From Drones to Dystopia: The Future of Jobs, Fires & Meta’s AI Land Grab | E2140

0:00I want to make one more little point about the labor discussion because Andy Jassy the CEO of Amazon dropped a public memo yesterday. And the key quote, which I just pulled off. I was thinking like, Jason, it's almost like you're getting the inside scoop. This is what he said about Amazon and their deployment of generative AI products. He says, as we roll out more gen AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done. We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today and more people doing other types of jobs. It's hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, But in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.

0:42That to me is so, yes, true. I mean, we talk a lot about productivity improvements. And when you have more productive individual units, you need fewer of those units. So that to me is the non-doomer take, though. Because the doomer take is white-collar work is going to evaporate overnight. That's not going to happen.

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1:36Starting your business should be simple. With Northwest Registered Agent, you can form your entire business identity in just 10 clicks in 10 minutes. From LLCs to trademarks, domains to custom websites, they've got you covered. Get more privacy, more options, and more done. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com slash TWIST today. all right everybody welcome back to this week in startups it's your boy jay cow alex wilhelm here as well how are you doing alex i'm doing fantastically well i'm caffeinated i had a shirt to wear i'm feeling great man but you're still you're still on the road somehow i'm on the road you can tell when i'm running out you can tell when i'm on the road i'm running out of shirts you know i've got to do a second laundry run oh yeah yeah on this thing and i got a little bit of a thing i can't i get really upset about paying for the hotel to do my laundry it's a per piece item it's 20 for a t-shirt it's 12 for a pair of underwear it's six dollars for a pair of socks i'm like you could buy a t-shirt for 20 it makes me a little mental and so yes uh i like staying at airbnb houses uh so i'm going to be at an airbnb in la for the we're having a little party for the launch of the all-in tequila on saturday oh yeah yeah but i'm not supposed to i don't think i'm supposed to actually like broadcast that too too widely um so i didn't tweet it or anything but um yeah still on the road and i'm at this conference uh which i think i could say is the co-to you know co-to that big firm yeah it's their conference uh east meets west 150 people.

3:09A lot of interesting discussions going on. I did a little all-out panel. It was me, Sachs, Brad Gerstner, and Philippe, the co-founder of Kotube. And yeah, we had a big debate about immigration and AI and job disruption. And I kind of gave my little, I don't want to say stump speech, but I gave my position of why a lifelong optimist is now doomerist curious okay i'm kind of find myself like a like a hanging out with the the doomerists and and chilling with them because i was talking to the guy from zipline which has that incredible drones they started with fixed wing but you remember zipline and i think they're in the twist 500 are are tracking up 500 most important private companies twist500.com long story short you know he's really doing a lot i don't want to give any numbers but i had a meeting with him yesterday he's doing a lot of deliveries and uh you know they have walmart he's got a bunch of other similar customers and doordash is doing their own drone delivery internally and so you know zipline is um no i don't think that's it is that zipline oh yeah so yeah the video loops around and you can see the little box there yeah sure yeah so for those of you watching the way it works is it stays 300 meters in the air or 100 meters in there 300 feet in the air and there's a little cargo that zips down on a tether releases your stuff in your backyard and then goes away so the drone is so high and quite which makes it quiet so if you have a backyard it drops it but the pickup is really the interesting thing so those little boxes are um you know easily filled by somebody at a cafe or a sandwich shop you know pick your poison and they're doing a lot of you know eight pound deliveries and these things come in minutes you know sub 15 minute time delivery so it's going to really change this back to ai and how this is making you doomer adjacent because i'm really curious so automatic delivery is a big one and andy jassy spoke here and i got to ask him two questions and i asked him about return to work and the kerfuffle remember was all this kerfuffle and he said you know it's actually turned out to be not that dramatic because the people who we we knew going into it we would lose people who we didn't mind losing that weren't essential.

5:51And we lose people who we loved working with, but we decided we wanted to have a certain culture and it's turned out the culture's back at the company. And so we love it. So that was my second question. My first one was, hey, job destruction, disruption and retirement. You've seen these, the figure robot sorting things. You have tons of robots in your factory, self-driving, you're doing zoos. it seems to me that when a lot of those jobs go away and obviously you're not hiring a lot of people you have less people at amazon than you did a couple years ago so it's happening in white collar and um he was basically very upfront and candid that he did think there was going to be a lot less people working at companies and that it was something society would have to navigate yeah and that is the tension and you know when you say that to a room full of investors and i just said you know i think we have some responsibility uh i don't buy into like technology is just going to technology and let the chips fall where they may i think we actually should think about it i know it's a bummer but we should think that hey some jobs will be disrupted now is it our responsibility to create all the new jobs in the world no no of course not but i think we should just be thinking it as human beings on planet earth because there could be some disruptions and we have safety nets and the safety net used to be being a doorjash or an uber driver or working at starbucks and you know now the safety net that we created like i think gig economy work is that is the great safety net we might be looking back remember all that hand ringing in the press and all the union leaders oh my god you know this gig work is terrible you got to work a shift you got to come in at 6 a.m work till you know 4 p.m whatever it is it turns out like we're going to look back and be like wow that gig work was like key you could pick who you wanted to work for you could work for three different people they were all competing with each other for your work if you didn't like working for one of the customers someone you can go to the next so long story short we're going to have job destruction everybody agrees on that the only thing people don't agree on is the timeline and if we can create new jobs in that time period and then philippe had something you know i think i think it was philippe who just said something really interesting about like people have to also be motivated to start jobs uh to create jobs and that's going to be very interesting i think very interesting moment in time where you know group of five ten people like when you graduated from college or i did when i graduated there weren't a lot of jobs in 94 92 93 were coming out of like um a recession and everything.

8:26Some people didn't get jobs. They just stayed at home. I think that might be a trend that we're going to see. Young people without jobs. Yeah. So that means we're looking at job destruction now from two different perspectives, because we've talked a lot on the show, Jason, about our concern that AI is going to automate early career positions in law and programming and other kind of like knowledge heavy industries. But now if we take away the gig economy safety net as well, I mean, that does really give people right out of college or just right out of high school frankly a pretty limited set of gigs that's that's worrying well and it's happening to white collar too so you know we've seen in big tech that they're like yeah we're not going to hire young people because we don't have to we don't want to have to train them and the time it takes to train a young person versus the time it takes to automate some amount of work at your job just might be easy to automate it so i think this is the tension that's going to become very real in the next you know five years over the next five years and so anyway don't have solutions but that means there's a job that means there's an opportunity if there is surplus cognitive surplus white collar and there's physical surplus people doing things in the real world moving atoms moving bits if you had a surplus of young people what could you do with them what could you do with them that would be a creative i don't know All right, founders, let's talk about your website.

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10:27Personalized layouts, on-brand visuals, and voila, you're done. I've been using this product for over a decade. Check out squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com slash twist to get 10 % off your first website or domain purchase. once again squarespace.com slash twist i mean i have a lot of ideas but they're not very good capitalism but like you know we we could use a lot more cool trails through the national parks and forests we could use a lot more painters i don't know but nothing that's plus gdp immediately comes to mind maybe we just say teachers work four days a week they get the fifth day to do professional development or recover from teaching and you i'm sorry to sound like a socialist but you just increase the number of teachers 20 so maybe like if every teacher took off friday and just back of the envelope map to make it easy for people to understand my my point here if every teacher took off friday and had a professional development day right uh to research stuff whatever uh or maybe do one-on-one tutoring then you need theoretically 20 percent more tutoring so you hire you know whatever a science person who rotates and takes the kids you know 20 % of the kids each day.

11:39Or maybe you just take class sizes from 30 on average and make them 15. Yep. There are 3.8 million public school teachers in the K-12 system today. So if we can make that 5 million and get class sizes done, that'd be tremendous. I want to make one more little point about the labor discussion because Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon, dropped a public memo yesterday. And the key quote, which I just pulled off. What timing? I was thinking like, Jason, it's almost like you're getting the inside scoop. Yeah. This is what he said about Amazon and their deployment of generative AI products. He says, as we roll out more gen AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done.

12:18We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today and more people doing other types of jobs. It's hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company. That to me is so, yes, true. I mean, we talk a lot about productivity improvements and when you have more productive individual units, you need fewer of those units. So that to me is the non-doomer take though, because the doomer take is white-collar work's going to evaporate overnight.

12:48That's not going to happen. No, it's, you know, you're going to need less people because people will do more. That's the upside. That's what could save the entire economy. You know, the idea that we've had so much disruption geopolitically tariffs you know the israel bombing iran that conflict um you know all this type of chaos we're seeing immigration whatever uh changing in the united states here uh everybody knows my feelings on that and the stock market continues to rise so you know putting aside the the the freedom day or whatever that you know shock and bore wound up being you know shocking 150 tariffs then bore we just want reciprocal you know that's the standard playbook for negotiations with trump shock and bore it's like crazy shocking and then it's like okay this is kind of boring we can just not pay attention to it uh it's not going to be impactful in a major way like it's not going to be disruptive it could be impactful but not disruptive it would be the fair way to say it yet here we are stock market keeps climbing and the fed's not cutting rates so they kind of have a they have a perspective too yeah so their perspective is economy's good economy's good uh i checked the data this morning according to fed watch no one's pricing in rate cuts until september at which point investors are a little split between a 25 or a 50 bip cut which is 0.25 or 0.5 but yeah it's going to be static for a while i just find it very surreal to your point that my family's net worth is probably at an all high and yet when i read the news it's like the world burns down again and i'm like oh okay i guess so weird you know split screen here's a polymarket fed rate decisions yeah so july 30th september 17th am i in the right thing here let's see fed decisions fed rates yeah so let me uh i have a bigger better screen for that i got it yeah so 55 chance no change in september and everything else is uh 41 25 bips so you know we're basically now down to 50 50 on the screen sharing i want to show you something funny yeah okay so uh i had prepared a different polymarket for today but we're doing this early so this is totally fine um so i just pulled up the same page and look at what they've put they actually literally have the live stream from the fed open markets committee on the page nice i love that yeah you know it's it's kind of working back from you know you and i were talking about how journalism is changing yeah you know and i i jumped up the journalism boat a little earlier uh you're still like half journalist you know um and uh half uh entrepreneur now i think like this is part of the future of journalism which is starting with every placing a bet and saying, here's my skin in the game.

15:45Yeah. And then, you know, placing, you know, literally putting skin in the game and then working backwards to the discussion. And so if you think about that versus traditional journalism, and again, I'm not here to beat up journalism, the world evolves. You know, when you see people talking about sports now, they're talking about their wager on the sports on ESPN and giving their position. having a bet and then they watch the game and then during the game they're talking about maybe changing their wagers or how the odds have changed so if you just think about what are consumers wanting from media i think they want despite all the fake news and you know all the you know everybody's terrible at this job or whatever there's a group of people who are saying hey we're going to make some hard decisions put skin in the game and we have a more interesting way of getting you the news.

16:39Podcast is one of that groups. That's why I'm always trying to make this podcast better. When we cover companies, Alex emails them. Sure. Emails the CEO and says, hey, we're covering you today. Here's two questions. And that's why we get inside information because we literally just do this old school thing of doing that. But we also talk about bets and we make bets on this program. Although we have to do better at following up on those bets. I need all the sunny bets looked up, editorial director, Lon, and so we can maybe settle some of those. Okay. Anyway, your thoughts? you had something you wanted to show notes got some notes no no i'm just i'm enjoying uh the discussion of how things are changing in regards to journalism because one thing i'm still wrapping my heads around my head around is simply the power of industry insiders who are conflicted to have an enormous media position discussing not just their industry but the industry at large and i i that is so antithetical to the way things were done in the 80s just to roll the clock back far enough to be uncontroversial that i don't think we fully digested what that means for truth telling but i do agree that it is incredibly popular impactful and people do find it useful so i think we are going to see more hybrid stuff um speaking of which did you see that just to build on that position good position um used to be if you wanted to tell your story you were andy jassy you had to or you're jeff bezos you had to go to the new york times or wall street journal give them the story they interpreted what you said and then they put it out there and in the best case you felt like okay yeah that was that was fair and balanced in the worst case you felt like they spun it and had a position they were going for and it depended on the publication depended on the journalist and over time people felt like maybe it wasn't balls and strikes so they went direct so now you have direct podcasts with the principles on it and you know like if you watch all in uh and the four of us are talking we're talking our book by default the audience understands that if you look at like the back channel they're like okay david sacks works for the you know for the administration so he's going to be in solidarity with them that's how it works you know chamath has these investments jason has this investments freeberg's a man of science has this uh you know uh ohalo company uh and so i think the audience is saying i understand the conflicts i'm willing net net to take that i think ultimately where it winds up is a hybrid I think it's a hybrid, you know?

18:57I agree. But if you think back to when blogs were new, like literally back when weblogs were still called that, I remember when a company would open a blog, people were like, what, they're just going to like post on it and write things? Well, today I, for my newsletter and for the show, pulled up the Amazon, sorry, the about Amazon webpage to read the memo from Andy Jassy directly. I did not need an intermediary. And that's kind of the gist of what we're talking about. Well, and that's probably because he doesn't want to be interpreted. he wants to be taken at his word because he feels this is super important so that's actually a really important insight and i asked steve jobs why don't they blog at apple it's like a famous clip from the d conference the wall street journal had a conference called d back in the day with walt mossberg and caris fisher and i was but a you know 30 year old uh you know running weblogs i think at the time and i asked him like why don't you blog so he takes too much time and then people are going to say stuff and it might not be in sync so yeah it's not for us but now you see people going direct.

19:53And now you start to see podcasts. I saw the Carlson brothers, the Stripe, speaking of startups, Stripe launched their own conversations. I think Connor Perkins just launched a blog. I'm like, my God, how many blogs are there? Like, does anybody get any work done in this industry? Pretty crazy. You know, here at This Week in Startups, we try to keep founders just up to speed on all these trends in AI and marketing, but we can't do it alone. But you're also going a need to connect in person with your colleagues and partners and innovators. There's no substitute for in-person. So if you want to connect with visionary leaders and personalities like Dario Amodi, Victor Ripperbelli, Dharmesh Shah, my friend, and more, your chance is to do that at Inbound 2025.

20:39That's right, the epicenter of tech innovation that will help you transform your strategy as we approach the AI era. It's happening this year from September 3rd to 5th in my old hometown of San Francisco, California. It's a rare chance to really immerse yourself in San Francisco's unique venture ecosystem where new companies can quickly evolve into billion-dollar unicorns and beyond. Use the code TWIST10 at checkout to get 10 % off your GA ticket at inbound.com slash register. Inbound.com slash register. That's inbound.com slash register. Okay, well, if we're going to do that, here's a website for you, Jason.

21:18Here's this from OpenAI. Introducing the OpenAI podcast from three hours ago. So yes, everyone is now doing this. I think probably because Sam Altman just wants to be able to kind of like not answer the same three questions 10 ,000 times, but I think it's going to become the norm. The question is, what's the first company with its own podcast, media publication, Stablecoin, eventually Sovereign. Everything. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, well, you know, we'll see who keeps publishing, you know, that was always the interesting thing. People underestimate the amount of work that it takes. And here we are 2000 episodes into this week and startups three days a week.

21:55And I just, I'm a machine about it. You know that, uh, you work with me. So I think a lot of people will just give up because it is arduous to put on a performance, you know, every day or every other day I do four days a week, you do three. Like it's, it's not easy. It's not easy to have that kind of consistency as a player. So, all right, what's in the news? Let's get back to the news now. Here we go. All right. I want to talk about a couple of twist 500 companies that are in the news. First up, Pano AI is a company that I added because I thought the bet that we could use AI to detect wildfires was a pretty good one.

22:27And what they do, Jason, is they put the cameras on top of cell phone towers. And then during the day, Pano AI looks for essentially smoke and at night it looks for heat. And the idea is what if we could just better detect and crack wildfires much more quickly and easily. I put them on the Twister 500 a little while ago. The latest news is that they have raised a$44 million Series B led by Giant Ventures with participation from both Initialized Capital and Salesforce Ventures. They're selling, Jason, to people that you love, including private ski resorts and landlords. So your two favorite things, owning ranches and going skiing.

23:03And also, of course, governments and utilities. The key thing here that I'm really excited about is not that they raise money. That's cool, but not really proof of progress. The journal wrote that they have now reached contracts exceeding$100 million, which I think shows strong early commercial momentum. Yeah. And you can see it there on the screen if you're watching. It's very simple. It's a camera high up and a bunch of software on the cloud. You'd think about how much it costs to deploy this you know these cameras are probably you know commercial grade couple of thousand dollar cameras um i'm sure they make them pretty rugged because of where they're located um and then a pretty good connection but you know 5g exists everywhere and um this is i think you know probably what people are underappreciating about it because i'm sure people were putting up cameras and looking for smoke previously you know but here if you look it's showing you like where you have transmission lines and main lines and um the wind speed wind gusts temperature humidity and then what assets you have, right?

24:22So when it shows a fire here, it's showing on the screen like, oh, there's a Valley Ford fire. It also has two nearby assets and it's 1.2 million to the closest asset. An asset I'm assuming here is something to put out the fire. So what we're thinking about jobs, right? To our early part here, this will be a complete closed loop system shortly. i've brought up zipline before the power of drones there is literally going to be helicopters or drones that have large water payloads that are going to be able to go out without waking somebody up in the middle of light firefighters not going to be able to need to get their gear on and run out to this fire they're going to have a drone go first drone's going to go and get above the fire and just monitor it right so now you got a quadcopter second drone quadcopter is going to get out of the way or film from a distance is going to drop a payload of water or fire retardant on these things the other thing that's going to happen is this is going to be doing an analysis and the ai for an algorithm instead of you know showing you your next video in tiktok as you're melting your brain and frying your dopamine sensors is going to say these places are where the fires keep happening and then you say oh this place waters and has you know better vegetation there's never a fire there so over time they're going to know exactly or this idiot keeps burning their garbage and sending embers up the second third order impact of this kind of a system is going to be incredibly underrated incredibly underrated you're going to catch the arsonists when they know there's fire oh you're just thinking it yeah well i mean if you have a combination of uh a time series bit of information about where fires began and you cross that with GPS data from cell phone locations, you're going to be like, well, that started and there were seven people nearby and one of those phones has been near the last three hotspots.

26:22And then we're going to take that person and we're going to three point them right into jail. The downside though, Jason, is that my backup career, which has always been going to sit in a firewatch tower and not talk to humans for 10 years as apparently now sufficiently indicated that I will not be able to do that. And that's a real... There's a really good sitcom or short run series here uh of the last fire warden you know the last what do they call those fire watchers what do they do what's their technical name i i don't i don't know some i'm on great name for them for this new series coming from calacanus studios uh the story of the last fire watcher uh and they have to shut the thing down and they're fighting to keep it going but there's a robot in there with them there's like an optimist or a figure robot living with them that they're training to do the job and their reward for training them is that they lose their job but then they decide that the robots would be bored and sad being alone so he decides to stay anyway and he makes a business doing some other business you know running a campground around the fire watch tower and they tell stories about the old days lawn's gonna quit and go write that uh no no this is part of lawn being here lawn is here so that we can do our creative ideas and you know we have a secret project we're working i volunteer okay to do this uh by the way they're called fire watchers so that's a pretty on the on the nose on the last fire watcher coming this fall to cbs my question is what about selling to governments because back in the day people said don't sell the school districts don't sell to counties it's too slow it's too hard it's too painful but here we have pano ai which does sell the government's doing quite well.

28:03So I'm kind of curious, Jason, when is it a good choice for a startup to sell into hard markets like that? Yeah. So we're talking specifically about our government, uh, you know, being slow and incompetent and filled with grip and fraud and stupidity and waste. We're not talking about the UAE or Singapore. Uh, and you know, if you go around the world. And if you show this to people in Singapore, Singapore pays people working in government three, four, 500 ,000 a year. They are the premier employer. If you're a smart person in Singapore, you would first look for a job, not at Goldman Sachs or at Google.

28:46Just picking them because it's G's. You pick government. Government over Goldman and Google. That's what you do in singapore how do they accomplish that they have created a sense of pride with working in government and a sense of like that's like um one of the most proud things you do because of lee kai um lee kwan you uh this incredible leader of singapore and when you watch his videos of how he built that country man he's like the iron fist he built that country but one of the key thinks is he said the best and brightest work for government and so you know there's people you can sell into there's you can go for those governments and then you can go for people who just land owners i i heard you mention they were going after ranch owners etc who have to deal with fires too and by the way i was spending time with rick caruso who ran for mayor lost to karen bass in la in la karen bass complete incompetence to scotzi ad like the worst leader you could ever have during a crisis as we saw her like freeze up when they were just asking her questions about what you're going to do when she was on some boondoggle out of the country while the city burned.

29:58And I hope he runs again and I hope they put him in there. But investors like me are not going to invest in your business unless you're structured properly. So founders, if you're serious about raising money, you need to set up your business the right way. And that starts with a registered agent. Before a venture capitals can wire you a single dollar, they're going to check if your company is incorporated and it's in good standing and it's compliant. That's where Northwest Registered Agent comes in. For just$39 plus state fees, they're going to handle your paperwork, keep it compliant, and make sure investors see you as a serious business concern that's worth putting money into.

30:38In just 10 clicks and 10 minutes, your business is officially investor ready. Thousands of founders trust Northwest, so don't let paperwork cost you your next funding round. go to northwestregisteredagent.com slash twist and get your business investor ready today. For just$39 plus state fees, you can set up your company the right way, fast, private, and compliant. Go to northwestregisteredagent.com slash twist today. You know, he figured out this incredible technique and he created the Grove. He created this place in Pacific Palisades. And he came up with this incredible technique, combating fire.

31:14It's almost as perhaps arguably more um innovative than panos it's called water firefighters incredible combination so wait so you have people who use water right to put out the fires yeah so when uh you know this place i'm at this rosewood here in the santa barbara area montecito is gorgeous when they had fires here you just like they knew it was fire season so they just stationed a couple of water trucks and then there are private firefighters you can hire yeah so they were like okay we'll hire some private firefighters if sparks come we can put things out yada yada and then they build things to be a fire resistant this is all just planning and will and um so if one government group can't do it i like that you keep your costs low and you sell into people who are impacted by this the insurance companies are going to love this as well because oh yeah they are losing their ability to provide insurance in certain regions in america and this would bring it back so yeah ski resorts would have an easy time paying for this and i think this is a solution that's probably i don't know a hundred thousand dollars to install five of these cameras around your ski resort you know and then uh maybe they charge 50 or 100 000 a year maybe they charge 10k a month for something like that.

32:35And so you're looking at going, okay, 120K a year, a million dollars over the next 10 years. What do I save on fire insurance? Maybe it pays for itself. Oh, I could easily see that. Yeah. But just to underscore what Jason's saying about insurance companies having a hard time insuring, this is a data set from NOAA, the government agency, tracking billion dollar disaster events that are essentially driven by droughts, wildfires, flooding, et cetera. and Jason there's a pretty clear upward trajectory to this chart so as the climate gets a little more unpredictable a little bit more difficult we're going to have a lot more problems wildfires are in this list by the way so I do expect a lot of companies to try to make insurance possible for people because if we don't have insurance Jason who is going to subsidize sports broadcasts on cable television if it's not Geico and freaking farmers right yeah like someone has to pay for sports so we've got to keep the insurance companies in business yeah insurance is critically I mean and insurance will change so you know this is an interesting thing for us to discuss as we move into ai boom ai doom ai boom ai doom that's going to be our new segment lon make us a jingle ai doom or ai boom should be like me with a devil on his side like one person on his side like it's the end of the world the other person saying it's going to be like utopia um the ai boom side of this equation is costs go down.

33:59So if you were to eliminate wildfires as a concept, well, then insurance goes down. If you have a car that can't crash and you reduce the ability to crash 99%, well, why do you need insurance? Or if your insurance is going to go down 99%. So with technology, we should see massive amounts of money in the economy free up. And insurance is a big, giant waste of money that should go away in many cases or be reduced at least 80 90 percent well you're saying that if you can reduce the underlying risks that make insurance a requirement then we don't have to have that essentially risk rent on the economy i mean do you have insurance for um you know i don't have ski insurance as an example i mean i have health insurance but i don't have like insurance on my skis you know breaking or something i don't have insurance on like this laptop breaking now they upsell me on like get the insurance and laptop break i'm like i replace it every three years the chance of it breaking is very low they make these things like you know remember everybody used to get for their phones insurance for the screen breaking and then gorilla glass you can literally drop your phone 10 times and it will not break i mean don't do that with an old phone it will break on the first try and literally for young folks with your iphone you paid a hundred dollars insurance when you bought it and you got one break and then they would you go to the store and they would replace it now it was worth it it was worth it because you were it was going to slip out of your hands and break it now i mean i i kick my phone across concrete all the time i'm distracted it's breaking and you know i get little chips in it but i've never broken the glass when's the last time the glass broke on an iphone hasn't happened to me three phones ago for me.

35:44Yeah. Yeah. It was three or four phones ago. Right. So it's a perfect example of technology, reducing expenses, making things more rugged. And we love that. What's the Reddit I always talk about? Buy it once? I believe it's buy it once. Yes. The idea of purchasing a high quality thing. Although I will say you have given Pano AI a really great second act because if they do figure out this wildfire detection system and it works as well as they want, and they get the coverage they hope to have, all they have to do next is just team up with a drone company and launch their own firefighting service.

36:13Like, why not? They already have the data. Yeah, I'm sure there is somebody making drones for firefighting already. So that could be like an API call or they could just white label it or they can make it themselves. It's clearly what's going to happen. Yeah. Buy it for life is the Reddit, by the way. Not buy it once. We were slightly off. Buy it for life, yeah. Great, great, great subreddit. One more little news bit, Jason. I know I talk about some founder stuff, but really quickly, we've talked about Scale AI and its partial sale to meta. We also discussed a little bit about how some of its customers might be backing away from it.

36:45Well, OpenAI said in the immediate aftermath of that deal that they weren't going to back off with CFO Sarah Fryer saying, you know, we don't want to ice the ecosystem because acquisitions are going to happen. If we ice each other out, I think we're actually going to slow the pace of innovation. That didn't last. According to reporting today, OpenAI is going to move entirely away from scale AI, which means I believe that this acquihire of Scales Founder and some of its technology is going to pretty much kneecap the company so i guess there's gonna be a lot of talent from scale ai that's available for other companies to hire but it does seem a little about that yeah okay okay it might be that zuckerberg is so ambitious that he will keep everybody employed and just make his ai uh make his ai the best one so i think that's what's going on here it's almost as if like you bought nvidia and then you take all the chips not making less chips gonna make more chips but nobody else gets to buy them so obviously it's impossible to do that with nvidia there's so many of them but you could imagine with grok or an inference chip you know a smaller a sub 10 billion dollar chip somebody might say yeah i'll buy grok for 10 billion and every single chip i'm going to take for myself and uh yeah if we have any left over maybe we'll sell them so So that could be the situation here, and I suspect it is, is that Zuckerberg is now taking a meta-glasses, metaverse approach to AI, which is, I've got the most money and chips outside of Apple, maybe, and Google.

38:27Therefore, I'm playing for legacy. I'm pushing all my chips in. He is, you can say whatever you want about, you know, what he's done to society and, you know, how he treats customers and the negative impacts of social media, which are vast. And we've talked about here countless times on a business basis. He is a complete berserker, like in the category of fighters. He will copy everybody's innovation and laugh while doing it and do it better than you because he doesn't have to come up with the original idea. he doesn't have to come up with the three ideas that don't work to get to the one original idea he'll just copy whatever your innovations are so fast that your head will spin and then he has all that free time since you spend all the time doing the product discovery and product market fit work you can just keep polishing your innovation then if there is a possibility that there is a disruptive technology and he doesn't he made a mistake meta and vr did not disrupt anything about social media zero had zero impact none so he made a colossal mistake and burned 50 billion dollars it doesn't matter that would be like me you know betting 50 000 or you betting 5 000 it's like okay i okay yeah it stings but who cares on to the next right you can make another 5 000 bet i can make another 50 000 bet he can make another 50 billion dollar bet he's playing with a different chip stack the end you know and i was playing low stakes poker the last two nights i just my v pip was 100 i played every hand and i told everybody i'm playing every hand i won three pops last night three six off eight four off king seven off in eight four i i got two pair on the turn after everybody was racing into an ace on the thing the other two i hit trips as well every nobody could ever imagine that somebody would be playing a three for a hundred for a$50 preflop or$100 preflop who plays three six who plays eight four it's just not in the thing i you know my my friend alan keating who i play with or stanley tang from doordash you know they have adopted this style because they have very big chip stacks they do that in high stakes poker when you watch that triton and stuff like that so this is an analogy that's important if you have a big chip stack you're a founder and you want to really be disruptive go all in and play a lot of hands.

40:52You're playing a lot of hands and you're putting max pressure on the industry. I think Facebook's going to do exactly in AI what they did in social media, which is find their WhatsApp, find their Instagram and go all in. And this might be the first of a couple of acquisitions that are going to happen. Well, I'll be very curious to see who they buy next as they pursue the Texas Mike pre-flop strategy. And if you don't get the poker references, well, that probably means you're going outside too much and touching way too much grass. So get back to your computer. All right. There was a really interesting story about a startup today.

41:28It's called Traversal. And it is building a AI, basically an AI agent that does site reliability engineering work or SRE work. Essentially, it looks at all your systems and helps you ensure that your company's website doesn't go down, your service doesn't go down. It's a good use for AI. And they just came out and they raised$48 million. All this is to say that they were in stealth for a long time. So long, they raised their seed and A while in stealth and only are now coming out to talk to the public about this. I'm really curious about the strategy because I feel like going in stealth is a very 2012 thing.

42:04So I'm curious from your perspective today, one, is being in stealth still something startups should consider? And if so, when? because i was just kind of blown away by this seeming blast from the past yeah okay so i'm gonna have a weird take on this okay weird take on this different entrepreneurs um have different energies there are some i i saw adam from um core i've always really respected him and i've always tried to talk to him because i i just think he's cool um but he's incredibly quiet and he just stealthily operates in the world and Cora just grows and then I was really interested in what Cora was doing and I said hey you know hey what's going on you guys doing like x y and z I want to say what it was and he said that's exactly what we're doing we're doing x y and z I'm like I never hear about it he's like yeah no explanation nothing it's just he's quietly moving in the world like an assassin doing assassin like things some people that's how they're built they're not looking to get a bunch of kudos from the world when they you know wake up in the morning and they show up for work other folks like these building public folks um they release a new feature they get their you know daily stripe report or their shopify report and it's public and you know the buffer app guy was like one of the pioneers of this he was showing his like actual he made a public version of his like stripe or whatever and you could actually see his revenue you could see his churn rate now all the statistics were great so it was good and that made his team excited it created excitement around his startup people checked it out it also inspired i kid you not there must be a hundred startups right now doing cross-posting uh services because it's all balkanized in social media and management because cross-posting and management there were like a small number of companies that did and it cost thousands of dollars now it's basically uh free you know like close to free 100 bucks a month 10 bucks a month instead of thousands of a month so yeah there you go and it looks like you had a bunch of churn during uh when when did you have that chart was that is this a yearly chart this is uh this is all time for them going back to january of 12th and so it seems like right around to right around covid yeah they had a pretty big decline but they've since and i knew this so going in i kind of knew what the chart was going to say they're now i believe an all-time arr high again um but what's cool jason here is they didn't stop sharing it when they were here right that's the thing that gives me a lot of when it went down they didn't do it yeah so it's like it's like a fun thing to watch along you know the challenge with this is he has employees so when an employee says i need a raise i got these other job offers and he's like you can't cry poverty he's gotta have like a really significant discussion and say you know what you're right you're worth it or you know what i got two other people here who are you know half your price so i can get two for one so i'm just gonna stick with them or you know what I automated your job.

45:03And, you know, so, but this reality has always existed. So in some ways, your job becomes pure. You can say to people, you can't obscurify the reality and then make that your tool for doing compensation negotiation. You then have to focus on reality. You're making X, market is X minus 20%. I like working with you. I'm willing to pay the extra 20 % because you're awesome at your job. or you know the market is now x minus 50 for your salary and i'm going to make a change because it's in the best interest of the business so you and i had this discussion about microsoft cutting three percent of their employees in a record quarter with record cash in a booming market where their prospects are incredible like what this is against all silicon valley tradition you always had extra staff you cherish the people who stayed with you for a long time you wrote them letters you celebrated their 10-year, 5-year, 20-year anniversaries.

46:02And now it's just like, yeah, we're in a different, it's a different world now, folks. You're going to get cut. It's a sports team world. There's 15 seats. And as Andy Jassy said, like, we're going to have less people doing more. So use AI every day. Best advice. And white collar work is changing, you know? Like, if you're good on podcasts, that's one thing. But, you know, if you're a developer or a salesperson or customer support, you know, it's just metrics. And can we automate your job lay? You know, I think this is why every CEO is like, please learn AI tools now. Cause what they're saying is please don't make yourself the first one that gets cut, but looping back to stealth.

46:41Some founders are quieter, moving in silence, like G's and lasagna, I think as Lil Wayne said, and some are more chest poundy. So essentially then does stealth just come down to, does it fit the founders operating ethos? Yes. If you're a founder and it gives you more energy to build in public, go for it. I don't give your entire roadmap. Don't talk about things you haven't done, but it does create momentum and joy. And, you know, with your customer base, they can get more engaged, be in a community. But again, just be aware that everything you're doing, your competitors are copying. And in a world where software can be built pretty fast, if your buffer, like that buffer chart, if the, I wonder if that buffer chart would be, he'd be at 100 million in reverend right now if he didn't inspire 10 competitors and competitors are constant it creates downward pressure you know people know you have a big business i'm going to go compete with it so if you really think you found a really great business maybe shut up don't yeah just collect the money do you remember when google went public and everyone collectively crapped their pants because they're like they're making how much money now no one caught google but like that was you know as i saw on saying please come here and take our business because we're just printing money.