Open source is going to win it all: Harvey proves it | E2328

24:06This was the July 4th All In, as you can tell from your casual, laid-back Honolulu vibes in the cliff here. Oh, yeah. That's when I had my beard, and everybody loved this when I was in Hawaii. I got to say, I think this is a good look. I'm not just trying to butter you up. I think this is – I like this. This is a good J. Cal. I think you should go with this one for a while. What do I have? Like a Tom Selleck type situation in Hawaii? Yeah, it's a little bit. It's a little Magnum PI. Okay, Magnum PI. To the platform. There is no free pizza. There's no free beer. When somebody like Sam Altman comes to you and says, here's some free tokens, your alarm should go up.

24:35Zuckerberg did the same thing. He said, hey, I'm going to give people a bunch of access. I'm going to give them money. Come to the Facebook platform. Nobody who went to bed with Microsoft in the 80s, Facebook in the 2000s, or Sam Altman now in the 2020s, did not wake up with their throat slit. This is a message to founders. If you partner with any of these people, they will slit your throat and take your business wholesale. There is nothing to discuss here. Don't trust them. Use your own models. Yeah, we'll link to it. You guys can go check it out. There's lots more. These are just the two that we could dig up 10 minutes before the show.

25:00This is the system I want to build next is like, I need to have an archive of twist and archive of all in with all of my opinions. And then I want our agent to look at how right or wrong I was and give me two lists. Here's where you blew it. Here's your Professor Galloway moments. This is your Professor Galloway. You've got completely - Your Matt Money Jim Kramer moments, yeah. This is my reverse Kramer, my Professor Cole takes. You totally blew it. And then here's your best J. Cal. Like the on fire. Nostraconis. A Nostraconis index. Yeah. And a Professor Galloway index. Give me those two. I do, for this week in AI, I do have a full, like a Claude skill that we've trained on every episode.

25:43And I can just go in and ask it anything. And it's brilliant. It is a little time consuming. But I want the bot to go through and say, make a summary of Jason's opinions, his hot takes from each episode, and then have an index just of the takes, not the full transcript. So then once you have the takes, then take the takes. How many times he said it? How did his take change over time? Rate the takes. It's a take rater. Rate the take. Then I want you to build, how did it change over time? So did my opinion on Apple, Facebook, whatever, change over time? What were the key moments? Was I hypocritical?

26:24Then, based on the last six months of news or three months of news of what actually happened with Apple's product, did they ever launch a new iPhone? Remember, I was very critical of Tim Cook for a long period of time. Stock went up. He bought back all the stock, bought back half the equity in the company, I understand, like$100 billion, $200 billion in buybacks. They never really came out with a killer product post the Steve Jobs roadmap. So, you know, right about that, no product ever emerged. Wrong about the stock price because it went. So I need that. So for my team, if you can do that, that would be amazing.

26:58And we're working on this kind of stuff. So anyway, what you're seeing with the Harvey thing, I said this two years ago. If you can find the two-year clip where I said, when I was in Tahoe skiing, and I think you pulled it for a previous all-in. And I said two years ago, there's a chance that open source is going to win the AI risk. I said it two effing years ago. I think what we learned in 2023 was that the language models are starting to hit parity very quickly and that the real value is going to be in, and it may even become commodities and open source may win the day. So then I think the winner is folks who have the training data.

27:38Give myself a pat on the back that you heard it live. That clip was like, I was shocked by that. I was like, really? Like in the age of chat GPT 3.5, 2.5, I said on the pod, filibuster here a bit, I said on the pod, open source is going to win the day. And I think we talked about that four weeks ago on All In or five weeks ago. That was like a very interesting moment because that's what's happened now. The evidence. So back to my like Jason's takes and just holding me accountable to my takes. and my professor ice cold takes prof g and macy's is going to beat amazon and uber and tesla and robin hood are going to zero and buy foreign stocks not u.s stocks like all those terrible takes i need to know when i had a bad take and when i had a great take like a nostraconist level take that was a nostraconist moment for me um and anyway we'll we'll find it for the vod folks i I don't know if I can pull it up here live.

28:37So I had mentioned when I talked to Lovable and Eleven Labs, they're huge, huge customers of the Frontier Labs. Frontier Labs can get competitive with them, just like Figma and Design, Cursor and Claude Code, Figma and Claude Design. They are, I kind of asked them on those interviews when I was in Paris in July, hey, are you making your own models? Are you doing that kind of stuff? And they're like, yeah, you know, we're looking at that. Here it is. Harvey, pull up the story. Harvey is making their own model. They forked an open source model. They're doing their own training. And they are working on behalf of their clients.

29:15This is the story. Over the past six months, Harvey's research agenda has focused on two goals. One, building frontier legal intelligence using open weight models. And two, creating systems to allow law firms to build their own specialized models and their own intelligence. Today, we're sharing an update on that research effort, including initial results from our first post-train model, which we're calling Harvey Tennant. Harvey Tennant is a Kimmy K3 base that we post-train together with Fireworks Research for long-horizon legal work. In addition, it incorporates harness improvements to make training and test execution more effective.

29:51Our initial work shows promising results for both performance and cost efficiency. I'm here with Keith Pierce, the founder of Lightfield. They are an AI native CRM that builds and updates itself in real time from your email, your calendar, your Slack, your meeting notes, all those things that you keep misplacing. Welcome to the program, Keith. Great to be here. Let's talk about Lightfield, your CRM. That is AI first. What can I do with it now that I've got it installed, now that it's pulled in all my data? What is it going to do for me? Because no CRM system ever had AI built in it. It's true.

30:23So the first thing we'll do is handle all of your busy work. You know, all of the emails you promised customers, all of the things that you were supposed to get to, it'll draft all of your follow-ups, send them on your behalf. Second, it's going to go and look at your happiest companies, your happiest customers. Learn from your happiest customers through product usage, feedback, sentiment, and generate you lists of new customers. It'll find contacts for you, too. And then third, it'll draft communication for you to send to those folks over email, LinkedIn, phone, whatever it is. So it'll sort of keep proactively building out your pipeline.

30:59And then last, I would say, maybe the most non-CRM thing, it'll keep your entire company informed and what your customers want, need, and are willing to buy. So you'll have tighter alignment across product and engineering. So lightfield.app is going to tell me what I'm doing right. It's going to tell me which customers I've forgotten about. And then everybody on the team doesn't have to be a slave to the CRM filling in all these fields. Go ahead and check out lightfield.app. Okay, so now you have to ask yourself, who were the original backers? Who? Oh, I've looked this up. The original backers of Harvey and who were their original frontier model providers?

31:43Who were Harvey's original backers? I'm looking at this on Harmonic.ai. Thanks to our friends at Harmonic.ai for allowing me to so quickly pull that up. A$200 million investment. Oh, that's March. Yeah, March 25th, 2026. $200 million at$11 billion valuation co-led by GIC and Sequoia Capital with A16Z, KOTU, Conviction. Go backwards. Elad Gill, Evacic, and Klein Perkins. Oh, okay. Who are there? Early rounds is where we want to go to. See, this is what Harmonix is going to help us with. Yes. Who were their earliest backers? Original Capital and Original Models both ran through this company. OpenAI was the day one believer.

32:31They led the$5 million seed round and also gave the founders early access to GPT-4, which was a massive head start in building legal-specific fine-tuning before anyone else had the model. There you go, Jason. Thank you, Harmonic. Yes. Thank you, Harmonic AI. There you go. $5 million. First investment. Yes. One of the OpenAI startup funds first for investments. Yeah, they led the seed round. They led the seed round. Now, here we are. It was the OpenAI startup fund. Other early backers included Jeff Dean, head of Google AI, by the way. Okay, now let's just pause here, put the two stories together.

33:11Sarah Fryer, CFO of OpenAI, says, hey, we hear you loud and clear. Harvey's saying, hey, by the way, just want to let everybody know, Six months ago, we started using these open source models. We started building our own. And we're building our own for our clients so that our clients don't share the intelligence. So if you're a litigation firm A and you're a top competitor, litigation firm B, so Acme litigators and Delta litigators are both using Harvey, let's say. Harvey now is like, not only do we not trust OpenAI with this, we need to have our own model. We need to build a fortress. We're going to, and we'll have our castle.

33:54It's going to have a big wall run. We're going to build two keeps. One keep for Acme litigators, one keep for Delta litigators. So y 'all are going to get your own litigation data, all your internal memos, all your emails, all of your Zoom calls about this. We'll feed your local model for you, but it's not going to make it to our castle. You're in your own keep. Defend your keep. And the two keeps will not share data. This is what's going to happen to the frontier models. When they go public, you're going to have this headwind of which of these customers Harvey was probably spending, if I had to guess, I'm going to say$10 million a month with OpenAI.

34:32Wow. I would say Lovable or Eleven Labs or Cursor. Those level of companies also probably were spending$10 or$20 or$30 million a month with the OpenAIs and Anthropics of the world. Those customers, let me be clear, are going to move their spend. 99 % of their spend is coming off the Frontier models. And any spend they do have with the Frontier models is likely, even if it's like 5 % of their spend, to be them doing distillation. It's going to be them doing distillation. In other words, they're going to be spending$5 million a year or$1 million a month in order to pull information out of the Frontier models.

35:14Open source is going to win. it all. Open source is going to win it all. I'm saying it now definitively. Two and a half years ago, three years ago, I said, you know, open source could win it. Now I'm telling you, open source is going to win it all. What do I mean by win it all? The majority of tokens, the overwhelming majority of tokens in corporate America will not be on the frontier models. It will be inside those enterprises. Why? They don't want to give their intelligence to somebody who wants to build the final company. As Gavin Baker discussed two weeks ago on All In. Right. If Anthropics is going to pop off at cocktail parties or internally telling people, and I believe it's true, they say it's not true, I believe Gavin.

36:03It sounds like something they would say. To me, it sounds like something I can imagine them saying. It's like, well, if we're being honest, there's a good chance we're going to be the last private company on Earth. Like, I believe it. I believe it. Sure. Why wouldn't there be? I mean, there was a final company in WALL-E. It's a great science fiction premise. That one company. Yeah, buy and grow. I don't remember what it's called. Yeah, buy and grow, whatever. It's like the Walmartification of everything. Thank you to Jacob for that. We got a guest. I want to bring up our first guest. He is the co-founder and CEO of the AI-powered free.

36:36Speaking of free, things that are free. The free AI-powered voice dictation app, Willow. Please welcome Alan Guo. Thanks for joining us, Alan. Okay. We made Alan wait, but Alan is here now. Welcome to the program, Alan. This is a Whisper competitor. Free is the model. It's free to use. Well, then how do you make money? Yeah. I'm happy to tell you more, Jason. First of all, I'm excited to be on this podcast because I heard that you're a big voice user. Yes. And I heard that you have a pedal. I have a pedal. I'm addicted to Whisper Flow. I use Whisper Flow constantly. So that's your competitor. That's where you got to displace now.

37:16Let's see what you can do here, Alan. In this period of time, I'm going to have to convince you to use Willow. Well, I mean, the other thing that I will say, Lon, I don't know if you noticed this. My Grammarly and my Notion are all trying to get in on the dictation game. So they also have dictation offerings and they're continuing to try to intercept this very important function. So, Alan, are you going to demo the product here for us and tell us your innovation? Yeah, of course. All right. Demo or demo. Here we go. So as a quick intro on what Willow is, we're a voice dictation product. We're a voice first interface for modern work.

37:57Similar to Whisper, we have a dictation product. You can speak, you can press a hotkey, it works, you can type anywhere. That's really, really magical. That's been really catching people's eyes, especially high communication teams, is a product called Scribe. And Scribe is a step above dictation. You can think of it like a writing assistant. You tell it what you want to say, and then Willow writes it for you using your style and context. So I'm going to share my screen here. Okay. Here's a demo. Someone said, you know, my dictation quality has gone down this week for some reason. and any idea what's happening with Willow.

38:31Okay. And this is a Gmail and you're responding. This could be like, you know, a customer support request. Got it. With the patient, as you know, you can press a hot key and you can say, hey, Sarah, this is a test best Alan. And you can see you kind of dictate that. Oh, it is. Very snappy. You know, less than 250 milliseconds, the most accurate dictation tool. But Scribe, which is what I really want to show you, I don't even have to word for word dictate. I can just say, respond to her with our common troubleshooting tips. So this is like a snippet. Oh, wow. Look at that. Coming from the corporate side of the snippet collection.

39:10Yeah. Yes. And I press enter and it magically appears. And what I can also do is, you know, let's say that didn't solve a problem. I could just highlight that again and say, can you also add my calendar link just in case those following tips didn't work for her? so we can talk about it live. And there you go. And press enter there. And it even knows my calendar link. Very nice. Very nice. Well done. The power of Scribe here is that it has context, personalization, understanding. And this is something we've deployed across enterprises, airlines, customer support teams, sales teams. We're Scribe as an understanding of your knowledge base, of your context.

39:49And so teams right now are no longer even typing. They're not even dictating. They're just saying, respond to this, respond to that. Tell them X, Y, Z, and boom, it's there for you. Who manages the canonical level of truth? Because I have been having this problem for a long time. I used to use like a text expander, like open source tool. It was like shareware. And then I put it on group. It was, remember when I had this line, it was like$10 a person in the company. Absolutely, yes. So I was spending$120, and I would write, hey, founders, thank you for applying to the Launch Accelerator. You didn't make the cut, but I want to make sure you understand.

40:26You can send us your updates to updatesatlaunch.co. We want to encourage you to do this. You can watch This Week in Startups. Here's some codes for free credits from some of our partners. Yeah, I had a whole thing, but I wanted consistency. Then I told Raul, a superhuman, please build snippets into the product. He eventually did. And then I said, I need it to be team player because I don't want mixed messages. So the challenge with what you're doing, I think, is if you have 10 people working in sales, and you want them all giving people the same language here, right? So how do you manage which one is the canonical perfect version?

41:05Yes. So with customer support teams, they commonly have a number of documents that are the source of truth that we will understand for them. And then we also have another aspect of this, which is auto learning. Over time, we'll have picks up facts about yourself that you can write and then it learns and so it can rewrite it. I also have a perfect example for you, Jason. Yes. Perfect. It matches with what you just said that you have to use a snippet for responding with who you are. This person just happened to say, yes, heard you might be joining this week in startups. Can you tell me a little bit more about this guy called Jason?

41:37Oh boy. What I'm going to do here is I'm going to say, yeah, that's great. You heard that. Can you, can you tell John more about who Jason is? Here we go. Yep. Here we go. Wikipedia page written by all my haters and jaders. Maybe it's just Wikipedia. You don't know. He's a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, angel investor, podcaster, best known as a third investor in Uber. Third or fourth. Previously worked at Weblog, sold it for $25 to$30 million. That's actually a true number. Later back, Robin to come, Dumbtack, and Trello. True numbers. Today, he runs LaunchOS This Week in Startup. Perfect. This is great.

42:14Good job. You put a level of interpretation and you still have to hit the send button. great job, great product. And so free to use, but then if you want to do multiplayer mode, that's when you turn on pricing, I guess? Yes. So what we've realized is that dictation is a commoditizing market. Okay. Always a difficult place to be as a founder. There's no doubt in my mind that within two, three years, Apple is going to get 70, 80 % as good as dictation tools like Willow Voigt's and other ones, AI dictation tools. And the reason is because it's going to be better built into your device, but it's only going to be 70-80 % as good because there's a level that we do that's more pro.

42:57We have auto-learning, we have fine-tuned models that are smarter, that do corrections, that do personalization. So we're always going to be a bit better, but when it's 70-80 % as good, a lot of people might not pay for this. And so rather than getting eaten by this commoditization, we want to commoditize it first. We made speech or text that's faster than Whisperflow, more accurate than Whisperflow and other dictation tools. And we actually launched a comparison video, one showing Willow, our free version, and one showing other dictation products. And Whisper was better at formatting, better at correction, faster, more accurate than all those other ones.

43:36And our paid product is Scribe. So Scribe, again, is like a writing assistant writes for you, as well as team plans, enterprise as planned, as they're saying. Well, this is the playbook, Alan. Is this your first startup? It is. Yeah. So you learned one of the most important lessons. Number one, fight up. You want to fight with a competitor who's bigger and established. And two, your margin is my opportunity. So, you know, Whisper's charging for this. We'll make it free and we'll charge for something else, et cetera, et cetera. Great job. Good luck with it. And I will give it a try. And I will find out with my pedal.

44:12If you are better than Whisper, and I'll let you know, if you can displace Whisper, that's going to be hard. I'm kind of addicted. You're a big Whisper user, heavy Whisper user. Heavy Whisper. All right. Thanks, Alan. Where can people find out more? It's willowvoice.com. Am I correct? Yes. Willowvoice.com is where they can try it out for free. All right. Well done, Alan. Congratulations on your success here. Again, this is the best thing possible for the ecosystem, Lon. And for entrepreneurs, there's two tactical, practical things I'm going to tell you right now. Number one, you fight up. So if you are apple, you're not talking about whisper flow.

44:46If you're whisper flow, you're not talking about willow voice. But you can fight up, right? You can fight up. So if you're willow, you want to fight with whisper. If you're whisper, you want to fight with apple, right? Fight up. And then if you're the bigger fish, never engage going down. Yeah. Because you're taking the bait. You're taking the bait. You're feeding into it. Same rule. It's the same rule in comedy. Don't punch down. You punch up. You go for targets that are higher and better established than you. You don't make fun of people who are already lower status. Yes, a very simple concept here.

45:19And then second, your margin, my opportunity. So you just look at the roadmap. It's very simple to do. If the roadmap for dictation starts with crisp dictation, then it goes to interpretation, which is kind of what he's doing here. And you have this killer feature known as snippets. What should you do? And then you have team player mode. just make everything free so if whisper's watching this they should just say oh yeah by the way we added to our free version whatever you know snippets and text expander tools and here's like our robust one what's really interesting to me is when these are all going to be done locally and built in with like very crisp local models right now they still go to the cloud so when i use whisper man it is flawless it is tremendous when i'm at home when i'm driving in the back country and hill country in uh texas the great state of texas the great state and i'm going to the watch the knicks beat the spurs in their own arena win the nba championship and i started using whisper and i had no connectivity uh yeah you know it's like oh sending it to the cloud coming back i really think hill country there's a lot your connection isn't always perfect out there it's not always perfect in ransom well you know what i'm gonna do now is um when i finally find my roadie i'm getting a roadie to go with me on the road because i have so many road things that i do I get my roadie.

46:36I'm on a lot of the trips, but I'm not good with the heavy stuff. I mean, given where you're at with road.co slash twist. Maybe. Maybe. You never know. Sometimes. What I would like to do is I'm going to get the Starlink Mini, like, on the road one. And I'm going to, I want to get this executive van. I love the Alford, which I think I drove with you when we were in Japan. The Alford. It's, yeah. When you take an Uber in Japan, these little commuter vans that they pick. Yeah. Take a fun. Put it up, Jake. Yeah. I'll find one. They're so neat. Like, I feel like I would actually, like, drive one of these if you could.

47:12Yeah, the Toyota Alford. I mean, it is the Toyota Alford in the executive mode is like a minivan. There's Lon on his iPad Pro. Exactly. And his suit looking good. Look at how big these seats are. Unbelievable how gorgeous. It's very comfortable. You feel like you're - Ride smooth. You've got a nice sort of distance from the drive. They're in their world doing their thing. you're in the back doing your thing it's very comfortable i felt right at home in the toyota alford why don't they have these in america i literally tried to import one you can't import them um i think they're getting there uh genesis uh 90 ev uh just dropped literally this just dropped and people are losing their mind over it let me show you this so i have i was literally going to import one of these and pay like a 50 percent import tax you're not allowed to yeah But this is the Genesis GV90 that's coming out.

48:06So what this thing is going to do, it's an EV, goes 300 miles, whatever. You see the doors look interesting, right? Yes. Boom. You open the doors. You can have the captain's chairs face each other. See that? Yeah, yeah. They spin around. This is like the old G90, but this one is something slightly different. GV90. Genesis GV90 is what you're looking for. people are losing their minds over it so that's what i want to get is one of these bad boys yeah uh and then put a starlink on it and then i could just recapture you know whatever an hour a day but look at that oh wow that's nice look at that by the way this if you were to build a uh like a becker or something automotive builds these for four hundred thousand dollars literally four or five hundred thousand this is going to be like a hundred 150 you know to go crazy it was like 150 50K was on the page you were looking at.

49:02Now, this is deceiving. You have, like, the chairs facing each other. Those two chairs are the captain's chairs for the driver and the co-pilot. And this is a parked car on the beach. What I want is an extended version of these with the four chairs. Yeah. So then you could have six-seater. See, there's the steering wheel back here. Anyway, if you're parked and you want to have a conversation, I don't know who's hanging out in their car. If you're living in your van, that's perfect. No, you know, see, they just, they got it wrong in terms of like what actually is going to happen, but it's going to, it's coming next year.

49:33So there's your off duty from J-Cal. Let's do our final guest and I got to get the heck out of here. Yeah. We got one more guest. I will, I will pull them up now. Here we go. We actually, we discussed our next guest when their video went viral and we, you, you wanted to book them. So here they are. He is a Stanford computer science student and the designer of the self-driving robo-taxi golf cart. Yes. That you'll recall that all the high priests of AI and tech were riding around because they all hang out on the Stanford campus. Ethan Goodhart, thanks for being here, Ethan. All right, Ethan. What's going on?

50:08You're an undergrad. You're grad. What are you doing over there in Stanford? Yeah, technically undergrad. So I'll be a junior next year. All right. That's technically undergrad. He's a sophomore. Incredibly hard to get into Stanford. So you're either brilliant or your parents built a building or you Photoshopped yourself playing lacrosse. Which one of those three? You're just a brilliant kid. Where are you from? I can definitely confirm that it's one of those three. No building, unfortunately. No building. Okay. Narrows it down. So did your parents Photoshop and do generative AI to put you in a lacrosse video?

50:41I think the models were not there yet. Okay. So you earned your way in. Where are you from originally? I'm from Atlanta originally. Oh, all right. Well, that's good. See, I actually know people who are moving to smaller states. You want to know how crazy these parents are? And Ethan's nodding. Maybe his parents left Manhattan for Atlanta to get him into slavery. Some of these lunatic parents look at the tables, Lon, of which states, because they want to have representation from every state, which state has the least number of - Wow. And they'll literally move to Nebraska, ruin their lives for two years, three years.

51:16George has got to be doing pretty good. I feel like George is competitive. Like West Virginia, that's where you'd go. Idaho, those are your Stanford states. Yeah, I mean, that's not the reason we're in Atlanta. No, but you have heard this. Yeah, I have. This is the lunacy. Okay, so what are you, computer science, electroengineering, double? What are you doing? Yeah, pure computer science. This is my first real hardware project. Got it. So self-driving? Well, you know, a lot of my position has been 20 different companies of note are going to get there in the same 24-month period. Putting Waymo out of it, just starting this year and next year into 2028, my belief, Ethan, was 20 people figure it out.

52:01I think I'm good, like, in the same 24-month period, we'll see 20 people figure it out. And when I saw Ethan's project, it said to me, I might have underestimated it by a magnitude. It might be 2 ,000 people figure it out in the same 36 months, just to extrapolate a little bit. Tell us what you built, Ethan, how long it took to build, and just the fidelity of it versus the brittleness of it. Yeah, for sure. Probably the best project I've ever worked on in my life. First hardware project. We got the first prototype up in like two, three weeks. So we had a golf cart that could drive with some very simple models.

52:41obviously not as advanced as a way more Tesla but yeah we've kind of been working on it for a couple months after that and then this is a standard golf cart and you built some kind of rig to go on or a harness but not a harness yeah it's a physical harness that's going over the steering column yeah yeah exactly it's it's so it's retrofit um we didn't modify any of the like internal electronics this is all displaced on top of the golf cart yeah um so it's like three front cameras three back cameras and then no light all cameras like no lighter okay yeah um and so you take a stock one you put cameras on it what is the hardware stack because you know elon's been working on this for a long time uh and building essentially the compute locally on the car to do exactly what you're doing here.

53:37So I see there's kind of a box on the floorboard. So I'm assuming you have an NVIDIA Spark or something down there doing this. Yeah, we have a NVIDIA Jetson Thor that's wired directly to the battery of the golf cart. Got it. So that uses a decent amount of power. And the golf carts are notorious for going, what, 50 miles in a day, 30 miles before charge so how do you deal with that you buy a bunch of anchor batteries and just bolt them in so right now it the the range is a little bit limited so it's definitely something we have to figure out uh in the future but it's still very much in like testing phases on the top you got a starlink i see um starlink mini that's right fantastic uh what is that doing uh so that allows us to do two things.

54:26It allows us to test out cloud inference. So we're exploring running some DLAs and world models in the cloud. And then it also allows us to have good connectivity to write code and ship code live to the golf cart while we're driving around campus. So I often work on it outside of my dorm. I've been a lot of all-nighters in spring quarter working on this and I can ship code live while I'm on the golf cart instead of having to go back into a dorm room or a classroom somewhere. Okay. I mean, listen, it is autonomous is on golf courses. People don't know this, but a lot of the grass being cut right now, Lon, and even in snow country, a lot of the snow being moved is being done by autonomous robots.

55:10The team will go find a video or two about this. But even here in the great state of Texas, Ethan and I drive around and I see in the planned communities, robots cutting grass. and that's in like hill country that's here today they're doing a lot of this on golf courses you made this as a proof of concept but you know you're right next to santal road there's so much money sloshing around is the idea to like go to golf courses and say hey we literally can help you bring the golf courses back so here's the snow one check this out ethan this thing's incredible That's awesome. And so snowblowing is one year when we had a lot of storms up in Tahoe at my ski house, I got an incremental$12 ,000 bill because they're paying the people who shovel snow $70 an hour.

56:04They're literally getting paid$150 ,000 a year long. And we had so much snow that it was going to collapse the houses. Therefore, there was no choice but to outbid everybody to save our houses. Anyway, these things are becoming a standard operating procedure. Here's one on a golf course using Toro, TofPro, Anonymous. And these things are really easy to set up. People love them. What's your plan? I mean, are people asking you to build this for golf courses? Because you might have a situation where somebody stops and leaves their golf court around, or they finish, you want to drive it back to get charged, whatever it is.

56:42Do you see this as a business? I think it's uncertain what the future of this was. This was just a fun side project, which I think it's absolutely incredible that something with the scope now can just kind of be a side project. The future is uncertain, but there's definitely been a lot of interest from people in the golf world, also people in the transportation world. So like people like Disney and other companies that have a lot of golf carts for transportation. I think there's a lot of use cases for golf cars. and yeah what can you uh if you were to iterate on this twice and get you know obviously this is like a custom sensor pack but let's say you had 10 million in funding you know you get to you know oh yeah number 500 what do you think it would cost to retrofit these these golf carts cost 10 to 20k depending on how fancy dancy they are what do you think you can get the retrofit to to have autonomous golf carts in the real world yeah uh even the current version is quite cheap so i won't say the exact number but i think it's a ballpark future yeah where you could see a retrofit version of a kit like this where you could sell for under a couple thousand dollars amazing wow incredible yeah what software did you use there's been a lot of talk about nvidia and uber and um this open source stack that they're providing because they want a uber obviously strategically wants open source driving they want a fragmented market they want every single car to have it.

58:08So that Waymo or Uber or, you know, pick your company, Noro, Pony AI, Wave, AV, Zoox, don't run away with it. They want it to be fragmented. And NVIDIA wants to sell compute hardware. So it's good for them if the software is abstracted. Are you using their stack for software or did you write your own or are there other open source ones? Tell us about the self-driving software, the brains. Yeah, the software is by far the hardest part so far. We've ended up using our own software. And so we found that a lot of the open source models, surprisingly, were either way too large, or didn't generalize well to the environment that we're driving on.

58:49Because it's a little bit different than the environment that most cars are driving on, given like the pedestrian density and temperatures, it's very different. So there's also the question of the models being too big. So most of the models that haven't been much fine videos so far actually like quite large and hard to run on even the like four thousand dollar gpu though and so we ended up using uh our own sort of approach and like custom semi-approach love it listen continued success uh if you make it into a company just save uh save a slice for your unc jcow uh you know i'm good for like you know if i get on the cap table I'm always good for like a ticket to, I don't know, an all-in summit, something.

59:35I mean, it might be good for a retweet. You never know. So this is what I gotta do, Lon. I gotta set, I'm like a, I'm like a 55-year-old man, unk, talking with 20-year-olds now, trying to get a slice on the cap table. At what point is that desperate? Is it 65? No. Where it feels desperate, or? You just graduate to becoming more and more senior, you know, like where you're. Okay, like Vinod. People want you on the cap table even more because of your incredible reputation. Because of the age. Yeah. Yes, okay. All right, all right. So I get to, I'm in my Obi-Wan era right now, Ethan. That's a Star Wars reference.

1:00:07And then I guess Binod is in the Yoda kind of timeframe on the timeline. Ethan, is there a place people can find out more? Is there a name to this company or a website or an open source project? Yeah, the project name right now is Wind. So kind of like the wind that you feel blowing on your face. Okay, I love it. You understand branding. Wind, self-driving, golf cart. I'm going to try to find your domain. Do you have a domain? There's no domain, but if you go to my Twitter, there should be a link to join the test flight. And then if you're in the Stanford area, you can come check it out. How did you get Jensen to take a ride?

1:00:42How did you finagle that? One of your props? Or your harangu? Well, kind of. He was speaking on campus. And so we basically waited outside the lecture and said, hey, we built a self-driving golf cart. That's my guy. I'm going to take a ride. That's my guy. Ethan is learning the startup lessons. All these guys like punk rock. Fuck, Ethan, punk rock was a style of music in the 70s. And what punk rock people did is they didn't give an F and they would just go do stuff. The Clash, have you heard of this band, The Clash? Be honest, Ethan. I haven't, no. It's killing me. I'm going to blow your mind, Ethan, right now.

1:01:19You probably heard London calling and just doesn't know that's The Clash. You and this is going to score you a lot of points when you throw a party and you meet girls. At some point, this is going to happen for you at Stanford. You're going to throw a party, meet some girls, or guys, whatever you're into. They, them, no judgments. I know it's a whole thing. They don't want to hear the Clash. But you're going to get an album and vinyl, and you're going to get The Clash, London Calling. And you just do a Google search, or you do your LLM search, go down the rabbit hole. The kids, they want pink panthrists or something, Jason.

1:01:52And then I want you to DJ, and i want you to just play rock the casbah london calling and then when you meet a chick or a guy whatever you're into no again no judgments here i know it's like 20 26 whatever you're into um i want you to just say like yeah just i'm in kind of my class area i'm reading and then i want you to get the london call put up london calling and i want you to get the original vinyl spend like 30 bucks on it i want you to get a t-shirt but don't play it i wanted you to give me the cover of London Calling. Yeah, we're not allowed. We're going to get... Well, we can show a little bit, but anyway.

1:02:23YouTube's going to get us in trouble. And I'm telling you, Ethan, you're going to listen to this while you're coding. It's going to break your fucking brain, and you're going to be able to code 40 % better listening to the class. Show the album cover, London Calling. Does Jacob not know? Jacob might not know what you're talking about, either. Jacob's like tining the... I might. There it is. Look at this cover. There's the classic Clash show. you see this smashing yes you see the you see the art direction of this and he's smashing it that's you in your startup that's you intersecting Jensen you're punk rock you're willing to break the rules you don't give an F you're willing to smash your guitar on stage and just let out all your emotions the clash London calling coming at you on a two for Tuesday alright Ethan get back to work is everybody cheating on their with AI?

1:03:18Tell me about the cheating. Not you, but other people. I think there needs to be a real working of the educational system. I think it's evolved to the point where people kind of do the work that they want to do. They kind of pick and choose what parts of education they want to get out of it. So I think it's a lot different than how it was before. So if they're not into this course, they just AI speed run it. If they love the topic, they're like, I'm going to go acoustic and I'm going to really learn it. Is that what you're telling me? Yeah. I think for the most part, that's pretty accurate. Can I be honest, Jason?

1:03:51I was already, like, by college, I was sort of like that too. Like, it was pretty easy. Some of these courses, you could sort of like microbiology. I wasn't super into it. You could just kind of figure out what was going to be on the test. Yeah, but you didn't have the tools to get an A in it. You would kind of cruise to a B. Like a B plus. Yeah, I can cruise to a B. These kids can just speed run it either way. It wasn't like having Claude. It was still like I had to do some of it myself. Yeah. You know what I take from that, Ethan? The kids will be all right. I think the kids will be okay. Because here's the thing.

1:04:20Yeah. That's what adults are doing. They're like, this job is completely effing boring. My boss wants me to do a TPS report. That's an office space, a really good movie that you should see. And they're just like, I'll just speed run this, give it to my boss, write some sycophantic answer, ask my boss three questions, tell him it's brilliant, and then I'll actually do the work at work I actually like. Well, just everybody does that. You ride around the stuff you don't like. you don't do your chores and you pay somebody to do your chores in this case AI. I like it. The kids will be all right, Ethan.

1:04:48Thanks for the honesty. I think we live in a world where every young person has access to a superhuman software engineer, mathematician, expert in medicine, physics, all at the same time. So if that doesn't fire you up as a young person, I don't know how well. Yeah, it should fire you up. What are you going to do with this$300 ,000 in debt you're going into? What's your plan there to pay it back? You got some scholarships. You look smart enough to get a scholarship. How much in debt do you think you'll be when you get out of this? ballpark? It depends on how many self-driving golf carts they build, I guess.

1:05:19I'm going to give you a secret. When you go raise your round, here's what I want you to say. I'm going to give you the script, okay? Don't tell your Uncle Jason said this. Unc is going to give you some advice. You're closing that$3 million seat around. Here's what I want you to say. Listen, I want to give it all my energy. I got a little anxiety. This is like thing over here, my tuition, it's$140K. When we do the$3 million, would it be okay if I just sold$100K in secondary of my common shares to take it from$140K down to$40K so I'm not anxious about that? I can put my whole effort in. Boom. That becomes the ticket price to get in to your new company.

1:06:00That's a tactical and practical tip, right? There's a tactical and practical. That's very tactical and practical. Here's how to manipulate your seed investments. All right, brother. Good luck with everything. And yeah, when I'm next on campus, I'll be on campus in January possibly. Apparently this is where you have to hang out now, Jason. Well, I mean, that's not now. That's always been. If you want deal flow, you got to just be hanging out on the Stanford campus. No, if you go to GSB, if you wind up going GSB route, Professor Pfeiffer, Prof Pfeiffer does a course called Power. And there's a case study in it about this podcaster, blogger, kid from Brooklyn who accumulated far too much power than he deserves in Silicon Valley.

1:06:40And it's about me. And I go every year to talk to the students about accumulating power through media and other things. So good luck, Ethan. Hopefully I'll see you on campus. Thanks, Ethan. Yeah, likewise. So you guys are on. Peace out. That's like that Harvard class that Bill Gates's daughter was in that teaches you how to manipulate people and cheat. Did you hear about that? Oh, how to manipulate your stats on that? Yeah, no. Apparently the rumor is there's a Harvard class that's about like how to rule the world through manipulation. It's like a secret, a secret class. And they say that, yeah, that Phoebe Gates was in it.

1:07:13And that's where she learned. I think she's being railroaded. I'll be honest. Really? Wow. Because I think there might be at first you were. I think this might be like a, I think everybody's kind of trying to manipulate the attribution tag. And so I think. Well, that's undeniably true. I'll be honest. If she wasn't Bill Gates's daughter and she was a dude, I'm going to be honest, like on two levels, Nepo baby plus woman. Yeah. Plus let's, she's like a, I think she's kind of like an Instagram influencer type. So that has a little baggage with it. And the cap table. It's Khloe Kardashian. It's Sydney Sweeney.

1:07:51It makes people resent it. Exactly. People resent her for being a Nepo baby, resent her for celebrity connections, resent her for her Instagram stuff. And if it had been a guy, same set of circumstances. Wow. I wonder. And I don't have all the details of it because it's a little bit like in, we'll see. None of us do. I'm guessing somebody might say to the founder, that's a really clever growth hack. Trying to get the attribution tag so you get the commission. Wow, it's a good growth hack. Cookie stuffing, they call it. They might be like, you should probably read the terms of services because you might be in a gray area.

1:08:27That might be how the conversation actually went down, in my experience, in a board meeting. because I've seen people go to the gray and have these kind of situations. And I always say to them, it seems a little gray. Maybe we should read the terms of services and maybe back off this, you know, a little bit. It might be, you know, we could get in trouble for this. But there might, is this like a criminal legal case? I don't, I mean, I don't think so. No, and they stopped doing it. As soon as the report came out that said they were doing it, they stopped doing it. So I, no, I don't think it's great.

1:08:58Anyway, I want to adjudicate this case. I'm going to adjudicate this next week on the show. All right, we'll talk about it. So I'll see you on Monday and I will put on my robe. This is This Week in Startups, thisweekinstartups.com, at TWI Startups. We'll see you next time. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.