What will be OpenAI’s IPO price? Place ya bets! | E2202

Summary

Podcast Summary: This Week in Startups

Episode: What will be OpenAI’s IPO price? Place ya bets! (E2202)

Date: November 1, 2025
Host: Jason Calacanis
Guest/Co-hosts: Alex Wilhelm, Oliver, Lon Harris

Episode Overview

In this lively Halloween episode, Jason Calacanis and Alex Wilhelm dive deep into the rapidly evolving world of startups and AI, discuss OpenAI’s coming IPO and its implications, analyze the risks for developers building on major AI platforms, and explore several cutting-edge AI products, including startling demos of AI music creation and face-swapping technology. Producer Oliver joins for an extensive hands-on showcase of Suno Studio, an AI music generator, and the hosts dissect recent earnings, market trends, and some of the trickier ethical questions facing founders and early-stage investors.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. OpenAI, Platforms, and Developer Beware

• Jason’s Warning for Developers ([00:00] & [50:09])
  • Jason strongly advises developers not to build on OpenAI's API or Sam Altman’s platform:
    • “This is a warning…for anybody dumb enough to use Sam Altman's OpenAI API. They are studying you…like the Borg, steal every innovation they have.” ([00:00])
    • He likens Altman's approach to the “Zuckerberg school of Business,” historically co-opting innovations from the ecosystem and rolling them into the platform—much as Microsoft and Facebook did.
• Alex and Jason both discuss the platform-application tension: successful applications run the risk of being subsumed or cloned by the underlying platform provider, especially as OpenAI looks to move down the stack.

2. Prediction Markets: Brian Armstrong’s "Punk" Move ([05:08])

• Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong gamed prediction markets during a live earnings call by explicitly stating keywords referenced in ongoing bets, causing major swings in betting charts.
  • “So punk rock Brian Armstrong is the greatest. He literally...punked the prediction markets.” ([06:09], Jason)
• The episode debates whether this constitutes insider trading and explores the implications for the fairness of prediction markets.

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3. AI Demos: Face Swapping and Music Generation

Higgsfield AI Face Swap** ([08:51])

• The hosts showcase a viral AI face-swapping tool, highlighting implications for creativity, entertainment, and the entertainment industry.
• Notable moment: Jason riffs on how game-changing this is for casting directors and fan-made content:
  • “Imagine you’re the casting director, Lon. How amazing would this be?” ([12:29], Jason)

Intellectual Property (IP) Risks** ([14:05])

• Jason provides a straightforward take on IP law: using such tools for personal, non-commercial use is generally fine, but commercializing IP-owned content invites legal risk.
  • “If you released this and you said, put Leonardo DiCaprio as every Star Wars character…that's very illegal.” ([15:15], Jason)

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Suno AI Music Studio Deep Dive ([21:07])

• Producer Oliver walks through Suno Studio (V5), an AI tool for automated music creation and editing (“like Ableton for AI”).
  • Suno Studio now allows users to write lyrics, select music styles, assemble tracks, and even extract or modify individual instrument “stems.”
  • Jason is clearly enthralled, having the AI generate a song about his own startup journey in the style of Dire Straits!
    • Lyrics: “Late nights, cold pizza, chasing a muse / dream stacked higher than the skyline views...”
      ([25:21], Oliver demos Suno output)
• Oliver: “For non-musicians, a tool like this really opens up the world of creating music to millions of people.” ([37:30])
• The hosts compare AI-generated music to existing DAWs (digital audio workstations), demo music editing workflows, and discuss the unprecedented accessibility for creative newcomers.

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4. AI & Music Industry: Lawsuits, Settlements, and Cautionary Tales ([16:21])

• Universal Music Group and Udio settle and partner after legal dispute—Jason explains why the music industry is so aggressive:
  • “They set a trap…Once they see you have success…they’ll come after you like rabid dogs. More like in Game of Thrones, the White Walkers…They are going to come forever for you.” ([17:22])
• His advice for startup founders flirting with music IP is unambiguous:
  • “Never use their IP. Never ever touch it, not even for a second.” ([18:49])

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5. Cloud & AI: Market Trends, Spending & “Grokopedia” ([39:43])

• Alex breaks down public cloud earnings:
  • “Growth at Azure for Microsoft was 40%...Google Cloud 34%...Amazon 20.2%...over at Amazon, each of the companies also said they're going to spend even more money than they thought.” ([39:43])
• Jason advocates for incumbents reinvesting cash into infrastructure, predicts prolonged cloud/AI expansion, and discusses “Grokopedia,” an LLM-generated encyclopedia linked to Elon Musk’s projects.
• Discussion pivots to whether companies like Apple, Meta, or Elon’s X should launch their own cloud services to rival AWS.

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6. Startups Building Their Own AI Models ([46:42])

• Alex notes a surge in startups creating their own tailored LLMs, often retraining open-source Chinese models to reduce dependency on OpenAI or Anthropic’s margins.
• Jason reiterates platform risk, forecasting OpenAI’s inevitable encroachment on successful applications and references historical platform behavior (Microsoft, Facebook).

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7. OpenAI’s IPO: Timing & Valuation Bets ([57:04])

• Reuters reports OpenAI may IPO by late 2026 or early 2027. Jason and Alex debate the likely timing and market cap.
  • Alex proposes over/under at $1.25T—Jason opts for the under, Alex the over.
    ([58:36], Alex & Jason)
• Jason’s rationale: OpenAI will need to vertically integrate and own businesses to maintain growth and justify the massive infrastructure spend.
  • “If you're using them, you're enabling your own demise.” ([54:21], Jason)

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8. Recent IPOs & Market Sentiment (Navan/TripActions) ([59:24])

• Navan’s IPO (formerly TripActions) went out at a $6-7B valuation and dropped 20% on the first day.
• The hosts analyze the lack of IPO “pop”:
  • High but justifiable price-to-sales ratio, solid revenue growth, but unprofitable—likely explaining investor caution and underperformance.
• Jason compares the opportunity cost: why buy newly public SaaS if Google/Amazon are accelerating thanks to AI?

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9. Founder/Investor Trust & Bad Behavior in Early-Stage Startups ([66:43])

• Discussion on founders abusing trust structures like SAFEs and failing to properly use invested funds:
  • Jason: “The safe is so in favor of founders…bad actors in the system. In a peak market, you see bad behavior go up…” ([67:37])
• Jason’s “stump speech”: never abuse early investors, cherish your backers, and play the long game.
  • “The best part of life, people, is when you can build a 10, 20, 30 year friendship where you just collaborate on everything and you win and sometimes you lose. But if you lose, you learn something.” ([73:20])
  • “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” ([77:09])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Jason Calacanis, on platform risk:
  “If I was a developer of any kind, I would never work with Sam Altman and OpenAI. This is a warning…They are studying you…like the Borg, steal every innovation…” ([50:09], [00:00])

• On AI face-swapping tools:
  “Imagine you’re the casting director, Lon. How amazing would this be?” ([12:29], Jason)

• On music industry caution:
  “Never use their IP. Never ever touch it, not even for a second. In fact, only hire work-for-hire musicians…” ([18:49], Jason)

• On AI music creation:
  “For non-musicians, a tool like this really opens up the world of creating music to millions of people.” ([37:30], Oliver)

• On OpenAI’s competitive moves:
  “Wake up, people. You're going to see them go after every single vertical…They're going after everyone. Wake up, Wake up. If you use their API, you're educating them as to how many tokens you use.” ([54:52], Jason)

• On founder/investor trust:
  “Cherish the early investors. Act with honor. And then you will be in a situation like I am…This is the best part of life, people…If you want to go far, go together…” ([72:09], [77:09], Jason)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:00 – Jason's opening warning to developers about OpenAI & platform risk
• 05:08 – Brian Armstrong games prediction markets
• 08:51 – Higgsfield AI face swap demo and IP discussion
• 14:05 – IP risks with AI media tools
• 16:53 – AI music industry deals/lawsuits
• 21:07 – Suno AI music studio demo with Oliver
• 39:43 – Cloud earnings, infrastructure investment, and Grokopedia
• 46:42 – Startups training their own models and escaping platform risk
• 50:09 – Jason’s emphatic platform warning redux
• 57:04 – Jason & Alex’s OpenAI IPO bet discussion
• 59:24 – Navan IPO analysis
• 66:43 – Founder/investor trust breaches with SAFEs
• 73:20+ – Jason’s reflections on ethics, loyalty, and long-term relationships in tech

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Concluding Notes

The episode is a whirlwind of insight on the intersection of AI, startups, platform risk, and the social dynamics of entrepreneurship.
Jason is in classic form: blunt (“It’s a trap. Don’t use their API!”), humorous, and passionate about founder ethics.
The hands-on AI demos (face swapping, AI music) underscore just how rapidly the landscape for startups and creative tools is changing, while recurring discussions of trust and platform power serve as a caution to builders everywhere.
For founders, investors, and technologists, this episode is both a warning and a call to be strategic, thoughtful, and loyal as the next tech wave crests.

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Listen if you want:

• Sharp takes on how OpenAI is changing the rules for developers
• Insider perspectives on music, AI, and IP law
• Deep (and fun) demos of the latest generative AI tools
• Tactical lessons for building and investing in startups in 2025 and beyond

Skip if you want:

• Ads, news intros, or background—this summary avoids those and focuses on the substance.

Transcript

[Jason Calacanis]

If I was a developer of any kind, I would never work with Sam Altman and OpenAI. Let me say that this is a warning. People can clip this. This is a warning for anybody dumb enough to use Sam Altman's OpenAI API. They are studying you remember Sam Altman's been around the block. I've known him since Loop. He's incredibly savvy person and he wants every bit of revenue from the ecosystem. He isn't taking no prisoners. He's going to study how you're using the API, which he has the right to do. Sam Altman comes from the Zuckerberg school of Business, which is give dumb people access to your tools, study them and like the Borg, steal every innovation they have. And Zuckerberg got it from Bill Gates and Microsoft. Microsoft had a platform, an operating system. They let people build Lotus 1, 2, 3, then they did Microsoft Excel. They let people build a product called WordPerfect and WordStar and then they built Microsoft Word.

[Alex Wilhelm]

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[Jason Calacanis]

All right everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. It's Halloween 2025. It's October 31, 2025. Here we are a month away from my birthday. I'll be the the double nickel coming up. 55. I can drive 55. I have been using. I have been using FSD 14.1 in Mad Max mode and we had Elon on all in. That'll be out later today as a little surprise for folks. Elon episode dropping and I was talking to him about it. It's nuts.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Mad Max mode is when it is a bit more aggressive.

[Jason Calacanis]

Let's say they already have hurry mode. They have hurry mode. Now they have Mad Max. The Mad Max mode is like you gave. When I used to be in a rush in New York, taxis were cheap, you know, and I'd be like, hey, I'm late to the Garden. Get me there by this time and I'll double the meter as your tip. Yeah, you know, so it's $12 ride. I'd give you 25 bucks. And they'd be like, absolutely. I'm looking for an excuse to drive that way. Guys would be driving up on the.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Sidewalk if you do that.

[Jason Calacanis]

Mad Max doesn't drive on the sidewalk, but it will go around people and it will make lane changes, you know, to a minute to just get around people. It's awesome. And it does go above the speed limit. So it does lead you to believe. Well, it is supervised fsd. So therefore I should be able to do what I want. And if I want to go a couple of miles over the speed limit and push the envelope, like 95% of people on the highway are doing anyway, yeah, I guess I can get a ticket. Not the fsd. But it is a spicy, spicy ride and it does feel like FSD is the 14.1 is, I wouldn't say like a step function higher, but it's noticeably better than 13. So the, the journey continues. And he said on all in and I think on the earnings call he was preparing to take safety drivers out by the end of the year or, you know, pending regulators. So I interpret that as second quarter of next year. The regulators will let him, but maybe in a small section of Austin they'll let it happen. But I'm feeling pretty good about self driving coming on, you know, in 2026. It's going to be pretty amazing.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I'm so glad that I bought my last car that I'll ever buy that won't drive for me and I just do not want to buy another one until it's time. So just tell Elon to go a little faster if you don't mind.

[Jason Calacanis]

No, no, take your time is what I literally said to him. No shame in the safety driver game because I do think if we have another cruise or you know, Uber from Arizona back in the day, these tragedies, it's going to make regulators take a whole different approach. So we got a lot to run through today. I thought we should start with Brian Armstrong punking the prediction markets. Oh my God.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Okay, so I have to explain a little bit to everybody. So prediction markets we talk about on the show a lot, Jason. We often use them to take a look at who's going to have the best AI model by December 31st, or who's going to win an election, or who's going to win a sports game. You can also get super granular on call she and polymarket and literally wager on what someone will say on an earnings call or even how many tweets Elon will have in a day. There's really a lot of. A lot of stuff out there to bet on. So at the end of the Coinbase earnings call, literally at the tail end, something absolutely incredible happened, Jason, and I think it's best to just play it and let people know for themselves. So you're going to hear the end of the earnings call with the CFO and then there's going to be a pause and then Brian's going to jump. Yeah, I hope we answer your question on that. I was a little distracted tracking the.

[Jason Calacanis]

Prediction market about what Coinbase will say on their next earnings call.

[Alex Wilhelm]

And I just want to, you know, add here the words bitcoin, ethereum, blockchain staking and web3 to make sure we.

[Jason Calacanis]

Get those in before the end of the call. Okay, so what he did was he punked. So punk rock Brian Armstrong is the greatest. He literally. Here's the poly market. What will Coinbase say during their earnings call and margin crypto winter? He didn't say prediction market. Sec, custodial custody regulator, institution staking, stablecoin shutdown. He didn't say subscription. He did say Bitcoin. He did say web3. He did say trading volume, Ethereum, blockchain, etc. And yeah, that's how it goes, folks.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Well, Jason, pull up the. The Kalshi link there. There's a chart that shows just how much this changed the betting at the very last moment. I think you'll like.

[Jason Calacanis]

Ah. Oh, my goodness, look at that. Yeah. So here's your calci chart and I guess I could put it at one day. And yeah, as you can see, terms that you wouldn't expect to go way up, went way up during the call. So just understand how prediction markets work. You are in a grand casino where lots of different things can happen. And one of the things that can happen is the CEO can be aware of them and say things or the person writing the script could say things. And it's all fair game in the world of predictions markets.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah, Brian Armstrong did say in a tweet that quote, lol. This was fun. Happened spontaneously when someone on our team dropped a link in the chat. Here's A question, though, and I don't wanna go too long on this, but like, is it insider trading if you read the predictions for your own earnings, call and do then and bet that you will say them.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, see, I think that would be against the terms of service of these. That if you are the person who reconciles the trade. Yes. I don't think you're supposed to participate. So somebody should. We should ask producer Claude to look that up and we'll, we'll, we'll get that answer. Producer Marcus, go, go find that. Or producer Long, go find the terms of service. But can people who are involved in resolving the bet alter the bet and then what happens in that circumstances? My understanding, which is based on my memory, is that you're not supposed to do that. Now, I don't know what they do in that instance, but hey, brave new world. And here we are, folks. Very punk rock. And yeah, we'll keep watching it.

[Alex Wilhelm]

It was the funniest thing that happened in the whole earnings season. So shout out to Brian. All right, next up on the docket, Jason he Higsfield face swaps. Now, Higsfield is a company we haven't talked about on the show, to my knowledge. Just to give people a little bit of context here, it is a San Francisco based startup with roots in Kazakhstan, and they offer to consumers essentially a lot of AI models you can play with. Some are open source, some are not, and you pay for a monthly number of credits, essentially. So we've seen things like this before. The reason why this is blowing up and I want to show it to everybody is that the face swap is bonkers. Good. And Marcus pulled some clips for us. So can I entertain you for a minute?

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, please. All right, Go right to it.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Here it is. Take a listen or take a watch, everybody. And I'll narrate just a little bit for folks on audio. Here's De Niro turned into Trump shooting someone in the face. Here is Joker turned into Joe Biden pretty effectively.

[Jason Calacanis]

Oh, my God.

[Alex Wilhelm]

And they swapped in Robert Pattison Jr. Instead of the.

[Oliver]

The.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Joaquin Phoenix guy.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yep, Joaquin Phoenix who played the Joker. And this is all the Joker trailer. And then you get to see what Batman would look like as the Joker. You know, it's pretty effective. Keep going.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Here's another one, Jason. This is the character from Squid game.

[Jason Calacanis]

Okay.

[Alex Wilhelm]

And they're going to drop in Samuel L. Jackson very effectively. And then they're going to drop in other dude. Other other dude. And one more really short one.

[Jason Calacanis]

Chris Hemsworth, I think, also known as Thor, the main Thor. And here is Leonardo as. All right, all right, all right. McConaughey, Interstellar. Incredible. Founders. Listen, if you've got a B2B company and you're marketing your product or service to other businesses, you need to use LinkedIn ads. Otherwise, you're, you're wasting your time and you're wasting your money. LinkedIn knows who the big players are and who the key decision makers are in your vertical. Based on the data they're already collecting, the platform has more than a billion members, and that includes those 10 million C suite executives. B2B marketers report 2.5 times higher returns on ad spend on LinkedIn compared to other social platforms. That's why my firm Launch advertises our own projects on LinkedIn. We want to reach people who are actually doing exciting work and at real companies. So here's your call to action. We've got a special offer just for Twist listeners. Launch your first campaign and get $250 free. When you spend at least $250, that's one for one. Go to LinkedIn.com thisweekinstartupstoclaim your credit LinkedIn.com thisweekinstartups I have to say, hey, our director, Lon, you can jump in on this since this is your wheelhouse. It. This is actually putting all jokes aside. What a great way for a casting director to see what a person might be like. So in the, in the Ashoka series, one of the former Jedi who turns to like, not the dark side, but kind of like in the middle side or maybe the dark side, he died after the taping of season one. I forgot the names. It's Balin, I think is his character's name. In Ashoka. Balin, the real actor, tragically died and they replaced him. Ray Stevenson. Ray Stevenson is the actor. You're thinking, okay, so he passed away. Correct. Am I remembering this correctly? And then somebody's replacing him.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah, he played Balon Skoll in the.

[Jason Calacanis]

First season of Ahsoka, and then he died in May 2023. So they are discussing. They want to keep this character Baylan Skoll in the Star wars universe. So they're probably going to recast. I think they have. If you look at producer Claude. So interestingly, you could. As the, you know, the Star Wars. In fact, it's Rory McCann who played the hound on Game of Thrones. He's going to take over as the new balance.

[Alex Wilhelm]

He was great in the Game of Thrones.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, it was great in Game of Thrones. So now Imagine you're the casting director, Lon. How amazing would this be? Or if you're doing Indiana Jones, like they're going to reboot the Indiana Jones franchise. You and I have talked about on the group chat, recasting Star wars for a new generation. Like the original trilogy, you know, episodes 4, 5, 6. You could just replace. Folks, this is great. What an amazing way to do casting. Or if you're just a fan of, you know, a certain series, to put yourself in it. Like, incredible to see myself as. I mean, you don't have to really stretch the imagination here, Alex. Given my weight loss and my increased muscle mass and the haircut that I just got tight as. Right. You could put me in as Daniel Craig. You don't need to squint. It's just. It is what it is, folks. He's my doppelganger.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Absolutely. Similarly good poker results. Similarly chiseled jawline, similar British accent, similar English roots. You know, absolutely 100% slam dunk. Seriously, though, Jason, how does this work with ip? Because we've talked a lot about IP and we'll talk about. Okay, next story. But, yeah, what are the rules here?

[Jason Calacanis]

So the rules are, if you're using this as a tool on your desktop, you bought the tool and you put images in it, that's on you. You could do whatever you want as an individual with media you've purchased. So if I bought a magazine and I cut it up and I made. What do you call those? Like a collage? A collage or a picture box. They make those framed boxes. I don't know what that's called.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Diorama.

[Jason Calacanis]

Sure. If I go do that. I bought the media, I made some new product. Great. I'm not selling it to the public now.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Got it.

[Jason Calacanis]

If I start making art and I use this ip, then you could have a lawsuit because you're infringing on somebody's unique ip. So if I made a thousand posters of, you know, the. The Star Wars IP because I thought it was fun, and I sold them on Etsy, Etsy gets takedown notices now. If you do it bespoke, it's one piece of art, It's a little harder for them to come after. So if you were to release this and you said, put Leonardo DiCaprio as every star wars character and make me a montage, that's very illegal. Because this company would be then using these. This protected ip, and that would be their opportunity in the world to pursue that revenue stream. So the way IP works in fair use works if you're doing something for educational purposes, you're doing it on your own computer and it's non commercial and, and you're not like making a profit off of it. That would infringe the original party's ability to exploit their ip. No harm, no foul. So me making the collage and giving it to you for your birthday, it's not really like going to affect the Star wars franchise. However, if the Star wars franchise makes a Jedi me, as I talked about for the past year here on the program, that's their opportunity. You can't take that from them. And especially if you're making money. So if this platform lets you upload videos and you happen to have stolen the video, okay, that's on you. And individuals would then be responsible for their use of this tool. Just like the scissors and the glue making the montage are not responsible when you make your Star wars montage.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Right, next up on the docket, we're going to do a demo of a cool product from Suno. In a second though, Jason, I just want to throw in one little news hook first before we bring Oliver on to show us that, which is that Udio has done what you said they were going to do, which is they have signed a deal with a major record label, umg in this case, terms were announced, I think it was later on Wednesday. The thing to know here is that it appears to be a little bit restrictive. So I would just say that we are now in the lawsuit settlement era of AI music.

[Jason Calacanis]

So just so I understand, Suno did reach $150 million in arrangement. That's incredible. And UMG, the Universal Music Group and Udio, a different service, settled their suit and formed a partnership. This is critical. Now the partnership means they own part of the company. I'm guessing that we don't know.

[Alex Wilhelm]

There was a compensatory legal settlement. So we know some value changed hands, but we don't know yet if that's cash or stock.

[Jason Calacanis]

So I have much experience in working with the music industry, which does does take IP very seriously. I would say they take it the most seriously of anybody. And so what they will do is they let startups do all kinds of experimental stuff. They don't say anything. They set a trap. This is my belief, this is my conspiracy theory. The music industry sets a trap for startups. Here's how it works. You go do things, you do them non commercial. Somebody gives you advice, hey, you're not charging anybody. Be fine, they let you go. Then you get to a certain level of success. Once they see you have success. These are cutthroat individuals in the music industry. Look up the history of the music business for 100 years. These people are hardcore gangsters. And I'm not saying like literally like in the mafia, but there's a history of the mafia being involved in the music business that I think creates an overhang. I'll be totally honest. I think the way they operate is like the mafia in that they will, hey, they'll let you gamble, they'll let you get in debt and then they take over your sports store and then they have you purchase a bunch of stuff and then they burn it down. This is what they do to startups. Never use their ip, never ever touch it, not even for a second. In fact, only hire work for, hire musicians to work for you and sign a work for hire agreement to put music into your product or, or make your own royalty free music. Then you can go to them and say, hey, we'd love to have one of your songs in here. We'd like to charge you this amount to be in our product. And you come to them with that approach as opposed to using a 30 second clip and saying I only use a 30 second clip. They will come after you like rabid dogs. More. More than that. No, more like in Game of Thrones, the White Walkers, they'll come to you like the white Walkers at the wall in the north. They are going to come forever for you and they will destroy your company. And the way they do that is they just file all these lawsuits, all these legal letters and then they get you to sign a settlement for millions of dollars and there's like five different companies that will sue you and one or two sue you. You start to settle with them, the third shows up, they know what the settlement is. I think it's all Iraq and I think it's all coordinated. And that's why we don't really invest in any companies that touch the music industry. Well, I'm glad that they did. But on that note, let's talk about this company and see if they have figured out a way to thread the needle. Producer Oliver, get on, talk to us.

[Alex Wilhelm]

About Suna, my man.

[Jason Calacanis]

Hey listen, we meet a lot of early stage founders here at Launch, my investment company and some they don't have a lot of traction yet. They just have an idea. Maybe they haven't even finished their product, they've just got an mvp. But they still need investors and accelerators like ours to take them seriously. And you know what, we can't just Wire money to your gmail or your PayPal. That's not how it works, folks. We need to know that you're a legit and official business. We need to know your company is incorporated. That's why you need Northwest Registered Agent. It's the service that will help you run your business the right way from day one. In 10 clicks and in under 10 minutes, you're going to file for your LLC or A C corp. If you're a startup, get a domain name, launch your official website, claim your business email, and even fast track your trademark application, which some people forget to do. We're talking about more than just company formation. This is your entire identity as a business. Go to northwestregisteredagent.com twist and show the world you're in business. And make sure you use that URL twist. So they know that we sent you. Producer Oliver, researcher Oliver is here. How you doing, Oliver?

[Oliver]

Great. Just been spending a lot of time in Suno this week. It's been. It's been really fun to play with. And I do come from a background. I've spent a lot of time producing. I've been in a band previously in a previous life, so I had a bit of previous knowledge, get that one before I dove into Suno. So I'm excited to kind of show you some of my takeaways. I think something that's really important to note is that Suno, you know, is a company that's making AI generated music. They recently released their V5 model, which was just their newest, most upgraded model. It's great fidelity, the vocals sound really clear. Overall, the song structure is much better. But they also recently released Suno Studio, which is a huge upgrade from what they previously had because it allows you to dive deeper once you start experimenting with the tracks that you made. So now you're able to kind of get a little deeper.

[Jason Calacanis]

So does it have tracks in there that are known artists? Can you pick a Lady Gaga track or does it have similar to a Lady Gaga song? How does it work? Walk us through making a song here in real time.

[Oliver]

What I'm going to do here is kind of walk you through what I'm seeing on the screen. So on the left here, this is the create section and this is kind of what's. What was there in the previous model before Suno Studio. And this is where you can add some lyrics, kind of talk about what style you want, then sooner will generate a song for you from there. This is kind of.

[Jason Calacanis]

Okay, let's do it.

[Oliver]

Got it.

[Jason Calacanis]

Library in the middle.

[Oliver]

And then this is kind of the timeline where you can kind of edit your project and then this is detail. So we'll get into it. So one thing I love to do to create the track is head over to Chatbots and kind of have it. Have it make a prompt in the style.

[Jason Calacanis]

Let's do it in the style of Dire Straits and the song Sultans of Swing or Sultans of Swing and Telegraph Road and Love Over Gold. Perfect. So let's see if it will make a proper prompt or it's going to tell you. Wow, look at this. So you're using ChatGPT to make the prompt great.

[Oliver]

Yes, because honestly, for many people, even even myself, it's pretty hard to describe a genre of music. For some reason there's so many different styles. You know, a lot of my favorite artists are make EDM music but it's. They're so different and unique so it can be hard. So ChatGPT helped me create a prompt for Dire Straits. It started a smooth story driven rock song in the style of Dial Straits. Warm, clean electric guitar tones with expressive finger picking and melodic solos. Kind of mid tempo groove with tight drums. So it goes on to continue to describe kind of more Dire Straits style. And you do want to kind of put in some lyrics so you can actually generate lyrics directly in suno.

[Jason Calacanis]

So okay, so here we'll describe the song. The song will be the story of a kid from Brooklyn who breaks his way into the venture capital industry and becomes a legendary angel investor and podcaster in 20 years of hard work. All right, this is. I finally have Mark Knoffler making a song about me. No, I'm really interested to see.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I'm like, what's he gonna do with that?

[Jason Calacanis]

I mean, who knows?

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah, I'm curious.

[Jason Calacanis]

I mean, who knows? These LLMs are powerful.

[Oliver]

We can maybe try this one. Kid from Brooklyn, Holes in his shoes, Concrete jungle taught him how to choose. Late nights, cold pizza. Yeah, we can, we can select this option.

[Jason Calacanis]

Chasing a muse. Wow. Okay.

[Oliver]

It gets pretty spicy. So one thing to note is once you hit create, we filled in the lyrics and we've filled in the style and then we can create and it always makes two versions of whatever your prompt is contained artist name. So we got a little bit of an error here. So.

[Jason Calacanis]

So this goes speaks to ip. We have to take out Dire Straigh. So I would say in the style. Oh yeah, you're just going to take out the band name and you got to take out Mark Knopfler's name. A storytelling tone. Right. You just take out the like and let's see if it does it this time.

[Oliver]

So like any LLM there's or any model, you're able to kind of get around it. I have written artist names in here. It doesn't flag it. I think it kind of just depends on how it's feeling. So you can see.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, it did it, which is incredible. Okay, now let's see what you came up with here. This is going to get interesting.

[Oliver]

So we can listen to these.

[Jason Calacanis]

It does sound like a little bit like D. It's like bluesy. Got the finger picking of the guitar. That's very much like late stage Bart Knoffler like Privateering. Oh, God. Late nights cold pizza Chasing a muse dream Stacked higher than the skyline views oh, yeah he had nothing but a notebook A name and a spot Pitching big dreams on the street Light, dark Come on. Now.

[Oliver]

We can check out the other one too.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I mean, Jason has never been happier. I think you really.

[Jason Calacanis]

This is hilarious.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Oh.

[Oliver]

No, the first sounds like John.

[Jason Calacanis]

Mayer, which by the way, John Mayer, one of his muses is Mark Knopfler. So his entire album, Sob Rock, including Wild Blue, the best track on Sob Rock by John Mayer is a specific tribute to Mark Knopfler's 80s finger picking guitar blues style. It's incredible.

[Oliver]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

Now what can you do in terms of if you want to change it? Like if I wanted to change it around.

[Oliver]

Yeah. So you can drag it directly into the timeline over here and so you can hear it. This is the song that we chose, I think, Jason, you like the version one as well. So what. What I love to do is you have to click on the track and then you can click extract stems. So this is something that I've kind of been seeing more with different tools where you can actually. It'll use artificial intelligence to extract each channel, each instrument. So this usually takes a little bit to learn.

[Jason Calacanis]

I see that. So it's breaking out the vocals, the B vocals, the drums, the bass, the guitar, the keyboard, the percussion, the strings, the synth, the fx. And the, you know, synth was a big part of the 80s there, brass and woodwinds. And it's interesting that it's doing this after it made the complete track. Alex. It made the complete track and then it's using AI to break it down. I thought it would have made the individual components and then put them together.

[Alex Wilhelm]

This is wild, Jason, because I remember playing with Suno Nudio back when they were pretty nascent and like it was like a 30 second snippet, you couldn't change much. Now it is so much more granular. Oliver, this reminds me quite a lot of a digital audio workstation like Ableton that I'm familiar with.

[Oliver]

Yeah. So Ableton is a tool that spent.

[Jason Calacanis]

A lot of time not that familiar with it.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Well, I've never said it out loud about.

[Oliver]

Apparently Ableton is a tool that I've spent a lot of time in. This is like, it's called a digital audio workstation. This is where a lot of producers spend most of their time. Even when they're, you know, whenever they're recording, they're typically recording into something like this. So you can see each channel you can connect.

[Jason Calacanis]

Super complicated.

[Oliver]

A guitar, a bass, percussion. There's a ton of different knobs here. You can see you have all your plugins effects and you also so complicated. All the different. Like here you can have a MIDI scale. Here you have your different effects. So.

[Jason Calacanis]

So different tools. I got it.

[Oliver]

Yeah. So that's kind of what SUNO was looking to implement here as users are familiar with.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, here it is.

[Oliver]

So you just split it all apart, all of the.

[Alex Wilhelm]

How cool is that?

[Jason Calacanis]

Now you can isolate just the guitar and play me just the guitar. Is that correct?

[Oliver]

Yep. So we'll do.

[Jason Calacanis]

Let me just hear the guitar here. Now can I just change just that with a prompt? The guitar, can I like give it a prompt and say do a little more finger picking?

[Oliver]

Yes, you can. So that's something that's really cool. So let's try it out.

[Jason Calacanis]

Okay. So we can style, I would say a little more finger picking and slower finger picking on the electric guitar. That sounds like a Stratocaster or perhaps Sire Draits. Don't do that.

[Oliver]

You highlight this section and then you can just click replace. So I'll actually highlight a. The whole intro here. You want to make sure that you're selecting guitar and then click replace and it'll start to download that. But we can listen to the soloed vocals here as well.

[Jason Calacanis]

Okay, so let's do one on there too. The whole concrete. Let's do. For the vocals, just pick the entire track if you can. I don't know if you can highlight the entire track. Yeah. And then say less country, more raspy, less country. Let's see. Oh, and I should have said English too.

[Oliver]

But yeah, I did try and add a accent to a track that I was working on and it didn't really work. So hopefully that's coming soon.

[Jason Calacanis]

This is unbelievable.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I'm kind of blown away Yeah. I want to play with immediately the.

[Jason Calacanis]

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[Alex Wilhelm]

What do you have to pay Oliver to get access to this? What a pseudo charger?

[Oliver]

Yeah. So this is. You have to have this premier plan. It is $30 per month. You get 10,000 credits. I've been playing with Suno basically all week and I've already. I'm only 1500 credits through, so you really have to be abusing Suno.

[Jason Calacanis]

So it's basically free. Let's call it what it is.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Exactly.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's free. A dollar a day is free. If it costs. Let me just explain to people, if it costs more than Sweet Greens, it's free. Of course, less than Sweet Greens. It's also known as free. Anybody can. An Uber driver, a doordasher who's delivering sweet greens can afford to eat at Sweet Greens if something costs less than your average Sweet Greens order, which I think is about 25 bucks if you get a lemonade. Okay, so let's hear this guitar. Oh my God. I did it right? I was what I was looking for. Either I'm a master prompter or this is really smart. It was more raspy too. Wait, did it do the raspy? Did it, did it update the vocals? It is a bit more raspy. Perfect.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Sounds more auto tuned actually.

[Oliver]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

Anyway, whatever this is, it's super fantastic. Can you upload a person's voice and say I want it to be in this person's voice without like telling it? So if we like I was talking about in the previous example for ip, with Higs Field.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Higgs field. One word.

[Jason Calacanis]

Hags field. So with Hags field, you know, if you do it, it's like, not their problem. You're just using the tool. So with this tool, could I upload Sultans of Swing, you know, and Mark Knopfler track, especially if I found an isolated one and say, make it sound like this guy.

[Oliver]

So from what I've experienced, if you upload a version of yourself singing and then you kind of mess with it in Suno, it'll have the same style, but it won't sound exactly like you yet. I think that will be a feature that is definitely going to come. Um, so one thing I. I can show you here is a project that I kind of been working on and kind of give you a little more details on ways that you can use Suno. So one thing that's really cool is I. This is the track I was working on. It's kind of more EDM slow. This is the one I.

[Jason Calacanis]

Come on, Alex, let's get into it. Alex, we just drop one thing. DMA on the. Go ahead.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Sorry, I'm trying to do the, you know. You know, dance. This is.

[Jason Calacanis]

I know what that is. That's the Donald Trump. Totally inappropriate.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I know, but. But I'm imitating dads. Get your mind out of the gutter, Mr. Calacanis. Gee.

[Jason Calacanis]

I'm just saying it's a little bit graphic, that dance, but keep going here.

[Oliver]

So I used one prompt and it gave me these two different tracks, and so I used one of them, but the other one was still. I still like some components of it. So what I did is I extracted the stems of the other one that I didn't use. And I really like the drums. So I actually brought the drums into the other song and I was able to take this part and like.

[Jason Calacanis]

You.

[Oliver]

Like working in a daw, I was able to kind of just chop it up. And one thing that I think a lot of people don't realize is music is super repetitive. So I can just click command D and I think that that will kind of do what I want it to do. So I wanted to.

[Alex Wilhelm]

You're looping it, essentially.

[Oliver]

Looping it. So originally there was no drums in the intro, and I kind of wanted to get a little more energy in the beginning name of the song. So.

[Jason Calacanis]

Wow, it's a banger.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Oliver, what about. What about key changes and time signature and tempo changes? Like, how. How nerdy can we get in music.

[Oliver]

Theory terms so we can get Pretty nerdy. I think that in terms of the beats per minute and kind of, you know, staying on the same time grid throughout the whole song, you do have an option to select a track and control the BPMs down here. So for those of you who kind of aren't familiar with music, every song is at a certain kind of beats per minute. So, like, it usually follows the kick. So in this song, most house songs are in 120 to 130bpm. So Suno understood that this is a EDM track and they made it at this tempo and every single stem. And when I added the stems from the other song, it always lines up, which is a great feature to have here.

[Alex Wilhelm]

But that's why I was asking, because what if one was in seven, eight and the other one was in, I don't know, three, nine. Right.

[Oliver]

I don't think. I'm assuming that Suno's kind of sticked with four, four time signature, which is kind of, you know, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, which is very the common 1, 3, 4. And other time signatures are way less common, especially in kind of pop music. So I think soon it was definitely focused on that originally. And one thing that I do want to point out here is I was actually able to create a section using my voice so we can give this a listen. So this is a guitar idea I had, and I kind of had this empty section in the middle of the song. You can hear it here. So I was able to prompt my voice to become a guitar. And this is a little more complicated than it seems. You can't just kind of say, hey, make my voice a guitar in this section. You kind of have to do a little more digging, which you can see, which I do on my demo, which you can watch later today. And. But yeah, you can see it really did a great job kind of copying what I envisioned.

[Alex Wilhelm]

All right, so, Oliver, given your music background, given that you've been in bands like I have been, what do you think about this? How impressed are you on a scale of 1 to 10? And are you going to keep paying for it even after you're done testing it out for Twist?

[Oliver]

I think I'll definitely keep paying for it. I think that this is just v1.00 beta of this tool. So I do think that they will start incorporating other aspects of a tool like Ableton or Logic, where you have more ability to really play with the track. And I think that something to point out here is for non musicians, a tool like this really allows. Opens up the World of creating music to millions of people. And that's why we've seen crazy ARR numbers in revenue from Suno and I know they're raising at a higher valuation. So I think that not only is it great for non musicians to play with, to be able to create music for the first time, producers can also use this to help them with their ideas and now take ideas and make them into full songs and show my friends, hey, do you like this idea? I'm thinking about working on this more and maybe they'll say, yeah, go, keep, keep going. But I do think that there's definitely some things that are lacking. So I think that I'm going to rate this tool a seven at the moment. I think that there's still a lot of room for improvement, but I think this is really the first great tool that I've messed around with in terms of AI and music. I think something to think about is where will the biggest impact be at first? I think obviously it's kind of the fun factor, but I think if you think about score composers, that's a huge market. Buying a song for your. For your TV show or commercial, that process is usually takes, you know, a couple of weeks, even a couple of months going back and forth with the. Usually it's like a freelance artist who you hire one time for that gig. You have to go back and forth.

[Jason Calacanis]

Hey, yeah, this clearly is the huge win. If you need stock music, you want to make a song for somebody's wedding, like a parody song, or you're doing music for your event and you don't want to have to pay for live event music, license it. You know, like if you do a conference and you were to use somebody else's song in your conference, they might ask you to pay a fee for it. So yeah, it's just absolutely incredible. Great job, producer Oliver. Okay, go back to work. Get out of here. Get that kid back to work. We got a little bit more on the docket we need to get through, so let's rocket docket. It's rocket docket time.

[Alex Wilhelm]

We were talking about cloud earnings this week. Curious if the AI world is spending too much money on compute. The answer, Jason, is at least not yet. Okay, three big numbers for everybody. Growth at Azure for Microsoft was 40% in the most recent quarter. Google Cloud 34%. Amazon 20.2%, the best in 11 quarters. Over at Amazon, each of the companies also said they're going to spend even more money than they thought. For example, Google said, we now expect CapEx to be in the range of 91 to 93 billion, up from our previous estimate of 85. That's for this year. So in other words, people are still spending, they're still growing. And everyone said we are compute constrained. So, Jason, I'm curious, does this mean the party is going to keep going for longer?

[Jason Calacanis]

Absolutely. If these firms can make the investment from cash flow without taking loans or taking additional investing and diluting their cap table. What a great use of cash on the balance sheet to build up your infrastructure and have customers willing to take the excess. Which is to say, when we had Elon on All in, which will come out at the same time. You're listening to this so you can jump from this week in startups and all in and get tons of jcal. We were talking about Grokopedia. Now Grokopedia. My Grokopedia page, if you pull it up, is five times longer than my Wikipedia page. It's also more accurate. It's also more up to date. My Grokopedia In 0.1, I would say is 5 times or 10 times better than my Wikipedia page. And I'll have editorial director Lon come in and talk about this a bit. One of the things you'll notice if you go to the bottom of my page is the number of citations. So how many citations do I have on that page? And then tell me how many I have on my Wikipedia page. I think it's like triple.

[Alex Wilhelm]

It's 177 on the longer Grokipedia. Jason, on Wikipedia, as I frantically type as we do this, live under 50. Yeah, 54.

[Jason Calacanis]

Okay. And then what happens is on my Wikipedia page, anybody who I fired, anybody who I competed with in the marketplace, anybody who's mentally ill, they go crazy on my page. If you're part of the Jeffrey Epstein, like, you know, cult of people, the Pizzagate people, you're obsessed with me because I appear in Jeffrey Epstein's black book. I never went to the island. I met him at the TED conference. I've talked about it a thousand times. I give him my business card, he puts it in his black book along with 5,000 other people. So now those people come to my page and like, we have to make this a big part of Jason Calacana script. I met the guy like a half dozen times. He was donating to Marvin Minsky and Daniel Dennett. I don't know who he was, like, literally surrounded by scientists and giving them donations. This is long before all this craziness. I'm talking about, like the late 90s, early 2000s, before he was ever, you know, accused of anything or went to jail. Anyway, the point is they are relentlessly focused on these weird things that happened in my life, not like the balance of my life and what's important. So Grokopedia 0.1 powered by Grok, any LLM could rebuild Rockpedia. But he was saying that, I think he said that he thinks that they're used, they use 10,000 H1 hundreds to like build this or something. And then he said they were using a similar number to do the new Grok algorithm. And he said the Grok algorithm on Twitter now the new one is reading 10% of like the hundred million tweets every day and then making sense of them in real time with like 10,000 or 20,000 of these things. That's something that like Twitter would never have done before. AI what that means is you're going to be able to do a very natural language search on Twitter soon. If you're Google, if you're Apple, if you're Amazon, Oracle, any of these companies and you got cash laying around, why not build an AWB competitor or co? I think the power move for Elon, For Claude, for OpenAI, for Apple and for Meta would be to launch a cloud service so that they could offer it to their developers. Apple having an AWS competitor would be mind blowing because they have all these app developers. What if they said if you're an app developer, you get $10,000 a month in free credits at Apple Web Services.

[Alex Wilhelm]

AWS, is that, that's legal, right?

[Jason Calacanis]

You could say it would cause confusion. So they would not do that. They would say Apple API Services or something. AA yeah, they'd have to. Apple Cloud Services acs, the acronym being the same would not be a big deal unless they marketed the acronym. That would be the big deal. But if they just.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I meant offering free credits for their in house service to compete with AWS because. Yeah, well, they've gotten in some trouble with.

[Jason Calacanis]

I mean if you were to. Yeah, if you were to look at antitrust, they would have 1% of the cloud market. Therefore, you know, are they in some way using their dominance and smartphones to do it? No. If they said you could only have apps in the App Store if you were a customer and spend at least $10,000 with Apple Cloud Services ACS. Yes. So okay, it's a great question though.

[Alex Wilhelm]

So I, I'll be very curious to see. But I think Meta is the obvious candidate, Jason, because Meta is earning all this money and they're offering that.

[Jason Calacanis]

And Elon, look what he's doing with Colossus. I mean he's, he knows how to build a lot of these things. A crazy performance from Amazon. And I think Amazon is my pick for the stock of the next five.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Years because of the headcount reductions, reacceleration of growth at Azure and the ads business, I presume.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, Azure is Microsoft. I'm saying Amazon aws. Yeah.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Friday Brain, everyone, don't worry about it.

[Jason Calacanis]

I just want to make sure we're talking about the same company. Yeah. So with Amazon, I think they have the most to gain from AI that they have not yet realized, which is to say they're behind. So the growth hasn't shown up. Now they're the worst performing of the max 7. So sometimes you're behind and you got to like catch up. Dropping 10% of the headcount in a quarter where you smashed it. And then they need to have their own language model. I think they need to try to buy XAI or Claude or Mistral. They need to buy one of those teams Perplexity or just maybe become the open source champion of the world. And they have work to do because people will have their services on AWS, but they'll use a language model directly with xai, with Quad anthropic. So you can, you know, be multi cloud and do your AI one place. But they have to catch up on that. It's going to, I think if we're sitting here, I think Amazon will be the number one performer in the MA. It will be the number one, two or three performer in the Max 7 over the next five years.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Next up on the docket, speaking of AI models, do you know who's making them? Jason startups, surprisingly enough, yeah. So this week Cursor launched an update to their experience, also including a new model called Composer that they say is roughly performant with existing state of the art models but is a lot faster. Then Canva launched their Canva design model this week. What they claim is, quote, the first AI model trained to understand the full complexity of design. And then Windsurf, which of course is now part of Cognition, launched an update to their first model called SWE1, now SWE 1.5. And these are all pretty cool for two reasons. One, it's fun to see startups not want to pay anthropics margins for them. But also the thought here, and this is also confirmed by DD Das over at Menlo, is that these are basically re skinned and retrained Chinese Open source models, perhaps from Minimax, perhaps from whoever made the GLM family, but in a world where you can kind of roll your own model, Jason, pretty quickly, that's pretty damn near close to the state of the art. Why would you go pay xai's anthropics or OpenAI's gross margins for them?

[Jason Calacanis]

Well especially if, because Cursor was an anthropic partner for the first couple of years I believe. And so this is the natural tension between platforms and the application layer. If you built a 99 cent flashlight in the app store in the first couple years or a calculator, you woke up one day and Apple had released a calculator or flashlight and yours was, yeah, there it is. Is not necessary. So that's what's going to happen in the LLM space. They're going to say you know what, we should really have the cursor business, we should really have the copilot business. We're going to just make it one of our business lines at OpenAI, at Anthropic, etc. So there you have it. It's. They have no choice but to do that. It's existential.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yes.

[Jason Calacanis]

And if they have an open source model, well then they could be making progress. And for consumers there's no difference between paying 10, 20 or $30 for business consumers for these products. In fact if they gave you but 1% more efficiency as a developer, you'd buy all three and spend $300 a month. Who cares? $100 each. Because developers time is so valuable and so it is the absolute right thing to do for Cursor. They're going to accrue a lot of value. And what Cursor should actually be doing is they should be selling this to anybody who wants it. So they should have an API and they should allow anybody building developer tools to use their Cursor API and then they would be monetizing it on top of, you know that. In other words, let their competitors use it too, who cares?

[Alex Wilhelm]

So just so to be clear, what we have here is state subsidized data centers in China being used by venture backed Chinese startups to make open source models for American tech companies to retrain, to offer to other developers, to offer to their customers. This is the modern economy. Jason, just to back up what you're saying about the risk of being taken over by OpenAI or a similar company, here's a news item that we're not going to talk about in detail from Yesterday introducing Aardvark OpenAI's agentic security researcher. That's. That's the future. They're coming for the app layer, so maybe you don't want to be dependent on them.

[Jason Calacanis]

If I was a developer of any kind, I would never work with Sam Altman and OpenAI. Let me say that this is a warning. People can clip this. This is a warning for anybody dumb enough to use Sam Altman's open API. They are studying. You remember, Sam Altman's been around the block. I've known him since Loop. He's an incredibly savvy person and he wants every bit of revenue from the ecosystem. He is taking no prisoners. He's going to study how you're using the API, which he has the right to do. Sam Altman comes from the Zuckerberg school of business, which is give dumb people access to your tools, study them, and like the Borg, steal every innovation they have. And Zuckerberg got it from Bill Gates and Microsoft. Microsoft had a platform and operating system. They let people build Lotus 1, 2, 3. Then they did Microsoft Excel. They let people build a product called WordPerfect and WordStar, and then they built Microsoft Word.

[Alex Wilhelm]

RIP.

[Jason Calacanis]

They RIP. They were more than happy to have everybody at their developer conferences showing off their work, giving them awards. I'm talking about Microsoft. Now, Zuckerberg did the same thing at Facebook with their platform. Oh, Zynga is their big partner. And then they shiv them. I guarantee you, if you're using and you're trusting Sam Altman from OpenAI and their API, they're studying your data, they're studying your usage patterns. I guarantee it. And they're allowed to do it. Now, they're not going to study your data, but they're going to see how much of the API you use. That's all they need to know. There's. You remember they gave an award at that developer conference and they gave everybody a plaque for how much they spent with OpenAI.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yes.

[Jason Calacanis]

Somebody can pull up the image here and show them giving out. And all these people, these idiots were like, oh, my God, I got an award from Sam Altman for giving him my money.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Here's. Here's one from McKinsey, the consulting company. Jason, it's okay.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, that's a slightly different situation. MacKenzie should be using it.

[Alex Wilhelm]

100. They don't have tokens. Look at that.

[Jason Calacanis]

Okay, great. So, but now if you were building cursor and you're like, I gave. I bought a billion tokens. And they know the list of who's using the most tokens. As somebody Moves up the list. That's their roadmap. So if Cursor was number one and I don't know what's another tool that could be using it. Suno is like in the top 20. I guarantee you if Suno is feeding their information in there and it goes into the top 100, there's a business development product manager saying, oh, we should do a music platform. And then they will just go step by step and steal. You know, I don't want to say steal. Copy. Liberate every innovation you have and they have the platform. So they're going to roll over. You do not use their API. It's a trap. It's a trap. Insert into the post here. Admiral.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yes.

[Jason Calacanis]

Saying it's a trap. And then take me in the facial thing and make me into Admiral Adbark Saying it's a trap and make a meme out of it. Producer Marcus and release it over the weekend. That's your weekend homework.

[Alex Wilhelm]

First of all, at least Akbar.

[Jason Calacanis]

Akbar. Thank you.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I'll just say that it was going to be very interesting to see who wins between OpenAI and Anthropic and similars eating more and more of the app layer. And on the other hand, open source.

[Jason Calacanis]

Chinese model Anthropic is not trying to take the whole app later. They're very cognizant of that. They want to. Yeah. They're very rarely dipping down to compete with their customers. Customers. So it's just something to think about.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Here's a chart of OpenAI customers that have used more than a trillion tokens. Sorry for the quality here, folks. It's not the best, but Duolingo Open Router. Indeed. Salesforce Code Rabbit Isolutions AI. No idea what that is. Tiger Analytics Ramp a bridge. Let's see who else we know here. Shopify Notion, Whoop HubSpot. Of course, there's Jetbrains T Mobile, Zendesk, Harvey Canva Cognition Status.

[Jason Calacanis]

Okay, here's what's going to happen. I guarantee you Duolingo will be built into OpenAI. Guaranteed. 100%. Indeed. And job search. 100%. They'll put.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Don't.

[Jason Calacanis]

They'll do OpenAI. They'll do ChatGPT jobs. Boom. He's going to do every single business. Why? He wants to spend $1.4 trillion. In order to spend 1.4 trillion. You can't just be providing tokens in an API that go down 90% a year. It's not possible. So how is he going to do it? He has to own your business. If you're using them, you're enabling your own demise.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Do you feel the same way about all companies like xai Anthropic as well? I mean, Straw and so forth?

[Jason Calacanis]

No, because if you just look at the amount of product on the application layer that OpenAI is producing, they want to produce a device and compete with Apple. They want to produce. They have a browser competing with Chrome, they have a code thing. They released Sora to compete with Instagram and TikTok. They're going after every single vertical. Wake up, people. You're going to see them go after every single vertical. They'll go after Craigslist, they'll go after the travel sites, Expedia, they're going to go after Apple, they're going to build, they're building a social network with Sora. They're going after everyone. Wake up, Wake up. If you use their API, you're educating them as to how many tokens you use. And, you know, while they might, you know, while you might have it set to not train their algorithm, you know, this is all the arguments that people made when Facebook double crossed everybody and took away the social graph. Remember that?

[Alex Wilhelm]

Oh, vividly.

[Jason Calacanis]

They were going to give everybody access to the social graph. Everybody built all these amazing tools. And then Zuckerberg was like, we need to make more money f this. And they got rid of the social graph. You couldn't use the social graph. You couldn't post to people's pages, you couldn't post your latest harvest from, you know, whatever mafia game you were playing or your hand from poker. And they just took the entire business away from everybody. And if you wanted to do anything like Zynga, you had to buy Zuckerberg dollars, Zuckerbergs, Zuckerbucks, and literally use their currency, which then cost you 30%, which then killed your margins. And Zynga, literally, after having a deep partnership with Zuckerberg, got stabbed in the back.

[Alex Wilhelm]

No, I think they got stabbed in the front.

[Jason Calacanis]

Sure.

[Oliver]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

And OpenAI is going to go public. That's so clear what's happening here, if they're allowed to. Because even though they flipped, and I guess this is the next story on the docket, even though they flipped, remember the Elon lawsuit is still hanging out there. That was carved out of the settlement. So they still have to get that resolved. I don't have any insight into it, but we talked about it on all in, so you can go. After you listen to this episode we talked about over there, I thought we.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Could do a little bet. A little bet for Fun. We love to do bets here at Twist. And so Reuters reports that OpenAI is talking to bankers thinking about maybe a late 26, early 27 IPO. I found a poly market. 46% of folks over there think the company will go public before the end of next year. So less than half think it's 26 IPO, Jason. So for fun, I thought you and I could do a little bet on when they go public.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, I think we both agree it's going to happen before the end of 26. Am I right?

[Alex Wilhelm]

Dang it. Okay, I was hoping you were on the other side of that.

[Jason Calacanis]

So now we're just down to what month. So would you like to propose a month and we go over under or would you like to propose a valuation bet? Over under. What would you like to propose?

[Alex Wilhelm]

Valuation things. I think we're too aligned on on time to get in too much trouble there. So Reuters again reports that you pick.

[Jason Calacanis]

A number, I think over under trillion. Okay. And so this is the price it goes out at, not the end of day trading.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yes. This is their IPO price based on their per share IPO price.

[Jason Calacanis]

And you say a trillion, then trilling.

[Alex Wilhelm]

To keep it simple.

[Jason Calacanis]

Okay. And so you're setting the line and I'm picking the over under. And you'll take the other one.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I'll take the other one. For fun. Yeah. This is a normal hundred dollar bet, right?

[Jason Calacanis]

But I mean this is why you set the line. You don't have to set the line at just, you know, in terms of like being a sharp here and like really getting into wagering. You can set whatever line you want.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Oh, okay. Let's do one think it through. Let's do 1.25 trillion.

[Jason Calacanis]

I'll take the under.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I'll take the over.

[Jason Calacanis]

Okay, got it. Okay. 1.2 for $100. And so here's what I want you to do, Marcus. I want you to make a calendar item for 30 days out and for that date or a calendar item with a 30 day out notice with me, you and Alex on it and Lon on it. So make a calendar item and then put it on this week in startups.com bets. And I think we have a calendar there. If we don't, let's make a Google Calendar so people can add the bets to the calendar. We see it on our calendars. Right. I'm always building systems. I'm always thinking in system. When we make a bet live on the air, we make a calendar item immediately. Great bet. I'm going to Say it happens in September. October.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Exactly.

[Jason Calacanis]

Not over the summer. You get the summer. They're, they're going out on the road in the summer. Yeah, for sure. And then they just have this like right after Labor Day. Yeah, it's Memorial Day, then Labor Day.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah. So I would say, you know, September, October is the right timeline for that ipo. The question is just price. Jason, can we just do one tiny thing just to wrap us up today about an IPO that I think is pretty important? Okay, so Navon, formerly known as trip actions, prices IPO at $25 a share, right in the middle between 6 and $7 billion valuation, depending on how you count shares there. So a little bit down from its peak valuation. But most people that back the company did very, very well. And then it kind of flopped. It lost 20% on its first day. And the question I just wanted to ask you, and I wanted to get this in before we go, is how bad is this? Because you and I both wanted to see more IPOs, more liquidity, more deals. But to see Navon, a well known company with 30% growth, falling losses, improving gross margins, really stumble out the gate surprised me. So how bad is it?

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, you know, usually when this happens, it's because either people fundamentally are not excited about the core business. I think it's being dumped on retail, or it was mispriced. Right. So is there hair on the dog is the first thing we have to ask. And then the second thing is, did they just price it wrong? So we can go in reverse order in terms of the price. What's the price sales ratio here? What's the market cap? What's the price sales ratio? It's valued at 6, 7 billion. Right. And they went out at $25 a share. What's their revenue right now? So if we get their revenue for the year, then we can divide the revenue into the valuation.

[Alex Wilhelm]

So the revenue, Jason, in the most recent six month periods, we can kind of multiply that by two. Was a total of $330 million, let's say. So call it 660 run rate.

[Jason Calacanis]

All right, so we'll go to 700 things. If it's at a seven billion dollar valuation, it's only 10 times, nine times price to sales ratio. Okay, so that's not insane. It's 30% growth. So if it grows 30%, you know, that price to sales ratio would come down a bit. But it's not cheap, so it was priced high.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Okay.

[Jason Calacanis]

Or the growth. So that's part of it. So people Aren't excited about the price. Now let's look at the core business. Are they losing money or making money? Are there earnings or are they losing money? Is the next thing we have to guess because I am not familiar with Naveen Navon.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Okay, I'll just pull up the income statement here for everybody. The gist is they're still unprofitable, but as you can see right here, Jason, their operating losses have fallen by about 50% over the last year. So I would say pretty positive direction there. Elsewhere in this S1A filing, their gross margins are improving. Elsewhere in this filing, they Talk about using AI to control their customer support costs, keeping their G&A costs growth slow. And I thought that was a pretty compelling story. Reasonable growth for an IPO over the $500 million run rate mark. Improving profitability, improving revenue quality, and an AI story. It seemed like something that would at least stay flat at its IPO price.

[Jason Calacanis]

So with 6 or 700. Yeah. So if you're losing 180 million on 600 million and it's going down, okay, they only lost 100 million the first half, can they get that to go down even more? Hopefully, But I think it's just not as attractive as other options. So then it becomes, what else can I buy? Where else can I put my money? And if you see Google, which was supposed to, remember a year ago, I was telling us, like, oh my God, the search franchise is over. And I was like, no, I think the pie gets bigger. The pie got bigger, right? Like, search was up again. The number of searches is going up. Why? People are searching and then they're seeing the AI summary and they're like, oh, this is dope. Let me do more searches.

[Oliver]

Yes.

[Jason Calacanis]

I tried to explain this to people. If the product gets better, consumption goes up and so are people going to just automatically forget about Google or change it From Google to ChatGPT in their browser settings? And like, I mean, I might. You might, but we're the vanguard. Yeah, we're the vanguard with the top 10% search and research is going to grow 10%. I'm sorry, 10x in the coming years. Why is it going to go 10x the number of searches? Because the results are so much better. They're so much more helpful. I would. If you could do a search and figure out what's wrong with your dishwasher. I always love to use the dishwasher one and not have to call the plumber. You're like, this is an incredible experience. You know what? People haven't had that experience yet. But this winter, when people's H Vacs go off or their pipes freeze and they take a picture of it, or they do a search on Google and it says, oh, you have this H vac unit. It's known to do this. Here's how you reset it and relight the pilot. And you don't have to call the person and you fixed it. Or, you know, your housekeeper was able to clear the dishwasher thing because suddenly they know how to, you know, take a picture of it and put the model number and say, what is error 72? And it's like, error 72 is something's blocking it. Take out this thing and clear the blockage. How many times have you had somebody come to your house and they were like, fix it in five minutes. And you paid 150 bucks or 300.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Bucks more times than I want to admit, including some very embarrassing situations. But I just didn't understand something. They came and flipped switch.

[Jason Calacanis]

I literally had this happen. They called, I come into the kitchen. You know, I'm in my robe, and there's a guy there, and he's like, yeah, what's wrong with the refrigerator? I'm like, I know.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I just live here, man.

[Jason Calacanis]

I just live here and pay the bills. I go over, and he's like, yeah, you have to press this button to turn on your freezer. Your freezer was off. And I'm like, oh. I was like, how much is that gonna cost me? He's like, oh, it's 150 bucks.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

I'm like, oh, it took you five minutes. Can I pay you 50 in cash? And the guy was like, I'm sorry. I work for a business that's 150is, like, my time to drive over. It took me half an hour to drive here, and I got another half hour to drive back to the office. I was like, all right.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I slipped him at 20 in his hand out the way at the door.

[Jason Calacanis]

That's what I was trying to do. I was like, hey, if I give you a 50 in cash? He's like, ah, it wasn't his business.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Yeah, I understand, I understand.

[Jason Calacanis]

But I tried. So, anyway, it's all going to go up. So why would I put my money into this company when I could put it into Amazon, which I just said, is going to be tremendous. You know, Amazon and Google are going to make crazy runs now. Are they fully valued? Yes, they're fully valued for a reason. I think the optimism you see in Palantir and Tesla is the optimism we should see in Uber and Google, which we're starting to and Amazon, there are other companies that are leveraging massively AI and they're going to have an incredible outcome. But the sentiment has to change over time. And the sentiment takes a little time to change the sentiment in Amazon. Change the sentiment in Google just changed. Sentiment is going the other way with Facebook, which is, hey, maybe you're spending too much here and not enough product. So they just got to, you know, and they just made all those purchases. So it's going to be wild for founders. You know, the lesson in all of this is there's so much money to be raised right now. I am seeing people and I talked about this on Twitter. Maybe I think it's a good place for us to end for the weekend. And it'll be a little stump speech here, but somebody was complaining that there were three startups they had heard of that had raised money, kept the money on convertible notes, and the founders didn't build anything. They just took the money. So show the original tweet, not mine.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I am. Okay, here's the original tweet. It's from. I was. From my friend Jason Lipkin. I love Jason.

[Jason Calacanis]

Jason's great.

[Alex Wilhelm]

One of the many Jason's in my life. One of four. All right, here is our guy so far. I've watched three VCC deals this year where the founders just decided to keep the money for themselves and not build the product. All were on safes and they took the position they owed investors nothing and that in fact they were not even investors, just safe holders what eventually returned cash after keeping a large chunk for themselves. Another hired an attorney who said plainly nothing was owed to the investors and the founders could pay themselves whatever they wanted. I did not personally invest in these deals, but I might have. They had a lot going for them, or so it seemed. This is going to happen in the age of AI. It's the flip side of so many things also exploding so quickly and growing at insane rates. It's just a risk to be more aware of perhaps than in the past. I didn't know you could do that. I thought when someone gave you money, you had to be responsible with it. Jason, what's this?

[Jason Calacanis]

So we live in a trust based system. Venture capital and startups are a trust. Trust based system. There are protective provisions in the documents. Hey, you got to send us information. We have information rights. You got to let us know if you're going to raise more money and dilute us. We have these protective provisions against dilution of Corporate governance of board seats. But, you know, in YC's infinite wisdom, they decided to create this safe device, which was quick to help people fund. And in fact, a lot of founders just sign these and investors sign them without ever talking to attorney, without ever changing them with, like an expiration date or interest, like a convertible note. Because we went off the convertible note, which had more protective provisions. The safe is so in favor of founders that, you know, with no expiration date on it, it can just go on forever. And I have seen myself founders sign a term sheet with a firm at, you know, X valuation, which is a contract, right? It is. So you would have some honor and you'd have some ethics around that, then get another offer within 10 days, then say the other contract's not valid, I'll give you your money back, lie to the investors, say, we're shutting the company down, all kinds of hand gestures. Oh, and then they would go to the investors, say, you're not being founder friendly. These three can claim that. Now, if you were Jason Lemkin and one of these founders did it to you, you're like, okay, I put 150k and I put 250k and they screwed me. Am I going to sue them for it? Okay, that's going to cost a million dollars, or am I going to write a legal letter? Then they're going to say, I'm suing a founder. So founders now know this, and there are bad actors in the system. Every system has bad actors. In a peak market, you see bad behavior go up, whether it's VCs on a board ousting the CEO, which was the pendulum the old way. Now the pendulum can go the new way, which is the founders can abuse the trust in the system. This is a message to those founders who are doing this. And I've had countless messages to the VCs and investors. So I'll save that for another time. But just for founders, play the long game. If somebody believed in you and they were your first investor, I've seen this situation. I've been in this situation. You're the first investor in the startup. You help them get it off the ground. They use your name. The fact that you were an investor in Uber and Robinhood, they put your face in the deck. They ask you for introductions to 50 people. They get 20 meetings, they get more investors. Then they try to take away your rights, they try to take away your board seat. And then I have to have this discussion with the founders. Hey, by the way, if your new investors want to screw your earliest investors, then they will keep trying to do that. But once you've screwed your early investors, the next people to get screwed and the only people left are the founders. So what you want to do is you want to cherish your early investors. You want to say, oh, my God, Paul Graham. And, you know, Gary Tan backed me first at yc or I backed you first, or angellist Naval backed you. Wow, those are the really. Those are the good guys and gals. Cyan Bannister. Okay, I'm doing another round. These new investors who come in three years later when the business is on fire, and they say you should screw your existing investors and get rid of their pro rata and tell them if we invest in your company, they have to all give up their pro rata in their winner. But they weren't here for the last three years and helped you, and they didn't write you a check when nobody believed in you. And then you're willing to screw them because they said to you, oh, we're not going to do this deal. We'll give you a great valuation. We'll let you take some secondary. But you have to screw those people and take away their board, state, take away their information rights, take away their prorator or whatever it is.

[Alex Wilhelm]

But what ethics, karma.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, what happens is the investors who come later try to like. What's the character in Lord of the Rings? Worm ear. Worm tongue. Grimo.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Worm tongue Law for all future Lord of the Rings references. I got him.

[Jason Calacanis]

Okay, but this character was speaking into the king's ear poison, right? And he was making bad decisions. And the Rohan writers were like the most ethical and greatest people, and they poisoned the king's brain. This happens to founders. Actually, some new investors, like f your early investors.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Okay.

[Jason Calacanis]

They got too good of a deal. We're willing to pay you $50 million for this company. YC paid 2 million? Yeah. Why is he paid 2 million when it was just two people and an idea?

[Alex Wilhelm]

When it was literally worth zero, by.

[Jason Calacanis]

The way, it was worth zero and you loved it, and you loved them for it. And you signed the deal and you were well informed and they got 7%. So who cares? This new person's gonna get 15, and there's still plenty left. Cherish the early investors. Act with honor. And then you will be in a situation like I am with, say, Raul, where I got to invest in his first company, Rapportive, and we got to collaborate on superhuman or with Jonathan from Thumbtack, where I got to participate. And, you know, he Valued My contribution with athena. Go to athenawow.com and get like two to four weeks for free because I'm a spokesperson for that company. I use my platform to build Athena.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Wow.

[Oliver]

Wow.

[Jason Calacanis]

Athena.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Wow.

[Jason Calacanis]

Even Christopher Walken wants to use it. It's not a celebrity endorsement, but I'm doing endorsements for Athena because I love Jonathan and the team so much. I want to see them see. And he's loyal to me. I'm loyal to him. I'm an investor in Cloud kitchens. I was an investor in Uber. And I'm gonna help. I'm gonna help Travis with his XG Gammon because we both love backgammon and I've been crushing him in backgammon games.

[Oliver]

Heads up.

[Jason Calacanis]

And we're gonna collaborate on doing a backgammon tour. This is the best part of life, people, is when you can build a 10, 20, 30 year friendship where you just collaborate on everything and you win and sometimes you lose. But if you lose, you learn something and you just get. Don't fuck that up by trying to be petty between rounds. And like this person signed and wired and you want to rip that up because the next person offered you more and then they worm eared you.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Worm tongued.

[Jason Calacanis]

Worm tongued you. Don't do it. People who are worm tonguing. I'm on to you.

[Alex Wilhelm]

I think we need more tongue worming.

[Jason Calacanis]

I'm on to you. No, literally, somebody was like, oh my God, JCAL is screwing and screwing founders. Somebody said this and I was like, wait, what? You come to my accelerator. This is a rumor. Somebody said this to me. I said, that's a. Wait, what you come every. And I called the person up and I was like, do we have a problem or something? And he's like, no, it's not true. And I'm like, okay, that's interesting. But like, we have tremendous relationships with all the other accelerators, all the seed funds, because we find companies that they are too busy because they like to Invest at a $10 million valuation. They don't want to do Foundry University $1 million valuation. They don't want to do an accelerator. Y Combinator $2 million valuation. They don't even want to do the 5 million valuation when you get to 10k a month in revenue. They want to get on the train when it's $10 million valuation and you have 500,000 or a million in revenue. And we know that. Well, 50%, I would say. 50. 50%, yeah. And I get on when it's 0% DE risked and then I make a second bet when it's 20% DE risk, they get on at 50% DE risk. The series A, it's 60% DE risk. The series B is 80% DE risk. It's 90% DE risk after that. Great. But let's not screw up a trust based system. And I really applaud Jason. Who we gotta have him back on the pod. It's been too long. But you know, Jason's amazing and you know he's taking a little risk by putting that information out there. There's bad behavior all over the ecosystem. Just play nice. Words of Michael Dell win, but play nice. And you know, I told this to a founder. I was like, can I be candid with you? The only way for my investment in your company, like if we own 7% of the company and I get 20% of the gain on that 7%. So if that 7% became worth 70 million, our firm gets like 20% of that. It's $14 million. And then I give some of that to my team and then I pay taxes on it. It literally would not change my net worth. It'd be a couple million bucks. It doesn't do anything for me in 2025, you know, I'm past it. Doing something for me, it would, you would need to be $100 billion company, a $200 billion company for me to notice it. So all the work I'm doing is because I love founders and I love you and I want to see you succeed. I'm not doing it for money. Folks. This is an important thing to understand the best investors. When I saw Doug Leone and Michael Moritz at 8am doing meetings at Sequoia, after Google, after Apple, after Cisco, after Airbnb, after Zappos. And then I came back at the end of the day one time to meet with Roelof and It was like 4:35 and I, they're still in meetings with different founders in the same conference rooms. They're doing back to back meetings trying to help their portfolio companies. Like there are some people who are in it for the right reason. Align yourself with those folks and you can tell because they're just, they're working hard, they're working hard to try to make things happen for their partners win. But play nice and go, you go further together. If you want to go fast, go alone.

[Alex Wilhelm]

Sure.

[Jason Calacanis]

If you want to go far, go together. Folks, it's been another amazing week of this week in startups. He's Alex Wilhelm. Cautious optimism is where you're going to take your hundred dollars and get $1,000 in value. You're going to go read his daily newsletter, throw him the hundi. He's got kids to feed and you've got knowledge you need to gain. He's Lex on Twitter. I'm at Jason and Lon Harris is at Lon's and producer Oliver. Maybe in a year if you do as good as you did today, we'll shout you out and get you a couple of followers. But for now, heads down. Everybody go check out twain.substack.com tw AI.substack.com everybody go visit twi AI.substack.com this week in AI.substack.com just five letters twi AI.substack dot com I'm going to put it in the notes. Coming next year, all demos all the time with a roundtable every week. So it'll be kind of like the all in roundtable or the liquidity roundtable we do here when we have like four investors on a little roundtable and I'm recruiting AI experts to be part of that. I'm looking for like, you know, Chamath Sachs level people, like really high end folks to do that roundtable for me. And then we're gonna have demos between the weekly episodes. So just like my guy producer Oliver, that credible demo he did today, imagine a couple of those in between the roundtables coming to you, coming at you in the new year. Have a great weekend everybody. Enjoy your Halloween. Stay safe. Bye bye.