In short
Podcast Summary: This Week in Startups - Episode E1986
Episode Overview Podcast Title: This Week in Startups Episode Title: The Power of WEKA with Antonio Gracias and Liran Zvibel + Jam with JCal: Uptrends AI Host: Jason Calacanis Guests: Antonio Gracias (Valor Capital), Liran Zvibel (WEKA), Ramsey Shaffer (Uptrends AI) Release Date: [Date not provided] Episode Length: Approximately 1 hour 5 minutes
Episode Description In this episode, Jason Calacanis engages in discussions with Antonio Gracias and Liran Zvibel about WEKA's product market fit, the company's innovative technology, and the future of data centers. The episode also features a "Jam with JCal" segment with Ramsey Shaffer of Uptrends AI, where he pitches his startup.
Key Discussions & Highlights
- Investment Insights (0:00 - 30:07)
- Antonio Gracias's Experience:
- Antonio discusses his investment thesis for WEKA, focusing on its infrastructure capabilities that enhance data center productivity.
- He highlights the importance of investing in "winners" within the AI and compute technology sectors.
- WEKA's Product Market Fit:
- Liran Zvibel introduces WEKA, detailing the company's approach to managing large data sets and improving GPU utilization.
- WEKA’s technology reportedly increases GPU utilization rates from 30% to over 90%, significantly decreasing operational costs for clients.
- Energy Solutions and Data Centers (30:07 - 34:22)
- Discussion about the future of data centers, including energy solutions, capital allocation strategies, and the necessity of reducing energy footprints.
- Antonio mentions investments in companies exploring renewable energy solutions for data centers.
- Jam with JCal Segment (37:00 - 51:02)
- Guest: Ramsey Shaffer, CEO of Uptrends AI.
- Uptrends AI Overview:
- Uptrends AI focuses on automating news cycles for financial advisors, helping them stay updated on market movements efficiently.
- Ramsey pitches the product, emphasizing its potential to save time and improve client relations.
- Feedback and Advice:
- Jason provides constructive criticism on pricing strategy, user experience, and sales strategies.
- He emphasizes the importance of founder-led sales and capturing high-value clients.
Key Takeaways
- WEKA's Impact: The company is revolutionizing data management with its innovative technology, providing substantial cost savings and efficiency for large organizations.
- Capital Allocation: Antonio stresses the importance of making smart investments in companies like WEKA that can navigate the complexities of modern energy and data management needs.
- Uptrends AI's Market Potential: The startup addresses a significant pain point for financial advisors and has the potential to scale rapidly, particularly with a refined pricing and sales strategy.
- Importance of UX Design: Jason emphasizes that a well-designed product that aligns with market expectations can substantially improve customer acquisition and satisfaction.
Conclusion This episode provides valuable insights into the intersection of technology, investment, and market needs as discussed by industry leaders. The focus on building efficient, scalable solutions like WEKA and Uptrends AI exemplifies the ongoing evolution within the tech startup ecosystem.
Episode Links
- [Valor Equity Partners](https://www.valorep.com)
- [WEKA](https://www.weka.io)
- [Uptrends AI](https://www.uptrends-ai.tech)
- [CommandBar](https://www.commandbar.com/twist)
- [Lemon.io](https://www.Lemon.io/twist)
- [Jam with JCal Contest](https://www.jamwithjcal.tech)
Subscribe and Follow
- [This Week in Startups on Apple Podcasts](https://rb.gy/v19fcp)
- [Follow Jason Calacanis on X](https://twitter.com/Jason)
- [Follow Ramsey Shaffer on X](https://x.com/RamseyShaffer)
- [Follow Liran Zvibel on X](https://x.com/liranzvibel)
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00They go between 5 % and 12 % of the fund. You know, this is just at five. We would have bought more if we could have. The round wouldn't give us any more. So, you know, I'm hoping after this podcast, he decides to sell us some more shares. This round was super oversubscribed. And so we were scratching and cloning everything we get. We've offered to do some operations help, which I think, wow, we were able to get the allocation we got. But we were super impressed with these guys and with what they've done. And you'll, you know, you hear about the customers, the logos, the growth. I mean, I think you'll feel the same way.
0:24And this is a strategy that some savvy managers are pursuing now. Just if you have that winner, trying to get as much into it as possible. because of the power of law. I see Brian Singerman doing it. I saw one time Sequoia do it with WhatsApp. But I will say we invented it. You invented it, yeah. And we've even taken a page out of that book with our fund instructions. So yeah, great artists copy. What is it? Immature artists copy, mature artists steal. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Command Bar. Seamlessly integrate an AI-powered guide into your software, making navigation intuitive and interactive.
1:00Visit commandbar.com slash twist to get a custom live demo. Dot tech domains. Don't miss our Jam with Jcal contest. To apply and get more details, go to jamwithjcal.tech. Brought to you by dot tech domains. And lemon.io. Hire pre-vetted remote developers. Get 15 % off your first four weeks of developer time at lemon.io slash twist. All right, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. I'm your host, Jason Calcanis. And I'm really excited today because a friend of the pod, Antonio Grazias, is here. He is a tremendous investor, one of the greatest of this generation from Valor Capital. You know some of the amazing investments he's made over the years from SpaceX, Tesla, and now actually an investor in Athena, an investment we just did together.
1:49And we saw along the Newswire press release about this new investment you're doing in Weka. And so I thought, gosh, this seems like a very important company. And so I asked you and the CEO, Antonio, to join us. Laurent Zivbo is the CEO of Weka. It's pronounced Weka. And there's some background to the name, yeah? For people to remember, Laurent, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me. So Weka is pronounced as any Greek unit. So you probably know how to pronounce Mega, Terra, Exa. So you're just doing a Weka. Weka is 10 to the power of 30. and if EXA is a thousand peta, which is probably the biggest number people really can interact with, WECA is a trillion EXA.
2:32So it's a huge, huge, huge number. And you know, Bill Gates at once said, we'd never end up getting more than 640 kilobytes in a computer. Why would anyone need that? I'm not going to predict whether we will or will not need a WECA, but hopefully we're all going to leave to the point that someone's going to need that. And so as we start here, Antonio, we're always interested when a capital allocator who likes to tackle hard problems comes into a company and writes a big check. So maybe you could tell us a little bit about what you discovered here with Weka and what the investment thesis is. Thanks, Jason.
3:07And thank you for having us. We're really grateful to be here. It's always enjoyable to see you and talk about our companies. So, you know, I think first and foremost, we're spending a lot of time in artist intelligence. As you know, we invest in DeepMind back in 2010 and I was on the board of Tesla during the being of the eye vision systems there. So we thought about that a lot, and we have dozens of investments on our intelligence. They're focused in two areas. One is infrastructure. The other is what we call verticalized applications. These are applications that have very good proprietary data, and then a reinforcement that's very tight.
3:36Weka is in the first category, infrastructure. And what they're doing is making the data center much more productive. So the average GPU is utilized about 30 % of the time. This is like a close regard and secret, but that's what we think. Weka makes that a lot better. and they do it in a very very interesting way i'm gonna let lauren tell you about the product but i will tell you when i a funny story to lauren when i um when i first met him and we actually went a second second time with him we went to the product i asked him to kind of explain the math to me how this thing works kind of amazing how it moves it makes the back end of the gpu the memory behind the gpu much more productive he went into the math and he started diving into the math deeply on a whiteboard like a like a you know kind of plays professor kind of thing and i'm watching this i'm asking some questions and i realized that i actually remembered my math i knew what he was talking about so i was i was very impressed but he's a deep product expert so that's the the first thing is the product's amazing it fits inside of our investment thesis for the infrastructure in the data center the second is that um you know our strategy as you know is to write kind of smaller check and you know how many bigger check bigger to bigger check we wrote a small check into weka um followed them they beat every number they ever gave us and then and exceeded substantially product market fit was incredible and then i got to know leron because you know you know companies i was impressed with with leron's team and how well they execute i mean they are really product market experts they're product experts and they built something before the market knew it needed it and then the market came to them and the company just exploded but that's what we did and this uh strategy to feel their bet get to know the company and then place a second or third bet it's worked before yeah yeah it's right it's worked very well.
5:11I mean, our portfolios, typically our biggest winners are largest investments, very different than many managers that kind of spray out lots of positions. We like very concentrated positions. We'll write lots of small checks, but our big checks, and this is a$100 million investment in our fund. That's a large position for us. They are typically our biggest winners. And those tend to be 10 % of the fund, 5 % of the fund size, 15 when you make a gigantic... They go between 5 % and 12 % of the fund. This is just at 5%, and we would have bought more if we could have. The round wouldn't give us any more.
5:43So I'm hoping after this podcast, he decides to sell us some more shares. This round was super oversubscribed, and so we were scratching and cloning everything we get. And we've offered to do some operations help for Weco, which is why we were able to get the allocation we got. But we were super impressed with these guys and with what they've done. And you hear about the customers, the logos, the growth. I mean, I think you'll feel the same way. And this is a strategy that some savvy managers are pursuing now. Just if you have that winner, trying to get as much into it as possible because of the power of law.
6:14But I will say we invented it. You invented it, yeah. I see Brian Singerman doing it. And I saw one time Sequoia deal with WhatsApp. So I think collectively people are starting to become aware of this, Antonio. And I do give you some credit there for pioneering it a decade ago. And we've even taken a page out of that book with, you know, our fund construction. So yeah, great artists copy. What is it? Great artists copy, some of the steel, something like that. Immature artists copy, mature artists steal is the strategy here for us and for maybe some of our contemporaries. All right. So let's get into the product.
6:49The company's existed for a decade. I know you've been moving large data sets around. So explain to us, Laurent, what happened in the history of the company where you realized, hey, managing large data sets, moving them around, and then all of a sudden these H100s and AI sort of hit a tipping point. I think we'd all agree about two years ago, maybe you could tell us a little bit about the strategy of the company here and getting that extra 70 % out of every H100 for people who don't know. People call it a chip. It's more like a platform made by NVIDIA. And Zuckerberg just announced they did their latest LLM on 16 ,000 of them.
7:24So to get an extra 70 % from those 16 ,000 is, they're not cheap, right? 30,$40 ,000 each, I believe, or on average. So yeah, tell us about the product and how you got here. We've been doing data management. We've been doing storage for a long, long, long time. Work as our second company, the previous one called Exiby Storage and IBM Acquarda. So anyone you know that's been buying high-end IBM Storage in the last 15 or so years in previous company we've learned a lot about the enterprise about big customers and about why people buy storage while being at ibm we left ibm at 11 at that point we basically took an oath and said hey never again this market just doesn't make any sense and it didn't make sense for two main reasons one the delivery mechanism for this product is flawed while most of the engineers are software engineers and when i'm saying most is like 99 not 51 the delivery mostly comes in some proprietary box uh it makes it hard on premises it makes it impossible to run the product well on the public cloud the second problem is that the market is fragmented like crazy so it's a 150 billion dollar market but there are hundreds of products that actually sell and when you're looking at it from the large enterprises, the big corporations, they're using anything between 10 products, if they're really lucky, to maybe 40 to 50 products across hundreds and thousands of silos.
8:54So it's hard for the customers. It's incredibly difficult for the vendors. So that's the reason we said we want it out. Then back in 2013, when we started three huge, huge, huge changes in what's possible happened. Containers happened and they led to completely different thinking about software, microservices that let you take a big monolithic system, chop it down to tiny little pieces and run them on many, many, many machines. So microservices changed how you can think about infrastructure. NVMe happened, which allowed you to take flash, connect it directly to the CPU and control it very effectively in tiny little fragments.
9:40And then the third change, which was the most important one, is network finally caught up to the speed of the servers. So throughout history, the network may have been 100 times lower if you're looking at the 80s and 90s, maybe 10 times lower if you look at the early 2Ks. In 2013, network has caught up. And by the way, by now, the network is twice as fast as the servers can create frames at 100 gig, but the network switches them at 800 gig. So this is incredible. Founders, I know a lot of you listening to this podcast, you build software for a living, right? We love doing it, but we all know it's hard.
10:21You know the pain of trying to onboard new users and get them up to speed quickly. Worse, most chatbots and guides built for the task are annoying as heck. Users tune them out because we all hate random pop-ups. Thankfully, there's one company that uses generative AI to help users onboard without annoying them, and it's called Command Bar. It has a chatbot that gives personalized responses to user questions instead of a basic Q &A. And it shows users around your product like a live guide, cursor included. Even more, Command Bar can detect when a user needs a nudge, giving them a product hint or special offer to close that important sale.
10:59Command Bar is used by unicorns you know, HashiCorp, Gusto, Sixth Sense, AngelList, and others. So here's a simple call to action. You got to check out this product. Integrate an AI power guide into your software so your customers can navigate your product intuitively and quickly. Visit commandbar.com slash twist to get a custom live demo. Wow. All of our competitors, the reason there are so many products out there, they are basically compensating for slow network by optimizing for locality. They're creating a storage array. I'm sure you've heard about the storage arrays before. At the storage array, you have a bunch of controllers.
11:39Each controller owns a portion of the namespace, and you're picking whatever storage you want to buy, but how the application basically spreads their data across the day, across whatever, and you want to break into controllers in a uniform way. The problem is, once you've picked that, your solution now becomes a victim to the clients, because if all the clients would approach a single controller, it's the bottleneck. So you may have a hundred controller system, you're getting 1%. On the cloud, it's even worse. Let's say 1 % now sits on an instance that has noisy neighbors. You're not even getting your 1%.
12:19What we have done between microservices, NVMe, and fast networking, we've started as a clean sleigh, and we have created a system. It took us years, by the way, about eight years to get it to really run well, and then few more words to mature it, where what we're doing, we're looking at what the server sent, the client sent every split second, and we run the perfect load balancing of IO throughout all the NVMe devices and metadata throughout all of the CPUs. And we're showing that even on cloud with noisy neighbors, we're getting perfect linear scalability. So if you give us twice the big WACA, you're getting twice the results.
13:06And that's the reason, since what we're controlling is latency, what's keeping the GPU servers starved for data is high latency. Since we're controlling the one thing that actually matters, we're the only product that optimizes for the one thing that actually matters, we can get to the point that it doesn't matter how many GPUs you have, what is their access pattern we can get them filled up to the 90th percent so this becomes an acute problem when you're trying to solve major problems in the world um maybe self-driving or uh you know running a language model people really didn't face this problem all that often previously yeah no they have not so now comes the big question of product market fit and how do you take it to market.
13:56So we predicted customers would need bigger scale, would need bigger performance. We started this thing through simplicity saying, hey, you don't need to buy these 50 different products to run all of your workloads because we're just going to run them well. Had we had to go through that phase, it would have been a much longer journey. What are the biggest workloads today if you were looking at like categories i mentioned self-driving i mentioned language models those seem like super obvious ones are am i correct that those are in the top three or four for sure so we're now seeing the explosion of gpus you've mentioned the h100s previously there was the a's and the p's and the v's and the b the b's are coming in uh in the next and they're used a lot in AI.
14:48We are showing that we can get AI projects running on, if you're looking at the cloud, we have Stability AI running us. When they have switched to us on the AWS cloud, we're able to get their storage bill down from 5 million to 1 million, so five times cheaper. And as Antonio said, before they switched to us, their GPUs are running at 30%. The biggest problem was that they needed to get more job done out of the existing GPUs that they had, they couldn't get any more because there is a supply chain crunch. After they switched to WACA, we got their utilization up to the high 90s. So over three times more output with five times cheaper, so 15 times better.
15:32So for AI, we're bringing big, big help. We have big car makers that are using us exclusively for many years and we got there time to epoch from a couple of weeks to four hours. Explain time to epoch for people who haven't heard that term before. So time to epoch basically means, hey, we're going through another round of training and you need to go through, hey, I'm ingesting the new data or it's already there. You're running a bunch of ETL. ETL is not sexy enough. You cannot charge for it. So now it's called ML Ops or LLM Ops. But the ETL portion of it basically takes your tons of tiny files and prepping them for the next job.
16:15So you're reading and rewriting them in a good format. Now you're retraining one form of your data. So you're picking a subset of the data. You're sending it to tons of GPUs to retrain. So you need to copy the data into the GPUs. this operation takes a long long time and it's really great that now you can parallelize these on so many GPUs while you're doing that you actually need to save checkpoints so you're writing a lot because if it fails you actually want to go back and you don't want to miss so much time and at that point at some point you're done with the next retrain you have now optimized for another portion and you would want to go and run regression tests and see, hey, I've optimized the model to slightly better, if it's a car, let's say, junctions with always stop when it's raining and there is a crowd that casts a shadow over the sides.
17:19And now we want to see, hey, with these crowds casting shadows, did we get anything else worse? So now you're running a huge amount of regression. you basically would drive your cars through all of the rest of your data so you want to see that this has worked well and finally this is one one one circle and now you have a slightly better model and you start all over because it's crazy antonio to think like we actually went full circle in the history of computing from there's way too much compute way too much storage tons of bandwidth and there's no application for it and you know it's just youtube is chugging along facebook is chugging along massive amounts of data your iPhoto going to 4k storing it all sorting it all and just nobody seemed to have a use for us and now here we are Antonio with a moment in time when we have supply chain you can't get enough GPU CPU power you can't get enough storage you can't get enough bandwidth to move it around and we're doing technology runs like it's pro systems in the seventies or something where you're time sharing and you have to wait to release your product and run another job and coming out with versions of it.
18:34I mean, is this going to last or do you think all of this incredible effort to make better chips, better storage, better operating systems and processes will result in us kind of catching up to the jobs as it were? It's funny. When I was 12 years old, I went to computer camp at Michigan State University and I had to hand in punch cards. That's how old I am. And come back overnight after the run. If you made a mistake on it, it just didn't run, right? And you had to go back and like - Yep, get in line. Yeah, exactly. You write the code out by hand and then use the binary punch code thing. This is like air traffic or actually traffic control systems for the GPUs, right?
19:08So filling up the CPUs are always fully utilized GPUs. And I think the answer to your question is, I think this is always a problem because the technology is moving and the software side, the LLM side, that the model technology is moving faster than the compute. So absent a large breakthrough, like a quantum computer or something, which, you know, it's always like, it's always one year away or two years away. It's perpetual. It's almost ready. As long as you're on Silicon, I think you're always going to have this problem because the model seems to be moving faster than the ability to create compute.
19:38Now, it doesn't mean you won't go through some boom and bust cycles. You know, you and I were both running the internet, right? So I was building infrastructure back then, the connector business, right? So overcapacity, I built, blew up. Then we were short capacity, went back up again, and you'll continue to have these kinds of cycles. But artist intelligence, I think it's kind of a super, super cycle in the sense that it is much bigger than the internet. And the need for trained data is huge. It's global. And it's not going to stop. We're just at the very beginning of this. So I think it's a long-term trend that will have a sine wave with a very steep upward slope.
20:12Yeah, if we were to compare it to, say, building out bandwidth, that was a 20-year story. and yeah it we had a boom bust cycle was worldcom and all these places where they overbuilt the fiber and google bought it for pennies on the dollar people don't remember this it was the early 2000s yeah they went for it laid so much fiber and that actually became i think in some ways the precursor for things like netflix and youtube and your photo library not caring about bandwidth anymore i mean it used to be putting any viral video on the internet would result in a 10 000 or a hundred thousand dollar bandwidth upcharge from your provider and then bandwidth suddenly became free and unlimited and the storage that that was another 20 30 year story so if we were to parallel to those this could be a decade or two decade chase to get more gp at least and with with the added difference that the in that case the end use which is sort of like you know moving packets on the internet is kind of a fixed use and it didn't change very much in this case the end use is changing a lot so the applications of our intelligence are going exploding right so right now we're at the very early stages like it's it's an app on your phone it's grok and xai right it's not um a robot yet but it's washing your dishes so imagine the amount of data required just the things these things we can imagine forget things we can't imagine what's going to happen but going from um you know the at the grok app on your phone to the robot washing your dishes is going to take a lot of compute.
21:40We don't have it today. It doesn't exist. And building it is an enormous lift. And anything that makes the dentist more productive is going to be very valuable. Founders, these jam sessions with J-Cal we've been doing are a huge success so far. We've seen so many great submissions. We picked two winners so far, and we interviewed them on the show. And we're still looking for three more amazing founders. Here's all you need. If you want to come on this program, This Week in Startups, and Jam with Jcal, where you pitch me your company and I give you a bunch of feedback. Just two qualifiers. We want you to have less than$2 million in funding, so we want it to be a new startup, you know, one that needs help.
22:16And we want you to have an awesome.tech domain name, so head to jamwithjcal.tech. Jam, J-A-M, with jcal.tech. It's so much fun. The winners come on the podcast. I have to tell you, this is the greatest editorial segment on the pod for me. I love doing it because you pitch me what you're working on. I give you some unfiltered feedback. We do it in real time. We ping pong back and forth. We pickleball. I ask you a question. You give me a response. You ask me another question. And you know what? We both get smarter and we understand your vision for your startup. And hey, it never hurts to get your company on the number one startup podcast in the world.
22:46And we're working with our friends at.tech domains because it's super cool to have a.tech, rabbit.tech, aurora.tech, 1x.tech. Everybody's using them. Heck, I use it for founderfridays.tech. So here's your call to action. Tell me about your awesome.tech domain and startup and apply for the Jam Session with JCal contest today at jamwithjcal.tech. We're picking those last three winners soon. And so take us through some of the logos, Lauren, that are doing the most interesting things. When you look at your Lighthouse customers, people who are doing the biggest, most ambitious things that you can talk about.
23:19Maybe you can give us a little highlight. Either your big Lighthouse customers or the type of customer, the type of job, if you want to abstract it a bit. Yeah, so I've already mentioned some huge AI project between deep learning, machine learning, the generative AIs. I mentioned stability. We have mid-journey and a bunch of the other very, very exciting forefront of AI. But, you know, GPUs are really useful for other means as well. So if you've been to Las Vegas, you've seen the sphere and you went to the U2 concert. You two basically were the first show on the Sphere when they got the residency.
24:02It was June. They had to start showing up and performing in September. Their initial plan was to use their own infrastructure that owned tons of GPUs, but no previous way of thinking about all flash arrays. They started re-rendering their thing. It would have taken them six months. at that rate obviously they didn't have the six month from june to september they've switched to us to switch switch to waka from the moment they got it on the floor to the end of the first render it took them under four weeks so six times faster but then what they've realized hey if you're taking a hd square thing that makes sense in a stadium you're reporting it to the sphere which this magnificent screen it just doesn't look good so the fact that we were six times faster the fact that they got the first render and they still had two more months actually allowed their artists to come in and reiterate and change and reiterate until this magnificent experience happened i don't know if you've been there but i haven't been to it but yeah i've had some friends who went to see the dead and the and the youtube stuff yeah yeah so the dead already dead and calls to use those and they have these experience where like the whole thing closes on you like a box or you're out there on the desert and now that experience is like magnificent it's so i i better say a lot of times awe-inspiring it's like being a medieval european and walking to a cathedral right that's how it feels but i want to say this it wouldn't exist without weka it wouldn't work and um it was so important that loran got invited to the opening night because he his technology enabled it to work it wouldn't work otherwise and you know the dual infilling made a bunch of bets here of technology that didn't exist before they built the sphere and one of them was this back-end gpu problem that weka solved yeah i mean if you think about it a 4k movie is probably 50 gigabit if you were to download it and i don't know if those are 8k or 4k i'm assuming 4k is enough but how many screens are there like if you were to actually make it into a television screen like is it 100 000 screens 10 000 screens it's some large number yeah huge i think they said like 150 ,000 screens and every second of the show it's over 400 gigabytes and they did some really really impressive stuff if you go there you look the YouTube videos you can see Bono and the edge singing inside of bubbles and if you're watching it there is no lag so there's not even a single frame of lag so it's all going through the through the waka being gpu processed through the waka projected all in 120 frames where no not to spill like yeah i was about to say if you're doing i was going to say 30 or 60 frames but if you're doing 120 frames it's obviously four times as much as that now you're talking about just an impossible task and they're doing some things in real time like you're saying they're stitching in the images of people which is just unbelievable and if you think about pixar which now has like i think maybe half of the all-time uh highest grossing films their biggest problem when steve jobs was starting that company people don't know this was just waiting for the render of toy story and it would you know they would make story changes and they'd have to wait 10 days to have it output and that was you know according to ed catmull their their biggest challenge was actually the rendering of it i mean what is it what would it take a pixar film to render today a full-length film do you think using your platform and everything we're seeing a lot of these things go through and it's unlikely that you're watching something enticing late at night that didn't go at some some stage through a workup so a lot of the big ones are isicus but just just benchmarking it to like make these films now to actually render a film what do you think it takes now to to render so they know a james cameron what was james cameron one that he that was super intense.
28:01So they had many, many dozens of thousands of CPUs. They're now switching to GPUs. They have huge networks. So when you're looking at these impressive AI infrastructure, you know, AI is all the rage. It doesn't matter if you're running AI, if you're creating a new movie, that the data center basically runs of the triangle of compute, network, and data. And now that everything looks so good because compute is four or five orders of magnet faster the network is four or five orders of magnet faster and all of these folks that were when they're taking compute the network to the extremes they also need to do it with the data and this is where weka comes in going back to what antonio said earlier hey quantum computing or neural networks i i went to school in the 90s back then neural networks and quantum computing both failed too far up what has happened with GPUs is basically we won over Moors Law.
29:00So we couldn't create a single chip that has twice the transistors every 18 months. But with advances in networking, we can now create bigger and bigger and bigger computers that are disaggregated and scale. And it took us another 15 years, but this is what we're doing. So the world stops scaling up, we're scaling out. which requires that bandwidth and storage and the sharing of the jobs. You're basically chunking all that data and then managing it. And then in between those GPUs, I mean, we're going to be seeing optics between them soon. Yeah. In some cases, it's already out there. And so that's how large self-driving car data sets or protein folding is getting moved around.
29:46Let's end on this, Antonio. When you're looking at and just sort of zooming back, okay, you got to manage the data loads. So you got vertical applications here. There's another big piece people are starting to talk about, energy and data centers. These data centers need to be at a different scale, Antonio, than what we traditionally thought of, and they need a different energy footprint. Maybe you could speak to what your team and you are looking at there in terms of opportunity for capital investment, opportunity for capital allocation, and just generally what these footprints will look like because it's different, yeah?
30:20Yeah, look, we're going to, you know, 100 megawatt and gatewatt scale plants. And as you know, around the world, everyone's thinking about this problem. And you did that, Jason, we're going to cross to the Middle East talking about this. And our friends in the UAE and Abu Dhabi built a four gatewatt nuclear power plant to power data centers here in the US. You know, we have a couple of companies, and I won't name them all, that are working on renewable energy solutions for the data centers. And I think this is very interesting. you know we have a power problem in the us we were not going to have power to make this work in america and so we have to work both on generation creating more power and actually getting it to get in the grid stable so we can both have power and the power to use and have it where we need it when we need it now weka's part in this is it if the data center gets a lot more productive you need less data centers right right so like three times more productive means two there's less hardware exactly so it basically the return on capital we you know i'm investing miles but roic right so the return capital data set goes up a lot if you are using um your gpu more and very simply put so if you if you invest in things like weka that make the data data set more productive you're also making the energy footprint much lower because you just need less data setters how are people solving the problem today because you know creating energy and nuclear power plants Even in China, you're talking about five, six, seven years.
31:46Maybe they could do it in three or four, but it seems like it's five, six, seven years. So we're not going to have nuclear power in time. So what's going to happen if you have to take out the crystal ball here? Are we going to have data centers being moved to where nuclear reactors are, putting them next to the existing ones and upgrading them? How is this going to get solved? I think there's two kinds of companies in the world. There are those that go slowly and kind of do things straight by the rules and book, and they will take a long time to find power and get it right. And there are those that move fast and figure it out.
32:17And we have a couple of companies in our portfolio that move fast and figure it out. One of them is doing it in a very, I'd say, creative and unique way. The other has been executing a strategy for some time of using stranded energy to build data centers. So we have a company called Caruso that's building a data center now next to a trapped wind farm in Texas that's built because of subsidies. All the power can get used. And they're putting their data center kind of right next to it. Use that power and then using battery backup as well. And they have backup behind that for cogen. But I think we're underestimating in America how much energy we have around in hydro, in wind that actually isn't being properly utilized.
32:59it's feeding old industrial assets can be repurposed which we're seeing in the smartest players and this is i think one of the great things about this country is you you have such a fluid capital allocation strategy sometimes people feel overbuilt we talked about fiber earlier so somebody gets a subsidy overbuilt solar wind whatever hydro and then that energy is going to find a customer eventually and it's actually worth it to ship the gpus to the energy as opposed to building the energy where the GPU is or where you want the GPU is, correct? Yeah, that's correct. Because you can get network built.
Read the full transcript
33:32I think this is a period where radarnters will win because they'll free this problem out, right? This is a serious problem and you're going to see a shakeout. We're the best, smartest, scrappiest, most commercial people. If you're going to make it work. And the other kind of slower moving behemoths maybe don't. Yeah. All right, listen, this has been an amazing dive into an awesome investment. Congratulations, Antonio and the team at Valor for finding another breakout company. And, Leron, thanks for the hard work. This infrastructure is obviously going to solve some great problems from humanity beyond being entertained at the sphere at a dead show.
34:09You know, this is the kind of stuff that solves self-driving, maybe drug discovery, solves cancer, or maybe even tells us how the universe was created. So in advance of those amazing questions being answered, I thank you all for coming on the program. you're hiring uh lauren i know uh with all this money you raised you're adding 100 people or so i read how can people find out more and what top two or three positions do you need to fill acutely because we've got a big audience here people looking to work at great companies so you can go to our jobs and on the whack website so we publish all of them some of them also go on on our linkedin we are hiring tons and tons positions in engineering we have engineering in the bay area we have engineering in tel aviv with engineering in bangalore any anything from infrastructure engineers to even kernel developers to to front end to to cloud so if you're a good software engineers we're we're looking for you and the flip side we're also hiring tons of very hungry go-to-market people all around sales sales engineering marketing team, the field folks, so basically throughout the whole company.
35:21Okay. So if you can make it or you can sell it, WECA's got a seat for you. You know, I always tell people, if you got a chance to get on a rocket ship, take the seat and figure it out later. We'll see you all next time on This Week in Startups. Bye-bye. Right now, startups have to do more with less. We all know that. And founders have to be smart with how they deploy capital. Investors are very tuned in to being capital efficient. So if you need great tech talent, but you don't have the time to interview dozens and dozens and dozens of candidates, you need to check out Lemon.io. They have thousands of on-demand developers to choose from, and these devs are vetted and their experience.
36:01And most of all, they're results-oriented. They're going to get you the result you're looking for. They're not going to leave you hanging. And guess what? They charge competitive rates. Great developers can be incredibly hard to find. We all know that. And when you do find them, it can be hard to integrate them into your team. but Lemon.io will handle all of that for you. Startups choose Lemon.io because they only offer handpicked developers with three or more years of experience and strong portfolios. In fact, only 1 % of candidates who apply get in. And if something ever goes wrong, Lemon.io will get you a replacement ASAP.
36:34A couple of launch founders have worked with Lemon.io and they've had great experiences. So here's your call to action. Go to Lemon.io slash twist to find your perfect developer or tech team in 48 hours or less and twist listeners get 15 off their first four weeks stop burning money hire developers smarter visit lemon.io slash twist all right everybody it's time for another jam session with jacal this is a very simple project that i came up with this is my invention no it's not actually you know whose invention it is travis from uber used to do something called the jam sesh. And it was just like a couple of founders getting together, we hang out, you know, pop up on a couple of cold ones and talk about business and jam out on ideas.
37:21Man, it was some of the best times I ever had. And we're bringing it back to this week in startups. And we have got a partner on this program. The partner is.tech domain names. And they came up with a simple idea. Hey, listen, if you got under 2 million in funding, and you got a.tech domain name which is a really cool domain name to have you get to come on the program if you've got a great idea and a great company and so today we're going to hear from ramsey schaefer and he is the ceo and co-founder of uptrends ai and they are uptrends-ai.tech ramsey welcome to the show thanks for having me jaykel excited to jam okay let's jam out why don't you start just telling us for you know two minutes about your company run us through it show us the product whatever you want to do and then uh tell me what's the what's the most uh challenging part of your business three two go sweet okay i've got some slides love to just get your raw feedback on them and then i've got some questions that we can get on the deck i get that a lot feedback on the deck you're gonna use this deck to raise money or you just want to explain the product um to raise money yeah intro got it okay good so the audience for this is seed funds i assume you're a seed stage startup Yep.
38:29So great. Three, two, go. All right. I'm Ramsey. I'm the founder of Uptrends. We help financial advisors stay ahead of the news. So this is Zach. He's an independent financial advisor. And a few times each day, he'll get an email from a client asking him something like, you know, John Deere is up 5 % today. Why? Or I saw Nike fell 20 % last week. What's going on? So he'll go to Google. He'll go to Twitter. He'll go to Morningstar for some headlines. But more often than not, he's left scrambling to get back with a solid answer. Now imagine, multiply this by dozens of clients, hundreds of stocks, thousands of daily news events, and you can see how this becomes a huge time-consuming part of Zach's week.
39:10And frankly, it's holding him back from being a better advisor with more clients. So we're introducing Uptrends, the AI assistant automating the news cycle for investment advisors. Uptrends monitors thousands of news sites, filings, and financial data sources to detect, summarize, and alert Zach about the trends and events affecting the stocks that matter to him and his clients. With Uptrends, he can easily see which stocks are trending in online chatter. He can click into those stocks and get an AI summary of recent market moving events, which he can then directly send to his clients. Things like John Deere's up 5 % today because they got an analyst upgrade from UBS.
39:45Most importantly, he can set instant, highly customizable alerts to be notified about the next big event. Just choose the stocks he cares about, pick the types of alerts he wants to receive from price changes to insider trading, set the frequency he wants to be notified, and we'll send him an AI summary via email about the chatter when it matters. So ultimately what used to take him hours now takes him minutes. Uptrends makes it 10 times easier to stay ahead of market moving events and find the answers he needs right away without any doom scrolling or FOMO required. Uptrends operates as a freemium monthly subscription.
40:19Anyone can get started for free. And then we have premium plans for more customizable, higher volume alerts. We have a$15 essentials package for DIY portfolio managers and a$50 pro package catered towards investment advisors like Zach. Now, there are 300 ,000 investment advisors in the US today, along with millions of DIY portfolio managers and retail investor. So for us to get from here to 10 million in ARR, we need to get to something like 16 ,000 advisors on our pro plan. And to get to 100 million in ARR, we need to get to 166 ,000 advisors. Last but not least, our team consists of myself as CEO and my co-founder Sam as CTO.
41:00Let me say that again. Last but not least, our team consists of myself as CEO and my co-founder Sam as CTO. Sam and I have 10 years experience as stock market investors. Together, we've written peer-reviewed research on the relationship between new sentiment and stock market outcomes. I've previously been a financial analyst and Sam was employee number one of a 10 million ARR startup. We're rounded out by our PhD machine learning lead, Joe, and our front-end developer, Hamza. So that is Uptrends AI. We're on a mission to save investment advisors from the news to help them build better relationships with more clients by staying ahead of the chatter when it matters.
41:35thank you okay so uh there are great job by the way uh overall uh the pitch is tight in that it explains to me what you do who your customer is and what the product is so when you do these pitches especially in a condensed format two or three minutes you really have a very small number of boxes you need to check this is not a 30 minute presentation this is a three minute or less presentation which is you know to be honest all an investor needs to start a conversation okay the customer of this product is a financial advisor and there are registered investment advisors there are wealth managers there are financial advisors there's a lot of different categories here but it's for somebody who manages another person's portfolio and it's a b2b to c type product there's b2b there's b2c you're enabling a business to talk to a customer in the same way shopify is you would say shopify allows somebody selling stuff on the internet to then reach customers fantastic these businesses tend to be great because you're enabling an existing business to do more business to do business more efficiently uh or to save money one of those things and so here you've identified a problem do i think you've identified a big problem i'm not sure yet your advisors will tell you but we know that these advisors get paid a lot of money right what is the average wealth manager make in the united states what is the median wealth manager make what is their compensation per year i know each client for them is an average of ten thousand dollars in the door okay every year yep okay so they have but uh if they have a hundred uh clients that's a million dollars a year and you know what i see these uh guys and gals uh who are and they come at me all the time silicon valley guy i'm a whale uh for them but you know they're going after also my mom and my dad uh you know there's somebody who helps them and so you know people have a retirement account they got some you know 401k and they got some equities you know to save the money you know and these guys make one percent of it one percent of a million dollars ten thousand dollars got it okay so and there's lots of millionaires that's growing because equities are growing and america has a large number of millionaires uae has the most imported millionaires right now that in terms of where millionaires are flowing so i do think it sounds crazy um if you want to raise money one of the easiest places for you to raise money is to move to abu dhabi or dubai and put your company there because that's like kind of the new hong kong or new york and you can get a golden visa and you can uh get them to invest 250k 500k out of the gate boom they do that for like almost any american or european or somebody from singapore australian that uh indian that comes and puts their company there so i'm just gonna put that as a little caveat there because money is moving to abu dhabi specifically and then also dubai two amazing cities let's put that on the side here um i think the product looks okay i think it needs a bit of a design refresh it's a little bit too techie and not finance i want to just talk to you about design for a second i actually have a question around that yeah okay tell me your question so speaking of design i'm thinking a lot about our team right now we're a team of four getting ready to fundraise.
45:09Yeah. And you've talked a lot in the past about the importance of your founding team, but thinking about what's next, my question is like, those two to three next specific job functions or hires, where should we be focusing? Well, let's talk about the four you got. I'm hoping two of them are writing code. Four of us are writing code. God, I'm in love with your company already. You got four people writing code. How many of them are founders? How many of them are employees with? Two founders, two employees with stock. Perfect. that's great so you got some redundancy there um you can basically there's going to be two more positions you have to add at some point one is going to be um somebody to do sales uh and that person right now should be one of the founders why should you do founder-led sales because you need to know you need to have customer zero customer one two three and you got to be able to listen to them.
46:03So let's pause for a second here. Tell me about how many paying customers you have and how much you charge ballpark and how do you charge? Yeah. So right now we have a few hundred paying customers, two paid plans, a$15 a month and a$50 a month. I will say originally, we were more focused on the B2B retail investor. And after feedback, we've learned a lot about focusing on the pros. You've made the cardinal sin. Yes, we did. Of all startups. But we've learned. You tried to run two different businesses concurrently, a b2c and a b2b but you figured out that b2b is the one great and then you've made the next cardinal sin which is uh you are charging far too little we just established that one customer equals ten thousand dollars do you believe you will keep you will get your clients these wealth advisors do you believe you can get them one extra customer a year i think so yeah okay do you think you could save them from churning a customer every year easy yeah okay what is the value of getting a new customer and not losing a customer to them yeah i mean that's my pitch right there what is the value though i'm asking you a specific question a dollar amount well if it's ten thousand dollars one percent commission yep whatever that is ten thousand dollars and they would have lost one that cost them 10 and they would have gained one that's 10 so you've created twenty thousand dollars in value which means the uh ltv do you know what that stands for ltv lifetime value perfect okay I'm just benchmarking where you're at in your startup journey.
47:29Your LTV is people will stick with this product for seven years. I'm going to guess maybe five on average. Let's pick five and be conservative. That means each customer you acquire is worth$100 ,000 to you. That means your CAC. What does CAC stand for? Customer acquisition costs. Perfect. Your CAC could be$1 ,000 and you would make it back very quickly. um so the value you're providing if we blowball it you gain one you don't lose one you know 20 ,000 a year you're providing in five years 100 ,000 of value that means you really should be charging 10 of that number which is ten thousand dollars which is two thousand dollars a year you're charging fifty dollars a month fifty dollars a month you know is but six hundred dollars a year so you probably for this product should be charging 500 a month 400 a month because you can really justify it.
48:26That first customer you save, you should get 100 % of it in my mind. Okay. You should get 100 % of it. So that would be 1 ,000 or 800 a month. So I would just get rid of all this pricing and be taken seriously by your customers. A wealth manager is spending on lunch with their client$600 or dinner. They're taking them to a Knicks game or a Mavs game, and they're sitting in the first four rows for$10 ,000. That's how they think. And you're coming to them asking for 600 bucks you it's like they pay more for you know they they're paying that's what they're paying for their gmail account come on sure yeah let's raise the price on this right signaling yes so signaling is way off now what this will also do for you is it's gonna have you capture the high end first and then go downstream you want to capture the high end because the high end is going to have the best advice for you so not only by raising your price do you increase perceived value you have more money to hire people and you have the ability to get the best chef's kiss best advice so i want you laser focus not on the number of customers i want you to get i would rather you have the 10 10 of these uh wealth advisors who make five million dollars a year or two million dollars a year than for you to have 200 of them that make 400 000 a year you want to go for the really high end here and they're going to give you great advice so i think you got to redesign the product at the ux a little better and i think there's some virality here that you haven't thought of and this is what a jam session is about you identified like there's a problem oh they send the customer customer says oh my god i own tesla stock uber stock uh oh my god uber's up like four bucks right now i just noticed before i got on air because uh the robo taxi is being delayed in some way who knows what's going on and now you got this like existential thing i mean this is like panic inducing for tesla shareholders lyft shareholders uber shareholders if i had exposure to that i do i would be like oh my god i'm not but anyway putting on all side be really interesting if when you shared the dashboard of the stocks with a customer if the wealth manager got a ping jason just opened the website jason just like a docusign so look at the docu sign hey the customer opened the contract the customer went to page two where you send your deck to somebody and like whatever the slide deck thing that watches oh they stayed on they went back to slide five you know they spent two minutes on slide five and they just zip zip past six seven and eight why oh six seven eight are irrelevant to them but they really cared about the team slide but they didn't care about the go-to market or vice versa so you got so much you could do here in intelligence and people will pay for that big time if i know that my customers are typing in the ticker symbol uber and then if they could write a question on that portal where they said uh you know let's say you know i'm the i'm the i'm the i'm the wealthy individual you're the the wealth advisor ramsey and i'm on the website and i just say like what what is this about?
51:35Why is Uber up and Tesla down if Tesla is going to kill Uber, according to this story? And then you wrote back, okay, here's the Goldman Sachs report. That's a business insider story. Business insider is sensational. They want to get you to click. Goldman Sachs has an analyst who's been covering Uber. This is the analyst name. And I direct you to that story. Now the interface has the entire history of us going back and forth. And then additionally, this all has to be mobile at some point so getting a mobile and a designer is critical and then i think the next piece would be to have what's called an sdr or business development rep would be very good for you to have somebody trying to figure out who wealth managers are and a viral way to get them on the phone with you those would be my next two or three hires if you could get the money in here uh you're doing a great job you got a great idea um and i understand you told me uh you were talking to some of your customers in a group chat somewhere like a discord or a signal or a whatsapp yeah just i message i message you got like a you do you have one to one discussions or do you have like a product council yet we've got a discord for like large group and then i have like a small group of three or four advisors that i text weekly okay awesome that's really what you want to do ramsey i wish you massive success with this idea it's supposed to be just 10 minutes but your business is so great you're at 16 minutes with me uh you jammed with jcal rate your jam with jca how would you rate this in terms of helpful huh give me an honest number between one and ten that was great i would say ten yeah for sure okay there we go i i don't want to bias it in any way uh but you you know what you should meet our team so you might be a good candidate to come to our accelerator um because i think there's something here and when i jam with somebody i gotta tell you you're good to jam with because you're quick you give really good answers you don't filibuster and that's what people love when they're jamming so that's a really good note for Everybody listening to This Week in Startups, when you're interacting with an investor who's a know-it-all investor, who's seen it all, who's invested in hundreds of companies, you got to be able to go back and forth quickly, right?
53:39And you got to be able to have that real intellectual discussion. And you did good with that, right? It's like kind of playing pickleball or ping pong or tennis. You want to have a good volley. In just 15 minutes together, we had a great volley. I like you. I like the way you answer questions. I like the way you think. You kind of did your thing. You made yourself likable. I understand your business. You're thoughtful. you seem like you're uh you got a chip on your shoulder and you want to be successful i think lean into that a little bit like a little bit of the drive don't be too mellow and congratulations ramsey and we'll see you all next time on jam with jcal thank you to our sponsor dot tech
From the publisher
This Week in Startups is brought to you by…
CommandBar - Seamlessly integrate an AI-powered guide into your software, making navigation intuitive and interactive. Visit https://www.commandbar.com/twist to get a custom live demo.
.Tech Domains - Don’t miss our “Jam with JCal” contest! To apply and get more details go to https://www.jamwithjcal.tech brought to you by .tech domains.
Lemon.io - Hire pre-vetted remote developers, get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://www.Lemon.io/twist
*
Todays show:
Antonio Gracias of Valor and Liran Zvibel of WEKA join Jason to discuss WEKA’s product market fit and real-world applications (13:49), energy solutions for future data centers and capital allocation strategy (30:07), and a Jam with JCal session with Uptrend AI’s Ramsey Shaffer (37:00).
*
Timestamps:
(0:00) Antonio Gracias of Valor and Liran Zvibel of WEKA join Jason.
(2:52) Investment thesis for WEKA and discussion on investment strategies
(5:30) Investing in winners and the future of compute and AI technology
(10:14) CommandBar - Visit https://www.commandbar.com/twist to get a custom live demo.
(13:49) WEKA’s product market fit and real-world applications
(21:49) .Tech Domains - Apply for the Jam Session with JCal contest today at https://www.jamwithjcal.tech
(23:08) Innovative customers and technology behind the Las Vegas Sphere
(23:08) Innovative customers and technology behind the Las Vegas Sphere
(25:12) Impact of Weka’s technology on rendering and data management
(30:07) Energy solutions for future data centers and capital allocation strategy
(34:22) Weka's hiring and job opportunities
(35:34) Lemon.io - Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://www.Lemon.io/twist
(37:00) Jam with JCal winner Ramsey Schaffer, CEO of Uptrends AI.
(38:09) Ramsey’s pitch and Jason's feedback
(45:22) Importance of founder-led sales, pricing strategy, and UX improvements
(51:02) Engaging with customers and final thoughts on Uptrends ai *
Links from show:
Check out Valor Equity Partners: https://www.valorep.com
Check out WEKA: https://www.weka.io
Check out Stability AI: https://stability.ai
Check out the Sphere: https://www.thesphere.com
Enter the Jam with JCal contest: https://www.jamwithjcal.tech
Check out Uptrends AI:https://www.uptrends-ai.tech
*
Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com
Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com
*
Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp
*
Follow Liran:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/liranzvibel/ *
Follow Ramsey:
X: https://x.com/RamseyShaffer
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ramseyshaffer/
*
Follow Jason:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis
*
Thank you to our partners: Timestamps:
(10:14) CommandBar - Visit https://www.commandbar.com/twist to get a custom live demo.
(21:49) .Tech Domains - Apply for the Jam Session with JCal contest today at https://www.jamwithjcal.tech
(35:34) Lemon.io - Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://www.Lemon.io/twist
*
Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland
*
Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis
*
Follow TWiST:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups
Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com
*
Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916




