The Pentagon Wants Equity in AI Startups | E2336
Jason Calacanis and Tibo Louis-Lucas discuss using AI agents to automate startup tasks, replacing expensive contractors, plus take on the Pentagon's proposed $5 billion investment in Fluid Stack.
The gist
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Agentic workflows can replace contractors costing $2,000 to $5,000 a month by automating marketing content, ad audits, and code monitoring.
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Stacking AI subscriptions at $200 a month each from multiple providers gives roughly $15,000 in monthly token value and is now terms-of-service compliant.
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Tibo says 3 to 4 prompt feedback rounds are enough to train an agent on your workflow, after which it runs and improves on its own.
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Calacanis argues the Pentagon's $5 billion loan to Fluid Stack sets a bad precedent by letting government pick startup winners outside competitive processes.
"There's no way you can run this on a $200 per month subscription with Codex or Claude Code. I even have a Grok one and a Claude Code one and so they would fall back between each other when one of them is going down."
▶ Play at 46:37108 creators recommend it, including Riley Brown, Liam Ottley, and Peter Yang.
See all on the Claude Code page"I was not super happy about the person working on Google Ads for us. I was paying this guy 5k per month. I was able to fire the guy and create this workflow where the agent would review the ads performance every week for me and give the exact step-by-step on how to update the ..."
▶ Play at 49:3411 creators recommend it, including GaryVee, Charlie Clark, and Helen Stephens.
See all on the Google Ads pageWhat they recommend · 9 picks
Productivity
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Gear & hardware
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Other picks
5 picks · Lon Harris, This Week in Startups, and Tibo Louis-Lucas
"I'll tell you about another great show that I highly recommend. It's on Apple TV Plus, just back for season two. It's called Dark Matter. If you are a hard sci-fi fan, it is gre..."
"I just finished his biography. Absolutely fantastic. You should definitely — I highly recommend this biography to everybody."
"Having that work on the incredible hardware I'm gonna have on my desktop on this $12,000 Mac Studio."
This Week in Startups
6 picks · host
"I just finished his biography. Absolutely fantastic. You should definitely — I highly recommend this biography to everybody."
"I travel with all three — phone, tablet, and computer. I prefer to watch when I'm in bed. We're streaming a movie or playing a casual game. It is a better experience to use an i..."
Tibo Louis-Lucas
2 picks · guest
"There's no way you can run this on a $200 per month subscription with Codex or Claude Code. I even have a Grok one and a Claude Code one and so they would fall back between each..."
"I was not super happy about the person working on Google Ads for us. I was paying this guy 5k per month. I was able to fire the guy and create this workflow where the agent woul..."
Lon Harris
1 pick
"I'll tell you about another great show that I highly recommend. It's on Apple TV Plus, just back for season two. It's called Dark Matter. If you are a hard sci-fi fan, it is gre..."
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