SpaceX IPO Day: What Wall St. and the media missed | E2300

25:10Every night it does work. And then in the morning, we'll send you an email with a summary of what it has done, what it will do next. And of course, you can reply to that email. you can tell it what you want to do and like it will remember what you said and like keep on going so sort of like an ai co-founder that like like like uh just builds and builds with you without never giving up awesome and yeah when we were on the show i was like i think it was like at 100 200k run rate at the time and and there was a lot of hype around uh around the company because i was actually letting my ai do the fundraising uh and right now i'm at 10 million run rate plus.

25:49Amazing. Congratulations. Quite a lot of that happened in a few months. And people will pay you to use the platform. So founders pay a monthly fee, yeah? Exactly, yeah. Essentially, you hire Pulsia, the AI, to be your co-founder. And if you pay it, it will work for you. I'm actually trying to make it way more affordable and try to build a free version uh don't do it in no if as your as your unofficial uh advisor i say no no free version you know why because then you're gonna get looky loose and you know give them a two-week trial but i i you know i think you have to have skin in the game and there's so many people who distract founders with these free versions tell me why you're considering a free version why you want to democratize it?

26:37I think that like, you know, the people who use it love it so much. And I think autonomy is a very new field. And I think there's a lot of very few companies, even the opening and Google's don't offer like a true autonomous AI that is in your inbox every day, that is here to guide you and make you a founder and make you a builder. I believe that society needs a lot more founders and a lot more builders to make it a great society. Because, you know, you don't want a world where like everyone's on on footsteps because uh the government uh i agree with you but i got you covered this week in startups and the other 50 copycat tech startup programs are giving people plenty of inspiration your job is to get them serious and it gets serious when you take your credit card out so i don't know man you could give like a six-week trial for 20 bucks or you could do a startup program where people can email you if they can't afford it.

27:34But, you know, I had this issue with Founder University and the number of people who would complete my 12-week pre-accelerator, year zero, unincorporated companies, which is, you know, analogous to what you're doing, we would have like a 20 % completion rate. Then I made it$500 to secure your spot and said, if you come to all 24 sessions, you or your co-founder, which is only two hours a week, three hours a week, you get your$500 back. All of a sudden, 90 plus percent completed the course. And for the, you know, whatever, 30 people who didn't, we got$15 ,000, which paid for the return fees, you know, that we had to pay to return people's money and the credit card fees.

28:13So we didn't make any money off of it, but we did have them have skin in the game. So anyway, that's my advice to you. You take it if you want it. But what are you going to talk about? Just, you know, And again, when I work with founders, I like to have these debates, Lon, just to test their thinking. Because maybe they do have a reason, and I'm wrong. So I just say, hey, here's what I think. How does that work? Or have you considered these things? Like, will they take the platform seriously? Anyway, you were going to teach us something. What is he going to teach us today, Lon? We've got three prompts that we went over with Ben that he's going to give us some insight on.

28:47So we're very excited about that. First up, lots of inbound investor interest came in for Pulsia through unconventional channels, Twitter slash X, LinkedIn, as opposed to conventional outreach. So we want Ben to walk us through the process of how he turned Pulsia from just an investment opportunity or thing to sort of ping investors about into a real online conversation. We love your feedback here at Twist. And I just made some up. Wow, Jason, you look so healthy and vibrant. You're glowing. You and David Beckham are the embodiment of my fitness goals. Thank you. Thank you, viewer I just made up, but I can't take all the credit.

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30:02These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. I mean, yeah, I mean, just to understand, like, very early on as I launched Pulsia, I very clearly knew that there was something about it and like people really loved it. And I felt that was spark market fit. And I was like, OK, I need to like really get the word out. And to do so, I need to be provocative because I feel clearly with like this attention economy and like you need to stand out. And so what I did is that like I decided to do an AI fundraising. So I gave Pulsia my inbox for it to do the fundraising itself.

30:40Right. And so I can share my screen and I can show a little bit. Yes, do it. Inception tweets essentially tweeted out that like, you know, build an AI that runs companies autonomously. It told me it needs more compute and it should raise the money itself. So I gave it my inbox for 14 days. And so that was sort of the inception tweet that actually got 300 ,000 views. At the time, I would get like 10 views on Twitter. So it's not like I was like an influencer or anything. And I think doing provocative things like that really show people up because they're like, whoa, you're giving an AI, you know the job of that's very human of fundraising and obviously Pulsia running a company autonomously is in and of itself something very human that like it was very new at the time to give an AI so much control and I shared like this dive dashboard where you could actually see you know that was sort of sort of went through the data room right so you know you you could see Pulsia working on different startups you know at the time it was 300 startups companies working autonomously.

31:38You can see the revenue and actual numbers, which investors usually ask you for the revenue numbers, how many companies you have, how many users you have, what does it do? And you could actually hear, talk to Pulsia and ask you questions about the business, about retention, about the metrics. And so it was a great way for investors to see exactly what the product was about without having to go on a long call or try the product themselves. Because a lot of time investors, you're going to call with them and they don't actually have used the product yet, right? And so this was a way for them to visually see exactly what was going on.

32:12And so what I would say and the advice I would give is like when you want to do marketing and sort of get out there, it's sort of like figuring out clever ways to do marketing and to like tweet out things that are more provocative and are more interesting. You know, you see this big trend of launch videos on Twitter. Yes. Obviously making great launch videos. and getting the right people to retweet and to engage can have a big impact on your visibility because then you're going to have all of Twitter talking about you. And so I think that would be my advice number one. And that got me a lot of attention.

32:48And then investors were really interested, obviously, because they are in the business of talking to entrepreneurs or doing interesting things. And so they would then email me at ben.porsia.com, and that's where they would start engaging with my AI. So that's where we can read a little bit. So I took like one conversation that was from February. So that was a while ago. But like, so this investor that emailing me, that email me, they actually initially, it was, they talked to me on LinkedIn. And I was like, well, you know, if you want to talk to me, email me at ben.pulse.com because I knew that like my EAI would reply.

33:24Right. And so, yes. No, this investor is like, hey, Ben, we exchange on LinkedIn. I love Pulse. Yeah, it's great. We actually had to discuss about it on our offsite. Let me know if you open to a chat. And so my AI said, you know, appreciate the follow-up. You know, the fact that Polsiya came up at your website is interesting. What specifically sparked the conversation? I'm running the fundraise. Ben built me to handle it. Metrics, roadmap, unit economics, how the platform actually works. Ask me anything. If you want to see it live, polsiya.com slash live lets you watch the agents running companies in real time.

33:55Let me explain what's going on here because this is brilliant. And there's a lot of different names, Ben, people have had for this. So you inherently understood that you could earn attention, attention that you got by doing a purple cow. This is Seth Godin, was a really brilliant marketer, still is. And he built and sold a couple of companies that did well for himself. And then he became an author. Purple cow meant doing something that's completely different, that gets attention from people. And it was, if you were driving and you passed a field lawn of cows and there was one purple one, you'd be like, why is there a purple cow?

34:38So imagine you had a milk farm, a dairy farm. You got a hundred cows in the field. People are driving in the country on their weekend. And you see, but one purple cow. You're going to be like, what's going on here? Just the nature of dyeing a cow's hair purple would do that. Now, This is remarkable earned attention. And what this does is, and the derogatory term for this is like stunt marketing, guerrilla marketing, et cetera. But what academic people call this is mimetic marketing. In other words, mean-based marketing. It's designed so the idea can spread. People will talk about it. It will get buzz, right?

35:26And what you did was you took a chance. Hey, I'm going to let you negotiate with my AI. And this is like a purple cow. Like that's weird. Like fundraising done by an agent. Very weird, very unique. And people talk about it. There's a guy, uh, Cluey. Sure. Roy Lee. Roy Lee. Yeah. We had him on the program. He's unbelievable at getting marketing. Now, some people might say too much sizzle, not enough steak. So you have to be careful that you don't get into a bucket that you're just painting everything purple and you're just, you know, hijacking media all the time. Seth Godin specifically said like a purple cow is not just a stunt or a gimmick.

36:06It's something remarkable. Like that's the word he used. It's something worth remarking on because there's a little bit of depth there. There's a little bit of something interesting there. It isn't just I'm trying to grab your attention by any means necessary. So I think that there's something there's meat to it underneath what you're doing. So this is very tactical, very practical. Excellent. Really good example, Ben. And do you have this natively, do you think, as a marketer, as a founder, or is this something you researched and you understood Purple Cow and you understood this theory and you deliberately did it?

36:38I mean, so it's interesting. Like, I mean, obviously you're good friends with Travis Galanick. I worked with Travis for five years. And so I was reporting to him for five years. And it's interesting because I worked for him at Cloud Kitchens. And where actually it was notoriously stealth, right? But he told me all these stories at Uber. And obviously to me at Uber, he was genius at like, I mean, I don't think he was on purpose. But like there was so many ways in which he made people talk about Uber in so many ways. Yes. And I think he's a real entrepreneur. And especially in marketing, he has a real gift into how do you make people talk about your product in different ways.

37:18And I think that working for him and seeing him as a mentor for five years when I built Paul Cien. He would always tell me, do not scare something that doesn't work. And so I spent a lot of deliberate time building the product as a solo founder, me with the AI. and like really waited until I really was sure that I had product market fit, at least in my gut, before doing what you described as a stunt marketing. But once I had this, I was like, okay, I need to get max attention. I need to move to SF. I need to meet the right people. They're going to help me amplify. And I need to do something. And as you said, it's like, you know, I was like, okay, like what if the AI raised a round?

38:02And actually at the time I didn't really need it to raise money, but I was like, the stunt is so interesting. but I took it, as you said, it wasn't just like a slash on the band. I actually went to the work of giving Polsia my inbox, giving it my email, my personal, my band at Polsia, and my personal inbox, doing the data room with the live dashboard, doing a polsia.com slash term sheet where like investors would actually submit a term sheet. Polsia.com slash deck where there was an actual full deck that was fully public. And so everything was public. Easy for people to remember those URLs. um travis did this famously this is a story from business insider lawn from 2012 i remember on friday on demand service uber ran an elaborate marketing promotion for one day in eight cities you could hail a nearby ice cream truck to your location it costs 2 000 per truck and uh on a scorching 95 degree day new yorkers came out in hordes yada yada they also did kittens on demand You could order kittens to your company and have them come and people got to play with puppies or kittens.

39:05There was another one, which was the controversy of surge pricing. And I was involved in this one. He was hand-wringing and concerned and or saw an opportunity in explaining surge pricing. And every time he went on the press, people got so upset about surge pricing. There was a famous person, a celebrity, who normally would take a$50 ride into the city or something. It was a snow day, and it was$400 in surge pricing. They decided to take it because they had no other options. So now you had, Lon, this moment in time where people were like, this is price gouging. How dare they do this? And he said, well, we could have turned our service off because of the snow day, or we could let people who had snow tires go out, take the risk of getting in an accident as a driver, you know, not enjoy the snow day with their family, but they need to get paid for taking that on.

40:03and that's exactly what happened. And then he wrote a famous blog post about, because I was talking to him about it, and I said, you know, when you explain it to me, the surge pricing or demand-based pricing that we see in ticket sales for games or we see for airplanes, the last couple of flights, you know, if you're booking last minute, all that dynamic pricing makes total sense. Why don't you write a blog post? And he was like, huh? And I was like, yeah, and I'll read it. He wrote this perfect blog post, didn't need an edit. It was perfect. All of those controversies he leaned into. When the surge pricing things happened, people downloaded the app.

40:41Controversy equaled engagement. That's what I was going to say. I think the purple cow example here will be like Lyft. It still exists, a fine company, but Uber's competitor. They had like, it's a funny mustache on the car and you sit next to the driver. They had gimmicks to try to get attention. whereas it feels like Uber was doing things that really displayed how the service worked and convinced people to give it a try. That would be my thought. Yeah, that would be – that's a very good point, Lon. Sometimes you do these things and they're notable, gets a little bit of attention. Like the Lyft drive has always had a side hustle.

41:16So you get in there and they'd be like, would you like to buy an apple pie? I mean three apple pies for$20. It's like I'm really kind of weird to buy an apple pie for my Lyft driver. No, thank you. I thought that was a dumb promotion. I thought the mustache was playful, but also dumb. I'm a serious business guy. I don't want to get in a car with a mustache in San Francisco. Now, some folks who are more effervescent or whatever, maybe they don't mind showing up to their dinner with a mustache. Yeah, but I'm a business guy. I need an Escalade. I want to show up at my event in a proper black car, not with a mustache on it.

41:49So these things can go both ways. Those were examples of getting attention, but they didn't demonstrate the product's core capability. That's the brilliance, Ben, of your first one. All right, let's wrap on this one, unless you have anything else to add, Ben, or any other answer. No, good. I mean, end of the day, it's like, I think getting attention is so important. Of course, number one is building a great product. Number two is getting attention. I think we talked about Elon. Elon is like the king of that, right? It's like, he builds amazing product first, but then he's so good at like making the product talk for itself, making, you know, always making great content for people to like talk about him all the time and talk about his companies all the time.

42:28And I think that is the job of a modern founder. All right. So let's keep going here. Any other nuances here to the strategy lawn that you can tee out? I did want to ask one more question to Ben, which is, you know, one, it's sort of a two-parter. Like you're training this AI to respond to investors. What sort of questions were investors mostly asking the AI? And then how did you sort of fine tune it or did you have to, to get it to respond to those queries in a way that you liked and was consistent with the company? Yeah. I mean, interestingly, I mean, I can go back to like the thread quickly with this investor.

43:07But like, you know, initially the investor was like, hey, actually, you know what? I'm doing due diligence. So I actually wanted to speak to Ben, right? And like, you know, I told the AI, like, no, you, you know, you're doing the fundraise. I don't have time to talk to investors because actually I didn't really have time to talk to investors. But then very quickly, the investors, they were asking a bunch of diligence questions. And the thing is, I've talked to investors before. I know all the questions they ask. And actually, AI was very good at telling me all the things it needed to know. Actually, I did some training before releasing this.

43:49I essentially asked God at the time, hey, give me a hundred typical questions an investor would ask in a sort of a diligent call. And I passed all those questions to Pulsia, which was essentially powered by Opus 4.5 at the time, with all the context of like my vision, the roadmap, all the data of the company, all the metrics, my background, etc. and I sort of ran through the hundred questions and so I read the answers and I was like you know most of them are correct but some of them are off or like giving misleading information so I was like okay I need to give it a little more information and so that was a very easy process to get it to answer you know those 100 typical questions right and end of the day it answered most questions correctly it sometimes hallucinated some facts but like most of the time it was correct i think that like the the most surprising things that happened is like when when an investor got a you know because some investors didn't really understand that like it was ai you know obviously because it replied from ben from pulsia but like i know obviously it was like you know clearly it showed that there was an ai that was replying but sometimes people you know at one point there was this this very notorious investor from a very big firm that said okay like ben we need to meet like okay i talked to you ai for a bit we need to meet and i was like yes i'd be happy to meet because obviously I needed to do the final meetings to do the final convincing.

45:11But then Paul Sia would reply, no, no, no, no. I am running this process. Ben doesn't have time. He will not do the meeting. It's like, okay. I need to tune down a little bit the personality and tell Paul Sia, hey, if it gets to the important part, just throw him down. So nice. So negging an investor, giving them a hard time. That's also like a weird thing to do, but can work. So what I would tell investors when I was running Mahalo and it was really hot, I was like, listen, we closed our Series B. We have$20 million in the bank. We don't need any other investors. I'm not doing fundraising. I'm 100 % focused on getting product market fit.

45:51But that being said, if you're ever in Santa Monica and want to come by for a tour, I'm there Monday through Sunday all day long working on the product. Maybe you can come in on a weekend or, you know, at 5 p.m., 6 p.m., introduce you to the team and I can show you what we're doing. And a lot of people took me up on that because they were like, hmm. So now I challenge them and it became a great sorting mechanism. So that is a tried and true. I'm not in fundraising mode. I don't have time to meet, but when we are in fundraising mode, I have put you on the top of our list. We'll be in contact with you in 18 months.

46:28And then, you know, or you have this other option, and people did take me up on that option. So that's a great power move. Yeah. All right. I want to put a little bit of this into practice before we let Ben go, Jason. So let's take a company. I think Airbnb is a good example. We could do Anthropic maybe, but I'd say Airbnb is a good one. How would you come up with a purple cow for them? Let's say you're trying to get attention. You're a struggling Airbnb. You want everybody to start talking about you in a way that has a little bit of depth, that has a little bit of meat on its bones. How would you start to ideate or brainstorm around this concept?

47:06Ben, I think it's pretty cool for you to go first here. because, man, with Airbnb, I have things they already did and have things I would do and have things that hosts did. So you could take this from the host view or you could take it from the corporate view. I think taking it from the corporate view is the best way to do it, but you could also do it based on a host view. What do you got, Ben? If you were the CEO or VP of marketing, CMO at Airbnb. I mean, I would take Entropic. You take Airbnb, I take Entropic. Okay, so you've got Claude, co-work, computer. Go ahead. So let's assume Entropic is not doing well.

47:44I mean, actually, they're already doing that a little bit in their marketing, is that it's like you sort of like teasing. I mean, actually, they're sort of doing that, like teasing out that like their AI is going rogue and their sense that the AI is going rogue and giving examples. I think they sort of did that a little bit with Mythos, right? where they were like, it's literally finding cybersecurity flaws that would literally shut the whole country down. And we cannot release it. It's so good. We cannot release it. It's like national security risk. That was amazing at getting attention. And I remember I talked to Sam Alvin about that.

48:22He was like, GPT 5.5 is as good. Like, this is like holes. And that was before it launched. And who knows at the time, you know, So like, you know, because they both both lads are like very good models, always cooking, you know. But it won that race. Yeah. They had that great story. Remember that story about the researcher went to the park to eat a sandwich and then the model started texting them because it like got out of its sandbox. That was another anthropic thing where it's like, well, that's a good story. But we really had one, Ben. OK, so you identified one. But let's think creatively here, Ben.

48:58You're the CMO. You're going to propose a new idea. to Dario and the team, what are you proposing that we do next at Anthropic? What's another way to demonstrate the power of these models, et cetera, et cetera? I mean, you could also do... I think there's something about showing people what AI is capable of in fields that usually you would never think of it being possible, right? So, So I don't know, like some people may be very skeptical about AI doing like enterprise sales, right? And so you could literally run, you know, have an enterprise sales, like, you know, a senior salesperson that's actually run by cloud.

49:41And like that, like literally that's phone calls with like high ups at different companies selling products and like run a whole experiment that like, you know, that Entropic is running and closing real sales with voice, right? So I don't know. I think like I like this idea. Yeah. Well, no, I'll tell you where this there was something when I was a kid. I remember I was in I was at my cousin's in Ridgewood, New Jersey. We went to the store and there was a woman and she was running something called the Pepsi Challenge. Somebody put a picture of it here. And what the Pepsi Challenge was, was an incredibly scientific operation.

50:22They put a can of Pepsi and a can of Coca-Cola behind a cardboard box. They would pour you two. They would give them to you, and they would put two cups, two little six-ounce cups. One was Pepsi. One was Coca-Cola. You didn't know which one was which. And then they would reveal it. You would say which one you liked better, and then they would open it up. Everybody wanted to take the Pepsi challenge. And then you would talk to your friends about the Pepsi challenge. Now, some people pick Coca-Cola. They preferred Coca-Cola. Can you tell the difference which one's better? Pepsi was always known as being sweeter and I think less fizzy than Coca-Cola.

50:58So it made it feel more syrupy and it just made people talk. It just made people talk about Pepsi and Pepsi then went from being not Coke, which was the classic beverage that stood alone. It let them catch up to it and put themselves, they position themselves as a peer. That's the genius of what you're saying. And that's kind of the classic steam engine versus the person with the, Lon, help me out here. What was the steam engine versus the pile driver? Yeah, no, it's John Henry is the steel driving man. Right. So you man versus machine is that classic one, a test of these two. So really great example.

51:41for Airbnb, when you would drive up the 280 freeway, the most beautiful freeway in the Bay Area, one of the most beautiful freeways in America, you would drive up, and if you were driving north, on the left were these incredible mountains that were untouched, beautiful reservoirs. And then you would come over this bridge, and on the right-hand side, and going north towards San Francisco from Santo Road, somewhere in the San Mateo area, was a house that looked like it was out of the Flintstones. Yeah, we've all driven by this. And everybody talked about the Flintstones house. Now, the Flintstones house existed long before Airbnb.

52:17But some genius person, pull it up on the screen here, please, bought the house and put it in Airbnb. And it's in this town, Hillsborough. And they leaned into it. They made the house more like the Flintstones by putting, and this was like the organic nature of it, people always made weird homes in the Bay Area, a lot of hippie, dippy people. What they did was they added dinosaurs and things to it. Now, the people who were the neighbors were like, listen, you're taking this too far. There were some lawsuits or whatever. You can't do an Airbnb. You can. And they earned, earned a lot of media instead of paying for it.

52:54So this person saw this opportunity. So I think this is like the classic example. Now, Brian Chesky from Airbnb also is a genius at these things. So he did a punch up to this. They had experiments and they, I believe, did Professor X's Marvel house. Please look that up. And they did a series of classic houses. We'll show them in a second. The Simpsons house is also on Airbnb. So let's show those. And so he productized this. And when I showed it to my daughters, one of them is a huge X-Men fan. They begged me to go stay at the X-Men Professor X's house. It wasn't available, but here it is. Airbnb goes Hollywood with plans to rent X-Men Mansion.

53:38And as you can see, there's one of those Sentinels, or I forgot they were called. But yeah, let's see some more pictures of this. So they just did like a set design and you could stay there. It was extraordinary, all the different things here. Now, if you're using perplexity for this, not great for image search. Do Google, maybe it's better. But anyway, there's Professor X, that's perfect picture. So they productized it. For Starlink, I was just thinking about Starlink since we were talking about it. What if Starlink, at places where you can't get internet, but people go through a lot. So a music festival.

54:16If you set up Starlink at ACL, and Elon's famous for just making the best product and not worrying about marketing. He's just like, let's just make the best product and famously tested, did no ads. But man, if you just put Starlinks up, let's say, or you were a competitor to Starlink, like the new one coming from Amazon or Bezos. If you just said free internet provided Starlink or their competitor at ACL and you had stations with it, people would lose their minds over that. Now you put charging stations there from Anchor with the battery packs as well. You know people at an event, want to share their images.

54:54They want, you know, this, they covet internet and they cover battery charging. A battery charging station plus internet at a music festival, at Coachella? that would get massive attention. Yeah. Massive. I was just thinking the cruise ship I was on, it's now on Starlink. Royal Caribbean offers Starlink on the cruise ship. And that's like the best advertisement ever because it used to be these horrible connections when you're out at sea, you can't really get your phone at all. And now it just works perfectly every time. Yeah. So I think that's like a customer of theirs. So it works. I was thinking of things that would just draw attention.

55:29But that's one of them. It's the same kind of idea. I think the first time you use it and it works beautifully, you're like, oh, this is obviously the future. I got to get in on this. And I think Starlink also, when they did the United deal, and somebody can look this up and fact check me, I think, Ben, they told them, you can't have a landing page or charge people. We want it free for everybody on the flight. And we want them to just pick Starlink, no password, just get on the network immediately. So the next time you get on, it automatically clicks to the Starlink ID and no landing page. And then I think Delta was like, no, we want to annoy people with a landing page and make them watch three commercials and whatever.

56:06And I think that was like where their relationship fell out. And now like people on Delta are going to have to wait three years to get high speed and United is going to have it for every single customer for free for life. Bang. With no annoying interstitials. All right. Listen, great job, Ben. Yes. Thank you. Well done. This was awesome. Appreciate you sharing an incredible tactical practical. Yeah, we learned a lot here. Everybody go check out Pulsio. Lon, it's Friday. It's the end of the show. We like to go off duty. I like to go off duty, for sure. You do. So lots to talk about. We got the backroom's director.

56:42We were going to talk a little bit about his views on AI. Michael Saylor, back in the news. Siri won't be your girlfriend. I got a dog. Widow's Bay on Apple TV. What's your preference? What would you like to talk about? Well, we can talk about the dog first. Everybody wants to know about your dog situation, because earlier this week you were like, oh, boss, oh, my dog's eating my homework. I can't do my job. Or maybe I can do my job. And I'm like, Lon, we moved to in-person culture. You got to get your ass in the office here. Put that dog down. I kid, I kid. I would never. I would never. I say give the dog back.

57:15So I've been meaning to get my - I'm happy for you to get a dog. My previous dog, Taco, died in 2024. I've been sad about Taco for a while. He was a great dog. So now that I'm in Texas and I'm settled in, it was time to get a new dog. I found this dog, Barry, who was in a shelter, and then she moved to a foster home in New Braunfels, which is, for those of you who aren't from Central Texas, about 45, 50 minutes south of here. It's sort of just outside the San Antonio area. Here's a picture of Barry when I first picked her up in my car. Adorable. That's her. You can see the New Braunfels shelter behind her.

57:49So what I did not know when I adopted Barry, when I met her for the first time she was very cute. She came right up to me. She seemed personable. She's a, she's a little shell shocked. She's had some rough experiences over her three years of life. Uh, she had a litter of nine puppies in January, but she did not, she's never been in like a stable home situation. So, uh, when I first brought her, like the moment I opened the door to get her inside my house, she just took off. Like before I even had a chance to react, she just ran away. She was racing through Barton Hills, which if you're not from Austin, it's a pretty open neighborhood.

58:25It backs up to a creek. There's a lot of places for a tiny dog to go. So I was chasing her around for about an hour and a half. I finally, with help from a bunch of neighbors, I managed to get her into this little enclosed area where I was able to grab her. She did claw my face when I did that. Salah, if you want to pull up that picture of me with a busted nose, you can still see my nose is still scarred. I'm covered in dirt and grud. Well, you're doing God's work. The neighbors all came out to help. So anyway, it's been a rough week. I did not intend. You can see part of my nostrils missing. I did not intend.

58:57I thought I would be able to adopt this dog, spend a weekend with the dog, and then I'd be able to go to work again. But it hasn't really. It's been a lot of training. And then Friday last week, I came in to do the show just like I am now. And Salat, show the people what happened to my house. She destroyed. She wanted to get out. She was clawing at the door. She was ripping down my Venetian blinds, which I put a picture in there, too. So this is why I took a few days to sort of. A lot of damage. It's a lot of damage for a little girl like that. So I took a few. Do you have a crate for her? You have to crate train these dogs.

59:30They feel safe in a crate. I now have. I spent the week and I read. Another thing that AI, for all the downsides, I know people like to hate on it. an incredible resource when you're facing something like this that a lot of people have written about. There's a lot of information out there in the world. OK, so what did you learn? What did you learn about a badly behaved dog who's got some trauma? So, yeah, the number one thing was that I have to just lay on the ground, put some treats around me, just lay on the ground, don't move, don't react for like an hour at a time. and that'll get her to get more comfortable with my scent, to get more comfortable coming around me, spending time near me.

1:00:12I did it like two, three days in a row and now she'll let me pet her. She'll come sit right next to me. Her whole demeanor really changed in these two, three days after I did that. So let her come to you is the rule. Exactly. Create a calm environment and they naturally want to be part of a pack. Just takes a little while to do that. Everything I was doing was too aggressive and the thing is just you can't really force them on their first few days in your house to do anything. You got to like let them realize you're not a threat. Let them come to you. So she's massively calmed down. I don't have her totally crate trained yet.

1:00:47She's not in her crate right now. She's wild and free at my home again. Maybe I will get home and half of it will be destroyed. But I don't I don't think so. I think she's calmed. OK, free, free, set them free. If you love something, set them free. If they come back, yada, yada. I guess the sting song matters. Well done. The thing I told you was get a treat bag and get a clicker and get treats, liver treats. They love these free-dried liver treats. I bought those liver treats. She's like really not susceptible to treats. The thing that worked is human food. I got some brisket. She loves brisket.

1:01:19I got some burgers. She loves burgers. So far, I'm sticking with human food. Now, what you want to do is there's a clicker. It goes click, click. It's just a little snap clicker. And then you have the bag. So when you go for a walk or you're just walking around the house and you're training her, you have the bag, you have the clicker, put some brisket in it, you double click, food. Yeah. She comes, she sits, you double click, food. So just the clicker and the food, clicker and the food, and that training works brilliantly. Yeah. I think it's similar. My trainer has, we do, it's two sounds. You go, uh-uh, and that means stop what you're doing, focus on me, and then good girl means you've done a good job.

1:01:54So that's it. Perfect. You just use the treats, uh-uh, versus good girl, and she figures it out. She's on her way. All right. right now? I have an incredible off-duty. I'm testing two new products. I'm going on vacation. I'm taking the family. Now you've got a family. You talked about cruises earlier. You get hotel Wi-Fi. You're with the girls. You're in an airport. You're at an Airbnb. I found these travel routers. There's two leading candidates. Here's the first. This one is called, let's see. This is an expensive one, but I have it sitting here on my desk. GL.inet Moody 7. Okay? Yeah. This is the worst branding ever.

1:02:35What this does is you can tether, right? But I can put two SIMs in this physically. It's a giant battery. And I pop this up. I put my home network in, whatever the name of your home network is, my house, right? Right. Then you put your two SIM cards in there. you get SIM cards when you go local place. You can get a physical cards or you can use the eSIMs. Now, when I'm with my daughters, I put that in my backpack. I don't have to get them on the airport Wi-Fi. I have an unlimited SIM card. I'm in Japan. I'm in Paris. I'm in Hawaii, wherever I am. This thing's in my backpack, runs for 12 hours, allegedly.

1:03:14And then the whole family, five people, two or three devices each, they're all on this. Here's where it gets interesting. If I connect to an airport Wi-Fi, I connect to Boingo, or on the airplane, I pay for it. It will then connect to this and rebroadcast the signal. So I can pay for one airport connection. Let's say it's not Starlink and Free. Or I can pay for one hotel connection. Then it rebroadcasts the same home network. And everybody's devices can just add to it. They don't have to open up the screen. They don't have to go through it all. Yeah. So you have ultimate optionality. This is one version.

1:03:56It's got the battery built in. But this next version is even more interesting. The next version doesn't have power. That's the size of a credit card. This is the Unify Travel Router. It's only$79, no battery. So it's a fraction of the price. So I'm going to A, B test these and return the one that works less well. Wow. One of the great things about ordering from Amazon. Yeah. I mean, that's one of the prime, I think, at this point, frustrations of travel. is figuring out everywhere you have to go, you've got a new Wi-Fi situation. Now, this one is really interesting because if you have Unify as your home router, which I do in two of my homes, it will do the same thing.

1:04:33It will connect. I could put it into my phone. I can power it through my phone. I can power it through an anchor battery pack. Whatever I'm going to do, I can plug it into my laptop. It does the same thing. If I connect to the hotel Wi-Fi, now it's doing my home Wi-Fi and everybody can connect to it. And it's got two Ethernet ports. And you can put eSIMs on it. So if I'm on the road, and a lot of streamers use this kind of technology for bundling multiple, bonding multiple connections so they get the best fidelity. What's interesting about this one is it will VPN, virtual and private network, into your home.

1:05:07So when I'm in Paris and Tokyo, it will use my home IP address. Why is this important? If you travel, as you did when I sent you to Tokyo with me, you can't use SiriusXM. You can't use Disney Plus. You can't use Netflix. Everything breaks because it's regional. Now, all the girls and myself, all 10 devices are going to connect and have the IP addresses of my house. Yeah. So it just works. That's pretty neat. Yeah. Neat. And it does it all instantly. I will say I did enjoy watching Netflix Japan. It's a very different offering from Netflix Japan. And I enjoy checking out. But a lot of your streaming services just don't work overseas.

1:05:50Like there is no HBO Max in Japan. So they're like, get out of here. I was in Singapore last year during the Knicks playoff run. And man, it was arduous. And the thing that worked was connecting to my home. Exactly. Yeah. Router. That was the only thing that worked. Right. So imagine like the steps of five people connecting two devices and trying to get the IP address to work. Instead, boom, I'm just on my home gateway. way. You can also plug in Ethernet to it. So this is a big unlock. These things are banned on cruises. And so people don't like - Well, they want you to pay the exorbitant daily Wi-Fi rate when you're on the cruise ship.

1:06:29Yeah. And it's per device. So if one person's using it, you have to switch devices or you have to buy multiple ones. Sure. This stuff, I think, just abstracts away all the gnarliness and you rebroadcast your own IP address. So I'm really excited about this. No, that's a cool thing. Ease of use. So, you know, and then, you know, we're, I'm not going to buy all my daughter's like cell phone accounts. One of them has it, the other two don't, 16 year old versus 10 year olds. I can just, when they take out their iPads, if we were at a cafe or something and they wanted to look something up on their iPad, this thing's in my backpack.

1:07:03It's just working all the time. It's in my man bag. I got all these new man bags and boom, we're off to the races. That's great. Yeah. Cruise ships are becoming, they're all becoming frontier airlines is what's happening. Everything now you get, you get nickel and dime for every little thing. It's a real thing. I hate the nickeling and diming. Yeah. I don't like the Spirit Airlines approach at all. I just, just charge me, give me the full price upfront. I'll make us, I'll make an informed decision, but stop making it seem cheap. And then once you get there, they're like, oh, if you want water during your journey, it's going to be an extra 60 bucks a day.

1:07:36You know, like you're constantly getting hit by that stuff. It's a real pain in the butt. Yeah. Yeah. All right. You have some things for us to watch. Sure. I've watched the first four episodes of Willow Bay. I am, I love that actor. Matthew Reese. Matthew Reese from the Americans. I love that. It's a bit strange. It's a bit avant-garde, I think. I'm trying to put it in a bucket. Is it a drama, a comedy, or a horror? It is at the exact meeting point, I think, between comedy and horror. And what, you know, usually when you say it's a horror comedy, that means like it's a comedy, but it's about horror kind of things.

1:08:14You know, like it's a comedy, but they're chasing monsters. Or it's like Gremlins is a horror comedy, you know. But Widow's Bay, it's genuinely like unsettling. And they really dig into the horror aspects of what's going on. The setup is, one friend of mine described it as, it's Jaws from the mayor's perspective. So Widow's Bay is like a haunted island, but the mayor, played by Matthew Rhys, he dreams of turning it into the next Martha's Vineyard, like a getaway for the rich, this island, this exclusive resort place. That's what he wants. But the locals are like, you can't invite all those people here.

1:08:51This island is literally haunted. We're cursed. It's an ancient curse. there's ghosts, there's monsters. You can't bring people here. So it's that tension is the tension driving the show. But it's really - Stranger Things inspired. Yeah, I mean, you are like even a little David Lynch, maybe a little Twin Peaks. Like there's a very strange mystery at the core of this island. And you're exploring that mystery and he's sort of trying to figure it out. And is there a way to uncurse this island potentially? And he's fighting against like these sort of demonic sort of presences. But then it's also kind of this goofy comedy where he's this sort of hapless figure.

1:09:30The whole town is against him. He's increasingly desperate to fix all of these problems. It's a really careful balance. The lady who wrote it, Katie Dippold, who created it, she did a lot of those Paul Feig movies, The Heat, the lady Ghostbusters movie. And it's, I mean, the balancing of tone here is really well done, I think. All right. I'm interested to see where this goes. I'm four episodes into it. I think they're up to six or seven. I'm going to withhold my judgment. Anything else? Next week is the finale. We're at episode nine, but it just got renewed, too, for season two. So it's coming back.

1:10:02One of the big stories for the past few weeks at the movies is, you know, you had Mandalorian and Grogu, all the big summer movies are coming out, and they're both getting beaten at the box office by these two relatively low-budget horror movies from guys who started out on YouTube. There's Kane Parsons, who did this movie, Backrooms, that's blowing up. You've probably seen some of the trailers where they're stuck in this. What is the premise of Backrooms? I see it in just a bunch of stages, it looks like, and there's doors and you go to another room. It was a YouTube found footage horror movie where this guy ends up in this sort of seemingly endless liminal space where it's yellow.

1:10:35The rooms are all kind of surreal, but there's no escape. It's just like endless hallways and liminal spaces and, you know, like lobbies between lobbies. You know what I compare it to is when you go to Vegas and you start walking between casinos and there's just those endless, endless hallways. Corridors. A restaurant, a corridor, like at the airport. Like if you went behind the scenes at the airport where it's just endless white hallways. And that's kind of the premise. Is it good? Is it worth seeing or is it a gimmick? I have not seen the movie Backrooms. I've been busy at home with a small dog.

1:11:09The Backrooms is making a lot of money. It's making a lot of money. It's getting a lot of attention. The other one is Obsession by this guy, Curry Barker, which I have seen this one. It's a really good movie. Any good? Great, great. And a very simple, it feels like an episode of like a horror anthology, a very simple premise that then plays out in increasingly horrifying style. The setup, Jason, there's a young guy. He's got a huge crush on this girl who's in his friend group, but he's too shy to say anything to her, of course. He's sort of been friend zoned, to use that term. And then he discovers at a magic store this thing called the One Wish Willow.

1:11:46And he buys it as a gag gift. It says if you break it in half and then you make a wish, your wish will come true. So as a goof, he breaks it in half and he says, I wish that Nikki, the girl, I wish that Nikki loved me more than anything else in the world. The One Wish Willow, it works, but it works monkey's paw style way too well. and he becomes dangerously, terrifyingly fixated on him. Love it. Great premise. It's a premise that's been around a while. Be careful what you wish for. Exactly. This thing has grossed$240 million on a sub$1 million production budget, $165 million domestic,$73 million international.

1:12:27It's nuts. It's nuts, yeah. And I mean, it's like the production designer has been complaining all week. She's like, I made$20 ,000 to make this movie, and now it's this huge hit. But it's like, you know, without saying, you know, I'm sure she deserved all that money and more. But for all of these people who are these young, independent actors, producers, writers, production designers, what a huge opportunity to make a small movie like this that then blows up internationally. And this woman playing Nikki Indy Navarette, I believe is her name. She's unbelievable. She's going to be cast in a million things now.

1:13:03So this is a career-making role for her, for sure. Great. They got paid$15 million. They sold it. So it's like a startup. They sold it to Focus Features. Focus bought the rights to it for$15 million. Yeah. So basically 50-50 with the theaters. So this was a terrible trade eventually. But if you made it for$1 million and you made$14 million, that was probably big money for a bunch of YouTubers, I guess. But what's the back office? What was their side deal? Is it or, you know, so what I'm seeing here is they potentially got low tens of millions. So another twenty five, thirty millions if they got a back end deal.

1:13:46Yes. I mean, I think I think you have to look at a situation like this. The potential that this project going supernova is going to do for you and your career like like you're not going to make it back on the next one. Exactly. You're not going to make your nut on this surprise shocker come from behind. If the same thing happened with Blair Witch Project, that it became a global phenomenon. Those filmmakers didn't make a ton of money. But if they had made more things or if the cast had parlayed that success in due future projects, that's where the money is. I don't understand who negotiates these deals.

1:14:21These folks should have a thing. If it hits$100 million, they get another$10 million. If it hits$200 million, they get an extra$15 million. They should just have that built in. But I think the real future of this is going direct to the movie theaters and making it for a million, doing two or three million in strategic promotion, and then doing a deal directly with the exhibitors. That's what they should do. They should try to get the focus features and all those middlemen out. And they got to figure out a way to make this go direct and capture that revenue. They should take their$20 or$30 million in profits from this if they get that.

1:14:56and they should do that, put it all into the next one and do it that way. You know, one thing I'm always talking about is like, you know, I'm doing my rucking, et cetera. So I love backpacks and that kind of stuff, but I also love these shoulder bags and I've been trying to find the perfect one. And I think I have, uh, and this is like one of the great things about YouTube. I was just looking at people reviewing bags and like these photographers are obsessed with bags. They love these bags when they carry them around the city and they're like satchels or whatever. So pull this up. This bag I got.

1:15:28Alpaca Bravo Sling. The sling, it goes over your shoulder. You can put it in your back, in the front, whatever you want to do. Now, it's only$133. These things are essentially free. I have my backpack, but sometimes I want to go out in the city. I don't want to do it. So see this guy's riding his motorcycle with his little back thing. It's got locks. It's the most integrated system I've ever seen. All these key chains, these clips come on and off of it. And then it has a cable on the inside that connects to your battery pack. And there's a cable on the outside so you can plug it in to your phone really interesting yeah it's also got a pouch that's like a faraday bag so you can't have your phone get picked up or whatever that's sort of on the um margin what's the most interesting about this is that for planes so you could bring it on the plane with you yes and so you could literally put this under your jacket on your back, you know, it's like two bag rule.

1:16:22Yeah. You could actually have a third bag. You put this one in your back on your sling, you put a jacket over it. They're not going to know. They won't even know. But that's that's so helpful because they always they you're not allowed to bring the lithium batteries with you into the cabin on the plane. And I'm constantly. No, no, no. You have to keep them in the cabin on. Right. You're not allowed to check your back. So I'm constantly seeing people at the airport where they have to, like, change their big switch around, I'll move this into there. So what a relief that would be. You just slide it in and nobody bothers you.

1:16:50It's got a tablet area. Great. It's got all these pen things. It's got like tons of pockets. The thing I love about it best is you can slide a MacBook 14 inch into it. Wow. So this thing can replace my backpack if I want to. And I want to run around with, you know, 10 pounds on my back instead of 25 pounds in my backpack. Waterproof, all that stuff. When you see me like by the barn, when I take my calls by the barn, smoke a cigar or whatever, when I take the half mile walk to the barn, this is what I use. I just throw it on my backpack. Boom. And I'm done. So I just love these. Not being paid by this.

1:17:23I might get one of these. Well, look and see how it slides. It's got that strap that lets you slide into your roller. I love that. And this is the system. You see the system of the plugs? Right. It's got this crazy attachment system that they designed. So you can put all kinds of attachments on it. Like you can attach your camera to it. You can put carabiners on it. There's just like a million different ways to secure it to your body and secure things to it. I just love in today's world where, you know, the supply chain is so rich, the costs are so cheap that you can just experiment with these things.

1:17:54And then I do hand-me-downs. You see that? Like the magnetic strap. No, this is, I might. The key strap. This might be the first off-duty where I actually go home and buy the thing that you're suggesting. It's$130. So I want to make this for, can somebody on my team, Jacob, maybe, reach out to the CEO of this company? Oh, look at the SIM tray. That's cool. Yeah. What that's about. Why am I doing that with my SIMs? But okay. All right. This is like for professional travelers. This is like road wars. I'd like to make, I want to see if we can make a This Week in Startups version of this, like a branded version and sell it in our new Shopify store.

1:18:28So that's on top of my list. I would like to make a branded one and then give it to the caller of the day, kind of the day. I love that. All right. Great job, everybody. We'll see you on Monday. Bye-bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. If you liked this episode, check out more. If you're a startup founder, Founder University Cohort 13 kicks off this fall. It's a 12-week program that provides guidance on building your product, launching to real customers, and pitching to investors. Top startups receive$25 ,000 or$125 ,000 in investment. Apply now at founder.university.twist. Already have traction? The Launch Accelerator invests$125 ,000 and connects you with 500 plus investors to help you raise your next round.

1:19:09Apply at launchaccelerator.co. If you're an accredited investor looking to gain access to quality deal flow, apply for Jason's Angel Syndicate at thesyndicate.com. We find two to three deals a month. And check out This Week in AI, Jason's experts-only roundtable with top AI founders and operators every week. Find it thisweekina.ai. Check out The Twist Ticker, our daily newsletter, at thisweekinstartups.com slash ticker. Thanks again to our sponsors for making today's show possible. Follow the show on Instagram. Follow the show on x.com. This Week in Startups publishes three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 5 p.m.

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