TWiST News: Nvidia's AI Edge, Google Might Have to Sell Chrome, and Founder Fridays Updates | E2049

So, JP, do you think that the DOJ has gone far enough in its proposed remedies? I was reading Luther Lowe, who heads policy of Y Combinator, and he was saying that some of Google's complaints are them actually just pretending to be upset and that the DOJ could have gone further. So, was brave, hoping for an even more punitive set of remedies? So, everything we need is in there, and then some.

It's all about monetization, right? And there's two ways you can monetize, and there's two ways that Google can remedy the situation. One is, if you have a browser like Brave, and you send a lot of queries to Google, because half of our users, let's say, are still using Google as a search engine, so we send them a couple billion queries a month, for which they don't pay us.

We're talking about big numbers, and 1 billion queries a month are coming to our browser, but we get no money on this on this traffic we send to Google for free for years. We're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars that we've given them.

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All right, everybody. Welcome back to this week in startups. I'm Jason Calicanis X dot com slash Jason Instagram dot com slash Jason LinkedIn Jason Calicanis and me on all the platforms. I interact with people. DMS are open and with me, of course, Alex will have the famous tech crunch editor and writer has joined this week and startups to chop it up with me three days a week. And we've got more guests coming in. We're going to be doing some triplets and quartets coming up. If you have people who you love and you want to see on regular

Rotation here on this week in startups. Let us know because we're doing news three days a week with interviews. We put it together. Alex, how are you doing on a Thursday? Yeah, no, I'm doing good. I'm just kind of amazed at how much is going on in technology right now, given that it's this time of year. I've been a reporter for a long time. Usually, back in the day, things would slow down a bit, but it feels, I don't know if this is just post-election jockey and so forth, Jason.

It feels like the news velocity is about as high as it's been at any point this year. So I'm feeling good. Lots to talk about. You are right. The velocity of news is tremendous. I just saw Matt Gaetz is not going to be attorney general. He took himself out of the running. It's just non-stand.

And with Trump, you have to understand he's an entertainer. And he does a lot of entertaining things. And the press loves loves Trump because Trump equals ratings. So there's going to be a lot of politics and policy on the show over the next four years. We're going to try to keep it out of the lunacy and the Matt Gaetz craziness. We're going to try to keep it policy based.

But of course, here we are. We're about to talk about Google on the docket and the Google breakup remedies. Yes. And I think that Matt Gates would have made your part in that. But now we have to take that out. So it's going to be crazy. And one of the great things is having people who are first principal, nonpartisan, to talk about it. And that's what we're hoping to do here on the show. Let's get right to it. You know, I know you were very excited about NVIDIA last night and they crushed it.

Yes. Just give us the overview here. I mean, this is extraordinary. It was incredibly impressive. As we said, if they just met expectations, probably not enough. We expected them to actually beat them by a little bit, Jason. And here's the number. So revenue expected, 33.2 billion revenue, right? Actual, 35.1, and then earnings per share expected, 74 cents, actual 81 cents, and then

Yeah, I know, right? And then critically, their guidance for the last quarter of the year, their Q4 of their fiscal 25, did have guidance that met investor expectations, so everyone's pretty happy. Shares haven't moved too much, Jason, but it does seem to be that this indicates that the high train in AI can keep going for at least another quarter or two.

All right, I just want to pause here and say they beat the top line by $2 billion, $1.9 billion. That's extraordinary. Yeah. I mean, that is just bonkers on already high expectations. They beat the EPS by seven cents a share, which is about 10%.

Yes, exactly what I was about to say, about 10%, yeah. That is extraordinary. And they're saying revenue in the next quarter will be 37.5 billion or something to that effect, which is another two and a half billion, another almost, you know, whatever, 10%. I mean, it's just, and that's quarter of a quarter to go up 8% or something.

Yeah. But the stock didn't move. I think that means that it's all priced in. Everything's always priced in. So be careful out there, folks. This thing is a juggernaut. It's not going anywhere. And the question I had for you yesterday was,

Is anybody going to compete for these dollars? Is there a competitor for these dollars? And it does not seem like that has emerged. I know Amazon has a big project to make their own chips, et cetera, and competing products. Is there any on the horizon, headwind, or what I have is headwinds. Headwinds would be things that are not direct competitors. They would be things like the economy, et cetera.

I guess there's two things that people are wondering. One, will there be a competitor for this category of servers essentially in data centers for AI? And then number two, this hitting a wall concept.

that people have been debating is there going to be some plateauing of AI and therefore the need for these. Any insights on those two? The way that I would answer the question about AI chips, AI-focused chips, and competition is that as it stands right now,

They have already secured sufficient leadership in the next generation of chips that any material competitor from a startup, or I would say a big tech company as well, will be in the next generation. So the investing call after Nvidia's earnings focused a lot on Blackwell, Jason, which is the successor to the Hopper architecture that we all know, the H100s that are out there.

And just putting from their earnings call, demand it greatly exceeds supply. We are on track to exceed our previous Blackwell revenue estimates. Customers are gearing up to deploy Blackwell at scale, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So it seems that NVIDIA will retain the crown for the foreseeable future.

That said, there are a lot of startups out there that are pursuing this because the company makes so much money. Jason, I think any business that has 35 billion in revenue and net income of 20 billion in one quarter is going to attract a sea of competitors over time because there's just too much profit there to not go after. I guess the Amazon in-house AI chip, Trainium 2, that's the one that's designed to reduce

essentially Amazon's reliance, but Amazon is one of the biggest customers because they have AWS. So even if Amazon does make a great in-house chip for lower-cost jobs to reduce people's AWS cloud computing bills, and you would assume other people will do the same, people still might want to rent H100s.

Or it's not blackwell chips. Well, the new blackwells, yeah. So therefore, it's not even Amazon's choice. They're providing to the startup community and other folks their cloud as is Azure as is Google cloud as is Oracle cloud. So they're just going to buy what their customers want. So.

We're going to see, Siribris is the other company, I guess, that's making AI chips. Siribris etched, and then also there's a company called D Matrix, and they're actually Microsoft backed, and there was a new story that came out this week, which we just pulled up, that they've actually kind of put together their first actual chip. So there's movement here. I think one reason, Jason, we haven't seen as many competitors out in the market, as you might expect, is that building chips is much harder than building software in terms of time to product and market.

So I would not be shocked if next year was a very exciting year for chip startups, but you also asked about the AI wall. And this was what I was most curious about in the earnings. Once we saw that the numbers themselves were good, kind of what we expected. So the first analyst question that I saw was I'm going, Hey, Jensen CEO of NVIDIA. What's up with this AI wall? Are you worried?

And Jensen gave, I would say, a very good answer. And I'm going to try to just digest and do a couple sentences here. Tell me if this works. Essentially, the old model of training AI models, pre-training scaling is intact, he says, and it's still continuing. But that does not

address, I would say the rate of progress, which people say has slowed down. But Jensen says there's two other ways that they are improving AI models in the market today. One is post-training scaling, and then essentially what we saw with open AI, which was test time scaling. So there's two other approaches now creating a three-prong approach to improving AI models, which Jensen thinks is going to keep going and improving what we have in the market for a long time to come.

So, some slowdowns in one approach, but there are several approaches, we're fine.

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disclaimer, cards issued by Sutton Bank, members, FDIC, terms and conditions apply. So let's talk about Google, the DOJ, obviously has a case against Google, and now we're going to the remedy, Google lost the case, maybe tee this up for us, and then let's talk about the remedy. And I have been giving a lot of thought as to how this might go down, and I have a lot of

practical questions about what would happen if Google Alphabet was forced to spin out the Google Chrome browser.

Yeah. Okay. So just to back everyone into this, uh, recall that back in August of this year, Google was declared by court to be a monopolist and one that put acted as one to maintain its monopoly. This was for you nerds out there, a violation of section two of the Sherman Act. Jason, this sent shockwaves through technology. This was a big moment. The question then became though, okay, Google's a monopoly. What are you going to do about it?

So we've been waiting to hear from the Department of Justice what they were going to put out in their initial proposed final judgment or PFJ. So if you see that acronym out there in the news, it's essentially the DOJ's pitch to, hey, they're a monopoly. Here's how we're going to fix it.

And Jason, the headline story out there that everyone's talking about is that the DOJ wants Google to divest from, but there's quite a lot else in there, including the possible divestur of Android and a lot of other business rules about what Google can and cannot do, including investing into other AI companies or other search companies. So it feels pretty broad and Google is beating its pants. Maybe how I'd put it, frankly. That's a technical term. That's a technical term.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know that they need to. I think what they need to do, and this is really the hard thing to do when you've got something as core to the business as you have two core pieces chrome, which is kind of built into everything. It's very integrated into search.

because you have the default search engine. It is very tied to your Google account, whether you have a Gmail account or a Google Domains account, like a Google Docs account, because it syncs all your information into the Chrome browser. You know that when you log into a Chrome browser. So they have really integrated this tightly. And then, of course, the reason they did Chrome was to control

The user behavior of going into the URL bar and instead of typing in google.com typing in your search and firefox was printing money for a long time as was the opera browser mozilla just a bunch of folks and so all of this added up to a way for them to kind of intercept.

searches before anybody else could intercept them. That's why it was so critical for them to give tens of billions of dollars a year to Apple to secure those high end customers. Apple customers are the highest end customers because they can afford a $1,200 phone. So the default search there is worth more because remember Google search monetizes through advertising. Whoever owns the Apple user base gets the

Mercedes, the Tesla ad searches, whoever owns the Android users, well, yeah, they get a lot of global users. They're going to get the Toyota, no offense to Toyota, you know, the Toyota Prius searches and the use Prius searches. So just keep that in mind of how critical some of these deals are to them.

And also, Jason, the data that comes from those searches is more monetizable to your point, which is very critical. But also, it provides a lot of signal to Google about how to tune its search engine. And one of the points that DOJ made was that Google bought access to essentially search audiences, used that information to make itself better, and then no one else could compete with that virtuous cycle.

So one of the remedies is that Google will have to, quote, disclose data sufficient to level the scale-based playing field that is illegally slanted, including at least licensing syndicated search results that provide competitors a chance to offer greater innovation. That's a lot.

Yeah. So I had talked to you a little bit about maybe putting in context how much revenue Google has from advertising versus other ad networks and stuff like that. Because one way to look at this is product based. Another way to look at it is revenue based on a product basis. You can't debate that Google doesn't have 90% of queries searches right now. Although you and I know

People are doing searches on Claude and chat GPT pretty frequently. I would say the majority of my usage of Cirque has gone to open AI with a trickle to grok and a trickle over to Claude right now. And actually, some to Gemini. So I would say I might be the early adopter in this metaphor, the Vanguard of technology adoption. So I feel like that part of it

Is going to be solved by the market which is the great paradox of this by the time they got to 20 years later to google search monopoly it has viable competitors.

which is really weird. It's almost like somebody got to the top of the hill and they started running down the hill and you just push them in the back and they're going to go tumbling down the hill. It's very weird for it as well. Look what I did. It's like tripping somebody who's already fallen. They're already at peak search, markship. But if you look at this through online advertising, they are also a smaller percentage of online advertising than people realize because they're competing with Amazon.

Uber, Instacart, DoorDash, and of course Meta, who have large advertising businesses. And then if you look at advertising overall, which would include television advertising, I think Netflix, Amazon, Prime, other people have advertising, right?

No, yeah. And then you have advertising in newspapers, magazines, and then you have outdoor advertising. See if other places to put your advertising dollars. Do you have any idea of percentage-wise, what percentage of revenue? We all know that Google has the majority of searches, but what about ad dollars?

I want to make a point before I answer that, Jason, just so everyone knows that when we talk about the Google search monopoly, just to be clear, the DOJ reports that Google has unlawfully maintained its monopolies in general search services and search text advertising. It's a constrained point, still a large market, but certainly not trying to say that they own all the advertising market or all of search whole cloth. So there are some distinctions there.

In terms of their total share of the US advertising market, I don't have the number off top of my head. It's 27%. I was going to say less than a third. There you go. If you look at the duopoly of Google and meta together, they hold 57% here in the US. That means of all advertising in the world, they own maybe single digits. That's the question I have.

How much do they own of all? So we'll bring that to you in another episode as we double click on it. Let's talk about what are some possible scenarios here. And then we have a special guest, which I'm very excited about because my favorite browser is brave and we have somebody from Brave here, a competitor who is directly impacted by all of this. So if Google is forced to spin out Google Chrome, I have a series of questions. Who would buy it? They have to spin it out. So that means somebody has to buy it.

Or it has to be a standalone business. Yes. So let's start with the first question. Who would possibly buy this because and then what would you value it in?

Yeah. Then what you would value it at would be based upon its ability to do a deal for search. So here we are. If you are the DOJ, you're probably going to say it can't be owned by the max seven, right? Because that makes no sense. You're breaking up one of the max seven. You're not going to let Apple buy it, right?

you're not going to let Amazon or a meta buy it, because then it's just like making somebody else one of the seven giant bullies or whatever you want to call them if you view them as bullies like the DOJ does, you're just letting one bully get the weapon of another bully. So it's got to be somebody below that group, somebody under a $500 billion market capital.

Okay, then would you allow if a smaller company bought it, let's say, just going to pick a random company here, Salesforce isn't in where HubSpot aren't in the max 7, right? They're under a trillion dollar market cap companies, I believe. So if you let a SaaS company at lassen, I don't know, some 50 to $250 billion, $500 billion company buy it. Yep.

Would they not be allowed to do an ad deal with Google? Would that be not allowed? Because if Salesforce buys it, I don't know why they would, but let's just say they did. Then they're going to be banned from having Google buy it and Google monetizes at the highest level, which means they've got to let somebody else buy it.

Then how do you value it? Because if you can't do a Google deal, well, then it's, I don't want to say worthless, but it's going to be hard to monetize this thing. That means you have to sell the advertising to Bing or Brave or DuckDuckGo or somebody who has a competing search engine, or would you sell it to Yahoo, the private equity owned, you know, maybe five or $10 billion company that owns a collection of assets. Maybe that makes sense, but you would essentially be sunsetting this browser. Now, on top of all, that is an open source company.

So I'm going to stop there because this is one of the most complicated things I've ever heard strategically cutting out Chrome. OK, no big deal. It's a pain in the neck for Google. But how does it become a viable standalone business if it can't have a search deal?

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I honestly do not know, and Jason, it's great that you point this out. We were on Hacker News earlier today looking for the most interesting commentary from the market, and quite literally this is the thing people are chewing on. What is the value of Chrome not inside of a search company and when it's unable to monetize via a major search deal, all of what we've seen with iOS and Google? I honestly have no idea.

And so normally when we talk about taking a large company and breaking up in smaller pieces, we think in terms of unlocking value, that if you took something and made it smaller and more discreet, people would value it differently, and that the aggregate would be worth more than the whole. In this case, it feels like if you break off Chrome, it crumbles into your hands like sand.

And so I don't see it happening. And so here's my pitch to you. Is this the DOJ doing the door slamming negotiation technique, make a lot of noise, threaten this. And then when they actually retreat to the position they expected, it feels like a concession. And then Mountain View gets to say, Hey, you know, we got to keep chrome.

I mean, who knows? I do think they're probably trying to give Google an off-ramp here to make a sacrifice. You're exactly correct. Taking some things out of a conglomerate would unlock value.

taking YouTube out would unlock extraordinary value. And I think the greatest move for Google shareholders would be to just offer that. That would offer YouTube. That's 50 billion in revenue a year plus the subscription base. It would be a Netflix competitor immediately. Google would be bummed, but it wouldn't be the end of the world for them.

I agree with that. And just to put it into context, everybody, in Q3 of this year, YouTube ads were at $8.92 billion business, Jason, up from 7.9 in the preceding year. So not the fastest growing company, but certainly one that has ample scale to be public and still maintain advertiser share and so forth. So that makes a lot of subscription revenue too.

for sure. But the issue I have with this is not a product complaint, but more of a, how would divesting YouTube answer the core issues that DOJ has with Google's kind of search ads business? And does it actually go at the heart of that particular issue? As it's not commercial lamb, I get it. I'm just curious if it'll, you know, appease the right thought. I think the search a lot of YouTube is a lot of searches.

So if you look at the percentage of searches, it would go down. And I don't think they would be able to monetize the search deals with Apple, et cetera, if they didn't at the level they're able to, if they didn't have YouTube. I think it's that key of a piece. They think they're making 50 billion a year off of YouTube, because they add revenues, like 33, 34 billion, and then there's another 15 billion, I guess, in

subscription revenue with YouTube premium. I don't think it's a perfect Mac to the concerns they have, but it would be significant. I think it would actually be more significant than Chrome in terms of hurting Google in some ways in terms of the size of the business, because I think you'll walk 500 billion off the mark. I think we trade at 10 times.

Chrome. Yeah, I'm not sure. But let's bring our guest on and let's see what their opinion is here. And so that will really help us contextualize this. Everyone, we have Jean Paul Schmetz or JP. If you want to call him that, if you're here in the US, head of Brave Search, head of ads over at Brave, and also worked according to his LinkedIn ad Abe books way back in the day, which if you're a used book nerd, you know that company. JP, thanks for coming on the show, man. Appreciate it.

What's your take here, JP, when you see them spinning out Chrome, you work on the Brave browser. It's a private company. I love it. It's my favorite browser. The reason it's my favorite browser is you don't track anything and you have shields up. And when you have your shields up on the margins, some websites don't like it. But I would say 95 out of 100, it just works so much faster and it works really well on mobile.

And you have your own search engine, which I do not change my default search engine. I like to use brave. I like to have a little privacy. I like to go faster and I don't like to be tracked. Of course, I use Google sometimes. I go back for Google flights. I go back for next scores, but I have gotten quite used to Braves search engines who.

When you run a browser company, you're a standalone browser company. Do you make money through a deal with Google at all? Or is your money all coming directly from your own ad network? It comes directly because one of the points that the DOJ is making is that Google only gives you money if you're agreeing not to compete with them.

And that is the crux of the matter. So if you have a browser and you decide to make a search engine, you're not going to get money from Google. You only get money from Google if you agree not to compete, which in the case you had the example of Apple doing some deals with Bing for Siri and then Google telling them we don't really like that so much.

Or Firefox was actually invested in clicks, which is the company that created what became BraveSearch. And when they renegotiated, they deal with Google in 2017, Google told them that they didn't like that thing in Europe that they were doing. So the payments of Google to browsers were always conditional on non-compete. And this is the crux of the case. And this is in the remedy. If you read them carefully, this is basically what is not forbidden.

So these strong-arm tactics will call them what they are. If you want...

this incredibly robust, the largest search ad network in the world. And you want to monetize it on your search engine, let's say Braves or DuckDuckGo is a competitor. You are the two, I think, largest independent search engines outside of Google in the United States, in the English-speaking language. You can't use their ad network. Their ad network has scale. And then if anybody tries to compete on the margins, they swing a stick.

essentially and say, yeah, we don't like what you're doing there. It would be terrible if something happened to that really nice car you have parked outside. And in Brooklyn, when they told you it would be terrible if something happened to the car you're parking in front of my house, you would move your car because you would know what would happen. You might have a broken window or your tires might be gone when you get back.

Now, that's really one of the main monetization. So one of the main anti-competitive moves that Google was doing was basically, here's a part of money, but you agree, do not compete. And if you compete, we basically make your life nearly impossible because you have to do, you have to finance a browser, which is since the day of Explorer as becoming a nonprofit, right? Let's go.

did not monetize the b2c business they gave the browser away try to sell the server. When explorer came out they were spot a window so it was for free when firefox came out it was open source and sort of an old cast of netscape and they couldn't make money was nonprofit right and then chrome was offered as a way for google to reduce their payments to sell parties so the browser business has always been a loss leader.

Right. Tell me how you built your search index and how hard it is to compete against Google's global search index, because this seems like a non-trivial task. It seems like it would cost a lot of money and a lot of time, but correct me if I'm wrong or if I'm right.

First of all, we are at Brave Search, one of three independent indexes. I think there's Google Bing and us. They used to be Yandex and Baidu, but I think both of them have pretty much given up on trying to index the American and European world.

Companies like DuckDuck go perplexity or everyone else that you could call a search engine, typically just worry about the user interface, not put it in a very nice way. They basically use a search API in the back. There's three search APIs in the world, Bing search API, Brave search API, and Google search API, which is actually under use because it's not a high quality and it's not exactly. Is it not high quality on purpose, by the way? Yeah, of course.

So this is one of the other remedies that the DOJ is asking Google to make a basically cheap and high quality version of its search index.

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I'm ambivalent about that one, because we built a large business in the Search API at Brave, and we would not like Google to have to sell it for zero bucks, right? Like, that would not be so great for us. So that's one of the stuff that we criticize. But there's only three independent search engine, and to come back to your question, yes, it is hard. That's why I started this thing in 2008, and it took a great team of people many, many years to get to a level where we could get 200%.

which was only achieved by Josep and his team, so Josep Pujol runs the search engine. It was only achieved after Bing raised his price factor 17-fold after they had the deal with OpenAI, and we could not afford the 10% that we were still using Bing on, and we decided to go to Onimosan. So it took us 13 years to go to independence in indexing.

So, JP, do you think that the DOJ has gone far enough in its proposed remedies? I was reading Luther Lowe, who heads policy of Y Combinator, and he was saying that some of Google's complaints are them actually just pretending to be upset and that the DOJ could have gone further. So, was brave, hoping for an even more punitive set of remedies? So, everything we need is in there, and then some.

And so I do agree with what you guys were discussing earlier that that there's a good settlement that can be made there. And it could very well be that they don't have to die this crime in the end, but the main reason people don't compete in search, right, is it's not about data so much because, you know, there's a lot of kids that went to Stanford. I went to Stanford. We know how to build it, right? The problem why we're not building it is because no one is going to give us money to build it because they don't think it's going to be remolitized, right? No VC is.

in the last 15 years, Jason knows this, but it was more like 20 years ago, Jason and I were fooling on research engines. No one will give you money to build a search index, right? So you got to find it somewhere. And they don't give you money because they don't believe that you will be able to distribute it.

Number one, because they know distribution cost money. Distribution would be possible if you had tons of money. So it's all about monetization, right? And there's two ways you can monetize. And there's two ways that Google can remedy the situation. One is if you have a browser like Brave and you send a lot of queries to Google because, you know, half of our users, let's say, are still using Google as a search engine. So we send them a couple billion queries a month for which they don't pay us.

We're talking about big numbers, and 1 billion queries a month are coming to our browser, but we get no money on this. On this traffic, we send to Google for free for a year. We're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars that we've given them. On the other hand, if you have a search engine, they have a product called AdSense for Search, which actually is made to finance search engine, except you cannot use it if you have a browser because they don't allow you to monetize queries that start from a toolbar, they call it. This is ridiculous.

And both of these points are in the DOJ document, meaning that there is somewhere in there where it's a bit lawyerly, right? Because they turn it in the negative. They say that Google is not supposed to pay or to give special value to people for exclusivity, et cetera.

Now, let's play this for a minute. Does that mean that Google cannot pay Apple for the traffic? Well, that would be interesting because then the market cap of Google would grow up by 500 billion, right? Because 23 billion times multiple and Apple's market cap would go down. So the perpetrator gets up.

That doesn't make sense. So they will continue to pay Apple, I believe, roughly the same amount of money, but they will also have to pay brave the same amount of money, but they cannot request exclusivity, which means that Apple will have to display a choice screen and say, do you want to use Brave? Do you want to use Google, right? There's a lot of choice creams in this remedy situation because

Just to make sure that I'm tracking this, because exclusivity won't be allowed, your company will therefore be able to monetize the search queries you already send to Google from folks who use Brave, but don't use Brave Search.

whenever i had the chance to talk to the deal i always said look look if it doesn't help brave i don't know if it's a remedy that works. Now if you know if you spin out from does it immediately help brave or it depends because if they have a gigantic deal with google. You just create another monopoly or new monopoly not a monopoly but new monopoly and they do which is company in the world right and they can start.

I don't know. I mean, it's a different world, but I don't think you really make a huge difference by just doing that, not to be fair to the DOJ. That's three lines in a 35 page document. Obviously, for the press, you have the impression that it's 35 pages out of 35 pages.

That is, I think, it's very easy for the press to conceptualize spinning out a product. What they don't understand is the deal structure. And that's where the nuances, and I think JP, you explained that perfectly, which is if you run a search engine, you can't use their ad network. If you compete with them on a browser or a search engine, you can't use their ad network. And just saying to them, listen, if you're going to let people monetize, it's got to be good for everybody. You can't pick and choose and you can't strong arm people into not competing with you.

Because that is the definition of antitrust being able to say, and they could keep taking this further and further and further. Now, they can't bully Apple, but they could have said to Apple at some point, and there was a lot of rift here between Apple and Google over the iPhone, because Android came first, and Steve Jobs felt very betrayed by the iPhone. I mean, imagine if

They said to apple like you can't make an iphone or else you know we're not going to allow max to have sir can use google search on a map right like it's really crazy to think of telling other people what businesses they can be in in order to have the business relationship with you.

But that's what they did with Samsung. That's what they do with Firefox, which are less powerful. They basically told Samsung, you can have your own browser, but it has to have Google search in it. But you cannot run a browser in Asia and try to be on the phones. And they would tell me, no, we cannot do it because we have a deal with Google. And even browser that we would pre-installed on the second screen have to have Google search as a default. If not, we don't get the App Store. Yeah.

So that's one of the remedy as well, that Google cannot in the future condition the availability of the app store, which you don't have the app store, you Android phone is good, right? It's like having a supermarket and you don't have anything on the shelves. It's kind of like...

And so that was the, it's another remedy, you know, you have like, I don't know, there's like 10 sections and each section has like five remedies. And one of them is Google cannot condition the availability of another product based on the supply of search as a default.

Is Google upset at Rave for protecting people's privacy so deftly and removing ads and giving back control to users? Or is that part of their animosity towards Brave? They just don't pay us, but I think the fact that they don't pay us is more connected to, they don't like competition. Brandon is a person that has built two major browsers in his life.

who's to say cannot do it a third time. And I remember that there was a company before Brave that was sold to Brave. I used to tell a prospective employee who would always ask the question, why does the world need another browser in the search engine? And I would tell them, look, there has been five browsers in the history of the web. It's only 25, 30 years. Who tells you there cannot be a sixth one, right? Like why does history stop at Chrome? And why do you only need a search engine in a world where

I don't know. I mean, it's difficult to build, so yes, there are less countries in the world that make so-changing than countries that make atomic bombs, so it's difficult. But having another search engine, I mean, that certainly is a nice thing to have. What do you think of what Sam Hotlin's doing over at OpenAI with their search experiment? Is it good? Yeah, I mean, first of all, they realized that

They realize a number of things. One is that an LLM that's not connected to the web is a bit, well, it's less good than it could be, right? Yeah. And if it's connected to the web, then it is most likely going to use a search engine to go to the web because

I cannot talk too much about other things, but they have to connect to some search engine. They're like an API with a company that we may have mentioned in the last five minutes, perhaps.

Maybe, but the thing is that not a question becomes much more interesting is where does AI live in the future? Because you can answer that question by saying, oh, it will live everywhere, but that's not an answer. The real answer is there is a place where people ask every question they can think of.

And that's the navigation bar of a browser, right? And so does AI like in Brave? I mean, you use Brave Search, right? So you know that we have the Summarizer, which by the way, we launched way before Google did that and way before everyone else. And it basically reads all the results of the web for you and summarizes them on top, which I think is a super useful feature for that kind of queries.

And so exactly, I mean, people are going to use GPT, of course, in a B2B API type business thing, and it will have to be connected to the web as well. Some people are going to use GPT on a web page, but I think, you know, a lot of people will use GPT in a

browser like yes products and that will have access to if I want to go to a restaurant tonight and I want to know who had a five best restaurant and you know you got to get some AI somewhere and that is going to be in something of a browser so yes at OpenAI there's a guy who was one of the first creators of Firefox and one of the guys who created Chrome so they work at OpenAI so yeah they're probably doing a browser right yeah and at some point they will launch a browser you're right

Yeah. One thing is that over the years, building search engine, I realized that some people think differently about things. So many years ago, I was trying to convince Facebook, Dan Rose and Zuckerberg, you should launch a browser. You're such a threat to Google. If you launch a browser, you're going to be a master of the world. And they were like, no, we already have one.

And I said, OK, well, my app is a browser. People open link and my social discovery search. So they had a different view of the world, which does not not to be correct, because social is not a good search engine and the fifth app is not a good browser.

But they didn't feel the need so it could very well be that that open a i goes in the same direction and then say it's very ai centric and we don't care about navigational queries, we don't care about this we don't care about that but, what google discovered in the past is that you need to have 100% of the queries if you want to make money on the 18% and so.

Sure, you remember the queries you've done with perplexity and open AI, but these are the 24% that are not monetizable. So if you explore the number of queries and you say, oh, there's a company that does the smart stuff, there's a company that does the navigational stuff, there's a company that does the porn stuff, and then there's a company that does the commercial stuff, that doesn't work so well.

because you have three bankrupt companies and you have one that makes all the money and that would be Amazon, right? And so, so I think the magic of search is having this box where people just ask everything. Yeah. And AI is going to have to live. It's going to have to live there. We talked about how there might be monetization, you know, opportunities in a post Google settlement world for brave and brave search. I'm curious though, what your expectations are for driving increased search volume, because if you monetize your existing volume better, great.

But do you think that the remedies as discussed by the DOJ will actually help smaller search engines get more net new users? Yes. So we already have kind of in Europe, we have a preview of this because the DMA, which is a new legislation in Europe, actually forces Apple to give users a browser choice and the DMA forces Google Chrome to give users a search choice. So if you start Chrome in Europe, the first time they ask you, do you want to use Brave Search or Google Search, etc. So we do know that this works.

What's the impact on that? How much acceleration did that drive in your ability to get new regular users? Oh, it's very significant. Growth in Europe is twice as big as it is in the US. Just because of that.

Yeah, I think the word of mass growth is probably the same across all countries, because people have social structure and stuff. But Europe, we can see double the growth at the moment, and it has to be coming from now. OK, thanks. I really appreciate it.

JP, thanks for getting us into what actually matters here. It was really great to catch up and I appreciate you educating us on the nuances here. It really is about these deals and the deal making. And the browser is just, like you said, a couple of sentences in this 35 pages. Really truly appreciate you coming on the show. Thank you, Jason. Thanks, Alex. I've talked to you soon.

Okay well that was great Alex because this is like a breaking news story and absolutely i think when you get somebody who's on the inside who's got decades of experience on it you actually get to what is really happening here and he seemed very excited about not chrome being spun out but just the deal making.

Being leveled and anytime you're an organization you have great deal makers in the organization needs to grow incentives really matter so what we've seen happen over 20 years is a lot of great people at google building amazing things and it's been amazing for customers to get a free browser to get free youtube free storage you know we can stream to youtube right now for free all that infrastructure is paid for.

and the Chrome browser itself and Google Docs, which is available for free. All this free stuff they give you, Gemini is free, is because of that ad network. But then you put a bunch of pirate business development people into an organization who have stock options. And the incentive is to grow market share. That's the incentive. There's no incentive to not grow.

And so what happens over multiple decades in a business is if you've won everything, your team is there saying, well, what do we win next? What do we win next? And some of the creative people will go over and do creative things like Waymo.

Some of the energy will go into buying things like android like buying youtube sure and then there's also some creative energy and cycles that go into bd business development and they are going to scour the earth find incredible deals to grow the business right so there's multiple ways to grow business you could acquire things.

you could create new, credible new verticals. Like, remember, they tried loon to do low earth orbit. I miss loon balloons that would do spread things. Obviously, that worked better with satellite when SpaceX lowered the cost to put those up there. So make new, incredible things like Waymo. And then the final piece is, we'll let the BD team scour the earth, go to every corner. But eventually, when you're a monopoly and you have a monopolistic position, that business development team is going to do more and more extreme

Yes. Cutthroat things, just the nature of business. It happened at Microsoft where they told people, if you want the Microsoft operating system, Windows, on your machine, you got to put on the desktop, the Internet Explorer browser, and that's what killed Netscape or greatly angled Netscape over time. Netscape used to be able to buy Netscape. It was packed in software at CompuServe. You would go and buy a $50 browser, then they had the server, web servers and everything. They tried to monetize it otherwise.

Anyways, a really interesting case. We'll keep watching it. I believe Google's going to navigate this and we'll be sitting here 10 years from now and Google will be a five-brid company and they'll have figured this all out and they'll maybe lose on the margin. Some of these really aggressive deals, but they have other businesses like Waymo that can become a trillion-dollar business. Waymo is worth whatever it is, tens of billions now. Yes.

I think that becomes a trillion dollar business itself in the next 10, 20 years. So there's other ways for them to make money. I think YouTube will continue to grow. So great job taking that up. And I think you got, for the audience, really awesome information here. And with this new Lena con, with the end of the wrath of con, and a very frisky, non-Mac gates, and a very frisky M&A environment,

Google might be able to buy into other verticals that are not the core one. This is where M&A is valuable because if Google could have been buying things all along, let's say they could buy Snapchat or they could have bought Whole Foods or they could buy Uber or Airbnb and their M&A teams were like, you know what, we're sitting on all this money. Why don't we go buy Uber, Lyft, Instacart, DoorDash, whatever, then they wouldn't be doing these kind of grinded out deals on the margins.

Do you think so? Because to me, Google's a big enough company with enough smart people that they would do both at the same time. The profit motive is a great driver of activity. But there's leadership at the company. And the leadership, if Sundar is setting direction, and you say, you know what, Sundar, you can't put any cycles on M&A. We're not doing it, right? Look at Adobe Figma. It's just not worth the time. The Jews ain't worth the squeeze. So for four years or more,

They've just said, you know what? Can't focus on M&A. So when he goes and puts in an eight hour day, there might have been two hours in that day where they focused on M&A opportunities or an hour. And that's like, well, there's nothing we can do here. So let's go figure out something else to work on. OK, let's work on squeezing more money out of the search business. Jason, that was the meanest thing you've ever said about a CEO I've ever heard that he puts it in an eight hour day. That is such a 10.

I mean, when you work in a big company like that, sure. I mean, it's a 24 or seven job. Yeah. He probably puts in eight hour Sunday, some Sunday, too. I know. But yes, you're right. I'm just joking because they came out. I know you. I know how you approach work and time and so forth. So I'm just laughing because I think that's about the rudest thing you said to someone who even has two direct reports, let alone 200,000. This is a great segment. Jason wisdom. We'll just if I have any wisdom to share.

Here's what I've learned. All right. I'm taking notes. There's a group of people who just love their jobs and careers. You don't need them to tell them to work extra hours. They just love it so much. I don't have to tell you to check tech meme, shout out Gabe.

you know, to check your Twitter handle and see what's buzzing in tech over the weekend. You love tech. And S1 comes out. You're going to read it when it comes out. It doesn't matter if it hits your desk at 10 a.m. or 10 p.m. You're going to be like, oh, S1, I'm in. You're going to go read it because you're Alex Wilhelm and you love and.

There are people who want work life balance and when it's six o'clock they're like my phones off my slacks off. And you just have to determine if in your company you want to have people who are just naturally motivated and you don't have to push them or if you want to have people who have live work balance and that's fine to or.

In some positions, you don't care. And in some positions, you do, right? So in customer support, you may not need people who are putting in 50, 60 hours a week. And they're just so enthused about the next episode of the pod. They want it to be 10% better each time, like you and I do. And it's just the nature of things. And what you have to do is just define what you want as an organization and make sure everybody who comes to that organization understands that.

And that's where young founders make mistakes is they think that they can get inside somebody's head and motivate them. It's a narcissistic pursuit. It is a delusion of grandeur.

that I could take another human being and make them as motivated as I am to watch the nicks, or listen to dire straights, or go skiing, or read an S1, or put extra time into thinking about who the main character is so we can have a better guess for today's show. I wake up every day, I think, who is a really interesting person that we could talk to? Ben, yesterday, how great was yesterday when we talked to Alan Control Systems? Alan Control Systems, I don't think you picked that one.

That got me jazzed up for the 24 hours after it. I was stoked that you found that guest and founders are the best to talk to you because they will always give you the energy boost. And that has been true my entire career is he. Especially a founder who's doing well is like a double shot of espresso because not only are they powered by themselves, but they have a tailwind. Yeah. They're going to hypersonic mode. You know, they're about to hit the.

Pass to the space boundary. Long way of staying, you know, just define the culture you want. It's okay to have a nine to five culture. It's okay to have a 24 seven culture. Just make sure people know on the way in. That's what it is. And you got to tell them 10 times. I tell people who come work for me. I define how good you are for a match for our company and how responsive you are to me and your teammates.

That doesn't mean I expect you to put it in an eight-hour Sunday, but it does mean if I text on a Sunday or I slack on a Sunday, you're probably going to see it and respond. I mean, unless you're off the grid or something, of course. Yeah, everyone gets sick here and there, but I think that's actually the toughest matters. Wisconsin? Absolutely matters. And also one of the things that I've consistently noticed in people who are

highly performant is that if you go to their preferred channel of communication, they are highly responsive. That does not mean they're responsive across every channel. Some people love emails, people love texts, some people you have to call, but people will find a way to be available to the right things, and that does seem to track very closely to high performance.

All right, speaking about founders, though, let's do some other Fridays, Jason. All right, well, let me tee this up for you Friday's. I love meetups. Last night, I spoke at the all-in meetup here in Austin, and the 290 people had signed up when I was on my way over there in the afternoon, and there were definitely over 200 people who showed up. Got to meet everybody, did a Q&A. I think people love using online to go meet

offline. I wanted to do meetups for this weekend startups, and we've tried them three or four different times. I used to do them ad hoc. In fact, in the first year of the show, we used to have a Korean one, and somebody who wanted to come into work for us did that one. We had one in Japan, we had ones all across the country, France, and we would have them pitch their startups in these live meetups. I was bringing it back, but we needed a platform, and this platform river,

allows us to have these founder Friday meetups. But I wanted to come up with a purpose. And the purpose I wanted was four founders by founders, four founders by founders. And I got this from Nick's fan TV is my friend CP slogan is four fans by the fans. You know, it's a radio call and show after the next game. We all chop it up. I call into the show all the time and talk about the next game. For me, it's like my local WFAN when I lived in New York.

I never got on the air for that but i'm i go on the air you know every fifth or tenth game for next fan tv so this is four founders by founders and we give them a format and we want them to have six to eight people in each pod and we have dozens of cities now i've hired a half time person to manage this.

And we've now got thousands of people signed up in dozens of cities. And they've been doing this founder Fridays. Once a month, they get together. Here is founder Fridays. You can go to founder Fridays. Tech, right? Founder Fridays. Tech. It's very simple. Founders host a local meetup in their city on River. That's the event. That's the software platform we use. They find a venue, coffee shop, co-working, a restaurant, whatever, and they get together on that Friday. We have them in all different cities, which is fantastic. Amsterdam, Calgary,

Vancouver, we're looking for hosts for these. No lawyers, accountants, service people, no look you lose. You have to have a startup and it has to be run by two or three founders. You cannot do it.

as a law firm or something like that, or a real estate broker, no offense to all those folks. I used them all day long. We have startup basics here with Wilson, Cincinnati, and Cruz. We'd love the service providers to support these, but we found that when we did these previously, they would get taken over by people looking for customers. What we wanted to have was a tight little circle. Enough that you could go around the circle, which I think is six, seven or eight people. Once it gets past eight people, it takes too long.

To answer one question each month with each other, hey, what are you struggling on? What's working? And man, it has a transformative effect. I've been very low key about this because we're about to hit a year on it. I don't promote it too much because I didn't want it to get inundated. But the conversations that are happening here are changing people's lives. It's very lonely to be a founder. We've now created a vehicle for it and you can sponsor it.

So on river for a thousand bucks, if you're a law firm and accounting firm, you can go, but you got to buy everybody dinner or lunch for 350 bucks for each one. So three for a thousand bucks. It's a de minimis amount of money. If you do go, you can't be a pain in the neck. You got to be supportive and helpful. You don't get to promote yourself at it. You just get to be, you just get to say, I'm happy to buy everybody lunch. That's it. So if you're like a law firm and you got an office in Vancouver and you want to do this, feel free. We don't have a sales department itself, sir.

I asked Maddie, who's a researcher here in Austin with me, to talk to the founder Friday folks. They're in a WhatsApp group and we have them all in a group WhatsApp group. It's really fun because you get this persistent discussion of all the hosts in one group, Alex, and I'll make sure they edge you. And then each of the cities has their own group. So they're just talking about stuff all day long. It's really wonderful.

small communities for founders by founders. I asked Maddie to talk to them and say, hey, are there any good stories that occurred and to coordinate that with you? And I think we have two of the hosts who are going to talk about the stories occurring in their local chapter. Yes. And the first one of those is Jor Colbert, George, founder Friday host over in Austin, Texas. And George, you are the CEO and co-founder of albatross.ai. And that's albatrossTROZ.ai. Welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Jason, Alex. Happy to be here. I'm sorry. I'm in Austin. I haven't been able to go because the founder Friday is the following when I was traveling, but I will be coming to one and maybe we'll do it instead of we usually coordinate them all on the same Friday. So everybody can do it. They all share their photos in the groups. They share it on socials and then my team likes and retweets and we get to promote the companies. But how many months have you been doing it? Where do you meet? And then maybe tell us about a discussion that's occurred that's been helpful.

Yeah, so I've been the host for the past three months. We meet at a bar on the east side. The name is giving me right now. But yeah, so we meet every Friday from four to six p.m. We've had, you know, every Friday. No, so.

It's like every first Friday of every month. And we're four to six p.m. Central machine works. That's where it is. Yeah. Four to six p.m. The idea is, hey, if you're a founder and you want to get together, one of my philosophies is founders learn best from other founders. So especially in the early stage, you know, you might be very strong on the technical side. You might be very strong on the business side. You might come and say, Hey, like I'm wondering how to approach this aspect of a problem. And so that's what I've been doing. And in terms of

good stories. There are two of them. I'm going to go with the first one. It's Joe at Talonway.io. So he's a non-technical founder and he's working on the product and his key issue was he suspected that the approach to engineering that we're currently doing was not the right way. And as a technical founder, one of the first we told him was he was absolutely correct. If you let engineers, they will try to over optimize everything.

And they'll tell you, hey, give me a long list of requirements, and then leave me alone for two to three months while I go build it. And then you can go present it to the customer. And one of the things we were shorting was like, no, you have to be even if you're non-technical, confident enough to push back and say, we're not going to get along this requirements. We're going to minimize those requirements to exactly what we need to solve that problem at 70% of the way. And then you're going to go back to your customer and say, hey, this is a 70% solution. Is that good enough?

Yeah, exactly. And so as soon as we talked to him about it, he was, you know, as I said, you already kind of suspected it, but he needed to hear from other technical founders that, yes, your engineer is telling you this because, you know, he's just being an engineer. He wants to overmise, worry about scale in the beginning. And he doesn't need to do that. So that builds your confidence as a first time founder, you're hearing it from multiple co-founders. Hey, there is a better way. And it just allowed him to make a better decision. You said you had a second discussion that occurred. Tell us about that one.

Yeah. And so another benefit of learning is also, you know, there's a lot of talk about, you know, founders should be thinking about strategic partnerships, right? And that's one of the best ways to grow. And so myself, you know, I'm a technical founder, I a little bit like a little bit on the distribution side, right? And so I had a founder who showed up, uh, Michael at pussy that AI, they build AI generated videos for social media.

And, you know, a quick explainer what Alberchas is. Alberchas, we build AI sales agents for the real estate space specifically over the phone, email, and social media. So here's the picture or AI connects to the properties, Instagram profile, TikTok, and when people are interested, the AI engages with those people.

But as we said, we are a social version talking to Michael and Twisty and looking at his videos, I'm like, huh, could a property use this to generate videos to post on Twitter or Instagram profile? That can be a lead generation thing. And then my AI sales agents can be the lead sales conversion tool. So we got together, we started talking, realized, yes, this is an opportunity here to bundle our solutions and start offering it here. And so

While he was originally a BDC guy, there was an opportunity for us to work together and on a division, and this allows me to say, hey, we have a almost, you can think of as a full-stack AI marketing solution, where you'll use Twisty to generate AI videos for lead generation, and then you'll have Alberchase AI as an AI sales conversion to engage with leads. And so that was one of the two things that I know personally have come out of Founder Friday is super excited about it. All right.

So go to founder of Fridays.tech and you can sign up for the Austin one. And how many people come each week? What's the range of people coming? Is it five, 10? So I need to admit it, but we've gotten something from like 20 to 30, 35 people showing up all founders though.

But there is a, I think Austin is unique. There is quite a bit of demand for this. And so, yeah, so we've had 20, 30 people. We've tried to split it up between, hey, B2B founders in this section, B2C founders in this. You know, I think Amazon has that policy of like everybody caters are on a pizza. So actually we've gotten a sponsor. We get pizzas and then we just put them on the table. People get around the pizza.

I think that assigning people to a table and having a lead on each table is the way to go because the more people like structure in these things, and you could have just a structure time. Hey, we're going to do our round table and pizza from three to four thirty, you got to sit at a table, you got to be on time, eat a couple slices, you have a beer or soda pop.

And the leader goes around the table and keeps some time constraint. Each of the eight people gets to explain what they're working on, what their problem is. For two minutes, there's four minutes of feedback. That's six minutes told, or we go to the next person, six times six, 36 minutes, six times seven, 42, whatever it is. And you just have a stopwatch and somebody's the timer. So somebody's the moderator, somebody's the timer. So I really encourage you to put structure on it and then explain.

how that works with the other leads and the other hosts so that we help people do that. Do you think people would pay a membership to do this and would it make them more serious about it? I'm curious. I think they would. However, if I cannot show my opinion, I'm a little bit against it, especially for early stage founders. They might want to throw a barrier or something.

Right. So like it's not just five bucks. Maybe that might be fine and might be way to interpret it. Hey, it's not like we're trying to make money off you here, but it's more like we want to make sure that you're seat. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. We want to make sure you're committed. And yeah, like I think early stage founders, especially when they're, you know, they just launched a product or they're about to launch it. I mean, I've had a conversation with founders where they had a product and idea, but they were not sure if it should be B2B and B2C. And they're asking everybody else, Hey, what do you think?

Yeah, I agree with a barrier, but now what about the vetting to make sure you don't get interlopers in there trying to sell into it. Are you vetting each person who applies and checking their LinkedIn and making sure it's not a service provider or a lookie-loo? Just somebody who has got nothing to do on a Friday, or does the river team do that now? How is that working?

So it's a little tough when you have 30 to 40 people coming up, but River just launched the questionnaire. And one of the easiest way to do to filter is just, Hey, are you a founder? And if so, do you have a website? And, you know, maybe if you're very early, you may not have a website, but I think it's kind of key. Like if you're a founder and you're serious and you're, you know, you're trying to build a business, you probably have a website. So show me your website, tell me about your company. And then that should be enough to kind of filter out anybody who's, you know, he said, so looky, Lou.

Yeah, I mean, that's going to be the key. Great success. Who became the sponsor of the Austin one? I'm curious if it was a law firm or a kind of thing. I see Bank of California. Shout out to Sophia, reached out to me. She was like, Hey, this is cool. I would love to do it. She bought us all beer and pizza at the last one. So that was pretty good. Yes.

Awesome. Yeah. So I'm asking all the partners to go through the website and to do those sponsorships through rivers. So make sure they go through river and then they'll just send you the money. We'll keep track of that. Make sure they get their deliverables. It's kind of like Alex in some ways, like TEDx. We want to have some controls, but we want to trust founders to do what's right. And we're going to make no money on it. Like we're not going to take any of the money, just so you know, we have one person who works on this. And right now, maybe we'll, if

The sponsorship does become a thing. We'll have our go full time and be the coordinator full time and pay her salary with it. But for now, enjoy the pizza. Thank you, George. And I will see you at the next one, hopefully. Hopefully. That's really fascinating. Any thoughts, Alex, before we bring on our next one? I love community. I got.

Raised in the Chicago technology scene actually to be totally honest. And so I'm a big fan of people that actually bring the stuff together. And these are getting big. The Culver City meetup says 58 people are going to that December 6th meetup. So probably time to start breaking into small groups. But next up, we have Hiddie, Bogle Sherman and Coco Harmon. These are the founder of Friday hosts from Longview, Texas. Shout out Texas for having some reactive hosts. Hiddie, where's Longview, Texas? I don't even know where that is.

Okay. Longview is about four and a half hours from you probably. Okay. It's between Dallas and Shreveport on I-20. Got it. Okay. We're at East Texas.

I love it. I love it. I was just reading in The Economist today about how fabulously Dallas is doing. Dallas Fort Worth is booming, and a lot of people moving their headquarters there. Obviously, Austin is booming with the tech scene, but even a bunch of financial companies and manufacturing companies are putting their headquarters now, Alex, in Dallas, and they're going to have their own stock market.

How many months have you been doing it? How's it going? You probably heard the past the last interview with George. Tell us a little bit about who you are and how it's gone. I'll say thanks to George for being a great host because Coco and I have actually attended the Austin meetup and really fun, made incredible connections, can't say enough good things about that experience.

So on our end, which is a little bit of sort of the opposite end of the spectrum, I think we've hosted four or five. And they have been really great. And we've kind of been experimenting because, you know, Jason, you mentioned that being a founder can be lonely.

And that isolation factor, it doesn't have to be there, but especially in our community, it's almost like their founders, they may not know that they exist like the others exist. And so founder Friday has given us an opportunity to start finding those people and bringing them to the fold. So it's been going great. And we're really excited to sort of kick off the new year. We had the Longview Economic Development Council's CEO come to our November meeting.

Yeah, it was awesome. And he was really excited about it because part of their strategic vision right now includes a real emphasis on innovation, which actually in our area, there's a lot of aerospace opportunity. And so that's kind of random and interesting, but it was really cool to have him there. And we've got some other people like that lined up for January. So I think we're really going to kind of try to take it to the next level in the new year. Love it. How many people have come and any good discussions?

Absolutely. So we've had between like four and eight people come. Perfect. The story we submitted to y'all is, you know, probably a little non-traditional, but so one of our founders, he actually wants to promote an album, but kind of more just promoting an album. He wants to build community. So his passion is getting like neighbors to know their

neighbors again, so to speak. And so he wants to build a community around that using art. And so he is amazingly talented and incredible musician, but he has almost no experience on the business side of things. And so basically since coming, and he's come to all of them. And so since coming to the first one, he's made so much progress. And he's gotten help with like, you know, just understanding the barriers to entry on like a website are actually much lower than you would think. Right.

What you don't know, what I find is, somebody might have done six hours of research on something and you don't even know what you don't know, but that person's done the six hours and they can explain it to you in 60 seconds or six minutes and you're like, by the way, you're building a website, just use Squarespace.

Or, oh, you're building that type of website. Oh, there's a vertical provider who does just websites called Motive and it's for car dealerships where investors in that company has an example. So if you're a car dealership, there is a solution for you. I found it. I talked to the person there.

And so that's, I think, one of the magical things about the format of forefounders, bifounders, and small groups, because you don't also have to worry about the motivation of the person. They're doing it because they know you as a founder will be able to help them with something. And man, I have seen this over and over. We do jam sessions with our portfolio companies and my lord, sometimes they will come together and somebody has a problem and like three out of 10 people in the circle are like,

Oh, you don't know about X product or service. And they're like, no, I've never heard of this, you know, stripey talk of, you know, back in the day, right? I've never heard about HubSpot. And they're like, oh, let me show you my HubSpot. And they pop it open and they show them the details and boom, they're done. So awesome. Well, you know, it's kind of crazy. You mentioned the founder Jamsush. So Kofo and I think the founder Jamsush, I think last November, actually. Oh, wow. The other day, we watched the recording back just like, what actually, you know, what was said then?

And we went through and so many suggestions that the founders had are things that we've now built and implemented and deployed. And just the network building opportunities, I think the other thing is that founders are a certain breed. And like you were also saying about the motivation, very motivated. And it's what they think about 24 seven. That's actually part of the isolation too, is because not everybody wants to do that. And so it's like, how do we find friends who also want to do that? And I think that's what you're offering.

Yeah, well, actually what you're offering, Coco, any highlights for you and maybe tell us a little bit about your company. Well, so Kitty and I are co-founders, so we have the same and we run the founder. What is the company? We'll give you a little plug here. Give us your really simple sentence. Indora, we're mobile games personalized with the photos stored on your phone. Yes, I remember.

Gen easy and fun. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. What a great. It's such a great idea. And I can see like grandmas and moms and everybody. I'm on a family group thread now that is all the calicanuses and then all the turkeys and the macaves and it just keeps growing. I don't know how many people are on this. I message them, but I'm sure that my sister-in-law, Deena or my sister-in-law, Carrie, at some point will submit one of your games to the group chat and everybody will talk about it for a month. It's such a great idea.

we're kind of nerdy about the science of nostalgic reflection. And so it's actually one of the lead researchers in that category is our advisor and proven to be restorative and expansive in nature. So just by looking back at your photos, it's restorative and that it reduces anxiety, loneliness and depression. And then it's expansive. It makes you more creative. It inspires you and motivates you on your future. Actually, I love your idea so much. So nostalgia.

Alex, going back with your family and friends and remembering the good times, makes you feel better and it's restorative. I love that. It makes you optimistic about the future. It's one of the things I love about you, Alex, is sometimes I talk about when you first came on the show or you'll talk about when you're a teenager coming to TechCrunch 50 or something and seeing me on stage or whatever.

Nostalgia does do that. It fills your bucket as I talk to my daughters about. And, you know, I literally warms your body temperature. Really? Yeah. When you reach the age of 40, it makes you feel younger. So, yeah. For that. Okay. I haven't had 40. Yeah. It's nice of you to mention that I look younger. Thank you for that. I thought it was the weight loss, but I think it's all my misnostal shit that you must be reflecting.

We was like, love that we did compete in a pretty big competition last night. And we actually won the Investors Award and the Judges Award and $35,000. So, what? 35 dime skis. I am. Is it an investment or is it just free money?

It's an investment. And it's an accelerator here in Texas based originally out of Frisco. But what's the terms? Do they give you specific terms or is it like on your next note? We set the terms. Oh, cool. We'll have the best deal, J-Cal. Oh, good. At the terms. And yeah, they're really growing. And I was there first. What's the name of that? Well, let's give them a plug. Who's the accelerator?

So launch accelerator and it's improving, which is a software development firm. They've got a presence in the US and then all over South America. Smart move. Yeah. If they are building websites for people in apps, they have a vested interest in startups. We have so many of those Latin American dev firms that really great have great developers that have helped our startups.

I'm super excited for you all, founders are mutants. And so they're very strange, Alex, to the rest of the world. But when you get together, it's kind of like, oh, yeah, you can make ice. I can make fire. And yeah, I can fly. What do you do? I fly really, I can run really fast. And the mutants just immediately take to each other. And so we call it founder Fridays, founder Fridays, that tech.

Go there, sign up. If you want to start your own chapter, I just ask that you have two or three founders of the chapter. So we don't have the chapter die because one person, I don't know, has life experiences going on. So you have like a little redundancy. I think three is the right number. Keep building them, keep them pure. Please, as all I ask is don't pervert them with, you know, other agendas. Let's keep this pure for founders once a month on the first Friday. We do it the first Friday of every month, right? Is that the rule? Unless it's a holiday and then we move it to the second Friday.

But we want it to make it easy to remember. First Friday of every month. So I guess it would be December 6th is the next first Friday. So hopefully everybody gets that going. And I am super excited and a quick announcement. I'm going to host all of the founder Friday hosts for a special barbecue here in Austin if they want to come.

So we'll have like an afternoon at the Salt Lake. Well, it's on me. We'll just eat a bunch of barbecue and we'll just have all the host meat each other. So it's like all the mutant, the captains of the mutant super teams will come together at the Salt Lake and eat some, I think they have one or two vegan or vegetarian dishes if you're into such things. Oh, that'll be sad. If you go to a sort of vegetarian mutant, I can't help you.

But you can just bring a brown bag and brown bag. Uh, absolutely fantastic. This has been great. I'm so happy for you guys. Congratulations on winning 35 dime skis. That's great. It's going to go a long way. Um, and, uh, Alex, any further questions or I just want to give them a plug. If you want to take a, a take a look at what they're building, it's indora dot app, E and D O R A dot app. And I have recently learned the power of nostalgia because my nearly two year old

We make a quarterly book in my family of all of our photos from the last three months, and then she carries it around the house and makes you look at all the pictures of her and she doesn't stop doing this. I've recently done market research and I agree. Kids really love our app accidentally. Love it. Keep grinding and we will see you all next time on This Week in Startups. Bye-bye.