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Unknown A
How do you get Microsoft on board? Because this is a paid partnership. They're giving you money. This isn't like a letter of intent. My understanding is they wrote a check, they put a deposit down. Am I correct?
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Unknown B
So, no, this is a power purchase agreement is that they pay as the electrons come off the grid.
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Unknown A
Okay.
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Unknown B
But if we can't meet those timelines, we pay them and so there's penalty.
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Unknown C
You have a dagger over your head, dangling. I love it. That's going to. Your sleep score is going to suck.
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Unknown B
There's. There it is.
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Unknown A
Yeah. Sleep score is going to go. Sleep score is going to be variable.
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Unknown B
0.91 this Week in Startups is brought to you by Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC2 report fast. Twist listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com TwistNorth registered agent. Starting your business should be simple. With Northwest Registered Agent, you can form your entire business Identity in just 10.
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Unknown D
Clicks and 10 minutes.
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Unknown B
From LLCs to trademarks, domains to custom.
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Unknown D
Websites, they've got you covered.
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Unknown B
Get more privacy, more options and more done. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com twist today and LinkedIn ads to redeem $100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign, go to LinkedIn.com thisweekinstartups.
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Unknown A
All right everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. I am the host of this show for gosh, over 14 years. This is one of the first five podcasts in the world back when the pod in podcasting was the ipod. Ipod for those of you who don't know, was a device that played music only had no Internet connection and they were awesome. With me, my co host Alex Wilhelm, who 15 years ago was in college.
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Unknown C
I believe more or less. I graduated in 12. So yeah, I was okay. That's two years out of school.
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Unknown A
And he's worked at all kinds of places. TechCrunch, crunch, bass matter, Mark, Gosh, so many different gigs. He's got a great newsletter you can subscribe to. Cautious optimism and it does very well. And he's one of my new subscribers now that I have a thousand subscribers on XX.com Jason He's X.com Alex first name club. We have a crazy docket today. We gotta get right to work. Yes, I have a lot of strong feelings, a lot about a lot of different things, but I say we save the all the stuff I've been talking about online and we just get to our first guest. Is that a good idea, Alex?
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Unknown C
I love it. We have some of the strongest guests we've ever had on the show today. So let's start with the first one. Sam Lesson is on. He's from Slow Ventures. Everyone's probably heard of him who listens to this show, but they have a new effort called the Slow Ventures Creator fund. Jason. It's $60 million vehicle, and we have questions. Let's get Sam brought up. There he is.
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Unknown D
Thanks for having me, guys. Good to see you.
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Unknown A
Nice to see you, Sam. He's been on the program a couple of times. He's got his own great podcast with his wife and my good friend Dave Morin and Brit. It's called More or Less.
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Unknown D
It's the More Games.
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Unknown A
Yeah. And it's Great pod. Great pod. I got a shout on it once every 20.
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Unknown D
Absolutely.
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Unknown A
I get, I get.
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Unknown D
I get a Come on sometime. You want to come on sometime?
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Unknown A
I will absolutely. Come on our. I don't. I don't know that it's all in inspired, but it is the all in format for really smart people talking for an hour, chopping up the week's news. But what's interesting about it, Alex, is these are power couples. They are couples who are both in the industry. So Jessica Lesson, who's been on the show many times from the information, you know. Well, of course. And then Brit Morin, who did Brit and Company, she was kind of like pinned as the Martha Stewart of the. Or the next gen of Martha Stewart, but she's an investor now. So you got four in three investors and a journalist walk into a bar. It's a great show. Go check it out. But, you know, I saw your announcement today, and you and I have a thesis around creators. Why don't you explain what your thesis is?
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Unknown A
Sure. And then why this is so significant. Significant. And I think it's very significant that $60 million in LP money has come into this fund. This isn't just a bunch of Hollywood money. It isn't Kevin Hart or Kevin Durant.
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Unknown D
It's mostly none of those guys. It's. Believe it or not. I mean, I got permission to say it's people like mit, Michigan, Rutgers. It's like the real institutions, and some of them actually are even. Amazingly, some of those real institutions aren't even in our seed fund. They say we have plenty of seed exposure. We have plenty. We like this strategy. So there's a real change going on here. And look here. I mean, you know this better than anyone because You've been doing this 14 plus years, right? Which is there's something that something has happened in the last many years, which is the strategy for building companies and communities has actually inverted in some cases. It used to be, you're two Stanford kids, you start with a product, you build community around that product, but you start with its product first and technology first. As technology has gotten commodified, not everywhere, but in a lot of places, and as the Internet has kind of exploded and we've gotten into these niche cultures from this mass culture, there's this new pattern where you have entrepreneurs coming out and saying, hey, I'm going to build in a vertical,
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Unknown D
I love trust, I'm going to build community first, right? I'm going to. And I'm actually going to, if you put it in business terms, have a zero CAC sustainable audience, right? And then I'm going to layer products on top of that, right, in high LTV segments in places where they're really valuable. And we think this is a really big deal. This is kind of what happens. This is the natural conclusion that I think some of us have seen for a long time of what it means to have a global Internet population and a move away from mass culture to places where people are trying to find community and interests that are deeper and more niche and more specific. So this is, it's a natural conclusion. Now the interesting thing, Jason, as you know, is people have been trying to fund in the VC community, the creator economy for years.
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Unknown D
This is not an unknown thing. It hasn't worked that well. Right? Creator platform financing is meh, at best. It sometimes works, it sometimes doesn't. You know, people have tried to finance individual products from creators that have their own problems. So the real innovation that we've been working on now for years is how do you properly seed fund creators in these communities for deep alignment, right? For cheap cost of capital to make it something where we really can back these up and coming obvious build business builders and entrepreneurs that have honestly been underfunded to date is the way we look at it.
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Unknown A
So to translate that, Alex, I think customer acquisition cost always the biggest piece of the puzzle when it comes to everything from a game, an app, a consumer, packaged good or SaaS, you have some acquisition cost, that's CAC, as you mentioned. And then if you invert, as you're saying, Sam, the building of community first and you spend a year or two or ten building a community and you have trust with them, then you can launch a product. And we saw this, I think the Greatest example of the last decade has been Mr. Beast. Mr. Beast built this phenomenal audience. He builds really interesting videos every week or two and then feastables. Their, Their. Their chocolate bar is, I think makes more money than. I don't want to speak out of school here, because I do. I have overheard some inside information. I believe taking a guess might have some inside information.
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Unknown A
I'm old and can't remember Alex, but I think that makes more than maybe the, the, the advertising revenue. And then of course, he launched a Netflix show. Yeah.
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Unknown D
And Jason, if you don't mind me jumping in on that for a second, I mean, here's the interesting thing is Beast has been incredibly good for people understanding this world because said, oh my God, this can be way bigger than we realized. And I think that's actually been very helpful. Popular for two reasons. One is it's helped LPs, the industry understand this is not some small thing. It's not just niche business. But also really importantly, it's gotten creators or people who have started building communities to dream much bigger.
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Unknown A
Right.
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Unknown D
Which I think is great. Now I will say from a slow ventures perspective, we actually probably would not underwrite a Beast right from the early days. We'd probably miss that one. You don't get everyone. Right. And the reason is we think general entertainment is extremely difficult because it's so competitive. We're much more interested in people who like, they love lawn care, they love chess. There's like a vertical which is surprisingly big and deep, but not universal. The second is, you know, there's two elements. One is the cac, which is how cheap cheap is it to acquire? Like how much trust do you have with how big an audience? The other is how valuable is the audience. Right. And the problem with Beast, and again this is with respect for what he's done, is it's such a broad general audience. There aren't that many products you can sell, we believe.
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Unknown D
Right. That are that high value. And so we're. It's not that we don't believe that there's things to do there. We just think from a venture capital seed perspective, being hyper focused on niches with very valuable customers. Right. And very clear products is the way we're going to run our fund.
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Unknown C
Is that because the more niche you get, the easier it is to have a community that's incredibly aligned with the creative themselves versus a more general audience is going to be harder to kind of tie to one person most of the time.
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Unknown D
That's part of it. It's also the business Building opportunities, right? Which is, you know, if you are for instance, the God of aviation, you know, like for people who are really into flying cirrus planes, you are their God and you have, you've built that trust over years. You have the community because you were authentic, you actually suggested the right things. You've really built that personality. There are so many products to build and such a deep market for that that you can then be that person. Whereas again, general entertainment, the Kardashians, where it's not that it doesn't happen, it will happen, it's just very hard to underwrite.
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Unknown A
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Unknown A
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Unknown C
So on the financial side of this, you guys wrote on the new website that you're going to invest between 1 and $3 million for an equity stake of about 10% on average of the creators cash profits. This to me sounds a little bit more like rev share versus traditional venture investing. Sam. So I'm kind of curious like if you could kind of bridge that gap for me.
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Unknown D
Yeah, what we care about is the company building like when we were looking for entrepreneurs. Like we're not looking to invest in the cash streams from advertising ET etc. The number one thing we care about big picture is alignment with creators. We learned this from our seed practice. You know, when we do our seed investing in traditional companies, it's usually around 10%. It's usually 1 to $3 million. Right. And we don't do board seats. We're looking for entrepreneurs that we can be their first text message. We can be deeply aligned with them. And so the thing with creators is we want them to have the freedom to explore the best business models, period. Right. If it happens, that's a highly cash generative business. But it isn't a company. We don't want to get cross swords with them. We don't want to be like, well, don't spend your time on that because that's outside of what we invested in.
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Unknown D
You promised us X. We want to say like we're just investing in you, we want you to have business ideas, but let's just be aligned. And so there are lots of, there are some extra nuances in that. Like we always make sure on cash, for instance, that there's like we'll say, hey, if you earn over $1 million next year because you're focused on some cash generating business, then pay us, but less, don't worry about it. So there's some nuance, but that's the, that's the emotional and innovation, the direction which is we just care about alignment holistically.
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Unknown A
I think it's a really interesting model and I've started to think about it ourselves. About two years ago, I saw this guy on TikTok, chef reactions. And I thought, my lord, this is hilarious. And it was like the only person I followed on TikTok and I'll pull up a video of it or Alex, you pull a video of it. And we incubated it. He came to our founder university. Then he came to our accelerator and I said, listen, let us just give you a small amount of money, talk about business with you and how businesses are formed and if something comes out of it, great. If something doesn't, here's a video of him. You know, he's getting these, Sam, these brand sponsorship deals and I think this what we'll play here. You go ahead and play it Alex. I'll talk over it. Headley and Ben is like the number one apron company.
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Unknown A
Like if you're a chef, this is what you wear. And they recognize him. He goes to French Laundry because they see he's in Napa, they invite him to come. They make him an entire meal based on his channel because they're so enamored with him. And I think the Brilliance of what you're doing, Sam, is that you understand endemic advertising, endemic products. What does that mean? In my career, whether it was Silicon Alley, Reporter in the 90s, Engadget in the 2000s, Auto Blog this week in startups are all in. There's an endemic group that loves certain verticals. Then you know who the advertisers are. This Healy and Bennett, whatever these aprons are. I wouldn't know that, but he knows that. So there's just a clear path. And he's launching a new product that we're backing and I think it's going to do great. There's one issue that I've seen come up over and over and over again, which is.
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Unknown A
Well, there's really two. There's the Martha Stewart issue. What happens if you get pinched and you go to jail and you have this dependency on one person? What if Mr. Beast, God forbid, got hit by a bus? It's the standard, you know, talent issue. But the second issue that's, I think the real one is what's included in the deal, what's not. Mr. Beast had a burger and there's some sort of lawsuit going on about Mr. Beast Burger. Then there was another person who contacted me to invest in like, you know, some projects he was doing. And then, you know, there was this constantly, like, are you investing in Mr. Beast and Project 3, 4 and 5 or are you investing in Projects 2 and 7 and Projects 3 and 5 hit and you just made a mistake and then where do they spend their attention? And if they do speaking gigs or books?
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Unknown D
Totally.
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Unknown A
Does that get included? Does not get. So how have you handled this?
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Unknown D
So 100% this is the problem. And for what it's worth, we actually use Mr. Beast Burger as an example of what not to do. Right. Because you don't. And the thing that is so different about these creator and community driven businesses is the brand and the. There's a lot of equity and value that's held outside of Feastables. Right. It's actually Jimmy. Right. It's not. And so it's like the question is, and I actually think in my experience that by far the place that this is with venture capital in general, that people get sideways is when they're misaligned. Right. When I've invested in X, but you're doing Y or things like that. And so that's why I go back to this whole thing, which is our approach is extremely holistic. There are obviously things that are outside of the deal. Right. You know, if you say, I don't want to be a creator anymore, I'm going to go work at a law firm.
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Unknown D
That's not the deal. You know, it's about the creative business. But it's very broad the way we look at it. And that some creators don't like this. They say, well, we want you to invest in X and not Y. And I'm like, I get it. It's just not for us. Then we look at it holistically. And the thing we like to say to people is two things. One is the reason we're able to give you unrestricted cash and trust you is because we're fully aligned. I can't. I'm not going to tell you. I'm not going to get mad because I actually, I'm trusting you with the money to do the right things. I think it's the right emotional thing. But the venture capital mindset, what we do as seed investors is we're looking at hundreds of deals to find one. Right? And it's kind of a similar thing for now.
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Unknown D
Now, I do think, and Jason, I'm curious what you think about this is you have experience here is, look, a lot of people will also come and say, look, Sam, we like this idea, but you really need to pair this person with a business person. They're not business people. And I say, I heard this story before in 2003 about tech founders, right? Where you'd find the kids who are great engineers and say, well, that's fine, but they're just engineers we need to find. And I'm like, that's not the way this is going to evolve. The best will rise and figure out the holistic picture. But it will be a minority of people. It's not most.
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Unknown A
When Larry and Sergei were going public and they were going to make a run at it, they said, you know what? To engineer Stanford, let's get Eric Schmidt. He did novel. He did this. We could put him in charge. There's an adult in the room. You can do it. And it was unnecessary. It was performative. Eric did provide massive value. Then Zuck came and, you know, Peter Till was like, you know what? We don't need somebody to tell Zuck what to do, for better or worse. And then he obviously had Sheryl Sandberg as a collaborator who taught him how to scale the ad network. And you were there, I think, for a lot of the Sam, so you probably have some thoughts on it, but people over index on the business guy, and I specifically say guy. But it could be gal like Sheryl Sandberg was the Business gal and some people.
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Unknown A
Business guy Eric Schmidt. You can learn business. There are business experts who are verticalized. You cannot learn to have a motivation and a, and a, and a sensibility about content. That is something innate in the creator. And I will include engineers like Zuckerberg in that creator class. I'll include Elon in that creator class with SpaceX. There's something about the motivation and the drive that's the magic. Well, the business people can fill in on the margin.
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Unknown D
Well, I'll give you. Jason, I'll give you a funny one, which is this is actually, I'm stealing this from someone from, actually, from Mark's sister, Arielle Zuckerberg, who's a. Yeah, I've met her. Yeah, she's, she's wonderful. So she says what we're looking for is risen. Tis right. You got to have Riz, right? Which is like the, you know, this is the, they've got in their community swagger, etc. And then Tiz is autism. Like, you need to be a little bit autistic about, about the topic or area you're in. Right?
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Unknown A
And like, I've never had a. That's why I'm not a billionaire. I have the Riz, but I don't have the autism to focus long enough to be a billionaire.
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Unknown D
I mean, you and I might have that in common, but the point is only that I think, well, we're here to support those types of people. And that's, that's the thing that's special. We do care about people who have demonstrated commercial instincts. Right. So you can't. Yes. If you're just a creator and you're creating video, that's wonderful. You can build a great business. Doing that that's content oriented is fine. But you know, the people who really are ambitious, you know, they've shown that they can monetize, they care to write. That's an important signal. But, you know, you do the math on it. Let's pretend you're a successful creator making $1 million a year, top line on your content. You know, pay your. Pay your team, chop that in half for taxes, you're doing fine. But it's not like you have a bunch of investable capital for business building, which means that you're much more likely to take the sponsorship deal rather than say, no, no, I can make a better product myself.
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Unknown D
Right. And what we want to do is enable those seed creators to say, no, no, no, I have a better idea. I know the community, I have the access. I want to build something special. And as you said, in an ideal scenario, it goes way beyond where they start.
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Unknown A
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Unknown A
So here's your call to action. Don't let paperwork hold you back from your entrepreneurial dreams. Get started today@northwestregisteredagent.com twist. That's northwestregisteredagent.com twist. For just $39 plus state fees, your business can be up and running in no time at all. Get more value, more convenience and more peace of mind. Only with Northwest Registered Agent. It's so great. I love the idea. Have you made an investment yet out of the fund?
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Unknown D
Sometimes people not so yeah, sometimes you warehouse deals. No, we've actually made about six or seven of these out of our Opportunity Fund. So we have, we have LPs that have allowed us some flexibility. So we've learned by doing.
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Unknown A
Which already you've had the best experience with. Learn the most from, you know, all of them.
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Unknown D
You know, the first one we did was, was a woman named Marina who's crushed it with language learning school. She's an entrepreneur by background. She's dramatically grown since we've invested, has started several businesses. You know, we've done one creator called Vin Wiki who does some great stuff around cars. There's incredibly passionate car communities and you know, things like that. So we've done a few. But we now the reason we've kind of switched this from our Opportunity Fund to his own special thing which is the first time we've done this. You know, we did a lot of crypto investing. We kept it in the core fund. But this really is a different style of investing that we really believe deserves its own vehicle. And so we're here to double down on it.
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Unknown A
I love it. If anybody wants more information on the Twitter, you can interact with Sam. Are you Lesson or Sam?
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Unknown D
Lesson. I'm just Lesson. I'm not as good as you guys. I don't have Alex, but I've got Lesson.
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Unknown A
That's pretty good. I mean, it means you were, you were an OG. You were there in the first six months of Twitter. Slash X.
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Unknown D
There you go.
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Unknown A
DMs are open. And yeah, ping him if you got an idea.
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Unknown D
And Jason, let's find some deals to do together.
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Unknown A
I, you know, I'm going to introduce you to Chef Reactions because that's very early on and I DM'd you there and then, yeah, let's find somebody to collaborate on. I think there's, there's so many people. One of the things Alex and I have been talking about was what is the impact of startups being able to do more with less. And you wrote an essay on it at some point, I think. And it's been like the trend of our careers. You know, used to take 20 people and $3 million to launch a product, then five people and 200,000. And now with AI, you can kind of fill in all these gaps. And I think that's what the creators are going to really take advantage of. And it seems like the niches are small. Dave Morin and I were actually talking about our love of a niche app called Slopes, which tracks.
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Unknown D
I was using it this weekend with Dave.
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Unknown A
Okay, so Slopes is awesome. You can get your speed, you keep track of it. I've been using it for four seasons. It's really interesting. We have another one, Go Polar, which is a app for people who do coal plunging and saunas. Now you think these things are small niche apps, but they're done by hundreds of thousands to low millions of people. And because they have. Because the cost of building apps is now under a million dollars and two people, it just opens up a lot of doors. And it used to be whoever your language person was or the chess person, that might be a five to $10 million effort to make a world class app. Now it's a 500,000 to a million. So I think the timing is particularly good for you, Sam.
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Unknown D
Well, I appreciate it, I appreciate it. I appreciate you getting it and I'm excited to work with you guys on it. It's a new thing.
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Unknown A
Can't wait. Cheers. That's Sam. Listen, everybody, well done. Thank you. You know, we always like to have whoever the. Alex.
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Unknown C
Main character.
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Unknown A
Main character of the week is a concept we use here on the program. And I just saw Sam and I'm like, you know what? Sam I think is the main character here. Also the data Republican one I want to have her on.
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Unknown C
We will, we will work on that. But here, here's from my end. How this, why this show works is sometimes you, you push a little bit on like what we can pull off.
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Unknown A
Yes.
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Unknown C
But it's always better because the last couple of guests you've thrown in politely at the last minute have been clutch. So I, I like this. And on the same lesson point, I didn't get to put this in when he was here. He had a hard out. But I have like six names that I want to send him that are possibilities for his fun just because I love them already. So like, I think he's really onto something. But let's do a hard right turn. Let's talk about Fusion.
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Unknown A
Yeah, yeah. And I just want to tell Jesus in the comments. Jesus is here. You know, if you're going to troll me on my height five three, understand I was five nine at one point. I've shrunk into five eight and a half. I'm in the best shape of my life. I'm rich, I've got more friends than you can imagine. I have an incredible family. I got a 91 sleep score and I don't ever have to work and I ski 40 days a year. Jesus, if I was 5 3, I'd be the happiest short king in the world. You have to come at me with something more like the Knicks haven't won a title since 1973. If you want to come at Jake out. That's where the pain is. I'm not fat anymore. You could have gone after that. I mean, the pain in my life is that the Knicks haven't won a title since 1973, but we got the best team since Patrick Ewing.
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Unknown A
So you got to try a little harder on the hard insults. The sleep score is amazing. 91 sleep score. Ray from Rivers in the, in the chat, she knows 90 when we break 90 in sleep scores. You're good. I was on time today because of that sleep score. But let's make our right turn because we went from creators and now we're going to.
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Unknown C
We're going to Fusion. Ladies and gentlemen, startups killing it this week in startups shout out to Jesus. We are working on a project called the Twist 500. Finding the 500 most exciting, most potentially lucrative private market companies in the world. One of them is a company called called Helium. You may have heard about them in the news. Sam Altman has backed them. They've raised about a billion dollars. They're working on a very, very interesting piece of fusion technology. We have a clip we're going to play. But first, let's welcome co founder and CEO David Kurtley to Twist.
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Unknown A
David, there it is. Nice to see you, Dave.
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Unknown B
91 sleep score. My goodness.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown B
Do not undersell me.
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Unknown A
You know what I just want to say two nights in a row. So I'm looking at it right now. 91 last night. You want to know my deep sleep? One hour, 32 minutes of deep sleep, 21%.
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Unknown C
Is that good?
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Unknown A
And I don't mean to flex here, but last night, two nights ago, 92 sleep score, an hour and 13 minute, 15% deep sleep. When you get that level of deep sleep with a bulldog in your bed, that's significant. With a snoring bulldog, it's significant than two nights before, we're 74 and 56 because the super Bowl. And then the night before, I was out late and I had a Macallan 18. Alex, close your ears.
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Unknown C
Look, I was delicious. I still smell Macallan 18 in my nostrils. But, David, we did not have you on to discuss your asleep score. Although we could. We want to talk about Helion. I thought it'd be best to start with a. Just a really compressed version of what the technology is behind Helion and why it's different than other fusion projects out there. Because you're not building a tokamak, you're not building a stellarator. You're taking two plasmas, slamming them together, and then crunching them, and then pulling energy out of it. So can you just give us the quick rundown of how it works?
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Unknown B
Yep. So we build fusion at Helion. Fusion is how the sun works. It's how the vast majority of energy in the universe is generated. And right now, we don't. On Earth, we don't make electricity from fusion. As humans, we need to be doing that, and we can talk about all the reasons why. Fundamentally, what you're doing is taking lightweight isotopes, helium and hydrogen, and then at extreme pressures, 100 million degree, a thousand atmospheres, you force those together, they form heavier atoms and release a lot of energy. The what most people do in infusion is do that, do those reactions to generate heat, to boil water, to run a steam turbine. Our pioneering technology at Helion is to actually take that energy of electricity and magnetism and the fusion particles themselves and extract them directly as electricity. Super high efficiency, which means the systems get smaller, cheaper, faster to build all that stuff.
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Unknown C
And the way this works is when you collapse your two plasmas together from opposite sides and then crunch them, it pushes back against the magnetic field. And if you change the field, that creates a current. So you essentially pull electricity directly out. You take away the whole steam power component entirely.
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Unknown B
Alex. You got it? There it is. I don't. You don't even need me. Let's do it.
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Unknown C
I do need you. I need you to build it. I just prepped about how it works by watching a lot of fusion videos. Um, so my, my thing with fusion is, apart from the fact that I'm excited by it and I understand the massive need we have for more power around the world is just how close we are to getting net positive fusion production into commercial use. So, yep, I know everyone probably like.
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Unknown A
When, when do we think this arrives? Give us a range. The earliest we could be powering a data center with it is X. Maybe, you know, the mid term would be. Yeah. And you know, if it's hard, you know, the, the hard case, the worst case is we get it this year. Give us the. Give us the range. Because that's what your investors must ask when you raise a billion dollars. They want to know the timeline. All right, everybody, it's 2025. If your B2B marketing strategy for the new year doesn't include improving your ad targeting, well, your ads are going to get lost in all the noise. It's crazy out there right now. We need you to target your ads properly if your business is marketing to other businesses. Doing B2B advertising LinkedIn ads is amazing because it guarantees that you reach the right audience.
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Unknown A
I'm a venture capitalist. Somebody wanted to reach me with their new product or service, Bing, tied together, not targeted. I don't need an ad for HR tools as an example. Right. There are other people who work in hr. I work in venture. So you want the HR people to get the HR ads. You want the venture capitalists to get the fund management software and services. Ads makes total sense. And LinkedIn's advertising tools will connect you to decision makers based on their firm O Graphics. Firm O Graphics. You may not have heard that term before. That's your job title, your industry, your company size, and more. LinkedIn has two things that you need to grow this year. First, reach. LinkedIn has over a billion members. 130 million of them are decision makers. And of course, 10 million are C level executives. And number two, LinkedIn has impact.
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Unknown A
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Unknown B
We just raised another 425 million. Our Series F invest in manufacturing and then push our seventh generation prototype. So we built a lot of these systems that do fusion. That's one thing that sets Helion apart. We're builders. We built a lot of hardware out up here in Everett outside of Seattle. And so that, that's what we do. So our seventh generation system came online and started the early operations last year. We got a lot of work to do this year to get up full power, doing lots of fusion with it. Goal is that we can make first electrons in 2028. So that's a deal with Microsoft that We signed in 2023 to start building the first power plant for them, making electrons and then dialing that power up through 2030. So our goal is first electrons 2028. I'm going to need a sleep score 91 to get there.
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Unknown B
So because we got a lot of work to do and then, and then full power by 2030 and we start deploying power plants in the early 2030.
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Unknown C
Can I double click on first electrons? Does that mean that's the first time that in your manufacturing facility or lab this system will generate power or is that when you have taken it out of the lab and have built actual power plant out of the technology that then power is taken out of?
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Unknown B
Yeah. So the goal is that's the first revenue from electricity that got it. Actually somebody buys those electrons. So our seventh generation system we built now its job, the whole goal is to demonstrate not that we can do fusion and make lots of energy from fusion, we've done that. Lots of other folks have done that from fusion, but actually make electricity. And so that's, that's the goal of what we built now and what we're Testing today.
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Unknown C
How much technology risk is there left in your model compared to more conventional reactor designs?
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Unknown B
Yeah, so two parts to that one. Because you're skipping over that whole middle step of steam turbine cycles and all of the closed loop fluids and all the engineering around that. You actually have less technology risk because you're just missing a whole step.
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Unknown A
How do you get Microsoft on board? Because this is a paid partnership. They're giving you money. This isn't like a letter of intent. My understanding is they wrote a check, they put a deposit down. Am I correct?
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Unknown B
So, no, this is a power purchase agreement is that they pay as the electrons come off the grid.
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Unknown A
Okay.
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Unknown B
But if we can't meet those timelines, we pay them. And so there's penalty.
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Unknown C
You have a dagger over your head dangling. I love it. That's gonna. Your sleep score is gonna suck.
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Unknown B
Yeah, there's. There it is.
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Unknown A
Yeah, sleep score is gonna go. Sleep score is gonna be variable 0.91. What is the story with fusion versus nuclear? Because correct me if I'm wrong, a piece of this was that nuclear was DOA in America. You couldn't do it. Germany was turning them off. But then all of a sudden, France is hosting an AI conference. The last couple of days, they are getting a bunch of people like UAE Mubara, I think, investing in their country because they have so much nuclear. Germany and the hippie dippies over there are considering turning their nuclear back on after the whole boondoggle with Putin and NORD Stream. And here in the United States looks like we're going to be ramping stuff up. So now I think you were not in a race with nuclear, but maybe you are. You're not fighting this war for energy in a vacuum anymore.
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Unknown A
There's, I think, two really big competitors, new nuclear and solar, plus batteries. So maybe you can compare and contrast those two.
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Unknown B
I mean, I think when we founded Helion on the order of 10 years ago, we were at a place where we were looking at small power growth in the United States. And, and our focus was how do we replace fossil fuels and maybe more expensive technologies with cheaper fusion baseload clean power technologies? What we're seeing is explosive growth of power demand in the U.S. right? I mean, AI data centers, you know, why we're working with Microsoft and others is that the 2% growth in power that we had seen for year over year, for maybe decades, that's gone. Like we're seeing massive power power growth that needs it. We're going to need it. It's got to be on all day Long so baseload power and, and it's got to be low cost and customers aren't going to buy expensive power these days. And so that's our focus.
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Unknown B
I think that there's room for everybody, that's the general PC CEO talking that there's room for everybody in the market. It's a huge market. I do think we focus on things like safety that we know fusion, when you turn the key off, fusion turns off. And so, and so that's one of the focuses that we, we focus on, on helance which means you can build them much faster. The nuclear regulatory agencies passed law last year that said fusion is not regulated like nuclear reactors. Fusion generators are regulated like hospitals and so still highly regulated. It's really important to do it safely. But you can go build quick and build much faster. And that's one thing that unlocked Microsoft is that we had a path that didn't take 10 years of regulatory approvals. We had a path that was much faster. And so, so we think that.
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Unknown B
And then in terms of solar and battery, we live up here in Seattle that. Yeah, when that where the sun is shining and bright and low cost solar, you should put it in. Absolutely. There are places, there are places I see that every day where that's just, that's going to be hard.
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Unknown A
Tell me about safety in these things because obviously you know that is a concern with nuclear power. What are the safety concerns here? Are these things going to be too dangerous to put near people? How far out do they have to be from a city and how concerned are you about that? Because I've, I remember hearing people being concerned and then I've never heard anybody bring it up again. So what's the state of safety when it comes to fusion?
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Unknown B
It's super critical if you build a technology. But then either it takes a ton of time and money to regulate one of these, that technology or the customer doesn't want it and the community doesn't want it, then you haven't actually solved the mission. And so at Helion we focus a lot on that, both the technical case and the operational case for safety. Fusion, fundamentally the way fusion works is you put in your fuel, hydrogen, hydrogens and heliums, these lightweight, common, common materials. You then when the system, when you're, when you don't want to run it or if something happens, you turn the key off, fuel stops flowing in, it turns off the same way as every other natural gas or other system you might have. So fundamentally you don't have the big safety concerns like the evacuation or those types of things, those all go away.
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Unknown B
With fusion, that's really powerful. We've been able to make that case to all the regulatory agencies. So we're regulated by the State of Washington, the Department of Health, been working with them for a lot of years on regulating all our previous machines and to make that case. And I think that's, that's really important that we've able to demonstrate that. However, just to be like crystal clear, fusion is still a big industrial power system. This isn't a thing we imagine is going to be on the back of a DeLorean, just based off the physics. And so what that means is that we build industrial safety systems and industrial operating equipment. So this is regulated by the Department of Health like a particle accelerator in a hospital. And so you do have trained operators, you do have shielding systems, and we do have some radioactive materials. And so we have to make sure that just like a hospital, we're regulating these, we're controlling these.
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Unknown B
And we spend a lot of time and money thinking about how to do that.
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Unknown A
What are the elements you're using, besides the obvious ones like hydrogen or whatever that are common? What are the uncommon ones you're using, and is there an issue with those being available? Where do they come from and who controls them?
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Unknown B
Yeah, we spend a lot of time thinking about the manufacturing of these systems. So we spent a lot of time on the generators. We know that the cost of manufacturing, if you do a really good job of manufacturing on your product, comes down to materials cost. So if you're using ultra rare materials, that's going to drive your product cost and then your electricity cost. And there's almost no way around that as good a manufacturing as you want to do. So we use common aluminums and steels and coppers and some more complex alloys of those, but not rare materials. And we spend a lot of time on that to make sure that as we build these systems, it can scale to big, to big scales. The other part to that is the fuel. And we use Helion. We use a different fusion fuel than other folks.
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Unknown B
We use a helium 3, which is called light helium. It's actually quite rare. And one of the things we pioneered very early in the company is actually manufacturing that. So we make, make that from hydrogen, from heavy water, from things that are very common and found in all water on Earth. And then we've demonstrated that we can make that. Helium three, fundamentally, you make it from fusion itself. Is that from the fusion process? It's one of the actual things that comes out of Fusion and we measured that on our sixth generation system that we could do that. We can make this helium 3 and then it's a matter of filtering it. Why other folks don't make Helium 3 is that you have to actually be able to do it to what you said efficiently and at low cost. And so what you need is efficient fusion.
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Unknown B
And that that bootstraps right back to that very first question that because we can efficiently directly recover electricity, guess what? That means we can actually make the fusion fuel efficiently too.
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Unknown C
That's such a bummer because I heard that there's a lot of helium 3 on the Moon and I was really excited about lunar mining operations to power our fusion future. It's much lamer if we're going to do it in the same warehouse we're doing the power production.
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Unknown B
David, there's a couple of companies out there talking about how do you go to the moon to mine helium 3 to sell to Helion. But yeah, I think it's yes, it's lamer, but our goal is to make electricity. And if it's lame, great, that means it's low cost.
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Unknown C
Okay, I want to ask.
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Unknown B
It's probably expensive. So let's, let's focus on, on how do we get it as lame as.
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Unknown C
Launch costs are coming down. Get excited. So what is the next major milestone from helium that we should have our eyes out for? Because we love watching technology products mature and come to market. So David, what's the next big bang?
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Unknown B
Yeah, so the big ones from last year was get our seventh generation machine built and get started operation on it. Big technology goal internally is get that machine running at full power, making electricity, showing you can do that from fusion. And in parallel to that, building out US manufacturing of the fusion industry, which is a brand new thing. So that's mass producing electrical components, ones we call capacitors, building more R and D and advanced semiconductors here in the US and then we haven't talked too much about all the hard manufacturing we do in terms of machining and electromagnets. And we've got a lot of those to build too. So we'll be doing that over the next year and then starting to work on that power plant. So one of the bigger announcements we'll have coming out later is where that first power plant for Microsoft will be.
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Unknown C
I'm going to guess Redmond. And then that means that I can come up and see you guys and zap at the same time for a field trip and see all the American fusion. David, thank you very much. And we love to ask, is there a particular role that you're looking to hire for that you're having a hard time filling that we can give a shout out for while you're here?
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Unknown B
Oh, I love it. Yes. So we are a company of builders, hardware building. I think right now over 75% of our team are technicians and assemblers that are building. And so we're hiring anyone who is great at building complex technology with their hands and a lot of building out in the engineering team, the engineering side. So I'm old tonics. Come on by.
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Unknown A
Yeah, go to the website, check out the careers page, and go save humanity by making energy free. I mean, that is going to be a wonderful future. When energy becomes, you know, 90% cheaper or whatever, it's going to become just great job. And appreciate the hard work you're doing here in America, make America even more extraordinary again.
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Unknown B
Amazing. All right, thank you, guys.
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Unknown C
Good job.
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Unknown A
All right, we'll talk to you soon.
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Unknown C
Bye, David. Thanks, man.
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Unknown A
Take care, David. You know, we have one other major story that's a little bit underground. I thought we'd bring Lon Harris on, new editorial director here, back from the future, when he was the original newsreader on the program, gosh, 14 years ago. But I really wanted him or you to tee up this story around large language models and copyright and ip.
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Unknown C
So the headline here is that Thomson Reuters has won its case against a company, a former legal AI startup called Ross Intelligence. Now, if my understanding is correct, Jason, this is not actually about generative AI, but instead about training a different type of AI model, kind of in the pre LLM era. But people are really applying this decision by the judge to the current moment. So it is a very important point. And what happened is the judge ruled in Reuters favor, essentially saying that the information that Ross Intelligence had procured and we can talk about that process, did constitute a copyright violation and did not fall under the protection of fair use. Now, there's four things that come up.
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Unknown A
Four part test. The four part test of fair use I've been through so many times because, you know, as a, when I was doing blogging or we would cover something in our magazine, sometimes we would want to use somebody else's IP to, you know, make a point. Right. And the purpose of what you're doing, what you're using, the content is important. Is it for commercial purposes or nonprofit uses? Is it an educational right, in an educational setting, are you doing commentary? So there was a famous case, Alex, where somebody did a voiceover. Producer will know all about this, actually.
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Unknown C
Just let's, let's bring LON on right now. Hop on and help us talk through this, because you are our media guy.
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Unknown A
Let me walk you through this. If you. There's also how much of the original work you're using, is it commercial, non commercial, educational. In other words, it's a context under which you're using it and the percentage that you're using. Right. And then the nature of the work also comes into fact. So if the work is the real world, like a documentary or something that can play into it versus something completely fictional, and then how does this affect, and this is the most important one, the potential market for the original work. Right. And so what does that mean, practically speaking? If you're Napster and you say, hey, we're just providing these MP3s or people are sharing them online. You sell CDs, you sell live concerts. This isn't, you know, impacting you. Well, that's the wrong way to look at fair use, because the potential market for the original work is what's critical.
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Unknown A
Now when you look at something like the Internet, that was a potential market for all content creators, you can't just steal stuff. Now you look at the exemptions. Exemptions. If you were doing Lon, you might remember this or be able to look it up real quick. There was a guy who went over the prequels and he just did commentary on the entire movie, put it on YouTube. And Lucas was like, hey, you can't do that. That's the entire goddamn film. He said, well, I'm doing commentary. I'm not actually making money from it. I don't have it monetized. So these things act, you know, because they're one offs. People aren't making money off them. There. There's kind of a special place for them in the fair use law. But the mouse house, Disney, the music industry has made this very clear. You can't just take our stuff.
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Unknown A
And this is where stable diffusion OpenAI with ChatGPT. And in this case, they're making a legal document. They try a legal service. They tried to get Westlaw, which is a famous Westlaw or LexisNexis, to give them a license to this. It doesn't matter that you tried to do it. It matters what you did. You can't just take other people's content without permission. And the judge here basically said as much.
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Unknown C
So in the question of what was the use, because it was both commercial and competitive and not transformative enough, that was a strike against the infringing property The Ross AI startup, the other two, the next two. So the copyright works nature, and then how much of their work was used, those actually went in favor of Ross.
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Unknown A
So going against Ross was, hey, this was a commercial use, right? You weren't transforming it. Transforming it would be like Andy Warhol taking the soup can and painting it. That's when you transform the original work significantly. And again, that's like up to a jury. It's up to a judge to interpret that, and it's up to the person whose artwork it is to decide if what you did was transformative enough. That went against Ross. What went in favor of Ross is Westlaw's material has more than a minimal spark of originality required for copyright validity, but the material is not that creative. In other words, what Westlaw has is a bunch of cases that they have scanned in OCR ed and cleaned up and put into their database. So if you're a lawyer and you want to search case law, that's what you use Westlaw for. This.
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Unknown A
LexisNexis is another. But part four is that this is the money quote. I guess even taking all the facts in favor of Ross, it meant to compete with Westlaw by developing a market substitute. When I talked about this on All In, I showed if you go on ChatGPT and you ask it to make a version of Darth Vader as a bulldog, it wouldn't do that, but I asked it to make a Jedi, and it did, or a Sith Lord, and it did. So somewhere along the line, the folks at OpenAI who have a long history of stealing content, according to the lawsuit from the New York Times, and stable diffusion, which got caught with like the Getty Watermarks on their images, I mean, talk about red handed. They decided, hey, let's take out the Mouse House's iPad. In other words, somebody said anything that's a character name from Disney that must have gone to, you know, Wikipedia or DBpedia, like one of these sources and say, give us the character names, put them into our rule set.
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Unknown A
Not the original lm, but the rule set around it. That's like that little thin layer of rules put on top of the LLM. They put a thin layer on top saying, you cannot make IP from Disney characters utterly meaningless.
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Unknown E
Though in stable diffusion, particularly, because the whole way it works is it's like it's a platform and then people design their own models to go on top. So stable diffusion can say, we don't have Darth Vader, we're not putting him in our library. But Then I as an end user can just make my own Darth Vader model, use it in stable diffusion. And now I'm using their platform to make my own Darth Vader images.
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Unknown C
Anyway, Lon is your point that all these models are inherently anti copyright and therefore they're all suspect. By the way, this is what Dall E, which is a open AI thing they have inside of ChatGPT said it would not create Darth Vader. It said it could try to get close. I said sure. And it made me a poodle.
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Unknown D
Darth Poodle.
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Unknown A
Darth Poodle with a TIE fighter and the Kylo Ren lightsaber. So this is trademark infringe in here using that ip even though it's subtle in my mind the TIE fighter is Lucas's ip. You can't just use use it. And the lightsaber, that iconic one you see there isn't just a light sword. If you just did a light sword that would be different, but it's actually Kylo Ren. So yeah, it's kind of Kylo Ren's lightsaber they're doing here. And yeah, the difference lon to what you're talking about is the difference between personal use that's non commercial and building a service. ChatGPT charges for their service. ChatGPT has a vibrant multibillion dollar business that's based on subscriptions from consumers who want to make images. Now if you on your own computer or you at home were to make your own home version of Star wars, you literally hired actors, put them in your backyard on your ranch and made a Star wars film in your forest on your ranch.
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Unknown A
You can do that. You can do all kinds of copyright breaking stuff on your computer. You could download a New York Times story, you can edit it, you could republish it on your computer. You just can't publicly publish it. And that's the difference. So you will be able to make a Star Wars LLM for personal use. You just can't use it for competing against Disney. And I believe Disney will make at some point as part of Disney+ an LLM to do this, which by the way YouTube released today for premium subscribers.
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Unknown C
I do want to say though that producer Matty did manage to get a very convincing Jedi bulldog made. So it's funny how thin these, these barricades are around ip because if you look at that, that just screams I like dogs and I like Star wars. And half of that's copyright protected.
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Unknown A
And that's a licensing deal right there. By the way, Alex, you know, there are people who license Disney ip, Marvel IP to make ashtrays and saucers and T shirts. And that's a vibrant part of any IP owners, whether it's Elvis or, you know, the Rolling Stones. They make very detailed decisions on who gets to license for cups, who gets the license for a fast food Happy Meal. And they have a bidding war between all of the different fast food restaurants of who gets, you know, the Happy Meal characters for the next Marvel film.
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Unknown E
And there's so many legal requirements, like, here's what you can have the characters doing, here's what you can. They can't be associated with anything like this and you lose all that power now. Yeah, put them next to whatever they want.
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Unknown A
Lon.
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Unknown C
I think Ferrari has a thing in all their licensing deals that if you show a Ferrari car, it has to be leading the race, for example, they don't want ever to be shown in second place.
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Unknown B
Exactly.
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Unknown C
People are particular about this. They're serious. But what I'm curious about is not just the implications amongst ourselves, but also for the industry itself. And according to Cornell University professor James. I'm going to guess here, Grimmelman.
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Unknown A
Grimmelman again. Grimmelman. He's always got something to say. Grimmelman. Grimmelman.
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Unknown C
Mr. Grimmelman says, quote, if this decision is followed elsewhere, it's really bad for the generative AI companies. So we are talking about a legal database, we are talking about Reuters. But the thing is, this does, I think, chip away a little bit at the foundation of the value of some of these companies. Jason, we've talked about it on the show a bunch. What's OpenAI worth? 157 billion. $300 billion. If their foundation is porous, it could be 30.
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Unknown A
And here's what's going to happen. I predict the New York Times is not going to settle, nor should they. New York Times has to take this one to the mat. And if they do take it to the mat, they're going to be able to get an injunction against ChatGPT. And if they get an injunction, what that means is Chad has to turn its product off. They have to stop providing it. That would be cataclysmic. The damages that the New York Times could get here, I believe could be like nine figures, like 100 million, 500 million, which is pocket change for Chad GPT. Except when 10 other people show up and then it's like getting 10 speeding tickets or is having 10 cars impounded. Now you got 5 billion in liability. 10 billion liability. That's what sunk Scour Napster and made all those Companies become insolvent.
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Unknown A
Will chatgpt become insolvent in this case? I don't know, but I.
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Unknown C
Probably not, but.
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Unknown A
Well, it's going to be. This could be cataclysmic. I think it's a 5% chance or less that this becomes existential for them and a 95% chance they write really large checks. And I do think this could Balkanize everything where Reddit then says to folks, you know what, Pay up or take our stuff out. And then Quora pay us, take our stuff out. Getty pay us, take our stuff out. And it is going to cause absolutely absolute chaos in the industry, I believe. And then it's going to cause a really positive model of licensing for the New York Times. I believe the New York Times will make more money, more money from licensing their content to LLMs than from advertising and possibly more than subscriptions every year.
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Unknown E
But haven't so many of the AI leaders have said they can't afford that? Like if they have to start paying everybody but boo.
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Unknown A
Do you not believe them? I don't believe them. Okay, Spotify pays. You tell us, Alex, is it 70 cents on the dollar? 60, 65.
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Unknown E
Yeah.
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Unknown A
This is why Alex is here. He knows this stuff. You know pop culture. He knows numbers. It's 65 cents of every dollar. You know what Napster said, we can't possibly make this work. Somehow Spotify figured out how to give two thirds of their revenue away. By the way, Apple gives away 70 cents of every dollar in the App Store. Yeah.
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Unknown B
Oh, okay.
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Unknown E
Yes, but okay, I mean, literally said, we need too many materials to train these models. It's not possible. We'd run out of money.
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Unknown A
Try harder.
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Unknown E
Before we could pay all of these creators.
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Unknown A
Very simple. You just think it's made up percentage. He should take 65 cents of every dollar of consumer subscriptions and give them to content creators.
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Unknown E
Yeah, but they hoovered up, like, all the content they have to pay.
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Unknown A
I'm just saying this is a potential settlement. If you say you can't pay everybody, then you could say, I'll pay a percentage.
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Unknown B
Okay.
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Unknown A
And then you come along for the ride. Which, by the way, is what Spotify did. Spotify figured out a way to say, even though we can't pay you for every song in the system, we can pay you a percentage or your revenue as it goes out. We pay you.
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Unknown E
But Spotify can measure that numerically. Here's how many people listen to rihanna this month. OpenAI can't do that with their whole system.
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Unknown A
They call it, I call B.S. they could say in the system these are citations. When you get medical information, go ahead and do a medical search right now and ask like what is you know this statin drug used for? Please give me citations. You can ask these LLMs right now, Gemini etc please give me citations. And they somehow figure out how to get citations in there. So I do know that the model has been trained. And yes, you're right Lon, there's probably some general knowledge in there. Guess the next word in an email that they can't. But they can also add citations. So I do think there is a way for them to re engineer the models from first principles to say anything we ingest when we, when it comes out the other side of the transistors. Let's make our best effort to attribute it.
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Unknown C
I, I struggle with what to do here because I am a writer, right. I, we do this three times a week. I also love technology. I think startups are awesome. I use AI and so I just feel conflicted as hell and I don't.
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Unknown A
Even know which way to shoot somebody republishes this and puts ads in it and reconstitutes it. I can't pay my salary and your two salaries and I mean that's the whole idea.
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Unknown E
Fair use isn't supposed to be a new business. It's supposed to be me doing some kind of analysis or some kind of parody or it's not just supposed to be me recreating your business for myself.
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Unknown A
Now if you do a picture in picture reaction shot, that would be okay with me.
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Unknown C
So transformation, that's addition, that's a lot.
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Unknown E
More A reaction is something new. You're making the content of you reacting.
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Unknown C
Yeah but in the economy of reactions on YouTube, quite often if you sit down and you put on a new a band's new single and you have yourself in the corner and you're talking over it, often the label gets the money from that and I think that's mostly okay. Sometimes they cut side deals with creators just to help encourage them to kind of like show off newer bands. But I mean like even in that case, YouTube won't mess around Nintendo.
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Unknown E
This is always an issue with Nintendo. They don't like let's play people reacting to the new Zelda game. Even though you know that's how you get the word out that there's a new Zelda game.
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Unknown C
Yeah, you can choose to do that. But if you just take our show without permission. Yeah, okay.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown C
So that's not short meta. Short Microsoft because they're in trouble with OpenAI long New York Times, no speaking startups, investment advice.
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Unknown A
I think they're all going to win. It's just going to take some settlements.
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Unknown B
Yeah.
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Unknown A
But, you know, I just love this one. The Daily Doug. He's a composer. He smokes weed on air and then talks about songs. I can relate to this. Like, I like this. And he does like my. And I gave him 100 bucks. I said, do more Dire Straits and he did it. Couple of Dire Straits for me. And I don't know how much he makes, but the Daily Doug is so great.
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Unknown C
Oh, this guy.
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Unknown A
He's so awesome.
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Unknown D
This guy before.
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Unknown A
And if you go look at. You know, it's a really great feature in YouTube. Is they. If you go on the timeline on the scrub, you can see which are like the key points that people will watch again. So pick whichever one is like a P. There we go. There you go. Boom. And he started playing along to Dire Straits and trying to figure out the chord progression. You can play there. We can listen.
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Unknown C
I'm gonna play only 30 seconds at most to respect the copyright.
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Unknown A
It's fair use of a fair use. And here he's like doing. He is digging Brothers in Arms, which is one of my favorite songs of all time, Dire Straits or otherwise. And just go check out the Daily Doug. And if we could book him as a guest. Daily Doug, I want to book us a guest.
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Unknown C
Okay.
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Unknown A
And then Blanco Lirio pull up Blanco Lerio. I pay for both of these substacks. This is bizarre stuff, Flan. But Blanco Lirio channel is so great. And Doug is so great. Daily Doug is so great.
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Unknown C
Ah, okay.
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Unknown A
Blanco Lero, I love. Because I fly planes. Not myself personally, but I fly in planes. I was going to say, like. And I don't want to die in a plane. I don't want to die in a plane. Blanco Lirio channel does an amazing job. You pull up any of his videos here.
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Unknown C
Here is a very short clip of him discussing the Azerbaijan Airlines preliminary report. It was, quote, shot down. And here we go.
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Unknown A
Okay. This guy is a pilot. He's somewhere around Lake Tahoe where I have. Where I ski and I have my ski house. And it's incredible. He goes through every step of every report line. And he actually did the Blackhawk one. And, you know, he will do three, four, five of these reports. Pulls up the NTSB report. I love this guy. I love both these YouTubers. I want to do a collab with both and talk to both of them about their businesses.
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Unknown C
You know, the.
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Unknown E
There's a Tick tock. Guy who's an airplane mechanic. Do you watch his stuff? I'll have to find his.
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Unknown A
Send it to me.
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Unknown E
He just shows you whatever he's working on. He just brings the camera and he's like, now when you're changing a fuselage cover, you gotta.
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Unknown C
You guys need to play more video games.
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Unknown E
It's fascinating. I mean, he's funny, but it's just interesting to see how planes work. I had no idea.
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Unknown A
All right, everybody, Another amazing episode of this week in startups. Thanks, producer Lon. Thanks, Maddie. Chris, Court, sales team Hannah, Jamie and Matty Boy. And of course, Alex Wilhelm. He's X.com Alex. I'm X.com Jason. And the shortest. No, tied for shortest is X.com Lons L, O N S. We all have great early year one Twitter handles.
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Unknown E
You went to south by Southwest and then came back to the Mahalo offices and stood up on a chair and said, everybody, stop what you're doing.
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Unknown D
Yes.
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Unknown E
Go download this new app called Twitter. We're all going to use it every day.
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Unknown A
Alex is like, nothing's changed in 15 years. He still does that.
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Unknown C
No, no. I was just thinking that I wish I had been. I wish I had been there for a little bit because I've known Jason mostly in his, like, investor e of like, you know, like aging into the elder statesman role type. You know, I didn't know, like, scrappy Jason startup mahalo. I mean, I knew about Mahalo, but we didn't know each other back then.
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Unknown A
I'm going back to scrappy jcal mode. Well, I'll tell you. Well, scrappy with resources.
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Unknown E
Horrible mistake.
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Unknown D
I'm sorry.
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Unknown A
With resources. Well, I was like, I like it better now because I have resources. It's a little bit easier. Everybody gets paid a little more money and there's a little bit more budget for food. We get a nice office. Maybe there's some money to pay for the old relocation costs. So Lon is moving to Austin and he will be with me, Jackie and the team in our new studio. People don't know, but we're building the studio. So I am looking for a 10,000 square foot warehouse somewhere in Austin to put my team and maybe two or three sets of the pod. We keep working on the sets and maybe some new shows and ideas and then just generally a good time. We'll see you all next time on this weekend startups. Bye.