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Remyx AI 8

### Human: I guess. But you know what, that's where you like to spend, like that's worth it. And for me, I just don't, I seem to not get the same rush. And look, like, I know it's virtue signaling. I show status in other ways, you know? Like the car is just not the way in which I show status. Do you know this is an SM 58. This is what Bono used in 85. Oh, wow. Fantastic.### Assistant: So you also do the same thing with microphones. Well, here's the thing. I agree with you. And I the thing that has hit me is I'm trying to make things last longer. For two reasons. One, the environment and to the overhead of the unboxing overhead is a new thing for me. uh the amount of time it takes to swap out your phone to swap out your car all of that is time i want to spend with my children my spouse on my writing on you know skiing and so i'm like you know what I don't want to upgrade my boots. I bought my downer boots. I love my boots. These are the downer boots. They're going to bury me in these boots last 30 years. My, my Crockett, you know, my I have a special specific type of James Bond shoe I like to wear. They're now 10 years old. They came out when Spectre came out. No, when I'm Skyfall came out, I have the same shoes you weren't Skyfall, Crockett and Jones and these things are incredible. Yeah, And so I now I'm buying pans. So nutty I am as a consumer. I am buying the pans knowing which ones last the longest. That's my goal. I want the pan that I don't have to replace. So I'm buying skillets or La Crusade, you know that thing? You know, and I'm just that's, that's what I'm focused on. That's it. That's it. Crockett and Jones. These are the shoes I wear. Let me see if my producers can do this. Crocodile Jones, James Bond shoes. uh they're incredible jason this must be hard for you in real life when you when you want to just like um say words and have have someone like pull something else you're like oh my god my my super power doesn't work with me no i have a producer with me at all times with a laptop so when i'm like just out at the club or whatever i'm like you know like the crockett and jones shoes and then the producer comes up and just brings the laptop over look those aren't the ones but those are another crockett and jones shoes but those are timeless yes um the ones i have are the uh Yeah, there was uh, one of the james bond shoes or well, no, no, this is them I'll tell you there are i'm trying to have them mind read me because actually he's worn five different pairs of these So this is one pair of the crockett and jones 007s Uh, but that's not the ones I have but there are other ones that are you scroll down, you'll see 007 and the soul does not it does not but there's a whole group of them. This is the like oldest shoe manufacturer, I believe in the UK and man these things they may cost like 800 bucks. The ones I bought were like 800 bucks, but I literally have had them for 10 years and I send them I send them back. to this company to refab them, like once every seven years, and they're perfect. And it's just it's really just because I don't want to have to think about what are the greatest dress shoes that you can own the trash is I can wear them with jeans, Ben, I can wear them with the tux and anything in between. And they look dynamic. That's great. Interesting. All right, listen, I think it's enough show for today. Maybe any other plugs or things that are on your mind these days that you want to share?

### Human: this would if it did compete at all, because there's many players, so I'm not sure that you're exactly competing. But the typical program would be a player plays in high school, they don't get paid, they don't get all this elite training and mentorship, and prehab, etc. They might get some of that would certainly be a variable. And then they go to college, they also don't get paid in college. And so when someone like Zion or RJ Barrett, or whatever decides to go for a year, or sometimes two, I guess, in some cases, they're basically taking a year to showcase themselves, maybe get a little bit better, get some brand recognition, get some reps in, but then they don't get paid. And they have a huge risk that if they were to blow out their ACL, they could have no career.### Assistant: It is a crazy concept and it is an ambitious concept. It starts this September. We already have five or six players signed up. We have how many teams will it be? So we will have three to four teams that will play each other internally. And then we will also play other schools and we will go to Europe and play. So we'll have kind of internal competition and we'll have external competition. And then over time, we'll continue to grow. And all of those players have a unique opportunity because on the kind of input side, they all get a six figure salary. They all get health insurance. They get kind of downside injury protection insurance. they get our coaches kevin ollie one and one of four black coaches to win ncaa tournament title at uconn with a massive coaching attribute they get a full education they graduate from high school we have like an incredible education platform out there my background is i spent the first ten years of my career working as a public school teacher and in nonprofit education as one of the founders of the Teach for America program. I bring a lot of experience to that. Ultimately, the other thing is that one of the things that was interesting to me as we started to talk to players around the country was this idea of sports science and prehab. There's this thing in the basketball world, LeBron James spends a million dollars a year on his body. And that's why he can be 36. Yeah, that's why he can be LeBron James at 36. It's incredible. Yeah, exactly. And the fact is that What I think what we found was that there was this tremendous desire for elite nutrition, elite training, sports science, what they call prehab, which I learned about, but that it's not equitably distributed, like a lot of things in this country. And if you happen to grow up in a certain neighborhood, or you don't have enough money, you don't get access to that. And if you're rich, and you go to a certain school, you do have access. So the idea to take some of the best athletes who don't have access to that and bring them here is huge. And I'll tell you like a silly anecdotal story about this is we went to scout this player and he was, you know, 17. He's an excellent player. We're thinking about signing him for the league. And his finger got dislocated while he was going for the ball. And he came over to his coach and his coach said, well, the doctor doesn't come for three more days. So let's just tape it up and we'll wait till he comes and then we'll fix it. And our scout literally said to me, he's like, I almost went over there and just put it back in myself for him. And the idea that these folks are coming to play professionally for our entertainment and for their careers without that level of support is huge. And then I think the final thing is we all know the story about the athletes who go pro and they lose their money or they mismanage their money and they don't have that. And so we have an extremely robust financial literacy program focus on mental health. And so you have these incredible inputs, where these young people are getting essentially the Juilliard of basketball, they're getting paid. And you have this output in which our audience gets to watch all kind of their version of superstars. And playing we're building our own arena. It's located in Atlanta. Live in Atlanta, they'll train there, we'll have our own 2000 seat venue that will be finished in September. And then we're off to the races.

### Human: I think, I mean, and the book on this is still being written, right? It is an extremely challenging time for all leaders. I mean, for absolutely everyone, but leaders especially, because I think the bottom dropped out on a lot of the tools we've had. a lot of situations that just arise when people disagree with each other, got resolved by everyone getting in a room and starting from the top and saying, Hey, all of us agree that planet Earth is a pretty good place to live. And then you just sort of take it from the big picture and then you walk down the list and say, Okay, And here we arrive, you think we should do the package management of our application this way, and you think we should, you know, like, after this, everyone's like, you can do this in one room, but like doing a zoom call feels weird. And so I think this is the interesting thing. I think we just, like, at least I can't speak for myself, but I've heard this from other people, so maybe it's general. the culture hasn't built correctly around video chat before. And people who study the history of other communication devices, like the telephone, actually point out that this is a very ordinary thing. People used to calling someone ended up... I mean, saying things like, this is political residence or something like this. And there was an entire formality. So I think the interesting thing is, eventually people realized, you know what, let's telephone. Kind of a way we just talk to each other. And I think a lot of people realized, hey, there's no other way to go. So let's just do video chats. Kind of a way we used to do things together. And all these assumptions about what works and what doesn't. I mean, maybe we had to adjust a bit in certain certain things.### Assistant: But it kind of worked. It kind of worked. You know what I did? I just put my foot down with people. And I said, you have to have an ethernet connection on your computer. You have to have a proper microphone, because I'm a podcaster. So I know what a proper microphone is, you have to have a proper microphone, you got to get that goddamn ethernet cable, no Wi Fi, because it's garbage. You need to have a proper processor. So you need to have a computer from the last 12 months. 24 minimum, and you get a digital SLR and a proper light ring. And you and I have these perfect setups. And then of course, zoom and other platforms have really revved on the software to make it really tight. And now here we are. And then people also know how to use their mute key when they're not talking. And they know the quick key all day, you know, toggle your sound on and off if you're not talking and how and how to like run an agenda. But I had to learn how to manage people. I just told everybody, listen, I I don't want to manage anybody anymore. I don't actually get enjoyment out of out of it. If everybody could just put here's an idea. And I basically gave her an idea just at the start of the day, put in slack what you're working on one bullet or three, I don't care what it is. And at the end of the day, when you're done, reply to that same one with what you got done. And if you need help with that, that's not I call it the SOD and the EOD start of day, end of day, and then I say on Friday, and it should take no more than five minutes. That's the key. And then on Fridays, just give me your EOW and share it with the entire group transparently. And don't put in silly stuff like did email or had lunch. Just put the major points that impact the business. And it's not a contest for whose is the longest. It's a contest of, you know, if anything, how productive you want to be in the company, what kind of contribution you make, but then also tell us it's a contest to see who can inform everybody and how in sync we can be with the least amount of meetings. Right. So it's almost like a video game of how can we just do less, but be more informed, right. And it's worked some people it doesn't work. You know, what I found too is some people weren't actually doing a lot. And And then there was this like pervasive fear like oh my god i'm a great culture person in the office like i'm you know very affable and people like me and you know i'm great by the water cooler having a cup of coffee but am i actually plowing through stuff to get us to a goal no. And so it kind of actually made people aware of who in the organization was actually carrying the bricks, and who was building the wall. And then other people were kind of sitting on the side, like getting coffee for everybody, which could be a value pursuit, don't get me wrong. But I did find this has become a great it makes things more, I don't know if you find this, but it kind of levels the playing field for a lot of the, the newer employees, because everybody's the same, like you and I have the same zoom window as CEOs as the same size as everybody else. It's not like it's proportional, as opposed to an in person meeting.

### Human: Well, what we have right now is 170,000 plus people who've signed up for hey.com now. Got it. And if 10% were to convert, just 10%, that'd be 17,000. Am I correct?### Assistant: Okay. I wish they would do that. Why don't they allow you to pay a hundred bucks or 500 bucks, something de minimis, to get your app reviewed, this waiting and waiting It's ridiculous, and I think they do that specifically to have power over you. And this is the Google technique as well, which is if we make this process opaque, the more opaque we make it, the less you can complain on CNBC like David was doing, because they're just like, oh no, it's in process. When we get back from this quick break, I want to tell you my favorite feature, which I think is absolutely a game changer and everybody will copy. And I want to tell you my solution to the Apple App Store problem and get your feedback on it when we come back on this week. It starts with Jason Fried. He is finally on the program. I love modern furniture. I am a modern furniture snob. And what I love most about modern furniture is it looks so clean and gorgeous. And I found a brand that I am obsessed with. It's called Modloft. M-O-D-L-O-F-T. Now some of you are saying, I know Modloft. Of course I know Modloft. Well, I found out about it maybe two years ago because I moved from a house that was like kind of an old Mediterranean style to a modern house and I needed modern furniture. And I kept doing Google searches, and I was on Pinterest, and all roads led back to Modloft. And I bought all this Modloft stuff. And I had some other, you know, expensive, like, from Italy, fancy, modern stuff. And people like the Modloft stuff better, and it's more affordable. Modloft is now sponsoring this week in startups and giving you 15% off and free shipping if you go to mod, M-O-D, loft, L-O-F-T, modloft.com slash twist. You can finish your entire home. Bedroom, living room, dining room, outdoor. Outdoor is really good. And of course, they have office stuff too. And it's risk-free at-home trials. You can just order it, try it out. If you don't like it, they take it back. Delivery in days, not months. And that's super important to me because a lot of this furniture I found out is bespoke and it takes six months. I'm team in stock. If it's not in stock, I'm done. It's got to be in stock. And you know what, Modloff, everything's always in stock. And these are spectacular pieces that have won international design awards. And they'll even do some free interior design consulting to fit your style. The customer service is second to none. I've gotten them on the phone. I've gotten them on email. Super responsive. They know what they're doing. Modloff.com slash twist for 15% off. I love this stuff. Go ahead and check it out. I know you will too. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. All right, Jason Fried is here. If you haven't gotten your hey.com domain in an email yet, go get it. I'm Jason Calacanis at hey.com. You can go get yours. But you only get it for free for 30 days. After that, it's nice. 14. 14 days. Oh, it's down to 14. It's always been 14. Always been 14. Then you pay 99. You had hundreds of thousands of people signed up on the wait list, correct?

### Human: Yeah, so we started in 2009 and what you spoke at was our finale event when we gave out the awards at the end of our Boston program.### Assistant: Okay. And when we get back from this quick break, I want to understand how does a million dollars in prize money get split amongst the hundred companies when we get back on This Week in Startup? want to take a moment and tell you about the importance of insurance for your startup. And I am an expert at this because I've been doing it for 30 years. I had a magazine, I had a search engine, I had a blogging company, I have been sent legal letters every year. Anybody who's successful in business is going to need insurance because they're going to have things come up. Let me just go through the top four types of insurance with your cyber insurance. Imagine you get hacked, your entire customer role, maybe their credit cards if you didn't hash them properly, maybe it's an inside job and really important stuff gets leaked, you need to have cyber insurance to cover you. There's DNO insurance, that's directors and officers, that's like your top employees, officers. And if you do something stupid, you're going to get sued and you want to make sure that your officers, the top employees of the company, And your directors, people who are on the board, have insurance and they're covered. In fact, people, you can't get great directors and you can't get great officers for your company if you don't have this. E&O insurance stands for errors and omissions. Really important to have, especially in editorial and other services. And any big customer you have using your product is going to want you to have E&O if you're going to close a deal with them. And then finally, this EPL employment practices liability that covers harassment and wrongful termination. And you see these things come up all the time. And listen, you might be the greatest boss in the world. But if somebody else feels like they've been wrong, they're going to sue you. And there's plenty of attorneys out there who want to sue you, especially if you're a venture backed company. And you might have somebody in your organization, it may not be you, it might be somebody else in your organization does something really stupid and harasses somebody and then you're on the hook for it. So you want to get that EPL, you want to get that ENO, you want to get the DNO and you want to get that cyber insurance. And in brokers technology, it's going to get it for you and it's going to save you time and money. Prices are up to 20% lower and you're going to get better coverage. You go sign up and get a quote and you purchase within just, wait for it, 10 minutes. So what's your excuse now? here's the thing you don't have to call a traditional broker insurance company and deal with large low incumbents and sign up taking days if not weeks and a process that's just simply not transparent with opaque pricing they make it quick they make it easy and they make it better to instantly buy custom built insurance for startups go to in broker.com slash twist in broker.com slash twist that's em broker br ok er.com slash twist and get an extra 10% off by using the offer code angel 10 All right, Siobhan Delay is with us. She is the CEO of the MassChallenge. If you heard about that and are a little confused and think it's an event, it was an event. At some point I spoke at it, I remember, when I was in Boston at some point. Maybe it was even further than that. It felt like it was earlier than 2016. Did it exist as a conference before that?

### Human: And I'm going to be gone. Like my question, actually, fundamentally, is not about attorney leave at all. It's like if you think you're it I guess the question is sort of like, how do you react when you think you are about to be purchased? And that you yourself CEO are gone? Do you make a bunch of changes? Or do you just like shut everything down and freeze it? I mean, they froze product releases. Like I just think it's really interesting to know, like booting your leadership.### Assistant: Okay. All right. I think number one, as I as I told him, and you know, I, I think there it has been very, it is a very hard position to have. You're not the CEO, you're responsible for the product. You got a board that is sending mixed signals, you know, you should be growing, you should be cleaning up the box, you should not be cleaning up the box. you know, there's, this is like, you're getting pulled in all directions. This is like, you're the chef at a restaurant. And there's four owners, and one of them wants it to be like, you know, high turnover, fast casual, and the other one wants it to be fine dining. And you're just like, I can do what you want. Just give me a direction here, you know? And then somebody's coming in the back and saying, Yeah, but I want it to be vegan. So you get pulled in all different directions. He does not have an easy job. I will say their shipping of spaces was done very fast in response to competitors and Twitter blue, they got it out there. It wasn't it didn't hit the right notes. It didn't provide enough value. But I think he knows the value it needs to provide. And there were just too many cooks in the kitchen. Twitter blue was the perfect example of like, somebody had a big vision. And they're like, yeah, you can't do those three things, because those are sacred cows. But what else you got? And they're like, well, here's like the next six ideas. Like, yeah, throw those six ideas out. And it's like, you really need to do the number one idea. Yeah. And the number two idea. And so now you're just you took the stars of the show out, and it's just not going to work. So a really hard job now to the point of like, while on paternity, okay, if your paternity happened to be during the moment in time when a company is being sold, and there's an epic downturn in the market, there's a caveat here, you know, it's just bad timing. It's that's not the CEO's fault. It's not the product manager is nobody's fault. So it's a great one for the press to like, you know, put in there as a dunk or for, you know, people to virtue signal, how could you do that? Well, if he's gonna be out, what if he's on paternity for six months, this company is, there's stuff going on. Yeah, I mean, we're in the thick of it here. And in fact, I mean, I don't listen, let me tell you something. Also, if you're on paternity in the middle of this, I'm a dad. I think I would be like, you know what, I need to be back a couple days a week at least to figure out what's going on. That would be my decision. I wouldn't blow out on paternity for three months in the middle of this. I would talk to my spouse or partner if I had one and said, I think I need to be in the office two days a week while this is going on. And maybe he was who knows. But this whole paternity thing, let's just put all that aside. And what's the reality here? they need to make a lot of quick decisions here. And maybe we'll consolidate who's in charge. Maybe the CEO wants, maybe Prague wants to make these decisions.

### Human: That is incredible. Again, today on today's news segment, January 13th, Jason was mentioning how ineffective remote education has been, especially in the school system for people looking for higher education. I personally loved online learning. I didn't necessarily do it because of the pandemic. I actually started before the pandemic. I was at Penn State and then I took a lot of classes at University of Maryland Global Campus, I believe it's called. And they were phenomenal. They were six weeks long and because they were shorter duration, I felt like I could learn so much more. And then a following semester at Penn State when we went remote, our professors that have never taught a remote class before that taught in the semester setting, I found it so difficult to pay attention because it was no longer in that six week almost like crunched up segment. So that is really awesome. I've definitely had issues with that before. It's another reason why I love Coursera rather than taking a class in college because I find that learning off of something that is like incredibly engaging is so helpful and you don't get credit for Coursera. classes, you know what I mean? So that'd be awesome if teachers, especially ones in the traditional school community could start creating content that isn't so dry, for lack of a better term, I guess. And you were building this in public, which must be a little bit scary as a founder Do you think it's necessary now with how much we are putting on the internet to build in public or do you think that it's okay to build something and then once it's completely done and once it's announced, only show the final product on places like TikTok and Twitter and then jump off from there? Is the jumping off point, I guess, way earlier than it has been in the past?### Assistant: Yeah, I think I think there are pros and cons to both. And I'll say like, I'm still figuring it out. So I don't want to present as if I have all the answers. But what I can say is from startups that I've been exposed to that do this really well. One comes to mind a company called levels health, which is started by one of I'm very familiar with the team, I've worked with them in the past, they're an A-list team, and they are extremely transparent. They share their own documents, they share investor updates, they share every Friday, and a forum meeting they do at the end of the week on YouTube. And when I got exposed to kind of that style of company building, it no question was very foreign, right? It was very almost a little intimidating. Because the number one fear I used to have when kind of working on project is, is someone going to steal my idea? Right? And it's probably a fear that's been propelled by the social network film. or that's a very prime example of someone really stealing an idea. But what I kind of learned when I got more exposed to Levels and quite a few, you know, MicroQuires and other ones, just other companies that are building in public on Twitter or via, you know, Notion docs or videos, you know, the idea that if all it takes to kill your company is someone replicating the idea, then, you know, you're probably not doing it right, right? You're probably not differentiated enough. And so from my perspective, there's certainly a line of what you can share and what you can't. And like, I'm still figuring out what that line is. And I'm sure, you know, occasionally I may share too much, I'm sure occasionally I may hold back too much. But the idea of building in public has been, you know, something that I've wanted to do for a while. And when I started this company, and you know, as per the deal, being able to create my own TikTok account, that that is kind of more of a personal brand. that isn't related to kind of the latest current events as it pertains to startups and is much more focused on on the journey of building i think the positives far away that the negatives and i've already had tons of course creators and people interested in using our product reach out and sign up for a waitlist i met my co-founder through tiktok Some early hires are through TikTok. I've had people reach out. I've had investors reach out through TikTok. There's something really wonderful about having a group of people who are interested in what you're doing follow along the journey. And I say this being very interested and fully understanding that there have been people who have been building in public way before it was something that was way before building in public was a thing. Alex Bloomberg, when he was building Gimlet Media and the Startup Podcast, which I refer to a lot, but it had a huge impact, on me personally, like that was a great example of building in public. Casey Neistat with Beam was kind of like the ultimate example of building in public. So there are a bunch of different kind of examples of building in public in the form of on Twitter and via podcast and, you know, and even on TikTok too. Like I'm certainly not the only one there. There are a lot of people who are kind of creating really engaging videos and it's benefiting their startups too. And I think that's great. And I'm kind of like very excited to be part of that community.

### Human: Is that a way of saying that the privileged kids can afford to be sad and you know that maybe the kids who have less privilege are experiencing a little more hardship, perhaps a lot more hardship and getting more resilient?### Assistant: I would say two things. First off, I think that what's happening is ironic, because it is the parents attempt to prevent their children from feeling anxious in the short term, that is hurting their ability to deal with stressors in the long term. That is the irony of the bubble wrapping strategy, right? By accommodating now you hurt their ability to accommodate for themselves to protect themselves in the future, they don't grow the resilience, the skin thickness that they need, because you're taking care of absolutely everything for them and designing a world in which they never have to feel deeply the anxiety, the distress that they feel, right? Like, we don't need to go all the way back to like Marcus Aurelius stoicism, but like a part of stoicism to which I subscribe, like, you know, to a bit of I think there's there's wisdom there. A part of this logic into a certain extent, the logic of Buddhism as well, is that life is suffering, life is pain, And you have to just stare that fact nakedly in the face. Life has suffering and it is pain and it is our responsibility to determine our emotional reaction to the inevitable pain and suffering that is life. And if you're going to raise your children in a way that sort of protects them from having to feel those negative stressors, then they won't be prepared in the kind of, you know, stoic or Buddhist way that Marcus Aurelius or Buddha would have told you to. That's, I guess, point number one. Point number two, and I didn't want to sort of lean on this too hard, because to a certain extent, this is a bit of a classed argument. I'm describing what is a global phenomenon among American teens, not just among upper middle class teens. But the following is, I think, more of a classed argument. Valerie Ramey is an economist who wrote this very famous paper on the rug rat race. And this was a paper looking at time use surveys of upper middle class parents. And it showed that upper middle class parents, especially college graduate parents, started in the 1980s to spend much more time with their kids when they were teenagers, that time spent with kids started to go up and up and up and up the 1980s, 90s, 2000s. Valerie Ramey's thesis is that this is about parents becoming much more obsessed with getting their kids into college, and that the college achievement rat race might be another layer of this stress cake that we're trying to disentangle, right? That in addition to being sort of closeted and bubble wrap from everyday stressors, like, I don't like dogs, I don't like broccoli, I don't like Brussels sprouts, you also have this enormous pressure on your back to get into Williams. And if you don't get into the school that has an acceptance rate of like 5.1%, then you're a failure. And that combination of I never have to feel this kind of I'm protected from these anxieties, my everyday life, but also I'm given this unbelievably difficult achievement expectation for my parents and for my world, I think the combination of that is unbelievably stressful to a lot of upper middle class kids. And it should be said that while income is not asked about in the CDC survey, ethnicity is unfortunately in this country a relatively close proximity for income. And the fastest growing anxiety rates, the fastest growing sadness rates in the country were among white kids, more than Hispanics, more than black kids, more than any other demographic, sadness and hopelessness is rising fastest for white kids.

### Human: What does participation mean?### Assistant: Okay, Ashley, Ashley. Thank you, Ashley, managing director here. Lawyers typically handle this. If I get anything wrong, forgive me, but you can look up liquidation preferences. The liquidation preference, when I was an entrepreneur, I couldn't understand. I had lawyers explain it to me two or three times and it was like, do I understand this? There's a lot of fancy terms in here. I'm going to explain it to you just based on why this exists. Because once you understand the why, it becomes easy. There is a concept called a liquidation preference. A liquidation preference, it represents an investor's right to get money back before the proceeds of a sale are distributed. Let's just do this through an example. The example I'll use here is a company called Uber in its first valuation, which was $5 million. Let's say people put a $500,000 investment, let's say it was one investor, just for simplicity sake, and that investor owned 10% of the company, $5 million. Put in 500, the valuation is 5 million, and they have a 10% ownership. Just keep it very easy peasy model. The 500,000 bought 10% of the company. If it was straight equity, they just earned 10% of the shares, and the company got sold, and let's say the exit value was $2.5 million, well, 10% of 2.5 is 250. If it got sold for 5 million, well, then you get your 500,000 back. If you sold for 10 million, wow, you doubled your money. You sold for 50 million, you 10x your money, your 500,000 turned into 5 million. Then, of course, if you hit some huge $100 million valuation, you get $10 million back, you did 20 times your original investment. 10% of $100 million pretty simply is $10 million. Now, when you look at this, in the first scenario, a $2.5 million sale, the investor lost half their money. They only got back $0.50 on the dollar. They got $2.50. investors don't like that idea. So investors came up with a provision called the liquidation preference, so that in that scenario, they get a minimum of their money back. And then in the second scenario, they to got the minimum of their money back, but because it was 10%. And that would be considered one x, one x times your money is the second scenario we're seeing here, I put in 500, one times 500,000 equals 500,000. Welcome back to multiplication tables in second or third grade. If I got back a million dollars, well, that's two times. A 1x liquidation preference means you got your money back, but VCs, of course, want to get a return. They came up with this liquidation preference, which means they get their one times money back first off the top. They sweep that money, they get their original investment back. That's a 1x liquidation preference. Then they get their 10%. So now let's look at this based on a liquidation preference. And this is called non-participating. There's non-participating and there's participating. I'll just do this by example. So here we go. We're now on the section in this chart. We'll put a link to this Excel. Here's the return based on a non-participation liquidation preference.

### Human: How hard is it to do this? I mean, it sort of feels like there's a regulatory boost. But I wonder from a technology perspective, a lot of companies are rushing into this space, right? Some version of data analytics or measurement? What is the differentiator for you?### Assistant: So that that's a bit of a problem, right? So there's a lot of noise in our ESG and impact data industry. And there's a couple of areas where, you know, certain data providers or data analytics company are different from others. So first you have to look at what is the underlying investment. Is it a public equity, so a company that's listed on the public exchange? Because in those cases the data sources are very different. They actually issue reports every quarter. They have to do their quarterly filing, their quarterly reporting. Those get picked up by Reuters and Bloomberg and then you have hundreds. of ESG analytics company who go, oh, here's nice processed meat, right, that I can stuff into my sausage and then it becomes like, you know, this ESG scoring rating. But unfortunately, the meaning of those ESG ratings is highly debatable because the raw material, the underlying source of the meat isn't known. It wasn't sort of, you know, well indicated. So, that's a problem there, but we don't play in that space. So, we don't play in the public equity space. Someone has to solve for that. Yeah. No, no pre-made sausages. No pre-made sausage. Love it. Yeah. So, then on the other side, which is this private markets, which is what I said, that was the problem that we intended to solve for. In an environment where companies do not have to disclose how do we get the data, the difference between us and everybody else is, and that is the hard work, is that we are literally connecting into the operating systems, IOT devices, digital surveys. So, we are And I don't like using this word, but we are in that sense the plumber, right? We are literally creating those pipelines. And that very few people have done, right? Because it's hard work, right? And why would you do it? Well, we do it because we also have the impact measurement expertise, which is another big, big skill set, right? having data come in, but knowing what that data could mean are two very different things. So over the last, I mean, for me, this started in 2007, right? Some of our team members were like the first guys who built like the impact bonds for Freddie Mac, right? So maybe that was seven, eight years ago. So we have this inner blood, we have this inner team, and we have a very dedicated impact data strategy team that is experts in that. And if you ask any of the carbon tech solutions who come to us to partner, they're like, listen, carbon accounting is hard, but what you guys do is far harder, right? And no one is doing that. So can we partner with you? Because Proof of Impact doesn't do carbon accounting. We need someone to really dive into the weeds and figure out, you know, what are the accounting. But those carbon accounting firms, they are getting requests from their clients. Okay, carbon is one thing, but what about all my other areas that I'm trying to prove that I'm contributing on? So it's the understanding of what drives impact, how do you value impact, what's important impact. And then the third aspect is the technology side. So again, our team is heavily biased towards decentralized technologies and distributed ledger technology. And again, in those three in a row, so doing the hard work, having the impact intelligence, and then having the huge competency and desire to move to that decentralized finance and decentralized technology world, that's really unique and proof of impact.

### Human: I like it, but I think there's one massive difference here. And again, this topic's come up a few times, which is there is an element of having access to unique data when it comes to building something in and around AI, that's very important. And that was one thing that you didn't have to think about if you're building an app. And so there's like the feature angle, but you could build something that wasn't quite the flashlight or something like that. But this whole notion that you have to have access to unique data, that's a new layer in the thinking around, you know, how you can differentiate yourself. Because what I refer to what I refer to open AI as is the apex aggregator. So if it's anything that can be aggregated, it will be like, you know, the top of the food chain, right? The the T rex, the, you know, great white, whatever you want to call it, right. And so I think Google index, the world's information, Sure. But in, but what Google always promised to and continues to still do, and you know, this really well, but you know, you were impacted by this in Mahalo, right, which was, yeah, they promise at least drive traffic to you. When open AI becomes the apex aggregator, they necessarily can, they don't necessarily have to drive traffic to you, they can connect to your API, And they can, you know, get whatever data they need or perform whatever action they need, without ever having sent someone to your service. And so unless you have something that's really defensible, you're going to be at risk when that I didn't see that in mobile. And, you know, and that that kind of defensibility is much harder to achieve than it was in mobile.### Assistant: Listen everybody, when it comes to the blocking and tackling of running your startup, you don't need to reinvent the wheel. CDNs, aka content delivery networks, are the place where startups can really overcomplicate things. You don't need custom authentications or custom codes. Nope. If you're a startup, you need to just check out CashFly. It's a pure play CDN. And CDNs are literally all they do. So they're the best in the world at it. They've been doing it for over two decades. That's 20 years. CashFly makes CDN simple, effective, and secure. Let me say that one more time. Simple, secure, effective. Effective, secure, simple. Simple, effective, secure. You eventually are going to outgrow the smaller ones that are trying to give you too many discounts. You want the best of breed. So don't burn your startup credits using a CDN and one of those larger players. Let CashFly handle it all for you. They will help you deliver your content faster than your competitors. You have to be fast if you want to compete, whether it's videos, your mobile app, games, content, SaaS. The faster you go with your delivery, the more people use your products. So go check out CashFly. And Twist listeners are going to get 10 terabytes free forever when you sign up at twist.cashfly.com. That's twist.c-a-c-h-e-f-l-y.com. 10 terabytes are waiting for you for free. Stop what you're doing, pause the podcast, go to twist.cashflow.com and get your 10 terabytes for free forever. yesterday, I brought our accelerator and Foundry University back to in person. I went to the city of San Francisco, and I was in the Phi Di. And I had our accelerator class at Fenwick and West over in the Phi Di. And then I had the Foundry University over at Wilson Sassini's office and 100 people showed up for that. And then seven people in the accelerator. And the big topic of discussion was I built this using chat GPT, or some other language model. And now 4.0 kind of includes it. And then are they going to just our users going to be able to just go use chat GPT for instead of using mine. And we had a really thoughtful discussion. And I said, you know, this is exactly Sonny, the moment that happened in app development, and you had a very famous app development company in Canada, with hundreds of developers. If you built something that was of low value, and easy to replicate, like a flashlight app, like a calculator app, those things were 99 cents, people bought them, there were, you know, there was a lighter app. I mean, people had all kinds of silly apps that they built, and they were able to make, you know, $100,000 or $250,000. But shortly thereafter, you had to make something thoughtful. if you want to end something subscription that people could kind of work on. And so I told folks, it was one that was making a virtual travel agent. And I said, you know, there's things that chat GPT for can do. But there's this entire feature set that they're never going to get to, and customizations that you can do here. And I don't want to say them out loud here and give people a roadmap. But is that not a good analogy? Or is it a flawed analogy, Sonny, the one I gave about apps in the App Store,

### Human: Yeah. Amazing. Kind of shocked, as you describe it, that no one else thought of this. But your experience here, I think is probably what makes this so successful, right? Previously, you were with David Uriman, one of the original team members on the men's line, where you'd already developed new products, is my understanding, right, and product collections that featured materials that weren't necessarily endemic to the jewelry industry?### Assistant: Precisely. I cut my teeth in jewelry at David Uriman, a wonderful company, got to work on some really, really exciting projects. It's where I met my current co-founder and several members of our team that we've now brought on. I was the materials guy. I was the mechanical engineer. I got to, you know, say, hey, if we're going to make carbon fiber jewelry, I actually have experience working with composite materials. I can be the guy who goes to the factory and is talking to the people who are doing the wet layup and understands, you know, at a very fundamental level, how that works. That was really crucial for what we did. We did some stuff with meteorite, really, really interesting material to give me a meteorite. It's a metal that comes from an asteroid. It landed in Africa a millennia ago, and If you cut it and etch the surface with acid, it reveals this Wyman statin pattern. It looks like a circuit board almost, but it's naturally occurring, really beautiful material. How do you make a luxury product out of that if it's chock full of nickel and iron and if you leave it out on your counter for a couple of days, it's going to rust. You'll get a little surface flash rust that happens. Can we come up with surface coatings? Can we deal with this through using sacrificial metals and just the basic galvanic principle to protect that surface from looking like something beautiful one day and looking like something, you know, horrible the next. And that's just an engineering challenge. That's chemistry. So I got to I got to do some really cool stuff there and ended up leaving jewelry. I started a hardware company, did that for five and a half years. And that was my first real foray into into the world of startups and entrepreneurship. We sold that business in 2018. And this was an idea that came out of a you know, offhand conversation with my now co-founder. I had just finished reading a book called Drawdown. And at the tail end of the book, it talks about, you know, technologies that are coming. And I'd read about this new facility in Switzerland that was being built. Ended up talking to Dan, my co-founder, about two or three hours later. And I said, by the way, have you heard of direct air capture? You know, we have a way of chemically removing CO2 from the air. Can you imagine if we could turn that carbon into diamonds? And that was literally the extent of the conversation. Was that literally it? That was it. A week later, maybe five days later, he calls me up. He says, Ryan, I can't stop thinking about diamonds from air. I said, yeah, neither can I. And I held up a piece of paper that had all of my notes. I'd done like 20 hours of research. I'm like, I think I know how we can do this. And what we're doing today is not exactly what we cooked up in that first week, but it's remarkably close 80% 90% of the way there, we had to add in a couple steps in between just to, you know, to get certain elements, certain processes along the way a little bit more efficient and get rid of some toxins that we weren't aware of early on. But generally, you know, what we're building, what we've built and what we're scaling right now is what we conceived, you know, over the span of a week in 2018.

### Human: Don't worry, producers are like their jobs are safe because I hear it's not like up to date with data past 2021. So until it gets that done where everyone's in the clear. Some other jobs, though, that might be getting taken away or might be in. able to do something else with their time, were released by a research study with UPenn and Open Research. In the paper, they predicted what US jobs will be impacted by LLMs, language learning models like GPT. Yeah, it was really, really cool. And a Twitter user actually broke down the paper's major takeaways. Well, accounting for other generative models and complementary technologies, our human estimates indicate that up to 49% of workers could have half or more of their tasks exposed to LLMs. Research suggests that half of all U.S. jobs will be cut in half or made twice as efficient by LLMs. That's crazy.### Assistant: This makes total sense, because I just explained it with developers, SDRs, and producers of podcasts, right? So what's going to happen is something like AngelList or Crunchbase or LinkedIn, like will have their own built in LLMs. And you'll be able to say, instead of using advanced search on Crunchbase or LinkedIn, like people are currently doing to find startups, that have raised their seed funding, that are based in New York City, and that have founders who went to Stanford or an Ivy League school, right? Let's say that was your search. You could say, I want founders who are building startups at the seed stage in the Northeast that went, that have at least one founder who went to an Ivy League school and that have had their, and have an app in the app store. right? Okay, really, that would be something you would put an associate on or a researcher really at a venture firm. Well, that research will probably take a week, maybe put 50 hours into it, that same researcher will be able to do this in one hour or two hours, right? And they're gonna have to do prompts, they're gonna have to clean up the data. And then over time, they may not have to clean up the data. So maybe instead of a researcher doing it, an associate would do it, maybe instead of an associate doing it, a principal, a managing director, or even the general partner at a firm could do it. But that's something we've seen already over time. And people are still thriving. And we have record low unemployment. So I'll take the other side of the bet, which is people will just be twice as efficient. We'll have twice as many products in the world solving twice as many problems, and doing it for less money, just like cloud computing meant and fractional CTOs, outsourced HR, outsourced accounting, outsourced cloud computing, outsourced office space like we work. All of that didn't lower the number of startups, it increased the number of startups. And the amount of money it took to get a product to market went from being $3 million 20 years ago, 25 years ago, take maybe two $3 million to get an internet product to market. Then it went to 250. And then it went to 25k. And then it went to essentially free, just sweat equity, the time it takes for the two founders to produce something. And so all of this is amazing, which is why I'll be candid here and put a little plugin. So why we started founder dot university, where we have 300 founders come, And for 12 weeks, we have them take all these courses, learn how to build companies. And at the end, we invest in 20 of the companies 25k to be their friends and family around. There will be many more people trying to build software that solves a problem in the world. And that means if there was going to be a niche piece of software for tennis players, or pickleball players, those might have not been venture backable previously, but now they will be because they're going to cost a fraction to make And you could make a really robust app instead of for $3 million a year, you know, 20 people working in an app company, you're going to be able to do it instead of 20 people working for a modern app company, working on all platforms, you'll be able to do with five people or 10 people, right. And then more flowers will grow. So I think nothing to worry about for now.

### Human: The producers went through the job listings for product focused software engineers. Yep, good reporting. Some of the projects listed were developed conversational interfaces that leverage leverage the language models. So chat GPT like product sounds chat GPT, build core components of the API to access large language models. So an API for others to build on sort of like open AI does. And then things like write, billing, email and other integrations with third party providers, suggesting that some version of revenue will eventually be turned on. So really, it sort of sounds like OpenAI 2.0, but with this kind of vague safety lens.### Assistant: Yeah, I would discount the whole safety thing as marketing. And it sounds like they're going to build the same exact stuff. Yeah, that open AI is building and they will make it AWS like in other words, you can go take this and use it to build your startup build your vertical product, right. So I think this is kind of like the beginning of a new cloud computing era where there'll be the equivalent of s one or EC two, whatever they are, you know, CPUs on demand, storage on demand, CDN on demand, now you'll just have some chat GPT-like product on demand. And if you're, I don't know, intuitive, you have some billing software, you're going to be able to have it automatically figure out, oh, these expenses are in this category. And it'll just, you'll use something like OpenAI, Azure, something on Amazon's cloud to do that. The thing that's super interesting, I think, is In the short term, what this is going to do to developers, because it seems like developers are going to be writing better and better code faster and faster. So this is where this augmented human intelligence, I think, is what's going to be particularly notable. If developers, just as a group, become 20-30% more efficient, then they're going to be training the AI that made them 20 or 30% more efficient, which means that AI is going to become again, 20 or 30% efficient, because it's going to see those developers say, Oh, yeah, the of these five snippets of code you gave me, these two were perfect, this one needed a tweak, these two didn't work, and I passed on them. So now you're training that AI in real time to write better code. So as developers use this, It's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's just going to get better and better and better. And then developers, you know, are just going to be like watching the AI write code and like steering it. And then that's going to get really weird. If you want your business to be more productive, more cost efficient, and you want to have bigger impact, you need to use notion. We run our entire business on notion here at launch. And, you know, we were looking for a deal flow solution. And these CRM systems for venture capitals, my god quarter million a year, I was going to build my own software $100,000 a year, plus $50,000 a year just to maintain it all the existing solutions. expensive, slow, janky, not customized. And then we built our own system right inside of Notion at a fraction of the cost with no developers. We just used our team and we built all these different views of all the notes that we were already keeping inside of Notion. So, whether you're starting a new gym routine, organizing a trip with your friends, or even planning your company goals, Notion is a flexible, collaborative workspace that helps you make meaningful progress in every part of your life. Get started in seconds by choosing from thousands of templates for every task and make it your own. From to-do lists to OKR trackers and so much more. Notion lets you build the exact system you want so you can work the way you work best. Here's your call to action. Get started with a free Notion account at Notion.com slash Jason. That's right. Make sure slash Jason is all lowercase. Notion.com slash J-A-S-O-N to get started for free right now.

### Human: I'm telling you, I think this is why Reddit works and why Wikipedia works. Like you have, first of all, with Wikipedia, you have an army of editors who care about you. You have transparency. Every edit is on the record. You have an army of people who only care about the truth. And on Reddit, you have upvoting and downvoting. Like you have community level moderation, which is all, you know, at some point we just all want to be like, this guy's an a**hole, get rid of him.### Assistant: It's a cop to your house, right? Like, no, it's eight steps, eight steps too many, you should be able to report it. And it should just say, report and block, you hit report and block, it's reported and blocked. And then it says, Would you like to give us more information? So you can one click report and block. Now, you know, just how many people reported and blocked it 100. And then six of them, you don't need everybody to put the details in. But there's six maniacs to put the details in, just like Wikipedia. So they're just not thinking through the user experience of how to make things simpler for users. So on my system, when I'm building an inside is and I'm testing it with our internal people. If you see somebody report something, if you go to inside.com slash new, you can see this if it's self promotional, you just click report and it shows you five report types. spam, low quality source, duplicate, self promotional. And so when I'm on the site, I'm just like, beep, self promotional, beep, self promotional, we're not, you're not supposed to submit your own stories, kind of, you know, like press releases or spam. And so I'm just like, boop, self promotion, and then it puts a flag on it, self promotional. And now people can see on your profile that you submitted something self promotional. And then that makes you not do it again. So imagine if on your profile name and showed well, consequences, you know, it's like, so if it showed on your profile reported for harassment, or suspended for harassment on the state, you could click it and you could see, here's why you were supported for harassment on Twitter. And here's your response to it. And here's how many people reported your harassment and for what tweet, like, that'd be pretty great. Like if people supported it reported me for harassment for doing my, you know, tweet with somebody sent me images of me and sax and broke back mountain and I was like, this is pretty hilarious. Uh, if somebody's like, oh my god, sax was like, you harassed me for that. I'd be like, okay, great, you know, like I was reporting you can actually see it. That's the problem and I I did that. Did you do that shadow banning thing to see if you've been shadow banned the twitter website? No, so it turns out like my some of my replies have been shadow banning. Well, I follow a lot of people. Um, so I think it's like if you follow a lot of to you No, I replied to other people. Oh, your replies to them were shadowbanned? Yeah. So, if I reply to people, it's like... What are you saying? They found examples of my replies not coming up in other people's threads, which is like a light shadowban. It's like, you can still see my stuff if you follow me, but if I reply to some high-profile person, maybe people don't see. This is the kind of weird stuff that should be just should all know about yeah yeah it should just be transparent because all it's doing is creating this culture of like you know oh they're banning the libs they're banning the right wing they're banning this group they're banning that group it's just like just make it transparent like just let people know and let the person know that they've been banned or reported i think that's part of the

### Human: I got to know these accounts so I can follow them.### Assistant: Yeah, I think some of it... Well, so, I mean, there's a reality, which is Q2, interest rates in the United States raised at probably the fastest rate ever in a quarter. And that affects a lot of things in real estate before it built, most importantly, mortgages, the price of a mortgage. And that's what most people can decide... Dictates what most people can afford, which indirectly affects the house price because prices have to come down to stabilize where the market is. So one quarter of massive interest rates hikes or accelerating pace like that is pretty challenging. However, I would say after that quarter, and before that quarter in some ways, the company has completely mismanaged communicating what's actually going on. So it justifies my believe that there are actually two Twitter accounts that very accurately... By people who are not professionals, one's a surgeon, I forget what the other one does for a living, but not tech professionals that accurately describe what's going on with Opendoor. Well, at least 10x better than the company does. And so I think part... A lot of it is communication of being able to frame like the world is in a transition, particularly in real estate and interest rates. Like, duh, anybody who has a mortgage absolutely knows this. Anybody who's signing a new lease or signing up for a new mortgage definitely knows this. And being able to communicate that, yes, that transitional quarter was very painful. It was painful for the company, but the company did the right things, sold the inventory, removed the inventory from its books, blah, blah, blah, didn't try to fake it, didn't try to hide it and mask it. And now the company is performing quite well, actually. And so I think that it's more optics than substance. And there are some real challenges. people will... The company's cost structure was predicated on a certain number of real estate transactions occurring a year. Typically, the average year in the United States, 5 million people buy and sell a home. The global financial crisis, it went down to 4 million. It can go as high as close to 6. Obviously, the more people that transact in the United States, the better for any company like Open Door that's in the business of transacting. people have stopped transacting at the rates you would normally see. You can still make money on a per transactional basis, which is what Opendoor is excellent at right now, but there's less people transacting. So the overall revenue for the company is by definition going to be less if only let's call it 3.5 million or 4 million people transact instead of 6 or 5.5. People will eventually start transacting again, because they have to. People have to move. People do get married. People get divorced. People die. People have kids. They need more space. These things happen. You can postpone it for 6, 9, 12, 18 months, maybe. But you do have to move cross-country at some point if you want a different job. And so in 2023, with at least some predictability or visibility into real estate, interest rates, and mortgages, I think people are going to be... There's a lot of tailwinds to people starting to transact again. And because Opendoor is doing a good job in pricing the homes, I saw a tweet from one of these accounts I like this morning, and I have it separately audited. What are these accounts?

### Human: So here's what happens, dear audience. I'm like, you know what? I treated myself because I'm on Zoom and we're on video every day. And I just don't want to have mess around with my makeup and get like a rash from not taking it off right or whatever. I'm just I got myself lashes. And then Jason. somewhat unexpectedly, was like, oh, did you get Lashify? I know all about that. And I was like, I'm sorry, what happened just now? I thought I was really girling it up and he took it up a notch.### Assistant: I did. What happened was every month or every two weeks or so, a Lashify box would come to our house, beautiful package. And then we would be getting ready to go out. Oh, my wife looks great, but I couldn't put my finger on it. You know, like when somebody looks great. Yeah. And you're like, I can't exactly. Our wife is stunning. And she like she stops the party. You met her when she walks in. And then this is like a whole nother level. And so I'm like, honey, you look really good. Thank you. You know, you know, blinks her eyes. That's it. Like I just do. So that exactly. And then I walk in, you know, to the bathroom at one point, and she's putting she got like a little pair of like very funky looking tweezers with a curve in it. She's get out. Oh, what's going on? She's putting lashes on. And I said, Oh, that's really just a lashify thing. I saw the box. She says, Yeah, you know, this friend we met at this party. She's friends with this person. Sahara is doing this company lashify. I said, Oh, Sahara, she's great. I remember meeting her. So long story short, Sahar has a love of bulldogs, which I have. And she's a tremendous entrepreneur, it turns out. So I start talking to her about her business, and she starts relaying to me what's going on. And this woman has created a business that would put to shame 99 999 out of 100 1000 businesses in Silicon Valley, off of her back, bootstrap to a level of revenue that is beyond all but our most elite portfolio companies in our portfolio here at launch. I said, that's great. She said, hey, I got questions about this, this, this, and this. She's running a beauty-directed consumer brand. But without maybe some of the techniques that we see in our companies, just popping up her Insta, and you can pull up her Insta and see, but she will do a three-hour live stream with thousands of people while she puts on her Lashify lashes. She's got these all patented. you know, credible stuff. So I literally I'm announcing today I joined the board of lashify. And I do not do direct to consumer. I do not do beauty products. But I was like, here's an entrepreneur I can learn something from because she is a literal product genius, a literal marketing savant. And yes, and she's truly I mean, that million followers is not done with, you know, any kind of silly games. This is like done through sheer force of will. And she just innately knows how to do packaging so when i go to l.a. a lot of times i'll stay with sahara and we will sit there and you have a glass of champagne and wine. Get a nice hamburger or something and some of our bulldogs and talk about lashify and you know what she's doing and it's very extraordinary to me so i feel very lucky. We haven't invested in the company yet. They don't need it. They're wildly profitable. But I thought it'd be an interesting adventure to go on. And this will be, by far and away, one of the top 10 successful founders I've ever worked with already, and certainly the most successful female founder I've ever worked with by a factor.

### Human: has been sentient for 10 years. That is the best AI text box on the internet. Yeah. Like, I don't think we give them enough credit. Like that text box is amazing. And yes, we do appreciate it. Yeah. Saving everybody a click and just adding Reddit.### Assistant: If you want to get ahead in your career, you need to sleep well. And if you want to be a stallion, you want to be a workhorse, you need to get a great night's sleep. It's that easy. So do what I do. And that's getting an eight sleep, right, especially over the summer, right, temperatures are going to rise, you want to stay cool. And eight sleep mattresses allow you to set the temperature. And they're selling more than just mattresses right now. They have something called the pod cover by eight sleep and this fits on any bed. It's just like a fitted sheet. So if you don't want to get a new mattress, you but you do want to sleep, you just get the pod cover. It's going to keep you cool all night all the way down to 55 degrees and it's going to improve your sleep by automatically adjusting to the temperature on your side of the bed. And you know, your partner spouse, they get to set their own temperature. So no more battle with your partner or your spouse over the thermostat. Nope. It's going to adjust based on you and your partner's preferences and you get personalized sleep reports. Eight sleep. I love it in the winter. Oh, I keep it nice and toasty. But in the summer, I like those cool crisp sheets. And I don't want to have to blast the AC in my house and burn all that extra fuel. No, I just use my eight sleep I dial it to exactly where I like and you know, I get a better night's sleep temperature really does correlate with a good night's sleep. So go to eight sleep.com slash twist to get 150 bucks off the pod cover. Stay cool this summer with eight sleep, please. And they're now shipping not only in the US, but Canada, and the UK. and some other countries in the EU and Australia. So H sleep.com slash twist for $150 off the pod cover. Can't go wrong. All right, so suffice to say, this data business is going to be amazing. I think it really is going to be awesome for y'all. Now, people who contribute to Reddit, they understand you get a license forever to their content, just like any other service. I think that's the pretty generic standard on the internet, you get to license it, but people own it, they get to take it out. If they don't like using it, you decide you're going to do this API. When you have an API, you had a lot of people build apps. And that's, I guess, at the center of the current controversy. So maybe for background for people to level set. My understanding is, and I remember this for Twitter, but I don't know specifically for, you know, in talking to Ev Williams back in the day, in that web 2.0 period, startups were resource constrained, they didn't have enough developers didn't have enough cash. So you put out API's, people build products to extend the service. And then Twitter went around and sort of bought some of the best of that tweet deck, some eyes, I remember a bunch of startups got bought, and then incorporated into the mothership. Reddit had a similar trajectory in terms of letting people build on the API. But at some point, you need to get paid. So you decided to put some numbers to that. So maybe you could explain the history of why Reddit let people build off the API, and then why now you want to get paid for the API.

### Human: Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. It's your boy, Jason Kalacanis, here on This Week in Startups. And we are continuing. In fact, we're wrapping up our Power of Accelerator series. And this was intended as a 10-part series, since many of the founders who are watching and aspiring founders want to know, hey, should I consider an incubator? Should I consider an accelerator? And what's the state of those? Because I get this all the time. Which accelerator should I pick? Should I go to TXR? Should I go to Launch Accelerator? Should I go to Y Combinator? What's this Dreamit thing? What's SOSV? And we did our study of all the different accelerators out there. We wanted to have a range from internal ones like Ford's X program, obviously having Techstars, which is the largest one in the world, Science, a startup studio model. We went through all these crazy different models. And to be totally honest, all of them you probably already knew about. They all fit the exact mold. But I always look for things that are innovative. And we're ending with what I think is the most innovative new idea I've seen in accelerators in a long time. And it's called Pioneer. And the founder is Daniel Gross. And I believe he was at Y Combinator for a bit. And when I saw this, I said, wow. This is amazing. Everybody in Silicon Valley, everybody in the investment space, even in the accelerator space, because there's so many companies, has moved a bit downstream. So you look at VCs, they used to invest in a business plan, then they invested in a prototype or a mock-up, then they invested in MVP, then they invested in pay trials, and now they're saying, hey, wait till you've got a million to $3 million in revenue, Then a VC will do it, seed funds, angels, accelerators, incubators will do that early stuff. And then even the accelerators, because they had so many people applying, they started to move downstream. In fact, the launch accelerator, we changed the name from an incubator, we went to an accelerator because, my God, the first two years of trying to just get your product launched, we have so many companies to choose from, we just wait till you get to 5K in revenue and maybe 1,000 people using your product a day for a consumer product, and that's when we like to engage. And then I see this pioneer. accelerator. And it starts with a form and says, Hey, what do you want to build? And it's literally starting from day zero. Daniel, thanks for coming on the pod. I'm incredibly impressed with what you've built. And I'm monitoring it daily. Because you share the videos on YouTube and it's a little bit like it feels a little acoustic right now still feels like you're figuring it out But it's impressive in what I think is year two for you Where are you at with this project and tell me what you how you describe it to the world?### Assistant: Sure thing, yeah. Thanks for having me on. I've been a fan of your work and of your content for quite some time. Thanks, Ben. I'm excited to participate in it and give back and hopefully be even 10% as amusing as your regular guests are. So Pioneer is, yeah, you know, it's funny. A lot of people talk about themselves as a startup accelerator. We're almost really hoping to be a startup generator. We're looking to find people you know, at the point where they're working on an interesting project, and they're not even really sure if it's a company, or they're working on maybe a very, you know, they just incorporated, but they're not really sure they have product market fit. And we're aiming to bring these people what I think is the largest kind of scarcity in the in the startup ecosystem pipeline, is a sense of validation and confirmation that yes, they should be working on what they're working on, they should be going down the rabbit hole they're exploring. And they should be taking their dream and their passion a little bit you know, more seriously, my view is twofold. One, I think like weirdness, and change and variety is a great thing for the world. And I think we want to live in a world that has many more small startups, instead of four or five large tech companies. And I think we want that we want more variety, we want more choice, we want more creativity, lots of small islands instead of a few continents. And secondly, I think the largest constriction towards creating more of these startups is effectively generating more of these extraordinarily productive people that go on to form these companies. And I think the largest constriction there is there's a lot of people and there's a lot of companies that never make it past the GitHub repo phase. I think GitHub is the largest graveyard of startups, period, because someone kind of gets started and they're, really sure if they should take the idea any further. And, you know, unlike a structured job where there's a very clear motivational treadmill, and there's almost a very obvious game to play, you know, in terms of how to advance what's good, what's bad, you know, if you work at Starbucks, or in the military, or even just a manager in a large company, it's really clear what to do next. In startups, especially in the early days before you have revenue, super unclear what to do next, right? And so motivation comes in fits and starts, and maybe you're excited and inspired, and you get started, and then it dies. So Pioneer takes literally the shape of an online game to try to inject some of that motivational structure into people that are kind of at the project building phase to try and get them to take that thing a little bit more further. So it's a website you go to. It's pretty simple. Unlike traditional accelerators, we try to run as much in software as possible so that we can service as many people as possible. And you can go to the website, you can check it out. You can even check out the internals without registering. Literally, it takes the place of a structured game with points. And the more progress you make on your project, the more points you get. And if you get a bunch of points, you become a pioneer. And that kind of gives you funding, active network and so forth. But the real vision is to really generate another thousand companies that would not exist without kind of this web product and platform.

### Human: They did the magical 13%. Right.### Assistant: No, of course I'm gonna answer it. I don't come on the show and not answer stuff. You know, first, I would say what I when I wrote this letter, and, and Jason and I talked about, I think over poker, but you know, the week before, you know, I, I really was thinking about this. And we've been talking about it as an open letter to Silicon Valley. Right? I mean, this applies to what I said in here applies to almost every company in Silicon Valley. At at Facebook, I thought they had a particularly acute challenge, but a particularly interesting opportunity. The acute challenge was they had gone from 25,000 to 85,000 employees in just a few years. And at the same time, they were making a massive and uncertain long-term bet, more sizable than any bet we've seen in Silicon Valley, on Oculus and Reality Labs, where I said, you've confused investors, which is hurting the company. And so like, let's just telescope out for a second and think about the parts of the business. This business can do 40 billion in free cash flow. Instead, you're going to do 15 billion in free cash flow, right? Because you're making these massive investments. So I said, tighten your belt, just go back to where you were at the start of 2021. in terms of numbers of employees, okay? I really think they should go back to where they were at the start of 2020. But again, these are my opinions. I'm not telling the company what to do. They get to do whatever they want to do. And I sell the shares or I don't sell the shares. The second piece I said is they're investing way more in AI than most people understand, right? The magic of ByteDance TikTok was that it was not a social network, right? They targeted my son to watch TikTok through AI and it worked. So Facebook has done a complete retooling over the last three years, right, has been one of the largest consumers of GPUs, right to really build an AI discovery engine. Okay, yeah, the world doesn't even know that because they think that Mark, you know, renamed the company, you know, meta and the only thing he's doing is running around with these glasses on. And yet he's building a goldmine in a side quest right under their nose. This other thing. So you know, I basically said, Hey, tighten your belt on people, you'll get more innovative. This is the misnomer. It's not about cutting. It's not about killing investment. It's about getting more innovative, more productive. Okay, those two things coexist. So it's get more focused on that get more productive. Number two, focus on AI, in fact, maybe invest more in AI. And then on this third thing, if I were doing this, I do what Google did, which is I would say long term bet more uncertainty, I'm going to put this in something that looks more like Waymo or Verily, right, I'm going to make this another bet, I'm going to capitalize it, I don't know, 5 billion a year, which is what I suggested in the letter, if you want to take outside investors, take outside investors, do whatever you want to do. But that would allow each part of the business to, I think, perform much better. That was that was a thought. They can, you know, I think that

### Human: Yep, so, uh, you know at that point I was at a mattress firm. I originally I went there. I was working at sleepies Converted to mattress firm and you know, I had my job. That was the best job I had at the time You know, I was making thirty thousand dollars a year at the time. I thought I was on top of the world### Assistant: No, I was going to say, so you went from minimum wage, you get the sales job, I'm assuming you're making a little bit more than minimum wage, and then something happens where your salary, I think, more than doubles, correct? More than doubles. When we get back from this quick break, I want to talk about how you went from zero to minimum wage, to a little more than minimum wage, and then you double, triple up, because you learned another skill after sales, when we get back on this, we can start over. All right, everybody, if you don't have your SOC 2 compliance buttoned up, well, you're not going to be able to close those giant enterprise customers. It's really that simple. And if you already have a SOC 2 report, don't you want to make it easier to maintain it year after year after year? Of course you do. Well, Vanta's compliance software makes it easier to get and to renew your SOC 2. Their software continuously tests against technical and non-technical SOC 2 requirements and They partner with over two dozen audit firms who have been trained to file SOC 2 reports directly within Vanta. The average 20-50 person company is SOC 2 ready with Vanta in just 2-4 weeks. Compare that with 3-5 months without Vanta. With Vanta, you can connect your tools and infrastructure and continuously monitor for risks and vulnerabilities. And you're going to be able to fix issues fast with actionable guidance. Avoid anxious on-site visits from auditors and never again. have to prove compliance with manually captured screenshots. Oh my god, you're never going to have to do that if you just use Vanta. Companies like Notion, which we love, Lattice User Testing, and hundreds of others have successfully gotten their SOC 2 reports with Vanta in weeks, not months. And we are on startup time here. Months? No. Weeks? Yes. Launch portfolio company Lead IQ said they couldn't imagine having to go through SOC 2 compliance without Vanta. and they are one of our fastest growing companies. They're doing incredible. So don't hurt your revenue and frustrate your sales team because you aren't SOC 2 compliant. Get it done, people. Here is your call to action. Unlock those sales and give your employees time back to their calendars to work on more important issues. This is an incredible offer. They're giving our Twist listeners here exclusively $1,000 on a discount. to their subscription, just go to vanta.com slash twist. That's Vanta v a n t a.com slash twist TW is t for $1,000 off. What a great deal. Thanks to Vanta for supporting independent media like this week in startups. All right, welcome back to the riveting story of King Atoke. His name is Chris, but he has the Twitter handle King Atoke at okay. Alright, so you just to catch everybody up if you're jumping in the middle of the show. You lose everything. You can't get the associate's degree. You apply to 1,500 jobs on one job platform. You get three shitty ones. You get a little bit of gas in the tank. You learn how to sell through some dogged, brutal, multi-level marketing shenanigans. But then something else happens. You flip, you flip, you flip, and then you find another skill to add after you learn to sell yourself. What happens next in the story of king otoki?

### Human: I 100% listen, I'm pro. I am pro all of these. Yeah. How and in the den in true dinner party fashion. We should acknowledge the weirdness of billionaires continuing to buy every part of billion of American life like that is weird. Two, there's great sense of humor. And then there's like troll and poster and pedo bear. Like there is no question that Elon is also a troll and poster and it distorts people's impression. Well, you know him. So you have this sort of the other side of the coin, whereas a lot of people don't. So in that sort of like, I don't know anything. I only know what people think about things. People think a lot of things about him. And I'm just super curious to see how this is all going to unfold as a product.### Assistant: And so, you know, be fun again. And the algorithm is comes to mind here. So Elon has been very clear. And again, I just encourage people to look at what he's tweeting. He tweets, he's tweeted more in the last month than the last three CEOs combined in the history of Twitter. Yeah, I'm not kidding. If you took all of Jack's tweets when he was CEO, Parag's, and Dick Costolo, you put all those tweets together, I think Elon has engaged more people and tweeted more in the last 30 days than all of those CEOs together, all four of them. And he knows the platform better than they do in many ways, because as a power user, he's used it to great effect, to get attention for hiring people for his projects or selling cars, and generally getting attention for his vision of the future. So the algorithm, though, he's been very clear, this should be transparent, and all shadow banning, all moderation should be clear. And so that is a no brainer. And again, I would just listen to what he's saying what he's saying what he said about Tesla wound up being true about Tesla, what he said about, you know, the rocket ship company came true. Starlink came true, people are using Starlink. And what he's saying about Twitter will, of course, become true. He's got a great sense of humor. And we're friends, obviously. So I say that, you know, just as a friend, he's got a great sense of humor. And as an executive, he does what he says he's going to do. So he does what he says he's going to do. And now if he's going to do the if he's going to make the algorithm transparent, if he's going to make all of the actions about censoring or turning off or suspending people more clear, he's going to do that. And that would be great for everybody. If you're a startup, you know you have to save where you can. That's why we love Coda. Coda is one doc to rule them all. In Coda, your text and tables can live together in the same document. All of your valuable data, plans, objectives, and strategies are in one place. Nothing gets lost or is out of sync, and your team is literally on the same page. Coda works right out of the box, and it's customizable. And you can create a wiki for your team on board new hires from anywhere adapt quickly to any major or minor changes in your business. And there are templates for basically anything that you can duplicate and start using today. My guy precious made a beautiful template for investor updates that you can go duplicate right now. Just go to this week and startups.com slash investor updates. investor updates are so important. If you're a startup, you need to send them if you're raising another round, they're going to be more likely to forge your update with permission to another investor who they want to introduce you to. But if you don't send those investor updates, well, then you're going to have a problem. Here's your call to action join the productivity revolution and sign up today for CODA head to CODA.io slash twist and you'll get $1,000 in credits so generous. that's CODA.io slash twist to get $1,000 off. Thanks for supporting the show. Yeah, it should be more clear. I mean, nobody doesn't want more control over the algorithm, right?

### Human: And tell me with without telling me the name of the customer, tell me a project that people came to you and you said, too soon. Not possible. Yeah, to us next year, or in two years, and let's continue the discussion or hey, we can do 10% of that.### Assistant: Yeah, I mean, so this is a lot of what what Ginkgo's kind of core technology is. So like, here's the I'll tell you a funny story from back when you're at MIT. So one of my co founders is a fella Tom Knight, right? And Tom Knight's like, I don't know if you know the old school... He's an old school legendary computer scientist from the hacker's book era of computer, like mini computer era. Cool. Sure. MIT AI lab, the first time around kind of thing. Worked with Stallman, the whole thing. And so, Tom's lab... He did computer. He taught the semiconductor design course for years. He started at MIT in the early 70s. And in the 90s, he decides, sales run on code. I've been developing programming tools. I'm going to learn biology and try to help out. And so Tom gets in and gets his feet wet. But he would also attract all these computer scientists who were like, oh my god, DNA is code. This is so cool, Tom. Let's do it. And Tom would be like, great. There's the lab. I go there every morning and work all day long on trying to do this. And these people would go in the lab. And two weeks later, they'd burn out completely. Because you're like, Oh, my God, I ran an experiment today. And then I do the same experiment tomorrow and I get a different result. I came from a world of pure math and logic in computers. And like, this is not that it is a nightmare. Right? And like, we just flush out alchemy more than science. Yeah. And it was enormously frustrating to that. And here's the reason Tom powered through it, by the way. Tom came from an era of computing where computers were like that. They were unpredictable. Punch cards. Yeah. He had to fix computers to make his code work. Paper jam. You had to be an electrical engineer to be a computer programmer back then, right? Tom wrote a program on mainframes, right? He's old enough to realize we did a lot of work to make it as easy to program computers today as it is. He was like, it's fine. This is digital code. We'll power through it. One of the things we had to fix was that by hand lab work that was associated with compiling and debugging code, Jason. Literally, if you wanted to compile some code, it's like, You're like a chef all of a sudden. It's like, get in the lab, do this precious protocol, do it exactly right. One mistake and it won't work. And you're like, I just wanted to load some code in and see even if it was going to work in the first place, right? And so what we've done is we've taken all those protocols and standardized them. We move them onto robotics and automation, and we run it like a factory. So to answer your question, in five years, each year, we've been roughly tripling the output of the facility and halving the cost per lab operation annually. Okay, so okay, so two to the fifth better than we were five years ago. Yeah, there's Yeah. And so so the that that and that's why we're now able to do millions of designs, right? Like the today compared to benchmarking with a scientist, the bench were about five to 10 times cheaper on a per lab operation basis.

### Human: And invest in the best of the best.### Assistant: Hey everybody, welcome to this week in startups. And I hope everybody is safe and everybody's family safe and you're doing the social distancing thing during this Corona pandemic. As a disclaimer, obviously, thank you to all the people on the front line, whether you're a janitor or delivering food or keeping the food supply up, or obviously a nurse, a doctor, an aide, anybody on the front lines of this war, we appreciate you and we're in awe of your sacrifice. talking about business, talking about people's livelihoods, can seem to some as maybe inappropriate or off the mark during a crisis. But as we all know, the second order effects of this crisis are going to be people's livelihoods. And we've seen record numbers of people file for unemployment. And to keep the economy going, so people can pay for their kids school, pay for their mortgages, pay for their food, pay for their healthcare, their medicine, and to generally have the resources they need to run a productive life. Well, A lot of those jobs come from startups. That is the driver of our economy. And the driver of startups over the last decade have been accelerators and incubators. So we thought it would be a good time to do a special 10-part series, and we're calling it the Power of Accelerators. incubators is another word for accelerators. We like to use the word accelerators. And during this 10 part series, we're going to talk to the different people who run them about how to get into them, how to get the most out of them, why they exist, and what has become kind of the de facto phase for first time founders and even some second time founders for starting up a company, which is you can do it and bootstrap it and not go to an accelerator. In fact, probably the majority of companies don't. But for those folks who are trying to get that rocket fuel going and trying to learn and build a network, they can be an incredible accelerant. And so we're going to do this 10 part series. And we're starting today with episode one with dream adventure, Steve Barsh, they have over have had over 350 startups go through their program. Those companies have raised over 800 million and have a combined value of 2 billion. Welcome to the pod, Steve Barsh. Thanks. Thanks, Jason. Good to see you. Thanks. And I'm assuming everybody is safe and your social distancing and you're working from home. I can see We are working from home, we are safe. People went home about three or four weeks ago. Our offices are in Philadelphia and New York City, and everybody is safe and well. Great. So tell me, how did Dream It start, and what is the goal of Dream It? Sure. So dream it started back in 2008. So about 12 years ago, 11 or 12 years ago, it was started by three entrepreneurs in the Philadelphia area that really in the beginning wanted to give back wanted to help other entrepreneurs and other startups get get their first start. So it started way back then. And it's certainly evolved over time. The mission and what Dreamit is here to do today is work with the best startups in the world. We've really evolved the program over time. We now focus on pre-series A startups. We like startups that are a little bit later than when we first started and we focus on three specific verticals. But then the mission is to help find the best of the best and make them better.

### Human: Hmm. I don't really I don't really know if it's either good or bad. I mean, I think in like, right, I'd probably even lean on like, towards the good side of things, right? Like, I think if you're if you're at a good place, and you're at a good company, The responsibility, what's beneficial for both the company and for the employee is for the company to continue to push the bounds of responsibility that person has. It's like, hey, my first six months I was responsible for this. And now I'm taking on more stuff or taking on bigger stuff. And you want to constantly be pushing that and constantly figuring out what people's maximum capacity is. And if that's happening, there's probably naturally going to be some churn where you're saying, cool, this person has scaled up to this point. And now they have the decision to either guess, move down a level and be consistent in a slightly less scaled up role, but they're not quite at the point where they could take on that next step. We're going to have to fill that from somewhere else. And so I think if that's the dynamic that's going on, then that's a good thing. Because it's like, hey, people are coming in, they're learning and they're growing as fast as they can. And whenever that growth point stops, they have the decision to either flatline for a little bit or move on. I think that's great. I think if it's one of those things where it's like, Hey, I'm going to sort of try something new and I'm not going to like, because I, you know, I think sometimes people take this attitude, right? Like I'm going to go to a new place and I'm going to kind of do my time and I'm going to do my thing. And then I'm just going to bounce around and move to another place because I got bored. Right. Like then that's probably net negative. But I think there's, right. So that's what I would say probably there's like positive churn and negative churn. Like, are people leaving because the company's a show and they want to get out of there? Or are they leaving because it's like legitimately like, hey, I've done the most I can do. I've grown the most I can. And like the next spot is going to help me level up even further. In that case, it's all positive, basically.### Assistant: Yeah, two companies come to mind and I hope I don't get like dragged or cancelled for saying this but I've I've met a lot of people that have been like x these companies and dealing with positive and negative. The first one being I have a lot of friends that previously worked at Morning Brew and it seems like it was a really good experience. I think it was a positive there like we learned so much at Morning It was a really cool experience. We just now feel motivated to start our own thing, go off just do something else. And it is really cool to see that even people that weren't at Morning Brew for maybe like since the beginning, I've had a lot of people that I'd like a really good experience and a great learning time over with that team. And I've also seen a lot of people that were ex-Coinbase that had the complete opposite experience, where I met quite a few people specifically over the past like two weeks that are like, yeah, we were starting new projects. We worked at Coinbase. And honestly, like we were just like we were pushed to the point of burnout. And that's why we left. And it wasn't necessarily they were pushed to the capacity of being able to take accountability for so much that they felt that they were able now to like juggle their own thing. It felt like they were pushed to the point of like just being overwhelmed. And it's so interesting. I think you're right where there's like positive and negative turn. And I think the older generation sees turn almost always as negative. It's like, oh, like these young people are only here for a year. Like they're just taking like the company's title and leaving. But I actually I don't think that's the case at all. I like to think like maybe this is just me being positive that most people And most young people aren't just bopping around with these companies for only a year at a time two years at a time because um They want to uh, like take the company for all their worth and like just get the get their you know Like get vested. Um, i i'd like to think that that's not like what everyone's doing. I I think That the reason that young people are changing so quickly is because they're hitting their cap of like what they can learn. And now that there's so many opportunities with remote work and with just different types of work that they have the opportunity like if it's like if this position is no longer serving me and I'm no longer serving this position. Why would you stay you're no longer bound by a location you're no longer bound by a pay especially with web3 a lot of these web3 companies are constantly hired i get approached like multiple times a week by these web3 companies and they pay crazy amounts of money like there are no bounds to what you can do anymore and i think that's really interesting and the learning is just uncapped like it's a very interesting space to see but um I'd like to see how this impacts us, I guess, later down the line. Like, this is just the beginning of this quick turn rate. Like, I think maybe our generation is probably the first generation to see jobs changing this quickly. I don't know how this will impact the economy down the line. I don't know how this will impact employment and companies themselves, especially in the startup landscape where, like, your day one employee might only be there for a year. I don't know how that will impact things down the line, but, you know.

### Human: 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. How many customers, broadly speaking, do you have? How many documents are in the repository? And then how do you start this process of the very scary prospect, I think, for some customers, of Oh, my God, am I feeding my data to this? And is it going to wind up jumping the fence? Am I training the box model or the open AI model? And are they going to use some corporate secrets and a strategy document? And then somebody else says, Hey, how does Michael border, you know, reinvent an airport and a new airport in New York, and that was their proprietary stuff. So that's like, got to be objection or concern. Number one, yeah.### Assistant: Yeah. I mean, I, I, the, the, the, um, the specific revelation was probably no different than anybody else on the internet is just, you can give it literally any prompt and, you know, at 99% likelihood, it's going to come back with a response. Now, now accuracy aside for a second, and we'll, we can get into kind of how we solve that problem. Um, uh, just the fact that it will attempt to do everything was, was sort of the mind blowing moment. I remember, uh, like probably my first, like, like big aha was. Was, you know, you, you initially start with use cases, which are like these, like very straightforward kind of facts. Um, cause like, we're so used to like, we go to Google and we type in a thing and then we get an answer. And so your first things are like, wow, like it's really cool that a guy had that answer. Um, so it was like really basic questions of like, you know, what's. What's the better way to, to travel, uh, you know, between, you know, X and Y place. And, and you're like, oh, wow, that's actually pretty cool. Like I thought through. you know, you might have to wait at the airport for this long, and so maybe it's actually more efficient in this case to drive, and so that was pretty cool, but very fact-based. And then, like, when you start to give it things that are not fact-based, but actually things that it has to take two pieces of distinct information and kind of combine them and reason through it, then I was like, that was really where I was starting to be, you know, my head started to explode where, you know, we were giving it like, so, you know, Peter, i'm michael porter of five forces framework which is the sort of competitive framework of how you think about suppliers and competitors etc and so take that i take that concept and apply it to. Apply the things that that no one has ever done it michael porter five forces forever like like in the history of the world. And it just did a really, really good job. We were like, do Michael Porter's five forces on an airport. And it was able to take one set of information it has and then combine it with a completely unrelated topic and basically completely exceed what even a human would probably have answered for that. And that was the big breakthrough of like, okay, so This is not just going to be this sort of question answer engine of raw facts. It's actually going to produce new information for people and then become really an assistant where you can just go to it and ask it anything. And so that was some more of the aha moments when you start to take and combine those two unrelated things and you're actually leveraging the fact that it has a wealth of knowledge within it, and way more than what any person would be able to keep track of, that's where you really get the power of it. And so then we said, well, what if we combine our data set with that? And then you start to create new use cases that just never before would have been possible. And that's where we didn't do a full company pivot, but about as close as you do when you're 2,500 people. And we just said, OK, this is a big moment for us. We're going to go and incorporate this technology.

### Human: It absolutely was. It's a I mean, I mean, again, commerce is complex. It's very hard to, um, build software that can address a lot of different use cases. And the inspiration there was really operating systems. An operating system that does a good job modeling the primitives can then be used for everything. Again, in many... You invoked the 90s. the 90s, like, it was very hard to do anything with the internet. And but it was also very idealistic.### Assistant: How much money does your startup spend on all these different software products? And how much time does it take you to integrate them all together? Let me guess, too much time, too much money. Well, Odoo is here to help, that's spelled O-D-O-O. It's a suite of business apps that runs your entire company on one platform, I kid you not. And if you're currently using a Franken stack of individual software solutions that don't talk to each other while you're wasting your time, energy, and that precious money you raised for your startup, Odoo streamlines your workflow and brings all that information together, your workday will be more productive because Odoo's integrations eliminate all of that repetitive tasks and data entry that you have to do when you're when you're doing a Franken site, right? Plus, if you only need two or three apps to optimize your workflow, that's all you pay for. Odoo Odoo won't stick you with the bill for the apps you don't use. You pay for what you use. Odoo has an app for every business need. They offer 30 main apps that are updated regularly and another 16,000 from their active community. For instance, Odoo offers a suite of financial software that'll help you keep your books tight with accounting, payment tracking, invoicing, and more. Your first app is free forever. And right now, Odoo is offering a $1,000 credit on your first implementation pack. Go to odoo.com slash twist odoo.com slash twist to check it out odoo.com slash twist. Take the thousand dollars, put it in your account and then use it when you're ready, but get it now because I don't know how long the offer is going to last. It really is a reoccurring theme as you watch what happened from, you know, the inception of the web in 95, 96, when it started to get commercialized and all the way to now is. It was so hard to get anything done that it was causing a very small number of people to do it. And every time an entrepreneur makes it easier, more people participate. And I think one of the great examples when you were talking about this was just thinking about like, um, web publishing. And I was thinking about I just had Matt Mullenweg on the pod. And Evan Williams has been on the pod, we got to have one again. But it was like just putting up a web page was so hard. You had to get Dreamweaver and build it or before that put up a server. And now if you want to put up a web page, you can go to Squarespace or WordPress, or even if you want to say something, You can kind of just do a tweet like boom it's up on the web and and now of course everybody participates everybody publishes stuff all the time whether it's photos and flicker was like this nice way point right if you think about the history of photos online. We all remember when Flickr came out, they created like an upload to remember the upload tool they had, like, you could download an upload tool and be like, Okay, we're gonna get your camera roll off of that camera, and your memory card, and put it on the internet. And now we all have these incredible devices. The app store was the other piece, right? I mean, at some point, you added an app store and let other people build plugins was was that another major inflection point on the journey?

### Human: All right, listen, my favorite not macadamia, my favorite chocolate dark now I have in my office. Nice box of macadamia bars and dark chocolate and I got dark chocolate covered macadamias. a perfect snack for J Cal, get a nice cup of black coffee, and I treat myself. And that company is house of macadamia. The founders of this company, Brandon and Carmen, they've been listeners to this podcast as we can start for a long time. And they told me I kid you not that they started their company. After listening to this week in startups, and they read my book angel, they use the returns on their first angel investment. I kid you not this is amazing. To start this macadamia nut business. And look, all nuts are not created equal. Here are the health benefits of macadamias compared to peanuts, almonds, cashews and walnuts. macadamias are high in omega sevens, which have been linked to fat loss, which I need right and natural collagen. So you look nice. They also have more healthy fats and less carbs. Every product is vegan keto and paleo, since you probably have two or three of those on your list. Take it from me. I eat this macadamia all the time every week. Two or three times a week I eat them. They're delicious. My little treat for myself. And again, for me, it's dark chocolate. For you, it might be one of the other flavors. They got spicy nuts, they got sweet nuts, they got everything. They got one side spicy and sweet. Here's what I want you to do. Go to howsomeacademias.com slash twist right now. Get 20% off by using the code TWIST20. That's code TWIST20 for 20% off at house of macadamias.com slash twist.### Assistant: A lot of things were happening simultaneously. So this is a little 2020 hindsight, but. You know, our first three years we were we were buying property around the country with a, with the thesis that I described that, you know, it was, there was going to be, um, you know, constraints and, you know, where, and there was going to be a real need and there was going to be a real benefit to being able to deliver that, uh, quickly. And so if we could get a headstart on, um, things like preliminary designs and getting site control that we would be able to you know, be in good position for the, you know, market opportunity when it presented itself. And so, and we weren't exactly in stealth, but, um, you know, we, there weren't really like really customers to talk to. Um, like we were going to all the conferences and we were telling people we're buying property and we're interested in fleets. And they're like, you're doing what? Like, I don't understand the connection. And so to our, to our investors perspective, As you rightly noted, there's... Obviously, there's a corporate element to what we're doing, but there's also a real estate acquisition and development angle to what we're doing. And so to our investor's perspective, we're purchasing some assets with a thesis around energy transition, which... And we had to raise appropriate capital from the appropriate sources to be able to do that. And so they we're interested and, you know, would keep tabs on us and keep tabs on market opportunity. And they would, you know, had kind of seen us as folks in the energy transition space. And we're kind of pushing us on, you know, what other kinds of assets are out there like that. And then simultaneously, we're having these conversations with with fleet operators. And we're talking to a fortune 10 head of transportation operations. And the properties we're buying were like metaphorically, think like the property next to an Amazon distribution center. And imagine if Amazon came and said, Hey, Can you give us a proposal for what charging infrastructure, like what a turnkey charging infrastructure would look like on the neighboring property? This sounds really interesting. And at the time, our team was just, I didn't get to tell you my and my team's full background, but our team was just pretty lean and mostly just focused on acquiring real estate until the market opportunity really presented itself. And it was at that point that we felt like, wow, we really have product market fit with just the land that we've bought. Or we called it land market fit. And we felt like Yeah, absolutely. We'll bring you a proposal." But then we came back with ourselves and we were like, wow, to be able to deliver a proposal that scope, we're really going to need to build out the rest of the company. And that's when we sat down with our investors and talked about what that was going to look like. And also talked about what I said before about, you know, their interest in the work that we had done over the past couple of years, acquiring, you know, assets with this differentiated point of view. And that's when we made the decision to recruit a team with the capabilities of like delivering on that technical vision while we continued to build the fund and be able to back them in, in building the business. And you know, and ultimately invest in other businesses like it.

### Human: Yeah, I think because I'm so passionate about these conversations, I make content exactly talking about these things. I think if you're curious about something or if you've had a life experience that can be a teachable moment for others, the way to reach people and the way to educate young kids today is literally on these platforms that they're navigating. And they're going through all these things of these viral moments of, oh, maybe I should start posting because people are getting these opportunities. They also need to hear this other side of social media and where you're going to help them Realize that because parents don't fully understand it at this point. I think even chamath on the all-in podcast was talking about like, you know, just like with the pandemic and like, this is the only way to socialize with their friends and like how he couldn't really reign in like the social media addiction that like all kids have today, everything like that. Not even in Chamath's wealthy position that he doesn't feel like he can fully comprehend and understand that that's how all parents are, who the people who need to educate kids on these are people like our age who have been through these like threatening or like negative experiences and posting on them so that they get on these Algorithms the for you pages of these kids and they can understand that side of social media too. It's actually really important I'm so like we were talking about earlier like as you are going through life and experiencing learnings like Share that you could have the ability to share that and make an impact on that with the world You don't have to be like yeah a child wellness expert to just be talking about these things People who have real-life experience are the best to be talking about them### Assistant: Yeah. And if people are more, I am freaked out by family vloggers. It freaks me the heck out. I guess I wasn't really. My parents could post, I guess, on they could have had a blog, but that wasn't really a thing when we were younger. They could post us on Facebook, but still doesn't have this reach that we are seeing over on YouTube, for example. And a great person that breaks this down is Tiffany Ferguson. I think her name's like Tiffany Ferg over on YouTube and her I think her YouTube channel, I'm totally could be botching this whole thing. I think it's like the dark side of family vlogging. And if the title doesn't give it away enough, like she's pretty critical of it. And I think it's a great thing to dive into. And, you know, it makes me think like I see people, another famous podcaster, Dax Shepard, who does Armchair Expert, for example, doesn't post photos of kids on the Internet. Or if he does, he puts like emojis over their face. And I'm like, wow, this is so interesting. And then going back to relationships, it kind of got me thinking that the first time you kind of like the, like our parents' generation showed off their significant other to the world was on their wedding day, like their wedding day. It was their wedding. You know what I mean? Like, or, you know, maybe prom, like something where it's like an event where all your friends are there. And now we have like an audience of people, even once we don't even know, scaled 10 times, whatever you're probably having at your wedding, at our fingers. tips. So I'm interested to see how our relationships not just romantic but with your family and with other people like down the line could it get to the point where like I get hesitant honestly even posting my own friends on my social media platform um any social media platform I get nervous about unless I know that they're also chronically online and okay with it I try not to post them on the internet. I also We talked about this yesterday. Don't post my location ever. Like if I'm walking somewhere, none of my Instagram stories are of where I am in that moment. And I almost never use Snapchat anymore. Almost never post on my stories because I don't want people knowing where I am. Like people are freaking creepy on the Internet. Oh, so creepy. And I yeah, but it's it's crazy, though, now that we're going to I feel like we had like stagnant photos on Instagram that were really, really cool. And now we're going more and more to seeing social media where it's like, what are you doing right here right now? Even with Be Real, it's like, where are you in this exact moment? Tick tocks, people, the algorithm picks you up if you're posting every single day like this instantaneous location giving information is being blasted. How can we teach the younger generation under us to guard their information and have better Internet etiquette? Because we are not seeing it right now. We are seeing people sharing things on the Internet, my opinion, especially over on TikTok that I'm like, dude, you don't want a job one day. And not to sound like prude or anything, but there's some stuff that people are saying. And I'm like, I don't know. How do we teach people to draw a line?

### Human: Can we see the birth of a startup that takes advantage of globally accessible talent in a way that it hasn't before?### Assistant: Yeah, I mean, I think, for people who are smart, it's, um, it's going to become the differentiator and the secret weapon for companies, you're going to be able to fill a position in, you know, 10 to 20% of the time, because getting people to move to a city to take the job was getting harder and harder. Operate your family, operate yourself, get an apartment, pay all those costs. And then what I think's happened is the most talented people, are going to basically say, I want the lifestyle of the CEO or the general partner at that venture firm, which is to say, you know, CEOs of huge companies are like, yeah, I'm I spend the summer in the Hamptons, I spend, you know, a month of the winter in Miami, and I'm in Aspen for a month skiing, and then I'm in New York for eight months. the next two levels down are getting that same treatment, which is I'll call the CEO treatment, where you get to define this. And then if you embrace that, you'll have less employees doing more happier employees, more efficient employees with the lower, lower the risk, lower the time to hire somebody. And it's just going to be a massive competitive advantage, I think. And so everybody's getting in on it. I opened a Canadian company and have Canadian bank accounts and all this stuff, because we're hiring so many Canadians, a lot of the talent, you know, was not able to come to the United States. So for the last four years, you had all this talent, go to the university system in Canada, or just move there and kind of wait in a holding pattern. So I was like, Alright, screw it, just set up a company up there. So we set up a company. And now I've got a dozen employees in Canada, which is great for exchange rate. But it's also great because we can be a premier employer in Canada, whereas in the valley, we're, you know, solid, but we're up against Sequoia and YC and other places as places to go work. So that's like, I think the really interesting thing is, you know, you could be a Facebook or a Google or an Uber and Airbnb employee anywhere. And that's just going to be amazing. So yeah, it's a it's a brave new world. I think online events are here to stay just in terms of what you and I do. I find that people really like these and they show up for them. And the going to your boss and saying, I need to go to Hong Kong for $20,000. And you know, we got a couple of clients there, I'm going to check in on kind of hard to justify that these days of two weeks out of the office is going to be worth it, right? We always have that debate. Is it worth it for you to go to Hong Kong? Okay, well, that client spends a quarter million dollars, that one spends a million dollars. Yeah, we should go. Now. It's like, let's just send them a box of chocolates. And we'll do a zoom meeting, you know, like this is probably unnecessary. So I do think travel for business is going to be a big loser in all this, but travel for fun and joy. And for people who live more nomadic lifestyles is going to make up for it. Right? So it'd probably be a wash.

### Human: Jeffrey, I actually was going to reference something you now famously told the Times back in the spring, and that was, I attribute everything that's gone wrong to coronavirus. Everything. Would you temper that statement now?### Assistant: All right, so this is super candid. I appreciate him. And I think, yeah, he brings up product market fit there and the fact that the pandemic did remove that commute time. And I will say there is something to that. We have seen reports that podcasting, listenership and viewership went down in the pandemic because people weren't commuting as much and needed to fill that hour and a half of their day. And maybe they spent it working or maybe they spent it watching TV since they had a TV in front of them and they could do that. I'm not sure I buy that. I think the person asking the question there had an astute point when they said, hey, was this really Snapchat and TikTok, which is flourishing? And that's user-generated content. And that's free to produce. And what you don't see in user-generated content, UGC, is that in UGC, for everything that goes viral, there's at least 100,000 videos, maybe a quarter million videos that didn't. So you're really playing the law of numbers there. We're going to have 250,000 videos. And then this one of a guy drinking ocean spray is going to go viral. And it's very hard to create viral videos. And that way everybody tried to figure out that science. Some people are better at it than others. But it's hard to build a business on breaking viral videos unless you're UGC and you can just have a big swath of them. So they picked something between even when we think about how narrow this product was, it sat between a vlog and a TikTok. And it sat between a comedy short film and a vlog and a TikTok. I mean, this seems like an area where putting massive production value is a mistake. And I think Katzenberg's skill has been to spend the money on building great content. He has an incredible track record of creating Disney hits and creating Shrek, Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast. Aladdin, Lion King, I mean, and really helping with that Pixar Disney relationship back in the day when he worked for Eisner, eventually leaving to do DreamWorks, SKG, and then doing Kung Fu Panda, Shark Tale, Madagascar, How to Train Your Dragon. Those actually are all very successful. And so he's used to spending big money on big projects. not little money on little projects. And so I think that might have been the mismatch of Katzenberg's skill set. But Katzenberg does has the ability to raise big swaths of money, which obviously is what makes the story so sensationalistic. I do think it takes a lot of guts to go out and try something this ambitious, and obviously a lot of lessons there. It's easy to go dunk on them. But to be honest, the people who are investing this money have trillions of dollars collectively, literally, when you look at those people who invested, they have trillions of dollars. So while this seems like a lot of money to people who are starting their careers, not small people, but small projects, it seems like a lot of money. For people on Katzenberg and Meg Whitman's level, and the people investing, it's actually not large amounts of money. They routinely put billions of dollars into movie studios and these kind of projects. So you don't have to cry for any of those investors. And then let's go. Here's my man Carl Cantanilla talking about the attributing the failure to COVID.

### Human: Well, it all is. It's all gambling. This is just higher risk gambling. And so just choose your risk accordingly. I'm sort of like, I mean, maybe I'm making a hard turn from public radio here, but I don't understand this sort of, you know, parochial, like, overly parental approach, like, well, only certain p I mean, you know, we've talked at nauseam about accredited investing and the rules for that, and why there need to be these sort of extra protections. But like, it feels a little hypocritical to me to say we're going to allow this vehicle to exist, even though it's inherently and fundamentally risky. And then to then come along and be like, we're going to make special rules for this thing that we specifically allowed to exist. Like, no, no. If it's fair game, it's fair game.### Assistant: They can be riskier. Which means, if they're out of favor and nobody wants them, there might be some cherry picking you could do here. If you lost a ton of money in SPACs, and they're all on the floor, you could actually start following them. And a great thing to do would be to, if you really are trying to learn how to invest, if like, my brother was asking me, this is what I always use as my disclaimer. And they're like, I'm obsessed with SPACs. I'm like, okay, take $1,000. And here's what I want you to do. you to pretend it's 100,000. Take the $1,000 and allocate it to 10 specs at $100 each. And then I want you to reallocate every 30 days. So on the first of the month, you reallocate based on the data, your instinct, what you've researched, do that for 12 months. And then look, did the thousand become 2000? Or did it become 500? And then did you learn anything? And did you were your bets, write down your bets, write down why you reallocated, why you dropped one, why you double down. And this would be, then what you can do is you can add two zeros to it. So what I did when I was starting to learn poker is I would go down to Hollywood Park, I played the smallest game possible $1 $2. And I would add three zeros. So I pretended I was playing $1,000 $2,000. And what that did in my mind was, it allowed me to pretend that I was really, you know, investing large amounts of money. And so I would play better. And then I would pretend I was playing $1 $2 again. And I would try any stack strategy. I wanted to and I wrote about this in my book, angel, where I started playing what I call Jedi poker, I put the blaster shell down. I literally would peel up my cards at the poker table and put my thumb over them. everybody at the table thought I knew what my cards were. I didn't know what my cards were. Wow. And then I put my poker chip back on top of it, I'd look at the table. And I would make my decision solely on what the other players were doing. And then I could I started saying, I think that person's weak. I think they're bluffing. I think that person's strong. I think they're medium strong. Okay, if they're medium strong, if I raise them, they're gonna fold. And let me try taking my time. Let me try checking my cards twice. Before I make my bet. Let me try making fast bets only where I just so I could see if they could pick up on my tells. And this became like amazing, because sometimes when I play Jedi poker, I play better poker than knowing what my cards were. And I was like, Wait a second, this game is not just about my cards. It's about what cards they think I have and what cards they're representing to me. And so that's the advice I'm trying to give people here by not giving financial advice, but giving thoughtful advice on how to learn. And one of the lessons here is, if you want to be a private market investor, and that's what SPACs kind of are, even though they're publicly traded, be careful.

### Human: As it were, it's all happening. I was looking up the year to date stock charts, stock price charts of Apple and Amazon to see if I could use them to make a bit of a prediction on Apple in particular. Because you do see this dip and spike model that isn't too different. Like if you were to look at this chart and compare it to Amazon year to date. Yeah. Amazon maybe has a little bit more of a steady decline, but it's not that different. So if stock price alone is the reason like. Yeah. But that doesn't Yeah, I don't know.### Assistant: Well, this is gonna get as I had said about my Facebook prediction that they'll start buying back their own stock at these low prices. That's also going to put an interesting rub in here. Hey, you're laying people off, austerity measures, buying back your stock at low prices. But the good news is, if that all is happening, what that means is the companies will become stronger, then they'll hit more earnings and profitability. And then we will change the mindset from one of scarcity to one of abundance. And so this is just for people who are going through the first time this is how it goes people get really scared people then clench up. They cut spending they try to understand their spending they look at all units i did this recently i just told him hey tell me every sass piece of software we're working on tell me every reoccurring charge on our credit cards let's see if we can clean some of that up. So in a time like this, that's what business owners do. And so, and I've seen it in some SAS companies, some SAS companies that had low product market fit with some of their customers had people churn. And so, you know, you're going to see SAS businesses churn, you'll see people cancel consumer subscriptions, you know, 10, 20%. And so now you have that headwind. Plus you have to work harder to get e-sale. E-sale might be lower dollar amount. So it's just going to be work. And this is the process. The good news is all of these people will start companies. And that's another way that after the fire rips through, you have the new seedlings, right? So you have this crazy forest fire. It's part of nature. clearing out the brush, and then all of a sudden new new oaks, new evergreens, new redwoods will start growing. And starting tonight, November 14, I am teaching Pound University week one, and I was in there and I, you know, despite all this, like negativity out there, Molly, I spent a couple hours last night, instead of binge watching TV, I just decided I would, you know, just do a little chat room with some of the founders for Pound University. And we're using a cool piece of software called Circle. It's like a It's kind of like Slack plus Notion. And I'm evaluating all the software, but it's kind of neat. Like there. I wish Notion and Coda had chat rooms in it. But the idea of having like a chat room associated with a page is going to be coming. So that is something I'm really interested in. And I was just talking to founders, and I just great to see people who are working at other companies quitting. and starting companies or at night, moonlighting and learning how to start startups. That is the viable option. Instead of sitting around with your, you know, sitting on your hands, why not put those hands to work? If you do get laid off, find two of your friends. If you're builders, if you're just idea people, you know, you probably want to learn a skill beyond ideas. Those are the first people to get cut marketers, HR people. Like if you could actually build a product, you know, I'm talking about just if you want to do a startup, right? I'm not saying those aren't skills, but, you know, to actually be able to build a product is the ultimate skill.

### Human: Exactly. So with Waitroom, we're basically moving to unlimited video. So you can do your video calls on our platform and no 40 minute cutoff. And because we're going to monetize purely on AI features. Also, when Zoom had the 40-minute limit, first of all, they were a lot smaller and it was 10 years ago, 12 years ago, whatever it was. The markets moved on. Video conferencing is super cheap. It costs nothing. What are you really charging for? I really believe the next wave of product innovation and product development is basically taking great products that worked in the pre-AI era and make them 10x better.### Assistant: If you look at Notion, I have Notion AI. I'm also playing for ChatGPT for my entire team. So I told my entire team, just pay for ChatGPT so you get ChatGPT4 and all the plugins early. And about probably two out of three, maybe half my staff is actually using it. The other half, I'm like trying to push to use it and they're kind of lidditing it, which I'm not pleased with. Sherpa Jason. Sherpa Jason. It's so hard. Like, I'm just like, you know, just getting people who are on the verge of like not realizing they're going to antiquate themselves if they don't get their butts in gear and start embracing this technology. It's really hard. I'm like, and I say it explicitly, like, I think you're like, not going to be employable in a year if you don't know how to use these tools. I don't know how to say it more clearly, folks. But notion is eight bucks a month, right? To add AI. So if you've already got, you know, plus business enterprise, you're like, hey, eight bucks a month per member. And I'm like, well, you know, 20 members 180 bucks a month, whatever that is 160 bucks a month, 2000 a year, plus I'm paying 2000 a year for chat GP $4,000 a year 20 person team couple million in payroll actually makes sense for me to spend and buy both just on the off chance that one person prefers using notion AI to chat you before I would pay for five of these services $100 per employee per month, just if they would use any of them because it will add what 40% seems like the right number, because I think people are going to be 30 40% more efficient with these things. Listen, I work with super early stage companies at launch, like literally year zero, they haven't even incorporated yet. And then we hit the series a people have 1000s of dollars in Mr. And they maybe they've only raised a couple 100,000 before that series a and they don't have their insurance set up. And in fact, we recently had a great startup that didn't have DNO, and we had to really stop everything because they were having board meetings, they were making massive decisions, there were legal issues. And they didn't have the basic DNO insurance that protects directors and officers. So we send them right to Embroker. Embroker is business insurance built specifically for startups. A single application will help your startup get four quotes for four lines of coverage in 15 minutes. Think about that four quotes, four lines, 15 minutes. And they're going to connect you with one of their expert brokers for unmatched service that goes beyond your policy. We use it at launch. It's easy peasy lemon squeezy. It's easy breezy. What more do I need to tell you? I use it. I love it. A lot of our startups use it. They love it. Try and broker today with the code twist, and you'll get 10% off their startup package in broker.com slash twist. That's e m b r o k e r.com slash twist and use the code twist for 10% off. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. I don't know if you're going to need to hire people.

### Human: I love that.### Assistant: It's gross. And, and it's these like white guys who, you know, live in San Diego or whatever. And then they pretend they have some system where they're going to teach you how to do what you and I do for a living, right. But you and I are not taking meetings with people who are curious about entrepreneurship, we're taking, like we said before, like, hey, show us your customers or whatever. So there's this big gap in the market, which is I'm interested in startups. Yeah, but I don't know anything. But I got a lot of energy. And I might even have a little bit of capital to invest in, or I got some time to invest it in. And they come in. And I tell you, these guys are such scumbags. They will say, I'll put you on a payment plan for the course. And they make them sign a contract. Wow, the person pays 10 times $1,000 $10,000 to take a course, they don't get anything out of it. And you know what they're teaching in the course, here's what SEO is, here's what a click funnel is, you know, here's how to build a landing page. And all they're doing is repeating the stuff that you know, people in our industry build web pages for and they build this like very light course that you could get for free on intercoms website or, you know, HubSpot has all the information for free and videos on their website because they want you to buy their product for $99 a month. So literally, these people could go to HubSpot, but they don't know what that is. And so these people come in and just intercept them, charge them $10,000, make them sign non disclosures. And sometimes they even get them to take loans out. So they're like, here's a payday loan company. go there, get a loan to take my course. And they fall for it, because they don't know any better. I mean, how would you know any better? My mom might fall for it. You know, she's, she's a nurse, she doesn't know how business and startups work. And so I'm specifically calling these people out on clubhouse, and I'm stopping them. I'm just absolutely just letting people know what the funnels are. And then I'm taking my founder university course. And I'm just going to make it into like, So you want to start a startup, here's like step one, step two, step three. And I'm going to make it just to totally fuck with these guys. I'm going to charge $1. And I'm literally hiring a full time teacher. And I'm going to charge $1. And maybe have 10,000 people do it a year, just $1. Just to make a point. I'll teach them everything for $1. And then I'll figure out, I'll get some sponsor to pay for the other stuff. I'll get HubSpot to underwrite it so that when the, if, you know, 10% of them make it to the end of the course, they might become HubSpot customers or I'll get Zendesk or one of my people to, you know, support it. But I am, I tell you right now, I am, I am livid. I'm going to come over the top and I am stopping. This is not happening on my watch.

### Human: I mean, it's, I mean, especially like, you know, your guys is, you have such a large audience, like your voices are in our heads all day. Yeah. So it's like, if you heard it in the wild, you're like, oh my God, you know, it's like, oh, I know that voice. I know that it's like Tom Brokaw of this era. You know what I mean? Like, it feels like that.### Assistant: Correct. Yeah. Like people, and also it's habitual. That's the thing other people don't realize is once you put that into your, you subscribe to it and you get the next issue, you know, this was the power of RSS, really simple syndication. Shout out Dave Weiner. Um, man, it's just the fact that it, oh, there's another one. Okay. Yeah. Maybe I'll have another one. Sure. You know, it's like the bartender bringing you a refill to your drink without you asking for it. It's like, oh, it's there. I might as well have a sip. Listen, we work with super early stage companies that my investment firm launch, you know, pre Series A, maybe got a couple $1,000 a month in revenue, you've raised a couple $100,000, maybe a million dollars, right? That's the early days, year one or two of a startup. And I'll be honest, a lot of times startups, they don't have their insurance. They haven't set that up yet. They haven't set up their accounting properly. They're getting things cleaned up. In fact, I was recently had a great startup, but they didn't have DNO insurance that basically protects your directors and officers. That's the D directors, people on the board, officers, the people who work at the company, right? Directors and officers insurance is super important. So what do we do? We sent them right to in broker our friends over and broker or a business insurance company that's built specifically for startups. You just fill out a simple application, right and then startups get four quotes for four lines of coverage in 15 minutes, four quotes, four lines of coverage, 15 minutes, easy breezy lemon. squeezy. That's right. They connect you with one of their expert brokers for unmatched service that goes beyond your policy. And listen, you might think, oh, it's too early to have insurance. It's not that expensive. It's not that complicated, because in broker makes it easy. So here's what I want you to do try and broker today with the code twist, and you'll get 10% off. their startup package at mbroker.com slash twist. That's mbroker.com slash twist. We love mbroker. I use mbroker. They're an amazing team. They do a great job for startups, whether you're in year one or year five, go use mbroker.com slash twist. So how has it affected business? Uh, I don't think you have advertising on it. I don't remember hearing ads, but you have something called like a chatty Kathy club, which I, which I think is a discord, which I think people pay for, but you kind of don't explain it on the show, which I think is interesting. Um, and you also don't talk about your own business on the show. So you don't talk your book too often. So I didn't know about ghost. I knew about the other stuff you were doing because when somebody sent it to me, I just clicked the links in the show description. But someone's like, yeah, no, Fred Wilson or somebody, you know, uh, your friend backed them. And I was like, oh really? What's that? So what's, what's the philosophy of the format and making money from it or not? Uh, you know, how do you look at it?

### Human: There's no pushback. Nice little pharma business you got here.### Assistant: Oh, exactly. And so, you know, I think we would all agree precision medicine is a much better way to go and we'll eventually steer towards there. But what I'm trying to ground us in is all the ways that you could take advantage of this system to become in control. So, what the PBM industry did is they created a formulary. And it started out like, hey, I have a formulary. And to be on my formulary, you provide me rebate dollars. And so what you're creating is kind of a pay to play economic scenario. Because what if someone says, well, I don't really want to pay? Oh, well, then you're not on my formulary." Now, when the PBMs were a bit more fragmented, that didn't mean as much. Someone would be like, all right, well, you've got like 8% market share, they've got 15% market share, not that big of a deal. But I always like to point out, out of every industry in the United States, the pharmaceutical industry is the greatest gift. anyone could ever receive economically. It's an inelastic demand curve. It does not matter what happens with the stock market or interest rates. Drug utilization has held rock steady for 30 years. No other industry could make this claim. In addition, drug prices for brand and specialty only appear to miraculously go up. And then you have what we call the compounding effect of proliferation of specialty. The average cost of drugs is going up due to the introduction of high-cost therapies. And so, I'm not here to debate what's right or wrong about our patent system or the price of drugs. What I am trying to have everybody understand for a second is when you have the perfect market, you never have to innovate. I mean, think about the advances we've made in things like construction to real estate to even the finance, e-commerce. There's always been ebbs and flows and you have to have the reset button become more efficient, become more competitive. But what if you're in an industry you never have to be competitive? In fact, it rewards you for being slothful. And The more focused you are on profit, the better. You don't innovate, you consolidate. Simultaneously, if we're looking at the history of the PBM industry, what's going on is, well, the PBM industry is eating itself. and you're seeing hyper consolidation. And they're literally from 2000 up until last month, there have been 30 plus mergers and acquisitions that have created jumbo entities. So you have literally three entities, you have Cigna Express Scripts, you have United, which owns Optum, you have CVS, which owns the carcass of Caremark, which they took over. And what this is, is you have three entities, depending upon how you do the math, utilization or GPO economics controls anywhere from 75 to 90% of the purchasing power in the country. So this is important, because if we go back to my formulary example, in early 2000s, pharma could kind of push back a little bit and be like, yeah, I don't know if I'm going to pay your fee. Well, now I knock on your door and I say, I control 30% of the patient utilization in the country. And if you don't pay me to be on my formulary, you're probably going to be fired.

### Human: For SaaS companies. Right. And the dotted black line is kind of the 10-year average. And you see where multiples had traded to. And at the beginning of this year, the argument that I was having around the poker table, because Chamath was a little doomy about the world. And he's like, dig a hole, climb into it, buy treasuries, don't buy any of this stuff. And I was like, that was a fair argument to make when we were at the **** peak. But now that we're down here, the consensus is saying the world's ending. The consensus was Mike Wilson at the start of the year. He said, after what's left of this current technical rally, we see the S&P discount 20% interest sometime in Q1 of 2023, and we're going to 3,000 on the S&P. Instead, we're at 4,200. That's how wrong. And he, Mike Wilson was the guy who was most right in 21. But mental flexibility required that you changed your framework. And at the start of the year, the argument I was making to our team, and to you guys, was the framework has changed. This is no longer about rates up and inflation up. It's now about economy and earnings growth. What relevance does that have for an angel conference? This was out of consensus thinking. This was the consensus. Mike Wilson, dig a hole, get into it, buy treasuries. We're going to $3,000 on the S&P. And it's hard to fight that consensus with my LPs because they're like, this was the smartest guy over the last year. So listen to the smart guys. When I'm pushing chips onto the table, they're like, whoa, why are you pushing chips onto the table? Now we've had our best start to the year in the history of the firm on the public fund side. Again, an example of being outside the consensus. And this is what we said, the reset has created fair entry. So we're in the middle, we're in the beginning of a major platform disruption. Multiples are below the 10-year average. The platform disruption being AI. Correct. Again, I'm skipping through a bunch of these because we're doing this, but you know, tech's already discounted. It's the sh** you can drop on your foot, the tractors and everything that everybody hid in during COVID that is now expensive. So just think about, again, are you a consensus thinker or are you outside the consensus? Are you chasing what everybody else is talking about or are you not? But Here's, here's the real thing. At the end of the day, all of this macro stuff that we do is very relevant for the public stuff.### Assistant: But in the end, the innovation that starts in this room, trumps all that macro nonsense in the long run, which was the point that got very heated on this last all in pod that you've probably heard we had this kind of big flare up where it's like, wow, this balance sheet for America is unsustainable. True. are geopolitical issues that are really troubling. Absolutely true, whether it's China, Taiwan, Russia, Ukraine. And there seems to be a culture war that's incredibly distracting and perhaps important to a small number of people, but maybe unimportant compared to the bigger challenges the United States faces. Certainly not as important as having a solid balance sheet. But during all of that, I just keep looking at the companies we're seeing as compared to other global companies. And when I meet with people from Japan, or when you and I went to the UAE, or I go to Australia, or I go to other countries, they're all trying to replicate the innovation cycle here. And the innovation cycle here, I believe is the strongest I've seen in my lifetime. Listen, when you're a fund manager like me trying to raise money for your fund, it's it's not an easy task. Let's face it. Well, there is a new way for you to find elite institutional LPs and it's I connections and this platform, which is an app online in person. it allows you to meet the most elite capital allocators. I won't tell you the names, but I was able to get in touch with and meet with beep, beep, and beep, three of the major funds that I was looking to meet with all on iConnections. These are the biggest LPs in the world, endowments, foundations, sovereign wealth funds, fund of funds, et cetera. iConnections is specifically built to connect the global network of capital allocators, LPs, with a diverse range of fund managers, GPs, general partners like me. And they do this two ways. They got the iConnections platform, and then they do the bespoke events. The events are amazing. And you have an LP meeting schedule inside the app. You can share documents, you get a database of all of these contacts and you get access to these world class events, which have exclusive content like me. I am over the moon with iConnections. I love it. And this is like the product I was always looking for. And if you're a fund manager of any kind, you can sign up for iConnections at iConnections.io slash twist. That's right. iConnections.io slash twist. First 25 funds that sign up for iConnections Miami in 2024 in January of next year will receive a 20% discount. This is the largest capital allocator intro event in the world with trillions in LP money represented, sign up at i connections.io slash twist. And thanks again to my friends that I connections, they sponsored my angel summit and they bought everybody poker and dinner and everything was just very generous of them. Great team over there well worth checking out if you're a VC raising a fund, or you're a capital allocator looking to invest in funds. When you look at this innovation cycle, and we pivot to AI right now, What will that do to these four really important platform shifts? Obviously, the PCs and servers, desktop internet, mobile internet, and desktop internet was just huge. But then mobile internet made it even bigger data cloud AI, even bigger. What will I look like on this chart?

### Human: I think there was that. And so there was all of that there were like a bunch of lawsuits, it sounded like it was like a lot of like yucky, rich white women is how it, you know, ended up feeling to people.### Assistant: Yeah, I think Listen, ego is a healthy thing for a founder, being driven is healthy, but sometimes you can have blind spots. And if you look at this as a product, objectively, it was an awesome product. There was market demand women in social clubs, the feedback I got was maybe they didn't always feel welcome. Maybe they didn't feel comfortable and a women first or a women only now there's some legal issues around this they had gotten sued for discrimination because you can there's always a guy who can sue for that, like when they have female poker tournaments. And some guys Yeah, who show up for the female poker tournament and they're like, I'm gonna ruin this and you can't stop me. And it's like, Okay, dude, just we're trying to get more women to play poker. Can you just it's one tournament. And then these guys would show up these poker trolls as women, and then still pay. And so they finally came up with in you know, the the laws are you can't discriminate against people by gender, I guess, including private clubs, which seems right. But it also seems right that people should be able to have their own spaces if they want to self organize. I don't know, you know, what I think of this legally or whatever. All I know is if women wanted to have a space for themselves, I'm cool with it. I don't need to troll them. So they did in poker was those they could charge men a different price. So that men had to pay 10,000 and women paid 1000. So women got paid 10 to one for these, you know, guys who came anyway, this thing was so beautiful and well constructed, they understood their customers. And the design was gorgeous. You came to the space. And it felt like your you know, best your best friends, you know, your friend with the best taste, who had the best apartment that always hosted the greatest parties or brunches, just really well done. And then they also did amenities that seem to really appeal to women, they had a beauty salon in it with a shower, you had all the products there for free. So if you wanted to do your hair, you're having a meeting, just all really good stuff now. Yeah. there seemed to be a leak in their game that came up over and over and over and over again. And I don't know enough about this. So I'm just going based on what I saw on tik tok, and in the articles, which was, instead of having this be run, you know, this perfect product, what I think had perfect product market fit. Yeah, how they applied the membership was to be very selective, and people felt like it was run like a sorority. where you had to be cool, and they had to exclude people and maybe not run for the bottom line, the profits of the business, the sustainability of the business, because the sustainability would say, we'll keep raising the prices, have a good profit margin service to customers. If you're running a hotel, are people come in, they pay for the hotel room, you treat everybody the same. You're not saying like, Oh, apply to come stay at this hotel. And they certainly got this reputation. And I don't you might know more than me, if people in your circle talked about this place, that they let in a certain demographic, a certain type of person and maybe excluded other people.

### Human: You've made that point about YouTube. Also, like YouTube. I mean, it's so interesting that YouTube is, in many ways, like flies under the radar in these conversations. But that was an acquisition that that Unquestionably, $1.6 billion, you know, consolidated a lot more data and information inside of Google, but also maybe reduced how big YouTube could have been.### Assistant: The goal of business is to kill your competitors. Yep. So what we're talking about here is not that we're not saying don't try to kill your competitors. If you're, you know, Google, don't try to beat Yahoo. If you're Microsoft, don't try to beat Apple and vice versa. Right? We want competition. We want people in a dogged fight to win. That's good for consumers. Ultimately, what we're talking about here is does an acquisition result in less competition. So that's the framing. Is this a deal? We're talking only about deals here, not when you make a product internal. If you make a product, and you do it on the playing field, that's fine. Now there might be some bundling and some other strong price fixing. There are other things that lowering the price and losing money on something to drive out a competitor. There are nuanced anti competitive practices that you can bring up on the battlefield. But that's in the game, right? That's in the game on the court. What we're only talking about here is an acquisition. So if this was the NBA, listen, if you are great at three pointers or steals or setting picks, that's all part of the game. what we're talking about here is if you interfere with another person's contract, and you, you know, get Chris Paul to leave one team to create a super team, and there was some malfeasance there, it's only in the acquisition phrase here in that that are deals. And I think this is an interesting lens to look at. Because I think anybody who is looking at a market share, you got to take numbers out of this, because it wasn't a big acquisition, a billion dollars for Instagram, what you have to look at is in social networking, how many users did they each have? What percentage of users in the United States did they each have? And it was both very high. And that's really the lens to look at. Now, if you look at the Microsoft lens, right now, is there like, is, is, is there in terms of game share, and I don't know where we'd ever get this data. And maybe somebody could email producers at this week at startup. So we can we can continue this thread, Molly, when we look at game share, is there with Call of Duty and Diablo and Candy Crush or whatever, do these make up 60% 50% of game share? I don't think so. I think if we look at the totality of gaming, this probably Blizzard and Activision are 10% or 20% of gaming hours played or gaming users, I don't know the exact number. So it doesn't feel like it would not pass that lens, you have to take, I believe you got to take money out of it, look at market share. And I like this lens to look at it. Because as an investor, I want more competition. And I want companies to go long. The investors were very upset when Instagram sold inside information was they were throwing money at them, please don't sell. Kevin Systrom and his partner regret selling, you know, as much as one can when you make a lot of money, but obviously there's a lot of regret there. And so those are my thoughts on it. You know, if I was a shareholder in Instagram, I would have preferred they keep going preferred they keep going. And you've made that point.

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That'll help you deal with scaling your business because any major customer you try to sign up is going to say, hey, can you show us your E&O? Part of the diligence process. So you want to get it now. It's not that expensive. These things are part of the process of growing up as a startup. And you know what? I find sometimes people wait until they get burned to put on their insurance. The insurance is not that expensive. You want to do it proactively, especially if you've raised money recently. That's the perfect time. to deploy a little bit of capital into protecting the kingdom, protect your enterprise. So instantly by custom built insurance for startups, go to broker.com slash twist. And while you're there, you get 10% off. They're already amazing prices by using the offer code West TW is T in broker e m e r o k e r.com slash twist. Alright, thanks for supporting the show and broker. Love you guys. you decide to raise like a $10 million company based a $10 million fund based on this meme action, you start and this is kind of like how open the industry is because of Twitter, Clubhouse, other social platforms, previously blogs, obviously podcasts, getting into VC, literally interacting with the top VCs requires mastering Twitter, which requires arguably 100 hours of being on Twitter, maybe if you do it thoughtfully, and just copy the people who are doing interesting things or being, I'll let you say reasonably good at the Twitter. Yeah. you just slide into everybody's replies to start doing funny stuff. Obviously, I see it, you're trolling me or you're, you know, mixing it up with somebody else. And it's like, Okay, of course, I'm going to respond, you're talking about me, I have no choice. I'm at least gonna like I have a sense of humor, but you must have gotten blocked. Did you go over the line with some of these memes? Did you, you know, piss people off? Because when you're doing comedy, it's a fine line, you know, like the joke and the hurt could be right next to each other.### Assistant: I don't know why you try it to be honest. Yeah, it was kind of an accident. I mean, I had been essentially trying to prove I could be a VC from Michigan, which essentially meant being online instead of in San Francisco. And this was like early 2019 was when I finally got all the interviews and everyone was like, you got to move to San Francisco, you can't be a VC unless you're here. No. Which made sense at the time. But my, you know, when I think about like my advantage, like if you're a startup, you got to think how do you attack the incumbents? I was like, how do I compete against the incumbent VCs or just like the people who are know, probably like a shoe in to get the jobs, you know, I'm the complete opposite kind of background and network that I have set up. So I was just like, I don't think I need to be in San Francisco. So yeah, I that's kind of I just tried to figure out how to make it work. And I took an internship, took a pretty big pay cut. And I actually had to sell my house because I couldn't afford my mortgage. And then we had a rental property that you can buy real estate in Michigan for $65,000. So I sold it because I had a ton of equity in it and we had to move. So we just moved right next to my in-laws in Ann Arbor, on the other side of the state, instead of moving to San Francisco. And then pandemic hit. I joined this real estate firm called Gelt. And they were like, hey, let's raise a venture fund for our real estate LPs. And With the pandemic, COVID, they were really focused on the real estate business. It was tough to get LPs to come in. And I just had a bunch of people that were like, Turner, we've been co-investing together. If you ever start your own fund, I'm in. I had a bunch of money soft committed for this fund that I actually wasn't going out to try to do. But I just hit a point where everyone was like, yo, you got to do this. I think you'd be good. And I thought maybe in 20 years, I'd launch my own firm. I think that's what I told my... Pay your dues. Yeah, that's what I told my wife the first date that we had. I was like, what do you want to do? I was like, I want to be an investor. I want to run my own firm one day. And I was like, 23 at the time. So yeah, I think I'm 30 right now. Started raising this right before I turned 30 in January was officially when I was like, okay, I have to do something. And I just went back to all the people that I've been talking to, meeting, co-investing with all the founders I backed and told people what was happening and everybody wanted to invest. And it was my thesis was, I can use memes to get distribution online and it's way more efficient than anything else. And it was while GameStop was happening. And that was not a tough sell at the time. everyone was like oh memes duh like this makes sense so just really lucky timing with how covid the pandemic happened how memes have kind of blown up it just all kind of worked in my favor so yeah super lucky

### Human: And by the way, producer Nick just on it putting in pieces of page two, which are classically and wonderfully Bezos s let's move to the future. Why should you be optimistic about the future of e commerce and the future of amazon.com And there he goes. And then a bunch of data about why you should be so then there you go. He's got it. He's got it. I love this editor.### Assistant: That's pilot ASMR for me. Pilot ASMR. And they're so chill about it. We're coming in on it. And you're like, they're just at work. Roger that. And you're just like, oh, they're not worried in these turbulence. I guess I don't need to be. They're like, we have a level four chop, you know, dah, dah, dah. They're cool as cucumbers. So this is like, in both these instances, the analogy, we're going to go aviation, is you lost one of the two engines. And I think what they're both doing is saying, listen, losing an engine is not good, but here's how we're going to land the plane. So just great job, stay calm in an emergency. You got to channel your calm. When I worked on the ambulance in Brooklyn, that was what I saw from the senior folks ahead of me. is when we pulled up, you know, like your adrenaline is going crazy. And they were just cool as cucumbers. We'd walk up to an accident, there'd be two cars, pieces of cars everywhere, airbags. And, you know, they were just very cool, methodical. Okay, triage this person first, then we're going to do this person, we need the vitals, you do the vitals on this person, I'm going to do the vitals here. Boom. Okay, is the airway compromised? Okay, are they breathing? Okay, let's check the circulation. ABC, you know, airway, breathing, circulation was the acronym there. So think about that when you're running your business, you know, you know, do you understand the reality of your business? Do you understand how many months of runway you have left? How much revenue you actually have? How much cash is actually in your bank account? These are the things that you need to know your growth rate, your burn, what are you spending? What happens if that marketing spend goes away? Does your customer go away? Really great stuff. Startups need a central hub to store information and collaborate on work now more than ever. That's because we're all living in this crazy remote world. Everybody wants to put all the information in one place. And that one place is now notion, documents, projects, all that stuff. It kind of goes in the same place on what you could consider a wiki. When we went fully remote in March of 2020, notion became our internal knowledge bank. We even use it for external purposes, you know, like when we did this series on this week and startups called the startup checklist. Well, we just put it at this week and startups.com slash checklist. And that is all hosted on notion on notion, every team from engineering to sales can work together seamlessly. And they have 500 integrated apps, including things like Google and Slack collaborate in real time and tailor workflows to your needs hundreds of 1000s of teams worldwide. are already delighting their employees with notion notion is now a worldwide community of millions. And they're creating templates and tutorials. So the product is continually improving. Just go to notion.so and use the promo code twist and you will get $250 off their annual team plan. That could be a couple of months for free. So it's pretty great for a growing startup like yours. That's notion.so and use that promo code twist during checkout for $250 off.

### Human: We're very close.### Assistant: I think it's going to be amazing when the data gets in there, too, and then in consultation with doctors. I think doctors are going to become better doctors because they'll be augmented. They can't possibly know every edge case. No, they can't. If doctors can become 10 times more efficient, what I would like to have is 10 doctors. And I use chat GPT, all my data is poured into it. It gives them some sort of dashboard. And I have 10 doctors and they each give me a recommendation every month based on my new blood tests, my weight, my sleep patterns. And yep, all 10 of them give me what they think I should do. And the chat gbt then feeds back to them. Here's what the consensus is that the person should do, what do you think? And now you have group, a group of humans analyzing what the what the AI is doing. And they kind of work together in reinforcement learning to how do we make this person a peak human. And this can be incredibly powerful. This is one of the things I think people When we start testing this in order to trust it, I want to have doctors give opinions, AI give opinions, and then compare it to doctors using AI giving an opinion, and then have another doctor or senior level or a doctor or, you know, committee, look at the three or four answers, and rate them and say what was lacking. And this is where it's going to get interesting, because when they would do I don't know if you remember this, but there was a time when they before OCR really worked well, they were trying to get a lot of documents on the internet. And so they would literally ship legal documents to India to have people type them in, because they could just send them there by the boatload. Here's like 10 years worth of legal documents, go and get them in there. What they would do is they'd have two people because labor was cheap. And they needed to have high fidelity, they'd have two people type the documents in. So they'd be sitting there typing, turn the page type it. And then once those were in the computer, they would look for where people weren't, you know, correct. So if somebody typed in Vinny, and I typed in Vinny with one n, it would highlight that. for somebody to look at it, that person would see the document a third person and look at the Oh, why does one have two ends one have one end, oh, it's an M, they're both wrong, whatever it is. And those kind of edge cases, well, AI is doing that particularly well. And humans can do that with the results. It's actually what's happening with training data when when a Tesla or some cruise hits an intersection that doesn't understand it, it disengages or it has a problem or it stutters. all of those intersections get sent to a group of humans who look at and say, this is the proper way to navigate it. And they literally, I don't know if they hard code, but they they do reinforcement learning, I think, and in some cases, they might hard code if there's an error, here's how to navigate the specific intersection. And I think that's what's going to make a tipping point. in self-driving in the next year or two. I think we're going to hit a tipping point. Oh, we're very close.

### Human: Uh, no, actually, I thought about writing a book, which I did. You know, there's, I guess, between looking for power or influence, I'd rather have influence and, you know, maybe have some people who are braver than I am to give them some ideas, or at least the way an investor would look at the world to try to, to try to fix some of the problems that you know, everyone pretty much sees.### Assistant: But you ever have that 10 jack suited and you're just like, this is on the bubble, I could play it, and then you watch the flop and it comes down, jack, jack, 10, and you're like, oh my God, I'm an idiot, and it's like, hmm. You wouldn't be an edit if it came down, you know, like Ace King and brick, you know, like you got you dodged a bullet. You can't look backwards like that. When we get back on this from this quick break, I want to talk about education. You start the book out talking about education and you are on fire in this opening chapter. You are tilted, to use a poker analogy, about the state of education, which I see as a trend Mike Bloomberg, anybody who's done well in the markets or in business or in capitalism, when they see the state of education, they lose their minds and they're appalled. But you have great ideas as well about education. I want to talk in the next segment about some amazing ideas and fights you've had about charter schools. And then I want to ask you about income sharing agreements, something I've been looking deeply at and made a couple of investments on when we get back on This Week in Startups. Hey, everybody, I want to take a minute to thank Embroker for sponsoring this week in startups and supporting us all year long. What a great company. And it's very simple. You need to have insurance. I don't know how many times I got to talk to you about this. You have to have insurance for your company. It's time to grow up. and it's time to save money and to do it online quickly and easily. And Broker's technology will let you save a ton of time and a ton of money. Prices are 20% lower, and you get better coverage than all these crazy incumbents who are slow. That's not what you want. You want cyber insurance, so if you get hacked, you're covered. You want DNO insurance, directors and officers. You're the officers of the company, not like police officers, officers as in executives, and directors are the people on your board. You need DNO if you're gonna have a board, if you're gonna have officers in a company, the company. And finally, this Employment Practices Liability, EPL. So you're gonna talk to your attorney about cyber, DNO, ENO, and finally EPL. And the best place to get insurance today is that in broker.com slash twist, E-M-B-R-O-K-E-R.com slash twist, where if you use the offer code twist, you will get 10% off. They do a great job. They do many of my companies. In broker.com slash twist, get that 10% off using the offer code. Twist. All right, I want you to stop what you're doing right now. I want you to go to Amazon, Audible, or your local bookseller, whatever you prefer. Get the audio book, get the book. It's called Common Sense, The Investor's Guide to Equality, not equity, equality, opportunity, and growth. And it's a bit about markets, but it's also about how to solve society's biggest problems. If I were looking at this book, Joel, and I didn't know you, say you're thinking about running for office at some point. You ever think about that?

### Human: Did it go right? Sure. Well, the the general economist problem with minimum wage is that if you're if you're contributing $8 worth of value, and you force people to pay you $15, a few things happen. One, you know, those places go out of business, or they're not competitive, or two, they use technology to substitute as much as possible because, you know, that's not a good economic bargain if someone has $8 of skills that they can contribute and you're forced to pay them $15. And so what I talk about in the book is our earned income tax credit, nothing I invented, it's actually our third biggest social welfare program in the country, where basically for mostly people with families, we give them extra money, if you're willing to get a job and willing to work, we'll pay you more. Okay. And it would be nice if we could pay everyone 15 to $20. You know, with the earned income tax credit, we in 2018, which is the data I use in the book, we spent $68 billion, third biggest social welfare program in the country. You know, but And it's a great program. I mean, we take 6 million kids out of childhood poverty with that 68 billion. But there are studies that University of Chicago that show that actually, the net cost is closer to 9 billion, we spend 68 billion, but I took the view of an investor in, you know, all of the chapters in the book. And on this one, it turns out because of the extra employment taxes, the sales taxes, we collect the lower social welfare costs for getting people that working that wouldn't have worked because we're paying them more with the earned income tax credit, meaning it's kind of reverse income tax. If you're willing to work, we'll give you a little more money. And we give that 68 billion because of the lower social welfare costs and the low and the more taxes we collect, the net cost actually works out to $9 billion. And so You know, I suggested that if we wanted everyone to who is willing to work, that's why I'm not for universal basic income. But if you're willing to work, I think everyone should get paid. Well, it's just that you can't force businesses to pay people more, at least from an economic standpoint, it's not going to work out well, if someone's contributing $8, and you're forcing them, you're forcing a business to pay them 15. So what I'm suggesting is you're willing to work. If we could pay everyone 15 to $20 an hour, minimum, supplement their incomes from the private sector, with the government extra funding to 15 to $20. Now that would cost a trillion dollars, we're spending 68 billion, that costs us a trillion dollars. But if you go through the same logic, the net cost after the extra taxes we collect in the lower social welfare, other social welfare programs that people are now working, it would net cost would be about 600 billion. But here's the thing. We now have, there was a study at the Washington University that looked at the cost of childhood poverty. And that's a child, poor childhood health care, poor education, crime, incarceration, homelessness, social service costs, that's actually costing us right now a trillion dollars a year.### Assistant: Yeah, I'm looking at two other ISA investments. I don't know if you invest in the private markets, but I'll loop you into them if I get a deal structured. But there are people who are now doing platforms for ISAs. And this one company I was talking to, they provide Amazon Web Services, almost like a cloud, to anybody who wants to start a school. And then they don't have to worry about all the infrastructure for setting up ISAs. They'll manage all that for them and outsource it. And they actually have done it with trade schools, like plumbers and electricians. So you can take this plumbing or electric... Those schools already existed, but they were having a hard time getting people to sign up for $20,000 or $10,000 to take it. And then when they did ISIS, all of a sudden, everybody's like, oh, I don't have to put up the 10K and take the risk. Great, I'll do it. We actually have a shortage of plumbers and electricians that's happening. The average age of those professions now is over 50. And nobody wants to take those jobs. They don't even know how to get started in them. And there are other places in the world where those professions are looked at as really great ones. Let's shift and move over in terms of... I got two places I could go. I think I'm going to go with the EITC. The earned income tax credit. I have been looking at the minimum wage. The minimum wage is $7.25 for those of people who don't know. That's the federal minimum wage. In cities like Seattle, San Francisco, and New York, they have been in Florida recently with their ballot measure, all committed to a $15 minimum wage. I think the first to get there was Seattle. San Francisco is almost there. New York's almost there. And at the same time as this has occurred, Amazon, which is hated by a lot of the AOC crowd and Elizabeth Warrens of the world, very personal, bitter attacks from the Socialist Party, or the growing Socialist Party in America, compassionate capital, whatever they want to call themselves are socialists in my mind. They have been riding them hard. Amazon just got ahead of it. They said we're going to charge $15 an hour, the gig economy was giving people options. And pre pandemic, with the lowest unemployment in the history of the country. It was extraordinary, high functioning capitalism, with a massive competition for the lowest paid employees, whoever thought we would see that everybody thought it was going to be the opposite. What happened in the marketplace where companies got into this rabid competition for low end employees, entry level, whatever you want to call them, that drove companies, I think Walmart also went to $11 or $12 as their minimum wage because they're getting crushed because they can't find employees. And even McDonald's I don't know how you feel about that company. I have ties with them. They were actively fighting minimum wage increases for the last two decades. And they just agreed to stop fighting the minimum wage. So they haven't decided to advance it. But let's let's open up minimum wage and start with pre pandemic, how did we get to the place where capitalism worked, and you had a rabid, absolute dogfight to get gig workers and entry level employees. What went so right? Sure. Well, is it right?

### Human: It's really true. It started with climate. I was like, I don't have time to change anybody's mind. Now I'm like, I don't know. You know what? Like, I don't I'm not interested in your... I just want to stack more politicians on my side.### Assistant: Uh, you know, it's what's great about this also is like, he's a young guy. He's 42. Last thing is a tremendous company. And I think this is dare I say coolest. It is like, I mean, it legitimately is. I mean, he is so cool. Mike Cannon Brooks. This guy gets J cows coolest award for 2022. Because he could have taken his money. I don't know how much he spent to do this. I'm looking for the number here. But you know, this this was not cheap, I'm sure. Whatever he spent on this 11%. Okay, maybe he makes some money, but there's other people who are buying boats. You know, yeah. You know, there's other people buying a new plane getting the game. And this is like, if you think if you're optimizing for joy in your life, you're in Australia, as Molly people don't know, necessarily. But the wildfires in California, when they see the wildfires in Australia, they're like, Oh, so much like wildfires are like, really? Oh, dude, put that out. It was serious. That country was seriously on fire. And it's very simple, like, and they have the Great Barrier Reef people shows a long way away, you go to Australia, because it's the most amazing ecology, you know, ecological journey you can make in the world, you know, or it's top five, you know, along with Africa and South America, a couple other places. what he's doing is so cool. And it ultimately could be profitable, because if they are making their money off of 85% coal, and he says, Hey, let's try nuclear, let's try solar, let's do when let's do this, let's do that. Maybe this becomes profitable. Yeah. And so I love the idea of a group of people buying cult and saying, you know what, we're going to have a terms of service. Here's our terms of service, our terms of service, you can do business things that are good for business, our terms of services. If you buy this gun, we can't force you to take this course. on gun safety, or this license because your state doesn't have it. But in your state, we're just not going to sell the guns. And if your state wants these guns, you need to have a test because we don't want to be party to selling guns in a state just like Elon doesn't sell Tesla's in a state where you have to have dealerships, because what dealerships add nothing, they screw customers. So it's like if you if you don't let me sell direct and, you know, and fix the car, I'm not selling there. So and then what if cult or some other manufacturer said, you know what, our minimum age is 25 years old to buy this gun? Okay, yeah, you can sue us. But we're just gonna make a minimum age if you want to buy like a two shot rifle to go hunting and you take the test. Yeah, we'll sell it to an 18 year old. But could a could a gun company put a minimum age to buy their guns or put minimum training. Like if you, if you want to buy software, there are some companies that won't sell you the software unless you send somebody to training because they know you're going to fail with the software.

### Human: So spend the next almost decade building this community on Reddit. That's right, becomes iconic and important in the world. When did you first realize this was an important place? what are the milestones of the wall, the or WSB, I guess people refer to it as? What are the major milestones here? We all know GameStop and AMC. But were there other milestones where you saw WSB having real world impact on equities and stocks and how the markets operated?### Assistant: There were, you know, and for a lot of people, when they hear wall street bets, they obviously think GameStop. It was a big, uh, uh, for most people, it's the first time and probably only time they've heard about wall street bets. And it makes sense, right? Because it's a very niche community. It's very finance centric. Uh, you know, the only time that CNN covered wall street bets was during GameStop. That's the only reason why they ever would cover something like wall street bets. Uh, outside of that, they go back to covering the normal stuff. Um, But WallStreetBets was never about moving stock prices around. There was a lot of milestones throughout the way. So this is a community of people that are, once again, the incentives are, let's try and make money. Let's try and take on risk. Let's try and find advantages, inefficiencies, competitive advantages that we can exploit for our own benefit. There's lingo that gets used on WallStreetBets. It's funny. It's easy to understand. Sometimes you see Bloomberg actually trying to decipher it, but the concepts are finance concepts. It's known as arbitrage. When you find an inefficiency in the system, you say, hey, looks like looks like there's an error, but maybe it'd be a pricing error or maybe it'd be like some type of an asymmetry. You can say, we can actually take advantage of the way that this thing, this mechanism works out and we can profit from it. There's been a lot of examples. This sounds abstract and I apologize. I can break it down in many examples that are simple. GameStop is one such example of that. How does that look like an arbitrage opportunity? Well, If you have a lot of people that buy a thing, the price goes up, that's supply and demand. And so the arbitrage comes in in many forms. That's a lot of us and it's few of them. So even if we don't have a lot of money, if we purchase the thing, then it goes up and then we can start doing it. But it's a lot more sophisticated than that because then they go, well, we're still not enough to be able to purchase. We don't have enough money to actually push the stock high enough. So we'll wait for it to be shorted a lot. You need a high short flow so that it has a higher propensity to... It magnifies the effect. Once again, I'm not sure how technical your audience is, but it's one of those properties that makes it exacerbates the price moves. And then they said, well, we want it to even be worse. We want the price to even be more exaggerated. So then they take on these things that are called gamma, delta, they use stock options. to make it even more exaggerated. So that's how you take a price to go from $20 to $500. They do a lot of little things and they do it because they can get away with it and they understand the market well, but they've done other stuff. So I know it's a long-winded answer, but I've covered a lot of different things as far as the mentality is concerned, as far as what the incentives are concerned, as far as how the culture... These are people looking... You're talking about it as a casino, right?

### Human: Ironically, it also required sort of a new chip architecture, right? The shift from CPUs to GPUs.### Assistant: That's true. Correct. So GPUs did not exist at that time. So the early interfacing of software with the new generation of microelectrodes was all CPU-based computing, which worked just fine for tens of electrodes. And it was kind of strained at the hundreds of electrodes level. But now, you know, in the 20-teens, computing was able to catch up. And concurrent with all of that, you know, there was a generation, I include myself in this, of, you know, engineers in training, masters and doctoral level engineers who kind of cut our teeth on circuit architecture, algorithm design for how to interface with the signals coming off of these sorts of electrodes. And by the early 20 teens, I think there was a general consensus that most of the major science problems or many of the major science problems, even some of the engineering problems had basically been solved. In other words, how to how to build back-end electronics and how to encode software that would make sense of many simultaneous electrical signals coming out of the brain in a way that we could understand what the brain was trying to tell the arm or the leg or the mouth to speak. And at that point, there was a sense that to take the next step, to really transition academic science into clinical reality that would benefit people. it was time to move into a commercial and industrial setting out of the lab. And I want to give you one other piece of context, which is that, you know, think about the historical backdrop of all this work as it was happening in the United States. you know, from the early 2000s, 20 teens, we were seeing a lot of, you know, wounded young people coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan and the National Science Foundation and DARPA and other funding agencies. had a strong mandate to try to do whatever was technologically possible to take care of these motivated young people who had been serving our country. And so, that led to a tremendous amount of attention being paid to advanced prosthetics development. Not all of that was neuroprosthetics. the work took many forms, but certainly that motivation catalyzed a lot of tremendously important work. And so the government funding agencies invested heavily in the development of this technology. But at some point, it became clear that that that form of investment and the timescales that were required to secure the government grants and do the work in an academic setting, the funding wasn't enough and the timescales were too long. And in order to really translate the advances that had been developed in academia into clinical reality, it was time to move into a commercial setting. And so, in 2016, a couple of major efforts shifted attention from the academic to the commercial setting. Neuralink was one of them. Facebook had an initiative around brain-computer interfaces. A company called Kernel also was started around that time. Each of these entities put a huge, what at the time seemed like a huge amount of capital behind moving people and resources from academia into a more commercial research and development setting to build the brain computer interfaces that would actually go into the clinic. And that has given rise to a small ecosystem of advanced startup companies and a tremendous amount of talent being brought to bear in the field. And I would say that that's the best thing that happened out of Neuralink, is that engineering talent has been really focused on what I think is a tremendously important problem for our generation. And the more the more talent we bring into the field, the better.

### Human: Monday, he tweeted, everything is fine. Tuesday, there was a takeover attempt because everything was super duper not fine. Wednesday, everything was going to be okay because of the takeover and that was all in process. By the end of Wednesday, I believe the takeover had fallen apart. Thursday, the takeover has fallen apart. SBF is seeking rescuers. Right. Trying to figure out if somebody will put in some money. Hail Mary. Hail Mary. He's also reassuring people, which we will come back to, that everything with FTX US is fine. By Friday, he's declared bankruptcy, and the bankruptcy includes the sister company, Alameda Research, the 130 other affiliated companies, because he's been on such a big buying spree, and FTX US is also verifiably not fine. That has all happened in the span of five days. It's crazy. It's crazy. Oh, and he has stepped down, by the way. He has stepped down as the CEO, not surprisingly, of FTX. He has been replaced, this is just even more insane, by John J. Ray III, a quote, restructuring expert, who is notably the guy that Enron brought on during its liquidation process. And he did manage to help return $20 billion to Enron creditors. Oh, my Lord.### Assistant: Now, here's the thing. That's a history book you want to be in. I hate to say I told you so to everybody. but I told you so like there has to be a core amount of value in whatever asset you are trading. If you are trading an asset worth nothing, eventually, it's going to evaporate because there's no there's no fundamental value there and you will run out of buyers for whatever the object is that's being traded. Objects core value matters. And I don't understand why this was so hard for people to understand. If this was tulip painting, there was a core value at some point, which was a tulip. It was a freaking flower. There was a flower. There was a flower. A field of them. Yes. Even. They were super pretty. Okay. But tulips come from bulbs, from the best of my understanding. And my mom, God love her, would get a bag of bulbs. She would purchase them. They had value to her. And in front of the brownstone in Brooklyn, I'd watch my mom plant her bulbs, and then they would bloom. And she got incredible joy from that. There was somebody in the world, my mom, who loved planting these bulbs to see these tulips rise. And the tulips created massive joy. Now, this is the simplest thing in the world, a flower. When we look at these tokens, and we've had these people on the pot, we had Terra Luna, we had Doquan on the program, and even another object, a hydrogen-powered truck to deliver beer. We had... Right. Milton, Trevor Milton. Trevor Milton, thank you. So you look at the core value of these things, and in both cases, a little suspect, hey, where's the truck? Oh, the truck is being pushed down the hill by gravity. Okay, so when you look at the core object, Molly, you go, okay, that core object doesn't work. Yeah. Oh, the badger. He's going to make his own little truck compete with the cyber truck and the F 1 50 with the electric F 1 50. Okay, wow, bold entrepreneur, but it also does not exist. It's just a prototype made in the lab. It's it's it's not a it's it's not a real object. It's it's an idea that this object may future exists. Like somebody making like a tulip out of clay, right? This is what the tulips gonna look like. And so that's, I think, the underlying lesson here for everybody is at some point, you have to look at what is the core asset here. And the core asset here was the trading that never made sense to me. And yeah, I'm just glad to see this all flush out. I think if we can just erase this entire period of nonsense from the system, get rid of the people who were investing in it. Get rid of the people who were you know, trying to find bag holders, get the bag holders edge reeducated to like, hey, maybe buy some shares in a company of a product you use and love, like, okay, you love Disney, you love Amazon, you love the Facebook, go buy their shares. If you happen to be a person who loves a headset, go buy that. Because at least you can use that product and make some investment decision based on the product.

### Human: I think it is a red herring to make this a political issue or even an issue of free speech. Because the fact is that, yes, these guys styled themselves as free speech radicals. And as a result, they implemented zero controls on these platforms all the way back from the beginning, right? None. And those zero controls included the bots, the spamming, the brigading. And then ultimately, they created and get in, they created technology, and algorithms that prioritize divisive speech, and that created literally created the extreme personalities that we're seeing right now, on these platforms who are then getting on the left and the right, right? We saw it on the left to like that. But again, that is a red herring, right? That is a red herring. We prioritize extremes. We prioritize extremes. They prioritized extremes because it got engagement, then for profit, then as a result, you had platforms that were a complete show. You had, you know, for lack of a more sensitive phrase, the inmates running the asylum. So then you had a situation where you had to try to put some inmates back in cages, and they staged a coup. Like, it is not a it is an absolute it is falling into the framing trap to say that this is somehow about free speech, or that it somehow is about the right or the left, when the truth is, it's about disinformation that causes harm in the real world. It's about coordinated harassment, bought campaigns and propaganda. And it always has been a technology problem that any of these platforms could have tackled at any time I tweeted today that I didn't because 100% because they care about money. Jack is 100% right to be on Twitter right now saying, I this is partly my fault, I helped centralize debate and conversation on the internet into one of these platforms. But what he misses is that if there had been clear rules all along, that applied equally to everyone, and that there had that there had never been the creation of algorithms that prioritize and created extreme monsters, right? Like they literally created these monsters because they made so much money. that they wouldn't be in a position where they then had to try to like, oh, crap, overcorrect, maybe de-platform the monsters that they themselves created. Yep. But I'm not ever going to engage in the idea that this is somehow actually about free speech. It's about technology and capitalism.### Assistant: Yeah. And I think the counter to that that some people have is that the gatekeepers have been are there are there are a small cohort of gatekeepers who are acting in unison now. And so when they decided to D platform, Alex Jones, something I back 100% the guy's a scumbag, he's the most evil person on the planet in my mind to go after the parents of deceased children and say it was a false flag so he can sell more meal kits for preppers. I mean, this is for me the most pure definition of evil is to increase the suffering of a parent who lost a child, right? It's just who would want Alex Jones on their platform. And Alex Jones D platformed over every single platform. And I think correctly so. And now Alex Jones has a fraction of the reach he had. And you're correct, he can still exist on his own website. But they did a great job of getting that scumbag off the public square. And I think what absolutists of free speech think is okay, great, you got rid of him. And then who's next? Who's next? Who's next? And then who's making these decisions? So that's what the people on I think the right or the strong free speech which I'll call like the og free speech movement feels like is at play here, you can we can debate it. But at the end of the day, like I said, the internet is an open platform, there are 20 different platforms, they all just happen to be in unison on this. And in fact, you saw it go down into the payments layer. So you also had was with the truckers, a bunch of platforms that would also be doing funding, cancel them out. So I think what people are feeling is on the right, and I am a libertarian, moderate, I think it's pretty obvious. You know, where my politics lie, I hate politics. I think they're all grifters. And I'm kind of, I guess people describe me as a libertarian. But putting it all aside, I think people are, are sort of on the right feeling that there's a cohort of people on the left coastal elites who control these companies, who can disappear people from the financial stack, the server stack, you know, domain stack, and obviously the publishing stack. That's what I think what they're feeling. Those are the people probably cheering this on from the other side. But I don't think that's Ilan. But I know that's not Ilan. Ilan cares about freedom of speech, full stop. And he thinks Twitter is an important square for that. And he obviously loves and understands the product with 80 million people is probably nobody who is trying to think of somebody who's mastered Twitter more in their domain. There's no CEO, obviously, who's mastered Twitter more. Is there somebody else who's mastered Twitter as a communication platform? I mean, he's driven massive sales for Tesla on it. So I can't think of I can't think of a better person who own it or Ryan Breslow. Ryan Breslow, of course, has done a pretty good job. Oh, that's a good one, Nick. Producer Nick coming in with a strong one. And then on the left, people, I mean, tell us what the Oakland radical... I just think it's a red herring to make this.

### Human: I'm gonna try to Go for it.### Assistant: And so that would break the rule of where and when. So once you put a shift on it, and a location, you've broken the number one and the 20 factor test. So this is where Microsoft used to put people on contract, and they had a thing where like the duration of it, like three months or six months, and then you would cancel the person was a contractor, and then you had to rehire them and do a process again. So this was all open to interpretation. Training does the worker receive periodic or ongoing training performing services rendered? Well, no, of course not like a you know, if you're a freelance writer, if you're a hair stylist, barber, if you are a real estate broker, there are a number of categories like this where people could provide services integration and business operations as a services rendered by the worker a core business activity. This is one of those tests that they're still struggling with. There's a business business success heavily rely on the workers performance. Well, of course it does. And this is like a very general one. So you could fail this one, but pass the other ones and still be considered a freelancer. And you can, you know, set hours for work was the big one, right? Is it mandatory for them to work at a certain time? Is full time work required? And, you know, what we see is when you have a Republican in office, people are very much in favor of freelance and people having agency and being able to choose when you have old school Democrats in like Biden, who are very pro union. They're kind of living in the 1950s. You know where they expect. And this is the problem I have with this is they are dictating to people how they work and where they work. And you know who I think suffers the most from this? I think women suffer the most from this. Oh, this is living, I will tell you my position, you can fight it. I believe that this is incredibly anti stay at home parent, which statistically, more often than not, is a female. this is a lot of women who come back to the workplace do it through freelancing. And that's why when you look at real estate agents, this was a primarily female, at least in California, way to get back into the workforce, or if you had kids, and you were the stay at home parent, I'm paying with a broad brush here, but the statistics are the statistics. That was a job that many women would take to get back into the career freelance writing another one and increasingly with gig economy, you're seeing that I think that people should be able to make their own decision. And companies should treat these employees really well. And if you look at what Uber did, Uber picked a third way to do this, they started giving people a contribution. If they worked more than 15 hours a week, this seems perfectly reasonable to me, there needs to be a place between being a pure freelancer, which is your right as an American to be a freelancer, or being full time. And the issue here is benefits. the other issue for certain people is, can we increase the number of people in a union? Because they get put in office by unions. There's the end of my rant. Go ahead, Molly, you can, you may have strong feelings otherwise. Um, take down what I got wrong, if or what you disagree with.

### Human: Yeah.### Assistant: Well, or a longer trip to the ocean, longer trip to the ocean. You know, that's actually the issue is I think a lot of folks a lot of investors are slowing down their investment pace. You're seeing this in the meetings we're having where people came to us six months ago, it was closing, you know, we had to get on the train train was leaving the station. And then the train never left the station, they came back to us and said, Hey, you know, we didn't close, we made some cuts. And And now we're, you know, the business looks a lot different. We raised our prices, we cut our costs. So we doubled our prices, we cut our staff in half. And all of a sudden, we're only burning 25k a month instead of 100. It's like, Oh, well, that business looks totally different. Maybe we would want to invest in that business since it's not burning through, you know, 1.2 million a year with 10k in revenue or whatever it is. So you know, I think a lot of those changes take a while for people to change their approach to running their business. And as we talked about just yesterday, with Uber, turning the dials, great segment, Uber had to make that change. That was a multi year change. Then you we talked about the that matrix we made the four by four on the, you know, 16 quadrant matrix of like, how much runway do you have? How profitable are you? this is all part of the same theme, which is unwinding what the strategies were in growth to what the strategies are in a bootstrapping environment. We're in a bootstrapping environment right now. And I think a lot of founders and a lot of VCs were operating in a cynically reckless fashion, entitled fashion, reckless and entitled would be you know, how you would describe the worst of it. VCs were being reckless with how they were investing in the diligence they were doing the bets they were placing. And, yeah, and some VCs were acting super entitled, thinking they would just blow through a fund in 12 months, and everything will happen to the right, they didn't have to be thoughtful. And then founders to being reckless with the dollars and entitled with the dollars, hey, this, I'm always gonna get my next round, the never ending bridge round is over. I know people who've raised two, three bridges. And each time, like, I'm just gonna do another bridge for a million. And it's like, and it's gonna go up. So like, what would be the incentive then to be profitable, Molly? Well, now all the reality is here. This reminds me very much of the time when I invested in Uber and thumbtack, where you just you had four or five people in your company, you tried to get to 1020 k revenue. And you didn't really get distracted with anything but your product and your customers, right? And so this ultimately will be a good thing for the market. And it seems like a very wise decision for Y Combinator to hunker down and maybe they lay off, you know, half the Y Combinator team or a third of the team, if they don't need that many people to do 400. You know, that would be the next shoe to drop would be anything.

### Human: Thanks for coming on. I heard maybe Keith were boy mentioned the book when he was on this pod. And I was like, you know, I know the history of Silicon Valley. I've read all the books. I got what do I need to read this book, but I got it anyway, because it gives good, you know, judge of like, what's a good book. And I was absolutely delighted by a couple of things about your book. Number one, you pick the right stories. and two you threaded them together very nicely and you focused on what matters why each of these companies why each of these venture firms were formed and what impact they had on the valley and as you read the book. You know, if you're in Silicon Valley, so I've been investing for 11 years, I've been in the industry for 30. I knew 60% of the story 70%. But the way you thread it together just created a nice mental model for me and framework and filled in a couple of stories I never heard of, I was a little, you know, not knowledgeable on the Cisco drama as but one example. And the book is so good that with the 11 people I have on our investment team, I said, Listen, I could tell you these stories over, you know, the next couple years on an investment team meeting, everybody read the book, and take notes per chapter. And we're all going to just talk about it. And we're going to put it to bed. So everybody understands the history of Silicon Valley, and how we got here. So just congratulations. The book is just right at a writer, it reads very quickly. It's a great listen, by the way, and incredibly informative. So why did you write the book? And how did you pick which stories to include? Because, you it the move the book, the book does move briskly, which is great. That's what you want in a history book like this. So you can cover a lot of territory. But you had to make some hard decisions, I think on what to include and what not to include.### Assistant: So how did you pick which to include? Well, thanks for that great intro, both of you. I wrote the book for two reasons. One was to explain the thought process in venture allocation. As you know, It's not like public markets. There are no quantitative metrics. I had written a book before about the history of hedge funds. And intellectually, that was a fascinating challenge for me to understand how, in an early stage, when you've got no price-to-book ratio, no price-earnings ratio, none of that stuff, and you're making judgments on people, how do you think about that? So that was the first thing, to get inside the minds of venture investors by hanging out with them, by hanging out with the entrepreneurs that they funded. And by taking time, I always take four or five years on these books. And that gives me enough time to really absorb the culture. And then the other thing I was trying to do is show what the impact of venture capital is on tech ecosystems. Because there's always this question, does venture create innovation or does it just show up for innovation? And there's a lot of cynical people who you know, just think the investors are there, you know, leeching off the entrepreneurs and don't contribute anything. And I think I kind of had an open mind before, but when I done the research, I was convinced that, you know, the network effects that VCs create by connecting people, money and ideas, are huge in terms of explaining innovation. It's instructive that the only rival to the valley, really, as a major tech ecosystem is China. They started with the same venture capital, in fact, the same companies. Sequoia China is the biggest in China as well as the biggest in Mali, right? It was the same connecting up of people and ideas and money combined with an investor who's seen multiple startups get started up before. And you marry that with a passion and commitment and hard work and vision of the entrepreneur, and you get magic. So those are the two things. And you're right, Jason, I had to kind of pick stories. There's too many stories, you can't tell all of them. And I guess I went for stories that I thought would resonate with a lot of readers. If it's a name that people have heard of, the funding of Apple, the funding of Google, the funding of Facebook. Those stories were obvious draws, because I think it's tough to get people to read things about companies they never heard of. I made one exception. which is in the early Internet, there was a company called UUNet. Nobody's ever heard of that today. But back in the day, it was very important in getting the hardware built for the Internet. People sometimes say, well, the government created the Internet or the defense department, DARPA, created the Internet. And that's kind of literally true in the sense that the early, early, early internet was like that. But, you know, the user base for the internet around the time the private sector took over was probably I don't know, a million people, I mean, 100,000, something very, very low. What took the internet from being a niche product for scientists into being a household thing was venture capital, and Accel's backing of UUNet, along with a couple of other investors, Menlo Ventures. Mitch Kapoor. Right, right.

### Human: Right. And then what Walk me again through the sort of end of life of the algae. Is it just dried and buried? Or is it used as any kind of a biofuel?### Assistant: Oh, for sure. So per square meter per year, we can sequester 30 times as much CO2 than a forest does. And so, there are no leaves, there are no roots, there are no trunks, there are no branches. It's very simple in terms of all of the biology goes into growing more algae that capture more carbon. And so, it is a very, very fast system. What the real invention was, is that in nature, these algal blooms happen very episodically, usually in the springtime and usually in the autumn. And what we normally witness is sort of fish laying their eggs and everything to coincide with those blooms. It's the base of the food chain. And so all we wanted to do was to take advantage of the local organisms the way they like it in those exponential growing, very rapidly growing algal blooms, and make that happen in our ponds year round. The real invention is that we got to sort of perpetuate that phenomenon in our ponds all year round. And we've now done this in South Africa, in Oman. South Africa is very cold in the wintertime. Oman is really intensely hot in the summertime, across a huge range of environments. And now we're in a more moderate place in Morocco. And we've now run this for five years in the real world, not in the lab, in actual production scale. We've got the largest algal raceway pond in Morocco. probably in the world. And it has shown us that we can do this even through COVID, when there were very stringent COVID restrictions in Morocco, and you couldn't go in and out. But the local team continue to grow things with what nature gives them right there. And so, it's been a very good experience in the sense that we've seen this now work through a whole lot of different seasons, a whole lot of different environments with local challenges, of course. And what makes us confident about this is two things. One is the algal growth process works really well. But the other thing is, is there's an enormous amount of empty desert land available. And the reason why I say that is, there's virtually an infinite amount of nutrients available in the ocean. Obviously, there's an excessive CO2 right now in the environment. And, and We really genuinely believe that we can scale this to a really significant level. The other part that makes us confident is that we've now spend the years of trying to identify all the places where costs creep in. And we've got a collaboration, for example, with Southampton University, that has been very, very productive, where they look at our paddle wheels, and how we mix the algae in our ponds and keep them in suspension. and they have reduced the cost of that paddlewheel by 90%. We've learned from shrimp farmers how to sort of pump the water once and then percolates through the system by gravity. So we don't have any pumps. We've learned from the miners how to remove the algal biomass very cheaply on these, again, very passive screens that are gravity fed. And so the point is, We spent the years to try to strip out all the electricity costs and all the energy costs. And from a lifecycle analysis point of view, make this a very, very low technology, low cost, low operational effort system, so that when we pull that carbon out, that we actually really have a net big impact.

### Human: And hopefully that keeps up. I mean, that's been the hallmark of their brand forever. And then AT&T bought it. And now they're like, well, what else can we jam into this pipe that people seem to love?### Assistant: I hope these guys don't screw it up. When we get back, we're going to talk about screwing it up. We're going to talk about Apple screwing up every single aspect of developer relations. We're going to talk about TikToks. uh CEO resigning and deciding he would resign from the Chinese Communist Party uh we're going to talk about the bidding war from Walmart and uh the SEC is changing accreditation laws oh I love you SEC thank you finally finally it's been a long road for you but this is big for JCal and I'm excited stick with us All right, this deal from Vanta is so good, I want to start my ad read with it. Vanta is giving our Twist listeners, think about this, $1,000 off their first SOC 2 by going to vanta.com slash Twist. That's not a joke. $1,000 off, Vanta, V-A-N-T-A.com slash Twist. So, why is SOC 2 compliance so critically important? Well, If you don't have your SOC 2 buttoned up, you can't close major customers because major customers have security concerns and they should. And if you already have your SOC 2 report, don't you want to make it easier to maintain it year after year after year? Of course you do. Well, Vanta's software continuously tests against technical and non-technical SOC 2 requirements. They partner with over a dozen audit firms who have been trained to file SOC 2 reports directly within Vanta. On average, Vanta customers are SOC 2 compliant in just two to four weeks. Compare that to three, four, five months if you're not using Vanta. You'd be crazy not to use Vanta. I just had a twist listener. You guys and gals are so good to me. You tell me when you use the products and you always use those promo codes. Super important. Well, I had John Hegranes, who's the founder and CEO of a drone startup. It's called Kitty Hawk. Everybody knows that they've raised a lot of money super important company and he said Vanta was essential in helping them get their sock to Compliancy set up and maintained and he loves the tie-ins with Google Slack github and AWS, which is really essential for Kitty Hawk's business. Use Vanta, people, and get that $1,000 off just like Notion, Lattice, User Testing, and hundreds of other successful companies who got their SOC 2 reports with Vanta in weeks, not months. Unlock those sales and give your employees all that time back in their calendar to work on more business critical assignments. There's so much you got to get done right now. Use an expert that expert is Vanta. And they're giving twist listeners $1,000 off their subscription at vanta.com slash twist. I don't know how long they're gonna keep this going. So I want you to take advantage of it right now vanta.com slash twist. All right, my guests today are the co hosts of acquired FM, you are required to go pay for acquired FM LP, if you are a founder, if you are an entrepreneur, if you care about the technology industry, they put a shit ton of work into every episode and the LP stuff is the hotness. I think it's about I don't I think it charges about uh, it's about a hundred dollars an episode.

### Human: So let's wrap up the Uber. Everything. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, Uber clearly signaling, I think a couple really interesting things. One is that they see the opportunity to take like seize this moment in time, which is like, look, there's a pullback. Nobody's in a question, any hard choices that you make. And also clearly institutional investors are like, look, we've been patient long enough. But we're not at a point where we can just continue to funnel money at this thing until you show us that you're willing to make the hard choices. I feel like if you consider the long, super pumped journey, we're now at the point we kind of knew we'd always be at where it's like Dara sure you can do it.### Assistant: Show us the money was the money is Jerry Maguire moment. And here's the thing. Great. It's going to be easy enough for them to do. You just cut the cost, you cut expenses 10%. It's not the end of the world. Yeah, you may have to raise prices a little bit here, you may cut some marketing there. But they'll easily do it. And then if you look at what's happening in the public markets, this will be great for employees because their stock options will accelerate rise. And I think when you're I'm looking at the market right now, and not the overall market, but specifically tech stocks, I think and I'm going to call it right now we're here on Monday, Monday, May 9, I believe we are doing what I call bouncing along the bottom. So I don't think there's going to be precipitous drops in the tech stocks from here. Because listen, I mean, it's easy call to make if they're down 70 80%, you know, they could go to 80 90%. But we're bouncing along the bottom to where The cash in the bank at some companies, and the revenue of these companies is so great, and the cash in the bank is so great, that they can flip the switch, make the hard decision and the company becomes like if a company is valued at two times revenue, one times revenue, or they have 5 billion in cash, and they're worth 7 billion. Now you're saying the enterprise value is worth 2 billion. If they bought that stock back from the public market for the 5 billion they had, then they'd have a $2 billion market cap. And I think certain companies like Peloton, Robinhood are going to start to fall into this category, Lyft might even, if they, you know, tighten up their business, because they're only worth 7 billion, right, then they become potential buyout candidates. Now, if they're gonna get bought out, they have to be bought out for a premium, the premium typically is 50%. So what you're going to see here is this is I think, the bargain hunting summer, the summer bargain hunt. I think this is a unique opportunity between now May 9, and call it when we get back in September, sell in May and go away is what people typically say. You know, it's going to be a really tough market for the next couple of months. But I think I am calling a bottom now that doesn't mean it's not going to go down a little bit more. I'm calling the bouncing along the bottom of the bottom. And now's the time to bargain hunt in my mind, for the companies you think that can pull off this change. And I think stock buybacks is something we might see if a company is sitting on a ton of cash, like you know, Robin Hood is or Uber is, and they get to profitability, if you see them start saying, you know what, we're gonna, we're gonna do a buyback of, you know, $100 million, or 250 million, right. And so, you know, this is the case, because what you'll also see is the CEOs of these companies that may have sold shares earlier, and they may have sold them at a premium now start buying their own shares. Because if a CEO we did, right,

### Human: Yep, I actually just off from Austin emailing me back that showed like this is where I'm supposed to be, you know, I Never talked to a CEO before, you know, I didn't even know the CEO of mattress firm at the time or any other company I'd been in right but here you are CEO of a tech firm who could change your life and he accepts you into the school when we get back from this final break We're coming around the third base right now### Assistant: And I think that this is why you are unstoppable king This is one king talking to another king yes Or in my case from mount olympus, you know, i'm not saying i'm a god, but I could be a hero I could be in the hercules category. Maybe someday i'll be zeus but uh, you know just king to king You're getting the unlocks now you you unlock the the rule of numbers you don't need if you send 1500 you unlock 1500 job requests you unlocked uh sometimes you've got to do crummy jobs to get the one you want you unlock sales is a numbers game you don't need 10 yeses you need one yes and then you unlock wait a second the most powerful people in the world are accessible wait a second This is a major unlock because I remember when I learned that When I was young I used to think God, I want to be important in life. I want to be powerful in life I want money. I want money. I want power I want people to know the name Jason Calacanis And this is when I was on the subway going to Fordham at night and I was a bar back You know what a bar back is That's worse than your job of packing pickles into things. I mean I I would have to carry ice and Beer from the basement of a bar the salty dog in Bay Ridge. I would carry up a staircase and that was made in the 20s, where the steps were just broken, and I would trip half the time and smack my knee on the concrete, carrying up, just in the dank, dark basement, two buckets of ice, cases of beer, and then pack the beer into the ice. My hands would be raw from packing that beer. And you know, I started at six o'clock at night and I finished at 5 a.m. And I made, you know, the good news was they would pay me $25 cash for 12 hours of work. It was $2 an hour. But the bartenders, if I did a good job, they made 200 a night. And depending on how hard I worked, And, uh, how, you know, and I'd be like, yep, you got it. I'll clean it out. I'll do whatever you need to do. They break a glass in the ice. I melt the ice. I put new ice in, I get the glass out. I did whatever they wanted. I would run and get them a pack of cigarettes, I'd do whatever they need, just so instead of giving me $40 at the end of the night, they might give me $50 or $60. So I got the original $25, plus they might give me $40, $50, $60. If it was a good night, I might get $80. $80, hey, you know, now I'm sitting pretty. You know, I'm making like $8 an hour here. This is getting legit, because at the time, in 1989, Minimum wage is $3.50. So I'm doubling minimum wage, but my hands, when I say my hands were raw from that ice and I smelt like smoke, it sucked. But put a little gas in the tank and then you start meeting people. So that's what you did. You learn to meet people and you get accepted, correct?

### Human: It's funny. Yeah. When you read the details, it sort of sounds vaguely similar like if you squint it looks a little bit like our firm and a syndicate doing a public fundraise just with sixteen other layers of complexity attached that don't seem totally necessary. And I don't 100% see the obvious benefit of the 16 layers of complexity.### Assistant: You know, okay, so they're, they're, they formed a traditional venture capital fund, they did it properly. They're not breaking any laws. Yeah. I it has nothing to do with crypto. That's all fiat money. Yeah, they're not investing into a company or they're not getting eat from somebody's wallet. And then, you know, voting to invest in something. Okay, so let's put that aside for a second. They did everything right. It's just a standard venture fund like anybody else. Now what so what is the purpose of the DAO? You took some really good notes, Sonny, and you're thinking about and I think they're taking the down saying the DAO is going to be for due diligence, deal sourcing and post deal help. So, in a venture fund, you might have some associates, you might have some researchers, you have some principals, they're out there, they're pounding the pavement, they might have venture partner scouts, of course, trying to find you, hey, you should check this company out. So if you aggregated all the YC folks, and you said, hey, go to this discord, and then talk about the companies, and then the venture fund partners, look at what they're saying, and then just cherry pick, it's kind of like just creating a giant scout program calling it a DAO. So to me, It's a it's a scout program, looking like a DAO. But you have to remember, there is also going to be tax treatment and issues around the DAO. And that's where I think there's going to be some legal details here. Those 1300 people are going to have to be pre vetted. They're going to if you I don't know how you distribute. So let's say you have 20% profits a carry. Let's say this 80 million, I'm going to just say it goes three acts like a standard venture fund was three x 380 times three to 40 minus the original 80 160 and profits 20 million of 160, roughly $30 billion in carry. So let's say this 30 million carries 1000 people. Okay, everybody gets $30,000. Or this person gets more for having done this, they voted, you know, how does that even get distributed? When it does get distributed? What is the tax treatment of it? is this long term capital gains is qualified small business is it income because they did work so they getting paid an hourly rate if these people are doing work then you might be forced to pay them they could sue you post because you were using their labor it's it's very very even with this, as clean as you can make it structure, there are a lot of checkboxes and issues that I think they're going to have to work on around tax treatment, how these distributions happen. I also think the scout program, obviously super valid. I was the first to play a scout scout programs are now everywhere. So that part is valid. consensus building is not how angel investing works. That's not how great investing works. It's not about consensus. It's about people really doing diligence and spending hours and hours, not the wisdom of crowds. So I wonder if having 1000 people is as good as it might be better to have just had 100 or 50 even to do this work and to just pay them cash.

### Human: That's right. I mean, I try to think of what the limit is, and you can keep going, but I'll take it one step farther. Humans are currently made by humans through a nine-month pregnancy process, so there is clearly a way to piece together a few molecules out of pretty much nowhere, through a biological process to create something as complex and amazing as a human being. Um, if you look at human, like at, at, at factories that humanity has built for things like computers, which are probably the most complex piece of engineering we've ever made, or for simple things like, I know I have a glass in my hand now, right? This is probably easy to make, um, compared to a computer there. They're just like, nothing compared to what the human body can make. And that's something that was created through evolution, not through design. Now imagine what you can create through design if you had factories that didn't operate at the level of computer complexity, but at the level of human body complexity or beyond. But now, instead of it being designed through an evolutionary process that has all of the flaws you could imagine, it's just pieced together out of raw atoms and molecules, whatever it is that you want to make. The universe is made of atoms, not of things, and we just see things because that's how we evolved. But the max level of craziness that we could get to with this technology is I, yeah, I don't know what you can build once you have machines that make things of the, it's scary. It's really scary. Um, but it's also, it seems like, you know, this is the, probably the most important thing for a civilization, um, in, in the existence of that civilization to, to build, to build a thing that surpasses it. Like evolution does that evolution creates things that are more fit and and by evolution's fitness function than the previous thing that was there, just through survival of the fittest. But never, ever, ever in history has one of those things made a thing that is more fit. Like, never. But we're about to do that. And that loop is probably never going to stop, as you've alluded to, right? Like, if you make an M1, you get more compute, you make an M2, that thing is real. Like, if you have an AI that's a better ML engineer than I am, why would it be better at writing the next version, right? That's real. You know it again that can go horribly wrong if it goes right it's just. It's a different civilization it's an evolutionary timescale it's an evolutionary scale event this is not just a technology it's not like mobile or the internet it's those things are really important at the human time scales but this is this is like.### Assistant: there's a you know, it's really interesting how you have, as somebody on the inside understands this, and this is I think, the problem we're seeing in the world. You know, when the ancient Romans started writing books by hand, and then giving them to the nobility, right? Those books took months and months to be handwritten by monks or scribes, whoever wrote them. Now, if you were to take that book, and transport the monk from 400 ad and put them into a modern printing press today, take their book, press a button and show them 10,000 copies of their book the next day. They would not know they would think you are a god. They would think you were an alien, they would literally think you were Zeus. And that you took you know, this book that had been written and took years, months and made 10,000 copies of it, they would not understand. It would be like Jesus taking a fish and turning it into two, but instead of two, it turned into 2000. Right? Like, it would be like taking a farmer who was, you know, making, you know, pulling potatoes from a field and some Irish farmer, you know, pulling potatoes from a field and then showing them a million potatoes going through a factory onto trucks, they would say, how many humans do you have inside that box to do that? Because it wouldn't, it would be hard to comprehend. And this could be even more. then that analogy, and humans, we use analogies to try to understand stuff. But that's, that's the analogy I I've come to be just hard for somebody to understand modern day book printing or modern day newspaper printer or modern day food processing. 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### Human: Yeah, that was the most intense period I've been through. As you mentioned, I've, I've taken a lot, you're a public figure, so am I, I've taken lots of stands. And you do it to support something you believe in. I'm big on civil liberties, especially domestically with the ACLU. But I had many friends in that region from business school, and they were going through a period where I felt like they needed support. I didn't anticipate what would happen after. I will say, initially, obviously there was a lot of non-support, but I will say that behind the scenes there was actually a lot of support. Publicly, as you mentioned, a lot of the Bay Area got behind me, which I really appreciated. Tillman Fertitta, who took some heat, he actually was very supportive. Adam Silver was very supportive. And I always felt good that I wasn't going to back off my comments. And that, you know, it was a cause you couldn't back off was sort of how I looked at it. And I was going to let the chips fall where they may. And that's sort of scary, because, you know, again, I just talked about how much I love what I do. So I thought that those two things may not be congruent. But thankfully, thankfully, they were.### Assistant: It's so true. There's people who will be cordial, uh, socially and say, Hey, listen, if you ever need a gig, or I'd love to collaborate with you. And then crickets, if you ever reach out to them, I've had this experience as an investor in my, myself. Do you want to have a strong start to 2021? I know you do. I do too. And Dell is here to help you kick off your 2021 right with their year-end sale. Yum yum. Since most of us aren't spending money on holiday vacation this year, why not put that extra cash to good use and upgrade your home office I did I am sitting here with this giant 49 inch monitor powerful Dell computer so I can play some games and do sick amazing DSLR videos and zooms can't do that with the old computers you need to upgrade and you get 60 3% off on certain products at Dell.com to check out some of my favorites, the UltraSharp Curve Monitor. I love these. Give these to everybody on your team and oh my God, yum yum, the XPS 13 is the Windows amazing long battery life, up to eight hours of streaming on a 4K model, the highest resolution possible. This is gonna promote teamwork. You give new equipment to your team, it means so much to them. There's never been a better time to upgrade your home office hardware, especially with so many of us working from home. Head over to launch.co slash Dell. That's launch.co slash Dell for an extra five to 10% off all Dell products. And while you're there, you can sign up for a free IT consultation to find out the best solution for your team, big or small. The Dell team has been amazing to us in 2020 and to the community. So many offerings, so many great products. Looking forward to working with Dell in 2021. Go ahead and go to launch.co slash Dell and get that incredible discount, you know, without getting into super details, because I don't want to get you in more trouble. You know, and I was my first job was working for Amnesty International, the human rights organization. You took a stand on just, you know, something that was, you know, pretty innocuous. But you did. You took that stand with, you know, something that could hurt the pocketbook of a lot of people. And It was crazy to watch how much heat you got and how little support you got. As a fan of the league, you might have seen my tweets and some other people's tweets here in Silicon Valley. I mean, we came out strong and we're like, listen. This is completely crazy. We're Americans, first and foremost, we stand for freedom of speech, freedom of assembly. And you cannot take an executive, an individual who just takes a moment in the most innocuous way to say American values matter, and then blacklist them. This is insane. A friend of mine decided to make t shirts and the Warriors game were filled with them. How What was that experience like? I don't want to get into details about it, you know, too much here. But just in general, when you're getting that kind of blowback, and you're not getting support, you're getting criticized. What was that period like in your life for you as a human?

### Human: Yeah, next up this week in climate startups, again, more and more hopeful, incredible, every founder is hope in this case, actually, it's a brother and sister. Zora Chung and Stephen Chung have created this company called Rejewel. And it's developed technology. This is so interesting, because we're now getting to the place in EB sales, where not only are they all over the road, some of them are starting to come out of service and be resold as used cars. And right now, there's not really any way at scale to test the health of a high capacity battery. You can test your iPhone battery and see how much like lifetime is left in it. You can't sort of safely do that for EV batteries or like grid scale batteries. And so they have developed this technology to do this for EVs, particularly with the purpose of identifying and then encouraging a second life for them, figuring out either can it be resold to somebody and they still have, you know, battery life left or does it need to be recycled?### Assistant: Like it's all happening. It's all happening. You found them. And if you want to join us on this adventure, if you want to support the new, this wasn't intended to be an ad, but if you're a rich person or anybody of affluence, if you're an accredited investor, which means you're the top 6% of the country, you could give to charity. I encourage you to do so, but also maybe thing. I could invest 5k or 10k instead of my, you know, $15,000 in first class tickets or business class tickets to Italy this summer, or in addition to it, maybe I'll place a bet on a startup on something new. And you can go to the syndicate.com slash climate and the companies we share that are going to be super, super speculative and risk taking. by definition, I mean, it's the one of the most risk taking categories, climate and sustainability. So come in with eyes wide open, this is going to be hard work. And the chance is the majority chance is you lose your money. But if you keep investing and you get to a diversity, you know, of, you know, diversification in your portfolio, hey, there's a chance you could have outsized returns as well. That's why I wrote a book, Angel, that's why we do angel.university, and have given $200,000 to charity just by rich people coming to angel.university and learning how to get richer. So I love, that's like my Robin Hood squared, not the stock trading app, shout out to Vlad, but my Robin Hood squared of like, I'm not robbing from the rich, I'm getting the rich richer, and then getting them to donate to charity and to do good things in the world. It's a virtuous cycle. It's a good virtuous cycle. Anyway. The promise of remote work was more flexibility, more time back, and more freedom. But in reality, many of us are more bogged down than ever. Why? Because of the nonstop messages, emails, and video calls. So let me tell you about Bubbles. Bubbles is an asynchronous collaboration tool that enables teamwork on your time. It's a 3D environment of screen, audio, and video recordings. It combines the best parts of Zoom meetings and Google Docs. It's great for giving designers feedback, product walkthroughs, code reviews, and so much more. bubbles is free, and it includes unlimited recordings, one click sharing, and it works in browser, there are no downloads necessary. I was going through the new job board we launched at inside. So I told my product manager Alex walk through the product for me. And then I went through and I gave him video messages back and I put notes on different moments in his video. And I did this all I kid you not in under a minute, and there were no meetings necessary. And also no more mistakes. Send me your product tour. And if you add Jason me with your bubble, I will guarantee you I will watch it use bubbles.com slash twist. Go ahead and just send me the bubble to add Jason on Twitter, us e b u b b l e s.com slash twist. I want you to use bubbles. It's an awesome product. Great job on that. And then next up is your climate interview, correct? Yeah.

### Human: Season 6 of ANGEL is brought to you by OurCrowd helps you invest early in pre-IPO companies alongside professional VCs. If you're interested in investing, you can join OurCrowd for free at O-U-R C-R-O W-D dot com slash ANGEL and Broker's Startup Insurance Program helps startups secure the most important types of insurance at a lower cost and with less hassle. Save up to 20% off of traditional insurance today at Embroker.com slash twist. While you're there, get an extra 10% off using offer code twist and LinkedIn marketing to redeem a $100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign. Go to LinkedIn.com slash angel pod.### Assistant: Hey, everybody, welcome to Episode Six of Angel Season Six. This is the series we do as an extension of This Week in Startups where we talk to capital allocators, a fancy word for angel investors, seed funds, and venture funds, even syndicates, and accelerators could be considered part of capital allocation. What do capital allocators do? they pull together some pool of capital. And they look for opportunities to invest in high growth companies in the venture space, private company space. We're looking for very high growth companies because most startups fail. You can look at them as experiments. That doesn't mean the founders are failures. It just means that experiment failed, and they move on to the next experiment. Typically, we see founders on their second, third, fourth one, they can get on base or even hit a home run. And so it's very exciting to be a capital allocator. And one of the most exciting things over the past decade, and I'm in my 11th year now of investing, is that investing in startups and creating funds has been massively democratized. We're seeing many, many, many more people start their own funds, start their own syndicates, where groups of people get together and invest. And we're seeing a ton of diversity people from different backgrounds, different regions, genders, ethnicities, it's absolutely fantastic to see this kind of massive change. And, and it's been great. In doing this series, the five interviews we've recorded already Mack Conwell, Mac, the VC from rare breed, David Rosenthal from kindergarten, Paki McCormick from not boring page fan Doherty from behind genius ventures, and she's like 23 years old, when he would good friend of mine who was at 500 startups, which is now called 500 global and incubator here in Silicon Valley, and she has cake ventures. So we've been having this incredible parade of capital allocators. Some of them are on their first fund and did venture before other ones. It's their first time adventure and their first fund really amazing when I came into the industry 2030 years ago. If you wanted to join a venture fund, man, you had to be out of Harvard and get your MBA out of HBS, Harvard Business School or Stanford, GBS, Graduate Business School, maybe Wharton. And it was kind of an insider's game. Your fraternity brother basically got you the job or your dad or a cousin or something. Now, completely democratized and everybody's figuring it out. Today will be no different. In my little pre interview with today's guest, he said, I'm figuring it out. And I said, you know what, me too. And decade two, it's not an easy job. So Fahd Ananta, please tell me I got your name. Thank the Lord. know, it's very weird to have, sometimes there'll be a name that's incredibly challenging to pronounce, and I nail it. And then other times, it's incredibly simple. And my producers are just beside themselves. And FOD is and it's, it's spelt FAHD, if you're wondering, is a general partner at Roach Capital. You heard that correct, as in cockroach. And I'm guessing you named your fund after the phenomenon of the cockroach entrepreneur, which is the entrepreneur who will never be killed and never give up, correct?

### Human: Well, it's not a secret conspiracy, right?### Assistant: I might I don't want to get my cards at acquisition draft becoming interesting. startups need a central hub to store information and collaborate on work more than ever. That's why right now I'm reading this ad read in my notion page where I have this week in startups, all the guest notes, all of the previous episodes, all the ad reads, everything is centralized in notion. I as is my entire life at Inside.com and my entire life investing in companies. That's why you need to try Notion, especially in this new remote world. It's one place for notes, docs, projects, and everyday work. It goes well beyond a wiki and When we went fully remote in March of 2020, Notion became our internal knowledge bank. Here is one of my producers going through our pod notes page on Notion, where we highlight the top lessons from past episodes. And we're going to ramp up our pod notes in 2022, so you can look at any episode of This Week in Startups and see all the lessons you can learn. Doing this in Notion is so easy, and they keep releasing new features. It's such a beautiful product. Every team, from engineering to sales, can work together seamlessly. And they have 500 integrated apps, including Google and Slack, you collaborate in real time. And it tailors all the workflows to your needs. Hundreds of 1000s of teams worldwide are already delighting their employees with notion. But it's so great to have a right first culture. And then everybody feels like things are less chaotic, because you're writing important stuff down and not losing all those great ideas, or your checklist, etc. They have a worldwide community of millions of people creating templates and tutorials. Now you're going to find incredible templates for everything you're doing, whether it's a podcast or investing or building a product. The product is constantly improving. I can't say enough about notion. I really love the product. Go to notion.so and use the promo code twist to get $250 off their annual team plan. It's super affordable. Once again, notion.so and use that promo code twist TWIST so you get that $250 during checkout. Great job notion. Love the product sincerely. The story that's not dying. So you ate your vegetables everybody got we got you through earnings and we're gonna go through all the earnings and so here we go yesterday there was a bunch of back and forth where the c.e.o. Ryan breslau who is on this pod who had the four day work week at his company is the c.e.o. of both. he was saying how uh stripe is a mafia y combinator plus sequoia plus all adresin harwitz we covered it on yesterday's show you can go back and listen to it but essentially the the long and short of it was y combinator the vc community hacker news or in some grand conspiracy to block his company, Bolt, from getting funding and getting into YC and trending on Y Combinator. As I said yesterday, Y Combinator's Hacker News is at the domain name news.ycombinator.com. It is the alumni of Hacker News talking about technology. It is not an independent news source. Of course, they're going to vote for their home team, whether it's Airbnb, GitHub, or Stripes, so there's no conspiracy there and there is a bit of a conspiracy.

### Human: I think you can I'm trying to figure out if in this case, yes, I mean, look, trying to predict usage and control content is a fool's errand. Like trying to say, this is a this is a product that only exists for people to be nice to each other. It's just like, I mean, I think that maybe is what Mark Zuckerberg thought initially about Facebook, right? You will find cute girls, because that's what they originally designed it for. And everybody will just want to be friends here. And I think there were people legitimately at Facebook who had never just considered what people are like, right. So That so that is always going to be a dangerous game. What is interesting about gas is that appears that they have a set list of prompts, you can't enter your own. So it's just a like, maybe they will increase the prompts over time. And all you can do is enter names of people in your school. Right. So it's a super limited interaction.### Assistant: This is the same team that brought us the TBH to be honest app where you can take like anonymous questions, which obviously, you know, we talked about anonymity here. It's very dangerous space with children. We We had a whole wave of suicides. In web 2.0. There was an app called form spring. There's an app called secret. Yes. And we were investors in an app called whisper, which was exactly like this a positive spin where you And all of these shared a common dynamic location, and anonymity. And then in some cases, address book and friend graph plus anonymity plus location. So some combination of those things means you can find your friend group without knowing who's saying what. Now, of course, the app would probably know, and if the app knows, boy, that's super dangerous. But it eventually leads to bullying. And so I mean, you have to tread very lightly. And here, I understand, I believe the founders have great intent, by the way. And I think the founders of those other apps had great intent as well. Whisper never got caught up in this, but form spring and secret. I don't know if secret but with form spring, there were a number of suicides. Now, there's a number of suicides that happened sadly, in the world. So if you were like how many people ordered an Amazon package today and killed themselves, not the Amazon story where we talked about you know, specific things to kill yourself with. Just generally people who used an iPhone today and killed themselves, there would be a correlation of 50%. Because they either use Android or, you know, iPhone, so just be careful with correlation and causation, right? This is obvious. But sometimes the press will run with things or social media with run with things, this is causing that and it's just, you it would have happened anyway, because tragically, some people commit suicide. So anyway, in this case, you because of these anonymity, that releases the ability of people to bully. And young kids experiment with bullying, sadly, tragically, because they're becoming adolescents and adults bully kids bully, it's just part, it's part of the dark nature of our DNA. Yeah. And so you just have to be careful if you build a tool that accelerates that, right, or exactly accelerate it, because the person on the receiving end may have never experienced in person, you could have five people bully you, right? Or in the case of the movie, Carrie, the whole school class bullied the one person at once. right? She obviously had superpowers and murdered them all. But you know, so be it. That's what makes the that's what makes that story so resonant, right? Is that so don't bully friends? Yeah, well, it is what makes it so resonate. That's why that became such a powerful story carries because everybody's experienced bullying. And then you had, well, what would happen if the whole school bullied somebody, and they could actually, you know, take back their power. And of course, school shootings are part of that. And this is why it's a dangerous thing for entrepreneurs and technologists to get involved in this dynamic. because it is there are edge cases. And as a parent, we both are attuned to them, because we hear the stories when people come back from school of somebody who's been bullied.

### Human: This is, by the way, we should clarify that we're talking about being a customer as opposed to investor in this case. And also, that J-Cal has had too many salads for too many days, because it's like the third day in a row that cheeseburgers have come up. So I'm gonna say, Sunday is when you treat yourself. Yeah, exactly. I had a cheeseburger the other night. It's quite nice. It's like the rock says, you gotta treat yourself. Don't cheat yourself. Oh yeah, there you go.### Assistant: So anyway, that's, that's how you look at the multiples. And so the question then becomes, is there if there's no market, which is what we're seeing now? Yeah. So we're starting to see, you've actually had this happen two or three times now. And I told you this would happen, you know, and yeah, and I was like, be patient. You know, a good founder, like that good SaaS sales executive who keeps emailing me, and they're sending me videos. um like explaining the position i have to show you these like loom videos they're nuts um wow yeah they're incredible it's i mean they're personalized to me and explaining why you know like this is a partnership i feel like i was like being indoctrinated into a cult or something um anyway i was like the person really wants to say i know i'm like i'm a little like half z's on that It's pretty, it's pretty great. Anyway. So what will happen in a market is founders will tell you like, hey, the deal is closing. And nine out of 10 times the deal is not actually closed. You'll know if the deal is closing, because there'll be another term sheet, they will have sent it to you. so that you can review it and request an allocation. If they have not sent you a term sheet, there is no other deal. It is not imminent. It's imminent. In my definition, when there's a term sheet, and the person is signed it or they're about to sign it, and then you will either not be the lead could be asked to be the co lead or could ask to maybe put in a smaller amount than the leads. So long story short, now we're going to get to the point where we have to, in some cases, since we are the only funding source come up with a valuation ourselves. And that's a whole different, you know, thing we have to unpack. Yeah. When you're scaling your startup quickly, hiring engineers can slow you down like nothing else. Well, here's some good news. Lemon.io will find you a perfect candidate in 48 hours. What's Lemon.io you ask? Well, they're a marketplace of engineers from Europe, and they'll match you with a candidate within 48 hours. And if it doesn't work out, they will replace the developer right away. There's nothing to lose. There's no downside here. They test and interview every developer to eliminate the risk of a failed project. And guess what? When you hire in a European time zone, you can have developers working basically 24 seven, you can go faster than your competitors, and you're probably going to beat them. Launch portfolio founder drew fabricant said lemon.io was a game changer for his startup scout. Well, Drew was under the gun to hire a developer with a very specific skill set and lemon.io delivered a great candidate. And they were a pleasure to work with. Not only did Drew find exactly what he was looking for, but lemon.io also delivered them a second engineer just as fast. So if you could use a full time or part time developer to run your projects faster, go to lemon.io slash twist. That's lemon.io slash twist. And you'll receive a 15% discount for the first four weeks of work with a developer. What a nice offer. Thanks, lemon.io.

### Human: Yeah. The other thing is, especially if you're early in your entrepreneurial career, let's say you're doing your first one. The other reason to kind of lean a little bit more towards kind of potential for the idea is that You want like several if you can several steps up to bat. So you may not get it exactly right the first time, right? But if you do a service business, you're sort of in there for the grind, you're going to be there for 510 1520 years. And that's sort of going to be it like it's not going to die, right? It's going to make revenue, you'll you'll have a comfortable living. But it's unlikely you're going to have this kind of breakout success, which is which is okay. There's nothing wrong with that. But You know, if you really feel like this kind of entrepreneurial drive to kind of take your swinging bat and swing for the fences, you're better off doing a product oriented company. And as it turns out, in my experience, and this is a little bit paradoxical, it's often easier to pursue a larger idea than a smaller one. And the reason is that a larger idea will attract better people that are more ambitious, that will kind of thrive on that challenge, like, oh, we're gonna do this thing that's really, really hard. That's the way to get people kind of into the company that will help you increase the odds of your, of your success. Whereas if you're going at a, oh, we have a high potential, it's like a 70%, we're gonna all make money here, it's gonna make you know, be a million dollars, $5 million, whatever it is, that's fine. But you're gonna find other people that are kind of mitigating risk a little bit too early. So if you're an entrepreneur career, you know, as much as you're kind of willing to stomach nice, I'd say take your shot, right?### Assistant: All right, we all know the one thing that separates great startups from the good ones is product velocity. What does it mean product velocity fancy term, right? You got your product and your velocity speed, the speed in which your product improves. So can you ship updates? Can you release new features? Can you do bug fixes? Can you iterate on the interface? Can you solve problems for your customers? And can you do it quickly, because you're not alone, you have competitors, and your customers have choices, they may solve their problems by writing their own custom code, or they might use your solution. This is what startups are about. How fast can you get that product velocity going? And so, you know, how do you supercharge it? Everybody says, Okay, yeah, we want to go faster. But you got to go faster, intelligently. And Crowd Botox is going to help you do that. They're your CTO as a service, basically, they provide you with the most optimal architecture to get your product to market as fast as possible, you'll have access to an on demand product manager and developer talent, and they will help get your app into production 10 times faster than conventional development. Crowd Botox can work with your in house dev team, or you could just have them work independently. and you own all the IP, you own all the source code, let the folks at CrowdBotics supercharge your product velocity today. No more waiting. Get a free build plan at crowdbotics.com slash twist. That's a $4.99 value just for the twist listeners. You get that for free. That's c-r-o-w-d-b-o-t-i-c-s.com slash twist for a free build plan. It's such a great framework. I think one of the things I've seen over and over again is people will pitch me what is essentially a service business, you know, maybe in a wrapper with a little bit of software or software enabled services, whatever. And if you think about the expected value, something we talked about in poker, if I do call this bet, and I or and I do hit it on the river, or I do hit my magic card on the turn, do I get that person's whole stack? Do I get three people's whole stack? Is everybody going to come in, you really have to think about that. And what I tell founders, you know, which is largely based on your framework here, is you're going to put in 60 7080 hours a week for your startup. It's just the nature of it, it's gonna be all encompassing. If you're an entrepreneur, you're gonna put everything you got into it. If you put everything you have into a service business, you're gonna get it to $10 million a year in revenue. If you put everything you got, know, into a software business or a marketplace, or FinTech company, and, you know, pick a platform company, you know, the the potential revenue is billions of dollars. And there's just a natural cap to some businesses, you pick DTC, it's going to be a low margin grind. Yeah, sure. You get a bowling branch once in a while or an eight sleep. there are outliers that can do it, but man, it's hard. And then I love yours passion and proximity to the idea.

### Human: Yeah, I mean, I don't even know if he really is. I would be so curious. I did not expect it. But I think what we're really talking about is like, this is the consequence. And look, I hate to be the one who keeps saying this. But it's not like Twitter was not warrant. Right? It's not as though they're under a fine, right? It's not as though people have not been saying for well over a decade, like, hey, you need to clean this up. You need to clean up all of it. You need to clean up the harassment, you need to clean up the part where you let everybody say whatever the hell they want, and you don't do anything about it. And you let them brigade. And you have all this coordinated inauthentic activity. And you you don't respect user privacy in favor of targeted ads, and you choose growth over everything else. it's not as though we have not been saying this to Twitter for 15 years. And now you are in so much trouble. You have the bed so completely. Yes, we have to burn the house down.### Assistant: All right, listen, I'm going to name the super team. These two Jerry hat trick centers. I'm going to call them the Karens. Lindsey Graham, don't listen. They're coming in, they're gonna regulate your social media here. I I have a very pragmatic view on regulation. These social media companies are dumb, because they have flaunted their absolute disregard for the impact of their products in the world. And they have snubbed their nose at regulators. And so what happens when you do that for too long? Well, then people get upset the public, the public puts pressure on their representatives, and then you get regulated. And the regulation, of course, is done by people outside your industry, what you always want to do is regulate yourself. And the best example of this is the movie industry, the movie industry was getting in a lot of hot water, right? People were upset. Oh, this movie is too violent. Oh, this movie's got too much sex in it. And then the Motion Picture Association said, Okay, we hear you, you don't want your kids to see whatever happened in the exorcist that was way too graphic, whatever happened in this movie that was too much sex, whatever it was. And they said, No problem, we'll create our own organization. And we'll rate the movies, we'll have g rated, we'll have our rated, then they're like, you know, that's not enough. So they went to G. Then they went to PG. And they said, well, this is kind of like third. And then they were like, well, this is kind of a little too much for a 10 year old. Like, okay, we'll come up with PG 13. And then we'll come up with not rated. And then we'll come up with x. And they self regulated Molly and they created a board that looked at every movie. And if you wanted to be in movie theaters, the movie theaters required at least the big chains, you submit your movie to the NPA so they could put that parental warning at the start of every film. Then the government was like, okay, Fair enough. I gave Zuckerberg and Sherrill the answer to this question. I gave them the equivalent of the MPAA. When somebody logs into these services, it should say, would you like to pay $5 a month? We will track nothing. Or would you like the free advertising version? We're going to track everything you do and serve you ads. If they had that, that would be the equivalent, Molly, in my estimation of the MPAA self rating. Because they could say, look at 7% of people paid us half of what Netflix costs, our average user spends more time on the service than Netflix. So we think we're worth at least what Netflix charges. And if people want to trade their their data for that, who are you the politicians to say no, we put this we remind everybody on the first of the month, I have this option. And we link to what data we're using, and they can go see their profile and see their data. And at any point, they can click delete all my data I'm paying and put their credit card in. If they did that, they would have the high ground. That's my belief. Yeah, I believe they brought this on themselves.

### Human: Yeah, absolutely. And Jason, so good being here and seeing you again. Yeah, it's been a while. Yeah. Yeah. So in a minute, as the kids say, It has it has interesting times, right? So yeah, so solo, it's pretty simple. We help truck drivers become independent, so that they can finally legally work with customers like Uber, Freight, Pepsi, FedEx, and thousands more.### Assistant: All right, when we get back from this quick break, we're going to meet the number one vote getter in the launch accelerator 17th class stick with us. All right, everybody, I want to tell you about an exciting new online community that I just joined. It's called Trends, and you can go visit it at trends.co.twist and sign up for $1 in a two-week trial. Trends.co.twist to get that $1 two-week trial. And it's from the team over at The Hustle, you know, that newsletter that everybody talks about. I spoke at one of their conferences. That guy Sam runs it, really smart cat. I had him on the pod at one point. I didn't use roundtable have money again but i love their analysis they just did a really interesting one on retail heavy businesses that are avoiding bankruptcy during covid they do these like analysis pieces that are really in depth where they detail the strategies that these companies like lululemon and gap are trying to do to stay afloat during the pandemic. It's great work. They put a lot of effort into it. And when you get trends, you're going to get a network and information to help you succeed as an entrepreneur, you're going to get access to a community of industry leaders and founders and investors like myself, and they also have weekly live lectures with experts who will teach you things like growth strategies, SEO, and how to send the perfect cold email. Trends has exclusive research with intriguing topics that will help educate and inspire you and your team, like the 30 companies defining the future of media and pop culture, or data on thousands of successful Kickstarter projects. It's a really cool new offering. Sam's a really smart cat, I had coffee with him. the other week over at Cyclast before the pandemic happened actually. And I was just taking notes. That guy, Sam Smartcat, visit trends.co slash twist, T-R-E-N-D-S dot C-O slash twist. And you'll get in for two weeks for just $1 and I'll see you in there. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. All right, welcome back to This Week in Startups. We're talking to the three top vote getters at Launch Accelerators. 17th class, we've done 17 of these. It's always seven. seven founders and uh... third place was nude bar aaron carpenter we met with and that was ninety four point five points she scored cumulatively in the accelerator and then we met nicole deals uh... with technique and she had accumulative hundred twenty eight point five points in voting which put her in second place and in first place we had armando Perez, he is the co-founder of Solo Trucking, S-O-L-O, trucking.com. And they came in first with a whopping 159.5 points. So a spread of 60 points between the third and first place. And about, yeah, about 30 points equally. Armando, congratulations on coming in first. But it, of course, means nothing, ultimately. It's just a kind of fun thing we do each week. tell everybody, because ultimately you have to build up just a large sustainable business. That's the goal not to win a prize here. We're not playing for trophies, we're paying for revenue and building an at scale business. But tell everybody what solo trucking does.

### Human: Which is obviously not investment advice.### Assistant: I think there'll be a lot of options for them to pursue once they, the new CEO gets control of the ship. And, you know, we, we went through the new CEO's pedigree. Um, he's, you know, a legit guy who's done stuff like this before. And I believe he's a previous CFO, if I'm not mistaken. So it's kind of how you send in here is like the fixer. So they sent a fixer in here. And what you're seeing is fixers fixing. And the previous founder was all over the place and not disciplined. And so this is like, the down, this is the downside of the founders can do no wrong. Yes, you know, founder authority is really important. You want the founder to run the company ideally, unless the founder isn't disciplined enough to run an operationally hard business. Some founders are super creative, they make a category defining product like Peloton. there is no doubt that Peloton is the greatest exercise equipment ever made the greatest, most innovative product ever made, period, full stop. There's nothing even close to it in my mind, except for maybe the tonal, which I think, you know, got a lot of its DNA from Peloton in fairness to Peloton. And I don't have shares in either company, just to be clear. But I do own both of them. And I can tell you, I watched tonal copy Peloton, and you know, they're clearly inspired by it. It's that much of a category defining company. But a category defining company with bad operations is what Apple did when Steve Jobs was running it without people like Tim Cook. And then Steve Jobs got ousted. And then he came back for round two. And it was like, you know what, I need to have an operationally sound business. I need people like Tim Cook running it. And now we're seeing the totally uninspired version of Apple today with Tim Cook running it. So they lost the founder, innovation and authority. And they just got this incredible operator running it. And it's printing money. So Prince money doesn't have to be inspired. Well, it's just basically all the inspiration that Steve Jobs came up with, like, they just keep releasing, you know, MacBook Airs, and iPhones, that are literally cover songs of what Steve Jobs came up with, like, literally, they just added a verse to one of Steve Jobs, great, you know, songs, it's a remix, like, it's just a remix on the brilliant stuff that Johnny Ive, and Steve Jobs created. They keep releasing the MacBook Air. And I keep buying them. They keep releasing the iPad and the iPhone. I keep buying them. Yeah. Because they're so f***ing good. know, it's, it's like, they're so classic. It's like the Rolling Stones or, you know, whatever incredible band, they can just keep going on tour and people keep buying tickets. You know, that's how transcendent the product was, I actually believe Peloton is that transcendent of a product, that if this person can just get the ship righted and operationally make the math work on the subscriptions and the product sales, and the cost structure, they'll be back in the game. So now I'm talking myself into a J trade. Oh, my God.

### Human: In this case, it's a 9-figure bet. A lot of figures.### Assistant: Yeah, so the person obviously understands markets and trading, right? And I guess, if they're trading crypto for institutions, their arrival with Coinbase, who also I think I mentioned this the other day, just custodial stuff when we're talking about like, if you lose your money, what happens to your crypto? And I guess they have like institutions where they will, you know, manage your crypto for you and be the custodian of it, but it's still yours, and you have the keys and you have access to it. And then there's everybody else's logging into an app And that was part of that big controversy, the last two days, if Coinbase, which is extremely unlikely were to go bankrupt, what would happen to your crypto? And so, I guess, FTX is not a US based company, they don't operate in the US, my understanding. And if their rival is Coinbase, well, Robinhood and Coinbase are a bit on a collision course here, right? Yeah. Coinbase does not trade stocks, but Robinhood, of course, does crypto. And I'm still a Coinbase, I was an angel, and I still own my shares. So according to this SEC filing, Emergent Fidelity Technologies, which is his company that he's the sole director and majority owner of, took a stake worth 648 million. What this is, as we did the other day, this is just a really opportunistic buy, is my take on it by somebody who's in the know. We did a little take the other day, what is the market cap of the company minus the cash in the bank, which gives you true enterprise value? If the true enterprise value seems insanely low after you net out their cash, because the cash could buy that equivalent of stock, if you just think of it that way, people are bargain hunting, hunting. And what did I say last week, people were asked for earlier in the week, I should say God is a long week. I said, we're bouncing along the bottom, this is the ball bouncing along the bottom, it will come to a rolling stop at some point, and everybody will stop losing their minds, we'll create a floor, I guess, as they say in the markets. And it seems like, you know, today, we got the bounce, we have people like Dara bought 5 million worth of Uber, that's another one of these opportunistic buys like this one. I think Toby bought some Shopify, I saw that the guy who does I heart media, Bob Pittman bought some shares of his own company. He's the CEO of it. So when you start seeing that, you know, the people who are insiders or who are very sophisticated realize there's an opportunity here and they might have some cash laying around. Also, Daniel, I think, bought 50 million in Spotify. So people can criticize these buys. But you know, as like, oh, they're trying to pump up the stock. It's a pretty cynical look, but okay, sure. You can have the cynical take on it. My take on it is money's money. If you're placing that bet, sure, you're making a signal, but it's still money and you're still making that bet. So if it's a 7-figure bet, it's a 7-figure bet. Or an 8-figure bet.

### Human: You're like, I need you to understand this is major like this.### Assistant: Nothing comes in isolation, right? I mean, we're conscious that there is decades of neuroscience and engineering that have allowed us to to get to this point. And likewise, there is an ecosystem around us that we are interfacing with. And that is an ecosystem of high-performance manufacturer, advanced manufacturer in the United States, the whole medical device industry as it exists today, the regulators, the FDA, and insurers, hospital systems, neurologists and neurosurgeons and patients and their families. I mean, there is an entire ecosystem required to move, you know, a promising technology from the laboratory into patients' lives. And that was kind of what you were asking before is, how do you decide when to make the leap? How do you make it work? Yeah. And we're very conscious. This is not tech development that happens in a bubble, especially medical technology. The environment is highly regulated and the ability to the ability to to The ability to get early feedback from our users in medical technology is very much limited relative to almost any other high-tech industry. And we're sensitive to that. And I will say that is one thing also that is unique about the precision system. And you asked before about what our next steps are and how close we are to actually being able to deploy the system. And because our electrodes don't damage the brain, they're what we call surface microelectrodes as opposed to penetrating microelectrodes. They can be removed or they're designed to be removable without damaging the brain. And so, we're designing the first system to be a temporary system. meaning it will be usable for a temporary interface early on for diagnostic use in conditions like epilepsy, and then it will be able to be removed. And that has certain advantages. One of them is that The first generation device, we hope, will do a lot of good clinically. It will certainly deliver to, we hope, will deliver to clinical practice the ability to interface with the brain at spatial and temporal resolutions that have never been possible before. We'll be able to see, we've seen it, you know, we've seen it in development, but hopefully we'll see it very soon in patients. The real-time activity of the brain at spatial resolutions that have really never been seen before. And to us, that's tremendously exciting. We think it will have a significant impact on clinical care. But the fact that the first generation device is removable allows us access to a regulatory pathway called the 510k pathway, which is what the FDA calls the pathway for devices that are sufficiently similar to something that's been done before. And so the path is somewhat expedited relative to what we call the PMA pathway, which is used for class 3 high-risk permanent implant devices. And we're very excited about that because we feel that even as we deliver first-generation benefit to clinical medicine, we also will be able to understand how the device works in the hands of clinicians and in the lives of patients. And That will be, we hope, the first or one of the first, if not the first, you know, approved high-bandwidth electrophysiology systems in clinical medicine today. And that, we hope, will set the stage for the generation of perinatal implants that come in the years to follow. But that will generate a lot of learnings in our view, and we hope will be good for the field.

### Human: Yeah, yeah.### Assistant: I did, because you know, Robin Hood, let's trade overnight. But I mean, basically, the concept here is this is an investment advice. I'm trying to find companies that I think could be five times larger in 10 years, I'm trying to learn the dynamics of public markets to inform myself, I'm doing this with a small amount of money relative to my overall net worth. So it's like a basically like a million bucks, just I'm trading here. And so what? Well, you know, I've been thinking about our conversations a lot, and which companies I think are poised for greatness over a decade. Right. So everything I'm doing is looking at like a decade long approach to this. Now, sometimes, you know, that means that in the short term, you could have ups and downs here, but I bought some more Apple. Why did I buy Apple? It is shocking how many shares they're buying back, how much cash they throw off. And I just think as we get closer to this AR deployment, the buzz I'm hearing is that they have something very special. So I just, I think the developer community rallies around a product from Apple in a way different than they're going to rally around an untrusted partner like Zuckerberg. Now this is a little bit complex as a trade. I believe the problem with Zuckerberg's bet on Meta is a problem with the lack of trust people have for Zuckerberg. Now this seems crazy. Not in the slightest. not to you because you've been covering the cover so long. So if you double click on the issue, the platform is only going to do as well as the apps that are built for it. Now when I open up my my Oculus every Thanksgiving, somebody brings a new one, one of my my brother in law or whoever will have a new one, I put it on I played a racquetball game. The interface is still really clunky. I did lights, the lightsaber game saber, whatever the saber. Beat Saber, you know, and I'm always amazed at the technology, I played a Star Wars game. And this time around, I was like, you know what, my motion sickness didn't kick in until maybe the 30th minute inside the Star Wars game, which was massive progress, because it usually would be in the first three minutes. So I'm like, okay, the fidelity is getting better. So what will define the winner is who makes the best apps. And you know, I started looking at my Apple Watch, which I resisted for seven versions, and then I got it. and now i use on a very regular basis a number of apps here i will use slopes i will use the tonal app i will use the starbucks app i'm looking at my apps here i will use i message peloton's app for my heart rate and overcast for podcasts, listening my alarm. And I answer the phone and I set and mapping directions. So and I would say four or five years ago was zero because I was on Fitbit. So just watching that progression. I hated the watch. I don't wear jewelry, jewelry. I don't own any jewelry. I don't wear watches. I'm not a watch person. But this has become like when I forget my watch. It's not quite as bad as forgetting my phone. But they kind of got me.

### Human: And it wouldn't be that much compared to what you would pay if you got sick. And if you all of a sudden were a diabetic and you had to pay for your insulin, for God's sake, you know, I mean, the amount that people have to pay, like a type one can't help it, right? Their pancreas doesn't operate. Yep.### Assistant: Well, I mean, it is definitely thanks. Thanks. Every time we do this, putting them on blast. Well, it is, you know, I do think we've been talking about this, we had to land beyond and talking about their sort of, you know, affordable, quote, unquote, you know, concierge doctor at 3000 a year, this is a similar price product. you know, these things are not yet cheap. But what I've learned with technology is uber black quickly becomes uber x becomes lift line uber pool, you know, or jump mobility, lime scooters, whatever, you know, innovation just keeps happening. And I think we do need to get to a place where we have an honest discussion about what are we spending on healthcare especially for young people or younger people before them, you know, the plane or the car breaks down, this is like not having a check engine light, or only having a check engine light, but not having what pilots see pilots know the temperature, the speed, the altitude, the oil pressure, how much fuel is in, they really have a lot more detail on what's going on with the car. And that does become a discussion with the maintenance crew, right. And they can see the history of things. And I think this whole IoT movement, Internet of Things for people weren't here for it, is going to have like this sort of second or third wave where we're going to have more sensors around, I just got a sensor for co2 monitoring as an example. And I've been carrying it around my house with me when I work out. And I was like, wow, the co2 levels in the house are amazing. The HVAC is working. Well, I have also some sensors for, you know, California fires, Molly, just to make sure everything's nice and clean. But And then I was working out and I brought the sensor with me. And all of a sudden, for the first time, the carbon monoxide went off. And I was like, what's going on here? It's a problem. The gym. It's like, I'm the problem in the gym. I am running carbon, I'm huffing and puffing. And then I opened the doors and put on the air purifier just to get some air circulation and just boom dropped immediately. And I was like, wow, you know, this is why I might be feeling a little dizzy on the treadmill. because I'm not getting enough oxygen or the carbon monoxide level is triple what it was, you know, previous to the doors being open in the air filter being on. And you know, this just about one example, I think, temperature sleep with eight sleep where investors in that company, I think we're going to start to see these items. And Alex, I don't know if you agree become part of a collection where people will drive their own health. And I think that, to me, with the you know, the common investment as well is what I'm interested in is people taking control of their own health outcomes, people picking their foods wisely, picking their exercise wisely, and just, you know, making an investment in time, because it really isn't money, it doesn't seem in all cases, you could use this product for the three months, right subscription, and at least get some basic understanding.

### Human: Yeah. Yeah. Other interesting things to note, Airbnb is also preparing for a $2 billion share buyback to offset dilution from employee stock bonuses via Bloomberg and then said, they said, quote, we're so confident in our long-term growth and profitability that today we are announcing a $2 billion share repurchase program.### Assistant: Oh, really? Yeah. Wow. So they believe they're undervalued. Day trade? Well, there's two ways to this is my understanding. I'd like to get an education on this. You really have to dig into these buybacks. Because some people may be interested in your position on this Molly. Some people say people do buybacks when they feel their shares are under priced. And it's like they would they think by buying them and reducing the total number of shares. That's good for the company or for the shareholders of the company, which includes management and the public shareholders and employees and everybody. can't find a better use for it. In other words, building more product spending on marketing, not as good as buying your own share and reducing the share pool, which should be right by the price of other people say it's manipulation. And you're just trying to make the stock price go up by getting rid of them. Now for somebody like Apple, who just keeps printing money, Yeah, doing share buyback seems like a healthy thing to do. Because what else they can't figure out what else to do with the money. Because it's just so much money sloshing around. I don't know if that's where Airbnb is. Do they have that much money, especially around but here's a very interesting chart because we're talking about Uber versus Airbnb. Airbnb is profitable, and has free cash flow, and they have had for a little bit. Now, if you look at the this is from why charts, thanks to the folks at why charts, they're not a sponsor yet, but they should be. I need a charting sponsor for j trading. PS ratio price to sales ratio. Yeah, the purple is Airbnb. They were trading at 36 times at the peak of this madness 36 times their sales. not their earnings. Now, this isn't a price earnings ratio, right? Then, you know, you look at Uber, it was much less 2.7 times their sales, and maybe it got up to 10 or whatever. And this is the compression that happened in the market. But you'll see that the two companies have started to narrow why my theory on that would be because Uber now is taking free cash flow more seriously, they're going to try to get up to that Airbnb and because, you know, an Uber has that faster growth. So we'll see what happens. But, you know, there there are price mismatches in the market on this price to sales. And I think Airbnb is was a real darling, I think Coinbase was a real darling. And if you look at Coinbase is price to sales and Robinson hoods, and like they were also extraordinary people were really pricing in a lot of growth, a lot of growth. And you know, they're, they've seen movies like Google, and Facebook, and Amazon, and when you and Apple and Microsoft before that, when you see those movies, and you think, well, one of these companies is going to be like those, or a couple of them will be like the next version of those trillion dollar companies. That's when people get excited. And maybe these things start getting a little out of whack. Or that's the my theory on why people are making those bets. We'd love to hear your feedback, Jason at calacanis calm for life.

### Human: I like to say I love founders that are dumb enough to bash their head through brick walls, but who are smart enough to realize sometimes you can walk around it.### Assistant: Yeah, great. So you like to have that, like, they'll never give up, there'll be dogged, but they're also savvy. And they're willing to, you know, think outside the box and try other strategies. know, at the end of the day, many different intangible qualities can make a successful founder, I've met introverts, extroverts, I've met engineering, you know, folks, and I've met artistic folks, you can have a designer like Airbnb, you could have a dogged, you know, Travis with Uber, who is just a great leader of people and a visionary. You could have Larry and Sergei who are engineers, you're gonna be one who's an engineer. you know, there's a lot of different prototypes here. And the truth is, having a product that you want to see manifest itself in the world, and you are relentless in the pursuit of that, and building a great team, if you can build a great product and build a great team, it tends to work out. So I think who can build a great product, who can build a great team, somebody who is good at building product, and somebody who's good at getting people to join. So if you can't find your co founder, if you can't find your first employee, you may have failed the first test, which is you're just not able to recruit a team. And if you can't build a great product, well back to that Baker analogy with the previous question, it's kind of like, Well, who are you? What qualifies you as a founder, you don't have the ability to build product, you don't have the ability to recruit teams, I've always been really good at recruiting people, and building enthusiasm and conceiving of products and marketing them. And, you know, branding them, that's been my skill set. I've always been able to find technical people to work with me. So no big deal. But some people are not good at the recruiting thing. And they're not good at product. And I'm like, What are you good at? And they're like, I don't know. Well, maybe you need to work on that. There seems to be like, the thing I find problematic about this question, Jake is What are you gonna do change your personality, like to fit what I what Zack and I said here, at the end of the day, build a great product, build a great team, delight customers and have them not shut up about your product. Those are things you can actually change in the world. You're not going to be able to change your empathy, flexibility, clarity of thought, like these are hard things for you to change in our personality. Just make a great product, build a great team, delight customers. And you got a really good chance of getting funded. Okay, Matt via email from your career as an entrepreneur investor, what are the similarities between all successful startups you've seen? Again, back to pattern recognition? I hate these questions, because they, they, they really show a lack of knowledge of the space, which is many different things can succeed. And the similarities, you know, there are similarities, but many different things succeed. I don't know, gee, can you think of similarities? Or do you get annoyed by these questions? Like I do?

### Human: It's funny because of all people, right?### Assistant: Listen, lots of founders are loosey-goosey with their personal phone numbers. You know about this problem. People start putting their personal mobile phone in documents, proposals, and it makes things super messy. If you're running your own company, you need to be professional. An open phone helps you create a business phone number, and it's really easy. How easy is open phone? You install an app, and you're done. You pick your number, you're done, and you can create a shared phone number. How great is that? You know how you have like an email for customer support you do VIP at? Now you can have that for a phone number where multiple employees can feel calls and texts, including those texts super important, because that's how a lot of business happens. A lot of these young folks, they don't want to talk on the phone, they want to text. Well, open phone can help you with that as well. And it's affordable already. It's just 10 bucks a month. I mean, it's so affordable. It's ridiculous. I think they should triple their prices. I think I would pay 30 bucks a month for this, but they charge 10 twist listeners can get an extra 20% off that. For any plan for your first six months, that's even ridiculously generous. I mean, that puts it down to $8 a month. You're kidding me. You need to do it for yourself as an executive or a salesperson. Openphone.com slash twist. And if you have an existing phone number with another service that's overcharging you, or that doesn't have this incredible feature set, they'll put it over for you. If you're thinking about phone numbers, I just want you to think openphone.com slash twist. That easy, folks. So I would like to give advice. I've been thinking about this a lot. And I've been thinking about it in relation to the very scary recession we're going into, having lived through two recessions, and in both recessions, having had to lay people off, I'm determined to not have to do that this time. So for inside employees and launch employees listening, as the boss, I am monitor things. I keep cash in the bank. I keep myself cashed up. I'm very conservative in my lifestyle. You don't see me flying private even though I arguably could I don't do certain things. Because I try to keep cash reserves high so that I don't ever have to deal with laying people off. But we're all thinking it, right? Oh, my God, what happens if advertising takes a hit? What if the economy is thrown in for two years? Will you have to lay people off? Will our company be one of those companies? So I always think about, well, how do you avoid that? Well, when you keep revenue high, and you have to have efficiency high. So now we're all if we start thinking of ourselves as a team, which in my later life, You know, I've really started to look at teams and team functionality. It's hanging out with, you know, Draymond a bunch and watching the Warriors up close and watching that team. I've actually learned a lot from Draymond, talking to him about team dynamics, Kevin Durant, Steph, all that stuff.

### Human: Yeah, let's do it. So last month, Sequoia left the board of its portfolio company, Citizen, otherwise known as the app that scares the crap out of you because every time you wake up in the morning, you have 10 Citizen notifications and none of them are ever good. Maybe that's just Oakland. Anyway, Sequoia left the board of Citizen after declining to participate in a pay to play round, which there's a lot going on in that sentence, but let's sort of unpack it one by one. Why this matters is that these crammed down rounds have apparently been happening frequently in this new environment and maybe this is a good time for you to start by explaining what a pay-to-play round is and how it happens.### Assistant: Sure. If you're raising money, you went to an accelerator, your valuation was 2 million, you just see it around your valuation was 8 million, 6 million, whatever. You raise a series A 30 million posts, and then you're a series B at 100 million. Okay, the company then doesn't get proper product market fit. It's spending too much money. It anticipates since hey, those four fundraisings I just described happened easy peasy lemon squeezy in the height of the boom market, you know, founders expect, okay, I'll just do a series B and double the valuation and be great. Maybe I'll even sell some shares to the new investors and buy an apartment. So then you find an environment where people re value the company, they say how much revenue you got and how much you're burning. And it turns out, let's just make a number appear if they had a million dollars in revenue, people are valuing it at 100 times revenue in the last round, the new investors say a million dollars in revenue, okay, 10 times that. worth 10 million to me, the person as well, raise our last round and 100 million and nobody can agree. And then some people might have the ability to block some valuations. Now, citizen, I just made up an example of a composite based on what we've seen that pretty much tracked the last five years of the bubble. they were valued at 447 million. So this could have been, you know, really expensive. And then nobody wants to invest, maybe the company's burning a ton of money. So nobody sees a way to fix this. And then somebody comes along and says, I would invest, you know, if I saw the company, and you laid off all these people, and you got to, you know, 30 people and you had 3 million in revenue and you know, there's a chance for this to get to break even in a year or two and then be profitable. I would do it but I would only do it at this valuation. And now if that valuation was 20 million and the company had raised 50 that the math doesn't work out, right? You have more, basically debt on the books, more capital put in than you do room to invest. So they say, Okay, move all of the existing investors to common, and the board would have to vote on this. And they get 20% of the new company, they lose their preferred shares, they get 20% of the company, there's no longer a preference stack. So they don't get their $50 million at first. And then anybody who wants to can participate in this new round. So to keep any reasonable amount of ownership, you have to put money in. And if you don't put money in, you're going to be washed out. Recapitalize is a way to say this. So the round is paid to play, you pay, or you basically are going to lose a bunch of equity. And it's kind of cutthroat. I think we've had many conversations where people just say, I don't, I really would not want to be the person who suggests the pay to play around, or offers it because it creates a lot of bad feelings. And here we are lots of bad feelings.

### Human: I wonder, talk to me a little bit more about that. I think we're all familiar with the kind of academic valley of death that can occur with R&D where it doesn't become commercialized, or there is just not quite enough investment, right? It's like you can get here, but you can never make the final leap. And yet, there is also that question about what happens if you attract all of the best and brightest researchers and scientists to private industry. that if that doesn't work, then you've left universities unable to continue this research to like, how do you tackle that tension behind doing this as private companies that have, you know, investment return expectations as a result, you know, because of their VCs, versus having this happen kind of in an academic way that might be more open.### Assistant: Yeah, it's a great question. And there is that tension always there always will be that tension. And it's hard to solve the general case. But I can speak to I can speak to the specific case of how that sort of dynamic has played out in our field. And maybe to give a little bit of perspective, I like to think about what's happening now in neural interfaces as somewhat similar to the genomics revolution of the early 2000s. And if you sort of think about it, you know, actually, in the year 2000, it was not common for a computer scientist to be working in biology. True, right. That was kind of a new thing. We don't think about it so much nowadays, but it was not really a standard thing to have computer scientists working in biology, but the Human Genome Project gave them jobs in biology. There was no such thing really as computational genomics, you know, in the 80s and 90s, right? Biology wasn't really a platform. It wasn't enough data. There was not kind of an infrastructure And then, you know, what happened was that the Human Genome Project, in the final stages became kind of a competition between, you know, industry and an academic consortium. And it doesn't really matter so much who won, it just matters that that competition made it clear that it was time for for high throughput gene sequencing to take its place in industry, as well as in academia. And so it gave people who had been working in a purely academic sense, an opportunity, some of them to move and to take care of the engineering and scaling challenges required to actually bring what was essentially an academic endeavor until then, to patients, doctors, and healthcare systems. And that itself has been challenging in all kinds of ways. But that transition has been made by quite a few companies that have gone on to be tremendously successful to generate jobs and have economic impact that has been far greater than the total amount of federal investment that's gone into the field. And most importantly, it has had a tremendous impact on medicine. you know, to the point where now you can, you know, you've had some of these people on your podcast and, you know, in the past, but, you know, you can, as a consumer, you can have your genome sequenced, you can have all kinds of insight into your family and past and future health, as well as, you know, patients undergoing advanced medical therapy can have not just their own genome sequence, but, you know, the genome of a tumor, for example. I mentioned that as as background, because I think that something very similar is happening in neural interfaces today, that, to me, I think the year 2016 was for neural interfaces, kind of like the year 2000 for genomics, in that several major entities were formed that drew tremendous talent out of out of academia into industry with the mandate to try to take academic science and bring it to patients. And, you know, like you say, that transition is fraught and it's challenging in all kinds of ways. It's not usually well done in an academic setting. It kind of needs It kind of meets professional engineering and oftentimes a profit motive to really develop a robust engineered system that meets all the quality control standards and regulatory standards that allow it to be patient facing. Right.

### Human: Let's go right to the hard stuff. We were like, it's not OK, Tuesday, so we're going to go spreadsheet. We're going to go hard on spreadsheets, God, and liquidation preferences. This was your idea. So we're going right in. OK, here's the setup, though, to how we get here. One, Joker. So we've talked a lot about these instant delivery platforms when we had the GoPuff CEO on. We talked, I think, about how Joker, the instant delivery Startup had basically pivoted to only focusing on the latin america market hold out of the us market it's now in talks to raise between thirty five million and fifty million dollars led by existing investors at. A one point three billion dollar valuation this is according to a scoop from the informations and will. Viewed a bunch of the fundraising documents, that would actually be not a down round for Joker. Everybody's been very worried about these instant delivery startups. This would effectively be like a flat round, a $1.3 billion valuation compared to its most recent, which was December, which was $1.2 billion. Joker's raised $430 million so far, which includes debt, as I mentioned, pulled out of the U.S. market after heavy losses. Even after leaving the U.S. markets, it was still losing about $10 million a month. Yeah. As recently as July. And then here's where the round gets kind of interesting and gets us into a little like bonus VC Sunday school, VC Tuesday school. Yeah. G squared and GGB Capital are both existing investors and they're leading the round and have a 1.4 times liquidation preference. Liquidation preference, got it. Meaning that investors are guaranteed a 40% return in the event that the company is acquired or liquidated. Yeah. So first, right, like before we talk about timing and whether that's what they are now planning on, let's talk about how this works. Because liquidation preferences is one of those things I've read 50 million blog posts about, and I just don't understand it.### Assistant: Well, and then at night, it drops down to 40. And so, and you have to bring every ounce of liquid you're going to drink, and every ounce of liquid that's going to come out, you're responsible for, you know, so you need to bring in everything and you got to take everything out and there's no store. There is a hospital if you need something if there's an emergency. But you're basically on your own. If you run out of food, you got to go ask your neighbors. And so that's what that radical inclusion is about. Like, you know, if you are, if you have food or whatever, you're kind of obligated to give it to the next person if they need it. So it's kind of beautiful. I highly recommend people check it out. And Jeffrey, read the principles and start backwards from there. And if you do go, my only piece of advice is join a camp. Don't go solo dolo. go online, I think the Burning Man website has all the camp information. And so you find people from your city, if you're in Arizona, if you're in Texas, you can find people in your city, you go meet with them beforehand, and you plan out, you know, okay, I'm going to do breakfast on these days, you do lunch, you do dinner, I'll bring the water, you do the porta potties, I'll bring the medicine and, you know, make sure if we have, you know, emergency supplies, and, you know, medicine kits and everything. So you know, it's just, it's kind of beautiful in that way. Highly recommend everybody do it. Got a lot of news to get to. Listen, Squarespace is the platform where you can build or sell anything. You all know it. I've talked about it forever, a decade here on This Week in Startups, in partnership with Squarespace. We love it here. We use it for all our websites, remotedemoday.com, et cetera. And there are so many great features in Squarespace that you need to know about and that founders love. Obviously, e-commerce has been huge for them. And you're like, well, Squarespace, I immediately think beautiful templates, perfect responsiveness across any device, mobile, desktop. Yes, but they've added inventory management APIs and advanced analytics. They have incredible SEO right out of the box. So you're going to start ranking and selling and now they have member areas. What's member areas? Well, you can generate revenue through exclusive members only content. You can take all of that great content that you can teach people put it on your Squarespace site. and then sell it to people as a subscription or one off pieces of content. It's amazing. And if you build it for yourself, you don't have to give that 15 or 30% to other platforms, right? Let people come direct to you own that relationship. Don't get dis intermediated head to squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain squarespace.com slash twist squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial offer code twist for 10% off.

### Human: That can be our chaser. Give us our five minutes that we would have talked about Amazon and MGM, and then we'll... So here's the thing.### Assistant: It is going... We're going to look back on this and say, globalization created this incredible opportunity for humans to work together. And then a certain group of humans decided, they still wanted to act like savages and murderers. And participate in, you know, humanities, the best of humanities, you know, which is democracy and freedom. I think it's pretty great idea that we decide that the cost of participating in the global economy, and being part of the we'll call it the West, but let's just call it the free world. If you want to be part of the free world, and you want to get the benefit, your people need to be free and stop murdering your neighbors full stop. I think it's I think it's a very reasonable price to pay for a dictator. Yeah. want to sell your oil to the rest of the people you want to sell, we you want to participate, you want to have investment from outside. For the love of God, just stop killing people, and let people practice whatever religion they want, and let them read books, I don't know crazy ideas, maybe they could read a newspaper or have an opinion. You know, that's not the same as the dear leader. It's enough with these dictators. Listen, there's been a great reshuffling. Everybody is doing the great resignation, people are moving jobs, the pandemic has changed people's goals in life, maybe they want to work from home, they're being forced to come into an office, everything's on the table. Well, you need to go recruit those people. You need to get them on your team. Maybe you've lost some people on your team, and you got to refill positions because of the great resignation because people are checking out their options. Well, it's time for you to go on offense. And it's time for you to use my secret weapon, which is LinkedIn jobs. LinkedIn jobs is here to help you connect with the best candidates faster and your first one's always free. We just hired another video editor to help get this week and startups out you know we're doing six episodes a week and we needed more video editing help boom we found somebody amazing and we found them in under two weeks. You can create a free job post in minutes. And you'll reach the world's largest professional network with over 770 million people. And now you might have noticed this, it's very subtle, but when you go to somebody's LinkedIn profile page, you notice that purple hiring frame around their avatar, you know, in the picture? That is a new feature that they added to spread the word very subtly that you're hiring. So here's your call to action. It's super easy. LinkedIn jobs help you find the candidates you want to talk to, and it helps you do that faster. every week, nearly 40 million job seekers visit LinkedIn. And you can post your job for free. I kid you not a linkedin.com slash twist. That's linkedin.com slash t w i s t. Again, first job is free. LinkedIn does that to support startups who listen to this week and startups terms and conditions do apply because they're giving you something for free. All right, let's move on. to Bored Apes, the Bored Ape Yacht Club. I want to read one. You're really doing it.

### Human: Well, I was gonna say this, you know, when you when you have a good demo like this, your mind starts to just come up with ideas. Yeah, I was immediately like, who in the organization has to approve this? And I wonder if I connect this to my email, and I can source 100 leads from the database who haven't been contacted. So you start to get into information you probably have, which is the org chart and the permission. So who you know, you'd be asking who handles the automotive category on our sales team in the United States? Can you get them to approve this? And in our sales force, or wherever that data is stored? Can you get me, you know, all the sales leads in automotive that haven't been contacted this year?### Assistant: Sure, so we, I feel, this is fun going back to the startup roots of a forced live demo. So here's basically how it works. So I'm in my Box account right now, just looking at one file. And this is actually, it's a little meta because it's the press release for the announcement, but it's just an easy kind of public document. So this is the press release. And you'll be here, you know, you just click this box AI icon, we're still going to continue to play with the ways that this gets incorporated in the product. But for now, it's this sort of chat interface on top of your content. And so now, you know, this would work, whether it's a three page document or a 500 page document. But again, for demo purposes, we want to keep this simple. And you just say, you know, please summarize this announcement. And if it works pretty quickly, because we're in a dev environment, yep, it'll just go in and summarize the announcement. And then you say, what are three use cases for BoxAI? And so the key is it's saying, according to this document, here are three use cases. So it's not attempting to kind of go into the large language model and say, what do you know about BoxAI and can you respond to it? It's just saying, from this document, what are you finding inside of this piece of information that could answer this query? So that's sort of the way that we set the prompting up, and that also then dramatically reduces hallucinations that you might see, because it's not attempting to make anything up. We're really kind of forcing it to stay within the document. But there's one kind of cool thing, which is, while we're telling it to only answer questions based on the document, We're giving it a little bit of free reign when you want to do more transformative type use cases. So let's say you want to take this document and turn it into something. We're instructing the model to go along with that. So as an example, we'll just see if this works out to prove my point or not. Please write an email to an automotive company pitching BoxAI and please include three auto-specific use cases. So, in this query, this information is not in the document, but we're having it go along with that instruction to say, use this source information to answer this question still. We'll see if it comes up as a desired answer. And so, it wrote this email to an auto company about use cases that they might have for BoxAI. And so, So now you can imagine, you know, you're a sales rep and you're looking at, you know, a product marketing, you know, PDF, and you really quickly want some ideas in front of a customer of like, so what are some use cases for this new technology? You know, box AI would be this assistant for you to go and quickly, you know, answer that question. Um, and so any, basically any kind of, um, you know, tasks we give it other than just using the large language model as the, the sort of database of, of answers, um, it will, it will generally do on your content. And then, um, yeah, sorry.

### Human: And build that ad business and add yet another venture to the stable. I mean, Microsoft is just absurd. Every single cylinder is firing there. We should note as just a preview that Netflix is going to report its earnings on Tuesday, and they are expecting to have lost 2 million subscribers. during the second quarter. So I hope they are enjoying today's little stock bump should it be occurring because it's going to be a tough one.### Assistant: So here's what you need to know. Microsoft made almost 50 billion in q3 of 2021. I just was looking for ad revenue. So this is a little bit dated. But I was looking for the 2021 yearly ad revenue. So at that time, they were doing search and news advertising revenue combined was 2.9 billion in q3. Actually, here we have it in q3 of 2022. they had almost 3 billion in ad revenue. So that's 12 billion a year out of their whatever they have in revenue per year, which is I think, probably in the 200 billion range. So this is not a small amount of revenue for him for them, you know, this is like 6% of their revenue. So Microsoft is trying to continue to grow their ad revenue, just like Amazon is because it's really highly profitable. And so, Google's revenue is, of course, like, you know, 85%, 90%, I mean, it's 80% ad revenue. And so, know, it's kind of the opposite the companies in terms of, you know, mirror images, one makes their money through software, and the other one makes it through advertising, but it's meaningful. And this is a way for Netflix to get a really great deal. Microsoft has the need to grow this and advertising is about scale. So you if you get some really lighthouse customer, a lighthouse customer is one in our industry, the term lighthouse customer means they are so bright, that all the other ships can see them from far away. And they are, that's where everybody goes, they go towards the light, right. So when you get Microsoft gets Netflix, know, that's a setup that somebody else who wants to follow this path, you know, might come to them, HBO Max, whoever. And if they can get more and more partners like that, then they control the interface. Some advertiser wants to be on Netflix, which seems like a place advertisers are going to be. And then Ford now has to go to Microsoft, through the Microsoft interface. And hey, maybe while they're in the interface, they were doing a little bit of being advertising or news advertising. Maybe they increase it, right? So there's a huge loss for Google and a huge win for Microsoft in terms of building their ad networks. And I'm bet you I bet you Microsoft was like, you know, we'll take some very tiny percentage, you know, Google might have offered them like, you know, we'll do it, but we want 30% of the ad revenue, Microsoft might have come in and said 10%. Right? I don't think that data is available yet on this deal. But eventually it will come out what percentage they get. And I would guess, you know, it's low double digits. So 70 80%. I would say Google might have offered 30. And they offer 10. If I had to take a guess, right? YouTube offers 55% to just anybody off the street, and they take 45%. So they would have to give a better deal to somebody bringing so much audience. So maybe they go down to 30. But maybe Microsoft doesn't care about making a profit here. They just want the lighthouse customer, right?

### Human: So they're too good to get erased. Okay, so here, this is the lash. Okay, so work of this depth is paid, says Nilesh Ashra. And the fact that there were two presentations, August and October indicates this was certainly a paid creative retainer. Agencies get paid for ideas production is additional budget 99% of the time clients contractually own all the ideas.### Assistant: Brutal. I can basically tell you what happened here. Because I know kind of how this goes down in terms of a leadership kind of situation. Brian was not involved in putting together these ideas. But somebody on his team didn't tell him where the ideas came from. And they hired a bunch of agencies, he may or may not have been in those rooms, as you alluded to earlier, sometimes the CEOs of these companies are very busy, and they delegate part of being a great CEO at scale is delegation. Sure. Yeah. Here's what happened. This is my Columbo. Because I can figure this stuff out. So you said that an agency could never have made this, Mr. Armstrong. That's interesting, because the agency said they did make it. And it was on page 19. So then how come you said that they didn't say it? And the answer is, which he doesn't want to say publicly, was somebody on his team lied to him, or didn't tell him the truth. That's what I actually like. Nobody knows the Columbo reference. No, no one gets it. Just watch Columbo episodes. They're brilliant. Peter Fogg is the greatest. Guys, one more thing there, lady. You said you had the chicken palm or something like that. Gonna make you want a cigar. Exactly. So that's what happened here. Then he went rogue to write this because he was so pumped. And then somebody had to say, boss, we made a mistake. Yeah, it turns out we hired like 10 creative agencies over the last number of years or whatever number. Now when you hire a creative agency, I just asked this question on Twitter, and somebody who's at an agency explained it to me, because I was like, who owns the IP? Is this a pitch? Or was this paid? Right? Like, did they get pitched this and never open the PD? I started thinking of every permutation, like Did they get because I want to see the leak deck. I'm dying to see these pages and see how close the pitch was to the reality, right? Yeah. Yeah. So I'm not saying somebody should leak this. I'm just saying if it was leaked, it would give me great joy. I do, you know, it's seriously not encouraging anybody to leak it. It was giving me so much joy. So I got dust in my eye. But what somebody replied to me and explained was, listen, uh, actually Jake out. they were doing two of these pitches, they would have been paid as a creative agency. Actually, somebody wants to look in the replies to that tweet you just put up on screen at youtube.com such this weekend, sign up for the pod, you can see us in video and oral glory. They said in the reply, they were probably paid. Now when you're paid, I also was wondering who gets the IP. So if you pitch them, do they get all those ideas forever? And the answer is 99% of the time? Yes. So if you're being paid, it's like work for hire. They're just sending you ideas. Oh, and by the way, the Martin agency, I look them up. They're like agency of the year, the last two years, I think. They're like super legit.

### Human: Well, I burned out from micromanaging people during the Wanderlust days. I was completely obsessed. And I think most founders have this insane challenge of doing most of the work themselves in the early days, then to becoming and growing into a CEO that just manages people who manage people. So everyone is going through that weird phase and transition, and I think most of us are probably doing a terrible job the very first time you go through this. at pitch because we have done this before from the beginning, like we knew, okay, we have to create autonomous product teams. We can't really micromanage people. If you want to make everyone, keep everyone excited and mission driven, we have to just provide a lot of freedom internally. And we also hired a lot of senior folks who have been a part of other startups, failed startups, successful startups, venture firms. And I think that really helps to, like you say, to create a very mature company culture. How do you deal with people who### Assistant: It's really good, actually. And Patti McCourt's previous one, because she was the human resources person, I had her on the podcast like three years ago when she did her book. There were good reads back to back, the Reed Hastings one with Erin, I forgot her last name, who's a HR specialist, she's going to come on the pod. And then Patty McCord, who was the HR person. So there's literally two books. And then the co-founder of Netflix wrote a book, so I'm going to read that one too, and have the trifecta of them. So you kind of get the Rashomon, all different versions of what happened at Netflix. But the core thesis of freedom and responsibility really resonates with me, which is like, hire adults, have talent density, hire the most talented people. That's kind of obvious. You want to hire the most talented people you can afford. Aaron Meyer is the person who really wrote the book with Reed. It's basically her book though based on my take on it. Reed is kind of like maybe 20% of the book and Aaron's 80% or 90% maybe. Um, which is fine. I mean, I think they really nailed it, but freedom and responsibility of like, you're responsible for Netflix, Brazil, Netflix, Poland, Netflix, Tokyo, whatever Netflix Japan, and you're going to have to make decisions. But it was really interesting as they went around the world, like in Germany, like certain things about freedom and responsibility where like, you know, Oh, we don't have a travel policy. Do what's in the best interest. Do what you would do with your money was one, their original travel policy. And then somebody was like flying first class and like going out to like absurd restaurants and ordering $800 bottles of wines. And they're like, what are you doing? Because like the CFO was in the back and coach and like all these sales executives were in business at first and they had spent thousands of dollars on wine. Like what the fuck are you guys doing? And they're like, you said to do what I do. This is how I fly. This is what I spend my money on. And then they said, okay, that's not the rule anymore. The heuristic, we're not going to tell you how much you can spend, is do what's in Netflix's best interest. Is it in best interest to spend $8,000 on wine? Maybe if it's Tom Hanks and you're trying to win a deal, and he loves wine and that wins you the deal. But if you're just going out with four other Netflix people, please don't buy $8,000 bottles of wine. So it's really interesting how they like try to take away because they basically were like the basic premise of the book. And I'm curious what you think of this just as a general strategies. Talent density, get the most people, best people you can give them freedom and responsibility and be candid with each other and then take away rules. So remove rules, but you can't remove rules if you don't have the right people in it and you don't have this like freedom and responsibility FNR. What are your thoughts on management? What did you learn in terms of managing a startup and managing people?

### Human: I think you should jump into some of the jobs. And I also think you should like rebrand yourself as like a professional shit poster.### Assistant: Yeah, I think a lot of people sort of treat us like this startup that's like, oh, they have like a hypey Twitter about them. We're really a product-focused startup. We just are also good at marketing. I think people are saying that now, like when they use the app, they're like, oh, holy shit, this is an entirely engineering and product-focused startup. But yeah, we're good at marketing on the side, too. And I think it's not because we're good marketers. We just like making cool shit, making stuff that we find. Can I swear on this podcast? Yeah. Okay, cool. Our strategy for marketing is pretty simple. It's like, we want to make stuff that's funny and we want to make stuff that's cool and we want to make stuff that's useful for founders. And if we like it, I think other people will like it. And we've proven that. So we were just like, we're going to go out there and we're going to have fun. I think a lot of startups underestimate that building a brand is really important. There's a trend in the last five years at Silicon Valley that's like, you shouldn't worry at all about marketing. ship and do engineering and build out a really functional product. And that's actually true. It is totally true. And we do that. It's just like, I'm not an engineer. I can't sit there and code. We have a fantastic engineering team, led by our dear Brian Armstrong. He's an amazing, not the Coinbase one, the better one, head of engineering at PartyRound. We have an amazing engineering team, and they're fantastic. And we have an amazing product team. But me and my boss, Dylan Abruscato, on the side, we were having fun. We're just showcasing our love for founders and the startup world and building awesome things. So yeah, we have a couple of strategies. We have a very pop in Twitter, I'd say. A lot of founders use Twitter. And we were like, hey, at the start of this all, we were like, we want to reach founders. We are founders. And I think Tech Twitter and Crypto Twitter are this really rare, high-density collaboration of people building stuff. So we immediately were like, let's just channel all our energy into it. And Twitter is great. It's amazing. It's a really meritocratic platform in the sense of good stuff comes to the top. So we just make good stuff. We make stuff we find funny and we interact with our followers heavily. It's been great. We've had endless amounts of founders come through our Twitter. We have a wait list. It's like 40,000 strong right now and we are onboarding founders as fast as we can. Twitter is incredible for us. And then we also do drops, which are just launches of little mini products that are kind of unrelated. Sometimes they're fun. Sometimes they're useful. Sometimes they're just And those have done really well and gone viral and brought more founders on board. That's sort of what I do at PartyRound. I'm a growth hacker, so I do a lot of our Twitter community and I also build these products on the side to go viral. Can I jump into some of the drops?

### Human: Yeah. It's a really interesting idea. The seasons, we get a little screwed up, but it's interesting. No, seriously, what do you think the changes might be? Obviously, people, I have a phone call this week as a friend of mine said, can you talk to one of my best friends who's considering going back to Stanford for their MBA, which will cost them $200,000. and it's going to be remote. So should they, I think it was Stanford, it might've been Penn or Harvard. Anyway, it was one of the big schools. They're like, they don't know if they should be 250K in debt or if they should go deploy that some other way. I'm like, well, that's a really easy question. Spending $200,000 on a Zoom education makes no sense. What do you think the second order, third orders that you're looking at are?### Assistant: Well, we can kind of I mean, in terms of maybe first and second order, I like to think of it as a bit of a Gartner two by two, which is, you know, what are things that are nature has put us through like this AB test, right? And so we're living in a different variant of the world. And so kind of one axis is what things will kind of go back versus stay. And I think a lot of it is driven by the other axis, which is in what situations is the alternative, is the alternative that we've been exposed to better or worse. So give me an example, handshakes, clearly not coming back. Because not doing handshakes is fine. And the cost of doing handshakes is now potentially, you know, a terrible disease. The inversion of that, in my view, is restaurants. As it turns out, not having restaurants is a bummer. People really want them. And so they are going to come back. Now, there's a lot of stuff that kind of gets caught here in the middle, which is, you know, at work, does the office, does it matter? We don't really have the data on that, whether you know, some teams increasing efficiency, some teams decreasing efficiency. So on the margin, I think we're actually going to see teams disappear. So a lot of discussion of that on the internet, I wouldn't want to bore us with that. The third order effects I find very interesting. And the one particular that's on my mind is How does this change the kind of undercurrent psychology in terms of making people more tribal versus more porous? I think, for example, two very obvious changes that I think will kind of just drive how people think and operate. One is just this notion of any human I'm walking around can be carrying, how would you say, like a biological machine gun almost. It requires you, they're armed. Everyone could be armed and this requires you to do a lot of, I'm sure you're doing a lot of weird calculations. I find myself doing as I meet friends, which is like, you know, do I really trust them when they've been quarantined? How clean are they as a person? And you're trying to project all this information from almost no data points. And that type of worry, I think will make things a little bit less porous and people a little bit more clicky, a little bit more Facebook groups. Yeah, and less, sorry, more WhatsApp groups and less Facebook, Facebook, so to speak. Yeah. The other thing that I think must just must change given how humans operate is if everyone walking around with a mask is different. You know, you look at people with masks, there's there's something going on there that is just a different in the way you're the neural net of your mind perceives the face. Right. You know, I find, you know, I can't see someone's expression quite clearly. There's something that looks a little bit guarded about it. And so, I don't know, I find it does change human psychology about other humans quite a bit. And I do think one of the most important things we've learned from social media is it's really important for humans to physically see each other as much as possible.

### Human: Yeah. And so my question back to you is, cause you've been in and around this for a while, right? This goes all the way back to your web blogs, even Silicon Valley reporter, like when this happens and someone says that, and obviously, you know, the cashflow hunter has done the work to call it out and really bullet by bullet. Why, what happens to us that doesn't allow us to react to this and do something?### Assistant: Well, uh, it's a great question. Uh, I think part of finding the truth, right? Cause what we're talking about here is the search for truth at its core. And the search for truth is a messy process. Because journalists and investigators, they typically have a small amount of information, they pursue it. And then they try to build what we would say in investing a mental model, right, they try to paint a picture. And it's kind of like puzzle pieces. Okay, I got a couple puzzle pieces. Oh, these three snap together. Okay, let me find a couple more puzzle pieces. Where can I find more of these? And then all of a sudden, you know, you get to that point where you're making a puzzle, and it's the puzzle pieces start to snap in easier. you're like, Okay, well, this one has to go here, this puzzle piece has to go here. That's the process of the truth. Just like poker, you're trying to unpack a hand of what's going on. You have partial information. That's what happens in the messy journalism process. Now you have the messy social media process, where citizen journalists are saying, Wait a second, I'm going to take a picture of this bank. Is that a line for a taco stand next to Silicon Valley, First Republic Bank in San Vicente? Or is that the line for uh first republic literally somebody said that like wait a second i think there's a taco truck there is that are they online for the taco truck in the background like somebody said that and then somebody else is like i'm going down there i live around the corner and some citizens i'm going down there and taking pictures and this is the messy thing that we are now living through so i think everybody has to become part of the process and understand that when you're on social media, you're in the thick of that process, what journalists were doing quietly knocking on doors trying to figure out is the Catholic Church abusing children and are the priests being moved from, you know, different churches in being covered up. That's what the Boston Globe did in that incredible Pulitzer Prize winning series, they literally went door to door to try to find the priests, and to try to find the victims, a slow, messy process that's now been accelerated, then you add a layer to that. Sonny, I think you nailed really what's at stake here is then you have, well, do you trust the people who are on the other side, who are denying something is happening? like the Catholic Church famously denied there was any issue with child molestation in the Catholic Church. So I know it's a really hard thing for people to talk about that, but there was a massive cover up there. And then eventually the truth came out, it took a decade or two, maybe two decades. And so here, we have an accelerant. So do we appreciate the fact that social media is an accelerant, that people can go take this picture, Well, we're going to have to get used to the fact that when there is something wrong, instead of it being covered up, instead of it taking a while, you're going to get all these kind of false information. But the process has now been accelerated. Same thing happened with COVID. People were denying COVID existed. Right?

### Human: And that's part of what the chips act was trying to do here in the united states is to create some redundancy. have some of these on the North American continent, and maybe have less dependency on regions that could be impacted by geopolitical events. Taiwan, fill in the blanks. That's right, yeah. And so ramping those fabs up is underway, but this is a non de minimis task. It is a significant task to put one of these, to stand one of these up, this is a couple year process.### Assistant: Well, yeah, we are in a GPU crunch, no doubt about it. And that's not going to alleviate for a while. I'm happy to talk about why that is as well as a lot of time in that in the semiconductor industry. But right now, if you're willing to sign longer term contracts, you can generally get them. So we we as a company actually have blocks of GPUs that we buy, and we can bring to customers. We call that a 1P deployment, a first party deployment, where we basically create a tendency for our customer with GPUs that we already have contracted. So that actually works great. They basically pay us for a block of time, and we can run those things and get them access and do it very efficiently and effectively. The other way we deploy things is within the tendency of a customer. So a customer has a relationship with AWS, They believe they can get AWS to give them GPUs. We can run our software stack inside of their tenancy without ever seeing their data. That's something that people like because of the security and privacy. But as he said, the shortage of GPUs starts dictating how people go here. And so we actually do have a large number of GPUs. I don't necessarily want to comment on how many, but in the several thousands range that we can bring to bear. Now, the reason this is an issue is that we're seeing scaling up these neural networks matters, right? For a 7 billion parameter model, I need it on the order of 4 to 500 GPUs. That wasn't true two years ago. People weren't doing this. And all of a sudden, it's like, what you would do on 4 or 8 or 16 GPUs, now you're thinking I need 400. And so the demand just went through the roof. The new H100, that's the latest GPU from NVIDIA, is going to help a bit in the sense that each one is faster than the previous generation, so you don't need as many. But I think what will happen is it's sort of like goldfish, you know, you grow the pond you have. Like, as the capabilities of the hardware gets better, people just want to use more of it. And I anticipate us using routinely a thousand GPUs for customer workload. So that crunch is going to continue. Now, why do we have a crunch? I mean, can't we just crank out more silicon, right? What I think the world doesn't realize is that there's really three places in the world that can build state-of-the-art silicon. TSMC, Taiwan Semiconductor, that's the biggest one, and that's where NVIDIA has a deep relationship. Samsung is another one that NVIDIA also fans on, and then Intel. as a fab and intel primarily focuses on cpus for their for their fabrication capabilities and then beyond that there's like something called high bandwidth memory hbm memory it's packaged within the the same physical package as the gpu the process of packaging and getting memory together and making it all yield is actually the biggest bottleneck There are two places in the world that make it be a memory samsung and sk hynix this is your supply chain for these things and. There's a whole lot more left of it and to build out capacity means you gotta build a whole new building you know.

### Human: I mean, I think we have to, I've been saying this for months now, like, I think we have to, at some point, take a hard look at the get paid twice factor here. If VCs also got tokens, I said this on, like with Derek Thompson, I've said it on this show, if they also got tokens, even if they had a lockup period. At some point, they were able to sell, the tokens were liquid at some point. FTT, not so much. But you could also see why a VC would be like, oh, I'm totally going to invest in the exchange because the exchange itself is a product. Even if the underlying token is still kind of, I know Vinny took issue with my characterization of it as invented, but it still was fundamentally invented. Manifested?### Assistant: Yeah, I think the token handouts the bag holding the selling of shares think then you have to take all that enthusiasm and then put it on the Silicon Valley playbook where we give people milestone based financing. And we hold our shares for a decade. And we play the long game. And those are the two things where I think this got perverted. this ability to create shadow and shadow security system outside of the SEC jurisdiction to be flipping coins. And you know, I don't know that Chris Dixon was flipping coins, but I know coins were being flipped by many parties, and that they invested in companies were coin flipping and securities laws were quite obviously, you know, missing. flaunted, maybe I guess is the most generous way they just decided their interpretation of securities laws was we can create a security Gary Gensler saying no, you can't. They're saying yes, we can. Right? They, they do the test, they find a lawyer who, you know, yes, mans them to death. And okay, we got some lawyer who says we're in the clear that we paid a million and a half dollars to to make some bs statement when you know, a normal law firm would have charged $15,000 for the same work. Okay, put it all aside. You know, why did these companies need so much money? Why did they need to get all this money before they built the products? And this is where VCs need to look to a deep look in the mirror. This is where like a Chris Dixon needs to take a deep look in the mirror. Again, I'm not singling him out. But if you want to be the number one guy in the space, you have a leadership position you chose. Chris Dixon chose to be the leader in the space by raising the most money by beating everybody else's term sheets. Okay, if you want to be a hotshot, You want to place the hot bets you want to be number one on the list, you know, well, you're gonna have to make sure that those companies behave in a certain fashion, which is to ship product. You can't give people $500 million $300 million when they don't have a product or the products not launched. You got to keep people on a milestone based reward system here. I'm referring to myself as well. I don't want a $2 billion fund right now. I want to build my little hundred $50 million fund launch fund for Jason Calacanis at launch.co if you if you're a QP and you want to talk to me about the fund. I want to earn trust in the community for the capital intelligently. I think we need to look at the VCs who made some of these bets and say, what were you thinking? Let's do a postmortem here. How would you do better the next time? I think the LPs are going to be infuriated after this. I think LPs are going to look back on this and look at billions of dollars just incinerated, and they're going to hold people accountable. And they're going to say, take me through this. Take me through it. Just what happened here? Or not. Maybe they just maybe they all got there. They flip some bags, and they're in good shape. I don't know.

### Human: Yeah, that's right. So 72% of employees in one big study said that they felt that they would have better performance at work if they received more feedback and they weren't getting enough of it. I think just simple things. One thing is putting feedback on the agenda. If we have a meeting every month, the first item on the agenda or the last item is feedback. At the end of the meeting, you give me some feedback about what you think I could do to improve and I give you some feedback. Super simple, right? But when you create those spaces for the feedback, suddenly I say, oh, I think I'll tell her that thing I wasn't going to tell her.### Assistant: Right, you're giving people the green light. And sometimes people, you know, we want to be polite to each other where we want to create safety. We don't want to create animosity or, you know, uncomfortable feelings. So to give people the green light and say, and I think Ed Catmull does a good job of this at Pixar, and I don't know if you've read Creativity Inc, another really, it's a nice companion to your book, actually. And it really does. giving people that freedom, giving them that, you know, green light, hey, can you be candid with me and using the word candid, I guess, has become kind of annoying now, because people are just saying it over and over again. But they don't want to say be honest, because if you say be honest, that means you were lying before you can just like this higher level of green light. Hey, do you have a business that accepts purchases, maybe orders online? Well, if you do, have you ever had a digital transaction not go through and you're like, wait a second, the card work person is telling me the card works? Well, this is called a false decline. And this happens when an online purchase is declined when it should have been accepted. So that's the technical term in the industry false decline. And this is often the result of just like a technical or a financial or even a fraud score reason. You should have gotten that money. You should have had that transaction. You shouldn't have your customer frustrated with you and they blame it on you, right? Because that's what happens. It worked the card work two other times. It doesn't work on this website. It reflects badly on you, right? Last year, false declines. This is amazing cost us UK, French and German markets over $20 billion. And that's why if your business takes payments online, you need checkout.com. I mean, what an amazing domain in checkout.com. If you run an e commerce company, this is a no brainer. You can't lose your valuable customers to something that is an unforced error, right? You shouldn't yourself in the foot. That just can't happen. So here's a demo my associate press creating a free test account at checkout.com slash twist. Now if you're watching the video, it's super easy. He just has access to the checkout dashboard interface and it lets him play around. He's got all the tutorial data and just sets it up so easy a permanent gateway into a Squarespace website in seconds. Right. And it works with all the other major platforms out there, obviously. So right now, go ahead and create a free test account, see how it works. The dashboard is gorgeous. Very simple, checkout.com slash twist, checkout.com slash twist, and you'll see if their payment solution works for your business. I'm sure it will check out.com slash twist. is the Netflix group and they're not listening. So you can be totally candid. Are the Netflix executives a little narcissistic in that they want too much feedback? Are they too self absorbed? Because it seemed like they were getting into levels of feedback of, you know, hour long feedback sessions and this like, really intense feedback that it almost felt a little cultish.

### Human: Caffeine is a website. It's an app that users can come to and watch a whole new world of live. It's all live streams and broadcasts. So it has everything from gaming to live battle rap to live sports content and people can watch it in a social interactive way. And it's a whole new experience, you know, for creating and watching all of that.### Assistant: It's super special. Hey, when we get back from this break, you launched your company on April 1, on the 40th anniversary of the launch of Apple itself, which is an incredible tribute. And I want to understand how you came up with the idea for caffeine dot TV. And do you call caffeine or just caffeine or caffeine TV? I know the URLs caffeine dot TV. It's just caffeine. It's just caffeine. So when we get back, I want to know what was the inspiration for caffeine and how it's going when we get back on this week. Sorry. All right, this deal from Vanta is so good, I want to start my ad read with it. Vanta is giving our Twist listeners, think about this, $1,000 off their first SOC 2 by going to vanta.com slash twist. That's not a joke, $1,000 off, Vanta, V-A-N-T-A dot com slash twist. So, why is SOC 2 compliance so critically important? Well, If you don't have your SOC 2 buttoned up, you can't close major customers because major customers have security concerns and they should. And if you already have your SOC 2 report, don't you want to make it easier to maintain it year after year after year? Of course you do. Well, Vanta's software continuously tests against technical and non-technical SOC 2 requirements. They partner with over a dozen audit firms who have been trained to file SOC 2 reports directly within Vanta. On average, Vanta customers are SOC 2 compliant in just two to four weeks. Compare that to three, four, five months if you're not using Vanta. You'd be crazy not to use Vanta. I just had a twist listener. You guys and gals are so good to me. You tell me when you use the products and you always use those promo codes. Super important. Well, I had John Hegranes, who's the founder and CEO of a drone startup. It's called Kitty Hawk. everybody knows that they've raised a lot of money super important company and he said vanta was essential in helping them get their sock to compliancy set up and maintained and he loves the tie-ins with google slack github and AWS, which is really essential for Kitty Hawk's business. Use Vanta, people, and get that $1,000 off just like Notion, Lattice, User Testing, and hundreds of other successful companies who got their SOC 2 reports with Vanta in weeks, not months. unlock those sales and give your employees all that time back in their calendar to work on more business critical assignments. There's so much you got to get done right now. Use an expert that expert is Vanta. And they're giving twist listeners $1,000 off their subscription at vanta.com slash twist. I don't know how long they're gonna keep this going. So I want you to take advantage of it right now vanta.com slash twist. Hey, everybody. Welcome back. Ben Kieran is with us. And he is the CEO and co founder of caffeine. Thanks for taking us down memory lane. Ben, that was just awesome. And so tell me you what is caffeine? And how is it going? What's the vision there?

### Human: Do you find that to be the fault of the venture capitalists? Or do you find that to be the fault of the founders that paradigm they just described?### Assistant: Yeah. So I think, in some cases, there were neophyte investors who did not want to upset a founder. Okay, so there could be multiple dynamics going on here. But just working this out, there were VCs who maybe were recently founders, or they just have no experience and probably no mentoring, because they started their own fund. You know, they started their own $10 million fund, they rolled their own on angel list, whatever, which is totally fine in my mind. But you understand that they may be nobody, there was no Bill Gurley or no rule off or no Michael Moritz saying, Hey, here's how we evaluate companies that Sequoia at benchmark. So with no mentorship, or light mentorship, they mightn't, they might just say, you know what, I don't want to, I don't want to upset the founder, I'll lose the deal if I ask for information, etc. So yes, they would have perversely been enabling their own demise. Because they just didn't feel comfortable, and they wanted to be popular. I sometimes will be unpopular with a founder in the short term. you I can give you one anecdote, I had a founder, who, we had an agreement that we were investing this amount of money, we had over a 10% position in the company. And that came with a board seat. And they demanded we give up our board seat in this bridge round that was coming up, because this new investor was going to put more money in a higher valuation, all this stuff. And I said, Listen, you know, we have an agreement. So what, you know, we're inclined to go just go with the agreement for now, if we own under 10% shortly, maybe it makes sense for us to give up the word seat to somebody else. So maybe we go forward with that. And that seemed like a reasonable way to handle it. They got very upset at me that I was not being founder friendly that I was like, this is not the Jason Callahan. So I said, Well, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We gave you, you know, millions of dollars. We have an obligation to our LPs as well. It's unfair for you to say we should now having give you all that money have no insight into the business and not be stewards of the business when we own such a large percentage. We were the third largest owner in the business after your two founders. Sure enough, company had all kinds of issues, investigation because of financial irregularities and problems, and the co founder quit. So you know, it in fact blew up the founder a year later, two years later, came to me and said, You know what, you explain to me why you need to have the seat. you then were correct things got off track. And then you wound up being my biggest supporter when we cleaned up all that mess. I really appreciate you Jake out. So it was like a little bit of an arc. And sometimes in the short term, the job is to not be popular. It's to be candid and honest and to be a you know, a real part a true partner, which is tell people if like, things are dumb. You know, I'm saying

### Human: if you're if you if money is coming in the door very easily every 12 months. Yeah, you don't need to watch every dollar in the store. If somebody spent $4 on a bunch of blue bottle chicory coffees, and people were going on conferences and people were taking sabbaticals and you had all these kind of benefits and people were spending marketing and not looking at the ROI. Now it's time to say, Oh, we had five different marketing plans, which two are the most efficient, great, cut those three. and do the top two. Nothing else. And that it's really essential ism. And getting focus. Oh, we're trying four different products. We're trying six different ways to get new customers. Great. We're going to focus on our two money printing product products. We're not going to keep building those other two. We're going to put them on ice. Not right now list. Let's just expand the runway just a bit. And it doesn't necessarily need to be a real you could do something called a reorg. You look and you say, given that we're going from know, we have six different pokers in the fire, we're going to go down to the two, do we need these two other teams? Can we outsource something, you know, and you'll find almost universally, there might be some things you could outsource, there might be some, you know, project projects that the CEO may have really loved, or the, you know, somebody, one of the co founders is running, and it's just redeploy that money to acquiring customers, delighting customers, whatever it is, but if you never, one of the things is we had a generation that's never lived through a downturn.### Assistant: I'm gonna I'm gonna answer them differently. Okay, I'm gonna tell you what I think is gonna happen. And I'm gonna give you different advice. Great. Okay, so here's what I think is gonna happen. This is based only on the path not I'm not going back to 1842. And the Great Railroad crash, or the the wagon wheel crash of 1884. I'm just going to deal with the last decade or so. Okay. Um, I think that we are in, we are still trying to figure out our COVID hangover. Like it, it was crazy when we sat at home on zooms all day and never got out. Do you remember that? Yeah. It was crazy. It was crazy when Shopify exploded because you couldn't, you would, you thought you would die walking into a store. You thought you would die walking into a store. So we got to put that behind us. I think we're going to rebound fast. And we're going to rebound in between. We're going to rebound in between where we were in 2018 and where we were in January. And just look at offices. The office is rebounding. It's a different office, but it's rebounding fast. Everything rebounds fast. It's really, really, really, really slow. And then it's really hard to see these J curves and these logarithmic changes. And this market's going to rebound fast because these are good companies. whose fundamentals are just as strong. And you're going to wish you had invested. You're going to wish you had invested. So that's my prediction. Do I think it'll happen tomorrow? No. And I'm not a public market guy. Do I think it will be December? I'm not betting it's December. I think it's well before December. We see a snapback. And we see a snapback certainly better, far better than it is today, and probably a smidge better than it was in January 2020. That's the bet I'm making personally, financially, otherwise. But that's not the advice that you're giving. No, the advice I'm giving is add six months to your runway. The advice I'm giving you is add six months to your runway. Don't chop your head off. Don't run around like it's crazy. If you have one month, there's no way to add six unless you raise more capital. But if you're sitting on 12 or 18 or 24 or 30 today, don't do the layoffs. You're not out of money. Calmly sit down. I guarantee you any company with 18 months can stretch it to 24. Would you agree, Jason? 100% 100% 100% without don't don't don't do that in August. Do it now. Right now. So many meetings with founders right now. This is the lesson calmly. Great. You got 10 2040 100 million the bank just make it last six months longer. This is your job for finance and the team. You won't miss a plan. You won't you won't you won't it won't you will not miss anything by stretching that cat you'll you'll just you'll you'll just be less sloppy with your money.

### Human: There could be a million games going on. All over the world.### Assistant: Let's go. So so anyway, so I think there's a few things. One is FanDuel and DraftKings were operating for a couple of years in kind of a regulatory gray space, as most new startups do, because by definition, if the law can anticipate new technology and account for it, and the people who make those laws would be entrepreneurs, not bureaucrats, right? So almost always new technology is not going to be completely covered by the existing regulations, because it's a new thing. So they're operating in this gray area, Then the kind of hits the fan, we get cease and desist orders from like 40 plus states in like a two day span. And we had to go out and run campaigns in a couple of dozen states to relegalize daily fantasy sports. But the thing that we had were our customers, right? They were really passionate. I remember like I would talk to or my team would talk to what's called a state rep in Georgia. I'm making this up. And we'd say, Look, let's be honest, here are the people in your here that are people in your district. or FanDuel and DraftKings customers. Let's be honest, they don't know who you are. They probably don't even know that the State Senate exists as an entity, let alone who the members are. However, they love this thing. And if you take it away from them, we are going to register them and we're going to make sure they know your name and they come out to vote and they're going to take you out of office. know, every politician may said, fine, no problem. And then so that happened. And then after that, Supreme Court overturned, the congressional ban on sports betting was a long case that kind of wound its way through the judicial system. And that then freed up all 50 states to come up with their own individual regulatory frameworks for sports betting. So there are still states that don't have it. A state like a Utah probably never will, right? There are states need to have kind of a religious bent to them or whatever it is. But Governments need revenue, and they always want more and more revenue. And if your choice is to get it from traditional taxes, or you can get it from kind of third party sources, you'd rather get it from third party sources because it's less politically fraud. And so as a result, the legalization, because the Supreme Court, the desire for revenue, and I think the understanding that people who do play these things are really passionate about it, all combined, led to this paradigm shift, where now you're seeing, you know, a couple of dozen states, I think we're up to like 32 or something like that, have legalized sports betting. And then, by the way, the real frontier is still coming, which is eSports betting, right? Sports betting is, think about this, if you want to put a bet on a football game, A lot of things have to happen logistically. You need teams, you need a stadium, you need uniforms, you need referees, a lot of stuff. Two dudes are playing Madden on Twitch, and you want to bet 25 cents if the next play is a run or a pass. It's literally infinite, right? Yes.

### Human: I love it.### Assistant: I got a couple. I got a couple. We got to do some deals, boys. We got to get some deals going, man. You guys got my phone number? Let's get on a little phone thread, go in here, iMessage. Let's just start sharing some deals, making some money. Let's get some conflicts going. I'm going to have this back. Well, that's the next topic, and we'll close on this. SPAC IPOs per year, special acquisition, special purpose acquisition companies, corporations, one of those two words, my friend, corporation, my friend Chamath brought these back to life. Three years ago, I was at the poker table talking to him about him when he did IPOA, was looking for a company. As you can see in 2016, we had 13 of them, 2017, 34, 2018, 46, 2019, 59, 2020, 80 and counting. And so this is taking off and you can see the chart there if you're watching the video, youtube.com, subscribe to This Week in Startups to see the video. And I just literally had a wonderful moment My friend Rick Fulop DM to me and said, I need to talk to you. And I was like, Okay, here we go. We sold desktop metal, which he got me a little yum, yum slice of in the early first round. And he said, I got some good news. I said, Hit me, what's the price? And he said, We're going public. And I said, What? He said, Yep, it's backing it out. And that was announced yesterday. So now J Cal has uber desktop metal, And a little company called waiter that we have a de minimis number of shares in but at least I get three IPOs These are your public companies. These are three public companies in you know, the first hundred investments, so 3% gone public Plus, it's still early. I think maybe it's the first hundred 50. I'm not sure of the desktop metal occurred. I'm losing track. But I mean, obviously Robin Hood calm. There's a couple of other companies, you know, that are being spec thumbtack data stacks that are being speculated, but these facts are changing everything. And our good friend Bill Gurley, who has been lobbying against the wealth transfer that occurs during regular IPOs. He was on the direct regulatory capture, the regulatory capture. He was talking about direct listings with Spotify did but are very hard and painful. SPACs are very easy and painless. And he just wrote a blog post, which I'm sure the two of you read called the third door. And he is now on board. I would not be surprised. I do not have any information. If Bill Gurley who is on his last fund with Benchmark, would pop open a couple of Benchmark SPACs. I don't know that, I'm completely speculating there, but my best DC, Chamath, is now on his third or fourth SPAC, and I don't have any inside information on those, but I would never bet against Chamath or Bill Gurley. What are your general thoughts, David, on SPACs?

### Human: I'm a child. I'm just like, anyway, it's designed to do that to everybody.### Assistant: Oh, yes. Yeah. The lazy entitled group is under reported on, you know, and so then you start thinking about it. It's like, we get to spend our day. If you look at the best of founders, you know, the top third or whatever it is, top half top 25%. I'm not I don't know what percentage it is as human beings. But they really want to build something in the world. And just the act of building, as opposed to critiquing. Which is what critics do, right? I always think about that Anton Ego speech from Ratatouille. It's one of the most important moments, you know, or speeches in my entire life that I ever heard. And, you know, I'll pull it up here and I'll read it to you. So if somebody could just pull it up, one of the producers, I'll read it. This is one of the most important things. I think people who are in a position of power to critique people, people who have the audience, people who have the pen, need to remember that the life of a critic, you know, they get to lord over people, they get to have this position of authority. Okay, criticism is valid. We all like to read some criticism here and there. It's helpful to the world. It's entertaining all that. But the world needs more people to try to solve problems. And what a critic can do, in their best instance, I think, is to make a little space for these imperfect, young, you know, even just the ideas being young, the products being young, it's so important. And so, that's, I think, part of our jobs. And I'll just read it to you, in many ways. The work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth is we critics must face. The bitter truth we critics must face is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and the defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends. Last night, I experienced something new, an extraordinary meal from a singularly unexpected source. To say that both the meal and its maker have challenged my preconceptions about fine cooking is a gross understatement. They have rocked me to my core. In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau's famous motto, anyone can cook. but I realize only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can be a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere. It is difficult to imagine more humble origins than those of the genius now cooking at Gusteau's, who is, in this critic's opinion, nothing less than the finest chef in France. I will be returning to Gusteau's soon, hungry for more. this speech so important for people to realize don't get are you getting I'm literally tearing up like this.

### Human: That is so interesting that we have totally talked more than once about that exact generational difference. Like this question, this, this total concept that there just is not ownership. There is not, you know, the law doesn't exist. The law doesn't exist. Right. Exactly. You don't have to run anything by an attorney. It's super. Yeah. It's, it is. I mean, it's actually kind of appropriate that we're having this okay boomer conversation, because literally boomers are like, I'm sorry, stuff can be owned. And it sort of now feels like with with the youngs that's like, no, I can't.### Assistant: I literally had somebody use me in their marketing video. I'm like, one of these like, you know, there's there's like really cool crowdfunding platforms for public seed, invest our crowd masterworks, you know, like these are like really on the up and up. But like, there's like this whole underbelly of these ones. And one of these underbelly ones, the founder put me in there in their marketing video, because he had asked a question on ask Jason. won't say which company and then they made me the focal point of the video. And then all these people invested and then people in the threaded comments were like, Oh, Jason Calacanis is investing. He's the uber guy. And I like was like, Hey, guys, take me out of your video. And they're like, Well, we were on your show. And I'm like, the keyword in that sentence is my show. You're on my show. And this is you're using my content for this. Well, you didn't get permission from us. I was like, I implicitly got permission from you. When you asked me a question at a public forum, like, you opted into that I did not opt into this and I had to like explain to this idiot multiple times. And then he got really offended. He was like, you are anti startup. I'm like, okay, pull the anti startup card, you're using me to market this and you're confusing angel investors who are influenced by this. And I talked to the platform. And the platform was like, yo, we don't want to be in a battle with Jason Gallagher. And it's like, so like, can we be on your show? And I was like, listen, I just don't want people to be confused. How many people have done this equity crowdfunding? Like, there's like 200 investors are like, well, you just make sure because you have now misled them. That's securities fraud, you sold them a security, thinking that I am the investor, and that I'm the proponent of this, because at some point, I said, Oh, what a great idea. And like they're like using Oh, what a great idea. And the video like, I'm endorsing the fundraising, like they, you know, did the like crazy edit. Long story short, they emailed everybody. Just to be clear, Jason isn't in it. And they finally removed me from it. And then the guy emails me a year later after I have this battle with him over it. And it's like, Hey, are you sure we can't use you in our video? Like, yes, I'm sure. So you know, some people might say, Hey, what about writing a review of your book or doing that you can review anything you want. It's when you use somebody's likeness to mislead the public that that person is associated with your product, and then to sell a product. So when you do commerce, which is what they were doing. So if somebody did an NFT project, my favorite entrepreneurs, and I made a painting, and they're an artist that's different. Anyway, there you have it. I can't wait to listen to that. Anyway, RIP, Josh.

### Human: This is why, by the way, don't you want Jason on your board? I mean, I'm just saying like, the the nap, the ease with which you ideate is kind of a joy to watch.### Assistant: Well, I'll tell you how that happened to be all you know, flattery. Well, it wasn't always that way. But when you spend your entire life as a journalist, I think is really good training, because you are asking those questions, and you're building the mental model. And then you've done 50 media 4050 meetings in two months, all of a sudden, your brain is just used to filling in things, right. And so you're constructing the model. And let's say you didn't understand their customer base. That was what I was thinking about. Well, who's the customer base for this coral company? And I just started thinking, okay, well, obviously, Australia, they got the most acute issue. Okay, Mexico, maybe, maybe not. I think the plank are reefs doing okay. Okay, there's got to be other people who have smaller budgets in Australia. Great. Where else would coral exist is the first thing that came to my mind, or where could it exist? And then I immediately thought about aquariums. And then I thought about home. But what if they get really good at making these and people could put a coral aquarium, if they owned a beach house, they could throw it out in front of their house. know, and then you had mentioned, oh, well, coral is really good for seawalls. So then I immediately thought, well, what's the budget for a seawall? That sounds super expensive. Well, if we're going to do the seawall, and that's going to be a billion dollars to do what Amsterdam did, or what Venice is going to have to do around Florida and South Beach and Miami. Well, it's gonna cost a billion dollars to put Miami behind a seawall or many billion, maybe 10 billion. Maybe we should drop $100 million worth of coral in a pilot program and see what happens over the next two years, because we're not building that seawall for 10 years. So let's start doing the coral now. And if it works, well, okay, great. Yep. So really, it's like filling in the mental model, there'll be pieces you don't understand. It's like a map, and you're missing a piece of the map, or it's a formula, and there's like a variable in there. And you're just like, Okay, let me plug some numbers into the variable and see what I learned. Mm hmm. I, for some reason, I did very well at math when I was a kid, even though I didn't do good in the classes, but when I took standardized tests, and the technique I came up with was I would, when there was a variable, I would just put numbers into it and do the equation and write it down. So I almost brute forced it. Right? Like, oh, here's a number here. So I'd be like, okay, put the number 10 in, put the number 100 and put the number three in. And I would just put it in. And then I would try and triangulate around the answer. And then my mind would, okay, yeah, it's going to be somewhere between these numbers. Yeah, that's how I do back of the envelope math constantly.

### Human: So Amazon's ad business is booming, right? As Jamal pointed out earlier, but so much more of consumer behavior is shifting where people are going direct to e commerce sites. And then the ads that are getting the highest click through, and where advertisers are spending more and more money is on e commerce sites. I know this from experience on a couple boards I'm at, where companies stopped spending on Facebook and Google and just started spending exclusively on Amazon. And that's where you get consumers that are much more likely to purchase, the purchasing proclivity is higher, the click through rate is higher. So the return on ad spend is much higher.### Assistant: Yeah. And as I said, you have no choice. If you don't spend on it, your competitors and a lot of these products are commodities, like a pair of ski socks again, back to skiing on my mind, but you know, I buy ski socks on a pretty regular basis. You know, if you're if you're not buying the edge, you're not going to get seen. And a lot of times I see on the ads, like this is a four and a half star with 3000 reviews. I really want to check out those socks. It's proven to me that they have a large number of people who have purchased them. So uh amazon it's gonna do fantastic and um yeah But yeah, not a lot of profit there. So that's something they're going to have to make a decision on is do they want to start showing a profit or do they just want to keep growing that top line and taking all that e commerce share. They obviously have headwinds with Azure doing really well for Microsoft. And that's growing faster than AWS is so AWS could be a little bit challenged here. And you could see Azure catching up and certainly chat GPT and that being available as part of Azure. That's headwinds. I'm also seeing in startups, Microsoft startup program, which advertises here on the program, they give $150,000 in Azure credits and AWS, I don't see doing similar startup promotions. And so I think Azure is being really aggressive. Microsoft is being super aggressive and trying to win cloud business. 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 2-4 weeks, compared to 3-5 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, 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 app. Oh, by the way, I think Jeff Bezos is coming back. I know it sounds crazy, but I think Amazon is going to have some significant headwinds and challenges. And so I could very much see Jeff Bezos coming back and maybe running the health group and just making sure that that works. But I think Bezos is going to just be like Bob Iger, but into a couple years off the grid, and get bored, and he's going to want to come back. So that's my prediction. You heard it here first.

### Human: To me, it's not necessarily that Gen Z marketers are better at branding than anyone else. I think it's more that, of course, branding is developing at the same time as we are. So people that are now becoming Gen Z designers and marketers are the ones that have a very innate understanding of current trends, which is of course, like natural for every generation. But for us, our focus and the point of it is that we show brands how to market to this generation from our own perspective, considering everyone on our team is a Gen Z marketer, designer, you know, Gen Z copywriters and everything. So Compared to you know people that might try to market to gen z but being millennial marketers or older. I think what drove most of our clients to us from the beginning was that. you know, they're trying to target an audience and we are that audience and we are also marketers. So it just works extra well. But of course, Gen Z audiences have also grown to have more of a liking to branding and aesthetics and content that is very current and very trendy and has like, you know, a special kind of like modern and bold aesthetic. And for all those reasons, it takes also a Gen Z team to properly help a brand craft that.### Assistant: It's funny that you mentioned Twitter. So when I was in college, I don't necessarily thought I had an emphasis on Twitter in my mind at all. I feel like the social media, at least when I was in school, was Instagram, right? And I got a very lucky situation where I had a mentor that was in the VC space. And he was like, no, you need to start being more active on Twitter and sharing your opinions online, which is really scary as I feel like we were grownups to not do that. Our parents, at least for me, were always like, don't share things on the internet and don't get in people's cars so you don't know. And now here I am on Twitter, tweeting out things and getting in Ubers all the time. And so I feel like Twitter is, if I could give any advice to people, especially that are Gen Zs starting out, you're right, just doing it. I think starting a Twitter account that I made away from my personal account, I started making a Twitter account where obviously there's some personal things on there, but that really is how I network. If somebody is cool on Twitter, I feel like that's somebody I would meet in real life, and I wouldn't necessarily meet people on Instagram in real life if I just followed their, I don't know, Instagram account. Instagram's for people who I know. Twitter's for people who I wanna know. And then on that, I really, really wish I capitalized on just doing it. I wish I started putting more of myself on the internet earlier. And the way I would have done that is actually, I think, through a Medium account. Because when I graduated and became more interested in the startup and VC community, I noticed how many people were excellent writers. And I studied something in tech in college. So I was like, Who needs to know how to write? If I know what pretty UX UI is, somebody will hire me for that. Now look, I obviously wasn't hired for that. But I totally agree with you, just doing it and then taking the work that you've done in school and putting it out to show people that you're well articulated in your speech and in your writing. And Twitter is obviously a great place to do that. I think Medium is a great place to do that. But yeah, I really hope more of the Gen Z audience puts themselves on the internet earlier. And I think people are starting to do that. Maybe I was late in the game, but I see the generation above us, like the millennials, taking over Twitter. And I'm like, you know what? I think Gen Z people have a way, have a much more in-tune sphere of things to understand what people are buying. And I guess you're the second person actually spoke to that has kind of had like an agency built all the way around Gen Z. So we previously got to speak to Ziad Ahmed. As you guys probably know, if you're listening and you've listened to previous OK Boomer segments, he's the CEO and founder of Juve Consulting. So what makes you think that Gen Z is so much better at social media, at branding? What makes us so much better and why are there so many agencies focusing on Gen Z?