That's... right, actually! But NOT YET!

After this commercial break, Chad and the ladies will decide on a BUSINESS PLAN!

Any PARTING WORDS before the break, Chad?

"I admit, the number one question on my mind right now is whether the first three seasons were also like this.  But as for questions numbers two through eight, well, we'll find out soon enough, won't we?"

HARDAFIL, the PDE-5 Inhibitor that also works for PDEs 6, 7, 8, and 9!

You'll be able to punch right through a sheet of titanium! With your cock!

When your partner has that vaguely dissatisfied look... HARDAFIL!

AND WE'RE BACK!

Chad, it's time for you to run your first STAFF MEETING!

You'll pitch your business ideas, and the LADIES will SHOW their APPROVAL of the ones they like.

"So I've never owned a dog myself, but I remember my college friends being pretty broken up whenever one died, and I was thinking:  What if there was a service where you sent them video of yourself with your dog, and they found a dog which looked just like that one and trained it to recognize someone who looked and sounded like you?  At scale we'd want to find actual actors, but for a start we could use videos of the owner and give the dog a biscuit each time the video showed them.  Hot-swappable dogs, the new one can show up the same day the vet puts the old one down."

"It sounds like a novel idea to me, but then I can't remember anything, so I might be wrong."

"I'm worried that we shouldn't call it 'hot-swappable dogs,' that makes people think of frankfurters."

"My company tried something like this before the pivot and it was a total shitshow, literally, taking care of all the inventory. You find yourself just wishing a golden retriever would finally kick the bucket because you have too many in stock."

Oh, shit, she forgot to flirt.

She'll just cup her own boobs for no reason.

Okay, so that was a completely dumb idea that he was tossing out to see who pretended to like it, and now he genuinely does not know whether Iroko is serious that her company already tried it.  God help Silicon Valley.

...no it can't possibly the case that Iroko's own company happened to try exactly that thing.  She's either joking or lying... presumably joking because a spy would expect the lie to get caught.

"Well, be it far from me to contradict somebody with so much prior experience," he says, dipping an agreeable nod at Iroko's boobs.  "Next idea.  How about if we find some people who are really good at understanding dogs, and use that to build a dataset that translates dog body language into human language?  The hardware for the dog collar could be our moat against somebody else just taking input-output samples from our product and using that to train another multispecies language model more cheaply."

Pansy smiles at Chad. "Oooh, I love it when you talk like that. Tech-speak is hot." She flips her hair.

"Are all of your concepts dog-related and if so, why?"

"I mean, I can come up with others, but the question is, what do people still care about enough, in this cynical age, to spend money on.  And one possible answer is, their dogs."

"Is that true? I never had a dog, it was just training all the time, day and night. Do we get to do any market research or do we just decide on the spot?"

"Market research is how you end up with three hundred identical companies all trying to sell software as a service as a service to YCombinator alumni.  We should find an idea so good that we don't need any market research to believe in it, because if you need market research to tell you whether an idea is a good one, it probably isn't."

"What if you give us a few more options to choose from, before we decide yes or no about this one?" she smiles winningly at Chad. "I love to hear how you think."

Hmmm.  That sounded like somebody pushing back against a terrible, terrible idea without yet taking the risk of offending him, which he's guessing is a little bit more like what a regular contestant should sound like, compared to a mole who wants the company to fail but is constantly thinking about whether or not her actions get her caught out as a mole... though, of course, it's still just day one, here.

"It's not illegal to sabotage other companies so long as they're not in your own country, right?  Suppose we recruited some black-hat hackers, and offered a service to AI companies where we do our best to sabotage competing AI companies so long as they're not operating out of the same country or our own host country."

"I think we're not allowed to hire other talent during the show? We're limited to the talent in this room for the pivotal parts of the business plan."

Silver read the paperwork carefully.

"I don't know if I am a computer hacker. The only way to find out is to put me in front of a computer with a lot of code scrolling by and see what happens. How about anybody else?"

Pansy's not going to just admit anything like that!

"I know my way around. You can learn a lot of things when you don't have to sleep."

"I mean, we can always improvise the computer security part -- I'm sure there's directions online -- but the real question is, is any of us a lawyer."

"I mean, I've never passed the bar exam, if that's what you mean."

"Late at night in the farmhouse I would study legal texts by candlelight and I'm so sorry, but sabotaging foreign companies is illegal under the United States Computer Fraud and Abuse Act as well as the international Budapest Convention on Cybercrime."

Jade looks pained.

"I'm really very sorry. I don't mean to just shoot down your ideas."

"Let's just get everything up on a whiteboard so we can see what we've got!"

Iroko gets up and starts writing in big block letters:

• REPLACEMENT DOGS
• DOG TRANSLATOR
• AI COMPANY SABOTAGE SERVICE
•  

Amber narrows her eyes at Iroko but doesn't say anything.

"I have other startup ideas, of course, but how are we feeling about these three?  Both as a rank-ordering, and as pass-fail?"

There is a notable absence of anyone jumping up and advocating for any of these ideas.

There is some sycophancy, though.