Venture Concentration, High-Skill Immigration, And Who Should Buy Lyft? | E2067

26:33Why do I like to share what I'm thinking, Alex? People email me. Jason at Calacanis.com is my email for life, where they DM me and tell me that I'm a horrible person. And, you know, matter for all my DMs. You've got to stop accepting. Dude, you've got to lock down your DMs, man. I love it. I'm not locking my DMs. I love the savage DMs I get. It's incredible. Okay. You don't like them. No, no. I tweet them. I tweet them out in collections. I'm just like, I can only take so much. I think I have a slightly lower bar for negativity day-to-day than you do. After the third or fourth time someone calls me something nasty, I'm just like, all right, all right.

27:07That's enough for today. It's strictly a reflection on how they're feeling about themselves at that moment. Yeah, that's true. Yes. And usually it's a troubled person or a 12-year-old or a Russian Chinese bot trying to cause trouble. Or just somebody doing engagement farming in order to make money. Jason, you asked us to put together a couple of stats to help frame the debate that we've had nationally, I want to say, about high school immigration. And we have a guest in just a second that's an expert. But I want to show this little infographic because I think it provides some good foundational information for everyone who's watching today.

27:42So this is a couple of data points. One, how many new H-1B visas were granted? And the latest full year data we have is from 2023. Everybody will have 2024 data very soon, but we wanted to be consistent. So the number was 118 ,948. and that's a little bit above the cap number everyone talks about. And that's because there are some exempt categories. The total number of illegal immigrants in the U.S. in 2023, we went through a bunch of different data points. The best number we could find was about 11.7 million total. And then the unemployment rate for the U.S. back in 2023, 3.6%. And as of right now, open tech jobs, the best number we could find that was inclusive was about 530 ,000 tech jobs.

28:27So Jason, that's what you wanted to know. and I hope that that is accurate to current data. Well, we will put these in the notes. We'll cite our sources always. And the illegal immigration number is hard to pin down because it's an estimate and they have this thing like encounters at the border. And I don't know if that 11.7 million is the cumulative during the Biden-Kamala Harris administration or it's in the single year. I think that's like the combined - No, that's expected total illegal immigrants living in the U.S. Oh, living in the U.S. It went down to 10. and has now picked back up and we're approaching 12 million again, but we're still under the all-time national peak, which was 2008.

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30:25LinkedIn ads allows you to build the right relationships, drive results, and reach your customers in a respectful environment. I mean, it's really about business. When I say business, you think LinkedIn. When I say LinkedIn, you think business. That's why you want to put your B2B message there. Start converting your B2B audience into high quality leads today. We'll even give you $100 credit on your next campaign. Go to linkedin.com slash thisweekinstartups to claim your credit. That's linkedin.com slash thisweekinstartups. Terms and conditions apply. LinkedIn, the place to be, to be. And let me just say here, I am trying to, because I have a lot of friends who are involved in the administration, I don't have to say who they are.

31:04You can just Google them, look at my Twitter stream. And people are weaponizing what I say against my friends. I don't know if you've seen this, but a lot of the fringe elements of MAGA and some other things are just taking whatever I say and then slamming it into my friends' feeds and saying, hey, you're a bestie, you're a best friend, you're a good friend, you're a colleague, you're a business partner. They don't even know the nature of my relationships. They're saying this with people who maybe I don't even have a relationship with or have a very cursory relationship. I am going to be very muted for the next couple of weeks about these issues on my social and here because I don't like to get my friends dragged from my comments.

31:45So if people think I'm being a little subdued, I am self-censoring myself by choice. I don't have to. Nobody's asked me to. But I'm going to self-censor myself a bit over the coming weeks just so I don't get weaponized. But the H-1B visa discussion you wanted to talk about on the show. You're the co-host. We had a guest booked. I want to talk about it here from maybe less of a political basis, but more of an educational basis. Absolutely. Just to level set facts. This is Lisa Wedden, founder, CEO of Plymouth Street. Jason, she worked for Bloomberg Beta back in the day. She's a Sequoia Scout as well.

32:23So she's been on the venture side and the founder side. And I booked her because I had the same thought, H-1B visas. And then as I was learning so much more about the U.S. immigration system this week, it turns out that sure, her firm mostly works with O-1 visas, which are different than H-1B visas. So one, Lisa, thank you for being here. How are you? Thanks for having me. I'm great. Happy New Year. Yeah, Happy New Year. So I want to start at a kind of a high level here and talk about the impact of immigrants on the technology scene. The American Immigration Council says that 44.8 % of the Fortune 500 companies back in 2003 were founded by immigrants or their children.

33:04I know this is a near and dear issue to your heart. So I'm curious, when you think about high school immigration, what is your compelling argument you tell people who are skeptical as to why it matters to our national growth? so i think the stats are really compelling here 55 percent of technology unicorns are founded by immigrants some of the most iconic companies of our generation spacex repli stripe have all been founded by immigrants and when you think about you know the early discussion capital is not necessarily the constraint for innovation human talent is uh plymouth's mission when we set up was to accelerate U.S.

33:42innovation by enabling the highest skilled talent to build in America. And immigrants have consistently proven time and time again to be some of the most innovative, risk-taking entrepreneurial individuals. Absolutely. That's the core focus here is how do we unlock a new era of U.S. innovation? So my question then is, why is your firm so focused on O-1 visas as opposed to the much more, I would say, newsy recently, H-1B program that I think people are much more familiar with than the O-1 program. Totally. So the H-1B program was designed in the 1990s and it was set up with a 65 ,000 cap limit.

34:21Today, over 780 ,000 individuals apply for the H-1B. And the reality is, is that we could be losing out, and I think we are losing out on the world's best talent because these individuals are put into a lottery ticket system. And so you could imagine a leader in AI, a leader in quantum, a leader in nuclear energy puts their name in a lottery ticket system and they don't get it. And I think the reality is, is that we want to recruit and retain this world-class talent. And in comparison to the H1B, the O1 is not a lottery ticket system. You have to put together a real research report about an individual.

35:00You know, these applications are between 400 to 600 pages long to document someone's extraordinary ability. And so you have to be really elite to get this visa pathway. Okay. I just want to recap here, Alex. O-1 visas. This is, I think the quote is, I'm reading here, extraordinary ability or achievement in the science, arts, education, business, or athletics. They must demonstrate sustained national, international acclaim and recognition in their field. This can be proven through awards, publications, high salary, etc. That is one type of visa to come to the United States. And this is extremely rigorous.

35:42And there is no abuse here or almost no abuse in your mind, Lisa? It's too hard to game the O-1? You know, less than 5 ,000 STEM individuals come into the US on an O-1 visa. And you have to document substantial evidence to prove that O1 visa. So it's not easy. No, it's not an easy pathway to game. How many get awarded each year and how many applications? Just ballpark if you know that number. Just under 30 ,000 get awarded each year. And the majority of those visas actually go for O1Bs, which is in the entertainment and the artistic professions. So if there is less abuse of O1 visas compared to the H1B program, which I think everyone agrees has a place, could use some fixes.

36:30Do you expect that technology companies writ large are going to move away from H1B visas and toward the O1 process simply because it's not a lottery and therefore is worth the extra effort to go through because it's not random, it's merit-based? I think companies use every tool in their toolkit to retain their best talent. And different visa pathways offer this opportunity. You know, there's the TN category for Canadians and Mexicans. There are visa pathways for Australians. You know, the visa landscape is not a one size fits all. I think also when you talk about early stage startups and later stage companies, they have different talent needs.

37:13I think that O1 is an amazing visa pathway for the very best talent, both at the earliest stages for founders who want to build an America and the later stages. And I think the best companies that we work with, like Midjourney, Replit, PicoAI, they take their talent extremely seriously because they know that the constraint for growth is finding the very best talent. I'm just curious about the viability of O-1 visas to hopefully expand to allow for more high school immigration. Because I think personally, just my own view, not even speaking for Jason or the show, that if we could 10x the number of very brilliant people that work in technology that can come here and stay every year, it would be worth, you know, at least 1 % GDP growth per annum, which is the cheapest thing you could possibly buy.

37:59I'm just curious, does the O-1 program have the capacity to help with that? Or do we have to fix H-1Bs to get that level of high school immigration flowing? So I think there's reform across the system, but the O-1 is an uncapped user pathway and we should be utilizing it. And this administration should utilize it insofar as it achieves our goal of American competitiveness. I think the message for the world should be America is open for business, for the world best skilled innovators. And we want you to come and build here and innovate in this economy. And I think this is a golden opportunity to share that message and utilize every tool in our toolkit to do that.

38:40And visas are a component of that. All right. And then I just want to get your take on this because I know you're a bigger fan of the O-1 visa than the H-1B, but the H-1B has been criticized just a lot lately. It's lost some of its, I'd say, public luster. How fair do you think the criticisms are of H-1B visas that they underpay or they entrap workers into contracts they can't get out of because then they get deported. How reasonable are the criticisms of H-1Bs in your view? I think there are, you know, most practitioners would say that these are known issues that we need to identify and reform.

39:14I think there's been a ton of really interesting discussion online around increasing the compliance fees for companies, you know, increasing the wage requirements. This program was designed in the 1990s. Again, we want a system that is adaptable and updates to our modern era. And so I think there is reasonable criticism that most practitioners have known. I can give a little color on that, actually, Alex. When I started my career in the IT business, I was at Sony. Statute of limitations is over. Or I don't really care. I'll just say it. I was out to lunch with the people running the IT department.

39:51And they said, hey, we don't have to work weekends anymore. We got these Indian guys. And they're going to be in this office somewhere in the middle of America. And they're dirt cheap. They get paid 50 % less than us. And they come here with their family. If they don't do what we tell them, and they don't work the hours we tell them, we can deport them. and they have 30 days to find a new job, which they can't. So therefore, they're going to do all the weekend shifts. They're going to work 50, 60 hours a week. There's nothing they can say. And I said, wow, that's really dark. And they said, yeah, it's great.

40:28And I was just a 21-year-old kid. And I was like, yeah, but that makes them kind of like indentured servants. It's totally abhorrent. And all the discussions I heard about H-1B specifically during that time period, in the IT business specifically, not entrepreneurial pursuits, was just about saving money and maybe being able to grind these employees down. Is there a fair criticism to that and what I experienced 30 years ago? You know, I can't speak on behalf of all H1B holders, but I can speak to the people that I talk to every day. A large number on H1Bs and they want more flexibility to be able to work at different companies, start their own companies.

41:11You know, there's these incredible H1B employees who are working at large tech organizations, and they want to move on to another visa pathway because they want to build in America. And they are, you know, struggling with this visa category that they're pursuing, because they do have to maintain their status, maintain their prevailing wage. And so from my kind of own personal perspective, like I am hearing stories of individuals who want to move on to the move off the h1b because it is not the right for use category for them um and there are you know there are companies that abuse the h1b category too we know this like there are how do you solve the abuse how do you how would you solve the abuse what are i mean i've watched the twitter debates i have my own answers but i'm curious from your perspective if you could wave your magic wand you do this for a living you work on these what three things would you change in order to make it more fair to American workers who want those jobs and to the employees who I believe in some cases might be 5 % or 10%.

42:13It's obviously not the majority. Maybe, you know, it's unfair to them. Yeah. You know, I focus most of my work not on H-1B visas. Like I look to people who are moving off H-1B visa. But I think the reality is like there are several things that are interesting about reforming the H1B. One is that you could look to explore to increase the costs for companies for the H1B. So increasing the annual compliance costs for H1B visa, that would be, I think, really interesting. Increasing certain elements of the wage requirements could be really interesting and reforming the number of allocations in the lottery for companies.

42:56And I think those would be, frankly, kind of like an interesting and necessary requirement for ensuring that this visa category is updated from the 90s. Awesome. If you go back to Twist episode 35, we had Brad Feldon and little baby Jason, you know, 14 years ago, they were talking about this issue. And one thing that they brought up was the idea of a like entrepreneur or investor visa, Jason, the idea that if you're going to deliberately come here and start a company, there should be a separate door just for you. There should be an easy way for a foreign entrepreneur who wants to start a business in the U.S.

43:34that raises a certain amount of money from U.S. investors to be able to get a visa and get going. Right. Put that amount of money in a bank account. Fill out a form. You're done. That's right. So it turns out, as we start talking, you know, to our... I don't... You know, politics is a mystery to me, but to my, you know, the friends of mine that are in the House and the Senate, and some of the other people that we know. What we found out pretty quickly was there's a type of visa called an EB-5 visa, which is basically the opposite of what we want. The EB-5 visa, which has been around since 1990, gives a visa to a foreigner who invests a million dollars in a U.S.

44:11company. Oh, genius. Right? So you basically are, you know, the idea is to drive investment in U.S. companies, but the person getting the visa is simply the investor. So, you know, there's a lot of controversy around that particular type of visa, people buying visas, etc. But the structure was parallel. We want the opposite. We want the U.S. to be the investor and we want the entrepreneur to be somebody. This is the talent. Exactly. If you have Yao Ming in China, you want him to play in the NBA. Exactly. Somehow his visa got approved. That's right. That's right. And Lisa, just as a last thought, do you think we need, instead of trying to fix and shoehorn our needs into the O-1 and H-1B categories, just simply a blank sheet of paper in an entirely new category or new system to avoid just endless rounds of small technocratic fixes to a program that seems to have larger issues?

44:58I think there's huge opportunities to explore like a fast track entrepreneur visa. They did actually come out with the international entrepreneurship rule, which was a different opportunity, but it was very complicated and not super fit for purpose. And so, yeah, to the extent that we can streamline this immigration system and have very clear opportunities for innovators, I'm so in favor of it. In this moment, we do have visa categories that are advantageous for entrepreneurs. So we're doubling down on that. But again, let's be innovative and let's think about our ultimate goal, which is advancing US innovation.

45:35And to the extent that we can think through every tool in our toolkit, I'd advocate for that. All right, Lisa, thank you so much. PlymouthStreet.com, if you want to look up her work. Thank you much. What do you charge? Lisa, how much does it cost if a company hires you per person? How do you get paid? We get paid per visa. How much? What does it cost? Between$10 ,000 to$12 ,000. Oh, okay. So it's kind of reasonable, but it's not cheap. It's your very best talent. We really fundamentally believe in investing in your talent. And these applications are over 500 pages long. So we really focus on ensuring that you can consistently and reliably bring over your best talent.

46:13Fantastic. Really appreciate you coming on, Lisa. Thanks so much. Thank you very much. Appreciate that. You know, it was great to have her on. I think there's a really easy way to solve this problem. Hit me. Number one, a minimum salary. Yes. I don't know if it's 50, 60, or 70K, but that's an easy one to do. You put in a minimum salary for this. Number two, you have one year to find a new job. So if you're on an H-1BVZ, have a year to find a new job. Now, I know what people are going to say, you know, like, that's unfair or whatever, but hear me out because there's the next piece. When I'm an employer, I pay 10 % of your salary, 10 % of your salary, not just$1 ,000 or whatever these application fees are, 10 % of your salary up to a certain number.

47:01So there's like a minimum, but it also maxes out. So that you have a disincentive for trying to use this for like, let's say frontline IT PC support specialists, you know, somebody who comes and reformats your hard drive or reinstall software, your whatever's not working. And I think a lot of this stems from the fact that a lot of people on the GI Bill or, you know, folks thought, hey, I can get a degree from some degree mill. They sold me on being an IT person. They told me the starting salary in IT was 75K. So I went 30, 40K into debt. I figured I could pay that back after the five or 10 years, you know, and then I would be making six figures eventually.

47:46And then all of a sudden, you're like, wait a second. The job I was going against is somebody getting paid 50K instead of 75K. Well, if you charge a minimum of 10K per year and you force people to pay not only the 10K, but the employer has to pay the 10K the second year when you leave. Oh, so if you go away, they're still on the hook for it. Still on the hook for that year. Or maybe you're on the hook for six months and the new employer's on the hook for the next one, whatever it is. There's some sort of fee. So that if you are an employer, you really have to think about this. Then you take all that money.

48:20And I think Aaron Levy, friend of the pod, has been on many times from Box said, hey, why don't you put that money towards STEM education? Hey, there you go. Now we're talking. Or maybe you put that money towards the people who had IT degrees from those paper mills. we identify them and we have a way for those folks to pay down the debt for IT degrees that maybe were overpriced or whatever. And I'm not big into that because I like people to make that decision, but I'm just thinking creatively here because there is valid criticism here. I believe there's significant abuse on the low end. And once you eliminate that, I think people are going to have a much easier time with this issue.

49:05I think so too. I don't think we're ever going to get the people who want to shut down all immigration for all time in the United States ever on our side here. But if there's a way we could grab 65 % of the population and open up the economy to allow for more smart people to come here and build and have faster GDP growth and have more of a talent edge on the rest of the world by being an attractive place for brains to drain to, Well, then we'd have a stronger nation, more money, and happier people. Jason and I are just so in favor of that. I want big America, big, strong America. I have literally three blog posts I drafted that I'm holding until after Trump's in office and this all dies down because I don't want to poke the tiger here and have people taking my blog post, quoting it, because I have different feelings on this.

49:51And you can look at my Twitter. I've said, I think we should be the most prosperous and the most populous country. I think both of those things are important. And how do you get there? You're going to get there through population growth and people having babies. You're going to get there through immigration. But you know what? We've got plenty of time to talk about this in 2025. We do. And we have plenty of time after the administration has all gone through confirmations. So now, moving on. Okay, sad news. But I want to talk about this. So, rewinding the clock a little bit, Bench fell apart at the end of last year.

50:19At the end of 2024, Bench, a company that people had heard of and used for a long time, that had last raised money back in 2021, Jason. Outsourced accounting firm, right? All source accounting firm, exactly. Loved by startups. Loved by startups. And when they died, it shocked people because I don't think people knew that they were on the ropes. And then to start the year, there's another company that's followed. It's a fintech HR startup called Level. It offered benefits. So essentially, if you were an employer, a startup, say, you could create kind of an innovative benefit program for your employees.

50:51They did self-insured dental and vision products. And you could also do wellness, fitness, all sorts of things using this Level program. they have also died. And according to Jason, the CEO, Paul Aaron, in an internal email that the information got, he said, quote, while fundraising, we entered an acquisition process that we believed would provide significant value to our clients and members. Unfortunately, the deal fell through at the last minute due to external challenges beyond our control. My question to you, because I have a lot of thoughts about the business and the timing and so forth. But when a CEO says we were fundraising, there was an acquisition and it fell apart.

51:25What does that tell you in your spidey sense? It tells me the company was burning too much capital. The investors had lost faith in this company being a great place to deploy capital. So they're burning too much money. Maybe the actual unit economics didn't work. So new investors assessing this opportunity might have thought, if they're burning some millions of dollars a month at this company, the valuation is very high. There's all these covenants and all of this preference stack where the latest investors get 2x. If I come in and I do a pay-to-play round or a cram-down round where I say all the existing investors, their shares are going to get diluted 100 to 1 or 50 to 1 or 25 to 1 or 10 to 1 or 5 to 1.

52:20They're going to be common shares. And then we're going to start over, raise more money. They just thought, you know, that pain and suffering, as Bill Gurley has said over and over again, I've heard him say this on many podcasts, a lot of investors are just like, I don't want to come into a toxic situation and be the toxic person who delivers the medicine into the patient. And maybe acquirers, because of the wrath of Lena Kahn, looked at it and said, I can't acquire this for some reason, or they just weren't acquisitive. And or the unit economics of doing outsource bookkeeping just looked like this was a bookkeeping firm that didn't really have enough technology there and the mission to use technology to make bookkeeping, you know, auto-categorize expenses and costs.

53:06Maybe that just never got there. So maybe it wasn't wasn't great execution, or maybe they just couldn't get the margin there and this experiment failed. And the board seems to have made two mistakes. One, they ousted the founder. There's been a big controversy, hey, trying to out the board. Now, I would be very careful. The board might have been doing something fiduciary that was responsible as a fiduciary. If that CEO, and we don't know, was not hitting their numbers, was not a great leader, couldn't track talent, we don't know, then they probably were right to try to find a new leader and maybe they found the wrong one.

53:37Or maybe it just, like I said, was a crack foundation or a failed experiment. So we don't have full information. You know, trying to out the VCs who ousted the founder, I'd be very careful. Yeah, I saw that. I would be very careful with that because they might have actually been doing the right thing and the hard thing. And doing the hard, right thing is hard and it makes you look like a jerk as a VC. I've actually never ousted a founder. I've never, because I'm an early stage VC, that we never got to that point. But I know people who have, and sometimes it's like, this founder was off the rails.

54:11They were in founder mode. They were off in la-la land. Well, that's why, to me, when a VC does actually pull a founder, I almost don't view it as a non-founder-friendly move because it's done so infrequently, I presume, in only the most extreme associations. So to me, if that happens, I actually judge the founder more than the VC. I want to go back to this bench thing. One last question, because I have been, I have a question, more of a thing that I'm curious about. We have seen fewer deaths, fewer implosions, fewer big flame outs in the startup world of companies that raised a huge round at a big valuation in 2021 than I expected.

54:48But then we just had these two companies land in quick succession, bang, bang. And so the thing I'm curious about for this year is how many will we see in 2025? Will this be the year when companies that haven't raised since 21 fail? because there's probably several thousand of them out there that are just waiting to either get bought for a dollar or to die. And maybe we're finally at that moment, Jason. Maybe it's here. I think when you raise a ton of money and you have a lot of runway, you can kick the can down the road. You can do four rifts. You can raise your prices. But eventually, you can put lipstick on the pig.

55:27You can paint the house. But it's still got a cracked foundation. It's still got a bad fundamentals, possibly. And I think that is the challenge. That is the challenge. Well, we'll see. Do you want to wrap up with just a little bit on this Lyft Amazon? Sure. Yeah, I mean, I think that this was one of my big, the all-in prediction show comes out tomorrow. I predicted that one of my big business, my big business deal of 2025 in the prediction show, which you'll get today, Friday, was that there would be consolidation in the on-demand space and the autonomous space in 2025. Now, that's a bold prediction, but I do think we could see Amazon, Uber, DoorDash, BYD, Uber, Tesla, Zoox, Waymo.

56:18You're going to see some of these merge. If Waymo and Uber merged, they're de facto going to run the table on everybody. They become, it's going to be like a battle. It's going to be hard for Tesla to beat that, right? No, I absolutely agree. Uber plus Waymo equals win, I think. I think they win. Uber plus Tesla means they win. So if you look at that, you have Waymo and Tesla plus Zoox, very promising, plus another 15 other providers of autonomy. So you take those 18 different autonomy providers, There's probably five that are the most credible. You take those five and you pair them with either Uber or DoorDash or Amazon and their deliveries.

57:01You got a pretty robust offering. And so with the end of the wrath of Lena Kahn, we could see something epic occur. something like the acquisition of Whole Foods or something like the acquisition, maybe even a better one, YouTube, Instagram, WhatsApp, like a mega matchup that has significant impact on the future. So I agree with all of that, but I'm a recent convert to the Amazon possibility. And I had honestly forgotten that Amazon owns Zooks. Yeah, oh, you forgot. Zooks has got great potential. It does. And so Amazon, if you forgot, like I did, Amazon bought Zooks back for$1.2,$1.3 billion in 2020.

57:48The company had raised up to about a billion dollars, Jason, at a valuation that reached as high as$3.2 billion. So not the best venture exit, but certainly a property at Amazon that's done well. So lately, Zooks has expanded to San Francisco, larger Vegas footprint, and Foster City. And they're going to do their first public riders in Vegas this year. So Zoox officially is going to be a real robo-taxi company in the near future. So that means that they had the technology side, Jason, sorted out at Zoox, which is Amazon. And then there's Lyft, which my friend Anita Ramaswamy over at The Information pitched this Amazon Lyft deal as a 2025 option, which got everyone talking.

58:30And the thing that I'm just blown away by is how essentially Lyft is free. Lyft today is valued at exactly 1x its trailing revenue, whereas Uber is worth 3.25x and Tesla's worth 13.5x its trailing revenue. So you can buy Lyft for 1x revenue? Attach it to Zoox? That sounds brilliant. You'd have to pay a premium to get the shareholders to give it up, and that premium would probably be 2x or 50 % or 2x. So I think if you add a 50 % premium to it, But I think you're, and it is about to, you know, they are going to be breakeven profitable. I don't know if they've got some funny gap uniqueness to Lyft.

59:11I haven't been tracking them. But I do. I can answer that for you. So they are roughly breakeven-ish on a gap basis. They have 107 million of just EBITDA in the last quarter. But the thing that I think is most important, Jason, is their trailing operating cash flow was 740 million in the last four quarters. So it's kicking off cash. Awesome. So, you know, it's not, I mean, buying the number, you know, what will be the number five, six, seven, eighth most important player globally, maybe the 10th most important player globally, is not a power move. Power move is to buy Uber, Grab, DoorDash, like that's the power move.

59:53And so Amazon tried to do restaurant delivery. They failed at that one. I don't know why they failed. I guess it's a hard problem to solve. They weren't focused on enough. Who knows what the reason was? But they like to take big risks. They bought Whole Foods. I think that took them a couple swings at bat, but I think that's actually working because I see Whole Foods coming to my house, and I know a lot of people are buying from Whole Foods via the Amazon interface now, and they seem to have figured that one out too. So I think, I don't think this is going to happen. I think it would be, well, I just think you're like buying a brand, you're going to disappear anyway.

1:00:27and Amazon already has the Prime members. So simply opening this up to Amazon Prime members and saying every Amazon Prime comes with essentially what Uber One is. And Uber One, Apple One, Amazon Prime, it's all the same thing. A membership fee to get people to use a product more, to increase consumption, and to do more lock-in. Uber One's got, I think, 20, 30 million members now. It's incredible. I just slowly picked up on it. And those people, from my understanding from public reports, spend a lot more money. So there is something really interesting about that Uber One membership and Amazon Prime that could be very powerful.

1:01:08If you think about those as one thing and you think about what they're both doing, at their core, Amazon and Uber both move stuff. Yes. If I was on the board of Amazon, Tesla, or Google, I would have one thing in mind. And now people think I'm talking about my book here. I have exposure to all these names except Tesla. And if I wanted to have a bunch of Tesla, I could. I think the stocks kind of hit meme territory right now. And I have owned Tesla in the past. The reason I don't own Tesla, as I said before on the show, is people think I have some inside line because of my friendship with people over there.

1:01:42Just I have exposure to everything. I'm not talking my book here. Whoever on those boards buys Uber, and I don't think Uber is for sale. No, I don't think Dara is going to be Uber. No, but if I was Bezos, I would get in a room with Dara and say, what do we got to do here? If I was Elon, if I was on the Tesla board, I would be like, because I think Tesla's not worth over a trillion. Uber's worth$130 billion or$40 billion. Giving up 10 % of your equity or 5 % of your equity to own those 25 million members and then just be guaranteed to win and to have a global footprint. day one or day zero because the cyber taxis aren't going to be on the road till next year sometime or maybe the end of this year and they'll go into mass production to have that advantage if waymo gets that advantage if i was larry and sergey i would be going at uber i believe uber merges or is acquired with one of the four players tesla amazon google waymo and then And long shot of long shots might get blocked, but a DoorDash and Uber combination.

1:02:56Ah, that's scary. Merger. Even me, my ding, ding, ding antitrust bells go off at that one. But I'll tell you why this is something that the antitrust people should at least maybe consider letting happen. Okay. Then you would have a company add to the Magate or Uber plus Airbnb. and b so expanding the mag 8 makes each member of the mag 8 less powerful yeah we should be trying to take the mag 7 or 8 and make it into a mag 17 or 18 yeah mag 20 yeah make a mag 20 then that's the way because you're not going to stop them they're just too good at what they do they're at the top of their game they have too much cash no administration can stop them you're not going to break them up even if you do break them up they're going to add more businesses and so or if you break If you force Google to spin out YouTube or something, you would actually then create a mag 9.

1:03:47So there might be a case to break up one or two along the margins. That's my best belief here. But I do think we will see that we're going to go from 1 % of rides globally being ride sharing to 20. In that case, the TAM's going 20x in the next decade or two easily in my mind. And if that's the case, and car ownership goes away, man, Tesla's flat year over year, I think, on car deliveries, 1.8 million or something like that, which is extraordinary. It was 1 % down year over year. Okay, so even. Yeah, you call it even. Car ownership is having an issue right now. I think young people don't want to own cars.

1:04:22So actually, Tesla's making the absolute right bet on the cyber taxi. So why not insure the win for 10 % of your shares by buying Uber? For me, that would be like a dream. Or Amazon buying it or DoorDash. So a couple of data points here, just to wrap up this conversation. Lyft valuation as of right now, $6.03 billion. DoorDash,$72.5 billion. I think people don't realize how much more valuable DoorDash is than Lyft. Uber,$137 billion. And then we get into the big boys, Tesla,$1.27 trillion. And then Amazon,$2.35 trillion. And I'll just throw in Alphabet for good measure here. that is drum roll please 2.36 trillion dollars so there's a lot of capital here someone buy Uber to make Jason's month and we're back on we're doing a late show on Sunday and then we're back we're going to record the Monday show on Sunday we might go live with it we'll see so if you're around Sunday night because I'm going to be traveling on Monday we're going to record the show Sunday back to hey listen no rest we like to we love doing the show we do whatever we have to do together no rest for the weary alright everybody do me a favor founder.university, start a company in 25.

1:05:30Number two, follow x.com slash Alex, x.com slash TWI startups, x.com slash Jason. And finally, I'm trying to get to a million dollars in startup credits for getstartupcredits.com. This is a gift from me and my team to all startups. We can't invest in every startup. 20 ,000 people apply for funding from us. So what we did was anytime anybody takes a meeting with us, we give them the getstartupcredits.com package, which is, I think, over$500 ,000 in credits. I'm going to get it to a million. I got Oracle in there. I got Google Cloud in there. I got Cruise for accounting, like really stable accounting.

1:06:10I got Vanta in there. I got Oracle. I got Zendesk. I got LinkedIn. I mean, these are the biggest names. I got Embroker. I got Northwest. I got HubSpot. Athena. Go to athenawow.com. get a free month, I think. So what I'm doing is the people who are my friends who provide services at an elite level, I'm allowing them to provide something really great to founders. This is my mission, to help support founders in year zero, year one, year two, the hardest years. You go there, you fill out the form, you say what you need. I need accounting. I need hiring from LinkedIn. I need marketing from HubSpot.

1:06:47I need cloud computing. Could be Azure, I don't think we have Azure in there anymore. Oracle or Google Cloud. I need any of those. So if you want to be part of it, just email me, jason at calacanus.com. It's got to be something like legit. If you give away one month of your service, like the rack rate deal, don't bother contacting me. It's got to be super generous, like two years of the product, 100 ,000 in credits, no strings attached, and you have to attach an evangelist to it. So the way the Get Startup Credits works is when they fill out the form, Alex, the founders contact information. if they opt into it, goes to that provider.

1:07:24So if you say you want cloud, it'll go to the evangelist at Google. It will go to the evangelist at Oracle. It will not go if you don't click off cloud. So you're not going to have your time wasted. But then you're put in touch with people like a real human being. Yes, you're not sent to the slush pile. No, you're not just going to get added to a mailing list and get spammed. You have to, have to, have to put an evangelist on. It has to be a good deal. Anyway, it's an experiment. We experimented in the fourth quarter with it. We had hundreds of people, I believe, come in and fill out the form and the experiment.

1:07:55We had, I think, a half dozen partners. We're going to go to a dozen partners. It's working great. And we'll see you on the next episode of This Week in Service. Bye-bye.