2026 Starts with a bang: META AI Drama and Nvidia’s $20B Groq Acquisition | E2230

Summary

This Week in Startups – Episode E2230

2026 Starts with a Bang: META AI Drama and Nvidia’s $20B Groq Acquisition
Host: Jason Calacanis
Guest: Alex Wilhelm
Date: January 6, 2026

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Episode Overview

In the first Twist episode of 2026, Jason Calacanis and Alex Wilhelm dissect major happenings in the technology and startup ecosystem. The podcast features in-depth conversation on Nvidia’s blockbuster $20B acquisition of Groq, Meta’s strategic AI moves, Asian AI IPOs, trends in legal automation for founders, the shifting dynamics of dining culture, the evolution (and drama) in AI research talent, prediction markets, and the persistent struggle to fund investigative journalism. The hosts maintain their trademark banter, offering context, strategic insights, and predictions for founders, operators, and investors.

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Key Topics & Insights

1. The “Collapse” of Legal Work via AI Tools

Timestamps: 00:00–00:42, 46:28–54:00

• Jason and Alex discuss how AI tools are streamlining traditionally expensive tasks like startup legal diligence.
• Jason references Fred Wilson’s method: feeding prior deal data and a startup’s legal data room into Google’s NotebookLM to instantly identify contract gaps—collapsing a $50K legal bill into a few queries.
• Alex: “There is a product opportunity here.” (00:19, 47:23) — Suggests law firms and founders alike will benefit, as AI tools cut costs and barriers, enabling more startups to form.
• Jason: “Just like cloud computing let more people start companies, this will create even more startups.” (48:57)
• The hosts recount how founders increasingly manage legals and cap tables themselves with the proliferation of tools, a trend AI will accelerate.

Notable Quote:

• “If you’re going to get to the Series A, the seed round—you start raising over a million dollars—doing it on convertible notes and like, ‘No, no, I could do it all myself. I can do it with an LLM.’ So founders find a way.” — Alex Wilhelm [00:19]

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2. The Restaurant “Collapse” and GLPs’ Impact on Dining

Timestamps: 02:13–06:35

• Jason relays a high-profile LA chef’s claim that the restaurant business is “over” due to shifts in youth behavior: fewer outings, half-sized orders owing to GLP-1 drugs, fewer drinkers, and changing appetites (03:16).
• Mocktail and weed culture further erode revenue, with only high-end or low-cost chains surviving the squeeze.
• GLP-1 analogs (“retatrutide”) are trending in Silicon Valley even though not yet FDA-approved.
• Alex: Predicts a “cottage industry” in peptide testing and distribution, comparing the trend to the early days of cannabis (05:21).

Notable Quotes:

• “The kids are not coming out... everyone’s on Ozempic so they’re ordering half as much food. Nobody drinks, everybody’s smoking weed... It’s a disaster.” — Jason [02:29–03:50]
• “Similar to cannabis, we’ll have cask-strength peptides.” — Jason Calacanis [05:57]

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3. Blockbuster: Nvidia’s $20 Billion Groq Acquisition

Timestamps: 07:01–14:54

• Nvidia strikes a non-exclusive $20B licensing deal for Groq’s inference technology (not training, but the layer for AI’s “answering” capability).
• Jason and Alex place the deal at the very highest tier for tech M&A: “grand slam” territory (11:15).
• Reasoning: Licensing deals are faster, avoid FTC red tape, but have tax implications (treated as income, not capital gains).
• Alex discusses venture returns, noting that for “Spray and Pray” funds with dozens of investments, even a 20x might not return the entire fund (11:31).

Notable Quotes:

• “Anything above $10B is a home run—this is the grand slam category for me.” — Alex Wilhelm [11:15]
• “Nvidia should be buying conservatively 10 companies—a year. Maybe 20.” — Jason [13:32]
• “I’m gonna stick with my prediction: A $100B M&A deal will occur in 2026.” — Jason [12:33]

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4. International AI: Butterfly Effect, Moonshot, and Chinese Tiger IPOs

Timestamps: 14:54–21:24

• Meta acquires Butterfly Effect for $2.5B (including $500M for retention) after the AI agent goes viral. Demonstrates a playbook for exfiltrating Chinese-founded companies to Singapore and the West.
• Discussion of U.S. investor skittishness on China, the move of many companies (like TikTok) to Singapore, and parallel efforts in the Middle East and Japan.
• Spotlight on Moonshot and Minimax: massive (though comparatively smaller) AI fundraises and IPOs from China, with open-source models (like Kimi) valued less than proprietary, U.S./Western models.

Notable Quote:

• “There is something very notable here that Zuckerberg was able to extract this company—get them into the democracy bucket.” — Alex Wilhelm [16:12]

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5. Meta’s AI Drama: Yann LeCun vs. Alexander Wang & Research Shakeup

Timestamps: 21:25–27:33

• Yann LeCun, AI legend, departed Meta after Llama 4’s “fudged” benchmarks, new leadership under Scale’s Alexander Wang, and power struggles.
• LeCun, critical of LLMs as a path to “planet-scale” intelligence, publicly calls out Meta’s research missteps and the industry’s “next-word” mentality.
• Alex: “You had him report into a 20-something... that’s obviously disrespectful.” (23:01)
• Speculates on Zuckerberg’s motives: “Maybe he wanted to push him out.”
• LeCun is launching a new company—hosts suggest a “team of rivals” approach might have been more productive.

Notable Quotes:

• “The results [for Llama 4] were fudged a little bit. So there you go—confirmation.” — Jason Calacanis [21:25]
• “That would be the equivalent of putting the Michelin-starred chef in a position to report to the pastry chef.” — Alex Wilhelm [23:01]

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6. AI Agents and the Shift from “Guess the Next Word” to “World Understanding”

Timestamps: 24:56–29:15

• LeCun’s “AMI” startup will focus on world modeling—understanding real environments for robotics, agents, and more advanced intelligence (not just language prediction).
• Jason and Alex riff on the need for AIs to comprehend the real world’s edge cases (e.g., a drone not crashing into a gondola cable) with real-world tragedies cited as examples (27:33).
• Prediction: The next generation of AI value will hinge on sensory, physical-world comprehension—“augmenting human intelligence.”

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7. Prediction Markets, Insider Bets, and Proposed Regulation

Timestamps: 32:05–38:57

• Polymarket traders allegedly capitalize on insider info about major geopolitical events (e.g., Venezuela’s Maduro), echoing past shady event-based schemes.
• Jason and Alex discuss Rep. Richie Torres’ proposed bill prohibiting politicians and government staff from prediction market trading on inside information, but stress that “adjacent information” and cocktail-party rumors are the gray area.
• Engaging segment: The hosts place “over/under” bets on the likelihood of various major company IPOs in 2026 (Cerebras, SpaceX, Discord, Anthropic, Anduril, Ramp, OpenAI)—with quick-fire commentary on which odds are fair or under/overpriced.

Notable Quotes:

• “This is how the world has always worked... cocktail party discussions. People are always making trades based on that. Not illegal.” — Jason [35:11]
• “If you’re on a basketball team... and you knew LeBron James sprained his ankle in practice and you placed a bet... They’re educating people in the NBA now, don’t do that.” — Alex Wilhelm [34:19]

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8. News Apps, Supergroups, and the State of Investigative Journalism

Timestamps: 39:23–45:52

• Biz Stone (Twitter cofounder) and Evan Sharp (Pinterest) launch Tangle, a social/news app billed as “anti-social media,” aiming for meaningful engagement and reflection.
• Jason expresses skepticism of new news platforms, noting most consumers get news through feeds, not bespoke apps (“None of these news apps have ever worked” [40:58]).
• Inevitably, the conversation pivots to the crisis in investigative journalism:
  • Traditional models (ads, classified, subscriptions) have failed to fund deep work.
  • Solo “run and gun” creators like Nick Shirley (covered on All In) have impact but lack scale and legal infrastructure.
  • Opportunity: New startups/platforms could package insurance, editing, and support for solo journalists, similar to how Substack packages for newsletters.

Notable Quotes:

• “When things break and there is chaos, that is the ultimate opportunity for a startup to insert themselves... one will figure it out.” — Alex Wilhelm [43:14]
• “If you want to turn on investigative journalism and have errors and omission, you gotta pay extra. All of this is just business opportunity.” — Jason [45:07]

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9. Product Wishlist: Ambient, Contextual AI (and the Future of NotebookLM)

Timestamps: 29:15–31:49, 54:00–[End]

• Alex describes his dream desktop AI: a passive system that listens, surfaces quick, contextual factoids (“Hey, that’s the Zurich instance. Want more?”).
• Jason and Alex are both bullish on Google’s NotebookLM—using it to cross-index decades of podcast transcripts and deal docs.
• They reminisce about product launches that got lost by being too integrated (Google+), urging Google to spin out NotebookLM with its own domain and brand for maximum impact.

Notable Quotes:

• “This is this augmented human intelligence... I want an app that gives me one-liners as I work. When I get my heads-up glasses, all the better.” — Alex Wilhelm [29:15]
• “You gotta put a GM or CEO in charge of it and do what they did with YouTube.com.” — Jason [53:44]

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Timely, Memorable Moments & Quotes

• (03:29) Jason: “The kids are not coming out... It’s a disaster.”
• (05:21) Alex: “There’s going to be a whole cottage industry here.”
• (05:57) Jason: “If there’s one thing the cannabis industry has done, it’s make weed stronger.”
• (11:15) Alex: “Anything above $10B is a home run—this is the grand slam category for me.”
• (16:12) Alex: “There is something very notable here that Zuckerberg was able to extract this company—get them into the democracy bucket.”
• (23:01) Alex: “That would be the equivalent of putting the Michelin-starred chef in a position to report to the pastry chef.”
• (35:11) Jason: “This is how the world has always worked... cocktail party discussions. People are always making trades based on that. Not illegal.”
• (53:44) Jason: “You want it to stand alone, you gotta put a GM or a CEO in charge of it and you gotta do what they did with YouTube.com.”

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Timestamps: Important Segments

• 00:00 — Collapse of legal work, AI for founders' contracts
• 02:13 — Restaurant industry collapse, youth on GLP-1s, social change
• 07:01 — Nvidia/Groq $20B mega-deal
• 14:54 — Meta buys Butterfly Effect, Asia AI flows to Singapore
• 21:25 — Meta AI/LLM drama, LeCun’s exit, Wang’s rise
• 24:56 — World-building in AI, drones, and the next wave
• 32:05 — Prediction markets, regulations, and inside info
• 36:20 — IPO prediction market game
• 39:23 — Biz Stone, supergroups, Tangle, and news app fatigue
• 43:14 — Models for funding investigative journalism
• 46:28 — AI collapses legal, Google NotebookLM’s productivity impact
• 53:44 — Product branding/strategy: why NotebookLM should be spun out

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Flow & Tone

• Conversational and candid, mixing tactical detail for founders with banter and big-picture analysis.
• Both raise emerging questions—how AI changes every aspect of starting and running a tech company; what it takes for a startup to “cross the chasm” in a post-2023 world.
• Jason’s tone: irreverent and pragmatic; challenges conventional wisdom, often relaying “backstage” founder/VC insights.
• Alex’s tone: analytical, occasionally skeptical, always rooting ideas in data, sourcing, or personal anecdotes.

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Summary

This densely packed “first show of 2026” sets the tone for a fast-evolving tech world—one where AI not only creates billion-dollar winners but also redefines the very essence of starting, running, and exiting companies. Listeners get a front-row seat to how legal, news, food, and finance are being radically reshaped by culture and technology—and why nimble, creative founders will thrive in this environment.

Transcript

[Jason Calacanis]

It seems that he collapsed $50,000 worth of legal work into essentially a couple of queries and a free to use tool. If you already have G suite for founders out there who don't want to pay insane amounts of legal expenses, does this sort of like involved intelligent approach using modern tools provide a pathway to spend less money on things that are non product critical?

[Alex Wilhelm]

We had a company that had no lawyer, no accountant. They were doing it all themselves and they had gotten to hundreds of thousands of revenue. I know you don't have an attorney, but this will become a blocker for future rounds. If you're going to get to the series A, the seed round, you start raising over a million dollars, like doing it on convertible notes and like, no, no, I could do it all myself. I can do it with an LLM. So founders find a way and so there is a product opportunity here. There's always more legal work to be done.

[Jason]

There's going to be ten times as.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Many startups as young people can't get jobs.

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[Jason]

All right everybody, welcome back to Twist. It's 2026. Twist. 2026. We're ready to go. First episode of the year, January 5th. Don't call it this week in startups. Just say twist. Twist 2025. Just twist.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's simpler, it's cleaner, it's faster, it's better. Just twist. Friends, no more long names.

[Jason]

Yeah, like a little twist. You have a little cocktail, you put a little twist in it.

[Jason Calacanis]

Amen to that.

[Jason]

In your case, a mocktail, it's all good.

[Jason Calacanis]

You know what I love, Jason, is paying $12 for a mocktail. That always seems like such a good deal to me. Just a little Twist.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Try having three daughters and all three want a mocktail hit for 36 bucks. And then they're like, can we have a second one?

[Jason]

I said absolutely no.

[Jason Calacanis]

You may have a Diet Coke at most.

[Jason]

I think I got to. I got to pump the brakes on this mocktail thing.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I'm going to give them the choice. Mocktail or dessert?

[Jason Calacanis]

Yes.

[Jason]

Because it's just too expensive. It's way Too expensive on the mocktail thing.

[Alex Wilhelm]

But I understand, you know, there's a big thing going on.

[Jason]

Speaking of startups, restaurants, I was talking to like pretty high level, very world famous chef. I wouldn't say who. Okay. And I said, how's business? He says, it's over. I said, say again? He said, it's over. This is LA based.

[Jason Calacanis]

Okay.

[Jason]

You know, you'd know his first name anyway. Says, listen, it's over. I said, please unpack. He said, the kids are not coming out and when they do, there are, you know, people are on Ozempic so they're ordering half as much food. They nobody drinks, everybody's smoking weed and doing ketamine or just abstaining Again, some of them are on, you know, GLPs which also attend that. So they come in and they spend 25 bucks a person. We're losing money because they order a salad or an appetizer or like a side of potatoes. This business is over, it's done. People like you, jcal, who come in or chamath and orders a bottle of wine or you come in and you want to try a lot of things, you don't mind bringing a couple of doggy bags. I always, you know, or you leave a big tip.

[Alex Wilhelm]

He said, this is like the end of it.

[Jason]

It's over. And so it's really going to be hard. I think they're losing all the mid tier restaurants in Los Angeles and then.

[Alex Wilhelm]

The high, high end, you know, 300 a person, 200 a person, that will.

[Jason]

Exist and then Sweet Greens or Shake Shack. But this middle tier of restaurant where you go spend, you know, 75 bucks a person for dinner and four people go out, it's a $300 bill. You put $100 tip in whatever you do, 400 bucks, that's over. He said just people just don't order as much food. People don't want to go out to dinner because they're not hungry because they're on GLPs. It's a disaster.

[Jason Calacanis]

I got to get me on some of this GLP business because I really do feel like I'm the last person not on them. And I'm kind of curious what it would rub off my personality. Like what burrs would it kind of clean away from me?

[Alex Wilhelm]

Reddit Truetide, if I'm pronouncing it correct, is the one that all my friends are talking about. It's still very much in testing or.

[Jason]

Whatever they call it trials. But because of the compounding pharmacies, there are compounding pharmacies making it. It is all the rage in Silicon Valley in my circles. People are doing low doses of it who are already incredibly muscular, et cetera. Retatrutide is the one, if you wanted to double click on and look at. I don't recommend going and doing anything that's not yet FDA approved or whatever, but I can tell you everybody's doing it.

[Jason Calacanis]

Not saying that you shouldn't. I'm just. Everyone else is.

[Jason]

Well. And then the other thing that occurs.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Is there are testing sites for peptides. So there was a peptide article, I think, in the New York Times this weekend.

[Jason]

Everybody was talking about it.

[Alex Wilhelm]

So there are testing sites now. So these compounding pharmacies in China are making these in bulk, then they ship them to us. Then these biohackers, Austin, the Valley, et cetera, are setting up testing sites. They send it to an independent lab by batch. So you got this batch of retatrutide, this batch of bpc, this batch of whatever. Then they. And this is going to become, I think, a business. These are for testing purposes only, so they can't ban them. And if you use them yourself in your body, well, that's on you. But the testing sites are now saying.

[Jason]

Hey, we tested this. This is, you know, 96% pure, 98% pure. And then they keep a track record of the providers and the sellers online who are selling the stuff and their track record. So there's going to be a whole cottage industry here. I would say it's very similar to what we saw happen in maybe cannabis, where it was kind of legally unknown or it was kind of avant garde. In Canada, they made a national referendum and then people started, you know, all these subsequent businesses around it. I think this will become one of the great businesses of the next two years.

[Jason Calacanis]

If that analogy holds though, we're going to have like cask strength peptides. Because if there's one thing the cannabis industry has done, it's make weeds stronger.

[Jason]

Too strong.

[Jason Calacanis]

I'm old enough now to agree, Jason. Yes, too strong.

[Jason]

I mean, it just.

[Alex Wilhelm]

They are making these shards or resins that are like a hundred times more powerful than, you know, the street joint that, you know, the Lucy that somebody might have had in the 90s.

[Jason]

So be careful out there, folks.

[Alex Wilhelm]

It really is terrible for kids because my understanding is it causes psychosis and.

[Jason]

Then that becomes a bridge to bigger things.

[Alex Wilhelm]

So, you know, part of living in.

[Jason]

A free society, right, you know.

[Jason Calacanis]

All right, let's talk about some startup news. We've been off live for a couple of days. Jason, I grabbed some big stories that I think we should just touch on here. First one is the big Nvidia Grok with a Q. Grok with the Q. They're going to be licensing that technology for about $20 billion. Grok is a company that we've known here on the show for a long time. Your friend Sonny Madra used to host some AI stuff with us and he's going to be part of the deal going over to Nvidia, about $20 billion. The idea is that they will have a non exclusive licensing agreement for Grok's inference technology, which is a fancy way to say that they're going to get to use what Grok has built to handle AI inference, Jason, which is not training. Instead it's what AI does when you ask it a question.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah. So it's a huge deal. And I said we're going to start seeing some very big deals in 2026. And here is the first of the very big deals. This is a 20 billion dollar deal. You know, anything above 10 billion is a, is a, you know, significant M and a deal.

[Jason]

Anything under 10 billion is, you know, a single or double. But this is the home run category of exits. I was an investor in Sonny Madras Company, Sandeep Madras Company Definitive, which was acquired. He became, I think essentially the president and head of developer relations over at Grok. They did fabulously well since he acquired, you know, joined. He was a real accelerant. And now they're going to be part of this. It's one of these licensing deals which makes it go pretty quick. The existing company will still be there, you license it. We've seen this over and over again.

[Jason Calacanis]

Character AI, Scale, AI and Inflection.

[Jason]

AI and inflection. Inflection was the one bought by Microsoft. Scale was bought by Facebook. Meta, if I have all my memory. Correct. So this is a new way of doing deals. What's great about these deals, you know, when you do a licensing deal, you get to sell the company and it just happens immediately. You know, you stroke the pen and you're off to the races. So this is going to become one of the preferred reasons to do it. Now, there were people who speculated here.

[Alex Wilhelm]

On this program that maybe this was a way to get around the FTC and regulatory approval, which the FTC themselves, I believe, put a note out that, hey, under Lina Khan we're looking at this. We kind of see what you're doing over there. You know, today I think the whole concept is, don't worry about it. This is just A way to go faster.

[Jason]

Now there are tax implications because you're.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Not buying a share in the company.

[Jason]

And so then you have to pay a different tax treatment I believe.

[Jason Calacanis]

Not a long term capital gain. It'd be more like ordinary income.

[Jason]

Sounds like probably is how this works out. I don't know that definitively in this case or the others, but I will eventually know that because we were investors at my firm in.

[Jason Calacanis]

I was gonna say definitive.

[Jason]

And so, you know, I don't know.

[Alex Wilhelm]

If we'll get a 10x, a x.

[Jason]

Or something like that, but it'll be a nice little bank for us. It's not going to be a fund returner because again Definitive was bought by Grok and then Grok had this incredible accelerant.

[Alex Wilhelm]

But in a short period of time, you know, you'll take a, a 20x.

[Jason]

In a three year if that's what it winds up being for us or a 10x, you know, we'll take it.

[Alex Wilhelm]

And remember I talked about on previous programs ad infinitum, if I'm using that correctly. Till I was blue in the face. Basically we need these singles and doubles to keep the venture space vibrant. And this will be great for me as an, as a GP to send.

[Jason]

A distribution to our LPs.

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[Alex Wilhelm]

Learning how to solve their problems. And that is going to put you.

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On a relentless pace. And that means you're going to be releasing new products and features hopefully at a brisk pace or better. But my lord, the complexities of working.

[Jason]

With AI, it's going to slow your developers down.

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You're going to have to install new GPU drivers.

[Alex Wilhelm]

They're going to be provisioning clusters.

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[Jason Calacanis]

This is not a double though, Jason. It's $20 billion. And you know we had everyone from Social capital leading the series A and B. We had, you know, D1 and tiger and the B1 and C addition, Alumni ventures. You. This has to be like a home run, right? I mean, $20 billion.

[Jason]

Oh, yeah, grand slam. Okay, okay.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Got, yeah, I would say grand slacking. Anything over 10, anything in the billions is a home run. Typically depending on when you got on the train, if you were the last round. No, but for everybody else, should be a home run. Anything above 10 billion. The grand slam category for me. Now, for us, it'll wind up being.

[Jason]

A 20x for a seed fund. You know, for us, that's a home run, not a grand slam. Because in our funds, we will have 300 names, 300 companies in our fund. Whereas a typical venture fund that's doing series A has 30 names in it. So each name represents 3% of the fund. In ours, each name represents, you know, 30 or 50 basis points of the fund, which means we need a 200x to have a fund returner. If you just do the back of the envelope math. So a fund returner, four, a seed fund or a venture fund that has 30 names in it. 40 names in it tends to be a 30 or, you know, 40x, something like that. 50x. You can return the whole fund. For us, we need, we have a higher benchmark so we spread more bets. We get in earlier, lower valuations and hope for the best. But congratulations to the team over there and I think it's just the start. I. I'm gonna stick with my prediction. 100 billion $M and a deal will occur in 2026. A $100 billion deal will occur.

[Jason Calacanis]

Oh, hard agree for folks out there are curious why Nvidia would want to buy part of the Groq technology stock. I think, Jason, the answer is just tpus from Google. Jonathan Ross, who was the one of the founders of Grok, was a former Google TPU engineer. And if you recall, companies like Anthropic are turning to Google to use their technology. I think essentially Nvidia is like, look, GPUs are great, but we don't want to lose a trick on inference. So I think this is essentially de risking for Jensen and company. But that's just a little bit of context for folks out there who are curious.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Well, the company's worth 3 trillion now, so this is not even 1%.

[Jason]

Right. 1% would be 30 billion if it's a.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Or is it a $4 trillion company now?

[Jason]

Anyway, it's like 50 basis points or something.

[Jason Calacanis]

So 4.4.6. We're both wrong.

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Wow.

[Jason]

Oh my God. I just, you know, I keep losing track because things keep getting so big. So anyway, you know, if it's under.

[Alex Wilhelm]

50 basis points of ownership, dilution for the shareholders. If it doesn't work, who cares if it does work? Oh boy.

[Jason]

This is where, you know, Nvidia should be buying another.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Nvidia should be buying conservatively 10 companies.

[Jason]

A year, maybe 20.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Given the market cap of the company. If they can use their shares, they should be buying 20 companies a year, two a month, one every other week. They should be on a explosive M and A because what if they work.

[Jason]

Just like Palo Alto Networks, just like.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Microsoft or Google, you know, during peak periods you want to put that high.

[Jason]

Market cap to work.

[Alex Wilhelm]

So this is going to be great for founders. You don't want to build your company.

[Jason]

To be bought, but you do want to have that kind of in the back of your mind if this does, if this company can't grow revenues and get to 100 billion, get to 100 million, 200 million in revenue, which is, then you start just thinking about IPOs or you're just going to be massively sustainable. You know, then you're, you want to start thinking about who would buy this company and why. The, the obvious answer here of why to buy it is now they have a complete package, they have the inference, they take it off the market if the inference winds up, you know, being the more important part of the puzzle. And people like Claude and Anthropic are saying, hey, we're going to do less, we're going to do more with less, we're going to use less compute to make our models and, and that becomes the trend. Well, that's not good for Nvidia because maybe people over built and now they don't need more. So very complicated chessboard. Congratulations to them. What else happened over the break?

[Jason Calacanis]

So Butterfly Effect was a Chinese company, eventually moved to Singapore and is best known for its Manus agent. This took flight last year. People were obsessed with it. It was essentially an agglomeration of other AI tools kind of duct taped together and they turned it into a really cool product. It's now aimed today, Jason at SMB. So if you're an SMB that wants kind of magentic AI automation, well, this is for you. It's grow to $100 million in ARR and a run rate of 125 million and was thinking about raising more capital. Meta took it off the chessboard. $2.5 billion inclusive of a $500 million employee retention pool, if you will. But the real thing about this that I think is interesting is it shows that there is a way to get companies out of China and put into a new package, essentially, that allows them to both accept investment from global investors, including us, and also to find a way to sell themselves.

[Alex Wilhelm]

This is super notable because benchmark had invested $75 million in the company. They got a lot of pushback because.

[Jason]

Wait, you can't invest in Chinese companies anymore.

[Alex Wilhelm]

We have all kinds of regulations around this, and it just feels un American to invest in China now with this great rivalry going on. Company moved to Singapore, you know, but then again, TikTok's in Singapore, so this.

[Jason]

Really doesn't mean anything.

[Alex Wilhelm]

But again, to your point, if American companies can extract a great company from.

[Jason]

China or half from China, or originating in China, you know, listen, we can get into the semantics of this. There is something very notable here that Zuckerberg was able to extract this company.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Get them into the democracy bucket. So we need to be thoughtful as a country about winning the AI race. We've had this conversation a million times, and if we can have some of these models and companies, the founders want a base in Singapore, you know, or, you know, get out of Hong Kong. You know, it used to be Hong.

[Jason]

Kong is where you would put these.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Things, but now it's Singapore. Great. And this is why we launched Founder University in the Middle east, specifically in Riyadh and Saudi Arabia and also in.

[Jason]

Japan, and is because we think there's gonna be a lot of international M and A. There's gonna be a lot of international companies. Founders from around the world are choosing because they can't get into America, to domicile in the Middle east, to domicile in Canada, and to domicile in Japan, because those are all really dope places to live and talent wants to be there. And they're very fluid with their immigration laws as opposed to the United States, which is, you know, we basically locked this place up. It's pretty rigid. Okay, so congratulations. There's. What's next.

[Jason Calacanis]

One other thing that really kind of caught my eye, speaking about companies from China that are doing interesting things in the capital markets. Moonshot, the company behind the Kimi family of AI models. People might know Kimi K2 thinking, a very popular model at the moment, raised $500 million at a $4.3 billion valuation, including capital from Alibaba and Tencent. And I bring this up, Jason, because we're seeing a number of Chinese tigers, their AI labs that are challenging Anthropic and OpenAI go public. And so we recently got data from Z AI or zippu AI, which builds the GLM family of AI models. They filed to go public. And Minimax, another of the tigers from China, has also filed to go public. So we're seeing a lot of capital availability and some IPOs, but it just seems like every time I read one of these announcements from China, it's missing a zero, like $500 million for moonshot. Fantastic. But in the US, wouldn't that have been 5 billion? And so I'm not sure if they're doing more with less and therefore they're going to win or if they lack resources.

[Alex Wilhelm]

It does seem like this.

[Jason]

Because it's an open source model, the business opportunity will be different than a proprietary closed source model where. Right, and so Kimi is open source.

[Alex Wilhelm]

And that means any startup can take it, fork it, do whatever they want with it, and Moonshot gets nothing. They have to make money off people using their APIs on their hosted services. So much like the WordPress project, or MongoDB, I guess, is also open source. You know, you, when you have an open source project, you're hoping to capture 10% or 20% of the value, not 100%, whereas ChatGPT is an Gemini Grok. And Claude, because they're not open source, they just capture 100% of the value.

[Jason]

So that's the difference in the valuations.

[Jason Calacanis]

Do you want to see the Minimax income statement from their IPO filing?

[Jason]

I know you love these things, so. Yeah. What do you glean from it?

[Jason Calacanis]

Thank you for humoring me, just. And I appreciate that. All right, so this is from the. The translation of their IPO filing in Hong Kong into both US dollars and English. And what struck me here is, well, they were gross margin negative in 2023, so first of all, start there. But also the numbers are small, so this is Minimax they're doing. You know, people use their models all the time. They had revenue of just 54, $53 million through Q3 of this year, which just isn't that much. And so I think your point about not capturing all the value is super pertinent here. And maybe that's why the valuations are lower and the fundraisers are smaller. But it just, it surprised me that we're only.

[Alex Wilhelm]

And it was a $4 billion valuation.

[Jason Calacanis]

You said for Moonshot. Yes, they raised private. This is for Minimax, who's going public. We don't know their IPO valuation yet, but it will be Single digit. Millions. Billions. I'm sorry.

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That's uber.com twist.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah, so they're probably going to go for 40 times revenue or something like that.

[Jason]

So there you go.

[Jason Calacanis]

All right. John LeCun versus Alexander Wang. Jason, you mentioned Skale AI earlier being quasi purchased by Meta. As part of that deal they got then Skale CEO Alexander Wang to move over and kind of take over the super intelligence team over at Meta. And as we discussed earlier on the show, last year at some point in time that meant that Yann Lecun would report into Mr. Wang. Now Yann Lecun is a attorney award winner, kind of one of the godfathers of AI, very well known, critical of LLMs. He is leaving to go found his own company, but in an interview he did with the Financial Times, there was quite a lot of interesting tidbits. I wanted to bring those to everyone out there. Do you recall the launch of Llama 4 from Meta, which was kind of a flop, if you will. Well, Jan went ahead and admitted that the quote, the results were fudged a little bit. So there you go. Confirmation. Well, I think they did like a different variations of llama 4 and then they picked the ones that had the best benchmarks and so they weren't really being upfront with it. But as a result of that fiasco, essentially he said that Mark Zuckerberg was kind of over their existing team, just kind of sidelined them. So that does kind of put into context the change with Alexander Wang and so forth. And the rest of this that I want to bring up is just that he's very LLM negative in a way that I was even surprised coming from.

[Alex Wilhelm]

From Jan. Well, yeah, I mean the idea that guess the next word will.

[Jason]

Allow you to understand the complexity of planet Earth, of the human brain. For him as a researcher who's 65 years old, who's like top two or three in the world at this, who's been at it for decades, who created the category?

[Alex Wilhelm]

The fact that you had him report into a 20something, who does the training data. Now those training things are important, but that would be the equivalent of putting like the Michelin starred celebrated chef who defined the category, Thomas Keller. And you put him in charge of, you know, the pastry chef is now their boss, right?

[Jason]

Or the maitre d is their boss.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Like okay, like the maitre d or.

[Jason]

The pastry chef are important. They're obviously components of this. You know, somebody might even say like the dishwasher. I wouldn't say like trading data is like that low on the totem pole. But there was obviously like a lot of disrespect here. He got.

[Alex Wilhelm]

And you know, you have to wonder what Zuckerberg is thinking here. To lose somebody of this caliber by doing something so divisive as having the 65 year old research God report into the 27 year old, you know, with a couple years experience doing this training data. That's no dicta to Wang but you know, he's a bit of a live wire according to reports. He's a bit precocious maybe.

[Jason]

So you just gotta be thoughtful here. You maybe a team of rivals would be what I would have done.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I would have said, you know, hey, we're gonna have two groups competing to get these problems solved. But I would not have done it this way. Probably Zuckerberg regrets it, but you know, management or who knows, maybe Zuckerberg just thought I gotta get this guy out of the company, so how do I get him to quit? I'll have him report into the 27 year old. Either he starts shipping product faster or he just gets out and he quits. And I don't have to pay, you know, some severance something. So there's all kinds of like Game.

[Jason]

Of Thrones stuff that happens at this level. But AMI is going to be a company to watch because they're going straight to world building.

[Alex Wilhelm]

And that's going to be the discussion a lot of people are going to be having with self driving cars, with robotics, with just trying to solve and provide more value. You know, like even if you want a salesperson to be an agentic salesperson, if they can understand the entirety of.

[Jason]

The world they're operating in, well, that's.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Going to be, you know, sort of the next phase and guess the next word. And the literary nature of human existence is going to be complemented with the physicality and the dexterity of human existence. So if you're angel and you're making, you know, bombs and, you know, weapons technology, do you need to guess the next word? If you're optimist, you need to guess the next word. In some cases, perhaps, but you also primarily need to understand, like, okay, this drone is flying over this set of, I don't know, the gondola behind me. And, you know, the gondolas are, you know, in Zurich or whatever, or in China. Like, you don't want to hit the gondola or the cable because it's going to kill the people in the gondola.

[Jason]

Which has happened, by the way. I don't know if you ever heard.

[Alex Wilhelm]

That story, one of the craziest stories.

[Jason]

In the history of gondolas. These two American fighter pilots were deciding they would, you know, have a little bit of fun and fly under the gondolas. One of them clipped the cable and killed everybody. And they. And this happened. They were flying fighter jets in. In Europe somewhere, and they just decided to make a really bad decision.

[Jason Calacanis]

That's a career.

[Jason]

Even if. Oh, yeah, no, I think these guys went to jail.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[Jason]

Since we're here, let's look it up and we'll pull up the page. Ask producer Claude about this instance that's in my memory somewhere. But producer Claude will find much faster and we'll just throw producer quad up on the screen. The reason this is important as an.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Example is like, this is an edge case in the world. This thin little cable flying between mountains in Zurich or Germany, Switzerland, Italy, the Dolomites. Why on earth or, you know, how on earth does somebody account for that? There's only, you know, there's less than a thousand gondolas in the world. And this is where world building is.

[Jason]

Going to, you know, as opposed to.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Guess the next word or. Let's try to understand the question better. What are the subsequent questions? Let's try to do deep research. All that is fantastic when we're on our laptops pals. In comparison to understanding the nuances of the real world. Go ahead, Sean.

[Jason Calacanis]

Let's go ahead and talk about this. So we're talking about the Cavalier's cable car crash. This is back in February 3rd of 1998 near the Italian town of Cavaliers. And what happened? Well, a US Marine Corps EA6B Prowler aircraft, which I think I can summon my head did cut a cable in a gondola, killing 20 people. The gondola fell more than 250ft. Seven Germans, five Belgians, three Italians, two Poles, two Austrians and one Dutch person along with the operator.

[Alex Wilhelm]

What happened to the people who did this?

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, the pilot, Captain Richard Ashby, was on what was supposed to be a low altitude training mission. Fair enough. And then he violated regulations by flying at 621 miles per hour above the limit of 517. Struck the cable 365ft above the ground. Supposed to be 1,000ft up. Okay, that's what I was expecting.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

He was not supposed to be flying that low. That was breaking protocol.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Did you go to Kyle?

[Jason Calacanis]

Let's see, he was tried involuntary manslaughter, negligent homicide, convicted of obstruction of justice as well. And they were dismissed from the Marine Corps. The acquittal.

[Jason]

They didn't go to jail though. Wow.

[Jason Calacanis]

They should have gone to jail.

[Alex Wilhelm]

It's amazing.

[Jason]

Like you have these weird. This is one of the incredible things about human memory. Like I have this memory of this, but I, you know, and I have different pieces of it. But if I had actually had to go research that prior to the Internet existing, it would be impossible. Like how would you find that out? You'd have to get on the phone and call sources or go look at like Filofax or whatever that was called back in the day. I didn't think.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Then the Internet comes out. There's a Wikipedia page. I just go to Wikipedia, I find it. Or Google search. And now with LLMs, you just summarize it.

[Jason]

Bang.

[Alex Wilhelm]

And this is this augmented human intelligence. What I really want as a product is something I can add to my desktop. If somebody could make this, I would be thrilled. I want to be able to add to my desktop computer the ability to listen in on everything I'm doing. Not record it and transcribe it. But just as I mention things, give me little one liners. Oh, that was the Zurich instance here. Would you like more? That was this. Would you like more? And when I get my heads up glasses, that would be the next unlock is to have your heads up glasses showing you that.

[Jason]

And that's that.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Augmenting human intelligence.

[Jason]

That for some reason somebody hasn't created that.

[Alex Wilhelm]

If that exists in the world.

[Jason]

Producer Oliver, who is producing this week.

[Alex Wilhelm]

In AI, which is well underway here.

[Jason]

We'Re going to be launching it formally.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I think in February 2nd in the string of new shows that we will be producing here in 2026. Yeah. Anyway, I think that's the software I want. If anybody has an idea about that, just email jasonalicanis.com I'm a big enough.

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Hey, maybe you just got some new.

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[Alex Wilhelm]

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[Jason Calacanis]

Do you remember Windows Vista from way back in the day?

[Alex Wilhelm]

Which one?

[Jason Calacanis]

Windows Vista. They had these things called widgets. They would go over here and they were kind of transparent, kind of like liquid glass. Today in iOS, if there was like a liquid glass version of this that did what you said, I would absolutely use that day in, day out because it would just think for me and I could just grab it when I wanted it to. And so it would be like, give me a third arm, but never when I didn't need it, which would be ideal.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I want to invest in Yann Lecun's company. Can somebody on my team reach out to him and ask him to come on the program? I'd like to interview him. And then I want to invest in this company because I. I think there's an opportunity here. I'd like to place a little bet. Let's keep moving.

[Jason Calacanis]

All right, let's talk about prediction markets.

[Jason]

Oh, speaking of Placing a bet.

[Jason Calacanis]

Speaking of place to bet, nothing happened over the weekend whatsoever and there was nothing to talk about and there was nothing to wager on. Over on Polymarket. No, I'm kidding. Traders on polymarket seemed to make an early, accurate and incredibly lucrative wager on the capture of Venezuela's Maduro and picked up coverage from Axios, the Journal. People started to bid on this happening Friday night hours and hours before it actually occurred. And one trader, because this is all in the blockchain, turned 30k into a net profit of 440k, which was a very impressive 10 11x bagger. No, I'm sorry, way more than that. Like 15x in just a couple of hours. So this has led to people once again saying, hey, maybe there's a lot of insider information going on to trading on Polymarket and Kashi and so forth. We talked about this, which is why.

[Alex Wilhelm]

They exist, is that. Hold on, people can make smart bets.

[Jason Calacanis]

I'm getting into that. But you remember the Google search end of year thing that led to someone making a million dollar bet and making a lot of money on that we talked about a month or two ago. Well, now people are trying to set some rules into place.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Okay, explain the rules.

[Jason Calacanis]

Representative Richie Torres, a Democrat from New York, has introduced the Public Integrity in Financial Prediction markets Act of 2026. Okay, I read it. It's two pages. And what it does is pretty simple. If you work for the government, if you are a political appointee, if you are a member of Congress, you are not allowed to trade on insider information. And I'm torn about this because on one hand seems fair, on the other hand. Well then what are we doing? So I kind of want to bring this to you as a. What's the Jason Smart path through this?

[Alex Wilhelm]

Well, these things already exist. You know, if you work for a company, you're not allowed to do things like those expert networks where an expert network is where you hire somebody for $5,000 an hour. They say this person works in search. It's like, okay, so they work at Bing or Google or DuckDuckGo. And then you can hire them for 5,000 an hour and just talk to them, ask them questions. Those that's not illegal, but it might be against the employment agreement of that person.

[Jason]

So it is on these companies and.

[Alex Wilhelm]

These individuals to make sure that they don't trade on inside information. Just like if you were on a.

[Jason]

Basketball team and you knew LeBron James sprained his ankle in practice and you placed a bet on, you know, one of these prop Betting sites, they're educating people in the NBA now, don't do that because there'll be people under investigation. Remember that DOJ investigation earlier this year? So this is really just more about reminding people of their fiduciary duty and.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Their employment agreements than an issue with the prediction markets. Now, a clever person might also see the buildup of ships around a certain country and say, why are we building up those ships? They might hear the rhetoric of people talking. Now, if you don't work for the government and you happen to be in a conversation and somebody who's adjacent to the administration or the basketball team and they say, yeah, you know, I think that there's something going on here. My intuition and all this stuff adds up.

[Jason]

I'm going to place a bet, I'm going to place a wager. That's kind of what we want in these markets. We don't want the people who are the primaries doing it. Get used to it, folks. This is how the world has or always worked. The world has always worked this way. People were making trades on inside information or adjacent information. I'm going to just coin the term adjacent information or cocktail party discussions. People are always making trades based on that. Not illegal. But the person who's, you know, inside of Google and makes a bet like that or is inside an administration who makes a bet like that, they do need to be reminded. It's fine for it to be legislated, but you know, use your brains, folks. And the one I'm interested in is the IPOs. I love polymarket. Polymark's in a Polymarket's amazing.

[Jason Calacanis]

We spend a lot of time in Polymarket. We're big fans. I found a great market for us.

[Jason]

We have a great partnership with them too.

[Alex Wilhelm]

What's this one about IPOs?

[Jason]

There's a lot of volume on this.

[Alex Wilhelm]

This is going to become a big, I think, market. And I would like to, I'm online to be part of polymarket IPOs before 2027.

[Jason]

This is interesting.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yes. So I wanted to find a good forward looking polymarket to kick off the year. And I love this one because it doesn't just rank three companies that had a whole bunch of names with people setting different odds about who's going to list. So, Jason, what I thought we'd do is play a little game. I'll tell you the name of the company and what odds Polymarket gives it for an IPO this year and you tell me if it's too high or too low. Fair?

[Alex Wilhelm]

Okay, sure.

[Jason Calacanis]

All right. Cerebras the kind of Grok competitor. 80% chance of an IPO this year. Your take?

[Jason]

Yeah, that's accurate. I say that's appropriately priced.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Can I say that?

[Jason Calacanis]

I think that's. That's very fair. Yes.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I think that one's appropriately priced inside your house.

[Jason Calacanis]

So if you want to decline a comment, I understand. But 74% chance according to Polymarket that Space X goes out this year.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Not a Space X holder, except maybe through a venture firm. I'm in. And I would say I have no inside information. I think that that is. I would take the. I think that's under. I would say it's a 90% chance.

[Jason]

So I think there's some money to be made there.

[Jason Calacanis]

I agree with that. Discord, 50% chance and declining slightly.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I would also take that. That's underpriced. I think Discord is going to go public.

[Jason]

I think it's probably a 60% chance. It's probably a little bit of money to be made there.

[Jason Calacanis]

All right, 50 chance for anthropic on its way up.

[Jason]

That's totally mispriced. I would say it's 80% chance anthropic will go out.

[Jason Calacanis]

All right, let's do one or two more here just for fun. Andrew, 49 chance for my pal from my pal Palmer. Lucky, your favorite man.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah, I think that is also. I think that's a 60, 70% chance.

[Jason Calacanis]

Wow.

[Jason]

Of it going public. Yeah. Because he said it. He said it over and over again. He wants to go public. He's got a ton of contracts, you know, very. He's in very tightly with this administration. They're going to keep dropping contracts, so. Yeah, of course. I think it's 70% chance. Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

All right, let's grab a. Let's grab a fun one. Let's see. How about 12% chance for ramp to go out this year? One in eight, I would say.

[Jason]

Hmm.

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[Jason]

Yeah.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I don't think they're going out this year, so I think it's probably appropriately priced. I do think OpenAI is the one.

[Jason]

To look at here. Open AI.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Will they go out this year?

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Will they go out this year?

[Jason Calacanis]

I think they have to because they need the money.

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Yeah.

[Jason]

I think that the funding they. The Masayoshi San. $40 billion got put in.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Right.

[Jason]

He pulled that off.

[Alex Wilhelm]

So what that says to me is they do have a decent amount of cash, but not enough to hit their targets. Revenues booming. I think it's more like a 50 chance they go out. I would say it's 100 chance they go out by 20, by the end of 2027.

[Jason]

So before 2028.

[Alex Wilhelm]

So I think OpenAI is probably 50 chance. But this is a great little game here and this is, you know, one I would like to get involved in. So I hope that I become approved because I'm going to just start making. I'm going to start making these trades.

[Jason]

I'm going to just start making these.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Trades on the show. I'm going to put like 100 grand.

[Jason]

In my thing and we'll just keep track of my ability to predict.

[Jason Calacanis]

I mean we could even chart it into a micro website. Be a lot of fun.

[Jason]

Absolutely. Good.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I'll be j trading on poly market. There's something going on with my guy, Biz Stone. I've known biz stone for 15, 20 years now. He's brilliant, great product guy. What's he up to?

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, are you familiar with the super group in music?

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah. Super group. Yeah. That's when you like Traveling Wilbur's would be my favorite super group. Or Mark Knopfler did the Nodding Hillbillies. It's when four or five really famous names form a group for a limited run to do an album or a tour.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah. Essentially you take some of the greats, this guitar player from that band, that bass player from that band, you put them together and see what they come up with. And fans will often show up just because, hey, oh, I already know that guy. So Biz Stone, formerly a co founder of Twitter and Evan Sharp, one of the guys behind Pinterest, had teamed up to build a company called West Co with a dot and I mentioned supergroup because this is kind of what this feels like to me in product sense. It's a bunch of people who've done things, who are well known, who can raise capital and know how to build, build teams and so forth and they're trying something new. So they are trying to build and they've kind of just started to talk about this. A different form of social media. Their first app is called Tangle. It's invite only Jason and is designed to help get people to like follow through with their intentions. I have pulled a screenshot from the app store here for you and the idea is kind of like an anti social media. So instead of scrolling instead of swiping, you're imagining growing, reflecting, supporting and learning I guess.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yet another news app.

[Jason]

I've been here folks. None of these news apps have ever worked.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I started one inside Smarter News in.

[Jason]

Japan did work and obviously people get their news from Twitter and EV was A co founder of Twitter. Famously, he's really smart. I like people taking a swing at a category that's never worked. Pulse, you remember that one I was an investor in Circa. That was very elegantly done. Beautiful app. You know the problem is people like getting their news in their Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X formerly known as Twitter feeds. And going news first may or may.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Not work, but somebody might figure it out and there is an issue right now that news is broken or there's a perception that news is broken. When something breaks, there's an opportunity. I'll give the number one example of it. Investigative journalism is super important in the world. It's super expensive. It comes with high risk and it comes with high reward. 60 minutes, frontline. I was thinking about buying Frontline but again you can't buy it. It's part of like a non profit kind of situation. But I have always in another life wanted to run an investigative journalism group. It's incredibly expensive. The business model doesn't really work. But we saw this past weekend with, you know, Fox 9 and we talked about it on All In. We had the person who's been doing these investigative journalism stuff on the ground in Minnesota knocking on doors of all this fraud occurring in Minnesota. This is a 15 year story almost and these stories take multiple decades.

[Jason]

There is no business model for it.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Except if you're smart and you're a.

[Jason]

Solo run and gunner and you start.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Trending on YouTube and YouTube now allows.

[Jason]

You to monetize these. The monetization program previously left this stuff out. Now my understanding is it includes it. I, I think X includes it. Obviously Substack is a great way to do it. There's an amazing opportunity, investigative journalism. I would love to talk to somebody in the investigative journalism space about some startups to do this crowdsourced, which was supposed to do anything data driven. There's so many opportunities here. When things break and there is chaos, that is the ultimate opportunity for a.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Startup to insert themselves.

[Jason]

And most will fail, but one will figure it out. And I think investigative journalism, not generic. So this is where tangle I'm like, you know, is it enough for this to. Is there enough here for people to pay for it or advertisers? I don't know. But I do know there's something in the need for investigative journalism to exist in the world and I hope that more people try it.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, we used to have classified ads that subsidized all sorts of things, you know, that went away. We had all that ads that kind of worked out subscriptions have worked out for like three publications. I think individuals, you're probably right, will have more impact, but they don't have the structure, legal teams, backup editing. It's. It's just philanthropy only gets us so far. It's tough.

[Alex Wilhelm]

So the key here then is to take what we saw. What's the individual's name who was on All In?

[Jason]

Gosh, I'm sorry.

[Jason Calacanis]

Nick Shirley.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Nick Shirley. So Nick Shirley who? I don't. Did you see the interview on all in by chance, Alex?

[Jason Calacanis]

No, I was. Children.

[Jason]

All good.

[Alex Wilhelm]

You know, I interviewed him and I was asking him questions about his process, etc. There's no process. He's got an LLC, but he doesn't have apparently errors in emission insurance. He doesn't have fact checking or these kind of things. It's gonzo, run and gun that has a place in the world. But it's hard to scale, hard to get investors for. If you had investors, they would insist on errors in omission. You'd have to slow down the process and add, you know, all those features to it. Which I believe he will do over time, out of necessity. Because if you knock on a door and let's say you get something wrong, well, people will file lawsuits. And you can just look at his. 60 Minutes has been in Frontline.

[Jason]

They've faced all kinds of lawsuits and.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Threats of lawsuits for everything from the Catholic church scandal highlighted in the film.

[Jason]

Spotlight by the Boston globes investigative team. 60 Minutes versus the tobacco companies.

[Alex Wilhelm]

The movie the Insider came out of that.

[Jason]

There's so much important work to be done here. But you do need to add that infrastructure. All that infrastructure then could become packaged like Substack does. So what if Substack added errors in omission insurance to their offering? Wow, that would be interesting. And then you could, you know, pay 10 of your revenue to them for the platform. But if you want to turn on investigative journalism and have errors in omission, you got to pay. Pay an extra. Well, yeah, or 10% more, whatever it is to cover you. All of this is just business opportunity. So for entrepreneurs out there, when you see something going away in society but people still respond to it, that means opportunity. So get curious. And I would love to have these two gentlemen on. So producers, get to work.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Let's get my friend Biz on the program and let's have him tell us and show us the new product.

[Jason Calacanis]

All right, Jason, I want to do a combination founder queue and idea for you because I found something really interesting online. So There was a great question over on the startup subreddit. We're not going to talk about it in particular, but it was all about what does it cost to get legal representation for your startup, when do you need it? And people were talking back and forth about that in the back of my head. Then Fred Wilson did a very interesting post about how he was dealing with the closing of a startup investment. And normally he would take the draft agreement, take it to his lawyers and they would do a lot of diligence on it. And he said he did that. And in this case the lawyers wanted.

[Alex Wilhelm]

$50,000 to do a Series A.

[Jason]

That would be typical. Series.

[Jason Calacanis]

That's typical. Okay. So what he did instead was he took all of their prior deals they'd done, put them into one notebook on notebook lm and then he took action from the startup and put that essentially their legal data room into a different notebook and then interrogated them to find what was different about this contract and also what could he learn about the startup's legal setup. Couple hours of his time ended up with one question he couldn't answer, which he then went out to get legal help with. But it seems that he collapsed $50,000 worth of legal work into essentially a couple of queries and a free to use tool if you already have G suite. So first of all, are we underestimating the amount of work that's going to get collapsed by AI? Because holy crap. But two for founders out there who don't want to pay insane amounts of legal expenses, does this sort of like involved intelligent approach using modern tools provide a pathway to spend less money on things that are non product critical?

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah, this is already happening. I have met a number of founders in our accelerator launch. Accelerator Launch co apply. If you want to come and spend 12 weeks with me and get 125k or founder university. We had a company that had no lawyer, no accountant, they were doing it all themselves and they had company gotten to hundreds of thousands of revenue. And I said hey, I know you don't have an attorney, but this will become a blocker for future rounds. If you're going to get to the Series A, the seed round, you start raising over a million dollars, like doing it on convertible notes. I'm like no, no, I could do it all myself. I can do it with an LLM. So founders find a way. And so there is a product opportunity here. And that product opportunity is going to exist inside of Fenwick Wilson, Sonsini Oreck where attorneys will use these tools, tools and these tools will make them go faster, which then should result in them lowering their hourly for doing these things. So that'll happen from the supply side, the lawyers and then on the demand side, these startups, they'll, they're doing it on their own already. There's always more legal work to be done.

[Jason]

There's going to be ten times as.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Many startups as young people can't get jobs. That's why I'm all in on Foundry University and I'm going to Japan on.

[Jason]

Friday after my Cesar quick 48 hour.

[Alex Wilhelm]

36 hour, you know, jaunt that I'm going to right after we've recorded this episode.

[Jason]

Just look at convertible notes. Convertible notes and safes. These were things that founders started doing on their own.

[Alex Wilhelm]

The law firms were like, yeah, it's totally fine, come to us after you.

[Jason]

Have 10 notes stacked. We'll clean it all up. You know, manage your own cap table using all these different cap table tools. Right? Boom.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Founders are doing it.

[Jason]

So all it's going to do is allow more startups just like cloud computing did. So if you look at this like cloud computing, instead of setting up your own servers and having your own rack somewhere co located that goes away. You save each startup 250k. That happened 10 years ago. Now instead of 50k, it goes down to 5k. All good. There'll be more startups to service. So that's what, you know, the AI boom is showing me over time is if you can't get a job at Microsoft, Google and you're graduating from school, you're going to need to be resilient. So not to make this political, but Mandami made this comment like rugged individualism is going to move to collectivism. That is socialism. That's like one trend. Sure. The government seizes assets. They provide everything for you in your life. If you want that move to New York City, that experiment's going on there. And if you want the rugged individualism, come join me in Texas and you can be a rugged individualist. You're going to need to be a rugged individualist as a young person graduating. And this is part of that trend. And Fred Wilson is awesome and like a legendary vc if he's on this. And here's his AVC xyz, here's his blog post that he posted here. Yeah, go read it. We'll put it there. Google NotebookLM is an incredible notebook product that most people don't know about that's getting better and better. We had Stephen Berlin Johnson on this program. We'll Link to that in the notes. We should have Stephen Berlin Johnson back on producer Marcus, maybe, or actually producer Oliver. That would make a really good person to have on the AI roundtable we're going to be doing weekly with this week in AI. Stephen Berlin Johnson, brilliant mind and friend of mine from the 90s and Fred's from the 90s. Yeah, they did a feedback. They did the Feed.

[Sponsor/Ad Read]

Zine.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Back in the day. There was a zine called Word and there was a zine called Feed. There was a zine called Salon. This was like the zine movement online predated blogs just meant like, you know, a news feed. And this is the future of it. So awesome legal due diligence. We're using Notebook LM for 10 different projects here at our firm. Great product.

[Jason Calacanis]

Should Google spin that out, Jason? Should they spin out NotebookLM into a company like I feel like it's. Or just it's so popular and people just. Everyone talks about the same tone that you just did.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I hope it doesn't get lost inside a big company for being too niche. I like the idea that it's part of the Google suite of products. I like the idea that, you know, you upload a bunch of information, the number of sources. I think you can only put in 300 items right now. They should have an uncapped version. So, for example, I want to have all of this week in startups in there.

[Jason]

I had my Athena assistants go to Athena wow.com to get an assistant.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I had my Athena assistants take 300 episodes. The first 300 of this Week in Startups and the last 300. So when we need to search, hey, did Alex and Jason debate, you know, Apple AirPods or, you know, the.

[Jason]

The pin or, you know, what was that pin called that failed?

[Alex Wilhelm]

The AI pin?

[Jason Calacanis]

The friend.

[Jason]

The friend.

[Jason Calacanis]

The friend was append.

[Jason]

No, there was the other one that.

[Alex Wilhelm]

You, the Apple people did that you clipped to your shirt.

[Jason]

You would put your hand there and project onto it. Anyway, all of these AI pendants and, you know, third device that will go with your, you know, laptop and your iPhone.

[Alex Wilhelm]

How could we ever figure out when we talked about that and what we said? The way we do that is we go into the Google notebook and we have to have eight of them because we have 300. We're at 2300 episodes or so of this podcast. It's just hard. You know, Leo wants to go back to this week in tech and he's at whatever number of episodes over 20 years. Like, how do you even find those discussions? It's too hard. You'd have to put a producer on it. Now, a producer can find that in 15 minutes or 5 minutes instead of 5 hours. And so all of this is to say great product. And yeah, I actually told Sergey when I saw him, by the way, this is a sleeper product.

[Jason]

You got to really give this team more resources.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I think it's like the future double.

[Jason Calacanis]

Triple, quadruple their compute allocation. Make everyone happy. Take off that limit.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah. And notebooklm.com you know, the thing that Google has always struggled with is when to have it have its own domain name and be its own brand or to bundle it. Google plus, which was their social network, would have done fantastically if they had ripped it out of Google and just called it plus.com and it would still exist in today. But because they made it Google and they tried to goose the number of users by making a part of the suite, nobody ever knew where to find it.

[Sponsor/Ad Read]

Nobody knows where to find Google Notebook.

[Jason]

That's why it should be notebooklm.com standalone. Let it work, let it cook. Right? That's why I made the syndicate.com and took the time to get that IP and make that domain name so I can have that as a brand. That's why I took Foundry University. I made Founder University.

[Alex Wilhelm]

If you really care about a product.

[Jason]

Want it to stand alone, you got to put a GM or a CEO in charge of it and you got to do what they did with YouTube.com, which is let it live on its own domain name with its own brand. This product is good enough to do that. That's my best advice to the friends at my friends at Google.

[Jason Calacanis]

Amen to that.

[Jason]

All right, another amazing episode of this week in Startups Mondays markets and Startups Fridays. Lon Harris will be joining us Wednesdays. I think it's going to be the investment roundtable this week in AI. We got lots of plans with with you for 2026 here on Twist. Call it Twist, please. Like, you know, put a little twist in your beverage or take a twist on the wild side with us here. He's Alex Wilhelm. I'm Jason Calacanis. Cautious optimism.substack.com Is that your domain or cautious optimism.com, what do you got?

[Jason Calacanis]

Cautious Optimism News, if you will.

[Jason]

News. Okay, go to Cautious Optimism News and throw Alex a hundy.

[Jason Calacanis]

Find your local journalism, find your local journalist.

[Jason]

Okay? We'll see you next time on Wednesday on this week in Startups. Bye bye.