I knew Milton was a fraud. You know, I got a pretty good eye for this. There are people who are delusional and I would say not thoughtful. And then there are people who are delusional and competent. And I love me the latter, but incompetent delusional people, I mean, they just incinerate money, competent delusional people change the world. And they might incinerate some money. But you know, if you think, hey, I'm going to put a computer on everybody's desk, can your bulk aids and your company, you make good software and you're aggressive and you understand distribution and whatever, you know, like you might just make it happen. And that's what we do all day long as venture capital. We're looking for those delusional. Another word would be ambitious, competent people.
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All right, everybody. Welcome back to this weekend startups. We go live three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and this week we get Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday with me, the L director, the director, Lon Harris. You can follow him on Twitter, x, x.com slash L O and S. And we've got a full news docket today. So let's just rip through it and you can follow the docket at this week in startups.com slash docket. We also have a bunch of links on that docket. And when you go to the docket, you'll see links to everybody's socials, but we're also experimenting with some communities. We have a subreddit which we're cleaning up and getting rid of the spam and we have a LinkedIn group for startup founders. We have a Twitter X community.
And yeah, we've got a Slack community. We're just going to figure out where you all like to hang out. And we'll start out by asking you questions about your startup. Hopefully that gets everybody's conversations going. And each community has to have a purpose and each podcast has a purpose. The purpose of this podcast is to talk about startups, technology, innovation and founders.
Once in a while, we drift. We drift over to politics as it relates to technology. We drift into finance and culture as it relates to entrepreneurship. But let's get started. So, yeah, first item we got to talk about you. We're posting about this yesterday on social media. There is a new J trade. Oh, actually has come in Howard Hughes Holdings. Now, Acman is comparing this project to Warren Buffett's famous transformation of Berkshire Hathaway from a failing textile manufacturer into a diversified holding company. The plan is for Acman's Pershing to acquire 10 million newly shared issues of HHH at $90 a share. Then they're going to take controlling interest in various public and private companies that appeal to Pershing. That Pershing would already have been interested in using their sort of criterion for companies and investments.
HHH, unlike the failing textile company that Warren Buffett was sort of transforming, they're going to keep doing what they do. They are developing smart cities and planned communities like the Woodlands near Houston, Summerlin outside Las Vegas. So that company is going to continue operating independently while also helping to fund and drive this new holding company. So I've been following Bill Acman for a while. He's very smart. He makes great trades. He had a hilarious fight over Herbalife with the other famous hedge fund corporate radar or whatever they call them, activist investor, I guess. What's his name? God, Carl Eichmann.
You know, when I saw him do that Herbalife thing, I was like, yeah, I know people in Herbalife. It's an MLM, a multi-level marketing. Some might say scheme, some might say system. I don't get sued here. Everybody's got a little hair trigger line on the suing. But I always thought like every time I met an Herbalife person that the what I got was this person is entrepreneurial. They want to do great things in the world and Herbalife got their hooks into them.
And now they're annoying their families by trying to sell them supplements. I felt like it was predatory. I feel like a lot of these MLMs feel predatory to me. That's when Bill Ackman came on my radar because they used to do CNBC a whole bunch. And I was like, huh, this guy's smart. Then the next piece of the puzzle was he bought a bunch of Uber just two or three weeks ago. He amassed like a $3 billion position. And I thought his analysis was incredibly thoughtful. So when I saw this one, I just snapped. I was like, you know, I feel my J trading. I think I'm up. I put in 1.6 million. And I think it said 3.4 million in like two years. I mean, I like level results. I mean, well, interesting. You say that the Pelosi tracker put Pelosi versus J. Cal. You can look it up on Twitter.
Oh, wow. And or versus Jason. I was beating Pelosi for like six months. Which I just thought, well, wait a second, if I'm beating Pelosi, I need to stop trading because people are going to start thinking I have Pelosi level information. I'm looking at this graph right now. Your 2023 performance, she did. She was up 45%. You were up 47.4%.
Yeah, you don't want to be beating Pelosi. That means the SEC is going to start investigating you. Yeah.
是的,你不想打败佩洛西。这意味着美国证券交易委员会可能会开始调查你。嗯。
That's the string of investigation for sure. Here's the extent of my insider information. What I see on Twitter, which is all public. So I see Akman make this trade. And I think to myself, I know the planned communities. I know Akman. And I know from first principles, oh my God, that's hilarious. Pelosi versus God kindness. That's this is like when you're getting too much heat. You remember in Goodfellas?
Yeah. LaGuardia is a heist. What happens? Everybody shows up at the bar. Cadillacs for clothes. All right. You can't get anywhere. You can't believe this. You're stupid. Excuse me. Excuse me. That's mine. Take it off. Take it off. Take it off. Take it off. Take it off. Did I tell you not to get anything? Did I tell you not to attract attention? Two days one day. What the **** can you get? Cadillon gets a $20,000 make. Bring it back. I'll bring it back. I don't care what you do to bring it where you gotta be. You'll get an ad and get on me. Get the stage. Get the ad.
One of the things I noticed when I moved to Austin. Now, you know, Lon. I lived 20 years Brooklyn. 10 years Manhattan. 10 years LA. Just over 10 years split between San Francisco and a really Tony town called Hillsborough in kind of the Bel Air of the peninsula. And what I found was in New York, people found every nook and cranny to find an abode. In LA, I watched Venice go from like, you don't want to live in Venice to Venice is the most expensive neighborhood, right? And Silver Lake downtown LA. You don't want to live in these places. Now they're like amongst the more expensive areas. But what I did notice from living in essentially one, two, three, arguably five cities. If you can consider Brooklyn Manhattan different and you consider San Francisco and Hillsborough different, which I do. I've lived in five, I lived in five cities and I never saw anybody build enough housing in those cities. In fact, I saw an enthusiasm. And in fact, in the Bay area, I saw my rich friends buy the lots next to either side of their houses. Pretty well documented. People just do this as a, you know, if you're sitting on a billion dollars, you might, you know, it's a five million dollar house comes up next to you buy it and you sit on it and you know, maybe it's a guest house where you just don't want somebody to build a new house there. So when I moved to Austin, Texas, and I saw what was going on in Houston, I spent a little time there. My Lord, Billy, you know, whatever the hell you want. It does screw up the landscape a bit when you see like somebody's got a bar with a performance space next to a bakery next to a storage locker next to a strip mall. It's a bit random. What?
You both can afford homes. Housing prices went down two years in a row. I watched all these caletera, bell terror, all these terrors being built all over Austin. I said to myself, that's got to be a great business, like to be in the building a new city business and watching everybody leave the Bay area to go to Miami where they build a lot, Vegas where they build a lot. And Texas where they build a lot, I just realized, man, so much pent up demand that when you can buy a home for one fifth of the price as the Bay area is average home, people are going to move. It's supposed to be an easy J trade.
I've been looking for a play here. It feels like it's pre vetted since Ackman's in it. And then on top of that, Ackman wants to be super involved. So he's got like a bigger vision here. Yeah, he's going to be the CEO of this new holding company, Ackman personally. So that's a big deal.
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So here's your quick call to action. Do you want all gusto has to offer with no hidden fees? Well, how about a discount? Try gusto and get three months free gusto.com slash twist. That's G U S T O dot com slash twist. And that means attention. So there's money. There's a lot of that in the world, but people generally don't like to lose money. So when they place a bet, great. But when you see somebody give their attention to something and they have a bigger strategy, that means he sees an opportunity there that's bigger than the average investment he makes. Right. Same thing with Uber. He saw a bigger opportunity there because he's publicly talking about it. It's a three billion. You see people move from, you know, placing a J trade to placing a major J trade or not selling. That's when you know something's up. We'll see. And we'll not cover this company.
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Yeah, that's an interesting concept. And I liked how he turned the launch and the pitch into this kind of narrative, like calling back the Berkshire Hathaway, reminding people of what War above it did. He turned his pitch into a story, which I think gives it a lot of appeal. And to turn it into a story, there must be a story there. And another word for a story is a thesis. So if you think about like a story in a screenplay, it's got three acts, right? And you have these challenges and then you have this resolution. Yeah. You know more about this than I do. But there is something there to the story arc in a three act play slash film to an investment thesis, right? You have to overcome some things in that second act. There's a mission you go on and then hopefully gets resolved in the first act. They think things get set up. Is that generally the case of a. I think what's especially interesting here is all all scripts, they have to have a thing called the pregnant moment, which is why does this story happen right now instead of a month ago next year? Like why is this the decision the character makes in this moment? So if you think about a movie about a guy, he's desperate for money, you open the movie with the eviction notice on his door like, okay, it's happening right now because he's going to lose his house, you know? And I feel like that also very much applies for an investment thesis.
It's like, why am I making this bet today instead of a month ago or next year? And that's called the pregnant moment in screenwriting. That's what we call it, the pregnant, the pregnant moment. Like why is this the story must begin right now instead of another moment? Yeah, we call that the why now. So the why now in venture investing is GPS now exists. Therefore Uber can exist. Oh, unlimited storage at a very low price exists. Now YouTube can exist in store of these files. Oh, unlimited fiber and bandwidth exists now. Netflix can stream and, you know, HD and a large number of people can hit those files. So you do have the why now and obviously AI is going to be the why now for so many companies, whether it's full self driving or optimist, the robot and robot technology or any number of pieces of software. So anyway, that's my J trade.
Next story, humane. They've been acquired by HP. There are of course the makers of the infamous AI in that device. The goal was we're going to replace your smartphone with a device that doesn't have a big screen. So you won't be staring at the screen all day. The founders, their two former Apple executives and Bethany Bongiorno and Imran Chaudhury. And they said they were at a restaurant and they saw this family and everybody was staring at their screens and it made them very depressed. And they thought, isn't there a way we can keep everybody connected using these incredible new AI tools, verbal commands. And so it's a combination. You can input things verbally, like just talk to your device or it has a little projector so you could hold your hand up and it could actually project like a screen instead of having a screen.
Most of the startups assets have now been acquired by HP for $116 million. HP first thing discontinued sales of the $499 AI in support ends on February 28. So if you, okay, one of these, they want you to download your data and your photos because it's going to stop working at the end of this month. So they're just acquiring the team, I guess, correct and the IP, maybe they have some patents, but this is, you know, sometimes you get what's called an aqua hire or a landing. I think this means there's no number associated with this. And they're very clear saying this product is done.
Yeah. They're actually going to move the team into a new HP division called the HP IQ that is going to develop other kinds of AI tech and gadgets. I thought that this product had potential. Any kind of wearable has potential given how small these devices are getting and how powerful they are and how good voice is getting. This one felt like they really got it out early and I think they didn't manage expectations. If you were going to launch a really groundbreaking product like this and it doesn't exactly work and I think Marquez, you know, kind of gave it a harsh review and they got a little tweaked and everything. If you've launched this and said this is a beta product.
It's an alpha product. It's for the Vanguard. Work in progress. We're going to put out some use cases. We're looking for a thousand people to join the beta and then we're going to expand the beta to 5,000 and it's a developer preview, which they did for Apple vision pro. They said this is not for consumers. This is for developers. They just had launches as developers. I think the company could still exist today. I think the problem was they thought they could just launch just like an iPhone and they came from Apple and they thought it was polished enough and you know what? It looks polished enough, but the use cases weren't there.
Sometimes you need use cases, use cases and what we would call in the business, a killer app. Now, most startups are just a killer app themselves, hopefully, right? You're like, I have a killer app. This is my idea. It's going to be a killer app. The idea here was to create a platform and then a killer app would emerge, but they kind of launched it as if it was like super polished and it looks super polished. So I think the expectation was, well, it's going to do what it says it's going to do and it didn't because language models aren't ready in that. Now, there's a rabbit or one or something. That's that little handheld device. If you remember, and I had the founder on here, and he was very clear. Like I'm launching an experimental device. I want you to play with it. Give me some ideas. And I think that's still going.
You know, when you release things like that and their skunk work projects, developer reviews like Apple vision pro. There's nobody like wringing their hands about Apple vision pro not working or not being perfect because they know it's a developer preview. This one, and we have to get the founder back on when he hits the one year mark. So producer Maddie, if you could a researcher, Maddie, if you could go look into when he was on and let's have him back on. He's a really fascinating cat who built this. I think that was their problem. They just the gap between what people thought it was going to be and what it was.
你知道,当人们发布像 Apple Vision Pro 这样的技术和他们的秘密项目时,大家都知道这只是一个开发者预览版。所以没人会因为它不完美或者不工作而感到担心。至于这个项目,我们得在其创立一周年时请创始人再来做一次访谈。制片人玛蒂和研究员玛蒂,请你们帮忙查一下他上次是什么时候参与的节目,然后再邀请他来。他是一个很有趣的人,曾经创造了这个项目。我认为他们的问题在于,人们对产品的期望与实际结果之间存在差距。
Mark has if it was framed as this is just a developer review, he would have given it a different review, but he was like, Hey, this thing's weighed. It's like destroying my sweater. And it's getting hot on my skin. You know what? It didn't answer these questions. There was just a long line of things that he thought were not ready for prime time. Yeah. If you can release something that's not ready for prime time, it can't cost a premium price and you can't pitch it as it's ready for prime time. To me that immediately at that $500 price point, if this is a $200 thing that early adopters can chess can play around with, I think it's a totally different story. I think it's the same thing with the Apple vision pro. It didn't launch with like one killer thing you have to try. And it's overpriced. And so people are like, well, I'll wait till the next in iteration of whatever this is. Correct. Yeah.
So lots of startup lessons there. I do give them points for audacity and being bold. I wish there were 10 more companies that did this. I believe the winning format is a bangle. I'm putting it out there right now. I like a bangle. You remember in Empire Strikes Back, there were the robots that had the earpieces on. Yeah. And are they a brand of robot? I thought that was that guy's name, Lowbot. Your book on mine right now. I think his name is Lowbot, but there have been other people who look like him. Cybernetic kind of. Yes. In future episodes.
I don't know. We'll have to look at Wokepedia. Wokepedia. Wokepedia. My former friend. Lando Calarissin. You can pull it up and show on for people who don't know. Starts typing. And you see on his arm, he has like a computer on his arm. Yeah. Because like from his wrist, you know, his whole forearm is basically a computer. I would very much like to be at dinner as I'm holding my hands right now. So the person I'm talking to is seeing the back of my hand. And when I hold it up here, there's Lowbot. I'm looking at a screen where my veins are on the inside of my forearm. Interesting. And I think I've been very not intrusive. Because if you look at how I'm looking right now and kind of looking at my palm and they have that same observation, except they wanted to project onto your body. You'd hold it. Your pocket was here and so you'd hold your hand out and you'd see what would be on the screen. It's interesting. It's hard for me to imagine doing that all day, but I did like, I agree with you. Like, I like the idea that they have this far out. Maybe people will get into using their phones this way and they went for it. It's definitely like a very creative new approach, even if it didn't work out.
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我们还有一个简讯:Open AI 的前高管米拉·马拉迪(Mira Maradi),她曾是该公司的首席技术官,本周她推出了自己的新创业公司——Thinking Machines Lab。这家新公司云集了许多前 Open AI 员工,其中三分之二的团队成员来自 Open AI,现在加入了这家新公司。
Mira Maradi, of course, left open AI unexpectedly in late September. We heard rumors of behind the scenes personality clashes, but I did a lot of research on this yesterday and couldn't get a definitive. Here's what happened behind the scenes in open AI. That includes Barrett Zofe. He was open AI's researcher. He's now thinking machines new CTO and former open AI chief scientist, John Shulman is a co-founder along with Mira Maradi. Zof actually quit open AI on the same day that Mira Maradi left in September. Something happened behind the scenes. I mean, I think what happened was exactly what we saw during the firing of Sam Altman and the rehiring of him. Sam has taken control over the nonprofit and the for profit. I think maybe the stage is big enough for one person from open AI and you had a collection of incredibly talented people there.
If we were to make a list of the 10 most important people from open AI taking out Sam Altman, I don't know, three years ago, I wonder how many are still there. It's kind of, I think, they've bled this talent. There's probably two reasons for it. One, there's some leadership style that Sam has or the way he's decided to take it from an open source nonprofit to a closed for profit. There's the self-dealing or the deal making, which is, I know Sam for a long time, 20 years almost. He's really good at deal making. I mean, maybe that rubs people the wrong way, which is fine. Cultures change. I think they shouldn't be allowed to do it, but there should be some constraints on it. Let's put aside.
The second thing that's happening here is Joshua Kushner, Jared's brother, he has a firm called Thrive. Thrive has been doing secondaries. What's a secondary? That's when an investor buys employee shares or early investor shares so that they can own a higher percentage of the company. The company's issuing, I don't know, a billion dollars in new shares. When they set up a billion dollars to buy out the existing employees who have been there for four, five, six, seven years, I think that's what happened. Yeah. Yeah. Here is that they cashed out and they're like, hey, let me start a new thing where I'm in control and I get to make the decision.
So this new company focusing on AI alignment, which they define as encoding human values into AI models to make them safer and more reliable. Okay. So she is leading with safety and reliability, which is the area. Get a bit out. Another open AI early innovator, his company, super intelligence is now also AI safety and protecting us from the evil robots to come. I think that was everybody's original concept was, let's build this in a safe way. It was the mandate. And now it's not the mandate. Now the mandate is to maximize shareholder value, make as much money as possible, etc. And become a for profit. So understandable. And I think this is open AI's biggest challenge.
And you won't see it in the short term because they've got, they had a pretty good head start. They coined the term chat GPT. It's become a brand. People use it instead of using Google or bang. So it's, you know, it's like a, they've gotten a certain amount of credibility there. And super facing AI chat GPT is super dominant, like super amazingly dominant, I think. And that will take a little while for it to change, right? In the early days of search engines, Magellan and light goes. Yeah, there were tons of different opera opera. Well, those were the browsers and then on the search engine. So even with browsers, you had it too, right? You had a Netflix browser, a Netscape browser, a Lynx browser, whatever. And then now you use Chrome or Firefox.
I wonder what their innovation curve is going to look like when they lose those individuals. I don't know that they've replaced them, but I do with better people or hunger at your people. But what I do know is every time one of those people leaves and creates a competitor, you've got a double challenge. So this is why Google was so brilliant. They dumped money into the laps of their top talent and absurd, such an absurd amount of money that and such a low expectation of performance that they literally created a meme on the Silicon Valley TV show with Hoolie, where people would rest and vest and big head would hang out on the roof with other people arresting, investing, getting sun and it was kind of like a no show job from the sopranos at the Esplanade.
So why did they do that? Why was it brilliant? Well, if you pay somebody $2 million a year to sit on the roof for five years and they make $10 million, you seem like the sucker. If that person leaves and creates a Google competitor and takes about 1% market share, well, that cost you $10 billion in market cap, no, $20 billion in market cap. So that was the strategy. It was explicit in Silicon Valley. They just wanted to corner the market on technologists and people who could create competitors. If Sam was smart, he would have and I'm not saying Sam's not smart, but a better strategy for Sam would have been able would have been to lock these folks up with deals that were so absurd.
If the company is going from a hundred fifty billion to three hundred fifty billion, he should have literally given the top 10 people a billion dollars in equity to stick around to not go do this. Not because they're worth a billion dollars each. Nobody is. But blocking future competition would be worth it. Shout out, Lena Khan. Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. That is definitely something that's going on. One more quick hit before we jump into the main stories of the day. I wanted to pull up your best Guichamat is had this idea for a high stakes tournament. I wanted to pick your brain on all of his various, the rules he's attaching, whether this is something you would like to compete in. So first of all, no, no, he will. He's going to enforce a no drug policy, which includes focus up drugs like riddling and Adderall, no sunglasses. You can't obscure your face. He wants everybody making eye contact the whole time and doesn't want it to be one of these like all night endurance test kind of tournaments he wants it to be. You play during normal work hours. What do you think? Would you jump in on this?
Well, okay, I can just give you a bit of insight information. Oh, okay. I have another podcast. It's called All In. That I started with Chumath and then David Sachs and then Freeburg joined us. America's crypto and AI Zard, David Sachs. Yes. And it's been come quite successful. It was number eight this week on the top charts and Chumath and I were a Megan Kelly and that shot melding Megan Kelly, who already is in the top 10 regularly up to number four for the Valentine's special. So very weird weekend for me. I was in two of the top eight podcasts of the weekend. All right. If you're shipping a product or rolling out an update, you're building a company, you need to be organized, right? We know that Atlassian has exactly what you need to streamline your work and smash your goals and the Atlassian for startups program is packed with all the tools you need like Jira where you can track every task sprint and bug. That's the industry standard confluence. Another industry standard for team collaboration and documentation. And of course, Loom for quick video, explainer creation.
Now, Loom is really brilliant. My team started using Loom on their own. They started paying for it on their own. Why they wanted to get credit on the investment team for communicating to me, the general partner of the firm, why they wanted to invest in a company. So they would do a Loom where they recorded over a recording of an interview they did with a founder or visiting their website and going through why they want to invest in a company. And this was so great for me. I would be skiing in Japan. I would be on a flight to New York to see my parents and all of a sudden I get a notification for one of my team members, Hey, watch this Loom and I get the link for the Loom. I click it and then I can put comments at any time. So it's like doing a conference call, but on my time asynchronously and I can communicate right there on the video also included in Atlassian for startups is compass Jira product discovery, Bitbucket, so much more all powered by Atlassian intelligence. That's their built-in AI. Atlassian software helps companies like Canva, Cloudflare and Riveen keep growing and keep innovating.
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That brand is very strong amongst rich people around the world. Very elite people. This one is very popular with venture capitalists and startups. Okay. This is a niche podcast. That's a broad based podcast. And we've been talking about doing this under the all in brand publicly. We've talked about this many times, but you might have seen Phil Hellmuth and you could pull up his tweet. He's 60 years old now. He's one of my best friends in the world just to stand up and mention the guy. And he was lamenting and he basically made an announcement that he will not be playing. He put the announcement and it got Instagram, but I'm sure it's on his Twitter.
He said he's not going to play the main event. Now, he is the number one tournament poker player in the history of poker. He has 14 bracelets from the world series of poker. But what he said is like playing seven days in a row and they play, I think, 12 hour days or yeah, they and you get an hour break for dinner and then like two 20 minute breaks. But he said, you know, at 60 years old, it's an endurance test, not a skill test. And so I saw that he was sharing this. I saw people commenting on it. Let's just play it. If we have sound, we'll just play what he says here. This is a this I think is part of it. It's just too tough. Just too tough, you know, people don't be like, Oh, Phil, you can play seven days in a row. Yeah, try it. Try, try getting up and playing at noon until midnight. Seven days in a row. And then they're, Oh, well, today we have to play till two or three in the morning, which also happens at the W.S.O.P main event. It's just exhausting. And I can't win. And I think that it really hurts the older players in a much bigger proportion than the younger players. And I'll say this, I had four great players come and tell me that they blew the main event because they got too tired with 50 left with 30 left with 100 left. It's turned into an endurance test. I don't think that the World Series of Booker main event is measuring.
So anyway, he made this comment, then Daniel Negranu, you can look it up as well, a friend of mine. And he was complaining about all these people wearing hats, people wearing scarfs, masks, sunglasses and how it just looks ridiculous on television. And you can't breed people and it takes something out of it. So I think that resonates with people. And then I made a comment publicly like, you know, a lot of these kids are on speed. So in order to do 12 R a day, seven days in a row, what's happened in poker is everybody's on speed. Like everybody's on something at a raw, maybe illegal speed. I don't know everything in between. Now I understand people might use these things legally and have a prescription.
However, I think it's like performance enhancing specifically for poker. If you've ever tried any of these things, like you will be focused. And so who knows, maybe in the 80s and 90s, people were doing cocaine and now they're just doing out our own substituting that. And so very vibrantly or precociously, whatever he said in his post that, hey, cocaine, not cocaine, they do drug testing for stimulants, whatever, that's pretty controversial. So anyway, this is all shaping up to be really fascinating and interesting. I decided to be part of it whenever it does happen.
I'm assuming it's going to happen because Shamaf gets things done. And I feel like you guys should definitely live stream this, like the celebrities versus billionaires versus poker stars tournament. Like I know people who would want to watch that. I think it will be a big hit. The all in brand is in sugar, not obviously. All right, we don't need. You know, I'll leave it to Shamaf too, because I think he's going to spearhead it. Obviously, I'll leave it to him to do all the details, obviously, and I'll just show up.
But just thinking about the all in brands reach the top 1% of our audience can play, you know, $100,000 enough buy-ins. And then I would say the top 20% of the audience could play 10,000, 25,000, 50,000, no problem. Well, I mean, the world series progress 10k. Yeah, no, it's a lot of money. If you're a poker player and you do it 10 times and you think you can cash, you know, you don't want to make it too low because you don't want amateur casuals playing. You want it to be people who take their poker relatively seriously so they're good matches, you know?
Yeah. So we'll see what he comes up with. I'm here to support it. I'm here for it. It sounds like it would be also a lot of fun. And I tweeted like, make it eight hours a day of playing instead of 12 and then do 320 breaks, no dinner breaks. So you started 11, you're done by eight, then you can go to dinner or you can choose to go to bed. And then in the morning, you can work out, you can hit the pool, you could have a nice leisurely breakfast and you can show up at 11, 11, 30, 12.
Some people show up late for these tournaments and they'll lose a couple of blinds, but they rather be fresh. All right, let's get into some of our main topics for the day. Number one, Nicola files for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. This is of course the electric truck maker that at one time they were going to be Tesla for semi trucks once valued at $30 billion. They now file for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. They failed to find a buyer or raise funds to sustain operations. So now the plan is auction off assets.
Big turning point in the history of this company, of course, launched to a lot of fanfare. Wall Street got briefly excited. They launched us on the stock market before they even had sold a single truck. And this was always people were very conceptually excited about this. But founder and original CEO Trevor Milton, there was a scandal around his leadership of the company. He was convicted in 2022 for securities and wire fraud after misleading investors. A lot of it comes down to what's known as the rolling truck video, where he claimed the Nicola truck was driving under its own power. It was actually rolling downhill in the in the video. It was a purely sort of fraudulent to the SEC settlement cost the company about 125 million in penalties. That was basically the beginning of the end for them.
They only have 47 million in cash left for bankruptcy proceedings with liabilities between one and $10 billion and one to 5,000 outstanding creditors. So they are in a lot of trouble and they're part of a broader shakeout in the EV sector. Lordstown Motors in 2023, arrival in 2024. Could new already this year have all sort of gone belly up and Rivian and Lucid are still afloat, but uncertain futures. They're struggling as well. Yeah, I mean, Rivian and Lucid are learning just how hard it is to scale manufacturing. You remember it almost killed Elon in the Model 3. I spent some time with them in the. I mean, I basically went to see him do a mental health check on my guy during the Model 3 because, you know, I was talking to him and he's like, yeah, I'm at the factory. And I was like, wait, it's just like 11 o'clock. Like, let's go get a steak or something. He's like, yeah, I got to stay here. I was like, all right, I'm going to bring you a burger. Where are you? I came out to see him. Like he was literally sleeping in the conference room while he was trying to get that Model 3 out the door and he did. And it became actually, I think the best selling car in the EV category. You're correct. So the Model 3 was the world's all time best selling electric car as of 2021. It's since been topped by the Model lot. You're correct. Okay. So I got it exactly right. Sometimes I get things right here. Sometimes you mail it. Well, I mean, I read a lot and I get prepared for the show. And then when I'm wrong, people pile on. I mean, my lord, there's a, there's a large number of MAGA folks who are waiting for me to make a mistake and they just don't got me, which I like actually call me. Not if I get something wrong.
So it's really hard to scale manufacturing. Anybody can make a hundred cars. Anybody can make a thousand cars when you want to make a thousand a week, five thousand a week. You know, now you got a real challenge. I knew Milton was a fraud. You know, I got a pretty good eye for this. There are people who are delusional and I would say not thoughtful. And then there are people who are delusional and competent. I love me the latter, but incompetent delusional people. I mean, they just incinerate money, competent delusional people change the world. And they might incinerate some money, but you know, if you think, hey, I'm going to put a computer on everybody's desk and you're broke a thing, you're competent, you make good software and you're aggressive and you understand distribution and whatever, you know, like you might just make it happen. And that's what we do all day long as venture capital. We're looking for those delusional.
Another word would be ambitious, competent people. And it's important. My only second point here is that I want all founders to understand what securities fraud is at its core. You make a claim and then somebody buys a share of stock from you, whether you're a private company or a public company. So you make a claim and then they buy a share. If you make a claim that you know is false or you are reckless, you know, in a repeated way and you know, this is a spectrum here and that's why we have courts. What Elizabeth Holmes did in covering up these wild claims and then raising money, that's where the wire fraud comes in. So securities fraud, you told the story. We're just talking about Bill Ackman telling a story, right? We talked about story time. Yeah, you could you could spin a yarn all day long, but the facts have to be correct as you know them. And then your predictions need to be clearly predictions. You can meet the most outlandish prediction you want. If it's framed as a prediction, and I'll just give you an example of this.
I and this will be an amalgamation of startups because I never liked to talk specifically about one startup is people might be able to unpack it and then, you know, it's a bad look for me to be criticizing a founder since my mission in life is to support founders and inspire innovation. Imagine you pitch a bunch of investors, angel investors, and you put on a slide for your team, somebody who you made an offer to, but who had not accepted the offer. Now imagine on your next slide, you talk about customers, customers pretty well defined term of art. It's not even a term of art. It's a term. Yeah, it's very binary. Like they're they bought something from you or they have. Exactly. And then there's people on unpaid trials. There are people who have tested your product. There are free users. And then there's something in cells called your pipeline. I have seen imagine the same, you know, a composite of a founder. They took their customer lists, which had one customer, let's say, and their pipeline, which had nine customers. And they put it on a slide that said our customers and those nine people had clicked on a link and used the product as in they logged into it maybe or they touched it in some way, but they didn't actually put a credit card in or getting in voice or actually use it meaningfully.
Now that same angel investor finds out that these facts they were pitched on weren't right. They gave documents and they, you know, wrote notes and then they come back and say, by the way, I'd like my money back. Company's failing. Trying to raise a new rent, but it's got some money left in the bank and say, you know what, I'd like my 50,000 pack. Founder says, well, you know, you made the investments. Yes. But you committed security for it. This person never worked at the company and the I called three of these customers. They have no idea who you are. So I know that these three aren't customers. If you were that founder, what would you do with your last hundred K? You pay that guy off. Quite a good idea. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then, uh, because if not, that person literally all they have to do is just email the SEC and say, I suspect fraud. The SEC is filled with people who have given up jobs long that are high paying in the private sector in order to do what they believe is noble important work in markets. And they might be doing it to get a bigger payday later. Okay. Whatever. Sure. But they are sacrificing for a couple of years to go do this kind of thing and Trevor. I think and the courts found knowingly committed, secure is fraught. I kind of saw it. There was a really interesting moment when I interviewed him on twist and I don't know if we have a clip ready, but we do. I just, okay. So this is, I did this over zoom, uh, from our studio and I'm just wanting to just give a trigger warning here. You're going to see fat J cow.
So be careful folks. I'm pretty sure I'd be here. I know you see the schfeltness and you see the cannons and, you know, the muscle definition here. Listen, yeah, but in fact, J cows going to ask a question to Trevor Milton. The problem is is 90% of Americans will never own a semi truck. And so your investment, your investment, your portfolio of investors can be very limited. And we wanted to go and build a company that's going to be worth $500 billion, trillion over say 10 or 15 years. And if you're limiting yourself to 10% of the market, you'll never do it. No matter how good your numbers are.
The reason why people love Apple, everyone touches their product. Why do they love Google? Everyone touches their product. So what I did is I knew day one, you know, once, once we started coming out, we had all this gravy train coming in from the semi truck program. My question was, okay, that's great, but I'll never touch the average consumer. So therefore 90% of investors will probably never invest in me. So I needed to touch the consumer. And so the truck is for the profit, the semi truck, the pickup trucks for the consumer and the consumers, the one who is part of the Robin Hood.
So I heard this and I just, okay, I got it. I had asked him, why are you creating the badger? He was doing the premise of Nikola was they would have, they would rent trucks to anheiser bush by the mile, trucking as a service and they would have a complete stack of, I don't know, hydrogen, electric, everything. But then they released a badger to compete with the F-150, Nikola and the cyber truck. And he explains to me that he's doing this to bait Robin Hood in my estimation.
I'm using the term bait, but to get retail investors to buy the stock and he says to make a trillion dollar market cap company. Yeah, he specifically says that he's like, he's trying to do Apple, like people invested Apple because they love their products. People will love this product. They'll invest in me. My understanding is black flip was used in the criminal case against me. Wow. Yeah. So if you look at the criminal case and somebody in one of our producers, I'm going to have a crowd source producers here. If you want to get extra bonus points from J. Cal, I'll follow you and maybe I'll send you a twist mug or something. If you correct us or do research in advance, there'd be some kind of benefit. I don't know what it is yet. We'll brainstorm it. But he, the kindest interpretation here was he wanted to raise awareness. I don't think so. I don't know how anybody could ever justify what he said. It was absolutely clear to me that he was trying to manipulate or bait. I don't know what the word is. I'm trying to think of a good word here. Yeah. I'll fill in US Attorney Damien Williams has had this to say, quote Trevor Milton lied to investors again and again on social media, on television, on podcasts and in print. So that seems to be an explicit shout out to appearances just like that one we saw on this week at Star Trek. My understanding is they played the clip in the courtroom. Yeah. That was crazy. That would make sense if he's going in his big comment. He's like, this little, these lies happened on podcast. Yeah, that would be part of his case would be showing.
Here's one of those podcast. Yeah. I think it's gross when people do this kind of stuff. Is he out of jail? I think he's out of jail and the company's out of business. Yeah. I think he did three years of like supervised, I don't even know if he was in like federal prison or if it was just like house arrest or something, but oh no, four year prison sentence. So maybe he's not out yet. I just want to let founders know the system is rigged for founders in the United States. That's why every founder in the world wants to come here. The system is so rigged in your favor already. You can build a company here. Fail magnificently. Go down like humane did blowing hundreds of millions of dollars. Have your products shut down. You know what the next discussion is? What's your next idea? When somebody fails in our portfolio, I say to them where they have like an aquaire and Raoul from super humans, a perfect example. He did a company called report if he sold it to LinkedIn, you know, he tripled our money. I put in 25 or 50 K. I got back 150 K. I was kind of bummed because I wanted it to. He had some big plans that I thought were very interesting.
Well, it's very short. I said, I'm okay with this because you know, the major investors or all investors, you got to get them to sign here. Like, okay, I'm willing to sell my share. So, you know, it's that moment in time, hey, we're selling. It didn't work out as well as we wanted to, but I need you to sign this piece of paper that says you're not going to sue or you're cool with the sale so that the other person is cool with the acquisition. You want to get what's called anonymous consent for the sale.
And so all shareholders, you want ideally all shareholders to do it. If not, you got to get the majority and then you pull the minority shareholders who are not willing to sell and they have no choice. I said to him, just please promise me that when you do your next company, I'll be the first phone call that you get. I kid you're not two years later. He texts me on a Sunday. I said, where are you right now? I can't wait to hear the idea. He said, you know, I'm a noe or whatever. I said, I'm in Pac Heights or a cow Hollow. I'm getting bagels. I'll meet you at the house. How quickly can you get here? He said, I'll be there at 11. I went and got bagels. We sat there. He pitched me on a Gmail competitor. That one is superhuman. I just looked at my returns for superhuman for my first fund by Lord. If I saw my shares right now, I would return. I think, I don't know, maybe another two time one or two times. Everything on the valuation I got, maybe one even to three times because it's, you know, valuations have gone up and down. It's been an incredible investment. What is the second time? The second time third time founders, they always do great. We actually have a story about superhuman ready to go today. You've done that. I didn't know that. Masterful segue and twist history without even knowing it.
Superhuman, they released a video introducing new AI features aiming to help users better organize and categorize their emails. Some of these features include auto labeling. The AI will sort your emails into categories for you. You can even create custom categories that you'd like the, it just sorted to auto archive, instantly hiding emails so they don't clutter your inbox. AI follow ups, they'll let you know, hey, you didn't respond to this one yet. And even auto draft a follow up in your voice. Split inbox upgrade. You can use AI labels alongside existing filters to split your inbox into different groups to make things easier for you. And coming soon, they want to auto draft full replies and even schedule meetings for you based on your calendar, all working sort of automatically in the background.
We do have a little clip from Raghu, introducing some of these new ideas. Oh, looking good. You got the leather jacket. Now constantly working beside you, organizing your inbox, making sure you never drop the call, writing, and if you want sending fully written emails on your behalf, it can even execute complete workflows. End to end. Amazing. I mean, this is the Holy Grail. He's a, he's very good on camera. Whoa. Like we were saying before. He is now. He is now. Very polished presentation there. And I think that, you know, I invited him to come on the part. So I think he's coming on the part next Wednesday. Correct. And I think Vlad from Robinhood is going to come on soon. Also correct. We're going to. We got a lot of cool bookings like in, in process behind the scenes where we're going on some work.
Well, here's the thing. And it's interesting that those two are both coming on next Wednesday. So we got big Wednesdays, big Wednesday energy, big hump day. Yeah. I mean, that's like two all stars. And what I'll say about both of them, I don't know if we're going to overlap them on the live show. It might be good to overlap them for five or 10 minutes to ask them a question. Both of these individuals are obsessed with product and Vlad. When you look at Robinhood, world class design and product velocity and a customer obsession, and you look at Raoul from superhuman customer obsession, unbelievable world class design, and they just have product velocity. These are three of the things in my playbook for investing in companies. Product and customer obsessed individuals.
I'll just say customer obsessed because that leads to product. So if you're customer obsessed, world class design and product velocity, these three things, I don't think you can lose in your lifetime if you have these three. How do I know this? I've always had them. You've worked with me one. How much of a design snob am I? How often do I'm like, this design needs to be better? A lot. You're always thinking about that every time something's really like a lot of companies I work for. You kind of come up with, here's how the thumbnails look. Here's how the blog posts look. Here's how the descriptions are written. Right. And then that's it. It's automated. People are just doing it from then on. When you work for a Jason company, every time you do a new post, it's like, let's take a beat. Is this as good as it could be? Maybe we replace that line with this one.
Why not look at it with a critical line? Let's say I'm channeling the customer right now. Am I confused? What is the point of being here? What's the purpose of this product service blog post tweet? What's the purpose of it? I'm on the start of the show. I said the purpose of this show is to inspire founders and to help them grow their companies. And that's what we focus on. That's the purpose of this. You do have to think with purpose about these things. And this is a very important lesson for founders. If you are not focused on the design of your product, obsessed with your customers, and you're not shipping product on a regular cadence, you're not worthy of venture dollars or running a company you should get out of the way.
Let somebody else be the CEO and then ask yourself deeply, why can't I get product velocity? Oh, you don't have that chip on your shoulder where you're just absolutely perturbed, angry that things are not getting better in the world. The people who have invested in, who have actually changed the world, have that chip on, they have that anger, they have that fire in their belly that it's got to be better. It's got to be better. And most people in the world, I think, and it's not a criticism of those people necessarily. I'm not saying they're worthless and weak and they don't deserve to exist. They don't just content to punch that clock, collect that check.
And then there's other things in their life that I'm sure they're passionate about. Some people might be passionate about beer, football, family, horseback riding, guns, whatever. Mazeltov, my best suggestion for a career is if you find yourself, God, you find yourself not having that passion, then look at what you're passionate about off duty and make that your startup. If you're passionate about horseback riding when you're working at your desk, you're just thinking about the horseback running, quit that job, shut that startup down, pivot it, and then go work on what you're actually obsessed with. And shout out to my friend, Roel, who just replied to us on X.
Oh, nice. Very nice. I guess somebody live, I guess we're live tweeting the show now a bit too. It's part of long-being here. We've been looking at the show with fresh eyes. I'm like, why don't we live tweet this? And like mentioned, who we're talking about, Roel's amazing. And I'm not good at today. That's Maddie behind the scenes. Thank you. Good. Maddie's like, Maddie's got great potential and co-host the show. That's not possible. You want to start up guessing game? Do you want to do one more story? Oh, it's back. Guess the fake startup is back. I guess the fake startup for you.
You want to jump in. I'm going to describe giving you the log line in a basic description of three startups, two of these startups are real. You could go invest in them. You could go look at their websites. They exist. They are real companies. One of these startups I made up with my own mind and it does not exist on any level.
We want you and the folks watching at home, everybody, I'm going to give you a chance. I'm going to describe all three startups. You let us know which one you think is the fake startup. Now, for people who are in the chat, don't ruin it. I'm not looking at the chat right now. I just went full screen. Sorry. Don't see the chat. Don't go look for the startups. Don't go look for the startups. Don't go look for the startups. Don't go look. You're without yourself. Yeah. That's trying to play along. Enjoy it.
Okay. Here we go. Startup number one. Okay. Bar go. Bar go. This is the name is a combination of barter and haggle. The idea is that it's going to use AI to help you get the best deal when you're shopping at vintage stores, yard sales when you're in teaking. So you can take a photo of the item you like, search for similar items that have been purchased in your area recently. Go about what other people are paying for them and get a sense for like the relative quality. Like, how does this one I'm looking at stack up against other similar items that people in my area are by? Okay. Bar go. Bar go. Startup number one. Yes. I remember. I remember. yeah. Bar go. Haggle. Bar go.
好的,开始了。创业项目一号:Bar go。Bar go 这个名字结合了“物物交换”(barter)和“讨价还价”(haggle)的意思。这个创业项目的想法是利用人工智能帮助你在古董店、庭院甩卖,或者跳蚤市场购物时获得最佳交易。你可以拍下你喜欢的物品的照片,搜索最近在你所在地区购买过的类似物品,了解其他人支付的价格,并了解这个物品的相对质量,比如你关注的这个物品与其他人在你区域内购买的类似物品相比如何。是的,我记得,非常清楚。嬴价,嬴价。创业项目一号。嬴价。
Start number two. Canary, but spelled can canary. This startup is building the world's first nose to computer neural interface for animals. So a scent detecting animal. This is a neural implant that will interpret and decode everything that they smell. It enhances human and animal working relationships. If you got a bomb sniffing dog and drug sniffing dog, some other kind of animal that a human has to interact with, this makes it easier than having to read the animals. You can get a little written. Here's what the animal is detected. So it understands what's going to be detected. This is gnarling for dog sniffing dogs or fruit sniffing dogs. Right. You have contraband animals that look for contraband. That is out there. That's in out there concept, which is making me lean towards it's real. It's so far out there. Keep going. Alright. Number three, reflect orbital. This is a solar energy startup. They have a master plan. They're going to install a string of giant mirrors into orbit over the earth. These mirrors will then reflect sunlight totally down to solar farms on the plant surface. that will allow them to collect and distribute the hour even overnight. Okay. This has got to be real. I know this because there are so many companies that have been talking about this kind of concept and it's easier to get stuff into space. So I do know that reflecting from space energy is a real vertical.
Now I could be getting double faked by you right now since I you know that I know that would be impressive. That would be very impressive, but it would also be kind of lame because we know there's a whole category here and we would just be taking a real startup and just slapping a different name on it to be like, ha, ha. I think that's real. So that I'm back to the other two. I got a 50 50 shot of that. toothkill versus canary now canary. Spelt wrong that was a key piece of this isn't even that should not be there, but gargle bargo gargle bargo is such a clever name and then one is misspelled. They're both decent concepts actually. I would like a haggling, bartering kind of website. We haven't had a good one of those since a group on there. I like the very old, I feel like when smartphones in their current iteration were new, there were a lot of these like price comparison, take a photo of a product and then get it from it. But nobody ever like nailed it. And it's got the AI angle. So as we were talking about earlier in the program, the why now is there. Right. So why bring group on back now? Well, AI. Why bring eBay back now? AI. Exactly. cause if you think about it, if I like, say I took a picture of, you know, a lamp or something from my house, but if I didn't tag it correctly, the old apps wouldn't be able to find it. Whereas today AI is smart enough to go, Oh. you're looking at a lamp. Here's other lamps. But it feels almost too well constructed. feels very well constructed. It feels so well constructed that it's almost as if somebody constructed it to be so well constructed that it was real, but it did not yet exist.
And I think if you were going to bring, guess the fake startup back after a 10 year hiatus, you'd want to come out with that idea so strong. you're well, constructing the person doing this. You, Lon would want to do it well. And the misspelled one. I think is so obvious that it's going to exist because neural link exists and neural link has a dozen competitors actually just don't hear about them because I think they're behind and and they don't have the same team as a leader as prominent a team. So I think I'm going to go with the fake startup being the one that is in fact the most well constructed. I think the fake startup is Bartle. You are correct. The fake startup is Bartle. Oh my god. Yeah, you nailed it. Boom. I'll tell you this one. I actually, I started with the name. I came up with the name first and then I reverse engineered what the app would be based on how good a name I thought that was. Wow. And if you go watch the old episodes, I mean my ability to deconstruct this. You're very good. You're a tough to stop you. It's tough to stop. Yeah, it's tough to stop. Well, because I think if this was a random panel, they wouldn't know that reflecting sunlight down to the earth's surface for solar farms is real. That sounds made up like when I was looking at the website, I was like, this is science fiction. I can't believe they even. I mean, it basically is a moon wreck or something. It feels like it's a James Bond.
It's a James Bond movie where they're using us like a mirror in space to like, you can target people and blow them up, I think. I mean, it's kind of Death Star S. Yeah, that'll be. Death Star Light to like put an energy beam down to the planet. This is for good. Yeah. The only thing I'm a little worried about is if you miss the relay down at the planet, I mean, some guys turned into a desert. I think this was also Superman three. Yeah. Well, no. With Richard Pryor. Yeah, that is three. You're right. Richard Pryor, Superman three. The thing I like about Superman three is it was such a mess that they made like 15 different edits. You can watch different versions of this, but I just like the fact that Superman gets five o'clock shadow and he gets dark. And like, I think there's a scene where he goes to a diner. That's three. I think that's three.
We're like somebody's mouthing off to him. That might be two. But anyway, there's this diner scene. It's been a while. Somebody's mouthing off to him and he gets his butt kicked. Yeah. But then he comes back. But then he comes back because he's lost his powers in two, right? Is that it? Yeah. No, but that's Superman two, but the bad Kryptonite that turns him into a jerk is Superman three. Right. That's it. Yeah. They're right. The personality shift is three, but losing his powers, that's Lex Luthor in two. And he gets punched. Remember, he gets punched by somebody and he glies. This is Superman two. This is Superman two. That's Superman two. The dire fight scene where he gets beat up is two. Okay. So once again, if you were to rank the trilogy, for me, it's two, one, three. I'm wow. It's crazy. If you say that, I'm a huge Superman two fan. I agree with you. Like, I think that's the best one. It's two, one, three. A lot of people disagree. Oh, by the way, we're going to do it for Star Wars two, one, three. Yeah, I agree with that too. I like to do the best. Richard Lester, the great Richard Lester. And you like Empire the best. I did. And then you do it for Terminator. It's also two, one, three. I like Terminator one a lot. I don't know. I'm not a little bit bored. Why? It's acoustic in raw? Yes. It's more like a horror. It's like sci-fi horror. It's like a star- It's a visual effects history too, is a really important milestone, because it was one of the first computer-generated animation being integrated into live-action scenes. It doesn't hold up for Joss. On the level nobody had ever done before. Like the liquid metal Terminator coming out of the floor. That was super groundbreaking. It doesn't hold up for Joss. Joss is one, two, three. Yeah. Oh, yeah. None of the Joss equals it. I mean, Joss is like, that's one word. So what's real about it didn't come back? So you can't count that.
Yeah. I've never done this for the Alien series. We'll do more of this kind of stuff now that lones back, because people like this kind of stuff. All right, everybody. Couple of programming notes. Long will be with us again Friday and next week. While Alex is out on the town. And my lord, is it right? Is Alien two, one, three? We'll have to get back to you. Alien is definitely, I think Alien's for sure too, one, three. But there's four and then there's all those other sequels. Yeah, but we're just doing the first three here. You're just talking about it. I actually like Alien three more than most people. David Fincher did that one, but the effects were not. It doesn't hold up visually as well as the other one. We'll see everybody on Friday. Bye-bye.