Meta’s “creepy” new Ray Bans, Beehiiv teams with Discord, AND a visit from Lovable CEO Anton Osika! | E2181

26:24But that kind of hits on my point. So in your view, Anton, the products from your OpenAI, Anthropics, and the other major AI model companies are still improving at a pretty quick clip even at this point in the year. Yeah, exactly. And that's what's going to enable creating almost all software. We talk about 95 % of all SaaS businesses should be able to be built much faster and more reliably on our platform than other platforms. And with it, you get like one-click payments are set up, one-click in the future, maybe your entire company is incorporated and you have your bank set up on one platform.

27:00That's really interesting. So you're thinking of all the preconditions and post conditions that happen around Vibe coding. And, you know, Stripe did the same thing, right? They have a service. Stripe Atlas. I used Stripe Atlas to do, oh, you used it to incorporate? Yeah, same here, same here. Okay, great. So like a shout out to our guys at Stripe. This is like a really interesting thing. and these APIs are all available. And then hosting apps is the other big piece. So it was always very expensive to host on these platforms. How do you look at hosting as a moneymaker versus maybe a competitive advantage?

27:43And walk us through how you're pricing all this right now, because I played with lovable, you know, just to kind of get my feet wet, but it was like a 50 a month subscription or something or a hundred bucks. And I was like, wow, it's 25. Yeah. And I was like, well, I'm just, I'm not really doing this other than just playing with it. But I felt like there were a bunch of roadblocks, you know, or paywalls. So you have to balance these paywalls with engagement. So as a founder, how are you thinking about getting as many people onto the platform versus making money? That's a great question. We're looking at making it cheaper and cheaper to build so that when we're really providing all the value you get from running your product on the platform that's when you're never going to leave and because it's so much value and then you you will pay more at that point currently hosting is completely free you have you pay for buying a custom domain in the platform but the building consumes a lot of AI compute, right?

28:45So that's what we've been charging for to date. I will be able to say more about this next week so people can stay tuned for the biggest launch to date on our product actually happening in the coming days. Around hosting or just around the pricing? Yes, so hosting, default hosting is still going to be free. What's adding some more capabilities where we just have to somehow be able to charge because of that cost us a lot of money. And that's something that we'll be talking more about next week. And as an example of what value you're getting, once you have built something, you're going to be able to have to charge your customers.

29:32And that's how Stripe makes their money, for example. And now most companies and software has AI built in, right? And that's something that you shouldn't have to think about how that works. It should just work. And that's something we will be doing our utmost to take care of for our customers.

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31:33Walk us through that journey. Yeah. Again, we want to make it as cheap as possible to build and create things. It's a part of the mission to let human creativity be a driver, which is a more optimistic future than us just consuming brain rot. But today, we're in a very good place where we can very easily become profitable without big changes to how our business works. So, Anton, just to be clear, that's like just gross margin positivity? That's what you're kind of implying there? Yes. You split up your users into the free users and the paying users, and we have gross margin profitability on the paying ones.

32:11So that means that we can grow users very rapidly without me being freaking out about our bank account. Yeah, your burn rate could get pretty significant. But in today's age, you are facing serious competitors. So there's an argument to, like Uber did and Lyft did, hey, if we lose a couple of rides per, if we lose a couple of bucks per ride, no big deal, because at some point we could flip the switch. So take me through what it's like when you hit this kind of revenue as a startup so quickly, and then competitors emerge, and then thinking about pricing. and is this going to turn into a pricing war?

32:53Has it turned into a pricing war yet? I don't think much about the pricing. I think thinking more about the pricing in our conversation here than I do most weeks. We're just thinking about really building a product that our customers love and making that into a generational product and the generational company on top of that where we want Lovable to be used by a billion developers or builders that don't have to write software code. There's like 50 million developers out there today, right? And it should be the foundation where people build anything with Lovable. And what's possible for us to do here is to not just have this trillion dollar outcome as a goal, but to have it as a proving ground where more of the great ambition and the talent and a strong culture from European companies can be inspired to have this large global goals as we are currently pursuing.

33:54Anton, there was a really interesting piece that came out in early September. It was called, Where's the Shelf Aware? Why AI Coding Claims Don't Add Up? It was a complaint that we're not seeing as many new iOS applications come out. Basically, if AI makes it so easy to build, why aren't we seeing more of it? Then I turned to your guys' numbers, 100 million ARR, and your user base has exploded. So are people building apps that are a little bit out of the visibility of like most traditional developers? Because in my view, if I built a thing for my mom, that would not show up on GitHub, it wouldn't show up on the App Store.

34:25So I'm just curious about like, are people building tons and tons of apps or are the critics here a little bit mistaken in where they're looking? I think they are mistaken. Like there's so many software products that we use today, so it's harder to go like into mainstream media with success cases. But if you take, Lovable is very global. There is a company called Q Group in Brazil where the founder himself, it's a quite large company, but he sat down and built a new product for them in three weeks, launched it, made$3 million in the first two days after launch with some existing distribution channels of course.

35:06And that's just one of thousands of businesses that are being built oftentimes by people who were previously did not have the foundation, the capital required, a specialized skill set to build a business. So there are lots of success stories. And what I can say as well in how lovable is driving value for companies is that very large companies are using this technology and they're using it for a part of the product life cycle. And that's oftentimes the most time-consuming part, the 60 % of figuring out, is this actually worth investing in and taking it all the way to our customers? So product managers, designers, and marketeers, they're often moving much, much faster and prefer, like, Lovable is the best tool for them to prove out, here's my great idea.

36:01I'm not just going to talk about the idea. I'm just going to build it in a few hours, show it to my manager, Show it to my, try it with customers and then say, let's launch this. And then you've saved 60 % of the time. And engineers have this perfect specification to go out and implement in the system. That's so funny. I thought you were just going to say, yeah, you don't see them on GitHub or the App Store because they're web apps. But that's a different answer and also a really good one. Jason, I think you want to do something. Well, I think it's actually could be quite a revolution for young people.

36:29We've been talking, Alex, on the program about static team size. Big companies aren't hiring. and we've seen this massive increase, quite disturbing this past year in the United States of young people not being able to get jobs specifically in big tech. And I talked to Vice President J.D. Vance about it at the AI Summit, he was a little concerned. And for young people, the benchmark is gonna go up for you to show that you're valuable in this new world. Well, here's the easiest way to do it. If you have initiative, you know, on top of the hard work, that's what all bosses want. They just want somebody to show initiative because they're busy.

37:11Your boss is busy and they've got a boss and their boss has a boss. And there's all these goals and existing things you have to get done. So if a young person coming up in their career says, hey, I looked at this thing you asked me to do. It's repetitive. It's boring. And it's time consuming and expensive for our company. So I vibe coded something. Would this be okay? I have that happening in our organization. Now it's, it's not just lovable. People are doing it in notion with Zapier and kind of doing little workflows there with these form programs. So there seems to be like two parallel ways to do this, design a full product in a lovable, um, and then show that or doing, you know, what I'll call scripting and, and, and light coding, but this could be a game changer for young folks who can't get employed.

37:58And they called this spec work, Anton, back in the day. Have you heard that term before, spec work? I'm not that old though. Yeah, I know. That's what I'm trying to explain it to you. So there was a whole movement called the no spec movement. Somebody can pull up the webpage for this. When design became commoditized because, hey, Canva came out and other tools, uh, Figma, et cetera. Um, and even back in the day, Photoshop became more, um, you know, um, more common up and coming designers, especially from around the world would start making logos and they'd say, Hey, I redid your logo. Would you like to buy one for$500 or can I get a job?

38:39And then CEOs started to see this. So they started to ask people, Hey, I'm looking for a new logo. Will somebody make me one? And the designers got really upset because back then a logo design was five to 15 K. If you can imagine that, Anton, imagine five to$15 ,000. It seems crazy to you. We thought, okay, well, I raised a million dollars for my startup. Why wouldn't I spend 25 ,000 or 10 ,000 on a logo? And this was bread and butter. People would get two logo deals a month. They would do 20 a year. They'd make 5K each. They would be a freelancer making a hundred, 150 grand a year. It was quite common in web 2.0.

39:17And then the spec movement came out and then everybody started saying, don't do spec work. That was like... Yeah, I think we're seeing like a no spec 3.0. That's what we're seeing. And it's coming both from the people inside of companies, product managers and so on. But I foresee that what you're saying is definitely going to happen where young people who often learn faster, they have more initiative taking capability, are going to come to companies and say like, hey, I can do all these new things that your staff currently cannot because I grew up AI native. I actually have this 20-year-old who's helping with automations in our company.

39:50I can't put the most senior engineers on it because there's automations. But the mission I'm telling him is you have to automate lovable. That's the goal for you, automate everything lovable. And I love the positive vision you're putting on for young people out there. Yeah, and then if you can't get a job, even if you've done all that spec work, the company that doesn't hire you or you're inside a company and you build all this stuff and they're like, yeah, we don't want to do that. Well, here's what you do. You just think, are there other companies who would want this product or service? And maybe I can sell it for a hundred bucks a month or a thousand dollars a year and get a hundred people to buy it.

40:28And now I am working from home in my underwear three days a week and I make more money than I work for my current employer. So that's going to be a really interesting tension. That happened to Alex, by the way. He's now wearing pants, by the way. I am wearing very comfortable shorts, but from the waist up. I knew it. I knew he wasn't wearing pants. Okay, all right. Let's plug in. Are you wearing a belt? You left TechCrunch and now you have like two jobs, three jobs and you can actually start to say, you know what? I'll make more money. I have more freedom, more agency, I guess is the word I'm looking for.

40:58So it's kind of exciting. It's a really cool future. It is. Anton, quickly on the student discount that I showed, building off what Jason just said, how popular is Lovewell amongst students and is that a critical cohort of your overall user base? It's very popular. just because students are a bit disillusioned by feeling that the only thing they do in college is to ask Chatsipasti and put their answer into their take-homes and so on. And they're thinking about what's next. I heard at the most prominent technical university here in Sweden people thinking about starting a company as students after they graduate.

41:36It went from 8 % to 80 % over the last 10 years, which is huge. And you can really feel that in the atmosphere here when you go to events, that there's so many young people who want to build successful startups. And they often come up to me at least and say like, oh my God, I'm so grateful you saved my company or you made it possible for me to raise a big round based on what I built in Lovable. Students, they're not so well capitalized. So it's not the biggest chunk of our revenue yet. We're betting on that to become the case when they become founders, which is the biggest source of our revenue today.

42:13So founders are your biggest customer base? Yes, founders, entrepreneurs of small companies, the developer agencies and so on that have been bottlenecked by not being able to find great engineers or paying for great engineers. That's the biggest source of revenue for us. Wow. Hey, you know, one thing I wanted to talk to you about was when you have a startup like this and you're trying to build a community and a movement around it, what are the tactical things you can share with other startup founders listening about tactically building a community of power users? I know you guys have a Discord.

42:48Not sure how vibrant that is. Yeah. But maybe you can talk about that. Jason, 106 ,258 members on the lovable Discord, 8 ,744 online. So you got 8 ,000 people in a Discord grinding. How did you get that flywheel started and what impact does Discord have on your business, would you say? So the community and users wanting to teach each other how to unlock the full potential of this tool. It looks very simple. It's just a chat box. But there is actually so much to learn to really master it and be able to work in tandem with the AI. That educational part is huge. And all the hackathons and events, I think we're on track with 300 grassroots events being run about Lovable to the end of this year.

43:37In person? It's a big part. Really? In person events. Yeah. And what do you use to manage that? Are you using river? That's a good question. For physical events, I think the team, they're understaffed. There's like one person mostly working on this. And we're not being proactive in the sense that we could be on empowering that community. So that means an opportunity, yeah. It's a huge opportunity for us to empower that more and empower the Discord community more to put some structure around that. But I can just say, like, what you want to do is to think about what's the journey for people coming into the community and giving them a platform.

44:17If they are good ambassadors that can educate, giving them a platform, a personal platform that they can leverage in the community. And again, this is an opportunity that we haven't really jumped on. But if someone is listening to this and wants to help out on the community, reach out to me. All right, we'll talk about Stockholm in a minute and your love of that great city. But let's take a couple of questions from our live audience. If you're listening to this on podcast, you can go to YouTube and sign up for This Week in Startups, hit the subscribe button, and then there's like a little dropdown down when you hit an alert bell and then you'll get alerted when we go live.

44:53We're going to start doing some random live streams, by the way, Alex. So I'm giving you permission, Alex and Lon and Oliver to next week. When a live news story happens, go live on the channel and just talk about one story and do it in under 10 minutes. So I'm giving official permission to my team to do that. I think there's like, people want a little more content. I did it yesterday on space as I talked about the Jimmy Kimmel situation. I don't know if you saw that, Alex, but I did. You said you got good engagement on that. Unbelievable. People are like, do this more often. I want to talk more often.

45:27So we had so many questions come in for you, Anton, across our Substack live, LinkedIn live, YouTube live, um, and x.com live that we thought we'd take a couple if you're okay with that, Anton. It's a little dangerous to take five questions. So here we go. Um, editorial director, Lon Harris. I don't have any dangerous questions for you, Anton. They're Very above board. First up from Alex Ray. What do you think of Anthropic CEOs? AI is going to take over. We must regulate Tor. Alex saw him speak at an event in DC and felt like they're trying to get regulatory capture to happen. What are your thoughts?

46:04I hate like over-regulating things. I think Europe is a good example of where we're maybe too happy to pull the trigger on over-regulating before you see a problem. I think there is a, I mean, it's a bit scary with introducing a species that like humans are the dominant species on this planet because we are intelligent. And then when you introduce some new intelligence that could might be more intelligent than us in all ways in a few years, it's more unpredictable. and it's possible that we should think about regulating some of it ahead of time. I think you can do it in a way that is not regulatory capture.

46:50And I think everyone who is listening to this leader should really think first principles and question them in terms of if we should regulate, which I think we should, can we do it in a way that it prevents regulatory capture? Can we do it in a way that prevents regulatory capture? And I think the answer is yes. And that we can get all the benefits from the smaller players, the smaller ones that are tropic, to not be taking on the regulatory burden, while only the large players actually have to take on the regulatory burden. I think that's the case. But I'm not an expert. Let's take another question.

47:31Go ahead, Lon. So this one comes from PMDev, a little bit more technical. Lovable being built on an opinionated stack by definition dramatically narrows Lovable's capabilities. Pivoting off of that, what's Anton's technical background? So I've been a founding engineer at the company that just became a unicorn here in Stockholm. So I think I did some good work there. And I was the CEO. We're a cloner, true caller, kingfisher. It's called Sama Labs. So it just became a unicorn, I think, officially and exited. But since then, after that, I actually started the Y Company company that raised$20 million from top of VCs after growing really fast.

48:17And I was a CTO. So I went from CTO to founding and being a CEO at this company. And to the question, how we think about it is that Lovable needs to have all the primitives on the kind of software architectural side to be able to create everything you need for 95 % of SaaS companies. On the Facebook scale, maybe it's going to be hard to vibe code it on Lovable. but how these different primitives come together in the technical architecture that's what's opinionated but as long as you have all the primitives there should not be a significant narrowing of what you can produce and that's why people love using lovable I love to use it as well especially if you are technical you can do your hobby project in minutes instead of taking a few days for them Alright, any more questions from the audience that are notable?

49:14One more. This is the spiciest one. Uh-oh. Okay, here we go. Andre Ionescu, is vibe coding a little bit cheating? Do you think software engineers maybe are better off without it long term? Your reaction. Okay, so if it's cheating, would software engineers be better off without it? No, I think everything is a fun company. I don't know so much about them, but they're called Cluelay, and they talk a lot about they are going to build the ultimate cheating tool, and everything that was once a technological advancement, like the calculator, was considered cheating in the beginning, but a calculator is not considered cheating today.

49:53It's just a new tool to learn as fast as possible to increase your competitiveness in the job market. Absolutely fantastic. As we wrap here, Stockholm has had many, many unicorns. Sweden is a small country. Is Sweden 30 million population, I think? It's barely 10. Oh, Sweden's barely 10. Which one is 30 million in the Nordics? Was it Switzerland? I know that's the biggest, I think that's the biggest country, but you have Norway with like five or 10. I think if you count them up, it might be 30. Oh, it might be 30 all across all of them. So the number of unicorns per million people, Alex, in my book, Angel, I had talked about that, like as a per capita.

50:38Think about this list, Klarna, Spotify, clash of clans um i forgot the name of maybe that was king that was king that was king yes it was he's not in um minecraft i think minecraft am i right um and then lovable true caller any others i mentioned sauna now i think there's going to be more potentially soon so what's in the water in Stockholm that makes this possible in your mind, Anton? It's great water. It's super clean. Drink it from the tap. But specifically, there's just a deep pool of engineers here who are very curious, grounded, and serious about building good products. And people building are not just chasing clout, hopping between startups every year, but they really care about what they're doing and I think this culture of long term thinking matters a lot.

51:40When I was on the AI side specifically 10 years ago deep learning, you know, neural networks you feel a lot of data was coming out and then some of us here we built one of the early AI communities where there's like a great list of alumni from it. It wasn't hype, it was just a small group of people reading the most recent research papers and building them, actually caring about implementation, getting it all the way to a product. And I think that spirit stuck around of like building products on top of AI. And now I think we're seeing a new wave. Stockholm is a magnet for talent. There are people moving here.

52:20I'm having a large part of my leadership team coming from SF, moving to Stockholm. Still hard to find apartments there. I know that was like one of the blockers. I remember when a friend of mine, Tyler - It's good now. Is it better? You're building more housing stock. It was hard to get an apartment, right? And the apartments were affordable, but you had to wait years to get your apartment, I remember. I mean, there is a bit of this regulated pricing market. I think we have it in a few cities, but it's always possible to get an apartment. Have things moved outside of Stockholm? Is there a satellite city or two that have become popular?

52:55Stockholm is the one accelerating. I mean, there are two other big cities with some significant tech scene in Sweden, but Stockholm is the one ramping up the fastest. And I mean, as an example, Lovable is built from Stockholm by alumni of unicorns and a lot of global tech firms, top talent. That's the key thing. Whenever we see a startup community start to thrive, it's because you have some unicorn company create a bunch of alumni and that diaspora then invests in because if they made some money and you had stock options, they go invest in other things. And Canva came out of the Atlassian founders.

53:39And now you've got all these Canva millionaires, billionaires who are then starting new companies. and so now you've got like multiple generations and I think Stockholm with the same thing so many of the people who were in Skype and made a bunch of money then and those founders started investing in more companies and then obviously you're going to see that with Spotify founder Daniel Ek invests and starts other companies and I'm sure he's an LP and supports the community so it's absolutely fantastic and I think people should be taking notes yeah as to what happened there. Anton said one month ago that in 10 years quote people will talk about the quote lovable mafia.

54:15So Anton, I have to ask, are you already shedding talent, people leaving to go start their own companies? Or are you thinking about more in the future, people are going to head out? No, I think about more in the future. I used to say this in the last company I built, that I mentioned. And from there, we're seeing, I mean, four YC companies come out and multiple of them valued at hundreds of millions of dollars. Incredible. Yeah. And you have a view on secondary sales. I'm sure when a company accelerates in valuation, you have some early investors and or employees who want to sell. But obviously, if there's liquidity in your stock, then they might get too much liquidity too fast and not see any reason to come to work.

55:04So what's your take on that as a founder? and allow ourselves. Yeah. No, we want to help our employees. I think it's important I talk about not, we have a long way to go and the big thing you should be proud of after you're done here is what the generational product, the generational company team we built. And if you take some of the chips off the table, it should be done just so you can like think less about being like risk averse. And we, in secondary sales, how we do it is that we limit the total amount. Yeah, that's, I mean, that's what Elon figured out when SpaceX, and I think the Stripe team figured that out as well, just do like two orderly sales a year.

55:53I think both companies do that process. And then people make their requests and management says, okay, yeah, you want to sell 50 % of your position and you've been here for four years. Well, you sell 25 and whatever it is. some orderly fashion. Listen, Anton, continued success. You're incredibly focused. It's so much opportunity and you're doing everything right. So congratulations and I'll see you when I'm in Saco. Yes, come here, please. Yeah, I mean, I used to come all the time. There were so many tech events would invite me out. I just, I got too many invites right now and not enough time.

56:23I would like to come back out. Yeah. I found something you cannot say no to. Okay, there you go. Well, we'll talk soon and great job, Anton. Thanks, bro. See ya. All right. They'll ask you to upload your file. Yeah, another great founder doing great work. Great job with the questions from the audience. We always love that. And again, we're going to do a little more live, a little more experimenting. They're always experimenting here. You're excited about doing a breaking news story at some point? I'm totally here for it. I mean, Jason, fundamentally in my DNA, I'm a news guy. So like to me, when there's a lot going on and it feels very active and busy, I thrive on that.

57:00But I'm just so glad we had Anton back on so quickly because when we had him on, his company was at 4 million ARR. Now they're over a hundred million. And that's not how technology worked when I was learning about startups. That was just not at all. What a different world. You know, you have broadband, you have billions of users, you have credit card rails, and these tools are providing so much value at a low price. It's kind of hard not to engage with them. So if If you're working at a big company and you have a corporate card or you have a personal card, why wouldn't you spend 25 bucks, you know, um, you know, to just improve your lot in life.

57:41So for young people, I really recommend trying to, uh, you know, if you've got to spend your own 25 bucks, just do it. Can you imagine if you go to your boss and you're like, Hey, I, I started using this lovable tool. I paid for it. Don't worry. I did it on my personal card. Uh, it didn't cost the company anything. I spent a hundred bucks the last four months and I made this. Now your boss is like, get in here, talk to me, let's go get lunch. Let's, let's have a coffee. Tell me everything. Also, your boss is going to name drop you when they take your work one level up. They'll say, Bob did this or Jane did this.

58:10And then suddenly that person who never knew who you were knows exactly who you are. Huge for your career. Yeah. And this is why like, you know, keeping your head down is not the best advice. Like you want to, um, rise up and get some attention for what you're doing and be ambitious and just saying, Hey, over the weekend, I did something. I had two of my team members tell me last minute that they applied to get scholarships at the All-In Summit. They paid for like these$1 ,500 tickets. And they went there and they're like, I just didn't want to get in trouble, but we're taking vacations to go to your event.

58:41And I'm like, oh my Lord, you can not use your PTO days for those two or three days. Since you were so ambitious, I am so thrilled that you did that. That's amazing. Now, of course, now I've got 20 people who are going to do it next year and nobody gets any work done that week. but um i'll be here i'll be at home don't worry jason i'll hold the fort down you'll hold the fort down okay a couple of other news stories we should probably hit on um yeah what do you think the most pressing here i saw google is uh doing what comet and some other folks are doing with an ai first browser is that true and have we used it have we seen it or is it just an announcement just an announcement it's rolling out uh very soon i'm hoping to have this in my chrome by next week so we'll have some more hands-on notes some of the features though jason are going to be coming out a little bit later.

59:27So Google is baking Gemini into Chrome. That's the big headline. It'll be in the upper right section. You can click on it and then it'll help you summarize web pages or groups of tabs that you currently have open. It'll help find websites you visited in the past. So kind of a really advanced history search, which of course brings up some interesting privacy points, but we'll get to that later on. And of course, integrations with other Google products like Calendar and YouTube so you can kind of connect work from one tab to the next. down the road, Jason, that's when we get to agentic browsing, a bit more like Comet from Perplexity or maybe kind of what Diaz doing from the browser company.

1:00:00And there will be a feature coming later on. I think this is the most important thing that will turn your search and URL bar into effectively the chat interface you see with most AI products. Now, they're not going to turn that on by default, I don't think, because they can't afford to take everyone in Chrome and send them to the AI search tool versus the traditional one because all their money is made on the traditional side. but this certainly feels like Google now does not have to divest Chrome. We learned that from the judge in the search monopoly remedies section of the trial. So they get to keep Chrome.

1:00:30So now they're going to use it. And so to me, this is Google saying we've, we've shaken off the courts and now we're going to go straight pedal to pedal. Timing. Yeah. Oh, very interesting. Yeah. They wouldn't, they were probably, obviously they've been working on this for some time, probably a year, I would guess. And so if they've been working on this for a year, cause they did include it, I'm seeing lots of AI pop-ups when I'm using Google Docs and Gmail. I haven't seen it in YouTube all that often. I guess you can ask questions of a transcript now. I would just like the search box in YouTube to be AI-driven or in x.com, have it be AI-driven.

1:01:07I think the meta team has done a good job of making their search box in Instagram default to an AI result, which is kind of cool. But yeah, so many possibilities when the Chrome browser or your browser has AI built in. So this is going to be a big deal, a big, big deal. It begs a question though, and I'm not trying to pick a fight here. So don't, don't take this in a negative sense, but people in the consumer side, they're going to grumble and then end up using it anyways. OpenAI is building a browser. Fine, fine, fine, fine, fine. XAI sued Apple over, it claims, preferencing OpenAI in the App Store.

1:01:45Now, Now, no matter what you think about that, it shows that XAI is willing to go fight for what it says is a fair marketplace. If Google's going to bake Gemini into Chrome, isn't that a much bigger self-preferencing point? So I'm curious if XAI is going to stand up and plant a flag here. Or the Justice Department or anybody. I think it's one of these things where they're just we don't have necessarily a savvy enough group in Washington across any administration. Just historically, we haven't had people savvy enough to be at the tip of the spear like us. Like here we are. We've used Comet. We've used, you know, the other browsers.

1:02:22We're reading every update on them. We're hypothesizing as to how they will help people in the change. That's not how it works in Washington. In Washington, somebody comes and complains and says, hey, you know, check this out. And they try to spin it and, you know, get some maybe edge on their competitors. I do think the ultimate way to self-regulate in these cases, and ultimately the way the government can regulate these, is to give consumers more choice. Because at the heart of this is the consumer is not having a choice, right? It's just being bundled. It's being shoved down your throat. You've got Microsoft Office.

1:02:58Now you have Teams. And it's like you can't get away from Teams, right? Or remember when Google Plus came out, you couldn't get away from it. It was kind of everywhere. and Meta is doing that with their AI product. You can't get away from it. But if you say, when you load up your new browser, it says, would you like to use XAI, Claude? Would you like to use this open source product? Which LLM would you like to use as your default? Just like you can pick the search engine. And I think in Europe, they actually forced Google with Chrome to give that choice when you install it. I'm not sure if that...

1:03:33There's the browser ballot screen and more recently, September 11th. So one week ago, Jason, the EU commission accepted Microsoft's commitment to de-bundle teams to avoid a penalty. So we're still having these fights right now. Okay, great. So thank you for having that knowledge at your fingertips. This is the easiest way to do it is just give consumers choice. And ultimately, consumers are going to win in all this, as we just had with our guest from Lovable. that's 25 bucks to go make apps. And you could go from having no job and being a DoorDash or an Uber driver to starting to make little apps for your local dentist or your local, you know, I don't know, your local bakery wants to have a website and build something really unique.

1:04:18And you go in there and you build it for them. Just like there were people who would go build websites 30 years ago, or there were Squarespace consultants, you know, that go to local businesses. This is like one of the great hacks. You build a bunch of beautiful businesses using Squarespace, use the promo code twist, longest running sponsor here, partner. People would make, I remember it's in the early days of Squarespace, they would make websites, email them and say, Hey, I built a website for you. If you want it, I can set it up for you for a hundred bucks a month. And, you know, maybe Squarespace was 20 or 30 bucks a month.

1:04:52And they would take the difference and you know, the bakery would be like, this is amazing. I have a website that's gorgeous and represents us well. Thank you. So that's a really interesting hack. But I think the point about people going to private communities is interesting because Beehive, a company we've talked about on the show quite a lot. We use them. They're incredible for our newsletter. Yeah, big fan. Shout out to Tyler Dank. They just dropped a new feature. And I was thinking about it in this kind of vein because they now have a new button inside of Beehive that will help you set up a exclusive community on Discord for your paying subscribers.

1:05:23So kind of a tight, tight. It's a small new feature they just put out, but it made me think of like, here's a way for people that have a newsletter or a blog to quickly spin up their own community, just like you were talking about with Anton. And I was like, oh, this is fantastic. People are going to use it. And then my second thought was, oh, great. More people going into tiny little internet rabbit holes and having small communities. And so to me, it's this really interesting dichotomy between I love people getting to gather and have their interests and be niche and be weird. And then also the further from the light we go, the more I think we also have a reason to worry.

1:05:55You know, this could also be a positive because you get out of the slop on YouTube serving you like more and more extreme stuff and trying to tickle your rage or X algorithm trying to do that or TikTok algorithm trying to do that. And you say, you know what? I just want to be in the Knicks community. So I'm part of the Knicks fan TV community. And I have a private x.com group chat with a bunch of famous Knicks fans. And I also have the Knicks fan TV discord. And I find myself increasingly when I'm like, God, this is all so rageful and annoying and all politics all the time on different social networks.

1:06:34I'm like, I kind of like the respite of just saying, Hey, we're here to talk about startups. And so this weekend, we're going to fire up the, uh, this weekend startups discord. I'm going to try to see if the young ambitious people who work for me, I can get a couple of them to do a little weekend work and pop up a discord here, uh, for the show. And then we'll invite you all to that discord. Um, and I'm thinking about doing a paid membership. I know Leo has done really good with club twit and I spent some time there and I'm wondering, you know, I think I may start it off as free, but then go to a paid thing so we can actually put moderators on it or editorial people on it and make it self-sustaining.

1:07:12Not to make a profit, but just make it self-sustaining, right? Because these communities rise and fall with like the moderation, I find. Oh, well, we do. As of minutes ago, actually about two hours ago, we do have our Discord set up, Jason. So once we have it tuned, we'll invite everyone in. but stay tuned and we'll hang out there as often as we can just to be accessible. There was an IPO. I know you love your IPOs. Tell us about the IPO. Two IPOs. I'll do them in 30 seconds. StubHub, the online ticketer, went public at the midpoint of its range and then immediately started to go down. Not a great IPO, but then happily for everyone out there who likes liquidity, Netscope, the cybersecurity unicorn priced at the top end of its raised range, Jason,$19 a share, and then immediately rose 18 % in its first day.

1:07:58And then today, this morning, its second day of trading was up another six or seven percent. So I think the more tech IPO of the week did well. And we're seeing basically continued success from debuts. So everyone out there, Databricks, cough, cough, go public. StubHub was public previously, I believe. So maybe it went private and then went public again. If memory serves, it was public. It went private, sold, and then taken out again. So we're back, back, back to the future on that one. I just love this idea that Beehive is connected to Discord with the membership because this is a known problem.

1:08:32There's I think there's another company, Memberful or something, that creates glue between all of these different communities because you can turn on a sub stack, a Beehive, a Patreon, X, I have subscribers now for my commenting. And so you have all these disparate subscriber bases, YouTube. How do you get them all into the same Discord? and then when they stop paying for it, turn off their Discord. This is a complicated technical problem. And I guess people are just going to choose one location for their subscribers. But it would be nice if this was, you had the ability to subscribe anywhere and then manage it from anywhere.

1:09:14The world's getting complicated. There's just too many options. It used to be you could just start a Patreon and that was it. Now it's like... There's too many options. But I was just thinking about our Discord because I think it'd be great to have one. but we also have Slack that I got to keep tabs on. I've got iMessage, LinkedIn notes, Twitter DMs. And I do, I feel like at some point in time, don't shout at me, but like some sort of like super app that brings it all together. I know technology is just bundling and unbundling, but right now I feel like whenever I'm working, I'm not watching the 48 channels.

1:09:43So like today I came back to our Slack after trying to get prepped for the lovable chat. And then we had done AI images for startup idea pitches. And I was like, boop, oh no, I got to catch up. It's tough, man. The problem with chat is chat is like, it's just like a river. Like if you miss, you know, the leaf floating down the river, you want it to pull out of the river. It's just, it could be way downstream and you just, you lost it. This is where AI summaries, we have, we upgraded our Slack to like the more professional version because we had to do like more security because of our global operations.

1:10:16and the AI summaries are not great, but they're okay. And I find myself once in a while, like once a week, if I'm gone for two days looking at it and I'm like, this could be so much better. So for the Slack team, it's like if I had to rate the AI summaries right now and like their integration, it feels like a five out of 10. I would keep grinding on that and helping surface them more. Superhuman does a really good job. Every time you open up a superhuman email, it already has the summary at the top and they do it before you open it. So it's like preloaded in your inbox. So they take the time to do that, even if you don't see it so that it's just faster and better.

1:11:01Jason, do you want to read some comments from the people? Oh yeah, let's just grab one and we'll shout one person at you, pull it up on the screen. Here it is. This is from our Spotify comments. We love everyone over there. Jason, take it away. Oh, yeah, Spotify comments is on there. So this is comments, not reviews. But okay, yeah, we'll take a comment from Spotify. Who do we got? We got Giorno Passporto, 1533. Love reading that out loud. I have to give Eric Jackson, this is from, I believe, our last episode, so much props for finding the value of the company wherein value investors could not.

1:11:31For the retail investor, we had the best opportunity to get in as if it was a seed funding, paying cheap on the stock that we can then hold for a while. This person is just a big fan of Eric Jackson and the open door thesis, Jason, which you had quite a lot to say about. Yeah, I mean, I love the fact that there's now a group of maniacs out there who find companies that are distressed or there's an opportunity in and say, here's my vision for that company. They're kind of activists. You could call them meme stonks, whatever. But I think they're getting better at it and the collective knowledge they have and the time they have.

1:12:09and the motivation they have is, you know, greater than some of the stock analysts who work at, you know, whatever banks and they, you know, they don't have the time to obsess over stocks and it's a nine to five job for them. And these lunatics are like, I'm going to place a bet on open door. I'm going to say this CEO needs to go. They're not doing a great job. These are the CEOs I think who would, these board members don't have skin in the game. That was like the best part of that discussion with Eric was his, oh, if you buy even$50 ,000 worth of shares, it tells us something. And I got to tell you, that does change behavior.

1:12:42And we talk a lot here on this program about generation bet and, oh, people have concerns about it. I got no concerns, man. My concern is that people are not thinking probabilistically. They're not making bets. They're not making investments, investments, bets, wagers, they all require you to have a higher, um, a higher duty of handicapping and thinking through possibilities, which then makes everybody better at their game. Yeah. So put a little skin in the game. I invest to understand. I invest to understand. I bought KDEF, because I heard people talking about it and I started reading articles about President Trump negotiating with Korea over shipbuilding, because they're good at building ships.

1:13:33We don't build ships here anymore. And now I've like gone down that rabbit hole and I'm like, wow, there is a whole group of people who are better at building weapon systems, ships that are not in the United States. and then Andrel and all these other US-based companies are competing with them. It's a really great way to learn, great way to learn. Speaking of Andrel, just one last little note, just got a$750 million contract with the Ministry of Defense over in the UK. Not a bad thing for them. But anyways, Jason, I don't want to drag us down another rabbit hole here at the very end. So great that we got the review, Oliver, but great that we got the comments, Oliver.

1:14:10What I was looking for was a review, but I guess we'll do that as a concept. What I want to do is if y 'all take the time to write a review on Apple, we're going to take the time to post it at the end of the show. So watch the end of the show. I'm going to have producer Oliver or Lon or you, Alex, just read the review and shout the person out. So at the end of the show, you may get a shout out for your comment or your review. So get on the YouTube, get on the Spotify comments, get on the Apple podcast comments, write a review, write a comment, and you might get shouted out here and we'll give you a little plug for your company if you happen to mention it in there.

1:14:46Okay. See you all next time. Have a great weekend, everybody. Bye. Bye-bye.