Cerebras's IPO goes vertical, and the death of OpenClaw? | E2287

27:31So the goal is to take the risk of foreign dependence off the table for the U.S. with that first commercial plant in Arkansas. Okay, I got it. Yeah, Larry from Oxcart, one of your backers, was on our Venture Roundtable last week, and he's saying your praises. so I'm glad we got to go a little bit deeper on this. What's the website and are you hiring for any particular role you want to shout out into the void while you're with us? Yeah, the website is magretheametals.com. It's not too much on it. It's a little 1.0 right now but we'll be hiring more folks in the coming months after closing this capital and kind of expanding our joint venture.

28:05Good, well, I'm really glad you're working to bring industry back to the States. I believe as Jason says, much continued success and come back when you have that smelter up and running. We want videos and we want to see the magnesium rolling off the production line. All right. Well done. Well done. Wow. We got a hard science today. Really like these minerals are super important and looks like American independence from China and the CCP and what they're doing is a high order bit here in the United States. Yeah. It continues to be. You know, this is one of those companies, a bit like Knox Metals, that is not cosplaying industry.

28:39They're not like putting a thin patina of CNC milling machines on top of their business. This seems really like in the weeds, nitty gritty. That's why I like it. I like the companies that are really doing the hard work. All right. Do you want to see some final sidebar demos? Yeah, that would be great. We, of course, have been doing this project. It is a simple project. We want it to have, or a seemingly simple one that is hard to execute, but people are making progress on it. We wanted to have people create a real-time agent that could listen to a podcast and then, based on persona, do something like real-time fact-checking or real-time jokes or roasts or real-time deep research to come up with the next question.

29:27In other words, could you, in real time, watch a transcript go by and then feed it into an LLM? So when we were just hearing about magnesium, they could preemptively give us data. Now, this is what happens on all live shows. If you're Howard Stern doing a live radio show, there is Jackie the Joke Man or after him, Artie Lang. We're feeding Stern jokes. How did they do it? They have a little monitor here and they'd be sending jokes in. So what we said was, hey, we'll do this. Then I stupidly said, I'd pay$5 ,000 if somebody could figure this out. And then, of course, 15 different people started building it.

30:04A little bit of bad feelings from maybe two of the first people who did it because they were like, I thought I had this in the bag. No, if I'm going to give a 5K bounty, I want to see some people make something production worthy that we can use. And so we decided we would do like two more weeks of this and then pick a final winner. And then I reserve the right, since it's my bounty, to cut it in three different ways, four different ways, give it all to one, whatever it is. So sorry we didn't make the rules clear from the beginning, but it was just an off-the-cuff comment. And we had to work backwards into how we were going to run this as a contest of sorts.

30:39And I think we have to give you a 1099 or W2 or whatever because, yeah, you're winning a prize. Yeah. If you're not using AI tools to make your team more effective and increase your productivity, trust me, you are being left behind. Sitting on the sidelines is no longer an option. No more waiting. With NetSuite by Oracle, you can start putting AI to work for your company today. NetSuite is the number one AI cloud ERP, and it's trusted by over 43 ,000 businesses. It's not just an AI add-on or a chatbot that sits in your browser. This is a unified source of truth that brings together all the data you need to run your business.

31:22From software to IT services to healthcare, equipment manufacturing, financial services, and many other great American industries, NetSuite delivers a customized solution for your business. If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, get your free business guide, Demystifying AI, at netsuite.com. slash twist. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com slash twist. So we have two for Jason. One is Glass Sidebar by Oliver Choi. He's a member of our nerdy gang. We love this guy. And then we also have a major update to Sidecast by Pat Hughes. And I'm going to show you Glass Sidebar right now.

32:02Quick aside, we spent a lot of time on the show talking about using AI, right, Jason? You're like, you have to be AI first. Everyone at Twist has to be AI first. Trying to, yeah. Yeah, well, I took the GitHub link for this, and I was just feeling lazy, and I threw it into Codex, and I was like, can you just build this for me? I'm in a hurry, and it did. So this is my Codex-built version of this app straight from the GitHub code, and there's one technicality with it that's a little bit struggly, which is that if you wanted to listen to your tab, you have to run Zoom inside Chrome, and Jason, Zoom today, did not want to actually make my camera function inside of the tab.

32:40So instead, I'm going to talk and you will see this machine is doing a transcript of me as I talk. And then as we go through the fact... Oh, so this is a live demo. Oh yeah, this is live right now. I'm doing this for you. So it's in a browser and it's capturing your voice in a browser window. And because you're running Zoom in a browser, which most people don't know you can do, but you can run in a browser window. It's kind of janky. It is now doing a fact checker and a comedy writer. And that's what we're seeing here. Yeah. Yeah. So I was talking about zoom. And as you can say, the, uh, the comedy writer said if zoom had a mood today, it'd be camera shy riffing off the fact that I said that zoom wasn't working out so well.

33:21And so what's the difference between live cards and what's happening on the right-hand side? I believe on the right-hand side, you're getting kind of all of them. And then these are the most recent. So that way, if you're watching the video right here, Jason, for example, you can put in a stream, then it has these. You can also collapse the interface. There's a lot of like little things you can do up here that make it pretty neat. Oh, and by the way, you can also run quite a lot of different AIs to do this. We're using my personal OpenAI API for this, but it's very cheap. Amazing. So you're able to like actually take these and run them.

33:53But it does work. It does take an audio. It does transcribe. And it does do all the important things that we asked for. So I was very impressed with this, Jason. And I can build myself. Yeah. Oh, wow. Amazing. Okay, well done. So this is one of our, how many applications have we gotten? Oh, Jacob, hit me with the final count that we have. I know we had a total of six or five that were demoable, and we had some others that were inscrutable. Ten or so, he's saying. He's saying ten or so. And what's the URL for people to see all this? We always make an easy-to-follow URL. Do we have one? Yeah, we do.

34:26It's going to be in the show notes, but I'm just going to pull it up here. So this is the GitHub page. page and if you would like to go to it, you can go to. Or do we have it in the docket notes? Remember I had asked Jacob to make a page where we could have all the contestants so they know we reviewed them. So Jacob, is there a page for that? And can we put that into the docket? This week in startups.com slash docket, we'll take you to the docket. You can look at it today. Okay. It looks like we don't have it. Okay. So we'll make that and put it in the show notes this week in startups.com slash docket.

34:55And in the show notes, you'll find something for this project. What's the official name of the project? Did we give it an official name? Glass Sidebar, and we have links to the GitHub, the website, a video overview, and the - No, no, that's for this project, but for the overall bounty sidebar is what we're calling it, I guess? There is a link. It is in the section, right in the sidebar bounty section. So if people want to go to the docket, they can find it, and it is linked here. I'll just make it in big, bold letters. What's the plan here, Alex? When do we actually pick a winner? Well, it depends on how you want to go by it, Jason.

35:28Would you like to be the final say on this? Or would you like the production team to have a moot, put our heads together, and pick our favorite? Well, I don't know. We had already set dates. We had set dates, and we had explained that to the audience. So I don't like to change the dates, because then people feel like we're rug-pulling or changing the rules of the game. So what did we already tell the audience we would do? Memory serves. The last demo is going to be on Friday, and we were going to hand out the winner either Monday or Monday. This Friday, we were going to do... So today, we did an update of two of them.

35:56and then Friday where we're going to give the winner or next Friday? I believe it's this Friday is going to be the winner. I'm hedging ever so slightly because we might have a bank show that day. So there's some scheduling questions that we've been taking offline. All right. Okay. So we're making progress. Go to the winner actually is going to be a week from today on Monday. This week in startups.com slash bounties or bounty bounty. Let's just go with slash bounty. So we have two bounties going on. One is for the sidebar and the real-time sidebar, and one is going to be for annotated. So we're having some fun with these.

36:29And next Monday, we will pick a winner. We want something that's production-ready that we could actually use. And so I want to be able to share a stream at maybe, or at least be able to see a working version of this so that we can actually apply it. And I think the one I want to have is I want to take out the jokes. I just want to have a fact checker. So I think what we'll do is we'll reduce this down to one thing. let's for this next sprint where we pick the winner let's remove everything but fact checking because you know what it's we we gave like all these different personalities and i feel like it's so hard for somebody to just refine this down to a working product that will make it even easier for the people who are building these awesome uh products let's just make it fact checking real-time fact checking of podcasts makes it super easier easier on the builders and we'll judge you based just on that.

37:22Real-time fact-checking of a podcast. Moving right along. You're looking healthy today, Jason. Maybe even slim, perhaps even sevelte. Well, yeah, I'm doing okay with the weight. I'm adding a little bit of muscle. I've been really focusing in on my sleep. I've been focusing in on my nutrition. And that's part of this holistic journey. I've been on row.co slash twist. If you've been thinking about taking a GLP and you want to follow your boy J. Cal down this adventure of getting in shape. I peaked at 213. I'm 5 '8.5", 5 '9 on a good day. That was just way too big. I was fat Cal. And just over three or four years of using these GLPs, I just slowly shed the weight.

38:06And now a Svelte low 170s. I probably have five more pounds to go for my ideal weight. Not putting a ton of pressure on myself. The GLPs helped me break through, and you should take a look at it. If you're, let's just call it what it is, if you're obese, if you're struggling with your weight. I did, I gained two pounds a year for 20 years. Adds up. It adds up. One pound every six months is like 3 ,500 calories. 3 ,500 calories in 25 weeks is about 100 and change extra calories. In other words, if you eat two Oreos a week, more than you burn, you're gonna be 40 pounds overweight. That's how slim the margin for success is here.

38:47If you have a Frappuccino instead of a black coffee. And there we are. All of a sudden, you're massively overweight, unhealthy. Now I feel great. You know, dare I say, I look better. And yeah. Go to roe.co slash twist for your free insurance check. That's roe, R-O dot C-O slash T-W-I-S-T. Jason, did you know that one in eight Americans is currently on a GLP-1? 12%. that blew my mind. It makes sense to me because the United States has a broken food system and, you know, we have things in the food system we probably shouldn't have in terms of chemicals. We have fast food where, you know, we had a food pyramid that was completely ridiculous.

39:34Portion sizes that are absurd. I think everything is just stacked against you. You know, You walk through an airport, you walk through a mall, you're walking to work, whatever you're doing, you're presented with choices that are bad choices. And it's really hard. And then people are under stress. The food system is designed to make you fat. It's designed to make you consume more calories. And whether it's fast food, whether it's bread. And what I think the GLPs have done for people is it's really hard to reverse the cycle. But once you reverse the cycle and you learn how to eat smaller portions and the food noise goes away, well, you can then taper off of them.

40:14You can take a micro dose. Everybody's. And then there are some people who are just taking GLPs who think there are other benefits to it. You can look up the other benefits. But, yeah, the food system being stacked against you is the challenge here. All right. We have some news, yeah? Oh, yeah. We absolutely do. So Cerebus, everyone's favorite. Enormous chip company because they make enormous. Cerebus. Is it Cerebus? How do you pronounce it? Well, now I'm really doubting myself. Cerebus makes way more sense than what I was saying. Cerebus is the famous historical dog, right? I don't know if that's the origin of it, but sure, we'll go with that.

40:48Spelled a little bit differently, yes, but the Hound of Hades. Anyways, Cerebus, we'll go with that, has raised its IPO price range, Jason, from$115 to$125 a share, which was going to put it at a valuation above its last private, all the way to$150 to$160 per share. an enormous reprising of this IPO before it goes out, which frankly, very bullish. You love to see it. We could use a big winner of an IPO right now. And if folks are curious, the company's simple and fully diluted valuations at its 150 to 160 price could be as much as$34.4 billion or$48.8 billion. And what's the revenue on that? Does the revenue support this kind of valuation?

41:29What would be the price to sales ratio? Usually you've got like some of these on the back of your hand ready to go. What is it looking like in that regard? So Syribus reported 171.4 million in revenue in Q4 of last year, the most recent number we have. On a run rate basis, that's 686 million. Now, how does that translate to a multiple? Well, I'm glad you asked. At 34.4 billion, which is its simple valuation at$160 per share. It's 50X run rate at$48.8 billion. 50 times top line of revenue, not 50 times their earnings, price earnings ratio. No. And the average price earnings ratio in the market is typically a low of 15, a high of 25.

42:13It's probably right now the markets are trading at all time highs for PEs. These companies are probably, a lot of these new companies are money losing, but these are getting disconnected with reality, huh? What matters here is that the valuation multiple, it goes up. If you think about the company on a fully diluted basis, then it goes up to as high as 70%, but a little history, 70%, you mean 71 times, not percent. That is exactly what I mean, Justin. Got it. Okay. Yeah. Just so we're using the same. Right off the plank there. No, no. We want to make sure because it is confounding to people. I was talking to some people and I was doing this exact math.

42:49And sometimes people are like, oh, it's growing 70%. You're like, no, no, no, no. Or it's 70 PE. We just have to make sure. It's 70 times. So every dollar of revenue is$70 in the market capitalization, which you would think means this thing has to be tripling revenue year over year, quadrupling revenue year over year. We don't have that data yet. I don't believe. I can pull that for you one second. But the thing that matters here is if you go back to the first time it tried to list, it had interesting revenue, interesting margins, but essentially one customer, G42, right? The company has been, took its IPO back, waited a couple of years, did a lot of work, expanded its partners, expanded its customer base.

43:32It's still pretty heavily weighted right now towards the Middle East, but the company has done a lot of big deals so far this year. So a 750 megawatt deal with OpenAI in January. I signed a deal with Mistral in February. Collab with AWS to put its chips inside of its data centers in March, working with Cognition. So the way that I think this is being priced is not that today this company is worth this amount of money, but instead the amount of major companies that are saying, okay, we don't just need GPUs for training. We need fast inference chips. Now we're dying. That is bringing this company to the forefront of the market.

44:05So if you think that agentic AI is going to keep driving compute demand, especially on the CPU side and GPU side, then I can see putting money into this company. Would I bet the farm on it at that price? No, it's expensive. But I do understand a little bit of the logic behind it. It's not just insanity. It's insanity with a twist. Well, I mean, the question here is, what is that deal with OpenAI worth? And then is that deal guaranteed or not? So the headline number, I believe, is like$10 billion over some number of years, like three or four years. So the deal structure will be the one that matters.

44:48And is it actually guaranteed or not? What we saw from the NVIDIA deal, where NVIDIA had the option to invest in OpenAI, that was an option. So a lot of these deals are going to turn out to be optional. Now, does that mean they're going to happen or not? It's trending towards we have so much compute usage and so much token demand that you would think these would be fulfilled. But these are big numbers. It requires the open AIs, the anthropics of the world to actually have the money to pay for those. The cynics in the markets are saying, and you actually had Brad Gersner say this directly to Sam Altman, how does a company with$20 billion— Oh, that was awkward.

45:34Yeah, able to do hundreds of billions of dollars in build-out. And he said, well, we predict our revenues will keep growing. Sure. And that has come to pass. this is and then you had anthropic and dario say well you have to be very careful here because the amount of compute you're building if the revenue doesn't show up you're out of business and you go bankrupt can't pay your bills so this is the one of the highest stakes games i've ever seen and we don't know in all these contracts what's uh written in stone and then what happens if it's written and sewn and they don't have the money to pay is cerebris going to or oracle going to sue an open ai because they can't pay their bills or do they say hey we'll just push out the contract and do they have the option to push it out instead of buying these things in three years can they say it's nine years do they pull a space x ai uh and if there is excess capacity from your oracles from your stargates from your whomevers do you just rent it to whomever needs it because in the case of Anthropic, there may be demand somewhere else that is quite high.

46:42But I think that service is a wager that training compute as a percentage of global AI compute is going to decrease as we drive more inference products, as we see more workflows brought into the AI world. And so from that perspective, I think it makes a lot of sense. I just, I just, remember when we paid like 70X for SaaS companies and that was terrible. Well, I fret. I know that I'm boring, but it does concern me a little bit, Jason. Maybe we're being a little bit enthusiastic. We are going to find out in the next two years if we're ahead of our skis and if the build out can keep up with demand or if the demand is going to level off and open source models, you know making more efficient models running models locally you know there are so many different ways for this to play out that no one knows exactly what's going to happen except that this transformation is already happening and that it's moving very quickly so who knows if people have ordered too much compute or not enough it's starting to feel like not enough and if you look at what's happening in the mag 7 the ones who have cloud computing which is google amazon and microsoft all their services are growing massively the cloud computing the neoclouds are all growing massively they can't keep up with demand so yeah core we've got dinged for only growing like 25 percent from oh really the q2 of this year people were annoyed that their growth rate wasn't higher.

48:21I'm like, they're adding like 500 million from a$2 billion last quarter result, but it wasn't enough. And I think in that case, Jason, it's more concerns about debt. Last note on service. Benchmark is one of the leading 5 % or greater shareholders. So another winner for our friends over at Benchmark. Yeah. Well, that's the other thing about these IPOs that are happening. These crazy valuations is that we're going to see an answer to the question, is venture capital a viable investment category still with all these late stage investments or not? And it seems like between SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI, Cerebris and others, we're going to see some great returns flow through to LPs and keep venture moving.

49:07Yeah. Speaking of that, an apology. Did you know that Fervo Energy is going public? They're a venture-backed geothermal company. I did not know that. Yeah. I got halfway through the notes to prepare a little section for us. So maybe we'll get to it on Wednesday. But venture-backed company, raised more than a billion dollars, going public. And I was just missed that one. Anyways, next up, OpenAI has formalized its AI P-E push. We talked about this on the show before. Basically, OpenAI and Anthropic are partnering with investment firms and private equity giants to take their AI and shove it into Portco's.

49:38We have some information about what this actually is now. They've named it the OpenAI Deployment Company, which I believe Jason wins an award for the lamest name of all time because blah. So this is another company from OpenAI that is designed to help private equity firms, TPG, Warburg Pincus, whatever it is, go out and deploy AI in enterprises. And this is majority owned by OpenAI, but they've raised money from TPG, Warburg Pincus, Bain and a bunch of other people and Bain kept Gemini McKinsey. They're working with them to use this company to push open AI products into the market. This makes no sense to me.

50:31Why would it be a separate company? Why are they, why are these investors investing in a separate company as opposed to the main company? This seems absolutely convoluted. Oh, convoluted. Yeah. rat's nest, but welcome to OpenAI. It's a SAM company. Come on, Jason, there's going to be some deals, some side deals, and some arrows going all over the place. The way that I understand is pretty simple. You got OpenAI over here. They make models, they serve inference, and they don't really want to be a services company, which makes a lot of sense. So you need to put forward deployed engineers into these enterprises to figure out what you can automate and where AI fits.

51:05You need to put the experts in, but you don't really want to take all that spend and dump it onto OpenAI the year wants to go public. So what do you do? You go out to people with money, you take some of it, you promise them a 17.5 % annual return. That broke a while ago. And then you get a bunch of private equity companies that want to improve the efficiency of their portfolio. You take the bucket of money, plug in some FTEs, take the demand from the PE side, send the engineers in, inference calls go back to open AI, huzzah, more usage. And then everyone kind of gets some value out of it, except the employees who get fired.

51:38So, you know, the problem with these things always is who are they serving? And this reminds me of in the dot-com era, people would spin out from Barnes and Nobles, BarnesandNobles.com. So you'd have the Barnes and Nobles legacy company trading as one, and then you'd have BarnesandNobles.com. You'd have ToysRUs, ToysRUs.com. And what that did was it just confused the market. Where is the value accruing to? This to me is extremely confusing because is this company eventually going to go public? Is this company going to give dividends? Is this company, is the value in this company going to accrue to the model, the frontier model owned by OpenAI or is it going to accrue to the balance sheet of this company and their shareholders?

52:28It just feels super complicated and like financial engineering that is not necessary. If you actually believe there should be a company like this, it shouldn't have the OpenAI name on it. It could just be a separate company. Now they're acquiring a company to put into this company. Yes. And who's going to focus on this? It's the same thing with OpenAI's Johnny Ive project. They gave Johnny Ive some percentage ownership in OpenAI. Okay, so now they've got a hardware product. Now they've got this PE spinoff. Is the hardware product going to spinoff? Very confusing. What is the board of directors at this company?

53:06Who do they answer to? What if they want to use Claude? What if Claude's a better solution? What if the best advice they could give to their customers is to use Kimi or DeepSeek? Are they not going to give that advice to them because they're loyal to OpenAI? The best advice might be OpenAI is not a good piece of software for this application, or you don't want to feed your data into there. Super convoluted. I think these things are all going to wind up getting unwound and then put back into the mothership is my best guest. So Anthropic is also putting together a very similar effort. It's a$4 billion push from OpenAI,$1.5 billion from Anthropic.

53:46But you would also say in that case, same thing, bit of a boondoggle, going to get unwound? I just don't understand why these are being done as spin outs as opposed to a division inside the company. If you look at Oracle or if you were looking at IBM, they have services divisions. and they're not spin outs. To the best of my knowledge, IBM or Oracle picked the company. They don't create a separate entity to do this. So it sounds like they don't want to have the costs of these implementations hitting the balance sheet, as you're saying, to make it look less profitable, which then is not a good reason to do it this way.

54:24They should just have a business unit and be able to explain to people, hey, a certain percentage of our revenue comes from services. Or they should enable a channel. So Microsoft has channel partners to implement the hosting of Office 365 or whatever other software products and the implementation of it. Those people generate five, six, seven, eight times the revenue as Microsoft does from selling the licenses in a long tail of lower margin, 10, 20 % margin services businesses. So that would be typically how you would do it is have a channel strategy. So they don't want to create a channel. They want to create another company.

55:03Maybe this is to speed it up or something. But the only reason why I can see it making sense from the perspective you're arguing, and I think you make some very solid points, is if the private equity companies can go faster at automating their port toes, which are in many cases, a lot of SaaS companies that aren't worth much because they burn cash or aren't growing quickly, you might be able to rescue your portfolio. So there might be like this demand from private equity to please come fix our software companies. And if that's the case, then I can see a lot of like more pull than push. And from that perspective, having a separate CEO of this open AI development company could make some sense because you don't want everyone being too spread out.

55:42Yeah. But last thing I'll say about this is I just pulled it up. IBM's price sales trailing basis. Jason, give me a guess. Got it. Okay. So I would guess they trade at 2.5 times. So close. 3.2. 3.2. Okay. So if they make a dollar, they trade at$3 of enterprise value. So that's the reason to take this out of there. And so just my best advice to folks is financial manipulation or engineering is generally not a great idea. It just feels like a suboptimal. This feels suboptimal is all I'll say. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. There's been a lot of skepticism. you're not absolutely alone in that. People are skeptical, but they have enough money.

56:33I mean, OpenAI raised$122 billion earlier this year. Anthropics raising from everybody. So if they end up losing a little bit of cash on this, it's not the end of the world for them. And maybe it'll work. All right, next up, I want to show you something. We're going to talk about agents here really quick. Jason, this is the viral tweet that was going all around over the weekend. People were talking about it. And what we have here on the screen is a Google Trends chart for OpenClaw. And as you can see, Jason, peaked sometime in the middle of March and has been in pretty rapid decline ever since.

57:04I've been keeping tabs on this trend as well, tracking both the decline in token usage by OpenClaw on different services and tracking the rise of Hermes agent in several services. So I'm kind of curious if you think that Open Claw was exciting and directionally correct, but too early to sustain its hype. And if so, what does that mean for Open Claw in the next like couple quarters? Yeah, you know, I think the acquisition by OpenAI took the wind out of the sails where there was this enthusiasm with Peter, and this was going to be like the revolution, and then the Empire bought it. So it'd be like, okay, yeah, now Luke Skywalker works for the emperor.

57:46You know, like, okay. It's kind of hard, I think, for folks to look at all the competition coming out, whether it's perplexity computer, Claude Cowork getting better, or just people writing their own. And I can tell you internally for us, what happened was our top two people who were working on OpenClaw instances, I had to kind of redeploy them because they wanted to make software. They wanted to basically vibe code solutions for a number of internal projects we have. And so I was like, okay, go do that. And then we'll go circle back around to agents when we get to it. And then other people in the organization got a little excited about Perplexity Computer and Co-Work, and they're working on that, which has a better interface.

58:32So yes, the wind, I think, has come out of the sales a bit for OpenClaw. That doesn't mean it's over. I just think people are promiscuous when it comes to tools. And when five tools drop in 90 days, I think everybody has to go check them out and then there'll be a bake-off as to which one is the most supported and which one do you trust the most. Yeah, to me, well, one, yes to all of that. But also I think that OpenClaw was the signal of where we're going, not the final piece of technology that's going to get us there. The first airplane was like, ah, we're going to do flight now. It did not invent the F-16, right?

59:07The White Brothers were not there. And so when I think about what we're seeing from co-work, from personal agents coming from both Google and Meta, from set up deployments of Claw from Chinese AI companies, it's clear that everyone wants to crack the personal computer use agent. No one's there yet, but at least OpenClaw showed us that there are these regular moments of magic amidst the API fails and other crashes you have that really show us where we're going. So I think OpenClaw won, even if it's not currently seeing the same explosive growth that it saw, because it showed that this is what it may still have growth.

59:44I mean, what we looked at there was just Google Trends and people searching for it doesn't mean that the people using it aren't using it 10 times more. It just means people aren't searching for it. So searching and Google Trends is a way to know that some new trend has come out and people are looking for it. if you were to type Airbnb or Uber into Google Trends, you know, or Lyft, of course, those things would go down over time because people know those products, love those products. If you typed in Amazon Prime, I don't know how far back this goes. Google Trends is how interesting, how it's new to people.

1:00:20So look, here's Lyft in yellow. Nobody's searching for Lyft. There's Uber during some peak time period. Yeah. This is the pandemic right here really brought it down, but it's Jason. Look at that. I mean, it's still actually, people are still putting it into trend. So it's not a great example, but it's not surging. In other words, like these things are still popular. People still type in Airbnb into Google. People still type Uber. They don't type Lyft anymore. The point is it's a proxy for people who, who are the laggards. So anybody searching for Airbnb be an Uber today are laggards or Amazon Prime might be like a really good version of this.

1:01:01If you don't know about Amazon Prime by now, so it's just not a perfect thing to look for because it's also like the top 100 apps in the app store. When something's a new app, they give it extra pushes in the app store or a new podcast gets an extra push because they want it to not be just a self-reinforcement top 100 list i've covered up the branding on where this data is from to avoid you know making anyone unhappy but here's here's a chart that i track literally every day it's 30 days of uh open claw usage from an unnamed api model router okay and it has been kind of consistently coming down and i i i've been tracking this because it feels so counter-narrative to me as agents get better we talked about agents last year they didn't work this year they do and we're seeing this trend so maybe maybe or maybe people are just going to co-work and other managed properties that are easier to use but i think we're seeing a lot of people try to get that open claw magic and i think they're stealing away some of its um some of its hype and momentum yeah i mean you just have more options it's like somebody opens like the only sushi joint in town and then there are six of them so everybody goes and checks out the other ones we'll see who wins at the end uh but i do think the competitors in the market are really good.

1:02:23Grok has just come out with their downloadable desktop tool. With a K. Yes. I was like, no, no, no. NVIDIA bought that. Yeah. No, no. Grok as in XAI's product. They now have their Claude co-work competitor. So everybody's going to have one of these. Google will have one. Microsoft's going to have one at some point, a desktop app where you can start doing cron jobs. And, you know, listen, they work really well. And I think that they're much easier for somebody to use them. They have a much better interface. The open, it's very similar to using like Linux for your desktop. I don't know what those wrappers were like.

1:03:02There was at one point Lindos, where they were kind of making a play on words, Linux, Windows, desktop. And those things were just too hard to set up, you know. So the ease of use of OpenClaw is the issue. It has to be easier to just go to a website, download it, install it, and have it work. Somebody needs to build that, an OpenClaw client that you just download and it works. Well, last note, because we haven't gotten to bring this up in the last couple of shows, but there was a tweet from, maybe it was Peter, someone else from the OpenAI Codex team. And they were talking about like, yeah, we're going to bake OpenClaw-ish things into Codex, which is interesting because Clawd, co-work, clawed code, distinct, right?

1:03:43But if you take the co-worky stuff and put it into Codex on the OpenAI side, you have kind of a super app. And so we're seeing either bundling or unbundling at the same time. I don't know which is the better way to serve the market, but it's cool to see different approaches to it. We're not going to get the same thing warmed up from every company. And then Jason, is this the Grok feature that you were talking about a second ago, these connectors? Yeah, so I think the connectors are in the app. So you're going to be able to connect in whatever app you're using. This has existed in the other products for a while, so they're playing catch-up now, but Notion, Outlook, Google Workspace, Gmail, all that stuff, you need to be able to connect so you can say, what's on my calendar today?

1:04:27Or make me my to-do list, et cetera. All right, and then there was an interesting story. I don't know if you saw this, but TikTok is testing a$4 a month product, $3 a month product, and I thought that was interesting. An ad-free product is something that I think gets them out of some trouble with privacy issues. And so I like this as a concept. YouTube also has an ad-free product. I think three, four, five percent of people are, if you're addicted to these products, getting rid of ads has got to be fantastic if you consider this a new form of entertainment. So interesting to see TikTok experimenting with ad-free and a subscription model.

1:05:10As I, normally Jason takes me about two, here it is finally. Okay, cut. Jason here, I have a copy of the story of what's going on here. Four pounds a month for no ads in the UK is one price point for this. That's incredibly cheap. I would absolutely pay for that. Like right now, I think any service that wants to show me advertising, I hate. so for me I would definitely pay that but I do feel a little bit like I'm being charged to have them stop hitting me you know it feels a little bit unfair I mean it's I have to say I could never use YouTube with ads it's impossible to use YouTube with ads for me so I've had the YouTube premium they used to call it red I don't know what they call it now but I pay for it I could never use YouTube with the amount of ad load they're putting in there what are they doing Are they trying to make it so unpleasant to use that we all become premium subscribers?

1:06:03Because it's a much smaller cohort in the world. One of the goals to get people to move to a premium service is to make the non-premium service painful. So this is what the airlines have pursued for a long time. Let's keep making it more painful to be in coach so that people go for whatever coach plus is called or business class or business class light. They're trying to get people who are business travelers so they make it so you have to pay for the first bag, right? You have to pay for drinks. You got to pay for internet. It's just you have to pay for everything, and it's painful. Nickel and dimed.

1:06:41What's that? Nickel and dimed. You're getting nickel and dimed to a level of absurdity. And so I think what's happening here is if people were to complain about privacy on TikTok, TikTok can now say to the EU and the UK, which have very granular filters, hey, consumers have choice. So if consumers want a free service, they can be tracked and have targeted ads. And if they don't want to be tracked, we will know nothing about them and they can just pay us. So it kind of gets you out of jail from the regulators. That's, I think, the backstory here. Didn't Meta get in trouble for charging in the EU to avoid ads or something like that?

1:07:26I had advised it to Meta, but they were talking about a paid Facebook version. So ad free Facebook. Oh, yeah, here we go. EU says Instagram's paid ad free option breaches rules. July 2024. so okay um but i think i think what happened here was the eu said you're breaking our rules with your advertising techniques so meta said okay we'll just give you no ads at all for for 11 pounds a month and no one liked that either so but i but i i'm fine with this oh wow you know what it was they were forced to do it um so i think the eu commission uh forced meta to do it as part of they're fine. So they wanted to have a less personalized version.

1:08:14This is what happens when you get into this like crazy regulation stuff is you start doing unnatural acts to appease them. And nobody really wants to pay for Facebook except for like lunatics, like maybe me and you would be like, oh, my time is worth that. I do think every product's going to have ad-free, privacy-free versions just to appease the regulators and the top, call it 5 % of users. I pay for it on my NBA League Pass. There's like an extra 20 bucks a year, I think, to take out the ads. And then you get to watch the in-stadium stuff, you know, like the in-stadium when they have somebody come out and do a balancing act with the teacups on their head or they're throwing the shirts with the air cannons.

1:09:04Like I get to watch that stuff on my, my NBA league pass. All right, Jason, good news is that the Philadelphia Sixers not only lost, they got swept by your knickerbockers. How the hell did you manage to crush them four zero? Crazy. We had, our team is surging. I got to go to the third game. I sat courtside with a friend of mine, Ben Stiller. So shout out to Ben Stiller, the actor, producer, director. We had a great time in, and that was a great run for me. I got to see my dad for a week. My mom stayed at their place in Brooklyn and slept in the basement of my childhood home, the Brownstone, and went to the Atlanta Massacre courtside, two MSG games, and then a final uh court side so i did four games in a row four wins in a row and now i'm back home with my family getting work done but maybe okay pistons cavaliers right the winner of that series is your next opponent yeah and i think everyone out there you know who also appreciates the um the odds side of sports might be curious to know uh who do you think is going to win piston calves and then when you face them in the eastern conference finals what's going to be the series record yeah well we are these are the top three teams in the league uh or in the east most people consider those the knicks cleveland and pistons the three best teams boston was also up there but these are considered the three best team boston was a work in progress so we don't care who we play uh i think we'd rather i would personally rather play detroit because detroit won the regular season versus us and i don't want to have anybody complaining that we didn't play the the best team, but they're, they're, they're up two games to one.

1:10:56Obviously we want to see them go to a seven game series so we can rest and get prepared. And then I think we'll win that series in six games. So Knicks in six for the Eastern conference finals. I think we played the Spurs. I think we'll wind up playing the Spurs in the finals. I think we win that in six games as well. Haven't the Spurs not won a finals in like 30 years or something. Yeah, whatever. Tim Duncan era. You had something you wanted to add to the list. I had challenged you with, hey, what are you doing off-duty? Everybody wants to know what you're doing off-duty. Alex, what do you got?

1:11:26Yeah, I'm going to bring up a book that I'm just finishing that I think is so interesting that everyone who appreciates startups, technology, AI, and thinking about the future should absolutely get into. It's called There Is No Anti-Memetics Division. This is just the Amazon page. And as you can tell, I bought the audio book. So what is this about? It's actually not a novel originally per se. Instead, it turns out there's this collaborative speculative fiction website wiki, I know, called the SCP Foundation. And this author, under a pseudonym, Quantum, wrote a number of essays part of this project that were incredibly popular and were put into a book that's become a smash hit bestseller.

1:12:10Everyone loves it. What's it about? Well, it's about a secret organization that kind of keeps the world safe. Not very interesting. Okay. But what's cool is there's a group inside of it that deals with anomalies or weird stuff in the world that consume memory and information. Hence, anti-memetics, because other things spread quickly because they are memetic. Anti-memetic things consume information, and this makes them hard to see, hard to track, hard to know what's going on. So the book deals a lot with memory, collaboration, technology, and a kind of near future science fiction element to it.

1:12:44I can't quite do it justice. It's one of those things that I just, people should just read it. It's that good. So there is a wiki that one author is making or a group of people are making about this world. Yep. Okay. So here it is. A group of individuals is working on this SCP Foundation, which is a clandestine worldwide group that is securing and protecting humanity in the near future or far in the future? Near future. So the technology that you see is very much right now. In fact, some of the story goes back to like the 80s. Got it. So they then made this into a book based on the wiki. And some anonymous author or authors are the authors of this bestseller?

1:13:36It's one guy. Okay. It's one guy. And he has his real name's out there. I'm not saying it just because he, I think, wants to be known by his pseudonym QNTM or quantum. Wow. This is weird. I wonder if this has been bought to become like the next Nolan film, if it's dealing with memory and time and near future. But wow. You're thinking interesting. Well, I was just thinking more like Memento and his other memory. He's always Tenant was about memory. Memento was about memory and time. He's always into those kind of concepts. But I wonder with this, the IP ownership of it, if everybody's getting involved in a community, does that mean the authors own this or anybody can own it?

1:14:22There's like an author's page on the wiki. And there's a lot of people in here. It looks like, you know, I don't know, a couple of hundred people have contributed to this. Very strange. This is like super interesting. When I heard the title of the book, I thought, oh, I don't want to talk about memes. I'm so sick of memes. Memes, memes, memes. Wrong. I was entirely wrong. It's one of those books that like 20 minutes in, I was like, oh. Okay, there you go. Check it out. It's linked there. And you had another one that you wanted to share. Yes, really quickly. If you are a person who likes to do anything that involves long time horizons, stroller walks, running, playing complicated video games with the sound turned off.

1:14:59I cannot recommend highly enough the Fall of Civilizations podcast. I'm going to pull the website for everyone right now. For example, what they'll do is they'll do three hours on the rise and fall of the Persian Empire, replete with quotes and interesting stories. And it's one guy who writes and narrates the whole thing. You can find it on YouTube as well. It is absolute mind candy if you want to better understand the history of the world. For example, they have an entire series on the Aztecs and how they rose and how they fell. And it turns out that when you look at the historical record of civilizations, you find, interestingly enough, that it's where technology fails as the world changes that kills them.

1:15:39Usually drought. Drought playing a big one, yeah. And so this has been a popular theme for people, I think, with the American empire being criticized and, hey, are we in the final days of our empire? What's going on? And China's rising. And Russia fell. And the UK fell. Where we stand. And Ray Dalio talking about this as well. So yeah, this sounds fascinating. And have they talked about the American empire when they talk about stuff? Do they try to, oh, The Fourth Turning is the other book? Yeah, that's something people - Okay, should I read that? Because my dad read that when I was a kid. I don't know.

1:16:16I mean, I feel like people are obsessed with the end of America and I don't buy it's happening. I do think we have problems, obviously, but I don't think it's going to be the end of the empire. Yeah. I do think we're going to have a bad 10 years because we have to figure out how to spend less money at the federal level. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But once we get that sorted out. Pretty straightforward. You know, I've now come to the conclusion at my age. I think I'm moving into, you know, the last third of my life that I really appreciate the United States of America. I love the idea. I am against federalism and I like the states and I like states having individual freedom.

1:16:57And I like the idea that we can move from one to the other. I love this idea of like giving a really hard intractable problem, certification of universities and education, universal health care. I like the idea of splintering that and letting 50 different states really go at it and then eliminating the federal version of those things. So if something becomes intractable, why not give the states the ability to try it? Now, this one's going to be quite controversial. Roe v. Wade was something I did not want to see changed. I kind of like the status quo of it, but many other people didn't. And now I happen to live in a state where women have less protections and less options.

1:17:43OK, do I feel good about that? Absolutely not. But what I figured out is people now are working really hard to change it in the state. It's become unpopular in the state. And people also are routing around this state to go get their health care that they need in other places. in other words getting an abortion or morning after pills or whatever it happens to be so it's almost like when it goes to the state you have 50 different states processing it in real time and you can get to consensus and i think you and i just talked about this with poker regulation and cannabis regulation and reclassifying drugs psychedelics also being done on a state-by-state level, it's almost like a way of us state by state working through the issue in our local communities.

1:18:35And then maybe at the federal level, at some point, cannabis gets reclassified, which I think just happened. So generally speaking, yes, to all that, I think though, that the way we have kind of uniparty states now makes me a little bit worried about this because it It feels like it's not that Texas is going to be able to do a lot of experiments per se, because it's kind of run by one dude who we know who in Texas is the governor and so forth. But it's kind of like one person, one party, which to me feels less democratic in the way that I think we're shooting for in this. So absolutely. But I'm a little worried about implementation of it.

1:19:12That said, in Florida, they're doing their own accreditation, I think, for universities. Are they? Is that true? They're tickling in the back of my head. I think they have some sort of alternate system. um but yeah we're doing some of this uh can i can i push you on this in one in one particular way sure curious good okay so uh anti-discrimination laws let's say you're um let's say you're in a state let's say perhaps in the south and you want to roll back uh federal rules that prohibit school segregation and it passes to me personally alex i would say get bent but but you know states rights do have a say here.

1:19:49So hit me with where you would draw the line. Yeah. So that one feels like basic human rights. So that's where you get into like interpreting the constitution. And I'm no constitutional scholar, obviously. But yeah, so that would be one where the federal government got involved. Is it non-functional right now? No. So I think when things are non-functional, The abortion debate was non-functional. Cannabis, poker, online gambling, education, health care, certification of colleges and housing. You know, these things feel like they're non-functional at times. And if you look at housing as an example, Texas is killing it.

1:20:30Florida is killing it. Nevada is killing it. Yeah. New York can't build houses. And they don't seem to understand that. you just need to add more units and supply and demand. They're like, no, we're going to freeze the rents. And so, okay, great, Mondami, but that's not going to work because if you freeze the rents, nobody's ever going to build another unit because capitalism. Yeah. Okay. We can cut this out at the final show, but I have to yell about something really quick when it comes to housing, NIMBYs, and rent. Okay. So in Providence, some people were trying to pass rent control. And I've lived in San Francisco in a rent control building.

1:21:04I have lived the experiment and the dream. And let me tell you, if you want building maintenance, don't live in a rent-controlled building because they don't care. Anyway, so this all came up. And my local city councilman, John Goncalves, whom I know and I really like and I voted for him. And I have a sign of him in my front yard. He was the deciding vote to not get enough votes to override the mayor on rent control in Providence. And I wouldn't bring this up because it's just a small city issue. but there's now stickers going up around my city. There's that thing like, you know, John Goncalves raised my rent and I'm just ripping them off everything I can find.

1:21:40Yeah. Because he saved the city. You also have the option to move to the state that you like best. And I think with personal freedom, you know, that's the incredible story. There was Ezra Klein, I just saw a clip going viral. Ezra Klein had the guy who wrote the book Abundance with them. or the book that talks about abundance, which they kind of cribbed the term from Peter Diamante's and his abundance book a couple of years ago. And they were just referencing, man, how incredible the Dallas and the Austin story was. You know, you basically have rents going down for three years in a row and Dallas imported like essentially 100, 200 ,000 people and housing prices stayed the same.

1:22:27So you can make this work. All right, everybody, another amazing episode of This Week in Startups. We'll see you on Wednesday. Bye-bye.