The 5 Companies Apple Must Buy

0:00I was talking about things Apple could buy under John Ternus, who is the new CEO. Obviously, Apple's philosophy of buying things is they like to buy back their own stock and technical teams, the team that built Siri, the team that built Touch ID, they buy these little tiny tuck-in acquisitions of technical teams that can be added to their existing product line, but not robust, full-on products. I believe John Turner should stop buying back the shares and should take massively big swings. My way of looking at this is anything that the iPhone, your laptop, your watch, your AirPods, and their stores can integrate with on some level.

0:43That is the way I look at it. So I asked you if maybe we should play a game like Bill Simmons does. So explain the game. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Odoo, the all-in-one business platform. Your first app is free. Get started today at odoo.com slash twist. Northwest Registered Agent got a new business idea? Northwest Registered Agent helps you bring it to life. Get a free domain, email, phone number, and more with no purchase required. Learn more at www.northwestregisteredagent.com slash twist domain. PayPal is built for all business. Get started at paypal.com slash business. Oh, well, they do, a lot of podcasts do the sort of the draft where the idea is it's like You take the rules the way a fantasy football or baseball draft would work, but you're applying it to any other thing.

1:29So, like, the Simmons podcast I know, they do it with, like, action movies. Like, action heist movies. We're doing a draft, you know, and then my number one pick is Heat. Your number one is Ocean's Eleven, and we go from sort of there. So I think that's the kind of core idea. We picked out the pool, which are all these potential companies that Apple maybe could buy. and then we'll go. I see this. You got Perplexity. You got Disney. You got Peloton. You got Whoop. You got Sonos, GoAI, Winavar Investments, ExoLabs, Robinhood, tons of great choices. We based some of them on your pre-selected picks.

2:01I think, Jacob, correct me if I'm wrong, we did actually ask fans and viewers for their own submissions, I think. Did we do that? I did see in some of the... Oh, yeah. We've got some expert opinions from some of the viewers here so we can share those. And then, yeah, the idea would be we'll each pick a roster of what are the five companies that we think Apple should. Let's do it. Are we playing those clips first, or are we going right into this? I think we should pick our five, and then we'll see what the members of the public said. But yeah, do it in order, so the idea would be your first round pick.

2:37That's your best. You're centering your team. Like a sports draft. Yeah, you're centering the team around the first round draft pick and the second round pick. Of course. So let's do a type-in coin toss website. We'll do a coin toss to see who goes first. There are coin toss websites. There are coin toss websites. Just have a coin toss website on Google. Do it on Perplexity, whatever you got there. Flip a coin. Here we go. Call it Lon. All right. Flip. You got heads or tails? Oh, I'll take heads. Okay. I got tails. Let's see. And you go first. Oh, man, that sucks. I knew what you were going to do.

3:10Fuck. Let's see. Who's your first choice? Let's see. I'm looking over the list right now. Oh, one that immediately had stood out to me that I see right here in the center. I'm going with 11 labs. Put 11 labs. Interesting. What you're thinking? Obviously, I think with Siri running your life, running your phone, voice mode is coming. Everybody is going to want to do that. I think the idea, especially you can think of driving, where I still go at home from work every day. there's people like almost killing me doing this. If you could just have your phone in the car and you could just talk to it. People are, you're texting people, you're sending memos, you're answering emails, your entire life.

3:54Fix Siri and then some. Great choice. Above and beyond fixing Siri and making your whole phone a voice commanded system. I think, I think 11 labs is the one. And 11 labs, I think was last valued in the maybe five to 10 billion range. This would be like a rounding. Yeah. Yeah, it's not different. It's table stakes for Apple. Now, this is going to be interesting because I am also enamored with what technology could do for these. And, you know, I would love to go with a Tesla, let's say, but it's too late. They're in the Mag 7. They're too big. It's not possible. So I have to keep this realistic.

4:33But there is a big company, a big company that has a lot of shared fabric, and that would tuck in perfectly for everybody. And Apple has started to dip their toe in this. And in fact, they have gotten good at it the last two or three years specifically with Apple TV and a lot of great shows emerging there. So I'm not going with Netflix, but I am going with Disney. Disney is a large company that if you were to have on your devices every Disney show as part of your Apple One, you take your iPhone to the parks, everything there, why not go big here? Why not take a really loved brand and make your devices very unique?

5:23And remember I said earlier, like what happens in the stores? Imagine all those great Disney stores have some Apple products like AirPods for kids that are Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, or a Star Wars laptop, you know, or a Disney Apple watch, right? So I think they have done things with Disney for the watch faces already with Mickey, but you could start really doing interesting things with that IP. So I'm going to go big. I'm going to go with a curveball. I'm going with Disney as my first. I mean, you think about all the stuff Disney tries to do at the at the parks with the interactivity. You know, you put your they give you the band and then you use that on the ride.

6:01And then that's how you're interacting. Imagine what you could do if you had like everything is on. You're already everything in the park is on your phone. But if Apple and Disney were the same company, you know, unbelievable synergies to be unlocked there. For my for my next one, I have thrown this out in the chat room. I think this is a really interesting. Like when this first came up, this was the first company I actually thought of. Sony. I'm picking Sony for number two. Again, a relative steal if you are Apple. I mean, a market cap you could, I think, easily afford. The big one here is the PlayStation.

6:35I think Apple immediately gets another device that's in millions and millions of homes that people are obsessed with that they can take and make. I mean, they could keep it as the Apple PlayStation. They could make it Apple Gaming or the center of their new gaming sort of company. And, you know, I think incredible things they could do. Obviously, they also inherit a hell of a TV business. So Apple TV music could suddenly be Sony Music Group, Sony Pictures, Sony Music. They've got a huge TV and film distribution channel. They've got a huge music distribution channel. And the last one, a lot of people might not realize Sony owns Crunchyroll, the number one anime owner and streaming system.

7:15in the West, really, not even just America. So, I mean, imagine the power of Apple exclusively being the distributor for almost every popular anime series that comes out from Attack on Titan to Chainsaw Man and beyond. I think an unbelievable opportunity they could unlock to be at the center of all that. Disney's at 182 billion market cap right now. Sony's 135. Sony's 134, yeah. You know, is Apple at$5 trillion? What is Apple at? $4 trillion? $4 trillion, maybe? Apple's at$4.96 trillion, so$5 trillion. $5 trillion, so 1%. $5 trillion is$50 billion, so this would be like 3 % acquisitions, 5 % acquisitions raised.

8:01My second choice is going to be a wild one. Now I'm going to go tech. I'm going tech. Now, it would be very easy for me to pick GoAI, which is one of our, or ExoLabs for local AI. Yeah, you'd do great. It's an easy one for me to pick. Yeah, that would be, and I think it's interesting. But I have one that is a, might as well skate to where the puck is going, which is Boston Dynamics. Boston Dynamics has an interim CEO. I interviewed her in July for the All-In Interview Show. And they have all types of robots there. But eventually, Apple will have no choice but to have a robot. and they could have these be industrial, let the company run on its own, but then they could start working on the Apple A1 robot, you know?

8:41And oh my Lord, people would trust an Apple robot, you know, and it could be extraordinary for Apple. Yeah, I think getting people to buy a robot and put it in their home is a huge trust thing. And Apple is the brand that could convince people like, all right, I'll let the Apple buy my home. And, you know, what we should do is make a short video after we finished this draft of walking through the Apple store and seeing all this. So you see lawns, you know, Apple PlayStation, you see Siri work, and we can literally make a movie of these acquisitions. Let's keep going. What do you got? All right.

9:14I'm surprised. I'm amazed you haven't chosen this one. I thought for sure I was not going to get this going in the third round. I'm really surprised. I'm going with perplexity. I think that you, you had mentioned this in your next, you had mentioned this in your tweet and I was immediately like, that is the correct. if that's actually the right answer. Because Apple, they're in this amazing position of not being invested in just one model or one family models. They can afford to be totally model agnostic and perplexity would be the perfect router and system that you could plug into your Apple device.

9:45And now you can use any model that you want and all of these great perplexity harnesses and products and agents right there. Like, so, you know, perplexity computer just coming on your MacBook Air is like the solution to a million different, I think, problems. And so that's a gimme, I think. This holiday season, don't miss your chance to turn just looking into just bought it. Make it easy for your customers to say yes on the spot. PayPal Checkout is a trusted conversion engine fueled by 400 million active PayPal and Venmo accounts. And when you add Paylater, you turn holiday shoppers into regulars.

10:2396 % of Paylater shoppers are repeat users. Give them pay later flexibility now, and it could help earn their loyalty all year long. PayPal is built for all business. Get started at paypal.com slash business. PayPal later data. Eight markets, March 2025 to February 2026. Repeat users defined as more than one pay later purchase in the past year. I was going with perplexity next, so you stole it off the board. And I think you have search, which is a huge franchise for them. They do a deal with Google for that, but having their own search as a default, maybe you can switch off Google and pick perplexity eventually when that deal runs out.

10:57They have their own search engine now driven by perplexity. They have their own headless harness, et cetera, and it would just put them on third base. Now it gets hard here because you got so many great choices here. Looking at something like Spotify, they already have Apple Music. I don't think it's going to really help the situation. You look at something like Sonos, I think they could rebuild it. It would be a tiny tuck-in, but it's not going to dramatically change the fortune of the company. I'm looking for things that could build a$100 billion, a$200 billion, a$500 billion revenue stream.

11:33In other words, like really figure out how to replace the iPhone dependency. So Disney, you got that entertainment parks, merchandise IP. Very good, right? Boston Dynamics, totally new category. What if it works and you're selling 10, 100 million robots a year? Okay, that could be transformative. Here's a wildcard transformative one. I'm going to go with DigitalOcean. DigitalOcean, cloud provider. There's no Amazon Web Services. There's no Azure. There's nothing at Apple for hosting their apps, hosting software. But there is trust. They have a lot of developers who use MacBooks. Imagine your MacBook allows you to do hosting.

12:15And imagine you trust Apple. You maybe get automatically reviewed faster in the app store. Maybe you have some preference on the desktop. You have speed. You're in the data centers with Apple. And DigitalOcean is like$10,$15 billion, $20 billion, depending on when you would buy it. You have to pay a premium. So you probably have to pay 50%. So that's going to be a$25 billion acquisition. No problem. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy. Bang. Now they're in the game versus Elon Web Services, Azure, Google Cloud, and AWS. It could easily become a 50 or a hundred billion dollar revenue month. Yeah, that's a good one.

12:52Then that gets really tough. There's a few on here I'd still like, but you know what I think would be an interesting one is Etched. I think I'm going to go Etched for number four. Well, if you think about it, I mean, Apple right now, they're entirely dependent on NVIDIA chips like everybody else. Imagine owning their own chip company and Etched is exactly the kind of AI chip that Apple desperately needs. They're not training models. They're running inference constantly, especially now that they own Perplexity, Jason. So I feel like, you know, Siri and Apple Intelligence are answering all of these requests, billions and billions of devices.

13:28That's the kind of job that Etched is building all of these chips for. And, you know, their server side AI is currently running Apple Silicon, not really designed for this. Etched gives them a totally new sort of option in terms of how to run this. and, you know, it bridges NVIDIA-level talent without having to buy a company that's NVIDIA-sized. So, I mean, it's an expensive one. I'll look up Etch's valuation. It's high. But let's say$21 billion is what they're saying for Etch. So it's a chunk, but, I mean, still less than a Sony-level player. And I think it opens up— I think they have$250 billion in cash right now.

14:04So it's like these are all less than their cash position. Correct. All right. I like it. Etch seems like an interesting one. now it gets difficult. I like to think big categories. So what's a big category that they really sink their teeth into? I think it's transportation now. Obviously, Uber is a first love here,$150 billion company. It's super cheap right now. It's not$200 billion anymore. Trust me, I know it. I still got some Uber shares left. But then I think, hmm, maybe a Waymo, but Waymo's not available and things like a cursor not available, right? So I am going to think from first principles, how could they have their own robo taxi fleet or cars?

14:51How could they have their own car that you buy that you would buy a BMW not available, Mercedes not available, but two companies that could be available Rivian and Lucid. I think Rivian is a San Francisco based company with a loved car and it would easily tuck in. And then you have Lucid, which makes, I believe, a better product line. So it's a very big toss-up for me. I'm going to give the Edge two. Lucid, because Lucid is reportedly working on a dedicated CyberCab. But it's a coin toss there. So we don't have Lucid, but we'll have them make a little image there again. We'll throw Lucid in there, yeah.

15:32Yeah. So Lucid is my number four. Yeah, I think that's a great pick. You know, for number five, I'm really divided on number five. I had a pick that I thought was great, and now I'm hedging my bets, but I'll go with it. Okay. So I think one thing that I think is interesting is there's a company on here that has been making sort of preferred niche versions of a lot of the things that Apple already does. And by just buying the company out, Apple could like upgrade all of its products overnight. And that's superhuman. So I think if you imagine your document writing, your emails, everything you're doing on the phone with words, with text, with writing, with productivity, all of these different apps that Apple sort of has been struggling to update or upgrade properly, overnight you get the superior superhuman grammarly versions of all of that productivity.

16:27suite on everybody's phone, on everybody's laptop. It makes total sense to me that you would load up your MacBook Air and it would just have, you know, superhuman Go is your mail client. Why am I messing around with this legacy 20 year old mail app? So, yeah, I'm going superhuman number five. All right. So I now think I need to build a deep tech choice here. And so I was thinking about Higgs field. You know, it's like a five billion dollar private company and thinking Exo Labs for putting Macs together and creating local AI, runway, interesting mid-journey. All these are super interesting, and I would have put perplexity in this slot.

17:05I also love the idea of healthcare. The challenge here is Peloton is like a two-trick pony. Whoop and Aura are great, but they kind of already have that sensor stuff handled inside of the Apple Watch, so it would create a little too much tension, I think, to have that come in. It wouldn't tuck in very well. Formula One is a crazy wild card. Nintendo, crazy wild card. Yeah, Formula One was the one I was hedging on, actually, because it would be, I mean, if you think about it, like Apple having a huge presence, that's such an elite kind of event now that people are into, and it's just a huge growing business.

17:39But yeah, I went into it. You know, and to buy something like the NFL or the NBA is just not possible because it's a series of franchises. It just doesn't work. So I think local AI is the big winner. I'm going to take my chance and pick GoAI, one of our portfolio companies here, because I think local AI is the big winner. XO could have fit in here as well, but that's my five. There you go. Yeah, folks. Now, I guess the question is, we want you, the audience, to post a comment here. What did we miss? And who did a better draft? Who would you rather see as the corporate development person at Apple?

18:17Me or Lon? Who is going to win this, Lon? They're both strong. They're both very strong picks. They're both, we fielded, we fielded quality teams, I think. You didn't pick Netflix. I don't know for sure you would go Netflix. Yeah, well, I, you know, Sony, I feel like gets them. I feel like Apple TV already is like, they're better quality and consistency than Netflix. They're just not operating at that level and make at that scale. But with Sony, I think they, they, they could, essentially, they could become a Netflix rival. all right uh there you go there's your draft if you have other ideas post them in the comments uh we did get a few submissions i believe jacob let's hear it yeah let's hear from our audience who would they have picked to uh pick up it's i've been here um i think the next thing that apple should maybe be looking into is boston dynamics now that might sound crazy right but apple has spent decades mastering personal computing uh spatial computing um and you know They're trying now on-device AI, but computing is changing shape as we see it.

19:17The grand frontier in the future is not maybe on the desk or on your face or in your hands anymore, right? It's in motion, if you will. So by acquiring Boston Dynamics, Apple kind of merges the world's most advanced artificial brain with the world's most advanced physical body, right? Great job. We've seen the hardware that Boston has. What's his name? Lance Seidman. Oh, yeah. I know that name. Yeah, a super fan. And we've seen him before. So yeah, thank you to Lance. He picked Boston Dynamics. Regular listeners already know that if you've got a great idea for a new business, our friends at Northwest Registered Agent want to help you bring it to life.

19:55They're going to be the most amazing partner you've ever had. Even if you're not ready to form an LLC, you still need to take care of some basics. So Northwest Registered Agent is now offering free identity services. That means a free domain name, open source website hosting, a business email, and a phone number, and everything else that's going to make your new startup look and feel like a professional company, all with no purchase required. And you know you can rely on Northwest because they've been helping people like you start businesses for nearly 30 years. If you have an idea you can't get out of your head, or even if you're already building something amazing, you already got started, Northwest Registered Agent is the best way to establish your new company.

20:35Learn more at northwestregisteredagent.com slash twist domain. Up next, I think we've got another friend of the show, David Rosenberg. What's David got? Apple has a pretty clear pattern with acquisitions. When a technology becomes important enough to experience, Apple eventually wants to own it. So Next gave them the operating system foundation that became macOS and iOS. PA Semi helped them build the silicon capability that eventually let them move off of Intel. And PrimeSense brought the 3D sensing technology that eventually fed into Face ID. So I think AI creates the same kind of moment because it's changing how we actually use computers.

21:10Right now, if I want to do something, I have to know how to do it. I have to open apps, find the right information, and actually perform the task. With an agent, I can just say what I want done and let the computer figure out how to do it. So for my three acquisitions, I would have perplexity to number one because it gives Apple an agent that can actually reach outside of Apple's own ecosystem. So it can research the web, use software en route between different models. And at number two, I would have world labs because they're building spatial intelligence. So if agents are eventually going to work through cameras, glasses, robotics, they need to understand the physical world as well.

21:39And for number three, I have Prism ML because they're figuring out how to shrink much larger models enough to run locally instead of constantly relying on somebody else's cloud. It's interesting. We're all kind of circling around similar ideas. It's just like which company is the right one to do the job. Interesting, though. Let's keep going. Do you have another one? I believe we do. Up next, we've got a friend of the show. This is the same guy who called in to let us know that Grok is making money now. If you'll recall, when we did ask Jason, we were talking to our next guest about Grok being able to earn its own cash and what that means.

22:13This is Michael Lee Jr. Here's Michael Lee Jr.'s pick. Hey, Jason, thanks for having me on and allowing me to respond to this question. So the question that came through that you raised was which suite of companies would make the most sense for Apple in terms of acquisitions. And I just think about AI voice. So I've tried almost every AI voice tool out there and none of them work except for 11 Labs. And 11 Labs seems like so far ahead of everyone else when it comes to voice. So I'll say 11 Labs, Jason. And also, don't forget, I've already told you this, but Grok has money. This is a big story, Jason.

22:53So that was it, 11 Labs. 11 Labs. We had the same idea. I mean, it's so obvious. Siri still can't understand half the things I say. I'm like, give me, pull up the map. I want to go home. And it calls my mom or something. It's crazy. 11 Labs, the obvious, like one-shot solution. Up next, we've got Databricks cybersecurity expert and friend of the pod, Kristen Dahl. Here's her pick. Hi, folks. Kristen Dahl here. I wanted to chime in on the topic of Apple acquisitions. And so my line of thinking was how can we make Apple products more useful to customers throughout their day? And so the four that I landed on are Liquid AI, Aura, Sonos, and Kagi.

23:35Liquid AI I'm most interested in. So they actually built on-device local models that are designed to run in environments where latency is a concern or you've got power constraints or compute constraints or where you don't have access to a network. And so I think if you combine that with Apple's engineering expertise and their OS expertise, you'd have a very compelling technical product fit. Number two is Aura. I could see this as being offered in conjunction to the Apple Watch for folks that don't necessarily want to invest in the Apple Watch or walk around with a screen on their wrist. It could be a good alternative.

24:15The third is Sonos. And so I could see, so historically, Apple's not done a great job of getting into people's homes. And so I could see a Sonos acquisition is providing a good jumping off point for tying together things like Apple Music, Siri, Apple TV, and home automation. And then my fourth is Kagi, and they offer a premium subscription-based search service where privacy is kind of their number one selling point. And so Apple constantly talks about how they are privacy first. So I could see this. I could see them kind of offering this premium search functionality within their ecosystem, them, especially since I can almost guarantee like 99 % of Apple users are still using Google.

25:09And that experience, we all know that experience has gone significantly downhill over the past number of years. And so thanks for the time. Those are my four. Love the pop. Love it. Great job. All right. This was a big win. I like this exercise. This is a fun one. And yeah, more to come on this week in startups. All right. Let's tee up our guest. All right. We're going to be talking to Stacey Salvi. She's the co-founder and CEO of The 90. They're a startup that has launched a wearable, Jason, that is built to track your skin's real UV exposure. It's a small pendant. It uses built-in sensors to measure the actual UVA and UVB rays hitting your body in real time.

25:52Stacey, thanks so much for joining. Thanks for having me. Great to see you. It looks like you're at a beautiful, you're on a beautiful deck there with some beautiful foliage. Where are you calling in from? I am actually at my house in the East Bay. Oh, okay. Beautiful. Oh, the East Bay is gorgeous. Nice and warm over there. Tell us about what you built and why. Yeah, absolutely. So I have a deep background in wearables. I loved hearing what you had to say about the Plod wearable. um so i've worked at fitbit for uh quite a long time about eight years uh through the google acquisition and from there ended up building a smart ring that was designed with women in mind that who made the smart ring that was so it was a publicly traded company uh startup called movano