Nvidia tops Microsoft, FTC sues Adobe, weight loss startups, and more! | E1968

0:00Hey, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. It's your boy Jay Cow. Jason Calacanish. You can follow me on twitter at Jason X dot com Jason. I invest in 100 companies a year, if it's your first time here, with a team of 20. We also have a podcast called This Week in Startups. We've done almost 2 ,000 episodes. And my co-host is Alex Wilhelm. He is formerly of a little publication called TechCrunch and an amazing database called Crunchbase. And is the guy who, in high school, was excited about stocks and startups. He confessed this to me. He was Alex P. Keaton. And you know what? I was running all kinds of great businesses.

0:39Jason's Hot Fate, my first business when I was making copies of The Empire Strikes Back from a guy from, I think it was the Gambino family. And I don't know. I don't want to be a rat here and eat cheese. But anyway, we're both into it. We're both really into startups, technology, and business. Yeah. I mean, that's pretty much my three favorite things to talk about. And it's what I've talked about for a long time. So it is always lovely, Jason, to see you. I am Alex over on X slash Twitter. We're also on LinkedIn. And we stream the show live when we do it. We're doing two to three new shows a week.

1:08So make sure that you have us on YouTube. You have us on X, LinkedIn, whatever your platform of choice is. We're coming to you wherever you are. Or finance, tech, media, lifestyle, politics, like maybe way down the end. But it's really finance, tech, markets, all that good stuff. And we got a full docket today, don't we? Full docket. We're talking about the massive market demand for GLP ones, what that can mean for startups and also new technology there. than Adobe's problems with the FTC over their subscription business and what that means for digital product companies everywhere. New Twist 500 members.

1:44It's going to be a back show. Let's dive right in. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC 2 report fast. Twist listeners can get$1 ,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com slash twist. .tech domains. Don't miss our Jam Session with JCal contest coming soon. To apply and get more details, go to jamwithjcal.tech. Brought to you by.tech domains. And lemon.io. Hire pre-vetted remote developers. Get 15 % off your first four weeks of developer time at lemon.io slash twist.

2:34The biggest news of the day that I saw right before we jumped on is that NVIDIA has taken over the top spot. It is now the most valuable company in the world. And I'm so glad that didn't become not true since I put this in the docket and then we showed it. But as you can see in the video, we have a list here of all the companies by market cap, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Apple, steep drop to alphabet then amazon saudi aramco meta tsmc chips berkshire hathaway a conglomerate and then we have broadcom and then eli lily nova nordisk and tesla top 13 in the world nvidia is on top and jason i have to say uh it feels a little weird great company but i don't know if i would say that if i had to pick one it would be nvidia over say a recurring software business yeah i think this is a moment in time it's clearly not the most important company on this list in my mind uh in terms of the future if you told me i could only bet on one stock and hold it for 10 years uh it would not be nvidia so yes you know if you were to just do that mental exercise a company that 10 years from now you would still want to own if you went through this list alex just you know work me through it who on this list you know you look at Microsoft, Apple, and Alphabet.

3:50So, these are very big bases of users, both enterprise and consumer, right, in each case. Absolutely. So, Microsoft has been one of the most valuable companies off and on for my entire life. So, thinking about just value preservation clearly stands the test of time. Enterprise and consumer, huge businesses, Azure, OpenAI, that's an easy one. Apple, depends on how much you think consumer hardware will do. alphabet i don't think it's going to be i just don't think they have the juice anymore amazon we talked about tell me about that why why do you think alphabet has lost its mojo it's lost its way that's a controversial you know position i think okay so search came out they made search they made search ads they changed the world they had this unbelievable profit canon that just fired money at them for a long time but then they failed to have a major second act in the same way that Apple ended up with Mac, then iPhone, then iPad, then the headphones and so forth.

4:50And so what they've done is increasingly squeeze search for more and more revenue. That's why I think Google search has gotten worse over time. They're panicking. They're doing search generative experience, which is pretty crap. And I think fundamentally, they're not run by a technologist. They're run by a management consultant guy. And it shows in the products and decisions they make. They're good at near term EPS. But in 10 years, I don't think we're going to be using Google for search. i don't think we're going to be using gmail email i don't think we're going to be living in a google world you got me on notion you broke my google docs addiction right there yeah so you know i do think they have a problem about innovating at home if you were to look at the second act if there was a second and third act for um alphabet aka google you'd probably say it's youtube and android both of those are purchases not built there so if you look at what's been built there gmail obviously was built there chrome was built there uh you know there there are great things that have been built at google uh docs as well although they did buy a docs company that started them off with the google docs franchise i think they built the other pieces you put all that together um i think you have a very um important insight here it's not founder led it's led in a management way and i think sundar has to just clean house i think he's gonna he would have to become a wartime ceo right and he's not a wartime ceo and he's in a war he is a consensus builder manager of people keep everybody rowing in the same direction but i don't get the sense he's the guy who's gonna walk in and say you know what you guys are doing a good job you're fired i need somebody to do a great job because we're up against an elite competitor and this is a very hard thing in management i have struggled with this my whole career i have a rule you ever hear of this term a pip a performance improvement plan i i have been a manager in modern corporations so yes i am familiar with all things pip it is a load of bs yes if a person needs to be put on a pip they need to be shown the door now i have had many instances in my companies companies we've invested in companies i run where somebody will secretly put somebody on a pip they'll give them a talking to you know what business at this level is an elite sport if somebody comes to practice and they forget their shoes if they come to practice and they were at the club till 5 a.m unless you're alan iverson or james harden like you're some unbelievably elite talent undeniably elite talent you are fired there's no performance improvement plan for the guy who shows up out of sneakers or the person who shows up and they were out drinking you just fire them immediately this is a message to all startups that i've invested when in doubt there's no doubt when you have doubt about when you have doubts about a person there's no doubt of what you should do in an elite pursuit you fire them now if you're part of a union and you're part of the writers guild at business insider or vox and you have a bunch of rules i get it you negotiated that you bought into it management bought into it you went with the union thing you got to control salaries okay that was your decision jim bank off land zone whoever is dealing with these unions i get it you have to do it that way it's leaving but in small companies or even these big companies you're gonna have to make a decision you're up against zuckerberg yep you're up against elon you're up against satya nadella nadella right these people are hardcore you're up against sam altman these These people are no joke.

8:20These people are no joke. You'll get shivved. Two things about that. One, pips, I think, are a charade more than an actual technique. The way that I've always heard them explain to me is this is how we avoid getting sued by employees that we fire, which means that they are at best smokescreen. And everyone kind of, I think, knows what they mean, even though they're not detailed that way. So I agree with you there. on the kind of like who competes at Google side of things. I just think that even if you did a pretty big staff reduction, it wouldn't give the company the courage to go back on the crapification of search because that would hurt near term results.

9:00And this reminds me a little bit of, I think it was the interview you did with the intercom guy when he said that this AI way that's coming to software searches, software of a sort is going to let smaller companies attack market share because incumbents are going to be too busy protecting what they have than building for the future. And that to me is the thing that Google is going to trip over and hit the deck. Moving on the list though, just quickly here, Amazon, great company, great business. AWS has lost its growth momentum. It's just not what it was. So I wouldn't pick as my top company, top three, probably.

9:32Saudi Aramco, I mean, I don't know. That's like saying, here's a pile of diamonds. You know what it's going to be worth. Those diamonds are not going to magically turn into uranium or something. So no, it's even weird to have it on this list, right? But then you get to Meta, TSMC, Berkshire Hathaway. Berkshire Hathaway is going to have a leadership problem. Obviously, you take them off the list. TSMC, I think that's like a very predictable business. Meta is a wild card. You got to put Meta in your top three, I think, or it's got to be in the running. I would say in the running. Broadcom did well in their last earnings report.

10:02AI chips are doing well for them. And then there's two companies that I included in this chart specifically because we're about to talk about something. Yes. Eli Lilly and then Novo Nordisk. if you don't know these two companies they are big in the glp1 game and novo nordisk is single handedly boosting the danish gdp not crazy yes i love that story problem with monetary supply in the country because they made so much money like they didn't have enough of whatever the denmark dollar is and they have too many u.s dollars it just screwed up the banking system i remember the kroner i believe yeah i think is well at least that was the danish currency i'm sure the people are gonna make it's the euro i don't know but i do know that that novo nordis has become this giant instead of a relatively small country i will say i'm part danish so i'm not being rude here uh and then tesla's number 13 um at 587 188 billion dollars so this is a list of big kids you know everyone on this list we're talking about is worth a half trillion or more listen a strong sales team can make all the difference for a b2b startup but if you're going to hire sharks you need to let them hunt and you can't slow them down with compliance hurdles like SOC 2.

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11:41Stop slowing your sales team down and use Vanta. Get$1 ,000 off at vanta.com slash twist. That's vanta.com slash twist for$1 ,000 off your SOC 2. Jason, I do want to talk about Eli Lilly because you and I have been watching this GLP-1 phenomena for a couple of years now. and the growth of these drugs has been simply amazing so just start when did you first hear about a glp1 i don't care if it's from ele lily or nobun or disc i was in italy i remember it like it was yesterday i was in italy i had uh commandeered uh chamat's beach house i was public about this we joked about it on all in he was away for a week or two i was writing my book uh and i was like can i borrow your house for 10 days or can i stay at your house for 10 days he's like sure so i'm in for the demarme it's not his house yet they rented a house um anyway putting all aside i'm in there i'm going for my bike ride i would hit the beach i would write at the beach then i would uh you have my tradition of smoking a cigar i would reward myself if i hit my 2 000 words and maybe have a little cigarillo or cigar which i never do uh and then i'm riding my bike i'm listening to my my friend tim ferris and kevin rose and they're talking about taking an ozempic shot got it and i was really concerned about my weight i was struggling with it i peaked at 213 had gotten down to like 193 or something 185 bounced back up to 198 i just was really struggling with it in my 40s into my 50s and or this was in my 40s i guess late 40s and um i said you know when i get back i'm gonna try this thing because he had talked about how he turned the pen dial all the way up to a high dose and he started vomiting but like it's crazy like i stopped craving food and he had lost all this fat so i started it and i did three or four cycles of it from i was epic to agobi to mangiarno i was covered for a while because i was in fact pre-diabetic and obese my bmi was like really high and it was very early so i guess doctors could get you um this under a prescription or it was covered under insurance i thought a pretty big copay but it wasn't a big deal um and so anyway that's why when you see old videos of me three or four years ago my face looks like ernie and now it looks like burts so i got a little ozempic face and this big round face and now i have a slimmer face but this was the face i had up until i was 35 36 so i am now at 170 174 pounds i've been as long as 169 so anyway it's it's about yeah 40 40 pounds of weight loss i would attribute 30 pounds of it 75 of it to these glp ones i feel great on them and i would say the defining thing here is the danger of being obese versus you know whatever the side effects of these drugs are i made the decision being thin and being healthy was better because i had sciatica in my leg i couldn't sleep i was having breathing problems i couldn't run i had like a large list of problems and then all of a sudden i'm skiing 40 days i feel great i'm running again i mean this has really changed my life and so i think you have to consult with your doctor be thoughtful but i am currently on monjorno uh and i'm just trying to get to 164 which is my lowest adult weight and that's the weight i used to be when i ran the new york city marathon so i want to get to 164 and i want to start running 10ks again just as a all right you know start yeah so anyway i it's it's i am so enamored by this technology and this innovation um and i think that if you're overweight or obese um you should just at least do a consultation about it i was able to acquire monjano now from a compounding pharmacy got it which puts it at a price of about 200 a month i think it's unbelievably affordable and there's more to come because uh there are significant investment being put in this i do think this is going to solve the obesity problem in the world and just to pause for a second alex to think in you know first principle sitting here 10 years ago what are the biggest problems in the world or in the united states we could say education sure big problem we could say wealth disparity we would certainly say obesity right and you could sit there and debate three or four of those things technology just solved one of them this is like i'm convinced the solution so yeah i i think that the level of excitement you just showed to talk about your own journey with glp ones is exactly why i'm so glad they're on the show because that was not in the show docket That's not a bullet point that we were going to hit.

16:09That was just Jason being so excited about it. And that's why I think they're so popular because the impact is enormous. So I think if you think, look at Eli Lilly, they did more than$5 billion in revenue last year with GLP ones. And to quote the journal, these drugs are quote on the way to becoming some of the best selling pharmaceuticals of all time. I would scratch out the sum of the and just say best selling. I think we're going to end up there. and for business heads out there eli lily's stock has risen 50 in the last year 100 in the last 12 months we've seen charts here for everyone to take a look at give me a five year on that if we have it because you know what i when i started taking it i thought to myself i should put a trade on so where was it like three years ago uh 21 2022 you could have made a lot of money yeah three or four x so this is a really important note you know when you actually experience something that dramatic yeah you got to place a bet right so it's a stupid decision i made there um but and the reason you know i actually i don't think i've ever talked about my use of these at this length but the reason i i didn't talk about it for the first two years for two reasons one they told me ozempic was for people with diabetes not just pre-diabetic therefore it's going to be a shortage so i actually took like six months nine months off from it when the shortage happened i just told my doctor like let me just i don't want to be on it if there's a shortage right i'm not twofold one i wanted to see if i would gain the weight back i did gain like uh maybe 20 percent of the weight back i always gain back five pounds after i get off of it but i don't gain back 20 pounds yeah um and um you know there's a shortage and i also wanted to make sure like this was safe right like i can be a little experimental with my health but i wanted to make sure it was safe i my gut tells me if my family members came to me uh and said hey should i take it if it was a family member i'd say absolutely you should take it now i'm not gonna make your decision for you confit the doctor this isn't financial advice on the show nor is it type of advice yes there's a big there's a couple of big things coming here and one of the big things i think is you're going to be able to do this without an injection and an injection every week is a little bit or every two weeks some people take it i think that's a hurdle for many people so maybe uh i don't know if you have that in the notes um but there is a pill form that they have been discussing and eli lily i believe is all in on a new drug that's not terzepatide not semaglutide um because ter is terzepatide is terzepatide is the giorno yes and so i think the new one is called tide is ozampic and then there's a new one coming yes so it really has a drug in the pipeline called or for glipron i presume they'll come up with some better name so we don't have to say that out loud it sounds like one of the enemies are the clans in dune well you and i were cool growing up we went immediately for lord of the rings and dune in our references um but the critical thing here as jason pointed out is that this could be in pill form so right now there is a shortage of these drugs that are injectables it turns out it's a lot harder to actually create drugs that are injectables to make liquids is more difficult to scale up the plants takes time in the years so they want to make it in a pill form that's tough because they're very complex large molecules that are hard they tell me to synthesize down into a pill but eli lily wants to get there first and the article that we're looking at on screen if you are on the video with us does just discuss how eli lily has been very aggressive to ensure that as we get past this first generation they're ready because after prozac lost its patent back in the day elia was a little bit flat-footed so this is their new thing and they want to make sure they have a next act afterwards going back to the google point so i think if we make this a pill jason yeah it's game triples triples the market for it i think so i would say yeah um and i know there are millions if not tens of millions of americans on this drug right now you know i listen i'm praying that this is a safe drug and that there's no side effects again i made a personal decision i could not control my weight i tried everything working out trainers diets uh fasting and i i kept doing 10 pounds 15 pounds and then i gained back five it was just there's like somebody explained it to me very interestingly who was on osempic and had the similar type journey they had lost 50 pounds this woman and she said there's the will yeah using willpower to lower your calorie intake and then there's not being hungry yeah and this is very different when you're constantly thinking of food like i was and then you stop thinking about food and food goes from being the primary driver in your life or one of the top drivers you're constantly thinking about food which is i fell into that group and then it becomes like i haven't thought about food all day yeah maybe i should eat something and i talk to people who are not on it who are thin and they're like yeah that's how i feel all the time it's like okay this chemical my thesis i'm not a doctor my my theory here my thesis is some people have more of this therefore they don't have hunger pains all the time and that other people have less of it and they do have cravings all the time this is also working to help any number of long tail their symptoms including addiction yes and to gambling alcohol like all kinds of addiction they're giving this drug so there is something going on here and we we talked yesterday i was yesterday i was thinking about the show after we talked i think one of the good things about having us a partner we're kind of getting to like interesting areas to focus on and one of the most thing is like what can ai solve for us remember i said my definition of super intelligence was like it'll solve a problem for us that we have not solved a unique problem in the world finding aliens for example it'll say hey there they are you idiots you idiots i think like it's gonna figure out how these drugs work or other compounds around them And like, there might be a compound that we're taking that lowers your cravings for food and sugar, lowers alcohol cravings, stops crazy behavior, gambling, whatever, violence.

22:14And it might also like lower your cancer. I mean, they're going to find all kinds of little compounds. There's a bunch of work on peptides going on now, too, which is adjacent to this. and the people who were part of this ozempic thing like the hubermans and the peter atia i think that's how you pronounce his name all that like those guys who are like optimizing rich people's health for them no i mean i it's a big business i heard those and i'm not huberman but peter atia type doctors these consult with you know billionaires hundreds of millionaires whatever and they you know they charge six figures to be your concierge doctor which for somebody who's incredibly rich would be like you know you spending a thousand on it a year me spending ten thousand on a year it'd be like okay yeah it's it's worth it not a big deal uh in other words and they're doing peptides and there's a whole series of peptides now i haven't done this but i have been researching it because now i'm moving into my weight lifting phase i want to increase the muscle mass and at 53 it's harder to do there's a whole thing around uh this wolverine protocol and peptides that increase the healing so you go do some crazy workout and you heal faster like wolverine from the x-pen so that's kind of the next card i'm going to turn over again not health advice here but no logical and finance advice these companies are rocking and they're going to continue to rock the fact that they're number 10 and 11 in market cap is crazy yes i was blown away by that i'm like world's easiest segue from market cap chat to glp ones thank god that everyone bought the stock okay folks we announced the jam session with jcal contest just a couple of weeks ago.

23:47And we've gotten some fantastic submissions. But the submission window is still open. You got time in the coming weeks, five founders will get the chance to do a jam session with me, Jake Howe, your bestie, you'll get unfiltered feedback, visibility on my podcast. And if your pitch resonates with me, hey, you never know, maybe I'll fund your startup. Again, you get to have a one on one session with me and we tape it and we put it on this weekend startups. And so the whole audience gets to learn from our conversation about your startup and you get all that great exposure. Here's the two rules. To get into this one-on-one session, you need to have less than 2 million in funding.

24:21We want really early stage startups. And you got to have one of those awesome.tech domain names. So apply and get more details at jamwithjcal.tech. That's jam, J-A-M, with J-C-A-L, no spaces, no dashes,.T-E-C-H. And I'm partnering with.tech domains because some of the most innovative startups I've seen are using that dot tech domain rabbit dot tech aurora dot tech one x dot tech and of course we do founder fridays dot tech every month founders get together at founder fridays dot tech in their local city if you're using a dot tech domain name for your startup website i want to hear about it fly with the jam session with jay cal contest today at jam with jay cal dot tech we're gonna start picking the winners this week so go to jam with jay cal dot tech and join me for a chance to showcase your startup and potentially take it to the next level.

25:07I want to narrow this down to startups. There are a number of companies out there in the digital health space, Jason, that are working with GLP ones. Rose has me care. Him and hers also does their public now, but you know what I mean. So you know, what else is there for startups to do when it comes to GLP one usage? My first thought was make foods that people will eat if they're on these to replace what they were eating before aka my love and joy doritos like maybe there's a health food play here there's probably some d2c plays here as people change their lifestyle and feel better but what's like the positive case like hey people are going to be slimmer so what do startups do with that so telehealth i think is the future uh you remember during covid uh we were allowed to do our health care it kind of just sped that up we talked about the acceleration during covid we were all locked in our houses i don't know if everybody remembers this like wiping off packages of captain crunch or you know milk bottles with glasses on like in hazmat suits i'm on my front porch my wife is looking at the groceries going oh my god we're all gonna die i'm out there wiping them down with clorox wipes somehow i hit the i hit the covid lottery and was able to like the first two weeks i just ordered like an industrial size not a pallet but like literally a large case of clorox wipes and got them you remember that lottery system and so i had like plenty of clorox wipes i was giving to my friends telehealth is the big unlock here and you can go on to various telehealth sites now and get a large amount of um prescriptions and services and i think that's the big win for startups this is but one of them and so i think this is something that the next administration current administration should look at is to help telehealth policy we i believe had an emergency policy during covet and then i think they've started to pull back those restrictions of what you can deliver what you can't deliver so if you wanted to get i don't know you have adhd you want to get adderall i don't think you can get that now if you wanted to get obviously opioids you can't get that that's like way hard to get i was talking to a dentist who told me like for them to give two pills post oral surgery which i just had like they have to do like four phone calls right which for a doctor is dead four phone calls from the golf course is such a waste of time yeah and so i do think that's the big win is delivering services over zoom and that's what we're doing right here right we're delivering our service over zoom it all works perfectly and i think that's the big unlock and they're all going to have these glps and and whatever the future of these are you got to be careful though because there are rogue pharmacies and there have been rogue startups we're doing you know things that were on the margin probably not safe and so some of these compounders are making compounds in china and not testing them some of the compounding pharmacies are doing tests so they do each batch they do a test and so there's going to be a lot more regulation around this but i do think telehealth has unlimited upside for startups if you can crack the code yeah i don't know if it's a commodity or not but you know i do think these services are incredibly popular for things that are embarrassing ed drugs personal health sdbs etc so fantastic that that exists as an option for people but also i think it's cheaper we want health care even cheaper so and faster please yeah well we have an we have an ob appointment today and i know my my spouse i usually go to this but we're recording today so i'm gonna miss this one but i know she's gonna sit there for 45 minutes before she gets shown into the doctor area and then she'll wait 45 more minutes for what is about a three minute appointment to check the baby's heart rate you know like it's it's a little insane have at home a sonogram machine that they can give you it should be connected to the internet or an app and then you as papa and mama can check that anytime you want because you got anxiety it lowers your anxiety and then you send it to your doctor and what we what this was going to require is really taking the hipaa requirements and i've asked my doctors and everything can i just waive hipaa like you can just email and text me my shit and i can just get my stuff and they're like no we're not allowed to do that i'm like yeah let me sign some sort of a waiver that i want hip of light that everything doesn't because these doctors are so scared that you're they're going to send you your blood report or your whatever and it's going to get and they're or they're going to get sued and they're going to get sued because somebody intercepted nobody cares nobody cares 23 and me everything's been hacked already blood tests are all going to be hacked it's all going to be hacked anyway so i mean well on that cheery cyber security note i want to make the negative case though so that's what is going to be good here for startups i'm thinking a lot about what happened to cheg are you familiar with cheg ch the bookstore yeah they sell books they do uh textbooks for yeah textbooks for college kids they ended up working a lot more into like question and answer services and tutoring help and uh they became a big deal for cheating in college and if you write that down in an article uh they will complain vociferously to you over email i learned uh but chat gpt took cheg's share price from about 113 dollars per share at the peak of COVID, mid-2021, early 2021, and crushed it to less than$3 per share.

30:37Down 92%. Yeah, because they were replaced by ChadGPT. People wanted to use ChadGPT to cheat. They use ChadGPT to cheat now. That's what happened. Their market cap has been absolutely decimated. And so I'm curious to see in the GLP-1 world, who are the losers? It's not quite the nicest thing that I've ever looked forward to figuring out, but I'm curious to learn what this messes up. Weight Watchers, for example, or certain diet programs or health gurus on instagram i don't know but it's going to have a big impact and i saw a tweet saying hey let's just put the stuff in the water and i was like that's a bit much but now i mean we do a fluoride fluoride helps why not i mean here's the thing if you want to know who this is going to really hurt i think it's going to be junk food it's going to be fast food it's gonna be junk food and so i i can tell you already we go out to dinner i order for my daughters my wife orders something and i don't order anymore i'm just like i'll have a little bit of what you're having.

31:29Or a lot of times I go to a meal now. And because I eat two meals a day, not three, and I eat smaller meals. Sometimes my friends are going to dinner. And I already had a late lunch. I'm not hungry. And I'm fasting from, you know, 3pm till whatever 12 the next day, like not like a micro fast, you know, like an 18 and whatever six, 18, six, okay, 18, like an 18 six, right. And so you saw that with fasting in a microcosm, you probably if you were in silicon valley or a major city people were doing the fasting yep and again kevin rose tim farish shout out to my guys um and so they were probably doing that fasting and you would skip a meal now you have this similar thing happening people are on ozempic you go to dinner and the check sizes are going way down and you can't drink wine on this thing i have friends who are wine drinkers and they would drink you know their whole lives were centered around you going to dinner and ordering food was a canvas for the wine yes like okay we now have a canvas we're at a steakhouse we have a canvas we're getting sushi we're at a seafood place now what can we paint on this with wine and now they're just like i'll have a glass but you can't have the third or fourth glass you get indigestion you get uh heartburn whatever it is depending on the person so i think it's going to really impact the consumption of food well if we get short alcoholics anonymous then that would be quite the quite the trade um sadly they're not publicly traded or are they worth anything just a manual just a program folks just a lot of people sitting around drinking coffee right now startups have to do more with less we all know that and founders have to be smart with how they deploy capital investors are very tuned in to being capital efficient so if you need great tech talent but you don't have the time to interview dozens and dozens and dozens of candidates you need to check out lemon.io they have thousands of on-demand developers to choose from and these devs are vetted and their experience and most of all their results oriented they're going to get you the result you're looking for they're not going to leave you hanging and guess what they charge competitive rates great developers can be incredibly hard to find we all know that and when you do find them it can be hard to integrate them into your team.

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34:21Let's move on to Adobe, you and I were both pretty, well, okay, I've got a hot take on this, I'm going to tell people the news and then let you go first. The Department of Justice and the FTC are enforcing a quote civil enforcement against Adobe and two executives. The allegation here is I'm going to quote to get the phrasing right that Adobe fails to adequately disclose to consumers that by signing up for the annual paid monthly plan, they are agreeing to a year long commitment, and then there are hefty termination fees. And Adobe makes it very hard to cancel. So essentially, Adobe has been accused of being nefarious in how it signs consumers up for its subscription product and then for being very very hard to cancel and hitting people with fees yes i've looked into this a little bit more i have some information about it adobe has shockingly enough denied the complaint but i'm curious jason first thoughts about this as a business guy yeah so um let's talk about lena khan and her approach to what she's doing in fair competition, which we want to have some rules.

35:26If we don't have rules on the field for capitalism, people start doing crazy stuff like dumping chemicals into a river because it's cheaper than processing the chemicals, right? We don't want that kind of stuff. They'll also price fix, right? Three CEOs go to a golf course, they decide this is going to be the price. Everybody will lower their prices and do all kinds of crazy pricing for their cable modems. But at the end of the day, nobody's going less than$79.99 for their lowest package. So, that kind of price fixing, not in the best interest of consumers. And so, I love when the FTC, Lina Khan, governments get involved in tactical things that are bad for consumers and bad for competition.

36:06i am not a fan of future competition and trying to be like the precogs in minority report and predict who's going to commit crime in the future and lower competition future because as we can see it seemed like google was in it was insurmountable that google would ever be beaten intel tm you know sc whatever you know like all these firms seemed aol that they were yahoo they were absolutely never going to be, you know, taken on and disrupted. And they have been. And so it does take 20 years, but you can generally stay out of it. So I like tactical, I like looking at Apple and saying, you need to allow people to install whatever software they want on their iPhones, because they bought their iPhone.

36:53It's their iPhone, you don't get to pick what software they put on, you could say, if you put unverified software on here, we're going to remove your warranty. You can't go to the genius bar. But just give me a switch. And I've said this for a decade. Give me a switch Steve Jobs, I told him in an open letter that lets me go into experimental mode and sideload ever on my phone. So I like the tactical, this is tactical. Therefore, I like it. There are companies like Wall Street Journal as an example, who were doing this and the Wall Street Journal. You had to call them up, you could subscribe to the Wall Street Journal in under 10 seconds in 17 different ways paypal credit card vedmo apple android you could get in wall street journal then you want to cancel and you've got to solve the rubik's queues you got to call them on the phone all this stuff it was crazy um and so i i kind of like these type of actions um and california has a renewal law that has addressed this california came out with a law years ago um to have like very clear disclosure and like acknowledgements of like and notices of renewal so when you subscribe to a sub stack uh like cautious uh optimism dot news is that the url you nailed it you get 10 points yeah thank you you send a monthly a note you're paying 10 bucks a month yeah if you want if you want to change it click here that's what we all want so stop hiding to stop stop doing i think they call these dark patterns in our industry and these dark patterns by the way are from the cfo they're from the product managers this is a very deliberate strategy to make it so hard to unsubscribe and to say the second you subscribe on january 1st you can't cancel it and we won't pro-rate it that should be against the law if you subscribe to something and you want to get out there should be like some max number of days or something and so I like this.

38:51What do you think? Well, I like it too. I have a very similar perspective on this. I also love tactical things. Last time we talked about AI regulation, you and I were both being a little bit worried about the scope of essentially pre-regulation. Back to your point about that. So this sits very well with me. I went ahead and went to Adobe and tried to sign up with the process as it is right now. And I am a savvy online consumer. I was going into the Adobe website looking for this information. And what I figured out was I had to hover over certain links that were small or small little buttons to learn that the subscription, which is listed as a dollar per month number was actually an annual plan.

39:35And that I had to find really the small print to figure out that if I cancel it, I would get charged a fee didn't tell me what it was. If you are an average person, you are not going to be hunting for possible ways you're being screwed over. So to me, this is pretty clearly a good bit of enforcement action and i think that everyone who offers a subscription service should make it easy as easy to cancel as it is to sign up the times got in trouble for this publicly um amazon prime service is being dinged by the fgc for this i i to me if you're gonna have a big door in you gotta have a big door out and i it's being pro-consumer makes a sound to your point virtue signaling but like the consumer does matter and i think having these rules makes for a better marketplace and fair competition because if you can leave adobe you can go to an adobe competitor if you can go to a competitor there's more competition and more competition is more good now the irony jason is that adobe shares were up 1.3 today so the market is is is that just the presumption that this is going to be a speeding ticket of a fine okay it's a speeding ticket yeah they'll settle this um and you know this is the uh law um this was assembly bill number 390 that counted that uh i think uh gavin newsom uh the governor of california kind of worked on and this bill just made it like very black and white like um this is like just such a simple thing here um i'm gonna make it a little bit bigger so you read it a business that makes an automatic renewal offer or continuous service offer shall provide a toll-free phone number electronic email address a postal address if the seller directly bills its consumers or it shall provide other cost effective timely and easy to use mechanism for cancellation that shall be described in the acknowledgement specified in paragraph 3 of such a run uh and so this was what we were all looking for and i went crazy on the wall street journal one time because i went to call them i'm like how come i can't i can sign up online let me just ask a moment how come i can sign up online but i can't cancel online and she said to me um well that's because we you know for your security i'm like well that's the opposite of logic canceling saves me money yes buying a subscription costs me money so if you were trying to protect me which one would you be protecting me from taking my money or stopping taking my money and she's like that's a fair point i don't know i don't make the rules i'm sorry sir i work in a telecenter i was like fair enough yeah now i turned into the karen like asking to talk to the manager i'm like what am i doing here i i give this poor lady a break so i never never I never shout at the person who doesn't make the decisions.

42:18I never shout at anybody. Also a good rule. Also a good rule. But this is why I really do think that the old riff that CEOs should do at least one day a year on their customer support channels just to be there. Because I think you can get insulated or like almost separated away from the pain of the consumer, which is your customer. And then your CFO can tell you, well, it's plus 3 % growth. So, okay. but if you go listen to jason tell you that you're screwing him over it might change your view a little bit you know it's this is uh the kind of action i'd like to see lena khan take more of you know if somebody's doing something around privacy you know just fugazi billing you know that's the kind of stuff where or you know blocking competition i love the fact that like i messages we talked about this i think last week they're starting to open up a little bit and stop the green bubble problem and maybe allowing tap back to not do stupid things like this person did a thumbs up and write that out in text.

43:18Interoperability, that seems like a noble fight. The right to repair, that seems like a good tactical thing to allow people to do. I love this framework PC. I don't know if you know about the framework. My brother-in-law is a huge fan and so I've gotten to play around with them. Fantastic. It's a modular piece, a laptop. You can essentially swap out the components yourself willy-nilly i had the founder on and you know i just think like if this thing would run mac os this is what i would be using yeah um and because you know why can't i just here's a picture of it i had the founder on you can go to frame.work and as you can see is you can take out the motherboard the keyboard you want a clacky keyboard i don't know your wife likes a regular quiet one you decide to give her your laptop whatever you're switching and just change the keyboard swap it out um you you get these like little chicklets um these little standard boxes that um you can swap out one of them could be um a um expansion card so these expansion cards i don't know if you remember pcmcia was that what it was called the cards you would slide into your laptop pcmc i'm pulling that up uh pc cards yes pc cards you would slide them into your laptop one would be for a modem, one might be a storage.

44:34Anyway, they basically brought back this concept. So here's a one terabyte expansion card,$125. It's amazing. What would that cost you at Apple? I think it would cost you five times that. Maybe a zero or five times that. Oh, you want a second display port? You want an HDMI? $19. You're making my wallet tremble at the fact that I don't need any more computers because I had too many. But I kind of want, oh, they come in different colors? yes you want to hey you want to you're into the next you want orange and blue here's your usbc orange nine dollars add a usbc to your laptop nine dollars and you know you can swap these out so you're going on a business trip let's say you're going to be doing a lot of photography you need extra storage now you put in your you know card reader and your storage you're ready to go you want to have like a bunch of movies with you yeah you have these like little cards in your little gear bag fantastic and this is the type of stuff where i think we can put pressure on companies like they did to get usbc on the iphone 15 that i give europe a lot of credit for doing this this is the perfect example i believe yes set of why are we buying whitening cables like what are we doing here like this is terrible for the environment and when usbcs became uh the standard now and i upgraded my wife's own the first thing she said what do we do with all the lightning cables i'm like put them all in a box we're going to donate them they're going to eventually wind up in a landfill yes whereas had they just been usbc from the beginning we'd be using them for all time there would be a use for them and you gotta think environment you gotta think consumer competition interoperability um and so i just love this is the type of action i like Yeah.

46:19A couple of small notes before we move on. If you're thinking, well, there's a California rule, I'll just incorporate in Virginia, and then I'll be a real jerk to all my customers. You can't. Because of the Restore Online Shopper Confidence Act, or ROSCA, from 2010. And that is the law that Adobe has tripped up here at the federal level, though. Jason, I think, makes the point that they could be also hit with state law if that happened. And Jason mentioned an idea earlier that when people get together on the golf course, they price fix. He is paraphrasing a quote from Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.

46:48which I'll just share because why not? What's called book talk? People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion. But the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public or in some contrivance to raise prices. AKA, if you get together, everyone wants to make more money. And that's just the way business works. And that's why we need rules. And the question is just where to put them. But we can put all that aside because now time for my favorite part of Twist, which is the Twist 500. And Jason, I have, we got a lot to do here today. quick reminder to everybody on the monday show we added built which is a fintech that offers rewards for rent payments and is taking wells farco to the cleaners as part of that deal we added them because they're worth three billion dollars and they're highly notable so they made the list and then we also added sakana which is a japanese ai company that focuses on building japanese language models and sorry japanese language large language models and also cheaper LLM training.

47:42We have a number of new names, but I want to start with yours, Jason. Color hit the list because of their new deal with OpenAI. Yeah, so Color is an interesting biotech company. And, you know, this is something we all know is coming, which is when you have a narrow data set, proteins, DNA, cancer, whatever it is, and these are large data sets, but so they're basically going to be uh using ai to figure out and help doctors figure out what's going on with your tests this is um going to be awesome for early stage cancer and that kind of stuff so i do think color is worth keeping an eye on it's not the color photo sharing app that raised 40 million 15 20 years ago where no it wasn't that long there's no way wasn't it 15 years ago please tell me it's not i thought that was like six years ago hold on uh color it's quite quaint right now for people who don't know the history there was this uh apple executive who left to do color.com in the photo sharing era after flicker had been sold and photos becoming the thing instagram was becoming a thing and it was a super hyped and they had raised 41 million dollars my friend peter fan was involved in it um and it you know it wound up shutting down um in 2012 apple acquired some of the assets i think for their photo sharing business um but it was shocking to people that a startup had raised pre-launch 41 million dollars and i talked to the folks i think at sequoia and other places they said listen we think it's such a big opportunity we took the series a and the series b we decided to give them both at once they bought this incredible domain name color.com which eventually wound up going to this company so um i do think it's worth us putting this one on there and to watch it i'm very interested in the intersection of ai and biotech and health um not as an investor myself because we're early stage investors i think it's kind of hard to play in that role yeah definitely yeah but i do think it's interesting and so that was one i wanted to add to the list i'm pissed off that it was 11 years ago that's that's too many years past you remember covering it yes i remember the whole i've been around i'm starting to get to the point now when i've been around for a while and that's both amazing because every year you get older you get less stupid and i it's been such a blessing to not be 20 22 anymore but at the same time sometimes i look back at stretches of time and i'm like there's no way that's oh it is okay fair enough yeah well wait till you start like i mean imagine you were talking about dial-up modems in the 80s sometimes i'll go back that far and i'm like oh man i'm literally talking about dos and not windows yeah my dad loves to break out things like we didn't have laptops in my day we had luggables and i'm like what's that and he's like well it's a laptop the size of a briefcase and i'm like what's a briefcase and then he walks out of the room and yeah um yeah the original uh luggable um was a compact made one and when my dad bought his restaurant they had one in the in the um he had bought a bar in brooklyn and they had had one in the basement it wasn't functioning but it was a very famous compact one and this is what it looked like i'm going to show you because it's really incredible where we've gotten to and it really shows the power of compounding oh boy so this is 1983 i remember this one because i had a pc jr at this time and uh the way this worked is you had this giant box which literally was like a small piece of luggage with a crt and it two floppy dish drives um and a big clunky keyboard like you like the clack keyboards yes sir what was interesting about this that keyboard would fold into the top of the luggage and then you would have a handle and you would carry it and it probably weighed i don't know i'm gonna guess 15 20 pounds oh yeah 20 here it is 28 pounds yeah wow which was truly uh pretty amazing but the idea that you could take a computer from one location to another where there was no computer right was crazy and then laptops came out and then you could connect by vpn and you could i remember like in the late 80s early 90s we were on call um as local area network um um and pc support specialists when you were on call they gave you a compact laptop and they gave you a mobile phone that costs$3 a minute.

52:12And you would have people call you and you got paid like a 12 hour shift or something, even if nobody called. You just got paid a 12 hour shift to be on call for the weekend. And people would call at any hour of the day that their server was down and you had to spring to action. And so I love that. It was like my favorite thing to do. Not because I got paid the 12 hours for doing nothing most weekends, but because I got the laptop for the weekend. I mean, that was back when gadgets were rare and expensive. I mean, I have related stories about early computer technology that I hold very dear, but I'm glad that Luggables haven't lost all of their memory yet.

52:46Now, Color, for people who don't know,$482 million raised thus far according to Crunchbase. Last raised$100 million at a$4.6 billion post-money valuation. We have a chart on the screen if you're on video. So this is a highly valuable company. And the OpenAI partnership is all about a co-pilot that will bring, I'm going to try my best here, oncology-specific information to general practice doctors so that way they can be better at preventative medicine, Jason. Okay. So somehow they're going to interpret your results of different tests and then know, I'm guessing here, that you are possibly, you know, at risk of breast cancer, colon cancer, prostate cancer, whatever it happens to be.

53:29and i just took um a blood test last year because i asked my doctor like what's the latest just tell me everything and prunovo was one thing and we had talked about that on the all in podcast and i went and got a prunovo scan um and i'm going to do that every two years where they scan your entire body daniel ek from um spotify invested in a company that does a 3d body scan that's not as good as prunovo it doesn't do as deep but it does get you some information it's much cheaper and then i heard about this blood test you can take and it's just a blood test um i'll remember the i'm looking at it right now blood test for cancer screening called um and this blood test just will tell you if you um gal eri g-a-l-l-e-r-i galeri is i guess the brand name and it just tests for a large number of cancers 50 different types and you do this blood test it's a simple kit i think it costs a thousand dollars and i was like you know what my mom had breast cancer my dad has prostate cancer they're both survivors and screw it i'll just get this galleri test yeah i'll do it uh 88 accuracy and so if it does show you that you have a cancer it's not bulletproof then you go in for further testing right yeah so i think this there's going to be a lot of this stuff happening and eventually um you know back to the telehealth conversation man why can't this be done in you know imagine there was like i don't know where do people where people stuck for a couple of hours um dmv okay oil change um airport driving anywhere in providence dude airport's a great place i have nothing to do in the airport so now imagine that galera has a booth in the airport and they just say hey you're in the airport you're late you got to lay over two hours here's cancer screening 300 bucks come in get a blood test and by the time you land we'll send you a result that's what we need to do with health care put a doctor with glps you know if i'm nova nordisk i put a booth nova nordisk explain all these glp ones to uh individuals at the airport wherever Make healthcare easy.

55:45Make it easy, not hard. Your poor wife's going to spend three, four hours of her day for what should take three minutes. This is the inefficiency that we need to change. We have to change the entire approach. It should be convenient like coffee is convenient. Let's make healthcare like coffee. You want to get a cup of coffee? Go do it to your specification. You order it in an app. You get it for four bucks, three bucks, six bucks, depending on what you want. Bing. In and out. Nobody gets hurt. I love it. I watch my spouse, who is a physician for context, do paperwork. Well, it's actually not paperwork.

56:18It's just data entry and software. And she's expensive, man. Her time is expensive. And she's doing the most grunty work that is such a waste of time. And you know what those minutes are? Minutes that she doesn't have to spend with her kids. To be kids. And so to me, it's just time. Or other patients having more meaningful interactions. Oh, I mean, after work, when she's at home. At home, right. When she's catching up on all the stuff that she didn't finish. it's just we should take entire categories of this productize them and have competitions remember we used to have competitions to i'm starting to sound like trump remember we had great competitions they were the amelia airheart who can fly circumvent the globe beautiful okay we're going to make a circumvent the globe who can make cheapest blood test under a hundred dollars blood test at an airport it's actually not a bad trump impression but i've managed to not hear his voiced now for well up until now i think i'm just gonna get ready for another get ready for another four to 12 years i'd be somewhere in that somewhere in that zone i think he's gonna i didn't think biden was gonna win the first time pleasantly surprised not gonna lie i'll maybe jason there's another surprise waiting for me again i'm telling you i'm sticking with my theory i've said on all in for four weeks running hot swap is coming the hot swap is coming i know my guy sacks doesn't like me to say it because my god trump's gonna run away with this as it looks right now a hot swap is the own democrats only chance of winning that's my belief uh one man's belief yeah no i i mean i i see the logic behind it um i'm trying to get it okay okay yeah oh yeah no let's let's thank you for grabbing us by the collar employees back in i just want to i just want to mention you know i know you're so into s1s and stuff like that i did see neighbor very cool company in um which is kind of the google of korea i got to meet with them when i was doing mahalo back in the day because i had seen their search engine and i saw in their search engine they included images and books in the search results and i was like whoa and that's where i came up with the concept of comprehensive search which is kind of what perplexity looks like today when i did mahalo failed startup i did um but they had this product called webtoon and it's incredibly popular.

58:29And it does have some revenue. And I see that it's next up maybe in tech IPOs. It's the next tech IPO that I think we care about. And you're kind of underselling it ever so slightly because its revenue grew 18 % from 2022 2023 from 1.08 billion to 1.28 billion. So it's in the, you know, large revenue bracket. And it does, it does recently reached profitability. I took a look at the company a little bit. The only thing that's not great is that its usership has stopped growing. And it does have a bit of an ARPU problem across the world in which different countries are worth different amounts of money.

59:09And so it needs to grow in most highly valued markets, which I believe are South Korea, the US and Europe, maybe. But it's a really cool company. I really recommend everyone reads the S1. We are putting it on the Twist 500 for about nine days because the IPO is supposed to land on the 27th. perfect there's no minimum time requirement so we're throwing it on there i mean look at this they they've paid out 2.8 billion to creators they've got 1.3 million in revenue they basically have um you know people reading comics there and you can post your own comics there so this is kind of like youtube where there's a creative version of it and you know you can sell your comics and you know these comics then become big ip sometimes i don't know if they've had an example of ip spinning out into a movie series or you know a comic book series or whatever but it's um you know they they do own wattpad as well and so i think they acquired wattpad at some point wattpad for people don't know is where people write fan fiction and so wattpad um has um a big history of um authors um who get published based on starting there so the way Wattpad works is it's really interesting you kind of write your first chapter and it grows and then you get feedback and some five people read your first chapter then you write your next one you get 10 people and so it takes out the arduousness of doing a full book over two years and then waiting get feedback and it kind of makes it more fun right just like having I guess a youtube channel um most famously 50 shades of gray was originally twilight fanfic i knew that it was twilight fanfic i did not know are you saying that it was on a webtoon back in the day it was on wattpad yeah and then the martian okay i remember andy weir who i had on the program he lived in san jose at the time and so i went to his house and we did an interview it was a lot of fun andy weir who wrote the mart yeah the martian which i loved um and his follow-up was really good too um he started as a wattpad and he was working at one of the big tech companies was fuel packet or whatever and then all of a sudden he starts having his his book made tens of millions of dollars and you know i'm sure he got paid a million dollars for the rights to the movie or something and so you know this is like a really cool meritocracy i think it's one of the things we always thought would happen when we first saw the web we thought hey this takes out gatekeepers yes and then talent will rise and that's exactly what's happened yes uh the wattpad point's interesting so i recall that neighbor bought wattpad and then webtoon bought it from neighbor i presume that was some fancy corporate accounting there but now it's part of the webtoon brand um and if you think about their market opportunity the company does put a lot of stock in ip adaptations as it calls them it says that it thinks its market opportunity is 130 billion in paid content 680 billion in advertising and then 900 billion in ip adaptations those numbers are whatever but they show the scale of their ambition which i quite like and on the wattpad point there's another service called royal road which is big in the progression fantasy subgenre and it's exactly what you say people post story they post a chapter a week or a day and they kind of build their audience that way i'm writing a novel right now and i am not well it's not very good but it's it's making progress there's no way in hell jason i'm gonna go to a legacy publisher demand that they change my book pay me four dollars and make me wait three years i'm just gonna put it on royal road or maybe wampat so yeah i'm totally you should do it by chapter i would highly encourage you that and then i'll read it and we can talk about it here on the pod it'd be like a nice segment to read your book alex's trash fantasy book yeah oh it's a fantasy book okay i thought it was about working with a narcissistic angel investor who has his own podcast no i've already worked for aol that was my attempt at deflection that i realized i brought it back to you by accident it's all good you're actually not that big of a narcissist actually um i just play one on the internet no i mean when you be here here's what i learned if you become successful you know like you have to just change your approach a little bit because the the follower count right or the micro fame or people asking for selfies at an airport or whatever that can kind of make you seem like a narcissist and you just have to learn how to combat that um framing that gets imposed upon you and so the way i do that is i tell everybody if you see me at an airport please say hi and tell me your favorite episode and give me a high five just say high five jake allen and i'll give you a high five and if you want a selfie please ask me i'm more than happy to take a selfie people come up to me i say if you want to take a selfie let's do it uh let's do it for the gram uh and i say just please tag me so i get more followers so i kind of jujitsu it a little bit like i yeah oh i would love for you to take a selfie because then i get more followers so you know i i candidly could take or leave taking selfies but yeah it seems to be what the young kids like to do now they don't want an autograph they don't want your email they don't want a meeting they literally just want the selfie for the gram they just want the social clock i've been recognized a couple times in my driveway yeah oh okay ah ah tech crunch and i'm like i'm like i'm like taking out the trash wearing like one sock and like half a tank top and looking like, you know, it's a bit much.