Tech's Super Bowl, Huge Earnings Week, Lon Returns and more! | E2083

29:47It was just very slow and you had to get like AOL to use it. I just feel like today there's been so many more promises that we then haven't quite lived up to. I don't know if you can sell people on the future is now in the same way. Osprey says that Nike was the winner. I did like the Nike non-technology. It It was kind of a women's sports homage. I watch a lot of women's sports. Oh, yes. That was good. I like that one too. Yeah. I was like, oh, it's Aja Wilson. Oh, it's Caitlin Clark. You know, that was fun. I think there was an Uber Eats one again. Yeah, with Matthew McConaughey playing key figures from NFL history.

30:20I like this one, not just because of my history with Uber. What I liked about it is when you drop historical references and you can follow along with this kind of rapid drops of things, like they do the Refrigerator Perry. They do the Buffalo Bills. And they call it a pigskin. Like ice cream Saturdays, ice cream Sundays. There you go. Okay. Also, Sean Evans from Hot Ones right there. Oh, is that Sean Evans from Hot Ones? Yeah, another fun little cameo. Smart. I love Hot Ones. Me too. A big, big Hot Ones. Can't eat out of a cup, Ted. founders like me you've got a lot on your plate running a startup means you got to manage an endless to-do list tons of tasks right you got to do your chores as a founder and you got to juggle dynamic priorities one day it sells the next day it's development then it's product then it's raising money and that's why i rely on coda c-o-d-a to keep everything in our organization under control coda is the all-in-one platform that brings together the best of documents spreadsheets and apps all into a single scalable workspace.

31:34And you know, it's so much more than when I say a to-do list. I'm using that as like somewhere I start. Okay, I rattle off a couple of things that need to be done, but then my team builds databases and workflows into Coda so that repetitive tasks become automated and information is shared. And there's a single source of truth, our training documents, our meetings with founders, everybody who we co-invest with, LP relations. We do it all on Coda, and it gives us the flexibility to adapt to shifting priorities. We set our OKRs, and we balance all that ambition we have with practicality. There are templates that you can use to start you on second or third base.

32:14Projects like Twist 500, where we're trying to catalog the top 500 private companies, that's being done inside of Coda. When you go to twist500.com. It's a Coda-based website, public facing, but a database and a system for us to track those companies on the backend. It's an all-in-one hub for startups. It's literally a Swiss Army knife that we can use in any situation without having to go research another SaaS product and another template and another login and another debate and negotiation with a SaaS vendor for yet another$5 ,000 or$10 ,000 a year. And hey, it's my money. I would rather use Coda and have everything in one place, one login, and then hook it all together.

32:53It's intuitive. It's powerful. It makes our workflow seamless. Coda empowers your startup to strategize, plan, and track goals. Effectively take advantage of this limited time offer just for startups. Go to coda.io slash twist today and get six months free of the team plan. Very generous. Thank you to the Coda team. That's coda.io slash twist to get started for free. Well done, Coda. I give this one a B plus. I liked it. I love anything where there's like pop culture references seeded through it. Yeah. So I give it a B plus because I liked when they, this part, when they got the refrigerator Perry, I always remember the bears.

33:29Yeah, and he's playing Ditka right there. Yeah, playing Ditka. It's pretty fun. It's fun, yeah. I also like the Instacart, I thought was kind of similar where it was all the different ad mascots together. Like it was, it was doing like an Avengers end game, but for ad, you know, characters from other ads like that monkey baby from the mountain dew ad there's chester cheetah how do you know all those names i told you he's pop culture monkey baby there's the dough boy there's the jolly green giant jesus how do you do it i'm i'm like literally trying to keep up this jolly green giant you're right yeah yeah yeah there's more to mr clean it's cool a man cool a man there's the cheeto guy i don't remember what the the dogs in wiener suits there's the energizer bunny so yeah it's another like point at the do the dicaprio meme point at the screen when you recognize a character going by okay ah right the dicaprio meme so they get it's really strong from a see there yeah there's the old spice guy spice guy yeah it's just it's hitting so many memes and ideas and familiar characters that it keeps people's attention yes much like the uber one so that's a theme when you have the density of the plot with characters etc and you can point to it and it's um it's like that south park episode where they had member berries remember exactly nope you're exactly right yeah it's it's any any chance to you people love easter eggs they love references like it's like a it's like deadpool 3 but for a commercial fan service fan service exactly but for commercials which is a sad commentary in a way that you can have commercial fan service but you can in the instacart ad do we think that instacart split the cost of the ad which eat with everybody who got a mention in other words they pulled their money or do you think they said hey if you give us your ip give us mr kool-aid mr clean we'll just put him in there free of charge but you got to give us the rights to yeah i mean i don't know that's an interesting like obviously if you are pillsbury why wouldn't you want the doughboy in there it's like okay he's one of the prominent mascots.

35:38We want him included, you know? I'm with Lon on this, but I'll also throw in that Fiji, the CEO of Instacart, is on OpenAI's board. So in my personal 5D chess board that I have in my head, I'm thinking that everyone wants to be on Fiji's good side because she's so close to OpenAI. Ergo, everyone said you can have the Kool-Aid man for free in your advertisement. And so they didn't have to pay anything, but I don't think they contribute. So I give a B plus to this one. So we have some genres here. You got the dense, fan service one we got that as one and then we have the heartstrings country roads one and another heartstring one that i loved was my guy harrison ford who's a tesla guy by the way i know that you know i talked to him at a tesla event uh one time but he's a he's a big tesla guy but he did a jeep commercial which was kind of like a crossing the aisle kind of commercial and hey you might like to plug it in or you might like gas.

36:34I think that was kind of the point of it. Let's play a little bit of that one if we have the Jeep one. But you saw this one, right, Lon? What do you think of this one? Yes, I liked it. I mean, I feel like Harrison Ford, the last few years, he's really sort of taken ownership of his role as like America's granddad. And I think we all have such strong emotional connection feelings for him. More than, you know, like you could put Walton Goggins in an ad and he's a good actor. I'm a big righteous gemstones guy, but it's not the sort of person who evokes the same feelings as Harrison Ford. And so I think there's just a gravitas, a cultural significance that he has that only a handful of other guys have.

37:15Tom Hanks, you know, how many how many American actors are really in that in that world? Maybe Samuel L. Jackson, who also made a notable appearance, but not that many. if you put him in something everybody's paying attention because he's he's america's granddad i mean he's it's indy it's indiana jones yeah like matthew mcconaughey to me has become the salesforce guy who also does some acting a little bit he's in a lot of ads he was in two ads this year that's too much that's saturation that's brand dilution matthew's so they're doing like a lot of americana he's at a bar and he's in his j ranch era he's in his ranch era here as well and there's a part of this where it shows the plug-in and it shows people going different directions.

37:58If Kevin Costner hadn't bailed on Yellowstone to do his Horizon films, he could have done this. And there's the plug-in. See, look, there's the Rubicon plug-in hybrid. It's like that, like, you know, everybody, it doesn't matter if you're a big city liberal, if you live in a red state, if you're a farmer, a rancher, everybody loves Harrison Ford. He's universal. And I like the joke at the end where he's like, am I last name? And I love Jeeps. So I thought this was cheeky. I thought it was heartstring pulling. And I'll tell you how effective this was. I've always wanted to own a Jeep Wrangler. My wife has always wanted to own a Jeep Wrangler.

38:37And we just never got around to it. You know what I did after watching the set? What? You bought a Jeep? I didn't buy a Jeep. What I want and I looked at the Jeep inventory around me here in Texas. I should get a Jeep for the ranch. I just assume that's on a level you could just impulse. That's a J-impulse purchase. It could be a J-impulse purchase, but I didn't. For me, I'd have to build up a little while. I have to think about it, do some research. Just go online by it. Well, the only reason you have to do a ton of research on this, by the way, now is I was on Car and Driver. Jeep has so many options.

39:14You can go hybrid. You can go regular. You can go two-door. You can go four-door. You can go hard-top. You can go soft-top. You go Rubicon, you could go six speed. You could go manual, you can go automatic. I mean, it's so many options. It's fatigue with the Jeep. I feel like that's part of the bit though, isn't it? It's like an all customizable, like your need, whatever your specific needs are, there's a Jeep for that, you know? Yeah. But they do have a Jeep hybrid now. There's a Jeep Wrangler plug-in hybrid. I didn't know that. Yeah, I was looking at the Jeep Wrangler hybrid. I was like, well, that's kind of cool.

39:48Well, I wonder how many miles it gets or whatever. They're getting their ROI on that Ford commercial already. I mean, it made me want to know what's up. And I don't think they have, do they have an all-electric one yet? I don't think they have an all-electric Jeep yet. I'm not sure, but I do know that every time I see a Jeep Gladiator with the top and the doors off, I'm like, that is the tank top of trucks. And I always really want one, but my driveway is not long enough to have that plus my wife's car in it. So it's just, I can't buy one because I don't have room. For the ranch, yes, it's not a very practical big city vehicle, but for the ranch, I could see it totally making sense.

40:24What's the story, Alex, with Matthew McConaughey securing the bag from Benioff? Because Benioff is constantly running around with celebs. He's got the guy from Japan who is his best friend. I forgot that guy's either an artist or a musician that he's always hanging out with. Then he's got Matthew McConaughey on the payroll. and then there's another celebrity he had on the payroll for a while well i i this idea that like matthew mcconaughey is like the strategy officer of what is his official role and how much money is he getting paid to do this so i wouldn't look this up and according to reporting from 2023 matthew mcconaughey is getting paid quote more than 10 million dollars a year to serve as a creative advisor and tv pitchman and that's according to the wall street journal so how How much money is$10 million a year?

41:17It's about$27 ,400 per day. And I got to tell you what, Mark, I'll do it for half. I mean, it's a big number, 10 million bucks. But I guess if you've got like a hundred billion dollar company, I guess you can give somebody 10 million. But that's a lot of cheddar. Yeah. I don't know what people get paid. Ron, would he be considered A-list? Like Harrison Ford is A-list and George Clooney is A-list. We're in a very strange time in the movie industry. Conventionally, yes. He would have been like, he would have been who you'd normally think would be, you know, Oscar, like was in all those rom-coms, had a, had a, has a big career.

41:55Yeah, he's a legit guy. But in 2025, there's really only a handful of people who like we know can definitely open a movie. Even guys like Will Smith are no longer like sure things. And Will Smith is more prominent. So it's basically Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt. Yeah, I mean, Cruise, Even Cruz had a stumble with that last mission impossible. Who is still an A-lister? It's hard to say. Lon, great job. We'll see you on another episode soon. We'll drop you off. And we got a couple of business stories to get through today that are critically important. Well, that was fun. And what I like about that is we really got to talk about all the great internet companies spending money on this.

42:33This is not something you should do when you have a small amount of money. But if you're a billion-dollar company, you got over a billion dollars in your bank account, why not do it? And here's what you should do. If you have under 100 million, you want to participate in this? I might do this next year. You should do a spec Super Bowl commercial, let it out and say, this is what if we could afford a Super Bowl commercial, this would be our Super Bowl commercial. So you can hijack the Super Bowl commercial by releasing your not Super Bowl commercial or we can't afford a Super Bowl commercial, but we made one anyway.

43:06You should punk rock this. So I'm going to advise a bunch of my startups, if you have 10 million in revenue and you want to go spend 100K making a not Super Bowl commercial, I'll retweet it for you. I think it's like a really good idea to punk rock and guerrilla market into the Super Bowl and release it with a press release. And then also say, or if you wanted to take it up one notch higher, say, this is our banned Super Bowl ad. They wouldn't let us play this. It's 2X or 2Y. And then people will talk about that as a controversial free speech point. And then you get even more play. By the way, I think Calm, you know, the meditation app did an election night commercial.

43:41I don't know if you saw that. This is 2024. They did it. Okay. So it was a couple of months ago. I remember getting a lot of feedback on this. They just did a silent ad. We brought this ad space to give you 30 seconds of silence. Yep. It's pretty effective because I'm already talking quieter. I'm already on NPR voice. Yep. Just silence. You're welcome. I mean, it's so powerful when you think about it. Like it's election night. Everything is going chaotic and calm's like, boom. And I know this because calm was the number one app of the year. According to Apple, they gave it the app of the year, not just health, but overall when Trump became president as a like kind of sub tweet role of Trump.

44:26Like, listen, I know it's going to be chaotic. Captain chaos is in, you know, get calm. So when Trump won, I was like, this is going to be great. We're going to sell a lot of eight sleeps and a lot of calm meditation apps. people are going to be all high strung and bent out of shape. Okay. What else do we got in the news? There's a bunch of news going on. Let's just rapid fire go through it. All right. So AI news to kick things off. There's an enormous event going on in France. We talked about this just for a hot second at the end of last week. JD Vance is going. I think Modi is going. But the whole point is that France has unveiled a lot more spending than we expected.

44:59They're putting together a over$100 billion private investment pool, Jason, to build data centers, investing companies. There's a new pan-EU kind of like AI corporate consortium being put together that General Catalyst is a part of. Okay. And I think it's a pretty big deal, frankly. So they put a pool of capital together. Vive la France. They're going to try to compete in data centers and AI. As we talked about, they got tons of nukes. They got tons of energy. This gives them a pole position. So what a forward-thinking country in that they decided, you know what? we're not going to shut our nukes down we're going to lean into nukes because we know we don't want to we don't have oil in france that i know of so if we don't have that let's go clean let's build extra nuclear they were 80 90 percent nuclear at one point now they're probably 60 70 percent nuclear and 20 renewables but if you have extra capacity for nuclear and people need data centers absolutely why wouldn't you put data centers in france and uh get some pan-au-chocolat and uh yeah i mean i hear croissants in france cost a lot less than croissants in the u.s so i'm aboard it's 109 billion euros and it's called the eu ai champions initiative oh that's the general catalyst thing there's a bunch of ai stuff coming out of france right now and i know people have given europe a lot of stick for its regulatory posture they do seem to be shifting jason and i think that it would be great to have two hubs of AI development in the free world to counterpoint China.

46:31And then finally, one last thing here, Mistral, the French Foundation AI model company, and Helsing, the European defense company, are going to work together on AI defense tech for Europe. And I thought that sounds very American. So we have a big investment, we have less regulation, and we have guns. Europe is going American on AI. Yep. Hey, pay your fair share. I love it. And then And yeah, we had talked last week that UAE was going to invest in data centers there. And so this is great news. And if you want to play a part in the AI future, there's a couple of ways to go about it. Obviously, you could have great PhDs coming out of your universities who know how to write code, etc.

47:12You could have energy. You could have data centers. There's a lot of ways to go about it. And you can lower regulations so things can move faster. Good on them. I also saw, you know, and I replied to you, Sam Lesson, who worked, he's, I think he's Slow Ventures is his venture capital firm. And he had worked at Facebook for a long time. And obviously his wife is the Jessica Lesson from the information, which we sometimes quote here. Oh, yeah. He did a really interesting tweet. You can pull it up. He says, simple slash obvious AI company to build. Replace do not reply at email addresses with please reply at.

47:48and you know you could read his like little pitch on it but my lord i always hated do not reply emails because i'm like if you could get a reply from a customer like why wouldn't you want that like that makes total sense but you know with ai you could have people reply and then send them a thoughtful ai based reply first and then if they need a human they could ask for a human at any point in time just kind of like you do on the phone where you say i need an agent and um yes If somebody should build, please reply at as a company. Just take his advice here. This is a great idea to just build an AI email gateway that does this and this only where it's human in the loop.

48:29You make a web interface. I mean, this could change everything for small businesses. What a great, obvious idea. And, you know, you just have to be willing to iterate on it. But I just wanted to give him a shout out because that is a great idea. I think it's a great idea. Yeah, and it actually makes me pretty encouraged about how much space there still is in the market to take modern AI technology and apply it at legacy systems to improve the overall consumer and customer experience, to use kind of a buzzword-y term. This isn't even that hard, off-the-shelf technology, Jason. You could make it with pretty much, I think, any major LLM API.

49:05But here's the question that I have. Build it or buy it. If you're a company, would you want to pay a SaaS fee for this or would you want to just have your own crew spin up your own version of it? I mean, in all cases, you have this, it's a feature, it can be done internally, yada, yada. I would say if you make it and it's$99 a month for up to 10 ,000 emails and it's$1 ,200 a year, why would anybody build it? Because a developer's going to cost you$100 ,000 in a year of work to do it. And like Squarespace, what I always tell people about using Squarespace, they constantly add features to it so it wasn't like a shopify competitor it was like more for like a beautifully designed website and shopify was for e-commerce but they added the e-commerce features then they you know it wasn't for selling content like maybe patreon or some of those other platforms are for we can sell content or email newsletters or videos and then they added that so what you could do with this is you make it for email then you add it to whatsapp you add it to text whatever but it's a really great wedge.

50:07And what I would do is I would make it free for under a thousand emails and just see what happens. So if somebody wants to do this idea, find a friend or two, email me, jason at calacanis.com, go to launch.co slash apply and build a prototype. If your prototype's good, I'll give you 25K or 125K to go to Founder University or to the Launch Accelerator. It's just such an obvious idea. I'm happy to give people their first check to give it a shot if they're actually developers and they make a prototype. So somebody can clip this and put it on, you know, our request for startup. Shout out to Sam Lesson.

50:43Great idea. I think you could build it for 25 to 125K, no problem. So in baseball - On your weekends. Yeah. The Mendoza line is kind of like the threshold at which someone becomes like ineffective at batting. I think it's like a 0.2 batting average. I wonder if they'll be like a SaaS line. like if you charge less than one tenth of the cost of a developer for your SaaS product no one's going to build it because it's so much cheaper to buy it and I wonder if there's a way we can use that to like frame what software products might be at risk yeah I'd say three developers if you have to put three developers if the cost of building something and maintaining it in your company is three developers you're probably not going to do it because you got other things you'd want to put the three developers on but under three developers you probably just want to buy it right so So for us internally, we built all of our systems for tracking companies using Coda and Notion and Zapier and some other tools.

51:39That was under three developers of work. I think we probably have, in total, four people on the team spending 20 % of their time each, less than one full-time person. And they're not even developers. They're just savvy business people who know how to use these kind of scripting tools. So yeah, it might be like a two-developer rule. if it's over two developers or more, just, you know, we'll do it in, you know, or if it takes under two developers, just buy the software that's out there. There's something there where you don't want to waste too many developers on a project. So you don't have too many projects.

52:13I mean, we talk a lot about how focus is so important for startups. And then we also talk about rolling your own software. Well, those do kind of contrast a little bit. Well, now you've got a management team that instead of doing their job is managing the building of the infrastructure for the company. So you've got to really think is this worth doing and i can tell you at the core of running an accelerator or an incubator is processing a large number of applications efficiently tracking a large number of companies and their progress so when you're an at scale investor it does make sense to build custom software if you're a firm that does six investments a year and you process 2 000 applications yeah you can use off-the-shelf software we have 20 000 applications we do 100 investments we're tracking I don't know, a thousand companies that we've either invested in or that are in our programs like Founder University.

53:03So yeah, we need custom software. You know, there was another story that you had put on the docket about IT unemployment on the rise. I thought that was a very interesting story. So on Friday, we showed a chart showing that there's been a pretty sharp decline in how many new people were being hired into tech roles in the US. And I found some more data on that. So according to Department of Labor data that the Wall Street Journal published, the number of unemployed IT workers here in the States rose from about 100 ,000 to about 150 ,000 last month. And that pushed IT unemployment from 3.9%, kind of below the national average, just a little bit, to 5.7%.

53:42Now, some of this is end of year cleaning house companies, letting people go and so forth. But I wouldn't have thought in today's moment when there's so much opportunity in technology that we would have a higher unemployment rate for IT folks than the average American worker? And the question is, is this AI showing up in the numbers, Jason? I think it's two things. One, the software in IT is getting better and better, and it's being offshored. So that combination of offshoring and let's call it self-serve, so you are in a remote company, you have a problem with the Mac mini or whatever I sent you or the camera.

54:24If the microphone, the camera, and the Mac mini are well-constructed and the software like Restream is well-constructed, are you going to ask for tech support from producer Court or Chris, or are you just going to try to solve it yourself? You're probably going to just try to solve it yourself to not bother them and you'll be a little self-reliant and the answers are there so i don't think it's ai replacing the person i think it's the person replacing the it person i think what it is is the customer you know the executive going to chat gpt and saying how do i underline in word that's what's happening here okay so essentially people are more uh empowered by improved software and improved ability to go out and find their own answers.

55:10So in an IT context, going back to your early IT experience, we just need fewer bodies. Okay, I'll take that. You're not going to call the support desk if you can call an AI. So instead of calling the support desk, go to ChatGPT, go to YouTube, go to Gemini, ask the same question, go to Grok, and you're probably half the time going to solve your issue. So the number of calls coming into the help desk go down because of AI. So this is a very weird one. It's not that AI is exactly replacing the person. It's that people are going to AI to solve their problems. And I suspect this will happen with lawyers and accountants as well, and doctors.

55:46All of those professions, before we call our attorneys, we upload a document to ChatGPT and we ask it, is this a standard safe? Has anything been changed? Here's the standard safe. Smart. So before you call your attorneys and spend$800,$1 ,200, shout out to expensive attorneys everywhere. Shout out. Yes. Shout out. You should, as a founder, take the document and just ask ChatGPT to analyze and say, how is this term sheet I got from a venture capitalist different than the standard term sheet? Then when you go talk to your attorney, you could also upload as an employee, here's my non-compete, non-disclosure, whatever you signed, my assignment of IP.

56:26You could ask ChatGPT to analyze it, summarize it, and then you can go to your employer or your employment attorney and say, hey, who owns my IP in this case? If I use my own laptop on the weekends, all of this is to say the first third or the first half of questions for professional service people are going to be answered not by Google, but by chat. We're done. This goes back to, we talked about Glean the other day on the show, which is essentially AI for internal corporate answers. And Yahoo was a customer. So I actually got to use it for a second before I quit and they just hit a hundred million ARR.

56:59So there's another example of just this playing out in the market. I will say though, I think for the biggest companies, you're going to need IT staff because their internal systems are so complex. It's a little bit harder to chat GPT your way out of them. But for anything under a thousand people, I think you're dead on. All right. So we're going to have a big week this week with earnings. I'm just going to pick my top three that I want to go over. You can pick your top three and we'll meet in the middle. I really want to understand what's going on at Robinhood, Reddit, and my third choice. let's see zillow shopify fresh work similar web lift and solar winds are going to come out on tuesday so i guess i gotta go lift is my choice there because you know i want to see how they're responding to the situation um with self-driving i gotta go robin hood and reddit because i think those two are crushing it and super important to robin hood i never sold a share of robin hood we distributed from our first fund our robin investment at like i don't know if it was 18 or$20 a share.

57:59I think it's at 50 bucks a share right now and growing. 56, 34 a share. What? Up 0.86%. But look at that tear from the beginning of 2024 when it was 13, 14 bucks a share. It has been ripping all through last year. Give it the lifetime one, because what happened, this is a really important lesson for everybody. This is lifetime. This is from - Okay, perfect. This is, yes. So this is the lifetime chart. That peak is when Cathie Wood and when it went public and I was locked up for the first six months. So if you look at that chart, I think it peaked early at$50 or$60 a share. What was the peak? This is the peak was$70.

58:37Okay. So this is really important. It went to$70 a share and did it go public in 22 or 23? I think it was very early 22. It's August 21. I'm sorry. Okay. Wow. August 21. So I couldn't sell. August 21 was still Zerpy, kind of Zerpy in the air. And so people went nuts for Robinhood. And then it came crashing down. Everybody's like, oh my God, this is a terrible company. I was like, this company's great. People love this product. I'm not selling. I'm going to hold Robinhood forever. Little did I know that Robinhood would continue to crush it. And if you just watch it, it comes back. It does. And now here we are,$56 a share.

59:16You know what? And it's peaking right now. I'm not selling it. I told everybody, I think that this is going to be a trillion dollar company. What's the market cap of Robinhood right now? $50 billion, exactly. So I changed the chart if you're watching the YouTube version and I threw on, Jason, this is just the federal funds overnight target rate, the Fed rate, as we call it. And what happened was, you can see this was very much in the ZERP era, the early trading period. And then rates went up and there's a bit of a lag and then Robinhood rises. But one thing I think people forget about Robinhood's resurgence was, frankly, it made tons of money off of holding a lot of cash from its customers.

59:51And so when the price of money went up, a lot of fintech companies saw a pretty substantial boost to their revenues. So the Fed giveth and the Fed taketh away. But Robin's one of my favorite examples of how the Fed can really be on both sides of a trade. Now you wanted Reddit, let me pull it up for you. Yeah. So Wednesday, I think we have Robinhood and Reddit. I don't know if they announced beginning of the day, end of the day, but we could probably grab like Zillow's an interesting one on Tuesday coming out as well, because that would give us some insight into the changes that occurred with that settlement in the real estate market.

1:00:21So maybe Tuesday, we grab Zillow Lyft. Wednesday, we grab Robinhood Reddit. Thursday, I guess we got to do Coinbase with all the changes in crypto. And then maybe Airbnb, because that's an interesting bellwether. So there I got six that I'm interested in. You can pick a couple as well. And that gives us what we'll cover this week, because there's so many startup lessons from that cohort of six. right? And it's a marketplace, marketplace, marketplace, content, marketplace, marketplace. So it's five marketplaces, one content company. The only one I want to add, Jason, is what I have pulled up right now, which is Monday.com.

1:00:56They're up 28 % today because they reported this morning. And it's rare to see a SaaS company jump that much in the current moment. And just so people know, what does it take to crush as a public SaaS company? Revenue growth of 32 % year over year, faster than expected, better adjusted EPS than expected. And they guided to about 1.21 billion for this year, which was above estimates. And they're generating tons and tons of cash. So all you have to do is be at the pinnacle of public market growth, have expanding profitability, insane free cash flow generation, and beat analyst expectations. And you too can have a greater than 10X multiple.

1:01:35I mean, they got a billion in yearly revenue. That's great. They're making money they're profitable they're growing at over 30 year over year all of this is great so maybe this is the beginning of the return of sass and i bet you that their employee count is half of what it was at the peak i bet you that's the trend is that they probably had like a thousand employees and now they have 500 because in order to get their earnings to go up like this you got to have some discipline right there has to be some discipline and look at all that free cash flow low. They can start buying their shares back.

1:02:09I mean, and this is one of the things about if SaaS is going to be perennially undervalued by the public markets, then these SaaS companies can go private like Zendesk did, I believe, or they could start buying back their shares. So they really have two options of how to take advantage of valuations being low. Start buying back shares, which Uber's doing because they perceive their shares were low, or you could take the company private. No, no, no more of that. No more take privates. Only Publix. All right. I just, I really want more IPOs this year. Elsewhere in the world, OpenAI is taping out its chip with TSMC, which means that they're moving forwards on having their own hardware.

1:02:52Keep in mind that Amazon, Microsoft, Google, everyone's doing this. We also have a bunch of chip companies in the Twist 500, including Etched, which we're trying to get onto the show. They are making Transformers specific. Everybody wants Etched on the show. So if somebody knows somebody at Etched, let's try to get that locked up. Founder Friday's announcement, founderfridays.tech is where founders host other founders in groups of ideally six to eight, enough to go around a round table and talk about what was your big win for the last month? What are your big challenges? That's the format. That's all it is.

1:03:25But imagine if you're a founder, you're home alone, you're in Miami, you're in Austin, you're in San Antonio, wherever you are, and you got to sit with five other, six other, seven other folks and answer that question. What's working? What's not working? And then give each other advice. It's the simplest format I ever came up with. It's the most effective format I've ever come up with. We decided we're going to do a Founder Friday City Competition. We used to do this in the old days with meetups. We're doing a Founder Friday Competition. Each city is going to have the ability to have a little startup competition amongst their six seven eight founders you know each give their best pitch then whoever they want to represent them in the nationals we'll get to go we're going to make a bracket we'll have eight international cities eight u.s cities you know they'll all battle each other and then we will wind up with like four quarter you know whatever four people in the finals and then we'll rank them and we'll have a show yeah where each of these uh folks get to pitch for two minutes, take a question from Alex and I, and then we'll pick the winner in each of the brackets.

1:04:31So there'll be an additional great reason to join a Founder Fridays group or run one in your city. It's free for founders. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it. I love demos. I love founders. I love vetting things. I love asking questions. I'm a hundred percent. So share it there. He's Alex, x.com slash Alex. I'm x.com slash Jason. He's got a newsletter. It's called Cautious Optimism. I have one. Just type in Jason Calacana's Stubstack. You'll find it. Sign up for it. I'm going to start writing some email newsletters, I decided. Good. Now that we got Lon here to help me with ideas, and we'll see you all next time thisweekinstartups.com slash docket to see Wednesday's docket ahead of time.

1:05:10You can ask questions in the docket. Thank you to Notion for hosting the docket. Bye-bye.