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### Human: I'm going to unlayer that a bit, then maybe you both can jump on that. But this is specifically for founders here in the region. I want to layer this concept of product being the soul of the company it's all about the product and i know that you know david sacks talks about that on the pod where he says you know when i want to see founders pitching me i don't want to look at a deck i just want to go through a product demo. And when you look for founders when you evaluate founders how do you identify a good product from an average product. Are you able to see that early on and maybe you can tie it to some of the stuff that you've looked at like snowflake or you've invested in some of the outliers that have sort of made huge returns for you.### Assistant: Yeah, I think what we lived through at the peak there was a bit of a delusion. One of the magical things about Silicon Valley is that it's a milestone based funding system. And so you get friends and family who give you money, it makes it very difficult to go home for the holidays if you lose it, right. And then you go to an accelerator, perhaps, and then you raise a seed round 25,000 50,000 100,000 at a time. And each step along the way, you have to prove something. And what happened during this peak was people became so good And it's partially my fault with the podcasts, teaching people how to pitch and teaching people how startups work, that people became better at pitching investors, then selling customers and building products. At the end of the day, what we do as founders is we build products that delight customers that solve a problem for them. There's only three things that matter. And I'm training a bunch of young investors at my firm, team product, customers, everything else is not important. But during peaks, that's when people get distracted. They put get raised too much money, they start doing five projects. And then the founders start creating funds, and they're investing on the side. And really, wait a second, I thought you were a founder. No, no, no, I've also got my own fund. It just got crazy. So to answer your question, focus, Relentless focus. When you don't know what to do as a founder, when you're scared, when you're staying up at night, when you're panicking, when you've got three months of runway, 10 weeks, eight weeks, and you have that pit of your stomach, and you feel sick, and you can't sleep, and you're staring at the ceiling. That's when you go talk to your customers that's when you get your team together over the weekend and say i talk to our customers let's build this feature and let's test it so that's what i look for in founders i want people who are obsessed about the product and the customers and have what we call internally product velocity. That's how we make our decisions to pick the founders we meet with them. And then maybe four or five weeks into the process, we meet with them again. And we look at the product, we don't tell them we're doing it. But we looked at what we look at what's changed in the product, we go look at the app store and see if they updated their app. One company updated it twice, one didn't update it. So it really is about whoever can move at the head have that product velocity, small teams, and filled with builders. Not just idea people. People come to me all the time and want to talk about ideas. And they say, Oh, I got so many millions of ideas. And they said, Oh, yeah, I did too. Last night, I had a dream. Every night, we all dream and have 100 ideas. It means nothing. Your ideas mean nothing. Your execution is the only thing that matters. If you can tell from the podcast lately, we've been doubling and tripling down on Foundry University at launch. In fact, it's basically the future of our venture capital firm. And that's awesome because I'm working with a couple of hundred early stage founders really early and getting to see what tools they use. You know what tool they show up with most? They show up with Squarespace. They put up their first website instantly, quickly with Squarespace. And it's beautiful and it makes them look like a million bucks. The thing you may not be aware of is that Squarespace, beyond the beautiful templates that make your company look like a million bucks, and that work on mobile, it's not just a pretty website. It is a powerful e-commerce platform now. And they have member areas. What's a member area? You know, people like to sell content now and premium content. It's a big business. Well, they have that built in to Squarespace and they don't take you know, double digit percentages of your revenue like those other platforms do. And they also have appointment scheduling. So, you know, if you're doing a business where you're a consultant, you want to charge for your time, well, you have scheduling built into it as well. And this is the brilliance of Squarespace. It's going to look beautiful, as you know. So here's what I want you to do. Just head to squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use the offer code twist. You save an extra 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain. We love you, Squarespace. You know how it is. When you're a technologist, everybody in your family, your friends, your circle, your network come to you and say, hey, I got to get a website up. Can you find me a developer, a designer, a product manager? And you just say, you know what? Yes, I can find you all that and more at squarespace.com slash twist.
### Human: I don't know what your take on it is. There were right. So there was this there were obvious. I mean, there's obviously a lot of speculation about this. nonstop. There were tweets that were deleted. over the weekend, which was interesting, right? There were a lot of tweets that that Elon made over the weekend, that were somewhat critical of Twitter, like nobody's at the headquarters, so we should turn it there was a as usual, yay, a boob joke. Listen, I have the sense of humor of a 14 year old boy myself, but like, yeah, I mean, you were doing the BDE jokes two weeks ago on the program. So you guys might not be that different. in private, we would have the same but I don't make those jokes on Twitter.### Assistant: Yeah, and I'm talking to him with what me Walter Isaacson, Harrison Ford are talking. Yeah, you know, and now it's getting a 10 minutes 15. And there is like a group of people trying to get to either of those two. And in all honesty, a couple people want to take a couple selfies with me. know, Harrison Ford is the show. And so, you know, he doesn't want to stop talking to us, because we're having like a great conversation about really Scott about film about Tesla about car, I mean, just everything is a great moment. So here's what I think there is no greater product person, or executive. And this is kind of obvious, just in terms of like experience and success than Elon at Twitter. And on a product basis, he uses Twitter more effectively than anyone at Twitter and probably knows the product as good or better. And so he has a way that he operates businesses talks about them. He does customer support in real time. So whether you like his style or not, if you just look at it on a customer support in a product basis, but just narrow on those two things, which is a big part of running a successful companies, listen to your customers. and building great products. He's better than anybody there, hands down. I mean, the guys, while this was all going down, the Gigafactory is the largest footprint building in the world. I believe in the United States for sure. I mean, this thing, Molly, when you look at it, like it took me 1520 minutes to walk to like that, you know, top level VIP area to like watch the presentations and everything. I mean, it's like a long, long, long building. It is crazy. And then he also was taking people to the International Space Station on a tourist thing. This is all in the same 48 hour period. So if you're on the board of a company like this, you can't talk about the product anymore. That's over. And so I don't know why he made the decision. I don't know, Prague's decisions. I don't know the board's decision. I have no insight into anything. But For me, I'd rather see Elon talking about the product all day long. And there was a very vibrant discussion about the product this weekend, including Twitter blow, which I have, and which is kind of not worth paying for. But I have talked for many years In fact, I since 2007 2008, I've been talking about hey, the blue checkmark should be something that anybody can pay for. And then people are like, well, well, then how would that affect journalists like us who have the blue checkmark and we feel special about it or celebrities and we all know the history of the blue checkmark. The blue checkmark came because a lot of us had people faking and they just wanted to make sure you knew who was the real Ashton Kutcher. In fact, I think he was patient zero on the blue checkmark. I'm sure of that. Right. I remember having conversations with Ev about it. And so I think those kind of discussions are where Elon can be most helpful. And the amount of attention that Twitter is getting now is huge. And I guess there's speculation that if he was on the board, he could only build a certain size position. And so again, I don't know anything, right? Sincerely do not know anything, don't re aggregate me. But maybe he wants to own more, or, you know, maybe he wants to talk about it. And so that's probably better for everybody. by some estimates, over 90% of startups will go out of business in year one tone. I know it as an angel investor. That rings true to me. And that's why Microsoft created the Microsoft for startups founders hub. This hub provides founders at any stage with up to six figures in resources. Wait until you hear about this ridiculous list of perks, you're going to get up to 150,000 in Azure credits based on your stage and size, you're going to get technology benefits like free access to GitHub's enterprise here. 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### Human: I am, yes.### Assistant: All right, everybody, welcome back to another episode of this week in startups. It is our stars of sass. This is a series we do we like to do series so we can dive deeper over 10 episodes, let's say into a specific topic that we think is critically important for founders and investors. That's the bulk of the audience here. We do have people who are fans of technology, Fans of entrepreneurship. We also have a contingent of haters, communists, socialists who watch this show, and they hate watch it. They just hate watching people become successful, becoming rich and affluent and changing the world and using and creating products and services that are not created by the communist and socialist governments. So welcome, socialists and communists to This Week in Startups. You can watch now. We respect your ability to create no value in the world and only take and redistribute things that you didn't make. Anyway, a little mini rant there. Rising Stars of SAS is a 10-part series. We just had a great guest, Jason Lemkin, the godfather of SAS, was on. We had a rambling talk. You should check that one out, episode 1147. Before that, I had Darius from Maritas, oh, yum, yum, talking about ISIS, income-sharing agreements, and how these put the onus on the school to get their students jobs. And if they don't get a job, they don't get paid. Not the student. the school. And that is tweaking a lot of teachers unions, and a lot of just totally incompetent universities that are giving people $200,000 degrees. Love that disruption from Darius at Meritas. We had Dishcraft Robotics, which is going to get rid of the job of dishwashing. I am sorry that we are eliminating the job of dishwashing from humanity, but it is a really bad job. It's the worst job you could ever have. So let's get rid of dishwashers and give those people something better to do with their lives. That was a really interesting one. Chris Webb from chow now was on, they are breaking the false notion that My goodness, Uber Eats and Postmates and DoorDash are taking advantage of these poor restaurants because they're providing them delivery service and customers. Such a stupid framing. What Chow now does, and Chris explained this, is he tells the restaurants, if you don't want to use Uber Eats, you don't want to use Postmates, competition in the free market exists, I will give you software so you can run your own version of DoorDash." And many restaurants are choosing to do that. And they're telling their customers, don't order on those other delivery services. We want your order direct from us. We want to capture that 30% or 20% that those companies are taking. And Viva La Difference, that puts more pressure on everybody in the system to make better products and services. So it's been just, I'll be totally honest, a great series. I thought it was going to be a little boring, the future of SaaS. But man, great job, producer Nick, and to the This Week in Startups audience for coming up with really interesting companies. And I'm very excited about today's guest. His name is Christian Reber. Reber. Reber, yeah. Reber, got it. And Christian Reber doesn't know this, but I was a fan of his first SaaS, or his previous SaaS product, I don't know if it was his first, called Wunderlist. Wunderlist was wonderful. It was a really elegant to-do list and task manager that I use at all my companies. And I loved using, and everybody on the team loved using it. They just loved when JCal came in and put bullet points and items for them to do and stacked up all that work for them. You can ask any team member. There's nothing better than having JCal come in and just put eight things on your list for you to do this weekend when you had plans to go skiing or something. I'm joking. But he created a Wunderlist, which was a to-do task management, but just done so well. We'll talk about that. He sold it to Microsoft. which was heartbreaking to me. He sold it in 2015. He had, I think, 13 million users for that. But lo and behold, yum, yum. Somebody sent me a pitch from a website pitch.com. And I looked at it, Christian. And I said, this is elegant and beautiful and I'm already addicted. I don't have any presentations because we're taping this in the year of Corona and all of my high paid speaking gigs that pay down all my gambling debts, all of those got canceled. So I'm completely fucked. When we get on the other side of this goddamn pandemic, which is making me lose my mind, I am going to use pitch.com. Welcome to the program, Christian Reber. I'm pronouncing it right. It's R-E-B-E-R and it's Reber. Exactly. Exactly. Thank you so much, Jason. You're a German, aren't you?
### Human: Yeah, so, There's a lot to it. So first off we released, or we followed all the unwritten rules. So the unwritten rules basically are, if you have a software as a service product, which is what Hay is, and you allow signups on the web, well, you're not allowed to say sign up on the web on the iOS app or subscribe or have any billing information or mention money in any possible way in the app if you don't wanna pay Apple 30%, which we don't. This is what we do with Basecamp, this is what Salesforce does, this is what Slack does, this is what everyone does.### Assistant: I'm assuming he has a little upside in it too, so that's always good if he, if this becomes a billion dollar company, he might get a little something on the back end, I assume. I can't speak to any of those particular... Just for people who are, you know, what I'll tell people who are listening, who are founders, which is everybody listening, basically, except for the VCs. um is you got to play the long game with domains and it's a matter of you know the cash payment and what could happen in the back end it took me over 10 years to get inside.com that was a long one mahalo and kukula took me a year each or two and then i had 20.com 20.com which i bought for 70 grand and wound up selling for millions when the china when the chinese internet culture decided numbers were better than Word. You had 20? You had 2-0? I had 2-0. That was the original idea for Mahalo was going to be the top 20 search results picked by humans. But then I went to Hawaii and, you know, the word Mahalo.com just felt, you know, just better to me and it tested better. So I went with Mahalo. When we get back from this quick break, I want to know about the App Store feud and the battle you got into with Apple over them wanting to take 30% of the revenue from hey.com in perpetuity when we get back on this week. Hey, look, 2020 has been the year of many things, but if you own a startup, this could also be the year you switch to a better payroll provider. And Gusto is that provider. They weren't built just for small business. No, they were built for the people behind them. Their online payroll system is so easy to use. We use it ourselves and Gusto can automatically calculate paychecks and file all your payroll taxes. So you get that right. Three out of four customers say they run payroll in 10 minutes or less, which means you'll have more time to run your business focus on your customers and build an absolutely delightful product or service just like gusto is for us. Plus they offer unlimited payrolls for one monthly price. There are no hidden fees. Gusto does way more than just payroll. Nope. They're going to help you with time tracking, health insurance, 401ks, onboarding your new team members. Of course, commuter benefits, which some people love. Offer letters, which are super important and make you look professional. And you get access to HR experts when you need them. And if you're moving from another provider, they can transfer all your data and they'll do all that for you, make it easy breezy. And it's no surprise that 94% of customers are likely to recommend gusto to another founder. Because you're a listener of this week in startups, you get three months totally free. All you have to do is go to gusto.com slash twist g us to.com slash twist again, gusto.com slash twist. I'm telling you, you're gonna love it. Get started today. I use it. I love it. It makes everything easy breezy for us. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. All right, finally, Jason Fried is on the podcast. He's Jason Fried, F-R-I-E-D, on the Twitter. I'm at Jason. However, he's Jason at hey.com, and I'm Jason Kalacanis at hey.com. So I got the Twitter, he got the hey.com. And we all know Apple controls their ecosystem. With an iron fist they want complete and utter control this is a steve jobs legacy he wanted to have the computers work. You know the desktop computers work flawlessly easily but this has now extended into a money making strategy not just user. Ease you and we've all experienced it buying a charging cable over the years and having it stop working working. and paying $40 for a charger when they should cost $3, you know, when you buy a USB standard charge, USB-C standard charger. The App Store has some interesting rules around Apple cannot, Apple does not allow anybody else to run an App Store on their iOS devices. So if Apple sells apps, Amazon, as an example, can't have or Google can't have an app store on the iOS device, nor can they have a bookstore, or an audio bookstore. So if you've ever had the I have an iPhone, I listened to audible and love auto like a 400 books in my collection, we've all had this experience of having to go to the web browser to buy a book that we just bookmarked in the app, because Apple wants their vig. You guys are letting people, people have to sign up for email at hey.com and pay for it. You get 30 days free. After that, you pay $99 a year, pretty fair price. A lot more than the free Gmail account. We'll talk about that in a moment. But what would, explain to people who don't understand the beef you had with Apple, how it went down and what your position was and what their position was.
### Human: So why don't we get back to Sheen real quick, because there's another angle to the story.### Assistant: Yeah, absolutely. Um, I've decided, so I'll make this personal here. I've had a lot of people reach out to me for I don't want to say from where, but from places that are in the process of going from emerging markets, frontier markets, and you know, wanting to engage with the West, and I've had to have a really deep, thoughtful discussion with myself. Do I want to engage? Or do I want to take the high ground? I'm rich already. I don't need to have any more money. I'll be totally honest. I'm not chasing the third comma. Not interesting to me. I just like to do what I do every day. If I do think I would spend six, you know, days podcasting if I was trying to optimize for cash. No, I wouldn't. I just enjoy it. So I'm optimizing for my own enjoyment. I would And so I've given a lot of thought when I went to the UAE with Brad Gerstner, and I met everybody, I wanted to go because I wanted to see, you know, how much further along UAE was than other regions, it turns out it's far along. And then you look at Kuwait, you look at Qatar, they're also making great progress, and Saudi wants to make great progress. And that's why they're doing a lot of this stuff. So engagement, I think is the right model. I think everybody has to make a personal decision. And then if I take money from one of these places, and someday you see me doing and you say, Oh my god, you're a hypocrite. And I'm not saying I'm doing it, but I am deeply considering it. You will have the ability for me to say, I am taking this token amount of money for my fund 1% of my fund, whatever 5% of my fund, I know that this is a risky bet for my reputation. But I'm doing it, because I want to have the ability to say, what, I've decided to stop taking money from this region. Because of this, this happened. In other words, what Starbucks did in pulling out of Russia. And I think more engagement between countries that disagree, and more discussion between people who disagree is better. And I'm in a position where I don't need to do it. But I might do it. And I'm you might see me give a keynote, just like you saw me go to UAE, which is not a democracy, but is also incredibly Western and is an incredibly safe place to be. And, you know, has a lot of freedoms that are it's kind of like being in the in the United States. Honestly, I think the freedoms in the UAE and the culture feels kind of like the culture where I grew up in the 70s and 80s. It's not as woke as it is today. But it's it's not the 50s or 40s. It's kind of like they're in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, maybe 80s, 90s would be most accurate. So anyway, I just want to put that out there on the table, because it's an important discussion that we've been having. And I think this moment what's happening with sheen is absolutely fantastic. Ah, when you're looking for those B2B buyers, how do you find them, huh? They're so hard to find. You know, the decision makers, you know, senior VPs, executive VPs, CFO, COO, CEO, hard to reach them unless you use LinkedIn marketing. If you use LinkedIn marketing, you're going to have direct access to 180 million senior level executives. Think SVP, EVP, you know, the people who really make thoughtful decisions about these, and they probably have the ability to sign off on up to 25k or something like that, in my experience. But what if you need to get a 50k, 100k, 250k million dollar deal signed off on? Well, you know what, those are the 10 million C level executives. They're also on LinkedIn. If you use LinkedIn marketing, you will have direct access to them on the platform where they are in a business mindset. LinkedIn is about business. Business is LinkedIn, LinkedIn, business, business, LinkedIn. You want those eyeballs to see your product or service when you're selling into businesses. It's really just that simple. If you want to get access to these incredible decision makers and you want to make B2B marketing everything it can be and get $100 credit for your next campaign, go ahead and give it a shot. Go to linkedin.com slash this week and startups. claim your credit linkedin.com that's already in your browser cache, it's going to auto complete it. But this is what you got to type in slash this week in startups, and then you get that $100 terms and conditions do apply. Because my friends at LinkedIn are giving you $100 in advertising credits. Great job. Congratulations to LinkedIn and the LinkedIn marketing team. You're crushing it really great job.
### Human: And they told them basically they told Alexander, the CEO, that they couldn't open the account unless they have a certificate of good standing. And then he completely threw these people off at Chase by saying the remote and they don't have an office. And finally, on March 17th, he tweeted that Chase decided to close their account because they were fully remote without a physical office. And in a follow-up tweet, someone questioned why Alexander wouldn't just put his home address, and to that he responded, he doesn't want to speak public, which is pretty reasonable, and his lease doesn't allow it. And the new YC CEO and friend of the pod, Gary Tan, actually retweeted the following tweet from our Gugosian, a startup founder who responded to Lemon.io's situation. This is why founders were using SVB in case y'all were wondering. Regular big banks have no idea how tech startups work. For us, they wanted two years of profit and lost statements for a $5,000 credit card. We had 100 times that in the corporate checking account, but they didn't care. So yeah, I guess this is why startups love SVB so much.### Assistant: I've been dealing with business insurance for three decades. I am on the board of a bunch of companies I watch people who don't have insurance, get themselves into trouble all the time. Switching providers has always been a nightmare. It's too expensive takes too much time and often it doesn't even guarantee better coverage. But now you can make switching radically simple with Embroker. Yes, Embroker is the perfect destination for industry-tailored commercial insurance. It's business insurance specifically for startups. Embroker's single application helps startups get four quotes, one, two, three, four, for four lines of coverage in just 15 minutes. They connect you with one of their expert brokers for unmatched service that goes beyond your policy. And listen, Embroker is such an amazing product. I use it. A lot of my startups use it. It's so easy to use. So try Embroker today. with code twist and get 10% off their startup package at imbroker.com slash twist. That's E-M-B-R-O-K-E-R.com slash T-W-I-S-T and use the code twist to get that 10% off. It's meaningful. Every dollar counts right now. We love you imbroker. Thank you so much for supporting this podcast for so many years. Yeah, I mean, any bank that understands you, whether you're a farmer, there are regional banks that work with farmers, they understand the season buying seeds, equipment, you know, so you're just basically starting on second base with every conversation. And so now what founders are doing, and the best practice is put your money into one of the top three or four banks until this blows over. And then you know maybe a neobank or two and they have great services to do this but basically you want to get into as many FDIC accounts as possible i'd say for seed stage and series a companies. You can literally put yourself in five bank accounts couple money market accounts split two hundred fifty k into literally five to ten accounts and have. A million two million dollars FDIC insured and if your payroll and your spending was under two fifty a month. guess your your accounting function in your startup, whether outsourced or insourced, could probably manage it, it's a bit challenging. I think the FD ultimately what has to happen is FDIC limit just needs to be 1 million or 2 million. And then then you would see, you know, I don't know if it's 80. And I don't I haven't seen these statistics. If somebody has a way to get me these statistics producers at this week and startups calm, I'd be very interested in knowing how many accounts a business accounts in the united states have under 250k in them and i think a reasonable you know multipliers 3x or 4x so let's just use the 4x one because it's easy for math how many because you can manage rachel for bank accounts pretty easily right uh or for money markets etc that would all be fdi and c fdic insured Okay, so four times that number would be what I would want to know. So how many people have 1 million, 2 million $3 million in their bank account as businesses? Is that 10% 20%? Because we could probably just by raising the FDIC limit, make it so most people don't have to do this, splitting their money to five or 10 accounts to get some reasonable amount of protection. That seems like common sense. Of course with all of this banking chaos one is wondering you know again for the impact for startups. What's gonna happen in the market so. Yeah for founders who are listening you when you have instability in the market rich people venture capitalist. H and i's high net worth individuals they have to stop. being optimistic. They have to stop being creative with their money, and they have to retreat and be defensive, right? So they go from offensively deploying capital to defensively protecting capital. That's the moment we're in. What does that mean? It means people are scared, and people are in protect mode. That means they can't write that 25k check for your uh startup right so nine out of ten angels four out of five seed funds whatever they might be in defensive mode right now trying to protect their existing portfolio trying to protect their nest egg and that's a shame now friend of the pod apology if you don't follow him on twitter he's b a l a j i he's been on this pod he's been on all and he's spoken at my events super smart but he's also a crypto maximalist i don't think he's actually a bitcoin maximalist but he is a crypto United states is in downfall the fed you know it's as some people might say catastrophe he might be a catastrophe and he could be right so just cause you're a catastrophe does not mean you're wrong you could see a catastrophe coming and accurately be a catastrophe. uh as i was a week ago when i correctly saw the bank runs happening and here we are it has been a catastrophe uh that is being dealt with so maybe you can fill us in on below apologies is how you pronounce it apologies big Bitcoin bet.
### Human: I sort of feel like related to that, too, is that the the the rules around what constitutes a security, the rules around what part of this industry need rules are still pretty vague. So that's like there isn't yet, I think, a formal determination of what is a security and when and when isn't it a security. Right. And if that regulatory certainty, like it almost feels like they're moving to enforcement before they have moved to clarity. And if there were that clarity, then the education piece that you're talking about would be a lot easier to accomplish. And instead, you've got simultaneously an executive order being like, hey, you guys should totally figure out what's up with crypto, and 20 new people to come in. And so look, some of this is just old fashioned schemes and frauds. So like that part of it isn't even unique to crypto, right? Like a pump and dump fraud is just fraud. There's nothing special about it. So that that enforcement, in that case becomes easy, because just like enforce the law.### Assistant: Okay. So, you know, this is really becoming acute, because now there have been a lot of hacks, as we've seen, and the market is coming apart. So we're here now in, you know, the second decade of crypto. And, you know, it's, It's one of these situations where we had that wormhole hack, you know, the Solana Ethereum one, that was February, that was $325 million. Yeah. The RoninX Infinity one was $540 million. And then you had the Poly Network in August of last year, that was over $600. I think the hacker returned the funds there, it was some sort of white hat thing. Yeah, it was a test. So what's interesting here is just reading into this, I think the stakes have gotten larger. And now the market's coming apart when the when the market's going up and people are winning. They don't call their local DA and say I got scammed. Don't call the police and say somebody took my grandma's money and made her talked her into buying some gold mine in you know, the West somewhere in California. Well, here we go this era of, you know, everything goes up stonks go up, you know, crypto goes up, just buy stuff and it goes up. That's over and it's rocket. Yeah, now it's the opposite. Now it's like, okay, even the great companies, even the great projects, even the ones that are building real tech are going down. And so when you see that happen, that means there's going to be a lot of enforcement, and they need more, more help doing it. But here's something that would solve the problem. And you would need to do less enforcement if people were more educated. So the SEC's mission is also to educate, I think, investors and have them be better at managing and avoiding these scams, managing their money, avoiding the scam. So if you look at their SEC speed, they do a lot of like educational stuff. And so there's education going on here. then there's enforcement going on here. Great. Educating in advance. And then you have, you know, on the back end for bad actors, taking action. There's something in the middle, which is accreditation. and people being able to get certified that they are sophisticated enough to know what they're doing. So if we have 6% of the country or so is an accredited investor, they don't need a lot of protection here. They're sophisticated in the minds of the SEC, they can do what they want with their money, including making bad bets on stupid things at high prices. Mm hmm. Because they're sophisticated. Listen, if you made two or $300,000 last year, and for the last two years, yeah, well, like, you can't be dumb and get to that. I mean, it'd be very hard to be dumb and to make two or $300,000. And not saying it's not possible. I'm sure we could come up with three or four examples off the top of our heads, but it's not probable. Possible, but not probable. And it's not going to be repeatable. Yes, you know, somebody who is, you know, got that much money, okay, yeah, they get taken at a poker game, or, you know, you know, some bad investment, hopefully, hopefully, they're smart enough to not put their entire net worth into it, because they've made money before. Yeah, okay. Now, let's, let's go one step down, you know, people who are middle class to upper middle class, they make between 50 $60,000 a year and $150,000. They should really target that group of people next. Yeah. And they should say, Listen, we know you want to play. know you make enough money that you know you can lose some but you're maybe don't have as much money as those 6% at the top of the hill. We just want you to take this course. can do it at home. Here's 25 different providers. If you want to do crypto, you want to do private companies, you want to do collectibles, you know, you want to buy Nike shoes, you know, and Air Jordans, you want to buy baseball cards, we just want you to understand diversification, we want you to understand the history of these things. And we want you to just be a little more savvy. So take this course for four hours. and take this test and answer these 30 questions. Now they do that, you know, you can have half the country be chopped off from having to have enforcement action taken, because they were naive. And then we can just keep going down the line, because I suspect as you go down, the number of people who want to participate also goes down, right. And and also the damage goes down, right? Yeah. So the potential for a big hole can go down, maybe we don't have as much liquid net worth to spend.
### Human: So at what point did you say, I would imagine you ran into a lot of like, not very interesting executives and couldn't build brands around them. And I wonder like, at what point you were just like, you know what, I'm going to do my own thing. And that thing, by the way, is going to be making water awesome.### Assistant: Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, I grew up playing in bands. That's how I got into the creative stuff. As a little kid, I was always into drawing. I was the kid that could draw in school. And then once we started playing in bands, I was the guy that was designing the t-shirts and the show flyers, and I was silk screening stuff. And It was almost like in the punk world, DIY has been this thing forever. And I think that was where I got a lot of that entrepreneurial, just like you kind of run your own little business as a band, and you're doing everything. And I always really liked that. And I didn't even know that graphic design was a real job when I was 15. It was a thing I did. I had a friend whose dad was an award-winning graphic designer in Philadelphia, and I saw all the stuff he did. I'm like, oh, weird. That's an actual job. People pay you to do that. I was always like, what do you want to do, Mike, when you grow up? I'm like, I don't know, something with business, I think, but general. But then I ended up going to school for graphic design and then switched into advertising in college because I was always into just making people laugh. When I would draw stuff, it was like silly cartoons. I had Mad Magazine as a super early kid. And I our families into really funny movies. So, I was always into being funny. And it was like advertising seemed like the place where creativity and design could be funny, whereas design was very regimented. It was like pixel perfect, and it's more like architecture almost. So, I switched to advertising. And I went to work for an agency called Crispin Porter and Bogusky in Colorado. they were one of the more disruptive agencies that were doing weird, funny, what the **** kind of things. And as my background personality, that appealed to me way more. I didn't even want to work anywhere else. I'm like, I want to work at that place. I don't want to make, I don't know, like T-Mobile commercials. I want to make cool things. So I went there and made some really cool stuff, really learned advertising and that disruptive approach. We even use a lot of the things that we do in Liquid Debt now. When we worked at that agency, they were always about, will this idea get press? How do you make things that create earned media where they're so interesting that people have to talk about it and spread it for free because it's that interesting? Yeah. Then once I'd left there, and work for these other agencies for years after that, it really was clear that, oh, that place is a special place and there's no other place like this. Even though these other places were offering me lots more money and like, oh, we want the Crispin guy to come over here. And even though we're not creative, we want to be way more creative. And the reality is they can't change. It's because, again, the top decision maker can only be as good as the top. You can hire all the cool people down below. If the guy at the top doesn't get it, doesn't understand it, he's never going to make it out into the world. So I think after a few years of just doing really uncreative advertising, not at the level that I wanted to do, I just felt really creatively stagnant. And it literally came out of the idea of... And at that time, I was trying to get jobs back at these really creative places. I'm like, oh, took the money to come to the uncreative place. Now I want to get back into the creative places and they wouldn't hire me because it's all based on your portfolio. And they don't want to see fake work in your book. They want to see real work. So when you have these clients that want to do just really crappy marketing and don't want to buy good ideas, I had nothing in my portfolio to show, so I couldn't get jobs at these places. Then all of a sudden, I felt trapped. I'm like, crap. I backed myself into a corner where I'm not making creative stuff, and I can't even get into the places making creative stuff. So I was like, you know what? I think I just have to create my own brand to create marketing for. The very first thing that I built was actually a spirits company. where I wanted to make brandy cool. And kind of a similar thing, like find a stale category and be the one cool brand in it. And I kind of got that. At that time, I was working on Virgin America, the airline at the agency. And I started reading Richard Branson books. And I loved Virgin's approach of like, find a stale category like air travel where there's not one sexy, cool thing about it, make this cool, fun brand that almost changes the industry. And they would do that in all these different industries.
### Human: Yes. Completely online.### Assistant: And that means I'm gonna get to crack open a cold-course light after this After we get back from that break. Yeah, I want to know I What happens in lambda school and this isn't a commercial for lambda This just happens to be a viral tweet that happened. It could be any this free code Academy, it's a free code.org. What's the URL for the free one nick free code free code camp.org is the other one, right? Quincy larson shout out quincy larson. He's got the free version of lambda. So i'm not picking any code school here You can also learn code for free, you know on con academy or youtube lambda is but one So i'm not i'm not just like rooting for the home team. I own a de minimis amount when we get back I want to hear about what? It was like to sell mattresses, learn to code and then how you got that first job when we get back with the king on this week in startups. Hey everybody, I want to tell you about Republic's new product. It's really exciting. You know Republic because a lot of the companies I invest in will go and do an equity crowdfunding raise on Republic. And I know Ken over there and Chuck over there, we've invested in a ton of companies together and they have something new. It's called Note and it's the Republic Note. And you can see that at republic.co. Now, As I've said many times, I believe that angel investing is a great thing for society and that everybody should have at least the opportunity to do that. And the team at Republic has launched this new, very unique profit sharing security token. And this lets investors share in the upside of companies that raise money on Republic. And Republic has over 700,000 members now. So when a company chooses to raise money on the Republic platform, Republic receives an investment, basically upside potential in that company. We all know how that works, or you should. Well, if they do have an exit, then they're going to distribute some or all of that cash to the Republic core. That's the technology hub of Republic. and they're going to give that back to the holders of the Republic note. Well, more than 200 companies have already raised money on Republic using regulation crowdfunding. And one of our companies, Balloon, which went through our accelerator and that we syndicated and we put money in, Republic fell in love with that company as well, and they put some money in So we've done business with them before, and we love the team over there. They're really in it for the right reasons. And right now, on the accredited side, they've raised money for companies like Robinhood, Carta, and Relativity Space. These are names you've heard of. For now, it's only accredited investors, but non-accredited investors. can also right now make a reservation and reserve their spot for, you know, if they are able to do a public sale of these using Regulation A, which I have a sense that they're going to do at some point. So whether you're accredited or non-accredited, I think it's worth checking out at republic.co slash note. And as always, terms and conditions do apply. Congratulations to Chuck and Ken. I know you worked really hard on this for a couple years now. and it's great to see it come to fruition. And I'm always super open to new ways to fund these companies and new ways for people to participate in the funding of companies. And so a great job getting it launched and I will be participating and you should check it out. I can't tell you to participate, but I can tell you, you should check it out and get educated. Republic.co slash note. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. Everybody welcome back to this week in startups. The world is unfair. You don't get anything given to you You have to do jobs that suck sales solves everything and it is a numbers game and hey sometimes powerful people are available to you and there is racism in the world and people are jerks and worse to you, but if you have that grit and resolve It might just work out as it did for Chris Atoke, who is on the program today, you can follow him King Atoke on the Twitter at okay, I, his tweet went viral. I took the tweet, I sent it to the producers. And I said, book them, get them on the show. I want to know everything. Because I believe in America. I believe in hustle. I believe that society is unfair. I believe we have race issues that need to be solved and it's long overdue. I believe that people are racist jerks, but I also believe if you have grit and hustle and you work really hard, it can happen. There's no guarantees and it doesn't forgive all the other stuff I just said. And you are the living embodiment of that, Chris. So you get into the school, and the school takes place in a slack room and on Zoom or whatever, I assume?
### Human: So when we asked this question, Hey, what are the most popular desserts in America? And I, the first thing that comes to mind is ice cream.### Assistant: And then ice cream triggers me to think, well, apple pie, of course, and then apple pie, and ice cream trigger, whatever the next thing is, you know, maybe kind of, look, I think that the, the thing to understand is, when it comes to sort of a computational process, like how brains work, it's, there's a lot of detail that in the end doesn't matter. And it's just like saying, if you want to fly, do you need feathers? Do you need flap? Or do you just need wings? Turns out you need wings, pretty much, unless you're a drone with rotors, but those are little wings that happen to go around. But, you know, the details of feathers and so on don't turn out to matter. And so, you know, in the case of brains, our brains have a lot of detailed sort of stuff in them that's, you know, things like the glucose that's supplying energy to the neurons and things like this, which is obviously different from the electronic case. But at a sort of computational architecture level, I think it's surprisingly close. And what's sort of remarkable is people have kind of known roughly what this is like. for, what is it, 80 years or something. I mean, this is... That part is sort of unsurprising. Now, I would say there's... Well, there's a lot more to say about how a computer works, as compared to how a neural net, the sort of brain-like neural networks. The thing about computers, and computation in general, is it can sort of... It kind of goes much deeper than what a neural net can do. Because what happens is, you have some computer, it can, for example, it can go in a very tight loop figuring out what's the result of a computation. None of that stuff is happening in something like an LLM-like neural net. It's just rippling through saying, what's the next word, and it just ripples through and so on. And there's this concept that I kind of invented in the 1980s called computational irreducibility. It's the feature of deep computation. Because you say, okay, what is a computation? You have certain rules, and you're going to just apply these rules over and over again, and you see what the results are. Those rules might be the way the CPU of a computer is set up. They might just be some rules about black and white squares or whatever else. But the way it works is the essence of the computation is just keep applying these rules over and over again, you see what comes out. So the question then is, you're applying these rules, there's a certain number of times you have to apply the rules to get a certain result. The question is, can you jump ahead and see what the result will be more quickly than just following all those rules? And what turns out to be the case is there are many situations where you can't jump ahead. That means you have to do this computation. If you want to get the result, you have to actually go through the steps of the computation. And when you have computational irreducibility, you basically... The neural net is... It's too shallow to be able to deal with that. It can go a certain distance. If you ask chat GPT right now, match parentheses. You've got open parens, open, open, open, close, close, close, open, close, whatever. You're trying to make it... Just make sure that the number of closed parens... The closed parens match the open parens. it can do it up to a certain point. And then it sort of says, well, it doesn't say this as such. Actually, I haven't asked it, but maybe I should. Why it fails, it might have something interesting to say. But basically, it's just sort of run out of layers of neural net. It just can't represent that deeper computation. And so, there's this world of computation which include irreducible computations, computations that you just can't shortcut, you just have to do the computational work. And then there are these shallower things that are what we humans are using most of the time when we're generating language, probably a lot of the thinking that we do works that way. And so there's sort of a difference between how you can do things in principle with computers, and how things work in something like an LLM. And you might say, do you care about irreducible computations? Well, the answer is, for example, in nature, many things that go on in the physical world, if you want to work out how they work, you have to do irreducible computations. Those things weren't made for humans, so to speak. I mean, our language and things like that is made for humans in some sense. But nature just is what it is. And it can, to work out what it's going to do, can involve these irreducible computations.
### Human: So let's do a piece by piece here.### Assistant: Tell me what happened. I'll explain. I'll explain what like Reddit is a place where people come with their ideas, right? You go to Reddit. And you say, I would like to participate here. And Reddit says, okay, not a problem. You can participate any number of ways. You can read, right? And you can just click on stuff. You don't need an account for that. And so you consume information. And that's that. So it's hardly interactive. And you're able to digest stuff. So that's that. And there's not very much to it. If you actually want to participate, that's where it gets more interactive. You have to create an account, and there's only one way to use an account. You sign up and you click, you pick a name, pick a password, you agree the terms of service, and then you're good to go. Those terms of service then define, say, okay, you have to abide by all these different rules, and then you click yes, and you're good to go. Then you start contributing, right? In many which ways. You can contribute by creating a comment, right? If somebody says, here's a picture of my dog and you say, here, this is what I think of your dog. It looks like whatever, right? And you create a joke out of that. Or you can create a post, right? Because you go to a community about where people talk about dog pictures and then you create a post and you say, this is a picture of my dog. What do you think of Or you can create a community of people that talk about your dog, right? So it's just... It's all within that same scope. And that's how it works out. This is a typical social media place where they're like, here's my servers, here's my formula, you can use all these things. And that's the typical Reddit framework. And they're subdivided into these little categories. And it's entirely run by... Sorry, it's entirely... The content is entirely generated by the community, right? So from the comment... And then once people submit their contents, then the community can then decide to... They call the upvotes and downvotes. It's the same thing as saying like or dislike, right? Twitter has similar things. Facebook has... Every social media platform has some kind of a ranking. scoring type thing where if something is extremely popular, it gets more visibility. And therefore, when people come to consume the information, the stuff that people tend to agree with gets the most visibility. That's the general formula for it. that's how it's set off. I go to Reddit with my idea. I come up with the idea of WallStreetBets along with the name, along with the original framework, with the original post and try to get everybody to come on board. And I grow it and I nurture for many years and I'm, you know, involved with it for however long it is. And yeah, and then eventually get kicked out. And then eventually, I am prevented from taking that idea with me, right? So, there's a lot of things here that are at play. And this is kind of the crux of the loss. And this is the part that has It's easy for armchair spectators from home to narrow down to different components of it. But the part that I like to point out is I came to Reddit with an idea. I create my content on Reddit. I get removed from Reddit and I am prevented now from taking my ideas with me. And I am not alone with this, right? I've been accused of writing a book and breaking the rules because of those, selling my book on Reddit or promoting it or whatever, and doing a stock trading competition. There are many other people who have also been kicked out of Reddit. all of which have different circumstances. I believe I'm the only one that wrote the book and I believe I'm the only one with a trading competition. But I do believe that Reddit has trademarked and prevented these people from taking their stuff with them as well. I know for a fact that there is at least one other individual who got kicked out after he trademarked his particular community and he didn't write any book. But it's a weird situation that I don't understand because social media companies rely on content creators. There's this symbiotic relationship between, hey, here's my platform. I'll give you traffic. I will pay for the servers and I will pay for people to come here. I'm going to give you lots of neighborhoods and it does work. I recognize that symbiotic relationship. WallStreetBets grew because of Reddit, Reddit grew because of WallStreetBets, makes sense. YouTube grows because of, you know, Logan Paul or whatever, and Logan Paul grows because of YouTube, right? But at no point, you know, like, if YouTube kicks out Logan Paul, they don't keep his brand and his followers.
### Human: Yeah, but I was also 20, so I had to find some hack to get into it.### Assistant: They kind of own it. Yeah, that's fascinating. All right, when we come back, I'm going to tease for the third time how to make your investment decisions. You gave me too many windows into great, great tactical stuff. And I never got to how the fund, the stardex fund actually makes its investment decisions. We'll get to that in segment four when we get back. I got so much going on here. Obviously, the podcast is doing great. The Launch Accelerator is amazing. We've got over 100 graduates now in my fund. A ton of events. We just did Angel University for 250 people. Founder University, we've done 15 or 20 times. So many projects. And my team members are so in the weeds, getting so much done. How do we surface and control and organize all this information, all the different projects we're doing? Well, we use something called Notion, N-O-T-I-O-N, Notion. And it is amazing. It's one tool that does many jobs. You can organize your notes, kind of like a wiki, or your docs, kind of like a word processor, as well as projects and workflows in one spot. And it lets you use all kinds of different free-flowing objects. So you can have a list, you can have a table, you can have comments, you can have bullet lists. So what we did was we started a book club in the This Week in Startups Slack. You can join that thisweekinstartups.com slash slack. And somebody who was in the Slack said, here's my notes on the first book we're doing. We're doing Robert Iger's book, The Ride of a Lifetime. So we did the first book club. And like 60, 70, 80 people showed up on the Zoom in Slack. And those are great for talking and chatting, but they both suck for taking notes. One of the members of the community made an outline of the book. And then two of my team members, Laura and Tracy and Presh, three of my team members, were contributing all of their thoughts on the book and taking what people were talking about and making an outline of notes of everything we learned from the book. And we did that beautifully. And you can see it here on the screen in Notion. So we had this incredible, flourishing conversation that would have went into the ether, but it got captured on Notion for all time. Then we took that experience that 60, 70 of us were having, and we shared it with 10,000 people. I'm not kidding. And now all those people are going to read Robert Iger's book. We got to get him on the podcast, by the way. All of this was done with Notion, and it works so well for startups. It is a complete no-brainer. It's your wiki. It's your managing projects, creating documents, and taking notes all in the same place. So here is your call to action. Get started with Notion. and they're gonna give you 50% off their team plan for your first year by going to Notion.com slash twist. Please, I know you don't need to save money in a lot of cases, but use that URL so that they know you came from the pod. Notion, N-O-T-I-O-N dot com slash twist. I am addicted. to this product. It is like one of the great products of all time. And I know this is an ad read. I know they're partners with the program. We were using this long before they decided to sponsor the podcast. It's kind of got that magical feeling like Uber or Wikipedia or Slack or zoom had when you first use it. You get that tingle. We get that notion tingle notion.com slash twist 50% off their team plan for your first year. It's a great offer. It's a great it's not it's not a great product. It's a world changing product. I can say that. It's a game changing product. Alright, let's get back to this amazing episode. Welcome back to this week and startups our guest today. Cameron title, man. He is C Are you CJ? T man on Twitter. Yes. Okay. CJT man on the Twitter. He started stardex.com when he was 20 effing years old. I was starting my first new magazine zine just after that time. So my God, so young. So early to this um, but you did it as a non-profit. So you left probably 100 million on the table personally Yeah, well companies are worth I think uh, 30 35 billion now So 35 billion you would have had about five percent of the water down to two and a half two and a half 30 billion It's a 750 million 750 million games. You get 20 of that You talk about 150 you split it with five partners you get 30 million each
### Human: That would end up and like, this is where I should make it crystal clear that I 100% support and love the idea of Elon coming into Twitter, open sourcing the algorithm, making it crystal clear what's happening on the platform, stripping away the financial incentives that create extreme behavior, and spam, and crime, and all of that. I have no beef with that whatsoever. I think that's a great plan. Yeah, like, I think that is a great plan. I think two things can be true at the same time. One, public, if it is a town square, it's concerning that it's up for sale. Right? So we should let we should let go of a couple things. One, we should let go of the idea that Twitter is a town square or the only one that can ever exist. Because clearly, it's a company that can be bought. And two, we should let go of the idea that this is somehow, and I actually think when you listen to Elon Musk speak about what he wants to accomplish here, he is saying the same thing. We should let go of the idea that this is somehow a conversation about free speech in the sense that it will restore the ability of people to come on and say whatever they want and do all the harm that they want to do. Because that's not what I hear him saying. What I hear him saying is, this needs to be an honest broker. Twitter. Twitter needs to be an honest broker of conversation and that right now it's not. it's not this is not I'm not this is not an anti Ilan ranch, right?### Assistant: I'm not so sure I would take the opposite of that, which is, you know, if I'm willing to bet my own capital and take a big risk, in order to see something, you know, that I think is important to society, get better. And it's what what is Twitter in terms of usage, the 10th or 20th? largest, you know, site in this realm. Yeah, he believes if he can buy the 10th, and make it the number one or make it the best example, I think it's going to be for the bet. I mean, nothing's getting better on these platforms. Let's be honest, I mean, all the leaked papers from Instagram. And, you know, Instagram is changing nothing. So the idea that Zuckerberg would ever change anything and do it for the good of society, Zuckerberg is going to do nothing for the good of societies only going to make whatever the right decision is for Mark Zuckerberg, the 14th. Yeah, Elon is getting us to be a multi planetary species credibly, and has done more for carbon emissions, and electric vehicles and sustainability than any other human in history. 100%. So I'll look at the track record of Elon and what he has done publicly and what he is saying. And I think as peculiar and unique of a human being as Elon is to some people or as scary as it is for some people as triggering as it might be for the richest person to come in and buy their favorite platform. The truth is, if you know, putting aside that we're very close friends, Elon has done more. And he's done it openly and publicly for making us multi planetary and EVs and he cares about free speech, I think he'll actually do what he did in EVs, which you can certainly appreciate for freedom of for freedom of speech and fairness on the platform, his platform for the platform is make the algorithm open source. If people are being shadow banned, or whatever, just make it clear for people. I think his plan is credible. And I think if you open the API up again, And you allow this was one of the critical financial decisions to your point. they shut off the API. And if you remember when you did Twitter, I remember having these talks with Evan, he said, we have to make our own client for iOS. And I said, why I've got tweet deck, I got this thing, I got this one. Yeah, it's better that there's different ways to interpret the data. And he was like, yeah, but it's bad for us as a company when you know, your mom or your uncle gets on Twitter, and they type in Twitter, and they get 17 different clients. It's 17 different experiences, we need to have one experience so that it can grow and keep up with Facebook. that's a legitimate assessment of the confusion it can cause. But the reality is, if I could download an Instagram client or a Facebook client or Twitter client that interpreted that data without the algorithm or a better algorithm, or took out the inspiration and other things that were, you know, pernicious for young girls to see, that would be a pretty much better world. And I think that should be high on the list as well as decoupling the data set from what's going on here. And I think defaults matter to Elon will, in 10 seconds, because I know the self driving team at Tesla, like I've literally met them. I've spent time with them. I've seen what they're working on. I won't talk about it specifically. But watching that AI team, and the level of care they're putting into the edge cases like I've seen this up close. that team is the greatest AI team in the world right now. Like this deep mind and then there's a Tesla team. Those are the two greatest teams in the world. They literally, in a weekend could solve the bot problem. They could solve the brigading problem. They could solve it. And I kid you not 48 hours. So then you have to ask yourself, well, why didn't Twitter solve it? I do the answer is pretty obvious. bots making anonymous accounts equal more money. Elon's gonna come in there and in 10 seconds, get rid of the Bitcoin problem, the spamming problem, the brigading problems, and he can credibly do it because if you can figure out, hey, that's a paper bag flying in the wind, not a bicyclist, you can figure out when somebody is being brigaded. it's like fairly obvious, if you just look at the IP addresses, if you looked at who was talking to each other, who are friends with each other from the accounts, and then all of a sudden, 50 people from the same IP range, or whatever commonality go into Molly Woods replies, and then they use the following set of words, B word, C word, whatever words they use when they attack a woman.
### Human: Yes. The idea of using an alternative financialization mechanism. Yeah. Don't even get me started. We can already have a very spirited debate about the financialization of climate solutions, whether it will drive adoption, whether it has to exist to drive adoption, or whether it's distracting us from really hard tech and frontier tech. that's one conversation already. And then when you layer in the web three part of that and say, but it's going to be an alternate structure of extreme financialization of products that who are of dubious value to start with.### Assistant: What's exciting to me is people who are sort of building their new business thesis around a notion that we will have much more abundant energy in the future as an input to other things. It's not quite a kind of like abundance narrative as such, but it's something like that. I'll give you a great example in California where I sort of did some of my formative years where you still are. The grid is just not able to use a really significant amount of solar power at key months of the year. It's just a feature of the way solar has been built and the way that the grid operates. This is a technical term, it's called curtailed. Basically, it's being generated by the panels, it's not going anywhere. That's done on an economic basis, it's like magic, you just turn it off and never happens. That's going to go up so much in the future, no matter how many batteries you put in place or how much transmission you do. But a better way to think about it is like what businesses are going to emerge around that, around the notion that you can get either free or even negatively priced energy input that has no emissions. Like there's this universe of things that you could do. And it's not just mining Bitcoin, which is of course what every guy with laser eyes on Twitter tells me that you're supposed to do with it. Like there's going to be something else that can come up with that. And the really cool thing is that that unlock hasn't really been explored. Like that hasn't really been looked at yet because it hasn't really been a thing. Like you didn't have in the 1990s a thesis that said, well, people are going to pay me money to get energy. So what would I do with it? It didn't exist. And so therefore, a lot of sort of incumbent architectures are not really ready to think about that. So that's one. And then the other thing that's exciting is that people are now thinking way ahead in terms of solving really, really tough problems. Like the coolest thing for me is that my BNEF colleagues, when we catch up and I talk to them, are doing deep analysis at a market level on stuff that was like guy with ratty ponytail science experiment stuff even 10 years ago, but is now like part of a corporate consortium that's designed to make this sort of thing happen. And you start to see capital commitments go with it. And of course, you can say that you flubbed it and we spent $2 billion of capital investment on something and it didn't work. That definitely happens. But that's not really the principle in which most of these companies are operating. They're saying we're putting together a complex governance structure, multi-party, multinational, but corporate to go do something that's complex and was outside of frame even 10 years ago. So that's really cool. What am I less excited about? I said that I'm not completely convinced of the full utility of a lot of Web3 solutions that are meant to address, in particular, the early side of carbon markets. I'm quite fine with NFTs in a different way, and that's because I was an art history major, and art markets have an incredible way of collating and processing manufactured scarcity. So actually, I think the long run for that, completely independent of anything related to climate, it's probably fine. The challenge that I find with a lot of the Web3 things is that they don't necessarily make it easier to solve a problem for normal people, and they don't necessarily create much greater scale. I say this coming from the experience of working for a giant financial services company that has clients that are giant financial institutions. you were asking an awful lot of them to go create a new market by going on chain to learn a new protocol and having to stand up an entire division that does that for something that may or may not actually end up having a lot of effect. And you have to layer into that all kinds of other things, measurement and verification. And then if you want to get into sort of thinking about it from a real banking perspective, custodianship, possibly building instruments like futures and forwards on top of it, all kinds of things that will need to be built are probably going to be built in ways that are interoperable highly with other systems that we have that aren't necessarily that exciting, but that don't necessarily go through a kind of a web three lens. I mean, my last thought on that is like, and I've listened to many, many of these things and I always listen with an open mind, but Are they using web three to solve a climate problem or climate to solve a web three problem? And to my mind, most of them are tending towards the latter. The explanation from a climate perspective is just very Baroque. And I think therefore kind of like rate limited in terms of how far I could go.
### Human: That's a good thing to be aware of. That's a good that's a good note. But then and then the other was, you know, a company that sort of super interesting, free revenue, trying to determine things like that. Yeah. Do you have evaluation in mind? Like, multiple times I asked this question. It's like, we cannot and it was like it was a trade secret.### Assistant: So they this is where their target valuation do they have a valuation in mind for this round. So some people have been trained or have the philosophy, I'm not going to negotiate against myself. I'm going to let the market decide. Yeah. And so then you're again, patience. That's great. Let us know when you find a lead. And we will be part of that group of people who will consider investing once you've set the terms. And we're, we're not in a situation where we want to lead the round, but we might want to place a bet, a smaller bet, and we hope you find a great lead who can join your board and help you build the company. And we might be part of the supporting cast and, you know, be helping you fill out the round is the term we use in the industry. And you need people to fill out the round. So now we are part of that ladder group. So then when they go to the next person, they're going to use us and say, yeah, we got like 12 people 250 k each, we've got, you know, about $3 million. And we're looking for a lead to take the other 3 million now, right? What do we know now from being part of that collection? We're not soft circled, we're not committed, we are interested in reviewing based on the terms, the terms come back, and they're gnarly, we're not doing it. So this is where no lead. But, you know, x amount circled, really, I would just exit to zero, I would just assume they have nothing. That's how I look at it as a founder to when I'm raising money. unless I've got a signed contract, unless I've, you know, got the money in the bank, or it's being wired, you know, nothing actually matters. That's why we did an exercise of tell us what is soft circled. signed, signed and wired money is in your bank account. So we actually came up with a way to let founders be honest, be most honest, because, you know, a lot of times founders are scared, you know, like, Oh, my God, I, you know, have to, you know, dress this thing up, I gotta, you know, I gotta convince them. And actually, we don't need to be convinced, we just want reality. And at least I was speaking for our firm, we just want to know the reality, we might, we might give you an offer. But if we can't get you know, ground truth, as we like to call it in the business, we need ground truth, we need to know and man, sometimes we'll be like, I have a million. But I'll be totally honest with you. It's all soft serve. And I'm like, great of that million. how much do you think realistically would come in, not optimistically, but like just conservatively, realistically, even when you tell them conservatively, optimistically, founders are an optimistic group, they wouldn't be starting a company if they weren't. So they'll say 600. And then I just in my mind, cut that number by half, at least. Yeah, so I would cut it to 300 to 50, something like that, you know, 25% of the overall number half of their estimate. And, you know, there you are, in terms of, you know, creating a valuation, there is a new thing that's happening that I wanted to bring up with you that you might be seeing, which is, how do you name these things? We know what an accelerator is, that's for a company that, you know, either has very modest traction, or, you know, in some cases, there are some accelerators or incubators that, you know, will just accept somebody on an idea, very few these days, but they'll look for a prototype, maybe one or two customers, you know, maybe some data, but yeah, very little. And then you know what a seed round is, okay, that's around, that's going to be around 10 million bucks, you know, six to 12, six to 15 in the last couple of years. And that seed round tends to be a million to $5 million, actually. And that used to be the dollar amount actually of series A's was three to five back. Then you have a series A that tends to be five to 10 million tends to be for 20% of the company. But there are things that have been slotted in pre seed. right. And pre series A, or seed extension. So these three terms have come up. How do you do you? Did anybody ever give you a definition of these? I'm wondering, can you define what they are?
### Human: Well, you use your managers. If you have 73,000 employees, I want to hear from the CEO. Then as the CEO, you say, I want you to know I've instructed every senior manager at the company. We're going to be doing this time review. We all have to go through this together. We're going to be looking at strategies and training and making sure that our institutional knowledge is spread and we can do this and whatever. Because at that, when you're managing, we've got 73,000 employees, you're the chief cheerleader.### Assistant: Got it. Okay. So the punch up just took, cause I love to talk about exact language when one of the, one of the gifts I have is language. It's one of the few. Um, and I always try to actually workshop with founders. It's one of the things I do on board as a company. I literally, somebody said that I'm having a problem with X, Y, and Z. I said, well, how are you going to say that to that person? He's like, that's why I'm calling you Jake out. And I said, here's how I would say it. And then I said, and I said, Hold on, let me say it one more time. He's a little bit founder system. This is like a very significant company. Can I record this? I was like, by all means. And I just workshop back and forth. I literally roleplay with them. And I said, I really appreciate the feedback. I think it's incredibly thoughtful. Here's what I'm seeing on the ground inside the company. here's how your feedback relates to that. And I think a possible way forward, based on what I'm seeing with ground truth, and what you know, from your wisdom, from being in the industry for 30 years, with the best solution going forward, be for me to give you weekly reports on this data. And then for us to debrief weekly, monthly, quarterly, what do you think would work best? And it was like, he was like, Oh, my God, how come I don't know how to say that. And I was like, whatever I did, don't do it. So here's what Benioff could have added. Obviously, I'm speaking in general terms here about the overall productivity of the company. I would like managers to take responsibility for the productivity of their teams. And obviously, you should talk to your manager, because there are some people here who are wildly productive, and this doesn't apply to. And then there are people who are struggling. And they might be struggling because of their own personal effort, professional development, their manager not doing a great job, or in all likelihood, some combination of those three things. So just workshopping it, that's the unlock. He's not blaming people. Yeah, it's just setting reality. And remember, I told you Warren Bennis told me on this very program, we have to pull the episode number. Warren Bennis is a management consultant who I was very taken by when I used to do interviews live. Somebody had just tipped me off that he lived in LA. And he's passed away right now, but he was really great. And he said to me, something that stuck with me forever, one of the best pieces of advice, he said, Jason, what leaders do is they define reality. He got this from being in the war. He said, you got to define reality first. Once you define reality, then everybody can accept the reality and then work forward to solve whatever challenges you might have. Now that could be you're in a foxhole and you're surrounded and the 10 people in your platoon are not making it out, but maybe two could make it out. maybe three can make it out and tell the story. I mean, this is heavy stuff, right? But the reality is we're surrounded, we're out of ammunition, we're either gonna have to surrender and be tortured, or we're gonna fight our way, blast our way out and two or three of us might make it. Or none of us are gonna make it. Okay, now we all accept that reality, let's fight our way out, right? Han Solo, never tell me the odds. I wanna ask you about one thing embedded in here. And this is a serious, important conversation that Silicon Valley has to have. are we not for people who are first time employees, not just like, you know, it's their fifth job, but first job out of college, let's say, should they be working at home? Or should they be in an office with deliberate professional development management mentorship Because he's saying like, it's really hard to like become a Salesforce employee here. Yeah, now we had a lot. It's very emotional remote work, because people feel like I finally have the freedom and flexibility I want. You feel that way? I feel that way. But management's like, wait a second. So is that valid? Molly representing the worker class? Um, I had union leader. Here we go. I know. She's like, why'd you pay to be a union leader? We just should embrace it. People are on Twitter. Molly's too far left. J. Cowell's capitalist menace to society. Molly's a woke left. We're going to embrace it. Let's go.
### Human: Yeah, it is a big statement on like Mother's Day and Sunday night wrote in and said, Alright, here's the deal. We need to actually turn a profit. We need to make money and show free cash flow in order to win faith from investors, which is such a it's so interesting, given all that we've been talking about lately about the Twitter board and you know, Barry at Peloton and how to move forward. Let's do a quick catch up, though, before we get into the substance of the email. The stock, Uber stock is currently trading at a forty seven and a half billion dollar market cap. Last week, we covered their earnings, which were great. Right. Revenue was up one hundred thirty six percent year over year. Annualized revenue is something like twenty seven point four billion dollars, meaning it was only trading at one point seven times. Wild. They're twenty, twenty two. Right. Like the faith definitely is not there from the public market investors and evidently maybe even from the private market investors numbers down 60% from the mid pandemic high even as people get back in cars again. Yep. And it's down 45% year to date from $44 a share to $24 a share.### Assistant: Yeah. So it's gotten whacked and all tech stocks have I mean, the SAS companies Peloton zoom. I mean, just even snowflake. I mean, a lot of these have compressed we've talked about it over and over again. That's fine. But what we're starting to see is valuations that are making you go Wait a second, does that make any sense? So what's happening here, we know there's been a market correction, and money is coming out of the system, inflation is happening at the same time, this quantitative easing has turned into the government actually selling their positions in the debt markets. And so and we're in a recession, in all likelihood, we had one, you know, like the first quarter was negative growth, just like 1% and change. And so we'll see if we have 2%, or 1%, or point 5%, or 3%. Who knows what negative could be in the second quarter, the economy constricting, and some of that has to do with the war. Some of it has to do with supply chain, the war is exacerbated, and we have all these headwinds and crazy events going on. But the reality is, we have companies putting up phenomenal numbers. And when they release their phenomenal numbers, their stocks are going down. So this is a combination of retail, quantitative easing, etc, etc. But Dara is just not going to take it lying down. He basically wrote this email to employees. And he said, after earnings, which member we talked about last week, they moved up because lifts were so terrible. He moved the earnings up. And he said, basically, he spent several days with investors in New York and Boston, this shows you, you know how tuned in Dar is as an executive, because he's done this before. What was he at Expedia before he was running? So he really understands the highly operational businesses in Wall Street and how to, you know, manage customers, partners, you know, investors, employees, all that stuff. But you know, this, I would say is probably the fidelities and the Morgan Stanley's of the world people who own big positions in Uber. And now they're gonna want to see something different. They are in a flight to quality, everybody is going to buy companies or not sell companies, depending on the situation, like Apple, or Microsoft companies that just print money. And in some of those cases, they buy back shares. And so he says, Hey, you know what, we are just going to have to prove it to the markets. And I remember this from the dot com era, all the companies went down together. And then some of the companies then recovered. Some didn't write some of them just permanently stayed down. They were not viable businesses. And so what he's basically saying in this email, and I'll let you read it is, hey, listen, we just need to be in the bucket where people understand this can be profitable. And everybody knows, Uber can be profitable. You've seen the prices go up, you've seen the wages go up all the stuff they said would happen. It's basically happened. That doesn't mean it's going to be software level margins, but clearly they could have free cash flow. I'm going to quickly explain one crucial type of insurance that all startups need. It's DNO insurance. You've heard of this before. You might not know what it is. This is directors and officers insurance, and it helps if somebody does something dumb and you get sued. I don't know how to tell you more plainly, or maybe you didn't do something dumb and some dumb person decides to sue you for a dumb reason. 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### Human: That's a really interesting point you brought up to about how you I think that probably I have started to bias heavily toward getting as soon as you can as cheaply as you can. And you seem to be saying like, sometimes sometimes clearly, right, that's the what to do. And it's the most ownership, but that but that there may be times where you're like, this is a really promising precede round. I'm willing to pay a little more, I'm willing to be a little later and own a little bit less so that I can see this prove itself out and get the seed. You nailed it. This is a good list. A good one is a good day.### Assistant: No, no, I don't think I do. I think this requires patience. And it's very hard to have patience. When you're sitting there with a bunch of chips. It's the equivalent of, hey, I want to go to this restaurant. And it's been open for 30 days. And it just got this incredible review. And now it's booked out right for 60 days, or you have to wait online for three hours. And then you go in the afternoon for lunch, and you arrive first and there's no line. And you're like, Wait a second, this thing has a three hour line. It's like, yeah, not at 3pm. So in between lunch and dinner. So you basically have to look at the situation where this place is overbooked and say, Well, what is a place where I could enter? How could I enter this? Well, there's a couple of different things you can do. One, you can be patient with that company, and wait for it to, you know, start executing, because then they actually have to hit the numbers if they don't hit it. And now you're talking about maybe a down round or a flat round. If they do hit some level of numbers, you'd be looking at only a modest increase. So keep the relationship with the founder, send them notes, give them a retweet and just build relationship fabric. Because I've seen over and over again VCs pass on a seed stage deal, pass on a bridge pass on the series A and then do the series B. You don't have there's probably five or six chances to get on the train. And if you could get on the train for Google, anywhere between the seed round, and the series B, you'd be happy, right, you'd be happy to get on that train. So just keep that peace in mind. And then maybe go find other startups that are going to compete in the space that are more nascent, right. So you can just look at who's going to compete with that company and just get a full version of the field. So in the case of stable diffusion, right, raising 100 million at a billion, you know, there's gonna be 10 more entrepreneurs are going to see that valuation and have their own spin on it. get into one of those companies early, and now you're still in the category. So you missed Uber, but you did lift people who invested in Lyft got an incredible return, or you got DoorDash, where you got Postmates. All three of those series A's were our series B's were unbelievable investment. So if you missed Uber, and people did, like Andreessen Horowitz, they got into Lyft. Or famously, Sequoia did DoorDash. Right. And other people did Postmates. So you don't have to hit the Uber in the category, you can hit the other three. remote work is here to stay. We all know that, and I'm sure a ton of you are listening right now and you've gone fully remote. And a lot of remote workers love living that digital nomad lifestyle. Don't I know it? You see me during ski season. I'm out there doing the executive CEO, a little 90 minutes of skiing in the afternoon, skip lunch, eat it at your desk. Well, if the nomad life is for you, and I know it is, you need to check out Blue Ground. Blue Ground is a network of stunning move-in ready apartments that come with everything you need to work remotely. They manage over 10,000 apartments across 15 countries and 27 cities in the US, but also Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Here are some of the cities they're available in. Copenhagen, Barcelona, Madrid, London, Dubai, Paris, Vienna, Waits for you, Berlin, New York City, LA, Austin, Miami, and so many more. And they're super flexible. You want to stay for a month? No problem. A year? No problem. A couple of years? No problem. A quarter? You pick. You're in control. And you can browse all the available apartments in real time. Book in a few clicks. and you move in as quickly as the next day. You can manage your entire stay and enjoy a nice concierge-style service through their guest app. Yes, if you need something, they're there to help you. They make apartments available where you want, when you want, and on the terms you want with Blue Ground. Feel at home and be free to roam. And here's the best part, get up to $1,000 off your booking at promos.theblueground.com slash twist. That's promos.theblueground.com slash twist for up to $1,000 off.
### Human: I mean, conscious economics is a big deal, consciously uncoupled. So other things of note. And then let's talk about Apple in the context of this decoupling, because it is, it is extremely interesting. And exactly. I mean, this is such a massive, like trend that's happening globally right now. But on Taiwan, I think we should note, she also pledged to make the most efforts to pursue a peaceful reunification with Taiwan, but said China will not commit to abandoning the military option. stressed that China must achieve and has the ability to achieve a complete reunification, and then required strengthening military training and battle preparedness. So there does seem to be some there. So there's still a threat. And when you look at chip production, for example, TSMC is the biggest semiconductor manufacturer and foundry in the world. And that's located in Taiwan, where people have considered it to be sort of a safe place to do business. And she is quite clearly signaling here, like, No, it's not. That's still the plan. Like the plan is still to take back Taiwan full stop, which is how we get to Apple.### Assistant: It makes sense. If things aren't going well, it's kind of like taking a company private, you know, sometimes you have a public company, we talked about this, like with Zendesk, and things aren't going well. Yeah, it's like, okay, let's just take a private, we'll fix everything. And nobody needs to be giving us any scrutiny for the next five years while we get this thing. And you know, things can be going really well. But as I've told everybody, you know, if you participate in this country, you have to understand that it's top down control. And if you invest in this country, they will change the rules at any given point in time. And just be careful with investments over there is one of the reasons I haven't invested over there. Okay, if you're a startup, you need to know about Notion, you need to sign up today. Just head to notion.com and sign up for free right now. And write a deal memo about your company and then share it with me, jason.calacanis.com. Really, I'll read your deal memo if you start a Notion page, because that's what a lot of founders are doing. They're writing their deal memos, they're writing their companies on Notion. And at launch, we run it on Notion as well. Think about this. Notion is our all-in-one team collaboration tool. It combines note-taking, right? Like you use different note-taking apps. Document sharing. You probably have some suite of documents that you use. And then there's wikis, which you would love to use, but they're clunky, and they didn't work, and they're ugly. Now, Notion makes wikis and that functionality beautiful. 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I think the most important part is the point of like globalization, maybe being unwound a little bit, I think what we realized during the pandemic was that this codependency at best globalization means hey, less chance of war, you know, cultural sharing, we get to know each other all good trade, people visiting each other's country, fantastic going to different schools, collaboration on space stations, whatever, all good stuff. But But then when it dips into codependency, and we saw that with, you know, drugs, PPE, semiconductors, it gets a little scary, because then we have a disagreement, you can kind of rug pull each other. And we see that with Russia and Germany. And so I think this is the this race towards resiliency amongst countries is very important, because it will make the relationship more stable. So while this feels unstable in the short term, this kind of equal footing will not allow people to rug pull each other. So if you've ever seen a dysfunctional relationship between two friends of yours who have kids, and they don't have enough money to get a second home, and they you know, like they can't get divorced because they're in debt, and the kids are in school, and one of them wants to go to New York, I mean, and you see it get like really ugly, but they can't pull the plug on it, they can't fully get divorced and just move on with their lives for whatever complications. Now, if they both had enough money, they both had independent careers. And you know, and they could, you know, both therapy, whatever, all those things could add up. And they could just write, you know, you know, we see Gwyneth Paltrow and the guy from Coldplay, Chris Martin. Yeah, they're like, they have the resources to conscientiously decouple. They're like, Oh, yeah, just buy a mansion next to my mansion. And we'll, you know, whatever. You see celebrities do this all the time. Yeah, we can.
### Human: So MCJ. Yeah. Tell me what you're doing. How did how did you end up here? And how's it been going?### Assistant: Yeah, well, runkeeper. That was a I've only worked in startups, but that was the first one that I founded. And, and it was a a long, bumpy ride. And, and it was kind of like, like a marathon, a sprint pace, essentially. And there were several years in, I would call like prolonged wartime where it wasn't acute wartime, it was more like carbon monoxide kind of wartime. But ultimately, we got the company healthy and profitable. And got our narrative and focus back and rebuilt the leadership team and were acquired by a six, the big Japanese shoe company. And it was a great outcome for everybody involved, every class of investors made money, it was great for the team, it was life changing for me as, as, as one of the co founders, and I stayed on and ran digital at a six for a couple years left, took some time off, and essentially just It kind of hit me as I was recovering how lucky I was and how many things completely outside of my control went into having that outcome. And I had some survivor guilt. I wanted to make my next chapter about purpose. I felt a duty to do so and climate. was the most purposeful problem I could think of, and certainly a big source of anxiety for me. But I didn't know anything about it. And initially, I came in with the lens of now that I had a base hit or a double, like I'm de-risked. And so I can start another company, but this time do a moonshot type of, you know, ultra ambitious, you know, if it works, it's huge, otherwise it craters into the ground kind of thing. And so I went in with that lens, and it was just too big a leap to try to build a company in climate, given how little I knew about these domains. So I tried to build a company. So I picked the company building path versus the climate path. And I tried to start another company in a, in an area that I wasn't as passionate about. And literally during that three or six months, um, That was when I was doing that. I got the band back together from Runkeeper, raised some money, started getting down the path. It was a pretty fascinating, awesome area, but that's for another day. But the climate bad news kept coming. The IPCC one and a half degree report. Trump taking steps to withdraw from Paris. The symptoms getting more visible and obvious. The the scientific community foaming at the mouth, nobody listening. I was just having a harder and harder time focusing on anything that wasn't climate change. So about three and a half years ago, I still had almost all the capital in the bank. We just raised a little bit to get off the ground, returned it, gave it back, and came back into climate. But instead of coming into the lens of what kind of moonshot type company am I going to start, it was like, I don't know what I'm going to do. I don't know if I'll start a nonprofit. I don't know if I'll start a for profit. I don't know if I'll run for office. I don't know if I'll join someone else's saying I have no idea, but I'm just going to start by learning about climate change. That was three and a half years ago. And it's been a very organic process, just starting by talking a lot to people, started sending regular updates monthly of the ground I was covering and what areas I was tackling next distribution. This was growing. People from my old life started picking their heads up and heading down a similar path, would come to me and say, What should I do? And it's like, I don't know what you should do. But I wish you could learn from all the people I'm learning from. So started recording those discussions with the podcast on hundreds of episodes at this point. inbox started filling up people binging on the show. Those were awesome people super engaged, they didn't know each other and set up a Slack community, which has now grown into 1000s of people and lots of co founders met in their nonprofits got started in their open source projects that are hatched in their bunch of hirings gotten done companies raise money meetups in different cities all over the world. Started writing little angel checks is another way to learn that evolve now we have a fun we back 60 climate tech companies in the last year and a half and I brought in four partners, we're getting ready to scale a lot. And yeah, but just such a weird, kind of organic, unscripted type of story. And it's hard to explain what I do, which is why it just took me three minutes to answer a simple question.
### Human: Congrats, Gary. I'm so glad that we're talking about this news on this show, because that is the kind of like sort of context and awareness that is so fascinating. And you can only get to the next level to write like exactly like this is like, there's the news headline. And then there's the what this really means for this entire ecosystem. Yeah, that makes it an even bigger news headline.### Assistant: Yeah, he's friendly. So he's been on a couple times. So what I would say is, when you look at, you know, they were two big personalities, right? And I think I don't know what the split up was exactly. But I think they're both proud of the work they did initialize. And they both went on to do I think, you know, it seemed like to me, Alexis wanted had his own vision for what he wanted to do. And they both had access to capital. And so sometimes it's better to be a solo dolo than it is to, you know, be in partnership and do the, you know, Batman, Robin thing or whatever, Justice League. So I, that's what I think happened there. Now, this is amazing for initialized LPS. Now you'd say why, why would it be great? Yes. So let's say you were a basketball team, and Steve Kerr left. And Steve Kerr left to become the coach of the greatest, you know, college team, you know, with the greatest recruits, I don't know if that's Duke or Georgetown or whoever. Well, now you got to funnel that great talent to the team. Right. And so that's what's happening here. Gary Tan is going to be able to whisper to the initialized founders. And look over here, and look over here. and do the interest. Now, this is the other thing, no conflict, no interest. There has been this thing that like why sees a level playing field and the VCs who come to demo day, everybody gets first shot at the startups, completely false. The truth is, I know this because I've seen it up close and personal, the best companies don't go to demo day, the best companies close their rounds before demo day. Now why commerce says please don't close your rounds before demo day, please don't start raising funding till demo day. you're a top company, and you're in week two, and you meet Mark and Jason or rule of both, I may make you an offer. Are you not taking it? Of course you're taking it. So the whole name of the game is to meet the YC founders before demo day. Who gets to do that? Who knows who's in it? The people in the orbit of YC. So it's been known for a long time that YC alumni, you know, founders, etc, like an Alexis or whoever, Justin Kahn, whoever, they get first shot at these companies. And, you know, Ron Conway, who's worked harder than any angel in the history of Silicon Valley gets first shot at these companies, and they'll clay or, you know, Sam Altman, famously, so they cherry pick them, they'll say they don't, but, you know, of course, they do no conflict, no interest, and it's life is not fair. And certainly getting an edge in investing is the whole point of the game. So if you're going to Y Combinator, you're basically playing poker where the four aces have been taken out of the deck. So if there are 52 cards, I would say the top 5% of the companies 10% of the companies have already been picked off. So if you're okay, sorting through the rest, as your strategy, fine, but some people that's why they also don't go because they feel like they've been cherry picked Gary tan will be able to cherry pick as he should be able to great companies for initialized and he's an LP and initialized and he'll have his carry still. So it's frickin fantastic. Those LPs if I was an LP, I would be overjoyed. This would be as if imagine there was a position that was you're in charge of recruiting for the top 30 colleges. That's more the analogy. It's not even like one college, right? So he gets to see the sorting and who gets accepted. who did really well, and then who progresses really well. And then all the people running the pods over there, he gets to read the reports of who the top companies are in each pod. And then he gets to say, introduce me the top, you know, if there's 200 people per class, and there are 10 pods of 20. I'm just making those numbers up. I don't know exactly how they they they separate the pods. He just say, Yes, I mean, I want to meet on Tuesday with the top two from each pot, I want to meet those 40 on Monday and Tuesday, pick up the phone and or he just tells them in the meeting, you should meet my partners over here. Would you like an intro? Great. So no conflict, no interest.
### Human: What is it called Apple one or something?### Assistant: Maybe it's Apple one. Yeah. So little big details.com is a really cool design inspiration site. So this is I kind of stole the name from them. I'm calling it a little big things. It's people talk about this all the time in product design. So it's not exactly their idea. But you can go to little big details and see how UX designers focus on little details. This is kind of tangentially related. But I was going through Apple News, which is great, and getting better. And you know how I like to use these third party software is to listen, I use third party software to listen to articles, because I like to go for a walk in the morning. And I got you in on that. And we use a couple of different pieces of software for it. I wouldn't say which one. But we've used three or four different ones. And sometimes we'll get a PDF. of an early copy of a book. And I'll take it and they don't have the audio book out. And I'll run it through this audio software so I can listen to it. Anyway, put it all aside. I was on Apple News. So I noticed between stories, you know, when you're on your Apple News, you switch left and right. And then I noticed that some of these had a little note, and we'll see it come up in a second. There it is. Boom. So here is the untold story of the Biden family report of reporter at large. And at the top, it says play the story. And I hit play. It's a beautiful voiceover. We know like really like done NPR style. published in the print issue of the new yorker this isn't a computer no this is beautiful story of the president's family oh that's so i'm like whoa where did that come from and i i started whipping through and i found like three or four of them never heard an announcement about this. I didn't see it at a keynote. I don't know if I'm in the testing group. But the two details I want to point out here is just how powerful that is to get your news read to you. Now who's responsible for that? Is this a third party company? New York Times had bought a third party company that was doing this exact business called autumn that actually I tried to invest in and reach out to the founder. But they got sold really quickly. And I think they were just doing audio versions of you know, long reads Molly, so it could be a third party like that, or Apple, I think maybe started this program and is asking people to do it. And then just linking to it, this could change everything. What an incredible business model this could be, you know, in terms of getting people to pay for stuff. And I noticed other websites are doing this on their own. The Wall Street Journal seems to be doing some stories. I don't know if you've gone to a Wall Street Journal story and said seen playlist story. I have seen that. Yeah. Yeah. So but now to see it in Apple News is pretty incredible. I think Apple News has a chance of becoming like the the one and only newsreader, there were so many newsreaders, I had an app for newsreading for inside, I invested in circa, which was very cool. There was a whole swath of these smarter news tried it in the US. They're an incredible one from Japan and China. So in China, Japan, Korea, they have news apps that are social. So instead of going to Twitter or Facebook and getting news, you go to a news app, and then you put social underneath it. that never happened here. But I think Apple's got a shot here of having something very special. And then the final question is, Apple's building quite an interesting ad business with their search, you do a spotlight search, you see some ads, you do an app store search, you see some ads, those ads used to be on Facebook and Google. Now you see them in the app store. But swiping between stories, there's ads now, who gets the money for that? If it was between a Wall Street Journal story, and a verge story with the Wall Street Journal get the ad with the verge get the ad or would neither get the ad revenue where they each get a third and Apple gets a third. This is like, you know, when a podcast player tries to insert ads into your podcast, that's no good, right? No bueno. Right. But if they put it after your show, or before your show, they can't do it before you have to start with them. But at the end of the show, they will play an ad, I believe between podcasts on Spotify, I need to get clarification.
### Human: One of the companies that I work with is called Twine. And they just launched on Zoom. And what they do is they facilitate really fast networking sessions across a team. So you can take 100 people, load them into Twine, and they basically enable really quick breakout rooms, high quality breakout rooms between individuals and a bunch of metrics. And the best networkers in the old days were the people that got together and got coffee together. And they're constantly reaching out to people in their office and outside their office to figure out how to get together with them on a regular basis, like the VC job. And now I think, with tools like Twine, I think you can have these ways to constantly get people to remember that they have these coworkers and give them a little bit of time together and give them the ability to engage with each other. And I think that's going to be the sort of like the best networkers of the next generation are going to be the people who figure out how to do that really well.### Assistant: So basically, I'm looking at the website here for twine.nyc. If you want to go check it out yourself. It's basically like trying to recreate the water cooler movement moments. So they and I've seen like a bunch of like little integrations, and you know, apps in the slap directory for this, but they're using slack as well for this, which is, hey, we're going to figure out how to randomly put people together. Hey, what's your favorite ice cream or tell me about, you know, your hobbies kind of thing. And that builds fabric, and hopefully that fabric then when you're working together as a team, will keep you more in sync. This is why VCs would do all this kumbaya nonsense. And like, if you wanted to like work at a VC firm, I remember like, I don't know, you know, Tony Conrad, or these, you know, the, was it Tony? You know, like the True Ventures guys would go on these like long walks with their founders and stuff like that. You know, everybody's got to go for a walk, they got to go for a hike, whatever it is. And it's just like, okay, a little too much kumbaya for me. But it is nice to know. Yeah, people got kids what they do. And this kind of stuff seems Yeah, really well designed. And for five bucks a user per month, 60 bucks a year. If you have 10 employees, and you spent 600 bucks on this, who cares? Like, I mean, that's what you would spend on one dinner. So one of the things I love about SaaS software, If you're in a remote startup, you need to sign up for Notion. We use it every day. We love it. We run the whole company off of it. We have some amazing internal tools. We built a database inside of Notion of all the startups that we interact with. It's basically our deal flow CRM. Notion is not just like a wiki. It has all of these database functions that I wasn't even aware of. And my team keeps surprising me with better and better features. One of them is you can just at mention somebody or you can remind yourself and set a reminder in the document. So if I'm writing notes on a startup that I met with, I can say, hey, tell me to reach out to the startup again on this date in six months, whatever hundreds of 1000s of teams worldwide are already using notion. And more and more often, I'm seeing people use notion to share their company updates. It's really just changed everything for our company. And it will change everything for your company notion.so and use the promo code twist to get $250 off their annual plan 250 bucks, that could be a couple of months free if you're growing your startup. And if you want to send me your pitch in a notion document, just add Jason at calacanis calm to it and I will go read your pitch. And who knows, maybe I'll call it out here on the pod. But that's a great way to get investors to just share a notion page with them with your deal memo. Alright, everybody, let's get back to the show. And thanks to notion you guys and gals over there. Everybody knows she's doing a great job. Let me ask a question about the downturn. Yeah, we got a downturn right now. Yeah. Many different angles we could take here. The first one I want to take with you is, do you think we're going to see people canceling and reviewing their SAS bills and saying, Okay, I'm subscribed to 12 SAS pieces of SAS software, maybe I cut these four, and I make it work with these eight. Yeah, maybe I work with the bundle, I go to the Microsoft bundle, where I don't have to pay for slack, I get teams built in, maybe, you know, I use notion or coda, and I get rid of Google Docs, or whatever I'm paying for Google Docs is pretty cheap, but know, people are going to start looking at, you know, there's okay, our software, you can do your okay ours in notion or coda, or you could just use I have one very large company, and they were going to use one of the okay, our softwares, and they're like, it's really expensive for the number of employees we have. I'm using a Google Sheet. I'm like, is that sustainable? They're like, feels like it. So I was like, okay, whatever you want to do. What are your thoughts on the sat on SAS software? Do we see some retreat in SAS spending?
### Human: Yeah.### Assistant: Okay, lots to digest here. Yeah, I've come to the conclusion, you know, people complaining about Y Combinator generally is people being jealous of the fact that Y Combinator gets to invest at a $2 million valuation and they get first bite of the apple with a lot of great startups. So if you're a VC, somebody controlling the flow of startups, you know, you might get a little jealous of it. If people say this stuff about us. Exactly. So you know, and that's part of what's informed it is when you look at how hard we've done 26 classes of our accelerator and looking at it, you know, now having done it, and I wouldn't we're nowhere near a y combinator competitor, our class is a very like bespoke thing that just for my enjoyment and the enjoyment of our team. So we only have seven people per class, like very bespoke, and we do it because we love founders and supporting them. And we did take a lot of we stole a lot of notes from Techstars and Y Combinator. And Techstars and Y Combinator started at the same time, they both get equal credit for this revolution. And really, if you look at Bill Gross, who did Idealab, he was sort of the grandfather of all this, but he originated the idea as I think the big innovation for Techstars and for Paul Graham's Y Combinator, David Cohen's tech stars was they didn't come up with the ideas. And they took a very small percentage of it. When Bill Gross ran Idealab, they actually tried to recruit me to run a company. And they were like, we'll give you 5% of the company, we own 80%. And then the investors own 15%. You know, it's like a whole different world 20 years ago. when people were doing this startup incubator model. Yeah. So you give him I give Paul Graham a lot of credit. He's in it for the right reasons to you see Paul Graham is like, I know he went off and raised his kids for a little bit, I guess, and handed over Y Combinator, but he's suddenly very involved. Again, I think he's even in the Bay Area doing meetings constantly. So I applaud Paul's interesting. Yeah. you know, resiliency here and just dedication to the brand he created. And then the totality of the number of startups we've done is essentially the size of but one of the two classes a year that they do. So you know, we're in totally different transfer, we've had people go from one to the other. People come to ours go there, people go to Y Combinator come to ours. So I don't see them a competition at all. Although like people have said to us like, Hey, should I go to yours or YCs? And I was like, you know, YCs got a much more well known brand. Ours is more intimate, flip a coin, we'll go to both. You know, we'll see on the other side, whichever one you graduate from, we'll consider investing. But it has tweaked people because Paul has always been anti VC overreach. I would say it's anti VC. But he has been very vocal about, hey, VCs are the enemy, maintain control of your company, because he had a bad experience with VCs. And he's been very upfront about that. And, you know, listen, I've been critical of VCs, too. You know, on their worst days, you know, they have been not supportive. So the other thing is, they've also, YC has been at times, not just anti investor, But maybe a little, let's say the most cynical thing I've heard people say is that they manipulate investors. And so how do you do that? We have a demo day, you put high pressure tactics on people, you have to sign or the valuations going up and teach founders how to manipulate investors. That's the back channel for the since inception, the critique, and then you know, every year, you'd have some VC says, I'm not going to go to demo a day anymore, you know, blah, blah, blah. And you know, there is some truth to the fact that there are techniques that Y Combinator teaches of, you have to put pressure on people the handshake deal, once they give you a handshake, have them sign, don't let anybody put in more than 50k. So the whole concept of a party round and these high valuations, and the safe note, the whole arc of Y Combinator has been to empower founders, and to take power away from investors that has tweaked investors.
### Human: Well, that's actually the perfect segue to into the question that I've been encountering a lot, especially, I think, because I'm, you know, investigating doing climate investing, it which is, in some cases, like it's a different category for launch, but it's also like a relatively new category. And so these kind of you know, businesses will come up with every kind of potential that's scientific, that's business model, that's creating new markets, but that is not unique to climate, right? That's always existed when Uber came along and was saying this is turns out this is a whole huge logistics platform waiting to happen. That was new. And so it's led me down this question of diligence and research and how much research into understand, you know, I mean, there's sort of the basics, like, is this science real? Yes, or no. But sometimes there's like, does this market exist? Could it exist? How new is it? What are the comps? Do any of them exist? And I wonder, like, what level of research is appropriate, and also appropriate at different stages of investing? At what point? If are you like, we're hella early, we might just have to trust the founder on this.### Assistant: Yeah, it's a great question. Okay, let's separate diligence into a couple of buckets. There's a due diligence process, where you're making sure the company doesn't have any lawsuits against it, that they've done their IP assignment, that they have a cap table that they are doing accounting that the money they have in the bank is actually there. that can be done by any reasonably intelligent college graduate non college graduate who is focused and diligent. Usually there's a diligence folder, you open it up, you look at this things and the representations and you're done. Those are all checkboxes. those don't require what you're talking about, which is understanding underlying technologies or understanding market size. So let's take those two as the next two buckets. The first bucket, like I said, you could have a researcher, you can have an associate on your company, anybody in operations who worked in accounting or business operations can manage that. The second piece is understanding underlying technology. That is the job. But in different verticals, there's different levels of intensity. If we were in biotech, we would need to have PhDs in all likelihood, right? If you're in consumer software, like where I sort of, you know, got, you know, where I secured my bags, i'm a consumer guy i understand consumer i've made consumer brands before you know in gadget gave me like up close and personal looking at technology so i can hire a porter all these things really put me on a path to i can evaluate calm uber robin hood i know what products in a consumer setting will remove friction delight users. also came from me working in the restaurant business and watching like what restaurant succeeded, which didn't, I know it sounds silly, but really, the consumer experience is really what diligence there is about. So you use the product. And if after you've used 100 products, you actually can tell the difference between a world class design, Robin Hood calm, and Uber come to mind and what is everything else average design. So let's put that on site. Now we go to where you're working. All right, if it's a SAS software product in climate, well, do you really need to know much more than, you know, looking at a SAS product is a reasonably designed product and talking to the customers. Now you get into solar or, hey, we want to build kelp and bring it out to the middle of the ocean and drop it in to do carbon sequestration. know, okay, these things require a little more science knowledge, of course. And then if this is some breakthrough in solar technology, that's going to require more, I would look at each of those as an opportunity to slow down to speed up. In other words, the advantage when you're a deep tech investor, or you're in a specific vertical is how knowledgeable you are. So when you talk to founders, each subsequent founder you meet in carbon sequestration, am I pronouncing that word right? Mm hmm. you're going to be 20% smarter, right, right. So that means every three or four people you talk to in the carbon space, you're going to have doubled your knowledge, they are literally teaching you, we don't understand something just like a journalist, hey, I'm not sure I understand that you try one more time, or reading a book on it, or watching some videos, etc. And then there's, of course, talking to experts, but outsourcing that is losing the opportunity for you to be a competitive investor with other folks. So my competitive advantage in consumer and SaaS is I understand these things so well, man, I can evaluate a really good product person faster than an average VC. And for climate, you'll need to do that as well. And I would say the differences between somebody who works doing content at Huffington Post, no offense, if they're like rewriting the story from the Wall Street Journal, or the information story, you know, like some people just rewrite their work, but they didn't talk to five people to write the story. So the investigative journalist is like, okay, that's the most intense, they worked on a story for three months. then there's like people who worked on stories for two weeks and three weeks, and they talked to a bunch of sources. And then there's commenting. So you and I will comment on a story here on this week and startups. Okay, easy peasy, lemon squeezy. We know what we're talking about. But we didn't do any primary research. But then when you did how we survive, you actually went and visited places and did, you know, whatever, I don't know, five hours of interviews to get 20 minute episodes for five days of interviews.
### Human: that's gonna tell you something if it turns out to be right, or survives it.### Assistant: I don't really think they do with Yeah, the other thing you can do now with Uber, which I remember Travis talking about in the early days, and they just never got to executing is you can rent an Uber by the hour. so you know you got like an event going on yes and you're like i don't know when i'm gonna leave this party but i know it's gonna be hard to get an uber so okay i'm leaving the warriors game i just want an uber for two hours i'm gonna park them at miller and lux and when i get out after my stay i'm gonna just hit that you know good to know hit that miller and lux and get that wagyu that we get how great was that so great molly and i've gone to miller and lux twice now both both second time even better than first One fact about startups, finding engineers is time consuming and expensive. It's a pain in the neck. It's one of the hardest things you'll do as a founder. Well, if you're looking for qualified international developers without the crazy time differences, or you just want to scale without sacrificing on quality, Ravello is the answer. They are a talent platform that matches you with vetted full time remote developers in Latin America, where I have my engineers. They work in US time zones, which means your engineers can collaborate in real time. You can have them right in Slack. You can talk all day long. Plus, it's much more cost effective than hiring in the USA. You're going to get matched and vetted with candidates in just three days. And Ravello handles all the annoying stuff. Payroll, taxes, benefits, all that legal stuff, all of those regulations. They abstract that away and they let you hire internationally without the headache. Ravello's engineers are full-time and embedded in your team just like your normal employees. They're proficient in all the important stuff, AWS, Rust, Ruby, React, Python, Node.js, and more. Ravello's customers include, oh my lord, look at this list, GitHub, Foursquare, Carda, Indiegogo, and Kickstarter. Go to ravello.com slash twist and mention Twist to get 20% off your first three months. Plus, they offer a 100% risk-free 14 day trial period. If you're not satisfied, you pay nothing. So go ahead and go to r e v e l o.com slash twist and mention twist to get that 20% off the key takeaway here. It's Robin Hood is diversifying revenue. Hey payment for order flow if you don't have a lot of order flow, because the market's down and maybe people don't want to trade as much and you go from whatever 20 million monthly actives down to 12. I believe you get a little pullback in the retail sector. Yeah, you know, having some other products and other revenue streams. Absolutely fantastic. And I think this is why I had a real advantage when Robin Hood had all these troubles in the down market. And obviously, they got hit quick, because who's gonna get hit quick in a market like this crypto trading, and then maybe retail trading, stock trading, all that stuff. I said, that's not why I invested in Robin Hood as an angel. And that's not why I own the stock as a public company and J trading it. I'm just gonna hold for a decade, because I trust management. I trust Vlad. I think he's smart. I think he's gonna figure it out. So when people told me when we distributed, what are you doing, Jay cow, what do you suggest I do? I said, you have to do your own research. However, my I will tell you my thesis. I believe in the management more than I ever have. Because they're more seasoned they're battle tested. Vlad is a wartime CEO now, whatever he does for the second decade is with battle scars. He's been through the war, he really is, he's gonna make better decisions. And the same thing with Travis after getting through, you know, Uber, and now he's doing cloud kitchens, like when people go through that Steve Jobs, when he got kicked out of Apple and came back, Elon with the model three, you know, in that disaster, that almost killed the company when people go through the near death experiences in their companies, or they just get demolished. That's what makes the entrepreneur and what what makes the entrepreneur is not the upmarket and the flowers and the high fives and the IPOs and the stock records. What's gonna make Zuckerberg into a C a real CEO right now is this meta situation. If he gets out of this,
### Human: So, yeah, it's super frustrates me whenever I see, um, and most of the time I see these on tech talks, but all the people that do like social media marketing managers or whoever they are, and they just like tell you trends or like this sound is trending right now. And I'm like, Oh my God, that's going to create like such bad content. if you just regurgitate what's trending right now, rather than putting like a critical thought, or try to incorporate like your brand's voice rather than just speaking out and copying what everybody else is doing.### Assistant: Twitter's a really hard platform and I think people don't get used to that. So like Instagram and stuff, are they very repetitive? platforms. So like you win by posting a ton, basically, like just getting very consistent posts and Twitter is not like that at all. It's highly exponential. So like a viral tweet will get exponentially more than like 100 normal tweets. So you really just you should really just focus on like, like hitting home runs, if that makes sense. Like I can do 100 tweets a day. And you know, they'll get like, they'll get like, I don't know, like 1000 views each. But if I do one viral tweet in that same timeframe, it will get millions of impressions. So I think the problem is people take that strategy. A lot of brands are constantly trying to retweet and post stuff and constantly have a really good calendar schedule for content. And that's bad, actually. Face it, you're a brand. We're highly cognizant of the fact we're a brand. Our followers don't want their timeline crowded up with brand stuff. Founders are busy people and Twitter's a really useful tool, man. They gotta be checking out hiring, they gotta be checking out other stuff. So the only time we're on a founder's timeline is if we have something that we find really funny or really cool. And that's the only time that we're interrupting you. So yeah, I think that's probably the main problem with brands. It's like, stop, stop posting so much. You're a brand. So that's what I'd say. But I think it's, I think it's a, I think it's a great platform to get the hand of it as a, as a, as a company. I would say this though, like Twitter's really useful, but it's only useful for certain types of things. So it's like, I don't think every brand should go on Twitter. Like I think some should, And if you have the assets to do it, we have a lot of flexibility because we have two really fantastic marketers on the team and we can go wherever we want. But you need to, as a founder, invest in specific avenues. So Twitter was our first one because it was like, this is where 90% of our customer base is always on. Um, and now we're sort of reaching out to other sectors and sections, but yeah, just make a strategic decision. Like our drops and our Twitter strategy and everything was a highly strategic decision that we made that was like, here's where founders are the densest. So you need to look at that yourself. Like, I don't think that people should just do drops as a strategy. Like we love mischief and we had a really good game plan around how we did our drops. But the truth is marketing is like you, it's about making something fresh and if everyone's making drops, which they are now, it's like it loses the excitement. So, so I People who copy our strategy, it's like trying to copy a high-frequency hedge fund trader a week after they've made their trades. It just doesn't make sense. We're still doing drops, of course, but we're already working on other things. We're really excited about dinners for founders and just creating new types of really interesting content for people in the tech world. We're excited by longer-term structures, I think we want to productize things like the Big Tech Fellowship or founder houses. There's a ton of other things. You got to find what's next. And you got to find what fits for your brand. We were in a situation where we didn't want to talk about our product publicly for seven months. And I think a lot of startups will just not market at all. But we were like, we're going to still have fun. So we were the class clowns of the tech world. We were interacting with founders. We built this founder brand. And then we launched our product. And we told everyone what we were. You got to strategize for yourself. So I think it's fine to not do marketing if you don't have the resources for it. It's not always the best investment. We could, and we did it really well. And so it was an amazing investment. It got us a lot of hires. It got us connected with amazing investors. And it put us in touch mainly, most importantly, with a bunch of founders. But yeah, I think it comes from a strategic place. Figure out who you're trying to reach, and then figure out a fresh and exciting way to reach them. And don't just copy what people tell you on marketing.
### Human: Those are slides.### Assistant: Those are slides Yeah, I'm cool with it. If you want to wear slides, I don't think he's any less intelligent for wearing slides I know some brilliant people who wear slides and dress like they're going to the gym or like going to the pool at a the four seasons i'm here for it it's totally fine smart people can dress casual that's just a dumb uh twitter meme to be like hey trust a guy who's wearing slides and shorts but the truth is i i mean obviously i do get it i understand that the feds printing a lot of money yeah and i understand his bet i think i don't think it's an unreasonable bet but And I actually do believe that he is sincere. So I'll just say all those things. I believe it's, it's a fine bet to make. It's a reasonable bet to make on Bitcoin in a time of depletion. I don't know if I would make it but he certainly is allowed to I believe he's allowed to pump the bet. And then I believe he's sincere that he thinks he's helping people all of those things. I take him at his word. I literally take apology at his word. He's trying to help people. But I also think should disclose how many Bitcoin he has, which is a little bit of a safety risk, but he should say I am over 20% of my net worth in Bitcoin. So that would be a way for him to let people know disclaimer, or transparency. I have 25% of my net worth in Bitcoin. Now there is a little bit of a security thing for him to say his net worth, or to say that he's got a lot of Bitcoin because then, you know, some Russian You know chinese whoever you know like crazy hackers could then try to hack him to get his bitcoin so i do think there is a little bit of security risk for him. But there's no security risk to say i have a double digit percentage of my net worth in bitcoin just so you know i have made my bitcoin that. I made my bitcoin that's a ten thousand twenty thousand any dollars above the way to say it. I bought a lot of Bitcoin at an average price of 10,000. I'm in the black on Bitcoin. That would be really great. I think if he did that, but I don't have any problem with it. And we actually need people placing bets. We need people discussing these issues, because I actually think I'm being honest, that the Fed doesn't understand what's going on here, or they're not doing a great job. And I think some of the banks are taking too much risk. And I think we have a broken system where they're making decisions on outdated data, and they're oversteering one way or the other. So they oversteered by printing too much money. Then they ignored increasing the rates and they thought inflation was transitory. And now I think they're raising rates too fast, and they should go at a slower pace. So I think like, and I'm not an expert on this, but it's pretty obvious that those three mistakes were made too much money was printed. They waited too long to raise rates, and they got it wrong on inflation. And now they're going too fast. And going too fast breaks things. And what did it break? It broke the banking system. And now we have to play cleanup. So I think going pausing we're doing you know maybe less rates let's raises just saying hey for three months we're gonna just let things settle and assess. know, what's happening in the ecosystem in the in the economy. But what I've learned over this year and a half, you know, as being an adult living through my third boom, bust cycle, and maybe having a lot more experience and a lot more time to consider these things and a lot more money to work in the system is that macro is very hard. I think there might only be micro in the world, which is to say people make transactions based on their best interests. And then there are people who try to interpret those, like the cumulative nature of all of those the cumulative output of all of those microtransactions to make macro predictions. And it's incredibly hard to make those macro predictions. Some things are obvious, if you raise rates, you know, it's going to cause inflation to go down, it's going to cause consumption go down. But you know, People are still trying to figure out what's going on with employment as well one thing and they can't seem to figure it out. They're trying to figure out the real estate market. They're having a hard time figuring that out. So I think macro is hard is what I've come to the conclusion.
### Human: The goal of this is to make that cannabinoid or CBD, whatever, in order to not have to plant a bunch of plants.### Assistant: All right, so I'll give you one I like. So there's a company called Kronos up in Canada. It's a Canadian cannabis company. Altria owns like half of this company. And the way that you make cannabis products today is you grow cannabis plants. And so these guys, they got a giant greenhouse up there in Canada and all this infrastructure. And you have to do this whole elaborate thing with the lighting and all this stuff to make this little flower, the bud. And then from that, you're going to extract these cannabinoids that go into all kinds of different things, edibles, whatever. All right. Well, that's, you know, those cannabinoids are made with biology. So, just to state the obvious, there is code inside the cannabis plant that defines the little proteins, which are like basically little pieces of nanotechnology that are little chemists putting together the molecules that make like CBD, for example. Okay. And so, the plant builds that molecule using proteins encoded in the code of the plant. So you as the cell programmer who's been given the job of, hey, could we instead of having to grow all those plants, run like a brewery, like you would use to brew beer, all right, and we're going to take brewer's yeast, and we're going to have it make the CBD. And we're going to do it by basically taking the code that we learned from the plant and moving it into the yeast and having it read the code, because it's cheaper to run a brewery than to have this giant greenhouse and all this stuff to make this little bit of oil. Okay. And so that's your spec. How do you do it? All right, number one, look in the plant and find the part of the genome that produces those cannabinoids. And so there's like, you know, call it six or seven genes that are needed. All right. Now, the first thing you might do is just cut and paste it. Cool. Grab it, print it, right? Which by the way, like DNA printing literally means I'm like ATCGGG. I'm typing my computer here. Hit print. And then out of a machine behind me or from a company like Twist Biosciences out in California will come the piece of DNA you asked for. Alright, so you get exactly you like, you read the DNA using DNA genomics, you found the code, you put it in the computer, you hit print, now you got it. And you open the genome of the yeast. So you might have heard of tools like CRISPR, right? CRISPR is basically a tool to cut a genome at a certain location and open it. So you open it up, and then you put in that DNA you just printed. And now you grow it in a cell and guess what it does? Jack, nothing, it doesn't work. Okay, right. So because you can't just cut and paste it in from the plan, of course, that's not gonna work, right? So what do you have to do? Just like a computer programmer would, you gotta debug that code. So you're gonna go and you're gonna look and you're gonna say, all right, is the first gene the problem? The second gene the problem? The third, there's six of them, you know, what's one's the issue? And you're gonna use sophisticated like analytical equipment to like rip that cell open and look at what's being made and you're like, oh, the third gene is the problem. Okay, let's fix it. So you're going to go and look in these big genome databases, there's like big public genome databases, you could you could log on to it right now, it's called GenBank. And you'll put in that sequence, you'll say, hey, find me sequences that look like this from out in the wide world of nature. And you'll find 1000 other versions of gene number three, put them in the computer, hit print, they'll come out, you'll put all those into yeast, and you'll see that version number 507 fix your problem. Okay, so now Gene 3 is fixed. But guess what? Gene 4 is screwed up. And you're going to go through that process, just like a programmer would, iterating through ultimately, in our case, hundreds of thousands of designs, until you finally make one that just like Kronos announced last week, they're doing now commercial production of CBG. But that hits what they want to hit to bring it to market. And so that's an example of a cell programming project for a customer. And that's one scope. Yeah.
### Human: You did a very good job. People really struggle with the pronunciation there, so thank you.### Assistant: Hey, welcome to this week in startups. It's your boy Jason Calacanis here in the middle of The pandemic, it's Friday, May 1st, 2020. We found out that our pandemic stay-at-home order here in the Bay Area will be extended through the month of May, and we may get back to some normalcy in June. This has been, I think I started my quarantine on the 12th of March, so all of April, almost all of March, and now almost all of June, so this is going to wind up being a 10-week-plus quarantine for me and I'll be honest, not easy for me because I like people and I like being out there and I hate not going out and doing things. And so it's been particularly challenging for me, but it's been really nice to connect with all of you and do this podcast. And it's made me appreciate the podcast and the community even more. I mean, I always just love the fact that some of you stop me on the street or see me at a conference or drop me an email or write a review on iTunes and tell me that the show or some guest inspired you or you learned something from it or it just kept you entertained on some hike or something. Boy, you know, that is something as a performer or a host of a show that really fills your bucket and charges your batteries. But I wasn't prepared for the amount of warmth, love, and camaraderie I felt when we started our Slack channel. And I just want to thank everybody for showing up in the Slack and talking to me. And a lot of you are like, wow, it's amazing that you responded. It's amazing you showed up. And I appreciate it. I appreciate all you for listening to the podcast and showing up for me. This is a two-way street. This is how I get my energy. This is how I get my motivation in life is doing the show. And so I think when these crises happen, you do a little self-reflection. You look at your work. You look at your life. You look at your friendships. And boy, am I a blessed individual. But I may have taken for granted the audience of This Week in Startups because I don't see you all the time, right? You just download from some RSS feed, some MP3 file, you listen to it. And you're sometimes mistaken as a podcaster because you see a bunch of links, you see a bunch of metrics and stats. A couple thousand views here, tens of thousands of you here, a couple hundred thousand views overall. But you forget each of those views is a human. And if you wanna join those humans, you go to thisweekinstartups.com slash slack, and you join. And a community has formed, over 20,000 founders in there. And we did an AMA or two, and we have book club, we just finished our first book. And I have to tell you, The Slack channel, as good as this podcast has been over a thousand episodes, after two weeks the Slack channel I think is as valuable and in some cases people might be getting more value from that than the actual podcast. People have told me they've made business contacts, they've made friends. They've had intelligent conversations. They've gotten great advice. And it's not me. It's you. It's all of you as a community. And so I'm just absolutely enthralled. And I can't wait when I click on the icon in my Slack to see what y'all are talking about in there. Whether it's the book channel, the small wins channel, or I'm going to kick ass today channel. Sometimes I pop into the Australian or Chicago channels and just say hi to friends. London, big presence in London, the growth hacking channel, all this stuff is just great. And I was very concerned that this podcast would struggle because I thought, God, in order to have a good podcast, I got to look into the eyes of the guest. But we haven't missed a beat. team here has done a great job of moving this to virtual. And today's guest has a company and a lot of experience in the virtual. He worked at Google. He worked with my friend Evan Williams, and my other friend Biz Stone over at Medium, which is called Obvious Corporation. Now he's got his own company called Range.co. No M there. It's arrange.co, the great CO domain, like I use for launch.co. And he's the CEO and co-founder. His name is Daniel Pupius. Daniel, welcome to the program. And how did I do butchering your name?
### Human: Yeah, I think that's true. I think it's a pretty nuanced and good take. Jason, what are your thoughts?### Assistant: Finally, the SEC is proactively educating and discussing very complex issues with the American public. This is fantastic. So I am very pleased to see the two OG crypto peeps that we have here, Mr. Madra and Mr. Lingham. saying they like this video, I think that this is what the SEC needs to do. This is targeted at consumers. So although it's a little goofy, cutting the steak into three pieces and using a stock image, you know, and making it like a tick tock video. Well, that's how I love people consume. And those are the people who are attracted to this. And the SEC is meeting consumers where they are. We said before, hey, what is the mandate of the SEC? And you read Molly, from their website, protect investors, maintain fair, orderly and efficient markets and facilitate capital formation. Now the last one is about, you know, what we do for a living making venture firms and syndicates and something that let's put that aside. But a fair, orderly and efficient market means, hey, people need to be educated, and protecting investors, people need to be educated, they need to understand it. And it's delightful for me to hear our OGs here are crypto G say, Yeah, that's what we need to do. Now, Does it need a new agency? I think it needs an agency to do new things. We don't need a new agency, we need an agency to do new things. And the new things this agency needs to do is sit down with crypto people and say, tell us everything. And how would you like to proceed? And then say, here is how we already do this. we can only make so many changes to this because there's this Congress and you know, the public and they get to vote on things and they get to have a say here so we can make some changes. But generally speaking, you're going to have to play by this rulebook and this rulebook changes slowly. Listen, it's 2023. Closing business-to-business deals is going to be harder this year. You know this to be true because companies, hey, they're tightening their belt. It's the year of austerity and it's the year of focus. The last thing you want to do is slow your sales team down with a lack of integrations, right? These days, business-to-business buyers expect integrations. We expect our people management tool to work seamlessly with our payroll provider. We expect our CRM to work seamlessly with our accounting software. If it doesn't, it's a huge issue. But when you start a company, integrations are brutally hard. They take a ton of time. But Merge makes them way easier. merge is the leading unified API that allows you to launch integrations in days, not quarters. Think about that all of these integrations are out there. What if you could just have boom over 150 different integrations across five different categories, human resources, information systems, ticketing, it's all just built into merge so your developers can get back to working on the important parts of your product, Merge is the leading unified API that allows you to launch integrations in days, not quarters. That's all you need to know. So here is your call to action. Merge has unlimited integrations, and they charge based on how many of your customers use these integrations. So here's what they're gonna do. They're gonna give you five linked accounts for free today at merge.dev slash twist. Again, five linked accounts for free. There's just no cost to you. Free, you know what the word free means? Free, M-E-R-G-E.dev slash twist. I've been sitting here and a lot of this comes to my own personal jealousy of crypto. And I will put that out there. Absolutely. Honestly, I am incredibly jealous that capital formation for crypto companies can be done with anonymity, with global scale, with absolutely no fees. It's extraordinary what crypto has built. And I would like to deploy that at the syndicate.com to invest in companies, I would love for everybody to send me a fraction of a Satoshi and eat some garbage NFT, whatever, I don't care how they get the money in. And I could have a million people put in $1 each and then put a million into a startup. That is my ultimate dream. The SEC is a blocker. I can't do that. I can't ask 1000 a million people for $1 without doing a, you know, a crazy, crazy SEC public filing. But the two crypto people we have on right now could have that up and running in under 30 days, probably in a week.
### Human: I mean, I don't think Microsoft is, I, I don't think Microsoft is doing anything wrong here necessarily. Right. Like it may be somewhat anti-competitive, but not illegally monopolistic. Those are, those are two distinct Yeah. Thanks. And I think what I think is so interesting about the Salesforce Slack story is that I think Salesforce screwed it up specifically. I think this is a Salesforce issue. One, they bought Slack. for a lot of money for $28 billion, based, I think, on kind of a bubble perception, right? Like, Slack is awesome, because a lot of startups use it and it's hot in Silicon Valley, like Notion, like this and that, forgetting that out in the rest of the, and they left Slack vulnerable to competition. So they forgot that out in the rest of the world, nobody is getting fired for using Microsoft. And didn't necessarily invest in making Slack the kind of thing that could get huge at the enterprise level. And then to or B, like I said earlier, failed to integrate it into their core product to shore up Salesforce itself and make Salesforce that much more indispensable. Here's the thing, I blame Benny.### Assistant: There it is. You know, they paid. If you look at the current run rate 400 million a quarter for slack. I think they paid like 17 times what they're currently making, right? 28 billion divided by 1.6 billion, I think you get to like, almost 20. It's like 17 and a half or so. So it's not the worst purchase in the world, if it keeps growing, they can grow into it, it won't be a terrible acquisition. So I wouldn't say like they caught the knife, this thing is collapsing, it's still growing, it's still an important piece of software. But this should be like a Lorne Belzer going off at Salesforce, that their culture is inefficient, or doesn't don't have an innovative enough culture here. Because in a competitive vertical like this, when you have people bundling, you got to up your game. And this is where like founders, or, you know, very rarely, a non founder can operate a founder's vision better than the founder. have two examples come to mind. Susan Wojcicki and solar with YouTube. I think they even took chat Hurley's vision, and even took it to another level because they had globalized Google already. And Chad had it right. So dick to chat. He had this incredible vision. But because Susan and solar had been part of Google going to 100 countries, they knew the potential there. They had the playbook as it were. Yeah. And then the you know, the other one is obviously Tim Cook, being able to take all the innovations that were backed up from Steve jobs, including the iPhone and the iPad, just to extraordinary innovations, and milk them, right for every penny they can make and just keep just sticks the hell out of it. I mean, he did supply chain the heck out of it. And he did look at that supply chain and say, Hey, well, what if we had our own chips? Right. And so there were some strategic decisions that I think Tim Cook was really able to do that maybe, you know, who knows if Steve Jobs would have, I mean, Steve Jobs did hire him and did empower him, but maybe Apple's performance right now is even better on a financial basis, because Tim Cook is still cutthroat about that. And I just want to say, I had a premonition, Apple is doing so amazing. I think their stocks at like a 52 week low or something crazy like that. Can we put up the Apple chart for a second here. And I've been watching the stock market, you know, bounce along the bottom. Right. I, since I did my J trading, I'm still down a bit on J trading, J trading page, if you want to, but you start looking at that one year chart for Apple, my Lord, um, you know, and then you look at the five year, um, you know, they've been flat with revenues going crazy. And so this company, man, uh, is trading at a very reasonable P here. And, um, I get the sense. that they're going to knock the ball out of the park with the headset. I think the problem with headsets is use case and fit and finish. You know how they feel? Yeah. Oh my god, those two things we've talked about this ad nauseum. And so I haven't jaded in months, because I've been watching the world come apart. I thought, Hey, listen, be good time to take a pause and see where this ends up. kind of feel like again, I thought it was a double dip recession. Here we are in the double dip, feels like things are starting to turn over, I feel like it's going to be a rough, you know, two or three more quarters of chop, maybe four, even sticking with my same prediction, six, six to eight quarters of slog, and a double dip recession. But my J trading is not that bad. If you go to J trading, I think I'm off. like, compared to the seat, if I bought an index, just to be intellectually honest here, I'd be down 2.39. And my current portfolio is down 9.7%. Now I'm investing in tech, I believe tax at a bottom and so I'm trailing the market by seven points. I'm okay with it. And Of course, the things that I'm up on are the things that I bought last. So, you know, I think it's an issue of timing, but the meta Netflix, Adobe, Shopify trades have been great. My Amazon trades were a little rough.
### Human: I mean, look, I'm going to say something that's going to piss off all the crypto bros and they're going to come chase after me like they always do. Here comes your ad mentions. Trigger warning guys, you should turn off the stream because you're going to get mad at me. We've got laser eyes. You're all so dead. Like basically my thesis, and I've been wrong since crypto, I looked at it when it was like 55 cents. So at this point, I'm like 100,000 X wrong. So like, don't believe a word I say, but here's why you're dead. So I believe that the Chinese government is going to roll out a centralized digital. They have right now, but they're going to really roll out a centralized digital coin that works just like Bitcoin. So basically you have a secret key and basically you have a public key and you're going to be able to move money around using like the same innovations that are in the entire crypto ecosystem. But instead of being distributed, they're going to centralize it. And from from a from a strategic perspective, it's like unbelievably powerful because they're going to say, hey, you know how the U.S. dollar has all these KYC's and regulations and you have to go through all these banks. Not if you want to basically use our coin, you can do whatever the hell you want. It's got to go through our database, though, so we get to see everything. But if you're a drug dealer and you want to move some money around, we don't care. And so then you can imagine a world where remittances and global money movement across a single managed coin that is going to hold its value and isn't going to fluctuate up and down and isn't being manipulated by a bunch of people like tether is suddenly a superpower. And the Chinese government is in a position to basically like become the next global reserve currency because they will just everyone will use their currency. At which point the US government slowly and stupidly will do the same thing. At which point crypto as this sort of like decentralized libertarian wet dream suddenly becomes a very, very small part of the global currency movements. So it's the old sort of Microsoft world. They're going to embrace your innovations, they're going to extend their capabilities using your innovations, and then they are going to extinguish you, the lovely crypto people.### Assistant: It's the long hug. It's a long hug of it's an embracing long hug. We love your innovations. And now we will like a boa constrictor. Take the life out of you every breath is going to be your demise. I mean, it really is. a sinister plan. And the and I think actually, probably the most likely plan they kicked out if you just look at their behavior. Yeah, I always say like, just look at the behavior. They kicked out all of this, all the Bitcoin mining, they made Bitcoin illegal. They're tightening everything up, they experimented with their digital one. And there's a remedy, whatever it is, and they're if your premise is perfect, which is, hey, we don't care if you're funding terror, we don't care what you're doing. We just want to be the global supply. Yeah, then. Oh, yeah. By the way, you felt like you got your money stolen? Yeah. And you know, somebody in the Chinese government? Yeah, we can reverse that transaction for you. Because we control it, right? centralized and not being able to reverse things is a pretty cool feature. Yeah. unless you're a powerful person, and you want it reversed, and you got a you know, Xi Jinping will take your phone call now you could flip those things. It's a really interesting point. And then I think everything goes in the United States goes regulated, the US reserve currency comes out. And then they just say to anybody who's doing anything in crypto, either use the United States dollars, anything else is going to have a 10% tax on it coming in coming out of it, selling a trading or whatever, they can pick whatever tax they want, they can pick whatever regulation they want, and they will strangle anonymous decentralized money, if they want to, they'll, they'll strangle it through regulation and taxation doesn't mean it goes away, you can still use BitTorrent, you can still I'm sure use, you know, any of those peer to peer stealing file networks, whatever. But why would you bother if you can use Spotify and Netflix and Disney and get 4k and not have to deal with that? Yep. And that's really I think the end game here. So I would I'm with Zach. I mean, why bother buying this stuff if you really love crypto, and you know the code and you know the code base and you can evaluate the technology and you want to dabble in it? Sure, sure. But I don't think it's the casual thing to invest in. Live from YouTube hoda asks, I just have a question about some of the reasons you may find in due diligence that makes you avoid investing in a startup? Great question. We do serious diligence these days. I'll tell you some of the things that are very quick for us. If what the founder told us in the meetings doesn't match what we find in diligence, well, that's kind of lying or stretching the truth. We'll often have people tell us they have one amount of revenue, and that it's not what we see, or was exaggerated in some way. Then if we see accounting problems where they're doing cash based accounting, instead of accrual, they don't have good books, and they don't have control over their books. That's a problem if they have lawsuits pending, and they haven't been able to resolve them if they're major. That's could be problematic. And then most of all, I think, you know, the number one thing is we find problems on the cap tables. And the problems could be they gave 50% of the company to a development shop. over four iterations of their product for 10 to 15% each time, because it was 250 k worth of work, and they did it for free. And then all of a sudden, you gave a million dollars of your equity, which was half the company. And now you lost control of your company, then nobody else can invest in it. Or you have four founders, all four got all 25% given to them day one, and two of them never worked at the company past month one. Now you got half the cap tables dead money. So cap table problems are always problematic. You really want to have good books, great accounting, great IP assignment, everybody signed over their assignment, great vesting, really clean cap table vesting means all the founders get their shares over four years, as opposed to just getting them day one, and then somebody quits and they get all their shares for free. Those are the red flags that we see most often. What do you see, Zach?
### Human: And they need to pay for something, probably. I mean, you look at you look at the information and Axios, which has like a very expensive, you know, subscription tier for newsletters. Yeah, it's the companies, I think the media companies that have figured out how to make other companies pay expensive subscriptions, as part of work, are the ones who I think are going to be able to pull through this downturn.### Assistant: Listen, lots of founders are loosey-goosey with their personal phone numbers. They put it on their company documents, they use it on sales calls, email footers, it's all over the place. What happens if that salesperson leaves the company and now people are calling and that person's gone on? Maybe they went to a competitor and now they're using their personal phone number to get sales from previous emails that they sent under your email address. But you will clean up all this mess with Open Phone. They help you create a business phone number for you and every member of your team. And it works through an app on your smartphone or desktop. You pick a number. You install the app. Bada bing. You're done. That's it. No need to carry two phones like back in the day. And by the way, we can tell you Open Phone is amazing because our sales team uses it every day. I kid you not. We use it every day. That's why we're such fans of this. Open Phone. is already super affordable, a starting price of just $10 a month. Twist listeners can get an extra 20% off any plan for your first six months by signing up at openphone.com slash twist. And if you have an existing phone number with another service, no problem. Open phone will port them over for free. So head over to o p e n p h o n e.com slash twist. And listen, we get credit for you using the service, you're going to love it. And you're going to save 20%. Okay, great deal for everybody. I've come to some conclusions about the media space. Yeah, you know, in my career, because we both spent our careers there. It's not a venture investment. Yeah, it's not venture investable. But content is king, and content is super important. So the place I've come to, and you might see it in my behavior is media plus something. Okay, so there's two businesses I am CEO of right now inside and launch. And if you look at both of them, it's media plus something Molly in launches case, what is it media plus one plus investing? Okay, very good. Correct answer. So the media business like Oh, crap, what's happening? The media business helps the investment business and the investment business, of course, informs what we make here every day because you and I work with a team of 21 people looking at startups. So you and I become super smart about this. Look at your first six months, we were talking with Brad Gerstner, bestie number five, and he was just over the moon at watching how much you're learning. And so we share that with the audience. Now we look at inside.com inside.com has over 4 million in revenue, and we've been profitable, I think, six or seven of the last eight quarters, we've got over $2 million in cash, business is doing great, email newsletters and events making money, but it is now a media business plus something. what's the plus something that I added in the last couple of months, a social network. Okay, so here we go, folks, if you this is what this is just J cows observation. Yeah, media businesses are great. People love media, people love content. It's super engaging. It's top of the funnel. But you need something else. And you need something that scales. So inside.com now has profiles, it's got a social network, and it's got a social news product. And next week, we're going to drop the jobs. So you will be able to on inside, go to inside.com slash crypto slash jobs, and post a job for free, or browse jobs. And we added questions. So now you can post, you can add friends like a social network, you can post questions, you can post a news story, comment on any story, and you'll be able to post jobs. So you start looking at that it starts looking like Reddit, and LinkedIn, right. And so that was my intent. Because Reddit started doing content, they started professionalizing their AMA department, and LinkedIn has tried a couple of times to do more content. So my thinking is, if you're great at content, we'll build some other business and attach a high scale business to it. And for BuzzFeed, what would be a great high scale business, Molly, if we were to think out loud here, what could you add to BuzzFeed with this very popular audience of media savvy coastal elites, perhaps young people who like listicles, maybe it's very millennial driven, what could you add to that?
### Human: Yeah, I think, I mean, I think that's a, it's a great question. It's, it's one that we've thought about a lot. Um, the reality is these institutions, they're, they're sort of balance sheet rich and income poor, right? Um, so anything that they, they can do to raise capital from their, their balance sheet or effectively their art, um, I think they're interested in doing. So it is, it is something that we've thought about. We've had, um, frankly, very small institutions approach us about that.### Assistant: Okay. I'm going to ask you a question that I want you to think about when we throw a commercial. We'll call this a cliffhanger, okay? It's a little tease here. Why wouldn't a institution like MoMA or the Louvre securitize the Mona Lisa for a billion dollars and use it to buy a billion dollars in new art under the condition that it must live forever in the Louvre? When we get back on this week in Stardust. Hey, everybody, I want to tell you about Republic's new product. It's really exciting. You know Republic because a lot of the companies I invest in will go and do an equity crowdfunding raise on Republic. And I know Ken over there and Chuck over there, we've invested in a ton of companies together. And they have something new. It's called note. And it's the Republic note. And you can see that at republic.co slash note. Now, As I've said many times, I believe that angel investing is a great thing for society and that everybody should have at least the opportunity to do that. And the team at Republic has launched this new, very unique profit sharing security token. And this lets investors share in the upside of companies that raise money on Republic. And Republic has over 700,000 members now. So when a company chooses to raise money on the Republic platform, Republic receives an investment, basically upside potential in that company. We all know how that works, or you should. Well, if they do have an exit, then they're going to distribute some or all of that cash to the Republic core. That's the technology hub of Republic. And they're going to give that back to the holders of the Republic note. Well, more than 200 companies have already raised money on Republic using regulation crowdfunding. And one of our companies, Balloon, which went through our accelerator and that we syndicated and we put money in, Republic fell in love with that company as well. And they put some money in So we've done business with them before, and we love the team over there. They're really in it for the right reasons. And right now, on the accredited side, they've raised money for companies like Robinhood, Carta, and Relativity Space. These are names you've heard of. For now, it's only accredited investors, but non-accredited investors. can also right now make a reservation and reserve their spot for, you know, if they are able to do a public sale of these using Regulation A, which I have a sense that they're going to do at some point. So whether you're accredited or non-accredited, I think it's worth checking out at republic.co slash note. And as always, terms and conditions do apply. Congratulations to Chuck and Ken. I know you worked really hard on this for a couple of years now. and it's great to see it come to fruition. And I'm always super open to new ways to fund these companies and new ways for people to participate in the funding of companies. And so a great job getting it launched and I will be participating and you should check it out. I can't tell you to participate, but I can tell you, you should check it out and get educated. Republic.co slash note. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. All right, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. I'm your host, Jason Calacanis. My guest today is Scott Lynn of masterworks.io very cool company. And when we left our hero Scott, for commercial break, I gave the cliffhanger, which is if you if you succeed, and it feels like you're on your way to succeeding, I know you've got like over 50,000 investors on the platform, and you've done now, again, close to two dozen pieces of art. Eventually, if you build the stock exchange for art, which I think you're on your way, you may be 1% of the way, but I think you're on your way. Why wouldn't MoMA or the Louvre start putting paintings on or pieces of art on masterworks.io or another platform, whatever, or securitizing them under the condition that they live where they live, because custodia, nobody wants these things to be in a, you know, a closet somewhere, they should be enjoyed. Could you see a world in which the Mona Lisa was securitized and people could trade shares in the Mona Lisa and then they could build another Louvre based on you know, the Mona Lisa or put, you know, a million French students into art class for the next 50 years to create the next great artists.
### Human: Definitely. It's fascinating. And now I want to have part two. Dr. Benjamin Rappaport is co-founder and chief science officer at Precision Neuroscience. Your present really is our future. It's fascinating world you live in.### Assistant: That is a great set of questions, and it's not a seven-minute discussion. I'm not going to answer it, exactly. So please invite me back. I would love to. But no, it's a great question. It's absolutely critical, and I'll try to address it in a couple of minutes. But that question gets at some deep aspects of how medical device development works in the United States and in the world, and in what medical device what the medical device industry is going to look like in the years ahead. And, you know, to date, really, there is almost no example of implantable medical technology that really depends on microfabricated sensors and actuators. almost all medical devices today are artisanally finished, meaning human hands are met are making and finishing the devices. So unlike the semiconductor industry, which has all of the highly expensive infrastructure that you mentioned, MedTech has not relied on that today. I think that is going to change in the coming years. Certainly, the neural interfaces industry is facing that, and we are driving some aspects of that change. Meaning the sensors that we're developing do require microfabrication. They don't require the kinds of single digit nanometer resolution that advanced semiconductor manufacture requires today. But nevertheless, they require similar processes. And so we are seeing a need for advanced manufacture in medical technology. And to me, that's actually very exciting. But also, it does, of course, come with a number of considerations, including investment dollars for how to scale up that manufacture. But the question of how much it costs to manufacture the device and, and how that cost is born by insurers and so on, is a good one. I can say that these devices I think will be more expensive than the current generation of implantable neural devices like deep brain stimulators, then pacemakers, then cochlear implants and so on, but probably not 10x. And if you think about uh the kind of medical economics of what we're trying to do it's easy to understand how it makes sense what we're really trying to do with these devices is to enable uh say a young quadriplegic patient who may be 30 years old and have you know, 50 years of life ahead of them. And, you know, 35 of them may be in the workplace. We want those those patients to be able to have a level of independence and dignity and financial self sufficiency, and the ability to go back to work if they want to. And if you think about the change that that that is possible, we firmly believe that that is possible. We're not really that far away actually from enabling that. transformation. But if you think about the metal economics there, it's not a hard case to make. You're taking somebody who right now, forget about that we need to do it as a society. I mean, just that that's just a given. Okay. But but from an economic standpoint, You're taking people whose medical care is largely borne by disability insurance and state-run programs and things like that, and in the workplace, they pay for commercial insurance. So the impact of that economically on the medical system is a completely sensible model. So even if the devices are several times more expensive than current generation devices, the impact on the system as a whole will pay for itself. And I will also say that Most likely, I mean, almost certainly, we're going to look we're looking at a slightly certainly hope we're looking at a different model in the years ahead. There has been a shift in the medical device medical technology industry. towards more software as a service software as a medical device models. And a lot of the functionality, we spent a lot of time talking about the material science and the electronics and so on. And we talked a little bit about the computation involved, but a lot of the functionality over the years will come well after the implant, as software upgrades are pushed to the device. The ability to push software upgrades and enhance functionality will continue for years and years after the initial implant. One of the things that we say at Precision is that you know, every patient should, should the data that is generated by every patient should provide some benefit to the data to every other patient's care that comes after, you know, the every patient should be helping every patient that comes after them. And machine learning does make that possible. You know, data science today makes that possible. And so But that will also be part of the economic model. You know, the software upgrades will not be free. And but also, you know, people will only be paying for for functionality that benefits them. Yeah. So I hope that answers your question in a nutshell.
### Human: Yeah. I would love to miss writing, but we do a daily podcast and I'm trying to run this climate syndicate. So like, right. I'm not missing anything except sleep right now. But no, I do actually. And it's funny because I've got to like, I'm like, I have a piece inside me that wants to come out and there's just not the five minutes or the place to put it. So the newsletter is just a is a great outlet. It's called Bloomberg Green, by the way. I don't think we said how did you get hooked up with Voyager Ventures? Like how did that we've all got our sort of origin story. in terms of the arrival in BC?### Assistant: Sure. So let me begin with a little qualification on that, which is that I was the chief content officer. Now I just stepped back into a role that is purely looking at the climate mostly from an externally facing perspective. So Bloomberg NEF, for reference, where I did spend 15 years, was, sorry, is a research shop, started as a startup itself in 2004, covering the very early stages of what then was emerging as clean tech. It was acquired by Bloomberg in 2009, made its way sort of through the stack of global emissions and markets related to climate. And I spent 15 years with them. I joined in 2007, one of the first hires here in the United States, took it a bit on the road. Once we got acquired, the minute that we got acquired by the shop in London, where our team was, I realized I want to move to the West Coast. So I moved from DC to the West Coast, moved from there to Hong Kong. Now back here on the East Coast, But we at Bloomberg India have to cover the whole thing. So as I said, we started really quite contained on the things that, say, a German investment bank would be asking you about in 2004, 2005. How does solar work? And as I said, it's expanded to really cover all the kind of key questions that you might have for the deepest decarbonization that's out there. after all that time, after 15 years, seeing my title, I'd kind of reached the apogee of where I was going to go within that group. And in an important way, from a product perspective, where I'd spent a lot of time and from a strategy perspective on what we're going to cover, kind of tapped out. We'd done it. We were covering everything. We were at the point where biggest companies in the world were asking us the most formative questions, and I kind of missed the game a little bit. So I took a bit of a step back. So I joined the company in a new role, a contributor role. So basically doing public writing, assisting with some of our high-level stuff, taking it on the road with some key conferences here and there. And that gave me the freedom to be able to do what I was very much interested in, as you are, which is to work with these early-stage companies after so long. It's fantastic because I've got what I would hope to think are kind of a symbiotic set of processes and priorities here. The first one is I still write every week about climate and I started off writing a little newsletter of my own devising in 2014. I remember it was 179 people exactly that I signed up for the first one. It finished last year at 175,000, and now it's going to about 220,000 people in concert with some other friends at Bloomberg. Of course, it's not just me at this point. But then the work with Voyager is a sort of fantastic add on to go with that. It's my sort of chance to get way back towards talking to the earliest stages of companies. I was listening to your interview with Greg Dalton last month, actually, and you said a couple of things that sort of made me realize that we move from this world of high production and intense focus across sometimes months and years to put things together. And now we kind of have to unwind that and take our insights and our ability to recognize genius and brilliance back down to the level of like a person with a PowerPoint deck. And it's really, really fascinating. It's quite a bit of a learning curve for me. In many ways, it's kind of like an unlearning to an extent of the sort of skills that you put in place for working with big organization, dealing with other big organizations for such a long time. Yeah. And now you're back to how do I judge two students coming out of a lab? How do I also talk to somebody who might have spent 30 years doing this as a practitioner, but within the belly of a very big industrial beast for a long time? So, it's really refreshing. I'm doing these things both in parallel. do writing with Voyager. I do sit in on conversations where I might help troubleshoot something with a portfolio company or help a prospective investment to kind of see where the market opportunity might be. And then I'm writing every week. I don't know if you miss writing, but I know I would miss writing. I find it incredibly satisfying as a way to sort of shape my thoughts over time. And also to keep me honest, you're doing your work in public.
### Human: Great. The next question that I wanted to touch on that a lot of people wanted to talk about is how do you feel about managing your own psychology as an investor in this kind of macroeconomic situation and what do you focus on yourself to be able to not fall into the traps that you see a lot of other people falling into?### Assistant: Yeah, so I believe in a core set of principles around the companies I invest in. And I am willing to evolve those principles, but I think some of them are quite fundamental, and they work for me. Second, and we can go into what those principles are, but I have a very clearly defined set of principles writing the book angel helped me codify those and then and then teaching this angel University course every couple of months helps me stay sharp in that way. So I really examine my process. So I am obsessed with process. And so for the last couple of months coming into this, I said, What are the things about the process that we can evolve that we can refine. And I went on a bit of, you know, a mission to make everybody on my team, both at inside.com and launch the two companies I run, but they're separate entities, to be 5% to be 10% more efficient for each of the next four months, which would make each organization 50% more efficient, you know, because of compounding, not just 40. So looking at the processes, I just thought, personal time management, and what you're focused on, could be 5% of those gains, and then 5% of those gains can come from professional development, training, basically, to get better at your job. So I believe if you have a process, and you constantly refine it, that's the best way to manage psychology. And you've seen this, the people who if you've ever read Viktor Frankl's, Man's Search for Meaning, really, have you read that book? Yeah, wonderful book. Yeah. So if you if you have purpose, and you're realistic about what's happening, this makes anxiety go away. So why am I here? Why am I doing this? And then what is the actual state of affairs? Let's define reality. The reality today is most of these companies are going to go out of business, by the way, that's always been the reality, but it's just going to happen faster. And the reality is the money is going to go to the people who are builders and who can build efficiently and get to profitability and throw a free cash flow. Once you understand that's the reality, well, you can build a plan around. And then you can build a team to work towards those goals. Now, your psychology should be okay, because you've taken what you have control over. And you've mastered it, you've refined it, you've done the best you can. You don't have control over external events. So doom scrolling or looking at stock tickers is not going to help you. You have to if your coinbase right now, like like, what do you do? You don't? Well, what do you have control over the number of employees you have, what your spend is, how much cash you have and managing that? And then how good is the product? If you're a Peloton, what do you have control over the customer experience, the product, how many your balance sheet, and just surviving and then delighting customers. So that's how I manage my psychology, what do I have control over? And I'm doing everything I can to set myself up for success with those things. And then you're fine, you know, because at least you And people who've been in emergency situations, I worked on an ambulance. And, you know, you really start to disconnect from the reality of you accept the reality that you're going to be called when people are dying or have died. So once you have that, then when you get to the scene, and you have to do CPR, or somebody's been stabbed, my first call was somebody got stabbed right above their heart. Or it's a car accident, people are mangled, like, okay, that's the job. So therefore, let's just focus on what we can do from this point forward, we accept that death, we accept that injury as part of this, we're here to get people to the other side of that. And so then all of a sudden, the anxiety of the phone ringing at the station for the first couple of months for me was like the scariest thing ever. And then it became, okay, this is part of the process. This is the job. We pick up the phone. Where's the emergency? Bravo, where's the emergency? I have to answer the phones. Bravo, where's the emergency? Great. And then we just go try to solve the problem. So I think that's the best you can do. What do you do to manage your psychology?
### Human: And that's the way people need to think I bought this book, just based on a thing I saw on Twitter called arbitrary lines, how zoning broke the American city and how to fix it by this guy named Nolan Gray, who's a city planner, who basically argues that zoning itself is a flawed policy. Now, people who are honest about this do acknowledge that because supply and demand is a real thing, if you build more housing, there is a possibility that housing prices could go down. That's true, because there will be more supply. So you may not continue to benefit from artificially inflated prices in places that currently have, you know, extreme housing restriction, like there will be a period of adjustment to that. And I'm not going to try to pretend that, you know, maybe in 100 years, if enough houses were built in Atherton, it might immensely decrease the value of the properties there. If you don't want that to happen, sell now.### Assistant: The hypocrisy here is just stunning. It's stunning. It is gross, I'll say that. I think they need to sit and rethink their position and understand that all housing units help And I've lived in a number of communities with this same situation where they're zoned only single family. And now in California, they're saying, you have to be multifamily, you could have two units per lot, you can't stop multifamily development. So what's happening is each of these local cities, whether it's Brentwood, Bel Air, or up here, Atherton or Redwood City has to submit plans to have multifamily units because it's this past in California's legislation. California does not build because powerful rich people, like the Andreessen's or anybody else own large amounts of property, multiple units, whatever, or just a large property period, you know, and it's a, you know, for them, it's not a major asset. And they also have homes everywhere else, according to, you know, public information that you read about in the news. And I think they, I think they all moved to Nevada didn't, didn't Ben and Mark say they were moving to Nevada, and that was going to be like their HQ. And they were kind of out of Silicon Valley, and they were going to be a nomadic venture firm. So they're not even living there anymore. Yeah, maybe. But you know, you have to take a moment here and just think about what's best for society. And along the corridor of public transit, what should happen is if you want to have public transit, you should have to have within the let's just pick a number, I'm making a number up here two miles, let's just say one mile within the 20 blocks around that station, there should be a zoning, which is 20 stories. Sounds crazy, right? 20 stories, oh my god, but it's within one mile around it. And all those people can go down and they're in walking distance under 15 minutes. know, some probably on average, they're six, seven minutes, right? It takes 15 minutes to walk a mile, something like that. So on average, the people in that area would be seven minutes away from mass transit. In other words, they would have to walk, there's no reason to get in a car take longer to pull your car in a parking spot and park it again. So the within seven minutes of mass transit, this is the obvious solution. So what they should have said to this was, hey, at the Caltrans station, or if we build bark down, it goes down to Millbrae now they built the planning to build it to go down around all those train stations reasonably build 20 stories make and that and those would become worth, you know, $1,000 a square foot, they would come down another level from townhomes because this what they were fighting were townhomes. which are kind of like a bridge to, you know, getting a single family home. The one before that is obviously an apartment, a proper apartment in, you know, five, six, you know, even up to 20 stories. This would solve everybody's problem. This would make life so delightful. And the easiest way to convince any rich person to do this is, do you want your chef, your nanny, your housekeepers, your firefighters, your teachers, and your own children to be able to live and have a path to housing. Within 20 minutes, your team at Andreessen Horowitz who have to come to the office, wouldn't it be nice if they could be within 20 minutes of the office and not have to suffer? And then this argument about work from home Molly would go away. You know why work from home is so polarizing? Because if you're the boss, you pick the location of the headquarters, and you pick it within a 20 minute drive. right. That's how this is done. I put our office on six, you know, in in Soma, because it's the first exit off of the exit ramp coming up from the bay. I picked the location. I'm the CEO, I get there quickest. People who are coming in on board had to walk 15 minutes to the birth station. the boss picked, if it would have been better, actually, for everybody, if we put it right above a BART station, if I did it again, I would have done it that way after seeing my team suffer through, you know, having to take BART and then walk 15 minutes each way, getting on and off.
### Human: There's but also exactly that is the other reason I was chuckling is that there, you know, it's like, it's less about this specific message, which did get my hackles up from, you know, the populist perspective. But also, yep, there's clearly like, This is a CEO facing business headwinds that arguably Salesforce specifically has never faced. And so something is going on. So then to send a message that's like, y'all are not pulling your weight is like, Whoa, whoa, whoa, you seem to be driving executives out of the building at an alarming rate. So like, what's the deal?### Assistant: Well, We can contrast here. Worker slash management class now in our dynamic, it's, you know, appears here on the show. But I also did a version of this where I said, Listen, everybody, here's reality. 2023 is gonna suck. I need everybody, including myself, to work harder and be more productive. So we can get through this without layoffs. And layoffs are a possibility always, of course, it goes without saying. So I said, Okay, I'm going to ask people for that. But I'm also going to make the commitment. Here are my new hours. And I told my assistant, and I told Mike Savino, our president, 830 am to 830pm. And if there's any weekend meetings that I don't catch up on, just put them on Sunday mornings, because my kids are out on Sunday mornings. And I, you know, you got to walk the walk, if you're going to talk the talk. And so I just said, and I said it to both companies. you know, cards on the table. We have to have inside calm, I got the launch company, I've got this week and serves me all of its advertising base. And we know advertisers gonna get crushed next year. I built the companies with plenty of room for profitability and plenty of runway, but I'm not in control of this. So therefore, let's all work harder. And I think I don't know, you can give me a letter grade here live on the air. But what I got back from the team, you individually and others was how can I help What can we do? Let's have that esprit de corps. Let's all do this together. I got that from my inside team. I got it from my launch team universally. And I think you just have to start with looking in the mirror. And I looked at the mirror, okay, what did I do right? I kept the company small. I kept the company profitable. I kept the cash reserves up. That's why I'm not in a full blown panic right now. But I looked at individual's productivity. I said, you know what? I gave this, you know, everybody the start of day, end of day, just, you know, self-report as a remote company. But I never did time boxing. I never, or blocking, whatever people call it. I never gave people any training on being ruthless about their time. And when people did share their calendars with me, I looked at it and I was like, holy shit. Sorry about that. Holy cow. I didn't give the right priorities to some people. That's what I found. I was like, I have people doing grunt work are getting paid three times the salary of the people who should be doing this grunt task work. Let's call it task work. I don't want to be insulting, but there are task work. It's okay. We're all adults here. There's some things that are tasks that need to get done, and that should be, let's call it whatever, an entry level employee, not a senior level employee. And I looked at senior level employees, I was like, wait a second, task, task, task work, get that the heck off your plate. These are the things that are going to drive revenue. That's on me. I didn't set the priorities enough, but things were going up and to the right. I don't want to be micromanaging people. I want to be on those slopes behind me. I don't want to review everyone's calendar, but you know what? Here we are. I need every hour of every soldiers of every general of every captain. I need every hour. Perfect. No wasted time that goes for me to what am I spending my time on? Right? And am I spending my time in the right place. So I just looked at everybody, you, man, other manager, actors, associates, researchers at inside salespeople, writers, and I just said, Whoa, let's work together to be 20% more efficient. All of us can be 20% more efficient. Doesn't mean adding two hours to the day. If you're working 10 hours, it doesn't mean work 12. Keep the 10 make them 20% more efficient. Also appreciate the extra half hour if you got it. So anyway, I like to think I did, I don't know, rate me one to 10. How did I do? I mean, it's uncomfortable for you to write. Yeah. Where am I? No eights.
### Human: Right. It is very obviously better in all of those attributes minus the one big one, which is the full faith and credit part. And so I wonder like, how to what extent is your network and the products that you're building the kind of thing that get us there to right to completing that closing that very important loop.### Assistant: Correct. Yeah, I think it's a really healthy exercise to revisit a little bit of history and where we are today and why we're at where we are today. So historically, payment networks... So first of all, what is a payment network? It's pretty self-explanatory. Its job is to ask for a value from point A to point B. If I want to remit money from the United States to Europe, a payment network can help facilitate the value transfer from the United States of America to Paris. If I want to buy a burrito from Chipotle, a payment network facilitates the value transfer from me, the consumer, to the acquirer being Chipotle. And so payment networks as we know them today, Payment network, arguably Western Union is a payment network to remit money. Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover are the four payment networks that allow us to conduct commerce payments in person primarily. Even something like Stripe, it uses those four payment networks and it's just a layer that interfaces with the internet predominantly. And so, what are they and how do they work? The main concept that I think- And what's wrong with them? Right. The main concept that I think alludes to why this is such a disruptive concept, it's really exciting, is these are all payment networks that they're trying to build digital payment networks for non-digital assets. And so how do you digitally move a dollar? Or how do you digitally move a bar of gold? Or how do you digitally move a valuable piece of art like Vincent van Gogh painting? It's a trick question. You can't. Right. And so, all payment networks like Visa are promises of future settlement. Because when I go to Chipotle and I swipe my Visa card, the dollars aren't actually hopping out of my pocket and into Chipotle's register in real time. Visa is coordinating with the many banks involved and saying, hey, is Jack good to buy this burrito? Can Chase be in debt to the Bank of America that's banking Chipotle? Can we entrust that Jack's actually going to be good to cover the cost of this? Because we'll promise future settlement to Chipotle now and then actually settle two to 15 days later and tax the merchant for this giant revolving door of credit that we've created. Chipotle will pay 3% for us to future settle paper money because paper can't move digitally. It's the whole concept. Full faith and credit. Full faith in credit and every single payment that we know before Bitcoin, Molly, is a debt promise. No matter what, it is a promise to settle in the future. And then we build this really sophisticated systems like credit scores. And that's where you get financial inclusion is really complicated because in order to be included in the financial system, you have to be creditworthy. Who defines that? Do they have the bandwidth to define everyone in the world as creditworthy? Who defines creditworthiness? It's a very complex system and it's just old. And again, it's this concept of building a digital payment network for non-digital assets. Now, the big aha moment for Bitcoin is it is the first bearer digital instrument. It is the first actual digital asset that carries value, and it moves and settles at the speed of light. And so then if everyone in 1949 had Bitcoin, we would have never built debt promises and payments for future settlement. This would have never been a thing. technology was far outpacing payments and money. And Bitcoin caught us up to the first physical bear instrument that actually, it's a physical rock that's digital and can move at the speed of light. And so when I go to Chipotle, what can actually now happen is $10 is removed from my pocket, turned to Bitcoin, and there actually can be money that jumps over the counter and into Chipotle's register and turned back into dollars. So now if you re-ask yourself the question that Bank of America, when they founded Visa, asked themselves in 1956, Well, what's the best way humanly possible to escrow physical value from here to Europe, from Jack to Chipotle? It's actually the physical instruments can move at the speed of light. And that's the whole concept is it's a superior payment network, it's cheaper, it's faster, it's more inclusive, because everyone in the world can use this open payment standard. And it's inherently innovative, because everyone has an opportunity to build on it. And so I'll stop there. But that's kind of like this aha moment. And it's just very obviously better than everything we've known before.
### Human: I mean, my god to return enough to five x a one and a half billion dollar fund. I mean, it's it's seed and growth. But to do that, with a small team, having left the, you know, the big, big brand name of a 16 Z, like it is a lot of pressure.### Assistant: She'll be getting two and a half percent in management fees. So she literally has 37, maybe, you know, 35 to 40 million a year in fees. So with, I mean, just imagine, I mean, if you're paying your, you know, half a million dollars salaries, million dollar salaries, I mean, she could build a very large team with that giant windfall of management fees, those are the fees you get for managing the fund, they come out of the returns. You know, the early stage fund, you know, people want to see reacts, and the growth stage fund something similar. I mean, in reality, they want to see her do 4567 x, they want to see her be an outlier. That's the bet you're making is that you hit a fund that, you know, gets that five to 10 x cash on cash return in a decade. Yeah. And that would put you in the, you know, the 1%, the 2% of venture returns. Most people are trying to hit that 15 to 25% IRR per year. But yeah, amazing. And congratulations. Come on the show, for sure. I not only I emailed her yesterday, invited her on this show, and then I invited her to do a fireside or a keynote at the Olin Summit, May 15, 16, 17 in Miami. hiring well is one of the most important things a startup can do to increase the chances of being an outlier success. And that's what it's all about, right? So if your current hiring strategies aren't working, you're going to need to find a solution and rocket can be that solution for you. Rocket is trusted by companies like Tinder, nerd wallet and Carta, because it was built by former tech founders who understand how hard it is to hire at scale. It was built by founders for founders, they use machine learning to supercharge their team of recruiters to help you close hires, and they'll help you hire anyone from an independent contractor all the way to your executive positions. This is done with a white glove service rockets team of 60 recruiters across the US and Canada. Understand how startup recruiting is different. And that's helped rocket deliver results across hundreds of clients. It's going to save you time, it's going to help you meet better candidates and It's going to lower the number of hiring mistakes. Here's a really easy call to action. I want you to go to get rocket.com slash twist and use the promo code twist for 20% off your first placement. There is no risk with $0 required up front. That's get rocket.com slash twist and use the code twist for 20% off. All right, next up on our docket today. The crypto I don't want to say grift. My Lord, the amount of money getting thrown into projects that don't have any seeming purpose and or function in the world continues. You go labs, the maker of board a NFTs trading cards, and the dollar sign APE coin has raised 450 million from wait for it. Yes, of course. You know who likes to splash a cashy Andreessen Horowitz at a $4 billion valuation. The startup is also planning to launch a decentralized NFT metaverse massively multiplayer online role playing game called other side in April. So as we predicted and discussed, these NFTs have no meaning or purpose in the world. Trading cards are a minor part of the economy. And they I think people quickly get burned out on collecting stuff. So the NFT crowd, I think, has found their Hail Mary to build value. And it is the metaverse, specifically massively multiplayer online role playing games, which are the best example is Warcraft, I guess. No. World of Warcraft. World Warcraft. Correct. Thank you. Because people would pay $15 a month for it. So maybe all of these crazy valuations could get filled in in order for it to get filled in, you would need to have $400 billion of revenue in my mind for that game. $400 billion in revenue if people were paying. But I don't know $15 a month would be 200 $15 a month about 200 a year 200 year but you need to have 2 million players. So this is the bet that Andreessen Horowitz is making is that you go labs will have 1,000,002 million 3 million people paying for a massively multi-player one, which I don't think there's been many that have broken the million. So this is a crazy bet, to be clear. Yeah.
### Human: But yeah, I mean, the only reason you think you need to get from, you know, Miami to London in five hours instead of nine is because you think you have like a really important business meeting there by 2029. That's not going to be acceptable. And you're going to have VR meetings, like I'd say, but you are. And zoom and it's just not or you'll have high speed trains going to be tunnels.### Assistant: And you'll have self driving. So you put all that together. There's no reason for planes to fly in the Northeast corridor of the United States. You can take Excel, you can take all these trains, there is no reason for people to be flying from New York, to DC to Boston, that whole corridor, if they just made the trains 50 miles per hour faster, which is easily doable, you can just throw away all the planes in that area. Can you imagine how many planes come out of the air if you did that? Yeah. And then now you do Europe. like, does there need to be any flights between London, Germany, you know, France, like what, I'm not sure which countries on the continent, that's no, not really on the continent. And also that you think about the there's mountains, but you know, if you can get better tunneling technology, there's really no reason for it. Especially with high speed trains, if you can get these trains all to 150 miles per hour, 250 miles per hour, you'd see what happens in China. And you see what happens in Japan. Yep. you know, like, just take the train, like, why would you do anything else? It doesn't make any, it just have to make the trains more dope. Like the train has to be more fun, and just even more easy. Just keep making the trains easier, subway level, easy, none of that, like, buy a ticket and do the blah, blah, blah, do the whole thing, you know, you get a smartphone, you get on, they should just you get on the conductor system. I love the past system, you know, just swipe, I told you I ordered those bobas. I'm really loving the Apple Watch lifestyle of paying for things and just quickly going through like clear, you know, does that airports those things, I think mean more to people. then they're being under it's being underestimated how much those little accoutrements mean to people. If you upgraded the food on these trains, upgraded the seating and upgrade the Wi Fi train consumption would go way up. Yes, just make it high speed put those you know, low Earth orbit satellite star links on each train. Yep. why I think we should subsidize for sure subsidize trains. Yes, high speed trains and subsidize ebikes are my two pet peeves. But yeah, I would like to know what booms and I'm not like, on the company or anything. I hope people don't take it that way. I do think there's a case for having this. I just don't think we should be the default. So that's why I was sort of teeing it up to do you think it's moral ethical? like your answer. I think a lot of people are going to opt out when they find out how much fuel is burns. And then for other people, if you're a dignitary, if you're a CEO, if you're somebody who time is money, you know, if it's the President of the United States, if it's a senator, a congressperson, a CEO, and like, they just have a big schedule, or, you know, they play for a basketball team, or it's a musician, I actually look at those. And I say, You know what, people were giving Katy Perry or somebody a hard time about their jet. I can't remember who was left. Taylor Swift. And I'm like, you know how much joy Taylor Swift brings people when she plays to a stadium. I'm fine with her burning 100 times as much jet fuel. Because she's flying to a stadium to make 30,000 people have a great night. It's totally fine. As opposed to those people going and slapping to her backyard. Better to fly her there quick and style and let people have that joy. Just like having a basketball team go from place to place the basketball teams wouldn't be able to do thing that entertains us all, you know, these cross country flights to do, you know, the Warriors versus the Bulls, whatever. That's why they used to play regionally is because they were driving Greyhound buses, right? We're taking commercial, so they, they would only play people in their own division, you know, the Atlantic Division played the Atlantic Division over and over again. You'd be like, Wow, I wonder what's gonna happen when they play the Western Division, you know, or Pacific, whatever, you know, place. Okay. I guess we move on.
### Human: Yeah, so I guess there's a couple different ways to think about this. One is in an established artist market, someone like Monet, which I mentioned earlier, there's so much data, right? So there's been over 100 years of public auction sales for Monet. Now he's selling more than $400 or $500 million a year. His standard deviation of returns for For your finance savvy listeners, it's about 6% or 7%. So hugely predictable return pattern if you invest in a money. He's actually one of the best risk-adjusted returns, even though his absolute return is lower in the 8% or 9% range, just because it's so predictable. So, for someone like that, you know, we just look at the hundred years of data, you know, draw a line and kind of predict where he'll be in the future. For younger artists or what you think of as startup artists, it's a much more difficult question and there's a handful of things that we look at. So, we generally group these into what we consider cultural significance and cultural significance is usually defined to us as what gallery represents the artist. Some mega galleries tend to influence artists' careers in a huge way, and there's a lot of people that simply buy artists that certain galleries represent because they know those galleries have the machinery behind them to make that artist's career and increase prices. We look at what institutions own an individual artist, so the more institutional support an artist has, we like to think the more sustainable that artist's market or their artist's career is. Then we also look at who else is collecting that artist. So are major influential collectors buying that artist? And those are the three things that are early signals that help understand where an artist's career could go. But as you mentioned, it's complicated in the art market because there's lots of, it's a global asset class that spans multiple countries, from thousands of collectors, and it's controlled in lots of different ways by big galleries and big institutions. So sometimes it's very, very hard to predict. An interesting data point is if you look at the top 100 artists over the past 20 years, there's only been three artists, Damien Hirst, Murakami, and Jeff Koons, that have actually had negative returns.### Assistant: It's got to be because people who are interested in art are just probably a little bit more successful. I would think so. I think the Raleigh Road investors probably have a little bit of a smaller ticket size, because they're selling cars, which are accessible to a much wider aperture of investors, or just in the communities wider. Baseball cards are going to be traded like this eventually, and that'll be really super interesting. Okay, when we get back from this final break, I wanna know what are the characteristics that you look for in artists or art or segments, if we were to break it down, that signal to you that there might be appreciation in the future. When we get back on this, we can start. Hey everybody, are you ready to upgrade your workstation? It's time, and I can get you up to 48% off right now if you go to dell.com slash twist. Yes, Dell for Entrepreneurs is an actual program run by my friends over at Dell. You know I love my Dell laptop. I got the Chrome OS on this one. I got these giant Dell monitors all over the office, and I've been a fan of Dell forever. especially the widescreen monitors. I love those. And I love the laptops having all the ports on the side, USB-C, the old USB ports, HDMI cables, Ethernet ports, all built in. No dongle life for me. I got the whole lit shebang right here on this laptop. 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Of course Dell has Dell Financial Services. What this means is qualified founders can finance their entire hardware project and pay for it in low monthly installments. What an amazing thing to do. Don't blow all your capital. on buying a bunch of new machines pay for it monthly over time great idea and these dell machines are up to 48 off right now this summer right now get their dell.com slash twist twist listeners can get up to 43 off and take that extra 5% off right now at dell.com slash twist. Thanks to Dell for making awesome products that I personally love, and I've been using for decades as well as running a great company and providing this great support to the founder community. That's part of this week in startups. It really means a lot to me. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. All right, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. If you love the podcast, thank you so much. Go to this week in startups.com slash love. And we will beg you for a review on various platforms. We're not above begging when you review the podcast, it moves up the ranking. So that's great. And if you want to join our super secret slack group, where founders help other founders grow their companies, you simply go to this week in startups.com slash slack. And I hang out in there. It's a great way to meet me. I'm in there all the time. We have a book club in hashtag books and all kinds of founders helping each other, different regions. We have a bunch of people from London, Japan, Australia, Africa, and all different sort of communities forming there in the Slack. So it's a lot of fun and it's a little bit expensive. We charge $0 like everything else here. We make our money like Scott investing for the future. Scott, what is it that you look for or your team in specific artists or art that indicate that it's going to hit that 11% or greater, whatever, you know, I know you can't make any promises here, obviously, but you said there was like an 11% average or something. What are the indicators that somebody might be a strong artist or art category in the future?
### Human: super timely that you're saying this, because we actually just spoke with Jason on the news segment of today's show, today's January 13th, on how there are so many people not going to college. And originally, people thought in 2020, the lack of attendance into college was due to people maybe having a pandemic gap year. And it turns out only 2% of those people that they thought were having a gap year actually enrolled in college. So I'm sure you're one of many and doing something alternative after high school, I think is growing growing important. And honestly, this is I haven't ever said this before before. But I told Molly, Molly Wood is the new co host on this weekend startup Campbell. And I was talking to her and I actually almost didn't go to college because I wanted to see if there was actually a benefit for me going at the time I was really interested in things like video production. And when I was 18, I was like, I don't know if I want to spend all that money to go. But I ended up going. So it's really cool to see people taking the alternative paths. And I always wonder, I'm like, well, where would I have been if I if I didn't go to college? And like I said in the intro, you're just killing it in the reporting space. And Jason always tells the producers about how important it is to be a great reporter. And I really wish I started documenting my work and reporting when I was 18. Can you give us a little bit of a description about your journey into the reporting world?### Assistant: For sure. And yeah, no, I think you've landed in quite a good spot. So I would say, you know, not going to college or going to college is, I think, much more of a personal decision than I think the media may make it out to seem. And so, you know, just with that context, yeah, my journey to, I would say, kind of reporting and content creation really stems from my interest in business and technology and startups. I really just kind of gradually got into it. When I was 10, my family got an iPad, and I started making videos on iMovie there, just really kind of messing around, kind of learning the fundamental skills, and just got progressively more and more interested into it in the craft of creating videos. I think where I really started to find my groove and where I kind of always struggled before was the what. What are we making videos of? I was like younger i wanted to be a filmmaker but then i realize the only problem was i hated watching movies which is still something that is true to this day i'm so that didn't really hold up to well. And so you know when i became really interested in the actual subject matter of kind of business and startups and technology. In a podcast in particular, This Week in Startups is one of them, but also the show Startup by Gimlet Media and Alex Bloomberg documenting the inception of his podcasting company. That was really, really inspiring, I would say, and really pointed me in the startup business reporting direction. And so when I was 15, I had enough sitting on the outside on the sidelines and really wanted to start speaking with founders I respected and really looked up to. And kind of turn that into a content creation exercise. So I started a podcast called the ones who succeed. I didn't really have too much money at the time. And my parents were like, very supportive, but thought, you know, were said, you know, like, this is a great thing for you, but you have to bankroll this. So figure out a way to do that. So I sent a bunch of cold emails and got skillshare sponsor the first season and reach out to many many founders got rejected by many many founders but also ultimately can i put together this initial lineup of twelve kind of a list guest consisting of michael jubin from dollar shave club and elizabeth color from soul cycle and chris soccer who's been here a guest on Twist many times, and even Alex Bloomberg, who really kind of got me interested in the world of podcasting. And that content creation exercise was so exciting because I was just so into it. I was so into the subject matter. I was so into the creation aspect of it. It kind of came full circle. And then from there, I downloaded TikTok and originally downloaded it and started taking it seriously as a means to essentially promote the show. I thought that maybe producing little clips to promote the podcast would be a good idea, but what ultimately happened was I kind of ventured out through a series of videos, a series of many months of experimenting. I kind of stumbled upon this almost short bite-sized business news format for Gen Z. And it wasn't clear that there was a market for this type of content because Gen Z VC or Gen Z startups, I wasn't super familiar with that world in the beginning of 2020, pre-pandemic times. Feels like a different world at this point. But quickly, or not quickly, but over the course of a few months, started to build a decent audience. And people started to reach out, saying they enjoy my content and enjoy staying up to date with the industry. I've inspired them to start businesses or podcasts or a little bit of both. And that was extremely exciting and very, very gratifying because the distribution of the TikTok was just far greater than the distribution of my original podcast, though there's certainly a building block to the actual TikTok account. And yeah, in 2020, in the summer, the account got acquired by the Media Startup Workweek. And I'm helping them transition the account and I'm working on a startup now. So I would say making videos and reporting and becoming interested in the intersection of media and technology, I always thought of those two things as separate. I'm either going to do a media thing or I'm going to do a tech thing. And what I realized quite recently was that you actually have to do both. And it's not a this or that, it's kind of this and that. And that's kind of the practice that I'm taking to my latest company, Sequence.
### Human: That's great, because now I have roughly 100 follow up questions on each chunk of that. So what like, did the podcast come first? Were you sort of sitting there going, Okay, I want to start this something. I'm not sure how everything is content. Let me start there.### Assistant: No, literally, it was just, let me start reading about climate and talking to the like, people that are in the thick of the action with different perspectives. And given that I had heard my whole career has been in startups. And given that I'd heard that innovation gets more hype than it's worthy of, as it relates to addressing climate change, I actually started by talking to lots of people that weren't working in startups. So I talked to professors, I talked to heads of NGOs, I talked to IPCC scientists, I talked to people in the national labs, I was just trying to cast a wide net and just start somewhere and start learning. And then as I started pulling on threads, it led to more threads and more introductions. And those people were, because we were coming out of the kind of the dark years where, you know, Oh, Oh, six, Oh nine. And I heard your episode with Andrew BB, like, you know, a lot of money went in and, and, um, and then, and, and, got set on fire. And so a bunch of people in capital fled the space. And, um, and so for whatever reason, I, but probably because a lot of people were becoming, um, woken up to the gravity of the situation. Um, but I was just the, the, the person who happened to have no job while they were having, having that awakening and who didn't have time pressure to get a job. So therefore, I had the time to just learn full time. And as I was out reaching out to these people, they would say, oh, it's so great to see new blood coming in. Like, welcome back. Like, I can't wait to see where you end up. Keep me posted on your progress. So then I started sending email updates, almost like like you would send to investors in the early days of a startup. But I didn't have a startup, and I didn't have an investor. So when I started doing that, it was some forced accountability every month. And it would lead to more and more introductions, growing distribution lists. And what started happening was one piece was the people reaching out and saying, hey, like, where should I start? What should I do? And, and me not having a great place to point them, but talking to all these great people all day long and none of that knowledge getting shared. But another piece was, I kind of miss building something. And so, oh, and then the third piece was that, for that false start I had, it was essentially a content studio at the intersection of live TV and native mobile applications. So it was like taking the HQ trivia format and figuring out where else can you, you can apply it beyond prize-based entertainment. But when I was doing that, I was behind the scenes, but I kind of had the itch to be a host, right? And so it's like, you know what, why don't I just start a podcast? It would be fun. I've learned so much. It would give me something to build. Like it's not a business. It's not a company, but it would be just a fun project. And it would be strategic for whatever I end up sinking my teeth into in climate. And then once I did the podcast, then people were listening and I was uncovering like, oh, it's not a ton of listeners, but the people listening are super engaged. super kind of strategic people. And they're come from really diverse backgrounds, different industries, different functions, different geographies, and they don't know each other. And they're longing for a peer group, like, we should find a way to get these people together, which is, we set up the slack room, we had a first kind of ad hoc meetup that was community organized in San Francisco just before the pandemic, lockdown. And I went to that. And we did a live recording at that meetup. But there were like 80 or 100 people there. And these were like, Like, there were awesome people, right? It wasn't like the weakest of the pack that were fleeing from Silicon Valley tech. It was like, it was like awesome, you know, high octane, strategic, motivated people in the prime of their careers that were looking to like, come in and swing a big bat in this area, but they didn't know where to start like me. And those people kind of formed a tribe. And I just kind of lucked into being there right at the beginning of that, at least for this wave.
### Human: Absolutely. I think it was when Steve was there, it was even harder probably to get acquired, or at least you didn't hear about it very often when they happened. But for us, you know, we really did and had a measurable way of just showing how much better our search was than all of the existing apps. Even Google's Google Play, we had very measurable Like PhDs with statisticians, like very measurable ways of looking at how much better our click-through rates would be and our search quality. And so what we found was that by partnering with companies, we had a partnership with Yahoo at one point, we had a partnership with Sony Ericsson to power search, app search for them. And so we were talking, well, we did have a way to just use the service through a website or through our own app. We were trying to partner with Apple to power search for them and show them just how much better the search would be if they included our technology and sort of through those discussions. That's how they ended up saying we don't want to we don't want to partner with you we'd like to buy the company.### Assistant: So when we get back from this quick break, I want to know how Apple wound up acquiring Chomp, what you learned at Apple, working with Eddy Cue and, you know, working on the Apple TV, even a little stint in M&A, I understand. We'll hear a little bit about that, what you can say. I know that Apple's kind of secretive, but there are some broad strokes I think you can give us. And then we'll get into Caffeine.tv and how you came up with the idea and how that's going when we get back on this week's starters. Let's get down to brass tacks. LinkedIn jobs is going to give you 50 bucks right now because you listen to this podcast. That's $50 off your first job post terms and conditions, of course apply because they're giving you the $50. But we get so many great testimonials from you, the loyal this week and startups audience. You tell us all the time. about how you find perfect hires using LinkedIn. And one of our founders who listens to this podcast, Jay, is with a company called 10 Golden Rules. It's a boutique digital marketing agency. And he just needed another account manager. Sometimes your business is growing, you need an account manager. You need somebody to manage all of these fabulous accounts and things are going well for Jay over at 10 Golden Rules. And after he identified his two top targets, Jay noticed, oh, LinkedIn, yum, yum. He's got a mutual connection. You know what that means. You can do a quick reference check. And that's what Jay did. And then Jay was able to hire a great account manager over Zoom through the power of LinkedIn. And you know that power that LinkedIn has because they have over 690 million members across the world. I mean, it is the standard. If you want to find great people, you just go to LinkedIn. You know it. And they screen all the candidates for the hard and the soft skills you're looking for while putting your job post in front of the most qualified members every day they get that repetition and they're looking for jobs like yours and sometimes you might even get a passive job seeker linkedin.com slash unicorn you're listening to the next unicorns, you're getting 50 bucks off 5050 from your boy j cal and from our friends at LinkedIn, just go to linkedin.com slash unicorn and get that $50 off your first job posting terms and conditions apply, because they're going to give you $50 for just typing in this URL linkedin.com. It's already in your browser cache, you know, linkedin.com is in there. But again, just put a slash unicorn at the end, and you get the 50 bucks that easy. All right, let's get back to this amazing episode. Hey, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. It's our next unicorn series. This is the seventh of 10 episodes we're doing. Thanks to our sponsors for allowing this week and startups to grow and hit three times a week. It's incredible. The podcast is growing massively, and we're getting incredible guests. Today is no different with Ben Kieran on who is the CEO and co founder of caffeine.tv, which we're about to hear about, as a story leads us to chomp being acquired by Apple. So Apple was fascinated with your search engine, doing app search, because, let's face it, the app stores, and Apple wasn't very good at search, there was a rumor, they were going to get into search engines, at some point, they were dancing around, I had actually shown Steve jobs, mahalo calm early on. And he was fascinated by search, but they just went with a Google deal. And they had a great partnership for some period of time until Android came out. And Steve Jobs wasn't too happy about that. But they acquired your company. What is the process of Apple acquiring your company like? Because it's very rare, they have, they very much have a not built here culture, they like to build their own stuff, not buy companies, sometimes they buy an enabling technology, which I think is how they looked at yours, Ben. But But tell me about that process. How does Apple We heard how you get whacked a CEO, they invite you to dinner. What's the equivalent when Apple, you know, cut you the check and says, Come join the team because they're, I don't want to say they're snobby, but they have a very high standard would be I think we both agree, correct.
### Human: And you're using clever app harvest, by the way, like to be on the hand front, same with app harvest, right? It's like, just use this amount of pressure that works for strawberries and tomatoes, it can't just flip over and all of a sudden be like, Oh, I can do something even softer. like, or you just said it's like, just it's just that amount of pressure.### Assistant: Which we can, we should pull up to the two videos. But we'll pull up the root AI one as well. You know, this is a company we invested in, they got bought by app harvest. And we invested in this four years ago, three or four years ago, I believe. And you know, this is, again, a very narrow application, but computer vision, and this is a type of hand that's made specifically for this purpose, that can literally pull a strawberry or cherry tomato off of a vine without crushing it. Yeah. So you have, you know, from MIT to plenty other places, the ability to build these kind of this kind of hand technology, and there's just so many different people working on it, that the idea that we would send people into a field to pick strawberries in the hot sun breaking their backs, making them cross the border to go do this in another country is going to seem insane to our children's children, it's not going to exist as a thing the the concept of people going into a field and to work a field is just going to seem crazy in 10 years or 20 years, it's already starting to the idea that you would, you know, get an ox and, you know, you know, start pulling right, we have to do an autonomous tractor, autonomous tractor, right? Yeah, tractors will be autonomous soon. Alright, I want you to beat the holiday rush this year with SnackMagic and its newest partner in crime, SwagMagic. SnackMagic and SwagMagic are global gifting platforms. It's a stress-free and customizable way for you to delight your employees or your customers. They use software to help recipients build their own snack or swag stash. And all you need is a recipient's email. You don't need their shipping address, right? Because that's always a little bit creepy. People are like, oh, I want to send you something, J Kyle. And I'm like, I can't send it to our office because we don't have one anymore. I don't want to give my home address and have that out there. You understand. Snack Magic is going to help you stand out from the crowd this holiday season because giftees can choose from thousands of amazing snacks, drinks, office supplies, and now branded swag options so you can delight your hard-working employees or all those partners who are spending money with you, right? And in fact, we've used Snack Magic with our employees and we're going to use Swag Magic this year for the holiday season. Just to say thank you to folks, whether you want to delight one person or a thousand, Snack Magic makes it easy. All you need is their email address. Get 10% cash back up to $1,000 until October 15th. They want you to get ahead and they want you to use the code HOLIDAY. it would be so nice. See more at snackmagic.com slash twist. Get on this early. You want to get those holiday gifts out early so people can enjoy them snackmagic.com slash twist. So this is just in the narrow programmed case, let alone when we start getting into AI where you know that the concept of general AI you get you just tell the the robot you tell the the AI the outcome I want, I want you to win the chess game, I want you to win this video game, and then it has to figure it out, I want you to pick the strawberries, not crush them, it's got to figure it out. Well, there's going to be a bunch of precursors to that. And it will be an emergent moment when that happens. And I think what we saw, you know, from the Facebook Google, DeepMind, and Tesla, and what they're doing, like all of this stuff is the precursors to that emergent behavior. Now, will it be general AI? Or will it just be the culmination of so many cities falling, you know, each one subsequently, and then it's like, well, the AI has already obstacles, obstacles falling, okay, whatever. I mean, okay, we figured out how to make cups of coffee, hurdles being hurdles being overcome. But you know, right now, when we watch cafe x, make this cup of coffee here, you know, that's not using AI, this is, you know, a very narrow application of robotics, much like a factory, where you program it, this is where these things are, this is where these things are.
### Human: And and so anyway, I think the combination of brilliant as an investment, I mean, it's basically made him a pariah in the tech industry. So why would it be? No, I don't think it's I think it's certainly why when I say that his business is investing in companies and had nine out of 10 founders who would have taken his money before supporting Trump, I think wouldn't.### Assistant: Yeah, um, well, so so I'm really interested in the story of how Silicon Valley became what it is. It went from being important and culturally relevant in the 1990s, but kind of like a sideshow still, even during the tech boom, to being, I would argue, the most important economic center in the world, the most important cultural center in the world. Um, maybe it's not quite the most important political center in the world, but it is but obviously it's becoming more relevant politically Um than than it was and and the story of how does how does this kind of outsider industry? Um become so important in our lives. Um, and that's you know, that's anyone who's been covering tech, right? Like that's the story we've all been writing and um, you know, just when I was thinking about um, know, who's been involved in that story. I think Peter plays a big role, right? Um, as you say, and I totally agree, there are other people you could, you could sort of tell the story of Silicon Valley through somebody else. Um, and there have been like these other very important figures, but, but I think Peter's trajectory is pretty unique and pretty interesting, you know, PayPal. Um, I think even people who know about it, even people talk about the PayPal mafia, I think they kind of underrate, um just how influential it was not not in terms of i mean of course it's influential in the ways that like you know it's how people move money on ebay and it's this big valuable um payments platform but i mean in terms of creating um kind of a playbook uh for like how startups are built um and i think uh and i think so i think peter is really important there i think he's really important in um facebook you know one of the defining companies um you know maybe the defining company of the last um 20 years um you know Peter and Elon, of course, have a complicated relationship, but that relationship has been really important to both them. I think it's hard to imagine SpaceX... I think SpaceX maybe probably would succeed if Peter hadn't invested in it, but... Certainly would have, yeah. But he played a big role in making sure that at a very difficult time in kind of the business trajectory of Elon Musk, when during the recession and stuff, you know, he was there. I think Founders Fund just played this huge, not just in terms of finding important companies, but in terms of like articulating kind of an intellectual case for startups and a very specific kind of, you know, startup building philosophy. I think you could say the same thing about Zero to One. And so I think like all that just by itself right would be enough to justify a book because he's an important figure And why did you pick him? What what is it about him that made you interested? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I and and so but then there's then there's what happened in 2016 where um, We're we're teal who is as I said this important figure um does something that I think people probably who knew him weren't hugely surprised by but the outside world was surprised because you know how does a venture capitalist somebody who's you know obsessed with the future obsessed with you know um bringing about change in a very specific kind of change end up endorsing you know um uh basically reactionary and how does how does an immigrant you know get behind somebody who's running a candidacy that's basically a nativist candidacy um how does how does a gay man um get behind somebody who's from political party that has has been super hostile to to gays and lesbians and i think there's like a really interesting and um and complicated story you can tell but like that that contradiction i thought is really interesting right and i like i'm somebody who is interested in in kind of In those kinds of contradictions, and that's what drew me to it initially. And as I dug deeper, I do think that for all the reasons I articulated at the beginning, Peter's important, but he also saw something that was pretty important with Trump. Even if you can disagree with his decision to support Trump, But he engaged politically at a time when I don't think as many people in tech were engaging politically, and he was kind of ahead there too. And I think even if you regard the Trump thing, as it sounds like from your intro, you do, as a disaster, a huge mistake or something. I think you have to also agree that it was kind of brilliant in a way as an investment.
### Human: Yes, because there's a lot of like big infrastructure hardware pitches, right? Like it's a there's a like a desalination machine, or an electric jet or a power micro grid station for EV chargers, right? There's this that there's a million different things. And it's all like, yeah, we have an LOI for bajillions of dollars, that the LOIs are always for bajillions. It's a letter of nothing.### Assistant: So technical term, I refer to them as letters of bajillions. Orders are orders. Letters of nothing are letters of nothing. So I like orders with cash deposits. That makes sense. You know, I think when you look at it, pre orders are incredible, incredible validation, because it means you have a customer who wants the product so badly, they're willing to give up their cash, knowing there's a chance they won't get it back. And they want to see you succeed, which is the entirety of Kickstarter Indiegogo, why I love meeting founders who have raised on those platforms, there are problems with those platforms, we'll talk about it when we do a VC Sunday School on this. But just back of the envelope math, you know, they said Concord tickets were like 30 times more, which makes sense. You know, they were $5,000 to 10,000 for a round trip. And back then, you know, flights were two 300 bucks, right? I think in the 90s, I think we pay 300 bucks for a flight, you know, 500 bucks for a flight. So, you know, 20 times 500 is 10,000 or so. And I think 5000 was like the minimum Concorde flight would be so that kind of is directionally correct today. Interestingly, ticket prices actually haven't gone up all that much with the exception of the bump in fuel costs recently because of the war in Ukraine. So today 2019 flights were in domestic us were 359 probably international is probably 50% more than that, say 500. And that's round trip. So 500 times 30 is 15,000. So I would say my guess is that overture tickets are going to be if they said it's going to be 75% less 75% less than five 15k or 20k. I might put a 20k 75 less with 5000 I can't see these being less than 5000 roundtrip. I would doubt that it's got to be I don't believe them. I don't believe their numbers. I think they're wrong, or they're just being delusional. I can't see these tickets going for less than $15,000 roundtrip. Really? Yeah. Because I mean, just like if you want, because these are all going to be business class tickets, by the way, there's no coach, there's no fitness coach on these. It'll be one class and the class will be business. And so I would say right now business class to London, New York or Miami is going to be 10 to 20 grand business first class round trip. I don't think they're going to undercut it. I don't buy it. And I'm not sure about this jet fuel stuff being green. All right, everybody, listen, I love Brave. I've been using Brave for the last couple of months, and it is so much faster than any browser I've ever used. And it doesn't have all of those ads and trackers and creepy stuff happening on my computer. They really have three core products built into Brave. The core browser, which is tight, and it has all these great extensions that just work. They have the search engine and they have a browser native crypto wallet. Braves browser has over 60 million users already and thousands of daily downloads. Plus, all of this is built on Chromium, which is the open source Chrome project. So you're going to feel pretty familiar with it. All your extensions from Chrome are going to work. But here's the best part. They're going to work like two or three times faster than in Chrome because they're not going to bog you down with all those ads. And I tell you some of the Chrome extensions are some of the worst offenders in terms of adding a bunch of trackers. You can import your bookmarks, your passwords and settings from Chrome or any other browsers in just one click. So you're going to be off to the races day one and it doesn't track your website visits, your searches or your clicks. Producer Nick uses it and he loves it. Rachel uses it. We all love having a browser that's fast. It's truly private and independent. Their search engine is independent. So download Brave today. brave.com slash twist. to browse faster, search privately and so much more all in a single click. I guarantee you you are going to love it brave.com slash twist when they say jet fuel stuff is green.
### Human: Which, to be fair, is not unlike the stock market, but shouldn't be that way.### Assistant: So the first thing that we wanted to do was you have to kind of have the discipline. You have to have the discipline to what I call to never take the bad money. The bad money is spread pricing on drugs. Because the moment you make money on a marked up prescription, one, I don't think it's right. Because if you think about it, you can't mark up a medical procedure in the United States. I don't know how the heck we got to marking up drugs. But I always said you have to start with the discipline to never take the bad money. So you can't take spread on rebates, you can't take spread on mail or specialty, etc. So we decided to just charge a flat administrative fee. So this could be per member per month, flat administrative fee, or it could be a flat per script fee. We let our clients choose, it really doesn't matter. But what we're trying to say is we're performing a very valuable function. When you administrate a plan, you're keeping track of who's eligible, you're setting up the plan design, you're doing the clinical review, the clinical edits, drug utilization, drug to drug interaction, you're reimbursing the network on behalf of the payers, you're billing them, etc. You're doing hundreds of what I would say administrative tasks to maintain a benefit The key is to just always remember that's what your job is, not to be the drug czar of marking up drug prices. And so, what we wanted to do is to create what we call our clearinghouse model. And this is this concept of a public ledger. Our office is located in New York City. I say all the time, I walk by the most famous clearinghouse in the world, which is the New York Stock Exchange. and it lets the buy and sell side freely communicate on price. Molly, you would like to buy $100 worth of IBM. I would like to sell you $100 of IBM. We are communicating freely on price. This does not exist in prescription benefits. And so, we wanted to do this. And to do it, we also wanted to never be in a position where we manipulate or set price. So, we chose for our pricing benchmark, we use NADAC, National Average Drug Acquisition Cost. You're like, what is this NADAC thing? It comes from the federal government. The federal government uses it in Medicaid reimbursement in 40 plus states. And we like this because CMS controls it, the federal government, they set it, they update it every week. And what it's doing is I'm saying, I have nothing to do with price. I'm giving a benchmark for our retail pharmacies. So we go out and contract with all the major national network of pharmacies, the independents, the PSAOs. And basically, we say, we would like you to either sell the drug at NADAC plus your dispensing fee, Or if you could do a better job, feel free to do it. Now, this is where trust comes in. There hasn't been trust in the pharmacy supply chain in 30 years because if I'm a pharmacy and I normally give savings to a traditional PBM, They're going to keep the money. It's never going to make it to the patient or plan or a disproportionate part. And so pharmacies are very hesitant to offer a better price. So we decided to do something very unique, which is we don't set price. We give you the ability, the pharmacy. better than benchmark if you would like to set a better price please do and the patient will always receive it in the way that we prove that is all of our customers get the same price that seems like a pretty yeah that seems normal rate should never get the same price popsicles and lampshades Exactly. Well, think about it. You walk into a pharmacy and you go to the OTC counter and you pick up a bottle of Tylenol. Does it matter if you're insured or uninsured? Does it matter if you work for the biggest employer or the smallest? It's the same price, correct? And it will be the same price for months on end until the manufacturer says, I'm going to increase or decrease price based upon supply and demand, real market forces. That's not how prescriptions work. Right. You know, so you go 50 feet back to the register, to the prescription counter, and the price changes every second of every day. It's like spinning a roulette wheel. Am I today's winner or loser?
### Human: it's certainly going to be interesting. All right. And in the last story for today, the quick hit, there you go. So over the past year, for people that don't know, if you don't live in San Francisco, or one of these areas, Waymo, which is owned by Google and cruise have both launched self driving taxi fleets in limited areas. So way most main markets are San Francisco, and Maricopa County in Arizona and cruise is operating in SF, Austin and Phoenix. And police are now requesting self-driving car footage as video evidence for different crimes. So just yesterday, Bloomberg published a report where it found nine search warrants for footage from Waymo self-driving cars and one search warrant that was sent to Cruz. And the story referenced the 2021 scenario where footage from Waymo from a Waymo self driving car was used in a case where an Uber driver was murdered between shifts in San Francisco. And Waymo and Cruz basically state that they require warrants or and court orders before they provide any footage and they aim to provide the minimum amount of data necessary and object to overboard requests and both companies blur license plates and faces to protect bystanders privacy when they're when the footage is requested. But yeah, it's pretty crazy.### Assistant: Too dumb yeah the person knows the rules they signed the documents yeah so i think the more interesting part of this story is you know i think this will unwind i think trump loses whatever stake he had in this i think it's worth us to just throw it in the garbage um. There's no way when you have all of this you know all of all of these alleged crimes going on that you would want to go forward with this because it's gonna result in a ton of lawsuits so. It's a disaster. And, uh, the, but the bit more important thing is Trump needs Twitter. Trump needs YouTube. Trump needs Facebook. He's got to get off truth anyway. So I think he can easily walk away from this and just say, listen, uh, truth social is great. We built a great product, but, uh, you know, I need to be on these other platforms where a lot of the voters have asked me to be present, you know, and I got, I got to meet the fans where they are. Uh, I can't just broadcast to 2 million people, even though it's a better product and I created a much better product. So he'll figure out a way to blame somebody else for this failure, even though he's the majority shareholder. you're the majority shareholder, he should have got together, he said, Listen, I'm a majority shareholder, you're all fired off the board. These are five really highly competent people, but highly competent people don't work with Trump. This is what we've learned. And every time highly competent people go try to help Trump, you know, who are like, well, he's our president. And this was my hope, I tried to give him a chance when he won the presidency, I said, Yeah, maybe there'll be like, look at all these good people, these generals, and these like, you know, lifelong career servants who are trying to help him to move to a great president. What's that the mooch? Well, not that one, but no mooches. I like the mooch. I wasn't thinking of the mooch. I was thinking like even earlier. I got you. I got you earlier in his presidency, you know, chief of staff and yeah, Mattis, I get mad dog Mattis. I mean, he had a lot of really great, uh, people or at least people with great reputations. I don't know anything personally, but you just thought they were like, he'll rise to the occasion. Even Pence, right. Uh, you know, may disagree with him about abortion and some other things and having lunch with women. Yeah, I have some differences of opinion with him on the margins. I might agree with him about other things. But like, wouldn't he? Wouldn't they be able to help him rise to the to the office, right? And the truth is, he is the ultimate iconoclast who listens to nobody, including his lawyers, or including the smart people brings around him. So you can't build a large enterprise without attracting great talent. He was unable, unable to attract great talent, the end. he'll be back. He's gonna I mean, when he comes back to Twitter, oh my god, that's gonna just I think it'll be like a 10% boost to engagement on Twitter. When he comes back, it's going to be a total free for all when Trump comes back to Twitter, I think it will be like a 10% boost in engagement on Twitter in terms of like users and everybody rushing back to hear what he's going to tweet next. And you know, Twitter is, um, pretty engaging right now because a lot of the voices who were silenced on twitter are now back so it'll be a full contact even more engaging. Free for all what is that free for all mode when you play like a game you know like a first person shooter it'll be like one of those free for all modes were like. 30 people are battling 30 people at once, it's going to be pure chaos, you're going to have the left, the right, moderates, everybody is going to be going crazy. And the same thing with YouTube. I mean, if he just started doing YouTube live streams, it would be incredible. I would highly encourage him to if I was Trump, I would take a I would do a combination of Twitter and YouTube lives, because YouTube lives seem to work pretty well. The live streams
### Human: Because he looks like a genius all the way through that book. I mean, he is a genius.### Assistant: Well, it's interesting. I'm reading a book called The Power Law, which I recommend to everybody. It's a good listen. It's got one of those like really professional folks. I it basically goes through like the history of venture capital. It feels like it wasn't primary research and feels like they took all of the existing books out there. and they just made a nice package. It's almost like a history channel, like overview of the industry. But it's a good one. And it's very simple. And it's very to the point. And it really explains like chapter by chapter, each of the seminal moments in the history of the valley, you know, Kleiner with Helen pow, but Kleiner before that with Tom Perkins and his reign, and it really goes into the dynamics of founders fund and how it was formed. It goes into the Facebook, Michigan, showing up in pajamas, it's all rehash stuff. I didn't find anything new in it. For me, there were a couple of stuff in the early days of venture that I was aware of. But the fact that they stream together in like 15 chapters, each of the moments in history was very reinforcing to me, it was like somebody making an abstract on the history of venture capital, and be like, here's what you need to know. These are the 15 important stories. So it's kind of like a best of, you know, like one of those, like, you know, it reminded me of is like the 90s, you know, like VH1 does the 90s. And it's like, if you weren't there for it, here's Nirvana. Here's what you need to know about Pearl Jam. But here's Smashing Pumpkins. And it's a good book in that way. So I recommend it to anybody who's starting off in VC as a good book to catch up. And they do go into the whole formation of Founders Fund and the whole fight between Moritz and Sean Parker and Ruloff coming in. I haven't finished it. Somebody told me I mentioned towards the end. And they also go into the forming of Y Combinator, which I knew, but it was good to sort of hear even more about it and remember that moment in time. I think they had a big impact they don't talk about AngelList, which I guess maybe, you know, they they kind of stopped talking about stuff in the 2010 range. But I think AngelList has had such a profound and syndicates have such a profound impact that it's changed. They talk a lot about angels and super angels, they talk a little bit about Ron Conway, and his role in all of this. So I think it's pretty great in terms of back to the original question of advisor, the CEOs, the reason I bring that up is because they talk a lot about removal of the CEO. And that ended with Larry and Sergei, that was like, kind of the last time it happened. And then founders front said, we're going to let the founders as awkward as they are run these companies. For me, what would it take? malfeasance, like doing something illegal. Yeah. I've had this situation a couple of times where, you know, founders would do something with the cap table that was like, Whoa, that's maybe illegal, and certainly Delaware law would pounce on you like we're gonna all get sued situation. And in those cases, I do ask, hey, just please buy me out and get me off the cap table. In one case, I just said, you know, this company is now two years old, you can buy me out at cash I put in. Yeah. and I'll move on. Literally don't need to have a gain on it. Mazel tov, I can put the money to work somewhere else. And so I think that's what I try to do is if I really disagree, you don't need me or I can become I'll sell half my shares get me to under 5% don't need my board observer seed just semi quarterly updates is what I ask. And then I try to make that contractual that will get quarterly updates on the way out. Because you really do want people to live up to that expectation. As we heard, let's take a final question. Because here we are, we got Zack is Zack, you're in the zone today. Really appreciate you coming here.
### Human: I mean, it is really true. If you think about it, that these platforms became the most you could pay to advertise, but you didn't have to, right? It's almost like an evolution of the creator economy. And like, once brands realize, oh, you just set up like a really sassy brand Twitter account, and you get free access to all of these people. Or you use Facebook really effectively, even minus ads, and you can, you know, sort of freely promote your thing. This is going to make it sound more loaded than it is. But it reminds me of the old days of net neutrality. Do you remember it was like that guy Ed Whitaker from SEC Global or whatever it was like a little AT and he was like, wait a second, you should be paying me twice. Like you're a business. Yeah. and you're using my pipes to reach your customers, you should be paying me for that. And they were like, but we are and he was like, yeah, but it's a streaming service, you should be paying me more. Anyway, it's sort of this like, I guess it makes sense to eventually be like, if you're going to use Twitter, like LinkedIn, why not pay for that? or I mean, incentivize me Twitter or me Facebook to make it a better product.### Assistant: And it might be more. If you're a SaaS or services company that stores customer data in the cloud, you need to be SOC 2 compliant from a third party to close big deals. And you need to use Vanta if you want to do this quickly and easily. Vanta makes it incredibly easy to get and renew your SOC 2. On average, Vanta customers are SOC 2 compliant in just 2 to 4 weeks, compared to 3 to 5 months without Vanta. And they partner with over two dozen audit firms who have been trained to file SOC 2 reports directly within Vanta. This is a total no brainer. A bunch of my portfolio founders have used Vanta and have had amazing experiences. And one more time, if you don't have SOC 2 compliance, you can't close major customers. One major customer can keep your whole startup alive. That could be the difference between being profitable or losing money. You need to be SOC 2 compliant. And here's the best part. Vanta is going to give you $1,000 off. get $1,000 off at vanta.com slash twist. That's vanta.com slash twist for $1,000 off your sock to this is the first. So what if there's a second layer, which is Hey, for a corporate account? Well, yeah, I mean, he could, this is, you know, for 12 bucks, but okay, let's say he makes it $25 for no ads, privacy, plus you get a bunch of analytic features, and some other professional business related features. That's a fairly no brainer. The the LinkedIn professional, I think is 30 bucks a month. And I didn't know this. But like half the people at inside were paying for it. Another group of people at launch or salespeople or recruiting people were paying for it. And they're like, yeah, it's only $300 a year. And it you know, if you have LinkedIn pro, you know, we can get another we dm people in mail, find customers, it pays for itself, like in week one. So I think there's a lot more he could turn over. There could be three layers, four layers of four tiers here. A corporate tier is another one. Why should somebody with you know, Pepsi, or whatever, they should be paying, you know, $10,000 a month for their collective accounts. And you saw that on Twitter, I was, you know, involved in some of the meetings about this with David Sachs and Elon. If you look at my profile, it has an all in icon next to it. If you look at Marc Andreessen's, it has an A16Z. Now pull up Nick, if you will, the Twitter handle for all in, I think there's like five handles that have this. So It's this is very early days, but it's been public so I can talk about it and what you'll see Nobody's noticed this but I'll make the announcement here make it three times bigger. You see it says tweets look at that affiliates Tweets and replies etc. You see that affiliates. Yeah, look on affiliates. It shows the four besties I don't know why producer Nick didn't get in there, but he should so now imagine you're the New York Times now imagine your Pepsi now imagine you're a NYU, instead of saying affiliates, that's just a word, you're gonna be able to change that word. So we could say here, when you go to the NYU, it could say professors, it could say graduate programs, and it could say undergrad resources, whatever, or you could say undergrads. You go, you go, and it's like, here's the different schools we have here. So NYU Stern, or, you know, UCLA, whatever, USC, this, that, the other thing, they're gonna have that. Now, what is that worth? What is it worth to be able to navigate on the NYU Disney page, whatever, you're on the Star Wars page, and you see affiliates, or it says characters, or it says movies. So now you go to characters, And it shows you ant man and Hulk, then you go to movies, it shows you those that it says merge, right? I mean, it's the possibilities here for a social network to then get revenue from direct payments from companies is going to be just next level.
### Human: It burns you out. It burns you out after a while. It's tough.### Assistant: It does. I still believe though. Joe Spicer, thank you so much for telling the story publicly. I know it resonated with so many people like from that time, but also now in this exact moment. I mean, we have noties in the chat right now who are saying I'm trying to build a business on Instagram or TikTok or Spotify or Shopify. And it's, it's an uphill climb. So we really appreciate the perspective. Thanks for having me. Thanks. Take care. All right, everybody. Jason's internet crashed because he lives in the past or Russia has finally come to silence him, which is a very inappropriate joke, but sometimes you just have to laugh. Otherwise you cry. So that was a great interview with Joe, I am going to real quickly before I let everybody go talk about how we live in the future. Because even if your internet is not working, maybe a humanoid robot with human like intelligence can come and fix it. A startup building such humanoid robots just raised $58.5 million in a Series A. The company is called Sanctuary, based out of Vancouver. And I'm just gonna say in advance, that i know it is cliche and maybe even silly and self-defeating and overly cynical to say that like humanoid robots with human-like intelligence seem creepy or that the name sanctuary is creepy or that everything the ceo says about these robots is creepy i get it but it's creepy okay The startup is called Sanctuary. It's based out of Vancouver. The round was led by Bell, which is a Canadian telecom company. The robots will initially be general purpose and do all the things that, you know, we kind of want robots to do. Take on dangerous workplace tasks, eliminate labor shortages. We actually have a clip of the robots in action from July, 2020, which I think we can pull up uploaded by author and tech consultant, Kathy Hackle, which we'll talk over. um and you can see they have they look like way too hot they have you know belly shirts on and lady heads which like i hope there are some that don't look like sex bots but i don't know um and from what you can see of them in action right now they're mainly just sort of moving their arms around in an upsetting uncanny valley kind of way sanctuary's long-term vision however is Bigger, they say, the company is aiming to have the AI-enabled robots be able to reason and think like humans do. Here is the only slightly ominous quote from Sanctuary CEO Jordy Rose. When we think about finding a cure for cancer, addressing climate change or colonizing other planets, colonizing, we take it for granted that people will be needed to do all the thinking and reasoning to come up with novel solutions and then execute them. But what if you could build a machine that thought, reasoned, and interacted with the world like a person? What if you were not limited to having access to just one human-like mind? Just think how much more quickly we could arrive at the solution. According to an article by Silicon Angle, Sanctuary, quote, ultimately sees its technology playing a vital role in space exploration. I mean, this is just straight up ripped from the sci-fi chapter headings. And again, likely, maybe even valuable. There are things that robots are going to need to do. There are also, if you've read enough sci-fi, massive ethical issues with the idea of having robots that have human-like intelligence, but effectively using them like servants or worse to do all of the hard work. And I guess I would argue that we have like neural nets and deep learning to draw conclusions that one human mind alone couldn't like, I don't want to dis robots, because I wish I had one to clean my house that was better than the Roomba. Wow, I just went right to the using my robot as a servant, didn't I? Damn it. Um, but it is this is, I don't know, there's just something about it that always feels just a little terrible. When you hear someone talk about it that this way, maybe it would seem a little less terrible if it weren't like hot chicks and belly shirts. Either way, We live in the future and the future looks just as dystopian as in every movie we've ever seen. Anyway, that is it for today. I hope you enjoyed the show. I know Jason's hard at work getting his internet back up and we'll see you back here tomorrow. Have a great day. Bye bye.
### Human: And now another story about scapegoating the extremely visible, very flashy, flashy human. Here we go. Maybe. Yeah. Okay. So huge news all over the internet because Even Gary Gensler knows that if you put Kim Kardashian in your headline, everybody gonna click it. Today, we got news that the SEC is charging Kim K for quote, unlawfully touting a crypto security. Yep. On her Instagram earlier this morning, the SEC said that Kim violated its rules when she posted about a theory of Max's EMAX coin, without disclosing that she was paid to promote it. So she didn't include because there's the FTC has a rule that you have to include a hashtag ad. If you're being paid to promote something online. This is rarely enforced. It is a case not enforced. I don't think Yeah, yeah, I think maybe there are like one or two cases ever previously of it being enforced, but it turns out the FTC but okay, Gary Gensler is right. Exactly. So it turns out that the SEC thinks that that disclosure is even more important when you're talking about tokens which it is increasingly and now quite definitively saying are securities. Here's SEC chair Gary Gensler on CNBC this morning talking about the charge in actually quite simple terms. It's 55 seconds.### Assistant: think are not coming out now. The one they're showing is there's they showed two versions. One is there. I think they're both be called optimists, whatever. But this Tesla robot, they showed one that was using pulleys and joints and hardware that was not made by Tesla, and then one that was making hardware by Tesla. So there's been a lot of these this hardware that's available that you can buy, obviously, you know, cafe x doesn't make the robot arm. In the case of route AI, they made the hand but not the arm, I think. So they're making it from the bottom up for a purpose to work in the factories. And when you dogfood something, there's another important lesson for founders, when you're dogfooding the product for yourself, the chances of it hitting the note and actually solving a problem becomes much higher. Why? Well, because you need the product, and you know exactly what you want. So you can define the spec. So the spec for this robot is work in a factory, doing dangerous stuff that's repetitive, and hard and heavy lifting. And don't break the cars when you do it. And, you know, don't hurt the humans working around you. So that narrow focus, I think it's going to make this very successful. And I was watching people people dunk on it, you know, it's always gonna be critics, who've done nothing in their lives, but complain, but typically, The same critics I remember from the Roadster days. And they were like, well, that's just a Lotus Elise with a battery in it. And it was like, yeah, but it has a battery in it. And it has a motor that's not burning fuel, and it doesn't have oil. And they're like, yeah, but it's It's basically like a glorified Lotus. And I was like, well, that's like the negative, the most negative framing you could come out of, right. And so the negative framing here was, oh, not as good as a Boston Dynamics, or it doesn't do this, or, you know, it's not ready. And it's like, I would be very careful judging the company, Tesla, and I'm not a shareholder, I'd be very careful, underestimating what they're capable of, given what they did, and the resources they have. Now, they have a different level of resources than they had then. And look what they did. Then they literally destroyed the entire car industry and became the number one car in any sector where they were selling, you know, a competitive vehicle for something completely different. And they did it like in most countries. So I would be very careful because they have more resources now. And they're making it for themselves. So I don't think you're going to have this in your house like anytime soon. But I do think you're going to go to a Tesla factory in two years and see a lot of these doing actually meaningful work. Now, I think it's time for the segment. Listen, if you're a founder or an employee at a startup, it's critical that you become capital efficient at this time. Fundraising is tough right now. and cutting your burn is really important. And one great way to cut costs is to run all of your SaaS apps on one platform, and that one platform, Odoo. Odoo is the only software your company will ever need. Using Odoo's suite of business apps means you don't have a bunch of messy SaaS subscriptions. No, everything you need is already on Odoo. All you have to do is turn it on when you're ready and they'll only charge you the apps that you use. Odoo has over 40 main apps and 16,000 from their open source community. Sales, accounting, marketing automation, HR, website builders, and so, so much more. And this will streamline your business. No more issues with transferring data back and forth. Nope. And you'll have one customer support contact across all your apps, not 20. And you're going to get more done in less time while saving a ton of money. And here's the best part. The first app is always free. And Odoo is offering $1,000 in credit on your first implementation pack. So go to odoo.com slash twist for $1,000 off. That's odoo.com slash twist.
### Human: Yeah, yeah. Well, these are great takeaways, I think, for people interested in attending tech events and attending NFT NYC. Again, don't buy tickets. Don't burn yourself out. Find the Google Sheet. A person I want to have to plug, the absolute king of dishing out where people are going to be on the weekends, Andrew Young. at A-N-D-R-U-Y-E-U-N-G, I believe is his name, on Twitter. He has a link in his bio. He didn't tell me to promote this or anything. I met Andrew one time and he is just somebody that is normally really on top of the tech and business. If you're not interested in tech, I know he works at Facebook. So he does have more corporate-y kind of events that happen as well. But if you're interested in networking, I know a bunch of tech companies are laying off right now. So if you're interested in looking for a job, I would highly recommend going to his page, even DMing him. I've gotten coffee with him before. He's a really great person. He would be somebody that would... He gives me... I don't know if he has the Google Sheet, but he feels like somebody### Assistant: Anyway, yeah. But yeah, what I was I was also just going to add, like with all of these events, sometimes I've definitely done this in the past where I think I can hit like four events in a day. And then I'm like, wait. And then I do use Google Maps because I have no sense of direction, even in the city I live in, in New York. And so one thing that's been really helpful is I'll RSVP and I'm like, Okay, these are the 3 events. What is the vibe of each of these events? How much do I want to go to each event? And then where are they located? And then take into account how long it'll take to get there. And realistically, when am I going to get there? How long do I want to spend there? And I think in the past, there have been times where I would be like, Okay, there are... whatever like three happy hours that are each like from five to eight or six to nine or something in that general time range i can probably hop between all three and stay at them for like you know 30 to 45 minutes to an hour each and then go to the next one um and that's something that i've done in the past because a lot of these events do sound really cool they're in like insane locations where i normally would never um you know pay to get in or it's like you know a more rare occasion kind of thing totally or a artist is playing or or you are trying to see people that you would like to have a conversation with but they are only at these different events right yeah but this time around i've been like you know what i'm gonna pick like one, maybe two events that I'd like to go to every day. And there might be like a few other events that you know, if I make it or if I go to it after that would be great. But I'm not putting pressure on myself to go there. Because running around takes more time than you think. And sometimes you go to a party or a happy hour and you do have these really good conversations and then you're like, wait, I can just continue having good conversations here. I don't need to go somewhere else in the hope and pursuit of having good conversations at another location. If I'm having that here, why do you need to do that? And you know, there's always like the grass is always greener. Maybe there's like someone you'll meet at the other place that'll be like cooler or better or more beneficial for you to meet. But it doesn't always play out that way. And I think sometimes when you're like in pursuit of way too many different things, you just get exhausted, you don't actually have all the good conversations. And you might just be like running around telling people for five minutes because you're like, Oh, like, I need to go to the next thing. And that's what I've been trying to do this week. And sometimes even like not going to events that I was like, interested in or excited about. Like, that's actually okay, too. Yeah, last night, I went to like, a happy hour and a dinner. And I was supposed to go to like, a late night party like thing that a friend's company was hosting. But I was like, you know what, I'm just gonna go home and like, hang out with my roommates. And I did that and started going to the party. Probably felt great. Yeah, I slept in my bed at not a totally insane hour. Yeah. And I was like, I'm not mad. And you're good to go for today. Yeah. I'm good to go for today. So we went to the bar next door to my apartment. I was like, this is also a vibe, right? Yeah, yeah. And sometimes when you're chasing the most exciting thing, you run yourself ragged. And there's so many people that have gotten COVID after conferences or get like super sick. I feel like I'm already sort of losing my voice. But I think sometimes it's okay to keep in mind that you don't need to go to everything. Even if you're like, I flew to the city to network or to meet all these people, it is possible to still do that without doing everything. Without burning yourself out. Without burning yourself out. And that's okay. It might even be for the best.
### Human: And then maybe individually positive, right. And that could add up to some positivity. But that's only as long as the bubble lasts. And for every person who did that, there are going to be like 10 other people who lost all their money.### Assistant: It's like some Mary Kay cosmetic multi-level marketing, you know, whatever that is. It is. Vitamins. It's MLM for dudes. It's MLM for, for bras. Like this is Mary Kay or what was the, uh, Herbalife. Oh, yeah. Herbalife and Mary Kay for tech dudes. Yeah, that's literally like the use case. It just as a challenge, make something that people use and get value from outside of speculation. And I do think NFT art and NFT clubs like I asked them the producers here to get us in on this NFT. This this one is this is like an incredible idea. because it's it's based on that Spanish cooking clubs, right? The private cooking clubs. Sounds like a two two parter. It's like this crazy cultural phenomenon in Spain where people have these like so houses where you can cook for your friends. gourmands. And so imagine you went to so house and you could go in the kitchen and just make whatever you want. And you cook and clean yourself kind of situation. And you buy all your stuff at the farmer's market. It's across the street from that. So in Spain, I guess I have these cooking clubs. So if like you were into golf, this would be like if you were into food. So you you and I could go there when we get to Hey, Molly, you want to make cassoulet, the French dish that takes 24 hours. Well, yeah, let's do a cassoulet thing with our friends. And everybody goes and makes cassoulet and it takes 24 hours and we come back the next night and we drink some wine the first night and the next night we actually in the afternoon invite all of our other friends to come and partake in the cassoulet experience. Oh, I'm doing this. If it comes out, I would totally join as a member. Sounds incredible. All right, Molly, it's time for my favorite part of this week in startups, which is the startup of the day. most startup part. Yes, the startup part where we get back to our roots and talking about new, incredible projects in the world. mojo mo jo is a startup building a stock market like product to bet on athletes. They've raised $75 million in funding led by thrive capital, Tiger global jet.com founder mark laurie and alex rodriguez assuming the baseball player also participated mojo is alex rodriguez a rod as the co founder but it will not be involved in day to day operation Mark Laurie's quote to Bloomberg on building the platform, I've always thought the idea of a sports stock market was the Holy Grail, the vision could transform sports and fandom as a whole for years, I've heard people throw around the idea, but nobody had been able to do it. For the concept to truly work, you need underlying principles like intrinsic value and instant liquidity Mojo's product is stated slated to launch in the fall. and we'll focus on American football as its first sport. The CEO is Vinit Bihara, which is interesting because Bahara is also the last name of Preet Bahara of the amazing cafe. It's his brother. And this is his brother. Mm hmm. And to even put an interesting rub on this, Preet is known as the guy who shut down poker when he was the New York Attorney General because gambling was illegal at the time. And his brother is creating I believe this is a would be best described as a prediction market also known as a gambling site. And this is great. Fate loves irony. And here we go. If if Preet becomes the becomes the Attorney General again, does he have to take action against his brother? I don't think so. The laws have changed. Obviously, you know, the Supreme Court is now allowing for the overturned all that state and now states can make their own decisions around wagering. But this existed in the Hollywood Stock Exchange HSX. And that was a way to bet on your favorite artists. And the idea would be you could buy stock and an artist, there will be a limited number of shares. And then people could buy the shares. And it could be a way to bet on things. So prediction markets are a big deal. Yeah, I guess the Hollywood Stock Exchange may still exist in some fashion. Or we might be looking at the Wayback Machine. What am I looking at here?
### Human: Yeah, it is. I guess there's this concept in behavioral psychology and cognitive, how we cognitively interpret the world of anchoring, what was something worth previously? Yeah. And maybe you could talk a little bit about how you've thought about thinking. Because when you get into this game, and you're making decisions, much like poker players, gamblers, or anybody taking big risks, unless the risk we take compared to the risk founders take is much different, but we have to take many risks over long periods of time on many different companies. So in fact, you really start to have to think and analyze your firm, and individuals, risk taking and how they make decisions. Maybe talk a little bit about how you think about and you've gotten better as a decision maker.### Assistant: Um, so let me first talk about the conversation that I have with founders about alignment of interest between investor and founder. And then I can talk about my own decision framework. Um, so the conversation I normally have with people goes like this. You have nine months runway today as things stand, you're burning $1.2 million a month. I'm making all the data up. Um, you raised last round at make it up, uh, 120 posts. I can tell you that with market comps where they are today, your next round, if you were to raise today, would probably be at 30 to 40 post. Okay? So what's going to happen? Either you're going to run out of cash trying to raise and people are going to say, I don't really feel like doing a down round because I don't want to piss off all your investors. So I'll just wait for the next deal to come along. Um, or you're going to raise money and people are going to cram you down when they cram you down. They're going to look at me and say, Mark, are you writing a check? So I will write a check. So let's say that I own 20% of the company today. I can always write a check to fix my ownership, but if you're the founder, you can't write that check. So, well, you could theoretically, but most don't have the capital to do it. So I always say to people. I'm not telling you to cut your burn from 1.2 million a month to $250,000 a month to benefit me. No, it benefits you because if your runway can go from nine months to 23 months or 27 months, that gives you the time for two things, either to grow into your valuation or three things grow into your valuation. Number one, Or wait until there's a better capital market environment, number two. Or number three, when people go to fund you, when they make the investment decision, instead of burning 1.2 million, by then maybe you're burning 80,000 a month, right? Because you've kept your costs low, your revenue grows, your burn rate goes down. So instead of writing a $20 million check, they only have to write a $5 million check, and that's much easier to raise. So it's in your interest. Now you asked me about our decision framework. Let me tell you about our decision framework. Um, we've been around for 26 years. Okay. So I'm not the founder. Um, I've been running up front since 2011. It was founded my, by my dear friend and still colleague Eve sister on, um, in 1996. Um, and we did a rounds. You already said that our average check was probably four to $5 million in the past. Somewhere around 2015, 2016, when A and B rounds started getting so large, we had a choice to make. And the choice was, do we do one of three things, either write bigger checks, 10, 15, $20 million checks into A rounds. Do we B write the same size checks at the same stage, but own 10 or 11% instead of our target, which is 18 to 21%. Or do we still try to get 18 to 21%? Our strategy is defined by doing 40 deals where we own 18 to 21%. Our median ownership is 20% on our first check. And so how, how do you square the circle? What we decided was we would get religiously focused on just one investment thesis per partner. Okay. So we're eight people writing checks today. And each one has a swim lane. My swim lane for the last 11 years has been computer vision. That's why we work together on density. That's why we work together on fade. Like it's how do, how does the world get interpreted through cameras or lasers or sensor sensors or infrared? It's why I funded ring. It's why I funded Nanette, a baby camera. Um, but I have another partner and that partner is doing video game infrastructure. I have a partner doing healthcare. I have a partner doing FinTech. I have a partner who's doing cybersecurity. I have a partner who does AI and legit, sorry, not AI, robotics and logistics.
### Human: Right. Sometimes they're very aware. It's intentional. And it's like, you know, oh, you call people racial slurs your entire career on the bench and you're still there and you're still just like, your record speaks for itself or whatever. I mean, what you could do is analyze records. Yes. Like you would analyze the conviction records of judges, right? Because like there still will have to be judgment. Sentencing. Sentencing guidelines have in some cases, you know, like third strike sentencing guidelines have proven to be very unfair because arrests themselves can be based in so much bias. For example, so the last thing you want to do is be like a computer will decide this based on these strictures. And that will be the end of the story. And there will be no nuance, like you'll still have to have humans. But to to have a dispassionate analysis that can reveal bias. Yes, let's go.### Assistant: Speaking of chat GPT, since we're on a roll, Molly, let's keep rolling here. All right. I showed you on just a show and I saw on our tik tok account. which I think is TWI startups search for this week and startups on tick tock. I saw that the tick tock of my demo of the chat and GPT app, which I'm in the test flight of started trending yesterday. And you made a really good point. Which was, you know, I was like, Hey, tell me the best restaurants in yonville. That's like an area next to Napa, where all the fancy restaurants are French laundry, yada, yada. Then I said, Hey, tell me which ones have the best duck because if you're going to really test a chef, duck's a pretty good way to do it. I had incredible piece of confit, the confit when I was in UFL, at Bouchon. Bouchon is the best. Like I just was like, you know what, I want to have a birthday party just rent out Bouchon. Right. Definitely do that. Très magnifique. putting that aside. Yeah, you said, well, then Google could then do that thing where they call on the phone and get you a reservation, which Google has now Google Voice, well, if they don't have a reservation system, call me like, Hey, I'm calling on behalf of Mollywood, we can we have reservation tonight, they have the conversation. That's kind of what this bill Broder, I'm sorry, Josh Broder, do not pay thing is doing exactly what you mentioned there, which is, well, once the AI does the analysis, well, I could have the conversation. AI could navigate what the outcome is going to be, which means there is a very professional use case for chat GPT and other services. Again, I think chat GPT is probably as good but probably not better than whatever Google or Facebook have right now that they haven't released and Google Facebook need to release those they do they get 10% 20% pop in their stock, open AI quietly put out a form that we found on the discord there and I filled it out. They are asking people, how much would you pay for a professional version of chat GPT? And I put in, I would pay, and they did a very interesting pricing survey. They said, what would be too little that you would think the price was too cheap? And I put 20 bucks. They said, what would be like too much? I put 5000. They said, what do you think would be like, make you feel like it's a good value? I put 50. And then they said, when will you start like, considering it was like too expensive. So it's like this classic pricing survey concept of $500. And I filled it out, hopefully I get into chat GPT professional, but I think they've started a waitlist based on a Google form. And the idea would be you wouldn't be throttled. Maybe it would do some of the things it doesn't do currently that you have to say, like, oh, write a play in order to get it. So maybe some of those things, maybe it could have multiplayer mode, this is what I'm thinking. And you would have no limits, they can uncap it. But imagine multiplayer mode, where like, the producers of this week and startups are all in a chat GPT instance. And we're saying, somebody asked the question, what are slacks historical quarterly revenues, and it puts that there. And then it says, Hey, can you average that? And it averages it. Right now we ask a person there, but we could have a chat window open right now. And put chat. Imagine if chat GPT was built into slack. And you could just do slash chat GPT. What were slacks quarterly earnings, and it just gave it to you. Oh, my god. Oh, my god, professionally. Each query would be just paid if you just paid 25 cents a query. Yeah, like you would need half the number of people at your company or the company, people at your company would be 50% more productive. Right? So this is going to have a dramatic impact in the enterprise.
### Human: I think that's an astute observation, by the way, Cortland. It's a very astute observation. Yeah.### Assistant: But it was off. I mean, it was off putting to me in other ways, too. I remember there was a guy in my YC batch who had raised from A16Z in like the first week of Y Combinator. And the way people were talking about them, like, Oh, have you talked to so and so? It feels like talking to Mark Zuckerberg before he made it big. And, like, eventually his company sort of, like, flamed out and it didn't go anywhere. But, like, everybody was celebrating the fact that he had raised so much money. Nobody was celebrating how successful his business was, how much it changed his life and other people's lives. But I think you hit the nail on the head when you talked about the press. You mentioned, you know, Corlin, how did you come to this? Well, if you have at all followed startups in the last 15-20 years, you get your news from, like, podcasts like this one, from TechCrunch, from the other tech press, from Twitter. And while there isn't any sort of secret cabal meeting in a dark room to try to, you know, push the sort of VC funding narrative, I think just the nature of the tech media is going to do that already. So there's kind of like three different ways this happens. Number one, the press is going to write about what people want to read about. And people want to read about these giant consumer facing, you know, B2C startups, the Ubers or Facebooks, your Twitter, Airbnbs, exactly. And these are always going to be well funded companies. So that's going to be like one situation where you've got figure out what story do they have, and it almost always is going through YC or raising a ton of money. The press is also going to want to talk to people like you, who are very well connected, who have broad knowledge, who have deep access. Generally, you're going to be investors. And then finally, a large number of stories in the press are going to come from the comms departments of well-funded startups or from PR companies. And so, if you read any of the tech press, basically, you're just going to, like, if I go to techcrunch.com right now, I guarantee you, like, four to the top five stories are going to be, this company raised this much money, XYZ. And so, like, you just don't really get exposed to another path if you're reading about this kind of stuff. And when I was in college reading about all this stuff, it was basically TechCrunch and Paul Graham's blog. And every single source said, the way to do this is you raise money. And what I think is insidious about it is that when you consume this much information that doesn't really give you a full picture of the world. turns out like human beings, we aren't that creative. We don't tend to create new things from scratch. Instead, we're more like remixers. We take the knowledge and the experiences we have from our past and we remix them into other things. And so, if all of your knowledge comes from this sort of biased source, which says the only way to start a company is to go through YC or beg angels for money, then you're going to think that's the way to do it. And so, that's what I did. But I think the reality is, and you know this just as well as I do, that like you don't need permission to build a business on the internet. one's going to stop you from going online and putting up a website charging customers. I mean, you had Dave Weiner on your podcast a week or two ago. Yeah. And I didn't know anything about him. Great guest. Great guest. Super inspiring guy. Brilliant. Played like this great role in sort of pioneering and spreading RSS and a bunch of other technologies. But he had this other thread running through his story where he just seemed so bitter and upset at investors for never taking a shot on him. And he's a brilliant guy. And I was thinking the entire time listening to it, like, you don't need investors to take it. You don't need anybody's permission. Like you clearly were able to do things on your own.
### Human: How do you think about secondary? When the founder wants to sell 5 million, 10 million, 500K, a million, what do you advise them in terms of they've got a rocket ship company, on paper they're worth, you know, seven, eight, nine figures, and they don't have any cash. What's your best advice to them when they're in that series B, series C, in terms of taking money off the table, but not doing too much, or is it not a concern of yours, and then getting distracted? Is there a point where they get distracted?### Assistant: I'm conflicted. On the one hand, a lot's changed. I sold my last company just before the cycle started. So in 2011, I was offered 10 million of secondary liquidity. I turned it down and we ended up selling to Adobe instead. But I didn't understand how secondary liquidity worked and the price was low. Should you have taken that? Would it have been better? Oh, yes. For sure. Yes, for a million reasons, not only financially, I mean, I don't even want to talk about financially, but also it would have, even if it was less than 10 million, it would have, I'd already made a few million from my first startup, but it would have de-stressed my life. I could have gone another five years. That's what you want as an investor from secondary. You want, I'm up for another five years, Jason. That's what you want. That's when interests align, right? So you have to look for that. If it's too early, I'll tell you when it's too early, I always find it's terrible. Now, people will argue in 2020, secondary liquidity has dropped into 30, 40 million dollar valuation deals, okay? It used to always be in the nine figure deals, right? It used to always be, look, when the valuation crossed nine figures, whatever fund couldn't get enough ownership, so they throw in some secondary, not out of the goodness of their own heart, but so they could buy a few percent more of the company. Yeah. Right? But as bigger funds got more aggressive, a big fund, you know, whatever, Sequoia Index and Accel or whatever, them putting in 5 million of secondary into a Series A is irrelevant in a big fund, right? Right. Whatever it is, Lightspeed, any big fund. So it's creeped into early Series A's. And I find that I like to destress. I find it happens too early, so it's not about going another five years. Right. And I find they quit because why sell your shares cheap? The most successful founder I know still has not sold a single share. Yeah, Elon. And owns almost half his company. And it's not that he's greedy. He is greedy. I remember when- Were you talking about Elon or? I didn't invest in Elon. No, my personal portfolio. The most successful founder in my current portfolio never sold a share and had multiple opportunities. And remember, this is a first-time founder. At around several hundred million in revenue when he didn't have a dollar in the bank, he said, can I borrow some money from you to buy shares in the round? Wow. This wasn't facetious. I love it. This was an honest question. He's like, I'm broke. Can I get a million dollar loan to buy some shares in my own company? Yeah. I want to buy some shares in the company. And so, you kind of... Yum, yum. And so, as a founder myself, I'm completely supportive of de-risking and actually just de-stressing. I don't believe in de-stressing. That's the difference, right? Forget de-risk. If you see a lot of risk in your startup, just sell it. Just fucking sell it today if you see the risk, right? But we know that there's nothing more stressful than being a founder CEO. There is nothing harder than being a founder CEO. Anyone that says otherwise is full of it. It's the hardest job on planet earth. It's the hardest job. So if you not having to, if you having a house and having your husband not have stress and getting support for your kids, right? Getting support at home. If I can pay up for that, that's a gift as an investor, right? And the last point on it is, That's the general view. And then the other thing today is boy, this is what changed in the last since you and I met is unicorns became decacorns, not a consumer, but a B2B. Right. There were no... Zoom planned IPO, what, two years ago at a $4 billion market cap. That's what the banks told them. Twilio was like a billion or two.
### Human: Yeah, I think that they're the one that is the easiest for everybody to see how that one's going. I think there's probably a lot of situations like Luminary, we just don't know as much about their financials, but agreed. But to get back to the Rogan thing, I mean, look, to me, this is another domino to fall that for those of us that have been working in this field for a long time, a decade or longer, some of us, Um, you know, it's been getting gentrified for a while. And, you know, I think to some extent, this is, this harkens back to like Howard Stern moving from terrestrial radio to Sirius or XM at the time. But I I think it suggests a general trend, and this really started in 2018. The shot across the bow that I saw was when iHeart picked up Stuff Media for $55 million. Then one by one, you keep seeing these things happen. Now, Rogan, because he's top dog, that one's getting the most headlines, but I think this is just one in a succession of many. Unfortunately, I think that it is And fortunately, I think that this is the new way that this is going to go, you know, this is Starbucks moving into the the hipster town. And everybody goes, Oh, man, it's getting so commercial, it's going to happen, it's going to ruin some things that we love about podcast, it's going to open up opportunities as well. And I think what is the opportunity to open? So yeah, Potentially better listener experiences you know you've got real horsepower behind groups like spotify that are that are coming in and can actually you know like how long have people been complaining about discover ability. you know, and recommendations, you know, how about navigability, being able to go, you know, you can't talk to the thing right now, but and we may talk about this later in our conversation here today. But, you know, think about the opportunity with connected voice, and what's going to happen as that industry keeps emerging and what real players are going to be able to do to evolve the listening experience. And they're also just gonna be able to restore some programs that is really really hard and kind of the rag tag way that most of us have come to love the industry. So i think it's both i think there's a good and a bad but but what you have to understand is that there's really two worlds that are starting to split off here this place was built. Buy a venture capital backed startups. You know i was at the beginning and we launched brands like dollar shave club zip recruiter blue apron me on dc's were companies that came in and we put them on podcast because frankly they couldn't afford to do a lot else other than you know search and and and that's why we've had all these crazy promo codes and vanity urls. For all these reasons because these are performance marketers. They're counting customers when they buy the ads now That's not gonna be what gets podcasts to the next level. That's what got us here What gets the ecosystem to the next level is when they get brand dollars?### Assistant: The creator gets to decide, hey, I have this RSS feed. You can use it. under these rules. And if you break those rules, I can restrict your access to it. When we get back to this quick break, Dan, I want to take your temperature on what you think the Joe Rogan Spotify deal is, and if that is going to become an ongoing trend, and what it means for the business of the open source open platform world of podcasting when we get back on this, we can start All right, with SendPro Online from Pitney Bowes, you can simply print postage stamps and shipping labels even when working remotely, which, let's face it, a lot of us are doing. For as low as just $4.99 a month, you'll have access and discounts of up to 40% off USPS priority mail. 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Calculate the exact postage, get access to the mobile app and ship and track your packages on the go. Print from your PC, avoid trips to the post office, kind of important right now. All you gotta do is go to pb.com, not peanut butter, Pitney Bowes, pb.com slash twist to access this special offer for a free 30-day trial, plus a free 10-pound scale to get you started. That's pb.com slash twist. Experience a savings in your shipping costs with a free trial of SendPro Online from Pitney Bowes. All right, Marco Arment is here. He's M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T on the Twitter. He's pretty active. And he has a website, Marco.org. And of course, he makes the best podcasting app, in my personal opinion. It's the one I use my daily. I'll use Spotify from time to time. iTunes, the Apple podcast. But overcast is my default, mainly because I love the queue. And I love the custom settings. The queue to me is everything. I just start at the top of my queue, I work my way down and I have my paid podcast in one area. It's just a great product. Dan, when you hear Marco talk about hey, you know, Spotify now has this big chip stack, I'm adding that piece. And they're going to take something like Joe Rogan, which is, I think, the number one podcast in the world. And they're gonna say, you know what, it's now gonna, we're going to control it, we're going to control it 100%. Maybe there'll be clips here or there, but no more RSS feed, it's not going to be available on other players. It's an exclusive, whereas when they bought um bill simmons's company i think for 200 or so 250 they said hey the podcast will almost all be available still on rss we may cherry pick some content what do you think about this change we've only seen like a couple of examples and then there's luminary which i think is failing um pretty hard actually because i mean there's so much great content out there that For me, like Russell Simmons, I'm interested in maybe listening to Russell Simmons, but I'm not interested in paying for Russell, not Russell Simmons, Russell Brand.
### Human: You're getting your Lambos, you're going to be head to toe diamonds.### Assistant: It's just the situation becomes like, well, why even bother looking at this? So then that fed its way into unprofitable startups. And that became the problem. So where do we go from here? That's always the question. Where do we go from here? So as part of this cultural reset, I think you pointed out astutely, there's different ways to go about this. There is the ha ha, you know, where the people who are soft and weak, you just lost your jobs. We didn't like you. We never liked working with you. I see a little bit of that. But the more important thing, in and i'm giving this advice to people because i've been through this and i know how to get through it's my third time going to war like this put your head down as a leader you set an example you take on more work you grind harder you get people focused on the things that are essential in the business you watch every penny and you run lean and you run hard That's my advice to all founders here. And that also goes down to, you know, the rank and file class, everybody has to look at themselves in the mirror, from the CEO, down to the person who's been at the company, the junior salesperson, you know, first developer out of school, whoever, whatever your job you got, you got to just be efficient, Look at your calendar, look at your output. And just say, am do does this company need me or not? Am I contributing to the team? And if I'm not contributing team, let me find a team I can go contribute to. this happens with basketball players all the time, you know, they're on a team that the last four or five folks on the bench don't get a lot of time, but they they serve a big purpose in practice, don't they? They're the team that you play in practice or the other, you know, the the away jerseys and then the practice games. So what you need to do here, if you're in one of these companies, very simple. And you probably see me tweeting about it, you get to see it internally, Molly. We just did a founder university episode is one of the best ones we've ever done. Kelly, I don't know if you saw I shared it this weekend, Kelly did an amazing 10 minute episode. I will put links into the show note if you or if you search for founder dot university, just something very simple called time blocking or boxing and different methods for being more efficient. If everybody in a company becomes 10 20% more efficient every month for three months, all of a sudden, it's like the company hired three or four more people. It's time just for everybody to work smarter, harder, and for management to set priorities better. Anything that's not essential, as a project, you just got to cut it, put it on the do not right now list, and then get everybody focused. And then we all get fit. And then we get out of it. That's what has to happen right now. That's the cultural moment we're in. The party went on too long, everybody needs to get an IV, get some fresh air, work out, eat some soup, get back in the game. That's it. We don't have to make this into more than it is everybody. The economy is going to be brutal in 2023. I believe it was going to be a double dip recession. And I thought we had a 5050 of a soft landing. I think now it's like 8020 7030. Who knows. But I always said it's gonna be six quarters. This is quarter three. It's going to be hard for three more quarters. That's it. Everybody tighten your belts, work harder, work smarter. You don't have to kill yourself. But this is, you know, kind of the price you pay when you have a big hangover. It was things were too easy last year, things are going to be too hard next year. Part of the cycle, boom bust. And if you haven't been through a boom bust cycle right now, congratulations. Because we live in the modern world, the developed world, whatever you want to call it. Everybody.
### Human: He does this type two really well. This kind of like crabby slightly damaged neurotic. Yeah, he's got a type. Yeah, it works. It works.### Assistant: The fact that he's dealing wonderful. He's dealing blow out of the restaurant. I mean, I like go right back to my childhood, which is my childhood, Molly, like at my dad's bar. At a certain age, it all became revealed to me. Bookie. Coke dealer. Lone Shark. Hells Angel. Cop. cop who could solve problems for you. Like literally bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing bing I bring him the change 17 bucks, sometimes 47 bucks. Say keep it kid. Keep it. I love this guy. I'm not gonna say his name. Rest in peace. This guy was running he had services that were available. And in Brooklyn, every establishment had services available that not my dad wasn't running the services, but he wasn't also kicking the people out. And so as part of the keeping the peace, He would tip the proprietor, my dad's kids, who were working in the restaurant, with extraordinary tips. He was a bookie. He was the bookie. I never told you the story of this one. So one time, and this is great for the show, anyway, I go to the bathroom. I had to clean the bathrooms in this joint. So I go to the bathroom to, you know, every couple hours I go clean the bathrooms. Go clean the bathroom. Place is a mess, whatever. I'm like 13 years old. I look on the side of the toilet and there is a wad of cash. with a rubber band around it. We call this a knot in Brooklyn. There's a knot and you could always tell like a serious knot. Some knots have around them like a broccoli rubber band. Some knots are so big, they got a little thin rubber band around a couple times. Anyway, this is a big freaking knot of money. It's a couple of G's. So I pick it up I bring it to my dad. My dad looks at it like he's looking at like, an oyster or something. And he like kind of does a thing with his hand where he kind of weighs it. He looks at it from like one or two angles. He goes, Oh, that's already handsome back to me. Give it to already. I'm like, he's not here. He's like, he'll be back. So now I'm holding $7,000 in my pocket. All of a sudden, I see already come through the thing. I said, Oh, already. And he looks at me goes, Yeah, let me have it. He knows I have it. because he knows nobody's gonna take that. Right? Because in Brooklyn, you know, who's not it's not because you see people take these knots out, you know, this is already not. So I hand it to him. I kid you're not. Good kid kills off 100 off the top gives me it was all hundreds. There wasn't a there wasn't a 50 in here. He literally this is in 1982. He kills off a hundy for Jake out. This is when I was like, Whoa, money's cool. All right, that's it, everybody. This week in Brooklyn, stories from the 70s and 80s. What a show. Jay cow.
### Human: But it's well, it's horrific and also relevant. And what it comes down to ultimately is leadership, like it really does. And, and, you know, there are a lot of good men, there are a lot of bad, there are probably way, way, way more bad managers than good. 100%. But, you know, everybody sort of has to take this advice from the manager side and the employee side. It is really look, we've all been that like young person who's at the mercy of the meetings that we're not in. It sucks. That's a bad feeling. But it's true that as you get older in the work world, you understand the bad position that managers are in also. And like, I think everybody's got to sort of figure out the realities of the situation. There are a lot of feelings about work and it's hard to set, I think, especially in America, like we don't separate our feelings from work, right? Because everything is work. And yeah. Also, we can just continue to hope and not get sucked into the propaganda of this is going to be the worst recession ever. We don't know yet. There's also the really important part that we don't know yet. And I really do think that a lot of companies, look, if you're Coinbase, I get it, right? You literally have a business built on trading an imaginary asset. So if people stop trading that asset, that's a big problem. you know, respectfully, that stock is halved. Right. It has gone to half. There is just not as much capital as there used to be to run that business. Of course, there are going to be layoffs, right? Like Peloton apparently didn't know that pandemic was going to end. There are like individual cases that make things seem worse than they are, but we do not know how broad this is. And so maybe while you're contemplating layoffs, because you think it's going to make the short term bottom line look better. Take a step back and ask if that's what your business really needs, because it might not.### Assistant: And if that's the case, this is where monitoring situations daily, weekly, daily, and just you got to understand, like, you may see some panic, you know, selling, you may see like, if you were running a SaaS company, you might have three or four companies, all of a sudden stop using your SaaS software, and you don't have that revenue. I have to look at those three or four companies where those companies out of business. Well, that's not the fault of your SAS software is just companies went out of business. And, you know, you're going to have a certain level attrition. And those four people who canceled in the last two months, their, you know, SAS software, let's talk about each one of them are those terrible businesses that should have never existed, or these are lighthouse clients, right? So you have to really have your eyes wide open, you have to be super present looking at that dashboard. You know, if you think about this, like flying a plane, which is another analogy I use a lot, because it's super complex. And you're in the storm. And you're off course. Yeah, your navigation systems going in and out. You know, what data do you have? And that's what I always ask. What do I have here? What do I have control over? Well, I have control over the productivity of each of the team members. Okay, so that's good. Let's make sure everybody's super productive. Okay. What else do I have? Well, I can pick what direction we're going to go. Hopefully, this theory is working. I can pick how fast we're going to go. And okay, I can pick how many passengers we're going to take. What can I know? Okay, what is our altitude? What is our speed? What is our heading? You know, what's the pitch of the airplane, you can start to just figure out what the reality of the situation is, and then check it constantly. And when you see those plane accident videos that I watched on the Blanco Lirio channel on YouTube, you know, a lot of times, pilot, like sometimes they have recordings of the cockpit. Yeah. And he zooms in on somebody's like, the pilot did not see this. Yeah, he's not watching this pilot, like there was some pilots, this guy was not watching his, his angle. And he didn't realize he was in the dead spot. And he's like, you know, anybody who looks at this can see this thing is tilted. And you know, he's going faster. And so he's trying to figure out like going up, But he's really got to just, you know, even stop tipping the way even out the wings. And, you know, now you're going to have control of anyway, all these crazy things. And this guy wasn't, you know, it's a panic thing, right? Not being present, you know, not getting all the signal you can. So I think I'm looking at it right now, feel like the inflation is going to work itself out over the coming months. Because it's so high, there's really not much more room to go before people just stop buying stuff. So if you know, the people selling oil want to keep prices as high, people are going to start riding bikes, people are going to stop filling their tanks, they're going to take shorter rides, they're going to take one car instead of two, somebody is going to take the bus, like this stuff, if you push people to too high prices, people stop going, I went to a restaurant, I couldn't believe it. But I have this great place, New England lobster company, by the airport at SFO. And I love going there. But it was $40 for a lobster roll. And it used to be like 25. And I was like, Oh, my god, Yeah, I just bought, you know, I had my family, I bought like eight lobster rolls, you know, eight people, everybody gets a lobster. I was like, Whoa, I got the bill. And then oysters went from $2 to $4. What's going on in the world?
### Human: Yeah, it's very secretive. And I mean, yeah, I've heard some ideas, you know, finding out like trying to find middle ground when it comes to rates. And it gets very competitive, you know, like you'll hear another girl got the same deal as you, you know, she had to do one post and three Instagram stories and so did you, but you have a bigger following than she does. And then you think like, oh, am I not good enough? Why did she get paid more? And it really goes down to these PR or these influencer relations girls only... It's usually girls. They only get a max budget from the brand that they work for. They get, let's say, $24,000 to spend on a certain campaign. They have to spread that out amongst their favorite influencers. And it just kind of sometimes boils down to getting the scraps sometimes because they just reach out to you last or their biggest influencer that they really wanted for the campaign asked for like 80% of their budget and they really wanted them. It really just depends sometimes. And it also really depends on who's trending at the time because there's always an influencer who's got their moment. And they're going to be just like, on every single campaign. People are just going to be asking for them. But it is tough just knowing that there really isn't any middle ground. I think it's honestly because it's a female-dominated industry. I hate to be like, oh, it's because men get paid more, men have more say in things. But I have definitely felt in rooms, even virtual rooms, where I don't have much say solely because I'm a girl and I feel scared to even ask for what my worth is. And I think if this was a male-dominated industry, it would be no question. It wouldn't be like, oh, influencing isn't a real job. It would just be like, yeah, that's a man doing his job. But when it comes to females, because we use our beauty, we use sometimes our bodies, sometimes our bodies and our brains, like our looks all come together in this. I think that really upsets a lot of people because that's almost a privilege to have. Like not everyone can use their looks and make money with at the same time. So I definitely see where people come from when they get kind of bothered by influencers. But The way I look at it is we're all gifted at something. We've all got to make money off of some talent that we have. And if that's someone's talent, using their body, modeling, I see nothing wrong with it.### Assistant: Yeah. You see people that are influencers ranging a little bit more than you see the traditional fashion industry, I think, in what they look like and body types. And I think a person that highlighted the industry and people struggling in the industry and bringing light to certain issues that happen that I as somebody that doesn't work in that space, was the controversial TikToker Victoria Paris has spoken about time and time again about how she's like, I'm a skinny white woman on the internet. This is why I get sent this stuff. And it's so interesting, like hearing somebody who is at the top of a lot of influencing obviously there's like Emma Chamberlain, another skinny white woman who is up there is probably like the person that I've seen the most. And she might be the most popular influencer. The one on the male side, I guess, would probably be like Mr. Beast. I mean, even seeing, you know, the two different spectrums of them, I think it's just really interesting. And I think being a woman in a room, especially a room of men that get to dictate how much Money is on the table happens a lot with female founders as well. I've never been in the room and I've never worked in an industry where my paycheck was determined about what I wore that day, how much content I made out of it. I've always worked in this space. I can see how female founders also struggle being like, how do you even approach a conversation sometimes? And maybe not even just female founders, this could be a young founder, somebody that doesn't... An inexperienced person in this space. How do you even go about having those conversations? There's no rulebook. And there probably won't be somebody that makes a rulebook on that for a very long time. And I think that's an important conversation to have, especially when it's like your livelihood. And another huge aspect of your life that I want to touch on today is you are, like I said, you obviously make a living online. This is your full time job. It has been out of college, which is awesome. Now you have a wonderful daughter that I had the pleasure of meeting a few weeks ago, which was crazy. It's so awesome. And The thing that really inspired me to have you on the podcast was a former guest that was on episode 1459. She's also around our age. Her name is Nicole. She has since found out that she was pregnant, which is great. And she's been tweeting about her journey and some stuff that she says. I'm like, wait, what the heck? Like, I didn't I didn't know any of this. one of the things that she tweeted was like, okay, where's like the Gen Z maternity clothes? Because me and my husband are expecting, and I don't want to wear skinny jeans for the entire time of my pregnancy. Like this just isn't in, like, I, I'm not going to wear light wash skinny jeans. Like this just is not my style. And the only thing that's offered for me are these and oversized shirts. And I was like, okay, that's like an issue that like, you're not being able to express yourself, I think would be, um, frustrating. And I know she works from an office, so that must be hard. And then also just, um, seeing how she's like approaching, like she's tweeting about her pregnancy. That wasn't an option for a lot of people, you know, a few years ago. So not only how you're presenting like your kids online, but how you're presenting like your pregnancy online. Like she's a very, very open about being like a professional. And I don't think her tweeting about being pregnant is hurting her career in any way. Maybe that's different. I'm not sure. Cause I'm her age as well. So I didn't have any other peers that were, you know, I guess posting about their pregnancy, like her. beforehand, except for you. Do you think how you are going to approach putting photos of your daughter online or anything like that? Will that be any different than how our parents maybe did it? Or even how people that are like millennials, like one generation above us did it?
### Human: The best idea I've heard about this is Bology suggested that every employment contract should have a 90-day cooling off period in it for basically things like this. Now, I don't think the legal language is going to be really tricky, but it's like, okay, if something like this occurs, there's a cooling off period where Yeah, I don't know. It's like where both sides can basically like, maybe dig a little deeper and take a little more time. And the the company in this instance doesn't feel pressured to make a decision, they can't make a decision. And they can, they can evaluate what the right answer is. And you know, for instance, like If Antonio basically was to apologize for the fact that he stepped in it there, which he did, right? They're like, I didn't actually see an apology yet, or I he's he is he's definitely right now, right? We have not heard anything publicly from Antonio.### Assistant: It's strategy, but he's you know what he's like on The Walking Dead. Who makes the bullets? Who? Yeah, there's a guy like is like a real genius. But he's he's kind of a I want to say I'm not saying sex is a coward. I'm not saying sacks is going to do well against a horde, but we played poker sacks. He would be like he would rebuild society and come up with a new law. So he would be good to keep around for that. We need to keep sex. I think I agree most women in the Bay Area, I'm for the exact opposite of soft and weak. I mean, if you're a woman, and you survived in the tech industry, which was pretty gnarly, and it was a boys club, and, and still is in a lot of ways, and still is, in many ways, you're actually strong. So yeah, you know, it's the quote doesn't make a lot of sense. I think he was going for artistic license here. And he's talking about a zombie apocalypse. What I will say is what I tell all founders, which is if you're funny, And you're the funniest guy at your poker game, your company. You're still not Chris Rock. You're still not Dave Chappelle. You're still not Jerry Seinfeld and context matters. Yeah, he wrote this in the context of a book. He did not write in the context of, you know, a slack room. Yeah, totally. And the problem is, you know, if you try to do both, in today's charged environment, this is the result. And so maybe this can be the start of a dialogue of is there room for people to either change, you know, restate, clarify, or be contrite about a quote, and say, you know, it didn't come out the way I meant, just like when a joke doesn't land. And I'm a funny guy, I make jokes all the time. But I throttle myself, I don't tell the same jokes on the pod that I might tell, you know, at three in the morning with a bunch of friends having beers. I mean, you have to understand context. And so I wonder, we have not heard in your car that i put this in the area of him doing comedy he was trying to make jokes in the book and he's a great writer i give him that even when you're working his description of hit you know the mother of his kids just like a really great descriptor He just stepped in it with this, you know, correct quote, that actually is kind of hurtful. And I have three daughters, and you know, I don't want them to live in a world where people think like this. And it didn't land. And so now are we going to be about our people at Apple? So feel so unsafe by Antonio that he can't work there? Or is this an opportunity to have a conversation about it? Apparently, you know, you're on both sides. Now, it's either going to be coinbase, where you can't talk about this stuff, where it's going to be Apple, where if you tripped up in any point, and you said something out of context in a quote, you're done. And I think as a society, we need to create a dialogue. And that dialogue should somehow be about you know, what we're talking about here, Zach. And that's, I think that's why I was, you know, was delighted to hear because I know you guys are friends that you would talk about this. Like, what if he apologized for the quote, you know, and Apple explained the quote in context and said, it's a learning moment, like Obama did. I don't, I don't know if you remember that beer summit moment. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the beer. I kind of feel like there's a beer summit moment. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I also feel like, you know, things are so toxic right now that we should just move on and he'll get other work. This is only going to increase the value of his next book deal. I'll be totally honest. And, you know, yeah.
### Human: What kind of devices do will they use this on? Like, is it a big old ruggedized tablet? I mean, I'm assuming it works on phones. But I wonder, like, what's the best way to interact with this?### Assistant: So the core is it's a map based off of that. The next step is what's the wind data? What's the weather data? What is all this GIS information that you need to know? So that way, if you're fighting a fire, you can figure out is going to go north is going to go west. Like where's the wind taking it? Right. And so we provide all those wind forecasts. We provide all that weather data for them. Third is, there's something known as the IRPG, Incident Resource Planning Guide. They carry around this book, it's about 270 pages long, and it's all of their what to do in any given situation. It weighs a couple pounds, they put it in their pack, all 30,000 wildland firefighters have to carry this around. Why is this not digitized and easily searchable? Well, it is, but that's another app you have to go to. That's another site you have to download. And most people just don't have that. You know, it's not the they don't have the ability to content switch. It's just it's another thing to have to keep track of. So they just carry the book with them. So we digitize that there are a bunch of other resources that will be turning to PDFs and making easily searchable over time. And then the most important part of our map or of our app right now is the ability to instead of right now the existing workflow is there's a fire, it moves up the incident command system which is a standardized flow for public safety, which basically goes, if X happens, then do this. If this happens, then bring in these people. And as the fire gets larger, you move, escalate up higher and higher up the ICS system. And so right now, as these fires get to these federal levels, they're bringing in people, they'll have base camps, they'll have all these whiteboarding sessions, and they'll send out their IAPs, which are incident action plans. And there's all this documentation but most of it is concentrated to pen and paper or it's concentrated to here's a projector screen of a map and here is um you know us moving drawing on sharpie or like moving pieces around a like physical board and so then take a picture of it right here's where a safety zone is but just you know, try to like take a picture and remember where it is on a map. And so we basically allowed them to post geotagged photos in the form of annotations that are recognized by the instant command system. So they have 13 different annotations for all these different types of things they may see. And we let them add a photo to it, we let them add notes, we let them geotag it with the exact coordinates, latitude, longitude, etc. And we let them share it with the rest of their crew. And then after that, we let them for Strava, right? Like, why are they using a running app, they need to be able to track their steps, they need to know, hey, this is the perimeter of the fire, I'll get in my engine and drive around it, or they need to know And this is how the exact coordinates of this lake or of this area that's been damaged. And so like they'll turn on their track GPS on Strava, and they'll just start driving around an area. And so we built that really quickly into the app. And then one feature that nobody else really has that we have heard a lot of really good things about is our free drop feature. You know, can you believe this? There isn't anything out there that just lets you doodle on a map and say, hey, here is this thing or that thing. And so, yeah, we took all this tech and sort of put it together after listening to them talk about, hey, we need this. We need that. And most importantly, we let them save each of these individual maps as their own fire map. And those can be easily shared with each other. And over time, as we know, we just launched our MVP into closed pilots. And so over time, before we launch broadly to the entire firefighting market, we'll definitely be adding in more complex features.
### Human: That's an interesting point. Because you're saying there's different scales of venture scale, depending on your check size. Right? Maybe like, is there?### Assistant: Yeah. So in many cases, people think that venture capital is the funding source for their business. Venture capital is the funding source for a very small number of businesses in the world. this should be obvious to everybody. But it's not because they don't understand how venture capitalists get paid. And they don't understand why they exist in the world and why LPS give them money. So you will have somebody who's making a movie, or starting a hotel, or a pizzeria, or a chain of, you know, drive in say I want to raise venture capital. And now venture capitalists are charged with getting returns that are, you know, two, three, four times the public markets. In other words, instead of making 7% on average a year, they're expected to make 15 2025% every year in returns for their investors and their investors are looking at this category of investing as a way to go after very high growth, some might argue violently high growing companies, very hard to have a company triple, triple, triple, double, double, double their revenue, a million dollars to 3 million to 9 million to 18 million to 36 million to 72 million, like this is hard work doesn't happen for most businesses, certainly not for a chain of drive in movie theaters that you want to build or your album or your pizzeria, or your consumer package good company. So that's the first group of people. And it's pretty easy to explain this to them. We only invest in high growth software companies. This is not a software company, or this is a low margin company. So we can kind of take that first swath out of this small mom and pop businesses, non scalable real world businesses, that's 50% of the people who have this, you know, mistaken idea that venture capitals for them, they should build their businesses off of sweat equity, bootstrapping, saving money for five years, and then opening their restaurant, like a lot of restauranteurs will save money for a decade, then raise some money from folks, and then they'll open their restaurant, or they'll open a version of their restaurant, like a food truck, or instead of making their three or four movie series, they'll make a short film at Sundance, and then use a short film to make a bigger film. In other words, they do their own little incremental thing. Let's take all of those out of here. Pretty easy to explain to them why they're not venture scale. Now, there's a different group of people who are making software businesses, right? Yeah. And they're making marketplaces, but maybe even those are too niche. And that group of people, it's, you know, you kind of have to hand, you know, you kind of have to do the back of the envelope math yourself do a bottom up ham total addressable market size, and really start to look at, okay, maybe this business does have good margins, it can make $10 million in revenue with $5 million in profits. But it can't get past 10 million, or it's not going to get past 10 million, it's got a natural ceiling. So if you're making the proverbial software for dentists, and you know how many dentists there are in the country, you can actually do what's called the bottom up tan. And so sometimes it's very easy to figure out what the market is for a piece of software, there are only so many dental offices in the United States or the English speaking world. And they can only afford to pay a certain amount for their software. And you know, that business can't get to a billion dollars in revenue where Salesforce could or Twilio could or AWS could, or other SaaS software could. And so that's, that's the heart of discussion. And then that's just a function of where you invest. If you're investing as an accelerator at two or $3 million, implied valuation or a seed investor at 5 million. Okay, yeah, maybe you'd be happy with $100 million exit. But if you're investing a 50 million as a venture capitalist, or 25 million, you're not happy with a ceiling of a two x. Mm hmm.
### Human: And what's so interesting is, okay, so you know, in the we can dig into some of the specifics in this thread, but the the company was called little things, a female focused feel good entertainment company. And yes, it was built on the back of Facebook and eyeballs. They had, you know, hacked figured out how to use the newsfeed for these articles. Facebook was promoting it, right? Hosted them at headquarters, profiled little things. And then what's interesting- Same thing they did with me. They hosted me too. And then what's so fascinating is that the change here, this is what I think is super important. The change here was not just that the algorithm changed randomly. It changed because according to Joe, our high level contacts at Facebook said Zuck didn't like the fluffy content we were producing and wanted to be taken more seriously. He wanted the country to respect Facebook and get their actual news there. Previously, it was family and friends updates, feel good viral content. So yeah, this is a business story, but it's also very much a publishing and editorial story. They pulled the rug because of an editorial determination. Again, according to Joe, we have no way to confirm that.### Assistant: No, we don't know. Sucks, state of mind, or what he was doing. That seems directionally correct. That goes huge to you. Yeah. I think it's directionally correct because, I don't know if you remember this, but it was getting a little annoying with FarmVille and some of the games to constantly get Mafia invites and FarmVille invites in your feed. So there was a reason to throttle those because you had so many, if only 10% of users were playing FarmVille, But they kept posting every three or four days to get more, you know, mana or, you know, plants or whatever, it was just annoying. So they needed to throttle that. But this is, you know, the lesson here is never be dependent on one platform, which is why when we post our show to YouTube, we're on YouTube. But we also have podcasting feeds. And we're experimenting with video on Spotify. But and we have email and we were syndicating the video to LinkedIn. I never want to as a as a content creator be dependent on one platform, you want to work all the platforms and then build your brand. So people go directly to your domain name, direct traffic is what all VCs and investors look at as a proxy for are there any number of users who are going directly to your site? So if you were Mr. Beast, are people typing Mr. Beast into Google search? And are they does Mr. Beast because when I talked to Mr. Beast, I was like, how many emails do you have? And he's like, what? And I was like, I told him this over dinner. I said, your job should be look at how many subscribers you have on YouTube, and then judge yourself on the percentage of emails in your database as compared to your subscriber count. So if we have right now 190,000 subscribers for this week in startups, how many emails do we have? Do we have I think we have like 15,000 emails, so we have maybe 8%. Great, I would like to have more. So we have to build our email products up. Actually, with the launch ticker, we probably have double that. So that's just how I think about these things is how many phone numbers and emails Can you get to build a direct relationship? Yeah, I have 50,000 people on my personal email list. So that's great. And so keep building your list up. And Fred Wilson wrote a blog post about this called be your own. in which he was saying, like, you know, the startups, I'm in forgive the language, the colorfulness of it, like, you don't want to be Facebook, right in this example. And he said, be your own. So what he was saying was build your own platform, and have your own email lists. And so that was a very famous. And then people were like, Well, what about you're telling people to build this is in 2012. I think he wrote this, because there's a big controversy about these rug pulling instances, YouTube had done some rug pulling, and then they backtracked on it. So YouTube was doing this algorithm game. And the top people, including myself, I wrote a famous blog post, I'm not going to work on YouTube's farm anymore, like Maggie's farm, where I was just like, you know what, I don't want to be dependent on these platforms. In the YouTube case, I might have made a mistake because my YouTube channels have done so well. We own a YouTube channel called exit. If you go to youtube.com slash exit, it has 3 million subscribers. Now it makes the Mahalo YouTube channels make $250,000 a year to this date. And I pivoted Mahalo to inside comm and inside comm makes a quarter million dollars a year just off of, you know, defunct channels. And I've actually started posting videos to exit again with a partner. And it's actually doing pretty well now every time we post a video. So I kind of made a mistake on that one. If I had kept going, I would have had a good exit with Mahalo if I just went all in on YouTube, like other people did.
### Human: Yeah, so I agree with the way you summarized it there. I think for the majority of people, there's nothing really standing in your way in order to learn how to code. And if you have the drive and the means to do it, and you'd like to explore it, you should absolutely go and explore it. We have an example of someone on Repl.it who was a security guard. And he had exactly three hours a day to code. And he would code on his lunch breaks and at home. And he would go to Repl.it and open up a new application or fork something from our templates or community section and start coding. And I think a lot of it is after you've gone through, let's say, Free Code Camp or Codecademy or an instructional book, a lot of it is just going to be this trial and error. A lot of it is like, I want to... So what does it take to do a Twitter app, for example? One thing that it takes is to save, is to post a tweet, right? And so the way you do it is I have a form and I write the tweet, I hit submit, and that needs to go to a server and that server needs to save it in the cloud somewhere, right? And on Repl.it, we make the entire process easier. So on Repl.it, it's a full stack environment. So you can build using Flask, or Django, or Node.js, or what have you. And it's all in the same environment. So you have the back end and the front end, and the IDE, and the output for that all on one screen. So you collapse everything all one screen. where typically you have to go learn AWS, you have to go learn, you know, GitHub, VS code, whatever, we're bringing all that now one screen. We just released recently, a database that works as easy as pointing and clicking, you have an icon in the in the development environment that looks like a database, you click on that, it tells you bring in this library. And now you can do save. add, delete, you can do all these very simple operations on a database, and now you have a persistent application. And so it's a matter of every step of the way, think about what needs to, what kind of user experience I'm building, And then Googling, searching, asking in communities, asking on Stack Overflow, figuring out what you need to do in order to achieve that user experience. And I would say for someone who has basic proficiency in code, they should immediately jump in and try to build that Reddit, try to build that Twitter. I think a lot of people get lost in courses. I'm going to take this one more Udacity course. I'm going to take this one more Coursera course. Replet is a philosophy.### Assistant: to how computers work is a huge part of when we get back from this quick break, I want you to explain what it would take if let's assume you had the computer, you have the high speed internet connection, and you've taken your computer apart and reinstalled the operating system twice. And you've now got that under your belt, which would probably be a one month tinkering expedition with your computer, how long would it take the average human in the Western world, let's just say, well, Western level of education, high school diploma, GED, how long would it take them to learn how to build their own little Craigslist or Reddit when we get back on this week at startups? SaaS companies have something called reoccurring revenue. You all know about reoccurring revenue. SaaS companies need fuel, fuel to make the product better, and they need fuel to do marketing and make more people aware of their product. Now what choice do you have? You could raise no money and just grow really slow off your profitability. Number two is you could get equity from somebody like me, which is great, or There's now this incredible third option. You can go to pipe.com. Pipe.com is a marketplace, and this is super innovative. It will take the annual value of a contract. So if somebody was saying, my company will pay $1,000 a month for your software. Well, that's $12,000 a year. They'll say, hey, would you like to buy that $12,000 in revenue at a little bit of a discount to give that money to the founder so the founder can deploy it to, guess what, get more customers. With Pype, there's no debt, there's no loans, there's no dilution. It's frictionless, it's transparent, and within 24 hours, they can get that cash in your bank. They're so confident you'll love trading your SaaS subscriptions that if you sign up at pype.com slash twist, they're going to eliminate all your trading fees for the year, this could save you tens of thousands of dollars, depending on the size of your business, of course. So, happy piping. Sign up today at pipe.com slash twist. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. My guest today, I'm John Massad, who is from Replit. You can go to replit.com right now or repl.it if you, like me, miss Italy and you want to go back. We are talking about this issue, and I bring this up because it is one of these issues that it seems people can't get to ground truth on. The one, as my friend Chamatha said, canonical truth, the truth is you believe that 100% of young people can learn how to code. I agree with that. And then have some number of old people. Let's take the over 60 crowd. Well, they're going to retire anyway. So let's put them aside, they would have to learn computing and be willing to tinker and break things and get their hands dirty. And then even the tail end of Gen X, they've already worked on computers. So a coal miner who's 40 they're probably have enough information on how to use a computer to get up and running. So once they fall into that group of they've got a high school education, they understand basic math, they know understand how to type and use a computer, they can reinstall their operating system or change. I don't know the graphics card in their computer and reinstall Windows or whatever it happens to be. They're just comfortable, they're not going to break it. What would it take in terms of the number of hours, weeks, months of somebody at night and weekends, putting in two or three hours a day, let's say, say somebody put in three hours a day, that's a nice number. That's the that's about 60% of the time people spend watching TV currently in America, four or five hours a day is the average. So let's say half that amount to say three hours a day, three hours a day of learning to code and tinkering, what would it take for the average individual in the Western world to learn how to build Reddit or hacker news?
### Human: So, I think part of the confusion is that each of those things that you mentioned is not actually one thing, it is multiple things. And cancer is not going to be, you're going to find a magic bullet that has somehow eluded us, and when we find it, cancer is going to be gone. I wish it were that simple, but it's not. So, I think what we're going to see is a process by which we just continually chip away at segments of these diseases, and hopefully make a big dent in some of those segments, and over time, more and more. And even in cancer, we've seen a tremendous amount of progress over the last decade. diseases, subtypes of cancer that used to be a death sentence, like melanoma. I mean, melanoma used to be like, you know, you got melanoma and, I mean, if it was metastatic and you were dead, there was no cure. And now with some of the checkpoint inhibitors, the immune checkpoint inhibitors, there's now, for a lot of people, melanoma, they just, they're cured, which is not a word that anyone ever thought to apply. to metastatic disease, right? It's not everyone. I mean, the response rates are still, you know, 20-30% in many cases, but there are people who have, I don't know if they're cured because we never know if there is cancer cells that are still hiding there somewhere and might pop up in 20 years because we haven't followed patients for long enough. But, for all intents and purposes, years later, they don't seem to show any signs of the disease recurrence. And so, I think that's amazing that we've been able to do that. We haven't done that for all cancers. I mean, there are some that are still incredibly challenging. We haven't found anything along those lines, like glioblastoma is a good example. I think the same thing will be true for Alzheimer's. I'm confident that Alzheimer's is not one disease. There's multiple pathways that are involved, and I think part of the problem has been that we've tried to treat it as a single thing. So, my hope is that as we have better tools for studying the brain, we will identify those segments and be able to bring to bear a much more targeted arsenal for those segments in the same way that we've been able to bring to bear targeted therapeutics, what's called precision oncology, to certain subtypes of cancer. So it's not that we're going to beat one and not the other, we're just going to chip at all of them.### Assistant: let alone secondary conditions that occur, the economic turmoil, and then people being malnourished or not having jobs, suicide, opioid abuse, and overdoses. It's so weird in our society that we can't have this full-ranging discussion. We get back from this final break. I want to, obviously, you know, the major killers right now, putting suicide aside, which is just mind-blowing to think that suicide has become a major cause of death in some ways because we're living longer, but Alzheimer's, diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease, I think these are the big four killers. I want to talk about in our lifetime, and you and I are of a similar age, I think Gen Xers, What will we see first, you know, in terms of solving for those diseases in our lifetime? And what do you think about learning what you've learned if this trajectory continues? What would life expectancy look like for our children and our grandchildren when we get back on this week in startups? Okay, if you don't have your SOC 2 compliance buttoned up, you can't close major enterprise customers. It's really that simple. And if you already have your SOC 2 report, don't you want to make it easier to maintain it year after year? 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And they told us that they couldn't imagine having to go through SOC 2 without Vanta. Here's your call to action. Unlock those sales and give your employees all of their time back in their calendar to work on more important business critical assignments. You know you want to do that. So they're giving you and I know a number of you have already signed up. So thank you for using the code because I want to make sure that you get a $1,000. That's 10 100s. That's 2050s. One thousand dollars discount on their subscription at Vanta.com slash twist. That's Vanta V-A-N-T-A dot com slash twist for I kid you not one thousand dollars off. Thanks to Vanta for supporting independent media like this week in startups. Let's get back to this amazing program. All right, if you're hearing my voice, you will die. Not today, hopefully, but at some point in your life. And it's one of the things that We think about a lot, especially when you become a parent or maybe you hit a certain age. I'll be hitting 50 this fall, which is mind-blowing to me. And just thinking about death and life extension, if we were sitting here 200 years ago and we said, wow, people are living to 70 and 80 years old, and the reason people are dying in many cases is because they've opted into it by overeating, smoking, alcohol, drugs, whatever, and mental health were becoming some of the leading causes. I'm curious what you think about those four main causes of death, or four of the top ones. Which one of these do you think is going to be the easiest for us to solve? Obviously, Alzheimer's in the brain seems incredibly complex. And I always hear from people that that one's just too hard. But what about the other ones? And where do you rank them in terms of how difficult they'll be to solve for?
### Human: Yeah. Another way to describe this is that the, especially with the changing market conditions, their hurdle rate for what they think a good rate of return is on an investment sort of goes up. And so things either need to be more likely to succeed or if you think about the other variable and expected value, the magnitude of it succeeding, if it does, might be much higher. And so they'll lean into things that they really do think could be AWS-sized, or they'll lean into things that they think have a very high degree of certainty, like features you would add to AWS or to the consumer business. But if you have something that is potentially small, like this delivery robot, incrementally improving the consumer business, and not showing signs of success, then it doesn't meet the hurdle rate continue to investing.### Assistant: This was a key thing that Microsoft ran into as well, which was, why would we bother acquiring something? Why would we bother building a unit, if it can't throw off know, and bomber was very upfront about this. If we can't get revenue, a billion dollars in revenue, and whatever that is in EBITDA, you know, you know, a couple 100 million in EBITDA. Why are we doing it? Why wouldn't we just focus on the two huge castles we have thus giving a huge advantage to founders and startups. I'm going to quickly explain one of the crucial types of insurance every startup needs, E&O insurance. This covers errors and omissions. That's what the E and the O stand for. And it helps you scale because any major customer will ask you, do you have E&O? If not, you can't close the deal. It's that simple, folks. So if you don't have business insurance, you've failed one of the first steps of being a founder. And startups should look no further than a broker. Broker's technology saves you time, it saves you money, prices are up to 20% lower, and you're gonna get better coverage than the incumbents. You go from signup to quote and purchase in just 10 minutes. When you work with a broker instead of the incumbents, you're not dealing with large, slow corporations, no. And your signup will take days, not weeks. The process is completely transparent. There's no opaque pricing. This is a modern service. They treat you with respect. So here's your call to action. To instantly buy custom-built insurance for startups, go to imbroker.com slash twist. While you're there, you can get an extra 10% off by using the offer code TWIST, TWIST, as in This Week in Startups. All right, thanks, imbroker. You do a great job over there. They do my insurance. That's all you need to know. In this case, you know, there's a company cocoa, and I'll pull up a tick tock or two of these, these guys, gals, whoever's running this thing seem to have figured out these robots. And I've seen other companies doing them. Look, look at the speed on these things. I don't know if that's sped up or not. It looks like it's sped up. But this to me seems like such a no brainer as a business. But if you're Amazon, I guess, you're doing just fine with your delivery of drivers with vans, and you have so many deliveries that doing a one off small delivery doesn't make sense. I think that's what this comes down to is the use case of delivering boxes to people's homes is the primary Amazon use case. And that works better when you put a bunch of boxes on one delivery van. Whereas I think these robots are best served for food delivery. I think this is an uber business. I think this is a door dash business. I think this is a burrito business. They're pretty cute and they're not in that business. Are you an investor in cocoa? I'm not I mean, I, this is the robotics company, I think that has been tried like 10 times. I remember these all from the Uber days, because I was maybe the third or fourth investor in Uber. So anybody who had an idea that was adjacent to Uber would come to me and be like, Hey, invest and then you know, ask Travis to buy the company. And I looked at all these, but they they didn't work five or six, seven years ago, I'll be honest. And the world wasn't ready for them because you just saw videos of them like on Market Street getting literally punted across the street or literally people would pick them up and throw them down. But I do think that with self driving starting to become more common. people are going to understand this. And with the stack of self driving, computer vision, you know, real time decision making through machine learning and AI, understanding the world around you, these things become a no brainer. These are super no brainer for Santa Monica, you know, for Brentwood for Brooklyn.
### Human: Hey, Jason. My name is Benjamin Burns, the founder and creator of ourspace.co. O-U-R-S-P-A-C-E dot C-O. My mission is to build the largest centralized platform highlighting the remarkable talent of women and men of color, specifically in technology and in creative roles. I'm tired of the HR and recruiter excuses year over year over year that they cannot find such talent. The question I have for you, Jason, that I need help on is balancing the customer acquisition and giving value to the previous members. We're very early stage and it doesn't seem like we have a problem acquiring members because there's this natural organic tribe mentality that we all want to have this platform. But that being said, what does that value add at the end of the day for current members? Access to mentors, jobs, recruiters. I'm not sure. I'm looking for you to help. Jason, thank you so much. Keep BK looking good. I'll talk to you, man. Thank you. Peace.### Assistant: Alright great question how can i solve your problems with the community built over the last decade i get this a lot actually people look at this we can start up so they'll look at something that's at scale and they're like i have a product i'd like you to promote my product we actually don't promote anybody's products really because We have to stay focused on creating content and then we have advertisers who sponsor the show and partners as we call them and so we limit as very important for anybody building a media brand you have a lot of people come at you who want you to promote their products and what we do is very simple on the editorial side the editorial team picks the gas on the community side are the advertising partner side we promote them and we don't do anything in between so it's probably a no for us in less People in the community were like hey can we get together and talk and so we had a personal interest in starting the slack channel which is that this week in startups dot com slash slack, you can enter your email you agree that you're not gonna spam the slack group and then we let you in and then if you do spam we ban you for life and we ban the url that you set shared me bad. anybody else from your company, so please don't spam slack. But it sounds like an interesting idea. I don't know if I want to have everybody in the slack group doing speed dating, but I'm not sure I don't. I mean, if they self organized and wanted to have something like that, we might allow it. But it's it's an interesting idea, I would encourage you to start your own community and start building your own community of community organizers. So instead of getting trying to get me or some at scale communities to promote your software, which is unlikely, because we're too busy, and other people are gonna be too busy, what you should do is you should say, I'm starting a community. And it's going to be, you know, your community slash slack. And I'm inviting people who run communities to invite our community managers and other people's community managers to join your community of community managers, that would be better for you, that'd be more sustainable. And then you would show them in your community, the ability to do speed dating, and then we might be sold on bringing it to our community. So I think you're kind of you're throwing the Hail Mary pass here trying to get me to promote your stuff to 10s of 1000s of people, it's not going to happen. Just like people are like, Hey, will you promote our you know, podcasting app. I'm like, No, I'm not gonna promote your podcasting app. Like, if you want to do something like that, go ahead and buy ads on the show. But we're not gonna we're not here to promote the seven new podcasting apps every month. And so when people do come to us with that, we're like, Yeah, no, do something for us. Right. And so people all the time are asking us to do something as opposed to providing something to us. So you're kind of asking me to solve your problems. I would tell you to change your mindset into providing something of value to me. And the way you giving me your tool is not really providing value in your mind, you might think that what I would encourage you to do is say, I run a community, and I have a top 10 guidebook on how to grow communities, I think you could have twice as many people in the this week and start up slack in the next three months, you should join my community mastermind group and our slack to learn how to run a better community. And you should do these three things. That's the better way to bait a potential customer or partner is for you to be helpful to me, not for you to look for me to solve your problem. So just in terms of your SAS pitch, you're kind of asking me to solve your problem when you should be trying to solve my problems. That's a better approach to asking for favors in the world and trying to promote your product. I hope that's helpful, David. Okay, another question. This one is from Benjamin.
### Human: Yeah, I think it's a really interesting story. And I'm very curious what the internet historians will make of it when they bring everything together. But I was on the Gmail team, I had an infrastructure group who are building the foundation for the next gen Gmail infrastructure. and google buzz i'm not sure if you remember buzz but it's just shut down and then it was trying to figure out what the social.### Assistant: All right, when we get back from this quick break, I know you worked at Google on Gmail. And you worked on the Google plus the failed, gigantic, huge white whale of a project. And you got looped into that. I want to hear all about that and how it informed what you're doing with range when we get back on this week in startups. Have you been itching to upgrade your workstation? Well, Dell for entrepreneurs wants to help you level up your tech hardware. It was created to support founders by providing resources and tools that help startups grow and scale their technology scaling your company means more than just hiring means getting high quality laptops, network storage and printers to provide your employees with the best tools to succeed. I use this and I have used it for years to Dell 38 inch curved ultra sharp monitor. why do i use this why do i give one to every team member for the office and for home because with a little usb-c plug into your laptop boom your desktop expands you can have three giant windows open slack over here notion over here and it makes people feel great when they have that giant monitor and they don't have to test switch that's just one of the many options you can get with Dell for entrepreneurs. Founders that register for Dell for entrepreneurs have a wide range of free resources for startups such as free IT consulting, from experts who are ready to help you with any IT related questions, you get access to capital for buying hardware with Dell financial services founders can qualify for financing their entire IT project and pay it back in low monthly payments. So you don't burn that precious cash. and rewards like earning up to 6% cash back on Dell products. Every founder should take advantage of this program now. Level up your hardware today and save up to 43% by going to dell.com slash twist and registering for Dell for entrepreneurs. That's dell.com slash twist today to save up to 43% and get this amazing Dell monitor. I actually have a 49 one inch one at home. That one is bonkers. I have two computers plugged into it simultaneously. So we can have two different sessions going for two different projects I'm working on. It's a crazy way to do it. You don't have to go that far. I think you just go with the 38. But if you want to go crazy like me get the 49 inch. That's the future. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. Welcome back to this week in startups. It's May 1 2020. If you're listening to this 100 years in the future. We're in the middle of a pandemic. It's called coronavirus, COVID-19, and we're in, God, I don't know, six, seven weeks into a stay-at-home order here. And my guest today, virtually over the Zoom, is Daniel Pupias. He is on the Twitter DPUP, if you want to follow him, four-letter club. And, uh, the company is Range.co, which he's been working on for the last couple of years. They've raised a little bit of money from, uh, some known suspects like, uh, First Round and General Catalyst, uh, and Bloomberg Beta. Bunch of our friends in there. Um, and, and Ellen Pow as well. Interesting. Um, I've been trying to get her onto the podcast for a while, but she's, she's kind of podcast shy. Um, so you worked at Google. Mm-hmm. That's right and You worked on gmail chat, I know that and you worked on you got looped into Google Plus Mm-hmm for people who don't know Google got obsessed with the ascension of Facebook at a certain point They decided to pour a couple billion dollars into having a coexist or maybe not a killer But at least a coexist or having a stake in social media, so they created plus that google.com Eventually got Turned off it did get some decent traction and had some amazing world-class design and functionality Tell me first How you got looped into that tell us that story and then ultimately why you think it failed I? Have my own I have to do it myself, which I'll get into but you tell me yours. I
### Human: No, I don't think that's true anymore. Yeah, that's not true at all. I think you can look around. There's there's a lot of young guns going after those old boys, and we are tearing their guts out right now. Like you've got you got Tiger, who's definitely not the old boy network coming down from the top, just like attacking the late stage funds. And then you got folks like me and Jason and others come from the bottom attacking. Like if I was a VC fund on Sand Hill Road right now, I'd be like, oh, We're in trouble.### Assistant: I mean, that's how the industry works. We, the filtering process is so much work that we rely on each other to share the pre the filtered companies. And we know that early stage is a collaborative sport as opposed to maybe the series A or series B zone, where you might have some investors who want to take the whole round. In terms of myself, when I was a solo operator, I'm a solo GP right now, but I've got a team around me and we have five researchers slash associates at this point. who do about 15 introductory calls a week, also reach out to companies. So I am forwarding the majority of my cold emails that are coming in now to them. And I just forwarded to a group email address, I let them evaluate it. Now, if it is anywhere remotely close to being in our zone, we do what's called a we offer a 20 minute introductory call. So if you have an idea, maybe not. But if you have a finished product or an MVP, and it looks reasonable, you're going to probably get on to an introductory call, which is recorded on zoom. And it's 20 minutes, seven minutes of you presenting to us seven minutes of q&a back and forth, maybe five minutes of cleanup or any, you know, next steps, then it goes to the managing directors, anything that's in our zone, they then send to me, I download the video, put it on 1.5 speed, and I watch it. with VLC player, and I've got my own little system now. So that's how I deal with this ridiculous amount of deal flow. So I'm just giving you a big secret here. Zack, even for yourself, as you build yours, you know, you can find somebody who is a researcher, out of school for a reasonable amount of money. And I just put up a website how to get a job in vc.com explain, I'll pay you 250 k for four years of work. And if you do the kind of work I'm talking about research associate kind of work. And I hire, you know, what I'll just say blue collar, people who didn't go to Stanford or Harvard, and who want to break in and who want to put in the 5060 hours a week it takes to do this job properly. And I love cold emails I mean some of the greatest investments I've ever made where people stopping me in the street or a cold email so please please please keep sending them. You probably keep hearing about sock to compliance and you think, Hmm, is this really relevant to me? Well, if you're targeting any large enterprise as a customer, there are all sorts of data privacy and security measures that you need to have buttoned up to close those deals. And you don't want your engineering team taking time out to do this stuff. And you definitely don't want to hire a third party auditor. Nope. It's no joke. Getting a SOC 2 compliant can take months, and it can cost tons of money. That's where SecureFrame comes in. SecureFrame helps hundreds of companies get enterprise ready by streamlining SOC 2 compliance in weeks, not months. They also monitor over 40 services, including AWS, GCP, and Azure. SecureFrame will continuously collect audit evidence, run security awareness training, manage vendors, infrastructure, and more. It does it all automatically and on average SecureFrame customers save 50% on their audit costs and hundreds of hours of time. Their team of compliance experts and auditors are happy to help and they'll answer any question you have and give you advice. When you think of compliance, don't get stressed. Just think of SecureFrame streamlined, affordable, hassle free. So here's an amazing call to action. SecureFrame is offering you $2,000 off the first year for twist listeners. That's right $2,000 of your first year at secureframe.com slash offer slash twist secureframe.com slash offer slash twist for $2,000 off. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. All right. Harris packs from YouTube says why is the investment landscape still very insular? The old boys brigade is still too prevalent. And you agree with that Zack?
### Human: And that is a way to the world. They might have employees. They have investors that they don't want to let down. Like that's all so understandable. And you can see how some of this would start to spin. And then you can see where it had to stop and where it crossed over into late. I mean, fake boxes and literally lying to consumers and lying to investors and refusing, but it was, it was clear. And this is what has driven me crazy. Even for, I mean, when I was covering this as a journalist, I still was like, This is not a Silicon Valley. Like, it's just this constant insistence that it was a Silicon Valley story and that it's like all about the excesses. And you see that in every single lead today. And I'm like, the first big round she got after Threshold was from Rupert Murdoch.### Assistant: That's the big difference. And then did he go off the rails? Was he smoking pot on private jets? Was he not a good steward of capital? Was he buying wave machines? Was he double dealing and you know, reselling the IP of the trademark to his own company, buying real estate flipping. So there was all these ethical violations that he was doing. But at the core, there was a real business, right? So there's a spectrum between somebody who is completely honest, upstanding, and then there's fraud. And then there's like this whole thing in between. Okay, SOC 2 compliance is critically important. Why? If you don't have SOC 2 tight, you can't close major customers. It's really that simple. And guess what? Vanta is going to give you $1,000 off your SOC 2. Vanta's compliance software makes it easier to get and renew your SOC 2. They continuously test against technical and non-technical SOC 2 requirements They partner with over two dozen audit firms who have been trained to file SOC 2 reports directly within Vanta, and on average, Vanta customers are SOC 2 compliant in just two to four weeks, compared to three to five months without Vanta. Take it from Kitty Hawk's CEO, John Hegranes, who heard me read Vanta's ad and emailed me about how much he loves Vanta. John told me Vanta was essential in helping Kitty Hawk get SOC 2 compliant so they could target those larger customers. So here's a very simple call to action. Unlock bigger sales and give your employees time to work on more business critical assignments. Vanta is giving twist listeners I kid you not $1,000 discount on their subscription at Vanta.com slash twist. That's Vanta.com slash twist V-A-N-T-A.com slash twist to get that $1,000 off. And the whole thing in between, which now Molly that you're joining me on this adventure to be a managing director at launch our investment company, One of the things we have to continually that for when we're reviewing a deck is a founder, typically a young naive founder will say here are our customers, and they use the word customer. So when you say the word customer, I would assume you would assume a normal person assume somebody who's paying you for a product or service and using it. And they'll put 10 logos, right? And that's like the logo slide, it's supposed to get induced investors into investing in a company. But what if out of those 10 logos, three are paying, four on free trials. And you know, the other three, you know, we've had an email exchange with and you're calling them all customers. Well, now you're lying. And is it a big lie? I would say yes. But You know they would say well you know the people are on the free trials are using the product and other people give you thirty days free so yeah their customers we got their credit card and we will charge him next month. So now you're getting into this like you know nuance debate are you lying or not. And i just tell people own your metrics own the reality because we all know the reality. is going to be hit or miss in the early days of a startup. So you put one slide, paying customers, another slide, customers on free trials, and then pipeline. These are potential customers, customers in discussion, people we're talking to. And founders like, okay, yeah, I can split that into three slides. And I'm like, don't make me a detective. Don't make me into Columbo, to where I have to figure out the truth. Just tell the truth from day one. And that's something where fake it till you make it, bend the truth, present the best image. Founders get desperate to raise capital to not fail, and they're acting out of fear. So I have a little bit of empathy for a founder who is scared of failure, and who does a little bit of massaging or spinning. I still don't think they should do it to be clear. But I understand what's happening. They're scared. They're scared of failure.
### Human: So we were building this game and through the experience of working on it and talking with our customers and reflecting on our own behavior, we noticed that the tools that people were using to communicate inside the game with the people they're playing with were not great. That also caused us to sort of reflect and look at the way that we were playing games on PC and the tools that we were using like Skype, which was really popular at the time for this. and noticed that they weren't that great. People were playing these super fresh modern games that are pushing the boundaries of technology and using messaging and voice tools that had kind of fallen out of favor, almost built in a different time. And so we came up with this idea of what if we built from scratch an amazing voice and text chat experience for people that play multiplayer video games, and that's what we built, and it's called Discord.### Assistant: There you have it. Talented video game folks moving on and creating chat. Obviously, this is a trend that we've seen before. Raul worked on RuneScape before Reportive and Superhuman, which were investors in both of those. You know, if you can make a video game that engages people deeply, making a chat room pretty easy, right? Making communication software pretty easy when compared to making a game, which again is a very fickle business like making a movie or an album hit song. Nobody knows what's going to connect with consumers. So it's really hard. So I guess what we need to look at here is Microsoft buying this for 10 billion slack got bought for I think around 28 billion. So slack had 900 million in revenue. They sold for about 30 times revenue discord is 130 million in revenue. They would be selling here for 75 times revenue seems like they're paying twice as much. for this. However, Microsoft has a ton of money and they might have a thesis, a theory, a plan, a strategy that they can make this money back. So that's typically what you're going to see when there's an acquisition, the acquiring company has done some math in which they believe they could be a catalyst to the company in a way the company would not get there organically. And that really makes for a great Great acquisition for both sides, WhatsApp and Instagram come to mind for Facebook. Did they really help those products grow and scale? Of course they did. Would those apps been as successful if they just kept going? Probably 80, 90% as effective. Those are two examples where Facebook didn't screw up the acquisitions. Then you look at the acquisition of YouTube. Oh my Lord. You know, that company was on the brink of insolvency because of all the lawsuits, obviously, Google had just mountains of cash to fight that lawsuit, and had tons of servers to store all of those video files, which at the time, when they bought YouTube, the server bills and the storage bills were crushing for a company like YouTube really hard to, to manage those things. So sometimes there's a theory to grow these things. And in the case of discord, we'll see what that theory is. Are they going to go enterprise? Or do they want to go more consumer Well, because they have Microsoft Teams, which is a product they created specifically as part of the office, you know, offering to compete with Slack doesn't seem like this is designed to booster to boost that they've already got that they already built it. So this really is probably about the Xbox and Minecraft and that division, the consumer division. and getting people to embrace windows, and to raise xbox and to just, you know, sort of give them that foothold in community, which they don't really have. I mean, they do have bang the search engine, but that doesn't have any community. And if you look at Google, they also don't have any community with the exception of YouTube, which is a pretty gnarly community. Facebook obviously has a big community. Amazon has a growing community with Twitch. And so most of these great tech companies have some sort of community. Apple does not obviously because community so hard to manage. So be prepared for Microsoft to have to deal with people doing all kinds of offensive stuff planning, God forbid a terrorist attack using one of these servers, all this technology and managing a community and letting people go crazy on it is very challenging. It's one of the reasons why Disney and Bob Iger canceled the acquisition of Twitter if you didn't know about that. So microsoft obviously really cares about gaming satya nadel has been very clear about this and they see their xbox gaming subscription as netflix for games they've made that a strategic priority with this xbox gaming pass which is fifteen bucks a month which gives you a bunch of premium versions with all the cloud gaming services know, Microsoft bought ZeniMax media for 7.5 billion, they do Bethesda and a bunch of Elder Scrolls, Fallout, the Doom franchises. And so we'll just throw it here to Emily Chang from Bloomberg, talking in September of 2020 to the head of Xbox, Phil Spencer.
### Human: Let's see. The next clip is Elon talking about the challenge of increasing public trust in Twitter and his intent.### Assistant: It wasn't it wasn't I agree. It wasn't a great interview. I don't think Chris is super sophisticated on this topic. But I do think, you know, there, there is the issue, and it's a valid one of what is the role of these platforms? And should they follow the law? Or should they dictate a new law? And should they have? And yes, they're private companies, so they can do whatever they want. We know that. And I think there's a group of people who I'll call know, og ACLU, always tip towards more freedom of speech, which I would put myself in. And then I think there's a group of people who are saying, well, this is a unique, you know, set of circumstances. It's a private company, therefore, they can take a different approach, which is not the law. But it is what they want the service to be. And so if somebody wants to, you know, say somebody is an idiot, there's nothing wrong with saying somebody is an idiot, you think they're an idiot. And then there's the law doxing is clearly against the law. Now we've actually made a law about that, right? I think there is legislation, revenge porn, there's now laws about that. So the law trails the reality. And now I think what's happening is we're starting to look at what happens online and saying, okay, freedom of speech as outlined, you know, in the founding papers of the society we've created, is now up against a different thing, right? Like freedom of speech, where somebody goes to a town square stands on a soapbox or an apple box, and says what they believe slightly different than they send a tweet, it goes to everybody in a trends. And then some algorithm did it, and did it around the concept of rage. And all of a sudden, somebody has been slandered or doxed or brigaded and all these things. So we we're kind of adapting the law to that. And so that I think will be what this is about. And he made a good point about, you know, right now we have Zuckerberg controlling and Zuckerberg, the 14th will control Facebook forever the way super voting shares are. And in this case, I think Ilan has no intention of owning all of Twitter, he would like to have it, you know, be owned by which really said very clearly, which I think was other people's fears, like, is he going to be the one deciding and editing each tweet? I think he wants it to be more open sourced. And so I believe I take him at his word when he says that kind of stuff. Okay baby it's 2022 and I'm back. I'm going to events. I'm going to conferences. I'm hanging out with my peeps. And you know what? I gotta look good. Tight is right. So I've been using Indochino which makes high quality custom fitted suits, shirts, casual wear and more. And with Indochino you can customize everything. from suits and shirts to chinos and bomber jackets at surprisingly affordable prices. So you can get a wardrobe personalized to your style and taste without spending a fortune. Every piece is made to your exact measurements and you can customize every little detail of your suit. fabric lapel monogram. And I love the statement linings because when I fold my jacket over the chair, I always do it inside out. When you put it inside out, you know what the outside of your jacket doesn't get any stains on it. If somebody happens to spill or whatever, you're going to create the suit that fits you and your style perfectly. And the best part Indochino suit started just for 29 and shirts for $79. with all the customization included. So get yourself a style edit that sets the tone for the rest of the year with Indochino. You can get $50 off any purchase of $3.99 or more by using the promo code twist at Indochino.com. That's $50 off a purchase of $3.99 or more at Indochino.com. Use that promo code twist.
### Human: What do we want to accomplish? What do we want to accomplish, right?### Assistant: And you work backwards from there. Mm hmm. Right. So you have this is the output. And then you build what people did was they said, Alright, so let's budget x amount for that, and just spend it however. And that's a lazy person's way of running a business. And that's what everybody in the industry did. They just said, Okay, this group gets 10 million, this group gets 2 million, this group gets 20 million. And they just ran with it. Because as people were saying, I think in this letter, the person describes like three fundraisings in a year. What we used to have in Silicon Valley is a merit based, highly stressful, milestone based funding. I've talked about milestone based funding for a long time on this podcast. And what that did was it just kept a lot of intellectual honesty, kept a lot of pressure on management teams and founders, the CEOs felt extreme pressure because you'd start a fundraise six to nine months after your last fundraising. And if you got it done, you got it done. And if you didn't get it done, game over. And that was that leash that and I'm calling it a leash for a reason. Because VCs would jerk that chain. on founders, founders were subservient to this leash and chain that VCs had them on. And you'd get towards the end of that money. And oh, you couldn't get a term sheet. Great. Here's the most punitive term sheet you can imagine. And we're going to grind you down founders, and you're going to work harder. And so there was this, it was sadistic at times with chat with how the leadership of these teams were treated. But it did make everybody like gladiators. And so you have this gladiator culture from the, you know, post comm era in the early part of the entrepreneurial thing, then faced with this age of excess, everybody got fat, everybody spent too much, yada, yada. And then of course, these VCs who are yanking the chain now they were chasing all these deals. If you want to build an app, you want to build a startup, you want to build a website, a service, a marketplace, any of these things, well, you're going to need to have a really good plan. And if you don't have a good plan, well, your idea is probably going to fail. Well, I've got a solution for you. Crowdbotics gives you access to the best practices for your specific app. What this means is Crowdbotics has all the pre-built app templates ready to build your startup faster. You're not starting from scratch. Your developers would have to start from zero. These developers at Crowdbotics and their team, they've got that technology ready to go. And so the architecture is going to come together very quickly. You can think of CrowdBotics as a CTO as a service, right, a chief technology officer, who you can just drop in and boom, they are going to build your app for you quick, and they're gonna spec it out perfectly. So if you're not sure where to start, CrowdBotics also offers professional scoping. Now this is going to help you flesh out your project. They're going to ask you the important questions. They're going to help you flesh out the features maybe you haven't thought of, right? I want you to talk to the folks at Crowdbotics and let them show you how good they are at what they do. They will schedule a free scoping session with you. and get you a detailed bill plan at crowdbotics.com slash twist. That's crowd BOT ICS.com slash twist. Try crowbotics and see what they can do for you in their scoping session. You got nothing to lose. We and of course, as I've said many times here, like you can't blame employees if if you're going to do my dry cleaning. Okay. I've got to do my dry cleaning anyway. You're going to buy me lunch. I was going to go out, but I'll go to the cafeteria.
### Human: Sam Altman, the CEO and co-founder, was interviewed by ABC News reporter Rebecca Jarvis on Friday. And he didn't talk about journalists very much, but he did talk about his biggest fears with open AI. And it's a pretty wild 60-second clip.### Assistant: Yeah. I mean, is it impressive? Or is it not impressive? I remember when HTML, WYSIWYG editors came out, what you see is what you get. And people were blown away when Apple came out with a word processor in the, you know, let's call it late 80s 87 8089. And you could then type something in and change the font and then print it on a apple printer and have different fonts because up to that point you had dot matrix you only had one font and you were like wait a second you would have to hire a printing company to use different fonts now the fonts are built into your computer whoa this is just an extension of that He's using OCR optical character recognition to WYSIWYG, what you see is what you get, build a website, and then publish it. That's not and write the code. It's not all that groundbreaking. When you think about it, it's a collection of technologies building on top of it. What would be super impressive here is if it said, and then make 10 categories of jokes, that are the most the 10 most popular categories of jokes. Go figure that out yourself. Dad jokes in a, you know, inappropriate jokes, you know, mom jokes, dad jokes, whatever. Then publish those jokes, allow people to add their own jokes and then have a commenting system and a rating system and make it like Reddit. Now that would be like, whoa, or if he just told you, hey, we built the website for you. Here are 10 more things you can add to this website. Would you like to add a voting system? Would you like to add comments? Would you like to add a share button? Would you like to have it produce a daily joke every day? Which by the way, I bought the website a da y.com to do this exact business, which I was going to do subdomain joke dot a day recipe data day. And now that actually AI exists, I could probably just build that. with chat GPT and have it just come up with garbage and pollute the internet. And I think that's going to be the next thing here is the pollution of the internet. If you thought social media polluted the internet and spam and content websites and people in Manila writing just horrible articles and doing keyword stuffing. Now imagine like people just take chat GPT and tell it Buy 10 domains a day, build 100 websites a day, produce 1,000 articles a day, and then interlink between them. The pollution on the internet, it's going to be absolutely like a fog of just garbage out there. It's going to be like, how do we know this is real? And this is where we're going to need to have credentials matter. So every article knowing a human wrote it versus a computer is going to become more and more important and who the author so I think authorship now in a world of pollution becomes more valuable. you can find a gazillion stories about tech or recipes. What's happening now, I think Rachel is those stories are going to pollute the internet so much that somebody who's authoritative like Gordon Ramsay, or let's say, CP from Nick's fan TV, or just somebody myself on seed investing, you on millennials and Gen Z culture, that authority and people who do sub stacks or do podcasts, they become more valuable. Because now the average customer is gonna be like, wait, who can I trust? Who's a real human, who actually is thinking about this, and who actually has authority or has wisdom or experience. So wisdom, in a world of infinite garbage being produced for free, wisdom becomes the difference. Wisdom becomes a difference. So maybe you think biology, as we talked about in the first half of the show is really smart. Well, now his intelligence, or his catastrophizing, whichever, however you want to frame it, is, or both, it could be both, becomes more valuable. So all of this makes the actual elite people in the world more valuable. Because average is now infinite, the average production of content, the average production of opinions is just a commodity.
### Human: Each sentence would represent 10 or 20 years. Yeah, depending on the formatting of the book.### Assistant: Yeah. So, I mean, there, there, there's like multiple tiers of craziness that lead into our current time. So like, um, the, so human history, you know, we can say it's 250,000 years old. Some people will say 300,000 or 200,000, whatever. And so I said, okay, let's just, let's just say two 50. And then if it's a thousand page book, if you wrote all of human history into a thousand page book, um, each page covering 250 years, um, then, you know, what does that look like? And the, the answer is that almost the whole 950 pages of that book is hunter gatherers everywhere. Just that really boring book. Um, and then around page nine 50, you start to have really early cities and agriculture, you know, that you have the agriculture revolution picking up in the nine fifties and nine sixties throughout the world, very slow. And then around nine page nine 75 is the beginning of recorded history. Cause that's when writing started taking hold. And so when we actually talk about prehistory prehistoric times, that's the first 975 pages of the book. So history is only 25 pages. Um, you don't get to a D until page nine 93. So it's like the, it's like the little epilogue of the book is a D. Um, right. So it's just, you realize it just puts in perspective that all these things we consider like incredibly ancient, you know, Buddha, you know, he's like page nine 90 or something like that. Right and so it's like we you know all this stuff is the very tail end of the human history story so far. And but the thing that's most interesting is when you look at it this way you realize that so if you took someone from any page in the book and you transported them one page into the future it wouldn't most of the book it would be. Same kind of hunter gathering lifestyle nothing much has changed. As you get later and later in the book, going forward, one page becomes a bigger and bigger deal. Until you get to page 999, you take, you know, baby George Washington, or you take, you know, 20-year-old George Washington, you bring him 250 years forward to today. Um, and he would get out of the time machine and just be in an, a dream in an alien planet. Like it just, nothing would make any sense at all. He didn't know about, you know, the transportation was just horses in his day, sailboats, right. Yeah. We're going to the space station and submarines and trains and cars and airplanes. Uh, and communication was just, you know, he'd write a letter, uh, or he would talk to someone and that's about it. Uh, and of course we have the internet today and we have everything else. We have TV and, and, and telephones. Um, and, and like, so forget even the internet, just like the basic things from 1950 would completely blow his mind. Uh, and then, you know, he also just did, there was no general relativity. There wasn't, didn't even know about Adams that, that recently. Um, like the, the, uh, the size of the universe, like there's all these things that we take for granted, just basic knowledge that one page ago we didn't know. So this page is an anomaly. In every possible way which is a way of kind of like i think we we we often like assume that if we think that we're living in a special time that must be naive because everyone thinks that. You know but actually we are and yeah and and then what you just talked about is you know our parents and our grandparents whatever. That's all within page 1,000. So page 1,000 already itself is just, that's, you know, really started with the industrial revolution, and it has just been complete madness, just accelerating paradigm shifts all over the place.
### Human: So, you know, I think in some ways, this is arguing for a thesis. Having a thesis is great. Which so far I have not had, specifically as a climate investor, but I have had these buckets that I tell people I'm good at, and ironically, one of them really is consumer. I'm like the last person who thinks consumers have a huge role to play in addressing climate and creating behaviors that trickle down into markets that become really valuable.### Assistant: Consumer and SaaS seem to me to be two vectors in the climate sustainability space that are going to be very attractive to a large number of founders, and they're going to build a lot of stuff there. And so it's a great way to learn. So then if you're looking at deep tech, yeah, you might want to sit back on deep tech, learn about it, wait for the product to come out, and then that would be a good entry point, unless you build enough understanding of carbon sequestration that you could say, you know what, I've seen for companies that are planting trees or kelp. And I understand the laws around incentives and carbon credits. Therefore, I could see this working, because we invested in two carbon credit companies that failed, right. And this one should be able to make it work, because I see the scar tissue, and I talked to two founders who failed. And this is where being patient with yourself like this is a 10 year career journey. It is not a 10 month journey. So you're very quickly to get to 10 months. But you should be looking at as a 10 year arc first six months, first year, just do meetings and learn how venture capital works. And then years two, three and four. Yeah, it's plenty of time to specialize have thesis, you know, and then you know, maybe some legislation comes out and you're like, Oh my god, this legislation changes everything. For me, it was okay, mobile phones change everything. Okay, network effects change everything. Marketplaces change everything. Great design changes everything. Consumer subscription changes everything. I had this like a little toolkit that started building and the theme started building in my mind. I said, Okay, get me five more companies that have consumer subscriptions. Besides comp, STEEZY, FITBOD, TONEBASE. musician, we found a bunch of other ones flew in forever. And I said, Okay, let's make five more investments in consumer subscription and see what happens. Okay, SAS worked. Great. Give me five more SAS companies. Boom. So you get the idea you you'll you'll figure out a couple of these thesis. You figure out a couple of these I Yeah, VCs, VCs, VCs, you find a couple VCs and you double click on them and see how far they go. Some of them will be dead ends. Some of them will be, you know, literally, you'll be going over the rainbow and there'll be like 100 pots of gold there. And you're like, how many pots can I carry back to the ship? know, like, there's just I mean, SAS was like that. It was like, how many SAS companies can I invest in? How many consumer subscription companies can I invest in? All of these seems to be working? Oh, we did consumer package goods. Okay, almost none of these are working. Great. You just have to, you know, have a have a theory, pursue it, and then monitor it. And if it doesn't work, great. It's like, finding a dead end. And you're like, okay, this leads to Antarctica, there's nothing here for us. Oh, this leads to the new world. Oh, this leads to South America, Africa, India. These are great destinations, we can do trade here. Let's pursue those. Let's make this route work. So you find them, you find those grooves and diligence is part of that research is part of it. And it's all part of personal growth, right? And what a great job. I mean, you do a story, and then the outcome is placing a bet that could change the world. Whereas, you know, in our jobs as journalists, we do a story, and then people are smarter, and they love us. Right? You just throw it out there and you hope for the best. Awesome. High fives, everybody. We all got a little smarter. It's a valid pursuit, but it's totally different than placing a bet. All right, I'll let you go.
### Human: Like, all you do is argue like, and they're comfortable for us. They've lost the like the benefit of the doubt. That is such a good. I mean, I understand the awkwardness of using relationship metaphors. But the fact is that you're what you're talking about is dating the person in front of you, like they're not going to change.### Assistant: But it's kind of accurate, because you're going to spend 10 years with this person in the company. Are you having design problems? Well, you need to check out SuperSide. SuperSide is a great alternative to old school expensive agencies that charge you an arm and a leg. And let's face it, it disappoints you often. Or messy talent marketplaces. They help you get qualified design at scale. In fact, SuperSide created a new category called CAS internally. That's right. Creative As A Service. By subscribing to SuperSide, you'll get a dedicated design team built specifically for you. and access to a platform that makes it easy for you to request designs and have them delivered quickly. They are a fully managed service and completely hassle-free. They work with brands like Amazon, Salesforce, and Shopify, you may have heard of them, as well as tons of fast-growing startups. SuperSight only hires the top 1% of virtuosos of designers around the world, and they make sure your team has a full range of capabilities. from ad creative and landing pages to motion design and custom illustrations and even memes. Here's your call to action go to superside.com slash twist and get 3000 or more in credits when you sign up for an annual subscription. This is a twist exclusive and valid for only the next three months $3,000 in credits when you go to superside.com slash twist and you sign up for an annual plan. It's a really creative idea to solve all your creative problems. Once again, superside.com slash twist If the person is like a bullshit artist or won't answer the questions or gets defensive, you gotta think like, what is board meeting number 30 gonna be like? What is like year five gonna be like? Is this person gonna miraculously mature? And I've been in the situation where I've been on boards where You know a ceo is not maturing and it's painful i'm just like can somebody buy my shares in this company and i just tell the founder like listen. It's happened to me maybe three times four times out of three hundred fifty investments where i said you know i'm not the right investor for you. And it's almost like breaking up talk and i'm just like. You know we only percent of the company at the next round of financing how about you buy four percent of it will keep four percent of it will be low the will be below the five to seven percent where we want to have a port scene and we can just. Add any insurance in the future and you can get us off the board i said that to hundreds that candidly. Because it is a long term relationship you want to be rooting for the person and i had somebody who coach me at one point cuz i was a bit of a terror as a manager. And I was telling him about this terrible employee and they're like, hey, you're not rooting for this person. I was like, what do you mean? He said to me, he's like, you actually don't want them to succeed at this point. Right. I just thought about it and I was like, yeah, I hate this person. And it's like, but you're the boss, you hired them. I was like, well, I didn't hire them. Somebody else did. He's like, well, you hired the person who hired them and you're keeping them employed. He's like, if you're not rooting for them anymore, why are they at your company? And I was like, well, they're good at what they do and I need that position filled. And they're like, really, you can't find anybody else to do it. Like, so you don't want the pain of hiring somebody, but you're not rooting for the person. You have to have somebody in that position you who you're rooting for their success, not rooting for their failure. It's dysfunctional. And I was like, Ah, this is like a dysfunctional relationship, dysfunctional marriage, whatever we've seen, you know, that that couple who comes to the dinner party, it was like, why are you guys still married?
### Human: So that's a great question and we did spend most of the the company's two years old we actually had our birthday a week ago so uh yeah we're very excited about that and we spent a large part of the first two years building the foundation because if you're building a data generation engine That requires a lot of infrastructure, and biology is messy, it's complicated. Cells are actually living beings, and they don't do what you tell them to do, and so there's this incredible amount of work to making all of the protocols and all of the materials that you're working with as locked down as possible so that the experiments work the way you hoped they would work. So, now there's still a lot of foundation building that we need to do, but we've done enough that we can now actually start prosecuting diseases in a meaningful way. And we've been working for about a year on a project that is joined with Gilead, who was a great partner to us to get things off the ground because they gave us a bunch of money that helped pay for the platform development and also some great expertise in the liver area. And so with them, we're working on a disease called NASH, which stands for non-alcoholic steatohepatitis, which is basically an inflammation and fibrosis of the liver, scarring on the liver, that is becoming much more predominant these days because of obesity and insulin resistance. it's going to become the largest cause for liver transplants and liver cancers in the coming decades. So it's a real serious issue. And so we've worked with them to allow us to create cell types from normal people like you or me, or people who are sick with NASH, in order to understand at the cellular level what the genetics that give rise to a higher proclivity to getting NASH versus a lower proclivity to getting NASH? And then how do you drive those cells using environmental factors more or less towards a NASH outcome? And then what drugs might be the ones that revert that disease phenotype back towards a normal state? So, we've made tremendous progress on NASH, and now we can, with that infrastructure in place, because once you know how to work with liver cells, then you could apply this to a whole range of other liver diseases. The other area that we've made a significant investment in is diseases of the central nervous system. And there, of course, I don't need to tell you about the incredible unmet need that exists in both neurodegeneration and neuropsychiatric disorders, both of which have been considered rather intractable areas to work in with tremendous numbers of failures and the few, very few drugs that have been approved mostly being symptomatic at best and often with significant side effects. This is an area where I think there is tremendous potential because there has been a much greater understanding of the genetics of those diseases and realizing that you know, someone, for instance, has a neuropsychiatric disease, a large portion of that is probably genetic. So, for instance, the concordance between identical twins in autism is about 60 to 70%. And depression is about 50. And so there's clearly a strong genetic component there that we now, I mean, it's very complex. We know that there is hundreds, if not thousands of genes that are involved in these disorders. But the fact that it is genetic means that we can see some of that in cells that are derived from people with or without that that phenotype. And you can actually look at a cell and distinguish whether it comes, for instance, from a patient with a certain type of autism versus one that isn't. And that's amazing.### Assistant: Yeah, where they're the stars of the show. It's sort of like you could, if you were a fashion designer, uh, like, would you want to be the costume designer in a movie? Like you're not as important as the director of the stars, the person who wrote the screenplay. You're just kind of like, ah, it's bringing the set to bring in the costume designer, change the costumes, but you want to be the star of the show. And those engineers are going to go work at Google or, you know, Tesla and work on self-driving cars or something that is super rewarding and go work for your company, which would also be super rewarding when we get back from this break. I want to know where you're aiming, you know, this machine learning gun and what you're trying to take out. What are the targets when we get back with Daphne Koller from the C-Track? Alright, things are a little weird these days. We all know that. But now more than ever, it's important to build and maintain great customer relationships. You know that that's the heart of every startup, you need to have a great relationship with your customers and Zendesk is here to help with their Zendesk for startups program. Yes, that's right. Zendesk is the first service free CRM company with support and sales and customer engagement products designed to improve your relationship with your customers and the Zen desk for startups program is offering qualified companies six months free and you'll be able to utilize their support and sell solutions and gain access to an exclusive startup community with resources to help you scale out your customer support. And here is one of my breakout companies that loves Zendesk. You know STEEZY Studio. They went through our accelerator. They teach you to dance. My wife's addicted to it. Everybody loves STEEZY. I get really great comments on the product all the time. Well, through a combination of Zendesk Explorer and their ticketing tagging system, they can track which features their users are most excited about. And STEEZY can then relay that information to the product team. So for STEEZY, Zendesk is more than a CRM tool. it creates a positive relationship with members and empowers them to contribute to STEEZY's growth in return for some awesome dance moves which i will not break out at this time i will save you for my dad dance moves if you're an early stage startup here's your call to action early stage means you have under 50 employees well you can get started today with six months free all you have to do is have under 50 employees which i think is most of you listening uh go to zendesk.com slash twist Every customer counts when you're a startup, especially now. So start building the best customer experiences with Zendesk. And they've also launched their new podcast. It's called sit down startup, where Zendesk leaders chat with founders, CEOs and makers on their startup journey. You can listen and subscribe to sit down startup on Spotify or Apple podcasts. Right now just search for sit down startup. Thanks for supporting the program, Zendesk. All right, welcome back to This Week in Startups, where I'm getting a quick education on, along with all of you, on drug discovery. I mean, many of the people in the audience that you all know about machine learning. Makes total sense to me, just the same way Elon is reusing rockets. That lowers the cost of going to space. The cheaper it is to go to space, the more missions you can do, the more satellites you can put up for his Starlink, The greater the chances of going back to the moon or to Mars. Makes total sense. You're going to make it cheaper, faster, better. You're going to avoid mistakes by using machine learning. You need all those talented people who are the rock stars in your company. You've been at this for two or three years. You've obviously built some software. Are you at the stage now where you're targeting specific drugs or targeting specific diseases? What are you thinking about in terms of where to point, you know, the super weapon you're building?
### Human: All right. And then here's where the dunking started slash the Oh, this is how we got a bubble. Yeah. Tips two and four are basically the same. Yeah. Run towards the heat. Okay. If a company has tons of hype and seems overvalued, don't run away, run towards it. Hype is good, meaning that they'll likely raise and exit at a higher valuation. It won't feel overpriced after the startup exits. And and then in tip four, if a big name investor invests, be a follower and invest. They've likely done a ton of work to discover, vet and analyze big investors are pouring resources and finding fast growing industries and companies. Copy them.### Assistant: Yeah. So that's something we talked about. You know, in terms of social signal, if Sequoia and big name investors, I would say, high performing investors, the highest performing investors, the legacy investors, the people who've done this before for a long time, I would not include Andreessen Horowitz in that. it's relatively new firm has made a lot of big large bets like bad bets, right. So if you're running towards the heat of an a 16 investment, that might not be the heat you want to run towards that might be like running into a money furnace, right? Whereas like Sequoia, or Excel, or benchmark, like if he's talking about those big name investors, see, that's why I wouldn't use big name, I would use historically top performing. Andreessen Horowitz is not historically top performing fund, statistically, they are an average fund, but deploying large amounts of money, right, they don't have the returns of benchmark, they don't have the returns of Sequoia. But they're more like an index fund, as Tremont said, on all in pockets at some point, they're trying to like be the BlackRock or something like that, like just put tons of money together. And just, you know, be the average kind of return on large amounts of money. So Laura, people want to put a large amount of money to work can go to an Andreessen Horowitz or whatever, where he works, you know, but you really always got to think about the person's motivation. When they're telling you to do things right. And I talked about that in my book. running towards the heat and just following an A 16 investment, I would not advise that I think that's a really bad idea. And so be careful, because some firms are playing a different game than you if you're playing the outlier game. And Jason Horowitz is going for average returns are slightly better than average, but putting large amounts of money to work like most large firms. They're not trying to do 100 x. Now an angel is trying to do 100 x, a big firm is trying to just do a three x. So you're if you've only got 10 or 20 of these bullets, and you're two or three x them, that's not going to be good. If 80% die, you're going to be underwater, right? You just do the simple math. Yeah, if Andreessen or whatever growth on that's not a dig, a growth fund, it's not a dig to a growth fund. If you're deploying a billion dollars, you return three. that's 2 billion in profits, right? And you get 20% of that you make 400 million like that is a specific game to play in Silicon Valley is to be a growth investor. And just invest in things that already have 50 million or 100 million revenue. But if you're mixing that advice with angels, that's a problem, right? And then here's the other problem. Yeah, if Sequoia is investing, or benchmarks investing in the series, there's no room for you as an angel, you're not getting in that deal. So that's a bit of a blocker. So you have to think through this advice. And then looking for things that are growing three x year over year is important. But you have to double click on it. Is that actual profitable growth? Is it bad unit economics, you know, actually understand that. And that's hard to understand. So if you spent $10 million to triple your revenue from 300 to a million, you lost 9 million to make a million. That's not actually good growth. You want quality growth. That's three x in year over year. And I actually use that number three x in our staff meetings, in our investment team, we actually consider high growth three x year over year, we consider good growth, you know, anything that's double or better. All right, everybody on the phone today is open phones founder Darina cool. Yeah, welcome to the program Darina.
### Human: All right, I take him for my team. Any other resistance, we'll do the resistance draft right now. I think we'd be a good team.### Assistant: Yeah, well, the first thing from a macro perspective, it's just important to be very, very humble and avoid having a strong view. For the simple reason is the Federal Reserve, They employ more PhD economists than any institution on earth by a factor of two. They have all the computing power they want to run simulations. They get what is effectively the equivalent of inside information, and that they get all sorts of daily sales feeds from big retailers, the big credit card companies. They know what is going on with the economy more than anyone else. And they control the single most important dependent variable for predicting the future of the economy. And that is the price of money. So they, at some level, control the outcome. And yet they regularly make forecasts. And if you look at their forecasts, they have zero predictive ability looking out more than six months. So if that's a success rate of the Fed, I think we should be very humble as investors. But the reason the Nasdaq has had this extraordinary start is gen AI. And this is, for me, I think for everyone in the room, the next three years are going to be the most exciting three years of all of our careers. And for the simple reason, there had been nothing new in technology in more than 10 years. So there was cloud computing in 2012. Before that, there was the iPhone in 2007. And before that, there was the internet, which I would date to the Mosaic browser in 1993. Those were all, at some level, new methods of distribution. you know, the iPhone and the internet, they directly distributed just existing content, you know, made it very easy to access cloud computing was just a better, more efficient, cheaper distribution mechanism for software. I think this is one reason that people went so crazy over the last five or six years, trying to kind of create new distribution channels. This is why Facebook spent $60 billion trying to bring the metaverse into into being. It's just a new distribution channel like the internet. It's why Amazon spent 50 billion on Alexa, which is a new distribution channel, ambient computing, because that was the paradigm that it created value, you know, for the last nearly 40 years. And then along comes gen AI. And this is fundamentally different. This is not a new distribution channel. If the computer was a bicycle for the mind, to quote Steve Jobs, Gen AI is somewhere between a race car and a spaceship for the mind. It's much more akin to the invention of the rotary steam engine in 1769, which spawned the whole industrial revolution and changed every aspect of life. 90% of people used to work basically in agriculture. Now it's less than 1%. And I think it's that level of social and structural change that we are looking at. And this is the first fundamentally new thing in technology in more than 10 years. And it is, for sure in my mind, going to be bigger than the internet. I get somewhere between the internet and the invention of fire. And I think one way to frame, downside and upside are correlated not just in investing, but with new technologies. So nuclear weapons, it's amazing. Cheap, abundant, free energy forever, should we have the political will to do that. Or it could wipe out the human race. Elon, who you were close to, has been warning about, you know, AI has an extinction risk for a long time. And really, in the last month, all sorts of people who had been really skeptical have come out and said, you know what, like, you're right, this is an extinction level risk for humanity. And so if there's some chance that this is a powerful enough technology to wipe out humanity, like what is the upside? I am not like, as far as the downside, there's not a lot I can do. I would just say like, if we're looking at a Terminator scenario, I will be in the resistance. I will not be like a very, I won't be a very valuable member of the resistance, but I will be high energy. But I think.
### Human: I tweeted one today that I read the other day that I like, which is, you know, a lot of founders are really proud of their organic growth rates. And they're like, Hey, look how great we're growing our cac is zero, and we're growing this fast. And like, for me, that's actually like a red flag, because paid acquisition and sales, marketing, understanding your channels is a muscle. You have to start doing it and iterating on it and learning and you do it and you realize something's not right and you get better at it. And like showing that you basically very early on in the sort of life cycle of your business, realize that this is a muscle that needs to get big and strong for your business to get as big as it could get and starting to build it and starting to think about it and starting to get good at it is like super duper critical. And I think there's a lot of sort of examples in businesses like this in every aspect, where being proud that you don't do something that you eventually will have to do, I think is for me, it's a it's a red flag. I'm like, Oh, you mean you haven't started learning how to do this yet? Like that means it's going to be painful when the time comes.### Assistant: yeah and really it is when you think about marketing as a muscle. You can go through ten campaigns and really achieve very little and then all of a sudden you get. You figure out some audience or some new channel or some new creative. And it just goes 10x. And all of a sudden, your cat goes from $100 to 10. And you're like, Oh, there it is. So it's pretty humbling, like how difficult it is to actually get to the point where you make something that actually breaks out. So you definitely want to stick with it. And yeah, I think that that is a bit of a tell, I would say low product velocity, I find super annoying. And I also find super annoying. people who obsess over things that are not critical to the business. So you have one founder who is obsessing over, you know, the, the, the super voting shares, and I'm like this, you don't even have product market fit. And we're talking about super voting shares. What's going on here? Like, let's get product market fit and then talk about that. Or like they were concerned about their board conversion. I'm not saying that's not an important thing. But I was like, you don't even have a thriving business here. And we're like debating stuff that's not important. And then Other times that people say like, Hey, yeah, we're gonna get this done, we get that done, and they just don't get it done. And I'm just like, you know what, there's no plan here. And the cadence is too slow, you have to move fast with a sense of urgency. And I've just watched people meander and meander. And I'm just like, Where's the sense of urgency here, just pick a date that the new product comes out and tell the team version two is coming out October 1, the end. And if it doesn't come out October 1, you're all fired, and we're starting over. Like, you at some point have to put your foot down and say we're going to be competitive in the marketplace. And some people do this, you know, really aggressively, and it has great success. And listen, it might burn some people out, it might rub some people the wrong way. Trigger warning, if you don't like, you know, intense work environments, startups are not for you, but man have a sense of urgency. I think that's one of the big reasons why tech and the media and this world crowd are having this, you know, big battle is because startups are about going fast with a sense of urgency. And then socialism, communism, and work life balance and living a full 360 life where you're focused on you and your self care is diametrically opposed to trying to beat competitors. And to, you know, trying to act with a sense of urgency. And so what neither side can understand the other side, if you don't want to be an intense environment, you can work for the post office, go work for Starbucks, go work for, you know, any number of jobs where you're not creating any new things, you're just punching a clock or creating a delightful product day in and day out, but you're not trying to change the world. That's fine. But if you're at a startup with a clock ticking, and you're running out of company, you know, cash, you have to move fast people, you cannot dilly dally, speed is success and going slow equals death, you will get caught. The zombies will catch you, they'll overwhelm you, and you will be ripped to shreds and they will eat the flesh off your bones. You need to beat out the other people. Sorry to say it so rapidly. But I just saw I mean, how annoying is it when you invest in a company and they just turn into the post office? And they're like, Yeah, we're not working this weekend. Yeah. I don't know if we're gonna get that done. Does that happen often to you? Or?
### Human: No, I mean, I think we should go on to this idea of it as supplemental internet to and the question of like, and the starling currently have All of this is predicated on households. You mentioned businesses. Presumably there will be a business offering at some point when there is this offering now. Yeah, it's a business offering now, like, basically, but you can start to do segmented pricing when you have enough kind of critical mass and economies of scale of satellites in orbit, then you and and then there will be Presumably, like in Amazon supposedly has been working on this and launching lower earth orbit satellites and is maybe going to do an internet service eventually of these, I think, so then there will be competition or three, and you'll start to but then the competition leads awareness, right? It's like when you put a Starbucks on every block, all of a sudden, everybody wants a coffee shop, like, absolutely, coffee bean does better rising tide lifts all boats.### Assistant: Exactly. Yeah. So this is going to be and somebody's gonna have to clip this here message to Sam Altman. If chat GPT gives data, it should say where it got that data from and start putting some links to it. Because that would be fair to the data provider. If not, then the data providers should opt out of having their information in chat beat GPT. I don't know why this hasn't come up in the conversation. But I had this great revelation over the holidays when producer Brian was like, asking me like, Hey, what's a good stinger? We were talking about like a little transition for big little things or segment on big little things. And I said, Oh, let me ask Chad GPT. And I was like, basically trolling him a little bit. Yeah, now he's trolling me back in the show notes today saying, I know it's about SpaceX are coming for GPT says blah, blah, blah. Well, and it's true. So now you're like, Oh, do you need producers? It's like, maybe the producers can do more, right? You have bionic producers, right? So they can, but it would be fairer if it put the citation And so this is what is going to be required of Chattopadhyay. Let's put that on the side here. I like to do bottom up TAMs, total addressable market, we talk about this with startups constantly. If you just look at a couple of markets, you know, let's look at India, population of whatever is 1.4 billion. 260 million households. So when you're looking at statistics, it's good to look at households because an internet connection we bought by household not by individuals, right. So it's not like, but smartphones would be bought by individuals. So 260 million households have 600 million broadband connections. So some of those are obviously businesses, right? Yeah. And so you got to think, you know, 10% of, you know, those homes, if they just in India, and they were paying, let's say, 45 bucks a month, maybe I don't pay 30 bucks a month, something in that range, let's say 30 bucks a month, you can be talking about 20 billion a year, right? Just in India. Yeah. Because they're not going to pay the same amount. They're not going to pay 90 bucks a month, like sure, but they probably pay 20 bucks a month. Yeah, so in India, they might be charging 90 a month, I think, like, you know, any other service, maybe they'll start at 90. But eventually, it's gonna have to if they're gonna hit the mass market be priced for that market. And then I think a lot of you get a US population 330 million people, we talked about that all the time. 120 million households, we've got 300 million broadband connections here. Again, businesses are a big part of that 10% of that market, 30 million $110 a month. You know, it's about 40 billion a year in the US. So there's a big prize at stake here, you start thinking about those numbers, and then you think about how profitable this could be. satellite array, that constellation is essentially a fixed cost business, you put it up, there's going to be some maintenance, some will come down, some will go up, but there's a redundancy there, I believe. So, you know, they could be lowering the price, once it's fixed cost, they can start lowering the prices and get more people. And, you know, just combine markets like that in Brazil is another big market, people forget how big Brazil is. You know, Brazil, us, India alone, India alone, you start looking at hundreds of billions of dollars in potential revenue with just a small percentage of the market. And then, you know, so anyway, let's just stop there. Any thoughts on that in terms of the total addressable market for these services?
### Human: When we talked a year ago, we were all locked down everywhere and no one quite knew what was going to happen next. Now that we're starting to see particularly Silicon Valley and startup land emerging from the pandemic, what does the landscape look like? How did things shift during the pandemic in a permanent way?### Assistant: I mean, yeah, I mean, the most the biggest change, which I had fought and underestimated was the work from home revolution. In America, we had a couple of little pockets of innovation there. You had 37 signals, which makes Basecamp, you had WordPress, and Matt Mullenweg, and intercom and a handful of companies that I would say we're quixotic, weird or boutique. Obviously, you know, a billion dollar multi billion dollar company, like WordPress is not boutique, but it was generally considered like this weird thing over here. Well, when 100% of people are forced to get a setup with a proper microphone and lighting a light ring and you know, put their ethernet cable in for the first time to their computer, and they didn't even know they had an ethernet port or an ethernet hub in their house. But they, you know, ran that 50 foot cable to make zoom work properly. Once that happened, we saw actually that work from home technology does work and managing people remotely does work if 100% of people buy into it. So it's almost like a prisoner's dilemma where if you were a work from home employee, you would be a second class citizen in most companies. because you'd have some conference or people go for a walk, they'd make business decisions, and you weren't involved in it because you were in Boise, Idaho. Now, when you get on a zoom, the CEO gets a little square box and next to them is the lowest ranking person and everybody in between. So it's created this level playing field. And then and this is where it gets even a little bit. It gets a little bit marauding. But I do think some CEOs looked at this and said, Wait a second, If we can hire people anywhere, the 30 40% premium we pay in Silicon Valley means we can get a third employee for every two, and we can lower salaries 30%. Oh, and we're spending this much on facilities in space is our number three line item or number two, we can reduce that 50%. Oh, and now there's nowhere left to hide. And that's the final piece, which is if you are not producing, or you are producing really a lot of work, in a work from home environment, a remote work environment, proper management is forced to do their job, which is not evaluate people on their culture, you know, quotient, or how good they are at meetings or water cooler or other performative stuff, you then have to look at what was the work that was done. So you don't you get no points for bringing in donuts or making everybody laugh in the cafeteria or whatever, all that stuff is gone. It's just what work did you get done. And when you take out commuting, which is two or three hours a day here in the States, we saw, I think a bargain happened a grand bargain, which is you get to work however you want, wherever you want. We're going to take those two or three hours and you keep one, we get one. And people are working more in the startups, I see there's not like this delineation. So that's something that's going to have to be corrected for. I think when when do I officially stop working if I'm working in my pajamas? And when do I start like, people are opening their laptops up in bed, and working and taking a shower every other day, you know, so it's, but it is going to come back. And then that's where it's going to, I think, get super interesting is what happens when Netflix comes back or Zuckerberg comes back. And there's a locus of power and 80% of people are not part of the star chamber, right, of where the decisions are made. So I'm really fascinated to see how it works out. But it's, it's good for employees. It's great for companies. And it's going to be great for efficiency going forward. We're all much more efficient. And we got through this together. And I think it's going to make everybody stronger for it.
### Human: Oh, I'm not going to that. You're crazy. Of course, you're coming.### Assistant: I know one of them is going to want to get in on this. And for me, it would be particularly meaningful. I mean, if I could take my life's work, supporting founders and doing this podcast and say to one of my three daughters, Hey, meet Molly, she'll teach you how to be a broadcaster. And if one of them wanted to be an angel investor, I say, Hey, meet, you know, Ashley, meet Jackie, you can work on the syndicate, you can work, you can do an internship at the accelerator or something would be really meaningful if one or two or, you know, even three of my daughters wanted to be in dad's business. would be cool for me. They don't have to, but I would like them to inherit something and be part of something that maybe the world's changed a little bit, right? And they would feel comfortable in. So anyway, I mean, anyway, I have to say afraid of really to change my thinking. And I think that's what I'm trying to do here is there's somebody listening to this, who had my position in my blind spot, which is meritocracy only best person gets the gig. And then you got to think, okay, think about that. Think about that homophily biases, think about the self perpetuating top 100 list. Just let that stew a little bit. And I think you know, sometimes it's very hard because you get attacked when you do this. That's why the person from Bain, you know, I think, you know, an exit ramp here, a path to greater awareness is the next piece here. So please don't go too crazy on him. Let's judge him in 3, 612 months on how he leads that firm. Yeah, you know, Ken, that's my challenge to him. Yeah. And when I would love to have him on the pod to talk to the two of us. you know, in three months or six months, maybe he can hire two or three people. And maybe that photo looks a lot different in six months. And he can tell us how we did it and give a roadmap and tips for other people. Because maybe they tried to have a couple of women on the team, and they just had nobody apply. you know, that's possible. Sometimes you put a job description out and you don't get any applications, right? Some way, I'll tell you how this is like, absolutely true. I looked at the all in summit registrations. And I asked my team because we didn't ask it on the form. Usually I do ask this on the form. We didn't ask people their agenda. So I said, Hey, can you just do me a sample size and you know, get me 100 click on their LinkedIn, we asked people for their photos. give me your best guess of the gender of the person, you can usually do that pretty easily. Not in all cases, there are some people who are non binary, or, you know, are not part of either gender, you know, respect. I know that's not a difficult thing to do in the world. It's like you could also be attacked for that. And we looked at it, and I think it was androgynous, or I don't know if androgynous, non binary, non binary. So it, it was like 15% female. Now that's to buy tickets. So any conference, which was like, well, the audience is going to be 85% male. And I just said, No, the audience is not going to be any 5% male, we have a scholarship program, we're going to start the scholarship program with female. And let's give the first 50 scholarships, or at least offer them to women at a massive discount instead of $7,500 $500, $1,000, whatever they asked for, we let them ask for what they want to pay. So at least when you show up at the event, Molly, you're not like, Oh my god, this is a bro down.
### Human: And now it's like, oh, now it's a program team. Right? Like it's, yeah, it's not just one.### Assistant: It's not just the accelerator. When COVID hit, I was struggling with my weight. So I tried a continuous glucose monitor, CGM. You've probably heard of them. And this product is called NutriSense. And it helped me understand why I was gaining weight. And it helped me get my weight under control because I understood when my glucose was spiking. I sometimes stress eat cereal. with whole milk would spike my glucose like you wouldn't believe. And then I'd have a small portion of full-fat ice cream, like a Haagen-Dazs. And I was like, wait a second, I am having my glucose spike much lower. I would have thought the opposite. I would have thought the Haagen-Dazs was worse than a bowl of cereal. If you don't have the data, you can't manage it. With the data, you can manage it and you will be able to learn how your body responds to these different foods. Here's how it works. The CGM, that continuous glucose monitor, it's a small device you put on your body and it tracks glucose in real time. The application, it's painless. Then you scan your CGM, right? You look at it, you visualize the data, you start logging your meals, you take pictures, etc. And you're going to get expert guidance from a dietician based on your goals. And that's how I learned about the sugar versus ice cream example I gave. Understand this data will make it much easier to identify what you're doing well and where there's room for improvement. Let NutriSense help you reach your full health potential. It was a big part of my journey. Visit NutriSense.io slash twist and use the code twist to save $30 and get one month of free dietitian support. N-U-T-R-I-S-E-N-S-E dot I-O slash twist for $30 off and one month of free dietitian support. Speaking of doing your job, Yeah, we talked about coinbase cutting 20% yesterday during a job. Whoo. Yeah. But remember, I said perp walks would happen. And people are going to go to jail because we saw the speeding tickets. Typically, how enforcement works is you get investigations, you get document requests, you get speeding tickets, settlements. But then at some point, some people go to jail. In the crypto world. We are now on that precipice of people doing jail time. It took six, seven years of meshugana and malfeasance and outright crimes. But the brother of a former Coinbase product manager has been sentenced to 10 months in prison. This is prison, Molly. This is where you go, and they don't let you leave because you broke the law. Yeah, this is not a speeding ticket. This is some crypto bro, who was front running listings on Coinbase is now going to stare up at the ceiling in his prison cell and cry for his mama for a week and say what life choices that I made that I tried to make a couple of shackles off of a Ethereum trade or XRP trade. And now I'm in the I'm in the big house as a crypto trader. Yeah. Wondering if I should close my eyes and go to sleep. Yo, man, this is real talk. I've been watching Screlly videos. Martin Shkreli's talking about his prison time. Oh, really? Well, you know, like Shkreli and I had a little flare up at one point that he went to jail. Yeah. And I watched it. He does like a live stream. So I watched one or two of his Shkreli's live stream streams. And now Shkreli's go to Martin Shkreli's go to link bait is talking about prison. and talking about how he was running prison with his thugs and his crew. And he's got like all the names of his crew. And he was explaining like how he would punk Sam Bankman free when he came to jail and how he would take his commissary and you know, they would dress him down and yada yada.
### Human: it's a whole new world here. I mean, I think what this will force is the search engines to get a lot better. And, you know, I think this is good for your website. But I think if you're using it for kind of spam purposes, I think the, you know, we're gonna see technology that can start to detect that these things were written by AI eyes. But I, you know, you've been doing this a lot longer. So I am really in because your reaction is pretty, you know, lukewarm to negative on these.### Assistant: Yeah, so what I think is because the quality is like generic, it's I think it's enough to confuse the algorithm into thinking it's a human. but not good enough to provide value for humans. So it's kind of like falling between, I think it's going to beat Google and bang, and they're gonna have a hard time dealing with this and figuring out if it's computer generated or by human. And then I think, conversely, I think humans are gonna get to this and feel like, what am I is this just filler calories. So it's, it's reminds me of like, you know, you eat some organic strawberries, and they're small, and they're delicious, and they're dense with flavor and, but they're imperfect, you know, kind of human ish. And then they make these factory ones, you know, that are giant strawberries that are like the size of like a small apple or a lemon and you're like, that's too big for a strawberry. It has no flavor. think that's kind of this artificial, you know, web of content that we're about to create, that's going to destroy the open web, I think this is going to flood and destroy the web if it's not contained. Now, if it got good enough that it was providing actual value. Great. But when I look at that, you know, a all in summit review, or any of these, it feels like filler content. So I get it for brainstorming. And it certainly will get you to like second base, it gets you 60% of the way there. But man, you really do need to have a human polishes, which I think means the great writers will get eat will become even more valuable in this world. Because average to good content is going to be everywhere. It's going to flood everything. And the automated nature of this is also troubling. That to me is the in the batch stuff. So you could say, rewrite the entire Wikipedia, I could rewrite the entire Wikipedia right now and say, take every section of the Wikipedia, rewrite every section, and do it in this tone, a funny tone, a clever tone, a more professional or less professional, you know, whatever it is and and then how does the internet deal with that right and it's supposedly it's happening on reddit too that there are reddit bots that are now posting comments Okay, listen, you got an idea for a tech startup. Great. You think you want to change the world? You think you got this? This is the one? Well, you've got that same problem that we all do. You don't have an engineer, or you don't have enough engineers to make this happen. And you need product velocity, you need to go fast. And how are you going to go fast? And how are you going to control your burn rate if you got no engineers? Well, what if you had a partner who could provide you with more than 1000 on demand developers, and those developers were all vetted experience result oriented and passionate about startups and building great products? Well, what if they also charge competitive rates? Does this all sound too good to be true? I know it does. Well, then you need to head to lemon.io because your dreams have come true right now startups choose lemon.io because they only offer handpicked developers with three or more years of experience. and ones that have strong portfolios, only 1% of candidates who apply to work at lemon.io actually get accepted. And if anything goes wrong, lemon will get you a replacement ASAP. A couple of great launch founders have worked with them in.io people in our portfolio, and they have had great experiences. So I want you to learn more at lemon.io slash twist. And when you go there, you're gonna find your perfect developer or any entire tech team. And you're gonna do that in 48 hours or less. and twist listeners get 15% off the first four weeks. I want you to stop burning money. I want you to hire developers smarter and faster. Visit lemon.io slash twist and give it a shot.
### Human: And it was great for me, Jason, because I just constantly felt in the zeitgeist of the conversations, and I miss doing it.### Assistant: Okay, we'll start it back up then. Okay, there you go. You just committed will start. I mean, it's a joke, but it's possible. You know, it's it's it I have to say thank you for the kind words. It has been the great joy of my life doing this podcast. And I agree. The zeitgeist is the reason I do it. Instead of going to lunch with people. I substituted this right and I would just take out one lunch a week and do the speaking startups and then it became two and then three. And now we're basically doing four or five. I mean, the ads are sold out till November. And now my team is like, Hey, what about a Sunday show? And I'm like, Yeah, sure, we could do a Sunday show. Let's come up with an idea. And it's getting it's so much easier to do mark now because of COVID. everybody like yourself has a quality setup at home. And zoom has gotten so good. And the microphones have gotten so good. And people know how to plug in an ethernet cable. And people also know how to talk virtually. And they're more comfortable having a conversation like this. I used to do a go to meeting or, you know, a Skype call. And I nine times out of 10, we'd have to cancel the show. Because they couldn't get it up and running. Now. It's like, this is my fifth call of the day. I know how to do it. J cow. We're good. reflecting back to you. Something I took from you as a friend is years ago, you wrote a blog post. And I remember Fred Wilson had written one before you about your yearly trips. And how you looked at how long you had left with your sons, you have two kids, I believe, two boys, yeah, two boys, and your sons were getting older, I think they were 10 and 11. At the time, you may have written this. He said, Hey, I got six left with one, I got five left with another, and then they're off to school got to make every summer count. Well, here I am, I'm in Italy. I did a two week trip my kids last year or two years ago, before COVID, we had done Australia. And I'm just looking at this with my 11 year old going, okay, 11 1213 1415 16, I got sick. And with the five years old, I obviously got a little bit more. actually sent them home because they had to start school. And my wife was like, you should stay a week and do that book thing. And I was like, wow, the greatest wife ever. So thanks to my wife, but I'm, I'm here. Still at a I'm at a secluded beach town in Italy. I won't say which one writing my next book. Awesome. It's been great. So let me start the conversation with you and I have lived through the start of a super cycle 2009. When I became a Sequoia scout, upfront ventures at the time was called GRP. GRP. Yes. I think you were a couple years into the job. You had been an entrepreneur before that. Yeah. And you and I were investing in companies for four or 5 million. And if there was the term unicorn did not exist. The iPhone was a very new device was on the second version, perhaps. And now here we are. It's 2021. It's about 13 years later, maybe give or take 1213 years later. What do you make of what we're seeing in terms of the outcomes for the companies we invested in back then at the start of the super cycle? I'll call it a super cycle. For lack of a better term? And is this sustainable? And does it make you nervous? What do you think about this? Because you you sold maker for a billion dollars that seemed crazy at the time. Now it seems like Oh, probably sold too early.
### Human: For instance, like one example that we saw a lot of over the last couple years is you had negative gross margin companies. So companies that were like, you know, the 15 minute delivery companies, they would literally bring a product to your door, and it would cost them more money they would make. And the argument that a lot of people were making was, Oh, at scale, this gets solved, at which point these become very profitable companies. But until then, we're going to lose a lot of money." And I always looked at that and I was like, there's so many more ways to invest in companies that are making money on day one. Yes. They make money on each product they sell. Why would I go play in that world where at the point that the macro turns, I'm dead? Now, some people made a lot of money doing that. Not my jam.### Assistant: before we get to the ad. It makes our team so happy to see our partners celebrate big wins. And I'm thrilled to hear about this huge funding round for our amazing partner. Oh, do really great stuff from Julian the team there, especially in this crazier venture market. So congratulations. And speaking of the market right now, being capital efficient is more important than ever. You know that if you're an entrepreneur, and one easy way for you to cut costs is to run all of your SaaS apps on one platform. So check out Odoo suite of business apps. Using Odoo means you don't have to have a bunch of different SaaS subscriptions, everything you need is already on Odoo right now. All you have to do is turn it on when you're ready. And They only charge you for the apps you use. Odoo has over 40 main apps and over 16,000 apps from their open source community. All of this will streamline your business. No more issues transferring data back and forth. And you'll have one customer support contact across all of your apps, not 20. And here's the best part. Your first app is free forever. And Odoo is offering you $1,000 in credit on your first implementation pack. So go to odoo.com slash twist for $1,000 off that's odoo.com slash twist. It's a risky bet to make because like greater fool theory in crypto or other places or Pokemon cards. It has to be somebody who values this asset that doesn't generate revenue. Yeah. Or profits more than you. And this is why all the companies where there's door dash, Uber, Lyft, etc, have said Airbnb. Okay, you know, we're gonna move to the profitability phase here. And you know, a lot of those folks joker getter go puff, great services really interesting. It turns out like if your bet was, you know what, it's, we lose money when we do one, when the when the person takes one bag of groceries out to delivery, we break even when they have to provide and when they do the third, you know, making Gary three bags when they take their e bike out to delivery, then we make money. It's like, well, how often is that third scenario going to happen? Yeah. And that's the efficiency that some people deluded themselves into. And then when you're talking about SaaS software, or some of the companies in your portfolio, you mentioned, they make money on the first transaction, right? They make money easily on the first transaction. Now, does that mean Uber or Lyft should get rid of Uber pool or Lyft line as a way to, you know, increase the number of drivers on the road and break even on that? Probably not like I think those things could exist to just keep the network effects going. And you can make money on x and, you know, food and on black, but black cars, but you really got to think this through and be thoughtful about it, I think. And so it's very important for angels to understand Zach's betting strategy. It's one I do with the syndicate.com. I don't like syndicating companies that are that do not have products in market and do not have revenue because I kind of train young angels. know, don't try to invest in pre product market fit companies or pre launch companies when you're starting out, because it's gonna be hard for you to identify what signal Do you use how charismatic the founder is like, it's pretty hard to guess, unless you've worked with the founder before, and they have a track record. Now that you can make a bet on that's easy. But that's easy, but the most of them don't. So, you know, unless you have a vehicle, like an accelerator, like I have a founder university now, what, why are you making that bet? Because you need to make that bet at what, like $2 million valuation, $3 million valuation, you can't make those pre product market bets at 10 million, can you?
### Human: So know what it's about for Tim, and he wants to give all that savings back to players. Anyway, he doesn't want that extra revenue. What this is about is having an open app ecosystem app store ecosystem and not just store, but like all of the infrastructure and services to run games to run experiences to run entertainment. that's what he wants. And that's what Apple has not been providing. Like, there's a reason why the most innovative, you know, besides Fortnite and PUBG, which runs on Unreal Engine, the most innovative games and experiences of the past, you know, 10 years, League of Legends, Dota 2, Overwatch, there's a reason these things aren't in the App Store. And it's this,### Assistant: Wow. So this this is amazing. I had an interesting idea. I want to run up the flagpole with you boys. See if anybody salutes Okay, we'll put a little toast in the toaster and see if it turns brown. I want to know this is a crazy power move. If epic bought or partnered with something like, remember HTC phones, everybody loved those, where there's like the one phone that some Apple, some Android nerds use. I was thinking about getting one. I just kind of like the Pixel. Let's say there's somebody with an ax to grind against Apple. Oh, I know who's got an ax to grind against Apple. Android phone makers have an ax to grind inherently. They're at war with them already. If they made a Fortnite, iPad competitor, and a fortnight phone. And it was, let's just say they partnered with HTC or Samsung. And if you use that phone, you would get a certain amount of other fortnight dollars, what do they call them in 40 bucks, V bucks, you buy this phone, you get 10 v bucks a day. What is the is the value? What do people spend on average? Do we know when people spend $1? It's a whale's business. It's a whale's business. Yeah. All right. So let's just meet let's just let's just set the table here. You buy the phone. You get 10 v bucks a day for by with the phone for the first 100 days you get 1000 v bucks. Now they partner with somebody for that, and the tablet, and they get that OEM, the original equipment manufacturer, to co-brand it as a Fortnite one, and it has one or two buttons that make playing the game even that much better. Would that not be the come-over-the-top moment for a $17 billion company like Epic that could crack the back of Apple? Answer that question when we get back after this break. Hey everybody, it's small business month at Dell, and this means you can save up to 50% off on all Dell products. Check out launch.co slash Dell, that's our domain name, launch, L-A-U-N-C-H dot C-O slash Dell. Dell and you're going to get an extra 5% off. It's almost over. It's going to end on August 30. So get that 50% off right now whether you want to get their new 15 inch Latitude 9510, the world's smallest, lightest and most intelligent 15 inch business PC or You could get one of the giant monitors that I use that make you 20-30% more effective at your job. Those are wonderful. That Dell Latitude 9510 includes the Dell Optimizer, which is a built-in AI that adjusts to the way you work, wherever you are. It's also their longest lasting PC ever. And this is crazy up to 34 hours of battery life Delphi entrepreneurs wants you to level up all of your hardware and your startup and they created this program specifically for founders by providing resources and tools that will help your startups grow and scale your technology they're also going to help you with financing they've got a great financing arm so you don't have to blow all your money buying hardware in month one of your startup nope you can spread that out over time and they give you free it consulting and rewards including up to six percent cash back once again it's small business month at dell and you're gonna get 50 off all dell products The offer ends August 30. So please hurry up. Check out launch.co slash Dell to get that extra 5% off all existing offers and to get more information about the Dell for entrepreneurs program. Thanks again Dell for making great world class products and for supporting founders who listen to this week in startups. All right, Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal are here. Follow Ben Gilbert, you got the G I l b e r t on the Twitter. And David is d. What do you DJ j r o s e n t. Are you dropping fat beats? David?
### Human: Well, I think different groups, I think gallery is a great example that was largely funded by industry, they've done massive trials, incredible data, I think, and I'm very bullish in general on this technology that like this is the future. And it's better than certainly what we're currently doing, which is much more reactive and less likely. I was just saying every patient like you instead of the anxiety may not be a concern, but you have to like very much think about what's the potential risk of the biopsy I might have to get to confirm something versus the risk of having cancer and just compare those risks, just that you know, every everything is everything has some risk associated. So one has to be really cognizant of what those trade offs are. But um, so I think the I think industry when they see an opportunity, you know, is going after this. I mean, pharma is extremely interested in non invasive tests. There's large companies, you like Illumina with Grail, who funded these major trials around gallery that I think are going to provide very good evidence around that test. And I think it's been yeah, largely, you know, many of these efforts, large scale efforts have been private, there have been some great federally funded efforts like TCGA, the Cancer Genome Atlas. So I think it's a whole slew of different problems. And, you know, many of them are being funded through industry or through the government. And it's not just one problem. One that actually sounds a lot like what you said is another privately funded the project baseline by Verily, which is very much I think, similar to what you're describing of just capturing lots of data from essentially healthy people and following them over time to be able to use machine learning over time. So I think there is a ton of activity in this area. It's and there's many different problems. And for some problems, it makes sense to put it all together. But for many, it sort of makes sense to try to solve that problem. I whether it's through industry or through government funded efforts.### Assistant: I gotta say, I know that I'm going to die. I'm convinced it's going to happen. So since I've already accepted that I'm going to die, if I could get even if even if they told me there's something here, we're not sure what it was, I would rather because I guess I'm not like prone to anxiety or like catastrophizing. I would rather go on the goose chase than not. I'm okay with a little goose chasing, you know. But I think you're thinking holistically about the entirety of the population. And like this impact it could have. Yeah. Yeah. I think I took gallery. G-A-L-L-E-R-I was a test I took. And prenova was the body scan I did. And then I don't know, did you see that Daniel Eck, the Spotify founder has invested in a scanning company that only costs 400 bucks or something, or he thinks he can get it to 400 bucks, which is pretty interesting in and of itself. All right, listen, you're listening to the next unicorns, right? That's table stakes. Well, if you want to start on the path to becoming a unicorn yourself, you're gonna need to find and hire great candidates. And how do you do that LinkedIn, of course, you're on LinkedIn, I'm on LinkedIn, over 900 million users. Now the march to a billion continues for the amazing team over at LinkedIn, then you can attract both the passive and the active job seekers. And all you have to do is put that purple hiring ring on your profile. that you post some interesting content when they see that purple hiring ring, it says, Whoa, wait a second. I know that founder, I know that CEO, I know that VC, well, they're hiring, let me click and check it out. And then all of a sudden, you start getting this great inbound, right? We love LinkedIn. I mean, I've gotten some of the most amazing people. In fact, I just got a new personal assistant because things are going so well. And I've got the new accelerator that we have coming in San Mateo. And I need somebody to help me run that and set it all up. And I said, You know what, I need to I need to have an executive assistant again. So we found somebody amazing on LinkedIn, of course. And so here's your call to action. LinkedIn jobs helps you find qualified candidates. You want to talk to fast post your job for free at linkedin.com slash unicorn. That's right. linkedin.com slash unicorn to post your first job for free terms and conditions apply, because LinkedIn is so generous. Maybe you could talk to me about what you think all of this data is going to do. And if there's anything with general AI that's starting to happen that inspires you, because pools of data are starting to emerge. I don't know if you have an Apple Watch on but I used Fitbit for 10 years, Apple Watch for five, I would happily give every bit and I have eight sleep for my bed, I would give every piece of data I have to the cloud, including every blood test I've ever taken. And I would love to be part of a national project to get all this data together. And I think there are some going on, but I don't think you need that many people either. I don't know what the statistical number would be 500 people 1000 people doing this in order for y'all to have incredible data. Why is there not some national project is why is it also piecemeal I guess is what I'm getting at. I talked to smart people like you, you have all the solutions you need only implement them. Why isn't there like a national effort, like we did with the Manhattan Project to just understand the human body in relation to the new tools that are available, ie AI, computer visualization technology, and make the proper data set for y'all to really have a go at this? Why is that not being done? Or is it?
### Human: I remember this because we traded emails or DMS or something. So you were literally engaging two months before we went on lockdown here in shipping PPE.### Assistant: Yeah, before there was ever a case in the United States, we were already shipping mass. I mean, it was kind of awkward because we shipped a whole bunch of mass from the United States to China. And then we found out we don't have any mass in the United States. So it's My bad. And then so things really started to heat up. And, you know, we went on lockdown at the same time. I mean, maybe a week or two before the city of San Francisco officially sort of locked down. Lockdown meaning start to work from home. But one of the things that we realized early on was actually there's a lot of masks in the world. China had ramped up production really fast, and there were tons of masks. U.S. hospital networks, we were hearing left and right, there's no masks. In fact, my neighbor is on the board of supervisors, which is like the city council in San Francisco. I saw her walking the dog, and I asked her, hey, how's the city doing? Do they need masks? what's going on with the fire department, the hospitals, etc. She's like, actually, you know what, we were short on mass, we're going to need them. Can I introduce you to the procurement group. And we the next day, we're able to deliver it. We had a partner in the United States and we were able to deliver 80,000 masks. to the city of San Francisco, London Breed, the mayor gave us a shout out, etc. So it was like, okay, that kind of turned us into a bit of a magnet. Once the mayor tweeted about us, once people started saying, hey, Flexport's capable of getting masks, everyone else who needed masks, which is kind of all the hospitals and cities in the United States started reaching out to us. At the same time, we had a huge network in China that produces masks of philanthropists, people like Joe Tsai, Alibaba, former CEO. We were working with him, a whole bunch of different groups to get masks. We suddenly saw this imbalance here. There are masks over there, but no one knows how to get them over here. I was like, well, we're pretty good at that. One of the things that we realized is that the U.S. hospital network doesn't do their own supply chain management. They're used to having goods delivered to them at their warehouse. They don't go out and source and manage shipping. All of a sudden, they needed to. They're not experts. They don't have the global logistics procurement expertise. We were able to onboard. We onboarded dozens of hospitals around the United States, actually around the world, and made it really easy because our shipping tools are easy to use, even for a non-shipping expert. They had actually done a good job sourcing stuff. One of these is UCSF. Mark Benioff had done an amazing job with Salesforce of finding the masks in China. We were able to help them with managing the logistics, understanding the compliance, getting good through customs, FDA registration. There's a whole lot of stuff that goes into that, even for a UCSF that hasn't dealt with that before. Where we really got creative, and I'm really proud of our company, is on the supply of air freight. Fifty percent of all the world's air freight flies in the belly of a passenger plane. And all of those, of course, were grounded because of the pandemic. Right. So we went out and so this caused the price to spike like crazy. All of a sudden, what's normally a $4 per kilo from Asia to the US went to $21 a kilo. Wow. All the masks are trying to, and another PPE are trying to force through a smaller pipe, right? We got very creative and we called up the airlines and said, hey, you got all these grounded passenger planes. I need them. And we leased 75 passenger flights build the belly of cargo, of mass, the seats, the overhead bins.
### Human: Yeah.### Assistant: I mean, prompt engineering, it's like actually working and I have everybody in my company using it. And I got 20 people in the investment company. I'd say I got five who are actually doing meaningful stuff. And two weeks ago or two months ago, it was zero. Two weeks ago, it was one or two. And I think I'll get 15 out of 20 by the end of this month, because I just keep telling them, like, if you don't use this technology, you're done. Not that I'm going to fire you. I just think you're done in your career. It's kind of like the people who, I don't know if you caught the tail end of this, but people who didn't know how to use Microsoft Office or Windows or a computer and email, and they were like, yeah, my secretary will print out my emails for me. And you're like, first, we don't use that word anymore. They're executive assistants. And two, like, Do you really want them printing out your emails and killing trees? Like it's crazy. stop using your personal phone for your startup in 2023. You have to stop doing this. It's such a common mistake that founders make open phone has totally rethought every detail of what a business phone should look like in 2023. And it's so affordable, you have no excuse. They make it super easy to get a business phone number for everybody on your team. It works through a beautiful web app on your phone or your desktop. And I can tell you it's amazing because our sales team and our ops teams use it daily recently found so much values in open phone for our angel summit communications. Open phone is the number one rated business phone on g2 for customer satisfaction. And twist listeners are going to love it. Brian Jagger. He's the co founder of startup called athlete. He tweeted the following I'm literally cash flow positive from listening to this week and startups for listener deals. And he explains that he previously got open phone money from this incredible discount that they give to this week and startup founders. And he says, I'm not paid to say that I don't know, Jason, pure, honest feedback and appreciation. And you know what, I love to hear this, because there's so many people who listen to this podcast, we're founders, and you need to use these tools. But hey, listen, you might be cash constrained, or you might want to put that cash into your product, open phone is already affordable. had a starting price of only $13 per user per month. But twist listeners can get 20% off any plan for your first six months that open phone.com slash twist and if you have existing numbers with another service, no problem open phone will port them over at no extra cost. So had to open phone.com slash twist to start your free trial and get 20% off. You understand marketing really well. I had a really interesting conversation about this Bud Light situation. And I thought I'd bring it up here, not because any of us don't think trans people shouldn't be have incredible protection rights. Obviously, we all think that. But there is something bigger going on here. With regard to consumers feeling empowered, you know, maybe marketers not understanding who their actual consumers are, or people politicizing everything. And I thought you had some very good points on it. And I think I gave you the free pass here. You believe everybody has a right to love whoever they want and to be whatever gender they want and can use whatever pronouns they want. Obviously, we all think that. I don't know if we all think that, but I think anybody listening to this podcast thinks that. There might be some people who are stuck in some religious funk or something and they are basing their lives on a book that's 2,000 years old and favors stoning and beheadings. Putting all that aside, what's your take on the consumer activism and what we saw there in terms of engaging influencers, et cetera?