In short
```markdown This Week in Startups
Episode Summary
Wiz Passes on Google, Meta Pushes Open-Source AI Ahead, Spotify's Earnings, and More (Episode E1984)
Hosts
- Jason Calacanis - Angel investor, former journalist, and publisher.
- Alex Wilhelm - Writer and analyst, host of a Substack called Cautious Optimism.
Key Sponsors
- AssemblyAI: Offers speech-to-text models for startups.
- Vanta: Simplifies compliance and security for startups.
- Eight Sleep: Innovative sleep technology for better rest.
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Episode Highlights
- The End of the Wiz-Google Deal (5:37)
- Wiz, a cybersecurity company, decided not to accept Google's $23 billion acquisition offer.
- Discussion on the implications of IPO versus acquisition, and potential future valuations for Wiz.
- Importance of maintaining independence and company culture over short-term financial gain.
- Spotify's Successful Quarter (13:36)
- Spotify reports significant growth, with over 246 million paying subscribers and major free cash flow.
- CEO Daniel Ek's strategies to enhance user engagement and reduce reliance on the music industry.
- The importance of pricing strategies and operational discipline after going public.
- Universal Basic Income (UBI) Discussion (27:49)
- Overview of a recent UBI study funded by Sam Altman.
- Initial positive impacts on entrepreneurship and mental health, but concerns about sustainability over time.
- The need for further studies to refine UBI models and potentially tie them to educational outcomes.
- Meta's AI Strategy (53:05)
- Meta's launch of its new open-source AI model, Llama 3.1, which aims to rival closed-source models from OpenAI and Anthropic.
- Discussion on the advantages of open-source AI, including potential regulatory support and market competitiveness.
- Mark Zuckerberg's reflections on the challenges of closed platforms like Apple, advocating for open-source development.
- Predictions and Insights (1:06:50)
- Speculation on how Meta's new AI model might disrupt the current AI landscape and affect valuations of competitors.
- The role of user interfaces and app functionalities in the competition between different AI models.
- Emphasis on the importance of adaptability and user-centric approaches in tech evolution.
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Key Takeaways
- Wiz's Decision: The choice to prioritize IPO over acquisition reflects a broader trend among startups to retain autonomy and build long-term value.
- Spotify's Growth: Demonstrates the effectiveness of strategic pricing and innovation in sustaining user growth and financial health.
- UBI Findings: Offer mixed results, highlighting the necessity of structured implementation and further research to optimize outcomes.
- Meta's AI Leadership: By embracing open-source, Meta positions itself as a substantial player in the AI field, capable of challenging established giants.
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Additional Resources
- Links to Articles Mentioned:
- [Wiz ends acquisition talks with Google](https://techcrunch.com/2024/07/22/wiz-walks-away-from-googles-23b-acquisition-offer-read-the-ceos-note-to-employees)
- [Spotify's earnings report](https://www.axios.com/2024/07/23/spotify-profit-q2-2024-earnings)
- [UBI study findings](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-22/ubi-study-backed-by-openai-s-sam-altman-bolsters-support-for-basic-income)
---
Follow Us
- Jason Calacanis
- [Twitter](https://twitter.com/Jason)
- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis)
- Alex Wilhelm
- [Twitter](https://x.com/alex)
- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm)
---
Conclusion This episode dives deep into significant themes surrounding startup culture, financial strategies, and the evolving technology landscape, offering listeners a comprehensive overview of the current state of the industry. ```
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00I think it's a little bit soul crushing when you go build features that are what you believe is good for your community and then you're told that you can't ship them because some company wants to put you in a box so that they can't you know you know what's a little bit of a little bit you know. Zynga and Farmville and Zynga Poker. What we should do is we should take that clip again and then scroll down all the headlines of like Facebook turns off, Facebook kills, Facebook, you know. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Assembly AI. Get maximum value from voice data with Assembly AI. Build powerful products and features for your end users on the industry's leading speech-to-text models.
0:49Get 100 free hours to start building at assemblyai.com slash twist. Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC 2 report fast. Twist listeners can get$1 ,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com slash twist. And 8 Sleep. Good sleep is the ultimate game changer. The newest generation of the pod, the pod4ultra, has arrived. Head to 8sleep.com slash twist and use code twist to get$350 off the pod4ultra. All right, everybody, welcome back to This Week in Startups. I'm Jason Calacanis, an angel investor, former journalist and publisher, now doing random acts of journalism.
1:38With me, my partner in crime, Alex Wilhelm, he writes a substack. It's called Cautious Optimism. am i correct nailed it first try cautious optimism uh and it's awesome every day you can get a note from him about what's going on in the market and then three days a week uh is what we're aspiring to to do news here i am on vacation for two weeks but yeah it's just too much news for me to be totally out of uh pocket so i'm working half time as many people who work from home do what what's the style of vacation you like alex you prefer the like work four hours take the afternoon off or something like that and then have two weeks of vacation or do you rather have one week of vacation totally unplugged what where's what's your style of vacation the audience wants to know yeah no i used to do very very serious log off be entirely distant take the time breathe and then once you have children going on vacation isn't actually going on vacation because you give up child care so then suddenly you're just exhausted all the time even more so than you are and then going back to work actually feels like a vacation so i have never tried the four hours on four hours off but i'm about to pitch you later this week my paternity leave plan so get ready for very similar ideas because i'm okay with it i am totally fine with it you have been such a great collaborator here in your first six weeks on the program and i always say there's like rules for uh you know work and remote work and contracts and agreements and then there's rules for high performers uh and we're going to talk a little bit about sales and uh this woman who's trending on tiktok and her whole vibes around sales and uh taking a lot of time off but i wanted to start with um a little bit of banter here you know we haven't talked since biden dropped out of the race so the hot swap has occurred the hot swap has occurred i told you last time we were on the show that um in the wake of the assassination attempt people were rallying around biden and i said i'll forgive you the hot swap prognostication because who could see you know an assassination attempt coming and then you ended up being right anyways now i'm not here to fluff the old ego but i will say uh i expected it to happen and even though i did when it did happen it still felt like a real moment yeah it was a real moment you know and i everybody's so uh caught up in the outcome of this election i i am a moderate and my vote doesn't count uh for me living in california earlier this year and now living in austin texas where i moved to uh so there's your announcement folks people were wondering where i was going to move i'll just tell you right now austin texas i moved and i actually have been in austin for a couple of months as many of you noticed when uh on all in or other times i said i was in austin breaking my teeth eating beef ribs at salt lick but yeah our family uh decided to be homesteaders and we bought a ranch uh now i will still be i will still be uh doing uh a bunch of time in the major cities where our startups are whether that's new york san francisco la um or miami which a lot of our startups are in and so it's a very little change in terms of my actual business life but a big change for our family to live on horse ranch yeah also it's a really big change for my life because i now have a free and open house in the bay area that i can borrow whenever i want absolutely absolutely free properties for sale i know if anybody wants a modern masterpiece in the bay area a ski house in tahoe or a loft in the city all properties are now for sale buy two get 10 off i'm joking there if that would be a lot of cash to care about the 10 discount but uh on the show today everybody we have the end of the whiz google deal meta's incredible new ai model that's open source spotify's sparkling earnings and if we have time what happens if you just take money and give it to people every single month but jason the biggest story is whiz and google are not going to get married no 23 billion dollar deal no happy vcs yeah well i mean this could be a case of going for long-term greed over short-term greed so the deal for 23 billion to google does have a risk of interference from uh different government agencies potentially right all of these deals do whereas an ipo has zero risk and after seeing what happened with um figma and adobe if i was a vc uh in this incredible company that has gotten to this you know call it 20 billion dollar market cap at least the offer was 23 billion and their last private round i think was 10 or 12 billion something in that range um you know the optimal thing to do would be go to go with what's the safest bet plus or minus 20 of the valuation right because this is going to be an extraordinary outcome either way so if i'll kick it back to you what has a better likelihood of hitting 20 20 less than 23 billion is minus 4 billion so let's call it 18 billion would you rather go for the 23 billion in a sale and get all of your money at once would you rather say take 18 billion in a public stock and be able to sell some shares after the lockup or hold some shares and have that optionality if you were a large shareholder here alice oh option b day night weekends and pick a sunday absolutely for a bunch of reasons but the first one is i don't really want to go work for google right i mean if i'm building a company called whiz if i'm the ceo ossoff uh wrap-up work by the way do you know what a person who works at whiz is called they call themselves wizards yeah i mean i was gonna get there i was literally putting i was wizettes
7:43okay congrats to the wizards yeah but but here's the thing to be an independent company means you could set your own culture set your own style of business build products no one's telling you and some different features of the company, what you can and can't do, how to communicate, how to lead, how to hire. And Google is one of those companies that has its own vision and a long time to grow into it. And it has its own way of doing things. And I guarantee you, it's not the way Wiz does things because Wiz is small and Google is enormous. So for me, I think that I would take the bet that you offered.
8:14My question is, what's this thing going to be worth? Because the crazy thing is Google was offering$23 billion for a$350 million ARR company. which is a pretty rich multiple for the current time. Now, it's growing very quickly. Huzzah, fantastic, very happy for it. Let's say that it does do what the CEO wants, which is reach a billion in ARR and go public. First of all, love those goals. That's fantastic. We're going to do a billion and go public. Love it. But today, how hard is it to get a 23X ARR multiple on the public markets? So the question is - Impossible. Yeah, it's, dare I say, impossible in the public markets right now.
8:53you might have some excitement weird things can happen so never say never but you know uh maybe they'll get 12 to 15 times forward-looking revenue this billion dollar goal you know a hundred times 350 million is 35 billion so i guess that offer of 23 billion is pretty rich right um that's where i ended up getting so you said 18 in the future public or 23 now i'll take the 18 i just hope all day it's not worth 12 when it goes public because then the math begins to hurt a little bit more but let's flip it around jason same question to you you're the ceo of whiz google shows up 23 billion taking the check leaving the check so i mean in the current administration i think i'm going public but i'm telling all my investors that we're doing a secondary at 18 billion right now and every employee and every founder gets to sell 20 of their shares so we need a four billion dollar you know or whatever it is a three and a half billion dollar investment to go long and or let's say 10 so we need 1.8 billion dollars in secondary go get me you know uh josh kushner at thrive is that his company where they just spent whatever amount on uh you know buying shares of open ai find me someone like that who loves to you know buy at the top of the market shout out josh kushner soft bank you know somebody who really likes has the guts to do these kind of deals so i don't mean that as a dig you know if you have the guts to make these kind of a deal like josh bishner did with open ai you know or masayoshi san did with countless companies it can pay off in a major way it just gives a little bit of risk but those people are out there so find me one of those and let's just clear 10 of our position the coat there's four co-founders i believe they own roughly 40 of the company yep you know so if those four co-founders can take you know 100 million 200 million off the table right now that gets a jet Least a jet card, get you a nice ski house, pay down some debt.
10:52I mean, let's go. So easy breezy, lemon squeezy. Jet cards only cost like a quarter million a year. They're not as bad as people think. Getting an actual jet is expensive. Jet cards is like middle class venture capital. I think this though, this whole saga does kind of show to me how hard it is to do 2021 style outcomes through an IPO with 2024 revenue multiples. because this is a company that is mind-bendingly good. It's growing so fast. Everyone wants a piece of it. It's got insanely great backers, lots of capital raised, cool culture, moved to New York City, so it's going to be based in the U.S.
11:29to have access to the best capital markets in the history of mankind, and we're looking ahead towards a billion dollars in ARR, and we're saying, maybe the math won't math out when it goes public then. Like, that just doesn't feel like the place we should be when we're discussing a company that could be, could be, the next Deca, Centicorn, whatever, and really change the game. i i'm confused what's broken i think what's broken is if you have a lot of cash you can make five six seven percent uh safe on your money or you can put it into corporate credit like we're just talking about i know that didn't work for the beyond meat folks but there's plenty of stronger companies that have corporate debt that pay 10 12 15 so really capital is going to find you know uh the returns and if it right now in a high interest rate environment you know doesn't think that these companies are going to be valued really well and that M &A is off the table, you know, there's a there's a major discount.
12:23So oh my lord, podcasts, audiobooks, virtual meetings, endless videos, we're producing and consuming more voice data than we ever have. And if your startup is building a product that uses voice data, you need to check out Assembly AI. Assembly AI builds speech to text AI models that can turn your voice data into new product capabilities. All you need is voice data and a few lines of code. For example, VEED.io makes video editing tools that generate the captions you see on our video clips, right? These are really cool. It saves us a ton of time. Well, that would not be possible without Assembly AI crunching all that audio data for VEED.io.
13:06Assembly AI speech to text models are simple, accurate and fast. and they've got the industry's lowest word error rate 30 fewer hallucinations and it's so easy to use so if you want to put your audio data to work and you want to build powerful ai experiences for your customers head to assemblyai.com twist and get 100 hours for free and join over 200 ,000 developers who are building amazing apps with voice data go to assemblyai.com twist a day i like the idea of being public like spotify did if you're public the amount of discipline you have and when i watched the video of daniel today where he did a video you know from sweden on vacation he just looks in the camera and is like we're kicking ass well let me explain to you how much ass we're kicking like that's what every ceo uh aspires towards which is lots of shareholders lots of expectations and a lot of pressure on the team and then you hit those notes and you get rewarded in the public market for they got is it over 200 million subscribers and 600 million monthly active users something in that range he said we'll get to the numbers in a second but i want to play the clip we haven't pulled up for you oh you do great we're going to start at 13 seconds which i believe is when he starts to really spit facts okay taking this quarter the The bottom line is we had a really great quarter.
14:28We are now over 246 million paying subscribers, 626 million monthly active users, and financially we had our biggest free cash flow quarter in the company's history. I really attribute this success to all the innovations that we keep on making to make the product better and better and stickier and stickier. First of all, he's stealing my style. like big glasses bald head too close to the too close to the camera that's me daniel come on calm down but it is a flex to just stand there and be like hello do you see the the swedish landscape behind me great quarter everybody like ah okay i mean this is where we're at is just ceos popping out their phone i don't know where the comms department is he's clearly not reading from a teleprompter i mean he may have rehearsed it once or twice but he's just like hey let me tell you how we're doing here now they went out with a direct listing their stock is i think at an all time high they've got free cash flow and so you know bill gurley my my pal bill gurley always talks about how when you go public you know this forces a a level of focus and that's what they wanted for the ubers and door dashes of the world and it just you know and and for stripe etc and it's so easy to stay private for so long that you have to admire the people who do go public who take the hits sometimes on valuation they they don't take the easy sale and then they get to this point where now spotify has a lot of influence and they have i think reduced their dependency on the music industry a bit by having this unlimited audiobook product which i haven't tried yet i now subscribe to three musics as i find myself accidentally um so i'm going to have consolidate and have apple music for free as part of my apple family plan because i went on that apple family plan that gives you everything then um i got these high fidelity headphones as i talked about a bit shout out to my friends at headphones.com not a sponsor yet uh and uh i bought kubaz q-u-b-u-z which is this incredible high fidelity service where you get like the flax like the original audio files from the studio real difference when you're using proper equipment and then of course i have spotify because i've loved that my whole life and now i find myself like i use spotify for playlists i don't use the apple music and then i use cobuzz for when i'm listening to miles davis or dire straits or some really high fidelity amazing stuff where i want to hear the nuance and i want to actually hear the music so i am enamored by his business i think the podcast stuff he did was bold and audacious now maybe they had some missteps but you know that's part of learning and now that they have that robust advertising business there and they let um you know bill simmons's podcast and joe rogan's podcast in the 2.0 version of this now they're available on youtube and other platforms and i guess they just take the advertising revenue where they can get it in super distributed not exclusive that's a brilliant idea too so you know i i think they could run the table on podcasting if they wanted to i mean if they came to me and said hey this week and startups makes this amount of money would you like us to take it over and we'll pay you i don't know they paid me a 30 premium or something i might take it we've been sold out i might take it and just be like okay yeah you take over the answer sorry to my head sales team we're probably listening to this yeah i was gonna say jamie's gonna have a viewpoint on that one well anyway i'm just saying like if you were a podcaster and they come to you and they look at your revenue and they say hey plus you know we'll give you one point x and x is a you know a three handle or more yes you have no choice but to consider it because they would be guaranteeing and taking at risk and so it's kind of brilliant what they're doing um and i think the sky's the limit for them now they they own audio and i don't know why they're not doing video production more they should be trying to compete with youtube they should be trying to get mr beast next they should be trying to get these youtube channels and say stop publishing on youtube publish to us oh okay i see what you're saying you're not saying they should get into video production you're saying they should get into video hosting yes okay they do host video versions of this podcast and all in and i think they opened it up to everybody now we've been in that beta for a couple years but why not go to a youtuber who you think is awesome for your existing ad base let's say they got an advertising deal with samsung uh you know and they already sponsor call her daddy and they sponsor bill simmons and they sponsor joe rogan like they're they're i think those are their top three yeah okay so they got the ringer and all those dialed in but samsung wants more so they say okay great we're gonna take marquez it's marquez right yes who does like the youtube channel just go to marquez and be like hey what are you making on youtube we'll uh give you a guarantee you can still post to youtube we just want it here first so give us you know 24 hours on spotify and then everything goes there how does marquez not take it i mean if they offered 1.5 well jason right now spotify is going through a period of financial uh strictness so while i like the theory crafting and because i live in spotify from the moment i wake up to the moment i go to sleep totally on board but they've been working on cost control and margin expansion so mr beast i can't imagine being cheap didn't he also do a deal with um amazon prime or something like that yeah that was for a different show though so you know anyway i think these opportunities are out there they would obviously have to be disciplined in doing them probably the first round of deals they did maybe they were less disciplined and learning but now that they understand the model you know if they lose you know tens low tens of millions of dollars across a couple of these deals but they lock in you know advertising and it grows audience and they get more members they've got two ways to win advertising and then subscribers so now let's say this week in startups and all in became part of spotify i'm not having any discussions about that so i'm just speaking completely hypothetically here but if they did make an offer for both of these one of which i own 100 one of which i own 25 and have one of four votes on you know i'd be like hmm at one point again three four five x our existing revenue i would have to take a look at it and um they would then have to make 0.3x extra on the subscribers so if you get some number of net new subscribers okay so you know they could make the same amount in advertising and then actually convert some number of subscribers and there's historical precedent for that working so did you ever watch top gear the old bbc show yeah yeah that was like the number one show the bbc ever produced right i believe dr who and that yeah and so the the three guys ended up leaving and went over to amazon prime and you had to sign up for prime to watch their new show grand tour and you know what people did they signed up because that show was that show had just a rabid audience there is precedent for this it'll be curious to see where daniel eke takes the company now because he's kind of done what he set out to do which was cut costs uh in the last quarter operating expenses were off 16 year over year that's one at every six dollars that's a lot and their operating income went from negative 247 million euro to positive 266 million euro their free cash flow went from 9 million to 490 million euro um and the real the real thing is their paid subs rose 12 their revenue grew 20 because they raised prices at the same time they were cutting staff so their profitability has just gone bonkers because they managed to grow the top line and shrink the cost basis.
22:08I mean, it's kind of a beautiful moment for them. So I wonder when they're going to have the belief in themselves to take a risk again, because I feel like they spent a lot of money on podcasts, maybe a little bit too much, and then they had to talk to Wall Street and say, hey, we're going to get cost under control. We're going to bring this back. Don't worry. They did that. But now, do they stay where they are with the happy Wall Street and stock back in record highs, or do they take another risk and say, we're going to double down on video, audiobooks, whatever it is to break this relationship yeah we we have this as one of our themes uh that we've been working on you and i um for 2025 which is the static team size and that is something i brought up with the ceo of etsy we just we just had the ceo of etsy on the pod it hasn't come out yet great guest by the way and great notes um but the static team size is i think one of these themes that i've been talking about now for two years and it is clearly infected every company what is static team size it means you keep the same number of headcount you empower those individuals to be 20 30 percent more efficient each year with tools like ai and then you fire the weakest performers and replace those with higher performers and instead of trying to grow headcount because you can uh and because everybody has done that since google started this trend and facebook matched them in this war for talent you don't compete in the war for talent you take your existing static team size the same thousand people two thousand people in the case of etsy or how many people it is here and you just say we're demanding excellence we're giving you tools we're going to give you more stock options we're going to keep the team size the same if we're more if we're 30 more productive each which is i think you and i become 30 more percent more productive every year right i feel that way um if you're 30 20 30 more productive each year um i would rather get raises than increase the number of people at the company that i have to manage or that need to be managed and that we need to hire hiring is brutal and time consuming managing people brutal and time consuming just find great people you trust empower them and be done with it so you you raised so one generally speaking i agree i do think our productivity is rising especially if you live at the forefront of new tooling like i don't know since i've joined uh the twist family i've learned how to use both notion and coda you know they've been fantastic i now can do a lot with them that i didn't do before i used to live in google docs i still kind of do yeah i do think we improve over time the the reason why i think it doesn't quite work out the way people want it to is that when a company can grow revenue and keep headcount flat they don't tend to change their salary increase chart and so people tend to get a bit more work without the kind of more than a two or three percent raise and this is why i think we see so much job hopping and so forth so if a company said we're going to keep headcount very low and we're going to grow and we're going to take a big chunk of that new profit and we're going to pay ourselves with it versus bonuses yeah that is actually that would be actually a really good you know for the for the employment side to be saying hey we kept we did our part we did more with less and then we achieve 30 percent hey let's you know we have a two percent standard raise three percent standard cost of living raise hey maybe we should talk about four percent maybe we should talk about five percent maybe we should talk a little bonus here maybe some equity and i think actually that is a really healthy dynamic um and so yeah you do hear about the complaining like you know oh you know we we got we laid everybody off and now i have to do more work you know the the people who are valuable today are the ones who learn the tools and just you know when we do show notes and research i'm taking podcasts or and cutting and pasting the transcript i do this myself i take the transcript i put it into claude and i say give me the 10 most important bullet points here with citations yada yada and so i take the transcript of somebody who's going to be on the show like here's the etsy founder you know here's their video from four years ago and i'll watch that video and sometimes you guys give me the summaries and i just say hey what are the major bullet points and give me the time stamps boom that that's uh you know a half day for a producer it's five hours of producer time to listen to that bond and write me you know those notes yeah so you know i do think it's a there's a great dynamic here for both sides of the table to you know uh get a little extra comp and a little extra efficiency in these companies and then you know what can happen with all the other talented people they can get ubi how's that transition i used you stole it i stole your transition i'm sorry back up to the facebook area because we're gonna talk about some ai models but i was like you know what i think this isn't trending in a the worker money direction let's just say the ubi let's go listen a strong sales team can make all the difference for a b2b startup but if you're going to hire sharks, you need to let them hunt and you can't slow them down with compliance hurdles like SOC 2.
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27:40Stop slowing your sales team down and use Vanta. Get$1 ,000 off at vanta.com slash twist. That's vanta.com slash twist for$1 ,000 off your SOC 2. I want to stay on that last point though. So if you had a company that was growing, let's say 30 % per year, growing headcount 5 % per year, because you're going to add another person in the mail room whatever you know and then the company keeps doing better and better and better everyone's happy if you offered people something like a pension or something like an old school style pension i wonder if you would have like akin to a hundred percent employee retention because that would be something that no one else offers nobody has pensions anymore because we all the biggest you know the biggest problem with pensions right now why would be insane to offer a pension is because with the gains in ai we actually don't know how long people are going to live so oh you're talking about the long tail of like life life extension life expectancy could be 110 you you are for a pension now like the new york times i mean this is an incredibly weird topic to bring up but you know we we know the tail end of the pension people at the new york times like probably john markoff or you know i'm trying to think of the old school tech journalists saw ansell sure came before us you know the people walt mossberg people who are 70 now to my 53 and you're 35 congratulations happy birthday you are very old um just as i told everybody man to get those 18 years back i give you every penny um they got pensions they got pensions at the new real ones like actual pensions and it was like you're gonna get 50 of your salary indefinitely you're and it's probably your last three years so like you hit right comp of 150 a year at the new york times or 125 a year they took those last three years they averaged them out or something probably and then you're going to make 60 000 a year which is what the cub reporter is getting on the way in so it's almost like john markoff or sol hansel if they did hit those pensions i'm assuming they did steve law some of those folks yeah they're probably getting 60 000 pensions right now so and they count this headcount i mean it could bury a company if they live to 110 so morally though do you think that pensions are a a good or do you think that they are something that is morally neutral and therefore the fact that we've moved away from them isn't a loss they're not aligned properly and they will bankrupt any company or system that employs them or you know or that strategy because people used to live to 65 and the average lifespan was 71 for a man so you'd work to 65 you get your gold thing and you had six years of pension if your wife happened to live you know uh you know an extra eight years i think probably life expectancy in these cases were like 72 78 something in that range so they looked at it like hey you put in your 30 years and we paid you another six and we paid a quarter to your spouse because there were some sort of triggers where like your spouse could get a portion of it you know what really has to happen is we need to do what they do in australia which is the super annotation funds where you're forced to put 12 of your salary every year nine percent of your salary into essentially what's a 401k because of freedom in the united states and you know a lot of weird things uh like democracy and uh it being bought and sold by either side of the aisle every four to eight years we don't have a thoughtful approach to retirement the really thoughtful approach you need only look at australia everybody in australia is happy they have no stress because they had a gun put to their head and they said you have to put nine percent into this super annotation fund you can't touch and everybody complained and then they watched the stock market rip and they're like yeah you know what i'm gonna retire at 60 and i'm gonna give my job to a younger person so they actually have a high functioning society there where people in order for people you know in a in a static team size how do you get the slot somebody has to retire somebody has to retire right you have to give up the seat so somebody gives up the seat you and i retire two new hosts of this week in startups boom and the cycle goes anew and that's what super annotation would do no i i'm here for it but we do have some data out on a new ubi study uh it's universal basic income giving people money for free i know if you are an american that's blowing your mind but they did it and the experiment was for three years involving 1 000 lower income people selected from illinois and texas they got a thousand dollars a month there was also a control group that got fifty dollars a month just to show kind of like two different data sets and this is all done through altman's sam altman's non-profit open research and unlike with open ai they actually did drop a lot of data and information about this we have parsed through it um they broke it down into individual buckets of findings including entrepreneurship health home uh and a couple of other things i have a bunch of information from the study itself here jason but i don't know exactly where you would like me to start we can talk about results we can talk about um expectations where do you want to dig on well i first want to start with you know sam altman does interesting things with his money um so he put 14 million dollars i understand of his own money into this and i think it was while he was a y combinator uh was president y combinator and some other group of people put in the rest of the 60 million and i think this is a worthy test because i have deep concerns about free money because you know i worry about motivation however i'm smart enough to know that all experiments are worth trying to get more data yeah and so i am thrilled that this occurred and i'm very interested i understand some of the points here but i'm just interested to get into it because what people seem to think about ubi uh and talk about prescient you know we're now really talking about ubi at this moment because of what we expect from ai so ubi three little letters ai in the words of trump two little letters okay very important ai two letters okay you can't just drop a random trump but i'm trying to say no sorry sorry nasty nasty lady running secret service okay i mean slope group okay i don't know if she's qualified or not speaking about hire and fire fast uh she didn't make it through that congressional hearing i think that was the most panned performance by any elected official i've ever seen in front of congress no partisanship just pure anger and just i mean it was infuriating to me because when i when i saw the clips i saw of her because you know i i like to think that as americans there's like a civic duty pride especially in the the pinnacles of leadership you know when you're the ceo when you're the director when you're the president whatever it is on the board and all i saw there with her obfuscation obfuscation thank you obfuscation i was she's got a pension back to pensions she's got a retirement and it was so obvious to me because anytime you want to understand the world just understand the incentives if she resigns she probably gets less than if she's relieved of duty like any other person there are triggers so if they said to her we want you to resign and she says okay that's interesting um they're like so you resign nope because if i resign my pension is this if you relieve me of duty i get this acceleration and i get my pension i guarantee you when we double click on this her whole farce of not answering questions is going to be based on her personal economics in filibustering so she went on to that you know that whole rigmarole was done just so she could get some amount of somebody should have just come in and just said listen we'll give you everything you're relieved of duty you can call a resignation call whatever you want and i learned this when i was young in entrepreneurship i got mentored and uh a human resources person uh said here's what i want you to do because we were firing somebody and we were firing somebody paradoxically for harassment uh a woman harassing another woman in a company and i it was like i'm 27 years old running my first magazine and one 23 or 24 year old woman told another woman about her anatomy and her body like i was just like what was going on like why am i in the middle of this and that person complained and wanted to sue it was nuts so the person says here's how you handle it you um take a check for one month of salary and then you have a letter here of the person being terminated and then in this one you have the resignation letter for them to sign the separation agreement walk into the room say sorry it didn't work out i know it's a it's a complicated situation there is one month severance if you sign this piece of paper here is your termination if you don't and no month severance and your desk is being cleaned out right now they're in the conference room your desk is being cleaned out right now all your accounts are turned off so you're no longer working here and i just do you hold the two envelopes and the person goes thank you for my severance and they send the piece of paper and we're done is that how it went of course of course yeah nobody i mean and i said we will never speak of this again because you resigned it was your choice you made some decision to leave as opposed to we fired you for cause here's the letter yes but there's one last clause you didn't you didn't add which is and don't call us for a reference because it's not gonna it's not gonna go in your favor after we've gone through this and we've we've let you go and i wonder i think if you make a threat like that about references maybe that could be double actionable i think what you do is just we will not i think that yeah the last time i had to deal with that humorous thing is we just don't give references because it's too much liability so a lot of companies today have a rule we do not give references good bad or otherwise because of liability reason we will tell you when the person started and when they left those are the two pieces of data you can have so anyway let's get into this ubi because i do think this is super interesting eight sleep has released the pod for ultra besides heating and cooling you know all about that now it elevates automatically which is so nice for reading or if you want to do a little netflix and chill it is the best way to prevent snoring which your spouse is going to be thrilled with so pod four ultra can cool you down on each side of the bed to 20 degrees fahrenheit below room temperature so you and your partner stay cool even in a heat wave when you have the pod four ultra man it is like being just absolutely cool calm and collective you're going to get a great night's sleep also the pod four has an adjustable base that fits between your mattress and your bed frame so you've got reading and sleeping positions to help you unwind after a hectic day not only that eight EightSleep has amazing sensors, 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39:30So you can get it down under now. Okay. Well done to my friends at 8sleep. Tell me what you found interesting here. NPR did a little bit of digging. I'm going to quote them because they have good verbiage. So overall, people who got the cash payments worked a bit less. 1.3 hours less per week on average. but that does include some people who are logging 50 to 60 hours a week so some people were working marginally less but they were already working time and a half and keep in mind that these residents had an income of below 28 000 so 12 12 000 a year is like you know 50 raise it's huge um there's also some data by the way this was tax free because it was a gift in some way or fell under the gift clause, I believe.
40:14So they were not paying tax on this$12 ,000. Okay. And then also the study found that it did drive it more interest in entrepreneurship, but it wasn't until the third year of payments that some folks really kind of got that bug. And I was trying to figure out why there was a lag between cash showing up and more entrepreneurial spirit. And I think I figured it out. Okay. If you're just getting by, barely, and you get some more money, you're going to fix the big things first your kids shoes are falling apart your car is broken you're going to really get everything broken dishwasher whatever it is yeah you maybe your ac doesn't work maybe you're behind on the light bill whatever it is you're going to work through all of that build a little base save a little money and then you're going to start thinking i should do something with that money then you're going to work on your company your idea um they did notice that there was a greater impact on entrepreneurship and kind of like the the desire to start a business and ideas for a new business amongst women and minorities.
41:14And so that was kind of cool to see. Bigger impact there in terms of driving entrepreneurship interest. And then something that I really, really found fascinating was, and this is a quote from the study itself, recipients reported decreased problematic alcohol use and some types of illicit drug abuse. We also find notable improvements in stress, mental distress, and food security during the first year of study, comma but the effects fade by the second year so people get used to free money is what you take from that and so this is a perfect example of a mixed bag right and so if you were to tell me what i expected it would be a mixed bag because not everybody's the same i'm sure some people get the money and they take it for granted and they spend it on booze and i'm sure some people get the money and they say you know what i've always wanted to be an entrepreneur and once i get you know my credit cards paid off i'm going to think about starting a business so it's a mixed bag and probably what needs to happen now is you do a second study where you build on this one and try four different modalities and i think you know if i were going to build another study on top of this instead of offering a thousand dollars in free money a month and doing just strictly ubi i would tie it to hey you can get these ubi payments if you take an entrepreneur course right so something's tied to it right um and that could be i think you know the combination of ubi plus something else you know paired with it i think could be interesting and the reason i think that's interesting is because having watched what i saw happen in the middle east where i met a lot of young people you know your age or younger who had the king abdullah scholarship or this scholarship they had told their citizens go anywhere in the world not only will we pay your tuition you don't have to apply for a scholarship just pay your tuition we'll pay for your apartment not only will pay for your apartment and your living expenses we're going to give you a stipend in other words ubi what happened a whole generation of people in saudi abu dhabi doha you know the entire region flocked to the west got degrees and graduate degrees and then came home with massive knowledge to build their economies and so i love the idea of tying it to education and then seeing what the outcome there would be right i mean what do you you think what would be you have an idea of how to level up the study and what you would do next well i would change the geographics i would change the dollar amounts i would change the frequency i would also set up one program with triggers so for example you know we're going to give you a thousand bucks a month but if you get a job that pays 20 more we're going to jack it up to 1500 a month just tag on some incentives and just see how fast people react to them because we talk a lot in economics about price elasticity and you kind of demand elasticity, I don't think we have enough data points here to actually see how people's behaviors are willing to change or able to change under these circumstances.
44:25So I want to go back to what you said. I love an experiment. I love seeing this. I love the fact that it also had some really cool impact on people's lives. So going from the macro to the micro, one of the study participants said that when he learned about the cash transfers, he went to his boss and said that he wanted to cut his hours so that he could spend as much time as possible with his four-year-old son. And that's the one thing that I think that these conversations often miss is that it's impossible to measure the GDP of joy. And if people get a little bit more time to be alive and themselves and just off the grind for a little bit, just a little reduction in the noise and pressure of life, I mean, I struggled to not view that as incredibly valuable to my fellow humans.
45:16I don't know how to measure it, but I would like to focus on both helping people work, found companies and thrive in the economy and boost joy if we can. I mean, you have to ask yourself, how big are the entitlement programs we already have in the U.S.? And, you know, we have welfare, we have food stamps, we have unemployment. employment is a long list of things that are done already so people get a little triggered by ubi like oh my god we're giving free money it's a wealth transfer all the stuff it's like uh it's already happening folks it's just got a lot of different names and programs on it that are incredibly expensive to run and are incredibly easy to game so one test i would love to see a state run is to say what are the collective value okay we got 10 million people live in this state We are spending this amount, a billion dollars a year, on these entitlement programs that 1 million people take advantage of.
46:13So we got a million people, and they're collectively getting$10 ,000 a year. Let's take, you know, 100 ,000 of them and just give them the money on$1 ,000 a month. And they can either opt to get the money or be in the entitlement program. Oh. See what I'm saying? like because i do feel like welfare food stamps you know all of these things create a game with a lot of overhead with a lot of constituents who are now you know um have incentives to grow those programs so you got somebody who's working at like we have in san francisco the homeless industrial complex well they're going to ask for more money each year they're going to spend the money they have each year and it wants to grow as opposed to if you said to you know a group of homeless people uh or people without shelter whatever whatever the correct way to say homeless unsheltered people thank you or as we called people in the 70s junkies uh in this case you know here's the pile of money that you were going to get anyway jason i think you're like here's the thing i didn't get it quite right is it supposed to be this never mind we're going back to the 70s we're going back to the 70s just straight up i mean if you if you shoot heroin you're a junkie that's that's super valid i'm not i just the the word called it junk and if you enjoy junk you were junkies anyway why don't we try something like that and you know every time you take a scientific thoughtful approach to this everybody gets triggered the right the left the people who are benefit from it and i think of all the money we spend i wonder how much actually gets to the person in need.
47:53Oh yeah. It's probably less than 50 cents on the dollar actually ever makes it to the person. There's an amazing comedian who I'm not going to be able to find the clip for this, this segment. Cause I didn't know where I was going to get here, but he says, um, that he was giving money to a homeless person and someone said, Oh, you know, don't, don't give him the money. You know, he's just going to use it on drink and drugs. And the comedian said, well, what did you think I was going to spend it on? And then, and then the person said, no, no, give us the money and then we'll make sure they'll get it.
48:22And we happen to have like a gorgeous, you know,$90 square foot office space in Soma. And we have 17 executives here, you know, who are wearing somehow Chanel and Prada and they get$150 ,000 a year to work at a homeless organization. I'm like, oh, mistake, error. But what you're describing is block grants, but not in the federal money to state block grant, but in state to individual block grants, essentially an option to grab. uh not to cry that sounds slightly rude but just to accept the same level of care if you will but in a cash form versus a service form just like school vouchers right and so what these kind of concepts do is allow the individual to have sovereignty as opposed to be part of the nanny state so do you want to have to get in line to get your welfare check to get your unemployment to get your food stamps to get whatever it is and i'm not saying i don't think those programs should exist i think it's great that we have a society with a safety net what i'm saying is collectively is that money efficiently deployed to the person who needs it and so i think your idea of tying it to outcomes around your employment or your savings etc like why not give the thousand dollars and say we're putting 200 of it into your retirement account 200 of it into you know uh the qqq or whatever index fund and then you're getting 600 now you can't take that 200 out for your retirement until you're 55 and then you can only take out x percent per year five percent a year for whatever and then the other 200 you know you can take it out 10 at a time when but you can't go below 5 000 in your account right now that could get really interesting so they're forced to watch 500 500 000 5 000 in their you know wealth front account e-trade account wherever it's custodian and now you have to watch that grow every year and now you're part of equity so that can just be so much more powerful in terms of educating people and that's really what you know i think is the missing component here is people who are at the bottom don't understand economics and and jd vance talked about this in hillbilly uh elegy a whole bunch which was social capital what's social capital it means the people around you and the circumstance you're in that socialization um educates you and provides opportunities if you are growing up and your parents are attorneys like the chances of you knowing how to become a lawyer are 100 if you grew up in appalachia or in deep in brooklyn and you never met a lawyer in your life and your parents you've got a single parent and they're you know on welfare or whatever you don't even know how an attorney gets a degree and jd van said that in his book which is he didn't actually know that lawyers needed to go to law school he didn't understand what law school was before he you know got to yell in other places and you know whatever you can think what you want about the person it's a good book to read to kind of get some insight into you know the some of the challenges poor people have you have you read it by the way oh i own a copy i have i have not read reading i'm really you know i i read so much non-fiction during the day that at night i am a 100 fiction guy and i really need to get off of that but there's so many good books to read it's a quick read it's a quick read it's easy breezy it's like and it's and it's a great listen by the it's got a great narrator on audible shout out to my friends in audible dude so anyway great job all my money i love you know what i do is i get the platinum every year 200 bucks i've had it for over 10 years so i've spent probably 3 000 on audiobooks you know what one good idea in your life one change in your life pays for the whole thing what is what is platinum there's a platinum program i don't know if they promote it anymore but they give you 20 credits for 200 or 25 credits for two hundred dollars and winds up being eight dollars a book but you know sometimes the books on audible are 35 or 25 yeah i know or 15 it's like it's variable they just abstract that away you have 20 credits it nets out to 10 bucks a piece when i and i've had years where i get through the 20 audiobooks by you know the summer and i just re-up it earlier and it they actually give you the option buy five more credits 10 more credits so i just have always 20 credits sitting in there i don't even think for a second if i'm going to read the book i just think this book i might read at some point i'm going to buy it put it in my library download it and have it there for my next flight boom yep all right that's my strategy agree with that anymore i do it slightly differently but the same result but we you have a board meeting so we're going to move on to meta's new ai model because this is probably biggest news of the google whizz thing this is the biggest news of the day so everybody uh meta has a new ai model it is called llama 3.1 405b for 405 billion um parameters yeah my brain just forgot that word mid-sentence um it was trained on 15 trillion tokens and 16 000 nvidia h100 gpus so an enormous cluster an enormous data set and meta says that this is the first openly available model that rivals the top ai models when it comes to state-of-the-art capabilities in general knowledge steerability math tool use and multilingual translation the thing that i think matters the most here jason is meta is challenging the top dogs using an open source approach so before open source was lagging open ais and anthropics here we have meta going right to the top of the charts with an open source model which i think actually very much changes the game and makes some of the closed source ai companies look a little bit expensive yeah and if you are working in a large corporation in america um and we were sitting here 30 years ago open source was like this weird thing that you didn't trust you bought ibm you bought microsoft you you know you took the safe route then open source became the safe route because you weren't tied to a vendor you weren't tied to their price gouging or their release schedule you could actually get in the code if you needed to and alter it so once it became stable to use open source and people felt comfortable doing it for their web servers for you know their databases it was like one step after the next that corporate america and that's what this is really about if you are a corporation whether it's a startup or it's you know ge you trust open source today more than you trust investing in a big company's solution now that doesn't mean people don't still use oracle databases of course they do at scale the sla is incredible doesn't mean people stop using office for an open source version of microsoft office that's a completely fine product majority of corporations use it but it is an alternative that um puts a little pressure on the proprietary solutions and that's what you're seeing in the market today you know inside.com i'm working with z who is our new ceo over there and we're building a new app and the app is related to news and community and and we're using a little ai in it and we're constantly having this discussion do we want to use you know the api from closed ai i'm sorry open ai do we want to use perplexities api you know you test everything but then you're like at the end of the day you want to have one of those companies rug pull us now facebook's been the ultimate rug puller remember zynga and some of these other companies they rug pulled everybody yep so you know they do not allow access to their api anymore they don't allow you'd have access to the graph anymore but they're behind so when you're behind you open source when you're ahead you go proprietary none of these people are honest about that it is an absolute lie that they are pro open source or they're pro closed source they are pro whatever wherever they have an advantage and the you know if you look at google google's like android open source everything's incredible like can you open search your api for the algorithm and search they're like oh no no that's a black box we can't do that we couldn't even if we wanted to it's impossible it's impossible it's impossible for us to do that and it's like okay but duck duck go and brave has this new awesome search engine that has by the way shout out to brave i love that browser it's my default browser highly recommend brave their vpn and then you know saving yourself from all advertising and tracking unbelievable product they're not currently a sponsor they were in the past i've used brave on all my devices since day one i am absolutely militant about protecting my privacy um in that regard maybe two but uh they have a new search engine with an api so it is possible to have a search api by the way and so yeah i think this is super significant and what's most significant about it is that zuck is engaged very you know he's on vacation he just got off the beach you can tell his hair he's got either he's using the sea spray salt spray for his hair um it's a new innovation since you lost your hair and i'm barely got whatever i got left here but i've used the salt spray it gives you like a right off the beach look but i have the feeling that's his beach house i was looking at the wood paneling i think that's it i think he's in kawaii right now i don't think you have to use salt spray if you um own half the world i'm pretty sure you just go to your if you own half a kawaii and you built a fence up and built a bunker 100 feet below ground yeah i don't i'm guessing he he got off the beach and surfing wave surfing whatever he's doing to put on his gold chain and to do this podcast that tells you everything you need to know the dude realizes he blew 40 50 billion on vr headsets and ar that nobody wants i mean all that people want are the ray bands to take pictures of their kids that's the beginning and end of it so that product doa maybe in a decade it won't be i think in a decade if the ray bands actually work sure why not sure um but they don't work as currently thing and now he's just so engaged you see it his eyes he's looking at this going oh i'm actually i'm doing something that could grow my company and that is worth the investment now 16 000 i think you said it was 16 000 h100s or something those go 20 40 000 a pop maybe put it at 30 that's a half billion dollars in hardware um and he's not done buying that hardware so you know compared to vr though ai is cheap you know it's a it's a bargain if you're a bargain and he still owns the h100s by the way it's not like you use them once and throw them away no he still got them so you know that 16 000 cluster will be 160 000 will be 1.6 million and continue on from there so absolutely fantastic for everybody that this is occurring most of all starting your point and my point together so your point about zuck being locked in engaged ready to rock super dialed in and my point about the importance of this being open, we have a clip from Zuck talking about his, was from the podcast you're referring to, and he's talking about his response to Apple and how that led to him thinking about open source and building in a more free setting.
59:57So John, can we run that clip? I was a little shocked by how directly you called out Apple and their closed approach. Can you kind of expand on that and where Apple has been a blocker for meta? Yeah, I think it's a little bit soul crushing when you go build features that are what you believe is good for for your community and then you're told that you can't ship them because some company wants to put you in a box so that they can better compete with you is he talking about himself or he's talking about apple i think i think mark pink has said the same thing about zuck when they uh shipped zinga and uh farmville and zinga poker what we should do is we should take that clip again and then scroll down all the headlines of like Facebook turns off, Facebook kills, Facebook, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:00:41But I mean, there we have Mark Zuckerberg, 30 or 40 minutes of one of the five or six tech CEOs who matters time is a non-trivial thing to get your hands on. Yeah. And that is an impressive amount of communication and candor. So I think that Zuck, to your point about investing money in something that is working for his business, I bet you right now he's walking a couple inches taller because everyone's been raving about this before 3.1, 4.5b came out, people were talking about it. It had amazing stats. People wanted to see it in practice. And we have a chart here from Meta just showing the overall score so people can see why this one matters.
1:01:20Basically, and I'm going to gist this down for everybody. Each column here is a different model and each row is a different test. You want to have higher scores. And as you can see, Llama 3.1, 4.5b competes well with what we're seen from open ai and from anthropic etc so i think he's uh i think after getting beat up for years over his ar vr bets no one really wants the metaverse i bet you zuck feels reinvigorated by this and that's why he has that broccoli hairdo he thinks he's a zoomer well and you know losing sucks and everybody mocking you for changing the name of your company um and blowing 40 billion like you know he's a human um you want to be loved you want to be respected um and you know he he's never been he was always kind of like no matter how much money he made no matter how big facebook got everybody always thought he he's just a memmic machine is that the right word memmic um yeah i know i know you're referring to memmic theory you know the thing that teal was always in of like copying and then caring about everybody around you thought he just copied myspace friendster and did it better never had an original idea bought oculus bought instagram bought whatsapp you know there's very few things that actually zuckerberg didn't steal in the history of facebook it's all either acquired or stolen there was no original idea there right like poke like there was no original idea even the news feed like he didn't pioneer it friend feed did they bought it yeah so people don't remember the history of this but i think you know he told his team i don't want your ideas i want you to just copy it and he took and that's why the instagram founders left because they were like we have our own ideas weren't pretty when they were just like just do stories kill snapchat right and there was this joke in the valley that evan spiegel was the hardest working person at facebook because he was their pre product manager exactly he was like the product manager he was working two jobs because all they did was They stole ephemeral messaging.
1:03:27They sold stories. They just kept stealing everything that he did, streaks, et cetera. You know, I think Zuck feels like he's not an innovative person. He's just an executor. And I think he, you know, now wants to actually put a stamp on something. And, you know, maybe he will. So good for him. You know, I hope it works out. There is one last element of this that I think is important to bring up. We have talked about AI safety, regulatory capture, AI regulation, and then the closed versus open source AI debate. Zuck makes a very interesting point. And I read his lengthy essay announcing these models in his own philosophy.
1:04:01And he says this. I'm going to just quote this. There is an ongoing debate about the safety of open source AI models. And my view is that open source AI will be safer than the alternatives. I think governments will conclude it's in their best interest to support open source because it will make the world more prosperous and safer. So doesn't like Apple's closed model thinks open AI, if you will, is the way to move forward with development. I got to say, I wonder what this does to the value of your anthopics and your open AIs because they're not better and they're more expensive. i mean until they launch um a hosted api version of you know their models and a consumer 20 dollar version and enterprise 20 dollar version that's really what suck needs to do or somebody needs to take that model and do it there was a note that you couldn't use his stuff if you had over 100 million or maybe it was 250 million users so this open source model you're not allowed to just take it and put it in a in an at scale company but really what has to happen is if they are going to defeat open ai they need to have an app that does and matches the open ai app which you know i think tens of millions of people are paying for open ai on enterprise like we do at launch and uh you know some number of consumers pay for it as well so i don't know why that doesn't exist yet but that would be the next card i think probably by the first quarter of next year uh there'll be a meta ai app a standalone app and you'll be able to access inside the apps right which already has that little search bar but look for a you know a chat gpt app competitor and that's really where i don't know why these other models don't have the focus on the fit and finish of an app because i have been using that every day multiple times a day i will take out my phone and ask it questions using the voice like the her mode uh scarlett johansson mode uh i'll call it from now on so i'll use scarlett johansson more trouble just again i'm in more trouble just a bigger settlement i'm trying to get scar joe a bigger settlement shout out to my car joe yeah shout out to my pal um but you know the scar joe mode and um also just research mode you know where you and i do the show i have chat gpt open and i was when we were doing our discussion of ubi i just said entitlement programs tell me what the biggest are just to refresh my memory and i always just say do citations it gives me the citations i feel relatively good now reading those statistics in 4-0 but you know you can't do that with this model you don't have that you know grok doesn't have that fit and finish yet so claude i don't even know if claude has an app yet but it needs to be in the app format that is the interface so i think look for that's my nostracanis prediction is we'll have a competitive meta app and it will be 10 bucks a month 99 bucks a year or ad supported in some way and that's going to be fait accompli and then we'll see who's well no just going to see who's better at apps sam altman and open ai or zuckerberg and meta and i think we already know the answer to that question of who can get more users for their app zuckerberg releases a competitor to open ai app i think open ai loses 50 of their value as a company i think they're literally get cut in half so that's my other prediction is open ai's valuation gets cut in half by a competitive app zuckerberg will copy that app pixel by pixel and then add a couple features and he'll make it free did you say no there's your nostracanis nostracanis because i thought i thought you mispronounced it at first i'm like oh you got that one wrong i'm like oh no it's chasing yeah after i got the uh after i got the hot swap correct now my friends are calling me nostricanus oh yeah in fairness i told them they had to call me nostricanus i was not i was not going to bring up the question of aster turfing in regards to that comment um i can't improve on that so we have to go uh a couple of others for for our friends um episode 2000 is coming up if you are subscribed to the schwist newsletters don't forget we are collecting everyone's favorite episodes moments and themes from episode 1000 to 2000 um we are also jason you told me to ask you we have a twist 500 party coming up oh yes you know you guys are doing such a great job on the twist 500 go to twist500.com a shout out to our friends at coda who make a great product they're not the official sponsors of this um we just love their product they have sponsored the show before and i just think the world of their product but if you go there you'll start to see you know it's getting a little more advanced you'll see that we now have it by stage we have it by topic and you know we're going to just keep growing this um and figuring out different views and i love to throw events and so you know the show the advertising on this week in startups once again sold out so we sold out the year alex once again um and you know it's only july or whatever so this happens to us we run out of inventory so my poor sales team is like can you come up with a new product and so i was thinking and i'm just brainstorming here but i'm thinking of doing a twist 500 party maybe doing in three cities you know we do like a new york a bay area and in austin texas and we tell and we do three times a year anybody who's uh works at this in a at a twist 500 company will get you know two tickets to the event so you know if for the management team let's say top 10 employees founders whatever so then i was thinking well what else could you do there and i was thinking about making it a one day just party then i was thinking you know in the early days when i did tech crunch 50 which was the idea i came up with with mike arrington your old boss or i don't know if you ever worked for him i've never i've actually spoken to mike arrington for a total of i think 30 seconds my entire life congratulations that's more than enough he was nice to me in those 30 seconds if you gave it another 90 seconds you might have had a different outcome it's a joke folks it's a joke folks he's a pretty promulgely guy um anyway putting it aside um what i did in that event was it was a gift back to the community and i said let's give everybody a free table um in a trade show area and you know we'll just have 100 tables and we'll have 50 people on stage and everybody launch a new product we wound up renting the tables i think for a thousand dollars for two days just to cover the cost which was more than that but you know there's a little cost to the trade show area so i'm thinking of two ideas um some sort of a party like a lawn party food trucks no agenda just for the twist 500 which is the top private technology companies in the world defined as because people have been asking me our definition we're defining these as the companies we think will have the biggest return on investment so just so we're clear we believe these will have the biggest outcomes in other words if you own shares in them as an employee as a founder as an investor consultant or if you were to buy them in the secondary market we're we're going to say we believe alex and i that these are the ones that will get the biggest return now we're not going to be right on that you have to make your own financial decisions but we're just going to take a stab at that right of the 50 000 companies these are the top one percent therefore with our editorial judgment we think it will have the second so that's what i'm thinking about i'm open to people's ideas and um i was also thinking about maybe renting uh something like the san mateo fairgrounds and just having three or four stages and then all 500 companies can get a booth or like a tabletop where they show what they're working on now you know andrel or stripe may not care uh to have a little booth there but the other 200 you know who are up in commerce series a and below might really appreciate that yeah and then we invite um you know the top 100 companies or a hundred companies we think are interesting to give a 20 minute talk with a 10 minute q a and so you got three stages two days and make it just like a big festival right so that's my thinking right now is some sort of event to celebrate these companies and let them come together and um yeah as long as there's a big focus on letting the people just mingle and and connect and cross-pollinate i'm so and also i love the food in all those places so I'm in I will be the first person there I'm totally into it but we have to go everybody don't forget like and subscribe on the YouTubes we did not get to audience queues that's because we ran out of time I have a list from the team I'm going to try to respond after the show we appreciate you all goodbye
From the publisher
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Todays show:
Alex Wilhelm joins Jason to discuss the end of the Wiz-Google deal (5:37), Spotify's performance (13:36), Universal Basic Income (UBI) (27:49), Meta's AI strategy (53:05), and more!
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Timestamps:
(0:00) Jason and Alex kick off the show
(5:37) The end of the Wiz-Google deal
(12:24) AssemblyAI - Get 100 free hours to start building at https://www.assemblyai.com/twist
(13:36) Spotify's successful quarter
(21:41) Daniel Ek's strategy and Spotify's future risks
(26:57) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://www.vanta.com/twist
(27:49) Universal basic income (UBI)
(38:05) Eight Sleep - Head to https://www.eightsleep.com/twist and use code TWIST to get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra.
(39:34) Findings and implications from a recent UBI study backed by Sam Altman
(48:22) The efficiency and impact of welfare programs
(53:05) Meta's AI developments
(59:58) Mark Zuckerberg's thoughts on Apple and open source AI
(1:06:50) Predictions for Meta's competitive moves
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Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp
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Mentioned on the show:
https://ai.meta.com/blog/meta-llama-3-1
https://x.com/rowancheung/status/1815763595197616155?t=1204
https://x.com/eldsjal/status/1815691024473166268?s=12
https://www.axios.com/2024/07/23/spotify-profit-q2-2024-earnings
https://x.com/smilleralert/status/1815372032621879628/photo/1
https://www.openresearchlab.org/findings/entrepreneurship
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SPOT
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Follow Alex:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm/
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Follow Jason:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis
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Thank you to our partners:
(12:24) AssemblyAI - Get 100 free hours to start building at https://www.assemblyai.com/twist
(26:57) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://www.vanta.com/twist
(38:05) Eight Sleep - Head to https://www.eightsleep.com/twist and use code TWIST to get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra.
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Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland
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