Student Roy Lee Hacks Amazon, SBF's Jailhouse Chat + more! | E2095

25:48So tell me about Interview Coder itself and how you built it and then actually used it to go through the Amazon process. And what was the screen we showed before, just so we can explain it to the... That was Roy's LeetCode profile, showing off all of his work in LeetCode. LeetCode is a place where people go and do these tests, just so we explain it to the audience. yeah yeah it's like a an agglomeration of all the problems that you might encounter you can like go through the problems and you can you can train yourself it's like a little training camp for technical interviews so this is like um kaplan sat prep in a way exactly exactly in a website it's uh it's a it's an independent company right it's not an open source project yeah independent company it's an independent company i guess you pay for it they got a premium version or something that's how they make money yeah yeah yeah okay so yeah show us what you did and um how you hacked the system as it were essentially i used pretty much all of the fall recruiting cycle as like uh like practice grounds for testing the product like i have i have all the offers from like capital one tiktok meta but those are all like like practice for the big one which i knew was going to be amazon because that's like the the thing that everybody knows and the product was developed throughout the recruiting cycle.

27:00But the core product really only took me about four days to make. It's a very simple Electron app with a React front end. And the back end is some serverless functions that we host on Rissell. Essentially, I mean, it's really simple, right? All you got to do is like take a screenshot of the screen and then ask Chasipiti to solve the problem. The only thing that's hard is making it invisible. But Electron actually comes with a lot of native built-ins. Like the technology is really not rocket science here. Like I'm putting together two concepts that have existed before in the past. It's just LOMs kind of make everything hackable.

27:30When you have to take the test with an Amazon, they're doing it over Zoom, I assume, or some sort of service? They have a custom screen sharing thing called Amazon Chime. But a lot of the interviews from what I hear from my friends and people who are using the product, sometimes they'll ask you to screen share, sometimes they don't. So they want to watch you code. How long do these interviews typically take today? The interview might be somewhere like 45 minutes to an hour, but they shave off 15 minutes for just talking time. Got it. Got it. So you got a half hour of practically writing code in front of them, answering their questions, showing that you qualify for the job.

28:06And how long does it take to get one of these, you know, for the average person right now? Because we've heard about static team size. They're not hiring a lot of people. People think, well, my developers are getting 20, 30 percent faster every year. So why would I hire more developers? I can just cut the weak ones and make the best ones 20 percent stronger. So what's it like out there on the streets trying to get a developer job? Yeah, I mean, hiring market. Well, to be honest, I've heard that the hiring market is brutal, but like I'm really I'm a sophomore. I don't really know what it was like two years ago.

28:34So I really couldn't tell you, but I've just heard that. It's brutal is what you hear. Yeah, that tracks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very few jobs. So it's getting they can demand more of everybody applying is, I guess, a simple way to say it. So in the old days, if you had four or five job offers, getting people to go on for two or three hours and do two or three interviews and code so much, maybe they wouldn't do it because they got a job offer. so quick. Yeah, yeah. But now things are quite different. And so you ended up using this service called Interview Coder and got an offer from Amazon. And then instead of accepting it, you posted a video on YouTube of the actual process of using your tool to hoodwink the Amazon guys.

29:09And then someone snitched and then everything kind of exploded. Did you leak it yourself or did you get snitched on? Well, someone saw the video when it was at about like 20 ,000 views. some Amazon executive saw the video and then they reported to Columbia. And all they did was post the letter that they sent to Columbia. So they, wait a sec. Amazon's a rat. Amazon's a cheese eater. They ate cheese on you. They ratted you out to the university. That's exactly what happened. Do we have the letter? I can see this. So now what's going on with your mom? Does your mom know yet? My mom, my mom learned about this like three days ago, like a couple of days ago.

29:44You're screwed, dude. what did she say to you honestly she's been pretty cool about it like surprisingly extremely cool about it she knows i'm doing something ballsy and uh she knows i'm making a lot more money off this than it would have over a summer at amazon so okay so she's actually happy she's a gen x or maybe she's a little punk rock your mom what's the story no not at all she's about as korean as you as it gets uh oh i'm korean as you can tell my wife's korean yeah yeah i'm i'm deep in korean culture. I get it. All right. We all know if you're a founder or even if you're on a small business, you're thinking about your company 24-7, 365 days a year.

30:23That's the life of a founder. This is not clock in, clock out, nine to five gig for you as the business owner. So when you're hiring, you want a partner that's as equally as committed as you are. And that's of course, LinkedIn jobs. LinkedIn jobs is like your co-founder. They're going to make it so simple for you to post your jobs for free on LinkedIn, where there are 1 billion members. You're going to be able to share what you're posting and actually keep all the promising candidates organized in one place. And also LinkedIn is going to help you quickly write a job and get it in front of the right people, whether you want to post for free or use some promotion to get it in front of even more qualified applicants.

31:05So do me a favor. Don't take my word for it. I mean, you should. I know what I'm talking about. This is where I find my great people. But just understand that 72 % of small businesses using LinkedIn said that it helped them find the best candidates. So find out why more than 2.5 million small businesses already use LinkedIn for hiring. So here's your call to action. Post your job for free. Why wouldn't you do it? It's free. F-R-E-E. That's a good price. LinkedIn.com slash TWIST. Once again, that's LinkedIn.com slash TWIST to post your job for free. Terms and conditions do apply. I can't find the actual letter from Amazon on your Twitter, Roy, but I'm seeing repeated letters from Columbia University to you that you have posted, which is hilarious.

31:54And if I recall correctly, you're supposed to go in front of a probationary board or something tomorrow. Are you going to go? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm already on probation, but I'm supposed to, there's like another disciplinary hearing that I'm supposed to go on tomorrow. And actually tomorrow is because they're mad that I leaked all the documents. So that's what I'm getting in trouble. All right, so you're fried. You're fried. You're barbecue sauce, man. You're, listen, you're going right. You're Korean barbecue right now, my friend. You're the guy I'll be in this. You're the bulgogi. I gotta say, I really disagree because like, I mean, this is actually a little bit punk rock.

32:29It's a little bit hacky. And I feel like we've lost that vibe in Silicon Valley. And so he's barbecue sauce. I'll tell you what's going to happen here. Columbia, they need to have good relations with the hiring people. Somebody comes in and breaks this. I think you're done. I think they're kicking you out, bro. Man, it's possible. Isn't that the idea though? Because Roy, you said in an interview with Gizmodo, quote, most human intelligence work is going to be obsolete in two years. So I have two years to make something happen. So I presume that you didn't really intend to stay at Columbia and you just wanted to make a big splash, build something and make a lot of money off of it.

33:01I mean, Viva. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, I, as soon as I got here, I sort of knew that I wouldn't be able to see myself through graduation. Um, I knew that I'd drop out eventually, but this would, it would be really funny if I got kicked out just cause I mean, like, like AI is growing so much faster than like everybody realizes. I mean, if you're on Twitter, then I think you're pretty early. If you know what cloud code is, you're pretty early, but the rest of the world hasn't caught up. And as soon as the rest of the world catches up and realize, realizes how unintelligent you have to be or how not competent at programming you can be and still make a really cool app.

33:32Like there's probably like every CS major in the world could probably have figured out InterviewCoder if they just hacked away at Curseur for long enough. So when you're using InterviewCoder, you basically start doing a coding test. And is it doing the typing for you and faking the typing? Or is it just in one screen showing you the answer while you're in the other screen doing the other thing? Or you put it on your phone on your desk and you look down at your phone in the cradle? What's the best practice? it's like a desktop application that opens up you can't have it do the typing for you because a lot of the uh they well a it's very hard to randomize typing speed because the browsers will detect what what sort what sort of things that you're clicking and be a lot of these a lot of these things that are that are typed for you they do the key down correctly but they never get the key up right which which the browser all logs and that's that's all specific suspicious activity the um the best way to do it is just to show you the answer have a movable overlay that you can put right on top of your coder so your eyes are like shifting making it look like you're looking at different screens so you do a little uh i understand let me tell you what i used to do yeah yeah i had the best hack when i was in civilian high school we would do a vocabulary test so i was obsessed with cheating like you i didn't consider it cheating but i considered it like an interesting way to understand things and what i figured out was if you took a yellow legal pad, an empty one.

34:49And then you put a piece of cardboard under the first piece of paper, right? Then you put a piece of paper on that top piece of paper. Then I would take a pen or a pencil and I would write nice and heavy what the vocabulary words were. And then I would say a word that would remind me of the definition. So I would go down that vocabulary list. Then I would take the top sheet, throw it in the garbage. Then I would take the cardboard underneath the first sheet and it would be blank. But if I looked at it from an angle, I could see the indentations. Right. And certainly if I took my pencil and I, you know, did it from the side, it would fill it in and I could, it would reveal it, but I never needed to reveal it.

35:30I kid you not. I would do this for four pages down in my yellow legal pad. I would have four pages of notes about every definition, everything history. So when I was taking my notes in history class, I was doing this technique four pages deep. Sometimes I would do it from the back of the legal pad. So if they came and they, you know, somebody needed an extra piece of paper, they would never know it was on the back one. So I just flip it, whatever. The interesting thing about this hack was the nature of doing the hack and taking the notes meant I didn't need to use the notes. Because you actually did the work.

36:01Because I did the work. But I was obsessed with how cheating occurs. And you came up with something really good was that you figured out the eye contact was super important. And that's a tag, right so you forget hey if i transparency layer this they're never going to find it right exactly super smart yes i immediately thought you you put it on your phone so if i'm looking at eyesight here and i look down on my keyboard down on my keyboard i could have my phone down here mirroring my desktop yeah i have the amazon letter here and um you'll note that it says do not distribute but uh too late you can't read this i'm going to read the the highlighted sections for you okay uh discussing roy quote his performance was spectacular and then quote soon after i the Amazon guy, received a link to a YouTube video created by Roy in which he showed himself using an invisible cheating tool to gain an unfair and unapproved advantage during the interview process.

36:48Later on, we trust in Columbia to take proper action with regards to this student. So Amazon - This is Amazon. Yeah, bro. What's up with this? That's not fun. Man, what a bunch of cheese eaters at Amazon. I mean, if Amazon could do this in a business process, they would get a high five and a promotion. I mean, all right. So let's talk brass tacks. you come from an independently wealthy family uh or you know they got like the 50k 100k to spot you to do the startup or no not very wealthy no middle class yeah i mean i i i would say middle top or middle class okay good same as me i was like lower middle class but yeah same same zone all right listen you're gonna get kicked out tomorrow but if not you're gonna leave anyway so um i like the punk rock nature of this um you haven't raised money yet right you're not even incorporated are you incorporated yeah yeah we incorporated a few weeks ago when we saw the stripe graph move and we were worried about taxes and did you take that angel check yet you got a first investor yet oh you got a check yeah i mean we did the z fellows program so shout out z fellows this was a great program so so so we have a couple thousand dollars what's z fellows how does it oh it's like a it's like a one week wow cory's gonna love this yeah yeah this is like a one week incubator it's like your first your first one week 10k yeah it's like your first check into Silicon Valley.

38:05Yeah. And they just get a bunch of young kids together for a week. Oh, yeah, yeah. I've heard of this. And then Corey writes in your first check. And so what do they get for that? 1 % or something? It's an equity check? It's at a billion dollar post-money valuation. So essentially, it's a free$10 ,000. Oh, but it converts at the next round. It's probably a billion dollar cap, but it converts at the next round. So you do Y Combinator or something, or you do R Accelerate Convert. All right. So you have customers for this product or no? Yeah. Well, yeah, yeah. I mean, for interview code, we have many customers, but we're thinking, I think that the underlying technology can be expanded into many different verticals.

38:42And that's what I'm thinking tackling next. There's not much money in technical recruiting and interviews, and there's even less money when you're on the side of the interviewee. Yeah, that's true, right? You're not getting the 10K for placing the person. But I mean, listen, if you're smart enough to figure that part out, you can figure everything out. You can figure out the countermeasures. So you're an arms dealer. Now you can figure out actually a better way. Possible. Listen, sometimes you sell, you know, F-15s to one side and then, oh, other side bought F-16s. They paid a higher price. They're a little bit faster.

39:13They got a 10 % edge. Maybe the other side should upgrade. You know, maybe they want to go to F-18s. I don't know. How many customers do you have now? And how fast is that growing? Because you say it's a small market, but I also saw you guys added Hindi. So I presume that you have people demanding access to this product in their native language too. Yeah. Yeah. We have like outside of America, India and China are probably obviously like our biggest customers, but it's really largely Americans. I think it's probably 75 % Americans. Like literally yesterday, last night, we just crossed the$1 million run rate.

39:45So, um, Oh, this has become like a real startup here. Okay. So you're, you're, you're way past even needing funding. Oh, then don't take any money from anybody. Just build this thing off of revenue. Don't sell any shares to anybody ever. You're Or like the, you guys could be like the, you know, two or$3 million per employee. Right now you have two people working on it. So you're half a million per employee. Yeah. Something like that. Yeah. So just keep going that way. Don't take anybody's money. Just add a zero, be a 5 million. Own the company, sweep like$5 million in profits, two or$3 million each every year.

40:16You make 30 million over those years. You hired three or four people to do the work for you. And when you sell the company, if you ever do, you're going to own 90 % of it. It's a much better thing to do. I've been telling people this is going to happen because look, I'm the earliest stage investor there is and I miss this. Right. So, yeah, you don't need me. You don't need anybody. I think it's really funny how much power that letter made. It's made it seem that Columbia and Amazon have. But over Roy, they have none. I mean, I like people have the agency. How are you thinking about fundraising and running the company?

40:49Tell me your vision for this. What are the vibes? Interview Coder itself is probably not going to get me to where I would like to be later in life. But I think we've uncovered some really key UX assumptions here. And I think we're first to market for this. I don't think anybody else has figured this out because nobody else has been trying to desperately to come up with the most undetectable, invisible overlay. But because I have, I think it's uncovered like something very big. And I think I'm onto something really big here. There's a couple of people I'd like to hire. And I don't think our current revenue is going to be enough.

41:22Okay. So you're thinking about doing a small raise. What are you thinking about raising? Not sure. Not exactly sure right now. Not exactly sure right now. We're still working out the details. Well, a couple of people. They're going to cost 10K a month or something. They're onshore. They're offshore. They work from home. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's a couple other expenses, but I don't want to give too much away. But we're going to launch in about a week and a half. And it'll be like the most ambitious version of interview coder you could imagine. Love it. So what do you think you want to raise?

41:50What's the I'll give you some advice to the extent that you give a shit, but you're so punk rock. It doesn't matter. So what is what is your plan in terms of raise? What are you thinking? Just just just a small raise. I don't even know how much I'm allowed to say. Like, isn't this like public solicitation or something? No, if you're not raising, it's fine. if i asked you theoretically what are you thinking of raising like if you yeah if you had your druthers what would your dream be what do you think you know i'm not asking you to like show like a business plan and a term sheet on the screen if you just directionally you want to raise a million a half million three million the directionally be some something like three to five probably oh you want to go right for a series a essentially yeah okay well i mean listen you got everybody's attention and you're at like a pretty sick run rate so you're possible you could do it yeah and then you have somebody join the board awesome next week you're going to launch something new huh or in two weeks very similar something very suddenly some something in the space yeah i think we've cried we've cracked some things got it yeah i mean if you've figured out some things about how ai lives on your desktop or lives with you it seems like the that that could be very powerful i think that's a pretty interesting concept you know there's a couple of people who are watching your entire desktop or watching your entire browser so yeah most people don't understand that this is the next level is the ai is living on your desktop and is watching what you're doing and you know going to start giving you suggestions it's kind of scary right for privacy reasons and for like what if this thing decides it wants to go buy a bunch of coffee for you.

43:30It could get weird. Possibly, yeah. But I mean, I just think it's crazy to think that in even two years, everybody will still be on chatgpt.com or perplexity.com using a chat bot in his face. That's definitely not where the future's headed, right? No, it's going to be persistent, right? It's going to be in your ear, talking to you the entire time. It's going to be living on your desktop. Exactly. Exactly. Roy, an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on. And when you do drop whatever it is in a week and a half, and you take the wrappers off of it, let me know, because we are watching your career with great interest and hats off to Columbia.

44:03You guys really got a great one and I'm unsartistic. He's barbecued tomorrow. You know what? Secretly record here's what you do. Secretly record tomorrow and then get banned for life. You're barbecued already. Good luck in your thing tomorrow. For sure get a pair of glasses and secretly record it. Release the transcript. I don't know. Stream it in real time. Whatever you got to do because you're going to wind up on like Johnny Carson. You're going to literally be on Bill Maher this weekend if you can record that. That's my best advice. Covertly record tomorrow. That's the idea. Good luck. Thanks, Roy.

44:37Talk to you soon, brother. Thank you, guys. See, this is the future of venture capital. You just saw it, folks. Humiliating defeat for venture capitalists. These young kids, these whippersnappers, they've basically got the ability now. This kid gets it. He's 21. He got the company to a million. I said this before, what leverage does a VC have now? He's like, yeah, I'll race three to five, maybe. But he's like a Pegasus. And I talked about this concept of a Pegasus with Calm.com. They went from a$5 million valuation right to a 250. I was able to invest at the 5 million when they needed my help.

45:12But after that, they didn't really need help. So the next stop was an express train right to 250. That means like, you know, everybody in between wasn't able to secure a position in a high growth company in between because they didn't need you to do it. So look, Roy doesn't need me. He doesn't need Y Combinator. He doesn't need Techstars. He got that 10K check, gave him a little bit of confidence from whatever that thing was. Kind of like our founding university where we give 25K, but it's got me thinking like, maybe I just got to give people 10K as they come into, maybe I had to give them 10K on the way into founding university.

45:44Give them a 10K option, a 25K option. As an investor, if you pick a team, you got to just make the bet early is what I'm learning. What did you think of that interaction? Well, it's very interesting because you raise a point that I don't have a dispute to. What do you offer someone who can show up with a little tool and make a lot of money really quickly? And what I like about Roy is that he didn't say, we've invented something that's brand new. We're going to change the world with our new technology. He took off the shelf parts and built something awesome that people wanted. And that's really encouraging to me.

46:14It feels like the old days are like putting together your own circuit boards, you know? Like here is a time in which technology exists out there in disparate Lego pieces that you can put together to build something people want. That's so empowering to people. It doesn't fit neatly into the venture model, Jason. But maybe I could see if I could slide 250 in at like a$5 million valuation and just say, hey, listen, I'll do this real quick. And then I'll get you into the, I'll get you tickets to all the all-in summits and I'll get you backstage, right? Like I got to use intangibles and pot sweeteners now to get in this round.

46:45Yeah. I mean, how am I going to get a slice of this? I mean, it's funny though, how much on the same page we are in my notes, prepping, you know, our, our, our, our centers for this chat. I literally wrote at the bottom, someone should invest 500K into this kiddo now. And it turns out I was too small and too late. There's a great lesson here for founders. If you get an audience first, like he did with like a stunt like this, then you get customers in revenue. Then you get venture capital. or you get investment. Most people do the opposite. They get money, they get a product, then they get attention.

47:20Flip it. Figure out how to get attention first. Now you've captured the world's attention and Twitter is where old VCs like myself live all day long. If you can capture attention there with some punk rock thing, you've kind of proven like you're a rule breaker, great. You're kind of like Steve Jobs. You're like Zuck. You're like Travis. You're like Elon. Okay, don't go too far. Don't go SBF. You know, don't steal something from Columbia. Get kicked out. Okay. But don't do fake blood tests. Don't theranos this. Don't SPF it. You know, there's a real lesson here. Get audience first. Mr. Beast got a huge audience.

47:53Then he got the business. I have a huge audience. You know, then I invest in your company, hopefully. And I can use that audience to help you magnify your voice. So here we are. Well done to him. And speaking of SPF. Yes. Hey, speaking of criminal behavior and punk rock and the difference between the two, here's what our previous guest doesn't want to do. You don't want to end up being a Rikers Roy. It's fun to do like, you know, break some rules at Columbia. Just don't get into actual crimes, you know, in ethics or whatever. A sanction is no big deal. Look at this. SBF was on the Tucker show.

48:33Yes, he was. I saw somebody tweet. I don't know if it's real or not. I always give the caveat, if it's real, that he put into this document of how to rebound his image. One of the things he said in terms of how he wanted to rebound his image and like one of these court documents that got seized was a Google doc where he said, go on Tucker and go right wing to get a pardon from Trump, I guess, as part of his master plan. Here's the court document that Jason's referencing, just because everyone wants to take a look. This is from courtlistener.com. And if you scroll down, this is pulled from a Google doc that he had put together.

49:06And right here, part three is go on Tucker Carlson, come out as Republican, and then essentially come out, quote, against the woke agenda. So here is the result of that policy. And we have a couple of clips here, Jason. I want to start with the one digging into how he communicated during the actual unfolding of the crisis itself. Let's take a listen here to our dear friend and everyone's favorite jailbird podcaster, Mr. SPF. I've had a lot of time to reflect on how to communicate. And in retrospect, you know, I was, I think I was not effective at communicating, especially when the crisis first hit.

49:47And, you know, in the months thereafter, I made a mistake I often make. I get swept up in details and forget to make the bigger picture. You seem like you were just flying high on Adderall every time I saw you on TV. You don't seem that way now were you no i wasn't but i was my mind was racing because there were you know a billion things to keep track of i think he's lying i'll be honest he was on this um patch e-m-s-a-m m-s-a-m patch from what i understand you know adderall's one level this thing is like a patch that gives you a consistent high um so he was on a lot of stuff here for example, is an article from Slate discussing exactly this.

50:35Sam Bankman pre-confirmed he wears an Imsan patch. What is that? So I think right there we've determined, Jason, there might be a slight credibility gap. Although you could argue that SBF was correct. He was not high off flying high quote off Adderall. He may have been flying higher off of an Imsan patch. Yeah, this is where like you know, listen, Tucker's a great broadcaster obviously, very dramatic. So he's got the bravery to ask him if he was on it. But I would have said, hey, where are you on stimulants? Where are you on sleeping pills? Legal, prescription, otherwise, you know, what's the real deal here?

51:07Because you have, you know, admitted to using these other things because he did admit to using these things. But hey, listen, I think like half the country, all these young people are on some sort of a stimulant. We've got an Adderall shortage, right? Wasn't there a shortage in the press last year? So, so many people are on this thing. They can't make enough of it, apparently. So, there's no shame in the medication game, I guess, unless you commit crimes. This is SBF talking about Trump's crypto approach, because the context here is people are kind of thinking that SBF is is hamming it up for a pardon.

51:38There was rumors about a Biden pardon that never came to be. But he now wants a Trump pardon. So here is Tucker and SBF talking about Trump and crypto. You look at what the Trump administration said, you know, going into office. There are a lot of good things. There are a lot of things that were very different from the stance that the Biden administration took, that, you know, Gensler and the SEC took. Obviously, you know, the follow through is what matters. And that's the stage that we're at now, which is what will come of this. Not surprisingly, changing the guard helps. But financial regulators, they're big, giant bureaucracies in the federal government.

52:16They're not used to changing overnight. They have been playing a really obstructive role for, you know, a decade. in crypto you know the u.s it's 30 of the world's finance it's about five percent of the world's crypto and the reason it's entirely regulatory it's just the u.s was unique in its difficulty to work with i think the big question is when rubber meets the road like will the administration do what needs to be done i was expecting him to say listen i would have been not guilty if they you know if they were pro-regulation at a different time i i should have been innocent If I was him and I was doing his defense, I'd be like, listen, I'm like a 2010 cannabis dealer in Santa Monica who got arrested.

52:58And now in 2025, you can just walk in with a driver's license and buy, you know, a pound of cannabis and nobody cares. That's his best defense in terms of getting a pardon. I wouldn't buy it because he committed crimes. Yes. But he might be able to work that angle. Anyway. The lesson here for founders, though, apart from not doing fraud, if you do do fraud and get put in prison, make sure you get permission from the Bureau of Prisons for doing an interview because SBF got into Trouple A for doing this from jail. And I got to say, going on Tucker, looking for a pardon and instead getting your wings clipped inside of prison is a pretty big self-own.

53:36I mean, did he say what he was doing from prison is illegal? Like, how did he do that? I'm not sure about the technical details, but the Bureau of Prisons apparently put him into solitary. I mean, worth it then. I mean, worth it to get your word out. Yeah, that is a weird thing to do. I got to find out technically how he did this because my understanding is I've been pitched on this and it's kind of a human rights issue. There are these companies that let you do video conference from prison. So you can, you know, talk to your family if you're in jail, you're incarcerated. They charge like a dollar a minute.

54:09It's some ungodly amount that they're charging prisoners. You just talk to their families. I'll tell you what. it should be free to talk to your family or close to free. It should be$1 an hour to talk to your family. Why? People could talk to their family and people outside of prison. Obviously, they got to record it, transcribe it, and make sure they're not doing deals, code words or something. I understand that there needs to be a little bit more infrastructure here because people from prison could be doing all kinds of nefarious stuff. But the more you could talk to your family, the better that probably is.

54:40And I just hate the idea that they're abusing these prisoners. And I hate the idea of solitary. That is literally torture. It is inhumane. I cannot underscore all that enough, Jason. Solitary is torture. It should not be used ever. Profiteering off of prisoners is exceptionally gross. This is the basis of my view about private prisons in general. But the good news, the bit of sunshine we can throw here on people is that there's a startup called Emilio, A-M-E-E-L-I-O. and they are a non-profit startup trying to bring free video calling service to inmates to build connections and prevent recidivism recidivism recidivism yeah thank you that word i knew i can read it never said it out loud before there you go yeah my you know it's a very weird thing about my dyslexia like sometimes i just nail long words and other times i'm just can't even say short ones as long as the two of us together can say the words we're in good shape i can understand solitary like a short period of times if somebody is like beating or murdering somebody maybe but like you know because of like safety issues right for the for everybody but short of physical violence you should not be tortured mentally that's just it's just like what are we supposed to be the good guys how you treat the most vulnerable people is how you can really judge a society i've always felt that how you treat the most vulnerable a homeless person a prisoner somebody who's flat broke, somebody who's down on their knees, you know, somebody who's handicapped in some way, you know, it doesn't need to be a literal handicap.

56:09It could be anything, emotional, mental, whatever. On that regards, with our prison system and our penal system in this country, we fail greatly. Oh man. I would love for there to be a private prison, because I too am against private prisons, that ran an experiment of they got paid a fee. I don't know, 300 bucks a month. for every month the person stayed out of prison and was productive so you get 50k a year to run the prison and then when the person leaves if they pay their taxes if they pass a drug test if they show up for work you get paid a residual for five years of 5 000 a year for five years you get an extra 25k for them to stay out because the cost of keeping them in prison is 50k a year so if you came up with a 50K five-year plan or 25K 10-year plan, whatever it is, to get paid a bonus for them staying out of jail, man, that would be an incredibly interesting concept.

57:06I know it's weird, but if you show me an incentive, I will show you an outcome. And the incentive right now is to get them back in prison so you can make 50K. Right. But if the profit margin was 20 % and you're making 10K a year of each one, if we made the profit margin 10 % for keeping them out, that'd be even better. Oh yeah, because it's total profit. Also, what this would do is it would incentivize investment into prisons for education, for fitness, for anything that helps build mental and physical health. And they could essentially expect those costs to be recouped later on when people stay out of prison.

57:38So it would encourage better prison conditions. So I mean, I know that we have a model, an economic and mental and business model we use, and it doesn't fit on everything. But in this case, I think incentives would actually help. And anything to reduce our prison population would be lovely um jason before we go can we do a little startup acquisition story sure what else is on the docket here yeah well i want to get into this quickly um service now uh a company we've all heard of is buying moveworks for 2.85 billion and i had entirely forgotten what moveworks is and was so moveworks is a company started back in 16 it was building a chatbot ai chatbot for like it it's expanded greatly to more parts of business essentially you can use it to answer internal questions for your company and it has an agentic ai element to it okay sounds generic enough at this point in time yeah but back in 2021 it raised a 200 million dollar series c at a 2.1 billion valuation okay led half by tiger so this should be an implosion but yeah the tiger the tiger cubs um you know that came out of that peak zerp era they've all had a problem getting to their previous high watermark.

58:49So this money was raised in 2021, you said? Yep, at a 2.1. And it sold for, drum roll please, 2.85. Okay. So they made a little bit of a modest profit, maybe. If they had put that money in the market for three or four years, it probably would have been similar. So it's a save, but really those Tiger valuations were typically two, three, four times reality. And so there's just a lot of catch up to do. If those Tiger and peak valuations wind up being but a push, In other words, the LPs put in$5 billion and they get$5 billion back. I think people will look at it, and this is perverse and crazy, I know, but the way LPs will look at it was no risk, no reward, no gamble, no future.

59:33Fortune favors the bull. So that's how the market looks at Masayoshi-san. Took big swings, did the vision fund. Should he be able to raise a second vision fund? Yes. Should it be the same size? Probably no. but those bets that were made at peak ZERP, if they wind up simply returning the capital that was put in, 1x, no profit, you would have made double if you put your money in the market, so be it. You placed a bet, you took a shot. What you don't want to see is losing half your money. That's when LPs can get a bit persnickety. If they come out par, plus or minus 20, like in this situation, they'll be fine with it.

1:00:09So interesting. We have a little bit more. Two things. One, I knew you were going to bring up the rate of return. So I chat GPT that before we got on the IRR of 2.1 to 2.85 from June of 21 to March of 25 is 10.5%. Not bad. I mean, you know, it's not the 35 % they said I've returned, you know, or 40 % Pelosi returns, but it is what it is. So great job today. We'll see you all next time on this week of startups.