-
Unknown A
If they put $150 million check in Mubadala and General Catalyst each, let's say they split it.
-
Unknown B
Sure.
-
Unknown A
That would be a very big check size. You can't put that into series A. That's 10 series A's, you know, or 20 series A's. That's 50 seed rounds.
-
Unknown B
Well, you might be able to put into an AI Series A, but any other normal non AI foundation model company Series A is going to be much, much smaller than that.
-
Unknown A
Well, valuation, by the way, just I'll end on this. It's a really good sign that secondary is happening because secondary doesn't happen if the valuation doesn't make sense and there's a clear path to the next milestones. So congratulations to the Deal team and to the early investors who get some liquidity.
-
Unknown C
This Week in Startups is brought to you by Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website. Go to squarespace.com twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code Twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Atlassian From MVP to IPO Atlassian for Startups provides your team the right tools to plan, track and collaborate on work. Head to atlassian.com software startups to see if you qualify for 50 free seats for 12 months and Adquick. If most of your advertising dollars are going to digital ads, it's time to diversify out of home advertising like billboards offers low cost, high value reach. Adquick makes it easy to plan, buy and measure all in one place. Visit adquick.com twist and mention twist to get $1,000 off your first campaign.
-
Unknown A
All right everybody, welcome back to this Week in Startups. We've been doing this for over 2,000 episodes. I am Jason Calacanis. I invest in 100 companies a year. With me is Alex Wilhelm. You know him from his TechCrunch, Crunchbase, Matterport, all kinds of different journalistic and database experiences covering business, startup finance, IPOs, all that good stuff and technology of course. We're here three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Subscribe on YouTube. You get to see us do it live around noon Texas time, 10am Pacific, 1pm East. We'll go live and we do about 20% more show if you come live and join the Noti Gang. The Noti Gang is the Notification Gang. N oti Notification Gang. To join the Notification gang, follow at Jason, follow at Alex, follow @TWI startups on X formerly known as Twitter or just go to YouTube. Type in this week in Startups hit subscribe and then put all alerts on.
-
Unknown A
You want all alerts and you get to hang with us and we take messages from the live audience. You can read the docket anytime this week in startups.com docket. And let's get right to work here. Alex. There's just so much on the docket. We should just go right into the first news story.
-
Unknown B
I want to start with a chart that blew my mind. So we've talked a lot about startups being high growth companies. Very important to get out there. Triple, triple, triple, double, double, whatever your favorite metric is. Then there came the AI era and we have seen, I think, Jason, a rapid acceleration in how quickly startups reach major revenue milestones. And this chart was shared by Aaron Levy from Box and everyone's favorite technology person showing how fast cursor the AI coding assistant grew to 100 million ARR. And this is not a two years. Two years, two years.
-
Unknown A
Two years.
-
Unknown B
Two.
-
Unknown A
Wow. And it looks like after year one it was at maybe 30. So $100 million in 24 months. That 4 million of ARR added a month on average. That is mind blowing.
-
Unknown B
Mind blowing. And keep in mind that when we think about other companies that have grown very quickly, like, you know, Docusign was a huge venture win. It went public, it did quite well. It took over 10 years to reach 100 million ARR. Now we are seeing with wiz and deal and together AI. I just think that now companies are growing faster, so the outliers are better than they were before. Jason, why right?
-
Unknown A
Is that the question? Why?
-
Unknown B
I mean, in a lot of these cases the answer is just AI is resonating with the market. But I wonder if just software is now bigger than it was back in the day and so there's more TAM to attack. So it helps companies grow.
-
Unknown A
Yes and no. I mean, when you look at that chart, Docusign is something that a company signs up for and you change the process of signing documents from the physical world to the digital world. Seems like that is something that takes time. With a copilot, it sounds like an individual can just sign up with ChatGPT, an individual can just sign up and that individual gets massive value. And the price point is so low that these things seem to be SaaS, companies that are growing like consumer companies. And that was always the dream of Silicon Valley and venture capitalists. SaaS, predictable reoccurring revenue paid for by the person who uses the software consumer typically Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Twitter, Foursquare, you know, pick Your viral Yelp app or product or service, they would grow 5% a week, week over week. You know, every 12 weeks they double in size.
-
Unknown A
But it was a free product. So this is free products growing violently. I'm sorry, paid product growing like free products did. It's absolutely astounding. I wonder how many people work at Cursor.
-
Unknown B
It's any sphere that makes cursor. Right? Any Sphere has between 11 and 50 employees, which is to say call it 25. That's 4 million in ARR apiece. I think curse is going to be okay.
-
Unknown A
4 million in ARR per employee. And if you were in the middle.
-
Unknown B
Of their employee range.
-
Unknown A
Yeah, yeah. So if that is the case, that would be one of the highest per revenue companies of all time. If you were to look at a company, you know, a Google, a Facebook, et cetera, they were typically at 1 to 2 million dollars in revenue per employee. So, you know, a million dollars per employee, every thousand employees, a billion dollars, 100 billion in revenue, 100,000 employees. You can kind of start to do the math here. Yeah, just extraordinary.
-
Unknown B
I mean, extraordinary. I'm blown away by it. I'm still very curious about churn long term and also like what happens when these products become a little bit more commodified like we talked about with self driving. But no matter what, no caveats needed, growing that fast to 100 million ARR, mind blowing. So I'm very excited about that cost.
-
Unknown A
What is the product cost?
-
Unknown B
I think it's a consumer style thing. But I'll pull it up for us just so we have it.
-
Unknown A
Yes, it's 25 bucks a month, $199 if you pay for the year. So cursor pricing is, you know, the other way to sort of understand exactly how many customers they have. Because acquiring a customer takes money or a high net promoter score. So you either have to pay for them, expose them through paid ads, or you can have earned media, which would be getting a TechCrunch story, etc. Or being here on this week in startups. And then the third possibility is virality high net promoter score. When you see that question in a survey on a, on a website or a product, how likely are you to recommend Cursor? How likely you recommend this week in startups to a friend. On a scale of 1 to 10, if you get a 9 or a 10, that means you're an advocate, you're a promoter, you're somebody who talks about the product to the public.
-
Unknown A
If you get six and under, you're a detractor. Seven and eight, you're indifferent. In other words, you're not going to say something bad about the product. You're not going to say something great about the product. And net promoter score for founders who are listening is a way to determine that Cursor must have an extremely high net promoter score from customers or they would have. Or they've spent an enormous amount of money and got an enormous amount of press. I suspect they've gotten a lot of press and it's a killer product. And people tell the developer on their team in their slack, you know, or in their discord, hey, you got to try this.
-
Unknown B
Well, so the pricing is 20 bucks a month for pro or 40 bucks a month per business user. If you're paying a developer, that's de minimis. So why not at least try it out?
-
Unknown A
Yeah, 500 employee is nothing compared to what these things provide. If you're paying 500 per employee per year and you make an employee 1% more efficient and they cost 100,000 for a developer on average around the world, I think you could do the math there. You've doubled your money. So. And these things definitely make you more than 1%?
-
Unknown B
Absolutely. So, I mean, on one hand, I wonder if prices will come down as there's more competition, models get commodified. On the other hand, there's so much value being provided, you almost want them to charge more. But anyways, Cursor is doing well. AI is doing well. Big news though, Jason, that will impact everyone in the venture and startup worlds, which is that it does seem that a favored tax treatment is coming to an end. And you had some relatively clear words about this. You tweeted out quote, getting rid of carried interest exemption is going to result in a lot less investing in startup startups. Huge mistake to take away that incentive. And the news, of course here is that Trump has floated a plan to get rid of the carried interest tax loophole, as it's often called. You were more negative than I expected here, Jason. So talk me through how you're feeling.
-
Unknown A
So I don't mind paying extra taxes, to be clear, but I saw Jason Lemkin from Saster was tweeting and actually he had taken that screenshot, I mean, I think explaining the carried interest loophole, which means if you have a carried interest, you get 20% of the gains in your venture firm. Should that be capital gains, as in like a share of a company increased in value and you got that share because you're getting makary or should, should it be income like a salary? Squarespace makes stunning professional websites ridiculously easy. It doesn't matter if you're just selling a product or a service. Maybe you're just sharing your ideas, maybe you're an artist, maybe you're a consultant. Squarespace is going to give you all the tools to make this happen. And as you know, Squarespace is always adding cutting edge features. This is why I've been using it for over a decade.
-
Unknown A
And Squarespace is actually the longest running partner here on this Week in Service because every time I need a new feature, Squarespace adds it. And the new AI tools are unbelievable. They have one called Design Intelligence. It's like having a world class designer sitting next to you in your office and you just answer a couple of questions and their AI builds you a fully customized site that's perfect for your brand, that's unique to you and it does it in just minutes. Personalized layouts on brand visuals, premium content. It's all ready to go. So start your year off strong@squarespace.com twist for a free trial. And when you're ready to Launch, go to squarespace.comTWIST to get 10% off off your first website or domain purchase. Squarespace.comTWIST thank you to Squarespace for making such a great product that we use year after year at an affordable price. And we really appreciate your partnership.
-
Unknown A
It is a share of a company, you're getting a share of the venture firm as the general partner in a venture firm like I am or Jason Lenkin is or anybody who's got that title. So if you were to take that away and then the person has to pay ordinary income tax, you're just going to go from capital gains treatment, which is half, maybe of income tax, to income tax. What does that do? That means venture capitalists make half as much and they pay twice as much in taxes, which means less people want to be venture capitalists. Less people, they just won't work as hard or be in it as long because you don't make enough money, I think on average from it to make people want to take that hit. And so yeah, it's going to lower the number of people who want the job.
-
Unknown A
I don't actually care because I hit a couple of home runs. It's not like, and I'm going to be doing this for another 10 to 20 years. I'm kind of on the second half of my career. I'm on the back nine, as they might say. So you know, it's like, is it going to make me stop investing in startups. I might make me retire a little bit earlier if I'm being honest. Like what's the point of putting all this work in if I'm going to pay twice as much in taxes? Yeah, I mean if you're, if you sold your equities and had to pay income tax on them and you paid 50% or 52%, I think that becomes the question is how many people quit. Dan Primrack, he actually retweeted me, he did a quote tweet and he said every time this issue comes up, I asked VC and PE readers if they plan to quit, have never gotten a single yes.
-
Unknown A
So I think people do a little hand reading. Jason Lemkin retweeted it. I'm on Jason Lemkin's replies. I'll just looking at this sort of back and forth and Jason Lemkin says, let's just see, we will find out what happens when you know this actually, if it, this actually happens, if it happens. What Jason Lemkin said, would I keep seed venture investing qsbs that's qualified small business stock for VC ended and I had to pay ordinary income tax rates on all seed investments? Not sure, maybe not. So I can tell you all the syndicates out there, if you get rid of QSPs, if you get, if you make syndicate leads, you know people who do syndicates on Angellist and other platforms, if you make them pay twice as much tax, I do think it will disincentivize them because the whole business, the economics are based upon hitting a home run and pay paying capital gains tax, not income tax.
-
Unknown A
If you take that incentive away, I do think you could see 10, 20, 30% of people say, you know what? Yeah, not worth my time.
-
Unknown B
So that perspective was actually echoed by again Dan Primack. He had a great tweet. He says source on phone just now on the carried interest tax situation, quote, it's like the Red Wedding. Trump collected all the VCs at the White House so he could more easily murder them. Just going to show that some people are really, really mad about this. So my question was how much money are we talking about? And I actually, I found a bill that was put out, I think it was yesterday by a couple of reps in the House and they said that according to the treasury, closing the loophole, to use that phrase, would raise about six and a half billion dollars in revenue over 10 years. So 650 million a year and the differential is 23.8% versus 40.8%, I think, is the top marginal versus the current carried interest rate.
-
Unknown B
So it's about 17%. 17% yielding 650 million means about 3.8 billion in yearly income. That would be taxed at a higher rate. It's money. It's not deficit changing money, Jason. But you know, we have talked in the show about shared pain and, and all that. I guess this is, this is when the rubber meets the road. You know, how, how much do people want to take pain for revenue versus more deficits, I guess.
-
Unknown A
Yeah, I mean, cap gains rate versus ordinary income federal probably 20% versus 37%. If I'm reading here, California would be 13% added on top of that. So your total rate, if you made a million dollars as a venture capitalist, which means, let's say your firm had a $5 million return, which would be 20% of 25 million. You sold a $25 million, you had a $25 million gain on an investment. You get 20% of that 5 million. You split it between four partners and 20% of it between the rest of the staff. Each partner gets a million bucks. Instead of getting $630,000, they would get. No, instead of paying. Yeah, getting $630,000, they Would get $500,000. So it's actually not double, but it's still very significant. And then it would drive more people to live in a state without income tax, one of the five or ten states.
-
Unknown A
So it could actually really affect California. More people would live in Florida and Texas and other states, which, you know, is the big trend. All these people from New York, New Jersey, Connecticut have moved to Florida from the private equity space. And in California, they've moved to, I think, mostly Nevada and Texas. So that's actually what this will do. It'll drive people out of the major cities where they'll look to get a savings on the difference between cap gains and already income. They'll look for that savings by moving jurisdictions. So that actually could be the second order effect as people go, gosh, this isn't enough money to make a living. I'd rather be a founder of a company instead of a capital allocator, because the founders and the LPs, they're still going to get cap gains treatment. So what you're doing is you're saying everybody who works at the company gets cap gains.
-
Unknown A
Everybody who is an LP in a fund that invests gets cap gains. The founders get cap gains. The gps who pick the companies work on them for a decade. They don't get cap gains. So three out of four people participating in this equity creation get cap gains treatment. The VCs don't. That's actually a way to look at it. So, again, I don't mind paying more in taxes. I just think if you're going to get rid of cap gains tax, you should just come up with one flat tax and put it between cap gains and income tax. Right. That would be easier because when you got to think realistically, well, we could.
-
Unknown B
Lower the top marginal rate, right, to call it to 35, and then raise the capital gains to that and. Or carry interest. I can see ways to do it. I don't think it's going to get killed. This is not the first time this has come up. Trump brought it up in 2016. I think Biden brought it up too consistently. It's raised as an idea and then it gets shot down because I think a lot of influential people don't want to endure it. And so I don't think it's going to happen this time. I just found it surprising given how close Trump has become to a number of people in the venture capital community in the last 12, 18, 24 months. I thought that was going to buy them a bit more.
-
Unknown A
Yeah. And private equity, I think this is saber rattling in. I think it's 60% chance of saber rattling, 40% chance of reality. I do think it will push, you know, one in five folks to just retire and be like, yeah, or maybe of angel investors and people who do syndicates, maybe half of them or a third of them might. A third of them might say, yeah, not worth it for me to syndicate these deals. And it just slows down. The one thing we have in America that really drives investment, which is we incentivize people to make these investments and to create funds and syndicates and all kinds of clubs and angel investing clubs to take advantage of capital gains and investing companies, as opposed to just putting it in an index fund and, you know, retiring. And so that's what you got to be careful about.
-
Unknown A
And this qualified small business means you don't pay taxes on the 1st. You don't pay federal taxes, I think on the first 10 million in gains if you invested in a company under $50 million valuation. We created that qualified small business exemption to get more people to invest in startups. So you get rid of that, then people are going to be like, you know, I'll just put my money in Bitcoin, in an index fund. I want to invest in startups. It's easy.
-
Unknown B
Those are two very different things to be clear. Bitcoin versus index funds. But I, I, I need DCA into both. So I'm, I'm with you on that.
-
Unknown A
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.
-
Unknown A
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 sudd. 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 Rivian keep growing and keep innovating. Whether you're brainstorming on sticky notes or scaling to the big leads. Atlassian is here to accelerate your startups growth. Check out Atlassian for startups where eligible startups get up to 50 seats for free for one full year.
-
Unknown A
That is absurdly generous. Why can they be so generous at Atlassian? Because they're the standard. Atlassian is the standard and they are generous to startups because they were once a startup. I remember meeting them 20 years ago in Australia. What a great company. Head to atlassian.com startups/twist for complete details.
-
Unknown B
Speaking about things that we incent with our venture capital money, Jason, I have brought on a twist 500 CEO and co founder on the show today. It's A company that when I first heard about them, I was incredibly excited. Their name is Orbit Fab and they are building essentially a way to refuel satellites and spacecraft and space stations in orbit. So they are doing what I think is one of the coolest things in the world of space technology Today, backed by Techstars, Type 1 Ventures, a bunch of other folks, and they have a lot of cool stuff. So Daniel Faber, we're going to bring him up right now. Daniel, welcome to the show. Thanks for being here.
-
Unknown D
Thanks Jason. Great to be here.
-
Unknown A
Nice to see you, Daniel. So tell us, what is the mission of the company, so to speak?
-
Unknown D
We want to see a bustling in space economy that can support permanent jobs in space. That's our long term vision. Our mission is to build the industrial chemical supply chain that supports that. To do that, we are focused right now on storing and delivering fuel in orbit. All the satellites in orbit need fuel. Otherwise the drift around and have issues you have to deorbit them when they run out of fuel. And so we paired that down and we're a gas cap company. Right now we're building the gas cap, we built the interface. It's becoming a de facto standard. Which gives us an interesting position then in the market on fuel in orbit.
-
Unknown B
I have a video of that right now. Jason, while you ask your question all the time.
-
Unknown A
Yeah, I was going to say it sounds like you're building a gas station. And you have confirmed here is the gas station. I don't know what type of fuel is used in space. I thought people used batteries and solar in space. So what is the fuel in the satellites that you're refilling?
-
Unknown D
Yeah, we, we're using hydrazine is what the US government wants. It's a, it's an interesting chemical. It's great for satellites. It's not so great for people. So a lot of, a lot of requirements come on the ground to make sure that we can fuel safely on the ground. And then we use that equipment to fuel in orbit. You can use batteries and solar arrays to run all the electronics, but you can't move the satellite just off of electricity. Imagine putting a Tesla in space. You spin the wheels all day, you don't go anywhere. You have to push something out the back. And so it's really reaction mass or propellant that we're providing. And yeah, there's a few different forms of that.
-
Unknown A
So hydrazine is a chemical that goes into satellites that allows some propulsion to occur. That liquid, I'm assuming it's like a liquid propellant.
-
Unknown D
Yes, exactly.
-
Unknown A
Yeah. Okay, so you get that liquid up in space, you build your space station. You created the standard for the gas hookup. What did people do previously? They just. The satellites fall out of the sky and they don't refuel them and then they just send up a whole nother satellite. Is that how it works?
-
Unknown D
Today they literally have to ditch them because. Because you can't control a satellite without fuel, you can't move it around. It becomes just a piece of debris and it's dangerous. Like we're now putting up thousands of satellites into the busiest orbits. It's a problem with the debris. So we're required by the government to get that debris out of orbit. And in fact, operationally you don't want that in your, in a busy orbit. So as it comes to the end of the life, as they get low on fuel, they have to ditch them, which is staggering. So 85% of the satellites, they've got customers still. All the, like the transponders or the imaging sensors or like whatever, the payloads are still working, but they have forced to get rid of those satellites because they're out of fuel.
-
Unknown A
That is extraordinary. And so is this an open standard you've created for the gas caps, as it were? Anybody can put it onto their fuel. We make it to their satellite.
-
Unknown D
Yeah, yeah, we make it available under an open license. We're in discussion with folks that make a lot of the valves for satellites and rockets to manufacture and sell that. So everybody should be able to get the gas cap and use it to fill a satellite on the ground. And then in orbit we've got the systems and sort of the active side that can dock to the satellite and deliver the fuel. We can sell fuel as soon as people have that g. I want to.
-
Unknown B
Ask about commercial progress because In March of 2024, you guys said that you were shipping your first 12 gas caps to customers including the Space Force. Have those made it up into orbit yet? Or are you guys not yet actually up in space?
-
Unknown D
Yeah, good question, Alex. We've sold now 52 units. We just flat qualified them last year and in the summer we got approved by Defense department in the US for using them on some of the biggest national security assets and everything else like that. So it's the first commercially available FUE import and that's why it's becoming a de facto standard. So we sold 50 odd units. We shipped a bunch of those. They're going up on satellites starting this year. So already it's starting to build that market. And of course Every one we expect is several million dollars of revenue that right now we're the only folks that can fuel that. So we've built 3,400 million dollars market just from selling those gas caps last year.
-
Unknown A
So right now, people buy a car, they drive it, they run out of fuel, and then they abandon the car. Now you'll be able to go fill up their car and then keep the car in orbit and you'll be able to refill it, I assume indefinitely. So then it's just what is the life of the satellite? It now becomes the issue. So what would the cost be to refuel an average satellite?
-
Unknown D
Let me talk about the cost of what they're doing right now and how much that fuel is worth. Right? You characterized it really well. Imagine buying a car that's got 10 or 15 years worth of fuel in it, right? Most of the fuel is in a train of trailers behind the car. And you use up most of the fuel just towing the fuel around.
-
Unknown A
Oh, that's how it works now. So you basically have an RV and you've got two people in it, and then the other 90% is fuel. So you have to spend all this money to put fuel up, which means you have to have a bigger satellite, which means you take more space on a space flight.
-
Unknown D
So 50% of the satellites on average is fuel. And that's not make like your money is being made on the payloads, but you've got to have that fuel and you're using a lot of it just to tow the fuel around. So you're on this exponential, right? Because the last piece of fuel at the end you've had to pay for with fuel through the whole life. And then you're on a second exponential because you had to buy it all the day you launched. So the cost of capital is adding up. So when we went out before we started the company, we're asking folks like, what would be the marginal revenue if you had an extra kilo of fuel in orbit? The answer was a million dollars or more, which is a staggering number. But it's not worth putting any more fuel in up front because of those exponentials.
-
Unknown D
So if we can run the logistics and deliver that fuel just in time at the end, we can get fuel to orbit for one to $10,000 a kilogram. I've got two or three orders of magnitude arbitrage. I can drive a freight train through that business opportunity. So that's why we went for it.
-
Unknown A
Can you make hydrazine in space or do you also have to get all that hydrazine up in space and pay for that cost.
-
Unknown D
Right. You're reading way ahead of my business model. You're absolutely right. We actually got asked about doing that because the space force wanted to know if we have an issue if our satellites get taken out in orbit. They're so important to how we operate. How quickly could we replace them. So they brought a satellite that bought a rocket and they said go for it. How quickly can you get this to orbit? And the thing that took the longest was fueling because of how dangerous and toxic this hydrazine is. It took them like a day and a half waiting on the pad to get it fueled.
-
Unknown A
Got it.
-
Unknown D
And so they called us and said, can we buy that fuel in orbit? Could we put inert feedstock in and you could make it in orbit? We actually intend to do that. So phase one, right. Storage and delivery of fuel. Stage two for the company is to become do the refineries in orbit. Right. Stage three, I want to use material that's coming from asteroids and ingest the trillions of dollars of material. That's my 20 year goal. So right now we're a gas cap company. But yeah, we have ambitions because it's.
-
Unknown A
Nitrogen and hydrogen I see here. So you can get it from water, ammonia. So it could be found and it has been found on asteroids in space. So eventually right now we're going to be putting that stuff up there. You're going to have to use like, you know, get a, get a hitch a ride from Elon and get up to space. That's great because all those satellites don't have to put it up there and it's more efficient. And then you got to just chase them around at 500 miles an hour or a thousand miles an hour and sync up to them. That, that's a little bit of work too. Right? The chase I assum.
-
Unknown D
Yeah. Once you match the orbits, like the relative velocity is not always what matters. Not the absolute velocity. It's like being on a highway. You can actually jump from one car to another. As long as the wind doesn't get you in space. There's no wind.
-
Unknown A
Founders, let's talk about building your brand here in the real world. We know digital ads are amazing, but if you want to stand out in 2025, maybe you need to think a little bit bigger. And a great way to do that is out of home advertising. Yes. You know those really impressive billboards you see everywhere or even the beautiful murals that everybody loves? This is how you build a brand and ad quick makes out of Home advertising easy, measurable and fast. They've taken the headaches out of. Ooh, you've probably heard ooh. Out of home. By combining ad tech precision with real world impact. So now planning, deploying and tracking your campaign is as easy as running digital ads. With Ad Quick, they're going to hyper target your campaign in minutes. Then they're going to use their data and technology to ensure your ads reach the right audience every single time.
-
Unknown A
Plus they're going to give you real time insights to measure performance and optimize your spend. So whether you're building brand awareness or looking to drive customer action, right, you want to acquire customers. You can see why Ad Quick is trusted by everyone from the fastest growing startups to the S&P 500. Take your brand to the next level with Ad Quick. The smarter way to do. O h, and just for Twist listeners, Ad Quick is waiving their fee on your first campaign. That's an amazing offer. Get started today. Adquick.com twist that's a D, Q U I C K dot com twist.
-
Unknown D
You're coming up and the relative speed when you dock the satellites together is less than a centimeter per second. Right. They do it really slowly to make sure that nothing's getting bumped. So while it takes a bit of fuel to do it, the math is known. And you know, these days that's a, that's a solved problem. Billions of dollars has been spent on self driving cars. We use a bit of that technology. We make self driving satellites.
-
Unknown A
Love it. Where are you guys based?
-
Unknown D
Based in Colorado, set up in Silicon Valley. Good place to raise money. But Colorado is an excellent place to hire aerospace engineers. So we had a great time.
-
Unknown A
I mean if you think about the cost of living for an average engineer, if they're making low hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, they are poor in Silicon Valley. They can't afford a home and they're under constant duress. And if they do it in Colorado, you can buy a beautiful home for a half million dollars or a million dollars and go skiing.
-
Unknown B
I knew this was going to get back to skiing, Jason.
-
Unknown A
I mean it always does. These engineers, they love to carve, they love to get out there and smash some of that awesome powder. So continued success. This is amazing. And it's just so great to see the space industry finding all the nooks and crannies. It's almost like you're rebuilding the entire Internet infrastructure. And it's like watching the Internet, just all that infrastructure, it's like you're like aws giving people storage. Other people are, you know, the transport layer, you know, fiber lines. And it's just wild to think in 20 years what space as an industry is going to be like and how easy it is to get stuff up there now. I mean, how easy is it going to be to go to space in 20 years, do you think?
-
Unknown D
Well, the starship that is expected actually to get operational this year, that is going to be a paradigm shift. It's absolutely amazing. But let me paint a picture for you as to why VCs are really getting interested in this. We're starting to build this industrial chemical supply. There are companies looking at manufacturing in orbit and there are things you can do in zero gravity that you can't do on the ground. Like buoyancy doesn't exist. You get orders of magnitude lower defect densities in semiconductors. You can make drugs that you can't make on the ground because the gravity effects will destroy them. You can 3D print organs and they won't collapse on themselves. You can actually like. There's so many things you can't do. We've barely scratched the surface. So I can see a manufacturing process where you need a bit of the start, a bit at the end in zero gravity.
-
Unknown D
So you just do the whole thing in space and we end up moving most of materials manufacturing to orbit. I can see healthcare. You do a surgery, you could put somebody in a rotating environment where you have this pseudo gravity, but it's lighter on your heart and you can control it. So you could recover better from surgery. You could retire in orbit and lower the stress in your heart and live a better life. And three times as long. We're talking already now with folks that are doing power beaming from space. You get three times as much power because there's no eclipses, there's no nighttime, and that the, the atmosphere isn't attenuating the power. And if you want to run nuclear, let's do that in space, not on Earth. That's safer. Let's move power generation to orbit. Right. I've just used, moved 20 or 30 gigatons of CO2 emissions to, to orbit.
-
Unknown D
I think we're going to have a bigger economy in space in years than we have on Earth because there are so many industries that are going to be up there.
-
Unknown B
I love that. But one thing that you and I were talking about before we jumped on was just that sometimes raising money for hardware projects is a little bit harder than software projects. And I'm just. Can you tell us a little bit about how Hard it was to raise capital at the start of orbit. Fab. And then where the venture world is today because it seems to be different.
-
Unknown D
When we started this it was like classic pre seed massive opportunity. But oh my gosh, the risks. If we had three or four impossible things that we had to achieve, we've now ticked off three and a half of them. And so our investors are getting pretty interested. But we did the techstars space accelerator program which is fantastic. And then we're talking to some folks from the software side of techstars and a lot of history in startups are talking like go out and raise money. You hit the road when you're prepared. It'll take you sort of two, three weeks to get a term sheet and away you go. And we asked what about for a hardware company? And they said oh that'll take four or five times longer. What about a space hardware company? And the guy just said oh don't bother.
-
Unknown A
Well these space things. I seem to remember Baiju from Rock Robinhood was working on a space based solar energy company. I think it's called aetherflux A E T H E R F L U X so that would be actually a good person to consider for the twist 500 next Alex. So let's take a look at the co founder of yeah, this is the next. I think shoe to drop as you're pointing out is well what if you could collect energy in space and then somehow get that energy which the density from the sun coming to solar in space is going to be much greater. Right. Because there's no atmosphere. So my understanding is even solar might work better up there. Then you use a beam which hopefully you don't miss. But if you go beam to beam, you know you could send a lot of energy from space down to the ground.
-
Unknown A
So imagine the most remote island in the world, Alex having not just a satellite with Starlink but the Starlink and some base station down there getting energy from the sun from solar arrays in space and then you don't have to run a cable or burn gasoline or have ineffective solar down there. You could just point and send energy anywhere. Again this is like some sort of. I don't know if this was like the. I think this might have been Superman threes theme which was there's going to be like a solar array in space that burns a hole into the earth. But yeah, be careful guys. Might have been Moonriker. Yeah I'm not sure exactly which one but man, what do you this energy is going to work.
-
Unknown D
You Think it was one of my three industries on the list of things that might create the first permanent jobs in space. Back 20 years ago when I got into this, into this industry. I at that time ruled it out because the economics did not work. But you have to look at what starship is doing to launch costs. The cost of solar has come down, the efficiency has gone up. All that matters, the technology for getting that power to the ground and doing it safely, which is massively important, that is now maturing. But it's really the drop in launch cost which is the biggest factor. I was talking with somebody just yesterday at a conference and they said the number they need on launch costs is $200 a kilogram. As soon as it hits that point, all solar goes to space.
-
Unknown B
At what price point does your business make sense? Because you have to get the hydrazine up there to run this process. So what's your kind of like maximum viable kilogram launch cost for orbit fab to work?
-
Unknown D
Remember that number that I mentioned? $1 million of marginal revenue per kilogram. There's a Space Force journal publication that said for us Space Force, the value of just delaying the asset replacements is $800,000 a kilogram. And that's before you think about how Contesta like the reason Space Force exists is because we need to be getting out of the way and showing up. Surprisingly, as a folks, the real value is just prevailing in conflict. So we have a contract with the US government. The first time that's ever existed, it established the price of fuel at $200,000 a kilogram. My launch costs are 10, $20,000 a kilogram. I'm already viable at today's launch prices. As those costs drop, it just increases what I can do. It increases the amount of customers. We will chase that, that pricing down and jack up the volumes. That's the future of this industry.
-
Unknown A
Absolutely fantastic. This is amazing, Daniel, and we wish you great success. If you're looking for a job, I understand you've raised a little money and I think you're hiring.
-
Unknown D
Indeed.
-
Unknown A
What's a, what's a position you really need to fill? Because we've got a big audience here, maybe you get a couple of resumes out of it.
-
Unknown D
Also we need a lot of mechanical engineers, fluids, thermo, a bit of electrical and software and then all the things that support a startup. Right. 80% of what we do is running a startup business. So need finance, I need fpa, I need HR or all those kind of things. The space industry across the board is like that now Right. It's now a mature business. You don't have to be a nerdy engineer. If you are, then there's a hell of a lot of opportunities as well.
-
Unknown A
All right, well done, Daniel, and continued success.
-
Unknown B
Thanks, Alex.
-
Unknown D
Thanks, Jason. Thanks, Alex.
-
Unknown A
Thanks so much for taking the time. Oh, wow, what a great guest. And I'm so excited, Alex, that we're adding so many interesting companies to the Twist 500. If you go to twist500.com, our friends over at Coda, they're not the sponsors of it, but they make really great software. So we made an amazing database. I think we got 200 companies in there.
-
Unknown B
We're going towards 500, 230 and plus another 15 today, so basically 250. So it's back half time, actually, so I'll just take a moment to ask the audience. You know, my email is alexwaunch. Co. And we spend a lot of time going through funding, news stories, revenue growth, just trying to find these breakout companies that are going to really drive economic success. We only have so many eyes. We're always looking for great suggestions. You can nominate yourself, but you know, minus five points. But if you know a company that's really burning up, just let us know because we're trying to make sure this is the list of the best companies.
-
Unknown A
Out there, the best private companies, you know, most likely to become sustainable, independent companies for a long time. So we're looking for the next Tesla, Uber, Airbnb, DoorDash, Google, Facebook, etc. So if you have them, send them along and we'll keep figuring out who those top 500 companies are. And if we do, I might make an index of it and just raise a hundred million dollars to try to put, you know, a million dollars into each of a hundred of them or 500k into each of them. So that is my long term play here is we really define these well and then maybe we'll make a fund. Yeah, that would go and try to acquire shares in those companies in the secondary market. So twist500.com we're trying to get this wrapped up in the first half of the year with great companies that have a ton of revenue.
-
Unknown A
So make sure we're looking for ones that have that clear path to revenue and sustainability. What else is on the docket today?
-
Unknown B
Well, how about a twist 500 company with tons of revenue that just did a massive secondary just hitting all the things you just said. There's a company called Deal which helps companies hiring remote employees around the world. Couple of big news items here. One, they just pulled off a 300 million secondary anchored by General Catalyst and a, quote, sovereign investor. This went to buy out their early investors. The company is not exactly a spring chicken, Jason. IT confirmed its $12 billion valuation in this transaction. And so I'm thinking, what's driving this? Why is a nine figure secondary? Well, it turns out Deal is on an $800 million run rate as at the end of last year.
-
Unknown A
Growing IPO territory, isn't it?
-
Unknown B
We'll get to that. Growing 70% a year and it's profitable. So the company is doing tremendously well. But instead of us sitting down here and going, you won't believe it, there's an S1 filing from deal we just did $300 million in secondary to buy out early investors. And my read is that that means investor pressure to make them go public has been dramatically curtailed. So yay. But also, I would have loved to not talk about a secondary instead talk about an S1.
-
Unknown A
Well, you do have this issue because of the wrath of Lina Khan for the last four years. And you know, by March 1, I will not bring up her name again. But over the last four years, you're a show man. You're good. You didn't have a lot of M and A and you didn't have a lot of IPOs. You know, the market was a little tough for those type of things. And so a lot of early shareholders need liquidity. When your fund hits year 10, 11, 12, you know, the LPs are like, hey, can we get some of that DPI? Can we get some returns here on our money? And there are large firms like it seems, General Catalyst and Mubadala. Mubadala is a firm I know well from Abu Dhabi. I've met them a couple times when I'm there. Really great firm, really smart.
-
Unknown A
The Mubadala team is doing direct investments like this. So I've talked, Alex, a couple of times about how I see the Middle East's role in Silicon Valley. Well, here you have Mubadala, you know, buying a significant, you know, ticket size here, 300 million between them and General Catalyst to buy about the early investors. This is something sovereign wealth funds are uniquely qualified to do. They can come in, do this kind of bridge financing or late stage financing, get ownership in these and, you know, they'll probably 5 to 10 access when the company goes public if it's been priced correctly. And it seems like in today's market, people are being more disciplined about pricing and this is going to be the difference. People Thought that a firm like Mobile, and I don't have any insight onto this deal with them, but in general, they thought, oh, Mubadal is going to be, you know, an LP in funds.
-
Unknown A
Some people might think the money in the Middle east was the dumb money, quote unquote, at the table. You just go to the Middle east, they take 10% of your venture fund, you go invest. Au contraire, mon fr. These are really smart people and they are doing direct deals. So the Mubadala people, you know, the folks from the PIF in Saudi, the sovereign wealth fund in Qatar or Qatar, depending on where you're from, they are now stacked by really smart people. So NOBL is the venture arm of the PIF from Saudi. And those incredibly smart people are not just investing in venture funds. Of course they do that. But now they're in the sort of next phase, which is they are joining the boards and doing direct investments, doing secondary investments, doing strip investments where they buy shares from venture funds to clear those out.
-
Unknown A
And so they're, they're Sharps now. They have Sharps on their team and they, they know, hey, deal is a really good deal. Let's get there and, you know, get a seat at the table now before it goes public. So this is really the, the story for me is seeing that Mubadala is a driver here, not just general catalyst.
-
Unknown B
So I agree with all of that, I think. But what I'm a little surprised by is just the deal they got because it feels inexpensive to me. If you said that deal was growing at 30% and was at 800 million ARR, and was worth $12 billion, which is 15x ARR, I would have said, okay, 15x 30% growth, fine, but 70% growth and profitability, to me, it just feels like they're getting quite a large discount on the future exit price of.
-
Unknown A
This asset, you know, or we're getting realistic pricing. Uber is trading at, you know, two and a half times sales. And then you have, which, you know, I feel obviously talking. My own book is like, unbelievable when Palantir is trading at 80 times sales. So there's like, there's your range, folks. People can get really enthusiastic and people can get super pessimistic. And then in between is reality. If we look at this, if they're doing 800 million in revenue, what was the valuation that this 12. Okay, so it's roughly. What is that? 14 times 15? 15. So, yeah, 15 times sales. If you, if they're growing, would you say 60% year over year or 70? I mean, that's pretty amazing, right? Yeah. So if they're at 70, they're adding another 500 million revenue to be at 1.3 billion. So then it's like 10x next year's revenue if it keeps up.
-
Unknown A
You know, 10x 12x top line revenue is very expensive for a public company. But if you're getting in early, you're securing those shares and it's going to go public and you have a five to ten year holding window, which a sovereign wealth fund would have, they might want to hold this for five to 10 years because they're public holders of equities as well. You know, if this thing's growing 70% and they overpaid by a year or two and then it catches up in the public markets in year three and four and then it keeps growing and you've secured Your position Years 5, 6 and 7 with an outside chance that it could get a Tesla like valuation or, you know, you know, Palantir like valuation. That's, that's a sharp bet. Right. We start talking about sharp bets. And so I think if you can't get in at the earliest stages, you know, this is what late stage is about.
-
Unknown A
If they put $150 million check in Mubadala and General Catalyst each, let's say they split it.
-
Unknown B
Sure.
-
Unknown A
That would be a very big check size. You can't put that into series A, that's 10 series, as you know, or 20 series A's, that's 50 seed rounds.
-
Unknown B
Well, you might be able to put it into an AI series A, but any other normal non AI foundation model company Series A is going to be much, much smaller than that.
-
Unknown A
Well, valuation, by the way, just. I'll end on this. It's a really good sign that secondary is happening, because secondary doesn't happen if the valuation doesn't make sense and there's a clear path to the next milestones. So congratulations to the deal team and to the early investors who get some liquidity.
-
Unknown B
Yeah, no, I mean, look, I'm not shouting about success. I'm just saying it's almost a bummer for me that there's so much late, late, late stage private capital that companies just don't end up needing to go public because I just want more S1 filings. On that note, Jason, a small point, Sail Point, which is going back out. It's an Octa competitor. It was public when private via private equity now going back out. They did announce this week that their first IPO price share range is 19 to 21. That's about $1 billion they're going to raise and they're going to have a valuation of about 11 and a half billion on a fully diluted valuation. That's going to happen next week, if memory serves. So everyone, we will have notes about that IPO when it does list. It'll be the first major technology listing of the year.
-
Unknown B
And you know, deal aside, I would like to see another 20, 30, 40. I'll take 100. I mean, whatever.
-
Unknown A
And it's, it turns out it's an Austin, Texas company. So my, my hometown right now. And they were founded in 2005. They've been around for 20 years. They went public, they went private, now they're going public again. So thus is the world of private equity. And they do identity management.
-
Unknown B
Yep.
-
Unknown A
Which basically means, you know, when you go work for some big company and you log into, you know, like Okta, many people know that one. But like Okta, if you log in one time and then all of a sudden it authenticates you in your 20 other accounts and it's all tracked and secure and monitored so that you don't get hacked. That's what this software does. Incredibly boring, incredibly profitable, incredibly important.
-
Unknown B
There's a really big connection between incredibly boring and incredibly profitable when it comes to selling to the enterprise. I mean, whenever I think about what Sailpoint does, my eyelids begin to droop. But you it's going to go out with worth 11 $12 billion. So clearly a big transaction. I'm just hoping it goes well because I feel like if it does perform strongly, so strongly that the IPO scolds complained that it was mispriced like that level of good, then I think it'll be a big signal to other companies that might be looking at the market right now going maybe we'll go in the back half of the year or maybe early 26 to get off the sidelines, get off the benches and go forth. I know politics is scary right now, or at least tumultuous, but maybe the public markets are warm and calm and ready to go.
-
Unknown A
And full disclosure, we invested in a very groovy company, cap based, that was making like a cap table software plus plus plus a lot of other features and they were acquired by deal. And so I have some exposure to this deal and deal.
-
Unknown B
I did not know that.
-
Unknown A
Yeah, well, you know, a modest acquisition. It wasn't like, you know, 20 people competing for a company before it goes public. You know, sometimes these companies, sometimes the management of companies decide they want to be part of something bigger. And maybe they can't clear a market. You know, in this case, I think they could have cleared market, but I think they really had some enthusiasm for being part of DL, if my memory serves me correctly. And so awesome. You know, it's great to have a little exposure here. And I guess this means somebody might offer us for you to buy our shares at some point in secondary or we might be going public. So. And then we syndicated that we run a syndicate called the syndicate.com where if you're an accredited or qualified purchaser, you can sign up and then you will see one or two deals a month that we're investing in that we share with our syndicate.
-
Unknown A
And yeah, it's a lot of fun.
-
Unknown B
Speaking about the Middle east, did you see the news that the UAE is looking to work with France to put together a 1 GW data center inside of France to help them with their AI efforts? This just happened today. I'm slightly surprised. I feel like the doom and gloom around Europe has reached kind of a fever bitch. And so this struck me as kind of a counter, counter narrative move, but I think it's a great one.
-
Unknown A
You mean every country needs more data centers? That's this, the law of the land. And it's great to have them distributed. Maybe there's an energy reason. There might be something in the climate or the location. People may not know this, but France was at 1.80% nuclear powered. I think today they might be 60%. They are. They were one of the visionary companies in Europe in terms of embracing nuclear. It might have peaked at 80 and on some days they might have been like 90%. Then you contrast to Germany, which shut down six reactors, I think over time. I think three of them immediately after Fukushima and then the. And then three other ones. And then when they got into this whole thing with Nord Stream and Russia. Here is the picture. The yellow is nuclear, is that right?
-
Unknown B
Yes, sir.
-
Unknown A
And I nailed it. It was, it peaked, I guess in the 2000, looks like nine era. And that was. Looks like about 80%. Yeah, I think I nailed it. And then it came down. It seems to have come down because of renewables. Their fossil fuels continue to go down, their hydroelectric is steady, and it looks like because of renewables they have a little bit less nuclear, which is fascinating.
-
Unknown B
I would, I would put nuclear under renewable just personally. But I do think that this is showing that when we consider the world, we might sometimes have too much of a startup narrative focus and we need to look more at what are the assets on the Ground perspective because this surprised me until I remembered exactly what we just said. That France has so much nuclear energy, low carbon power, stable baseload energy. Why wouldn't you want to build the data centers for Europe where you can just plug in to an existing running nuclear power plant? I mean it's exactly what people want here.
-
Unknown A
Yeah, I'm convinced that this announcement. Announcement. I think we probably nailed it. This has to do not with it being awesome to be able to go to France and hang out there. This has to do with nuclear. Yeah, they probably have extra nuclear capacity because if it peaked in 2009 and some of it got redone by or got eaten up by renewables, that means that capacity is probably sitting there. Okay, so France has 18 nuclear power plants with 56 reactors. Almost all are Gen 2 pressurized water reactors, PWRs 1 generation 3 EPR is under construction. But that's pretty impressive. 18 different nuclear power plants in a country I think is France 50 million people or so. What's the population of France? I can get, you know, I always like to know the populations.
-
Unknown B
68, 69 million.
-
Unknown A
Oh yeah.
-
Unknown B
So Germany, just for folks who are curious, is around 85 and then the UK is around 60. So France and the UK have about the same population which explains actually a lot of historic wars now that I think about it.
-
Unknown A
Yeah, yeah, no Germany and is 85 million, I think German speaking people because you got to take in some other countries, Austria around them, it's closer to 100. So.
-
Unknown B
But France though is not just nuclear power adjacent. They're hosting the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris and I think the VP is going and other major leaders. So there is some movement to keep momentum going in Europe and I really do think that more competition amongst, you know, free democratic countries is going to be good for American AI and for startups that build on top of it. So I'm hoping that there's a credible competitor from Europe, be it Mistral, be it someone else. I just. If we end up with three major AI companies and all American, I don't think we'll see as much competition as we would like. So.
-
Unknown A
Well, they are still building, they've got a bunch of new reactors I'm seeing here in Gemini Advanced just through the same search into both. And my Gemini Advanced with deep research says they are building small modular reactors and some of these EPR2 reactors and yeah, they're going for it in France.
-
Unknown B
So you know, we're having Helion Energy come on the show next week. They might actually be A live guest. We're sorting out the timing and some, and some things but they're doing fusion and this is the company that Sam Altman backed and he's been very bullish about it. It would be very interesting if people had made these multi tens of billions of dollars commitments to major data centers predicated on where is nuclear energy. And then fusion just comes in like the Kool Aid man and breaks the wall down and goes fusion time. Because then you can build anywhere there's water.
-
Unknown A
Fusion feels like it's this technology that's 10 to 20 years away. Every 10 to 20 years it reminds me of self driving, reminds me of satellite Internet. You know these things are always on the cusp of being here. And the thing about things that are on the cusp of being here VR being another one. You know, it's sometimes it's like the third or fourth time everybody thinks it's going to happen, that it actually happens. So here we have Starlink.
-
Unknown B
Yes we do.
-
Unknown A
Here we have waymo actually doing 150,000 rides a week in a couple of markets. So you know, fusion to me feels like 20 years out. Still feels like a bit of a pipe dream but would love to be wrong and it comes in 10 years. But all right, I'm going to clear though is going to take center stage now because who is going to block nuclear when you have these data centers happening and it's so much commerce available and so much revenue available that if you're a local state or a country like France or you know, Texas or whoever's, you know, trying to get the next Colossus or Stargate in their backyard, it's going to require approving a nuclear plant or using a nuclear plant that's already there and upgrading it or expanding it. So yeah man, this is going to be great for the country.
-
Unknown A
I'm really excited to see unlimited amounts of energy available.
-
Unknown B
I'm, I'm really happy that the hippies are losing because I grew up amongst the anti nuclear folks and it's always been a position that makes no sense to me whatsoever. And they kind of won. For a while we were shutting down nuclear power plants. You mentioned Germany, but like it's not just the only country doing that. And now that there's growing power demand, the anti nuclear hippies have lost. And I'm just a bullying over that.
-
Unknown A
You know. The only thing I just wanted to touch on was I saw you had a year over year change in U.S. technology. That chart was stunning.
-
Unknown B
Oh yeah, let me pull that up. I got to find the tab.
-
Unknown A
This feels like the chart of the day. It's right under the Google AI spend.
-
Unknown B
No, we have a. We have a special version of it.
-
Unknown A
Oh, got it.
-
Unknown B
Yeah.
-
Unknown A
Well, this says you're on your change in US tech employment. It looks like we were adding 100,000, 200,000 people a year. Covid, you had a little dip. 2022, you had a bunch of people hired and then into 2024, this is the AI and the anti DEI and anti management movement here, the get fit movement, Facebook, Google and AI. I think all of those things combined are why there's a headwind here. It looks like it went negative for all of 2024 and now we'll see. Maybe it's flat for a year or two. The question is, will this ever come back or will we have a static team size for some time to come? And this indigestion will just take some time, I think. Well, I did see Microsoft fired a bunch of people, Alex, for cause, which means for performance, when you get fired for performance.
-
Unknown A
A bunch of people were complaining on my TikTok. For some reason, my TikTok has a lot of this work from home stuff. And, and I guess I commented on one or two work from home. So now that's like my TikTok. There's bulldogs and that. And it's very interesting. People were really outraged that Microsoft fired people without severance. And I'm like the keyword in that sentence is fired. I think you're conflating a layoff with fired for cause. If you're fired for cause, you don't get six months of severance. You didn't do your job, you were dismissed with prejudice for being incompetent. That happens with 1 to 5% of people every year. That's not a big deal, folks. That's. You don't get severance for that.
-
Unknown B
And just before we jumped on and started to record, so I don't have this in the docket, but I saw the headline from the information Meta platforms ready staff for layoff announcement on Monday. And this comes after the company said that it grew its headcount by about 10% last year, which is slightly contrary to what we've seen from other companies. But they do seem to be getting the sisters out as well. And my thought here, Jason, is that we need to stop thinking about layoffs of this, you know, 1, 2, 5, 6% as shocking news. They just now seem to be part of the weather.
-
Unknown A
Yeah. So Meta is going to lay people off after adding People and. But the concept here is they're getting rid of certain categories of employees and adding another type of employee.
-
Unknown B
There does seem to be a swap. So I think it was Workday or Atlassian's cutting staff and they're basically cutting certain positions, investing in AI and still hiring. So I think there's been a bit of like swapping of people inside of companies, some firing for cause, some focus on just keep the high performers, cut the lower performers. But I think what it adds up to in aggregate is what that chart showed us, which is that negative job growth in tech was a real issue for some time and now we're just about back to break even on job growth for us tech companies. Oh, and by the way, Joseph Politano made that chart. I wanted to give him a shout out because it's lovely.
-
Unknown A
Oh great. Yeah, great job on the chart. And what I'll say is this is going to be a trend. It'll be reducing team sizes at these companies, which means you and your two besties who are great at building products or services should quit. Go to Founder University, we'll give you your first 25k, go to the launch accelerator, give you your next 125k or go to the syndicate and Launch Co Apply is our common application. You can fill it out for all these things, but if you've got a startup idea, found a university for people with ideas and a team launch accelerator for people with a product in market, getting a little bit of traction, but you need to raise that round and you need to use 125k. And then finally, if you've got 500k in revenue and you're doubling every year and you're raising around and you need an incremental 250k to a million, that's the syndicate.
-
Unknown A
Those are the three ways we invest in early stage startups. My email for Life is jason calacanis.com you can email me your business plan anytime. And I will CC one of our team members. We'll get you on the horn with them. And we do about a hundred meetings a week. First meetings, you can get one of those 101st meetings at launch Co Apply. Founder Fridays. Type in Founder Fridays and we do a meetup in about 100 cities at founder Fridays. I believe it's Founder Fridays Tech. Somebody on my team will correct me if I'm wrong. And the goal of Founder Fridays is the first Friday of every month founders get together and as a group they discuss what they're working on, what's working, what's not working and they mentor each other. You can only have six to eight people in each chapter. That's it. And then you have to start another chapter.
-
Unknown A
So you could have, like, two people in la, two groups of eight. You help each other grow. For Founders. Buy Founders first right of every month. You can't go. If you're a lawyer, accountant, you're trying to sell something into these folks. You're an investor. It's not for you. This is for founders. Buy founders. That's it. You can buy if you want to. If you're a law firm, you can buy everybody lunch. Go to Founder Fridays Tech, and he's Alex. I'm Jason. We'll see you next time. Bye.