see. These kinds of acquisitions happen all the time. If you're over $1 trillion market cap if you're over a billion users. Yeah. Maybe we create a second set of rules for those companies that are at scale, which is how it works in a lot of other geographies. If you're, if you have a specific amount of market share in Korea, you can't gain any more. So you have to like, essentially do other things with your company. So this makes a lot of sense to me. I want to interest you a question. Yeah.

So the company's lost valuation, March 2024, 550 million post money. Now, I raised capital a couple of times and sure, the early investors did fine. My question though is when you think about a round, Jason, at like a Half Unicorn valuation, 2024, do you think the last money in to the browser company had protections? So that way they're not essentially just getting their money back one to one, but they're probably making more than that. I'm just curious about the economics from the venture side of this.

So if this was, if that deal was done in 2018, 19, 20, 2021 Peak ZIRP, the founder could have said, listen, you're lucky to invest. There's going to be no protective provisions. You're just going to convert to comment on a sale like anybody else. So if you bought 10% of the business, you're going to get 10% back. And if that 10% is worth 25 million, 50 million or 100 million, that's just the way it is. But since this was done in 2024, you could see a savvy investor saying, okay, we're happy to pay this valuation you want. You don't have anywhere near the revenue that would justify it. So can we just make an agreement that if you sell, we get two times our money back, so we get 100 million minimum. You said it was a $50 million round. The last one, yeah. So, you know, okay, they sell for 600, 100k comes off the top, then the rest of the preference stack, the rest of the investors would all convert into common and they would just sell their percentage and get the percentage of 500 million, which I think the folks at the browser company would be okay with. And I would think the investor going back to their LPs and saying, you know, it's a $500 million fund, we put 50 million of your money into this. We got back 100 million, it's paying back, you know, 10% of the fund plus you got, you know, it's going to pay back 20% of the fund. And so we're getting Closer to the hurdle, or if it's already a profitable fund, the fund manager might say, okay, we're just dropping 100 million. If that fund was at 2x. Now the fund, if it was a $500 million fund, is at 2 point X. And that's a really nice thing to happen in a time when back to the wrath of Lena Khan, there wasn't a lot of DPI so early. DPI is better than no DPI and losing money. And there's also a clause in some venture funds which is called recycling dollars. The first 10% of returns can get reinvested into the fund. So in this case, if it's a $500 million fund, 100 million comes back. If they had said 10% can be recycled, give 50 million to the LPs and this would be the GPS, the general partner's decision. And hey, we're going to take that 50 million. We also happen to have perplexity in that fund. We're going to offer perplexity, that 50 million. We're going to double down on an existing investment, which the people who are LPs and funds tend to like that recycling because it gives a little kicker at the end of the fund where you might have some inside information. Private companies should trade on inside information. Public companies, you go to jail for doing so. So you're on the board of the company, it's private, you say, wow, this is pretty good. Maybe we buy $100 million in secondary from the early employees or angel investors in the company. So great to see this happening. The wrath of Khan is over and all of this M and A is happening. And this was the thing with Lina Khan's other comments with Tim Miller on the Bulwark, which you can go see. It was this week and I really appreciate him playing the clip because she was like, well, you know, we're not really seeing a difference in M and A. It's like, yeah, because people gave up doing M and A because the juice wasn't worth the squeeze. They knew you were going to run them through the mill. So that's like in San Francisco being like, oh, car break ins are going down. Nobody in San Francisco for some period of time would ever report a car breaking because they knew nothing would happen. And the police would tell you, nothing's going to happen. You can report it. Nothing's going to happen. So people just went and got their windows fixed at the end. Statistics be damned.

Statistics be damned. Next up, OpenAI. Jason, this came out Thursday evening, announced that they're going to do an OpenAI jobs platform and also certifications. This was a little surprising to me. Now I don't think they're going to take on LinkedIn, but the CEO of applications at OpenAI Fiji, previously the CEO of Instacart through its IPO, announced a couple of things. So the OpenAI jobs platform is going to be a place where essentially workers with AI skills can be matched with jobs that need AI skilled workers. So it's kind of a subset of the economy. But if you're a business that's having a hard time finding the right people to help, I don't know, modernize or agenticize your business, this is a way to go about it. Obvious question. How do you tell who's qualified? Chief Jason, Glad you asked. Well, that's called OpenAI certifications, a new tool that'll be inside the OpenAI app that will let people essentially prove, and I also presume learn their AI chops. So a bit of a surprise move from OpenAI, I think. I like it, but I haven't really digested it yet.

You know, one of the things that happens when you build a platform is you start seeing opportunities everywhere. So you study the data and Google saw, wow, people keep typing in stocks and they type in price. Oh, maybe we should put the stock price right there at the top of our chart. And they build Google Finance or they keep asking for, I don't know, movies like whatever. So then they build a database of movies and they show you movies like get them to the Greek and you know, you get the 40 year old version. That's one of my favorites. Oh, what a great film. I wish they made films like that. You know, you get Tropic Thunder. It's always a nice way to find stuff. So that's what I suspected.

I knew a guy who wanted to be a studio head and had some money. I mean like, it's almost like if that person had money and time, they could.

I mean, making raunchy stoner comedies seems like a genre that, you know, you could do some real damage.

That's like my personality after 8pm so I'm totally here for it.

That was a dad joke from Alex. I heard, I heard that. No, don't apologize. We love it.

I don't even mean to. Anyways, keep going.

So this seems like a good idea. There probably are people who are looking for AI experts to use OpenAI's tools to do stuff inside of their enterprise now, just like the channel at Microsoft, Microsoft would have like certified Microsoft engineers. I was a certified Novell engineer at a point. Those certifications allow you to have a little bit of trust that this person is going to do some good work for you. They get to charge a higher fee for their services and they get to. And then OpenAI has something to do with all the people calling on the phone who say, can you do this for me? Can you do this for me? We'll give you a million dollars. We'll give you $10 million. Yeah. Talk to these firms. Go to this page. You're going to find folks. So that's really what this is about. They're building up a channel to help applications get deployed. It goes back to that MIT story we covered.

Was that two weeks ago, 95% of corporate. Yeah, AI pilots didn't make it to production. And the data was a little bit suspect. Not suspect. It just, it felt like there was a lot of really interesting data points and people found the one that was going to make the best headline. No one's ever complained about headlines before in the history of journalism, so don't worry. But in this case, I felt like there was actually some more interesting news in there. But Jason, that report and that particular data point I think took like 20% of the air out of the AI. It did balloon right now.

It did. And that just shows you people can get skittish during a transition. We had this happen many times with the Internet. Oh my God, the Internet. You can't trust it. Everybody's going to use AOL, everybody's going to use CompuServe. You got to use one of these online services, Prodigy, whatever it is. That's the way commerce will happen, that's the way content will happen. And you have this hand wringing. This helps people make better decisions. It'll help them execute better. I think it's a good idea. Every time you turn on the news, it's about AI getting smarter and smarter. These models are writing perfect code. They're acing the world's most difficult exams. And it turns out they're also pretty good at making money. That's why there's Public.com, the investing platform for people who take their money seriously. What really sets Public apart are their AI powered tools and features. Check this out. You can ask Public a question about any stock in plain language and get a straightforward answer. If you want to see why a particular stock's price jumped or crashed, they've got a clickable AI generated summary right there in the performance chart. You can build multi asset portfolios on public stocks, bonds, options obviously. But hey, maybe you want a little crypto in there. Some ETFs. I will advise you to try public.com and access industry leading yields like 4.1% APY on your cash with no fees or minimums. Plus for a limited time earn 1% match on all IRA deposits, IRA transfers and 401k rollovers. Never too soon to get that retirement dialed in. So go to public.com twisttoday to fund your new account in five minutes or less. That's public.com twist disclaimer paid for by Public Investing Full Disclosures in Podcast Description.

We were talking about browsers, so I just want to get some other data points for the listeners on who else is building what now Brave, Jason you've talked about is a privacy focused browser. It raised some venture capital at an ICO for its basic attention token or bat back in 2017 and to my surprise, and this is why I included it, it's actually pretty big. So in August Brave's monthly active users grew to just under 98 million, up about 4% month to month. Now if you're a YC company, 4% month over month growth, growth, Jason, doesn't blow your top off, but for a browser it's pretty good. And the the company's high watermark daus. So in the last month what was their biggest day of usage was 41 million. I that's, you know, if it was all American that would be 10%. Yeah, it's quite significant. And I think it just goes to show that when we think about browsing technology we think about Chrome and then somewhere down there there's Firefox, Safari, Edge. But really there's a bit more dynamism in the market than I think we have been discussing, so I wanted to bring that up for everybody. And there's a project called Ladybird, which is a open source browser that I just heard over on Hacker News. So there's quite a lot of names out there.

I think if you think about every percentage point of search being worth a certain amount of market cap, every percentage point of ride sharing being worth a certain amount of market cap, I've been having this debate about, you know, self driving again today I keep getting dragged into it, so I have to keep making this point to everybody. You know, I think self driving is a $10 trillion opportunity and that every that means every 1%'s worth 100 billion. So here you have a let's just round it up to 100 million users for their browser. If there's 4 million Internet users on desktop or using browsers. I'm just going to pull a number out, you know, that means 400 million would be 10%. They have two and a half. They got two, three percentage points of that possible pie. Now people might use multiple browsers, obviously some do. It starts to get interesting. It does, based upon how much search there is that occurs through a browser. And they're a takeout candidate as well. They need to go all in on AI on top of having gone all in on privacy. Remember, there is an attack vector for these LLMs. They record everything you do. And when the police come, or a civil case comes, whatever it is, they dump your information. They use your information, they're looking at your information. Sam Altman said this. Now what if Brave took their same privacy approach to browsing where they remove ads, they remove cookies, they make your searches private, all that good stuff, and that's their commitment. I think they even have a VPN built in or you can pay like 10 bucks a year. It's de minimis. I think they should just do 100% VPN so they don't even know where you're coming from. Unless you want to disclose, you know, your city maybe and then make all your AI absolutely anonymous. And this is where I think Apple should buy Brave and duckduckgo maybe Perplexity. And I've been thinking, you know, I got that domain name, begin.com. i mean, it's burning a hole in my pocket. And I contacted one of these billion dollar startups, the CEO, and I was like, hey, you know, you're doing something that this might be very good for. So I started a dialogue there. Instead of me building the company, I was thinking, man, maybe if I can get 1 or 2% of 1 of these great companies that's already worth a billion, I get 10, 20 million now for the domain and for the maybe be an advisor. And then if they go 10x, this could be a big hit for me. But Begin would be such a great starting point for searches.

Certainly better because it's where you.

I'm trying to think of a worse name than Perplexity. That's what happens when an engineer names something. Perplexity. Okay, how many syllables? How do you spell it? Begin Google. Begin Google.

Well, Google was G O O G O L and they changed it right to the more phonetically and spellable friendly one. But like that's what you get when you let an engineer name something. You get a large number, which is what a Google is, or a Googleplex.

Yeah, but once you get past five characters, you know, now the person's still typing, you know, you can type in, you know, Google 6, Bing 4, begin 5, Yahoo 5. Like you can't. You have to be able to say it over the phone. This is like a really important thing for founders to understand. You have to be able to say it over the phone and you have to be able to spell it. If it's hard to spell, no bueno. If it's hard to hear over the phone and you can misinterpret it, no bueno. It's no good. It's boring. You see that scene from the Spielberg movie with the horizon?

The horizon. Oh wait, the drilling rig.

What's the Spielberg. Hopefully Lon's listening. The family will tell us. There's this incredible scene where Spielberg is on the lot and he goes and sees this director. Incredible scene. Lonzo. Here we go, John Ford. This is the John Ford scene. We'll pull it up here and. Well, maybe we shouldn't because we get a strike on the juju.

Jennifer.

It's the Fablemans. It's about, it's basically the, it's basically Spielberg's biopic. And there's this great scene where he goes to John Ford to get some advice. He happens to be on the lot. John Ford's on the lot and he says, kid, you see this picture over here and it's David lynch who's playing John Ford and he's smoking a cigar and I think he's got an eye patch on. He's like, kid, look at this picture. Where's the horizon? He's like, oh, I'm looking at the picture. He's like yelling at him. He's yelling at a 12 year old, where's the horizon? He said it's at the top. He goes, okay, what about this picture? And he's got paintings and he says it's at, where's the horizon? Spielberg nervous. It's at the bottom. He says, and where's the, where's the horizon in this picture? It's in the middle. He goes, when it's in the, when the horizon's at the top of the frame, it's interesting. When the, when the horizon's at the bottom of the frame, it's interesting. And when the, when the horizon's in the middle, it's boring as shit. Now get the hell out of my office. And he kicks him out of his office. And then every Spielberg movie has, whether it's Jaws, you know, the Horizon four, the Ocean and the boat are at the bottom. The sharks just you see it and now you can't unsee it. This incredible moment, this is me telling you about domain names and branding. If it's too long, it sucks. If you can't spell it over the phone, it sucks. This is why it's gone.

This is why x dot com. No matter. I'm not trying to bring Elon into this, but I will say compared to Twitter, which used to be twttr, then it became something you could spell, x.com is still a far superior domain name because to your point, it's short. You can spell it over the phone, it's phonetic. I mean, it's memorable. I'm a big fan of short domains in general because much like land, they're not making more of them. So I think it's cool to see when people do have more.

Anyway, I put begin.com up and I'm apply to tell me what they want to do with it. I'll either lease it or lease loan it to a founder or I might try to find a big company like I think Perplexity should just rebrand as Begin. Such a better domain. They could do a national campaign and then people would remember it.

I'm gonna apply. I'm gonna such a great. You're an email from me later.

This could be my biggest hit of my goddamn career. I bust my ass on 10 different ideas and startups. I'll probably make my fortune off of a five letter domain name. All right, let's keep going. There's a lot more to discuss.

A lot more to discuss. I want to talk about Polymarket. We talk about Polymarket on the show all the time. This week, Jason, the CFTC kind of said that they're going to be good to go. Now there's a little bit of nuance here because they bought a thing called QCX that was in the United States and that was the entity that the CFTC said they're going to have a no enforcement agreement with. But essentially it does appear that making prediction bets, prediction markets as a concept are going to be allowed here in the United States. And I don't want to get into politics. I will say that 1789 Capital and Donald Trump Jr. Recently put a little bit of money into the company and then they got the green light. And then got the green light. So that makes me a little bit unhappy as a capitalist. But I do think that if you're a fan of Polymarket as we are on the show, this is great news and I'm looking forward to see what impact this has on their numbers. Because what's fun about polymarket is that it's on the Polygon blockchain, which is AN Ethereum Level 2, which means that I've been watching their usage data pretty closely and I'm fascinated to see what's going to happen once you get a bunch of Americans showing up and making wagers, bets, or predictions, whatever you want.

To call it, I cannot wait. And yeah, there's a correlation between these two news stories. They both happened in two weeks, but I don't think it's a correlation. I think the correlation is with the QCX acquisition. They spent like over $100 million to buy that company. And essentially what they were buying is, you know, a company that already had the rights to do this because it does take years or so to get permission. So, okay, here we are.

Right?

That was like my dad bought a second bar. He bought out the previous owner who had the liquor license, so you could just buy and liquor licenses in New York, you know, they cost $5,000 to apply, but it took two or three years. They didn't want to give out too many. Cause you know, you don't want your neighborhood to become like, you know, college town. So, you know, there was. You could trade them for 25 grand or something. They had a market value. Like medallions, I was about to say.

Just like taxi medallions.

Y. Exactly. So that's what's going on here. I don't think there's anything nefarious with.

DJ T Jr well, I'm glad that you think that that's actually, I'm glad there's less corruption than I was concerned about. That's a good thing. I'll take that as a win.

Yeah, 100%.

So do you want to. I think we should show some charts here, Jason, because one thing people know is that the polling market and the prediction market game have done very, very well in and around the election cycle. But I think people don't know that they've actually held up reasonably well afterwards. So I pulled some char us from Dune, which we love. And if you look here, this is the Poly market. Monthly volume clearly spiked right around election time, fell very rapidly and people were worried it was going to do that, but instead it's actually recovered and it's doing, I would say, pretty well.

This is a known function in startup land and in company land. You have some event that drives a lot of attention to your platform, product or service. Then that event ends and things come down but they come down to a higher average, a new plateau, if you will, than the previous one. So as an example, on all in, when we had vlad during the GameStop, or when Chamath said something about the Uyghurs being below his line, or when Donald Trump came on, or when Elon came on, each of those events caused a massive spike.

Yeah.

But then when it came back down, we retained some of those people. And the crazy thing about this, if you look at the history of, say, ride sharing, you would have bad things happen in a Lyft sidecar or Uber. You would have people complaining about it, you would have bad press, and then people would go like, what's ride sharing? What's Uber? What's Lyft? It's an app. Okay. The first thing people will do is take off the front. Tell me more about the story. Oh, yeah, this is horrible. That's horrible. There was a car accident. They killed a puppy, whatever it is. And here's the dark secret. It went up. So you have this jeans company that Sydney Sweeney. We talked about that ad nauseam. Surprised this didn't make the docket. I thought for sure you would have had this in your sights, but American Eagle got crushed for this. Like, oh, is that eugenics or are you guys just dumb that you don't know that that's eugenics? And, you know, like, it feels a little white supremacist, you know? And when I say they got crushed, they. They got.

They were by some lefty tiktokers. Let's be honest, Jason, it wasn't like there was a national campaign. I think actually people mad about the response were a much bigger wave. You have to fill a lot of time on right wing podcasts.

Yeah, exactly my point. So this negative story, this faux pas, you know, people were like, oh my God, it's going to damage the brand. Like, that's some people's reaction. They just had their results.

Second quarter results. Total net revenue 1.28 billion, down 1%. Year over year. Gross profit was 500 million, 39%, up 30 basis points. Not bad. Operating profit was 103 million, up 2%. What am I looking at here?

Oh, maybe we have the wrong quarter, but the. The quarter just came out in the last couple days and I saw they beat earnings. They beat. And the share price went up. So they had a beat on both, was what I read, where that's.

Oh, here you go. So this is the right data, but here's probably the key quote. This is from September 3rd from their investment Investor relations site quote. The fall season is off to a positive start, fueled by stronger product offerings and the success of recent marketing campaigns. With Sydney Sweeney and Travis Kelsey, Shout Out Taylor. We have seen an uptick in consumer awareness, engagement, and comparable sales. So it does appear that their results into this were relatively blah. But I don't know much about clothing companies. I'm not gonna lie. I don't read these reports often.

Top 25% as well. So what? Yeah.

Why?

I think people thought it was gonna get crushed. So maybe just not getting crushed and having more awareness. They think the hype is going to drive some future sales or it's gonna tip over into meme category. You know, this is the thing when you have so many.

Not 25%. 38% today.

38%.

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt, but 38% is insane. Yeah. And it's still rising after hours. Now the company's worth.

Oh, wow.

Clothing's a tough game, Jason. With over a billion dollars in revenue in the second quarter, the whole company's worth now 3.2.

Yeah. So three times. Well, that's just quarterly revenue.

Yeah. So it's less than 1x revenue.

Less than 1x yearly revenue. Wow, you do have this gamestop effect. You do have the Stonks effect. I remember I yolo'd into open door for 50k. I then was like, you know what? I'm just gonna put a sell order in for a thousand shares at 6, 7, and $8. Or 6, 7 and $9 or whatever. So I'll clear my cost and then have the last 2,000 shares for free and let those roll. Cause I know how these meme stocks are. I was like, let me see. I just got the alert before I got on the show that my first thousand sold at $6. And so when it hits 7 or 8, I'll sell another thousand. When it hits 10, I'll sell another thousand. I'll have covered the original. Maybe I just yolo 25k in and then, yeah, I'll be sitting there with 2000 free shares, as it were.

Open Door Technologies, the stock we're discussing is up 16.2% today. And why?

So why?

Look, just to be clear, if everyone's listening to this thinking that I'm just gnashing my teeth, I think Sydney Sweeney is a gorgeous human. Good for her. But I'm blown away by the stock market. At times, it does seem that the stock market that I learned about as a child, Jason, is not the one that we're playing with today. And I'm not blaming Vlad. I'm not blaming anybody.

No, no. There's a second stock market.

Okay, I like this.

And that is the YOLO market. That is the. Let's see if we can make something into a phenomenon and if the CEO and management team can take that momentum and actually do something with it. And with Open Door, you know, the. It seems the CEO has engaged this debate. He started getting Mimi. Mimi, if that's a word.

Sure, Mimish.

Mimish. He started getting. He's not squeamish anymore. He's memeish. Good. I like it better. He's. He's gotten memish on the Twitter, so he's kind of leaning into being a stonk. And stonks only go up is the joke over on Reddit. So here we are, folks. It's just. It's also like the consumers taking. Having their say and being able to participate in capitalism and holding equity. So that, in a way is also interesting. That goes back to. Was it David lynch, the stock picker, who said, like, you know, go to the mall, see which one stocks are growing, etc. And then buy the ones where you like it, you know? And like, you would have bought Apple based on that and Starbucks based on that. So now, like, let's pick a retailer that's kind of middling. You say, hey, I think this thing's undervalued. Let's all start using our dollars to buy more. I don't know, In N Out Burgers, or maybe that's not public. So Shake Shack, we'll buy more. Shake Shack, we'll start doing videos on Shake Shack. We'll say, Shake Shack's underdone. And then if the Shake Shack CEO gives a salute to the. Yeah, Peter Lynch. Sorry, did I say David Lynch? I got movies on my mind. Peter Lynch.

Didn't David Lynch.

Dude, Wall Street. Yeah, David Lynch. No, he did. Yeah, but invest in what you know was his slogan. Thank you, producer Claude. Producer Claude coming to my rescue. Thank you, producer Claude.

No, David Lynch. I was wrong, sorry. I did Wild at Hearton, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive.

Oh, Blue Velvet. That was amazing. A creepy film.

So you talked earlier, Jason, about how companies that have a big moment will go to a new height and come down to a higher plateau. Interestingly enough, this is not a great chart, but if you look at this, you'll see this is GameStop's shares. And here you can see kind of the pre meme era. To my surprise, it's held onto more of its post meme stock value than I would have kind of estimated. So maybe there's amazingly enough, more staying power to meme stonk status. That's a sentence I never thought I'd say out loud than I thought because they've kept it afloat for four years now.

It's what you do with the energy. So I think what the GameStop CEO realized, and I think the AMC one realized this as well, is if people want to buy the shares, why don't I create more of them and sell them the shares? So if they don't want to go to the stores and buy physical games because they're getting them on Steam or whatever, what can I sell them? I can sell them more shares and then I can use them to promote the AMC Movie Club. So now you got all these AMC Movie Club people have become a little bit of a cult. And that's what you do is you use that energy, say, hey, we got a new product or service. Can you go out there and be the ambassadors for us? So you know how like VCs go on CNBC and talk their book and you know, after, I don't know, Bill Ackman loads up on Uber like he did, he's like, hey, I'm going to start talking about Uber all the time. Or Warren Buffett gets his position in Apple and then he talks about it all the time and then he gets rid of his position, he stops talking about it. So that's where we get the term talking your book. The public's doing it, the public's talking their collective book. More power to them, More power to them. And then to the CEOs of these companies. Okay. You know, and Tesla's one of them as well. People always trying to figure out, well, how does Tesla's market cap make sense? It makes sense because a lot of people see in Elon and those companies a massive amount of ambition and they're willing to pay ahead of the growth. So if their market cap would be half of what it was based on performance, the other half is based on promise. And now you've got all these people. This is what I was telling you I'm getting dragged into is the people who hate Tesla and love Tesla. Every time I talk about self driving or Uber, they get their. What's the term? I'm supposed to.

Knickers in a twist.

Yeah, I don't know if I'm supposed to say that. I was gonna say panties and a.

Crunch, but I think knickers in a twist. Is British. So I think if you get away with it.

Yeah, it was just like, you know, before we got on the show, and you were using the C word over and over again, and I was like, true. You can't call me the C word, Alex. You're like, I'm zooming in from England. I'm in England right now. I have the UK pass.

I'm Australian. I'm allowed to say that Jason is capacious. You're correct.

Capacious, yes. You did say capacious multiple times. I took it the right way. I took it in the spirit it was intended. When I first went to the uk, people started calling each other the Z word or started calling cigarettes fags. I was like, what?

Yeah.

They're like, we have to do this with every American. You're in a pub.

Yes.

You can say these things. I'm like, are you sure you can say those things? Yes. Here you can say those things. This is what it means. And I was like, oh, okay. Yes, fine. It has nothing to do with the, you know, the slur words. Okay.

No.

There's your little social. Yeah.

Commentary for the day. Let's keep it moving. So, Ms. Strahl, my favorite French unicorn, Jason, I know you love it when I bring it up on the show. Favorite, favorite.

And only three seconds on your list of one.

Three seconds into the clip, Jason's like, I hate Europe.

All right. No, it's not that I hate Europe. I like Disneyland. I like Epcot center, and I like Europe. I like all those places to go and pretend it's another time and place.

I'm gonna take a long sip of coffee. This is what I have to deal with every single week. Three times a week, everybody.

It's funny. It is like a fantasy land. But, you know, people in Spain. Spain is like this massive destination. They were getting pretty bent out of shape. Knickers in a bunch.

Did you see the squirt guns?

They were squirting people with squirt guns. And then in Mexico City, they had a little bit of this with the. Not expats, but what do you call the people? Nomads.

Digital nomads.

Digital nomads had been like, hey, this place is great. I can get an apartment for $500. And I can go out to dinner every night for 50, and I can go to a Michelin star restaurant for 100 for two. Like, it's crazy how affordable it is. They also had some protests there. I found out after talking to them, people who live there, Mexicans, they were like, oh, that's those are, those protests are paid for. The Socialist Party pays people to just run around and get press headlines. I'm like, okay, just like America. They're paying people to do this on all sides. You can't even believe any protest anymore.

I do not know enough about the current political landscape of Mexico.

Liberals.

I think, I think Gloria Scheinbaum's doing fine. That's my take. My mom's half Mexican, so I care a lot about the country. Where was I? Oh, Europe. Right. France. Right. Mistral. Mistral is going to raise money not at the expected $10 billion valuation target that it had in mind, Jason. Instead, it's going to be about 12 billion euro, about 14 billion. And it could raise, according to Bloomberg reporting, Kate Clark over there, 2 billion euro, which is, I know, not a lot for an American AI foundation model company, but for any other company in the world, that's an enormous amount of money. And I think that we could actually see some deuce in this firm. Not because of the fundraising, not because I'm a fan of Europe, not because we disagree a little bit on the future of its economy, but because I keep seeing token usage of its models. Over on Open Router, it's ranked eighth on Ella Marina. Yeah, somehow they, they're still holding down.

They're holding their own.

I'm happy there's more competition.

Yeah. I mean, it's not like the United States is the only place that great companies can be built. There are headwinds in other countries on the margins. But some places are a great lifestyle and they want to build a team. And then the question is, can that team compete long term with the work ethic here in the United States? And if you were to look at happiness studies, people in Scandinavian countries, people in Europe have a much higher degree of happiness because, well, you know, they put their kids to bed and they go to dinner and they leave work at a decent hour. And then in America, people are less happy, more successful. And if you define success by career and money. And so people get all bent out of shape when I talk about this stuff. These are choices, folks. If you want to live an incredible life, move to Denmark. Move to Denmark. They have a thing in the UN and you know, at Davos where they say, getting to Denmark, why? It's a high functioning society where people play safe. Now they also have to pay 60 or 70% taxes at the margins. So you do pay for it. But people are happy. And, you know, there's a ranking of happiness. This is when I run for president I'm gonna make happiness enjoy.

That's gonna be your platform.

One of my. Well, it's gonna be a pillar of my platform is more happiness and joy in the country. That's it. So have some pillars.

I don't mean to keep bringing up my mom, but my mom is half Danish, half Mexican, so I think this show is actually dedicated to her. Shout out, Mom. Hi.

Shout out to Mom.

Last thing here. Jason is on the Mistral front. They're expected to end the year on above a $100 million run rate. And. Well, no and yes, because if you think about anthropic going from 1 billion to 5 billion this year or OpenAI going from like 5 to 12, I think we become desensitized to how insane it is that many other AI companies are getting from 0 to 100 million revenue. It does not compare to what we've seen from OpenAI and Anthropic. But any other time, any other point in history, a French company going to 100 million revenue be a unicorn.

It's a Decacorn. Yeah, it's fantastic. This game that's being played is being played at a level that I've only remembered few times in my career. There was a time when people were doing big M and A in the media business, you know, which ended, you know, the peak was AOL buying Time Warner, essentially.

Yeah.

Which was crazy. But you know, you had this kind of high stakes game of chicken. Who can really be the most audacious? I think in the on demand economy we saw that like audaciousness. Who can lose the most money but get the most riders, get the most deliveries? And in E commerce with Amazon, which didn't make a profit for how long? 10 years, 15 years, they just decided to go break even. And you know, that's what we're seeing now. So that does make you wonder. Can Mistral, for the long term, carve a niche for themselves? And what would that niche be? Would it be other languages outside of English and they just have the best French, Italian, German, LLMs? Is it that they are more privacy based or compliant, you know, and their data centers are in those locations? Or who knows. But they're going to have to, I think, in the next year or two figure out how not to be roadkill?

I think that's, it's an interesting point and I think we're going to learn a lot over the next couple of quarters. But this reminds me of a story. I didn't throw in the docket because it felt a little bit too Small, but I'll just mention it. Now Switzerland has built its own open weight AI model trained on public data. And I feel the same way about that as I do when Databricks made its own AI model a couple years back. Like a cool experiment. I don't know what it's for, but I kind of just filed it away in the huh category. So if you're curious about that, guys, or you're Swiss, well, there you go, you have your own model now. All right, moving on. Stripe is building a blockchain just for stablecoins. Jason. Stripe, of course, is the enormous online payments nearly center corns worth like, I don't know, 90 billion or something now. And we don't know when this is going to come out, but it's going to be called Tempo. It will not have a native token. It will support a wide array of stablecoins. And I think this is going to be Fantastic. Up to 100,000 transactions per second in theory. Startup's working with Paradigm on this and critically will compete with. I think it's called Ark. Yes, Ark, which is Circle's upcoming stablecoin blockchain. So we're going to have two kind of neutral ish blockchains out there. I think this is cool and I think it just shows how far stablecoins have come in the last 12 months.

And this exists, Alex, so that people don't need to pay a large fee to Visa, MasterCard, American Express, et cetera. Is that kind of the idea here is these things will be clearing houses to let people. And wire fees. The loser in all of this are banks and credit cards. Yeah.

Oh, no. I'm going to cry an enormous tear for my bank.

Yes.

All of them. I hate them all.

I mean, it's so dumb when you try to do a wire transfer and it's like, they're like, oh, yeah, let me just. I'm gonna get on my horse and buggy and I'll be at your ranch in a, in a, in a, in two days. And then I'll meet you at sunset at the back end of the ranch by the cattle. And then we'll get some wax and some papers and we'll, yeah, we'll use my ring to wax it and certify it. Then I'll get back to San Francisco by horse two or three days later and it will be logged. And it's like, how is this taking so much time and costing $45 or $25? It's so dumb.

It's an amount of money that's shocking for the modern world when we're talking about literally just moving some numbers from that column to that column in a big spreadsheet. I've made a grand total of one angel investment in my life and wiring that money was an enormous pain in the butt. And I sat there going, ah, this is why VCs are always complaining about this. It's miserable. But if Tempo does work out, I think we'll see Stripe own a good chunk of the Rails for the future stablecoin market, which is, I think, going to be a pretty large market. I don't know if it's going to be the hundred billion or trillion dollar markets that we're talking about, but as stablecoins become increasingly better understood and better adopted, I think Stripe wants to ensure that it owns that future too.

So this will be a trillion dollar market.

Really?

I don't. Yeah. In terms of the market cap of all these companies collecting, because you got tether in there as well. And my understanding is tether is going to clean up their act very quickly, or they have been in the process of cleaning up the criticisms there have been of them. And I'm not going to say I'll put allegedly, I'll put criticisms, I'll put actions taken against them. All of the hand wringing, you can look it up on producer Claude yourself. Go to, you know, Claude AI. I use the promo code twist, get 50% off. I don't know what our code is.

It's something like that. There's a cloud thing you can use. Twist and you'll make us look good. It's worth looking into. And Tether, if that does become the case, Jason, is an enormously awesome business. Makes tons of money. Have you heard about the controversy, though, between banks and the crypto world about the genius act and how they handle interest? Essentially?

Yeah. You can't earn interest. That was the one concession they made by making stablecoins legal. They can come up with with some ideas to route around that. But you can be certain in another two or three years we'll be sitting here and then stable coins will become a big thing and people will be like, I need to make money on my stablecoin. The banks will catch up, have their own stable coins, and then all of a sudden, miraculously, everybody's going to be able to make interest on their stable coins.

But that could really undercut elements of the traditional banking market because what have we seen in the crypto world? We've seen essentially higher apys than you're going to get from Citibank, from Chase, from Wells Fargo, etc.

10,000 ATMs to maintain, maintain, and a thousand branches and tellers and people in the building.

I mean, Wells Fargo has to have a large staff to do the amount of fraud and abuse they've done over the years. And I'm not even going to say allegedly because you can go look up the enforcements from the government. It takes a lot of people to be that terrible a business. Wells Fargo, American fraud.

I mean, they were, they were the one who got raked over the coals in D.C. for like, opening accounts for people that they didn't ask for.

Yes, because they were just trying to hit internal numbers. That is, I think HSBC got busted for making larger windows in their banks to allow cartels to put money through the windows faster. And then they were given a small fine and allowed to stay in business. So cool.

Do we have any Ask Jason's or any other important news we should cover today?

All right, Jason, there was a great question over on Twitter from a founder talking about Churn. And I know this is something that every single founder watching this show deals with, so. So he said, I'll pay anyone $1,000 per percent. They help me get off my churn. Currently at 21.6 for his startup post bridge. And this chart, if you're on the audio version, just shows his Churn rate historically over time. Churn, Jason, is the death of SaaS. So what are your tips for founders dealing with it?

Well, I did see this actual thread because it kind of, you know, when we took the screenshot, had 136,000 views on X, but I think it's grown since and there were a lot of great replies. So we should pull up the replies there because one of the first people who responded gave him like three things and he was like, I didn't think of two of those three. I'm going to go do them and I'll report back the impact it had on Churn. And so this is a really interesting idea. $1,000 for somebody giving you an idea is like, great, I'll do that all day long. I got ideas to spare. But for him, there's the lowest his Churn is going to go is 5%. So he's essentially bet $15,000 that people could lower, you know, up to 15,000, could lower his Churn. Now if he was making but a hundred thousand dollars, it would pay for itself. So if he's making a million, he's paying out 1.5 of his revenue to Solve that problem. If he's making 10 million, it's like nothing. So what a genius idea to also get to get great ideas to crowdsource is what we called this back in the day. But additionally to get attention for your startup. I don't know who Jack Fricks is. I didn't know the startup or maybe I met them and I forgot. But this kind of was really interesting because Yasser, as you see there, said add a form after they cancel asking why. Of course that's like a no brainer. Some pieces of software have that built in, but who knows if he did that or not. Email people who cancel every day and try to understand why. Great. Watch people using your product for the first time and you will learn much. Then create an onboarding flow. Of course have zero bugs. Yeah, obvious UI UX redesign to make it easier. Okay, so this is really interesting as a concept to crowdsource this to get attention for yourself and get your brain flowing. I love it.

Now while we're on the screen though, Jason, if you scroll down just a little bit here, EP says no point hyper fixating on this. Instead focus on distribution. The best way to kill Churn is to outpace it.

I like that point too.

Is that okay? So you agree with that? Because I was really curious what you were going to say because when I read that I was like, I don't know if that's true. So talk to me.

Two things can be true at the same time. You can lower Churn because people, let's say, didn't understand your product or they were confused by it and your onboarding confused them or they don't know about a feature yet. Yet that is the feature they need. That all happens with communication. The way Superhuman had superhuman levels of engagement and low churn is because they did a 30 minute interview with you before you got to use to even buy the product. So they pre churned you. They did pre churn and so their churn was natural low. If somebody said I'm in my email for 20 minutes a day it's like well maybe you shouldn't pay $365 a year.

This is not for you.

Not for you. It's not for. Not for you.

Who was the Superhuman founder? I forget.

Oh, Raul.

Raul. We had him on when the Grammarly deal was announced. I never met the guy before, but after jumping 20 minutes with them, I would sell my house to back whatever he builds next. Just one of those guys.

So one of the things here in terms of outrunning it well, what if you're trying to outrun it but you're damaging your product? Because 21 in 5 people are saying this product sucks and they become detractors. That's the problem with trying to outrun it. And it eventually will catch up with you because you have CAC customer acquisition costs and you're not learning from the churn. The point of studying churn and why there's even a churn is so that you can make a better product or you can understand who your product's for and not go after the wrong audience. One of the major, major mistakes people make is they go to a small company that's only got two people and they don't have somebody in charge of marketing and they try to sell them a marketing tool. Well, guess what, there's nobody there who even understands the basics of marketing. Now you get to a seven person company and they've got four locations for their bakery and the eighth person they hire is their marketing, their cmo, their marketing and their growth person. Now when you sell that tool to them, that person's like, yeah, I've been in four different marketing positions over 25 years. I've worked in retail, I've worked in business, I've worked here, I worked there. And yeah, I've used tools like yours before and this one's particularly great. And then they just understand the value prop. So you know, listen, I could sell you a saddle, but if you don't.

Got a horse, what the goods are going to do while we're here? Before we move on, I want to give Jack his flowers. This is the website for post bridge, post-bridge.com, very cute website. But Jason, my favorite part is if you scroll down way past the testimonials look, it's the founder. I kind of love that. It's kind of cute. It's like, hey, it's Jack, the guy who made it. Here's why it feels very personal. Good design.

There's an even bigger reason for that. Personal means trust. And so having trust really works. I had read a thing about people and buying decisions. Somebody did a study where they put behind the salesperson in the cubicle behind them an incredibly attractive, well dressed person. And if the gender was the opposite of the person who was you were selling to. So if it was a woman who was well dressed, men would be, would more often buy the product. And if the person behind them was a well dressed man, I think the woman not to the extent that men did. And they were like, how do we Explain this. How do we explain this one? Am I supposed to hire a model to sit behind me when I'm on sales calls? But here we are.

Get a color printer.

You know, you could literally do a cardboard cutout. But this is, you know, and they were all, it was interesting, like all these different psychologists were sort of commenting on. They said, oh, well, a man does not want to not be decisive and buy something in the presence of an attractive female because they would seem weak. I thought that was a very weird explanation. But. But maybe it's accurate. Who knows?

I mean, our lizard brain down here in our brain stem is a evolutionary relic, y', all, and you can sell to it.

Well, and then the. Oh, well, listen, if you can't afford that car, you know, I've got this other one, so. No, I can afford that car. So, like, you know, nagging somebody. Yeah. Is like a premise of these, like, dating charlatan smarmy people who have like, dating systems.

Well, what are, what are they called? Pickup artists. Pick up artists.

Pick up artists typically do with negging. They're like, wow, you could be a model if it wasn't for your earlobes. And it's like, what? And then the person's like, oh my God, I'm going to date you because you neg me. It's a bizarre.

I never understood that. I don't know.

I don't know if it's true or not. But anyway, here we are, folks. Congratulations to Jack for this. And I guess it looks like it's got a content schedule, right? It's a marketing tool. So marketing tools are a thing and if you price them right, it's. It's absurdly competitive space, but you can get to millions of dollars in revenue.

Sprout Social, the Chicago based company went public and still is. Buffer Sprinkler, I think is public too.

Sprinkler Radiant 6. There's a bunch of these.

We can just name a bunch. Let's do one more founder question. Jason, while we're here, because this is a really good one. You actually mentioned it on the Wednesday show. There was a man named Jacob Klug, or perhaps Klug over on the LinkedIn and he had a really interesting insight about finding things to build by reading Reddit. Talk us through this.

All right, so I saw this and I was talking to our director Lon, and we're like, this is interesting. Reddit is where people go to complain and vent, right? You hate a movie. You had a bad experience at a car dealership. You know there was a cockroach in your burrito, whatever it is, you're going to take a picture and you can go to Reddit, right. It's where people get their revenge. And so he came up with a system. He started looking for rants and complaints in places like accounting, realtors, small business, freelance restaurateur. And if you go to those, you can find pain points. Pain points, we say in startups sometimes is it a vitamin something that's nice but maybe you're not going to notice any difference. Maybe you will. Or is it a painkiller where like you're in pain and the pain turns off? It's much easier your when you take like a Percocet or an oxycontin to have like your twisted ankle turn off. Right. Whereas like if you want more energy and you did like a vitamin C drink, like maybe you'd feel more, who knows. And so you can tell if you found one of these pain points, he says by them having 500 upvotes or comments like this is my life. And you can find detailed descriptions of workflows. You know, I keep trying to do this non compete and I put it into Docusign and then it's got the stupid thing where you know you have to load it. Why doesn't it work on a mobile phone? Why isn't there an easy way to just instead of drawing the signature with your finger to just adopt a signature from a collection of signatures, whatever it is. And he says it's a pretty valid way to. It's another after you've found a problem, it's a great way to validate it. So you write a follow up a post building a solution for Blank who wants early access. And he says, you know you can get like 50 DMs from people. If you get 50 plus DMs you're on the right track. So it's an at scale community where people go to vent. What a great idea. And you know, if you can message he says the next part of his playbook is message the 20 most interested user. Show them your mock up to your solution, get pre orders going, Vibe, code it quickly and shift ship. Man, this is great.

And the Vibe coding service they recommend, Jason was lovable, which I do believe is European.

Ah, this could become a recurring theme for you defending Europe.

I, well I feel like no one else is doing it. I'm the only person.

It's over, it's over. If you want cheese or wine, you want a classic car sold for a premium Price, like, you can get all kinds of interesting things in Europe. You have a lovely time visiting.

For example, you can get Arthur Mensch, the CEO of Strahl, who's going to be coming on this show not too long from now. So look forward to that.

My entire position. He comes on and like, I was wrong. Now it's, you can build a great company in Europe. We all know.

I know, I know. It's just, I feel like there's.

As often as we'd like to see, there is a.

There's that tweet going around about how, like, you know, if we were all Europeans, we know about Chinese pottery and cooking and the GDP would shrink by a percent every year. I feel like that has become so the de facto position in Silicon Valley that we need to be orthogonal to it to avoid groupthink. That's what I'm doing.

I'll tell you, there are some pockets of interestingness that we've talked many times about Sweden and Denmark and some of those countries as having really great design and taste and great products include that. And if you look at Spotify and Klarna, Clash of clans, there's been a lot of companies that have come out of that area that really do have a design sensibility, a look and feel. They do understand that. Germany, obviously is really good at building precision, you know, historically. But Portugal, I don't know how this happened. I don't. I mean, maybe I got asked producer Claude, how did Portugal be? Portugal become the place that digital nomads wanted to go. They must have fostered it with visas, they must have fostered it with taxes. And then obviously they must have a ton of homes available and gorgeous places to live in an amazing lifestyle, because there's, you know, every time we put a job description out, like, I was just looking for a Cap Cut Editor Cap Cutaunch Co. Send us your clips. You don't need a college degree. We watch in the office here in Austin. However, there was one person and she had emailed us, I'm in Portugal. And I said to producer Oliver, well, let's engage her and just see what her hourly rate is. Because my understanding is Portugal's like a third or a fifth of the cost of living in Europe. And therefore everybody's going there to have these colossal, amazing lifestyles. So there's some arbitrage going on there.

Just to be. I don't want to get too deep into this, but they had a digital nomad visa starting October 2022. If you make at least €3,000amonth. You can live there. English proficiency, lots of sun. And it's also about as close to the US as you can get in Europe because it's right there on the edge of Spain, so.

Oh, so you save an hour on the flight. Maybe, maybe two.

You're also just not. You're not in, you know, Belarus further in on the time zone. So I think it makes a time zone.

Yes, yes, yes, yes. So is it. Plus, where is. Let me just type this into producer Claude. New York vs. Portugal.

Claude points out that there's the mild Mediterranean climate. While I do love Claude and everything anthropic does, I keep hearing about wildfires over in the Iberian Peninsula. So, you know, maybe it's not.

That's five hours ahead. Yeah.

Okay.

Okay.

Jason, I know we gotta go, but you have an enormous event coming up with your other show. The show that I won't mention, but what's going on there?

Anytime you want. Are you gonna be busy all in Summit next week? Yeah. Thousands of people. I think it's twice the size of last year. Crazy. The good news is the first two years, I did all the work. The third year, I did the parties s. And then this year, I'm doing nothing but being on stage. So I get to focus just on moderating these panels and being the person who asks some hard questions.

Well, good luck at that. We'll keep Twist warm for you while you're out there. We'll see you all next week.

Bye. Bye.