The Browser Wars heat up! PLUS, Khan on The Bulwark, rules for great domain names, and Polymarket returns | E2174

27:14This was a little surprising to me. Now, I don't think they're going to take on LinkedIn, but the CEO of applications at OpenAI, Fiji, previously the CEO of Instacart through its IPO, announced a couple of things. So the OpenAI Jobs platform is going to be a place where essentially workers with AI skills can be matched with jobs that need AI skilled workers. So it's kind of a subset of the economy. But if you're a business that's having a hard time finding the right people to help, I don't know, modernize or agentecise your business, this is a way to go about it. Obvious question, how do you tell who's qualified, Jason?

27:46Glad you asked. Well, that's called OpenAI Certifications, a new tool that'll be inside the OpenAI app that will let people essentially prove, and I also presume learn, their AI chops. So a bit of a surprise move from OpenAI. I think I like it, but I haven't really digested it yet. You know, one of the things that happens when you build a platform is you start seeing opportunities everywhere. So you study the data and Google saw, wow, people keep typing in stocks and they type in price. Oh, maybe we should put the stock price right there at the top of our chart and they build Google finance or they keep asking for, I don't know, movies like whatever.

28:28So then they build a database of movies and they show you movies like get them to the Greek and you get the 40 year old version. That's one of my favorites. Oh, what a great film. I wish they made films like that. You know, you get Tropic Thunder is always a nice way to find stuff. So that's what I suspect. I knew a guy who wanted to be a studio head and had some money. I mean, And like, it's almost like if that person had money and time, they could. I mean, making raunchy stoner comedy seems like a genre that, you know, you could do some real damage. That's like my personality after 8 p.m. So I'm totally here for it.

28:57That was a dad joke from Alex. I heard the crickets. I heard that. No, don't apologize. We love it. I don't even mean to. Anyways, keep going. So this seems like a good idea. There probably are people who are looking for AI experts to use OpenAI's tools to do stuff inside of their enterprise. Now, just like the channel at Microsoft, Microsoft would have like certified Microsoft engineers. I was a certified Novell engineer at a point. Those certifications allow you to have a little bit of trust that this person is going to do some good work for you. They get to charge a higher fee for their services.

29:38They get to, and then OpenAI has something to do with all the people calling on the phone who say, can you do this for me? Can you do this for me? We'll give you a million dollars. We'll give you$10 million. Yeah, talk to these firms. Go to this page. You're going to find folks. So that's really what this is about. They're building up a channel to help applications get deployed. It goes back to that MIT story we covered. What was that, two weeks ago? 95 % of corporate AI pilots didn't make it to production. And the data was a little bit... Suspect. Not suspect. It just, it felt like there was a lot of really interesting data points and people found the one that was going to make the best headline.

30:17No one's ever complained about headlines before in the history of journalism, so don't worry. But in this case, I felt like there was actually some more interesting news in there. But Jason, that report and that particular data point, I think took like 20 % of the air out of the AI balloon. right now. It did. And that just shows you people can get skittish during a transition. We had this happen many times with the internet. Oh my God, the internet, you can't trust it. Everybody's going to use AOL. Everybody's going to use CompuServe. You got to use one of these online services, Prodigy, whatever it is.

30:46That's the way commerce will happen. That's the way content will happen. And you have this hand wringing. This helps people make better decisions. It'll help them execute better. I think it's a good idea.

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32:13We were talking about browsers, so I just want to get some other data points for the listeners on who else is building what? Now, Brave, Jason, you've talked about is a privacy-focused browser. It raised some venture capital, had an ICO for its basic attention token, or BAT, back in 2017. And to my surprise, and this is why I included it, it's actually pretty big. So in August, Brave's monthly active users grew to just under 98 million, up about 4 % month to month. Now, if you're a YC company, 4 % month-over-month growth, Jason, doesn't blow your top off. But the company's high watermark DAUs, so in the last month, what was their biggest day of usage, was 41 million.

32:54That's, you know, if it was all American, that would be 10%. Yeah, it's quite significant. And I think it just goes to show that when we think about browsing technology, we think about Chrome, and then somewhere down there, there's Firefox, Safari, Edge. But really, there's a bit more dynamism in the market than I think we have been discussing. So I wanted to bring that for everybody. And there's a project called Ladybird, which is a open source browser that I just heard over on Hacker News. So there's quite a lot of names out there. I think if you think about every percentage point of search being worth a certain amount of market cap, every percentage point of ride sharing being worth a certain amount of market cap, I've been having this debate about, you know, self-driving again today.

33:36I keep getting dragged into it, so I have to keep making this point to everybody. I think self-driving is a$10 trillion opportunity, and that means every 1 % is worth$100 billion. So here you have, let's just round it up to 100 million users for their browser. If there's 4 million internet users on desktop or using browsers, I'm just going to pull a number out, that means 400 million would be 10%. They have two and a half, they've got two, three percentage points of that possible pie. Now, people might use multiple browsers. Obviously, some do. So I think it starts to get interesting. It does.

34:12Based upon how much search there is that occurs through a browser. And they're a takeout candidate as well. They need to go all in on AI on top of having gone all in on privacy. Remember, there is an attack vector for these LLMs. They record everything you do. And when the police come or a civil case comes, whatever it is, they dump your information. They use your information. They're looking at your information. Sam Altman said this. Now, what if Brave took their same privacy approach to browsing where they remove ads, they remove cookies, they make your searches private, all that good stuff.

34:49And that's their commitment. I think they even have a VPN built in or you can pay like 10 bucks a year. It's de minimis. I think they should just do 100 % VPN. So they don't even know where you're coming from unless you want to disclose, you know, your city maybe. and then make all your AI absolutely anonymous. And this is where I think Apple should buy Brave and DuckDuckGo, maybe perplexity. And I've been thinking, you know, I've got that domain name begin.com. I mean, it's burning a hole in my pocket. And I contacted one of these billion dollar startups, the CEO, and I was like, hey, you know, you're doing something that this might be very good for.

35:27So I started a dialogue there. Instead of me building the company, I was thinking, man, maybe if I can get one or 2 % of one of these great companies, that's already worth a billion. I get 10, 20 million now for the domain and for the, maybe be an advisor. And then if they go 10 X, this could be a big hit for me, but begin would be such a great starting point for searches. Certainly better. Because it's where you, perplexity is a terrible name. No, I mean, I'm trying to think of a worse name than perplexity. That's what happens when an engineer named something perplexity. Okay. How many syllables?

35:59How do you spell it? Begin. begin google well google was g-o-o-g-o-l and they changed it right to the the more phonetically and spellable friendly one but like that's what you get when you let an engineer name something you get a large number which is what a google is or a googleplex yeah but once you get past five characters you know now the person's still typing you know you can type in you know google six uh bing four begin five yahoo five like you can't you have to be able to say it over the phone this is like a really important thing for founders to understand you have to be able to say it over the phone and you have to be able to spell it if it's hard to spell no bueno if it's hard to hear over the phone and you can misinterpret it no bueno it's no good it's boring you see that scene from the Spielberg movie with the horizon?

36:58The horizon? Oh wait, the drilling rig? What's the Spielberg The Fablemans Hopefully Lon's listening. Lon will tell us. There's this incredible scene where Spielberg is on the lot and he goes and sees this director. Incredible scene. Here we go. John Ford. This is the John Ford scene. We'll pull it up here. Well, maybe we shouldn't because we get a strike on that. Then I won't pull it up. It's the Fablemans. It's about, it's basically the, it's basically Spielberg's biopic. And there's this great scene where he goes to John Ford to get some advice. He happens to be on the lot. John Ford's on the lot.

37:35And he says, kid, you see this picture over here? And it's David Lynch who's playing John Ford. And they smoke a cigar and I think he's got an eye patch on. He's like, kid, look at this picture. Where's the horizon? He's like, I'm looking at the picture. He's like yelling at him. He's yelling at a 12 year old, where's the horizon? He said, it's at the top. He goes, okay, what about this picture? And he's got paintings. And he says, where's the horizon? Spielberg is nervous. He says, it's at the bottom. He says, and where's the horizon in this picture? It's in the middle. He goes, when the horizon's at the top of the frame, it's interesting.

38:12When the horizon's at the bottom of the frame, it's interesting. And when the horizon's in the middle it's boring as shit now get the hell out of my office and he kicks him out of his office and then every spilum movie has whether it's jaws you know the horizon for the ocean and the boat are at the bottom right just you see it now you can't unsee it this incredible moment this is me telling you about domain names and branding if it's too long it sucks if you can't spell it over the phone it sucks this is honestly this is why it's good this is why x.com no matter i'm not trying to bring elon into this but i will say compared to twitter which used to be t-w-t-t-r then it became something you could spell yeah x.com is still a far superior domain name because to your point it's short you can spell it over the phone it's fanatic like i mean it's memorable i'm a big fan of short domains in general because much like land they they're not making more of them so i think it's it's cool to see what people do anyway i put begin.com up and i'm having people apply to tell me what they want to do with it i'll either lease it or lease loan it to a founder or i might try to find a big company like i think perplexity should just rebrand as begin such a better domain they could do a national campaign and then people would remember it.

39:39I'm going to apply. I'm going to get an email from me later. All right. This could be my biggest hit of my goddamn career. I bust my ass on 10 different ideas and startups. I'll probably make my fortune off of a five letter domain name. All right, let's keep going. There's a lot more to discuss. A lot more to discuss. I want to talk about Polymarket. We talk about Polymarket on the show all the time. This week, Jason, the CFTC kind of said that they're going to be good to go. Now, there's a little bit of nuance here because they bought a thing called QCX that was in the United States, and that was the entity that the CFTC said they're going to have a no-enforcement agreement with.

40:16But essentially, it does appear that making prediction bets, prediction markets as a concept, are going to be allowed here in the United States. And I don't want to get into politics. I will say that 1789 Capital and Donald Trump Jr. recently put a little bit of money into the company, and then they got kind of - And then got the green light. So that makes me a little bit unhappy as a capitalist. But I do think that if you're a fan of Polymarket, as we are on the show, this is great news. And I'm looking forward to see what impact this has on their numbers. Because what's fun about Polymarket is that it's on the Polygon blockchain, which is an Ethereum level two, which means that I've been watching their usage data pretty closely.

40:53And I'm fascinated to see what's going to happen once you get a bunch of Americans showing up and making wagers, bets or predictions, whatever you want to call it. I cannot wait. And yeah, there's a correlation between these two news stories. They both happened in two weeks, but I don't think it's a correlation. I think the correlation is with the QCX acquisition. They spent like over$100 million to buy that company. And essentially what they were buying is, you know, a company that already had the rights to do this because it does take years or so to get permission. So, OK, here we are. That was like my dad bought a second bar.

41:25He bought out the previous owner who had the liquor license. So you could just buy and liquor licenses in New York, you know, they cost$5 ,000 to apply, but it took two or three years. They didn't want to give out too many because, you know, you don't want your neighborhood to become like, you know, college town. So, you know, there was you could trade them for 25 grand or something. They had a market value like medallions. I was about to say, just like taxi medallions. Yeah, exactly. So that's what's going on here. I don't think there's anything nefarious with DJ. T. Jr. Well, I'm glad that you think that that's actually.

41:57I'm glad there's less corruption than I was concerned about. That's a good thing. I'll take that as a win. Yeah, 100%. So do you want to, I think we should show some charts here, Jason, because one thing people know is that the polymarket and the prediction market game have done very, very well in and around the election cycle. But I think people don't know that they've actually held up reasonably well afterwards. So I pulled some charts for us from Dune, which we love. And if you look here, this is the polymarket monthly volume clearly spiked right around election time. fell very rapidly and people were worried it was going to do that.

42:29But instead, it's actually recovered and it's doing, I would say, pretty well. This is a known function in startup land and in company land. You have some event that drives a lot of attention to your platform, product or service. Then that event ends and things come down, but they come down to a higher average, a new plateau, if you will, than the previous one. So as an example on All In, when we had Vlad during the GameStop, or when Chamath said something about the Uyghurs being below his line, or when Donald Trump came on, or when Elon came on, each of those events caused a massive spike. But then when it came back down, we retained some of those people.

43:13And the crazy thing about this, if you look at the history of say ride sharing, you would have bad things happen in a Lyft, sidecar, or Uber. You would have people complaining about it. You would have bad press. And then people would go like, what's ride sharing? What's Uber? What's Lyft? It's an app. Okay. The first thing people will do is take out the phone. Tell me more about the story. Oh yeah. It's like, this is horrible. That's horrible. There was a car accident. They killed a puppy, whatever it is. and here's the dark secret it went up so you have this jeans company that uh sydney sweeney we talked about that ad nauseum surprised this didn't make the docket i thought for sure you would have had this in your sights um but uh american eagle uh got crushed for this like oh is that eugenics or are you guys just dumb that you don't know that that's eugenics and you know like it feels a little white supremacist um you know and when i say they got crushed they they got they were criticized by some lefty tiktokers let's be honest jason it wasn't like there was a national campaign i think actually people mad about the response were a much bigger wave you have to fill a lot of time on right-wing podcasts exactly my point so this negative story this faux pas you know people were like, oh my God, it's going to damage the brand.

44:33Like that's some people's reaction. They just had their results. Um, yes. Second quarter results, total net revenue, 1.28 billion, uh, down 1 % year over year. Uh, gross profit was 500 million, 39%, uh, up 30 basis points. Not bad. Um, operating profit was 103 million up 2%. What am I looking at here? Oh, maybe we have the wrong quarter, but the, the quarter just came out in the last couple of days and I saw it. They beat earnings they beat and the share price went up. So they had a beat on both was what I read. Oh, here you go. So this is the right data. Here's probably the key quote. This is from September 3rd from their investment investor relations site.

45:13Quote, the fall season is off to a positive start fueled by stronger product offerings and the success of recent marketing campaigns with Sydney Sweeney and Travis Kelsey. Shout out Taylor. We have seen an uptick in consumer awareness, engagement, and comparable sales. So it does appear that their results into this were relatively blah but i don't know much about clothing companies i'm not gonna lie i don't read these reports often pop 25 as well so what yeah why i think people thought it was gonna get crushed so maybe just not getting crushed and having more awareness uh they think the hype is going to drive uh some future sales or it's gonna tip over into meme category you know this is the when you have so many people.

45:56It's not 25%, 38 % today. It's up 38 %? I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt, but 38 % is insane. Yeah, and it's still rising after hours. Now the company's worth, oh, wow. Clothing's a tough game, Jason. With over a billion dollars in revenue in the second quarter, the whole company's worth now 3.2. Yeah, so three times. Well, that's just quarterly revenue. Yeah, so it's less than 1x revenue. Less than 1x yearly revenue. Wow. You do have this GameStop effect. You do have the stonks effect. I remember I YOLO'd into Open Door for 50K. I then was like, you know what? I'm just going to put a sell order in for 1 ,000 shares at$6,$7,$8 or$6,$7,$9 or whatever.

46:39So I'll clear my cost and then have the last 2 ,000 shares for free and let those roll. Because I know how these meme stocks are. I was like, let me see. I just got the alert before I got on the show that my first 1 ,000 sold at$6. yeah uh and so when it hits seven or eight i'll sell another thousand when it hits 10 i'll sell another thousand i'll have covered the original maybe i just yolo 25k in um and then yeah i'll be uh you know sitting there with 2 000 free shares as it were so uh open door technologies the stock we're discussing is up 16.2 today and why so why look i just to be clear if everyone's listening thinking that I'm just mashing my teeth.

47:20I think Cindy Sweeney is a gorgeous human. Good for her. But I'm blown away by the stock market at times. It does seem that the stock market that I learned about as a child, Jason, is not the one that we're playing with today. And I'm not blaming Vlad. I'm not blaming anybody. No, no, there's a second stock market. Okay, I like this. And that is the YOLO market. That is the, let's see if we can make something into a phenomenon. And if the CEO and management team can take that momentum him and actually do something with it. And with Open Door, you know, the, it seems the CEO has engaged this debate.

47:56He started getting meme-y, meme-y, if that's a word. Sure. Meme-ish. Meme-ish. He started getting, he's not squeamish anymore. He's meme-ish. Good. I like it better. He's, he's gotten meme-ish on the Twitter. So he's kind of leaning into being a stonk and stonks only go up is the joke over on Reddit. So here we are, folks. It's just, uh, it's also like the consumers taking, having their say and being able to participate in capitalism and holding equity. So that in a way is also interesting. That goes back to, was it David Lynch? Um, the, uh, stock picker who said like, you know, go to the mall, see which one stocks are growing, et cetera um and then buy the ones where you like it you know and like you would have bought apple based on that and starbucks based on that so now like let's pick a retailer that's kind of middling you say hey i think this thing's undervalued let's all start using our dollars to buy more i don't know in and out burgers or maybe that's not public so uh shake shack we'll buy more shake shack we'll start doing videos on shake shack we'll say shake shack's underdone and And then if the Shake Shack CEO gives a salute to the, yeah, Peter Lynch.

49:15Sorry, did I say David Lynch? I've got movies on my mind. Peter Lynch. Didn't David Lynch do dude? Yeah. David Lynch? No, he did. Yeah. But invest in what you know was his slogan. Thank you, Producer Claude. Producer Claude coming to my rescue. Thank you, Producer Claude. No, David Lynch, I was wrong. Sorry, I did Wild at Heart and Blue Velvet. Mulholland Drive. Oh, Blue Velvet. That was a creepy film. So you talked earlier Jason about how companies that have a big moment will go to a new height and come down to a higher plateau Interestingly enough, this is not a great chart, but if you look at this you'll see this is GameStop's Shares and here you can see kind of the pre meme era.

49:55Yeah, to my surprise It's held on to more of its, you know post meme stock value than I would have kind of estimated so maybe there's amazingly enough more staying power to meme stonk status, that's a sentence I never thought I'd say out loud, than I thought because they've kept it afloat for four years now. It's what you do with the energy. So I think what the GameStop CEO realized, and I think the AMC one realized this as well, is if people want to buy the shares, why don't I create more of them and sell them the shares? So if they don't want to go to the stores and buy physical games because they're getting them on Steam or whatever, what can i sell them i can sell them more shares and then i can use them to promote the amc movie club so now you got all these amc movie club people have become a little bit of a cult and that's what you do is you use that energy say hey we got a new product or service can you go out there and be the ambassadors for us so you know how like vcs go on cnbc and talk their book and you know after i don't know bill ackman loads up on uber like he did he's like hey i'm gonna start talking about Uber all the time, or Warren Buffett gets his position in Apple, and then he talks about it all the time, and then he gets rid of his position, he stops talking about it.

51:06So that's where we get the term, talking your book. The public's doing it. The public's talking their collective book. More power to them. More power to them. And then to the CEOs of these companies, okay. And Tesla's one of them as well. People always try to figure out, well, how does Tesla's market cap makes sense. It makes sense because a lot of people see in Elon and those companies a massive amount of ambition and they're willing to pay ahead of the growth. So, you know, if their market cap would be half of what it was based on performance, the other half is based on promise. And now you've got all these people.

51:40This is what I was telling you I'm getting dragged into is the the people who hate Tesla and love Tesla. Every time I talk about self-driving or Uber, they get their, what's the term I'm supposed to say? Knickers and a twist. Yeah. I don't know if I'm supposed to say that. I was going to say panties and a crunch, but I'm going to say. Well, I think, I think knickers and a twist is British. So I think you get away with it. Yeah. It was just like, you know, before we got on the show and you were using the C word over and over again. And I was like, you can't call me the C word, Alex. You're like, I'm in, I'm zooming in from England.

52:09I'm in England right now. I have the UK pass. I'm Australian. I'm allowed to say that Jason is capacious. You're correct. Yes. You did say capacious multiple times. I took it the right way i took it in the spirit it was intended when i first went to the uk people started calling each other the z word or started calling cigarettes fags i was i was like what yeah you're right there they're like if we have to do this with every american you're in a pub yes you can say these things i'm like are you sure you can say this yes here you can say those things this is what it means and i was like oh okay yes fine it has nothing to do with the you know the slur words okay no there's your little social uh yeah commentary for the day uh let's keep it moving so mistral my favorite french unicorn jason i know you love it when i bring it up on the show favorite favorite and only three seconds on your list of one three seconds into the clip jason's like i hate europe all right i thought i hate europe i like disneyland i like epcot center and i like europe i like all those places to go and pretend it's another time and place i'm gonna take a long sip of coffee this is what i have to deal with every single week three times a week everybody it's funny it is like a fantasy land you know people in spain spain is like this massive destination they were getting pretty bent out of shape knickers in a bunch did you see the squirt guns they were squirting people with squirt guns and then in mexico city um they had a little bit of this with um the not expats but what do you call the people nomads digital nomads digital All nomads have been like, hey, this place is great.

53:42I can get an apartment for$500 and I can go out to dinner every night for 50. And I can go to a Michelin star restaurant for 100, for two. Like, it's crazy how affordable it is. They also had some protests there. I found out after talking to them, people who live there, Mexicans, they were like, oh, those protests are paid for. The Socialist Party pays people to just run around and get press headlines. I'm like, okay, just like America. They're paying people to do this on all sides. You can't even believe any protest anymore. I do not know enough about the current political landscape of Mexican Tuesday.

54:20This is told to be by a bunch of liberals. I think Gloria Steinbaum's doing fine. That's my take. My mom's half Mexican, so I care a lot about the country. Where was I? Oh, Europe. Right. France. Right. Mistral. Yes. AI. Mistral is going to raise money, not at the expected$10 billion valuation target that it had in mind, Jason. Instead, it's gonna be about 12 billion euro, about 14 billion USD. And it could raise, according to Bloomberg reporting, Kate Clark over there, 2 billion euro, which is, I know, not a lot for an American AI foundation model company, but for any other company in the world, that's an enormous amount of money.

55:02And I think that we could actually see some deuce in this firm, not because of the fundraising, not because I'm a fan of Europe, not because we disagree a little bit on the future of its economy, but because I keep seeing token usage of its models over on OpenRouter. It's ranked eighth on LM Arena. Somehow they're still in the game. They're holding their own. I'm happy there's more competition. Yeah. I mean, it's not like the United States is the only place that great companies can be built. There are headwinds in other countries on the margins, but some places are a great lifestyle and they want to build a team.

55:37And then the question is, can that team compete long term with the work ethic here in the United States? And if you were to look at happiness studies, people in Scandinavian countries, people in Europe have a much higher degree of happiness because, well, you know, they put their kids to bed and they go to dinner and they leave work at a decent hour. And then in America, people are less happy, more successful. And if you define success by career and money. And so, you know, people get all bent out of shape when I talk about this stuff. These are choices, folks. If you want to live an incredible life, move to Denmark.

56:14Move to Denmark. They have a thing in the UN and, you know, at Davos where they say getting to Denmark. Why? It's a high-functioning society where people play safe. Now, they also have to pay 60 % or 70 % taxes at the margins. So you do pay for it, but people are happy. and you know that there's a ranking of happiness this is when i run for president i'm going to make happiness oh that's going to be your platform one of my oh well it's going to be a pillar of my platform is more happiness and joy in the country that's it so have some pillars i i don't mean to keep bringing up my mom but my mom is is half danish half mexican so i think this show is actually dedicated to her shout out to mom uh last thing here jason is on the mistral front they're expected to end the year on above a$100 million run rate.

57:01Well, no and yes, because if you think about Anthropic going from$1 billion to$5 billion this year or OpenAI going from like$5 to$12, I think we've become desensitized to how insane it is that many other AI companies are getting from zero to$100 million revenue. It does not compare to what we've seen from OpenAI and Anthropic. But any other time, any other point in history, a French company going to$100 million would have been - It's fantastic. The, the, this game that's being played is being played at a level that I've only remembered few times in my career. Um, there was a time when people were doing big MNA in the media business, you know, which ended, you know, the peak was AOL buying time Warner essentially.

57:47Yeah. Which was crazy. Uh, but you know, you had this kind of high stakes game of chicken who can really be the most audacious. I think in the on-demand economy, we saw that like audaciousness who can lose the most money, but get the most riders, get the most deliveries. And in e-commerce with Amazon, which didn't make a profit for how long? 10 years, 15 years. They just decided to go break even. And, you know, that's what we're seeing now. So that does make you wonder, can Mistro for the long-term carve a niche for themselves? And what would that niche be? Would it be other languages outside of English and they just have the best French, Italian, German LLMs?

58:31Is it that they are more privacy-based or compliant, you know, and their data centers are in those locations or who knows, but they're going to have to, I think in the next year or two, figure out how not to be roadkill. I think that's an interesting point, and I think we're going to learn a lot over the next couple of quarters. But this reminds me of a story. I didn't throw in the docket because it felt a little bit too small, but I'll just mention it now. Switzerland has built its own open-weight AI model, trained on public data. And I feel the same way about that as I do when Databricks made its own AI model a couple years back.

59:08Like, a cool experiment. I don't know what it's for, but I kind of just filed it away in the huh category. So if you're curious about that, guys, or you're Swiss, well, there you go. You have your own model now. All right, moving on. Stripe is building a blockchain just for stable coins. Jason, Stripe, of course, is the enormous online payments, nearly centicorns worth like, I don't know, 90 billion or something now. And we don't know when this is going to come out, but it's going to be called Tempo. It will not have a native token. It will support a wide array of stable coins. And I think this is going to be fantastic.

59:40Up to 100 ,000 transactions per second in theory. Starb's working with Paradigm on this and critically will compete with, I think it's called ARK. Yes, ARK, which is Circle's upcoming stablecoin blockchain. So we're going to have two kind of neutral-ish blockchains out there. I think this is cool. And I think it just shows how far stablecoins have come in the last 12 months. And this exists, Alex, so that people don't need to pay a large fee to Visa, MasterCard, American Express, etc. Is that kind of the idea here is these things will be clearing houses to let people and wire fees. The loser in all of this are banks and credit cards.

1:00:23Yeah. Oh, no. I'm going to cry an enormous tear for my bank. Yes. All of them. I hate them all. I mean, it's so dumb when you try to do a wire transfer and it's like, they're like, oh, yeah, let me just I'm going to get on my horse and buggy and I'll be at your ranch in a in a in two days. And then I'll meet you at sunset at the back end of the ranch by the cattle. And then we'll get some wax and some papers and some. Yeah, we'll use my ring to wax it and certify it. then I'll get back to San Francisco by horse two or three days later and it will be logged. And it's like, how is this taking so much time and costing$45 or$25?

1:01:10It's so dumb. It's an amount of money that's shocking for the modern world when we're talking about literally just moving some numbers from that column to that column in a big spreadsheet. I've made a grand total of one angel investment in my life and wiring that money was an enormous pain in the butt. And I sat there going, ah, this is why VCs are always complaining about this. It's miserable. But if Tempo does work out, I think we'll see Stripe own a good chunk of the rails for the future stablecoin market, which is, I think, going to be a pretty large market. I don't know if it's going to be the$100 billion or$1 trillion markets that we're talking about.

1:01:43But as stablecoins become increasingly better understood and better adopted, I think Stripe wants to ensure that it owns that future, too. So good on them. This will be a trillion-dollar market. Really? Yeah. in terms of the market cap of all these companies collecting, you've got Tether in there as well. And my understanding is Tether is going to clean up their act very quickly. Or they have been in the process of cleaning up the criticisms there have been of them. And I'm not going to say, I'll put allegedly, I'll put criticisms, I'll put actions taken against them. All of the hand wringing, you can look it up on producer Claude yourself, I've got a, you know, Claude AI.

1:02:22Use the promo code TWIST to get 50 % off. I don't know what our code is. It's something like that. There's a Claude thing you can use TWIST and you'll make us look good. It's worth looking into. And Tether, if that does become the case, Jason, is an enormously awesome business. Makes tons of money. Have you heard about the controversy, though, between banks and the crypto world about the Genius Act and how they handle interest, essentially? Yeah, you can't earn interest. That was the one concession they made by making stable coins legal. They can come up with some ideas to route around that, but you can be certain in another two or three years, we'll be sitting here and then stable coins will become a big thing.

1:03:00And people will be like, I need to make money on my stable coin. The banks will catch up, have their own stable coins. And then all of a sudden, miraculously, everybody's going to be able to make interest on their stable coins. But that could really undercut elements of the traditional banking market, because what have we seen in the crypto world? We've seen essentially higher APYs than you're going to get from Citibank, from Chase, from Wells Fargo, et cetera. 10 ,000 ATMs to maintain and 1 ,000 branches and tellers and people in the building. I mean, Wells Fargo has to have a large staff to do the amount of fraud and abuse they've done over the years.

1:03:34And I'm not even going to say allegedly because you can go look up the enforcements from the government. It takes a lot of people to be that terrible a business. Wells Fargo, American fraud. I mean, they were the one who got raked over the coals in D.C. for opening accounts for people that they didn't ask for? Yes, because they were just trying to hit internal numbers. I think HSBC got busted for making larger windows in their banks to allow cartels to put money through the windows faster. And then they were given a small fine and allowed to stay in business. So, cool. Do we have any Ask Jasons or any other important news we should cover today?

1:04:12All right, Jason, there was a great question over on Twitter from a founder talking about churn. And I know this is something that every single founder watching this show deals with. So he said, I'll pay anyone$1 ,000 per percent. They help me get off my churn currently at 21.6 for his startup Post Bridge. And this chart, if you're on the audio version, just shows his churn rate historically over time. Churn, Jason, is the death of SaaS. So what are your tips for founders dealing with it? Well, I did see this actual thread because it kind of, you know, when we took the screenshot, had 136 ,000 views on X, but I think it's grown since.

1:04:47And there were a lot of great replies. So we should pull up the replies there because one of the first people who responded gave him like three things. And he was like, I didn't think of two of those three. I'm going to go do them and I'll report back the impact it had on churn. And so this is a really interesting idea. $1 ,000 for somebody giving you an idea is like, great, I'll do that all day long. I got ideas to spare. But for him, the lowest his churn is going to go is 5%. So he's essentially bet$15 ,000 that people could lower, up to$15 ,000 could lower his churn. Now, if he was making but$100 ,000, it would pay for itself.

1:05:31So if he's making a million, he's paying out 1.5 of his revenue to solve that problem. If he's making 10 million, it's like nothing. So what a genius idea to also get, to get great ideas, to crowdsource is what we called this back in the day. But additionally, to get attention for your startup. I don't know who Jack Frick's is. I didn't know the startup or maybe I met them and I forgot. But this kind of was really interesting because Yasser, as you see there, said, add a form after they cancel, asking why. Of course, that's like a no-brainer. Some pieces of software have that built in, but who knows if he did that or not.

1:06:06Email people who cancel every day and try to understand why. Great. Watch people using your product for the first time and you will learn much, then create an onboarding flow, of course. Have zero bugs. Yeah, obvious. UI UX redesigned to make it easier. Okay, so this is really interesting as a concept to crowdsource this, to get attention for yourself and get your brain flowing. I love it. Now, while we're on the screen though, Jason, if you scroll down just a little bit here, EP says, no point hyper fixating on this. Instead, focus on distribution. The best way to kill churn is to outpace it.

1:06:44I like that point too. Is that, okay, so you agree with that? Because I was really curious what you were going to say. Because when I read that, I was like, I don't know if that's true. So talk to me. Two things can be true at the same time. You can lower churn because people, let's say, didn't understand your product or they were confused by it and your onboarding confused them or they don't know about a feature yet. That is the feature they need. That all happens with communication. The way superhuman had superhuman levels of engagement and low churn is because they did a 30 minute interview with you before you got to use to even buy the product.

1:07:21So they pre-churned you. They did pre-churn. And so their churn was natural love. Somebody said, I'm in my email for 20 minutes a day. It's like, well, maybe you shouldn't pay$365 a year. This is not for you. Not for you. It's not for you. Who was the superhuman founder? I forget. Oh, Raul. Raul. Yeah. We had him on when the Grammarly deal was announced. I never met the guy before, but after just 20 minutes of them, I would sell my house to back whatever he builds next. Just one of those guys. So one of the things here in terms of outrunning it, well, what if you're trying to outrun it, but you're damaging your product because one in five people are saying this product sucks and they become detractors.

1:08:04That's the problem with trying to outrun it. And it eventually will catch up with you because you have CAC, customer acquisition costs, and you're not learning from the churn. The point of studying churn and why there's even a term is so that you can make a better product. Or you can understand who your product's for and not go after the wrong audience. One of the major, major mistakes people make is they go to a small company that's only got two people and they don't have somebody in charge of marketing and they try to sell them a marketing tool. Well, guess what? There's nobody there who even understands the basics of marketing.

1:08:46Now you get to a seven person company and they've got four locations for their bakery. And the eighth person they hired is their marketing, their CMO, their marketing and their growth person. Now, when you sell that tool to them, that person was like, yeah, I've been in four different marketing positions over 25 years. I've worked in retail. I've worked in business. I've worked here. I worked there. And yeah, I've used tools like yours before. And this one's particularly great. And then they just understand the value problem. um so you know listen i could i could sell you a saddle but if you don't got a horse what the goods are gonna do uh while we're here before we move on i want to give jack his flowers this is the website for post bridge post-bridge.com very cute website but jason my favorite part is if you scroll down way past the testimonials look it's the founder i kind of love that it's kind of cute it's like hey it's jack the guy who made it here's why it feels very personal there's an even bigger reason for that personal means trust and so having trust really works um i had read a thing about um people and buying decisions somebody did a study where they put behind the salesperson in the cubicle behind them an incredibly attractive well-dressed person uh and if the gender was the opposite of the person who was you were selling to so if it was a woman who is well-dressed men would be would more often buy the product and if the person behind them was a well-dressed man i think the woman not to the extent that men did and they were like how do we explain this how do we explain this one am i supposed to hire a model to sit behind me when i'm on sales calls but here we are folks get a color printer you know you could literally do a cardboard cutout but this is um you know the and they were all it was interesting like all these different psychologists were sort of commenting on.

1:10:41They said, oh, well, a man does not want to not be decisive and buy something in the presence of an attractive female because they would seem weak. That was a very weird explanation, but maybe it's accurate. Who knows? I mean, our lizard brain down here in our brainstem is a evolutionary relic, y 'all, and you can sell to it. Well, and then the, oh, well, listen, if you can't afford that car, you know i've got this other one so no i can afford that car so like you know negging somebody yeah is like a premise of these like uh dating charlatans smarmy people who have like dating systems well what are what are they called um pickup artists yeah typically do with negging they're like wow you know you could be a model if it wasn't for your earlobes and it's like what and then the person's like oh my god i'm gonna date you because you nagged me it's bizarre I never understood that.

1:11:33I don't know. I don't know if it's true or not. But anyway, here we are, folks. Congratulations to Jack for this. And I guess it looks like it's got a content schedule, right? It's a marketing tool. So marketing tools are a thing. And if you price them right, it's an absurdly competitive space, but you can get to millions of dollars in revenue. Sprout Social, the Chicago-based company, went public and still is. Buffer, Sprinkler, I think it's public too. Sprinkler, Radiant 6. There's a bunch of these tools. We can just name a bunch. Let's do one more founder question, Jason, while we're here, because this is a really good one.

1:12:06You actually mentioned it on the Wednesday show. There was a man named Jacob Klug, or perhaps Klug, over on the LinkedIn, and he had a really interesting insight about finding things to build by reading Reddit. Talk us through this. All right. So I saw this, and I was talking to our director, Lon, and we're like, this is interesting. Reddit is where people go to complain and vent, right? You hate a movie. You had a bad experience at a car dealership. You know, there was a cockroach in your burrito. Whatever it is, you're going to take a picture and you can go to Reddit, right? It's where people get their revenge.

1:12:46And so he came up with a system. He started looking for rants and complaints in places like accounting, realtors, small business, freelance, restaurateur. and if you go to those you can find uh pain points pain points we say in startups sometimes is it a vitamin something that's nice but maybe you're not going to notice any difference maybe you will or is it a painkiller where like you're in pain and the pain turns off it's much easier when you take like a percocet or oxycontin to have like your twisted ankle turn off right whereas like if you want more energy and you did like a vitamin c drink like maybe you'd feel more who knows.

1:13:28And so you can tell if you found one of these pain points, he says, by them having 500 upvotes or comments like this is my life. And you can find detailed descriptions of workflows. You know, I keep trying to do this non-compete and I put it into DocuSign and then it's got the stupid thing where, you know, you have to load it. Why doesn't it work in a, on a mobile phone? Why isn't there an easy way to just, instead of drawing the signature with your finger, to just adopt a signature from a collection of signatures, whatever it is? And he says it's a pretty valid way to, it's another, after you've found a problem, it's a great way to validate it.

1:14:08So you write a follow-up post, building a solution for blank, who wants early access? And he says, you know, you can get like 50 DMs from people. If you get 50 plus DMs, you're on the right track. So it's an at scale community where people go to vent. What a great idea. And, you know, if you can message, he says the next part of his playbook is message the 20 most interested user, show them your mock up to your solution, get pre-orders going, Vibe code it quickly and ship. Man, this is great. And the Vibe coding service they recommend, Jason, was lovable, which I do believe is European. Ah, it's become a recurring theme for you defending Europe.

1:14:49Well, I feel like no one else is doing it. I'm the only person. It's over. It's over. If you want cheese or wine, you want a classic car sold for a premium price, you can get all kinds of interesting things in Europe. You have a lovely time visiting. For example, you can get Arthur Mensch, the CEO of Mistral, who's going to be coming on this show not too long from now. So look forward to that, y 'all. I'm going to change my entire position. I was wrong. No, you can build a great company in Europe. We all know that. I know, I know. It's just, I feel like there's a, there's that tweet going around about how, like, you know, if we were all Europeans, we know about Chinese pottery and cooking and the GDP would shrink by a percent every year.

1:15:32I feel like that has become so the de facto position in Silicon Valley that we need to be orthogonal to it to avoid groupthink. That's what I'm doing. I'll tell you, there are some pockets of interestingness that we've talked many times about Sweden and Denmark and some of those countries as having really great design and taste and great products include that. And if you look at Spotify and Klarna, you know, Clash of Clans, there's a lot of companies that have come out of that area that really do have a design sensibility, a look and feel. They do understand that. Germany obviously is really good at building precision, you know, historically.

1:16:11But Portugal, I don't know how this happened. I mean, maybe I got to ask producer Claude, how did Portugal become the place that digital nomads wanted to go? They must have fostered it with visas. They must have fostered it with taxes. And then obviously they must have a ton of homes available and gorgeous places to live in an amazing lifestyle. Because every time we put a job description out, like I was just looking for a CapCut editor, CapCut at launch.co, send us your clips. You don't need a college degree. We want you in the office here. In Austin, however, there was one person and she had emailed us, I'm in Portugal.

1:16:49And I said to producer Oliver, well, let's engage her and just see what her hourly rate is. Because my understanding is Portugal is like a third or a fifth of the cost of living in Europe. And therefore, everybody's going there to have these colossal, amazing lifestyles. So there's some arbitrage going on there. Just to be, I don't want to get too deep into this, but they had a digital nomad visa starting in October, 2022. too. If you make at least 3 ,000 euro a month, you can live there. English proficiency, lots of sun. And it's also about as close to the US as you can get in Europe because it's right there on the edge of Spain.

1:17:23So you save an hour on the flight, maybe, maybe two. You're also just not, you're not in, you know, Belarus further in on the time zone. So I think it makes a lot of sense. Yes, yes, yes, yes. So is it plus, let me just type this into producer Claude, uh new york versus portugal yeah claude points out that there's the mild mediterranean climate well i do love claude and everything anthropic does uh i keep hearing about wildfires over in the iberian peninsula so you know maybe it's not that wild it's five hours ahead yeah okay okay uh jason i know we got to go but you have an enormous event coming up with your other show the show that i won't mention but uh what's going on there and uh are you gonna be busy all in summit next week uh yes thousands of people i think it's twice the size of last year crazy the good news is the first two years i did all the work the third year i did the parties uh and then this year i'm doing nothing but being on stage so i get to focus just on moderating these panels and being uh you know the the person who asked some hard questions well good luck at that we'll keep twist warm for you while you're out there and we'll see y 'all next week.

1:18:34Bye-bye.