Silicon Valley Clones and Jersey Drones: Decoding the Signals with Nicole Wischoff | E2061

0:00We're starting to see drones emerge again as a topic and part of the Zycos. And obviously this is all happening because in New Jersey, there have been a ton of drone sightings and there are tons of theories of it. Politicians are kind of getting in on this. So now we have another layer to this weird information space we're in. I've never seen anything like this in our lifetime, but we have conspiracy theories, distrust in the media, citizen journalism, plus a layer of politics and gamesmanship. Yeah. And this seems like the ultimate raw shock test of what you believe about reality. So, Effett, let's just go down the rabbit hole here.

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1:24Terms and conditions apply. All right, everybody. Welcome to This Week in Startups. I'm Jason Calacanis. I invest in 100 startups a year. I do two podcasts, All In, This Week in Startups. Next year, three days a week for This Week in Startups, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Thursday, I tape All In. It comes out Friday, so you get four podcasts per week. That's the upper bounds here. And with me, my co-host on This Week in Startups, Alex Wilhelm. You know him from his TechCrunch days. And he is x.com slash Alex. How are you doing, Alex? Good. I'm very excited about today's show. We were talking before, though, about how you're a better skier than I am snowboarder and the fact that my children wake up too early.

2:00But the nice thing is, Jason, is that we don't have to sit here and vamp about BS for 30 minutes because even though it's late December or mid-December, I suppose, things are still busy, which is just, I don't know, a blessing for us in the news business. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot to talk about, a lot of information for startups, and we'll be recording through the holidays. I think we have two live shows during the holidays so we'll be coming to you live a little bit over the holiday just to keep you up to date on what's happening and maybe we'll do a twisty awards and um i think the drone story is where we should start alex because this has taken over people's imagination yes and drones were a major investment category a major startup category that kind of died down when dgi took over the space and won all the hardware that you know consumers buy but We're starting to see drones emerge again as a topic and part of the Zycos.

2:52And obviously, this is all happening because in New Jersey, for the last month, there have been a ton of drone sightings and there are tons of theories of it. So let's get into it. First of all, this is not something that happened just this last weekend. I think that people are now paying more attention to it in the last week, but you're right. The sightings in New Jersey and the surrounding areas have been going on for about a month. So this is actually a pretty long running story. but there's been an increasing amount of noise. So one thing that people were curious about is, is this the government?

3:22And Jason, I think as far as we can tell thus far, the DOD has said that this is not the government to their knowledge, but it's also not a threat. And then the FBI has said that a lot of these drone sightings are in fact just people misidentifying aircraft. I'm going to show a clip here of what this kind of looks like in the world. So Jason, this is a grainy cell phone footage of a drone. Yep. allegedly yeah allegedly there's a couple of these clips out there none of which i found to be super compelling in terms of convincing me that this is anything hyper nefarious so i think between the two of us we can scratch out the ufo tag as in aliens yes i think we should start with what are the theories and you know i i love what grok has been doing grok 2.0 came out and i've been using gemini 1.5 and 2.0 with deep research and i have to say i'm now realizing that about half my searches are no longer on chat gpt they've moved to grok or gemini which are both exceptional right now in fact i think there's parody but here is the grok conversation i just asked it what are the major theories of the drones over new jersey and you see uh what grok does is it goes and collects some news stories and it collects some posts aka or fka tweets really interesting and if you go through these misidentification is the number one so of course some number of these are obviously helicopters or planes etc second one is that there's some sort of military or government phenomenon going on commercial or research activities uh hobbyists and copycat so that's definitely a piece of this whenever there is a phenomenon like this of course everybody with the drone is like oh yeah i own a drone i'm gonna go fly my drone and look for other drones right and then drone to drone and then yeah exactly and then there's the conspiracy theories uh alien extraterrestrial and then there's adversaries like this is some other country and my favorite of course is project blue beam i never heard of project blue beam before this have you heard of this one i saw uh via the grok summary but i i just read it and i was like okay so conspiracy theorists um have this belief that there is a project to destabilize uh this is a conspiracy theorist by somebody named sir gmon song 1945 to 1996 he is mostly known for his promotion of the project blue beam conspiracy theory i'm reading off the wikipedia which posts a plot to facilitate totalitarian world government by destroying arabic religions by replacing them with a new age belief system of futuristic nasa technology involving fake alien invasion or fake extraterrestrial encounters so this is nuts right new world order crazy stuff but yes the idea being it's a psyops essentially and so i think we can take out it's aliens or psyops it's obviously something's going on here, but there's too much involvement here for it not to be an actual phenomenon.

6:32I think we've gotten through that, right? Definitely. I think the number of drone sightings implies that someone is doing something with drones over the skies in New Jersey. No one knows what it is. I remain, though, in the camp of there's going to be some very boring explanation for this. But you're right. I do think that there's been enough that I don't think that people doing copycat drone flyings and people just hearing about it and then misidentifying airplanes star clusters or just satellites like star is pretty low earth orbit you know so i i think there's something else here but i bet it's boring and these are very low um and so i think you know one interesting way to look at this is and there's a bunch of politicians coming in and one of the things about the information landscape right now is because of a lot of conspiracy theories becoming true which you know does happen one out of a hundred times right statistically something starts as a conspiracy theory then you know we get evidence that oh hey it's true and then people fill in their minds very naturally we have inquisitive great big brains we think of every permutation this is how the human brain works it is a speculation fear-based machine why is our brains you know and i talked to a lot of different evolutionary biologists over the years they I believe that our minds speculate and come up with theories for a number of reasons.

7:53One is survival, and one is to make tools and to evolve the species, right? So when we have these active imaginations, we come up with something like, I don't know, scuba gear, or we come up with the concept of a drone. Sure. Or, you know, we speculate that, hey, that person who's missing from the tribe was eaten by a crocodile, and that big thing in the lake that pulled the, you know, deer into the water and ate it could probably also eat a human, right? So, okay, that's what's happening right now. But what are politicians saying? Because I know we, politicians are kind of getting in on this.

8:26So now we have another layer to this weird information space we're in. I've never seen anything like this in our lifetime. But we have conspiracy theories, distrust in the media. citizen journalism plus a layer of politics and gamesmanship yeah and this seems like the ultimate raw shock test of what you believe about reality so effort let's just go down the rabbit hole you can absolutely apply any mental model to what's going on because if you want to think that there's one world government coming these could be cloud seeding drones or they could be you know surveilling people in the New York area over potential, you know, post-election discontent.

9:05The DOD, though, has said that these drones are getting occasionally closer than they'd like to military installations. That's their remit. But they've also said that that happens somewhat frequently. It's irresponsible, they said. Didn't sound like a new shocking concern there. Hey, everybody. I want to tell you about an awesome corporate card and spend management software that's designed to help you save money. Basically, it puts money back in your pocket. It's called Ramp. And we use it here at launch. My COO, Heidi, our chief operating officer, loves it because Ramp gives you visibility into your company's software usage.

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10:16And they'll even play bad cop for your company, chasing down missing documentation and requesting repayment. ramp so easy to use and you can start making payments in less than 15 minutes so join ramp right now and they'll give you 250 right into your account ramp.com slash twist r-a-m-p.com slash twist it is the best way to manage expenses for your team it's elegant it's dead simple and it's going to save you money disclaimer cards issued by sutton bank members fdic terms and conditions apply so i just showed a couple tweets from uh senator chuck schumer very well known i I believe he's one of the most senior Democrats.

10:55And he said he's pushing for answers amidst these drone sightings, implying that at least at his level, Jason, which is high up in government, he doesn't know what's going on. I will say, though, that people are getting angry. So the FBI and the DHS have held some briefings with people in government. And according to U.S. Representative Josh Gottheimer, he's a Democrat from New Jersey and on the House Intelligence Committee. So it should be very plugged in to all this stuff. He says, quote, the bottom line is this, the FBI and DHS are not providing enough information to the public and the public is concerned.

11:31Now, right before we came on, right before we started the show, Donald Trump, the future president said, here we go. The government knows what is happening. They know where it came from and where it went. And for some reason, they don't want to comment. Something strange is going on. And for some reason, they don't want to tell the people. And they should because the people are really, I mean, they happen to be over Bedminster. They're very close to Bedminster. I think maybe I won't spend the weekend in Bedminster. I've decided to cancel my trip. Have you received a intelligence briefing on the drones?

12:08I don't want to comment. Okay, so I wanted to play the last bit there. Well, actually, yes, Jason, he got to mention his golf course how many times in there? Three times. He sounds like me on the all-in pod mentioning Foundry University. Yes. i mean very similar trump and i business guys talk their book and that's not just that's just how they will he's been a self-promoter for a long time yeah says in that clip that the government knows he says that the military actually knows where they took off where they landed we're not sharing he doesn't think we should be so private about this then declined to answer the question about intelligence briefings talked about his golf course and then said i'm not going to comment on it classic trumpian both sides at the same time type thing but the fact that he was so clearly indicative that he thinks that the government does know that ex-president club is only so big jason and you and i are not part of it so i don't think we have the same uh view into what the government would and would not know in this case i was surprised by that clip because now he has to release lots about it come january when he's back in charge and he said you know he was going to release the jfk files he didn't do that you know so there is like you're right now we put a layer on top of this of trump says everything yes all permutations and gives himself complete optionality when dealing with you know making a decision he might uh go to japan and go skiing he might not but he loves japan you know it's it's like it never ends with him so here he's kind of like you know giving us both possibilities but the government there's something going on here i think everybody agrees with that yes so then the mind wanders the one that i attach myself to the most just with a curious mind and i thought this was super interesting and led to me doing a little research online was the dirty bomb yes and that drones flying at low altitudes with certain sensors on them could sense radiation yes and then there's always been this fear of a rogue missing nuke ukraine russia who knows it could be a pakistani nuke you know the they they did a lot of research they sold their technology to supposedly iran and north korea so completely possible of rogue nuke could be loose in the united states for the last 50 years i mean that would make total sense to me that we have a nuclear bomb somewhere in russia somewhere in china that we implanted at some point and hid in a basement somewhere why couldn't somebody do that to us and have that as an option i know that sounds like crazy conspiracy theories but that doesn't seem too difficult to do especially with the size of tactical nukes all right so there was a video of somebody who claims to be a drone expert they have a linkedin page that looks like it has existed for a while so i have no reason to not believe them but this is my favorite theory why because it's the most interesting and that's what our minds do so here we go speculation like Colombo.

15:09This is an individual who works in the drone industry's assessment of what's happened. Yes, this is John Ferguson, the CEO of Saxon Aerospace. This is pulled from a TikTok video that he made. But I want to give you the truth. Back in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan had dismantled the nuclear program. There were over 80 nuclear warheads that were in Ukraine that came up missing. I spoke to a gentleman a few months ago who was trying to raise an alarm to the highest levels of our government, which they had their ears closed about this one particular nuclear warhead that he physically put his hands on. He physically touched this warhead that was left over from Ukraine.

15:54And he knew that that thing was headed towards the United States. okay so first of all everybody if you're thinking nuclear warheads don't get loose they do sometimes for example when a major government collapses for example the soviet union chasen and i've been hearing about lost or missing nuclear weapons visible material or even just the nuclear uh batteries that they put in those far north lighthouses in russia that they used to generate power over a long period of time so the chance that there is visible material or just a lot of radioactive material that could enter the u.s from let's say the eastern seaboard doesn't shock me and your point is that this could be what the drones are looking for seems like a great use of drones so i did a little research and he said this sounds like a very interesting use of drones right if you're in a helicopter or a plane those are expensive they're loud and sending 50 cessnas across new jersey you know at 3 000 feet or 2 000 feet whatever it is that's going to create a lot of noise a lot of ruckus and sure they could put on the bottom of them some sensors but i don't know if it's low enough to actually pick up the radiation i'm no expert on this but sending drones and having them do it at night which he said that's when in the part of the video again who knows this is all pure speculation but if they were looking for the signature of radiation is there a startup that does this i asked myself because there would be multiple reasons to look for radiation a dirty bomb would be high up there but absolutely leaks and other you know material you know i'm sure these the israelis have some technology here trying to monitor what iran is doing with stuff uh with their nuclear material pakistan north korea there's all kinds of reasons to look for this so we did see there was a startup when i was doing some some research that does this Yeah.

17:50Yeah. So the one that I found is a Swiss company called Arctis Radiation Detectors, and they use UAVs to detect radiation. $15 million in known capital raised per crunch base. This is the company. It exists in the world. And they talk about, in their detection system area, they talk about using drones to do this sort of thing. Okay, here we go. Arctis Airborne FPG Radiation Detection Drone. this radiation detection drone can map an area of whatever in a single flight of 20 minutes the system is about 50 times more sensitive than typical drone-based detectors a central alarm station this is i think kind of like the the software for the different uh drones to actually go in um but they do a number why are they doing it do they explain why they're doing this because they're doing gamma radiation commercial uh oh for ports for security reasons okay yeah out so this has been the fear ports have radiation detectors because there's always been this i think this was the subject of 24 right like the tv show was there was a rogue nuke a loose nuke and so they said ports on a container where it would come from so i guess the drones fly over containers or the containers my understanding is go through machines that check them this is a theory with some level of credibility now on top of all this is the next theory i love so anything else on this theory that is notable or that we should if man if this if there is loose radioactive material that we're worried about and we've done this much drone discussion as a nation on tiktok and social media and government briefings and in congress i'll be disappointed that we weren't a little bit more open about it i just wanted to say that okay let's game theory then okay okay okay you suspect there's a one percent chance that this ukrainian former soviet union new is in new jersey at the port somewhere you tell people if you're the government one percent chance i i said to myself yeah one percent chance i said to myself on twitter and i got a bunch of people saying i was fear-mongering i saw you know twitter's for spitball and stuff i said you know if it was me and i saw all these drones and i thought there was a one percent or even a one in a thousand chance that it was actually a nuclear thing i would take a vacation with my family now of course i have the means to do that or whatever but if i was seeing these things over my house over and over again whether i was a middle class person or upper middle class i would get the heck out of dodge for a couple of weeks just go to a family member's house i would leave all right take a second and picture the ultimate all-star team for your startup okay you got that mental image maybe the avengers maybe even x-men wolverine cyclops pick your favorite superhero team.

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21:24All for 75 % less than a US-based team while being on your same time zone, which is really important. There's no long-term commitment. It's just seamless collaboration. So if you want a GSD, if you want to get stuff done and you're ready to squad up, head to devsquad.com slash twist for 10 % off your first engagement. That's devsquad.com slash twist and transform your startup with the all-star team it deserves. That's just me. I'm not paranoid, but I think it would be sensible if they were coming over your if you had these going over your house and you knew what we knew what would you do with you and your and your kids would you leave and go to your in-laws or your parents no no we'd stay we'd talk about it and then we'd go oh my god can you imagine packing up for two months sorry two weeks with a three three month old and yeah if our kids were two and four versus zero and two i can see us going to but you would have the discussion It's not a crazy discussion is what I'm saying.

22:21No, because with my children, a 1 % chance of death is 10 million times more than I'm willing to stomach. And I think that's the point you're trying to make. Precisely. Precisely. It's the same thing with like, I don't know, taking a small plane. I get offered all the time to go in little prop planes. I bring the girls, go fly around New York City, take a helicopter here. Hard no. Thank you. I'll take a pass. I get invited to go heliskiing. I just say, you know what? I've done the actuary tables. i get to go scooby diving 100 feet nope motorcycles nope i just took all the stuff no hard no on cave diving sounds fun diving no i'd love to cave dive i'd love to hella ski hard no for me i got three daughters i don't want them to wake up one day and get the news that dad died hella skiing and then have them say or wonder in the back of their minds you know dad took all this crazy risk did he love us or not i know i'm sounding overly dramatic but isn't that what everybody would think?

23:16Or am I different? I think that people, there's an assumption, going back to our thing about our brains and how we think about risk and so forth. I think there's another element of, oh, what happened to me? That's happening somewhere else. It's a theoretical risk. Now, the reason why I think people are so upset is because now that these drones are over their houses, it does make it very personal. It brings it very much close to home, literally. So I think that you're not that crazy because if you were, then we wouldn't be seeing so much interest in this story. So many people talking about it, but clearly they're at least upset.

23:51And they're also probably cognizant that social media algorithms reward exciting material. So this is probably also a hit on TikTok for a reason. Actually, Jason, here's a fun question for you. There's no TikTok. Imagine the world. Does this story get even half the attention? as as a dead yeah i mean without social media probably not i think in the era before social media it was much easier to control these kind of situations when something happened you know in a city whether you know god forbid a shooting a mass shooting or something it was easier to contain stuff right and to control the narrative but when everybody's got a broadcast capable satellite truck in their pocket and they can pop up any number of services in live stream and be citizen journalists you're going to get the good and the bad and you just have to be media savvy so the question then becomes you know for me every consumer people listening to this podcast and you have to become really good at doing what we're doing here which is handicapping the situation thinking of probabilities thinking probabilistically sure and maybe stitching together there's some facts here's another fact do we have tools to know the drones that are flying everywhere does that exist are there satellite companies are there radar companies are there camera companies that monitor drones how do local police how do military bases how do uh airfields and airports how do they know if drones are coming in because even a recreational drone certainly a larger commercial drone that could take down an airliner and we've seen just this week some dipshits in boston kind of i mean are we shocked that it was around logan airport i mean it's kind of obvious what's going on here in boston folks so a bunch of guys in boston may have been probably celtic fans or patriot fans decided to take their commercial drones and fly near logan they got picked up in two seconds they got pinched immediately for being idiots and they do this during a drone scare and you know what drones in ukraine we have now videos of drones dropping grenades yes on russian soldiers and vice versa so this is obviously on everybody's mind these idiots go they shut down logan they get pinched but how do we know and it turns out drone detection is a category in and of itself we found a startup that does drone detection so uh actually we found well there's a bunch of startups that are working on drones and i just want to give a shout out really quick jason to two that we've talked to on the show one is um frontal dynamics these were the students from university of toronto who were working on anti-drone technology using sound waves, if I recall correctly.

26:46And we've also had, of course, Skydio on. Skydio was sanctioned by China over providing Taiwan with some drones for their fire department. Great interview. We recommend watching that. We'll have a link to that in the show notes. But elsewhere, earlier, I chose some tweets from Senator Schumer, and he has also advocated for a company called Robin Radar, and they have a number of drone-detecting systems, and I have a clip from them, adjacent right here here we go uh so here we go from robin robin radar systems announcing on the move capability for iris drone detection radar so that's the radar and now you can put them on your truck and drive them around mobile and tracks rogue drones carrying improvised explosive devices and unauthorized drones surveilling mobile forces so this is a company that I think is super cool.

27:40And if you are watching the video, what they showed was, Jason, a large cake container sized device on top of an SUV that does mobile drone detection. And now you can take this on the road with you. I think especially in light of the violence we've seen in our nation's political landscape in the last 12 months, let's say, Jason, that we're going to see a lot more stuff like this. And then finally, one last one, there's a company called Apollo Shield. It's a YC company from 2016. team and they're also doing anti-drone stuff. So there's a lot of startups that are building cheaper, faster, better drones and startups that are working on keeping us safe from drones.

28:16So it's kind of like poison and cure. So this is really interesting, you know, the ability to have essentially air traffic control for drones. Then there's the ability to take the drones out and there's multiple ways to take a drone out. One is to screw with their electronics. Another is to hit them with another drone or a missile. There's all kinds of different lasers and and heating them up, frying them. There's tons of ways to take them down, but first you have to track them. And this to me is shocking that we don't have this technology in the field, which then leads to the next theory. Oh, interesting.

28:49Just to be clear, Jason, you mean why don't we have a satellite pointed directly straight down over New Jersey, just counting each drone that's flying and giving us a live map of, okay, I see your point. Well, I mean, we have air traffic control. Why don't we have drone traffic control? Because if we know the next, you know, assassination attempt, the next terrorist attack the next god forbid 9-11 is probably going to be drone warfare i hate to say it but that seems like the most obvious next thing for a lunatic a terrorist you know an evil person an evil group to do if they wanted to terrorize people sure if you did what people are doing in ukraine and you started dropping grenades on people waiting for a bus in manhattan this would be super terrorizing i bought a dgi drone drone the summer i was in manhattan i've talked about it this thing's incredible and i was just flying it around manhattan and i was shocked that you were allowed to well there's a lot of money at state here whenever there's the countermeasures as you're pointing out to the measures that means there's an opportunity and there's a business opportunity so we talked about all these different startups and we have nicole on the pod uh later in the program talk about the opportunities and seeing a lot of duplicates we're going to see this is going to be a good beach for founders to serve we now know that drones can help in construction inspections all these kind of really great awesome use cases they're also entertaining and fun they're great for photography okay great but there's going to be a downside so now there's a whole industry of detecting and countermeasures and those are you know um we're going to see a lot of them but geopolitics now plays into it so we have conspiracy theories we have reality and then we have all these startups playing but then there's going to be gamesmanship on top of this to get government funding okay everybody i'm about to give you a hundred thousand dollars in free credits on digital ocean listen to this quick ad read to find out how if you're running an ai startup you already know it's all about compute and that means training your models building AI agents, and of course, crunching massive data sets.

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31:32You have to be frugal when you're running your startup. And here's the kicker. DigitalOcean lets you scale your compute power based on your exact needs from a single GPU setup to eight GPU configurations without any upfront hardware investment. And with an intuitive UI, robust documentation, and on-demand support, you can focus on building the next big thing, not managing infrastructure, which is so tedious. Here's a very simple call to action. Right now, approval listeners can get up to$100 ,000 in free credits and GPUs at a special discounted rate of$1.90 per hour. That's about a 20 % discount on the rate in addition to all those free credits visit do.co slash twist to get started and view terms and conditions that's do.co slash twist so schumer came out and said he wants this technology okay there's also a bill so maybe we can talk a little bit about the bills that we've seen and what's going on there because there is a bill or an act that i think got signed into law that biden signed in where you cannot if you're a government employee buy a dgi drone dgi drones like the tiktok ban is a major issue that we should all be aware of because dgi drones are made in China and they could very easily be sending all the information they've got back and maybe there's like a zero a day exploit you know where all the drones could be controlled or taken over at a certain point same thing with self-driving technology do you want byd cars on the road in america do you want tiktok you know available in america do you want dgi drones the chinese could at some point just say okay have all the byds crash have all the dgi drones you know kill people and then let's use tiktok to create chaos so you start thinking about these attack vectors could be a little scary on the geopolitical front uh a lot of people have been talking about the american security drone act of 2023 effectively that got fused into the NDAA or the National Defense Authorization Act of 2024.

33:33What's going on here for folks who are not familiar with how the US Congress spends money? Sometimes when there's a must-pass bit of legislation, like the NDAA, other things get taped to it so that way they can make it through. So this bill does mean that the federal agencies are prohibited from buying or using drones that are made in countries that are deemed to be threats to the United States. This means China. This means DJI, who has, according to our notes, 73 % market share here in the US, which is a simply astounding number. Now, Jason, for most folks out there using a drone to take a video with their dog at the beach, really, I'm not that concerned about it.

34:11But I can absolutely see how if you're a startup wanting to sell to the government, and now they cannot purchase from the leading company in the space, it opens up a ton of opportunity. So I'm kind of hoping, and I know we'll talk to Nicole about copycats in a bit, but I'm kind of hoping there is a Cambrian explosion of startups working on drones across the gamut because I think this is a place where we need to lead. And so I think more people taking shots on goal versus fewer makes me feel safer. There is a theory we left out. There was one theory, this could be a military exercise. That seems plausible too.

34:42So I'll put the military exercise pretty high up on this list. and a military exercise with copycats could be like a really viable um explanation here and lest you think that our government is coordinated i need only bring up 9-11 where hijackers in florida were taking lessons and didn't care about learning how to land the planes they only cared about learning how to fly them and the fbi there knew about it yeah and it just kind of got lost you know across agencies etc we were tracking some of the hijackers long before 9-11 this kind of stuff happens all the time so it's completely possible wait somebody was about this we live in a very particular nation with a particular set of governing principles and rules one is shared power at the federal level and then distributed power at the state level this does create a less unified government it also works reasonably well as we've seen over the last couple hundred years Well, I've been a little surprised at the criticism of our patchwork of authorities from people who are, frankly, coming into power soon, because I kind of thought that it was a bit of a feature and not a bug that in our government, the DOD is saying, we're talking military bases and everyone's kind of watching their own area of policy or protection.

36:04and if we wanted to have a more centralized approach to this we'd have to have a stronger federal government and jason i thought that was what we were moving away from so i'm just curious your thoughts on on the government agency response to this situation and if it's actually bad or working as intended what do they say like success has a million parents and uh failures an orphan if something successful happens we're gonna say oh my god the federal government you know stepped in and it was incredible what they did and then if it fails to be like oh my god the government failed so you know if you look at something like education and we're falling behind on education or health care you know you'd be like you know what screw the federal government move it back to the states the states are failing at something like why don't we have a federal mandate for i don't know abortion or why don't we have a federal mandate for uh school vouchers you get the idea And so I think the best feature, if I'm being totally honest, is having two options.

37:03And in management, one of the theories is to keep switching things up so that you don't hit stasis and calcification doesn't happen. So you go from building up all these middle managers at Facebook and Google and product managers, etc. And then you say, you know what? Rip it all out. Flatten the structure. Let's have more chiefs, more Indians, not a bunch of chiefs. Do I get canceled for saying that? i just think it's i think it's gauche versus cancelable okay great uh what's the word you know doesn't exist more worker bees less whatever you know some you know structure and then you change the structure you go from you know uber having you know little fiefdoms where each city when they were growing were running their own city running their own marketing had their own little fiefdoms and they were battling it out and then dara takes over and says you know what let's bring the decision-making central so that we're not ruffling as many feathers and turning over as many tables in the bazaar.

38:03And that was better for Uber at later stages. Maybe it's better to let a bunch of country heads go crazy again and, you know, have their own five terms. So that's, I think how do you look at management theory is the best thing to do is to switch it up from time to time and crack any calcification that could be occurring there. Actually, I really glad you said that because I've been a little bit, I kind of laugh at how management theories change inside Silicon Valley. I think we were talking about this last week, how Google had so much money for a while that they were onboarding talent before they could use them to hoard them.

38:37Sure. That was considered smart for a while. Then Google got bloated and that was considered bad. So then they got smaller. That was considered good. And then I'm sure in the future, they'll hire too many people again and go through this cycle. But I guess to your point though, about just needing to rip out what you were doing and replace it with something else, no matter where you are in the extreme of that cycle, up or down, it's okay because you're going to end up going back anyways. So it's more of an oscillation versus destination. That actually makes sense to me. All right. Next on the show, we have a guest.

39:03We love to have a guest on the show. Who's our guest today? Our guest is Nicole Wiscoff, the founder and GP over at Wiscoff Ventures. She also back in the day helped found One Finance, a neobank that Walmart bought. Then she became a venture capitalist. Her first fund was$5 million back in 2021. Then she raised a fund to worth 20. And Nicole, Well, according to PitchBook, at least your fund three worth$50 million has closed. Yes, it has. And thank you so much for having me on the show. Yeah. So we wanted to have Nicole on, Jason, not only because we love talking to investors about what they're seeing in the market, especially after they've raised new funds, but also because she had a very interesting comment all about what she's seeing in the startup market today.

39:41And whenever someone manages to go viral with a bit of startup chatter, I love to talk to them. So Nicole, why don't you talk us through your tweet here and then we're going to ask you about it. Yeah, of course. So I should catting out this with, I do specifically pre-seed and seed investing. So sitting in a number of the same pitches from that lens, just wanted to call that out there. The point I'm trying to make is that the number of pitches, and maybe this is the case for you guys as well, coming from startups, even at the earliest stages, are almost always the same. So while this job can seem glamorous, I find that I'm hearing the same fintech idea or the same supply chain idea where people are building a digital freight brokerage over and over.

40:18The commentary was super interesting, Alex. I am sure you saw some of it. Happy to speak to it and give a few hot takes, but I will maybe let you guys lead with what you think could be interesting here. Nicole did a tweet yesterday about 3 p.m. saying, honestly, shocking how many startup pitches are nearly exactly the same. Building in a market that's saturated, similar product, similar GTM, et cetera. The number of companies building something that doesn't exist or that is truly unique is far less than 1%. And this begs my first question, which is, what was this like three years ago? Has there been a proliferation, a doubling or a tripling of the number of startups you see pursuing the same idea at the same time, Nicole?

40:56I would certainly say if you look at the data from 20, especially 2021, just about anything was getting funded. And so I'd actually say that it would have been much easier a few years ago. I think the bar is obviously much higher, and especially as things get to the series A. And so folks are probably a lot more gun-shy to go do something super audacious no oh jason please no i was gonna say you know this phenomenon is very interesting i've seen it many years uh you know going into my second decade um i think i'm maybe a couple years ahead of you in uh this career i remember during mobile and social everybody had a check-in app like foursquare or goala and we were investors in goala got sold to facebook um wasn't a major outcome but everybody was going to do a photo sharing app and then there was the sort of everybody was going to do a food delivery app.