Figma IPO, IMAX AI Festival, the Tea app spill, that one Sydney Sweeney jeans ad, and more! | E2157

27:05Footage went super viral. They obviously got caught with each other and were embarrassed that it became a whole thing. There's a new CEO. They're relaunching Astronomer. They're trying to sort of move past this moment. And they had this viral ad with temporary spokeswoman Gwyneth Paltrow, who, of course, Chris Martin's ex, very famously, they were they were married. And then the lead singer of Coldplay. Right. So this in some way is adjacent. She is. They hired his ex-wife Gwyneth Paltrow as their temporary spokesman to do this like ad where it's like we're we're trying to change the conversation back.

27:40Here's a little taste of the ad. Thank you for your interest in Astronomer. Hi, I'm Gwyneth Paltrow. I've been hired on a very temporary basis to speak on behalf of the 300-plus employees at Astronomer. Astronomer has gotten a lot of questions over the last few days, and they wanted me to answer the most common ones. Yes, Astronomer is the best place to run Apache Airflow, unifying the experience of running data, ML, and AI pipelines at scale. We've been thrilled so many people have a newfound interest in data workflow automation. As for the other questions we've received, yes, there is still room available at our Beyond Analytics event in September.

28:28We will now be returning to what we do best, delivering game-changing results for our customers. Thank you for your interest in Astronomer. shout out to my pal G-Po on just an absolute brilliant ad I mean she is a tremendous actress because she delivered that perfectly it's a great what you're missing here is they said like OMG what the F and she just answers a different question yeah which is whoever wrote this I also want to give a shout out to the agency or the writers whoever did this because they understood the moment perfectly and the comedic timing here Gwen Castro is like very, you know, serious actress, but also can do action and she can do comedy.

29:11And this just shows how great she is at it. If they paid her a million dollars for this, it was worth it because the lifetime value of a customer of Astronomers product got to be, you know, like a major customer is a hundred thousand a year. I'm going to guess 250 ,000 a year. So you get one incremental customer out of this. It pays for Gwyneth Paltrow doing this. And this took her based on her professionalism showing up at a studio and doing no more than a half day's work. An hour in makeup, an hour of rehearsal and talking about it, and then an hour. She can bang this out in half an hour. She knocked this out quick, yeah.

29:50This is a half day's work. And if she got less than a million dollars, I need to talk to her agent. Has to be a minimum of a million. I would have gone for a million in cash, million RSUs. Genius. Everybody wins here. We move on. All right, everybody. It is the summer of 2025 and AI is everywhere. And I promise you, AI agents are already rolling around your websites and your products. And I am using, hey, Perplexity's Comet browser all the time with Claude. Love it. And I can't be the only one. These tools are going to change online transactions on every single level. There's a problem. How do tell if this is a real, authentic, helpful agent that represents a real person coming to your website?

30:31Or is this a spam bot? Is this fraud? Is this a bad actor using AI agents? You're going to book a trip with a sketchy travel agent? You're not. You're going to trust some new employee without a social security number? Oh, no, you're not. Trust me. Compliance will not let you. So why would you trust an AI agent that you just met with your personal info and your credit cards? You're not. That's why our friends at Vouchd created Know Your Agent, K-Y-A. With K-Y-A from vouch, you're going to have identity servers that verify humans behind each and every agent and permissions and delegation enforcement, all of that giving you control over your platform, legal grade compliance, which is what you're going to need.

31:06And know that.ai is a living directory of pre-verified agents. Turn your AI infrastructure into production grade software with know your agent from vouch. Check it out for yourself. Skate to where the puck is going. vouch.id slash twist. That's vouch.id slash twist. It's Trust for Agents that's built for builders and founders like me and you. And this came out, what day did this come out? Because that's the other thing. I think this may have come out Friday. It was July 25th, which was Friday. And I think it was a week earlier, Thursday is when this broke because we talked about it on Friday. Oh no, we did talk about it on All In.

31:42So I think it happened Wednesday, the night before. So we're talking, this all has occurred in 10 days. Yes. This goes back to my meme processing concept. In our society, these moments, when they do hit, we process them so quickly that not only did we get to the memes happening same day, same hour. People had memes up in the same hour. Yeah. It was July 16th was the concert. Okay. So the total, we're here on the 28th. Nine days after the concert, this astronomer ad with Gwyneth Paltrow is posted. Which means they recorded it two days earlier on the seven days after. Yeah, so they recorded it within a week of the original incident.

32:21Which means they came up with the idea four days after. Fifth day, they pitched her. Sixth day, they got her a degree. Seventh day, they taped it. Ninth day, they released it. Yeah, something like that. And here we are 12 days later. I just want to give it just complete, utter shout out to the board of Astronomer. Obviously, the management was a disaster for doing what they did. Just total entitlement, ridiculousness, the HR person. But we can have some grace. We can all move on. Let them, you know, their biggest mistake or one of their biggest mistakes in their lives in all likelihood was captured and seen by hundreds of millions of people.

32:55But we're done with it. We move on, everybody. That is an interesting point that I think this ad, more than almost anything I can remember from recent sort of viral history, really did succeed at shifting the entire conversation. There was a story over this weekend that sort of started to break out. And I don't want to cast aspersions. we don't have to dig into it. There were more stories about the astronomer CEO and possibly other women, other allegations that maybe this was not an isolated incident, but those did not break out. Those did not go viral because everybody was talking about the Gwyneth Paltrow ad.

33:30And so like that's true success. They shut down the other viral angles and made themselves the center of the story, which is not easy to do. They understood the meme cycle. This is all meme processing folks. Alex, your thoughts? Yeah, so two things. One, 36 million views on X. That's a simply insane number that we should underscore. So if they paid a million dollars, they're paying, you know, three cents a view, whatever. It's cheap. Also, I gotta ask, who hired this CEO guy? Doesn't seem to be a very good leader. I'm looking at their cap table here. I'm like, was it Bain? Was it Insight? Someone should have had better personnel choices.

34:07Well, I mean, here's what you'll learn in business. I've learned this certainly over years. some of these individuals, these hired gun CEOs, I don't know this one, so I'm not talking about him. I'm just talking in general. You build a career. You basically don't have people around you who can tell you the truth. Like, you know, the mad king kind of syndrome, the king has no clothes. And so that is something that happens. People become entitled and then they become risk takers and risk takers in business succeed. Therefore they get these jobs. And then you will, would expect that they would do risk-taking in other aspects of their lives, including they'll go hella skiing, they'll do scuba diving.

34:50Richard Branson's whole career with this, like, I'm going to balloon across the Atlantic, look it up. He was involved in all these kind of crazy pursuits. Stunts, yeah. Stunts, but they're just thrill seekers. So it's thrilling to be an entrepreneur, be a CEO. It's thrilling to do action sports. and Mark Zuckerberg and fighting sports, for example. MMA. That one feels premeditated, PR constructed. Is there a way? Anyway, if we were to think outside the box here for that CEO or that HR person to do what astronomer did. So let's just let that sink in. The HR person who had an affair with her CEO, apparently, allegedly, I could put some things on there because who knows what was going on there.

35:35Could have just been the Heinlecht maneuver misinterpreted. could have been choking on a chicken wing. It's very unlikely, but it's a chance. I mean, I'm just trying to give the people the better way they die. Is there a company she could go work for? Like delete me. There's a company called delete me. I hear that. That's my best one. You know, you need to, sometimes you make a mistake and it ranks high on your search results. That's why I use delete me to delete. name from databases. I think there's always a way, you know, like you can always come back if you're clever enough, if you give it enough time, if you're smart enough about how you do it.

36:17I think there's always a second. People love that. They love a redemption story. They love a comeback. You gotta give me a specific. I got such a great one for this guy. I have the next CEO role for this guy. Okay. There you go. I was thinking, what's that Ashley Madison? Perfect. Bingo. You got it. Yeah. That's the obvious layup. He becomes CEO of Ashley Madison and says, listen, don't be like me. Yeah. You don't need to go to a Coldplay concert. Go to Ashley Madison. I don't know. All right. Before we let you go, Lon, what's going on with this IMAX AI thing? Oh, yeah. I thought this was really interesting.

36:49There's also, I noticed Netflix admitted they're going to start using AI as well. They already have. Netflix actually, during their previous earnings report, Ted Sarando said, we didn't say it at the time, but there is an Argentine sci-fi show called The Eternat, El Eternat. And in one episode, they used AI to help create this visual effect of a building. It's like a parking structure collapsing. That was made with the help of runway AI software at the time. They put it in the show. Nobody noticed or said anything. And now they've gone back and said, okay, we've already done it, but it's now part of the Netflix production pipeline.

37:26What does that mean to you as a creative and fan of cinema? I mean, I think it's important to draw some distinctions. I think when people think about using AI to make a movie, they're picturing me going to chat GPT and saying, make a movie about minions. And then it goes bloop, bloop, bloop, and it makes one. That's not what this is. This is people who are already using a lot of different computer animation, computer design, modeling technology to make all of these visual effects. And then they found an AI app that works well in that workflow to help make things faster and quicker and cheaper.

38:00So whereas you might've needed an animator to spend days creating the wire frame for this parking structure and then animating it collapsing, a program can do that much quicker and easier. Lon, do you want me to play the clip we had pulled? Oh, I'd love that. Yeah. Here's the clip from the Eternaut that I believe is, they didn't specify this is my best guess, but I'm 99 % sure I found the right clip. oh there's no sound i'm sorry it's okay we're seeing a person there's a building and it's the parking structure collapses some cars fall off that appears to have been the shot that they're talking it looks fake i mean it's definitely does not look practical the motion looks no it's it's either computer animated or ai i think it's a mix of ai it looks like incredibly bad cgi but you know i think for some of these schlocky movies they put out i'm not saying this one is a schlocky movie but I'd never heard of it.

38:54Sounds like a schlocky movie. It's a series. It's from Argentina, but it actually stars Ricardo Darin, who's one of the big Argentine film stars. So it's a notable show from Argentina. Anyway, it looks schlocky. Here's the good news. It does look a little schlocky, folks. So did the Irishman and the de-aging in the Irishman. That looks schlocky and they cost him 30 million. So did Luke Skywalker in The Mandalorian. All that looks schlocky too. And that was done with CGI, not AI. Yeah, that was human artists. Yeah. So, but using CGI, I think practical effects are so good in some movies that when you see a series like Andor doing a lot of practical effects and sets, I think, you know, for now, people who are fans of cinema can tell the difference.

39:40Yeah. Majority people can't. And this is going to get better. Ted Sarando said recently, the amount of money they spent on that de-aging was like 30 million in the Irishman. And they weren't sure if the technology would be ready in time, yada, yada. And they should just go back and redo it with AI and it would be better now, which somebody did. Somebody did that to Luke Skywalker. There was a kid who redid the de-aging. And I believe Lucasfilm hired this person to go work for them. Yeah, that's true. I do think there's another issue with the motion cap, the de-aging specifically. This has been brought up a few times.

40:17They can't de-age the way an old person moves. It's still 70-something De Niro, and they're animating over him, but a 70-year-old man doesn't walk like a 25-year-old man. And so your eye is picking up on all of these details. And even though, you know, the face looks 20, you're like, that's not a 20 year old. It's the same thing people were saying. This also happened in Captain Marvel, where they DH Samuel L. Jackson's face to make him look like a younger man. And it looks OK, but he still runs down a hallway like 70 year old Samuel L. Jackson. So it doesn't look right. So I think they keep running into that problem.

40:56Like there's a scene in The Irishman where he's like stomping a guy on the ground. He's like kicking his ass. And a 75-year-old man can't believably do that physically. You need a young actor to stand in for him. So it looks silly. But just going back to the person who got hired by Lucasfilms, it was the YouTuber Shamook. Yeah. Who stopped posting on YouTube and was asked why. And he was like, well, I got a gig doing this now for money versus a fan. He actually got hired to do it for real, yeah. Well, this shows you spec work can equal opportunity. Now, if you're in year 30 or 40 of your career, you might find spec work, doing work for free, as like beneath you.

41:32But if you're up and coming, doing a little spec work, I can tell you, you will get people's attention and might get your foot in the door. So, you know, it's not equally creative. In the 90s, they used to tell people not to do that. But in the 2020s, if you put your stuff out there online for people to see, that is the best resume you could possibly have. The woman from Insecure, wasn't she? She did a YouTube channel. It's right. Yeah, she was just a huge... She used to do... She had her own YouTube channel for years. Diary of... Of an Insecure Black Lady or something like that? Something like that, yeah, yeah.

42:03It was kind of like the rough version. It was, yeah. It was an early version of Insecure. And then I was going to say Dan Trachtenberg, he was a YouTuber. He used to host geeky shows. And then he made a short film based on those video games, Portal. He's the guy that's now running the Predator franchise. He just made that animated... He just made the Predator animated show for Hulu. He's making the movie now with El Fanning. So he just, they found him on YouTube. Well, and what's interesting about that one is they've decided to join the world's officially of Predator. And Alien, yeah, yeah. And Alien.

42:33She's a Weyland-Yutani synthetic in the new one. Yeah, Weyland is the company that went out to look for the aliens and owns all the spaceships and does all the terraforming and whatever. So now they specifically, I saw the Weyland logo. I feel like TractDark is getting us back to Alien vs. Predator. That's where this ends. We're going to do a new Alien vs. Predator franchise. Love it. Speaking of Runway AI, that same company that helped Netflix make the Eternaut scene that we just watched, they are teaming with IMAX to host commercial screenings of some of these short films from their AI film festival.

43:06Every year, they host a film festival. They bring in real people from the film industry to judge. So this year, the 10 finalists from the festival are going to screen at 10 different IMAX theaters across the country from August 17th to the 20th in New York, LA, San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle. So these films are much like that scene from The Eternut. They're not necessarily entirely AI generated. It wasn't just like a guy wrote a prompt and then the AI made this. They're AI assisted. So these animators are using AI as part of their workflow. But we do have a clip of the highlight reel from some of these films.

43:42I wonder how people in the industry feel about this my lord well we could talk about it there's some mixed reactions wasn't that the space was wrong our way of seeing it had never been right but i can assure you she's still in one place at first we thought it was a glitch then it moved there you go i mean it looks like um back in the day there was a computer graphics conference that used to do these kind of short things i forgot the name of the very famous computer graphics um confab every year it was like comdex or ces but only for computer graphics and this is with a computer siggraph thank you so siggraph used to do this whole time people were up in arms about siggraph in hollywood because hey the people doing star wars or blade runner they were building those sets so all those set designers were like, we're going to be out of a job.

44:39And yeah, probably they are. A lot of them are. But there was a whole group of people at Industrial Light Magic who were building CGI to replace the people at LucasArts who had made the miniatures. And it was like this, I think the prequels were the moment in which Lucas said, yeah, we're done here. We're not going to make miniatures of the Millennium Falcon. It's all going to be CGI for better or worse. I think for worse in many cases, what's the reaction in Hollywood? There's a real divide. You've got a lot of people now that have started coming around and embracing it more. Like Natasha Lyonne, the actress from Poker Face, she's directing an AI project now.

45:26And a lot of people were up in arms and upset with her. And she explained that for her, it was a question of the ethics of the AI itself. So she connected with a company where their AI model is not trained on any copywritten material. And so it's like, here's an ethical way to do it. So for her, that satisfied her sort of objections. And so now she's on board. Justine Bateman, I think, had a similar one where it's like, you know, AI has got to check these boxes before we can use it. Okay. But there is another side too, that is just anti, it's anti-human, it's anti-creative, it's anti-art, and we should just reject AI entirely.

46:07Did the same reaction happen in Hollywood? Maybe it's a question for producer Claude. When Disney started doing animated films, was there a similar act, you know, reaction from actors then of, oh, you're going to just make animated films and people are going to stop going to i mean yes i think the better the better comparison would be sound like yeah when the sound era was new and movies you first started it really did put a lot of people either they didn't sound right they couldn't sing they had accents like a lot of those people did lose their acting jobs in favor of people who had better voices and could make talkies better so we did lose a lot of silent actors when the talkie And this is a constant thing that happens every generation in Hollywood.

46:51Like the technology changes, the process changes, and we need different kinds of people and different kinds of artists. And so I do think there is some of that going on. Yes. I think that the objections make sense when you're talking about the AI doing the creative roles. I don't think AI is going to write a screenplay. I don't think AI is going to direct a film. But can AI like make this one segment that we're working on look better or make this animated effects slicker or sleeker, do it faster and cheaper and have it look the same? Absolutely. All right, let's get back to our tech docket here.

47:23We'll drop Lon off. Everybody follow x.com slash Lons, L-O-N-S. I'll see you guys later. What do we got going on here with, I guess, the T-App? I think that's the biggest news, yeah? So the T-App, Jason, is an application that hit the top of the iOS App Store, which is a big accomplishment. It dethroned JGPT for a couple of days. and the t-app was designed to let women run background checks share notes essentially uh kind of like the talk you might have in your living room about people you've been dating but in a centralized location and uh they had a data breach jason is probably the right word they left some information unsecured and so people could just access it so it wasn't a hack per se but a breach i think is fair they didn't encrypt the driver's licenses pictures and reviews of former dates or boyfriends that women were leaving in this app.

48:16So this is incredibly damaging on like multiple vectors. Number one, a person's driver's license and their photo being released in a hack opens them up to subsequent hacks. Yep. And if that person had posted about somebody they dated who they felt was dangerous, let's say in the worst circumstance. Yep. If that's true and that person was dangerous, well, then you've just let a dangerous person know that you wrote a review of them that you thought was anonymous. Yes. Now, there's a bit of a - just before we go into the more detail, if you wrote that in a vindictive way because your ex-boyfriend dumped you or your ex-partner, I think this was specifically women talking about men.

49:04I don't think this was gender neutral, right? Am I correct? This was women talking about men. It was for the FBI girlies who like to do their research. Got it. Is that literally the tagline for the FBI girlies who want to do the research? It was either FBI or CIA girlies. I was on the site earlier. So it was literally women warning other women about guys who they dated or reviewing guys they dated. I guess I heard on another podcast or another news report that you gave a red flag or a green flag to people. Very good. But yes, it was FBI girlies with an emoji, according to the tforwomen.com website.

49:36Okay. So these type of apps have always been super, super polarizing. We had one called Secret in Silicon Valley, if you remember that one back in the day. Vividly. There was one that was doing this, was it Forum Spring? For high school kids where they would anonymously post about each other, but you knew that they were within a certain geography. so all of these basically take the responsibility away from the person writing the review they give them anonymity that is the promise so this company promised these individuals they could write about other men these women that they could write about men so this has got like a major gender angle on it and those men would not know they were written about there would be seemingly no repercussion to writing a false review about somebody inherent in the way this app was designed.

50:34So there is first principle, should these apps even exist? And in the industry, most people think these apps should not exist because the abuse level is too high. And in fact, Formspring had kids, it was a long, if I'm correct, you can ask producer Claude for the details on Formspring because I know people who invested in it. I'm just making sure I got the name correct. There were a number of teen suicides because people were trashing other people. Oh, this person's promiscuous. Oh, this person is ugly. This person is fat. And then the pile-on would occur. And then people would, you know, how terrible kids can be, especially in that high school era where people can get bullied.

51:12The bullying went crazy. There were many suicides and it should never have existed. Secrets, same thing. People were getting trashed. And then it would use your phone book as the vector, Alex. So look in your phone book and say, okay, here's 10 people, here's their phone books. They each had each other in them in some permutation, right? So let's say we take 100 people and those 100 people all share a couple of phone numbers together. It would make a social graph out of that group of people knowing they were either one or two steps away from each other. And then you would trash people and it would go in a feed to that group.

51:47It's incredibly scary what can happen in these apps. The repercussions are all bad, even if you start with good intent. But then, is my understanding correct that this was a Vibe-coded app? And it was done? That is not clear to me. This is an application that's been built for several years, Jason. So the company was founded, I think, way before the Vibe-coding era. So I think people wanted to say, here's an app that had a huge, obvious glory and security flaw. Ergo, it's Vibe-coded. Therefore, it doesn't seem to be the case. So it's just incompetent people built this, apparently. It appears to be sheer incompetence, yes.

52:21Yeah. I mean, holy cow. This is just terrible. I mean, the people who built this app are going to have massive liability. Massive liability. Because, gosh, I hate to even say this, but if this app succeeded in what it was doing, then people would have written reviews about the people they thought were the most dangerous. and now those most dangerous people, if there in fact are dangerous people in the world, know who wrote the review of them and had previously dated them or gone on a date with them. Holy cow. That seems to me to be a recipe for real pain and suffering in the future. It's pretty bad.

53:06So there were about 13 ,000 selfies or selfies that featured a photo identification, like a driver's license, Jason. And the one thing that really stuck in a lot of people's craw here is that the company says when you use it now, we will delete your information. Once we verify that you're a woman, we'll get rid of it. We don't need to have that. So what were they doing here? Well, as it turns out, this was older data that was being held onto for legal reasons. I don't know exactly what those were, but they were required to retain some data. Okay, fair enough. But they lied. Well. Apparently, allegedly, or apparently, or perhaps, so I'll give a bunch of disclaimers.

53:41Perhaps they lied to the customers who thought they would have that photo deleted. It was a one-time photo verification. Yes. If I was a person that knew that the application promised today that it deletes information, I would presume that my information from 2023 or whatever was deleted. Such a colossal catastrophe. Now, the venture capital side of this is, as far as I can tell, T has not raised any external funding. So I don't think there's anyone that we can hang this on inside the industry, Jason, but there's 4.6 million people who were using this application before. And here's the crazy thing.

54:14I thought it was going to fall off the rankings because clearly it's not a well-run company. It was still ranked number two this morning, right behind ChatGPT on the American iOS app store. I think that's a lot of drive by people going and checking out what the excitement is all about. I'm going to go ahead and just say this. I think the app store should ban these apps. Anonymous apps like this, I think the danger is too high. if I'm Apple, I would just say no. Now, of course, you could go to a web browser and still run it there. But I think this company has got serious incompetence, apparently, because none of this was encrypted.

54:51None of this was tested. And then this also, if it is an app, isn't the role of Apple and this app store to probe and test these apps, especially the top ones? So I think this should be a wake-up call for everybody you cannot trust any of your information with anybody i mean i when i go through this um uh the new thing at security at the airports where they even if you're a clear member you still go through and they take your picture and then it says they're going to delete the picture and the picture is just taken to compare to your driver's license so i don't know how that software works or when that got introduced maybe it was a year or two ago i started to see it.

55:33And now it's every time. Look in the camera, take a picture. And if you go overseas, many countries, not only they take your picture, they're taking your thumbprint, they're taking your fingerprints. All this information is getting hacked. All this information is owned by, pick a three-letter agency, MUSAD, CIA, MI6, whatever the Chinese Central Intelligence Agency, all this stuff is hacked. So this is a complete disaster. I don't know why anybody would want to build an app like this. Well, I mean, it was clearly popular. I mean, so being very crass about this, it had product market fit, Jason.

56:08I mean, the reason they built it is because the backstory is the CEO, who's a man, his mother had a really hard time dating and he saw the problems that she went through with people that were catfishing or not sharing criminal backgrounds and such. So he built this as a way to be like, hey, look, I'm going to help women be safer. And that did very well. It was growing incredibly quickly before they blew up. I don't doubt there's a market for it. I don't doubt there's a good business in there that will make money that you can charge for this and that people want it. I just think the risk of trashing people who have no idea they're being trashed, have no recourse, anonymity at scale, and that becomes the issue.

56:49It's one thing if people are chit-chatting at lunch or brunch about people they're dating or there's even like a signal group or whatever, a group chat and people are like, yeah, I dated that guy. He was a little weird or I dated that girl. She was a little weird or maybe you should know about this. Like I get that. That has always existed in the world. But building something at scale makes it distinctly different. And I just wonder, should these things exist? Who's building these? I don't buy this like intent, like, oh, I'm doing this with good intent. I think people are doing these kind of apps because they want to make money.

57:21And I think if you talk to Formspring Secret, other people who've done anonymous apps where people get to review each other, it always ends in pain, suffering, suicides, and just really bad outcomes that you just have to learn from the past. There's no way to do this type of app without it resulting in bullying, pain, and suffering. And then in this case, I guess a hack of like epic proportions. Pretty terrible. Do you think that anonymity itself is something that we should clamp down on or just anonymity in these particular pools that are aimed at sharing information about one cohort of folks?

57:56I believe you can have anonymity in social networks. Reddit is a perfect example of large scale. Yeah. Quasi-anonymity. They have pseudonyms, so you have to own your entire behavior. And by the way, they probably have your IP address, but they definitely have your IP address. So unless you're very sophisticated, if you did something really bad on those services, they could probably find you out if, let's say, a subpoena came in. So just as a warning to people who want to do bad things with this anonymous account, you probably don't have anonymity, even though you think you do. You don't. You'd have to be a pretty sophisticated person doing really sophisticated IP work and your MAC address and cell phone towers.

58:40I mean, there's so many ways and vectors to try to fingerprint somebody, as well as fingerprinting their speech patterns and the terms they use because people have outed anonymous accounts at scale by just looking at how they speak, right? There was a couple of famous Twitter accounts back in the day that people analyzed and they were understood. But I think at scale, I don't like it personally. I'd rather people own their words. I don't like, as an example, I got into it with Kane Koa the Great on Twitter, if you know that account. It's like a MAGA type right-leaning news account. And I was like, who are you?

59:14Why do you keep stealing clips from all in? Why do you keep linking to me, mentioning me? Who are you? What's your motivation? Are you like a Russian bot or whatever? And then people got like, oh, you're trying to dox the person. I was like, no, no. Doxing is when you give somebody's address. And Kane Koa reached out to me and said, I have security concerns, my parents, whatever. And I was like, okay, fine. But just to be clear, I never said dox you. I just said, who are you? And then these accounts can get to a million people, have a ton of followers, and nobody knows. Is that a Russian account?

59:47Is that a compromised account? Who is the person? What is their motivation? And yeah, so I don't know how many followers Kane Koa has now, but it's a lot. 1.1 million. Yeah, don't go dox him and say you did it because I said it. I was just wondering, who is this person? Why do they have all this time every day? And now those people can also monetize their existence. So now you've got an anonymous account making money. Is it a North Korean, you know, farm that's doing this? And so be careful, folks. I prefer to live in a world where people own their words. I do believe that whistleblowers should be able to leak stuff.

1:00:26But I think these permanent ASCAL accounts or systems of providing mass anonymity and mass aggregation, I think these things are very dangerous. I don't like living in that world. That doesn't mean I don't think there should be some pocket cases of anonymity. I just choose to interact differently in those environments. So as you know, on X, Twitter, in my replies, 9 out of 10 or 95 out of 100, 99 out of 100 tweets I do, I have the comments limited to my paid subscribers, and I donate that money to charity. So I personally just would rather live in a world with more ownership of words. Yeah, I was just thinking about that because my online accounts are very boring.

1:01:07My Reddit username is Alex Wilhelm. My club WPT Gold poker username is Alex Wilhelm. And my friend was making fun of me. He's like, why are you using your name? And I'm like, I don't know. It's who I am. Like, that's literally how I go through the world. It's me. I mean, in a poker, poker is another interesting one. You know, I don't think anybody cares playing poker with people in a tournament online, what their idea is. But then when money is at stake, you do have verification because then you could have collusion. and then you also have, is it legal in that country? Sure. So there's an example of like, there were people who would have rings of 10 accounts.

1:01:44They would all join a poker tournament. They would be studying every player, looking for their exploits and then sharing them amongst the 10 people. Then as you get down to, let's say five of those 10 people make it to the final three tables. That means statistically, there's two at each table in all likelihood, which means they could tell each other their cards, which means they have a massive advantage. and they could then bully somebody. So you go in with aces. I've got jacks. The other person has seven, eight. We probably wouldn't individually call your all in, but collectively we could say, well, jacks plus seven, eight suited.

1:02:20If you put those two hands together, they have a 30 % chance each. Therefore, they're 60-40. You would go all in versus what you would assume would be aces, the person putting their life on the line. And so even more reason to really think about this question, but what a disaster. Oh, my Lord. What a disaster. I do want to point out, we asked producer Claude to pull some other examples of startups that have had data breaches. And there were just more last year, Jason, than I anticipated. So there was Mentalify in March of 2024, Anthropic in January of 24, Evolve Bank was May of 24, Trello, January 24.

1:02:55And so there's just more of these than I think is reasonable. So if you are a startup, I think the lesson here, speaking for the founders out there, make sure that as you think about your cloud infra and who's going to host your compute and storage, also pay as much attention to your cybersecurity posture. And the code. This was an example of not just basically encrypting stuff. So it felt like they, according to what I read, they were able to just download the entire folder where all this data was and it wasn't encrypted. So this was barely a hack. I mean, it was. Yeah. Yeah. And then the nature of the service you're running also increases the importance of this.

1:03:34So I think Ashley Madison or one of those dating apps in the early days got hacked. And what got hacked was the email registrations. So then people were like, oh, what's my spouse's email? Let me see if they're on whatever this service is. And I remember in our industry, people were like, oh, I just put in 20 names of high profile people in our industry and they found one or two people from our industry who were in there. And then they were like, oh no, I was looking at that for my research purposes, because I was going to invest, or I was going to write a story about it as a journalist. So they have it folks.

1:04:10You gotta have an excuse. I mean, I was watching a Sydney Sweeney ad on my work computer on repeat today, making sure the volume was correct. So, you know, you never know where you're going to end up. Absolutely. In 2025. I guess this IPO of Figma's pretty critical for us to talk about, yeah? Absolutely enormous. So Jason, you've talked so much about the distribution dire straits, the lack of liquidity, venture capitalists struggling to return cash to their LPs. What's going to happen to venture? Well, Figma is here to save the day. The good news is that Figma has raised its IPO price range, Jason, from 25 to 28 to 30 to 32, which means that this design unicorn, this amazing business that was built by Dylan and backed by companies like Kleiner Perkins and many other venture capitalists, is going to debut at, we think right now, roughly an$18.6 billion valuation at the midpoint of its raised range.

1:04:57A big day for Figma, a big day for venture capitalists. This is bullish as hell. I love it, Jason. The new valuation, 18.6, the price that was going to be paid by Adobe was 20. And that was two years ago, I believe, two and a half years ago. So they've grown a lot in two years and they still aren't, they're going to get the same price. So another way to look at that is if you owned, you know, a million dollars worth of Adobe, you could have gotten that money out two years ago, put it into the index funds and been up 10 % a year for two years. And you would have 1.2 and change. It's great that they're almost back to that peak valuation.

1:05:38When big companies buy a private company, they do have to pay a premium on the valuation. So if Adobe did want to go back and try to buy Figma in the public markets and make them an offer. It would have to be 20 or 30 % more than their public market valuation. So, you know, they would have to pay probably$25 billion. Quarter million dollars in revenue means a billion dollars a year. And so, yeah, this is 20 times or 18.6 times yearly price to sales ratio. That's very juicy. very juicy very juicy so not sure if this is expensive or not still growing at 40 you said yeah i think it was about 40 41 in the second quarter they have preliminary numbers jason they haven't quite finished their books uh but i gotta say the first range seemed cheap i wrote that down i said guys i think this is light it's gonna go up it did i think right now it's kind of fairly priced based on fundamentals but how much have we spent talking about the meme stock era Jason.

1:06:38So I think retail is going to retail. I don't know though, if we should say, oh, Figma had a 30 % day one pop because the GameStop folks got a hold of it. Therefore, it should have been valued at a higher point in its IPO. But that's a long running discussion in VCs about leaving money on the table when it comes to public offerings. Yeah. I mean, it's a great day. The good news is I know there's a lot of VCs and LPs who are going to benefit from this. Last year, when I gave that KPMG talk, I talked about the distribution dire straits and what would happen and that this was all because of LenaCon or largely because of LenaCon.

1:07:11And sure enough, here we are, IPOs. We had Circle, CoreWeave, eToro, Figma. When is Figma going to go out? I don't know if we have a date yet, but I just want to underscore your point just really quickly. This is some math that I ran. This was at$28 per share, but just taking a look at the share counts from Index, Greylock, Kleiner, and Sequoia, it was between a billion and$1.8 billion in essentially money they're going to earn from this IPO. Now, take these numbers, amp them up to$30 to$32 a share, and they're even higher. Huge, huge amounts of money. I mean, you've got four firms that are going to distribute$1 to$2 billion to their LPs.

1:07:49That is unbelievable and great for the industry. Yes. All right. I want to talk about something that Paul Graham said, because I think this is important for students who are thinking about getting into the entrepreneurship game. And Paul Graham had a very interesting and counterintuitive point, Jason. He said, don't drop out of college to start or work for a startup. There will be other and probably better startup opportunities, but you can't get your college years back. Now, in the industry, I would say in technology, there's a fascination with people who drop out of Stanford and Harvard and go out to found companies and such.

1:08:19But this struck me as almost counter-narrative. So I just was kind of curious for you, talking to the youngest founders who might be thinking about Founder University or Launch Accelerator, what would you say to them about college dropping out or just finishing up your years? Well, it's a good question. As a parent and a softie, which Paul Graham is, I think, this is like a softie, like, you know, oh, you know, you only live once and, you know, college could be so much fun and etc. So I get it. You know, he's not wrong about that. You can't get your college years back. But then there's also people who college is like kind of a waste of time for.

1:08:57They are serious, driven individuals. And those are four of your prime, let's call it 30 years of being able to have unlimited energy to pursue something. I'd say from 18 to 50, or you're like, I have unlimited energy. Now, when you're 50, you know, maybe you get tired. Your health could go. You just might not be as sharp. You could be in cognitive decline. You could be in physical decline. You could be in emotional decline. You just may not have, and I'm speaking very broadly here, but it does match my experience that you gain a bunch of wisdom. And one of the pieces of wisdom you might gain when you get older is, oh, yeah, it's not that important.

1:09:38What matters is your family and your experiences. So you lose that maniacal energy of youth where you see your startup, your project, your movie, your book, your art, whatever it is, your restaurant, as the most important thing and you get obsessed about it. So those are your obsessive years, your 20s into 30s and 40s. If you feel obsessed by something and you have to go do it, I have no problem with you dropping out of college. If you don't have something you feel particularly obsessed with, dropping out of college to join a startup is what he's saying here is the key part of it. But actually, he does say to start or work for startups.

1:10:17I would say to start a startup, I have no problem with you dropping out. I think it's a great idea. You'll learn more from starting a company than from working on a startup. To work at a startup, I probably wouldn't unless it was something incredibly unique in the world that was breaking out. I.e., you're Zuckerberg's roommate. He's dropping out. he got 500k from Peter Thiel and you're going to go with him to pursue that? Yeah, go do that. So yeah, that's how I feel about it. I see Keith Raboi is like, Thiel Fellows would probably disagree. Paul makes a good point. Well, the Thiel Fellowship gives you that money to pursue a project, but they don't take equity.

1:10:51And it's not like you don't have to do a startup, you could just do a project, right? Yeah, the Thiel Fellowship is just a different way to approach, I think, the college era of your life, which is here's some time to go explore intellectual curiosities, broaden your horizons, try some stuff. It's not go raise venture capital and try to build the next Palantir. Yeah. I mean, I have to say the Teal Fellows is looking like one of these crazy ideas that I think really paid off for Peter Teal with a huge chip stack giving, I don't know how many people have gone through the Teal Fellowship. Good question for producer Claude, but he's been doing that for 15 years, I think.

1:11:28And if he's been doing it for 15 years and 100 people went through it every year at 100 ,000 each, and he did 10 million a year for 15 years. That's 150 million. I think there's an investment in there or two that he made subsequent with those individuals. And I don't know if it was 100 people each year or 25, but whatever the numbers is, I think the math actually maths out. So producer Claude says there's 313 total Teal fellows and at your math for the cost, Jason added the time value of money. All he has to do is get one early shot of the unicorn and the math works out. It's actually not that expensive from that perspective.

1:12:04Not at all. I mean, which is Paul Graham's business as well and mine to a certain extent, you know, with Founder University and Launch Accelerator. So if it's an extraordinary idea and you feel like you need to pursue it, drop out. If it's an extraordinary company with an extraordinary founder and you feel the need to join it, okay to drop out. If you don't have a great idea, why drop out? You might as well just keep gaining your skills. And to Paul's point, yeah, you can enjoy college. Nothing wrong with enjoying college. People are different, though. Founders are mutants. And so the way you have to say this is, if you're a mutant, should you join the X-Men?

1:12:39Yes. If you're not a mutant, should you join the X-Men? Well, you're not qualified to. So yes, stay in college. The people who are actual mutants, they basically start building companies in college. I went to college at night because I wanted to build things during the day. I was building my magazines during the day, working and going to college. So mutants are mutants. They're going to use their mutant powers. You can't hold them back. For civilians, humans, mortals. Yeah, stay in college. Sure. I think that makes a lot of good sense. I think don't drop out to go work for your friend's company.

1:13:13That's going to fail. But as you said, if Mark Zuckerberg wants you to join his brand new social network, yeah, say yes to that. I just appreciated that it was slightly outside of the norm of Twitter commentary. Yeah. All right, everybody. It's been another amazing episode. This week in startups.com slash docket. to read the docket. And we'll see you all tomorrow. Bye-bye.