Spycraft in SaaS, Rabbit’s Comeback, and Startup Pitch Madness | E2106

0:00I provided Alex, CEO of Deal, with a lot of Rippling confidential information, including Rippling's product roadmap, which indicated where Rippling was currently providing services and where it's right now. expand. I also passed on the deal quote battle card, a document that instructed Rippling Salesforce on what arguments to make to potential customers about the superiority of Rippling's products over deals. I also provided Alex with many of Rippling's sales leads. Jason, in terms of like the crown jewels, right? If you're a reporter, the crown jewels is getting someone's income statement, right?

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1:11Get$2 ,000 off your first hire at lemon.io slash hire today. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. I'm Jason Calacanis. We do the show three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. We do it live. When you watch the live stream with Alex and I, you get to get about, I don't know, 20, 30 minutes more content, a little bit of bantering as we record the show, and then those live feeds go away. We will be adding images onto the live feed of our sponsors for the day's program. So team, let's make sure we do that. You can follow along on the docket, thisweekinstartups.com slash docket.

1:46If you go there, you'll watch Alex, Lon, and the team build out the docket, the stories we're going to talk about, and you can post comments there. And it's just a fun way to go along the show. In the show notes, we're doing really great show notes. We're doing chapters, I hope, for the podcast now. we're just trying to get our podcast game, you know, just really chef's kiss, if you will. Doing quite a lot of work on it. Of course, feedback is always welcome. So Alex W at launch.co if you have notes about things we can improve. But yeah, you can always drop comments in the docket. I see and read every single comment people drop in.

2:20So if you want to reach me directly, please do so. Context, things we've missed, these stories we might want to take a look at. We are always listening to everyone out there who's a part of the, I don't know, Jason twist gang, maybe. Yeah, the whole group. And we also are hiring. We're hiring. If you're interested in being the venture business, we are hiring in Austin. That's the starting point. If you're out of school, maybe a couple of years experience, or you're looking to do a career change. Basically, what does a researcher do? They research topics for launch, our venture firm, which produces two programs, Founder University, the Launch Accelerator.

2:55And of course, we do this speaking startups. The researchers are just the critical role. They meet and sort through 20 ,000 applications for funding a year. We meet with probably 20 % of those, about 4 ,000 of them, 5 ,000 of them. We put them into our database. We track those companies, the ones with the best teams and maybe the best execution as we see it. Just a great way for you if you wanted to break in. And we're also hiring. We're hiring another video editor here. We need somebody who is good at um shorts we're trying to figure out shorts but i'll be honest we've never gotten it right we're kind of boomers producer nick who went over to all in was great at shorts but i don't have him anymore i need i think i need a tiktok native so if you're a tiktok native uh go ahead and pull up that link if uh somebody can let me put it over here i got you uh oh you got it okay pull up the link uh it's a job description on linkedin you can go find it if you uh follow the launch account there and this would be in the office with me lon chris and the team we have our just podcast producer editor uh and uh yeah entry level job but if you have more uh experience yeah it could go up from there so if you're an entry level and you're just doing tiktok on your own great if you want to if you got a couple years experience that's okay too we just need somebody who's needed that's what we're doing tiktok shorts here and youtube shorts we're trying to figure it out Okay.

4:18All right. Speaking of things not to do, you should go out and learn things. You should teach yourself new skills. But if anyone ever offers to pay you, Jason, a couple of thousand dollars a month to learn how to be a spy, say no. So the news is that we have new information about the Rippling Deal suit. As everyone I'm sure recalls, Rippling and Deal are both just outsourced HR providers. They'll help you make sure your employees are paid both in your home country and abroad. They're both large. They're both unicorns. They're both well known. So when Rippling said that deal had put a spy essentially inside of its operations to exfiltrate information, it was a pretty big darn deal.

5:00Things died down for a bit. We waited for more information and now we have it. The spy, the mole, has essentially come clean and put together a large almost confessional that we have. He got pinched. Well, he definitely got pinched, but he was still considering we'll get into the the why he decided to come clean towards the end here but i want to walk people through what we've learned today just if that's okay yes we should totally do this because corporate espionage is incredibly entertaining two high growth companies in a spat both of which apparently now have you know let's call it sharp elbowed founders right parker conrad had an sec violation against him i'm kind of like on the periphery of it because i like parker conrad i he's like a cool founder and he's like a super aggressive founder who made a couple of mistakes got an sec claim against him whatever um you know it happens i'm not condoning it but i'm also not saying young people who make mistakes should like he didn't murder anybody let's leave it at that but parker conrad you know like pretty aggressive founder with sec violation is now up against the deal founder yep uh who hired a literal rippling employee to spy on the company and has been caught with his hand in the cookie jar yes they're both i think yc companies uh and this also speaks to a larger um silicon valley and specifically why combinator rule-breaking ethos so rippling was the winter 17 cohort and deal was the winter 19 cohort.

6:41So a little bit ago, but both companies went through YC, well-known founders. And I'm going to show some screenshots. Before we do that, I also want to put out a disclaimer. I have exposure to both companies through venture funds I'm in. And I think one of our companies, I won't say which, was acquired by one of the companies. I don't want to just create this, but we invest in 450 companies sometimes a company we've invested in 450 companies over 12 years sometimes a company gets acquired we wind up with some shares none of it is like enough for me to have like a horse in the race none of it is it's all de minimis in terms of its impact on me it wouldn't affect my coverage of this but as we say in the business no conflict no interest i'm an investor in 450 companies and i'm an investor in 20 venture capital firms some of them are higher profile than others um and you would know them and they have it okay so let's get to this case because in ireland the person confessed in an ireland court for some reason because they were out of the the irish uh rippling office if memory serves so this was a person based in europe so i want to start with how much money this person was paid so jason here is two kind of combined screenshots from the uh release and i'm going to go ahead and sportscast a bit here for folks who are on the audio release this is a news story this is a deposition this is a court document court filing from the high court of ireland okay but it's from the voice of the alleged spot so he's he's thank you for adding alleged oh yeah is it alleged if he confessed uh i think it's alleged until someone is um convicted because i would like to avoid extraneous uh legal risk What about admitted spy?

8:25Self-admitted spy, alleged corporate mold. Self-proclaimed, alleged spy? Okay, go. All right, so he says, Alex and Philippe, the founder, and his father was also the CFO, said that I would be paid approximately 5 ,000 euros per month for spying on Rippling for a deal and that I would be paid around the 6th of the month. They established payment terminology, so when he wanted to get paid, he would, quote, send a picture of a watch to the payment chat and Philippe would say send that watch to London then he would say the buyer is happy I understood this to mean that Alex the buyer of Ripley's confidential information was happy with my services and the information I sent Jason as far as code speak goes that sucks but at least they were trying to obfuscate a little bit I guess I mean I don't want to critique spycraft but here we are um why not send or hand the person you know a thumb drive with tether on it like if you're going to pick a way to pay somebody pick the one that human traffickers money launderers and terrorists allegedly prefer allegedly preferred by human traffickers and terrorists everywhere tether so they should have just been giving this kid tether on a thumb drive you know or dropping a thumb drive to, you know, based on my spy novel and, you know, knowledge, they should have been putting Tether on a thumb drive into a Dropbox.

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10:41I had my car waiting for me at SFO and I avoid waiting around and I had my own car so I could go to all these disparate meetings I had across the Bay Area. You can manage your entire trip in Kite's app, meaning you can avoid waiting around while someone else enters your data into a computer by hand. One slow keystroke at a time. It's like that scene from the movie with the sloth at the DMV. Anyway, Kite doesn't do extra fees. It operates in large cities around the United States, and I've used it in both LA and San Francisco and love it. Here's your call to action. Download the Kite app or book online at kyte.com.

11:17That's kyte.com. Go ahead and download the app now so you have it ready to go. Use the code Jason at checkout. You get 10 % off your first rental, which could be significant. Don't forget to use the code Jason. Download the app, kyte.com right now. So here's the next quote. What is this? This is what was actually taken. So, So the spy can use. Let's read the quote here, yeah. I provided Alex, CEO of Deal, with a lot of Rippling confidential information, including Rippling's product roadmap, which indicated where Rippling was currently providing services and where it sought to expand. I also passed on the Deal quote Battle Card, a document that instructed Rippling's sales force on what arguments to make to potential customers about the superiority of Rippling's products over deals.

11:57I also provided Alex with many of Rippling's sales leads. Jason, in terms of like the crown jewels, right if you're a reporter the crown jewels is getting someone's income statement right but if you're a competing sass provider this is what you want the product roadmap is extremely damaging um if it was accurate some of it might be obvious but it would give you the ability to front-run announcements um and then it would give you the ability to um say to investors or to your team or to your customers in other words your constituents look we release these free features rippling is just the fast follower they copy us right so you could really damage parker's reputation and rippling's reputation in this case by making them look like a fast follower when in fact you're if this is all true i i can't imagine that this is um to fabricate this would probably be a bigger crime than actually um doing the crime right like if you were to say this about deal and it wasn't true this person would be in massive slanderous trouble um it's either truth or the biggest defamation case in the history of mankind so okay great so here we go all right so keep in mind that we we heard about um a honeypot trap that they set up, Jason.

13:26Yes. As it turns out, there's a little bit of commentary on that in the notes that we got. And essentially, yes, Alex did ask him to pull that up. And then he did. And then he said, wait, don't do it. It's a trap. And he already had. After he got caught, there was an amazing bit of drama in which the spy was essentially accosted at the office. So we have that quote about what he did when he got pinched, as Jason said earlier. so on friday march 14th 2025 by the way that's like two and a half weeks ago i went into the yeah believing that i was there to pick up a compliance award from one of my co-workers an independent solicitor served me with a court order requiring inspection of devices uh he lies and says his phone's upstairs they go up gets his bag comes back downstairs once we got back upstairs after retrieving my bag it started to sink in just how serious this was i panicked i I went to the bathroom with my phone and performed a factory reset on it, erasing all of its contents, including apps and contacts.

14:25I flushed the toilet a couple of times when I came out. I just wanted to get out of there, started to walk out, was told and warned that I shouldn't do that. And then I said, I'll take that risk and left. This matches what Deal alleged in the original suit down to a T. But the wrinkle here is that Deal thought he might have tried to, sorry, Rippling thought he might have tried to flush his phone. Turns out he was just making some noise to have him pass the time in the bathroom. but I do love that they had to search the pipes by accident because they did again I'm not a spycraft expert here Jason but this I am I am a spycraft expert I people don't know this but I did spend some time in a couple of agencies my time is over now so I can talk a little bit about my time in the Musad CIA and some other organizations this is just very low grade spycraft if you're going to do spycraft you got to do it at a higher level folks you got to watch day of the jackal you got to just check out what musad is doing kgb is doing there's much better corporate espionage techniques this is just bush league it's an embarrassment disgraziad for being a spy but disgraziad.com at an even higher level for not being a great spy if you're going to be a spy i just i talked about this at the top of the show you should aspire to be an elite spy be top one percent top ten percent this is bottom 10 this is bottom decile this is negative irr venture returns level crap um i'm gonna run board a little quote just before we we scoot on asif deals in-house lawyer said he was speaking in a quote personal capacity and that rippling quote have nothing they suggested flying my family and me i to dubai that night saying we quote all need a holiday so they wanted to a holiday i think it means a place without extradition that is a nice place to live so um i guess we have to ask what happens now um and then maybe talk a little bit about corporate intelligence versus corporate espionage one is okay one is not okay but go ahead you have something you want to add i i was gonna uh prognosticate what i think happens but then i realized that you're actually going into different direction so i'm gonna hand the baton back to you okay so um what happens next is this criminal this is criminal so where's the criminal case it must be being built by the fbi and the department of justice right now this is happening in ireland there's been a confession this is a legal document so we have to get i looked online for this and i couldn't find it this is moving very quickly in the last two weeks but i don't think a criminal complaint has been filed yet so i'm wondering there is a suit between rippling and deal about this it's a private civil suit oh oh you referred is there a like a federal criminal corporate espionage stealing like Waymo versus Uber or Alphabet versus Uber.

17:12That was a criminal case when Lindowski was pinched. So I was thinking more in terms of startup blowback versus criminal investigations. Well, the startup blowback is going to be, he's going to lose his job. The reason he's still in his job and these people are still in their jobs is they don't want to admit guilt by leaving or resigning. So the board needs time to process this, collect the facts. That's why you don't see things happen immediately. This isn't like he murdered somebody. These are allegations. So we keep that in mind. You know, it could be possible. It's not probable that this confession is a CYA by this person.

17:54And, you know, it's all a big misunderstanding or something. They hired him as an information consultant. I'm just putting out what the logical defense here would be, is we used an expert network. I get offered to be part of expert networks all the time. They pay$5 ,000 an hour for an expert network. What an expert network does is they obscurify who you're talking to and they say, you're talking to somebody who's in the smartphone business. Ah, that's great. Then you, as somebody working at Apple or HTC or Xiaomi or Google, can talk to five experts in the industry. Now, they might tell you the person house from asia or north america or europe and they're a senior executive and then you talk to them you pay five thousand to the agency and that person gets paid five thousand these expert networks if you look them up have been pinched or you know uh they're a gray area of corporate intelligence so there's corporate intelligence and there's expert networks so i was going to bring this piece up because this is where the gray is in our industry this if the allegations are true and the confession is true this is like criminal straight up criminal and that means everybody loses their job some people go to jail some people get suspended sentences it will be out of deal and um rippling's hands if it becomes a criminal case they no longer there's no settlement that occurs The government decides, oh, here's a CEO who's a billionaire.

19:27Here's their lawyer who's got a$50 million worth of stock. Hmm, chef's kiss. This is a Martha Stewart-like pelt. All right, if you're shipping a product or rolling out an update, you're building a company, you need to be organized, right? We know that. Atlassian has exactly what you need to streamline your work and smash your goals. And the Atlassian for Startups program is packed with all the tools you need, like Jira, where you can track every task, sprint, and bug. That's the industry standard. Confluence, another industry standard for team collaboration and documentation. And of course, Loom for quick video explainer creation.

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20:38Hey, watch this loom. And I get the link for the loom. I click it and then I can put comments at any time. So it's like doing a conference call, but on my time, asynchronously, and I can communicate right there on the video. Also included in Atlassian for Startups is Compass, Jira Product Discovery, Bitbucket, so much more, all powered by Atlassian Intelligence. That's their built-in AI. Atlassian software helps companies like Canva, Cloudflare, and Rivian keep growing and keep innovating. Whether you're brainstorming on sticky notes or scaling to the big leads, Atlassian is here to accelerate your startup's growth.

21:13Check out Atlassian for startups where eligible startups get up to 50 seats for free for one full year. That is absurdly generous. Why can they be so generous at Atlassian? Because they're the standard. Atlassian is the standard and they are generous to startups because they were once a startup. I remember meeting them 20 years ago in Australia. What a great company. Head to atlassian.com slash startups slash twist for complete details. They love, they love, love, love getting FTX. They love getting SPF. They love Theranos. They love a billionaire pelt because there's so many kids in jail for selling weed or fentanyl or whatever.

21:54And they get 10 years and then everybody questions, hey, what about the white collar criminal? I'm just really curious about how the board handles this from a purely selfish perspective. Failure of governance, failure to you know, be the adults in the room? Can boards catch this sort of thing? Or is this below their line? Nope. When you're on the board, you're meeting four times a year. You might have phone calls or text messages, chats, emails in between those. And you're looking at the top level information. A CEO can do all kinds of things. They can absolutely pay their cousin in an LLC to be a consultant and it's buried in the marketing budget and you have no insight into it and you're screwed as a board member and then that's why whistleblowers exist and that's why whistleblower protections exist that's why lawsuits and drive-by lawyers exist because if something went awry at the christmas party and somebody you know i don't know streaked at the Christmas party across the front lawn of Veranos, somebody is going to report it to HR, or somebody is going to email a board member, or they're going to email whistleblower at deal.com, right?

23:07And there are whistleblower protections in place for this reason. And this is why boards should have some independence to them. So I wouldn't blame the board here. They did not know this. There's no way they could have known this. If they did know it, they would have resigned, and they had a lot at stake. They had so much at stake, yes, because this is a really successful company. This is the equivalent of somebody's Robinhood, Com, or Uber for me, or for Chamath, his Slack, right? When something like this happens and you've got a big stake in it, you're like, you know what? My LP stake in this, my personal stake in this, the employee stake in this, the company's employees, jobs, the customers, they're more important than a CEO who is behaving badly.

23:50We've seen this happen when Steve Jobs got ousted, when Uber's founder or got ousted these things do happen and you see a board take action very quickly and in those cases those weren't even criminal things they were gray or steve jobs wouldn't listen to anybody or you know travis was aggressive in interpreting the rules uh ride sharing whatever they will all be out of the company in a couple of weeks the board will announce an interim ceo uh or a board member will take over as interim CEO. The stock will take a 50 % hit and then recover. Now, one last note about this before we move on to our guest, Jason, you're right.

24:32This company will survive. It will. Yes. And it deserves to survive, you know, I would say. Yeah, but that makes the stumble here, the ridiculousness, the bad behavior, the poor choices, just all the more ridiculous. It's not like there was a founder who was about to like not make payroll and got a little spicy with things. It was like, here's a successful company just being a jerk. This is a YC specific thing. There is a punk rock rule breaking culture at YC. They like rule breakers. In fact, they index for rule breakers. They ask people, I think in their application, if there are things they've hacked, et cetera.

25:10And so you like a rule breaker. You like somebody who hacks systems. Paul Graham always had an affinity for that. That's why he picked sam altman to run it he liked sam altman you know maybe doing you know on the margins some things that other people would be more thoughtful about oh you know i'm just trying to be charitable because i like sam um and then when sam was going to be ousted from open ai people said oh it's because of his double dealing so here it is naughtiness is the way he framed paul graham though the most successful founders are usually good people they tend to have a radical gleam in their eye they're not goody two-shoe type good morally they care about getting the big questions right but not about observing proprieties proprieties that's why i used to use the word naughty rather than evil they delight in breaking rules but not rules that matter this quality may be redundant though it may be implied by imagination sam maltman of looped is one of the most successful alumni.

26:13So we asked him what questions we could put on the Y Combinator application that would help us discover more people like him. He said to ask about a time when they'd hacked something to their advantage, hacked in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into computers. So this is the kind of thing where you want people who are on the margins, willing to do things like this. And then people interpret that and they take it too far. Parker Conrad took it too far by creating, quote unquote, the script, getting the SEC violation against him. That's the culture of Silicon Valley. It is what it is.

26:49Do I disagree with it? No, I don't. I'll be honest. I like a rule breaker myself. I don't like criminal behavior. And that's the fine art here is understanding when you're bending rules and when you're breaking rules. If you bend a rule and it's like in everybody's best interest, an example of that would be Airbnb, you're bending a rule. But who benefits? people who can't afford hotel rooms you know bottom third of society get to go on a vacation that they couldn't previously do and the hosts get to make money and pay their mortgage you're doing it for the benefit of those two sides of the marketplace where you know you're doing wrong this is the test for founder is who benefits what's the latin word for that it's qui bono qui bono yeah qui bono qui bono who benefits in this case the deal ceo benefits yeah who loses everybody else the only person benefiting here is the deal founder uh and when you do quibono on parker conrad's transgression who benefited he did the company did did the people buying insurance from what was the company uh um not i just i almost said rippling zenefits thank you Zenefits benefited.

28:02And so did the company. That's why the SEC came down in it. So here's your filter. Who benefits? Let's talk to our, um, our rabbit, our friend from rabbit. He was on the program. I don't know. Was it two January or maybe 18 months ago when he was the bell of the ball at CBS? Bell of the ball. Yes. We're going to have Jesse from rabbit back on the show. Everyone recalls that the rabbit R1 device landed with a nuclear shock. Everyone was stoked about this device. Reviews were a little bit wrong here, but the company has been hard at work improving both the software and also its digital services.

28:37So please welcome back to the show. It's Jesse Liu. Jesse! Founders, let's be real. Let's keep it a buck. Finding great developers is hard. It's like one of the hardest things you have to do in our industry, especially when you're trying to run and scale your startup. But here's the good news. I got a tip that's going to save you time, money, and a ton of headaches. you need to check out Lemon.io. Lemon.io has thousands of on-demand developers who can help you. They have done all the work to find and vet great developers who are experienced, who are results-oriented, and who charge competitive rate.

29:17Great developers, we know, are hard to find and integrate into your team, so Lemon.io will handle all of that for you. They're only going to offer you hand-picked developers with at least three years of experience. And if something goes wrong, Lemon.io will find you a replacement developer ASAP. A bunch of launch founders have worked with Lemon.io and they have told me they've had a great experience. So here's your call to action. Go to Lemon.io slash twist and find your perfect developer or an entire tech team in 48 hours or less. And twist listeners get 15 % off the first four weeks. So stop burning money.

29:55Hire developers smarter. visit lemon.io slash twist did you go to yc jesse are you a rule breaker actually i was uh in yc winter 15 batch um all the way back in 2014 2015 so that was a long time who was running was it paul graham or sam it was a it was a last year uh i think it was the first year paul left it was the first year sam uh got it uh was running and uh with jessica gary tan justin can bunch of like amazing folks uh michael c ball yeah a lot of was it a rule breaking culture as i was just discussing break the rules bend the rules hacking culture at that time it was something they emphasized or was it just like an undercurrent no it was like super obvious it was super cool i think you know uh one interesting first lesson i learned i still remember today is that the first lesson they told you is that 99 of startup will die and i think a lot of the young funders when they first go to the YC.

30:53You know, I was back then 22, 23. I was under the impression, be like, okay, you know, I have so much ambition, I can build this and that. And they're like, if your product doesn't work in the first two weeks, you're that. So that's like, you know, a very different culture than if you just build by yourself. And I still remember it was a really, really good period of time where we have this office hours, but I still remember office hours for us. I just went to Michael Sibel's house and he was just cooking and he was just making coffees for us. And we were just sitting on his counter and, you know, talking about the project progress.

31:32And obviously, you know, see Sam and other people running back and forth. And it was like very intense. I would say two, three weeks of preparing for that, you know, the final showcase, the final pitch, which I believe each company got like two, three minutes really. It's very short. It was very, very short. but you got to learn a lot of like you know other ideas other people are building and it was super normal you have probably like i would say 20 of people they completely pivoted by the time they graduate right which is good you know um it was a good time yeah so you launched the rabbit we'll pull up a picture of it here it got a lot of attention because you hit it perfectly timing wise everybody was really enamored by llms and everybody loves hardware and everybody loves new hardware at the time you launched you had uh the human or humane pin humane pin you had these two pendant companies that were going to do ai pendants and you generally had a belief in the world that ai plus device new fangled device would be an incredible opportunity you had sam altman supposedly doing a new phone with johnny ive or a new device and raising money for it and like all technological hype cycles people get hyped up on it and then people get disillusioned and they go to the trial of despair and then after that people come out and they rise again and you can look at that uh yeah alex will pull up that trial of despair and the and the uh that whole chart i'm sure you're aware of it the hype cycle chart kind of thing are we in the trial of despair and and how are you getting through that and let's talk about your progress yep and what it's like as a founder to go through the hype cycle um so first of all i think again we we met a year ago which uh it was just by the time we're just about to ship um yeah the the luxury for our team is that we did hardware before uh i think first of all if you ever done any hardware project you would completely agree to that chart and you know the timing is very interesting because the core reason for us that we decided to build this little orange box is not that we don't like our phone.

33:47It's that we know this technology is just very disruptive, very new, and there's a lot of things needs to be changed, right? So I wasn't even, that was quite a different angle than, oh, I just want to build a new phone or I just want to build a new glass. So I guess for us, it's always that reason that we decided to have this little device to be able to run whatever the latest technology that we can put into. We didn't even hype about ourselves in the beginning. If you remember, we were not officially in the CES. We recorded my introduction keynote in a hotel lobby or a meeting room. You hacked CES.

34:24You were punk rocking it. You were an official presenter. And all of a sudden, you win the product of CES. Or you get on a lot of lists as the best product, which I don't think you anticipated. And you hit the timing right. And then your phone rings off the hook, I suppose. Investors, partners, et cetera. And then it dies down. Humane shuts down. We don't hear about these pendants anymore. The Apple Vision Pro had come out in a similar time. That got hyped up. Nobody's talking about that anymore. So let's talk about your conviction for your idea. Take me through emotionally how you as a founder, you know smooth out the chart we just saw which is the hype the trial of disillusionment and then here we go you've got to just grind it out so did that affect you emotionally to have everybody want to take a meeting and then everybody disappears um no i mean you know again i would consider myself as a veteran this is not my first time building a company you know i've gone through this in my early 20s and you know it's just one more time so i'm mentally fully prepared for this um but obviously you know i wasn't uh expecting the hype building up with all this ai product and ai hardware can be that big so i think you know we all learned how to become you know quote unquote celebrity you know i told my team and myself what we really should do is just go there and fix things you know because when people talk about it that means they they they care about it right they want the product to work in their imaginary way well there it will be like huge gap between how the AI is ready right now versus how human wish the AI will be but you know as a company we're super focused on just you know fixing out a lot of the things you know in fact I would love to mention in this podcast that we actually, I did just did a count.

36:26We shipped more than 30 30 OTAs. Jesse, I want to pick up there. I want to show people this rapid OS intern thing you guys launched today because I feel like it's newsy. So we should at least give it some shrift here. So for folks out there who are curious, this is what it looks like. And Jesse, the first thing that I noticed was, ah, I've seen this before. This reminds me of things that I've seen from OpenAI and I don't know, Google and other people. So I'm curious what the goal here is for Rabbit. Is this a way for you guys to refine your agentic technology? Or is this also an attempt to kind of bully your way into a burgeoning market, which is, you know, consumer AI agents?

37:07Do you mind if I share my screen? Because I've run some interesting cases. So here we are. To better understand why we build this tool is that, you know, it fits in line with our mission. Our mission is we're trying to build cross-platform general agents. That means that we want agents that not only can operate on website, but also can operate directly on apps. And obviously, if you're talking about apps, there's computer apps, there's phone apps, there's a lot of like different destinations. What we observed from the capability of all these models fastly growing since last year is that all these models are quickly getting better at reasoning, planning, as well as code level execution.

37:52So if you link all these three things together, that makes all these use cases become a reality. So I can show you my prompt that I just run. Literally, I started running this before I joined this room because I was in the meeting room for like 20 minutes. So I just, you know, run this. I said, I'll be on JSON since we can start up talk about newly released Rabbit OS intern agent. Help me create a comprehensive media prep book and make it into an interactive HTML web app. So to use an intern, you really think about this has a similar capability of a human intern level. You're not expecting, so set the expectation right.