How Many Startups Will Survive OpenAI? | E2288

24:33I wouldn't say the name of it, but I may have just inadvertently said the name of it. And yeah, there was all kinds of shenanigans going on. And then the founder has to worry, am I losing control of my cap table? Am I losing control of the story and my valuation? Because if they're going out there promising stuff, they don't have information rights. They're telling a story to investors. Is that the story you want? And that's the problem. Yeah, there were people who were telling me the figure thing was just a Wild West of all SPVs they'd ever seen. I don't know if that's true or not. No dig to the founder.

25:08But I just wanted to add, you know, one thing, which is I think it was Anthropic. They actually named some of these broker guys who are in my inbox every day. And they actually named some groups, I won't say here, that actually aren't brokers. They're just, you know, the back office or the container for the SPV. And those people had to then come out and say, like, listen, like, we, you know, we check all documents and like we haven't done anything, you know, here. So I think it's okay to name names. Sim Decide, the CEO and founder of Hive, wrote a very prominent letter this morning about that structure.

25:39Right, but I'm not talking about Hive because they are, as far as I understand, a broker, but I think they named Sidecar or some other folks. And I don't think we should scare people away from the industry is my point. Well, I am curious about you guys as VCs. It's like, where the hell is all this money coming from? Because it's an interesting thing. The Middle East is kind of like out of money, right? That is so not true, Sam. You are absolutely wrong. I don't know. I heard things. Oil prices are up. You think they're out of money in this environment? Come on, dude. Do the math. Listen, let's see how it plays out in the next few years.

26:17My sense is that that honeypot, which has been the last few years of ridiculous amounts of money, is like slowing and going to stop. You know, VCs keep raising. I think you're absolutely wrong. I don't know. Alice is nodding. Those guys went into Anthropic and SpaceX just as much as anybody else. They still have a lot more money than I do. but I think Sam makes a good point that when you look at the minimum oil price for many governments and oil producing countries in the Middle East, it's like 100, 110, 120. And so even though oil prices have rebounded, Dave, that does not mean they have massive surpluses that are new, that are coming into their coffers.

26:48So I've always thought that the big push into AI was get in early while we still have the capital, build something that will endure. And then as the oil industry slowly teeters away. Alex, the sovereign wealth funds of Qatar, UAE, and Saudi have over$4 trillion. The royals across those companies have hundreds of billions of dollars. They are not shutting off the spigot. They pulled out of Live, right? They're pulling back on sports. They're rationalizing their portfolios. I'm talking about Saudi specifically. I can adjudicate this officially. So Dave is in the Middle East. He's very close to it.

27:26And Sam, you're absolutely correct. They did get over their skis in a lot of projects. Neom specifically and Liv would be great examples of that where maybe they started spending a little bit. Neom for sure. Neom for sure. Neom for sure. And then in some cases, they were maybe doing too many venture funds and didn't have the infrastructure in place maybe to manage these things properly. And I think they're catching up to their spending. That's what I see when I go over there is, hey, we need more partners. We need to have more eyes on these projects. And they're just refining their strategy. So I call it like splashy cashy.

28:06Somebody who's made a bunch of money goes to the casino. They just start playing a bunch of games. Then the next time they go, they're like, okay, which games am I going to play? Where do I want to put chips down? So I think this is just the natural second decade evolution of their participation in private stock, stocks generally. The specific thing to your question, Sam, of where the money is coming from, we have seen the upper middle class or the lower part of rich people in the United States has grown massively. So everybody's moved up, but there's a very specific group of people, which is equity and owner-based middle class.

28:44And when you see the charts of how that's grown, it's kind of nuts. And it's grown at the expense of the lower and middle class, is the upper middle class moving into. So it is, but just to push them to connect the dots, we'll go is, is it is accredited investors? Yes. A hundred percent. It's accredited unless they lied on their self-accreditation forms, which I would say maybe, you know, low single digit percentage people do. So mine is anecdotal, but we just did a very large SPV and a buzzy company and all the money came from Palm Beach. So all families there, um, not Middle East, that is concentration of wealth in certain areas in this country, including South Florida, and they all want into certain categories.

29:27So their 401ks are doing really well. The businesses they own, whether they own a restaurant or an HVAC or a finance company, the rich are getting so much richer because of the stock market and the poor are staying the same, which goes to your point, Sam, of what's happening in the United States in terms of the haves and have-nots. If you own equities, you're running away with it. If you don't own equities and you're making income, you're getting hoaxed. For an accounting firm, keeping your books in order is table stakes. It's the bare minimum. It's the baseline. But for an early stage and Series A founder, you need a partner that actually understands the world of startups.

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30:43So stay focused on scaling and let Pilot take care of the books. Plus, Twist listeners get$1 ,200 off their first year. Go to pilot.com slash twist to get started. That's pilot.com slash twist. Yeah, and the interesting thing about this is it's not just technology. There's also this feedback loop cycle to the market, right? Where basically what's happening is the market is going up because the market went up, right? Yes. And that is a real, I mean, that is like a classic. It's interesting because on one hand, that's classic bubble dynamics, right? It's up because it's up. But on the other hand, I keep going back to this thing that we as a society have decided to start storing wealth just in stories, not in cash flows.

31:24If you think about it, it's like - Give me an example. Well, I just say the global clearing price, if I said I have a billion dollars of free cash flow, there is a global clearing price for that based on the growth rate or whatever that we could all model. And everyone global would basically model the same way. And you come up with the value of that cash flow. None of the assets that, Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX, all these enormous numbers, the tie to business logic is basically non-existent, right? Like in terms of valuation, right? It's a tie to - For those companies, yeah, I agree. But that's basically everything in tech, right?

32:00Like I can't name the last - No, that's not true. That's not true. There's companies that are still valued on fundamentals. There's more companies being valued on Vibes recently. Well, but I'd say the ones that are valued on fundamentals, is like the movement in the stock has much more to do with the vibe shift around it because it's just a multiple expansion question than like revenue growth right or but this is my point is that i think you know we're we're leaving fundamentals behind when we should absolutely be paying attention to fundamentals and in our podcast every week we we focus on valuation corner and we analyze companies and there are some that are way crazy out there and there are others that example palantir comes to mind well i would say palantir got ahead of itself yeah kind of crazy well i would put this is just my basic point of feedback cycles is like if you were a fun like being a fundamentals if you're a value investor over the last decade you're screwed right you've made like no money right whereas if you're a vibes investor you are like crushing it right like until you're not i agree with you i struggle with this i'm not saying that the vibes investing is In general, I'm not a Vibes investor, and I'm not an anthropic ore opening.

33:09But if you look at the public Mag 7, five of those seven, maybe six of those seven, aren't crazy on fundamentals. Tesla is a little bit crazy on the fundamentals. But the other ones are not. They're 20 to 25 PE, maybe 30. Jenny, are we massively ahead of our skis in terms of the public markets and the valuation of these companies and how they're being valued? And will we return to maybe a scale at some point where we actually weigh them and say, what is the free cash flow from this company? I think it depends if there's other asset classes to go in, right? A couple of years ago, everyone was very excited about credit.

33:49That turned out not to be a great place. And so they're just looking for interesting opportunities. So right now, the stock market's crushing. I think what we're here all interested in is what's going to happen as these companies go public and more liquidity kind of starts coming back. So that's the question I'm more interested in is like it's really hard to raise capital right now as a pre-seed investor. But I think the floodgates are going to open with SpaceA and these other ones. Here is the share of families in each class, 1979, 2001, 2024. And what you're looking at here really is the lower middle class going from 24 % to 15%, the core middle class going from 35 % to 30%.

34:29And then the upper middle class went from 10 % to 31%. And then rich people went from 0.3 % of our society. It went up 10x since 1979. So you have tripling of the upper middle class and 10xing of the rich. What's kind of interesting though is this chart says that the poor and lower middle class are declining. Yes. I guess the question is, what's the basis of how you define these buckets? Yeah, what are the bans here for income or wealth, Jason? Yeah, let me look it up while we continue the conversation. But on the point about excess and liquidity, Jenny, you make a really good point. This week, we saw Firvo Energy go public, venture backed.

35:05We're seeing Cerebus go public, venture backed. A little bit of liquidity there. Jenny, do those two IPOs drive any meaningful amount of liquidity through venture? Or are they relatively sideshows as we wait for the big three, SpaceX, Anthropoc, and OpenAI? My understanding of LPs is that, you know, they kind of work on, you know, sentiment and vibes and not necessarily reality. So I think seeing a few things gives them hope. And we start, I mean, we can literally track this, like the amount of inbound we get from LPs and how fast they kind of get back to us based on some of these IPOs. So I don't think that moved the needle necessarily, but I think there's a lot of anticipation of some bigger ones.

35:41And I think those will move the needle. But we're actually seeing a lot more inbound. We'll see. There might not be, though. I mean, I have this on a personal level, right? Which is, you know, I have a relatively small, it's all a relative slice of like the SpaceX, you know, thing. And I'm excited. I mean, like, you know, that'll be a great return for me personally, just from a PA perspective. But it's a really interesting question about whether you sell and redistribute back into other things or not, right? And it's not clear, right? And I'll give you the two. But if you were an institution and that was really your job and you were waiting, would it even come back?

36:12I mean, I talked to a lot. We have a lot of institutional APIs. I think there's a similar question, which is like, there's a really big difference between institutions that pay taxes and those that don't, right? So if you're a tax-free institution, you can reallocate for free. That actually makes sense. But if you have to pay taxes, you're paying 40 % taxes, 50 % taxes, we'll call it 40 in California. It is so expensive to redistribute. And on the flip side, we are living in this new feudal age of effectively these like fiefdoms where number go up because number go up and everyone has to buy SpaceX and da da da.

36:46So it's actually really unclear. I understand historically how this will work, but it's really unclear to me how this redistribution is going to work on these IPOs. Dave, what do you think? Just to get to some numbers here on the Cerebris IPO projected floats going to be probably between four and a half to five billion dollars back to investors. That's meaningful capital. Might be the only IPO we see before SpaceX and after that, because SpaceX is going to take up a lot of the available capital in the market and maybe Anthropic and others might before the end of the year. But I think our numbers are way out of whack because we're focusing on Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI being these massively large IPOs.

37:29Venture capital doesn't need that big an IPO to have meaningful paydays. It's still fine to have billion dollar IPOs. That creates meaningful returns. Sam brings up a really good point, which is if you are a family office, right, and you've got 20 % allocated to venture and you've got, I don't know, 40 % in equities, you're eventually, if your pipeline is your VC firms, you know, and you're in Founders Fund or you're in Sequoia and your VC fund is delivering you SpaceX shares or delivering you, you know, WhatsApp, Facebook shares via the WhatsApp and Instagram acquisitions. and then you had sold those previously, booked the gain, and then you wound up buying them in the public market.

38:14Like it's just not tax efficient. So you might as well just sit on them forever. And then, you know, this does create a redistribution issue. I think Sam's correct there. And then it's going to really matter to the company. If it's an Elon Musk company because of the Elon premium that he's created the future so many times now, that's like a venture investment and a public investment. If you look at Tesla's valuation now, it's not a car company anymore. It's going to be remembered as Optimus. The company will only be remembered. Nobody's going to remember RoboTaxi or cars, I predict. They're going to remember Optimus because that thing's going to sell a billion units, and they're going to charge by the hour for that product.

38:54It's got unlimited upside. And if he figures that piece out or data centers in space for SpaceX, this is like an unknown TAM. these TAMs could break people's brains in terms of how big they are. So you basically have no choice but to hold it, I think, forever, if it's like SpaceX or Tesla. Which becomes self-fulfilling because if everyone's holding it forever, the number go up. And this becomes an interesting disconnect of what's going on, which is if you believe the future is a feudalism 2.0, where you have a few hyper winners that have the cost of capital zero, they have all the things, right?

39:34and AI is fundamentally a compounder, then it's just an incredibly different configuration of the venture landscape and what you want to allocate to than what we've seen for the last 20 years where the whole story was software helps insurgents beat big guys. I've been saying this for a while that AI is just a strict benefit to the winners effectively, like cheap cost of capital. These are the things that matter. But I just think we have to come to terms with the fact that the venture capital the next 20 years is just going to be massively different than it was the last 20 years, right? What do you think, Jenny?

40:07How is it going to be different? Do you just take your fund when you raise your 50 million, put it into a max seven index, and then slowly draw down from it? And I mean, I know this sounds ridiculous, but in a sense, you know, that's what these crossover funds do. Yeah, we've been seeing that for years. I mean, people are getting really grumpy when all those funds were putting money into Bitcoin and Solana. And the LPs were like, screw you, I could do that too. Why are you charging me a fee? So I'm not sure that's the future of venture capital. But getting back to like the trickle down, I would say, maybe I'll amend my answer, you know, a slight bit that some of these, you know, although it may not be enough to transform the liquidity issue.

40:44I mean, a small investor like us, we're not in some of those names you mentioned. But you know what? The folks that put money into us are. And I don't mean the LPs like, you know, the benchmarks, the foundations, they all put money into early stage funds. And so then I have more money that I can deploy to early stage founders. So I actually think that it would be very healthy for the cycle, even those small ones. I mean, obviously, you know, the bigger ones would be even better, but I'm pretty excited. I think we need to temper our enthusiasm for tech and vibes and the potential for investing in companies that are going to have big outcomes with the strict valuation fundamentals that are still required.

41:22Like, you know, when my son was 16 over the summer during COVID, I sat down with him every week. We said, hey, let's go take a look at a public company. I'll give you a hundred bucks. You can go buy it on Robinhood. But I want you to explain to me like why it's a good buy. Let's talk about revenue growth and profits. Let's talk about balance sheets and capital and like know whether you're investing on fundamentals or whether you're investing on vibes. And it was OK if you wanted to invest on vibes. But I was like, you know, why the fuck are you investing in this company when PD multiples are way out of whack and this one's a reasonable.

41:53The same is true for venture. We can't just say like, hey, everything is going to be 100x, 2000x, you know, sort of outcome and throw fucking valuation out the window. Early stage valuation entry points still matter. And fundamentals still matter. I don't want to invest. I don't want to give my money to VCs who think that it's all vibes and not based on fundamentals. Fuck that. I want you to understand the numbers of the companies you're investing in. I want you to understand your portfolio model. I want you to understand whether it makes sense to do follow-on investments or not at new prices.

42:22Math still fucking matters. Of course. Dave, I'm like you. Look, we're incredibly cheap at Slow Ventures. We don't do anything. Sometimes it's okay to not be cheap. No, we're cheap motherfuckers. You are allowed to say that. And like twist. Okay, good. And like, you know, it's like you look at cash flow based deals. It was reported by the FT and a bunch of others that, you know, OnlyFans just did a transaction valuing at a$3 billion valuation. Financially, that's a steal, right? Like it's incredible. Yeah, because what is their earnings? I mean, they make$400 or$500 million in profit a year? I shouldn't comment.

42:59But the point is, I know you were trying to buy it. The point is only that, like, yes, there's always going to be a financial clearing price to things based on growth and fundamentals. But in the last like five to 10 years, the people who have done well have not done that at all. Right. And the question is what happens to the industry because of that? Like, you know, one tweet from Elon about space data centers makes your company worth a billion dollars. on vibes in the market versus if you go triple, triple, double, double on a software company right now, truly no A-round investor cares. Which is insane.

43:35It's such a great business. It could be a money printing machine. At some point, free cash flow is going to matter to people. And I think it's going to be this time next year. After these companies get out, then there are going to be institutional investors who are going to start looking at Anthropic and OpenAI, and they're going to take out their abacus, their spreadsheet, whatever, their back of the envelope, and they're going to just go, hey, math doesn't math. You're losing this much money on every transaction. When does this become a free cash flow machine? When does the J curve end? How do I know this?

44:07I watched it with Uber up close and personal. The entire narrative of Uber and ride sharing was it can never make money. It will lose money forever. It's going to constantly go down that J curve. It's never recovering. And then I was on CNBC famously one time, and I just said to one of them, like, would you stop taking Uber if it was$3 more a ride? And they were like, no. And I was like, okay, who would? And they're like, the bottom 3 % of users was like, okay, great. You fired your bottom 10 % of users, and then you became wildly profitable. And that's exactly what happened. But it took a changing of the guard and the changing of the cap table for that to happen.

44:46And that's about to happen for SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Cerebrus. They're all going to start getting weighed. Unless it doesn't, because the retail investor base of your upper middle class, Jason, is big enough and vibey enough, right? It's a GME situation, right? Where it's like, it actually hasn't happened to be a reality at all. No, I don't think Sam's right. I think that we've hit the top. I think we've hit the top to a certain extent. Jason, why do you think Elon's making a 30 % retail allocation in the IPO? Because they do math? is a total exception. And I think it will get filled.

45:19The question is, when that gets filled with SpaceX, what other stocks are going to go down? Where is that money going to come from? Is that coming from somebody's 401k, from a Vanguard fund? Is it coming from their cash on hand? Is it a second home that they sell to buy more SpaceX? Where is that incremental money coming from? If Elon gets his way, it's going to come out of the NASDAQ 100 and eventually out of the S &P 500. Yep. Correct. Yes. And that, so that's my point is this rebalancing over the next year is going to be vibes now, get on, get your shares. And then a year from now, people are going to start weighing these things and saying, well, I think what I could imagine, Jason, is that people, I mean, this has already happened in some places where people are, you know, on the margin, pulling out of MAG7 and going to chips in various places.

46:05But like, I could imagine that the PEs on some of the Mag 7 become so attractive that people just can't help themselves. The PEs on the Mag 7 are actually not crazy. Like, you know, again, Meta at 20, Alphabet at under 20, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple at 30. Tesla's the only one that's really out of range there. Right, because it's a meme stock. Yeah, but if you buy into those companies, you get allocation to the other private firms you care about because they're all investors. Next up, Jenny, you said something that I thought was absolutely fascinating. You told a story that I don't think I've ever heard told before.

46:39You said that you heard about a founder that closed a$15 million Series A from a top tier VC. And then a half year later, they plan to return the cash to investors. You add that Clyde will displace the product and erode the value. This is really happening. Most people are not talking about it. It's kind of wild. Tell me more about the story and how common it is. First of all, I think people don't want to talk about it because it's scary to admit that this is happening and it doesn't really serve their interests of raising capital from LPs or telling the narrative that Silicon Valley is healthy and everything's good.

47:12Now, I'll preface this by saying I'm long-term bullish. I will keep on investing in startups and I'm very excited, but I think people have underestimated the impact. In this case, it was a founder. He'd raised about$15 million Series A and he'd been working in the legal tech space, But not, I mean, this wasn't just like an application layer. This was a deeply technical second, third time founder who, you know, thought that he had a really interesting data moat and was working very, you know, hand in hand with a few firms to kind of pilot this and design it. And he wasn't saying that just because, you know, Claude released their, you know, their MCP connector that he was going out of business.

47:56But what I think is interesting is that these savvy founders are basically taking a long view, kind of looking back and not saying what's happening today. But like, where am I going to be in five years and where are these models going to be in five years? And I think that's what scared him. And that kind of freaked me out. And then when I started telling some of my my peers at other firms, they all seem to have stories about this. Maybe this one seems extreme, although it is quite true. So I think it's a real thing and it's a threat and we're not talking about it. I don't think that serves our founders.

48:23I think we need to have more open conversation about what moats can be and not moats today, right? I mean, I think everyone has a theory on what's interesting today, but five and 10 years out. I think it's moats. I think it's also just what people want to work on in this moment. To run a company and build a company, you need two things. One is you need a great business and the second is you need to care, right? And the great business part, I couldn't agree with you more about we spend a lot of time like what's a mode how do you really think about that long term but like we've also we had one founder this is years ago now one founding team was excellent founding team like couldn't be better group of people doing a thing and um they called up and they said look ai is about to happen this like oh this is the llm moment and we've studied this our whole lives and we're building this company and candidly like we really need to work on this like this is like what we've trained for and they're like so we're effectively returning capital and going to go take senior positions at open AI, good for them to have that perspective, which is like, this is my life.

49:22This is my next decade. And if the world is changing so fast and things change and all of a sudden, I just emotionally have to do something, I respect that. Yeah. I think there's opportunity costs, especially for seasoned founders. And in this case, it was that. It just seemed quite extreme. They just raised the money. They just convinced a top. I just think it's funny. For instance, as Jenny and you and I are talking about this, I'm extremely serious about pro rata rights. Like hear me now, startup world, like they're not. I was like, I'm crazy about that. But actually, the founder comes to me and raises money.

49:54And like six months later is like, we're wrong. And like, by the way, our opportunity costs and like the really expensive thing, especially early is your time and effort. It's not the money, right? Like you're like, I'm gonna return money because like I've this is not it's better for everyone. Like, they're not going to win at a thing. They're World changes fast. I candidly would rather have the money back and redeploy it if that's the situation. I mean, I'll just take the other side in that, you know, you're betting on people at the pre-seed and you're betting on them to figure it out. And I'd rather not get my money back, but have them try a few different things and try to, you know, skate where the puck is going.

50:27I get it. And I think you have to just be fast in this market. You know, I was talking to someone that runs a kind of quasi consulting, AI consulting business, but there's they productized some of it. And they said our team, you know, rips everything out every two weeks and starts again. I get it. It's just like, ultimately, like, it's like, it's running a zombie company as a great person in a moment where the world is changing so fast is like, it's like the worst feeling you could possibly have. Like, there's this amazing thing going on and you're boxed out of it because I'd like rather just fix that and like life is long.

50:59I think whether I'm investing in an entrepreneur or another fund manager, I want them to feel like they've got an edge and have conviction and passion for what they're doing. And so if they've lost that, then sure, I don't want them doing it either. But I want to invest in people who think they can still figure it out. All right. We got to drop Sam off. Sam, thanks for coming on the pod. And we'll see you next time. Thank you. He's got a high hot take per minute. So we allow him to leave early. Check out his podcast, more or less. Everybody has to have a podcast now. So more or less, you got to have a podcast.

51:34You need to control your media channel. He's got to go beat up those founders who didn't give him pro rata. Somebody just said, oh my God, we're challenging you on this. He's getting on the phone with his attorneys. If a founder gets to the point, Jenny, where they're like, I just can't do it. I'm not living my real life. I kind of feel like it's like one of these kids who goes and does ayahuasca or they go to Burning Man and they do LSD or something. They come back and they're like i'm living a lie i need to go be a yoga instructor i need to start a surf camp in wherever i'm just like you know okay godspeed godspeed everybody has somebody in their circle who came back from burning mad and their brain was broken and whatever they were doing is over like they left their spouse they left their city and they're in kawaii living their best life Mazel tov.

52:31Or they came back with a great vision for a new startup. And I'm like, great. I want to give them some money. But it is frustrating, Jenny. I always think to myself, I always say to the founders, what are your three other ideas? Do you have another idea? We've already got the capital here. We bet on you. What else? I'd be curious if you're seeing this too, Jason, around first-time versus second-time founders. We're finding that the first-time founders will just put their nose down and just try to get through and burn the money, potentially. But they're going to try to find something, the passion, maybe the ego.

53:02And the second and third time founders who've had a lot of success or some success, it's just opportunity cost. And in this case, it felt like a team, very seasoned, very technical, had a lot of success. And they just said, you know what? It's not going to work. It's a function of how great those offers were. I've seen some of these offers and to put your nose to the grindstone at a startup for 10 years, 15 years, and the outcome is unknown, or you get a guaranteed$10,$20,$30 million package from OpenAI, and you know it's going to 10x from here, so it's really a$300 million, and there's a secondary market, as we talked about in the first thing, and I could just start selling my shares immediately.

53:46I told somebody recently, they were like, 99 % of my net worth is in one of these companies. And I just said, sell it all and put it in index funds, like, or sell at least half of it, put it in index funds, go buy yourself, you know, a house and a ski house. Like, by the way, that's the advice I gave myself, which is just keep building that foundation. That's rock solid with the speculative stuff and get yourself diversified and out of these, because if these companies are trading at 30, 40, 50 times revenue, okay, there's a chance that they'll catch up and their earnings will get there. There's also a significant chance that open source and other products win a big part of this.

54:31And tokens just are the fastest declining commodity in the world are tokens. The cost of a token is plummeting because more data centers, better energy, photonics between the chips, language models that are more efficient, open source, distributed computing, tau subnets that are racing to the bottom. So if these things keep going down, I'm not going to give myself a clip like you only ever need a 10 megabyte hard drive. Obviously, people are just going to keep using a phenomenal amount of tokens, but it just may not be the most profitable business. What if the business looks like a bandwidth provider?

55:07What if the business looks more like a hard drive provider and it's a commodity business that braces to the bottom. It just, it might not be the money printing free cashflow machine that people think it's going to be. That's a possibility. If it's not though, then what is? Because if AI really does subsume a number of industries, like we're seeing progress on the legal field from Anthropic, they just dropped SMB products. And if they don't make money, Jason, then who does? The hardware, the energy company, the data center, the application layer, the person running a law firm that needs to have as many people and charges the same amount of money, or they charge 20 % less, but the cost to deliver the products, 40 % less, and their margins went up.

55:45There's a lot of permutations of this. And anybody who says they know exactly which one works and where the value gets captured, it's just not telling the truth. Jason, I think you pointed out a good... I think for a lot of founders, and actually for VCs, this happens later too, is you're concentrated in a single asset. You don't have access to diversification or liquidity. That's literally why the secondary market exists. But you helped with that, Dave. Go ahead and give a plug. Well, I'm just saying I did the same thing five or six years ago when I was looking to sell a piece of my carry and my first two funds at 500, which had become very concentrated in a couple of winters.

56:24And I wanted to take a little bit off the table and buy a house. I think that's the big reason the secondary market exists, at least for founders and employees who are selling, is there's 100 ,000 people in the Bay Area who own$1 to$10 million worth of equity. There's probably 10 ,000 people in the Bay Area who own$10 to$50 million worth of equity. And they can't afford to buy a house in the Bay Area that costs$3,$4,$5 million. Can't even qualify for the loan to buy a house. And I think that's why you're seeing more of these tender offers and a lot of companies providing regular liquidity programs is to give them an outlet because, you know, IPOs are taking 15 years now.

57:02The employee investing schedule happens in a third of the time it takes for a company to go public. So I think that's great. But I also think like, you know, these companies like Intercom, you know, that have to reinvent themselves and they're pushing true are very inspiring as well. And if you find a founder like that, who's just gritty as hell and wants to, you know, then become an AI native company after all these years, like, I think that's pretty awesome. And I was an early investor at Intercom and Owen coming back and figuring out Finn was amazing. Amazing, right? That doesn't always happen.

57:31it. There was a lot of commentary on the how much money does it cost to be kind of set in San Francisco conversation. OpenAI had a tender offer for employees last year. Turns out 600 investors, 600 employees sold stock,$6.6 billion, which led to this tweet from Shruti from ArayVC that went incredibly viral. She says the people who sold their roughly 10 million will still be quote SF brokey, 50 % in taxes, three, four million in cash for a house, probably needs another million improvements. Leads with one or two million. Kids on the way. Nanny's 100K a year. Daycare's 45K a year. Camps extracurricular$30 ,000 to$100 ,000.

58:07Tesla 50K. They will still be at the office 996 and not going to enjoy any of this. Only have money to hike and camp. If$10 million is a much day. Thank you. There's a high class problem there. Yeah, and that's also just one secondary that they did. They have a lot more upside. I don't think the perspective there, she got dunked on a little bit, but I don't think the perspective is that far off when everyone looks up to mere billionaires now as a second class compared to the 100 billionaires and possibly compared to the first trillionaire. I think people's expectations have really changed. And I don't think it's the right time for technology to become richer in a visible way, given how AI is pulling right now.

58:46It seems to be a mistake. Well, first of all, get out of the Bay Area. yeah by the way in austin yeah uh by the way you can buy an acre of land for 100k 20 miles outside the city and so you want to buy like your 10 acres for a million bucks like and people have no idea how big 10 acres is like it's a lot of space go buy your 10 acres austin and austin and mayam are great places to move after you've made money but there's a ton of people who are still here in the Bay Area who are making money in spite of the high taxes and the high cost of living, because they're making a lot of money working for the company.

59:28Totally fine to make it there. And then when you're ready for your second or third company, if you're doing your second or third company and you've got a crew, basing yourself in Austin is such an unlock, which is why you see so many people saying like, yeah, why not put my company here. And if I move my team there, they save on the state tax. So that's a whatever it is, 10, 12, 14 % raise. Then their cost of living goes down a third. So now they're at a 50 % raise. And your 100K nanny goes down. Well, that's in the cost of living. These are life optimization strategies after you've made money.

1:00:10Or you're running your second company. Nannies don't go down in price that much if you leave the Bay Area. just let just well i thought that was the one thing about her tweet that i was like 100k for a nanny i think keith ray boys was going to be mayor of miami for a few years but he decided to come back is he back in the bay i thought he was in new york most of the time yeah well i'm just saying that a lot of people came back to the bay area to either make make money or invest in people who are here yeah absolutely i just think like it's an entrepreneurship about zigging when other people zag so if like you have to live in pack heights and you have to send your kid to alpha school and you have to do all these things, then like you're going to have to pay the price.

1:00:45But otherwise you have to get scrappy and move to Austin or wherever. And I think you can do really well. I think New York and the Bay Area are still great places to build companies. I mean, I run a phone called Everywhere Ventures. So it's in the name, folks. What is this story about the company rebranding? Oh, Intercom. Yeah, we kind of skipped over that. But tell us about that. Jenny brought it up. So Intercom is a company that early in the AI era said, we are going to re-architect our firm around building an agent. And they said it early enough, Jason, that people were a little bit like, eh, maybe.

1:01:18Is the technology there yet? Is it going to be there? And as they worked on their customer service agent called Fenn and saw real success with it, they've talked about this kind of over the last, Jenny helped me out here, a year and a half, two years, somewhere in there. They just announced, Jason, they're going to rebrand the whole company finn and intercom will then be a sub brand of it they're still going to work on the core intercom product uh they said in a blog post that intercom 2.0 just came out and they're going to invest more in it but the company is clearly moving in the agentic fashion and what i think really matters here is this is not just a new product it's not just a new name they stress that they have changed how they price how they build etc so they really did a full architect re-architected the company and they've made it through so when jenny was talking about well they're starting to make it through.

1:02:00I mean, I think we all have portfolio companies that are series C and beyond, and they have to go through this chasm right now. I have probably five or six that are late stage and they have to transform. And some of them will work long-term and some won't, but I thought this was a great story. And I mean, intercom, customer service, you'd think that would be the first thing to be displaced. So I kind of love that it was a bold statement, the founder coming back, and I'm rooting for them. I'm not an investor. Do you think that the companies in your portfolio that are facing the similar chasm going from the SaaS era to the AI era or the agentic era are going to make it like 50 % of them, 80 %?

1:02:34How many make that jump? The ones that move fast and took action when they didn't want to. They had to fire their executive team because they weren't AI native. They had to change their pricing from SaaS to usage base. That was hard. So I think in my portfolio, it's probably 50 % that I think might make it because they were very decisive. They had great leadership and they had vision And it was painful, right? They didn't want to fire those people. It took them two years to recruit, but they did. And so I think that's the key. Jason, something in your portfolio, are people taking the medicine to actually get across and have them?

1:03:05There's an interesting story about Zoom Info, which helps you find leads, right? And sales team use these. What was like one of the first thing people did when they saw OpenClaw, when they see co-work? They're like, find me 10 leads. Find me, you know, everybody who, the first thing I did with OpenClaw was I was like, Take the top 100 podcasts, tell me who the advertisers are, then go put those leads into our SaaS product, which is PipeDrive, and then tell me if they're in there already and when was the last contact date. It did that beautifully. And it was like, okay, that's an SDR job of 30, 40K offshore work from home or 60, 70, 80K in the United States work from home or in a city in Austin or in Phoenix.

1:03:48So Zoom Info is like the perfect example of a company that's going to have a heck of a time. That's like private equity home company. I think it's a private equity company or a public one. It's public. It's public. So they're getting their ass handed to them. They're going to need to cut half the staff. They're going to need to take an AI approach. But we have a company, Lead IQ, which was nipping at Zoom Info's heels, has a figures in revenue. Go to leadiq.com. Their homepage is here's AI. Here's our AI solution to the same problem, as opposed to, you know, here's our SaaS software for the same problem.

1:04:24So accelerate revenue with AI-driven data. So they're like, here's the next person you should talk to. Here's why you should talk to them. But this is going to require a totally different company. And I remember talking to the founder, May, and she was like, okay, we have these, you know, offers to get acquired. They're not quite where we want them to be. We're still growing. But AI, you know, and AI-first companies are super dangerous. And I was like, there's really only one choice. Sell. if you don't believe in your ability and you just want to get off the train and, you know, accept, you know, you know, what might be to you, I don't know, the bronze medal or like a participation trophy, or do you want to go for the gold?

1:05:01If you want to go for the gold, then you have to skate to where the puck is going while dealing with a board of directors who wants the number to go up and is, and that really is the problem. You have, you might have somebody like Jenny or myself who's like, yeah, we don't care about a little revenue destruction and shaking up the management team in order to get to the future because we invested at whatever evaluation. The later stage folks were like, wait a second. We were supposed to double, double, triple, triple, triple, double, double, double, and then exit. And this was going to be incredible.

1:05:32And Salesforce was going to buy us and HubSpot was going to buy us. Those folks are the ones who are over their skis. So the real dynamic is the board issue. 100%. that. And it's just unfixable. I've had to have these conversations multiple times with the late stage board members who say, leave the board, sell your shares back to the company at a discount, or just leave the board and we'll take it from here. And you'll see if you get a return or not, right off the investment, whatever you got to do. But yeah, it just becomes untenable. What did they say when you told them? I mean, it's always the late stage folks always want to believe that they're the early stage investors and they have that gestalt and they have that passion for a blank whiteboard.

1:06:17They want to have that passion for a blank sheet of paper. And we're going to come up with a product this weekend. Let's do a hackathon at the company. We'll break into five teams, come up with five different product ideas. And one of them, Evan Williams, will say, oh, Jack, your version, this Twitter thing is what we're going to put all our eggs in that basket. Let's go. They want to believe they're that. But their LPs are not that. Their LPs, if they're late stage like that, are looking for five-year returns on investment as opposed to ours, which might be okay with 10 to 15 years. So time horizon is everything, right?

1:06:50And you just can't make unnatural... Late stage company pivots are not very talented. That's why we don't take board seats. So we can be, you know, the whisper in the founder's ear and, you know, the voice of reason and they don't feel nervous about it. I think it's a real advantage. I think the difference between VCs and late stage private market investors that are not quite PE is the divide that Jason just outlined. Like, are you willing to do revenue destruction or do you have to have this steady rise? So are you modeling or are you believing? Yeah. I mean, and go to Grin.co. This is another SaaS era company that we incubated, did fantastic.

1:07:29And if you scroll down on their page, you'll see their GIA product, G-I-A.

1:07:36And yeah, keep going down. So this is like their existing product. And then they're like, and by the way, if you're done with that affiliate product to manage influencers, here's GIA, the AI that lets your team focus on relationships, not the busy work. And what happens over time is you have the existing product, the paradigm is shifted, here's the new product. and you're trying to service both of these revenue lines and educate your market on, hey, the new product's going to be more effective. And man, it's just, it's hard to sell two different products concurrently. I saw this with Google right now.

1:08:08They released a Google book yesterday and I tweeted like, what's the difference between this and the Chromebook? And people are like, oh, well, it's Android, but it's built on Chrome, but it's got the Google. And I'm like, yeah, but my Chromebook had the ability to load these apps. And it's like, yeah, we don't know. It's just people's perception is they want a Gemini Google book. They don't want a Chrome book. Chrome means browser. Google Gemini book means like new AI book. It's essentially the same thing. It's a, it's an Apple Neo laptop competitor. It's a less than$500 laptop. Yeah. Here's a, here's an important picture of Google announcing the Google book recently.

1:08:48Yeah. I mean, it's, it is really hard. It is really hard. That's ours. Running a legacy business that's printing money, that's growing, that has constituents internally on the board. Hey, Satya made it work. What? Who did? Satya made that pivot work. That's a really late stage pivot. Yeah. I mean, it's just hard. You're going to be having... You have to have... I can tell you exactly how to say it. The only people who can figure this out is people with a high tolerance for ambiguity. Okay. Like a Jedi Knight. Give people more about ambiguity in this case, Jason. Ambiguity about what's going to happen or ambiguity about which...

1:09:28A tolerance... I'll give you the idea of a tolerance for ambiguity. Taiwan is a proud nation that's part of the incredible China story. And we respect Taiwan and China. This was the strategic ambiguity that the world gave China and Taiwan for the last 30 or 40 years. And it's worked. Chef's kiss. you don't need to challenge China. So far, it's worked pretty damn well. Now, you're talking out of both sides of your mouth, right? Is it a lie or is it you're holding space, you know, to use the woke term? You know, our company, Intercom, is loved and super helpful and is a catalyst for growth in over 10 ,000 enterprises.

1:10:14And our new product, FIN, is the future of customer engagement. like okay wait as soon as they realized that fun that finn was working and becoming the future of the company they decided to go all in on that and just recently but they didn't fire their customers for intercom and people can still log into their intercom accounts now if you want to understand somebody who burns the boats elon said tesla model s and x there's a hundred left you can buy one of the hundred to end the run. My wife bought one of the Model Xs. God bless her. I had the first signature Model S. She has one of the last Model Xs.

1:10:55And he's like, those are loved cars, but they have to die so optimists can live. And they're retooling those. There are Burr-in-the-Boat founders. They're very rare. Most people in Elon's shoes would have been like, absolutely, We're going to put these on a paced rollout. You can still buy your Model S. We'll incrementally improve it. They wouldn't have the boldness to say that business is nothing compared to the upside of Optimus. So you're basically saying that Google doesn't have that agility anymore. Only a founder can do that. It's founder authority that allows you to kill products. What a company like Google does is they just let it taper off.

1:11:38They just let it taper, taper, taper, taper. And then someday you wake up and they're like, yeah, the Nest is the Google thermostat. Took them like 10 years to have the boldness to say, you know, or drop cams are now Google cams or the Chromebook is now the Google book. Like, it's just there's somebody internally fighting. There's two camps internally fighting for each product. And then the CEO wants to be magnanimous. and she, he, they, them, it says, yeah, you know, okay, you made a great argument. So yeah, let's launch that new product on this date and we'll keep supporting that other product.

1:12:19I mean, I don't think you can count them out though, right? I mean, they came back with Gemini after they could have been ahead and did a phenomenal job and I actually love that product. And I made a huge bet on it. I bought Google at$100 a share when everybody said it's over and all the searches are going to check? Because I was like, wait a second. I watched them after Mahalo take all the little innovations we were doing at Mahalo and put them onto the Google homepage when it was 10 blue links. And I was like, there's nothing stopping them from putting the AI answer at the top of the page. They did that with the one box.

1:12:50So what if they put the AI answer at the top? Which is exactly what they did. I'd seen them do that my whole career. They would put flight information up there. They would put their local information up there. They would put the one box, the sports score. What's to stop them from putting the AI answer? So they did it and their revenue went up. Yeah. Very successful. Yeah. It just took them. How long did that take them? Two years to make that decision? Until they felt like they were going to be outrun pretty quickly. They had to feel the pressure. And then who actually made the decision? Right.

1:13:19They had a founder come back. The founder had to come back and put down his foot and say, founder authority, Sergey. That was a pretty important part when somebody came in and did that. Yeah. No, Sergey came back and said, enough. The decision's been made. We're going AI first. I think there's only so many Steve Jobs who can make, you know, company changing pivots and make that work. And sometimes if they're no longer there, that pivot might not be as easy to pull off. Which is, I think, why Tim Cook is retiring, is they're at a crucible moment, as Ruloff would say at Sequoia. It's like a crucible moment for Apple.

1:13:52Are they going to play a role in this next universe? Are they going to leverage their massive hardware footprint or not? I think they put a guy in charge who worked on the chips and is an engineer for a reason. Their future is local models running on massively powerful Apple Silicon with 128 gigs, 256 gigs of RAM on your laptop. And you're going to pay$4 ,000 for the privilege. I hope so. All my Macs are constantly out of RAM. I wish someone would fix that bottleneck. All right, listen, before we go, Jason, I want to get to a question from the Noti Gang that was submitted before we even went live today.

1:14:28We're taking questions from our awesome Noti Gang group chat over on X. If you want to join, there'll be a link in the show notes. but from Goldilocksville. Jason, how should I manage a meeting with large venture capital firms in New York City without losing credibility as both a newbie and someone who's still determining who to build the company with? I apparently need a co-founder. So they're looking for some general advice talking to New York. I mean, if you somehow got a meeting without your co-founder in a very nascent company, you should just own the state of your company. Hey, it's great to meet with you, Fred Wilson.

1:14:58I've been reading your blog and I heard your recent podcast. I need really three pieces of advice from you. Here's my vision. Here's our progress. Number one, do I need a co-founder or should I just go to building a founding team? Should I raise a friends and family round or should I go directly to seed? And we have this B2B or B2C function. I'm leaning towards B2B because that seems to be where I can get the flywheel going. And what are your thoughts on these three questions? If you come in and you say it the way I just say it, I'm owning the state of my business. I'm self-aware. I'm confident.

1:15:33And I have questions for you. I know that you're a wealth of knowledge. You did all of these dot-com era companies. You did Cosmo. You did, you know, Twitter. I have specific questions for you. So you're just basically kung fu-ing it. You're saying to the person, you know, here's where I'm at. Here's my problems. You might have solutions for me. I want to make the most of this meeting, and I need to get this information out of your brain, which then makes the person realize, oh, this person is good at collecting information and listening. They're a sponge. If I back them, they're going to suck more information out of other people's brains, as opposed to they're an arrogant 21-year-old who's telling me like, I'm going to miss the boat.

1:16:15I miss being an arrogant 21-year-old. Or delusional. Like a little bit, that's okay. No, life grinds that out of you slowly. What do you say, Jenny? You were nodding, I think, a little bit. I was. I've actually personally changed my tune on the solo founder. So it used to be something. I ran two companies. I had co-founders. I actually had a founder breakup, and I know how awful that can be. But I think for the first five years of my investing career, I always said, you need a co-founder, mostly because it's a lonely road and you need a thought partner. But I have really changed my tune on that.

1:16:49I think solo founders that have great foundational teams and support can be great and very successful. And so I guess my advice is I wouldn't really bring it up. I would just run it as if things are going smoothly. I would talk about the momentum in the business rather than the traction, right? So you don't have to worry about that you don't have metrics, that you're super early, especially if you're talking to an early stage investor, but just talk about all the progress that you and potentially your founding team have made. So that's how I would approach it. All right, friends, this has been another amazing Venture Capital Roundtable.

1:17:20We're doing this nearly every single Wednesday. So if you want to hear from the VCs who are writing the checks, come to us on Wednesdays. Jason. This is my favorite one so far. I mean, this is the based candid group. I like this one a lot. Absolutely. Jenny, thank you so much for coming. The URL is everywhere.vc. And for Dave, it's close. It's practicalvc.com. Please get together, figure out your TLDs, harmonize them. I'm going to forget those and get them all wrong. Can we plug something before we wrap up here? Yes, of course. Jenny, add me to your syndicate. Oh, yeah, for sure. Well, before I plug my other stuff, I want to say Jenny is an amazing VC and invests all over the place.

1:17:59And I would plug her as, you know, investing in her fund. Thank you, Dave. But I would say for folks who are interested in learning more about Secondary Trading Places is our podcast. Every week we cover news in secondary. We do a valuation corner. Who's your co-host? Aman Virji, my PayPal colleague from way back. He's good. He's a little spicy. He's a lot smarter than I am. Spicy, I was going for. And then a brief plug for a company we just invested in, not a secondary. We invested in a company called EquityBee that provides employee option financing. You may not know this, but a ton of options go unused, un-exercised because the employees can't afford to exercise their options before they leave companies.

1:18:45So EquiB helps people finance the purchase of their employee stock options so they can still keep some upside when they need to leave the company. Tel Aviv-based? They were, but now they're Palo Alto-based. Got it. I remember. I think I heard this pitch. Great job. And we're actually running an FPV. Ooh, I don't know if that's illegal. But if folks are interested, Jason, I'll drop you an email. Yes, send me that deal memo. I'll read it. Absolutely. Will do. And I'll see you at Liquidity Summit. Oh, yes, you're coming. Awesome. Great. Yeah, Liquidity is going to be nuts this year. Liquidity was my original angel summit.

1:19:18I renamed it Liquidity, did it for a year. The All In guys did me a favor and showed up and we taped an episode there for the last few years. And then Chamop was like, I like this event. Can we buy it? And I was like, it's just for angel investors and early stage folks. It's like, well, what if it was for everybody? And I was like, okay. So we took the price from$5 ,000 a ticket and I would just break even on it. And then we doubled the price and we tripled the attendance from 150 people to 500. And we took over the town of Yonville. So the budget, the revenue, everything year over year or year over 18 months went like 10X, triple.

1:19:56And it is going to be absolutely nuts. We said no. I think everybody who got a spot there, we said no to three or four other people who applied. This is applying to buy a$10 ,000 ticket. It is pretty bonkers. Well, I mean, the amount of money we're spending is crazy. Like, we literally took over the town of Yonville for the entire duration. It's going to be nuts. And people are coming in from around the world. And I have, like, speaking of people in the Middle East, I have people like, hey, I met you when you were over here. I run this sovereign wealth fund. I applied for a ticket. I didn't get in.

1:20:30Is there any way you can get me in? And I'm like, we need a bigger boat. I think you should have let in the people with sovereign wealth funds, Jason. Tell them to buy the next town over. The problem is everybody comes at the last minute, and then there's like four besties. Each one gets 30 requests, 40 requests for last-minute tickets. 40 requests times four besties, 160 seats. We're out of seats. It's a physical limitation. And that little town can't handle it, but that's so great. I think next year we will. We're on playoff game problems. Absolutely. So Jason, you know, the last time I was on a platform with you was at your launch festival in Fort Mason.

1:21:13And your producer, Jacob, sent me the clip. And I was like, oh, my God, that was 10 years ago. Holy cow. Yeah. And that was such a great event. I loved that venue. It was so fun. You know, I did that event. I had started TechCrunch50 with my friend. And then we broke up. Or I should say he kicked me out and screwed me. And I was like, OK, I'll just do my own. I'll do launch fast. and he went on to rename it Disrupt. And it was the best thing that ever happened to me because I got away from somebody who was a bit toxic. But I was able to do it the way I wanted to, which was I used to do it. Anybody could get a free ticket if they were a founder.

1:21:48They just had to fill out a form. We had 15 ,000 people at the big register. And then you had 6 ,000, 7 ,000 people there. And the audience size, like the number of seats was 2 ,000. We had like video rooms to watch it. So I brought it back this year and we had launch festival in San Francisco, only 400 seats, free for founders. I sold like 30 tickets, you know, for VCs or whatever, I want to sit in the front row. And we really had a great time making it intimate again. So I'm going to do it again and I'm going to do it twice a year and I'm going to make it themed. So launch your company for free.

1:22:21And I had done it, Jenny, as a reaction to Demo. Demo was charging$20 ,000 to be on stage. They would then charge you $5 ,000 or$10 ,000 to be coached. So they had like a mandatory coaching product and then you had to buy tickets and then you had to buy a booth. It was – do you remember those days? I mean I just remember being on that stage and looking at the audience and there were thousands of founders there. When I got off the stage, it wasn't like a line of 10 people. It was like hundreds of people. It was like so exciting. And that venue was just amazing. Well, they made it impossible for me.

1:22:51The unions then attacked me for using non-union spaces, started banging on the doors and protesting it because I used robotic cameras. And I was like I'll never do an event in San Francisco again. And here I am. I did one recently, but I think I'm going to move it to like the peninsula because San Francisco is just too hard. They make it way too hard to do anything. But you were at the early ones, Dave. You were at everything back in the day. You were admonishing me to take my iPad off the stage. Yes, we had a showdown since he was using his iPad. I was like, these guys have 90 seconds. Please pay attention to them.

1:23:23I was doing due diligence on the company. You have ADHD, my friend. You have ADHD. Yes. I am your Ritalin. I am the human version of Ritalin. I think everyone here has at least ADD. I'll just throw in my historical context. I was in late high school during the TechCrunch 40, TechCrunch 50 days, Jason. And you guys got me drunk enough that I threw up on the wall outside the venue as a baby. Wow, there it goes. I got you drunk enough. Yes, I put the gun to you. It was literally him, not the big one. That story wins. You win. You win. Puking at TechCrunch 40. All right, everybody. We'll see you next time.

1:23:56Bye-bye. Thanks for watching This Week in Startups. If you liked this episode, check out more. If you're a startup founder, Founder University Cohort 13 kicks off this fall. It's a 12-week program that provides guidance on building your product, launching to real customers, and pitching to investors. Top startups receive$25 ,000 or$125 ,000 in investment. Apply now at founder.university.twist. Already have traction? The Launch Accelerator invests$125 ,000 and connects you with 500-plus investors to help you raise your next round. Apply at launchaccelerator.co. If you're an accredited investor looking to gain access to quality deal flow, apply for Jason's Angel Syndicate at thesyndicate.com.

1:24:39We find two to three deals a month. And check out This Week in AI, Jason's experts-only roundtable with top AI founders and operators every week. Find it thisweekinai.ai. Check out The Twist Ticker, our daily newsletter, at thisweekinstartups.com slash ticker. Thanks again to our sponsors for making today's show possible. Follow the show on Instagram. Follow the show on x.com. This Week in Startups publishes three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 5 p.m. Central Time. You can submit an audio or video file question by emailing it to thisweekin.com.