Google’s search engine “panic,” AI-generated hits, Coinbase considers leaving US market | E1723

0:28Hey, everybody, we've got an amazing show for you today. a new game show where Jason is going to guess the real Kanye song. And then the producers trained a model of Jason and a very special guest joined him. I was very surprised that we were able to lock in this AI guest. And so this could be very big. Briefly, I'm going to talk about my feelings about Brian Armstrong saying he might move Coinbase out of the United States. It's going to be a great show. Stick with us. This Week in Startups is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. A business is only as strong as its people and every hire matters. Post your first job for free at linkedin.com slash twist.

1:05Merge. Let your developers get back to their core product. Merge is a single API to add hundreds of integrations to your app. Integrate up to three customers for free today at merge.dev slash twist. And Mercury, where innovation meets peace of mind. Now more than ever, startups need a safe place to put their cash. Mercury offers a simple way to manage bank risk and protect every dollar with up to$5 million in FDIC insurance and a money market fund. Visit mercury.com to apply in minutes. Hey, everybody, it's Tuesday, a lot of news is backed up. I'm on the road right now is that Starbase yesterday for the launch, which got scrubbed.

1:52But I'll be there on Thursday, I think I might record all in from Starbase. And hopefully, fingers crossed, we have a successful launch on Thursday. And so if you want to watch all that, go to YouTube or Twitter and follow SpaceX. But exciting times right now. And I thought, God, so much news is backed up. I'd have Rachel back on the program to tee it up for us and to get started. How are you doing, Rachel? I'm doing good. And like before we start, I have to say you are already doing something that's kind of, I don't know if this is like newsworthy, but it's definitely trendy right now. And that's blurring your background.

2:27The more meetings I've been on, the more background blurs have been happening. I think it's like the office. You know what I mean? Yeah. The issue for me now is when I'm on the road and I'm traveling like three different cities this week, sometimes there's no background. You know, like, so if you get a nice hotel room, you know, there's a desk, there's a chair, you can kind of frame it. but nobody wants to see my hotel bedroom or whatever where I'm staying. And so I've been going blurred background. But when I'm in Tahoe, it's nice to see the skaters going by. It's a great room at my home studio.

2:59It's all good. So I think you've been following this. There is just a lot of news around generative AI and the reaction to it. So let's get started there. Yeah. So there is some big news in the search space. Google is reportedly in panic mode and working on an entirely new search engine after discovering that Samsung is considering switching to Bing as its default search engine on all of its devices. So on Monday, the New York Times reported that last month, Google learned Samsung was considering replacing its search engine with Bing as the default search on all devices. And according to New York Times sources, Google's deal with Samsung is worth around$3 billion in revenue per year for Google due to traffic.

3:41And this is similar to the deal that they had with Apple. In 2021, Google reportedly paid Apple around$15 billion to maintain its status as the default search engine on all Apple devices. And before that, it was paying Apple around$10 billion a year. So Jason, can you explain a little bit about that, like smartphone contracts, especially with Apple? Sure. So when you own the smartphone, you get to set the defaults on the phone. Samsung is one of the great handset manufacturers in the world, along with Apple, when they set search up in Safari or whatever browser they use on the Samsung devices, the default search will result in a large number of searches.

4:22Just think, how many people do you think go into the settings and switch their search engine? If it's Google, that's the leading one, you're not going to switch it out. So years ago, people started realizing, hey, this is worth some money. So Apple, Samsung and others bid it out. And they said, who would like this search revenue? So it gives you a base of users. Now, what's important about this is this is only 2 % of Google search monopoly. If you know, it really is a monopoly, people like to pretend that Google doesn't have a search monopoly. They do, they have 70 80 90 % of the searches in different regions around the world.

4:56Now of the pie of the overall advertising business, they have much less because you have other players, right? Amazon has a new business, Netflix added ads, you have bang, of course, you have uh uber now has an ad network that they think is going to do a billion dollars this year or maybe next year so there are other pieces of the pie linkedin has been crushing it obviously with their ad program but for search it's critically important to get these default searches uh for two reasons one when you're going to buy ads it basically means you're going to spend more attention as an ad buyer on the google ad network because you have larger reach more reach equals more investment from the advertisers in learning how to use that setting up the keywords etc so it makes it kind of it's kind of a blocker strategy now if they were to lose the samsung one it wouldn't be like a big deal if they lost the uh apple one that would be a big deal and there were very credible rumors um and i i have let's just say um you don't want to say inside information because i don't want bells to go off but uh i have a whisper network apple was considering maybe going into the search business at some point.

6:04And if you look at their spotlight search, right, you do a search on your iPhone, it'll tell you if you know, here's the apps on your phone, maybe here's it looking deep into Yelp, some results, and then it will tell you to search the web. This is a small percentage. And what's really happening here is Samsung wants a better price out of Google. And they're doing what any good, you know, owner of traffic and users will do is they're stirring the pot trying to get google to pay more money and so maybe um bing and and microsoft will overpay for this but this is just great for samsung because it's free money they get a hundred percent of this goes right to the bottom line it's this is not the consequential uh contract the consequential contract is iphones again for not just their reach but because those are the well-heeled customers that's the the customers with more discretionary spending.

7:00Those are the ones who are driving Tesla's, Mercedes, going on fancier trips. And let's face it, Android phones are a third of the price, a quarter of the price. They may be their clicks are not as expensive. So it's, this is just Samsung having a great negotiator who leaked this information to the New York Times. Kind of like what you said with Apple users kind of just being like super valuable. Apple sold 232 million iPhones in its fiscal 2022 year. And iPhone sales alone generated around$205 billion in revenue last year. Based on that data, we can see that Samsung consumers spent an average of around$357 per new phone.

7:40This is a rough estimate. While Apple users spent around$883 per new phone. Again, that's like a rough estimate. But the difference between that is like 2.5 times more on new iPhones as Apple users. Yeah. How much is a Toyota Prius if you were to buy a used one? Oh, I couldn't even tell you. 10 or 20K. That's crazy. How much is a Tesla Model Y? 50 or 60. A 45, I think, to 65K, depending on how big the battery is. So the same car will get you from point A to point B. One of them will be more delightful to use every day. and there is a point in time where people you know you could buy a pair of levi's jeans for 30 or 40 bucks old navy for 20 uh uniqlo for 20 or you can go buy uh i think i buy lucky brand and they cost me a buck 50 and then i have friends who buy 400 jeans and i'm like okay whatever it's so cheap compared to the value you get out of a smartphone uh you keep your phone for what three years two years what's your average we just said i've had my same i've had the same phone for like five now but they kind of stopped working at around three like i have a pretty slow phone but i hate getting new phones like i hate i have to get getting the new getting new phones like i don't like getting you have to pay for the new phone case and you have to go and you it's like always more money than you say it will be so it's more about like the act of the apple store but yeah i I think slow at three.

9:07Yeah. So this, I think, is you very much represent the average millennial Gen Z consumer. You try to get three, four, five years out of these things. And then I think people maybe who are doing it for business have a little more discretionary income. They might do it every two or three years. I, too, now have been skipping a year. I used to just send my assistant back in the day. Whatever they sell, buy me the latest version. I would even buy like the interim plus versions. But now the time it takes to get a new case and to transfer your data, all that stuff, go to the store, that whatever number of hours to me isn't worth it for the gain in it.

9:47But if you take the dollar amount of an iPhone, this is rounded up to 1000, it's about if you keep it for three years, you're talking about a dollar a day, if you keep it for five years, maybe you're down to almost 50 cents a day. What other device do you use for five hours a day that costs 10 cents an hour to use it? Right. And that doesn't include the resale value. All right. The march to a billion users continues. For my friends at LinkedIn, 875 million people are now using the platform, including me. I'm on it every day, doing updates, finding new employees. And really, there's so many insanely qualified people out there looking for work right now.

10:24The stakes are so high for all of our companies. You need to have a bar raiser. Anybody you hire, you want that bar raise or somebody's going to bring it, make the organization better. So I want you to do something really simple right now. I want you to get your free first job listing on LinkedIn by going to LinkedIn.com slash twist. Again, your first job is free forever. Why do they give you the free job listing? Because they know you're going to get great candidates and then you're going to be on the hook and you're going to love it. It is the best way to find great talent. You'll get that purple ring when you start hiring on LinkedIn around your profile photo.

10:53So just let your network, where the great, great referrals are going to come from, your friends and friends of friends, get that purple ring. It stands out. So then here's the plan. You start doing regular updates. You talk about your company. You talk about the topics. You talk about your customers. You know all the great social media hacks. They see the purple hiring ring. You're going to get better candidates faster, better candidates faster, better candidates faster. That's what we all want. You want the great candidates and you want them faster. LinkedIn Jobs helps you find qualified candidates you want to talk to faster.

11:23post your job for free linkedin.com slash twist that's linkedin.com slash twist post your job for free terms and conditions of course apply i wouldn't call this a panic i bet you the samsung folks said it's a panic or the bing folks said it's a panic google does not need to panic about this but what google needs to do is um just do what they've been doing they were on 60 minutes um they have been thoughtfully releasing updates to their product and they need to just close the gap between the product velocity of open AI and the product velocity of, you know, Google, which has not been fast enough.

12:02And the reason they haven't been fast because they're being thoughtful. When you're when you're the incumbent, you have to really think about what you do. If you're Google's barred, if it hallucinates and give you a wrong answer, people like what, Google's giving me a wrong answer. Now, if something like ChatGPT gives hallucinates getting a bad example, who cares? It's like this is beta software and have the logo on it. So I think this is what Google will do. They'll increase their product velocity. They do more press 60 minutes. You saw them send everybody out. There was a real diverse group of individuals getting on 60 minutes.

12:37They're doing the full court press tour. this is all by design to slow the momentum of sam altman doing every podcast in the world lex friedman and then i don't know if you saw sam altman is he's really enjoying this moment um and it's hard for him you know he's he had uh you know a failed company looped back when we met each other in the sequoia days and we were both sequoia scouts then an incredible run as an investor and then y combinator was the president of but i mean i think this is something he's always wanted is to have this great um you know uh product and team and moment and he's taking the most of it he he's tweeted he's going on tour to like 20 cities so google's looking at that and going wow sam altman is going to be on 20 different cities um a 20 city tour yeah it's time for them to get these new projects out there and they're going to do that magi i saw their new search engine so maybe we could tee that up for the audience what google has said there because i just saw that in my travels fly by the twitter stream and i'm not actually even up to date on it yeah so uh via those like anonymous new york times sources the project is code named magi and i'm not sure if it's pronounced like maggie or magi like magic but it's it's spelled like magi like magic without the c so i'm gonna call it maggie maggie okay that's honestly that's when i read it through first i said maggie and then producers were like maggie siri okay i like it yeah keep up with the name i like it okay so project maggie has more than 160 people working on it full time it's kind of like a startup um new features yeah yeah new features are being developed by smaller teams working together in sprint rooms which also kind of sounds like like a startup and then there's lots of tweaking and iterations that are happening daily again um that sounds like a startup um and And this new search engine would offer users, quote, a far more personalized experience than the company's current service attempting to anticipate users need.

14:32So we're kind of seeing like that product velocity you were talking about earlier. But before the new search engine launches, Magi will create tools for Google's existing search product. Yeah, this would be a really good idea for them to delineate the existing product from the beta product. This would give them what ChatGPT and Bing has, the ability for people to say, you're playing in a sandbox, you're playing with a new thing, here's disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer, and just make it really easy for users. It will also create a hype cycle because now, oh, have you tried Maggie or Magic, whatever they do?

15:10Just note to people who are branding things, if there's like four different ways to say something, you kind of failed the branding exercise. so it's a terrible name um i would have just gone with magic i would call it the magic search engine or wow or something or you know it's just something fun and playful and then eventually they can bring those features back in bing and wow but bing and wow well actually it's interesting aol owned the domain name wow.com and when i was leaving to do mahalo i was trying to negotiate with them to give me wow because i was doing a human-powered search engine famously uh which was kind of like taking the wikipedia software and making search results that were curated by humans instead of using artificial intelligence, I wanted to use actual human intelligence.

15:49And amazing what happens in 15 years. So a lot of lessons there. That's for another episode. But I do think there is something really smart about what they're doing, which is, okay, we'll incorporate features into Google, but we're also going to let this team run fast, hard, and make different features. The personalization is going to be great. And what's going to happen is, what assets do they have that ChatGPT does not have? they have everybody's gmail and i believe gmail your youtube subscriptions and your google docs are going to be the foundational elements of why google i'd set on all in they're going to roll or i should say they could roll chat gpt if they execute well uh so if i was going to say that again i would say they could roll and this feels like they want to roll over chat gpt how do you do that i really have been and you know this uh because you've seen me like sharing it internally like, I'm trying to get everybody on the team using it.

16:46The number one thing I want to do is have chat GPT for under over my Gmail. But I don't want I don't trust open AI with my data. I don't want them reading my emails and then spitting them back out as answers to other people's questions. But I do trust Google. And so if when I open Maggie, I say Maggie, can you tell me everybody I emailed with in 20 before 2019? And can you give me a top five list by month of who I traded the most emails with, but that aren't part of launch or inside or those two organizations. And then give me a list of where they currently work, and put it into a table, and craft a check in email for each of them.

17:27That either congratulates them on their new position, or just says, Hey, I was thinking about you from our conversations back in 2018. That would be like an incredible mind blowing thing. Or, hey, what documents had the most activity for me in 2016, 17, 18, and 19, show me those documents, bring them up. And then I could start talking to an interface and do that or on YouTube. Hey, you know, I love Mark Knopfler, you know, I love dire straits. Can you make me an agent that makes me a playlist of only new Mark Knopfler, dire straits, concerts that have been released, and don't play me the ones that I already have in my queue.

18:04These kind of things that they already have access to, it's just going to start them on third base this idea of anticipating becomes really interesting so they know uh that you did a search like if i did my travel searches here and i was searching for flights they could just put in the side of my google or my gmail in the sidebar of matt of maggie uh hotels in you know this city restaurant top restaurants in the city restaurants you've been to in the city because they know i've been there and if i was in tokyo last year they could say hey are you planning to go to tokyo next year so just like it does autocomplete imagine autocomplete but for you personal and then the agent says here are new restaurants in tokyo in case you're going next year so all of those things are going to give them so many things to brainstorm on with this technology that uh i'm i'm totally here for this dogfight i i am long on google i'm long google in this fight i'm also long microsoft in this fight i think it'd be so sick to have like autocomplete with your calendar so you know how we have calendly now like hey can you meet at this time have like in your email at autocomplete hey why don't we meet at and then have google like Like, fill it in.

19:06That would be really nice for Gmail. Or to build on that, imagine it says, hey, these are people you were talking to. You have the whole afternoon off on Friday. Here are some meeting suggestions. Would you like me to book meetings with any of these 20 people you haven't talked to and do a catch-up phone call? Yeah. Oh, well, that's interesting, right? Who did I have the most meetings with three years ago, five years ago, 20 years ago on my Gmail? Give me 20 meeting suggestions for people I should catch up with. Because I'm literally doing that now. I'm looking back at my Gmail and it is a manual process of finding all the limited partners I talked to for launch one, two, three.

19:39And now we're raising launch fund four, and launch.co slash four, I think you can learn more about it. And so I'm going backwards. And I'm like, Oh, yeah, I met with this endowment. I met with this person. I forgot about that meeting. I just need Google to do that for me. Hey, these were the when did I last email people from these companies? Were there any other people I emailed and get back to whatever, just all that is going to be awesome. Yeah, it is. And also on that, by the way, I created a CRM in Notion like years ago, having a Notion AI go off of that CRM and tell me like I have as one of the columns, like the last time I emailed somebody, have I been able to send me reminders?

20:15If anybody from Notion's listening, I would like that. closing big enterprise deals. It's not easy. You all know that the last thing you want to do is slow down your sales team with a lack of integrations. That's table stakes. Everybody expects that your people management tool will work seamlessly with your payroll provider. They expect your CRM to work with accounting software. Just think about yourself. You log into some new business to business software. You want to start connecting it to the rest of your stack, but that's going to burn developer hours. That's going to cost a ton of money. What if you could just drop in a little code snippet, zip, zip, zip, and you were able to use Merge's unified API.

20:53And then your integrations would take days, not quarters. You're going to unlock new revenue opportunities. You're going to remove blockers from the sales team. So when somebody says, oh, does it work with this? Does it work with that? It's going to work with everything. Hundreds of integrations are ready to make your customers happy and delighted and remove those blockers from the sales team. Seven different categories. Human resources, information systems, application tracking systems, accounting, CRM, ticketing, marketing automation. Of course, file storage. This kind of stuff, it's constantly changing.

21:21The integrations break. That's not your problem anymore. That's Merge's business. Merge has unlimited integrations waiting for you, and they charge based on how many of your customers use these integrations, which is super fair. So they're going to give you three linked accounts for free today. So there's nothing to lose. Merge.dev slash twist. M-E-R-G-E dot D-E-V slash twist. Again, three linked accounts for free. merge.dev slash twist. Well done, Merge. A lot of my startups are using this product and love it. In entertainment, speaking of all this AI craziness, AI-generated song featuring Drake in the Weekend has gone just crazy viral over the past few days.

21:58The song is called Heart on My Sleeve, and it was generated and released by a TikTok user named Ghostwriter. And the song gained more than 8.5 million views on TikTok, according to a BBC article. And the song was streamed over 250. thousand times on spotify which is which is kind of crazy that it was that it even like got on spotify the producers checked out like both platforms for the original songs but both of the platforms took it down how it even got on spotify is like kind of insane that that was able to happen you yeah and you said just have been taken off spotify have been taken off talk oh wow that's interesting i have some thoughts on that okay let's listen

22:52i like it i can't tell the difference can you tell the difference if i played that for you would you know i totally can't and i actually i like i didn't hear it from the original creator but i did hear it like everybody's still screen recorded and like are using the audio on tiktok so i've heard the audio a few times and i before i realized it was ai generated i just thought it was like another catchy like tiktok sound so i actually had no idea this was like an ai thing at all and drake and the weekend by the way they did not record this song like the vocals are entirely ai everybody's freaking out and basically like saying if it was real it would be such a hit but neither artist responded regarding the new track yet.

23:33But Drake recently voiced his concerns over a different song using his AI-generated voice that went viral. The rapper posted an Instagram story with the caption, this is the final straw AI. So he's not a huge fan, but... He might have been joking. I don't know. Ice Spice... Yeah, maybe. I don't know. Ice Spice is like pretty big right now. Like the girl that was in the um yeah like the women she has like a really big tiktok sound from like the song boys a liar i think it's like part two and i always hear like obama and trump remixes like how if they were like saying her her song so i think a lot of ice spice stuff has been like her lyrics have been um used in ai but i'm not sure if she's said anything there's so many different ways this can go.

24:22When you do these tests, and you think about fairness and fair use, there is a an area for parity. So if it is Obama, we know Obama's not doing it. You don't even need to tell anybody that this is a parody, right? We just know it's a parody. And so under parody law, and that exemption from copyright, doing Donald Trump or Obama, only using a small portion of the original, and not interfering with their ability to make money and to leverage their voice of the future. And if you're making money, these are all kind of the tests for fair use. You can just look up fair use four part test on Wikipedia and you can go through it.

25:05And so what's super interesting here is with this set, this is in some cases new lyrics or cover songs, new lyrics that are as good and performances that are as good as the original and they're confusing the user. and in fact they would be blocking the ability for drake and the weekend to then go do their collaboration they were going to do a collaboration you just ruined it it is you know like i don't know if they've done collaborations before if somebody was going to do a cover or remix this actually infringes on their ability it confuses the user and if they put it on spotify and tiktok and they gained users even if they didn't turn on monetization if you gained users for your account like let's say this ghostface person keeps doing it and they get to 10 million followers those 10 million followers are worth one, two,$3 each.

25:51So they would have generated 1020$30 million in revenue. And the platforms, YouTube, TikTok, etc, have very granular, deep, important relationships with the music industry where they pay them licensing fees, they allow them to take stuff down themselves, they allow them to take the monetization. So if somebody uses a sound clip, they can monetize that video themselves, or they can have it taken down. And the music industry does not play games and so but this does remind me of sampling and so in the sampling era people were attacking the people doing sampling um and there was an a really reasonable argument that well they were transforming the work and they said they shouldn't have to pay because these are new works this is transformative but it was infringing on that person who owned the original sample especially like kanye west songs or if we have seen p diddy is supposedly has had to pay i'm missing you the the the diddy tribute 5000 a day to sing you are infringing on their ability to do those kind of uh remixes and elton john has a remix now we do a lipa i guess and other folks so you can't just take people's work you have to pay them and sampling is going to be i think the reasonable thing here if people create these uh and they get the blessing of drake great i could see artists like elvis and the estate of elvis selling um a cd every year of elvis doing you know hit songs and having ai do it and i would be there for it you know if you told me you could release a new dire straits album every two years and it would it was done based on ai and they made new songs and mark knoffler i i could be down with that why not you know the the band's not together anymore and then for bands that you know like people who really aren't around like jimmy hendrix should be delightful so there's a big opportunity here it's going to be messy uh and uh i'm here for it this is incredible um one of our producers put in will artists start leasing out models of their own voices to generate extra revenue of course i think this is like such a good idea but i even think it's a better idea for people that aren't even like big musicians yet so if you ever hear people that are like put out samplings like people like i know one of my friends is like a dj and he's never met this person before but she put up a bunch of like short snippets of her singing like samples up on a website he was able to buy like those samples i think it'd be really cool for a platform to just like create um like an ai version of this so people can start um doing this like before they're even big.

28:26And I think this whole conversation is going to be pretty ongoing because Universal Music Group, aka UMG, wrote a memo to major streaming services like Apple and Spotify, asking them to prevent AI companies from accessing their libraries. UMG wrote, quote, we will not hesitate to take a step to protect our rights and those of our artists. And interestingly, Drake is a UMG artist and they control most of his catalog. at umg subsidiary re-signed him for as much as like 400 million dollars last year yeah according to seeking alpha umg controls 37.5 percent of the music industry's market share which means on average one in every three songs you listen to will earn umg some revenue so that's crazy and this is all a matter of you know uh who gets paid and how much um and there this is just a great new business model the the character darth vader uh james all jones famously did the voice uh and now he's 91 years old and in the obi-wan series a company called respeacher uh a ukraine startup has now you know voices ai voices darth vader so that but i think jones got paid for that and he gave the rights to to clone the voice and he gave i don't know you know who knows what he got paid for it or whatever but fantastic you know if i was if at the end of my life this week in startups and all in are you know these huge franchises and somebody says hey can we use your voice and your daughters are going to get this residual for the rest of their lives and their kids will get the residual i'll be like heck yes yeah i'm dead i don't care uh go for it monetize the hell out of it keep my legacy alive it does block which is kind of a bummer it does block new artists from coming out so if the beatles it kept releasing albums and john lennon's estate and you'll go on on the beatles allowed that well maybe then coldplay doesn't get a chance to you know or you too doesn't get a chance to come out so there was it just is that just a different artist like the person creating the ai and like there's got to be like some human element to it right like that maybe the computer scientists we're going to start calling as an artist like david getta definitely considers the people using ai um he sees like ai just as like another instrument like a tool in your toolbox as an artist maybe i don't know uh because it's getting so good that the ai will be able to ingest you know all of m &m's lyrics all of bob dylan's lyrics and do a better job than a human of not only producing the voice but probably producing the lyrics and the guitar sounds.

31:11And given the pace at which AI is, and this is what I think people who are like, this AI, you could just unplug it or the answer is wrong, it's hallucinating. What they don't get is the velocity at which this is moving. We study this as investors, product velocity. The product velocity right now is moving so fast that what were goofy five-second clips last year are now full songs with, you know, 8 million views on TikTok. And next year, there'll be whole albums. So, you know, five or six second clips that you can easily tell are not real. Full tracks that you can't tell are not real. And then next year, I think there'll be full albums that, yeah, I would say by this time next year, can we put a little calendar item in here?

31:56We'll do, Rachel and I will do a little bit. Rachel, a full album by an artist that's as good as their previous work. but you think that'll happen in a year over a year or under a year i'm setting the line at 12 months from today so you know how gambling works well you have to take longer or not and it doesn't have to be sanctioned it could be sanctioned or unsanctioned but a full album under under a year okay i'm under i think i said a good line nick producer nick likes to gamble nick where would you take it a full album of like an m &m album a bob dylan album and just by me putting this bet out here there's 20 lunatics who listen to this show we'll go do it what would you take the over the under a full album you know six seven eight songs by an artist that's as good as they're they're your least favorite album of theirs previously um if you asked me this question last week i probably would have said over but based on listening to that song which is probably better than any drake song that's been out for the past couple years and then also my experiences this morning with training a couple of other ai models i'm going way i'm going way under we should jump to those too what do you mean you're playing with ai tools now i thought you were supposed to be producing this goddamn podcast uh we told you to start around with ai we'll see we'll see in a couple minutes what oh i did okay listen as a founder ensuring your cash is safe is priority number one it's been a bit crazy out there i don't want to put caps locks on right now but i will if you need me to the FDIC$250 ,000 limit is just not enough for most businesses.

33:29So let me tell you about Mercury through its partner banks and sweep network Mercury customers can access up to 5 million 5 million in FDIC insurance. That's 20 times the per bank limit. Sounds a lot safer, doesn't it? Well, these sweep networks protect your deposits by spreading them across multiple banks, which limits the risk of any single point of failure. And with Mercury Vault, any funds above the FDIC limit can easily be invested in a money market fund, mostly comprised of US government backed securities. So it's easy to get started with opening an account, you can apply in minutes, and many customers are approved and onboarded in less than two hours.

34:12Mercury also offers great resources for founders, including my favorite Mercury Rays. This program connects founders with investors to help them raise funds. Head to mercury.com to join more than 100 ,000 startups that trust Mercury for banking. And if you're interested in Mercury Raise, applications for both Seed and Series A are open through April 20, right? So you got to get it in there by April 20th. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided by Choice Financial Group and Evolve Bank and Trust, members FDIC. Let's get to it. Stop teasing the audience.