The 5 Companies Apple Must Buy
This Week in Startups
September 28, 2026
This Week In Startups is made possible by: PayPal - Northwest Registered Agent - Odoo - Today’s show: 0:00 Will Ternus take "massively big swings"?
Speakers Jason Calacanis, Lon Harris, Jacob, Lance Seidman, Michael Lee Jr., Kristen Dahl, Stacy Salvi
TopicsTechnology
Jason Calacanis (0:00)
I was talking about things Apple could buy under John Ternus, who is the new CEO. Obviously, Apple's philosophy of buying things is they like to buy back their own stock and technical teams, you know, like the team that built Siri, you know, the team that built Touch ID, they buy these like little tiny tuck-in acquisitions of technical teams that can be added to their existing product line, but not robust full-on products. I believe John Ternus should stop buying back the shares and should take massively big swings. My way of looking at this is anything that the iPhone, your laptop, your watch, your AirPods and their stores can integrate with on some level. That is the way I look at it. So I asked you if maybe we should play a game like Bill Simmons does. So explain the game.
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Lon Harris (1:15)
Well, a lot of podcasts do the sort of the draft where the idea is it's like you take the rules the way of fantasy football or baseball draft would work, but you're applying it to any other thing. So like the Simmons podcast I know, they do like action movies, like action heist movies. We're doing a draft, you know, and then my number one pick is Heat. Your number one is Ocean's Eleven and we go from sort of there. So I think that's the kind of core idea.
We picked out The Pool, which are all these potential companies that Apple maybe could buy. And then we'll see this.
Jason Calacanis (1:51)
You got Perplexity, you got Disney, you got Peloton, you got Whoop, you got Sonos, Joe AI, Win of Our Investments, XO Labs, Robinhood, tons of great choices.
Lon Harris (1:58)
We based some of them on your preselected picks. I think, Jacob, correct me if I'm wrong, we did actually ask fans and viewers for their own submissions, I think. Did we do that?
Jason Calacanis (2:09)
I did see in some of the...
Lon Harris (2:11)
Oh yeah, we've got some expert opinions from some of the viewers here, so we could share those.
And then yeah, the idea would be we'll each pick a roster of what are the five companies that we think Apple should... Let's do it.
Jason Calacanis (2:24)
Are we playing those clips first or are we going right into this?
Lon Harris (2:28)
I think we should pick our five and then we'll see what the members of the public said. But yeah, do it in order, so the idea would be your first round pick, that's your best.
You're centering the team around the first round draft pick and the second round pick. Of course.
Jason Calacanis (2:45)
So let's do a typing coin toss website. We'll do a coin toss to see who goes first. There are coin toss websites.
Jacob (2:53)
There are coin toss websites on Google.
Jason Calacanis (2:55)
Do it on Perplexe, whatever you got there. Flip a coin, here we go. Call it Lon.
Lon Harris (3:00)
All right, flip.
Jason Calacanis (3:01)
You got heads or tails?
Lon Harris (3:02)
Oh, I'll take heads.
Jason Calacanis (3:04)
Okay, I got tails, let's see.
And you go first. Oh, man, that sucks.
Lon Harris (3:08)
I knew what you're gonna do.
Jason Calacanis (3:11)
All right, who's your first dress?
Lon Harris (3:13)
Let's see, I'm looking over the list right now. Oh, one that immediately had stood out to me that I see right here in the center. I'm going with ElevenLabs. Put ElevenLabs.
Jason Calacanis (3:25)
Interesting.
Lon Harris (3:25)
What you're thinking? Obviously, I think with Siri running your life, running your phone, voice mode is coming. Everybody is going to want to do that. I think the idea, especially you could think of driving, where I still go in home from work every day, there's people like almost killing me doing this.
If you could just have your phone in the car and you could just talk to it. People are, you're texting people, you're sending memos, you're answering emails your entire life.
Jason Calacanis (3:54)
Fix Siri and then some. Great choice.
Lon Harris (3:58)
Above and beyond fixing Siri and making your whole phone a voice commanded system, I think ElevenLabs is the one.
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