OpenAI's new models, the MrBeast leak, Waymo ♥’s Uber and more! | E2009

26:41I think you could play other angles here, whether it's Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and maybe get the same result without the downside and the risk in it. So yeah, it seems if they're doing two or$3 billion in run rate, maybe they do a billion and a half this year, that's a hundred times revenue. If they're doing three billion next year it's 50 times revenue so maybe you split the baby 75 maybe a bad analogy for today but you know you split the difference you split the dad in half and turned them into a husband yes so i think maybe 75 times or top line revenue while losing and we don't know what this company's losing is it losing a billion a year or five billion a year i would say five yeah you know And how do you amortize these, you know, what is the lifespan of the H100s?

27:34Five years. And then they have to get chucked and replaced and they're like the new ones are that much better. So I do think it's like absurdly speculative kind of bet that people would make for vanity reasons. It would be like, I think there's a lot of vanity involved in here. If people don't realize this, but being able to say I was the investor and Uber gives me credibility, Robin Hood. you know i invested in you know open ai would give you some credibility now you talk to the next people oh yeah we're open ai shareholders of course we have an allocation oh we're spacex shareholders like right you can also just buy it on the secondary market it doesn't mean you came in when it was a hundred million dollar company or a billion dollar company it means you came in 150 billion so these things trade like public companies now and i think people are using these in some ways because they get management fees and there's not many places to put a billion or two billion to work.

28:27So if you're Thrive Capital and you've got all this money laying around or Andreessen, I don't know who's involved in these rounds. I know Thrive had done it before, Josh Kushner's company, like, okay, well, he's getting management fees on the two billion he put in there. He's getting carry. So you put a billion dollars into something, if it only doubles only, you get 20%, it's$200 million. So for the capital allocator, there's no downside, like literally no downside. And you get the fees on a billion dollars of 10%. So you're making a hundred million in fees. You net that out. You get that now guaranteed.

29:00If it becomes worth two or three times, you get that three,$400 million carry. And your LPs would have been better off putting the money into Facebook and being liquid for the next 10 years. So. Yeah. I think the vanity point is super huge. I think people really often want to be seen in the best companies in the best rounds. It's brand building for the venture capital firm. And the other thing that I would say, Jason, is if I'm an LP and I give Thrive Capital money and they put it into OpenAI and I don't get the return that I expect out of it, it's a bit like the old adage about no one gets fired for buying IBM.

29:32You probably won't get in that much trouble with your LPs for buying into OpenAI because, of course, you were trying to buy into OpenAI. Why wouldn't you? So I wonder if it also de-risks the reputational hit of a less than performing fund if you put a lot of the capital into what people expect is going to be the next Microsoft. though i do want to say that your point about you'd want to make a different bet it makes a lot of sense to me there's a new company called um super maven tech ones just covered them 12 million dollar round bessemer led uh open ai's co-founder john put some money into it as well and it is yet another help people code startup and if you um if you go into our notes docket and you click the little toggle that says compete with look at the names that i found that are in this space.

30:12Amazing. It's a lot of names. And I just, I'm trying to sort out, is that the better bet to pick one of the 30 horses chasing what is clearly going to be a big prize or do you back the model companies themselves? I don't know where I put my money, frankly. Okay. Are you worried that your startup is the only company out there that's not building with AI features? Well, if your company records or collects any voice data, I've got a secret weapon for you. Assembly assembly.ai has the AI models you need to turn that data into new features that your users are going to love. So don't fall behind. Put this incredible technology to work for you.

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31:38If you want to put your audio data to work and build powerful AI experiences for your customers, head to assemblyai.com slash twist and get 100 hours for free and join over 200 ,000 developers who are building amazing apps with voice data. Go to assemblyai.com slash twist today. If you had a billion dollars to invest, it would be more work to put 50 million into each of these 20, I think you would net out with a better result to play the index. Now it's a lot of work. And this is where GP Dynamics, the general partners at firms come into play. Place one bet, go back to Malibu, meet with the founder every month for an hour.

32:22You're done. Billion dollars put to work. What we do, what Y Combinator does, what David does at Techstars, you know, like we do 100 new investments a year. Obviously, by statistics, 80 are going to struggle and die in the first three, you know, and then you do it every year. You know, your whole life becomes people sending you desperate emails. We got to save the company. Nothing's working. And, you know, we're basically in hospice care with 80 percent of the portfolio at any given point in time. And that's a really tough life, Whereas other people have the other tough life of a general partner, watching public markets go up and down every day and having your LPs call you, what's going on with Apple?

33:03Why is NVIDIA not doubling? Why are you in this? And then you're dealing with having to get up at 6 a.m. on the West Coast to deal with the markets or 5 a.m. every day. So you pick your poison. And I do think it's really interesting to see how many people are going after coding. That's because of two reasons. Where does a lot of value in the world reside? And then what is AI good at right now? Bingo. I don't know if there's a better category than developers, lawyers, accountants, right? And we have a great company, TaxGPT, that went through our programs, then went to YC. And they're getting a lot of attention, a lot of illegal AI startups, because those are constrained data sets that can be mastered by AI without hallucinations quicker than other things.

33:50And then those professions get paid$50 to$1 ,000 an hour. Therefore, if you make them 10 % faster, it goes really well. I mean, 10 % faster. I mean, I flip it around a little bit and I'm thinking about what if you need 50 % fewer developers? I mean, what is the biggest line item at companies that build software? It's humans and cloud credits, but like whatever. I am really curious about what this technology is going to do to the arc of the number of developers. There's two ways it could go. One is the number of developers goes down because we don't need as many of them. Or the number of developers goes by 10x because suddenly everyone is one because they can just run the creation system themselves.

34:32It's the latter. Um, and I think the reason is if you were to think about typing or spreadsheets, you know, the spreadsheets, when they were done physically, there was a person on like a drafting desk and they had those sheets with cells in it and they were, you know, writing it and the accountants were doing it. Oh, we made a mistake. Rip it up, start over. And you would go to that room. When I started my career at land systems in the nineties, we would go and there'd be a typing pool at the law firm. they still had some electric typers and then they had word processing units and then eventually attorneys started using keyboards but those the same attorneys were like i'm not a secretary i'm not going to touch a keyboard that is like just like we might be like i'm not going to write code get a developer for that now it's just like i'll write code um it's not that hard and so yeah so i mean but in your analogy though then writing code is going to eventually become something that is both considered to be menial humdrum and low skill.

35:29Like, you know, typing is a skill for sure, especially back in the days of typewriters, because you can't do what I do, which is just spray typos all over the screen. I'm just, I'm very excited about seeing which of these startups from the great group of them that are working on this does come out as the winner. Let's make sure we make that a category on the Twist 500, like specifically AI for devs, because that's like worth tracking. I was thinking that this is kind of under the static team size and AI meets reality. Because one thing we did talk about a couple months ago was, hey, not every enterprise generative AI software service is doing well or meeting up to expectations.

36:06But here, I think we're seeing static team size run into AI in a more positive sense in the trend perspective. I do think this is a place people are having impact. And developers love this stuff. And that's why GitHub Copilot is doing so well. GitLab has one, Amazon has one, and a bunch of startups. So I will make us a new theme to match this. There's a tweet from Michael Seibel that I had been sitting on for a couple of days. And he said, Michael Seibel, of course, formerly head of YC, now just one of the partners over there, someone that I've talked to a bunch. I like him a lot. He said, too many startups and investors are exploring the B2B opportunities with LLMs and not enough are exploring the consumer opportunities.

36:42This is the moment consumer founders have been waiting for. And everyone did SaaS, Jason, forever because it worked. sell out to companies, make a lot of money. Huzzah. Is the generative AI moment as it is a catalyst for a new wave of consumer startups like we haven't seen in a while? I'm just curious if you're seeing deal flow along those lines. You are seeing it in the social media apps like Facebook and Twitter having grok. And I'm seeing people make images inside of Twitter and then post them. You're seeing something similar on Facebook. So I do think the big companies are going to keep adding to it.

37:22But yeah, I would like to see more folks look at, say, Yelp and Google local and say, those services, finding local vendors, finding local restaurants, coffee shops, now do it with AI. Take anything out there and do it with AI. Now you're in a race versus the incumbent to add AI, but an AI first version of Yelp would be quite interesting. And, you know, where it's you, you don't show up and start doing Boolean searches or clicking off buttons. You just say, I'm looking for a sushi place, uh, in Austin that's open on Monday nights, uh, that has an Omocasta menu and show me some great photos and boom, it does.

38:04Yeah. I wonder if the consumer thing here could just listen to you describe this. It feels very personal because if, you know, I don't care about sushi in Austin because one, sushi is disgusting. People shouldn't eat fish. It's gross. and two, I don't live in Texas. But what I do want though is my own thing that I talk to that has all of my context built into it. So I wonder if the consumer killer app here is just kind of a personal agent, if you will. And I would love to know who's working on that. But enough about AI. Let's talk about Jason's favorite company in the world, which is Uber and my favorite company in the world, which is Waymo.

38:34Because Jason, they are teaming up in a new wave Friday. They expanded their partnership. I'm going to quote here. They're going to quote, bring the Waymo one experience to Austin and Atlanta. only in the Uber app beginning in early 2025. This is big freaking news. The exclusivity really hit the hairs at the back of my neck because it feels very like a deep integration versus a lightweight partnership. Okay, so important for me to do a couple of disclaimers here. I don't have any inside information. I know Dara, but I don't talk to him on the regular. And so it was always Travis's thought that when this happened, Uber would be participating in the technology in some way.

39:17They had their own autonomous unit. And that if other people produced autonomous cars, they would be the fleet manager or work with fleet managers. Now, why do you need a fleet manager? Well, cars require maintenance. People puke in the back of cars on Saturday nights. They need to be cleaned uh cars need air pressure in the tires they need to be washed you know there's maintenance that you know if they're a gasoline car they have to have gasoline in them you get the idea and brakes you know all the standard maintenance so it makes sense that if there's a range of providers and you've got an established network of 250 million rides per week and somebody makes a great car, they may just want to focus on making that great car.

40:10Mercedes and BMW don't run cab companies. They also don't run rent-a-car companies. It's enough work to produce a Mercedes or a BMW or a Sprinter van. They don't run fleets of Sprinter vans. And I'm sure they've tried. I'm sure they've thought about being in Hertz's business. And so what you realize one business is manufacturing, one is software development, and one is running fleets, the other is running a network. So if you were to take those four circles and you start overlapping them, Uber has a network, but they don't make the technology. They have investments in a couple of companies. You have BYD makes the technology, doesn't have a network.

40:47You have Waymo testing a network in San Francisco and LA. They don't make the cars, but they make the software. Tesla makes the cars and the software, but they don't have a network. And they don't have fleet management. So you start getting into all of this, it feels like it's going to be hard for one person to do everything. It was hard for Uber to try to be a technology company and make this. It's going to be hard for Waymo to deploy this in a thousand cities around the globe. It's going to be hard for Tesla as well. And it's going to be hard for Tesla owners. If I'm a Tesla owner, do I want my car in the network and somebody puking in the back of it or whatever?

41:24I need my car during prime time. Do I want to put my car into the network during prime time? No, I need it available. So the times I will put it in will be when I'm on vacation or I don't know when. So I do think there's a lot of complication here, a lot of heavy lifting. And I'll just leave you with often deep partnerships that are exclusives result in mergers and acquisitions. Yes, I can see where that would trend. The interesting thing is Uber historically has worked with people who have their own cars and Waymo has had to hand build its own technology because, you know, if you're at the frontier, you can't go to Walmart and buy it off the shelf.

42:08In time, though, once Waymo sorts out more cities, more data, more time, I can see them licensing out their hardware to someone else to build. Maybe Mercedes builds the cars. And then, you know, the aggregation of demand stays on Uber's side. But in that division of labor, I think Uber is the fleet provider, which they're not mostly currently right now. And so that would have to be a new competency or cost center, maybe, for Uber. But they're saving. So I can kind of, we're not going to end up with the same companies at the end of this, is my point. They're going to look different because they're going to have to start deciding where to play.

42:41But what I care about is this feels like acceleration. Like this is more cities, more partnerships, more driverless cars out there. Therefore, more data, better models, more safety, more speed. I just want to fast forward this by five years, Jason. I'm too impatient for the progress here, but it is good. Yeah, the co-CEO, Takedra, spoke at All & Summit last week. And I asked her about these things. And their number one goal is to deploy the technology widely. so i said to her okay if you want to deploy it largely why wouldn't you do what android does which is open source she said open source isn't on the table i said okay if you want to deploy it widely why wouldn't you sell it to car manufacturers she said that is on the table i said okay i said what about partnering with ride hailing network she said that is on the table and then this announcement came out on friday later in the week when the stock went up i don't know five or ten percent based on it uh yeah so i think what we'll see and to your point like uber is not in fleet management right now.

43:38There's two possibilities here. One is they work with existing Uber drivers and fleets because there are people who own multiple cars and essentially run fleets now and they find drivers and have them use their cars. The drivers, if they were, let's say, immigrants, they don't have to worry about insurance buying the car. They just can drive the car essentially. And so I think they'll work with the existing fleet managers and those fleet managers out there will eliminate the drivers because they do work with them already, and they'll just deploy the cars and clean them. If you look at the economics, Uber takes 25%, generally speaking, the driver gets 75%.

44:16So I'd love to see the economics of this deal. Let's say they give, Waymo might be very happy to get 50%, 60%, 75 % of this and not have to deal with all the other stuff. They could just focus on software, making the cars. And then let's say there's a, who's going to pay for these cars. Waymo just said they're going to raise 5 billion. Yeah. Uber's$150 billion company. 5 billion. I think that buys like 50 ,000 cars. It's a lot of vehicles. Yeah. Yeah. So 50 ,000 cars, you know, if they're doing, you start doing back of the envelope math, you know, okay. If they do 10 a week, if they were to do 10 rides, 50 ,000 is 500 ,000.

44:55If they were a hundred rides, that's 5 million. Maybe they could do 300 rides a week each. That would be a lot. Maybe 400 rides a week. So you start to realize that maybe with that$5 billion investment, they can do, I don't know, 5%, 3 % of what Uber's currently doing, which is another way of saying you're now going to need$100 billion in cars. And then somebody's got to manage a fleet of not 50 ,000 cars, but 50 million cars. maybe 5 million cars, as this thing grows from less than 1 % of people using ride sharing to 20%. So if the money goes 20%, it goes 20X. I mean, we're talking about a large number of vehicles.

45:39And even if Tesla's entire fleet was in the network, they might have 7 million cars I think they've produced to date. Let's just say they produce 2 million cars a year and they have all 7 million in the fleet. If they're producing 2 or 3 million cars a year, They would need decades to fulfill the demand. So that's, I guess, the big challenge here is I don't think one company gets there alone. I'm not just talking my book. I've sold a lot of Uber before it was public. I still own a lot. I could sell my shares anytime and just buy Google shares or Tesla shares and play the other side. I actually think the pie is going to go from less than 1 % to 20 % of rides, either induced or replaced.

46:19Public transportation or new rides is going to go this way. And I don't think young people are getting driver's licenses. So it's going to be a decade journey. I don't think so on the driver's license point. I agree. Also, just as a parent who lives in a city, I think the first place we should get rid of human drivers is the small side streets, just because people drive like absolute idiots and they're distracted and they don't watch street signs, traffic lights, turn signals. It's brutal. Just trying to keep my kids from being hit by cars. So I would love that. All of this makes me very excited.

46:49The thing is, I was leaning towards as you were talking saying, okay, well, think about it. If everyone needs to have a new fleet, it's going to be larger. Two companies, GM, Tesla, because GM has cruise, Tesla has its own self-driving, they're already manufacturing. But even them put together can't make enough cars in the near future to come up with the amount of capacity we need for our relatively optimistic view of where this is going. So there's like$100 billion or $200 billion in spend missing that someone's got to come up with. And I think go back to an earlier point, Waymo, Uber, whomever it's going to be, someone's going to have to write that check.

47:23And you know who can afford that? The federal government and big tech. That's it. Yeah. And Uber is part of big tech. Uber could at any point in time, say to the public markets, we're raising 10 billion or do a bond for 10 billion to buy these cars from BYD. And even if BYD has a hundred percent tariff on it, a$20 ,000 car going for$40 ,000 into our ride-sharing network, still a pretty great deal. Absolutely. I think that's the thing people like to think of the world as winners and losers. If we were to look at e-commerce, Amazon and Shopify both crushing it, and then other legacy people, Target, Walmart, still crushing it.

48:05Instacart, still crushing it. DoorDash, Uber Eats, crushing it. Toast, crushing it. Toast is crushing it. So I think what we're going to see is as dynamic as Uber has been and Lyft and DoorDash for the first, for the last, you know, 10 plus years in terms of our imagination of how the world could change. Yeah. I think that's like the epilogue to the story. The autonomy endgame is upon us. This is the beginning of the autonomy endgame. We will be sitting here in 10 years and the number of people who have cars is going to have driven, dropped significantly. old people are going to stop driving completely.

48:41This idea that 70 year olds have to drive, that's done. You know, people over 60 are going to stop driving because they have money and resources. So they're going to move fully autonomous. And then this next generation, our kids, you know, when your kids start, you know, in 15 years driving, my kids in three or four years and 10 years, respectively, you know, they start driving in the next decade. They're not going to drive. I mean, I'm going to teach them to, but they're not going to need to learn and they're certainly not going to spend all their hard earned cash buying a car. Why would you?

49:11I mean, it's a depreciating asset that you use 3 % of the time. Yeah, totally agree with you that. I'm just giggling because I learned how to drive my dad's F-250 on logging roads in Oregon, big manual V8. And I used to kind of think about, you know, am I going to teach my kids how to use a manual transmission? And wrong question. The question is, will I teach them to drive at all? because our new daughter's two weeks old, which means that she is 16 years away from the legal age of driving in the US. And 16 years is five eras in technology. I mean, that's a long way from now. It's a long way from now.

49:43Long way. And, you know, there's been, I think Uber is setting itself up to be a platform. They have BYD buying 100 ,000 cars and putting them out there. They've got Wave AI they just put money into last week. cruise they're restarting cruise cruise is gonna and gm is gonna be looking to uber to run that side of the business ride alto and now this waymo dl and they've got a couple of other partnerships um and they've also invested in a couple of companies like they aurora i think is the spin out that was their autonomy and why did they close the i mean there's a question from our live audience here um and we go live on youtube when we do these news programs you can type in this week in startups and subscribe and hit the bell, you'll get an alert when we do.

50:30Why did Uber stop its autopilot program? They were doing too much. And when Dara took over, he said, we're going to focus on a small number of things and do them really well. Part of that was culture. Part of that was regulation. And then part of that was dealing with legality around independent contractors, getting back on the road in London, selling their shares in different regions where they weren't going to compete. So there was a lot on his plate. And I think they did the right thing by becoming a money printing machine now. The only person who can really go it on their own is Elon and Tesla in my mind.

51:04I don't have any inside information there, but I do think he shared an app and he has a unique ability. And they're going to be announcing on October 8th, I believe. The rumor is they're going to show a two-seat dedicated car that will go into production in the next couple of years that they could flood the market with. That's my prediction. They could flood the market with a two-seater that costs$25 ,000, but only make it for RoboTaxi. You can't buy that car. Oh, and that protects their gross margins on their core business or their existing business. Okay. You still have to buy the Y, you still have to buy the Model 3.

51:38Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And S, you can't buy this two-seater car, even though there might be demand for it. That one they produced with bare bones, two-seater with stuff on the trunk. If you got four people with you just take two of them yeah why not but they're electric and they're cheap like that's ah it's gonna be fantastic yes i will say i have like a smart car you know you know what my neighbors have a smart car you know what their kids have a matching smart car so often they park their two smart cars back to back it's the funniest thing it looks like two jokes just kind of come together i like the mini cooper better that was my first new car i ever bought in my life was a mini cooper the second year i came out i love the mini cooper wow so that would be what year was that gosh it had to be 2004 or five yeah yeah have you ever been in an original mini the old british i have not though i've seen them on the streets in london and in paris where like parking is at a premium yeah those things are real small you think a mini is small stack it next to that it's very different now thinking about things that might be getting smaller the interest rates might be going down this week jason we are finally on and i we're gonna keep this quick everybody i'm not going macro on you but it is rate cut week so jason we got to get some predictions on the board here.

52:4825 basis points or 50 basis points. What's your prediction for this week's Fed cut? I mean, I think the prediction markets are saying there's a decent chance, 50 to 70 % chance of a 50 BIP cut. I think that might make them look a little bit desperate. Oh, okay. Maybe they waited too long. I am a fan of 25, 25, 25, just consistently doing 25 while you get more information. In other words, they were late to raise rates and that kind of created a bit of chaos. Obviously we saw it with Silicon Valley bank and dated bonds and treasuries and everything. So I don't think they want to flip the market here and look panicky.

53:29Just think like every month, 25, get more information. Look at the employment picture. Now I do think politicians, specifically Gamala would love a 50 or 75 because what happens when you cut rates? Stock market go up. Stocks go up. I don't care anymore about this stuff because I just like the idea of predictability and calm in markets and thoughtfulness, whether it's politicians or our monetary policy. I like predictability. I think they get that they need to be predictable and independent of administration. So people are saying like this was all done in some grand conspiracy. I don't think so.

54:13No. I don't think they wanted that whipsaw that happened with Silicon Valley Bank. Also, they would have, I mean, let's be honest, if Kamala and Biden were secretly running the Fed behind the scenes, interest rates would have come down already. Yeah, do that in the second quarter. And then you go into the debates with a roaring stock market, you go into the third quarter, and then all of a sudden it's November. And hey, look, it's been six, all people know is six months of going up. Instead, they've been dealing with the highest interest rates we've seen in a generation. I'm team 50 just because I think it's time.

54:47I think we're a little bit late. The labor market's gotten weak enough that I think right now a shot in the arm is more important than the optics of it. But I do very much agree that no matter what this first one is, either a treat or just an expected snack, consistency moving on is forward. I think we should get down to like 3 % next year. Three, three and a half sounds pretty good to me. So a smooth path there. and it would be good for exits. It'd be good for IPOs. It'd be good for stock market prices, startup valuations. Like this is going to be a holistic good. And maybe it's going to make next year a lot more fun than this year for folks in your profession, Jason, the investment community.

55:22I love my job and I do it independent of this hand wringing. And if it's a little bit hard and there's headwinds, I consider that part of being a pilot and sitting in the seat that I'm lucky enough to have. You know, if you're a quarterback and you get sacked once in a while and you eat a little dirt, Well, you also get to be the quarterback and throw the touchdown pass. And so I take the go with the bad. This has been brutal the last three years with no DPI coming out of funds, no M &A, Lina Khan. We've talked about it here over and over again. And this crazy political cycle, just like it to end the political cycle and the whip sawing, stop steering the car all over the place and slamming on the brakes, slamming on the gas.

56:04We don't need to ever go back to this zero interest rate phenomenon as far as I'm concerned. And it's healthy to have people be able to make a little bit of money from their savings and understand that savings is virtuous. And, you know, it obviously, I think, puts a little pressure on my profession and other people's professions to perform above whatever that number is. Yeah. The risk-free rate. And so I like that. And when it's zero, it's like, well, where else do I put money? I have no choice. It's got to go into real estate. It's got to go into equities. It's got to go into private equity and venture.

56:39There's no way to put it if you don't have that. So let's keep it at three and a half, like you're saying. Let people make a little vig on their money and compete for those dollars, those investments. My favorite email that I get every month is when my money market accounts give me free money. And I'm like, thank you for the free money. Look at that cash. Because when I started building a real emergency fund, interest rates were zero. So you put in any amount of money and they flipped you a quarter at the end of the year. And we're like, be grateful. And that was pretty tough. You know what I did?

57:06I was looking at the price. I stayed at the Beverly Hills Hotel. My friend Freeberg sets us up there for the summit. Nice. It's a bit pricey. And I'm at the pool. It's quite a nice place to stay, quite charming. And it was$50 for a pina colada,$42 for chicken fingers. A frappuccino was$25 for like a frozen coffee beverage with no booze in it. Why? Because. And then I was at Shutter's, my favorite hotel to stay in Santa Monica. I moved out when it was on my nickel, not the conferences. as I moved to Shudders, which is still a pretty penny. Don't get me wrong, but it's like a third in the price.

57:40And it's on the beach, my favorite hotel to stay at on the west side. And you know what I did? I ordered Uber Eats for every meal. I didn't order room service once because the room service bill is literally two or three times the equivalent and you get better food from Uber Eats. And this was the first time a hotel was not passive aggressive and sending it up. All these other hotels make you come down as punishment for ordering, not from the room service menu. And I'm like, can you send it up? I can't send it up. You have to come down. I'm like, but you can send me up a shaving kit. A toothbrush.

58:14Yeah. A toothbrush can come right up. So like when you stay at like a mid-tier hotel, they won't send it up. And I understand not sending the Uber Eats or DoorDasher into the hotel randomly. But I mean, you got people, Vala. And then I give them five bucks. Still cheaper. I get to try all the great restaurants. It was wonderful. So shout out to my Uber Eats and DoorDash. I just, I feel whenever I'm getting charged an insane amount of money for something, I'm like, you have me in some sort of arm twist. Like if I'm at a concert and I need to get a bottle of water, I understand that I'm going to pay$7 for it.

58:43And I'm going to be furious, but I'm thirsty. But when there's options, man, I'm not, I'm not paying 50 bucks for a frozen coffee. That's going to be middle at best. Well, and Travis, we did release the video. he showed one of the things they're working on with the some members of the former autonomy team at uber went to cloud kitchens randomly they just applied i guess they got in and they have this new machine you fill the machines up tomatoes lettuce chicken barbecue chicken steak and then it you know does a little swirl the bowl comes by and it puts everything in the bowl then it puts a little sauce on it and then the bowl goes into a bag and then the bag comes out the end and it has the label on it and the driver just picks it up and there's no intervention so like you know these bowls you get in australia bowl culture yeah so here it is we're showing it from the uh all-in summit and uh you can see like they made their own hardware to do all of this you know purpose built those are the containers and so this is this means fresh healthy food 24 hours a day and you're going to take out i don't know if there was a back order you could be taking out a half hour of time right because this thing can just churn and you see how many days it has there it looks like some crazy 3d printer and it's not printing the food but um they 3d printed all these parts to make it and there goes the cardboard uh through the machine on a conveyor belt and right into the bag boom so this is coming to uber eats soon and they're going to be able to make you a breakfast bowl a lunch bowl a dinner bowl whatever it is a salad and you're done and the folks over at um um what's the salad place sweet greens sweet greens we had the the ceo on the pod yeah they uh they also have this technology they're working on so yeah brave new world autonomy the autonomy endgame is i think what i'm going to dub this theme everyone a dev and the autonomy endgame i gotta take notes everybody so i don't forget it's in the show we got it we make a lot of content here at twist jason it's good to have notes that way i don't have to scrub through my own video one of my favorite parts about you is that you take notes that's why you're a great journalist obsessive about it because my brain currently especially because i have a newborn is made of swiss cheese baby brain that you gave me an assignment on my first day back uh which was here is a mr beast uh leaked production document it's 37 pages uh summarize that and have it ready to go for the show so i did great um i got to read that lots and lots of uh jimmy i yeah i i honestly jason there's a lot of you in here it was kind of funny because he's very clear about what kind of person he wants, how he wants them to communicate, and what people should be obsessed with.

1:01:41And also, there's a lot of clarity of goals. So if you read this and you want to learn how to make YouTube videos, you will learn how to make YouTube videos. But more, it struck me as how to run a high-performing, mid-sized company that has successive recurring deadlines. Like, this is a company that has to ship, by definition, because they are producing something that it's consumed and then loses value. And there's a lot that I really liked. So I'm going to just call a couple of things out here. What is the goal of someone joining the Mr. Beast production organization? Really simple. One sentence, your goal here is to make the best YouTube videos.

1:02:18And he goes on about this. He's like, look, we are not Hollywood. We're not trying to be Hollywood. We are trying to be the best at YouTube. That's it. Full stop. So clarity was huge in this document. I really liked that. And then for example, another one, What is the goal of our content? One sentence answer. He goes on, but he says to excite me. I like it. Yeah. Haste. Well, it's and also if you are building for everyone, you're building for no one. But if you're building for Jimmy and his sensibility is I want something exciting. I want something that's snackable, like a 20 minute or 10 minute thing.

1:02:55Okay. And it's a YouTube thing. And one of the great things about YouTube is because it came from Google and they took it over so early, it's a metric-driven platform. So you can see how you did in the first 24 hours of a video. You can see when people drop off. And so everything for him, and I've talked to him about this personally. I've played cards with him a couple times, and he's a fan of Wall-InPod, and some of my friends are involved with his business. So he believes you've got to get that first minute right. You got to have a bunch of edits in the first minute. Once you pull people in, then there's like this setup for the first next couple of minutes.

1:03:32And it's very much like the three act, you know, screenplay in Hollywood. And, you know, these screenplays were kind of built into a science for our generation. They backed into what makes, you know, I don't know, Silence of the Lambs, Star Wars, you know, pick an iconic movie, Rain Man, into that. And it's like act one, act two, act three, the resolution and the journey and like the problem solving in the middle act and all that great stuff. So he's kind of produced, I guess, a playbook here that really works for him. Now, if you're not doing stunt reality television, I'm not sure this is applicable to every vertical, but it's certainly there's lessons in there.

1:04:15Any other lessons you took from it, Alex? Well, clarity of how to get good from him. uh quote get rid of netflix and hulu and watch tons of youtube like don't don't go drink from the pond we're not you know fishing in only double down on this i get back to the clarity and focus point notes in there about communicating how to communicate inside of an org go up then over don't go over and then up that way people who are having teams know what they're doing uh there was a big thing on creativity saving money which i think is his way of saying that constraints breed solutions, essentially. Yeah. The example was about Doritos.

1:04:54It's like, if we say we're going to give away$20 ,000 to the winner of a video, no one cares. But if we say we're going to give them a 10 year supply of Doritos, it could actually be less money and it's way more exciting. So creativity, saving money. And then I love this at the very end. One of his last kind of like notes was never do anything that can make us look bad from a PR perspective, which is not a bad thing to have in your document and they've had challenges like doing these kind of all the youtubers have had challenges around you know when you're doing stunts uh or you've got contestants yep fear factor had this issue everybody's had this issue all the reality tv shows and he's got that reality tv event um you're going to have a lot of issues and so i think that's very wise yeah do not do anything that would embarrass the organization i want to throw one more thing in here though now that i'm just thinking about it this is not a polished doc there are typos there are he writes haha at one point in time like there's a lot of just very it's like he sat down and literally wrote you a letter and that's i think actually why it's very effective because if it had been mckinsey or bcg you know it would have been impossible to understand but here is a a very quote quote founder mode document from someone who knows what he wants from his org and how he has gotten historically and i just i i think that people can people mistake polish for um quality in writing and i think here we have the inversion of that the polish is crap the writing and the and the actual information transfer jason various and so that that struck me as impressive i'm not shocked that he's a smart guy but he's smart yeah i think this quote is the one that's worth pointing out.

1:06:40You kind of previewed it here, but I'll just put it on the screen for a second. Your goal here is to make the best YouTube videos possible. That's the number one goal of this production company. This actually relates to the Purpose Driven Church, a famous book where it's like each church has to have one thing they do, not everything. It's not to make the best produced videos, period. Not to make the funniest videos, period. Not to make the best looking videos, period. Not the highest quality videos, dot, dot. Capital. It's to make the best YouTube capital videos possible. Everything we want will come if we strive for that.

1:07:18Fuji sentence. It sounds obvious, no comma. But after six months in the weeds, a lot of people tend to forget what we were actually trying to achieve here. So this is a very like, almost like somebody transcribed him in a meeting or having a drink after work. And I think this is critical because when you have an organization that gets bigger, you want people to point to something. And I tell that to folks here at our investment company, we want to do the seed or pre-seed round of companies and we want to help them get to their series A. That's the goal. We want to find the best companies with multiple technical co-founders and product velocity and get those folks to release a product, get traction and get follow-on funding or what's called a pull through in our industry.

1:08:04And we track pull through. 33 % of our companies in the first year pull through to another round or so. Just ballpark figures here. And so if they're not pulling through to another person investing at a higher valuation from us, what did we do wrong is what we have to ask ourselves. Did we pick the wrong team, the wrong idea? Did this team not achieve product market fit? Did they know what they needed to achieve in order to get another investment? Did we not introduce them to the right people? Do we invest in a category that VCs don't want to invest in, like event planning, apps, like what we're going to do this weekend, or split the bill apps, things that are maybe not going to be large businesses, not enough TAM.

1:08:47So we know why people will not invest. The team's not technical. The team doesn't have product velocity. The team doesn't have product market fit. The team is not going after a big enough market. So we should be asking those questions early and we should be communicating that to the founders. Hey, we're going to have you come to our accelerator. We think the downstream investors are going to think your TAMs too small. What's our strategy there? And then we just hear their answer. Yeah, we're starting with this. It's our beachhead. And then we're going to expand into this larger beachhead and we're going to go international.

1:09:19And that makes it a billion dollars in revenue a year. So, okay, good enough for us. Let's go. Yeah. Clarity of vision. I mean, I would boil down your launch proposal there too. We help the next$10 billion tech companies reach their series A or whatever. But I think you could probably gel it even more if you were doing a similar document, but just knowing what you're doing. And this is, I think, where we see rot at large companies. Because if you think about what Google does as a company, it does 55 things. And inside of it, everyone's vying for probably a bit more self-focused progress inside the org versus the goal, because I don't think you can have 50 ,000 or 100 ,000 people sharing the same goal because you can't coordinate work like that.

1:10:03I would love to learn more about management and systems theory to understand why big companies end up always looking and feeling and acting the same in ways that I don't appreciate. There's probably something here. There's a whole segue into founder mode. Yeah. Wow. But given that you've got a kid right now, I don't recommend you getting into founder mode. dude i i have two founders at my house and i am the thing that is being mo did uh there's a lot of okay one little story um have you seen the cars that children can sit in they're plastic and they have a handle behind them you push them around yeah they're like strollers yeah we didn't have one and now we do because our nanny's former family outgrew it so we got it as a hand-me-down love hand-me-downs by the way as a parent people give you the best stuff uh anyway this car is terrible because it has plastic wheels and ada demands that i push her around the neighborhood constantly and it's the loudest thing and it sucks so i've been bullied into that by a two-year-old so that's what i've been doing there's one of those that has two seats that you'll be doing soon enough where one's in the front one's in the back and we had twins yeah oh we did the side-by-side double stroller not not great too not the not the yeah i know you're talking about we were awesome And we bought tons of stuff.

1:11:19And then we just put it all out in the driveway. And our friends who were having kids, we said, this Sunday, everything must go. Yes. Take it on Sunday or it's going to donations. People came. God bless them. And their families didn't have to buy this stuff because you use it for two years and it's done. Yeah. People, some of our neighbors had us over for brunch and literally had a room set up of, we are going to donate everything you don't want. But we have two daughters. You're having another daughter. Come pick. And so we left with like, you know, loads of stuff. Cause I mean, newborn onesies, you don't wear it for two years.

1:11:54You wear it for two months, maybe. I love the idea of like, we put all of our 14 year old's clothes as she got older, put her age and her size, put them into plastic tubs, put it in the garage. Then the eight year olds now, when they hit her age, we take out the box and they rate it and it's like, oh, this is cool stuff. Right. Yeah. So it's just absolutely fantastic. otherwise you spend all your money on parenting stuff um but jason we are back to doing news live so next week we're gonna uh go back up to two i'm gonna quickly get back up to speed here awesome love it it's great to be back man i miss doing good to have you back and uh yeah next week we'll do two and in the meantime lots of great interviews twist 500 is growing and you're doing those short ones let's keep uh doing some of those short ones and we'll see you all next time bye Thank you.