Jason Calacanis (2:54)

To have a small venture fund like sub 10 million previously, and I think they had increased it under Trump's first term to 12 million, you can have these qualifying venture capital vehicles. All of these regulations started after the Great Depression when people were basically scamming people out of money with different investment vehicles. Think like, you know, here's a prospect somewhere out in the Wild west where they're going to have a gold claim or something. Anyway, we're sitting here 100 years later, literally 95, 96 years later, and some of these old regulations are still there. And one of them around these formation of capital vehicles has been the limit of 250 accredited investors in $10 million funds to have these small, easy to run venture vehicles, micro funds, let's call them. Well now it's going from 250 participants to 500, from 10 million to 50 million. What does this mean? Well, if you did 250 people, that's 40k each to do a 10 million fund. If you do 500, it's only 20k each to do a 10 million Fund. This dovetails with another part of the regulations here in what is, this is like an accurate, it's an acronym Incentivizing New Ventures and Economic Strength through Capital Formation Act. That's the Invest Act. Incentivizing New Ventures as in Funds and Economic Strength through Capital Formation Act. And it passed on a bipartisan basis. The other part that's super important that dovetails with this is section two or three. So they're going to create a test which will allow anybody who's non accredited, which is 95% of the country, to be accredited. Those other folks are going to be able to participate. So you combine these things to these two things together. Alex, what you could have is, I don't know, a bunch of HR executives who make $75,000 a year who really understand the HR space. They could form together, you know, 500 of them and put 10k each into a $5 million fund. And then anytime they get sold on some new productivity software for the HR space. They could say, hey, yeah, we'd love to have you come to our syndicate, our little venture fund. Pitch us on it and we'll vote and we'll all participate in it. What this also does is since it's a test, it becomes fair. Previously, as an accredited investor, you had to have like 200k a year in revenue or income, rather, or you had to have like a million dollars in net worth, not counting your. Your home. And then there's qualified purchaser, which is like 5 million in net worth. What this means is the ability to become a rich person, move from poor to middle class, middle class to rich, and all the little strata in between was greatly limited if you weren't born rich or got rich through the lottery or through your sheer force of will or entrepreneurship or some combination. These are important legislations, even though they seem minor, because company formation is where all the new jobs come from. So no Uber, no Airbnb, no Coinbase, no YouTube, no Meta, Facebook, Instagram. These things created lots of jobs and then lots of secondary economic impact. So this is a very, very important piece of legislation. I'm not sure what happens next, but eventually as well, what happens next, it.

Alex Wilhelm (6:00)

Goes to the Senate, where it has to be taken up, and it may be marked up, might be amended, there might be reconciliation down the road, but it has passed out, which is a critical first step. And the scale of the victory, the margin was sufficiently large that it does imply, I think, that the Senate might be very interested in it. And if this does pass largely as it is now, I think it's going to be huge. I do want to help people understand one point, though. In the smaller venture capital funds, Jason, that can now be up to $50 million and have lower regulatory requirements. How big of a deal is that? Because I have never put together a $50 million fund or a $500 million fund, so it's not entirely clear to me.

Jason Calacanis (6:34)

It's a huge deal because as an example, I have a podcast or I am a popular person on Twitter and I have 10,000 followers or 100,000 followers, and I say to them, hey, I want to start this venture fund to work in just startups in Nashville, just startups in Detroit. I want to revitalize Detroit. Now, I don't want to raise from, you know, 100K, from 100 people to get to 10 million. I'll raise 20K from, on average from 500 people. It's just going to allow more people to participate. It's going to allow the funds to get bigger. So it might be that 100 people put in 250k each, and that adds up pretty quick. Then you get 100 people to put in, you know, 100k each, and you get 300 to put in 10k each. All of that will create more participation, which then gets people looking for more startups and giving that crucial first check. The bottleneck right now is not Series A. The bottleneck is not, you know, seed funding, and it's certainly not late stage. There's plenty of money for companies that get to a million or 2 million in revenue and that get to year two or three. It's really year zero that matters, or year one. So you need high risk, small amounts of capital, and you need many different venture firms looking for their Uber, looking for their Airbnb, looking for their micro one. They have Robinhood. And if they get out there and they start placing bets at that critical year one stage, it's great for everybody. I have been pushing for over a decade for these changes, and I sound like a broken record, but here we are and we have an administration that is not paternalistic, I guess would be the term where they believe poor people are stupid and can't make their own investment decisions. The SEC has to create this test. I believe it's within a hundred days or something, and they have to create this test. And it sounds like a government entity, but my understanding is that means SEC and it has to be free. So there's going to be a free. If you've considered being an angel investor and you're a journalist who makes 100k or you're a developer who makes 100k and you previously couldn't participate, now you can, and you should risk. In my mind, this is investment advice. I believe that people should risk like 10% of their assets on high. This is my belief. It's literally. You know how everybody says, I don't give investment advice, I'm gonna give investment advice. If you're a young person, yeah. Why not take 10% of your net worth? 10%, 5%, whatever you can afford to lose in your mind, which for a young person might be 30%, why not swing for the fences and try to place bets, AKA investments on startups? Now you should read my book, angel, where I lay out, you know, all the lessons I've learned. You got to get to 30 or 40 investments. You have to have deal flow. I teach a course, Angel University. It all goes to charity. We've given a quarter million dollars in ticket sales to charity. I don't make money off courses, but I do this course. I used to do it four times a year now and do it once or twice. This Angel University course. I teach people how to, you know, source deals, how to make decisions, and you know, how to do a little bit of portfolio management. I would love to see the other 95% of Americans take this test. And by the way, no one's coming for you to help you with your job loss. Your job's going away. Every job in America, there's somebody training a robot or software or experts are training AI to do your job. Let me make that clear. Your job's going away. And when I say you are, I don't mean you, Alex, or me. I mean everybody. You're as in the collective jobs of humanity. The how do I know this Alex, is the question. Well, I get pitched by startups.

Alex Wilhelm (10:17)

I was going to say you're literally in the deal flow of what people are building to do this.

Jason Calacanis (10:21)

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Alex Wilhelm (11:50)

Roughly.

Jason Calacanis (11:50)

How do we solve for that? We got to Create more companies. We got to create more startups that find more problems to solve and create more jobs. The end.

Alex Wilhelm (11:57)

Couple of things that I think in the Invest act that will help with that, Jason, one of that is that it changes the rules about general solicitation. So now you can do more explicit pitching to raise money at events that are sponsored by states, universities, angel groups, incubators or accelerators, nonprofits and venture forums. So long as the person putting on the event is not telling you where to put your money or directly brokering the deals.

Jason Calacanis (12:19)

Now let's pause on that one. That's a super critical one. We have demo days. At demo days, lawyers will tell folks, don't say unless you know every person in the room's accredited, that you're raising money. And because you could risk somebody investing theoretically. And this has always been like a gray area. And some founders are just like, I'm going to do it. I'm going to say on Twitter, I'm raising around venture capital firms. When they raise around, they generally don't say anything unless you do, like a special designation. We have to verify everybody's accredited anyway. These are antiquated laws. They're overly protectionist. We want people to lose money. We want people to take risk. And if people can say, hey, I'm raising money, forget about equity crowdfunding, just regular raising money and not be scared of saying I'm raising money, well, then I don't know that group of dentists who create and they would be accredited, but the group of HR people who created their own syndicate, like, if you're an HR person and you get laid off, this is my best advice. Get 100 of your laid off HR executive recruiter friends and start a syndicate. Start a little micro fund, make a $5 million fund, a $3 million fund, and say, we're going to go invest in 20 companies and watch the magic happen. And these demo days, which we just had one, this is where the magic happens. Accelerators, college incubators, they all do a sorting function. They get rid of 50%, 99% in our case, 99% in Gary Tan's case at Y Combinator, we get rid of 99%, we filter out 99% of the applicants, and we try to do our best to give you the top 1%. We would love to have more of these demo days say exactly how much they're raising that they're raising. And in a lot of these demo days, they don't say they're raising. And you're like, well, why Are we having a demo day? It's like, obviously they're raising.

Alex Wilhelm (14:01)

It's kind of implied, but yeah, but now, now the, the wool has been removed from the eyes and everyone can be more explicit, which I think will open up access to these deals, which is why I think the HR people might have a chance, because people will clearly state, this is what we're looking for.

Jason Calacanis (14:14)

Now, you consider yourself still a journalist or you consider yourself an entrepreneur and analyst? We had this little discussion today on what you. What we consider. Alex, I consider you an analyst. But are you opposed to investing in startups?

Alex Wilhelm (14:26)

I have made an angel investment since.

Jason Calacanis (14:28)

You left TechCrunch and all that.

Alex Wilhelm (14:29)

Yes. Yeah.

Jason Calacanis (14:30)

Okay. So you are in the game.

Alex Wilhelm (14:32)

I backed a friend of mine, but sure, sure. If you want to be technical, I'm in the game. I consider myself a journalist in bad form. I'm kind of breaking my own rules.

Jason Calacanis (14:41)

I think you should just throw it in the garbage, the whole journalism rules, and you should just get conflicted up and create your own little micro fund.

Alex Wilhelm (14:47)

That's where we're going. That's what.

Jason Calacanis (14:48)

It's cautiously optimistic, you know, $1 million fund. I'm going to invest in 10 companies I find through the course of random acts of journalism and analysis. And I'm going to put 50k into 20 companies, 100k into 10 companies. I think you should just do it, eff it, and see if it works. And these new rules will make somebody like you, who might be venture curious, even more curious because it'd be less red tape, right? I don't know if you're venture curious.

Alex Wilhelm (15:11)

No, no, I think. I think it's a fair point for folks out there who may not have access to those funds, but may want to participate in equity crowdfunding. Jason, section 103 of the INVEST act raises the threshold from 100k to 250k. So you can now raise more money in equity crowdfunding. There's some other technical rules about venture capital reporting. I won't get into other things that matter. If you want to be an emerging growth company and go public, you now only need to have two years of audited financials, not three, which reduces red tape. You can also, it's now easier with section 303 to test the waters on a pre IPO basis. You and I would both love to see more IPOs. That makes good sense. And finally, Section 305 of the INVEST act is essentially demanding that the government do a study to figure out how to make it easier and cheaper. To go public so we have easier to format your capital funds, easier to raise money, lower regulations, easier path to ipo. In theory, this is a pretty solid package of things to make the US Capital markets more efficient and more open. And I'm hoping the Senate doesn't screw it up.

Jason Calacanis (16:11)

To be honest, we are already in the lead. So what you need to do when you're in the lead is not become complacent. You have to become aggressive. And what's going to happen is these democratic socialists, I'll guarantee it, are going to say this bill and becoming accredited. It's all a giant scam. The venture capitalist, technologists, the finance people are all trying to abuse you. It's a lie. They want to build larger government with more employees, and they want to take companies like iRobot and give them to the Chinese. After blocking M and A, we'll get to that. It's our third story.

Alex Wilhelm (16:43)

I want to make a point, though, about the power of technology companies, though, while we're discussing them in the aggregate. Jason, if you take a look at this right here, this is what we were looking at this morning as a group here. This is a Screenshot of Section108 from the bill. And if you don't know how to read a law, this is just an absolute mess. So what we did was we took all of these and we fed them into our dear friend, producer Claude. And what you get on the other end of it is this crisp, lovely, just easy to read, simplified version of it. And I cannot recommend this enough. If you're struggling to read something in a long bill from Congress, drop it into I prefer Claude or your favorite AI and it will just make it legible and readable. And this is how we prepped for this segment today. Fantastic. We use it each and every day. That's what powers the show. And we'll have more about this when the Senate picks it up, Jason. But at least we're ending the year with a positive regulatory note. High five.

Jason Calacanis (17:32)

Yeah, exactly. High virtual high five. I took this whole thing and I put it into Claude. I said, summarize it. Then I was like, oh, I got to get this to the team. And usually I tell the production team, hey, cut and paste this and spend 15 minutes cleaning it up. And that 15 minutes we recaptured, which means you can spend more time analyzing or reading the document and understanding it. I went back and I took that section on this, you know, small venture capital formation, and I looked at the history of it using quad and was like, oh, yeah, by the way it went from 10 million to 12 million under Trump in the first time, and I was like, it went up 20% while in that same time period venture rounds went up 20x. So like the average seed round went from like 250k to 3 million. Like it literally went 10x. And then they're like, yeah, we're going to increase the size of 20%. When you see it go to 10 to 50. That's the game on the field, folks. That's the opportunity space. So, you know, this is another great thing about AI today is just how quickly you can increase your understanding of complex topics. And one of the most complex topics is private markets. And private markets is where all the money's being made. When SpaceX goes public, Stripe eventually goes public. Any of these private companies goes public, a lot of the value has been taken out of them. And what that means is poor people, middle class people, even upper middle class people never had access to it. And the rich people did. You know how many times I get pitched on buying SpaceX shares or Stripe shares or Andrew shares? All week long I get offers. Do you know how much time my parents, middle class family gets pitched on this? Let alone your Uber driver or your doordasher? Never. And, and they would, and they would know. So let's let everybody participate in this. It's like those Invest America, you know, accounts. We need everybody to understand equity ownership. We need 100% equity ownership in America. And that's how you beat socialism, communism and control, top down, is by having so much competition that people can participate in it.

Alex Wilhelm (19:29)

It's a good point and well said. I think the thing you said about people trying to pitch you on Android shares and SpaceX shares, it's actually a good point because one thing that I've been seeing a lot of investors talk about on Twitter lately is stay away from the second layer. SPV is watch out. So can you give people just a really quick summary of like what they should be looking for in investment opportunities as opposed to the bad ideas?

Jason Calacanis (19:50)

I think if you can get into companies with incredible management teams that have incredible investors names on them and you can hit 30 or 40 of them. So you have diversification and you do it with the small amount of your net worth that you're willing to lose. In other words, the money you might spend on a vacation, the money you might spend gambling in Vegas or on sports. Sports, your disposable income, why not make this, this disposable income? Instead of making it entertainment, consider it half entertainment. And Consider it 1/3 Entertainment, 1/3 Education, and 1 third investing. If you were to look at it like that, you could say, okay, it's really entertaining for me to go to the syndicate every week or angel list every week and see what people are investing in. It's like really like you get a rush out of it, like, oh, wow, this is the future. Then second, you get educated. Oh, I know what Andrew is, I know how Stripe works. And then third, hey, it might work out. And it might work out to the tune of getting into the next Tesla or Uber before it goes public. Now the reason some people are a little wary of the SPVs now is that some of them, because they're so popular amongst the rich that everybody feels they need to have a piece of these companies. And they'll charge 10% load in fee. That's a big number. But they won't charge carry. And so there are hucksters or deal makers, however you want to look at it, almost like a trading desk where they just want to get that 5 or 10% commission. Just like in the Wolf of Wall street when they were selling penny stocks and they told Leonardo DiCaprio, he gets like a 50% commission or something selling it. And he's like, give me the phone, give me the phone. He's like, 50% commission, I'll do it. Now they're getting 10% and sometimes they're double layered SPV. So you're doing an SPV, you, you've got access to an employee. I do an SPV. You charge 10%, I charge 10%. Now you got 20% fees. So there are on the margins for the late stage things, a lot of fees you have to look out for. But as an intelligent person who takes the accreditation test, you should be able to understand fee structures. And if you can't understand basic fee structures, you can't understand the valuation. Well, then you shouldn't be in it. But and also getting in late, you start to learn, oh, well, maybe, you know, Anduril or SpaceX, maybe there is like a triple left in them in the next 10 years. Maybe they'll quadruple in the next 10 years, which would beat the market by like, you know, double or triple or quadruple. Market might double, you might quadruple. So you know, you take that risk, maybe being the last person in, but you'll still be the first person before the ipo. And then sometimes it doesn't work out. You have Instacart, privately valued at 30 or 40 billion, goes public at 10 billion and people are down from day one on that last valuation. So it is possible you could lose some 75% of your investment when it goes public. So then you know this is where diversification comes in, also part of the test. So this is a place you can take risk. I meet with a lot of companies and I'm telling you, every founder I know is asking themselves the same question, how do I get more out of AI? We all know these tools are making people more productive, they're making people more efficient. But a lot of founders still have reasonable concerns about data security or just finding the right application for their way of doing business. But waiting on the sidelines is no longer an option. So I Recommend Founders use NetSuite by Oracle and put AI to work for your company. NetSuite is the number one AI Cloud ERP and it's trusted by over 43,000 businesses. They're going to give you a unified suite of products, all safely sharing interconnected data. And that's going to help you automate routine tasks, dive into your analytics for clear, actionable insights, all while keeping your costs low and making your team faster. Right now, get the free business guide demystifying AI at netsuite.com Twist the guide is free to you at netsuite.com Twist.

Alex Wilhelm (23:38)

Lightspeed Venture Partners has put together $9 billion worth of new funds. Jason.

Jason Calacanis (23:42)

That was my bad ear, Alex. I thought I. I thought you said nine billion.

Alex Wilhelm (23:46)

I'm sorry, sorry, let me say it again. Nine billion dollars across six funds. I know. The largest vehicle in this Group is a $3.3 billion fund aimed at essentially backing the Xais, the Anthropics in their portfolio. The super late stage growthy stuff, but still quite a lot of capital in there for other companies. This to me fits neatly into the idea that we're seeing multi stage funds become ever larger, ever more important. Your Andreessens, your maybe your thrives, and now your light speeds. We have some data on the concentration of large venture capital funds and how they're changing the market. But I'm curious, for founders out there, when you're giving advice, what do you tell them about these funds that might be able to lead their Series A through Series F? Is it the right way to go or should they try to pick different partners for different parts of their journey?

Jason Calacanis (24:33)

Generally, having a deep pocketed venture fund is a great idea. When you're at Series B, Series C. Absolutely. For your seed and your Series A, you probably want worker bees who are going to put a lot of work into it and have expertise at those rounds. So these big funds, one thing that can happen, this would, this isn't unique to Lightspeed. This would be like a similar critique somebody might make of say, Andreessen Horowitz. You're too small to matter. Now they would argue, no, no, we care about all founders and that's absolutely true. But show me an incentive, I'll show you an outcome. If you give an investment team a billion dollar growth fund and you triple the billion dollars, you have 2, 2 billion in profits, they make 20% carry on that 2 billion, you know, in the 2 and 20 model. So they make 400 million. Now you give that same group a hundred million and they 10x it and they make a billion and they make 900 billion in profit. They get 20% of that, which is 20% of the 900 million dollar gain. Or let's say it was a billion dollar gain and turned it into 1.1 billion. Okay, they make 200 million. So the economics really do matter and the incentive matters. So, you know, and then there's this continuity problem which is a little more complex. If you get your seed round, let's say from a 16 speed run, which we've had like five of our companies go from our accelerator or Founder University to this awesome program. We had one of the Andresin partners on last week, Brian Kim, he was awesome on the program. Now let's say they have a growth fund or you know, and they did your Series A. Or they have a series A fund and they did your incubator and they have an incubator fund or a seed fund. Okay. If they don't do it, other folks might be like, well, why aren't they doing it?

Alex Wilhelm (26:12)

Signaling risk.

Jason Calacanis (26:13)

Yeah, so there's a signaling risk. I think people may be over indexed on that. It first came up with the Sequoia Scouts program, which was done in a pretty stealthy fashion. We didn't promote it because we didn't want if Sequoia passed on the Series A or didn't do the Series A of Uber or Thumbtack or Datastax, my investments, they wound up doing two of those. They, they wound up, I think investing in all three of those later on. But it could create a little signaling risk. So they were very careful not to damage the startups, you know, by saying, oh yeah, we're not going to invest, we're already on the cap table, we're passing on continuing investing. The market has adjusted to this, I'll be totally honest. But some people still have it in their head that, oh, what happens if they don't invest? It's a competitive marketplace. So therefore, the founders should be getting three or four term sheets when they do their Series B. And they should try to get a different investor than the Series A investor, to be honest, because now you got two smart people around the table, two people who bought at two different prices, set the price twice, and they're going to fight to increase the value of each share. You get two different firms. So this is why I have no problem. I was texting with Gary Tan this weekend. You know, I have a couple of companies coming out of our accelerator who want to go to yc and they were like, hey, can you recommend me? I'm like, absolutely, I can. We have them going to Andreessen, we have them going to Antler, we have them going to all kinds of different funds or other incubators. So that's a good thing for founders to have. Hey, you've got Jason Calacanis and you've got Mark Andreessen on your cap table. That's kind of a cool thing when you go for your Series A, right? Oh, you got Jason Calacanis and you got Gary Tan on your team like Tax GPT does. And then the next round goes easier. So that's the lesson of startups, is how many people can you get on your cap table who are rooting for you? And if they're rooting for you, that means they might not be rooting for your competitor because they've placed a bet on you. So there's that.

Alex Wilhelm (27:59)

Now, just a couple of notes about Lightspeed before we move on. What have they invested in? Why do we care about them raising so much money? Well, in the models area, Anthropic Mistral, Xai, Reflection. In the robotics area, skilled AI Andrew Enterprise Glean, Databricks, Granola, Tollbit, Consumer Pika and Suno. Very impressive fund. I did not know they were all of those names, but now I can see why they managed to put together 9 billion. Shout out to everyone at Lightspeed, please take everyone out to lunch. Because you have enough cash flow for that?

Jason Calacanis (28:26)

Yeah, absolutely. And that is. That immediately goes into the Alex's best dad jokes of the year.

Alex Wilhelm (28:32)

Thank you. Well, I'm running out of time. I mean, I. I gotta squeeze him in, man. You know, you gotta gear up for that third kid.

Jason Calacanis (28:39)

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Alex Wilhelm (29:52)

So we're going to talk about a company called Pipe. This was a fintech company that was very, very hot back during the ZIRP era. And Jason, if you recall, this was a company where SaaS startups could essentially sell their future revenues for cash. Now, people often call this revenue based financing. The idea was to create a marketplace for ARR because annual recurring revenue, because it recurs, is durable and therefore it can be an asset you can trade on. Okay, fair enough. Time passed. I forgot about these companies because no one talked about them anymore. And then our dear friends over at Fintech Business Weekly got their hands on the recent Pipe financial documents. And they showed that in calendar 24, what they also call their fiscal year 24, Pipe only had $7.1 million in revenue. Now, let's not make fun of revenue. Revenue is revenue. But for a company that had a $2 billion valuation, Jason, I think a $7 million result for a year is pretty low. Let's take a look at the first document and talk about a couple of important things. The text here I know is a little bit small. It's a board slide. Roll with me. What we see here on the top line is essentially revenue growth per quarter. So in the first quarter of 2024, they had 600k in revenue, 1.2 million in Q2, 2.2 million in Q3, and then 3.1 million Q4. The problem with that last number is that they had forecast 3.7. So it was a pretty serious miss from their numbers. Also, their cash expenses were quite high and their cash Balance was trending down. All that said, Jason, two things here. One tiny, tiny company, clearly in the middle of a reset and a pivot, but on the other hand, relatively impressive 2024 revenue growth.

Jason Calacanis (31:22)

I think, okay, the reason this is controversial and the reason this document leaked is because clearly somebody is upset. So I said to the person, like, how did you get this document? Like, how did you get word documents? How did you get the financials? And he said, oh, I did journalism. And I said, yeah, but somebody leaked it, right? Like, you should say how you in some way got this information and verified it's true. Let's put that aside, you know, in the, in the journalism, you know, controversies over leaked documents, I don't assume they asked somebody to leaked it because that would be potentially legally actionable. Yeah, that would be highly unethical. But they could have had somebody who was upset and they said, oh, I'd love to know more. And then that person sent them a screenshot. Now that person is breaking trust. I think a board member, former board member, investor, somebody who was associated with the company, leaked this because they're upset at the founders. The founders who left the company or became board directors had done a big secondary at the time. It was super controversial for a company raising at this ridiculous valuation. And it was a ridiculous valuation and everybody knew it. And I remember, I think Sachs maybe did the Series A. A lot of my friends were investors in it. It was a great idea. It was an idea at the time that was awesome for potentially our founders. So this is peak ZIRP. You've got SaaS companies with predictable revenue. You could go in. We talked earlier about investors being able to place bets on startups. Here was a way to loan money to a startup. Let's say it was slack, you know, like doing incredible growing when it was a private company. They're growing instead of raising another round of financing. They know they have 10 million in revenue. Next year, they're going to do 30. They say, hey, give us 10 million now, we'll deploy that and we're willing to sell that 10 million in future revenue for $0.90 on the dollar, $0.94 on the dollar. So give us $9 million now, and then when we get the 10 million next year, we'll give you the 10 million. You'll make, you know, this 10, 11, 12% gain. And it's like doing corporate paper and loans for SaaS startups. Now, what's the problem with this business? If those SaaS companies stop growing, which we had massive headwinds and they did. It was like the space was just too populated. And I came in and the idea of every one of your flagship customers going to grow their base of employees by 10% turned into they're going to lay off 10%. So what happened to the stripes of the world were, okay, we have a thousand person company paying us $15 a month per employee. It's $180,000 contract. That contract will be worth 250 in two years or 350. And we're going to sell them on these new features and products and then that company comes back and says, hey, we want a discount. We're thinking of using an open source product. And we went from a thousand employees down to 600. So we need to get 75% off. Well, if you gave them a loan against that revenue, that's problematic. So there were multiple reasons why this startup had challenges. But if you're taking money off the table and you allow secondary sales and then the founders move out of the management positions and they're not going to grind, they're going to go spend the money and on their lifestyle. This leaves a, this left a very bad taste in people's mouths, according to my recollection. Now, I'm not saying anybody did anything nefarious. These are all adults who sold shares and bought shares in the secondary market. And no crying in the casino. The founders made a better trade than the investors who bought the shares for them. In some cases, the founders make a terrible trade. Sometimes you'll have founders of a company sell shares early in YouTube or Instagram or Uber or DoorDash and they leave the last 10x or 100x on the table. And they should have just not bought in their second house or their first house. They should have just, you know, not diversified or sold their position. They. So anyway, it does make one wonder what's going on here.

Alex Wilhelm (35:10)

Yeah, a small point about why people were so mad about this company's founders. Don't forget that at the same time the founders were stepping back, rumors news was being reported that the company had lent something like $80 million to a number of crypto companies that had gone to zero. And so it appeared to be kind of like they got secondary and got to leave. Everyone else was left holding the bag. So it wasn't just a better time to trade. It was also possibly some operational incompetence. Two more things before we move on, Jason. First of all, the company had forecast that they were going to grow to about $25 million in revenue by Q4 of this year on the back of a partnership with Uber, essentially providing capital to people on the Uber Eats platform. And they were going to ramp up, they were going to hire, it was going to be fantastic. This was going to be the second coming of Pipe. And then they actually ended up going through layoffs. So it seems that the expected revenue growth from that that they were working towards maybe didn't pan out as expected. And I think this is, you know, another zirpicorn, if you want to call it that, showing how some of these companies that you know, are on paper still on the unicorn lists probably may not even be solvent for much longer.

Jason Calacanis (36:13)

The founder I knew, Harry Hearst, was particularly smart and a great fundraiser, and I would, dare I say, product visionary. I think he was like, particularly smart. And then maybe he was so smart he realized, well, this company is, I don't want to say overvalued, but if he just felt fully valued or valued to perfection is probably one way to say it, if you want to be gracious and, you know, thoughtful about it. Another way to say it is overvalued, you know, that's in the eyes of the beholder. But, yeah, I think he became kind of the villain in all of this and probably unfairly. If you're a venture capitalist and you're buying his shares or other founder shares, you are a very sophisticated investor. And they, those people buying their shares probably thought they were getting the better of Harry Hurst. And Harry, you can come on the program anytime and half of startups fail. You know, 90% fail, depending on what stage you're investing in them. So if it does fail, I mean, everybody kind of expected, you know, and understands those rules of the game. Netflix failing at this point in time, or Uber or DoorDash failing, or Coinbase, like, these are very robust companies that have decades ahead of them. In all likelihood, they could still fail, they could still get disrupted or they cannot execute well. But in startups, the people who are buying the founder shares, they knew that. And yeah, maybe they also went too aggressively in giving loans, like you said, to crypto companies. That's another thing. You know, when you go on, you have a company doing a new business model with companies that are not as robust. So you have a startup backing startups. It's like two levels of risk. Then you add a third level, crypto. Now crypto today, doing it might actually work really well. So timing also matters.

Alex Wilhelm (37:54)

Different market, different time. Just one question for founders out there. I was really curious about this. You know, the idea that this Uber Partnership was going to help the company grow dramatically. And in my view, based on what I've read, kind of safe pipe. How often does do you see a startup land a major partnership that really, when it's troubled, saves the day? Or is this more of like a Hail Mary that never actually gets collected?

Jason Calacanis (38:14)

Lighthouse customers happen all the time and they can save a company. You could also create a dependency on one company where if that company decides this isn't a strategic priority anymore, you got big problems. So it can save a company. It can give him life support for a year or two and just push out the eventual failure of the company because the company doesn't have, you know, a robust set of diversified investors. Anytime you get one customer being more than a third or half of your revenue, you should take notice as the board of directors, you should take notice as the founders, as the sales team, and say, hey, we need to diversify our revenue. LPs, same thing for venture funds. You don't want have any venture fund be more than 5 or 10% of your fund size. And in fact, some LPs have written in stone rules, we won't be more than 10% of the equity in a venture firm. So diversification of revenue across customers and sometimes across product lines is critically important. The reason Uber did spectacularly well during COVID 19 was as rides went down, ordering food went up because people were locked in their houses. Then when people started going out to eat, doordash had a problem because people wanted to get out of the house. The number of orders went down or didn't grow as fast. And then rides went crazy. Everybody was like, oh, I got to get an Uber and go get my drink on and, you know, whatever it is. So diversification critically important.

Alex Wilhelm (39:36)

All right, next up on the docket, iRobot files for bankruptcy and sales. So if you don't know iRobot, they're the makers of the cute little pucks called Roombas that go around your house and pick up cat hair and messes and everything else. Everyone's seen these by now. Jason. I don't have to give a deep explanation of roombas.

Jason Calacanis (39:53)

Yeah, yeah, I think people understand. They've seen them at other people's houses. They've seen cats jumping on top of them in TikTok videos. They were the leader in this category.

Alex Wilhelm (40:02)

Yes, they were the leader in the category. And if you go back in time to 2022, December of that year, Amazon announced its going to buy iRobot for $1.7 billion. And then by January of 2024, the deal was canceled because the company said that the deal had, quote, no path to regulatory approval in the European Union. Fast forward another year and a half and now it's bankrupt and the assets of the company will become the part. They'll be owned by the Shinsen Picea robotics company.

Jason Calacanis (40:31)

Yeah, so. And Lena Khan opposed this as well. She issued a second request for more details on it. She basically iced the deal. This is why academics with no experience like Lina Khan going in with novel ideas of how to protect against future competition was a huge mistake for four years and throttled competition in the United States as opposed to protecting it. The only people who would have won in this situation where the employees, the investors and consumers, everybody would have won. Why Amazon would have done what they did with Ring. My friend Jamie Siminoff sold his company to Amazon. My understanding is Amazon has made that company absurdly successful, just like YouTube is absurdly successful under Google. If they had blocked the YouTube deal, YouTube, the. With Google, YouTube would have went away. They could not fight. Even with Sequoia behind them and other venture capitalists, they couldn't afford the legal battles they were under, the lawsuits with Viacom, et cetera. So just another example of we should allow any. The classic antitrust rules are fine. Just look at it through the lens of consumers. Are consumers going to benefit? Yes or no. Are prices going to go down or up in this case? Amazon has a history of lowering prices and investing in products. What happened here, you don't allow the company to get acquired and the Chinese manufacturer in Shenzhen who built it for them, who was just the contract manufacturer, not the ip, they now own it. It's absolutely absurd. Descrit across the board. And now we're seeing correctly, under the Trump administration more M and A. You have to have single and double M and A like this in order to make venture work and in order for the employees not to get screwed and in order for America to excel. Not every company is going to be a large independent vacuum robot company. It's going to be part of something bigger and that's okay.

Alex Wilhelm (42:31)

It was public though, before Amazon went to buy. So it wasn't a startup per se. But yeah, I struggled to disagree with you.

Jason Calacanis (42:38)

A single billion dollar company, I mean it was, it was a nothing burger in terms of Amazon's revenue. Amazon buying Whole Foods has that like limited people's choice or has it increased our choice? It's increased our choice. You can now get Whole Foods delivered. You couldn't previously get it delivered. I mean, if they screw up the product, fine. Then that opens up another competitor like Irwan to come out, right? So, you know, if Whole Foods, you know, became too blue collar and too accessible and they lost a little bit of the magic, okay, Erwan steals their crown. We have a hyper competitive, high functioning market. You should just let. Anything under $100 billion is inconsequential in almost all cases.

Alex Wilhelm (43:24)

Why the $100 billion threshold? What happens at that point that makes it go from safe and totally fine to let's not let that happen?

Jason Calacanis (43:31)

Well, I mean, if you were to let Meta and Google to merge as an example, they would go from being a duopoly with 80 or 90% of the online advertising market to like 100% of it. But what has happened to that duopoly since they weren't able to merge? Amazon has a vibrant ad business. Doordash, Instacart, Uber, all have vibrant ad businesses now. And so, you know, you do want to keep things from becoming too large. If you said DoorDash and Uber could merge right now, I would be like, oh, that's. That would consolidate whatever, 80% of the delivery market. Now if you were to look at it and say, well, now you have robo taxis coming in and all cloud kitchens and other competition, at some point, that may actually make sense. It might not make sense for the last five years for Uber, Lyft and Waymo to merge. In the age of robo taxis and Tesla and Neuro and all these other things, yeah, you're gonna see consolidation in that space. So 10 billion in today's dollars means you're excluding the max 7 and you're maybe excluding the 500 billion to a billion group, you know, which would include SpaceX, Stripe, OpenAI. But even still, those are very. If you think about OpenAI buying companies, is there any problem with them being a purchaser of companies? That's actually kind of good because then you could take the Mag 7 to the Mag 17 and eventually the Max 70. The goal should be to create more large conglomerates, not let the seven codify themselves and, you know, become calcified. And that's what's happening today. Those groups, since they can't buy, build, and what they do is they just wait for something to be successful like Snapchat and they just copy the whole thing because they can't buy it. And that's problematic as well.

Alex Wilhelm (45:16)

So all that sounds fine to me. The thing that I struggle with is where we draw the line about what's too much consolidation. Because if we go Back to the, the meta FTC fight. The idea that technology changes rapidly and creates new competition was important to that. But if you combine, I mean, go back to your example, meta and Alphabet, I can make a really compelling argument that there is so much new technology, new ad formats, new ad placements, new ad businesses, that it wouldn't have anything close to Monopoly. And so I think that we end up with very few guardrails. And so I think we need maybe something else to be brought up because I can see the arguments that we, that we like being stretched to the point to which all deals are pretty much good to go. And I do think that you're right that at some point the competition does get a little bit skewed if you let everyone become one blob.

Jason Calacanis (46:01)

It really just has to do with market share. You know, if Nvidia wanted to go buy Grok and amd, you know, like, you might be like, yeah, you know, those companies are now going to be 95% of AI chips. Probably not a good idea. So it really just has to do with market share. When the market share gets up into that 70, 80, 90%, it's obvious now.

Alex Wilhelm (46:28)

So what about Nvidia buying etched or Nvidia buying Xtropic or one of the Twist 500 chip companies that I'm thinking of? Like, would you let Nvidia buy one of those?

Jason Calacanis (46:37)

Totally. Totally.

Alex Wilhelm (46:38)

Okay.

Jason Calacanis (46:38)

It'll be inconsequential in the long term because those single and double acquisitions are easy for other people to replicate. In other words, like if you're making inference chips now you have Broadcom making inference chips and AI specific, you know, app specific Asics chips for everybody. Google's making them, Grok's making the, you know, Elon's making them. OpenAI's got a project to make them. Microsoft's making them, Amazon's making them. Everybody's making their own chips with Broadcom as a part of. So there is just naturally going to be competition in that space. There's almost never a situation in today's market where the M and A would be in the worst interest of consumers and limit competition in the future. It's a rare, rarefied air. The only place you might see it is right now in the Netflix deal. You could say Netflix plus HBO is the number one and the number three streamer. That's too much.

Alex Wilhelm (47:36)

Disney, Hulu. I mean, I can just pull up my Roku and just walk you through the competition.

Jason Calacanis (47:41)

Yes. And then it depends on how you define the competitive set. If you define the competitive set, like I do, to include YouTube and TikTok, it's not a big deal for number one and three in streaming to do it. That's, that's the truth. If you want to go old school and say, like, well, that's a different market, okay, fine, you, you could make the argument one in three should not be allowed.

Alex Wilhelm (48:00)

Well, it's interesting because people don't take as broad of a view this as you and I do. And so you have people like Trump, as we quoted on the show last week, saying it's a lot of share. And I'm like, is it though? I mean, YouTube is the real streaming platform to beat everything else is just peanuts in comparison to that.

Jason Calacanis (48:13)

And TikTok. Yeah. Which is growing pretty, pretty nicely as well.

Alex Wilhelm (48:17)

All right, back to the happy news. I. This is one of my favorite stories of the year. So hugging face. Jason, the startup that hosts all the open source AI models did something very strange earlier this year. We mentioned it on the show, but I think people probably forgot. They bought this little French robotics company called Pollen and what they were going to do is they were going to make little robots and sell them to people. So that way everyone can kind of do open source robotics work at home. And these robots are absolutely adorable. I have a picture of one right here for everyone who doesn't recall what they look like. And I have to say, when they bought this company, I was like, this does feel a bit like a side quest. Why is the open source, you know, model company getting into open source robotics? But it seems to have gone quite well and the company announced this weekend that they were shipping out a block of 3,000 of these things worth about 1.4 million in revenue, if they're all the most valuable version, half of which are going to the U.S. but to me, this implies that the robotics work that we're seeing From Figure from 1x, from Tesla and so forth is going to get disrupted from the very bottom as people build stuff for the home that's not as powerful, not as performant, but open, and therefore going to accelerate very, very quickly. I just thought this was a really fun. I don't know, this brought me real joy to see a company doing well in a space where that's kind of a secondary path for them.

Jason Calacanis (49:32)

And the one you're showing is the Ricci Mini. That's the new one. The one when they bought it looked a little more like figure and Optimus. That was the Ricci 2. If you look on their website, you can see that. And what's great about this project is speaking of competition, obviously Figure and Optimus are going to be very proprietary systems. They're probably not going to sell those robots, they're probably going to rent them or lease them on a consumption basis by the hour, etc. So how do you keep somebody from having a monopoly in that space where they just run away with it and charge people a dollar an hour and then eventually people get addicted to it and they make it $7 an hour? Right. That would be the nightmare scenario, is that somebody has an absolute lock on the market. Well, open source means if the person charges too much for that technology, the open source community builds a version of it and people can do it for less money. This is what should have happened in self driving. My wish was that somebody would really work on an open source project and the technology would move faster. There was so much at stake. You now have 20 different companies at a minimum that are significantly backed pursuing closed sourced, you know, driving systems. Some of them are starting to abstract out the world building the sensor sets like the Nvidia project is. And some of that will be open source. Some people are putting out open source training data. But that is part of the amazing competitive process we have here in a vibrant community in America and in entrepreneurial system, is that open source can just turn everything upside down. You, you know, and, and it acts as a backstop. And if you look at Oracle, which would be the perfect example of a company that, you know, had a proprietary database system that, you know was expensive and you had to go through a salesperson and you know, listen, for enterprise companies it has to be perfect and Oracle makes the most sense. But for startups, a lot of them were like, I don't need to spend a million dollars on an Oracle database, I'll just use MySQL. And at the early days of that it was a little controversial. Can you trust MySQL, can you trust Hadoop, et cetera. But it became an advantage for some folks and then that keeps the incumbent, in this case Oracle, on their toes. They have to compete with those open source projects and they have to make their products competitive on price, on value, prop security, everything else. So this is awesome. I love this as a bet for hugging face because we do need more open source projects in hardware specifically. So this is a great, great outcome, I think.

Alex Wilhelm (52:25)

And I have some requests for the hugging face slash pollen team. So I went through the apps that people have built and you can just download apps that other people have made for their riichi minis like a clock, a radio. Some of them made a metronome, some of them make them dance. It's fun. What I want is to be able to buy one of these things, put it on my desk and then I want to be able to connect it to my ChatGPT instance because then I would have a physical device that I could talk to, which I think would be pleasant versus talking just to my computer and could emote and such. But I don't want a new AI. I want to be able to take my trained AI with me. And I think that building a connector there would turn this from a hobbyist thing. You have to assemble yourself. By the way, the how to assemble videos 45 minutes long. This is not designed for kids yet, but you know, give it a year.

Jason Calacanis (53:10)

Is it not designed for kids yet? I'm looking at the Reach mini right now. I think there's some high school kids who might be able to.

Alex Wilhelm (53:15)

Oh, high school, yes. I was thinking like not, not, not kids kids, but like teenagers involved. Absolutely. Great project. If I had a 13 year old, I'd buy them one and tell them to build it, you know, Cause that would be a fun project for them. All right, now just let's do a poly market. And today over on the world of prediction markets, I have a hedge for us. Now we often talk about binary results. Will this model come out by this date? Who will have the best model by the end of the year? This however, is a little bit different. So the headline here is AI Bubble burst by. And I was really perplexed by that because I thought how do you determine when a bubble bursts? What's the mechanism you and I always talk about in prediction markets? Read the fine print, make sure you understand the rules. The rules. So I went and I looked through the rules here and it's an interesting kind of multi part bet. So this thing will resolve to. Yes, if certain things happen by a certain date. So three things have to happen from this list here. So it's a little complicated, but if Nvidia stock falls 50% from its all time high, if this particular semiconductor ETF falls by 40% from its all time high, unlikely OpenAI or Anthropic declare bankruptcy.

Jason Calacanis (54:28)

Highly unlikely.

Alex Wilhelm (54:29)

Or if OpenAI is acquired.

Jason Calacanis (54:31)

Highly unlikely.

Alex Wilhelm (54:32)

Or if H100 rental prices fall below $1.00 I presume per hour. Unclear on that one. Or there's a major hardware supplier collapse. So if three things from that list happen by a certain date, it will resolve to yes. And so what this means is if you are heavily invested in the success of those companies or the stocks that are doing well in the AI moment. You can essentially bet here and de risk yourself because if your other bets collapse, then this one will pay out. And this is kind of what I was hoping to see from prediction markets, more so than just like, will the Eagles beat the Raiders? Because this is like, super cool. Curious what you think.

Jason Calacanis (55:10)

Yeah, I'm buying. No, by December 31, 2026, 32% chance. So I think that's free money. You put down 69 cents. When it resolves, you get the other 31 cents. So you make a 50% margin. I mean, I'll be totally honest. I feel like putting a million dollars on that right now. I mean, I could. Yeah.

Alex Wilhelm (55:30)

Well, that would be four times the current volume, Jason. So if you want to really change the odds.

Jason Calacanis (55:33)

Volume only 273. Yeah, maybe I'll put. Yeah, I mean, I. Now that this is up and running in the United States. Right? Yeah, we can do this in the United States now. Right.

Alex Wilhelm (55:43)

My understanding is that they began to invite US Traders after a beta period, so there may still be a wait list, but. Yes. Poly Market is back.

Jason Calacanis (55:50)

I. I need to. I need to start placing some wagers here because I am, you know, deeply invested in this market, and I would like to be even more concentrated given my knowledge of the space. There is no chance of this happening. Zero chance. I mean, I. I would give it. Actually, I'd say it's 5% chance this was happening. And the 5% would be not because of these AI companies screwing things up or going bankrupt or losing 50% of value. It would. Because we get into a hot war with China or a cold war with China even, like we had a supply. If China invades Taiwan, this bet is like, you're in the money. If it doesn't invade Taiwan in 2026, it's not going to happen. And there's too much at stake for China to invade Taiwan. I believe at this moment in time, that would take some really crazy behavior on our government and China's government at the same time. And that would. That does not make sense to me.

Alex Wilhelm (56:55)

Other ways this beck could come, good meteor strikes, you know, mass extinction events would be up there or the moon going away. But it has to be, like, tectonic because it's a. It's a really specific series of things that have to happen.

Jason Calacanis (57:06)

It would be a bank shot, I think. You know what I'm saying? Like, you'd have to have something happen that then causes this collapse, I don't think at the pace AI is going right now and the amount of money in the market and the amount of value being created, frankly that this makes any sense to me. Like let's just unpack this one step. Nvidia stock price right now is, let's pull up Nvidia stock price here because this is, I think if they're okay, it opened at $177 today.

Alex Wilhelm (57:37)

This here's the Yahoo Finance page for everyone watching the video version of this. And you can see that the 52 week range goes up to $212.19. So we're off about 50 bucks a share from that point.

Jason Calacanis (57:47)

So it has to go 50% down. So you would need Nvidia to trade at $111. You would have to lose $66 right now or $65 a share. I'd have to lose a large portion of its value.

Alex Wilhelm (58:00)

A trillion, a trillion and a half dollars in value have to be wiped off, which would require everyone canceling their data center plans, I guess.

Jason Calacanis (58:09)

Actually I think the people who are betting that the other side of this, I'm guessing that would be somebody who believes OpenAI can't live up to their commitments. Not that they go bankrupt, but that they scale down their commitments. It creates a shock in the stock market. The stock market goes down 20 or 30% and if it did go down 30% since the all time high of Nvidia or the 52 week high is 212 and they're already off that by a little bit, 15% that maybe it only has to go down another 30% from the high. So maybe that's the bet they're making. But yeah, I don't like, I don't like, I don't like the bet.

Alex Wilhelm (58:50)

It's a three leg parlay as, as producer Marcus put in the comments, which means that it's, it's very, very unlikely. But if you want to make a little bit of money betting on the moon, you can do it on polymarket. So hedge away my friends, not financial advice.

Jason Calacanis (59:02)

But this is exactly how I would bet.

Alex Wilhelm (59:08)

Yeah, I'm not telling you what to do. I'm just saying out loud what I would do. That's total.

Jason Calacanis (59:12)

I mean by March 31, I mean.

Alex Wilhelm (59:15)

People, there's a 7% chance people are betting that that's the case. I would also give that a roughly zero. But I don't really want to like put a bunch of my family's money into USDC and move it all around Because I'm boring. But if that's your jam, guys, polymarket's full of really fun things.

Jason Calacanis (59:30)

Bitcoin is, like, the really interesting one to look at because there you have a lot of people actually doing the hedging, I'm guessing, you know, actually using polymarket as the tool, as you're saying, to, you know, counterbalance a lot of holding. So which would be like putting, I guess, a put in a collar or collaring a stock. Because right now there, if you look at, like, the odds of it becoming $115 again is 1%. What price will Bitcoin hit in 2025? Oh, wait, sorry. This is. So some of these have already happened, and there's no chance of some of the other ones happening. So, yeah, I mean, this really. It's only got 16 days left to resolve. We need the chart of, like, what's going to happen in 2026, which I'm sure there's another 2026 market.

Alex Wilhelm (60:21)

There probably is. By the way, there's $115 million in wagered volume on the bitcoin price guessing because people just don't want to bet on owning bitcoin. They want to bet on it as a derivative. I. I love the financial mind of humans, Jason. We haven't changed once since the Tulip Days because we just love to speculate. We love it. We love it.

Jason Calacanis (60:39)

We'll see you all Wednesday for another exciting episode of Twist.