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This Week in Startups
5,000+ Tech Workers Laid Off This Week. It's Just The Beginning. | E2286
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- [00:00]
David Moscatelli
So here's the problem. You have banks, credit unions, hospitals that want to use AI, but they are not interested in sending their data to any of the public AI providers. They say, how do we use AI but locally within our network, so none of our data leaves our infrastructure.
- [00:17]
Jason Calacanis
You can make your own decision. For me, if you look at the record of some of the executives at some of the companies, it might make one wonder and if there's only one way to really know if your information is being shared or not, which is to not share it.
- [00:30]
David Moscatelli
25, 30 days ago and we have over 1600 orders of this device.
- [00:35]
Jason Calacanis
I wouldn't trust Biden or Kamala or Trump or JD Vance with AI regulation for everything from God. Kings in Washington D.C. who are on the grift, who are getting paid by these lobbyists.
- [00:47]
Alex Wilhelm
That system's broken the executive branch to your point of executive power. Control over what AI models I can use terrifies me to no end. Jason, this week in startups is brought to you by imhealth. Start feeling like your best self every day. Go to im8health.com twist and use the code Twist to get a free welcome kit, five free travel sachets and 10% off your order every for all your incorporation, banking, payroll benefits, accounting taxes or other back office administration needs. Visit every IO and sentry. Your team should be focused on shipping features, not chasing down bugs. New users can get $240 in free credits when they go to Century IO. Twist and use the code twist.
- [01:31]
Jason Calacanis
All right everybody. Welcome back to twist for May 8, 2026. I am at my mom and dad's brownstone. Got to see them for the full week. Got to take in four Knicks games. Atlanta, New York, New York. And tonight I'll be in Philly. Or when you're listening to this, I will have been in Philly. Acquired courtside for two out of four. It's a really hard thing to do these days. But I am really excited for my Knicks and I'm really excited for today's episode.
- [01:57]
Alex Wilhelm
Yeah, Knicks are up 20 over the Sixers, right?
- [02:00]
Jason Calacanis
Yeah. And it takes four wins. You play three series in order to get to the finals. And so we have to win 12 games to get to the finals, obviously. And we're halfway there. Six of 12. Halfway. Not bad. Still a long way to go. Mission not accomplished. But we really want to get to the finals. And then we'll have to strategize from there because we have some great, incredible folks that we're going to be competing against in the final either the spurs or okc. But let's get to the show. We have a lot of great guests and we have a lot of news. So we're going to try to whip through this docket for everybody. I know everybody's got a lot of comments and at the end of the show we'll be doing the plugs for the first time. Today we're going to be doing the AI plug. So listen to the end of the show for the AI plugs. Let's get started.
- [02:40]
Alex Wilhelm
All right, first up we have David Moscatelli. He is the founder of a company called Go Abacus. It's a launched back startup that wants to deploy a on prem AI for regulated industries. Jason, they have a thing called the Go1. It's a big bunch of GPUs in a box and I heard that they may have another one coming out. But the idea is how do we get AI in the door of companies that can't use Azure, AWS, OpenAI's APIs. That's the plan. So David, welcome to the show. Good to have you here.
- [03:06]
David Moscatelli
Thank you for having me.
- [03:07]
Alex Wilhelm
I'm so excited.
- [03:08]
Jason Calacanis
Now the name of the startup, the domain is Go Abacus but you just go by Abacus.
- [03:13]
David Moscatelli
Yeah, yeah. We have an arch nemesis, Jason, so we had to differentiate by adding the go, which means to our advantage we say Go healthcare, go Banking, go Finance, go Abacus.
- [03:23]
Jason Calacanis
Got it, Love it. And so before we get started here, always remember to start your Plod record everything and Alex has his on his wrist right there. You need to get the Plod Note PIN s amazing product. If you go to Plod AI Twist and use the code Twitch, you're going to get 10% off. Alex does it all the time because I'm constantly giving him notes on how to be an amazing co host and yeah, just how to get better and better. Thanks. We applaud Plaud for sponsoring independent media like this week in startups. David, we met I guess is it two years now. You were into launch accelerator. Which launch accelerator class did you go to?
- [04:01]
David Moscatelli
I think it was LA33, but I don't know Jason, because every day is like a year for me. So it's one of those.
- [04:07]
Jason Calacanis
Exactly. And maybe just give us an idea of what you're building in as plain English as you can. You know we always work on that really simple sentence and we worked with you really hard in all of our startups to present these startups so well. And one of the great things about I think our accelerator and Founder, University. Alex, if I give myself a pat on the back here, is that we really help founders communicate what they're doing and why it's important. So you'll see that when David sort of explains it to us versus other folks who come on the podcast and then I have to re explain it in plain English. David, what's the mission here? Who are your customers? How do you make money?
- [04:45]
David Moscatelli
Okay, so here's, here's where I disappoint Jason and the entire team. So we as a company, what I like to say is we're AI infrastructure for regulated industries. Now when I say that, people go, what's infrastructure and what do you mean by regulated industries? So here's the problem. You have banks, credit unions, hospitals that want to use AI, but they are not interested in sending their data to any of the public AI providers. OpenAI Cloud. I think they're fantastic companies, but it's just not their wheelhouse. So they say, how do we use AI but locally within our network, so none of our data leaves our infrastructure. And how do we box in the cost? In other words, with those guys, you're paying on usage. You know, if you're a bank or a credit union or an insurance company, that's a no go for you. You don't like a variable annuity every month, you want a fixed price. Okay, so they want to accomplish those two things. And then that's what we do at Go Advocus is we provide that on prem infrastructure through hardware and software so that they consume AI in a safe and reliable way.
- [05:51]
Jason Calacanis
And, you know, this is something, Alex, we've talked about here over and over again when it comes to running local models, running OpenClaw. And how do we think about all this incredible data I have on startups, we do 2,000, you know, we do about 50 to 100 first calls with founders every week. We have all that data. That data is stored in notion in other places. We have AI provided by to us from them. But we're always thinking, hmm, should this be training, you know, other people's models? And do we even believe them that it's not? Do they even have control over their models? Are these trustworthy companies? You know, listen, you can make your own decision for me. If you look at the record of some of the executives at some of the companies, it might make one wonder, you know, and the history of the Internet writ large, Alex, is privacy is a game people play. And if there's only one way to really know if your information is being shared or not, which is to not share it. Yes, that is the only way to know. So I think this is what corporations really want is to have an on prem. And now you have a hardware solution, a software solution. Let's get into the nitty gritty and then Alex, you can tee up your first question.
- [07:07]
David Moscatelli
That's right. So we have a piece of hardware, it's called the Go1. We came out with that about 25, 30 days ago and we have over 1600 orders of this device. So pray for me, everybody on the call. Hardware is a completely different business, you know, and we've had all sorts of people call. So we've had health fitness companies call us. We had one guy who does luxury homes for famous celebrities. He wants to buy one of these to put in the box, to put in the house. Because celebrities don't want their data for their tech enabled home going to any of the cloud providers. So there's been a whole bunch of interest that I could have never have anticipated. But I think you know, our core value prop is we have a piece of hardware which is the go one. Everything you need to consume AI is in that device. That device can Support up to 2,000 concurrent users at one time. We ship that device directly to our clients, they unbox that and in about 15 minutes they're up and running with on Prem AI. How do we do that? Well, we pre configure the software and pre install it on the device. What's the software? We call it go1os. It's a custom developed operating system that enables the enterprise to have AI and connect to their data. And then that device connects to all the PC terminals of each employee within the organization so they can communicate with that device. We replace that device every year to have the most up to date chipset. And in the device there's redundant Systems so there's three power supply units, there's duplicate GPUs, duplicate CPUs. We do that to maintain a certain service metric with the device as we deploy it to our clients. They can be chained together. So if you want more than 2000 users, you can chain them together at 4, 6, 8, etc.
- [08:54]
Jason Calacanis
So you have a service level agreement, you want to make sure you hit that 99.59 and you're basically mirroring. Duplexing is the term. When I was a network engineer we used but suffice it to say if a power supply or a card goes out, it's going to still be up and running and you can, you can daisy chain them so you could have unlimited number of users. And I think that means on a security basis, if it's in on premises, you could say, hey, only these IP addresses, only these specific Mac addresses, these specific hardware, these specific network cards can access it, which is a level of security that you really want. If you had, you know, Justin Bieber's home network on. And I'm just making up a celebrity's name. Go ahead, Alex.
- [09:32]
Alex Wilhelm
So the yearly refresh is very interesting to me. What does it cost to buy a go one? And then do I have to repay you once a year? Because I presume that newer chips are going to cost more, I was going to depreciate while I own it, and so forth.
- [09:44]
David Moscatelli
It's a good question, Alex. And since I have some of our investors on the phone, E. Jason, I have to be careful how I answer this question. So I replace them every year because I want them to have the latest and greatest hardware. And I'm trying to avoid the expense of sending out a technician. Alex. So I have redundant systems and I replace the box every year. I don't have to send out a technician because on the basis of our stress testing, the chances of failure is incredibly low. Okay. That's the main reason.
- [10:14]
Jason Calacanis
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- [11:19]
David Moscatelli
The chip technology is changing rapidly and we want to make sure that our clients have the latest and greatest stuff. So one of the only pushbacks to on prem as well as technology evolves, if I have this static thing, how am I keeping pace with what's coming out? And so we have a bunch of ways that we do that, both software and hardware. But on the hardware side we want them to have the best experience possible. And so we change it out. Every year we send them a new box, they migrate the old box to the new one, they wipe the old box, they put the old box back in the box it came and they ship it back to us and then we decommission it.
- [11:53]
Alex Wilhelm
What am I? So do I pay one main upfront price and then, you know, a different amount every year? Do I pay the same amount every year? Tell me about the, the price I'm going to pay as a bank here.
- [12:03]
David Moscatelli
Yeah, it's a really good deal. So you have an upfront fee, which is capex, right. So it's a capital expenditure. Then you have a monthly service fee. The box refreshes are included in that initial capex expenditure.
- [12:16]
Alex Wilhelm
Got it.
- [12:16]
David Moscatelli
So every year when we refresh it, there's no additional fee. It's included as part of the service. If anything fails, any of those redundant systems fails, we get a notification of a failure and we immediately ship out a new box. So that's all included in the price.
- [12:30]
Alex Wilhelm
Now these yearly refreshes, is that how often I, as a customer who has a GO one at my company can expect to have the models that I can access refresh refreshed or do those update more quickly than the hardware refreshes?
- [12:42]
David Moscatelli
That's a fantastic question. So we the, the go1os includes our own proprietary models. Now I know, Alex, you're thinking, okay, David, you don't have millions of dollars. How have you done that?
- [12:53]
Jason Calacanis
Right?
- [12:53]
Alex Wilhelm
You don't have tens of billions of dollars.
- [12:55]
David Moscatelli
There we go. So we actually as a company started in 2018. Alex. Back then this was pre LLM. It was NLP question answer matching. And back then we had the thumbs up and thumbs down button. Now some, some dude decided to call that reinforced human learning. We call it thumbs up, thumbs down. So back then people were really optimistic and they spent a lot of time writing very, you know, editorial about why a question was good and why it was bad. So we had 30 million of those queries right as data in financial services. That was our base model training. Now our core model, we ship out every six months and our core model in the GO and OS is a collection of tiny models. Alex. So we call those SLM language models from 3 billion to 7 billion. And each of those models specializes in a very specific task. So in banking, the things that folks are trying to do are not. They don't change very often. They're very specific and they're very deterministic. Okay. So we have a series of specialized models and we have an orchestrator on top. That orchestrator orchestrates to a model.
- [14:11]
Jason Calacanis
Right.
- [14:12]
David Moscatelli
And then that model performs the task. Okay, so that's our model apparatus.
- [14:18]
Alex Wilhelm
So what I haven't heard you say is we have a large LLM that you can pick between. Like I'm thinking, because this is on prem, it's going to be mostly open source, open weight models.
- [14:30]
David Moscatelli
Drc.
- [14:30]
Jason Calacanis
Kimmy. Yeah. What are we talking?
- [14:32]
David Moscatelli
So we can. But that's not our preference. So you absolutely can install a localized model. But we have our own models that we've trained. Now, just to kind of talk about this, you might. Again, back to the money, how do we do it? Well, each of our clients has our on PREM system deployed. Right at night, when our clients are not using their system, this is in their sla, we batch train on their data and then we take the weights from that training. Not the underlying content, just the weights and it sends to us every night. So we're decentralizing. We call it fractional reserve training. The more clients we have, the more clients that have the GO one, the more training we have in our network, that training then comes back to us. So we're able to spread the cost of training across all of our clients, across each industry. And because our models are much smaller, they're faster and they're way less expensive to train. OpenAI and Claude, they don't know if you're going to write a poem or a sonnet. So they have to have massive parameters. Does that make sense?
- [15:32]
Jason Calacanis
Yeah.
- [15:32]
Alex Wilhelm
I ask a really nerdy question about this. So for the customer, the unit is capex and they pay you a retainer when you're doing the training across customer hardware. How do you figure that out in accounting terms? Does that, is that a, a cost of goods sold or is that like them giving you income? I can't figure out where the value is flowing there. It's tricky.
- [15:57]
David Moscatelli
That's a good question. So on our contracts we have a monthly price and we say, hey client, we love you if you agree to share your weights with us. Not the data, just the weights. Because if, you know, if I put my computer scientist hat on for a second, an LLM is a CSV file with weights and software to run those weights. Hate to demystify it for everyone. That's what it is. So we just want the weight. So we say if you're willing to share the weights with us, we'll give you 20% off each month for the life of your contract.
- [16:25]
Jose Caldera
Got it?
- [16:26]
David Moscatelli
Or we'll discount the price of a go one by 50%. Right. And so that almost always does the trick. Not every time. We do have clients that say, nope, not doing that, and that's completely fine. But we have a fair number of clients that opt into that.
- [16:39]
Jason Calacanis
Do we get the price of the GO one? Is this like a hundred thousand? Two hundred thousand dollars? It sounds like this should be pretty expensive. It's got eight of those cards. Those cards are 5k each, I think. So there's, I mean I just off the top of my head, there's 50k in cards and then there's gotta be 25k in power supplies and memory and chips and whatever. So what's the ballpark here? And is that where the margin is or the margin in the service? Yeah. What can people expect, you know, out of the gate to be paying a year? Quarter million dollars, Half million dollars. Where does this start at? Because this is not a, you know, roll your own kind of situation. This is a high level sla. This is, you know, but it's not a hundred million dollar, ten million dollar install right from, you know, a frontier model company that's got a side hustle. Like I had the, I had the founder of Mistral on the pod and they do like on Prem themselves. But I gotta think their on prem starts at 10 million or 20 million before they even get out of bed.
- [17:32]
David Moscatelli
Exactly right. So the Go1, just as a capex item, starts at 250,000, the Go1 Max, which is coming out, which supports 8,000 concurrent users, that starts at $350,000. Now most clients choose to amortize that over the life of the contract. And if you think about the math, Jason, 250,000 divided by 2,000 users from limited AI. You could ask a million questions. 10 million questions, 100 million questions. It does that matter? The price doesn't change. Your per user is pretty reasonable.
- [18:03]
Jason Calacanis
Yeah.
- [18:04]
David Moscatelli
You know, you know, you're talking about, it's kind of a steal in terms of price.
- [18:08]
Jason Calacanis
Hundreds of dollar low, hundreds of dollars per user maybe. Which is what a Pro account, you know, consumer Pro account costs 250 a year, 350 a year, something in that range. And I think this is, Alex, something we learned when we were deploying open claw agents or Doing vibe coding is to get the most out of these products and to get the most out of AI. The caps make you concerned. You know, it's kind of like being a chef where you're like, hey, this is, these are white truffles, this is foie gras, this is toro. You can't get creative because this stuff is, you know, a hundred dollars an ounce, 200 an ounce, you're dealing with caviar, so you, you can't waste it. Whereas, you know, if you were making meatloaf or you're making some, you know, omelette, you can go all day long. Eggs cost, you know, 25 cents each. And you know, when you're buying them wholesale. So people can have a lot of creativity. There's. And you can experiment. That's. I think the magic of what Go Abacus is doing here is Go Abacus has a product that gives you unlimited usage. And the, the next blocker is, you're like, oh my God, do I want to have access to my data? That's another psychological blocker. So you think about those two blockers. In order to get value from AI, you can't be watching the register and be scared. Oh my God, what is this agent going to cost? And you can't be scared. Oh my God, what if like, you know, Go Abacus, we have Go Abacus's cap table, we have Go Abacus's due diligence on, you know, in a location. We, we have two factor authentication, we've got it encrypted, we got all this stuff. We, we had a, we, we don't want to have a situation where David calls me one day and says, hey, by the way, somebody did a search in, you know, chat GPT and our cap table came up because they asked what's the cap table of Go Abacus? I know this sounds fantastical, but remember when, what was the, the first image generation company that broke out and they were indexing Getty Images and when they started making images of things, the Getty Images logo started coming up. It was the. And then Getty Images sued them because they were like, hey, hate to tell you, but not only did you get caught red handed, not only did you steal our images, you're now doing trademark infringement because your goddamn slop AI, it was stable diffusion. I believe. Am I correct, Alex?
- [20:23]
Alex Wilhelm
I believe that's right.
- [20:24]
Jason Calacanis
I've been doing this job for decades now. Not a lot of people have worked with more startups than me over 600 investments. But honestly, every IO might be the exception because every IO is working with every new startup. It's the all in one finance, banking and HR app. They understand startups and they're now at over 1000 startups and that means first time founders working on their pre seed rounds but also veteran teams who've raised a series A or beyond. They can partner with every. And they are. And why are they partnering with them? Just to scale up their business, build out their teams, take care of things that are not core to your product or your service. That means banking, payroll, benefits, taxes, compliance. Everything you need to run your company is done in one place by one trusted partner. And they're going to give you 3% cash back on all company purchases. Purchases sent directly to your bank account. So it's time to visit every IO and get back to focusing on what really matters for your business. Every IO is going to help you do that. E V E R Y IO Talk
- [21:25]
Alex Wilhelm
about an embarrassing moment but I do want to say Jason, right now we're good. So I asked Chat GPT what is the cap table of Go abacus and it says there does not appear to be a fully public capitalization table for Go Abacus. So you're actually. It may have gotten the wrong company now that I look at it. But anyways so far so good on that front. Let's do some math though Jason, because I think you're making a good point about, about usage and costs. The if garbage is correct and people do want this because they do want to have you know, meter free AI, the money is huge. 1600 go ones at a minimum of 250 apiece is $400 million. So David, how long is it going to take you to deliver all those units? Because either you just made the new biggest hardware company in the world or it's going to take a couple of quarters to get those ships.
- [22:08]
David Moscatelli
This is where you know I have to talk to our board and you know I, I become the pseudo board therapist. They call me late at night worried and I talk them off the ledge. So hardware is, it's supposed to be
- [22:20]
Alex Wilhelm
the other way around.
- [22:21]
Jason Calacanis
I just want to point out that the founder having to talk the vc the board off the ledge though to the I may need to get on this board. I may, you know you always have. David, I don't do boards anymore because we have too many portfolio companies. You can always push the button. There's the BAT signal and you can say the JCAL BAT signal. If you need me to come to a board meeting I will come with Thor's hammer and Captain America shield and level set. If you need me to come, I will come.
- [22:50]
David Moscatelli
I love that I take you upon that.
- [22:52]
Jason Calacanis
Press the button anytime.
- [22:54]
David Moscatelli
But yeah, they're worried like, well David, how are you going to ship this? Well the good news about Enterprise is when they decide to purchase these items, it's not like okay, we added it to the cart, we hit buy, we put it in our credit card checkout and it's like shit, there's like a three or four month delay, alignment meetings. It wants to talk about where it's going to go, how is it going to ship? Like can we rack it? How do we do that? You know we have a, you know a script file that we send out that like collects their network configuration so we can pre install it. So what am I trying to say, Alex? We have some lead time. That lead time does two things for us. It removes a lot of the risk around supply chain. We have time to get the parts that we need and then the second thing is we have time to build the thing now. Building the thing is struggle. I'm a founder so I love this stuff. I geek out about it. Yes, I'm there helping build go ones. We've purchased these robotic arms that help us do it.
- [23:52]
Alex Wilhelm
Do you have a picture of your factory? I didn't know you guys were using robotic arms but if you have one handy, I would love to see this. Jason, we do love a factory shot.
- [23:59]
Jason Calacanis
One of the issues with hyper growth startups is the accounts receivable can exceed the operational capital which then there is two solutions. You can get a venture debt line or just a debt line in general, factoring whatever. But the better thing to do and listen, I'm not on the board. I mean I think we have a board seat but I think the better thing for us to do in this situation, if I was going to do a little mini, you know, powwow here is we should allow people who pay in full to move to the top of the list and then people put a deposit down. Go next. So there's two options if you really need this, you put a full deposit down. That's one VIP list. That's the VIP list. And then the second is you put a deposit down, we call you. How do I know this is a great strategy? This is what Elon did with the Signature series. When I bought signature 16 of the Roadster, I put 150k deposit down. When I bought the model s serial number one and serial number 73, I had to put 150k down for each. So he got 450k of, you know, my money into the company to be operating capital. I took the risk, but I got the reward. And that's really what you should do is just tell folks, listen, you know, if you put a full deposit down. Yeah. So because you're taking a deposit of what, 20%, 50%, it depends on.
- [25:17]
David Moscatelli
Some clients, surprisingly, are paying upfront, which is great. A lot of them are capitalizing it monthly.
- [25:23]
Jason Calacanis
Oh, right. Because they want to depreciate. Yeah. So there's bonus depreciation. Thanks to our incredible, amazing, wonderful, extraordinary. Insert a couple more compliments here. President Trump, you always got to do that just to stay in good standing. You know, he did like this capital depreciation, which was very good for this kind of thing. Yeah. I don't know where it is now. For what is the business depreciation in 2026? Is it 60% you can just write off immediately? It's not 100%, I don't think it's nice.
- [25:52]
David Moscatelli
I know that.
- [25:53]
Jason Calacanis
Yeah, it was like 100%, I think, in the first year. And then I think it goes down 90, 80, 10 or something goes down 20, 26.
- [25:58]
Alex Wilhelm
Businesses can utilize 100 bonus depreciation for eligible new or used assets. Machinery, equipment, software.
- [26:04]
Jason Calacanis
And so it's 100%. Yeah.
- [26:05]
Alex Wilhelm
That's great.
- [26:07]
David Moscatelli
Awesome.
- [26:07]
Jason Calacanis
Great business.
- [26:08]
Alex Wilhelm
My taxes didn't get. My personal taxes didn't get such a lovely boost. I'm jealous.
- [26:12]
Jason Calacanis
You do have that actually. Did you have. Well, no, you have a. Or you have a. You have a corporation. So what that means is if you bought a MacBook or whatever, you could depreciate the whole cost now as opposed to putting it over five years. So that would. Now you're, look at you. You're like, huh. So if you want to stimulate the economy, you know, independent of what you think, President Trump or Biden or Kamala, whatever, when you do this depreciation, what you get is a massive rush to, you know, to build businesses. So a data center or, you know, putting a go abacus or two in, people get a little more frisky, they invest a little bit more, they get off the sidelines. Because if you were going to pay your taxes anyway, let's say even with your, you know, one man, two, two person operation, you know, if you have to pay 50K in taxes this year, and I said, well, you could buy 10k of laptops for everybody and a Mac studio and you don't have to pay taxes on that. You'd be like, oh, wow, it's 35% off. It's 40% off. Yeah, yeah, it's pretty juicy. And it does get people off the sidelines.
- [27:17]
Alex Wilhelm
Totally in favor of Jason. 1000%. If I hadn't seen the recent news that the US now has debt greater than GDP, I would be. I'd be totally in favor. I want to ask before we let David go about Chicago, because this company is based in really my. My original technology hub. I have a lot of affection for Chicago, but I haven't been there in a hot minute. So what's the startup scene like? How active are VCs? Did Chicago finally get some later stage investors? Talk to me.
- [27:43]
David Moscatelli
Okay, so, Alex, you know, I. I tried to ask my parents tactfully once, like, why do we live here? Like, you could have chosen any place, like, but you chose here. And I never got, like, a straight answer out of them. But I've. I've never really regretted living here because it's just like, it's kind of a work city. People here work, and it has that Midwestern vibe, and so I just love it in Chicago. I know there are other places in the world that are fantastic too, but Chicago's always home to me in terms of the tech scene, Alex, this is a corny answer, but it's true. I'm working, so I don't know.
- [28:21]
Jason Calacanis
I love it. That's the right answer.
- [28:23]
David Moscatelli
Yeah. I don't go to those things.
- [28:24]
Jason Calacanis
Well, what about hiring? I mean, I do think there's been a number of companies that have left. Obviously, people are going to certain states for tax reasons, for freedom reasons, for. So I wonder if there's a. I know there's been some big companies there, from Groupon to others. So there. There. There is talent there. Do you have an in office culture or remote?
- [28:43]
David Moscatelli
We have an in office culture. I was remote for a long time, Jason. But then it's just easier when they're right next to you, when you could say, hey, man, let's talk about this.
- [28:52]
Jason Calacanis
Yes.
- [28:52]
David Moscatelli
You know, so we have two offices that we go between merchandise, smart and full to market. So it's in office culture in terms of the talent. There's a lot of talent out here. There's a ton of talent that we're tapping into. And, you know, I love San Francisco, but when I've tried to recruit from there. I love you, San Francisco. I love everyone from San Francisco. A lot of the folks that we try and hire, like, they want these crazy high salaries, and I think they deserve them. But there's like a certain caliber of work that you have to execute on to get.
- [29:20]
Jason Calacanis
Absolutely, absolutely. And I'm like, they're also a bit mercenary. You know, when you've been through this, like, you know, through three or four cycles, it's just like four year vest. And the loyalty to the company is second to the next opportunity. So there's a group of folks who just float between, you know, they started at Google, they went to matter, they did Uber, now they're at anthropic, whatever. And you know, if they leave some shares on the table because you know they can work Anthropic off of space x off of OpenAI and say, hey, you got to make up for what you know, I'm leaving on the table. You know, they're more than willing to do that. So I think it's a really smart to be the big fish in a smaller pond and then have continuity. And that's what I found. People love living in Austin. I think of 23 people, I'm down to like maybe five, including Alex, who are remote. I like to stay active. You know, I'm getting a little older, but I've started drinking IMH Daily Ultimate Essentials and it is delicious. I'm starting to notice a real shift. I drink it every morning and I just feel less tired. Right. Which allows me to really, you know, catch up and attack the day. IMH's daily Ultimate Essentials packs the benefits of 16 different supplements into one tasty drink. It's loaded with 92 nutrient rich ingredients including vitamins, minerals, adaptogens along with pre, pro and postbiotics. It's giving me a great energy boost. It calms your digestion and it's an easy habit to stick with because it tastes delicious. So start feeling like your best self every day with im8. Go to im8health.com twist and use the code twist to get a free welcome kit, five free travel sachets and 10% off your order. These statements have not been evaluated by the fda. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. And what I said to people, I think it was two years ago, you probably remember Alex, I just said, if you're an ultra high performer. E H P if you're an EHP ultra high performer, you can stay remote. Anybody else has to return to office. And then over time, people who were not in the top and I said, people said, what's the ultra high performer? I said, before our organization, it's the top one third because everybody's a high performer. Ultra high is the top third. Alex would be in the top third. You know, Matt, who's our top sales guy, he's in the top third. Heidi, top, you know, hardest working person. So, you know, I make an exception for them. Everybody else, I was just like, we'll see. And now I got everybody in office. It works better. You can actually build a culture. And then, you know, like, hey, you're like, hey, why does Alex get to work from home? Why does Heidi get to work from. It's like, look at the performance. All right, listen, we got to drop you off. David, continued success. I hope we've been helpful to you. You went to Founder University, then you went to the accelerator. So you're one of, you know, the. The true success stories in the, you know, JCAL portfolio collection. I'm so proud of you. I think we also did a syndicate too. So you. You are literally the trifecta of the vision I had, which is podcasts, Founder, university, accelerator, syndicate, which is like, hey, over the life of a company, how could we be helpful knowledge and community from the podcast? Founder, university, community, knowledge, maybe a small check. Accelerator. Okay, now we're definitely in business together. We're introducing you to as many great investors. It's got my name on it. People might give you a meeting or two because of that, and then finally syndicate. Okay, we can scale with you, you know, and keep our pro rata, sometimes even go super pro rata. So just absolutely great to be on that trifecta of a journey with you, David. Very just. I mean, we knew you were going to be successful, but this is a. A level of success, you know, up there with Micro One and Thalamus and, you know, Tax GPT. We've got a number of breakout companies right now. And just really excited.
- [33:06]
Alex Wilhelm
No pressure.
- [33:08]
Jason Calacanis
No, I just. I mean, here's the good news. Go Abacus is hiring selectively in Chicago for killers. David at Goabicus Co will get you directly to the CEO if you're extraordinary, if you think you can add value, you know, hey, this is a great rocket ship to get on now.
- [33:28]
David Moscatelli
Thank you, Jason. Thank you, Alex. I have to say, I feel like my life is now complete because Jason said he's proud of me. My next goal is to get Mike's savitos to say he's proud of me.
- [33:37]
Jason Calacanis
Oh, good.
- [33:37]
Alex Wilhelm
Good luck.
- [33:38]
Jason Calacanis
I.
- [33:38]
David Moscatelli
If I could get that, then I would be complete. I feel like that's gonna be much harder.
- [33:42]
Jason Calacanis
I mean, I've been working for him since the early 90s and he still held that. I think he might have said it this year. He might have said, I'm proud of you because I'm. I've matured just a little bit. Okay, great job, David. We'll drop you off.
- [33:55]
Alex Wilhelm
I have to do a little. A little interstitial before we bring up.
- [33:57]
Jason Calacanis
Please.
- [33:58]
Alex Wilhelm
Okay, so David said that they have offices in the Merchandise Mart, which does not sound cool, but I want to just make a little, little note here. This is the Chicago Merchandise Mart. If you're on the audio version, imagine a building that is so large, it is the only building, I think in the U.S. aside from the Pentagon, that has its own zip code. And we were talking about.
- [34:16]
Jason Calacanis
Lord.
- [34:17]
Alex Wilhelm
Right, right.
- [34:18]
Jason Calacanis
I mean, it looks like something out of a science fiction movie. Who builds a building like that? It must have a giant courtyard. Right? So in order to get all the sunlight in there, or is it just that deep?
- [34:29]
Alex Wilhelm
Merchandise Mart, from the top, I'll see what I can find here.
- [34:32]
Jason Calacanis
Oh, yeah, if we do. You know what? I. It might have been a factory building. Therefore they didn't. But in today's regulations, you need to have light coming in. So the depth and the footprint of that building is so deep they must have air shoots. So when they built those in. No, it.
- [34:48]
Alex Wilhelm
No, no.
- [34:49]
Jason Calacanis
It might. Look, there's a cut out there.
- [34:50]
Alex Wilhelm
There might be a cutout, but it is deep and thick and what, what it's for. I think in Chicago should be putting every single startup in that building. You want to build community, that would do it. Density, density. You have the building, just stuff it full of tech companies. Next up on the show, we have Jose Caldera. He is the founder of Yanez, which is a bit Tensor backed company of sorts. Jason rebranded from Yanez Compliance. If you're on the Googles and what does it do? Well, it wants to help people determine if a human is present, if a unique human is present, and how to ensure that when an agent is out in the world, the human that gave it permission to go out and do things for it is legitimate. So, Jose, you're solving personhood and uniqueness on the Internet. Welcome to the show.
- [35:36]
Jose Caldera
Nice to be here. I appreciate the time. Jason and Alex. Yeah, so it's a thing that we need all to wrestle with moving forward, trying to make sure that every participant that you have, every. Everyone that is in this call, that is actually a human and is actually unique. Some challenges that we never thought we would face, but something that we have to deal on a daily basis.
- [36:00]
Jason Calacanis
Now, who is the customer here? Who needs to figure out identity and needs to do it through a service like this? There are, I know some services, Alex. I don't know which they are but sometimes when I'm doing a transaction online, it asked me to take a picture of myself I think for age verification. Now I'm trying to remember what platform recently did this. I know the dating apps do it so I didn't experience it there but I did experience it on. Oh, I think I may have experienced it when I was doing Clear or TSA Pre. It might have been TSA Pre where they took a picture of you and then I did an age verification. Really where it. Oh, it might have been TikTok. I went. That was what it was. I went live on TikTok recently and it did a scan of my face and it said I'm just doing an age thing. And it was like, okay, here's you're old dude. And it let me start live. So who's using this? What are they using it for?
- [36:52]
Jose Caldera
The notion that you need to figure out whether you're dealing with a human. It's everywhere. So if you think about Captchas, you know, when Captcha was about, it was really about trying to figure out whether the person that you were interacting with was a live human. Right. So it would answer a little bit of a challenge. And then by answering that challenge then you proved yourself that you were there and you were a human. And of course across the years that has become a little bit of a nuance and people are looking for alternatives on how to do this. So who is the user? Everyone, every organization needs in moving forward is going to have to make a distinction in between whether you're dealing with a bot or whether you're dealing with an actual human. And that is different in a way from the types of identity verification systems that you were describing before where you actually have to provide prove in a way that you are who you say you are. Right. And I think there is a distinction there because as we move forward, the use of identity data and identity systems to kind of deal with fraud and so on are going to be very challenged because of the growth of deep fake attacks.
- [38:02]
Jason Calacanis
What I would take from that as an investor is the service is new, we don't have too many customers right now or we don't know who the customers are using it. Do we have like known customers using it?
- [38:11]
Jose Caldera
Our, our, our system?
- [38:12]
Jason Calacanis
Yeah.
- [38:12]
Jose Caldera
So we, we are in alpha state for this product and we have about five projects that are coming live soon. Got but one of Them are defi protocols, peer to peer moving money, digital wallets and that kind of product, that kind of industry.
- [38:29]
Jason Calacanis
Got it. So crypto really wants this kind of solution and they understand the crypto ecosystem. And you would just do this through an API. So I'm using, I have an app, I'm Robinhood or you know, I've got an app, it's a dating app. I would just hit it with an API and then it proves that it's a human. Correct?
- [38:46]
Jose Caldera
Well, you would have at some point to. The solution is biometric based. So at some point you have to do a capture of those biometrics and then a challenge to those biometrics. So you have to do a challenge and a capture. So that means that you are going to sort of hand it off, if you will, to an application that is going to do this verification and the capture.
- [39:05]
Jason Calacanis
And that's the miners on the other side are coming up with algorithms to do that and that's their role.
- [39:11]
Alex Wilhelm
Ah, close. Jose, hit him.
- [39:13]
Jose Caldera
Yes. So the miner is. So when you're trying to prove that you are human, right. You need to prove that, well, you're not an AI generated content, you are there. So what the miners are doing for us is generating the synthetic identity data that we use to challenge these models. So in a way, our models for detection, our models to prove that you are there, that you're a real participant, are always being attacked by our miners. And that's their function. Their function is to attack our system every day as hard as they can so that we can build better and better and better, better detection. So we can keep the ARM phrase basically going in that way.
- [39:53]
Jason Calacanis
Amazing.
- [39:54]
Alex Wilhelm
No? I think it's really, really cool. And the agentic use case here is why I'm really excited because I would love to be able to delegate to my agent the fact that I, Alex the human, have given it responsibilities and permissions to interact with my data and financial information. So talk to me about how delegation comes into this and how quickly you think you're going to be able to serve customers in the AI space.
- [40:14]
Jose Caldera
Yeah, that is a fantastic case. Right. Because agent world is growing very fast and is supposed to exponentially grow within the next year, especially in the e commerce world. So the idea that you can go and say these are my agents and I'm authorizing these agents to do this type of activities is something that is going to be fundamental on the other side to prove that Jose actually did this transaction. Right. So if you go to a merchant and you go and Say hey, I bought my thousand dollar computer or my $3,000 computer and it was an agent that did it. But you can actually tie that agent and give authorization to that. That gives you the merchant on the other side the tools required to say, I know for a fact that this agent was authorized to do this transaction on behalf of a human. And that's where the connection into the agent world is going to come. And that is just an example within the commerce ecosystem. But this is true for everything. This is true for if you want to sign say a contract and you have an agent that is signing that contract on your behalf, you want to make sure that that agent has a chain of custody in terms of the authorization. And one of the things that this technology gives you the ability to, is to give that chain of non repudiation in line. Right.
- [41:31]
Jason Calacanis
Let's show the video. Alex. We have a video. Yeah, and then we'll give another question.
- [41:35]
Alex Wilhelm
We do have a video. This is from our friends at Varanes and I'm pulling it up right now. Here it is.
- [41:39]
Jason Calacanis
Videos worth 10,000 words. And you could sportscast it if you want.
- [41:43]
Jose Caldera
Yeah. So basically what you're looking at is a registration concept. Here is how somebody registers and how the application is capturing your biometrics. And then those biometrics are being processed, cryptographically processed inside your device. And then we generate this privacy preserving set of bio keys that we store in a decentralized registry. And then when that person comes in, either to validate itself or try to register again, we can tell whether there is already has been registered or not. And that's what the uniqueness is about, that you are a unique person in here. So when you are doing things like, you know, voting, when you're doing things like try to say, okay, I'm going to give you rewards to this particular human, you actually have to make sure that that human is unique, that you don't have 2100 identities attached to the same human.
- [42:34]
Jason Calacanis
This is what I want for my x.com account and what I tried to do with subscriptions. I have 2000 subscribers out of my 1.2 million followers. So sometimes when I don't have time to like look at my replies, I just, I'm like, this is going to be a spicy tweet. I'll just let the $1 a month that goes to charity subscribers post. And by the way, some of them are people who are like maga, America first, trolls, whatever, they hate me and they pay a dollar a month to dunk on me. But I'm like, at least I know there's a hurdle here and it can't be there. Nobody has 2,000 of them because that would be all 2,000 of my subscribers. But I would love to say, hey, anybody who's a subscriber, a blue check mark, and who, when they post their post, it recognizes they're human. And I think that's what's coming next to X is they're going to do their own version of this proof of human. Because social networks are getting filled with AI slop. My replies, I can tell when something's AI slop. And it's so easy to do because you just have a, a virtual machine come up, you log in, it's looks, it's moving a mouse around, it's reading tweets randomly and then it replies and comes up with a spicy reply. And then of course they get followers, yada, yada, it's very hard for them to detect. But proof of human man, that's going to really change everything. And that would just be wonderful. I mean, I don't mind doing that. And in Korea you have to have a Social Security number, the equivalent, in order to join a social network. Now that might be too much for Americans. We might still want to have the ability to have an anonymous or semi, pseudo anonymous thing. But you know, for consumers to have that level of control. Only show humans in my feed, I think a lot of people would click it if I could say on Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, et cetera, only show humans. Only show human written posts. My God, I would love it. So Jose, continued success. What subnet number are you?
- [44:26]
Jose Caldera
We're subnet 54.
- [44:27]
Jason Calacanis
How long have you had that subnet? And maybe explain to people how they can participate in the subnet if they're technical or non technical and they're just building an app.
- [44:35]
Jose Caldera
So we launched in June of last year, we saw Bittensor as a great opportunity to create this network of decentralized attackers into our models. And that's what lured us into Bittensor. How do you take an advantage of all these scientists across the world to do this? So the current miners is, as you know, is a permissionless environment. So everybody could be a miner, everybody could be producing data. And we have the incentives, the protocol has the incentives to bring these miners into, into the protocol. So with that then we are, we are opening the challenge every time, the incentive algorithm. So Bittensor is a network of incentives. So basically the miners are incentivized, we give them money and they try to break our systems. And that's, that's kind of the cycle of it. And this is that ever. I mean that's the reason why we can be horror agnostic that we can actually get a leg up of the fraudster because well, we are inviting all of them into trying to break our systems before we build the protections in the solution that we provide to the market.
- [45:53]
Jason Calacanis
Awesome. And the market cap is but nine, $10 million right now. So if people want to understand why I'm excited about Bittensor, I consider Bittensor my own little Y combinator launch accelerator, Techstars. There's 128 of these subnets currently they have to fight to be one of the subnets. They have these tiny market caps. You can participate on the subnet level, you can participate on the TAO level and buy tao and we'll see where this winds up. If Jose doesn't build and deliver, you lose the subnet. If he does deliver, the market cap goes up. That it's the wild west, it's permission list. Disclaimer, Disclaimer, disclaimer. But when I see, and now we've had I think 20 different subnets, maybe 10 or 20 different subnets here on the program. Stillcore Capital, my partner Mark Jeffries working on that. You know they're investing in the subnets. I've invested in the tau on the top. I don't know Alex, if you bought a little towel on the side or not yet.
- [46:47]
Alex Wilhelm
Actually it's on my, it's on my short list once I get a little story. No, no. I have an old legacy Citibank account that I can't access that has like 11k in it.
- [46:57]
Jason Calacanis
I'm just gonna YOLO. YOLO. Five dimes in. Yeah. So anyway, I, I think it's like an interesting project. It could go to zero. It could go to the moon. Probably winds up somewhere between those two. Jose, thanks for coming on the program.
- [47:11]
Alex Wilhelm
Thank you, Jose.
- [47:12]
Jose Caldera
Thank you so much for having me.
- [47:13]
Alex Wilhelm
No, what they really want is Rapid Fire Foundry University Japan. Applications are now open for Cohort 2.
- [47:19]
Jason Calacanis
Oh well, that's going to be June 7th when we close the applications. It starts July 21st. I know that because I'll be in Tokyo in July, which is going to be a blast. And I'm really excited because I'm going to bring the fam. You can apply at Tokyo launch co. The program graduates in October in San Francisco. So the top companies from that program come to America and get to meet a bunch of people here. It's a great Program. It's our second one. We do it in partnership with our friends at Jetro. And what else can I tell you? You know, if you're, I think in terms of what qualifies you to be in it, you can go to the website. They basically want people who are in Japan or citizens of Japan or based in Japan. Go get the details at the website. Tokyo launch co. We'll see you there.
- [48:07]
Alex Wilhelm
It's going to be fantastic. How did Cohort 1 go?
- [48:10]
Jason Calacanis
I mean, it was incredible. We had 60 great companies. The top 10 came to America and you know, they're incredibly innovative. And something magical happened in Japan over the last decade. It used to be your parents pushed you really hard to go get a safe job. There's a term called a salaryman. A little gender bias there. But a salaryman as a concept means you go work for a company for 30, 40 years, you get your retirement, you're loyal to the company, companies loyal to you. That's every parent's dream. And kids who said, I want to go work at a startup, the parents would be like, oh my God, that doesn't sound safe today because they have so many jobs available in those, you know, large corporations. Young people have said, why not do a startup, why not join a startup? And the big corporation job will always be there.
- [49:03]
Alex Wilhelm
Right?
- [49:04]
Jason Calacanis
So if I want to flip to become a salary man or woman, I have that as my safety school. But my primary, I really, the, the going for the brass ring is now doing a startup. So that culturally is amazing, which is why I'm investing my time there. If it was 10 or 20 years ago when, you know, it's kind of hard to get people in Japan to think that way. Think startup first. The entire planet is going startup first. Why? Layoffs, tech layoffs, which I think is a good segue.
- [49:34]
Alex Wilhelm
Yep, we'll start there. So this week we saw layoffs from Cloudflare, we saw layoffs from Coinbase, and we got some updated news from Block, the fintech company that went through massive layoffs earlier this year. A couple of quick notes here, Jason. Cloudflare is cutting, I think something like 11% of its staff, a large number. And they said that their AI use has gone up by 600% in the last three months. They are trying to re architect their company for the quote agentic AI era. Coinbase, similar idea. They want smaller teams, they want managers that are ICs as well. They want to have fewer layers. And we're hearing it again and again and again. Every tech company wants to get smaller and faster. Jason, I'm kind of blown away, though, by how many people are getting fired.
- [50:16]
Jason Calacanis
Yeah, Coinbase is 14%, and that just happened. That's 700 people. Block was 4,000 people in February. That was 4. 40%. Crypto.com 12%.
- [50:27]
Alex Wilhelm
Cloud Flare is 20%, not 11. Sorry, I got my numbers mixed up there.
- [50:30]
Jason Calacanis
No problem. And so these are not insignificant layoffs. And now certain people are going to want to say these companies were bloated. Certainly that was true. And we saw that starting in the Postco era, they had run up too many employees and everybody started the layoffs. Then that would be 21, 22, 23 layoffs. Now, when we look at 24, 25, 26 layoffs, a lot of that is people who weren't brave enough or didn't want to take the medicine back then for being bloated. But now it's clearly AI. It's clearly AI related. Now, are some people using the COVID of AI to make themselves feel better about it?
- [51:13]
Alex Wilhelm
100%.
- [51:14]
Jason Calacanis
Okay. So multiple things can be true. I am not a partisan. I am not trying to defend the Trump administration. I don't have a horse in the race. I'm a moderate independent. You know, you, Alex, you're a little bit left. Some of my other friends are a little bit right. I'm straight down the middle here. I can tell you exactly what's going on. It used to be that deploying people was how you won. You could use capital and you could use people. Talent and capital were two vectors for beating people that's now switched. What is the playbook for founders today? At scale, it's not the Google Playbook and the Facebook playbook of we're just going to hire everybody smart, figure it out later. And it wasn't. We're going to raise as much money as possible and figure it out later, a la Uber. Now we're moving into a new era where it's infrastructure and AI as a weapon. The people deploying AI the fastest are getting the gains the fastest, which increases their margin, which means they're more profitable, which means their stocks go up, which means they have higher value RSUs to give to the most elite employees, and that's the virtuous cycle. Or you use that capital to build infrastructure that gives you a definitive advantage, like we're seeing the hyperscalers do, whether it's Amazon, whether it's Facebook, whether it's Google, whether it's elon with Colossus 1 and 2. And now having cursor and anthropic as their customers. So let's let that sit for a minute and what you'll understand is the people who are making AI, the people participating in AI, understand the application of AI a hundred, a thousand times better than legacy companies. Therefore, they are the canaries in the coal mines. And Block restated their earnings forecast. Correct. Alex, explain that piece of this, because I believe that that is the key piece.
- [53:20]
Alex Wilhelm
As you can say, we are raising our full year guidance to reflect our strong execution and increased expectations for the remainder of the year. Why does this matter in the context of what Jason just said? Well, the company went through massive layoffs earlier this year, partially predicated around AI. And it said in the same document that as of early April, 100% of Block employees are using AI tools to do their work. Production code changes per Engineer are above 2 1/2 x. So the company cut, it refactored how it run, ran, and now it is seeing results that are both better internally, how it operates with engineers and so forth and in terms of financial outcomes. So it's kind of a very quick validation, Jason, of the things they were saying in March and I think a validation of your point about how quickly things are changing. The thing that I want to narrow down on though is if you're a startup, you're already building a relatively small team. Right. If you're a Series A company, you don't have a thousand employees to cut. So what does, in your view, Jason, the perfect or ideal startup setup look like in terms of people, investment and AI at maybe the seed and Series A level? I want to just make this operational.
- [54:25]
Jason Calacanis
Well, if we get to the operational basis, it's use AI, be AI first or don't work here. And so I right now have a company where I would say I'm at 20%. I probably have four team members who are AI first. And I am going to give the edict this year by the end of the year, AI first or this isn't the place for you.
- [54:49]
Alex Wilhelm
Can you define AI first here? Because I think we use that almost anyway.
- [54:54]
Jason Calacanis
Yeah, very, very simple. Simple. Any task you're doing, you have to ask AI first, how could I do this task better? And then any task that you do over and over again, you have to work with AI to let AI do that task, or at least attempt to. Yeah. So frequently you see me doing this with the team because you are seeing me behind the scenes and I'll have somebody say, yeah, okay, I don't know how to do that and I'm like, boom, want to shoot myself? And I'm like, okay, here's what you do. Ask AI how do I make, you know, social media clips for this podcast more effective? Then the next level of thinking is that's like you learning with the AI. The next level of thinking is here are our last 10 YouTube clips. Please vet them, create a scoring system for that. Please run that scoring system against this, you know, Google sheet or this RSS feed and then send a report every day and take your skills MD file and run every Sunday. A deep learning of every way that people have talked about that's different than last week on how to make better titles and better thumbnails and just increase the, you know, engagement with your content and then tell me every week how that skill changed. So you're like managing the agent and you're managing yourself with AI. I still have people on my team. The majority of my team is not doing this. And the excuse is, well, I'm busy, I'm doing other things and oh, I didn't get to it. If you don't have the time to get to it, you don't have a job. That's what startups are doing now. That's what Block has done. Block specifically said 100% of employees are using this. And the real headline is not like, you know, us talking about this. It, it's the brass tack. So that's what I was trying to get you TO, which is Q1 2026 earnings per share. Block earned $0.85 per share versus 68 which was expected and 56 a year ago.
- [56:52]
Alex Wilhelm
That's roughly 26% beat guidance or when they raised guidance.
- [56:57]
Jason Calacanis
Whatever it is, earnings are going up. Yes. So just to get to brass tacks here, yes, their forecast, block raised its 2026 adjusted EPS guidance from 3.85 a share to about three year pressure, which is 62% higher than the 2025. Separately analyst estimate show earnings expected to grow from roughly 222 per share to 333, about 50% next year. So what's happening is the all of this is now dropping to the bottom line. And once one set of founders have now set the bogey, they've said we're going to increase earnings dramatically. You're starting to see the earnings guidance go up and the costs stay the same. That is the key here. And it is a prisoner's dilemma for anybody who wants to be loyal to their lollygagging employees or even their average employees. I know I sound like a manic capitalist here. I'M just telling you how people think in Silicon Valley, how people think in corporate America, and how people think on Wall Street. If there's a gain to be had, you have no choice but to take it. That's capitalism. Because if you don't take it, your competitor takes it, their earnings go up, they can attract the best talent, you can't. They get more investment because people believe in the management team more. And then people stop believing in you. This is the prisoner's dilemma. This is the savageness of it. So how does one counter this? If you're an employee who's been laid
- [58:29]
Alex Wilhelm
off, go ahead, Alex, go super deep on AI. Build stuff yourself and show your future employer that you can kick ass and don't need help.
- [58:37]
Jason Calacanis
I mean, not to make this personal, but you worked at TechCrunch. TechCrunch got bought by private equity. It got sold three or four times in like 18 months. I don't know how many people voted.
- [58:47]
Alex Wilhelm
Brutal.
- [58:48]
Jason Calacanis
It's like a hot potato. I'm guessing you're doing plus or minus the same as you were, but you're independent now, correct? In terms of total work, total compensation, your total revenue versus being, you know, having one, one revenue stream with like TechCrunch versus now having multi revenue stream
- [59:05]
Alex Wilhelm
by the end of this year? I will be. Right now, I'm still building up towards it, but yeah, I'm going to get there. Yeah.
- [59:10]
Jason Calacanis
So let's take a pause there and say, hey, you're seeing this in journalism over and over and over again. The top folks start a substack. They do a podcast, they collaborate on podcasts like we're doing, and they basically become independent startup founders. The only way you will solve this problem, whether you're a graduate or you've been laid off, is to study your previous employer. Look for what was too small. If you've been laid off by block by other people, very simple playbook. Find two or three people who are also laid off, maybe even five or six, and say, hey, let's have a meeting. Let's get revenge on the person who laid us off. Get a chip on your shoulder, do a revenge startup. Look at your previous employer and say, what opportunities were they screwing up? What opportunities weren't they taking? What projects would they never get to? What did we learn from running that company that was smart and what was dumb?
- [60:05]
David Moscatelli
Yep.
- [60:06]
Jason Calacanis
Brainstorm. Brainstorm. Brainstorm. Try, you know, making three different products. Excuse me, you can leave that into the short. Try making three different products and put them in the order in which you think they'll succeed? If you try the first one and it gets traction, keep going. If it doesn't kill it, do the second one. If that gets traction, then double down and double down until something breaks out and can cover your six people or three people, co founders salaries and then you're independent of them. And that's where the economy is going. There will be a Cambrian and it's happening already. There's a Cambrian explorer, there's a Cambrian explosion of startups right now. At independent contractors, it is the future. The future is independent contractors, independent solo startups, startups of two or three making low hundreds of thousands to low millions per employee. And you know what? It's like the Wild West. This is like America at its greatest. It's like going west. Go west, young man, and go prospect. Get your 40 acres and a mule. Get your, get your gold mine going. You know, try to, you know, sell shovels, do whatever you got to do and get your claim. Go stake your claim. Folks, this is the opportunity. You can look at it like a victim or you can look at it as an opportunity. This is the greatest opportunity to stake your claim.
- [61:25]
Alex Wilhelm
Another thing that I saw, Jason, very recently was that Stripe, which has an atlas program which I use kind of as a proxy for people who want to start companies, I used Stripe Atlas to build my arc. This chart shows how many people are incorporating using Stripe Atlas. Again, single data point one company's information. Caveat, caveat, caveat. But we are seeing from previously a steady ramp up to a massive step function change in the first quarter of this year. Jason, if this holds across the broader US economy, you're dead on. That's.
- [61:55]
Jason Calacanis
And actually pull the chart up again. It started actually in 25. You started to see a 10, 20% increase each quarter in 2025. So if we look at Q1 2025 to Q1 2024, that looks like 10% and then the next quarter Q2 it looks like a massive, you know, growth it I. Now some of this could be the marketing, as you said with your disclaimers of Stripe Atlas. They could have put more marketing into it or whatever. They could have lowered their fee. You know, they could be beating their competitors, who knows. But this is, I think what you'd see across the board from anybody in corporations. It's an undeniable trend. And so yeah, go get it, folks. All right, lightning round, last story.
- [62:32]
Alex Wilhelm
Anthropic 50 billion. At a $900 billion pre money valuation, the FT reports that its revenue is about to reach a $45 billion annualized run rate. Expensive, cheap. How would you rate that round?
- [62:45]
Jason Calacanis
If they continue adding a billion or 2 billion or 3 billion every month, we could be sitting here in six months with another 10, 20 billion in revenue. Maybe they end the year at 50 or 60. So you know, this is going to get them into eventually the Mag 7, you know, territory. Right now they're a fraction of that compared to Amazon, Google, you know, and the people who are doing, you know, 50 billion a quarter, 100 billion a quarter. So you know, there are some very big companies out there. But I think it's fate accompli that they will, if, if there is an addition to the Mag 7 they will be in. And then I would say obviously SpaceX will be behind them and SpaceX plus Tesla will rocket to the number one position or number two position in the Max 7, which I think is, you know, fait accompli as well. And so congratulations to them. I'm not buying shares at that level. I think all of these are going to trade cheaper in a year or two after. So if you were going to buy shares in these companies right now, I think you're paying well above market and there's risk factors. I think after they ipo, you know, like many great companies, they'll be trading below their IPO price. You'll be able to get in on them later.
- [63:59]
David Moscatelli
Yeah.
- [63:59]
Alex Wilhelm
Also here's the thing. Do you know who owns a lot of anthropic shares? Every single major tech company that you already own in your.
- [64:04]
Jason Calacanis
I mean Amazon owns 20%.
- [64:06]
Alex Wilhelm
Right, right. And you know what I own a lot of in my next funds? Amazon. I feel like people talk about like, oh, we almost had an OpenAI if you weren't an early investor. Not really. I've owned Microsoft shares through my index funds since the first time they put a dollar into that company.
- [64:18]
Jason Calacanis
You have exposure if you own those, you have exposure if you own Nvidia because they're a big customer. It's a lot of proxies here. Yeah, last story.
- [64:24]
Alex Wilhelm
What's last story? All right, so whoop. Everyone's favorite fitness is bringing clinicians into their application via video chat. Now part of this is going to be an add on cost if you want to talk to these people live. But Jason, I'm curious, what do you think about these doctors on demand?
- [64:41]
Jason Calacanis
Yeah, this is a major sea change. Aura, function, Superpower and Whoop are all at the forefront of consumer led health care. And while everybody is hand wringing about the, you know, universal health Care. The technology industry is coming up in the back of the race and they're rebuilding the Stack Road Co Twist to get your GLPs. Tell them your uncle J Cal sent you. All of these are leading to consumer led healthcare and whoop now lets you do blood panels in it. They have an AI in it. And now you know I want a doctor. I and listen, I, I can afford to have you know like a you know, high end concierge doctor. I've had them two or three times in the past and those cost generally 20 to 50k a year. There's some super ones that might be 100k a year for a family but this is going to give people the ability. I'm going to guess it's $300 a consultation, $200 consultation. I don't think it will get covered by insurance. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, who knows. But it doesn't matter because if your co pay is 5,000 or whatever your deductible is, this stuff is so cheap comparatively to the cost of healthcare that I think people are going to start rolling their own. And I can't wait because listen, if I'm, I want my doctor to start with my whoop data. I want them to start with my blood panel from Function or Superpower. I want them to start with my H sleep data. But they won't. They generally won't. And then how do you get them the data, you know, inside these products? You can take screenshots you print out. I want a whoop first doctor. I want an eight sleep first doctor. I want a peptide first doctor. A blood test first doctor. Superpower has a concierge that's kind of like a consultant but not a doctor. Maybe they added one. This is going to change everything. And I've been thinking about states rights a whole bunch as we've watched this country go, you know, you know, so divided over the years. I think the state that provides universal healthcare, I think we should get rid of healthcare from the federal government. The federal government should give some amount of money to each state to deploy as they wish, which I think is kind of how it works already.
- [66:52]
Alex Wilhelm
Block grants and so forth.
- [66:54]
Jason Calacanis
Yeah, I think we should break this up state by state. And if a state wants to attract people, let's say you're Idaho and you know, you got a big push to get people to go there and you're trying to, you know, get people to, to move there. You could create universal healthcare or you could say hey everybody who lives here gets a Blood panel gets a whoop, gets a glp, gets a thousand dollars in, you know, these kind of services as part of being a citizen here and paying your taxes. We need to have 50 different competitive states going at it, just like we have 50 different states fighting it out for data centers for, you know, different headquarters of companies, tax breaks, etc. The federalization of this country and executive power is killing this country. The, the absolute ridiculous amount of debt we're going into is killing this country. The only way to fight it is to fight against federalism and to let it be 50 different experiments going on. I'm pretty sure you agree with me on this, Alex.
- [67:53]
Alex Wilhelm
Well, I just want to understand it because you're talking about the federal government spending money to give it to the states, let them run their own experiments. So to me, it still feels a little federal.
- [68:02]
Jason Calacanis
Yeah, or you deprecate that over some period of time and you let them collect it themselves. So your federal tax goes down, the federal government gets smaller. They, you know, like the Department of Education on a federal level, it's not working. You know, the health care at a federal level, it's not working. It's too big, it's too unruly. And then what you have is the states gaming the federal government and corruption at all levels, from federal down to state cities. We're seeing it everywhere. It's not just a blue state thing, it's everywhere. In Texas, we had a bunch of, you know, I know the, the, the Republicans are doing a really good job of exposing California, Minnesota, but we have a bunch of this fraud in Texas as well.
- [68:40]
Alex Wilhelm
Florida too.
- [68:41]
Jason Calacanis
Florida has it. I mean, it might not be as acute. Putting it all aside, there's too much fraud, there's too much gaming of the system. If it's a distributed system, it's going to be easier to control because you have local control. The local politicians are going to fight harder and they're going to be closer to their constituents who are going to knock them out of their position in terms of local governance if taxes keep going up and they'll be fighting to bring them down. Too much federalism. The federal government has to get smaller. And then we have to give the regions the ability, the states the ability to fight and innovate, whether it's on housing, health care or education. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
- [69:21]
Alex Wilhelm
You heard here first. Jason Calacanis comes out and endorses state level AI regulation.
- [69:25]
Jason Calacanis
I mean, yes, I mean, thank you for pointing that out. I do think there are things and you know, David Sachs and I have a big difference here. I wouldn't trust Biden or Kamala or Trump or J.D. vance with AI regulation for everything. We have poker regulation by state. Is it a bummer that you can't go to one poker site and everybody's done? Yes, but each state getting to decide gives them some, you know, gives us some ability to test it. Cannabis regulation, gambling, gay marriage. Listen, I know that we all have strong feelings about these, but being able to pick the state you want to live in across 50 different ones to the one that matches your particular view of how the world should be, that's beautiful. That's great. That's called choice. And so if we broke apart the AI regulation. Yeah. I don't think we need to regulate models on a city by city or state by state basis. But for self driving, sure, why not? Why not have states have the right to decide what they want to do for employment issues, licensing of taxis, whatever. I know it's unfair. Listen, I'm a big shareholder in a lot of these companies doing ride sharing and full self driving. But if, you know, Massachusetts and New York and California and Texas have different views of this. I went through this already with Uber. Texas, you know, I'm sorry, Nevada took a long time to get Uber. People fought it in different states. Okay. Viva la difference. Better to have that than to have some God kings in Washington D.C. who are on the grift, who are getting paid by these lobbyists. That system's broken. We know that system's broken. So why not let the states have at it? I just. The older I get and the more I see the corruption, the more I see the executive power getting abused, the more I want more independence and more state sovereignty.
- [71:15]
Alex Wilhelm
I wrote about this the other day and I completely agree.
- [71:18]
Jason Calacanis
Cautious optimism.
- [71:19]
Alex Wilhelm
Yeah, well, I just. There's a lot of talk right now about AI regulation. I didn't bring it up just to be slightly annoying, but more to the point that the White House was floating some ideas about kind of having pre release rights to AI models and then people freaked out and they're kind of, they're walking that back. But even that hint of giving. Not Congress, because I think that would be slightly different. The executive branch, to your point of executive power control over what AI models I can use terrifies me to no end. Jason. No interest in that. Pass. Thank you.
- [71:46]
Jason Calacanis
Absolutely. Yeah, we just. Not where we want to live, right? Not where we want to go. Not where we want to go.
- [71:50]
Alex Wilhelm
Long live capitalism. Long live democracy and federalism. Because that gets power to the States.
- [71:55]
Jason Calacanis
All right. And we'll see you next time. Monday. Let's twist. Bye. Bye.