Is Anthropic Making the Biggest Mistake in AI History | E2258

9:25Jason Calacanis:I mean, we're an AI company, so like we pay attention and we're an open source, you know, like we love open source companies and projects. And so we were aware of it very early. We made a few pull requests like right when it came out and Venice was added as a model provider within the flow of setup. So basically if you want your claw to run on private inference and not have like every detail about your life and business going to Sam Altman, then we were a good alternative. So that's how we ended up there. And in the company, we've been huge users of Claws and it's been quite an amazing phenomenon.

10:07Jason Calacanis:I love that you've been covering it so much.

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11:23Logan Allin:That's linkedin.com slash hiring pro offer. Terms and conditions do apply. Logan, what do you think about this open source movement? You know, you had so many people trying to capture the agent opportunity, the co-work opportunity. And then you have just coming around the bend from the outside, this dark horse, this open claw project. And it is the one that took the crown while the king was looking down. The jester stole his thorn in crown. Like, this is it, right? Like, how did this happen? And what impact do you think it has on the marketplace as investors?

12:02Erik Voorhees:Yeah, so we actually passed on the proprietary LLMs, which I'll call, you know, anti-portfolio at this point. But our view was that open source was going to meaningfully catch up and close the gap around intelligence, speed and price. Right. And you've seen compression and the closing that gap. And particularly with Claw, as well as players like a Gemini, like a Meta, etc., investing heavily into providing these capabilities out into the market. And then you've got all of the China based players as well emerging. And our view is that now you're seeing Claude and certainly OpenAI start to produce at the app layer.

12:43Erik Voorhees:They always said, look, we're going to be the chassis. You guys go build on top of it and we'll stick to our knitting. Now you're seeing them need to monetize on applications. And suddenly, whenever Claude announces an application, it, you know, quote unquote, destroys, you know, or cooks some company. And I think that's obviously overborn. and our view is that the AI-first companies that are producing revenue through a product, less so on the OPEX reduction, I think that's more short-lived and more transient. I think you have to be AI-first. You have to be producing revenue through that product.

13:19Erik Voorhees:And it has to have domain differentiation, workflow, and data integration in order to be sticky and to have moats around it. Otherwise, you're very quickly going to get out-competed.

13:29Logan Allin:Yeah. And the fact that small organizations are adopting a technology, that to me is always one of my early signals when people who are tinkerers, hackers, DIY people, they start tinkering, I take notice. I get curious. And then when I see startups adopt a technology, I get really curious. And then when both do it, I become obsessed. Or I should say maybe the third factor is when I start tinkering, I get obsessed. Those three circles have now happened for me. So Eric, how do you think about OpenClaw, this open source project, and then also crypto and privacy? How is this all going to come together?

14:15Logan Allin:And what are your circles when you are evaluating something might break out your early signaling, your gut?

14:22Jason Calacanis:Like these tools are obviously so powerful. They are magical in many ways. And yet people have been led into this paradigm where everything they think and do is being absorbed into several central repositories where it will live forever. That to me is just so obviously dangerous. And I find it kind of ironic that many of these frontier labs, when they say they care so much about AI safety, are kind of missing the most near and present danger, which is the mass surveillance of all humanity. To me, that seems like a danger. And so, yeah, I'm glad that there are alternatives.

14:59Logan Allin:Eric, I am shocked right now. You're telling me that these entrepreneurs running the largest and fastest growing startups in history are saying one thing, but doing another. The thing they're saying is they care about safety, but then they are doing things that are not safe and that are the basic blocking and tackling, which is there's no need to take my queries and ingest them into your learning system if I don't want that. And I certainly don't want you keeping my history and giving it to the police. You could easily have a button or a checkbox, Logan, that makes this very easy for consumers to not be involved.

15:40Logan Allin:And there are, in fact, companies like Brave, like DuckDuckGo, NordVPN, other VPNs, open source projects like the Tor project that are designed from the bottom up to be privacy first. So what's your take there on, is this a missed opportunity for those large language models to incorporate this kind of thinking that Eric?

15:59Erik Voorhees:I think so. I mean, I was just learning about Venice and coming into this discussion and think what Eric's doing is super interesting. And obviously, Tim Cook and Apple have highlighted this in terms of we want to maintain privacy and we want users to have control over their data. I think largely privacy is very hard to come by these days, and I think we should all assume our data is everywhere. But I do think first principles-wise, building with that in mind, Jason, is absolutely right, particularly if you're going to touch end consumers. We're more enterprise driven. And so we're looking at companies that are helping encrypt, manage PII, obviously manage users' use of AI.

16:38Erik Voorhees:Our view is that this crossing the chasm moment for the enterprise and adoption of AI actually is going to be driven predominantly by cybersecurity. And so we announced an investment recently with Ashton and Sound Ventures in Witness AI, which is focusing on how do employees use AI in terms of tools we give them, but also employees get bringing AI to work. Um, everybody would talk about, you know, bring your device to work type, type dynamics. Now people are bringing their own AI to work and that has huge implications for what proprietary data is being added, what documents are getting added and so forth.

17:11Erik Voorhees:And until you can control that experience in the enterprise, you're going to continue, uh, to, to have meaningful lack of adoption.

17:18David Kaufman:Uh, Eric, I want to, I want to jump in here and ask you about your, you have a token. Venice AI has a token, a dollar sign VVV. So explain to us how the token interacts with the AI product and how people are using the token sort of as credits on Venice AI.

17:35Jason Calacanis:I'm a crypto guy, so of course there's going to be a token involved. Naturally. In our case, the token allows you to get access to the API for free. So basically, if you're a human or an agent and you want marginally free inference, like free at the margin where you're not paying per call, you can hold the token for that. So it's the different pricing model. And we think like whenever you can reduce friction, you find interesting new use cases. And so that was the impetus behind it.

18:04David Kaufman:And there's some degree of like volatility, like I'm reading here from our notes, like after it was made the designated model for OpenClock, your token surged 35%. So are you keeping that in mind as you guys are running this AI company? Like what's the price on the token and is that impacting decision making day to day?

18:22Jason Calacanis:Being in crypto since 2011, if I cared too much about the price movements, I probably would have had to shoot myself.

18:28David Kaufman:Yeah, fair enough.

18:29Jason Calacanis:You've got to keep a little distance and not get distracted by the noise. And there's a lot of noise. Ultimately, what we're trying to do is build a super useful platform for humans and agents to interact with all the leading AI models in a more private way. The token needs to be able to support and make that mission more feasible.

18:49Logan Allin:And is it using the infrastructure of BitTensor? I'm not sure if you mentioned that, but this bit tensor and tau projects, I think, are super fascinating. I don't know if you guys are keeping up on them, but I invested and helped co-found this fund that Mark Jeffrey is running that is exploring all these subnets. And the idea is to do distributed computing and provide, you know, an LLM or resources or storage, whatever it happens to be, and then have a flywheel way to make money. Almost like, I think it's kind of like the next Bitcoin in this way because it has an application tied to it. Have you been following it at all, Eric?

19:29Jason Calacanis:Yeah, I'm generally familiar with BitTensor. We don't have anything to do with BitTensor. We are not a decentralized protocol. We are a centralized company that offers inference, both API and app for normal humans. So yeah, our token is meant to enable people to access inference for free. And if that is appealing to you, then it's worth looking at.

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21:22Jason Calacanis:Yeah, basically, we have a subtoken called DM. DMs are created out of VVV and DMs, each one that you have gives you$1 per day of credit. So it's like a renewing resource. You can think of it like a perpetuity. So you can value DM as a perpetuity on inference. And if you hold these, you get a dollar per day of credit in the web or the API. And Bennis is willing to offer that even though it's a pure liability to us because we can control the supply of those. So you can think of it as like a mechanism that we can influence and we can constrain. But anyone that has these things, it's very valuable to them.

22:03Jason Calacanis:And it's been interesting to see like how the world thinks such a thing should be priced.

22:08Logan Allin:That's fascinating. I have hit a wall or a big challenge, which is we were trending towards with our open clause, about$500 a day in tokens. This is somewhat my fault.

22:21David Kaufman:I apologize. I've been teaching Gaff a lot about YouTube descriptions.

22:26Logan Allin:Yeah, and because it wants to please you, OpenClaw, Logan, it will not use the most efficient query. It will do more than it's asked of. And then we got Kimmy up and running on my Mac Studio, and we have one in the cloud, and we're starting to play with that. But it's not very good at complex tasks. Sometimes it, you know, bottoms out, but it does some things very well. So like, and that's what we're trying to figure out is when to route it. We may start intelligently routing things, saying this is a Kimmy task. This is a Claude task by putting like a keyword at the end of a sentence, like use Kimmy or use KKK.

23:04Logan Allin:Oh, don't use that. Use K-I-M-I. Pick a different one. Use like some triple letter.

23:08David Kaufman:I know he's got BVV, but that one doesn't work.

23:11Logan Allin:You know what? That one doesn't work. Let's keep that one off the table. But I think that might be the future is trying to intelligently route jobs. But I'm super fascinated about any way to get these costs down while we wait for the next step function down. But I am living, Logan, in Jevin's paradox now because I couldn't get anybody to use our enterprise chat GPT. They were like barely using it. Then I get open claw and I'm pointing it to our clawed opus and I can't get people to stop using it. This is like a very strange thing as a business owner. It was trending to beating and being more than our payroll.

23:54Wow.

23:55Logan Allin:Over to you, Logan.

23:57Erik Voorhees:I'm not sure what that says about what you pay people, but we'll leave that as a problem.

24:01Logan Allin:I mean, market.

24:02David Kaufman:Market.

24:03Erik Voorhees:Yeah, exactly. I think so for us, as we've shared on past shows, we built a platform called Lighthouse.ai. And that has been our operating system. And I think, as we all know, the tools for GPs generally in the market are great. And so you kind of have to build it. And now the experimentation with OpenClaw, we use Clawed as a firm universally. It's pretty incredible. And there's been some posts on X. And I saw Alexis Ohanian retweet this this morning. And I totally agree with this, which is the future of venture firms is very senior. It's almost like the old school benchmark model, right? A bunch of very senior partners who have deep relationships and can really manage through.

24:48Erik Voorhees:And then a huge hundreds of agents that you're operating. And those are looking for stealth founders. Those are monitoring your current portfolio from a financial metric and team growth, et cetera, perspective. Those are looking at new themes, doing deep research, et cetera. Like there's just so many permutations of that. And so I just think venture firms are going to continue to get leaner and probably more effective overall. And we built a Gen AI model we call Founder DNA Score, which was a mix of research I'd done at Stanford with Ilya Strublev. And it's so highly predictive now of early stage founders in the model we built, the backtesting we've done, that we've come to really rely on it from an investment committee perspective, particularly in our early stage deals.

25:30Erik Voorhees:Obviously, less signal as the companies get mature for more of the late stage work we do. But we're really excited to have been adopting AI since 2018 when it was back in predictive. And we named ahead of AI in 2021. And now you're seeing, I think, largely every VCMP firm name ahead of AI. But I'd like to think we were one of the first.

25:48Logan Allin:What is in that formula? What are the variables and how are they weighted? I'm assuming this is like open research at Stanford.

25:58Erik Voorhees:It was. So Ilya Stubilev, who wrote The Venture Mindset, is now more well known for that book. But back then, he was doing research and highly recommend following him on LinkedIn. He puts out a lot of studies on, is there a correlation between where you went to school, where you're building, the degrees you had, and so forth. So we actually use about 40 weighted criteria. And we've adjusted those weights using Gen.AI and putting more and more data through that, which is, by the way, where a huge amount of our expense comes from in just training this model and then deploying these agents. And I would say for us, the big factors are repeat founder.

26:37Erik Voorhees:Sure. Average age of our CEOs is 45. If you were a repeat founder, were you CEO? How long were you CEO?

26:45Logan Allin:Ah, whoa, that's an interesting one I've never heard. Yeah. So did you stay in the CEO slot is predictive of future success.

26:53Erik Voorhees:It is. Yes. So not highly removed is another way of saying it. Yes. Yeah. Did you stay in the slot? I mean, if you if you stayed in the spot in the seat and then handed the baton to somebody to take it public or, you know, you transition to another role, there might be some signal there. But generally speaking, if you were in the CEO seat and you exited and this is the other big one, right, what was your track record on the exit? And there's actually, you would think that the best CEOs are the ones that had the biggest prior outcomes. It's actually just the fact that you had an exit whatsoever is highly predictive of future success.

27:26Erik Voorhees:And the ones that had smaller exits or were aqua hired who are still hungry and want to build for more and have more to prove are actually more successful in our models in the future. And so we've done a lot of this work historically and continue to run data sets like Y Combinator, CB Insights, StackRanks, you know, fintechs and crypto companies and software companies. And we run all that data through. And then we do back testing on our own founders. We've also integrated personality tests, which I think is really interesting. And you can get AI driven personalities archetypes now off of just public data.

28:03Erik Voorhees:So how are they posted? Right. Exactly. ENTJ.

28:08Logan Allin:Every CEO, Eric, wants to be ENTJ. It's not the only model. There's INTJ as well. You got the Jacks, you got the Sergeys, the Larrys or INTJs. And, you know, some people, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, more ENTJ, they're a little bit more extroverted in their approach. One thing I wanted to get your both of your takes on is what happened with Anthropics revenue ramp. This is unbelievable. A bunch of information leaked. Lon, give it to us. This leaked tweet.

28:41David Kaufman:Yeah, well, Bloomberg, it's from a Bloomberg article that was published on Tuesday, and then a lot of people are now tweeting about it. Anthropic on track to generate annual revenue of almost 20 billion. That's a projection based on their current performance, more than doubling their run rate from just late last year. They recently surpassed 19 billion in run rate revenue, up from $9 billion at the end of 2025 and roughly$14 billion just a few weeks ago, Jason. It's a sign of how strong the adoption has been for toting tools like Claude Code and the other Anthropik projects. And it's also a sign that maybe this Pentagon deal is sort of fueling growth from the public.

29:22David Kaufman:Absolutely.

29:24Logan Allin:Any public battle for an emerging technology company drives consumer adoption, business adoption. I think there's two things mixed in here, Eric. Open claw and the battle with the government. And then there's some number of folks who are like, why are we even supporting? Why should we support what's going on with OpenAI versus Anthropic? We should go with the peacenik one, the one that doesn't want to create murder bots. What's your take on that whole beef back and forth? And then, Logan, I'll go to you in terms of the revenue ramp.

30:00Jason Calacanis:I mean, first, the revenue ramp clearly happened before the controversy. So it'll be curious or interesting to see what happens after it. I wonder if the incredible growth of that revenue is what gave Dario a little more confidence in taking the position that he took. Personally, I found it brave. It's very rare that any company is willing to do anything against what the federal government says. like I've come from a world where we continually battle regulatory agencies and it's a it's a total nightmare. And most companies just comply. They just comply.

30:38Logan Allin:Easier to bend the knee.

30:40Jason Calacanis:You'd always you always bend the knee. Your shareholders want you to bend the knee like you always comply with the government because the government's right. And that's how order works. And it's a bunch of bullshit. And so whenever anyone is willing to stand up to it, it's it's inspiring, frankly. So I liked seeing that. And I'm curious, like, what effect it'll actually have on their business, you know, good or bad.

31:01Logan Allin:See, Eric, this is such a good insight, because if Dario had shown up for all those Trump CEO meetings, if Dario had given$5 million to the Trump PAC, if like the, like, I think Greg did, I'm trying to make sure I got it right, Greg Brockman gave$5 million to Trump's thing, usually unpopular, I'm sure, inside of OpenAI to do that. even Tim Cook went and gave a gold bar and came to the Melania screening, which I think was more painful probably. You know, you have to play the game on the field is the common thinking. And I heard Logan on CNBC or Fox News, one of the two, an investor in Anthropic said, hey, listen, Dario's got to play ball.

31:48Logan Allin:Like you have to win the deal, play the game on the field. I think this is a lesson for him as CEO. Your take, Logan, on taking a principled stance and winning the crowd, right? Win the crowd, win your freedom, gladiator style. He got the crowd to use the product. They became number one in the app store versus bend the knee. Where do you stand on this, Logan? It might seem like your startup can save some money by using a cheap tool for your device management and security, but you'll eventually end up paying out the difference and more in time and frustration. Take the guesswork out and trust our friends at Eru Endpoint Management.

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33:25Erik Voorhees:I think some of the thinking behind the negotiation was a little flawed in the sense that if you're going to work with the military, you know, and they're out killing bad guys, you probably have to accept that your product's going to be used to go kill bad guys. So like going into that and saying, well, actually, you know, we want to use you to use it in the following ways is a bit odd. I think Keith on X used the analogy of that's like giving, you know, the Department of War a Mac and telling them how they have to use it. Right. I think that that was a little short sighted in that regard. They could have been probably more balanced.

34:01Erik Voorhees:But yeah, short term upswing. And I think it goes back to the productization of these apps on top of Claude, Claude Code being number one for them. I read somewhere that that's about$2.5 billion of the current revenue, right? So Claude Code is the fastest growing product. But every new product and app that they spin up is generating stickiness. And it's because of their enterprise first orientation. and those enterprise relationships are over 80 % of their revenue today from the numbers we've seen. And OpenAI, that number is less than 5%, right? And so I think all of those things are incredibly valuable.

34:42Erik Voorhees:And then we talked about it earlier, which is the usage-based pricing model, right? Going to value-based pricing is such a huge aspect of the asymmetric growth, but it's been astonishing, but I think well-deserved overall.

34:54Jason Calacanis:I got to push back on Logan a little bit here. Do it. Yeah, this is an important debate. Yeah, I mean, Anthropic wasn't trying to tell the military how they can go kill bad guys. That's a bit disingenuous. They had two prerequisites, two terms in their terms of use that were relevant here. One was that they did not want their technology used for autonomous weapons, meaning weapons where there is no human in the loop. Murder bots. Yeah, call them what you want, like autonomous weapons, because they don't know that their technology is safe enough to use in that kind of capacity yet. I think that's an eminently responsible way to treat things.

35:31Jason Calacanis:And two, their other requirement was you can't use it on wholesale surveillance of Americans. Basically, all they're saying is like, we want you to abide by the Fourth Amendment. That was not acceptable to the military. And so the military not only is like canceling the contract, but vilifying them and saying that other companies are not allowed to work with them either. It's that latter part, I think, that was quite gross. If the military doesn't want to work with them on those terms, that's perfectly fine. But I think it's a good nuance, Eric.

36:01Logan Allin:You're 100 percent correct that the framing was as a provider of technology. This is new technology. These are not batteries that have been around for 50 years, and we know the circumstance into which they overheat, and you shouldn't have them, you know, under the airplane in storage, and you should follow these precautions with an electric car. This was, hey, we've invented this new battery, this new computer, and we, as the creators of it, don't believe it's ready for prime time. We believe that it will accidentally murder someone. Second, hey, we live in the United States. We hear about the Fourth Amendment.

36:42We don't want this being used internally in the United States to create a mass surveillance state because this technology can do something that the camera at the 7-Eleven can't do because

36:54Logan Allin:it doesn't have a brain and it's not connected to every other camera on planet Earth. There's something between, I think, your two positions, which a reasonable group, I think you're both right. And a reasonable administration would have said, let's handle this behind closed doors. But instead, this is a performative group of individuals. And their core belief inside this administration is to never apologize, never be reasonable, and in fact, attack, attack, attack. So when somebody doesn't get an alignment, Lon, correct me if I'm wrong, the operating system of Trump, as outlined in that movie about him, the documentary was, you're supposed to attack.

37:36Logan Allin:Yes. And Dario is the one internet CEO of a nat-scale company, I believe perhaps the only one that has not bent the knee.

37:45David Kaufman:Yeah, I think a lot of it actually comes down to approach and tone more than the actual lines in the deal or the contract. I don't know if you guys saw, Washington Post quoted, a Pentagon official has said, they proposed to Dario during this meeting a hypothetical. They said, would Anthropic let the military use Claude to shoot down a nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile aimed at the U.S.? And apparently, according to this Pentagon source, Dario's answer was, well, you could call us and we'd work it out, which they did not like. So to me, it feels like if that answer had been 10 % more political, we might not be in this situation right now.

38:25Logan Allin:Logan, in all... honesty, there was only one answer to, would you save American lives from a nuclear holocaust? The answer is yes. Give it a shot.

38:35Erik Voorhees:Yeah, absolutely.

38:36Logan Allin:That was a self-fail. He could have said, if that's technology you want to work on, I think we should sit down and actually build it for you because we want to make sure it works when it does happen because we all don't want to die in a fiery nuclear ball. But what do you think, Logan, if you were an investor in the company and Dario said, what could I do better?

38:53Erik Voorhees:I think Dario has tended to politicize this a bit and has said a little bit of a trap for himself, which is we want AI to be safe. I'm concerned about what AI is doing to society. And it's going to eliminate jobs and all these things. And he's kind of talking against his book in order to support his book in some ways. And he got caught in a little bit of a trap here in the sense that he tried to politicize in a conversation where, frankly, you know, as you said, these guys are not going to stand for that. And they're going to then showcase why they're right. And they're going to pound their chests.

39:28Erik Voorhees:And I think he walked right into that, unfortunately, to the detriment of the company from a long-term perspective, because as Palantir has demonstrated, the government could be their largest customer. Eric, you want to give us your final thought on this?

39:42Logan Allin:And Lon, I'm going to let, I see Lon is, I see the steam coming out of you on there. No, no, no. Yeah, I think you have one thing you want to answer. So Eric, then Lon, and then we'll move on to our next topic. This is a fascinating one.

39:51Jason Calacanis:Yeah, I'll just say that the whole thing is interesting. I think there's going to be more of these conversations. And I'm curious. I'm curious what Anthropic would have done if Kamala was in charge. I'm not confident. I'm not confident that they would have had the same resistance if their people were running the things. So I don't know that it's a matter of principle on which this was done, maybe, hopefully. But in any case, it's refreshing to see business leaders stand up to the federal government in any capacity ever. I think the United States needs much more of that.

40:25Logan Allin:One of the great things about America is that we can have major debates and still come together as Americans in good faith. It's one of the things that's been lost in our current political climate where these two sides never think, hey, maybe we could go have dinner together as rivals, enjoy a nice steak. and then, you know, smoke a cigar, have a scotch, debate it all, and then come to what's in the best interest of all Americans. Yeah.

40:54David Kaufman:I think we kind of had -

40:55Logan Allin:The esprit de corps is over.

40:56David Kaufman:There was this moment, like I feel like that was Joe Biden's sort of 2020 pitch was like, hey folks, let's stop all the fighting. Let's come together. Let's all be Americans. And we just, we've now fully rejected that. We're like, no, we didn't actually want that. We don't like that. We like Donald Trump's winner take all style. And I think America sort of turned away from that and it's a little bit of a shame. Should Anthropic be forced to comply when choosing to save the U.S.? That's an interesting question.

41:23Logan Allin:I don't think that they should be forced to comply unless we're under attack, in which case the war powers thing comes in. And, you know, if you're Ford, you're making tanks now, not Model T's. Right. It's just the way it is.

41:32David Kaufman:Yes, I mean, that is sort of a very classic American idea. Obviously, they should be forced to comply.

41:38Jason Calacanis:This isn't Soviet Russia.

41:41Logan Allin:Except after Pearl Harbor or Hitler invades. Paris or Poland. Fair enough.

41:47David Kaufman:Should we take a look at this Polymarket, Jason?

41:49Logan Allin:Ooh, I love a good Poly.

41:51David Kaufman:Speaking of things I don't think we should do, Polymarket is asking, will the CEO of Anthropic Dario, Amadei, be arrested? Only 5 % chance. So the smart money apparently still on not being arrested for saying the government can't use his technology to make kill bots or spy on all of us.

42:11Logan Allin:I know we have some demos in the wings.

42:12David Kaufman:You want to see? We got two demos. You want to take a look at these?

42:16Logan Allin:Logan does because Logan and I want to play some bets. All right. That's what we do for a living.

42:20David Kaufman:We're bringing up.

42:21Logan Allin:Yum, yum, skis. We like to play as bets, Logan and I.

42:23David Kaufman:If you got something good, we're in. Who knows? We've got two eager founders. First up, we're going to bring up David Kaufman. He's the founder of Sightline. This is a launch port code, Jason. So you did already. Oh. You've already thrown a little cash. I got my slice. Part of LF4. Sightline tracks agent behavior on websites. It's sort of like Google Analytics for your agents. So David, welcome to the program.

42:46Jason Calacanis:Yeah, thanks guys. Happy to be here.

42:47Logan Allin:David, show us what you're working on.

42:49Jason Calacanis:Yeah, of course. As mentioned, we're Sightline. We are an analytics tool focused on agent visits coming to your site and how to capitalize these, what they're doing, where they're getting blocked. As you all know, people are searching more with agents themselves or in agentic ways. ChatGVT, obviously it does searches and query fanouts, but oftentimes it will go visit sites in real time. And the reality is most websites are just not prepared for the agentic web. They've set up fancy UI that is nice for humans, but oftentimes will get in the way. And so these agents get blocked. They get confused.

43:27Jason Calacanis:Maybe they're spinning up and trying to look at screenshots. But the reality is most people don't even see this traffic because a lot of them run server-side only. And so they won't show up in traditional analytics tool. And so our goal is to give people visibility on the agents that are coming to their site and then figure out how to capitalize on it, figure out what they're looking for, what they're interested in. Right now, a lot of what agents are doing is reporting back to the humans that delegated them. But we feel that over time, this will shift and become more and more autonomous and they'll start taking action.

44:02Jason Calacanis:They'll submit demo requests. They'll start doing bookings. There's agentic commerce in the wings. And so we want businesses to be prepared for this new customer source and be able to present themselves in the best light and drive growth from it.

44:18Logan Allin:Logan, your honest opinion as an investor.

44:22Erik Voorhees:Yeah. So who is the ICP here? Like, who are you finding that you're selling into predominantly and what channels are you using?

44:29Jason Calacanis:Yeah. So at the moment, a lot of ICP, it's mostly SaaS companies and oftentimes a more technical profile. so we work with some authentication tools b2b sass really this is because they their customers so procurement internally for example are already adopting agentic search in a lot of ways um so when you're evaluating a bunch of options for your company it's more than just google it's you know customized as far as what is your tech stack what are your requirements what you've been doing in the past. And we found that resonates the best just because their customers are already there and they're a bit more ambitious and ahead of the game.

45:09Jason Calacanis:I'm thinking about this new paradigm because it is fairly new as far as doing growth marketing, not only for humans, but also for agents.

45:18Erik Voorhees:Super interesting. Yeah, I was reading the other day that a massive part of Meta's revenue these days is AI monetization driven. And they're at a 60 plus billion dollar run rate on revenue as a result. And it feels like, you know, how do I understand my reputation? How do I understand the analytics from that growth marketing is incredibly important, particularly as you grow monetization there? Is that kind of what you guys are finding?

45:45Jason Calacanis:Yeah. And I think one unique challenge to this new world is that the attribution question is even tougher. and there's a lot of seo geo tools out there that kind of say like hey are you on chat gbt are you paying an answer but it's really hard to track that fully through um let's say the purchase funnel uh because often there's people that are using chat gbt to do research procurement but then the ultimate last step is to come in and navigate with google and still come through that way so we're trying to get a good feel on what parts of your site are being visited there's different types of agents too, some that are directly triggered by humans.

46:23Jason Calacanis:And then you can do the whole funnel from I'm being ingested, I'm being cited as an answer, I'm being mentioned in the answer. And then finally, humans come on through and I can actually, you know, tie this back to new customers or orders or what have you.

46:37Erik Voorhees:That's awesome. Yeah. I mean, I think agentic search and agentic commerce are the future. So having analytics around that makes a ton of sense. I really like what you're building.

46:45Jason Calacanis:Yeah, this is fantastic. I've already sent it to my claw, actually, to implement in Venice. We absolutely need this. So, yeah, we've already ingested it. What do you guys think of, Eric?

47:01Logan Allin:I don't know if you've seen this, but our friends over at Cloudflare, and I talked to the CEO when I was in Davos about it, they have a really interesting concept, which is paper crawl. If you want to come in, instead of just robots, TXT, so Eric and David and Logan will go in that order. What do you think of the pay-per-crawl concept?

47:22Jason Calacanis:Obvious and inevitable. That's very smart.

47:24Logan Allin:David, your thoughts on the pay-per-crawl? I'm sure you're watching Cloudflare.

47:28Jason Calacanis:Yeah, watching Cloudflare closely on this. And actually, we integrate with Cloudflare in order to see the visits. I think it makes sense from a publisher standpoint, an author standpoint, someone that needs to capitalize and monetize their IP. Yeah. From a business standpoint, it's kind of the opposite. They're telling us we want to encourage as many bots visits as possible. We'll even pay to have more of them because they want as much exposure as they can. And they want it to be ingested. They want it to be recommended, et cetera. So I think it depends on the context. Obviously, if you're a journalist, I think there's some upside there on protecting the IP and what you're producing.

48:06Jason Calacanis:But from a business standpoint, they kind of want to open the floodgates.

48:09Erik Voorhees:And I prefer more conversion orientation to like, you know, we're seeing agentic in the checkout now, right? So pay for crawl, I think you're going to have different levels of that. So, you know, did you land on the page? How did you interact? How long did you spend? And it feels like at least with Sightline, David, correct me if I'm wrong, you're trying to build is attribution and kind of removing the black box orientation around that so people can actually monetize against those types of metrics.

48:34Logan Allin:I got a really simple solution here, Lon. What's that? What if I could set my crawl to be, this website is crawlable, however you damn please, for$500 a year, put in your credit card, do what you will. And if you were a sub stack, and you had 1000 people or even 100 people pay 500, it could be material. This could just be a very simple solution. I know this because Microsoft went to Harper Business, which produced angelthebook.com, my book, and they said, would you accept to me$2 ,500, my agent called,$2 ,500 for the next five years or something, $500 a year, to put it into whatever Microsoft is up to with having a book in there.

49:22Logan Allin:And I was like, But if you're sure, and are there 10 other people who would pay$2 ,500, this is inspiring to write another book because it's two swings at Batalon. One, I'm included in the crawl and maybe even featured, so it gets me prominence. Two, if they link to the upsell, great. And if I got a little revenue stream coming in here, maybe it's time for two more books.

49:45David Kaufman:Yeah, I think it makes a lot of sense. I mean, there are a lot of these platforms and companies and even authors or media sites They feel like their data is the value of the company. And if they sell it at any price and just let everybody crawl their stuff, like that's why Reddit, I feel like is so hostile to all of our agents because the meat that's on Reddit is that's what makes it valuable. And if we can all just crawl it unlimited. But for a lot of different kinds of resources, I think that makes total sense.

50:11Logan Allin:For David, I'm going to be hosting Launch Festival again. Launch Festival is a conference I created because Lon, I couldn't afford to come to conferences as a founder. And they wanted me to pay$20 ,000 to demo back in the day to show my product. I couldn't afford that either. So I said, if I ever make it, I'm going to create a launch festival. It was originally called TechCrunch50. And then Mike and I broke up. I went to do LaunchFest. I'm starting it up again. Monday, the 16th and 17th of March, two weeks, 400 seats. It's like 50 investors, 250 founders. And I have 50 seats for sale for people who want to come to lunch,$1 ,000.

50:47Logan Allin:And that underwrites the founders who are coming. and Logan, I would love if you would come. Are you going to be in San Francisco? Are you in the Bay Area?

50:54Erik Voorhees:I am going to be in. I was just going to say I'm in town. So I would love to join you guys.

50:58Logan Allin:Can I get you to judge a panel with me and give some feedback to founders?

51:01Erik Voorhees:That'd be fantastic. Looking forward to it.

51:02Logan Allin:I appreciate you. I appreciate you for doing that. I know time is limited. And if anybody wants to go, openclawatlaunch.co if you want to be involved or just on the website, you can do a bunch of, you can figure out. It's free for founders. By the way, the way I do it, Logan, This is my brilliant move. It's 20 bucks for a founder to reserve their seat. When they pick up their badge, we give them the 20 bucks back. Then we don't have, you know, drive-bys. It just creates just enough friction. David, are you coming? Are you in the Bay Area? I'd love to.

51:33Jason Calacanis:I'm currently in Telluride.

51:36Logan Allin:Oh, Telluride. Fuck you. I love Telluride. Great skiing.

51:40Jason Calacanis:First time here.

51:41Logan Allin:Ever tell you the story when I almost died going to Telluride's airport? This is, I almost went on the do not fly list. Wow. This is before I had kids. I'm on a little puddle jumper from Los Angeles. Pull up the Telluride Airport video landing there. It's the most dangerous airport in America. You can find it on YouTube to my team. Telluride Airport. Dangerous. This thing is on the Telluride Airport. David, you've flown into it, yeah? Flown to Montrose, but yeah, I'm familiar, yeah. This is the worst possible airport you ever go to. It's in a box canyon type situation. And when you land at this thing, it's got a runway that goes up and down.

52:19Logan Allin:Why? Because it's so short, you want to slow down. It's also windswept. And I'm coming in on this in a prop plane, but it's a commercial, but one of those small like Eagle kind of regional jets. And as you can see, this is like a little peninsula type situation. On three sides is a cliff. We come in, there's crosswinds. The plane goes sideways down the runway. I think if this thing hits, the tires hit, we're flipping and rolling, we're dead. We miss the runway, Lon. Entirely? We miss it. It's like an act movie. And so, but he's already powered down the plane. So we fly off the end of the runway.

53:00Logan Allin:We haven't touched it. And we start falling down into the town of Telluride. He powers the thing up. This plane starts shaking like crazy. We finally go back up in the air. um and i kid you not um we go back up the guy says on the thing the plane is bouncing around he says i'm gonna try one more time yeah everybody on the plane goes crazy i tell the flight attendant i was like listen you try this again the pilot's gonna get beat up by all these passengers they say hey we're going to durango all of a sudden 10 minutes later we're gonna land in durango we go to durango my wife's like did you threaten them i said no no i just warned them like listen you're gonna have a mutiny here we land two police officers get in they block the aisle they let the um they let them the pilots off the plane who don't make contact with the passengers right they leave boom they're gone they don't want to confront the passengers and then i'm like oh my god we're gonna get arrested i'm gonna get arrested yeah you threatened to mute they just let everybody off we had to drive an hour and a half in but david please for the love of god you promise me you'll never go into that airport because i'm an investor in the cap table here and i need returns we need

54:10Erik Voorhees:dpi right logan we need dpi key man risk and dpi yes both are important um the only only worst i've flown into that airport didn't have as bad of an experience only worse landing in the entire world

54:23Logan Allin:in my opinion isst bart's um and that is spicy yeah and by the way the plane is like 30 years

54:31Erik Voorhees:older than whatever you were in is that the one where it goes right over the beach and like it's

54:35David Kaufman:like terrifying yeah i think i've seen oh my god you have to nosedive in yeah it's basically what

54:39Logan Allin:it is i know a lot of billionaires who go there and i had one billionaire who be you know company goes public this 20 years ago it makes a bunch of money he's a cowboy he's a pilot all this kind of nonsense here you go and he starts talking about like this landing and how intense it is and he says yeah you know my new plan is i was talking to my friend in the cia who's now on my security and they are able to open the doors on a g650 and you can parachute out they figured out how to do this on a private plane and they slow down and so i'm gonna start skydiving to my uh to my christmas oh my god and i said to him never hey buddy i know that you're a billionaire now i know you have unlimited resources let me tell you about eagle computer and toxic wealth eagle computer goes public in the 80s on the way to the ipo party the guy who's the ceo buys a ferrari he flips it kills himself in the cfo i believe tragically wow and uh now they sit everybody down you can look up Eagle computer on Wikipedia and the CEO dying.

55:36And ever since then, in Silicon Valley, they sit

55:39Logan Allin:people down when they make their money. They say, we know you can buy all the toys now. Toxic wealth. Don't kill yourself. You got kids.

55:47David Kaufman:Yeah. I died in an auto crash hours after his company offered stock to the public for the first time making him a multimillionaire. He was only 39.

55:54Logan Allin:Do you guys know this story? I'd never heard. I'd never heard. You heard this one, Logan, Eric?

55:59Erik Voorhees:I've heard that story because I grew up in the valley in the 90s. And there are other unfortunate examples about it. As a result, like GPs, depending on the LP base you have, will literally have key man clauses that prevent you from doing things like an NBA contract. You can't skydive. You can't go pick up play, pick up basketball. You know, GPs have similar, albeit, you know, for different reasons. Can't get on a helicopter. Can't go skydiving. Can't do any of these things.

56:26Logan Allin:No scuba.

56:26Erik Voorhees:Risk averse. Scuba is not for you. Yeah. So I agree with it. I'm highly risk averse. Pickleball is about as extreme as it gets for me.

56:36Logan Allin:Some twisted ankles in that game. All right. David, this is great. You're in launch fund four. What did I do? Did I put in like a little 25, 125K check? What did I do? I can't remember.

56:49Jason Calacanis:125 with full launch. Yeah.

56:51Logan Allin:Oh, okay. hey, great, I need to get in on this. Maybe we need to do another round. Me and you and Logan can take this offline. All right, let's drop David off. Great job.

56:58David Kaufman:Thanks, David. Great job. We've got one more demo. We've got to welcome George Pickett. He's the founder of OpenClaw Studio. They make OpenClaw user-friendly for non-technical users. We've heard from a few of these kinds of concepts. OpenClaw can be, as I've recently experienced, very intimidating when you're brand new, if you are non-technical. And so OpenClaw Studio, one of these projects that's kind of easing people in, getting them started with agents without having to do all of the complex setup. He was also a core maintainer of OpenClaw, met Peter Steinberger, self-taught programmer who helped bring us OpenClaw in the first place.

57:34David Kaufman:So thank you, George, and welcome to the program.

57:37George Pickett:Awesome. Thanks for having me. And great to meet you, the world's greatest moderator.

57:41Logan Allin:Oh, it's not for me to say, but it's for George to say. It is for George to say. Thank you, George. Show us what you built.

57:49George Pickett:Sure thing. So one difference with what I'm building here is that in its current iteration, you actually have to have OpenClaw installed on your computer. So this is for people who already have OpenClaw. Basically, you can run MPX OpenClaw Studio with your existing OpenClaw setup, and you get a really nice UI to view your OpenClaw. We're turning it into a SaaS product. I'm working with another one of the contributors from OpenClaw. And yeah, basically the idea here is that this platform provides guardrails, it's opinionated, and it does some version control behind the scenes. But basically, yeah, my thesis is that all the benefits of AI agents have been accumulating to technical people and software engineers.

58:43George Pickett:So I want to make it really easy to chat with your agents and have some controls around them.

58:48Logan Allin:Very nice. So explain to us what we're seeing here. This is the interface we're seeing. You've got 10 agents, Bill Nye, SF events, OpenClaw use cases, latest AI news, growth engine, YouTube channel, all these things that might be interesting. Now, they're all agents. Each one of those is an agent running on OpenClaw?

59:08George Pickett:Yeah, exactly. So each of these is a separate agent. Usually this would be like a separate telegram chat for any individual agent. But what you can do here is each of these has their own separated memory. You can have different tools enabled, different permissions enabled. And so in the, yeah, like I tend to have different projects inside of different agents that scope them like that. And inside of the settings here, you can set up the capabilities. So you can make it, you can kind of control the permissions, like when it's going to ask for your approval or not. You can configure skills on an agent by agent basis.

59:48George Pickett:You can set up cron jobs and like a pretty nice little UI here. So instead of chatting with your agent and telling it, hey, every morning at 7 a.m. remind me to do this or whatever you want, you're repeating. I call it timed automation. You can kind of set it up in a really nice, easy to use, kind of like more understandable way.

1:00:07Erik Voorhees:So this is like Wix for OpenClaw, right, George? You're making it easier for all of us non-techies, non-coders to build. I guess where's the use case for our being Polymarket? Because that would be my first use case.

1:00:24Logan Allin:Yes, Polymarket Sharp. I was just thinking the same thing because, you know, Logan, so many people are doing repetitive work that if you did the poly market sharp and you said to me, we have one agent doing this and all we do is focus on the poly market sharp. Um, I'd be like, that's worth$99 for me to throw into my, you know, uh, agent cluster so many different ways to win here, but yeah.

1:00:53George Pickett:Super interesting. Well, if I gave you my poly market strategy, uh, you know, you guys would to be taking my arbitrage. So I'm not going to give you that.

1:00:59Logan Allin:But your YouTube optimization, you might be okay with. What do you think of, you know, all the work that has to be done on an open source project to make it more accessible?

1:01:10Jason Calacanis:Well, yeah, it's cool to see this, George. Good to meet you. I actually had already come across this project and I had literally told my, my claw to install it and set it up. The claw failed and I hadn't been able to use it, but I don't think it was a Well, the claw has failed in many ways. So I have to...

1:01:28David Kaufman:They do that sometimes.

1:01:29Jason Calacanis:I have to have a stern talk with it later this afternoon. But yeah, cool to see this demoed. Obviously useful. I mean, like multi-agent orchestration is the whole point and value of these softwares to make it a little bit easier, or materially easier here, I think, to give you some visualization on the agents and to personify them a bit. Very smart. and I'm now renewed with the initiative to make sure that Claw will get this thing installed so I can try it.

1:01:59George Pickett:Totally. Yeah, and I mean, the way I see it going is that you probably have in the tens of millions of engineers who are using agents. I think in the next two years, we're going to see probably a billion people on earth using agents, but I really don't think it's going to be WhatsApp, Telegram. It's going to be some kind of interface and I think if the answer was Perplexity Computer or Claw Cowork, you would see an explosion of hype but no one is using co-work no one is using perplexity computer they're confusing they're coming from this way of interacting with agents from this really developer mindset you know they're showing you tool calls i do in the current version allow you to see tool calls just because i'm a nerd and i like to see like okay what's it what's it actually doing but in the sas version of this we're gonna we're getting rid of tool calls thinking traces we have a really cool continual learning angle where it's going to be learning more about you and retraining, which I'm really excited about.

1:02:58George Pickett:I'm working with someone else who's a core contributor of OpenClaw who so far doesn't want to be named, but he's just an awesome, awesome backend DevOps guy and has some really cool ideas around this continual learning stuff.

1:03:14Logan Allin:Georgia, is this a startup or are you doing an open source project? what's your aspiration here?

1:03:19George Pickett:Yeah, totally. So right now it's, it's totally open source. This project is just OpenClock Studio on GitHub. I've been working on it for about five weeks, 1.4 thousand stars, 1.4K stars. But yeah, we're, yeah, yeah, no, it's, it's, it's been going well, mostly all through Twitter. And I've gone, since I started working on it, it's gone from like 1300 followers on Twitter to almost 5K. It's, it's been super awesome. But yeah, we're, we're working on basically a lot of these open-cloth startups are, you know, they're wrapping the deployment for you and handling that. So you don't have to deal with API keys, you know, virtual machines, all this stuff.

1:03:59George Pickett:I think that's table stakes. So there's no reason why someone should have to work, like, you know, deal with AWS. But I think combining that with a really nice UI where you don't have to think about tokens, you can log in with Google, just providing a really simple way. And we're not calling it OpenClaw, the SaaS product. It's totally separate from the brand of OpenClaw.

1:04:23Logan Allin:Love it. Logan, your best advice for open source projects, tinkerers who want to then build a SaaS product and build a company, what should they be thinking about?

1:04:33Erik Voorhees:Who you're building for, Georgia? Is this something where you're going to individual consumers and saying, hey, we want this to be open source and available to all of you? Are you trying to back into like a Dropbox style, let's go to the developers who are then going to, you know, be in the side of these enterprises, tell everybody inside of the enterprise, and we're going to back in effectively into enterprise sales. Is that kind of your mindset from an impact perspective? I think having a view of who you're building for, how are you going to monetize and position it? And then the third piece is like, you know, this freemium open source model.

1:05:08Erik Voorhees:And then, you know, where do we go from there in terms of the premium models and how do we scale this from a product roadmap perspective are the three things I would think about.

1:05:17George Pickett:I'd say on the open source side, I'm going to continue maintaining OpenClub Studio on the open source side because number one, I just find it fun to build for open source and kind of get that feedback. On the target market, I have a couple different theses. One is that there are a lot of people out there who are already really great with ChatGPT. They're good at prompting. They're kind of power users at ChatGPT, but they're kind of too scared to go set up a virtual machine. I think those people are the perfect kind of like, you know, maybe like a technical product manager at a startup, some like ops person, people who really get AI and are using it a lot, but aren't yet using agentic AI.

1:05:58George Pickett:I think that's the sweet spot. I'm giving it to my mom. I set my mom up with OpenClaw and she's doing genealogy all kinds of random stuff so i'm i'm curious i'm curious to see people who have never used open claw see what they do with it so the very our first like closed alpha is just giving it to just giving it to people who have never used um open claw before and seeing what they do but yeah my prediction is that it's going to be people who are semi-technical but not programmers who are going to want something more than whatsapp or telegram totally um and and not have to deal with the API keys.

1:06:33Erik Voorhees:Do you think like the other part of this is just restricting what OpenClaw has access to, right, on your box and in your files and what APIs you're integrating with it? I think that's been one of the barriers to entry in the enterprise. And certainly for us, like, you know, do we want do I want to just give it access to to, you know, our desktop and let it run? I think that component would be really helpful if it's not already built in just to help people understand the security components of this.

1:07:01George Pickett:Totally. That's a huge part of what we're doing. And the SAS, like in this OpenClaw studio, you can do anything you can in OpenClaw. And the SAS version of this, it's going to be a lot more restricted. It's not going to be able to do as much, but you're going to, it's going to be safe. Like you kind of can't screw it up. So it'll be.

1:07:20Erik Voorhees:Idiot proofing the data is super important. We'd be users. So I'd love to learn more. Thank you, George.

1:07:24George Pickett:We're thinking about it's like going from Linux to Mac. It's like Like Linux allows you to do anything and kind of shoot yourself in the foot. The Mac version, it's like, can't quite do as much, but it's really easy to use and fun to play with. So that's kind of how we're thinking about it.

1:07:37Logan Allin:Well done, George. You're my guest at Launch Festival. If you can join us, launchfestival.com, March 16th and 17th in San Francisco, right in the city. All right, we'll drop George off. Well done. And Lon, we have a lot of nodi questions. What's nodi? Everybody asks. That's the notification gang. Those are the people who have notifications turned on on YouTube. You subscribe to the channel, but you hit the bell. Then you go live, and the noties are the most loyal fans.

1:08:03David Kaufman:Exactly.

1:08:03Logan Allin:Top 1 % of fans who come and ask us questions inside the live streams on X, on YouTube. But YouTube seems to be a good place to do it.

1:08:10David Kaufman:What does Eric think of increased Bitcoin exposure to TradFi? Will players like Jane Street win? Is Doquan going to win their lawsuit? Eric, go.

1:08:20Logan Allin:Eric, you speak for all crypto. You know, criminal, unindicted, legit, everything in between. You are the spokesperson.

1:08:27Jason Calacanis:Crypto people love having one centralized spokesperson for all their opinions. So I will happily take this mantle. I mean, the whole point of Bitcoin was to take over the global financial system. So you don't do that without the financial system merging with it. I'm glad to see TradFi adopting Bitcoin. I don't trust all those firms. They don't deserve all the trust. but it's inevitable and uh it's a sign of bitcoin you know ascending to dominance so i uh ultimately like it um as for the do kwan question i i'm not up to speed enough to answer that one

1:09:03Logan Allin:he was on and i i didn't i asked him like three times to explain staking and i'm like i you know i i deploy millions of dollars a year as an investor i've got lots of equities i'm deep in finance. I can't understand this. One more time, explain it to me. And he couldn't. And then he got picked up on a tarmac somewhere.

1:09:23David Kaufman:Wow, you're absolutely right. He was on episode 1251 back in July of 2021. Oh my Lord.

1:09:29Logan Allin:You should have the twist archivist put some clips from that one out because it was a banger. Well, let me ask you this then, Eric. Do you have any thoughts on micro strategy, you know, basically buying, I don't know if he's up to seven or 8 % of the, of the non-dead float, you know, the active float, you know, not the Satoshi wallets that have been dead since inception. But what has that done to the game, the religion, the project known as Bitcoin in your mind?

1:10:00Jason Calacanis:He is someone who has a thesis and has gone like full bore on it, which I respect. To acquire as much Bitcoin as possible is a very smart strategy. And I don't know all the nuances of how the financialization of strategy itself works, but the thesis is valid. The thesis is valid.

1:10:27Logan Allin:Logan, I'm not sure that anybody understands the thesis here. I've really tried. Oh boy. There's layers and layers of ways to participate in the game known as micro strategy. your thoughts, Logan?

1:10:38Erik Voorhees:Yeah, so I'm a full disclosure, a holder of MSTY. So I've enjoyed in the yield. And right now, just for the record, it is yielding 285%. And so not financial advice, but I did play it that way, because I did not want to have direct exposure or ownership, because to your points, I have no clue as to how he's running this business. And it feels like, feels a little challenging, a little pyramid-y, so to speak, in terms of how he's loading these assets and recycling the proceeds and buying more. And now he's investing in these ETFs and raising new ETFs to finance it. So I think BTC, Holdall, you got to be up and to the right for this thing to work.

1:11:25Erik Voorhees:Otherwise, you're in a lot of trouble.

1:11:28Logan Allin:Yeah. When I look at any startup that I've been successful in, I've been able to explain the business model to my daughters, whether they're 10, 12, 16. Oh yeah. Uber takes 20 % of the ride and they match people together. And Robin hood, you know, uh, makes money this way. And, you know, thumbtack makes money this way. Calm charges for a subscription. If you need meditations offering, you want to have a nice interface. It's a great way to do it. And, um, yeah, when, when I can't explain it or understand it, I tend to move on to something I can understand. And when I see multiple layers of creative financing or community-based EBITDA, like new definitions, these are the red flags for me.

1:12:13Logan Allin:We work, of course, at community EBITDA, Logan. A new way to understand profitability is the value it has to the community. I haven't seen any other company take that on as their key metric.

1:12:26David Kaufman:For everybody, what AI tool do you find absolutely indispensable? Which one are you using every single day? That's the question.

1:12:34Erik Voorhees:I use Claude every day, particularly for things like, well, two big use cases for me just in saving time and so forth. One is board materials. So just being able to dump board materials into Claude, getting a nice summary, it's a great way to prep before board meetings and to at least see the forest for the trees. And then two is data rooms and decks from startups because we get thousands of them per week. And it's like, I want to make sure we're doing justice to them. And as you guys all know, VCs are sitting there scrolling, you know, Docs ends, and we're probably not getting as much substance out of it versus Claude.

1:13:08Erik Voorhees:And then the third one, which, you know, I was at a dinner last night, I will effectively take the list of dinner participants who I'm going to go meet. And like, if I'm going to a a dinner party, whether it's personal or professional, I'll put all their names in Claude and I'll say, Hey, I would love the bios and backgrounds on all these people. And I think that the richness of the conversation and the engagement, initially, it feels a little creepy to them. They're like, Whoa, how did you know where I went to school? And why did you all this diligence? And then I'm just come up front. I'm like, look, I put all of your names in Claude before this.

1:13:38Erik Voorhees:I wanted to learn who I was meeting and I wanted to have deeper, richer conversations. I think that makes sense. And actually, it's totally resonated. So I think, you know, there's there's the double-edged sword of AI, but, but thus far I'm seeing a lot of positivity and, and Claude is, is the number one tool I use.

1:13:53Logan Allin:Eric, what are you addicted to? What do you use on the daily? I mean, this sounds, uh, I talk in my own book, of course, but like I, I literally

1:14:00Jason Calacanis:use Venice every day, but as a specific example, um, to upload PDFs of like legal contracts and, and medical records, like those, those two things, uh, which prior, you know, you would need specialists to review. And sometimes you do still want specialists for sure. But to do cursory reviews and to get a gist of things with AI is, you know, 10 seconds now and can save literally thousands of dollars. And often we'll give you better answers than professionals will do. I think that's an incredible use case that everyone should be trying, whether using that on Venice or any other platform. I mean, that's pretty much table stakes feature right now.

1:14:39Logan Allin:Yeah. My job, as you know, Lon, is to stay super informed and have conversations. Obviously, those lead to a lot of investments. And one of the things I love is the grok button on threads, because a lot of times, I don't understand the context. And then it takes, you know, whatever, one to five minutes to understand what, who clavicle, clavicle is, and what, I don't know, clavicular, whatever.

1:15:04David Kaufman:It's spelled like clavicular. I haven't heard it.

1:15:06Logan Allin:Gooning and looks maxing, all this stuff. Like, I could wait, you know, a hundred days for the New York times to do the, the trends officially over. So we're covering it story. Uh, or I can talk to somebody to explain it to me, or I just hit that grok button. Boom. I'm up to speed. The second thing I do, and I'll just talk about use cases because I think you can use this any way you like, but I had my open claw in Saul on the Mac studio, a way to rip videos. And I am a bookmark guy. So fashion, health, health inspirational quotes ideas for uh content here for the podcast um health all the stuff like i i have a bookmark list on tiktok i got a bookmark list on uh x i got bookmark lists on instagram and then i write my own stuff down in browser bookmarks i'm a bookmark guy so now what i do is i just ship the uh link to the video and my open claw downloads the video puts it into a Google Drive for me, then puts it on a Notion page for me and gives me background on it.

1:16:05Logan Allin:And I say, you're a curator. When I send you this shoe, like I was looking at shoes, I want to get a new pair of shoes. And I was sending it some shoe stuff. And it was like, okay, yeah, these shoes, you have Crockett and Jones shoes, you have Downer boots. These are other boot brands. This is the history of the boot. This is why they're special. I was going down the pen rabbit hole and I bought this new pen, this Zebra G 750. It's an$8 pen, but it's really quite nice. And I I went down the pen thing and I said, hey, put this into my, you know, gadgets and things I like. So now it's become like my life curator of the bookmarks.

1:16:37Logan Allin:And in just one zip, you know, like two clicks, I can get it and save it for all time because then I don't have to go find it. And what if like the bookmark, what if that TikTok or Instagram goes away? I own it now. I have it on my computer for all time in my memory, which I would never take the time to do that. Second, And I don't know if you guys have a spouse or a significant other, but you got a significant other, Eric or Logan, you have, and you watch the, you stream a TV show together and then you got to find the next show to watch, you know, or the next movie to watch. So I just sat there with my wife and I think I did this on Gemini because it's very good for, you know, uh, consumery stuff.

1:17:15Logan Allin:And, um, I said to my wife, Hey, we really enjoyed watching this show. We really enjoyed get them to the Greek. We like these stoner films. We like these comedies. We really enjoyed White Lotus. We really enjoyed this show. Give me other shows that we might like. We like Battlestar Galactica. So we were going through all the shows that we love to watch over the last 25 years together. And it started giving us ideas back. And then it has it in memory. I mean, this. It's doing my bit.

1:17:39David Kaufman:That used to be my bit.

1:17:41Logan Allin:It used to be your bit. But I can't bother you all the time. This has led to more joy in my life. And this is my key thought. what do rich people have that everybody wants? You mentioned, Logan, understanding all the people at the party. That's called the chief of staff. Chief of staff would do that for you. Huma Ubedin would whisper into Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton's ear, like, hey, Jason Calacanis is here. He donated this amount. Like Gary from Veep.

1:18:10David Kaufman:Okay, sure, Gary from Veep.

1:18:11Logan Allin:I don't know that reference. But anyway, you got that chief of staff. Then you have everyone's personal driver, Uber. Then you have your second vacation home. That's Airbnb. the chief of staff, such a really interesting thing for everybody to have. And the other one is executive coach. So I started using my replicant to executive coach my team. So I tell it, give a, what did I call that acronym? Check-in report, CIR. So I say to my replicant and I CC somebody on my team, do a CIR for Marcus while I'm talking to Marcus. And it says, okay, here's Marcus's schedule today and tomorrow. Here's all the emails he sent yesterday and today, ranked by order and with a little summary of the emails.

1:18:56Logan Allin:And then here's all the Slack conversations that he's been involved in. Here's his Zoom meetings and his Google calendar. So it gives a snapshot. And then I say, okay, looking at your time management, I can tell you these four things are not super important. Why don't we deprecate those? And then the two things I just gave you, when you complain you have no time, now you swap those things in and out. So an executive coach, I said, anytime you're looking for executive coaching, run the executive coach CIR. So this is a skill, Eric, that I'm going to refine over time for my team members, which is you have an executive coach, you have your CIR, use your ECCIR to just manage yourself better and be a better executive and improve your skill stack.

1:19:35Logan Allin:So anyway, those were mine. Just what does a rich person have that the rest of us don't? Those are awesome. Framework. Yeah. Well, I'm building on yours, right? The other one you said, like getting through all those documents, that was called an associate at a venture firm. And you mentioned earlier to go full circle, hey, maybe the benchmark thing is better. No assistants, no analysts pairing, just use your, you know, associate replicant to do it. All right, Lon, you got any as we wrap here?

1:20:01David Kaufman:Oh, I mean - It's a lot of show. We'll wrap. I do want to give a shout out to Notebook LM. It was one of the first AI applications that I ever got really obsessed with. I still love it. I still use it for research all the time. And just today, we had this in the news. We didn't get to it. They've added video overviews. So you know how you could put documents into Notebook.LM and it'll make a podcast for you? Now it'll make an immersive video presentation for you based on your documents.

1:20:27Logan Allin:You know what this is great for? Your kids. So I have been working on this when I have a bulldog, Minty the Bulldog, that I tell stories to my 10-year-olds for the last two years. And I will come up with ideas for Minty the Bulldog stories. He's a superhero. Bulldog. And just, you know, for me to be able to visualize, it would be like, oh my God, I'm programming my kids, uh, you know, education through Minty the Bulldog lessons. We'll see you all next time on Twist Friday.