Topics: Investing, Business, News, Tech News
**Rory O'Driscoll** (0:00)
Your gross margin problem is my revenue opportunity for my colossus cluster. Pessimists sound smart, optimists die rich. Only a fool denies that Elon Musk is wildly effective.
**Jason Lemkin** (0:11)
I would much rather initially work for Elon than for Zuck. I think it'll be like the scale acquisition. I don't even think this product will exist in five years.
**Rory O'Driscoll** (0:18)
You can't add expenses below the line fast enough to stop yourself making money. The only thing that matters will be the growth rate and the 27 and 28 projected revenue. Someone who was hired with a million-dollar package in 23 ended up making 51 million four years later. A billion knowledge workers in the world, absolute bollocks.
**Jason Lemkin** (0:37)
I think we'll give each of our best engineers $100,000 of tokens. I had two board meetings in the last week where they finished the roadmap for the year. They're into 2027 If you're not into your 2027 roadmap, deep into it by August of 2026 in the agentic world, your team is not good enough to survive today.
**Harry Stebbings** (0:55)
This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings. Today, it's my favorite show of the week. Rory O'Driscoll, Jason Lemkin coming together to discuss the biggest best news that's happened in the last seven days. This is the only podcast that you need to listen to every week to stay up to date on what matters in tech. But before we dive into the show today, you have the idea, but with most AI tools, you hit a wall, the setup, the config, the gap between what you pictured and what you actually ship. Well, Base 44 is where that wall disappears. You describe it? Yeah, Base 44 builds it. Apps, websites, AI agents, real working products, built in minutes, using nothing but plain language. And it's all batteries included, the backend, the database, the authentication, the hosting, the heavy lifting is handled, so you just really stay in the flow. This doesn't just take the busy work off your plate, but it gives you an advantage and pushes you past what you thought you could build alone. So in this market, fast is the baseline. To win, you just have to be first. Base 44 is that edge, the move that skips the troubleshooting and gets you straight to the breakthrough. Build your next thing at base44.com. That's base44.com.
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**Rory O'Driscoll** (4:16)
You have now arrived at your destination.
**Harry Stebbings** (4:19)
Boys, we are back. We have some mega news this week. SpaceX closes the $60 billion all stock takeover of Cursor, minting 1000x returns for the likes of Adi Patovia-Neo. OpenAI's Startup Fund is a mega winner who invested $6 to $8 million very early, which Rory, I thought of you when you said before about Elon Musk giving Sam billions of dollars through gritted teeth, and many others, Thrive and Andreessen most importantly netting huge returns. What do we have to say on this one? It's the closing of an already announced deal. Thoughts?
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