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### Human: Zero, zero cost the cost of the office suite. It's it's it's an added bundled.### Assistant: Yeah, it's bundled. And so there's a very simple solution for her here is to look at instances like that, where people are doing this kind of market allocation, you could argue, what Apple does with their app store is like they've allocated that only they can sell in this geo location, ie iOS. And just say, Listen, you can't do that you have a monopoly on these phones, you're in a duopoly. So in the case of a duopoly, where there's two players who own 90% of the market, we want you to have more interoperability, and we want more open platforms. So there should be other app stores on iOS. Now, you can just saber rattle and say, Listen, I'm Lena Khan, I'm the FTC. We're preparing a case against you, Apple, you have six months to allow Amazon to have a digital store, Microsoft to have a digital store and the Google Play Store to exist on Apple, and they have to do the same. and you can't make iMessage closed, there should be interoperability. And they'll say, like, well, we can fight that you can fight it. But this is what we're asking. Since you have a monopolistic position, we're asking you to be more interoperable member in the early days of iOS, they wouldn't let you have like a VLC, a video player, they wouldn't let you have the dolphin browser or Chrome browser this. In the early days, they wouldn't let you use a third party browser, they wouldn't let you use a third party media player. they jobs really wanted to own those. And so they would block you installing that. And then Microsoft, of course, got in trouble for bundling where they put. And that was the massive Microsoft case, that massive interest case in the 90s, where they put the Internet Explorer, the edge browser to try to kill Netscape. And so if you make it free, used to buy Netscape, shout out Marc Andreessen, come on the pod anytime. they used to used to buying Netscape for 50 bucks a year, you would go buy it. And then they would like Netscape Navigator 4.0 would come out 5.0 come out, you give them 50 bucks 99 bucks, you would go to comp USA. And you would buy package offer, bring it home, put a CD in and install the new browser. they're like, yeah, it's in the it's in the operating system now. So that's a much simpler execution, I think, and it's actually better for consumers. Consumers do not there's no consumer harm. If Microsoft buys, you know, Activision, or, you know, Microsoft releases teams there, but there is harm when they do it for free, or if they said Activision is only going to have their games on Xbox for the first two years, and then it goes to PlayStation or PC. And they already conceded that they wouldn't do that. Correct. So I think we can pivot to the next story.

### Human: It's part of the community model. If you are a subscriber, you unlock access there. Got it. How much is the subscription cost?### Assistant: Yeah, I have a new thing in our household that I've been doing, which is before we call anybody to fix anything, we found this website, YouTube. I don't know if I have it in your town yet. But if you type in, how do I, and then you type in the name of the product, it just immediately drops down the top 50 problems. And then there are 17 videos on how to fix anything. So in my company and at home, I just... If anybody comes to me with a problem like, did you... And they're like, YouTube it? Yeah, I watched a video. I did it. But this one requires that you have an electrical license before I rip the electrical cables out of the wall. So I'm not comfortable doing it. I'm like, okay, yeah, in my case as well, I'm an electrician. Every startup needs business insurance. Please get your business insurance tight and you don't need to look any further than my friends at Embroker. If you don't have insurance, you basically failed the first step of running a company. Prices are 20% lower and you're going to get better coverage than incumbents when you use Embroker. You can go from sign up to quote and purchase in just 10 minutes. It can take weeks when you use the large slow incumbents, the process is so transparent, there's no opaque pricing, you're not going to get jerked around like on these other, you know, incumbents, I'm telling you, I've been through this before. And there are four types of insurance you need to know about cyber insurance, hacking, everybody gets hacked. If you have cyber insurance, you're protected, DNO insurance, directors, and officers. This means if somebody does something dumb in your company, your board, or the management team has attorneys to protect them errors and omission. This is super important when you're scaling, and you have major customers using your platform, they're going to ask you, do you have you know, means if you make mistakes, you're covered. And finally, EPL, Sadly, this is very critical. Employment practices liability. This covers harassment and wrongful termination and other type of employee issues. And there's no better place to get it taken care of them with my friends at a broker to instantly buy custom built insurance. Just for startups go to in broker.com slash twist. Let me spell this for you e m b r o k e r.com slash twist. And while you're there, you're gonna get an extra 10% off using the offer code. You know it twist TW is T you are pursuing multiple business models at once. I am very often you know, admonishing my my partners on doing too much. while I do too much myself personally, take away too many projects. But you have a subscription box, you have educational videos, you have you can buy individual products. And I don't know if you charge for content, for webinars? Is that part of the business that you're like people pay for these webinars?

### Human: So Eden is a competitor to OpenSea?### Assistant: So the issue really is, if you've looked at like the trends from where it started, where it's going, I personally think that NFTs took off on Ethereum because of the wealth creation effect in the Ethereum ecosystem. So Ethereum soared to $100 billion plus. All these early Ethereum adopters had millions and millions of dollars. They can go drop 50K on a JPEG, no big deal. And a lot of artists were buying other artists' stuff, and people who had Ethereum made a lot of money, right? You went from a low of 50 bucks in the last cycle to 5,000, right? So there's a lot of wealth creation there. But then Ethereum had scaling issues. And you look at the cost of minting, the footprint, the carbon footprint, the negativity around the carbon footprint, the ESG sort of variables taking into the equation. And so NFT soared, and then there was this huge backlash. And then the market crashed for lots of reasons. Ethereum crashed, et cetera, et cetera. And now if you look at fast forward a year from where all the sort of peak madness was to where we are today, yeah, Ethereum ecosystem is still doing well. It's got a whole bunch of people doing stuff in it. The fees have dropped somewhat. It's migrated off to ETH 2.0. It's okay. But what you're seeing is in the Solana ecosystem, An ecosystem where the wealth creation, yeah, it did peak at some $50 billion market at some point, but now it's down to like $10 market cap. But the volume of NFTs and Solana, it's like eye-popping, but it's all low-cost NFTs. The ETH world is very used to $500, $1,000 mints, $5,000 mints, no problem. Ethereum, Solana, the mints are like $50, $20, artists are selling. So now it's gone from like, This is how technology evolves, right? The early adopters are always the wealthy people who can afford the expense of technology, blah, blah, blah. Then over time, it goes to everyone can now afford a phone in the world. It's just super cheap. I think if you look at the volume that you spoke about, Jason, that collapsed out of OpenSea, that volume was Ethereum volume. Let's just be frank. The sheer number and value was Ethereum-based. If you look at Magic Eden, which has eclipsed OpenSea right now, now- Why did it eclipse it? Because, well, this is the point, right? It's gone from being something which only a few people could afford, a $500, $5,000 NFT, et cetera, to something most people can afford to go and spend 20 bucks or 50 bucks on an NFT on Magic Eden. And because it's minted on Solana, where the fees are ultra low, you're seeing this huge move from being a niche market to a more of a mass market

### Human: Yep. All right, let's start with Square renamed Block. And I'm really, look, I get it. Sure, blockchain. It's just that all it ever makes me think of is Minecraft. Yeah. So I'm gonna have to start calling Jack Minecraft Steve. And anyway, Square, aka Block, bottomed out around $102 a share today, down 65% off its peak of $281 in August 2021. This represents a $70 billion loss in market cap, making Block's new market cap $54 billion. Over the last year, this company has done about $7 billion in revenue from transactions, SaaS, and hardware. TTM net income 537 million as of that same quarter. And of course, we have seen a decline since then. When you look at this, though, Jason, do you think the decline represents the business fundamentals? Like is it an overreaction to what is otherwise almost $7 billion a quarter business?### Assistant: Okay, so full disclosure, I have shares in square because I was in an LP and a venture fund that invested in it early. And so I've done quite well. I think I sold half of them, and I kept half of them. So I have a pretty significant position. If you saw, this is not super objective, but I think jack is a product genius, right? So I always look at the founder. And then, to your point, you know, it has a I'm looking at this one chart where it's trading at $112, which I think was today, you know, it's down massively, and the market cap of 51 billion p ratio of 118. So the price earnings is, you know, very high at over 100. But these companies are not trying to be super profitable, they're trying to grow. And so that is the question is, you would have to look at what is the revenue growth here? So are they growing 30% or more? It's a high growth company, you can get a much bigger valuation out of it. I think it's a company I made the decision with this name specifically that I would hold it for the next decade. And I think it's really because as much as square was a great product for small businesses, etc. You know, you use those square things when you go into a lot of cafes, etc. Any company that can grow on a large number 2030%. And I think their last quarter, they were 26% year over year, I see here in my notes. that is really hard to do, right, Molly, like you got a big number, and you're growing it, you know, 10 2030%. That's considered high growth, because it's growing on top of a big number. And what other companies do that apples of the world, Google's of the world, Facebook's of the world, just not easy to do most companies when they get that big start to slow down and grow. single digits, you know, maybe 10% a year, 12%, something like that. And that's even considered good, because it's a big number. So I decided to hold this for the next decade, because the cash app, to me, seems like, you know, the way people in the future are going to, you know, exchange money. And I think jack is a visionary, and a great product person. And I think he understands crypto really well. So I think now that he's 100% focused on square, I'm even more committed. And so here, I would advise a family member or friend who is interested in this name. that if they were going to buy it, I would buy it, you know, whatever, you know, five times over the next year or two dollar cost average, you know, take the price you're paid per share, and you just average it, and then hold it for a decade and see where you're at. I think you beat the market. That's what I would tell a friend.

### Human: If you do succeed, which is why we had to bring it up. Right.### Assistant: I would say, you know, in certain certain searches, it might come up with better 20% better experience. And that is always the challenge. And the challenge for the u.com team, and I hope they succeed is, if you're 20%, or 50% better than Google, nobody will change their behavior. you got to be like two times better than Google, three times better than Google to actually get some change in behavior. And that's why it's been very hard to challenge Google, either you need to have a distribution advantage, which is why being did okay. And Apple is doing okay with their search results. There's actually a search team in Apple. So when you do the spotlight search, do you notice it's getting more and more robust, and Apple where it shows you Hey, here's apps, here's things in your iCloud, here's that, you know, your photos, whatever. they're doing like their own version of comprehensive search, which is what's on your device, and then they're going into the app level and searching inside of apps. So, you know, that's because those two players at Microsoft has search inside of, they have search inside their browsers and their operating system. And then Apple, of course, has search inside of their devices. So it's going to be really hard, the chances of success are incredibly low. But I do like people continuing to after this. The one question I have is their actual search results. Are they crawling the web when they show organic results? So if I type an iPhone review, Tom's guy came up in a carousel as number one, and then trusted reviews, number two, etc, then CNET, did they index the web to get that? And are they doing a crawl? because that's the other problem. There's only like two people or three people really crawling the web. So when you use DuckDuckGo, you're actually using Microsoft Bing. Bing is actually crawling the web. I think Yahoo stopped crawling the web. Yahoo used to have a search API. And that's actually a question I have is, is there a company that makes their own search index of the web that allows anybody to use it as an API? That would be actually a company I would think would be very interesting. But searching the web in real time right now is an incredibly hard task. And this is where network effects become super important. You know, they got 10s of 1000s of people working on search at Google, and they figured out how to index Twitter and YouTube and Facebook and you know, every little nook and cranny of the web really well. So I wish them luck. And it's a really good series a company. Uh, they're going to have a really challenging time. This is one of the craziest things you could ever do is try to go over, uh, to go against somebody with a monopoly. That's 90% in most, most markets, the chances of success here are less than 5%, which is why people are making the bet.

### Human: There you go. Shout out. We're glad to see you back in the news on the plus side. We're delighted to see you back in the news.### Assistant: We're delighted to see you back on the news. And we cannot wait to have you on the show. All right, let me tee this up. Because I find this fascinating. All right. You know, I like efficiency. I like, you know, people management kind of things, you know, like for myself, like I like, you know, optimizing my own life. And I like to see people be super efficient. And meetings we've worked on. We have really efficient meetings, I think. So coinbase is trying a new real time meeting feedback rating system, which sounds dystopian and scary unless you're a high performer and you want more credit in your life. So this could go either way on the black mirror scale be black mirror or it could be you know, what's an Randy and, you know, you get Alex shrugged, it could be at least shrugged, or it could be black mirror. Right. I suppose for some people, Atlas shrugged is black mirror. Same, same. Yeah, exactly. Not for me, though. I like the builders, the information reported, the information.com, the great new source that Coinbase is using dot collector an app to solicit real time feedback during meetings dot collector was first developed as an internal to an tool at Ray Dalio's hedge fund Bridgewater associates. We've talked about this, we've had people who worked at Bridgewater on the program, they rate each other, they're brutal to each other. In the concept of everybody becoming absurdly high performers are kind of like those nerdy kids who just want to rate each other and really drive a competitive kind of culture. It's kind of the opposite of what we're doing at launch, we want to have a singular success. And once we have you on the team, we've kind of accepted you if you pull your weight, you're on the team. If you're not on the if you're not pulling your weight, it's my job to make sure or management's job to make sure you're not on the team. But I don't want to have Game of Thrones in the company. Because That seems like chaotic dots captures moments of micro feedback during media feedback is given on a personal performance like exemplifying company values. his books in his book principles life and work Dalio also which I listened to is okay. I like Dalio's concepts. It seems a little too extreme at times for me. Dalio also outlines how their internal dot collector app allows for believability weighted voting, believability weighted voting is where polls are matched with Bridgewater's back to back end system of believability weighting. where people's relative strengths are scored. For example, Jason would have a 10 weight for investing, but producing Justin might have a one because I've been doing it longer. And Justin hasn't done it yet. For ops, Ashley on our team might be a nine Jason might be a five and Andre might be a four because that's not my bag and that is hers. And so this is what it looks like I guess you get rated and it's all public.

### Human: Jason has in other news invited WeWork CEO Sandeep Mithrani onto the podcast after WeWork. unfollowed him on Twitter. This was in response, of course, to yesterday's conversation about WeWork's quite astonishingly tone-deaf response to the situation in Ukraine, saying not only are we going to continue to do business in Russia, it's going great. We're killing it. we're killing it, killing it in Russia. You evidently also Jason made it on big tech alert. Oh, because alerts is I'm on their radar now. Seems like we were unfollowed you and then started following you. And then Jason was like, make up your mind chumps.### Assistant: And you know what the reason was on privacy, like if we do that people are going to get things they don't like and it's like, okay, then flip everybody. then give people settings to turn it off, right? Like, it's very simple, like, or you do it at the company level. So if IBM doesn't want to support that fine, but what if everybody could have had essentially their Twitter handle their email address be very easy. And then you attach your instances to it, because I'm looking at my slack here, I got this week in startups, launch founders inside, inside public, I got one for my family, I mean, I got one for the syndicate. If all of those I could just check off for this one, I want it to be listed on my profile page. So I have that slack profile page. And it says communities I'm a member of, boom, boom, companies I work with slacks, I'm in and I can say, Yeah, don't show launch. I don't want people to even know launch has one. Or I do want people to do it because I don't mind people contacting people. Yeah, launch, right. Here's all the partners at launch. Here's all them associates. It's a new year, but for some businesses, it's harder than ever to find and hire the qualified people they need. This is especially true for small businesses, and that's where LinkedIn Jobs comes in. They make it easier to find the people you want to talk to, faster and for free. We love it. We've used it many times here. In fact, we just hired an awesome video editor just last week. LinkedIn Jobs is the best. You're looking for talent. That's the place to go. Because when you create a free job posting in just minutes, you're going to reach the world's largest professional network of over 770 million people. Wow. Use screening questions to filter out all the non serious candidates, right? Hey, if you're going to hire somebody to be a video editor, you can say, Hey, what tools do you use to do video editing? If you're hiring them to do podcast video editing, you'd say, Hey, what's your favorite podcast out there? If they can't answer those two questions, they really qualify for the job probably not. And you can use LinkedIn simple tools to quickly filter and prioritize who you want to interview. That's why small businesses rate LinkedIn jobs number one in delivering quality hires versus leading competitors. So here's the CTA the call to action LinkedIn jobs helps you find the candidates you want to talk to faster. And did you know every week nearly 40 million job seekers visit LinkedIn? And did you know every week nearly 40 million job seekers visit LinkedIn. That's why we hired our video editors so quickly. So post your job for free at linkedin.com slash angel. That's right for free. linkedin.com slash angel to post your first job for free. Terms and conditions do apply because it giving you a free job posting.

### Human: Yeah, we've been more than a man, we've been more than doubled. So it's like up 6000 people in two years or something like that, or more, even like it's, it's, we expanded a lot. Because, you know, there's, you know, Like, we did not want to compromise product. We see, for instance, customer support as product. It's like, again, we meet people very early in the entrepreneurial journey, they are often, they are courageous, but like, their commitment waivers, they might actually call us to ask what's the next task. They are not sophisticated yet. Like, they are on a learning journey, but there's a lot of new things to learn after they start Like, very often people start the Shopify store before they incorporate or do anything else. So, you know, that's when someone talks to us, we see this as actually our product represented instead of through web browsers for people. And so that's required a lot of, you know, getting ahead. And because we didn't want to compromise the quality that they set for ourselves on those things. So, you know, there's also some reasons where we had to build capacity ahead of demand, because it just takes a while to hire you and onboard. And then we didn't need... Once we knew, like once we had the data, it's like, well, we can now engage in saying, Okay, well, let's change the job you're doing. Let's find something else. Let's, but or allow people in certain groups, like maybe start a bench, right? Like, let's visit, like, that's not fair to everyone else, right? Like, so in a company dynamics perspective, it's just, it would, it would compromise a company we are in the way we are solving problems. And so the right decision.### Assistant: Yeah, I mean, to steel man it for you, like, everybody comes into this concept, like we buy in that this is a dynamic environment. And the reward for working in a dynamic, competitive, capitalistic system is that you can win, you can lose, you can make mistakes. And so everybody kind of buys into that. And it's double opt in. people can leave at any time, and the company can change its plans. And that's why the West and capitalism in the West has one versus authoritarian societies that can make unilateral decisions to pick winners, like literally in a competition, where the government can pick the winner, say China, or any other country. they can't beat competition, rabid, dogged, gritty competition will always win, will always win. And we were sitting here, I don't know, last year, two years ago, I was in this debate with my besties on all in sometimes, oh my god, like, China's gonna roll us. And I was like, Hmm, I'm not so sure. I'm not so sure that, you know, if they don't let entrepreneurs battle it out in the arena, you know, that's why we're battle tested here. And you have this giant competitor in Amazon, you got to wake up every day. And these two gladiators go at each other. This is the next jumbo point I wanted to go to you with you. They have a tenuous relationship, an unpure relationship with their partners, you have a pure relationship. You support people who want to sell stuff on the internet. You they only work with you to the extent you help them. Amazon studies the people on their platform, And let's just be honest, you know, call it what it is Amazon basics, 50 other white label brands, they copy them. pull the rug out from under them. And, you know, it's becoming a bit of an antitrust issue for Amazon. So obviously, you don't have to comment on their antitrust issues. But I'm curious, when people call that customer support line you talked about, and customer support as a feature as an actual product is brilliant. Shout out to Tony Shea, rest in peace, our friend from Zappos, who really, you know, I think set a standard here for everybody lost a good one there. So brutal. I was thinking about him a lot when I was at Burning Man. And You know, you think about his his contribution there. And you think about what your advice is to those people, those people who are selling when they come in to your ecosystem. What is the person say on the phone? Like, hey, should we put our stuff on Amazon? Or should we go direct? How do you think about that? If you were giving advice, let's say one of your siblings or a cousin started a store? What would you advise them privately and say, like, here's how to think about getting something out of being listed on Amazon, or baby, here's the things you should be concerned about?

### Human: Well, I said the first thing I said was a little joke. I was like, hey, great to meet you in person. I got that got a little left. But I mean, here here's the background on what I said about him. And we're going to we're going to publish this as an all in episode. Yeah. So I mean, I basically said, if it's true, and I remember saying this because I always I mean, people who listen to the show know that, you know, smiling. I say, if this is true, know, allegedly, like, I always put the caveats in there, because I know, a lot of news that breaks, we don't know if it's true or not, or, you know, the three different versions of the truth, palmers, Facebook's, and the actual truth, whatever, right? So I'm always pretty clear about that. I, to my memory, and I'm trying to find the video that he quoted, because I would like it to be super accurate. I said something like, if you're going to post like, these kind of memes and stuff like that, if it's true, like you should post it under your real name. And if under your real name, people find it offensive, like your family, your wife, I don't know your spouse, the people you work with, it should be an indication that maybe you shouldn't be posting it. And so to pay a bunch of shit posters or whatever $9,000 if that's what happened. We don't know what happened because Facebook when they fired him didn't give any details are obviously, you know, not going to put the details out there. that I said it's gross, right? And so he took it very personally. But then he made this kind of weird. His he made a weird theory that I ruined his career, right? And that Zuckerberg fired him because of me. And that I destroyed his career and he had to claw back, which I mean, let's be honest, I'm not that powerful. I'm just a podcast host. I there's I'm not making decisions for Zuckerberg.### Assistant: So we're doing that. Yes. Yeah. Palmer Lucky, who, of course, was the No, I remember. You remember? Remember? I got it. OK. Palmer Lucky, of course, inventor of Oculus was fired. Smart person. Very, very smart person was fired from Facebook after it was revealed. I'm just giving all of this like background very quickly as a setup. It was revealed that he had been, it seems like, bankrolling some anonymous accounts on Reddit that were spreading conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton. It was back in during the election. Allegedly. Allegedly. Yes. We'll put the allegedly in there. He has since gone on to found a very successful company called Anduril, which does national defense drones. And he gave an impassioned speech at All In about the importance of the tech industry working with our military. Right. That we got to have the best technology in the world. I agree with. Something you agree with. You've invited him on the show a long time. And then. He's like, on another note. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, begins to come for Jason very personally for, uh, getting him fired, trashing him, calling him an idiot. He was reading tweets. It sort of started out like it for a minute or so. It felt like maybe like a roast and then it just kept going and it was very personal right like it was he was emotional he was talking about how he has all of this rage because jason and his co-hosts would try by the way chamath asked me like did he mean you about the co-host thing i was like i wasn't even there then man yeah but maybe i was on that i have no idea we can't seem to find it but It just, it went on for a long time. He talked about how he has a lot of personal rage about how Jason and people like Jason tore him down and do that to founders and that it's this really negative atmosphere. And, uh, at which point, by the way, uh, all of the security in the building, including Jason's brother are like, do we need to kick this guy out? Like, it's like, there's a lot of how's this going to end. Yes. And, and then this is the part where it becomes in the spirit of the show. Jason comes up on stage. It is like, importantly, I think, hey, man, I'm sorry.

### Human: Anyway, it literally is a clown car. It's like it's it's the grifters and the washed up. Criminals will do a 10k speaking gig for any, you know, Russian affiliated, you know, syndicate.### Assistant: And then you have this like serious, very serious venture capitalist who is really respected, respected by people like me in media. Like, of course, Peter has his, you know, there are people who don't like him in media, but he's legit. Yeah. And so he was valuable to them. And, um, for that reason, and that, like, that's why he had the like primetime speaking slot on the last day of the RNC the day, you know, when Trump spoke, um, I think that that speech, um, while he might've been a little uncomfortable with talking about his sexuality, I think it was like a really important, um, I think it was important moment in the Trump campaign. I think it was an important moment, like in the history of America. Um, I like a really cool moment, um, frankly, where, because a gay man spoke of that. Yeah, and not just because he spoke, but because of the way he was received, right? He was applauded, there was a standing ovation. You go back to the last RNC when somebody, a gay person, talked about their sexuality on stage, and like half the convention was like, you know, taking their hats off to pray, you know, for the guy's soul, right? Big change from one to the other. And the fact that it was Peter, somebody who has not been super comfortable, he's not like somebody who's wearing his identity on his sleeve. I think all of that made it very powerful. And powerful both for Trump voters, but also probably for independents. And some Democrats. A lot of Democrats voted for Trump. But the really more important thing I would say is, if you remember October, Access Hollywood tape comes out, right? At that point, Trump's candidacy was not looking good. A lot of mainstream Republicans were backing away. The donor class is nowhere to be found. Two things happened, one of which is WikiLeaks. I think that probably helped Trump a lot more than Peter Thiel, but I think Thiel coming in, making a $1 million plus donation, pretty big donation as far as these things go, and giving a speech where he tried to contextualize and put into context the remarks, to defend them essentially. He didn't defend Trump for saying grab him by the pussy, but what he said was, hey, we got to take this guy seriously. Yeah. He has some, he, you know, seriously, not literally that was, that was the teal catchphrase. And I think, um, you know, that was, uh, that had some influence and it, and in terms of both like changing the news cycle and, uh, and so, so I think, I think all that made like a, a, a, a significant difference. I don't know, again, I think Trump, uh, you know, there were a lot of things that went well for Trump and, and not sure maybe, maybe could have done it without teal, but it was a very close election. So,

### Human: I think that's the exciting moment we're in right now. And for people who are not watching, just go to YouTube and type in this week in startups and you'll go find this episode in our in under the videos tab. But behind you literally right behind Gabriel is a surgeon working on a cadaver.### Assistant: Thanks, Jason. Yeah, hoping to blow your mind here with some real-time product demos. We are just outside of the Proprio headquarters operating room, Facility Makoar, if you want to think about it that way. I think it's on the door behind me, the Precision Lab, as we refer to it, where we do real-time surgical simulations. When I say simulation, it means there are cadavers and samples. like that being used in computer vision surgery live behind me right now as we sit here. So I wanted to give you a better version of the product demos that everybody else who comes on your show shows you. I'm not just going to share a Zoom screen. There's a body in the lab being operated on by our team right now. And this is not just a demo for the sake of a demo. We're developing applications, including already FDA cleared applications for performing surgeries like spine surgery. in a totally different way compared to how it was done in the past and happy to dive into more detail there. But the simple analogy that I think is really easy to communicate with your vast audience is up until very recently, all of surgery was operating in a map quest kind of a context. What does that mean? We expected surgeons to basically take an x-ray or a CT or an MRI, that type of imaging, effectively either print it out or have it on a screen, store this wealth of knowledge in their brain from 20, 30 plus years of experience, try to pull all that together computationally within one human brain and then apply it to take care of the patient. Oftentimes, it's quite literally printing out an x-ray and taking it into the OR. You and I are close to the same age, so we remember when you went from Rand McNally to MapQuest. That was amazing, right? I have a custom map for the entire world. I just had to print it out, type in the origin point and the destination, take it in the car with me, and it was amazing, right? Turn by turn, except for if anything changed. If anything changed at all, whether it was a construction project that wasn't on MapQuest, or an accident that occurred, or ****, I wanted a sandwich. There was no real-time aspect to that information or that data or how it was presented to us. Now fast forward, your good buddy Elon and others have taught us how to navigate in real-time with GPS and Starlink and all that good stuff. Now we have real-time updating for driving across the city or the country. And thankfully, plenty of charging stations. Well, we forgot to do that for surgeons, which is, frankly, unforgivable, given that they take care of you and me and our children and our grandparents. And so now's the time, we'll probably talk about why now, all these technologies coming together, as you alluded to, can actually provide real-time GPS, real-time 3D volumetric intelligence for a surgeon. to perform at their very best every single time really in pursuit of perfection of medicine.

### Human: Yeah, I don't know either. And I don't know if this what is stolen represents their actual holdings, or just the kind of in game assets. I mean, obviously, you're not sitting on $625 million in game assets that you're not doing something else with. So it's unclear at this point, I think what the business impact of this is other than just, again, the reputational issue, which is unavoidable when you're building things on top of You know, yes, as the nodes are pointing out, the underlying technology here, the blockchain itself is still impervious thus far. That is totally true. But the fact is you have to layer things on top of this to make it usable. And every layer that you build is a point of entry and means it's, you know, high value targets.### Assistant: And I understand, I'm just seeing some Twitter chatter about this happened six days ago, and they just found out about it. So there, this is one of the things when you run fast, or you move fast and break things, which has been a heuristic philosophy of hacking and building companies, and move fast, break things. Sometimes, you know, you can have a fatal outcome. So when the enterprise gets bigger, want to slow down and make things more redundant, make things safer, you don't want to break things because the footprint of something getting broken in a small enterprise, you know, if you had 1000 Ethereum, you know, total in this project, well, you know, what's the footprint times 3000? You know, it's $3 million. one of the investors could just say, here's another $3 million would take 2% of the company and 1% of the company and you can keep going or we'll loan you the money. You don't even need to go through hacker insurance, cyber insurance, you just float it. When you get big, you have to really make sure you have a security team. Yeah. I don't know that they have a 10 person security team on this project. But the scale of it is such that they probably need to have a 10 person security team. We don't know. Yeah. And that's what happens when things grow too fast. Listen, we all have regrets in life, some of us more than others. But if you ask anyone my age, something they regret, I bet a bunch of them are going to say they wish they had started their financial planning and their saving for retirement just a little bit earlier. When you get started building your wealth early, Well, you get to capitalize on compound interest over decades and wealth front makes it so easy for you to start building wealth, you can invest out of a Roth IRA, a 401k, and other kinds of investment accounts. And they're trusted with over $28 billion in assets, I kid you not $28 billion in assets, And they have almost 500,000 people using the platform right now. And again, the product is simple. It's gorgeous. It's easy to use. And that's why it has 4.9 out of five stars in the app store. for you people giving it a four. I mean, this is a five out of five star app 4.9. I don't even know if I've ever seen a 4.9 out of five in the App Store. Great job to the Wealthfront team. It's a gorgeous app. It's got so many great features. And twist listeners can get their first $5,000 managed wait for it for free for life. That's right. You got nothing to lose. It's incredibly affordable, and you're going to learn a ton. And all you have to do is go to wealth front.com slash twist. That's w e a l t h f r o n t.com slash twist to start building wealth today.

### Human: Yeah, I mean, the music and you know, we have this idea that the music industry is like done, like it's baked. And this is what it looks like now. No, like artists have been mad about streaming for a long time. And this is the start of a revolution. I think 100%### Assistant: startups need a central hub to store information and collaborate on work more than ever, because we're all working remote across different time zones, people are making their own schedules, it's a different world, folks, we all know that when we went fully remote in March of 2020, notion became our internal knowledge bank, and we added another 10 people to our organization and every time they came, we had the same experience, they would ask us a question, they would get a notion link, then they would say, Oh, I have another question. Oh, we didn't write that down. We would add it to the notion page. They say, Oh, do you have a checklist? I love checklist, right? Well, go to this week in startups.com slash checklist and check out the hundred point founder checklist that's all hosted on notion that you can copy and then run through the checklist yourself on notion. every team from engineering to sales can work together seamlessly. And they have 500 integrated apps, including Google and Slack hundreds of 1000s of teams worldwide are already delighting their employees with notion and really the employees drive this. Once you give them notion, they're happier, they're calmer, they're more focused, it just makes you ridiculously productive and the product is always improving. So go to notion.so and use the promo code twist to get $250 off their annual team plan. I use this product literally, not every day, I use it, I would say every hour of every day, you can experience just how amazing notion.so is. I mean, I know this sounds like a personal endorsement. It kind of is I love the product. So go to notion.so use the promo code twist during checkout, get the $250 off your annual plan, and then see the magic. Let me know how it works out for you. I'm sure you're gonna love it. And you know, Bruce Springsteen sold his catalog for 550 million the publishing rights. Yeah, I think they could do things like sell these kind of devices with their entire archive on it, he would sell a million of them for $500 over time, it would be the ultimate collector's edition to have every album and then every bootleg. So I'm into bootlegs of like Dire Straits. So when I ski, I just go on YouTube and people post these full concerts. Yeah. And I just bookmarked my make a playlist. And I listened to concerts. And for anybody who's an aficionado, that's eventually where you wind up with whatever band you're into. is you wind up listening to the live concerts and they own the rights to those live ones. Mark Knopfler sells all his live independent concerts on his website. So Mark Knopfler, if you're listening, like he sells thumb drives at the concert when you're leaving of that concert. So there's a service that does that what I want is I want like the best three concerts from each tour. So just artists out there now, it just opens up any number of possibilities, right?

### Human: And they got to vigilante as a service, like, you know, sounds like they didn't find they have a subscription, they have like a premium product that they always try to get me to sign up for whenever I open it would be worth it. I don't know. But generally, as we like get deeper into this downturn, I do wonder about this, like quantitative versus qualitative, and having to set the feelings aside and be a little more ruthless. which is part of the industry and always has been like it's finance at the end of the day, finance with relationships. But because there are so many founders who had a really easy time raising, who have not seen a downturn, and we're talking about funds, not just Sequoia, but funds that feel like they have unlimited capital. Like, I do wonder if we're going to see more publicly hurt feelings like this has been a business conducted in private for a long time, but you wonder how much of it's going to come out as, as these firms start to make harder and harder decisions.### Assistant: Yeah, it tends to come out, you have dribs and drabs of stuff, you know, the, there's an incentive to be magnanimous. in these situations, if you're the investor, you never want to say something bad about a founder, because that other founders like, Oh, well, if it doesn't work out, you're gonna say something bad about me, or vice versa. So for these founders, if they did leak this, I don't know that they did, but kind of feels like it would be a leak from that side. Or it could be a an angel investor who is aware of this talk to the founders and leaked it on their behalf. anything's possible here. So I don't want to speculate more than speculating every possible more than we already have 20 minutes every time. But I'm speculating for the help of the founders listening, like, yeah, if it doesn't work out, you can just quietly, you know, have your opinion about the other person. If somebody asks you, hey, should I have them as an investor, you can say it didn't work out for me. But you might have a different experience or say nothing. And that that really is, I think how Silicon Valley works. I you don't hear people bad mouthing people, it's very subtle here. And you want to keep optionality. What if the citizen founders, one of the citizen founders, their next business is Uber or Airbnb. Hey, you know, so you want to keep good relations and vice versa. But if they come up with a great idea, that's a guy who's going to back them again. Keep keep everything friendly. enemies accumulate as these companies go out of business. You got to just try to be kind to everybody on the way out. It's hard enough. You know, you get these stories once in a while the press loves these stories. I'm not saying they shouldn't cover me there. But the press loves these stories. These are you know, they don't happen often. And, but I wouldn't read too much into it. Like, you have to make the right trade as an investor for your LPS. And remember, they had FTX member square invested in FTX. And they had written that blog post that was effusive about how great Sam Bankman Freed was. VCs are on high alert right now. Oh, God, if you backed their nose, if you backed FTX, you're on high alert. And And you can't have those kind of things back to back. So maybe they saw like, oh, this could have had this could have other issues. Like, what if they do vigilante as a service, and somebody gets killed, and then Sequoia back vigilante as a service, they may have been trying to unwind this for a while, they may have been asking the founder, hey, please don't do crazy things. Like vigilante as a service, we, you know, it blows back on us kind of situation. Yeah.

### Human: And one time and it was almost a disaster. It was the worst ride to the airport of my life.### Assistant: This is one of the great things in venture capital and entrepreneurship. This is a great thing for venture capitalists and entrepreneurs to have discussions about. is part of the art of investing in companies is you don't know what your TAM is, the market's going to tell you over time, because there's another rub here, which I have looked at very often, which I call inducing a market to exist, right? There's a concept of induced traffic, you build an extra lane, you build a bridge. So when they built the Golden Gate Bridge, the number of people going from San Francisco up to Napa increased dramatically. Why? Well, because it was possible you induce them to do so by the nature of building a bridge. If you start doing transatlantic flights, and people can go from Europe to the United States by a plane has, you know, in a couple of hours, as opposed to on a boat for a couple of days, you've induced that traffic. Airbnb and Uber and Doordash induced people to take longer more exotic and more trips. So you take instead of going for three days, you might go for five because you can afford it. Yeah, you might go to a more exotic location because the reviews and you know, this really cool looking house with great reviews in some weird place just seemed very appealing to you and the price was great. So a lower price, more optionality and a better product can induce traffic. clear. I mean, I did not I used to go to the grocery store. Last night, right, I needed some things. And instead of using Instacart, I used Uber Eats for going to Safeway. And I ordered some Haagen Dazs ice cream, and some, you know, diet sodas and milk and other things we needed for the house came with it in, you know, under 90 minutes, maybe 60 minutes. And so that's the in the inducing of a market to exist. So these are all great things to debate and discuss about your product. Is it going to take a subset of the tam? Which tam are we talking about? Are you talking about the tam of all automobile sales? Well, or should you talk about all miles driven? And I think Uber pool, and lift line, if you remember those products, not everybody does, but that was the you know, I take a lift, and I'm going to the airport on the way I go five minutes out of my way to pick up Molly, then we go another six minutes out of the way to pick up Nick, and then we go to the airport. And then that's three rides to the airport. If the total value of those rides was $150. We each we actually put it down to 120. We each save 10 bucks. We each get inconvenienced by somewhere between 12, five or zero minutes, depending on which stop on the Uber or Lyft line. It was a brilliant product requires network effects could have increased the TAM of ride sharing massively. It didn't work. Rarely work.

### Human: This is... To the extent you can be honest about it without burning your... I don't want you to burn your relationship with Larry.### Assistant: No, no, I think Larry, one of the best parts about Larry is he tells you exactly what he thinks and he expects the same out of you. There's no holding back with Larry. And I think anybody who spent time with Larry, he can make you think about anything. I mean, he's got such unique way of thinking about things. So as you described in 2011, I think Larry took over as CEO and he made a bunch of changes and he turned us into business units. It's kind of crazy to imagine that like Up to that point, we were like 20,000 people and all of engineering, all of products, they all reported into Eric. It's crazy. We had all these multi-billion dollar businesses and everybody reported in Eric. So Larry said, this is dumb. We're going to have, we're going to have, we didn't call them GMs because of a bunch of SEC rules, but whatever. That's roughly what they were. And so each of us had our divisions and so on. And then he went through a bunch of other changes. And one of the changes he asked for, as you described, was he said, I want to bring everybody back into Mountain View. And specifically what he said was, he asked each of us to reduce our office footprint to three offices, one of which was in Northern California. Um, and like for YouTube, I had eight engineering offices around the world and like 20 plus sales offices. We were only really talking about the product offices. Uh, but the maps team was in, I think, 22 offices. The Chrome team was in like 19, like they're all over the place. And, and so we had this big debate about it. What, what, what do we do? And like everybody kind of revolted. And in particular, it was hard because. Larry was the creator of this dynamic, right? I mean, Google is kind of famous for in the early days. Larry basically said, if you can find three engineers in the city, you can open an office there. And so like Google kind of spread through the world this way. And for YouTube in particular, this has been a big deal because as I mentioned earlier, like YouTube was not the golden child at Google for a very long time. And so for me to grow the business, I had to open offices in other places. Like I couldn't get people in San Bruno to work on things, San Francisco to work on things. So I got a team in Tokyo, and a team in Zurich, and a team in Paris. And that's like, I had to do it. There's no way I could have hired the same people here. So I had this really interesting conversation with Larry, where Larry tried to convince all of us. And he would go one by one. And he would try to convince us. And by the way, the story played out. We shut down exactly one office, the Atlanta office. There was so much revolt, we stopped, and everybody forgot about it.

### Human: Yeah. Yeah. So in 2011, we had the first apartment get trashed in San Francisco. And it was a wake up moment for us. I think the company had grown a little bit faster at that point. And We caught up, thankfully. But it really put trust and safety at the forefront for us. And ever since then, trust and safety has been the most important part of Airbnb and our platform. And from that, we implemented a ton of improvements. You know, we implemented, I think, in the course of about two weeks, in August of 2011, we shipped about 40 new features to improve trust on our platform. And a lot of those are still around today, with major improvements, including our host guarantee. Our host guarantee started back in 2011 for $50,000 if anything ever happened to a host apartment or home. It then became a million dollars and it's gone up from there ever since. These are all safeguards that we've put in place to reassure homeowners and also guests.### Assistant: We had it happen. I had a had an extra had moved houses. We still had a house my wife put into the Airbnb pool. We had a very strict thing. Hey, no parties, no parties. You know, it goes on for a year, no problems. And then one night, the drop cam starts going off at that in the driveway, that a bunch of people there and somebody threw a party after they had said they weren't. And we they you know, like one or two things got damaged, and we just submitted it. And all of a sudden was like, Yeah, we have insurance. Yeah, your carpet, we had a really nice carpet that got trashed. I was like, yep, carpets replaced. I was like, Oh, okay, great. This is like, easy breezy. But now this was many years after that. Okay, imagine this, you got an idea for a great tech startup, and you think it's going to change the world. But you got a problem. You just don't have the engineers that you need to make it come true. Why? Well, it's obvious. It's hard to find engineers, there's a lot of competition. And hey, you're trying to keep your burn rate low. You need to conserve cash. Now, imagine you had a partner who could provide you with more than 1000 on-demand developers, right? As many as you need. And these developers were all vetted, experienced, result-oriented, and they were incredibly passionate about helping you grow your startup. And what if they charged, you know, competitive rates, things that you could afford? Does this sound too good to be true? Well, let me introduce you to Lemon.io. Startups choose Lemon.io because they only offer handpicked developers with three or more years of experience and who have strong portfolios. In fact, only 1% of candidates who apply to work with lemon.io get in a couple of our launch founders have worked with lemon.io and they had an amazing experience. And listen, I have used outsourced full time teams for decades, whether it was way back at weblogs, Inc, Mahalo on to inside.com at launch, this is the way to do it. Go to lemon.io slash twist and find your perfect developer or tech team. And you can do that in 48 hours or less and twist listeners get 15% off for the first four weeks. Stop burning money, hire developer smarter, visit lemon.io slash twist. I you were still at the company full time when COVID hit because that must have been Like, what do we do now? And you guys had gotten ahead of your skis, so to speak, in terms of hiring and gotten very big at that time, and had to do a big riff long before everybody else did. And Uber did a big riff, I think, at that time. Take me back to that and just, what do you do if nobody can rent a home and you don't know how long it's going to last? That's existential.

### Human: Okay, Molly, say more about your Skinamax. I don't watch anything else on Skinamax except for Strikeback, but I almost didn't want to let it go. I wanted to hoard it just in case I felt like watching Strikeback. And then I was like, that is so stupid. Cancels. Also, Strikeback is awesome. Looks pretty good to me. Oh, my God. So good. It's like spy shows. Oh, it's so good. Love it. God, I'm gonna have to read, freaking sign up for Skinamax. That was hard. That was hard. Everything else, though, like,### Assistant: I did not need that. Here is my best advice to founders. So this is a little nugget I'm going to add here. This a little founder trick. There are credit cards that you can get. And that's what I want you to do. I want you to write on your credit card, the 2022 card, then I want you to get a 2023 card and a 2024 card. Or you could do this in six month increments. So you just take a little sharpie out, you write that on the card. Then you put all your subscriptions sat anything that's a SAS subscription. This is your subscription card for 2223 and 24. Now, you cancel that card hard cancel it, close it down, shut it down. And these are three credit cards from three different companies, so that there's no way of rolling over the charges smart and then every December 1, or let's call it November 15, you turn the card off And if you are like cast away lost on an island, this SAS companies will find you. They literally this is how you can if you can get rescued from an island, because they'll literally find somebody who will show up at the island and be like, hey, your your sales force, your slack is turned off. That's how dogged they are. Yeah, the joke didn't land, I guess. Anyway, there are also cards you can get. I got it. I'm trying not to interrupt you're on a roll. Yes, there are cards you can get that let you program the card. I'm not going to give any shout outs to this particular ones. But startups use these cards all the time. And we use them internally, because young employees, you know, they don't want to have to use their personal card. And we don't they don't often use it anyway. So we can give them a card with a $50 a month limit. And if it cancels or something like that, if it bounces, no big deal, they say to the operations person, can you put it at 200? I have to do this on it. Great. But then we can also turn it to zero, turn it off. So the the programmability of cards is like that. Now the credit card companies are in cahoots with the subscription companies to screw you on getting rid of these subscriptions. So this is why you have to protect yourself. You just turn it off at the end of the year, because they'll contact you and the person in the company who needs it will contact you say, Hey, I went into my, you know, whatever my my box account my my my iTunes storage account, whatever SAS subscription product using New York Times, Wall Street Jersey, it doesn't work, I need it. So that's how you prove need is by turning off the payment. Please do this, everybody. I do it personally, I do it professionally at all the companies, the technique works. Chef's kiss, continue with the Salesforce story.

### Human: So super simple, they understand it simple. Yeah, you know, pay a couple of bucks every time you send somebody over, you know, this is quality traffic. Because the only way for them to get to your site is they would have had to done a search. And when they land on your site, you're going to have some information about them unless they're using like a VPN and the brave browser or something, you're going to get some and that's like, whatever, less than 5% of people. you're gonna get some good data on that person and know their providence, and you can just figure it out, right? You can figure out the value of it. If it works, it works. If it doesn't, it doesn't. The average diamond purchase is what in America?### Assistant: Sure. Sorry. Like I said, finance guy. So 75 days in arrears. So we're sending traffic to an online jeweler and somebody buys a diamond on January 1st, then we're not going to collect until March 15th is when we get this. Best case. Best case. So for example, if we paid on Google Ads to drive that click, we are bearing the cost of that click for two and a half months. And it's brutal. And so it made scaling really, really difficult. Ultimately, we were able to drive a lot of growth. We were forced to drive a lot of growth organically. And the way that we did that was by building products that were useful, that were differentiated in the marketplace, and that ranked high in Google organically for keywords that people were already searching for. So we recognize that people were looking for things like diamond price calculators in the same way that Zillow and Trulia recognized that people were looking for mortgage rate calculators. And there just wasn't a product out there, tools. And I think that this is an important point for anybody who's super early stage that's trying to go from zero to one, especially with LLMs, large language models, with AI. We're already seeing if you're in Google's test flight of their product, Google Labs, you get this AI description written at the top of Google search results. And this is specifically for answerable questions. Who's the Queen of England? Who was the Queen of England in X year? That's a known thing. That's factual information. It can be answered by an AI. That used to be something that bloggers were competing for to get to the first rank in Google. Now they're stuffed underneath this LLM. And so it's going to be very difficult to drive content-related traffic through undifferentiated or commoditized information, right? But if you develop a product that is unique in the market that leverages the information that you have, that's unique to you. So if you have unique datasets, or if you can combine two datasets that are separate, they may even be publicly available, and combine them in some unique or novel way that nobody's thought about yet, and build a product around that, that people actually search for, that a large language model is not just going to give a text answer to, That's a great way to drive organic traffic to your site. People will scroll past the LLM's response to that or the LLM may not even try to give a response because Google is training its algorithms to identify situations where the LLM is not the preferred mode of communication with the user. That's how we got the site rolling was by developing these products that people found useful, leveraging the information we were getting from the affiliate agreements that we had. We were able to drive enough traffic that we had leverage in our conversations with our partners. And then we were able to convert them over to our own business model, which is a cost per click model. And it looks very much like Google ads.

### Human: I mean, here's what here's the part I think is interesting is that they seem to be targeting. Yes, inaccurate spec forecasts, but specifically, they propose curbing the legal protections is according to Bloomberg. And this is by the way, still like anonymous sources. So until this actually, like we said, they're probably talking about it right now. So we don't know. Um, but one of the specific things that Bloomberg notes is that it would limit the legal protection. Some blank check companies have relied on to make bullish forward-looking statements about the firms they plan to merge with. So obviously that's just the SPACs, but what that made me think of was like, let's take Rivian. Let's say you weren't gambling. Rivian comes out, goes public through a SPAC, has deals inked with Amazon, and a deal inked with Ford. And that is a big vote of institutional confidence. And you're like, they have this deal with Ford, they're going to make trucks for them, it's going to be great. I actually Oh, Rivian was an IPO, not a SPAC.### Assistant: a little projections is kind of implied you would you make a projection as a publicly traded CEO that was not aspirational? Well, if you did, I wouldn't want to buy your stock, right? So I guess the question is, if stock if SPACs had performed well, and there weren't so many of them, would this be on the table? I think the answer is no. Right? I think this is a reaction to some of the really poorly done SPACs around specifically the EV market. And so I think this is kind of a reaction to the public blindly buying Rivian, Fisker, Nikola, some of those are actual frauds and being sued for fraud like Nikola. Other ones are just fantastic, fantastical delusions like Fisker in my mind, that's my opinion. And then some of them are just overpriced nonsense, like Rivian, where they are just getting credit for things 90% of what they've they're getting credit for 98% of what they haven't done. And so who's responsible? when a market is out of control. Everybody wants to point fingers when it goes down. But I'll tell you this, the people buying those SPACs, we're not buying them, because they wanted to buy a healthy company and have it appreciate at more than 7%, whatever the average of the S&P is, and they wanted to have the alpha, the difference above the average return of the market. They weren't trying to hit 10% returns. Let's be honest, these people were gambling, they were just picking a random number on the roulette wheel and hoping it went 10x. And so and they weren't doing any research, they were suspending disbelief. You know, they were using as Chamath said on the last all in clapping as a strategy, like, you know, clapping to get, you know, blackjack does not help you get blackjack, it may make you feel good. But it's, you know, clapping at the blackjack table does not influence the card. So I think this is I'll be honest, a little bit silly. Because people buying SPACs were, you know, really, I think they were in it to do what we do, Molly, which is by nasing companies and pretend they were venture capitalists and not have to do the work. Yeah. None of them were doing none of the retail investors doing the work. Now, does that mean that Nicola is not responsible for the fraud that they are alleged to have perpetrated? No, they should go to jail. They should lose everything. When they're caught, just like Elizabeth Holmes should or Bernie Madoff should or anybody else involved in this kind of nonsense. Should Flisker and Rivian? Well, did they lie? Did they have ambitious projections? And did people suspend disbelief and all throw their money on, you know, 32 black, and then double down on, you know, black over red. I mean, these people are just gambling. And so fine.

### Human: Because it's not in their interest, because they have 600 million to deploy, and they're over-investing at over-valuations in hype. Whereas Web 3 should mean, how do the people that lost in Web 2 that had the passion and idea that were powered by Web 2, and once you start seeing those builders of Web 2 that kind of got run over, whether it's dig by Reddit, or, you know, once you start seeing those people reinvent themselves, even 20 years later, you realize those same entrepreneurs that understood the web, and are coming back and doing it a second time, even in their older age is very exciting to me. And I'm, but I don't think I want to build the next Facebook, I don't dilute myself that we're going to invest in the next Facebook. I just think it's a different, more fun web. And so when the car, when the automobile first came out, if you had to drive it in the dark or it was raining, it didn't work. There were no windshield wipers. There were no lights, right? You were just happy that the car went and that was the internet. Web3 is just fog lights. It's windshield wipers. It's all those things that made the car the great thing that it is today.### Assistant: Alright, the second half of the baseball season has started, and it's time to turn big hits into big wins with FanDuel Sportsbook. And listen to this offer right now. New customers can get a no-sweat first bet up to $1,000. That's right, all you have to do, use the promo code TWIST when you sign up, you place your first bet, and FanDuel will give you up to $1,000 back in free bets if you don't win. I'm looking at the Knicks here. I'm looking at the Golden State Warriors. I think maybe I'm going Golden State to win the Western Conference. Maybe I'm going with my Greek brother Giannis and the Bucs to win the Eastern Conference. That seems like good odds to me, but you know, you got to make your own decision. I love placing a nice bet, so I have a little passion coming into this season. And here's why FanDuel is the best place for you to follow your passion. You can place one of those bets that re-engages you in the season while they have great promotions every day. And the app is safe and secure, and you're going to get paid fast. You can trust FanDuel. The best place to bet on America's pastime is on America's number one sportsbook. Download the FanDuel Sportsbook app and sign up with the code TWIST to get started with your no-sweat first bet. up to $1,000. Yeah, I think these NFTs when they have rights associated with them, smart contracts associated with them, decentralized, you know, management of the Dow's. And that's really what I find it fascinating. Imagine somebody had a golf club, or you and I want to start a poker club or a golf club. And we say, yeah, we're going to email our 1000 closest friends get 200 of them to put up 25 k each, all of a sudden, we've got this cash sitting around. And we then go build this club. And now your membership is your membership, you decide what you want to do with it. But hey, there's a smart contract that gives for right of first refusal to another member to buy it at the same price within seven days of somebody else putting a bid in. And you're like, Okay, how do I build that? It's like, well, the infrastructure is here. Okay, whose infrastructure is where do I put my credit card? It's like, Oh, no, you just pay a fee. And it's all done. And it's nobody's infrastructure. What do you mean? It's nobody's infrastructure. Well, it's not nobody's. It's everybody's I still don't. It's like a Laurel and Hardy routine. Like it's everybody's infrastructure. It's nobody's infrastructure. It's like, yeah, there's just some servers up there. And some people run those servers, and we don't know who they are.

### Human: Right. I want to ask you about that in a minute, since, of course, that's what you specifically do. But before that, like, what do you say to the idea that that that markets would have gotten this done anyway, markets would have led us in this direction, no matter what, because it is the natural way of economics to seek maximum efficiency. And that, you know, when government comes in with these incentives, you get like, perverse outcomes sometimes, or that you can have the rug pulled out, like happened in the first clean tech investing boom.### Assistant: So, I think I would take a little bit of issue with the premise of the question that the rug was pulled out of us in the first cleantech. There are certainly things that didn't work, for sure. So, I'm not saying that that didn't happen. But I'd also say that the economy is not a perfectly self-contained economy. managed machine, right? Like we have, you know, our flashback to the 1980s, we have a Top Gun movie, there's a war with the Russians, and we have inflation, right? And then questions about, you know, economic stability going forward, right? So, it's not a, you know, self-oiled machine in that sense. And the activity that led to the last stimulus was You know, the global collapse of the economy almost. And we're in a situation where, again, you have inflation issues, you have, you know, choppiness in all kinds of parts of the economy. And there's a time for the government to intervene. The other side of it is the government does stuff all the time, like we got to buy trucks for the postal system. So, are we going to buy ones that are going to drag the economy in a particular direction or accelerate it in a different direction? Are we going to support other parts of our foreign policy or economic engagement with the rest of the world in a way that actually supports our ability to build relationships and lead on climate and build technology in the United States, or are we going to sit back on our hands and sort of watch the rest of the world go forward and get to it? So, I think the idea that this is all going to happen at the right efficient pace and there's no other distortions in the economy, whether it's subsidies, for the fossil fuel industry or ways that we're actually buying and selling things in the government itself as an actor, I think is not entirely correct. So I would say that the difference is, you know, the rest of the world wasn't standing still either. You know, $50 billion was raised to deploy capital in these areas. This creates a different part of the conversation. that can continue now. And even though the federal government was sort of offside during the Trump administration, in the climate context, broadly speaking, you know, New York State and other states and municipalities were deploying utility scale solar and wind, and we're really moving forward with innovation and driving a lot of activity forward. Some of that, you know, catalyzed or facilitated at really critical points in time by the last two most recent people, but parts of the world are moving. What I think this does is creates momentum and stability around how that trajectory is going to go, as opposed to a lot more uncertainty about whether it's going to be two steps forward, one step back, or two steps back. I think this says, okay, we're really going to move in this direction in a reasonably sizable way and do it in a way that's multifaceted, that's more thoughtful.

### Human: Well, I mean, I think to set the stage, we did see the Supreme Court took some action on states being able to decide if they have gambling online or not. Preet Bharara had famously banned online poker, it was a lot of gray area there. So online poker and things are coming back, but it's state by state. So what's catch us up on when that when that judgment happened, and then how quickly each state fell and what that process was like, because I was getting all kinds of pitches, like, hey, this thing happened in the Supreme Court, and here we are, and then it wasn't actually ready to go yet.### Assistant: So where's what's the state of so so paspa was the name of the law that was overturned by the Supreme Court. It effectively prevented states from making their own decisions around gaming. State of New Jersey sued, and ultimately after going through the entire process, they won. So what it did was it certainly created the opportunity for every state to then make their own rules and set their own regulatory structure around gaming. And it opened the floodgates. But what I think people in the gaming world who kind of didn't know politics that well, didn't understand is, yes, more states are going to allow sports betting, iGaming, eSports betting, everything else for sure. But this stuff is not going to happen overnight, right? Because number one, politicians sort of They always think that if they do a pro-gaming vote, it's going to cost them their seat. In reality, nobody knows the individual vote that any politician, especially a state senator or state rep makes. Nobody knows who their state senator is, but they all have to get over that initial fear. I've dealt with it so many times in government. That's number one. Number two, gaming bills are tough because you have not just a fan duel to house an investor in or MGM trying to bring more iGaming or whatever it is. You have all the existing casinos. You have the racetracks. You might have dog tracks. You might have highlight poker rooms, Native American tribe. And they're all weighing in on the process, which means you can still get to the right place. I think something like 29 states have now legalized sports betting. But it's a multi year process. It's not an overnight process. But the good news is, every time that we get one sort of piece of digital done, I think the other ones move faster. So the first frontier was sports betting, which also, by the way, is probably the worst business within digital gambling, because ultimately, because it's a really commoditized product, you don't have any control over where and when it happens, and you just can't differentiate yourself. So FanDuel, DraftKings, MGM, Caesars, it's kind of a race to the bottom of who can give customers more incentives and free play, because otherwise, how do they really distinguish themselves? Whereas iGaming and ultimately esports gaming, so you want to bet on an NFL game, a lot has to happen. You need two teams, a stadium, referees, uniforms. The amount of friction is significant. Two dudes in solar playing Madden, and you're just betting if the next play is a run or a pass, it's infinite. Ultimately, both for the sector and for the taxpayers, to me, the real money will come with iGaming and esports gaming. And we're getting there. So five states allow iGaming right now, no one's even really, you know, thought about esports gaming yet, because it's so new. But that's going to increase significantly over the next couple of years.

### Human: Well, I mean, the I think people were living under a delusion that the government didn't have the ability to stop something. and you need only look at what happened with Napster and what happened with BitTorrent and other services. The government can simply use this tool called the law and enforcement. And these two things combined will put you in jail. And sure, you can do illegal things and get away with it for a time. But you know, you can stop things. Maybe not on a technological basis, people could still fire up crypto and send it, but you just make it really uncomfortable if you get caught doing it. And XRP is the perfect example, you have ripple, which was acting like a security had a fixed number of tokens, they control the supply, people are buying them to speculate, they were manipulating the market in all kinds of ways, according to the SEC complaint. And now they're in in broiled in a case right now that who knows, it seems like it's a coin toss to me. But have you been following that XRP case?### Assistant: And what are your thoughts on it? A little bit? Um, yeah, I don't sort of know which way it's gonna go either. Look, I'm rooting for them. One, I like Chris and Brad, the team over there, and we've done some work with them. But I again, fundamentally, even the courts are not immune to politics, right? They are not immune to public pressure to the zeitgeist, everything else. And you have to create an environment that makes the judges think, okay, if I rule in this way, I'm going to be publicly supported by because if they think that they're gonna get beat up for it, it's they're still human beings, right? As smart as our judges might be, they still want to be liked, like everybody else wants to be liked. And Nobody likes being criticized. And again, you have to create a climate and a culture that gives them the permission structure to rule in your favor, right? So for example, the crypto world could be a tremendous grassroots advocacy force in US politics, right? Because so many people do it. And I know that your average sort of, you know, Bitcoin maxis is not probably thinking that much about like who their city council member is or whatever else. But when you can organize people just from their phone, which they're already on 24 hours a day already, and you can start to then use that to impact public opinion, polling, everything else, that's what changes politicians. And then ultimately, we talked about this on the last podcast, Jason, mobile voting. So I've been funding and running the campaign nationally to make it possible for people to vote on their phones over the blockchain. And the reason why is right now we live in a world where Every district is gerrymandered. It's the only election that really matters are the primaries. Primary turnout is 10% to 20%. They tend to be the most ideological or the special interests. And as a result, nothing gets done. If turnout were 50%, it would change dramatically. So to use a tech example, I don't know if you guys remember when Amazon tried to set up their second headquarters in Queens in New York. And everyone thought they were going to have parades and roses, and instead they got run out of town. The reason they got run out of town was that they misread the politics completely, which is, yes, their polling was right. The majority of the city wanted it. Even the majority of the district of Long Island City wanted it. But that 8% who bother to show up in the state senate primary, they're as far left as you get, and they hate Amazon. City council members, state center, all of those people actually behave very logically politically by killing it, which is, these are the people that are going to vote in my next election. This is how they feel. I'm going to do what they want because I want to keep my job. Every policy output is the result of a political input.

### Human: And that is because conflict equals drama equals ratings, no conflict, no ratings.### Assistant: And also, of course, the oversimplification of things is particularly appealing. We'll turn this into a... I mean, in Britain, possibly less so in the US, this is a very rare point of view. But in recent years, I've occasionally gone into the Parliament building in the UK, into the Houses of Parliament, and you look at the meetings that are taking place around the building. And a very large proportion of those meetings are a bipartisan group of MPs from both the left and the right dealing with some complex problem united in the interests of solving the problem as the best they can collectively. Now if you watch the news or read the newspapers in the UK you would have no idea that any of that activity takes place at all. The only exposed coverage about politics is entirely about direct conflict. And okay, you can blame social media, but it's worth remembering that the very same narrative that social media profits from is also pretty convenient to conventional news channels as well. Yeah, if it bleeds, it leads. I mean, bluntly, one of the things I generally take as advice from people like Nassim Taleb and the philosopher Alan de Botton is don't pay much attention to short-term news in any case. Read weekly or monthly magazines because the signal-to-noise ratio in 24-hour rolling news is pretty much 95% noise. And So the other thing that I learned from on this is Robert Cialdini. I don't know if you've read his great book, Influence. He's in many ways the sort of godfather. He's at the University of Arizona. He's kind of the godfather of behavioral science in many ways. And he makes the point that most news bias, OK, most bias by news organizations isn't what people think. It isn't actually the news outlet telling you what to think. The bias is created by what the journalists think is important. And journalists don't have that much power to change my mind about free market economics or whatever it may be. They're not going to change my mind. But they have immense power to put something on the front page or to bury it in the back. And there are two great quotations from film on this from Citizen Kane. There's a line in Citizen Kane where I think Kane says, make the headline big enough and it'll make the story big enough. In other words, even if, to be honest, this is an arcane dispute only of interest to political nerds, if you put it on page one, OK, it's huge. OK. On the other hand, If you watch the film Spotlight, there's this extraordinary telling phrase, which is, this is about the priests and abuse scandal in Boston, OK? We had this story 15 years ago or 10 years ago, but we buried it in Metro. Now, I've always got a theory that if you'd put the Watergate scandal on page 7 and page 3 and page VII and the supplement, You could have put exactly the same information there and the story would have gone nowhere.

### Human: We are getting old. We might have met each other 20 years ago. It's been a long time.### Assistant: Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Startups. I'm your host, Jason Kalacanis. You can follow me on Twitter, twitter.com slash Jason, or instagram.com slash Jason. But I'm hiding all my photos and archiving them on Instagram because I don't want to support Facebook and Zuckerberg anymore. It's a crazy time right now, obviously, the pandemic and then the social unrest and what we've seen in terms of the protests, obviously. It's very difficult to talk about business at a time like this. It's difficult to run a business at a time like this. There's so many distractions. But as I've said a number of times on the show, What matters to people in their lives? Well, being alive, right? There's safety and security. And we've seen that in both of these crises that we're facing, people's lives are at stake. But shortly after, you ask anybody, what else are you concerned with? Livelihood comes up next. And entrepreneurship and startups and people having that support in the earliest time of their startup, not raising 100 million in your series CD or E, but getting that first 100k in the door. That's really what matters. That's the hardest check to write. That's the hardest time for a company. And that's why I really wanted to start this series, The Power of Accelerators. And so I'm just giving permission to everybody who's listening. I know you're suffering. I know You're probably losing your mind watching television. You have to pause that sometimes because the news is horrific. And you do need to focus on livelihoods and creating jobs. That is going to be the second order impact that we need to solve for as we go into the second half of 2020. And there's nothing wrong. with wanting your business to be vibrant and to be able to hire people and at the same time being concerned about social justice, being concerned about the pandemic and people's health. So I just put that little disclaimer and inspiration maybe for some of you who are founders and just You wake up and you have to make a decision. Do I run my business or do I put on CNN? Do I check Twitter trending topics and look at these? Disturbing videos or do I hire the next person and make sure my business is vibrant, you know a little bit of both is okay But you certainly don't want to get paralyzed and forget about your business and not be able to run it to the point at which It goes away and then you can't hire people and then we have more unemployment in the country we started this power of accelerators series because And we use the term accelerators as a catch-all for incubators, accelerators, in the case of mass challenge, a challenge-type event, which also helps people in the early stage, and today representing the startup studio. is Mike Jones, an old friend of mine. Not that he's old, but we are getting old, Mike. Welcome to the podcast.

### Human: Look, I get it. I understand where people are coming from, right? Like, like you said, for you, like if you come up and you feel like, look, I was poor, my family struggled and I made it. So I put in the work and effort and I could get here. That means you, if you put in work and effort, you could get here too. And it's really hard to put yourself in somebody else's shoes to say, well, you knew what work and effort was. Right. I didn't even know that.### Assistant: Right. That's a key insight, I think, like, I always tell people, like, everything you could learn in the world is on YouTube right now. And you found this week in startups, as but one example is to go full circle to restart. And like, I found the other day, MIT course where I just have to stumble upon, like they had a macro economics. And I was like, you know, I never got to go to MIT. I don't I mean, I understand what macroeconomics is, I've read some books, whatever. I was like, I'm gonna just play this macroeconomics course in the background while I'm doing some work. I started listening to macroeconomics, microeconomics. I'm like, wow, I'm really starting to learn some stuff that are gaps in my own education as a 50 year old guy. But if you don't know that the MIT courseware is online or this week in startups exists or core exists, like that's the thing I think we have to. There is a knowing the opportunity knowing that information is there knowing there are pads knowing the strategies and you are a lot code your cheat code. That's why i so excited to have you on it is like a great episode that we can build on from here because you figure some stuff out. And like, you know, the way you could thank me, based, you know, you had that very gracious thank you to me, is you just keep doing what you're doing. You keep sharing how you did it, right? And if we all just keep sharing how we did it, when I came into the industry, nobody would show you the term sheet. Nobody would explain to you how venture worked. Nobody, you didn't know who worked there. It was all a black box. All the venture webs, venture people didn't have websites. And if they did have a website, it was like, you know, like whatever capital partners, you know, and the address and like no phone number. And like, you just couldn't get in touch with anybody at those places. Nobody was like, Elizabeth was like, you know, let me get on the phone with you and try to help this person. I think that's one of the most beautiful things about our industry in 2022 is that, and a Twitter plays a part in it. Podcast plays a part in it. YouTube plays a part in it. Everybody really does want to help each other. I feel so, positive about our industry in that, you know, Neval wanted to help me. I helped Neval. Everybody was helping each other 12 years ago. Try to create more angel investing syndicates, whatever. Let's figure this all out together. And I think that's really like one of the great things you're actually doing every day when you're out there talking about raising funds and explaining to people how you did it. Because the more you help other people, the more it comes back to you in my personal experience. Yeah.

### Human: Pretty good. Welcome back, Lon. Thanks. Great to be here.### Assistant: Hey, everybody, I'm really excited to tell you about Prometheus. This is a new platform. It's like a version of Twitter, but it's focused on markets, venture capital and more. If you love twists, you're into that stuff. I know that you got to sign up for Prometheus right now. I've been in there. I've been interacting with the community. And as a capital allocator and somebody who invests in startups, it's awesome. Here's the secret sauce. Prometheus has a bunch of fund managers, like myself, and potential LPs, limited partners who invest in funds, like myself, on the platform. This is the social network I have been waiting for. And if you're going to raise capital, you can do it right in the app. But imagine you're an accredited investor, right? Like myself. Well, Prometheus is going to help you find new fund managers to back. every year I back one or two new fund managers so now I went in there and there's a tab like imagine the explore tab well for me I go in there and I found all these new managers I could back this is stuff that was previously spread through word of mouth right like just people emailing people or meeting them at conferences well now you can find all these new fund managers that you want to back on prometheus And if you're a fund manager like myself, they're going to give me access to potential LPs so I can fill up my fund and meet more people to join the party and invest alongside me in startups. I couldn't believe that my mind was blown when I saw Prometheus. And if you're a civilian and you just want to learn, well, Prometheus can help you learn from all these awesome fund managers. I was posting some of my J trades on there and getting great feedback. Prometheus solves the problems of visibility and access to alternative funds and it has lower investor minimums so that means a bunch of investors can get involved in alternative funds and let fund managers do what they do best, invest. So go sign up for prometheusalts.com let me spell that for you p-r-o-m-e-t-h-e-u-s-a-l-t-s dot com prometheusalts.com and right now i want you to stop what you're doing go to the app store and search for Prometheus and install it. In order to get in, they're going to ask you for a code. You want to guess the code? It's TWIST, T-W-I-S-T, and follow your boy JCal. Just search for Jason Calacanis when you sign up and you'll see me posting my JTrades there. It's a really cool, well-designed product. Congrats to the team over there. Really blown away and can't wait to interact more with the community on Prometheus. Hey, everybody, it's Thursday. And we're here for a little This Week in Startups and This Week in Streaming episode. Lon Harris is here and Molly Wood, of course. Hey, Lon. Hey, Molly. How is everybody doing?

### Human: They were it sounds like they were taking 2% of full 20%. Like they were not standard. So investors thought this is going to work like it's supposed to, they're going to get this 2% management fee. possibly on a declining scale, most likely like it's going to work like normal funds. But according to the SEC, instead, what ABG did was take the 20% performance fee that firms would normally collect on returns above breakeven. And instead, ABG collected that upfront. Yeah. And that and I have come to understand in just my brief time here that there are that each fund is set up as a legal entity that is not supposed to interact with the other ones. Like you can't just like move some money into here and take some money out of here and do this between the this thing. So in addition to taking this 20% fee from investors up front, the SEC also found that ABG made these inter fund loans and cash transfers between funds and then made loans to certain funds in violation of the funds operating agreements.### Assistant: Yeah, yes. So I think this is how the SEC likes to work. You know, the company was responsible for some set of things, but whoever was in charge or whoever set it in motion, I guess as well. Crazy SEC AVG his website, and marketing materials said its management fee was quote, the industry standard two and 20. For those of you don't know, 2% management fees, when you have a fund, let's just make it a $10 million fund, you would get 2% of that every year to pay for the staff of the fund, a $10 million fund might be a solo GP, they would get 2% 200k a year, maybe, you know, help some keep the lights on kind of situation. But obviously, if you have a billion dollar fund, or $100 million fund, you're starting to get, you know, $100 million fund that would have $2 million, they could have a collection of staff, you get the idea. So here's where it gets interesting. This led investors to believe that AVG would collect 2% management fees during each year of its funds on a 10 year term, which is typically how this happens. little nuance here, you don't get 2% every year, it usually slides down 2% for the first three or four years, then one and a half and one. Why do funds do this? Well, all the work is front loaded. So there's something called the harvesting phase, that's when you know, there's like seeding phase and the harvesting phase, the planting phase, the harvestment. So when you're deploying the capital, man, that's a lot of work. Then you get to year three, now you're just shepherding whichever company survive let's say a third of them survive for the last five years of the fund you're just making sure that those get across the finish line you need a little less money and then funds that so if you have three or four funds they're gonna overlap right. Yeah. And that's where the management fees can start to add up you can imagine if and when you see big venture funds with $300 million funds, and one's in crypto, one's in SaaS, one's growth, one's early stage, my Lord, the funds can just, the fees can get crazy. Now the fees are not free. The fees get paid out, or they kind of get tacked on to the principal that's being invested. So if you were to take this million dollar in fees over the life of the fund and the theoretical $10 million fund, you have to return 11 million to investors, And then if you made 100 million on top of that $111 million fund, the VCs would get 20% of $100 million gain $20 million. So that still has to be paid back. It's like a little advanced to keep the lights on. Well, I think from what I understand, they were taking all the fees up front.

### Human: Yeah. And so if everybody is working remote, what does that mean for business? How will business change? Which businesses will benefit from this? Will businesses be more efficient, less efficient? Will people be working more or less? What does the world look like if we're 10 years from now and people don't go to offices? Let's say 50% of people who are going to offices now don't go anymore.### Assistant: I'm terrified of predicting this because it's something that's been predicted for so long. And I had a friend, funnily enough, in your line of business, who was in Silicon Valley. And more or less, as soon as the internet came along, he bought property, I think, overlooking Lake Tahoe on the grounds that he thought that city property would plummet in value. This was 1995. And that the most valuable thing you could own would be a fantastic view. And that was his logic in 95. Now, so far, he's yet to be proved right. The opposite has happened. And strangely, in fact, the internet made the world more centripetal, not centrifugal, because it concentrated activity more, I think, in about five or six megacity hubs. And so I'm very, very loath to make confident predictions about teleworking and remote working. On the other hand, We all have had an enforced glimpse of the possibilities. It's possible that teleworking and remote working is something which I suppose in complexity theory you might call a threshold problem in that until about 30% of people adopt it 30% of the time, its benefits don't really become apparent. And so, I mean, what it would mean would be it would undoubtedly change property values, but ideally what I'd like to see happen is that the relationship between labor and capital to use kind of marxist terminology briefly becomes a bit more nuanced and so one of the things i've been talking to a guy at the adam smith institute in london and we said look The standard model of work is you pay people and they grudgingly come and work for you for the minimum hours necessary in exchange for money that they prefer to leisure up to the point of the margin. Now, that's patently not a very good representation. People derive identity from their work. Some parts of their work they find enjoyable. or purposeful or valuable. But one thing I did say is the exchange between work and leisure can be more nuanced. So if you think about it as you have free time, which is leisure, but you also value free where and free when. By which I mean the opportunity to work at a place of your choosing, which may not be home, by the way, but it may not be the office, and the opportunity to perform work at a time of day of your choosing, has a value to it, which is independent of work leisure, which is, I think, a false dichotomy. I learned a bit of this for two reasons. I was a very early Zoom advocate in the sense that, to me, this was like in behavioral science, the conundrum with moist toilet paper and video conferencing were two things that made obvious logical sense, but which nobody really adopted. Okay, so I will, I regarded those as the kind of Fermat's last theorem of behavioral science. And so I did lots of experiments, even two years ago before the pandemic, with my own team, trying to get them to work remotely more.

### Human: Yeah, I think they'll get there. All right. Listen, we talked about this before. You're one of the great entrepreneurs of all time. You have now been to Middle America, you understand not just the coastal elites and those cities understand the heartland, you put your money where your mouth is. you're telling me I got to get more involved in politics. When is Steve case going to get more involved in politics? Are you ever going to make my dream come true and run for public office? Because I listen, I love to have the idea of Bloomberg being president. I got all behind that. That got me very excited. But you running for president, to me, would be the dream, the founder of American online, somebody who understands business, somebody who understands capital formation, somebody who actually understands politics and could bring this country together. You're a moderate Democrat. If you were called on to serve, would you ever consider forget about the presidency, which is where you belong. That would have been a well time one or should have made you CEO president. That was the mistake. I'll say it. You don't have to say it. Would you ever consider in your third act entrepreneur, capital allocator, and then representing your country in any form, would you consider?### Assistant: Well, well, you're very kind. And I remember we've had this discussion. Last time, I figured it was coming again. And yeah, yeah, two things that say one is I do think there's a big difference between policy and politics. And I'm quite engaged on policy and do it in a nonpartisan way, trying to be a bridge between Democrats and Republicans and particularly around innovation, entrepreneurship, which ties in with some of the things we've talked about in terms of, you know, capital issues and immigration issues and so forth. So I remain actively involved. Once again, co-chairing the National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship, working on industry of the future and working on regional hubs and so forth. But I think my best and highest use is to be doing that in a bipartisan way and being a bridge. And I've done that for a while and I think I'll continue to do that. I also think the second thing I think is a way for me to contribute to this country is to help the rest rise. And while one could argue why you could do that from the prism of being in politics, I've actually concluded I can be as effective, if not more effective, doing exactly what I'm doing, you know, championing these entrepreneurs, spotlighting these cities, whether it's creating a fund to invest in them or writing a book to tell their stories. I think if we can back more entrepreneurs in more places, we can help more cities, communities more broadly, regions be renewed. We can help create more jobs in those places, more opportunity in those places. That could have a very positive impact on politics and maybe even help bridge this political divide, this hyper-partisanship that we have. And there are many facets to it for sure. I don't want to be overly simplistic, but one is this opportunity gap. And the data is pretty compelling that there are definitely a lot of people, probably about 70% of the people, that are anxious and fearful about the future, not optimistic about the future. And we have to change that. And the only way I believe we can change that is to create more opportunity for them, more jobs for them in their own communities, in their own backyard. And the only way I think we can do that is if we back more startups, support more entrepreneurs launching in those cities. And the only way to do that is to shine a spotlight on those entrepreneurs on those cities, get some of that coastal venture capital paying attention to what's happening in dozens of cities all across the country. So just for me, I think it's the best way I can contribute. So I'm grateful for your continued enthusiasm and support and championing my candidacy, but I think I'll continue to be the entrepreneur-in-chief on behalf of the entrepreneurs all across this country who I think can build the next great chapter of the American story and do it in a more inclusive way and do it in a way that maximizes the likelihood we remain the leader of the pack in terms of global innovation.

### Human: Well, and I keep saying that all these big funds are moving more toward private equity, like this is a thing. Anyway, yes, tell me. Yeah.### Assistant: Okay, yes, that's exactly what this is. If companies were overvalued, there'd be no opportunity, right? So yeah, we just bought Stitch Fix shares at a 95% discount to the peak. if it was trading at its peak, I wouldn't be bottom feeding like I am, and taking advantage of that. And obviously, like if battery was going to try to buy the company, and it was worth 20 times, you know, it's worth 10 12 billion, they wouldn't have the word chest to do that. But a $600 million stitch fix, and that's a public company. But if a private company was worth 600 million, they have the word chest actually buy something like that, and then try to take a public and grow it. So yes, that's opportunistic. The other thing they're saying this story is, their plan is to stretch out the $3 billion over as much as three years. So remember, I said in a down market that VCs will not make capital calls because they were they didn't in the 2008 crises, because they didn't want their LPS to have to sell equities, and they knew their LPS might be in a bit of a cash crunch, too. Right. So they were like, yeah, well, know, we'll slow down a little bit here, we'll circle the wagons, we'll work on our existing companies and getting them, you know, operationally sound, and we'll opportunistically make small investments. So we don't have to call that capital down. Right? Yeah. Now, they could be jerks and just be like, I'm going to pound that money because it's in my best interest as the GP. But there's a little GP LP dance that occurs here, where it's like, is it okay for me to draw this down? Or the GP, the LP might say, like, hey, we'd be good if you drew this down a little bit slower, right? So now that I'm in 20 funds, and I just announced one of the ones that I put in very small amounts of money. And typically, that's drawn down completely at the start of the fund, because they're micro funds, the ones I'm looking at, Yeah, sure. It'd be nice if people were like, hey, the market's down, we're gonna, you can give us the money over the next three years, instead of all at once, or, you know, over two, right? So it's just a kind thing to do to your LPs. So yeah, it's interesting. But buyout deals are not what VC funds do. You need to have a group of cutthroat, insane operators inside the business. I don't know battery well enough to know if they have that. I suspect this is not a good idea. Yeah, I suspect this is not what venture capital should be doing this or private equity people should and I'll tell you why.

### Human: So and to be honest, in the early days, Elon was, I think, very much like you let the work speak for itself. He wasn't a very public facing person, right? Just 1520 years ago, we would go out to dinner or something that people would not even know who he was. Right. But quite a change. Uh, for people who don't know, also you run the production board, according to our research raised about 300 million from Alphabet, a parent company of Google Allen company, BlockRock and others. Uh, and I think you've been running that since 2016 and maybe you could just explain to people as we build up to now talking about the big launch today. I'm sorry, the big coming out of stealth with this product today. Maybe you could tell people what is the structure of the production board? How many projects have come out of it so far? And then what project number is this one?### Assistant: Yeah, so we have, I set it up in 2017. I started making personal investments and started a few companies after I sold my prior business called the Climate Corporation, which makes software for farmers. I sold it to Monsanto in 2013. And then I was making personal investments and starting some projects myself. I had a series of conversations with Larry Page from Alphabet about doing something together. I wasn't interested in working at Alphabet again. He was really interested in the kinds of things I was working on. And so I agreed to set up this holding company where I would contribute these investments and these companies I'd started into it. And Alphabet became a minority shareholder by putting capital in. And then over the years, we've raised additional capital from Bill Gates and Allen & Co and Bailey Gifford, BlackRock, all those folks you mentioned, a lot of strategic family offices. So we don't operate like a fund. We don't take a management fee out. We don't have an incentive to mark up investments and go raise our next fund. We're basically a balance sheet. We're a company that owns stakes in other companies. Most of those companies we start So several minority investments we've made in businesses that are strategically aligned with the stuff we're doing. But generally, we start businesses. So we will spend a lot of time with scientists, with research teams, with academics trying to identify new and emerging trends in science and technology that we think could enable some sort of breakthrough opportunity. We also spend a lot of time in the markets we operate in. And then we really try and identify What's possible? And we ask ourselves, you know, how can we reinvent a system of production on planet Earth, you know, one of these systems that makes things that people consume, or provides health or therapeutic products to people? How can we reinvent that system using these emerging technical capabilities or emerging science? And then we'll typically run an R&D cycle in house. Once we've done that R&D cycle, and we feel confident that the technology that we're contemplating is actually possible, then we will form a new business. When we form a new business, it's like any other startup, it's a C corp. And, you know, the team that we've been working with on this project, will become employees of that business. They'll all get equity in that business. And we're the singular funder of that business, typically for quite a long period of time. And then in many of our businesses, we ultimately raise money from other investors into them. And so we've done... We have about 12 or 13 different businesses that we have stakes in today. And part of the advantage, by the way, of our model is number one, we can take on a lot of risk. Um, you know, we can think very long term, you know, we don't have a fun lifetime. We don't have to return capital. The goal at some point is for the production board itself to be a public company.

### Human: Yeah, I'm really proud of what the team built. The team did an incredible job.### Assistant: You know, that was when I think I I got partially Wrong because I was thinking about normal level-headed people So you're like well a level-headed person is not going to say things on LinkedIn with their real name that they might say in a IRC room with a with a pseudonym But then we look at Facebook and people are more than willing to say racist stuff or crazy stuff. And when you actually get all people onto a social network, the concept that a real name protects you is problematic. Although verifying people is another interesting thing. When we get back to this quick break, I want to get more into the details of how range works. And I will reveal my reasons why I think Google Plus failed. And I want to get your feedback on my Outsiders you as a social media addict who loved and was one of the I had 600,000 people following me on Google Plus I had a real following there and I love the product when we get back on this thing uncertain times, supporting your community and growing relationships with your customers is a strategy that will be appreciated, remembered and shared. In good times and bad open and empathetic communication with your customers is key. It's critical. Email is and always will be one of the best channels for delivering these communications. We all know that email marketing is one of Klaviyo's core offerings. And when you leverage personalization driven by a 360 degree view of the customer, those emails will feel even more relevant. fostering stronger relationships. Klaviyo truly understands how challenging it is for each and every entrepreneur to get their business off the ground, let alone navigate trying times like today. If you're feeling overwhelmed and growing your business is hard, especially in this climate, you're not alone. Klaviyo is here to help brands build relationships across any distance. So here is your call to action, create meaningful, memorable email marketing moments that last a lifetime. Visit Klaviyo, that's K-L-A-V-I-Y-O dot com slash T-W-I-S-T to start a free trial. Thanks again to Klaviyo for supporting independent media like this week in startups. Let's get back to this amazing episode. All right, Daniel Pupias is here. He is DPUP. We're having a fascinating discussion, not just about his startup, range.co, which helps teams be more productive, especially when they're remote. And we're going to get into some more of the features there and some more thoughts on remote work and best practices when we get to our third act. But we're having a fascinating discussion about, I guess, recent history, but not history, or recent events that are five or 10 years past, like Google's foray into social networking, which we eventually led with them giving up. I had a couple of ideas of why it didn't work. And I love the product. I think, actually, at the time, Google Plus was a better product than anything else in the market. Just heads up on features and design and everything. And a lot of people felt that.

### Human: Listen, founders, very important. If you're in SAS or you're in services, and you store customer data in the cloud, you need to be SOC 2 compliant yesterday. And you don't you might be hearing this and you may not even know what SOC 2 is, or maybe you heard about it. You know, you're behind the eight ball. Let's get this solved today. This week, I want you to be compliant from a third party so that you can close big deals. Do it now. Do not look like a dope when you try to close a deal. And they're like, Do you have SOC 2? And you're like, Uh, that long pause, that's going to be the sound of them going to your competitor. Use Vanta, which makes it incredibly easy to get and renew your SOC 2. On average, Vanta customers are SOC 2 compliant in just two to four weeks and compare that to three to five months without Vanta. And they partner with over two dozen audit firms who have been trained to file SOC 2 reports directly within Vanta. I was able to invest in Vanta. It's a great company. A bunch of my portfolio founders have used Vanta. They've had amazing experiences. They give it their highest rating. And, and let's just be clear here. If you're not SOC 2 compliant, you can't close major customers. It's that simple. It's one of the first things they're going to ask for. Here's the best part of this ad read. Vanta loves this week in startups. They want to support founders and they want to support founders early, and they don't want you to break the bank. So they're going to give you $1,000 off. Think about that. Get $1,000 off at vanta.com slash twist, V-A-N-T-A.com. slash TW IST $1,000 off banter.com slash twist, get your sock to now. And of course, the pandemic happens. work from home goes from being for weird people and face it strange companies, peculiar companies, but you know, odd founders who say like, I'm going to let people work from home. and maybe it's 10% or less than the tech market. And then it becomes the dominant modality. And now hybrid seems to be, you know, I don't know, maybe half of the modality, or maybe it'll be a third, I'm not sure where you think this will wind up. But of course, venture capitals, then, since we couldn't meet with people where we started placing bets over zoom, And what we found was, if everybody gets a beautiful setup, like you have there, we went from people using, I don't know, Skype and things that didn't work to all of a sudden, zoom and other pieces of software working perfectly, perfect cameras, perfect audio. And the society figured out a way to make it work. People are happier, you recapture two hours of commuting, three hours of commuting a day. It turns out people are happier and more productive. Do you believe Because let's face it, you're old school, man. You built these companies in person. And the whole culture in the 90s was, hey, get your ass in the office. And we judge companies by how many cars were in the parking lot after 6 o'clock. Do you buy into this work from home stuff? Do you think great companies can actually be built work from home? Or do you think you need to have hybrid at a minimum? Or do you think the winning companies will be where people go to an office? What do you what do you all about?### Assistant: We already seen that with even with our portfolio, there's some that are remote only companies that were designed from the get go to be fully remote, and everything they've designed in terms of the infrastructure and communication technologies, as well as doing some physical get-togethers, off-sites, things like that are designed around that. There are definitely some companies that are fully back in the office. That actually tends to happen more in some of these rising cities. I was in Fayetteville, Arkansas last week. One of the companies we backed there, AcreTrader, has 150 employees, and they're basically in the office all the time. But as you say, most companies are somewhere in the middle, some version of hybrid, and they're still debating exactly how to make that work three days in two days out, you know, which days do people come in, which time when when make sure teams are in on the same days, things like that. I think the main point is that it does provide a level of flexibility that did not exist three years ago, both in terms of entrepreneurs where they want to start and scale companies, investors where they want to invest in companies, certainly employees where they want to live and how they want to work. And I think it's going to take a few years to kind of settle it out. It's sort of like a shake the snow globe moment for society and exactly how it plays out. I don't think anybody has a really good crystal ball, but I think it has been an unlock and obviously you know well that Silicon Valley is still the leader of the pack and will continue to be the leader of the pack. There are a lot of advantages to be there for sure. But I do think we kind of hit peak Silicon Valley maybe three years ago, and now we're seeing the dispersion of talent, dispersion of capital, and that's going to be good for these other cities, and frankly, also good for the country. Because one of the things I didn't fully understand until about a decade ago when I started working at the with the White House and some other groups on policy related to innovation, entrepreneurship, was how critical new companies are in terms of job creation. It's not small business or big business that creates net new jobs. It's new businesses, startups under five years. And so we need to back more startups in more places. Most of those startups, not all, but most of them do want and need venture capital to really be successful. So we've got to get more venture capital, more entrepreneurs in more of these places if we're going to create jobs and opportunity in more of these places and give more people in the country reasons to be hopeful and optimistic about the future as opposed to anxious, fearful, pessimistic about the future. So at the core, we're investors trying to generate top returns by backing great entrepreneurs. But there's also some broader ripple effects this could have in different cities and more broadly, possibly even helping, at least in a small way, uniting a divided country.

### Human: that you're sharing information and having events. And then I noticed you guys were having like live events and bringing people together for talks. And that's what you do at a private club. I was only ever a member of the battery. But when I lived in LA, the soul house had me come out and speak to the membership. And it was like very intimate, you know, you get 50 people show up out of the whatever 1000s of members. So That stuff like, you know, really just proactively sounds like worth the price of admission. I always like to do a little math on businesses $3,000 230 people, it's about 700 grand 690,000 to be exact. And then I just divided the number 6000 because you have three people 2000 hours a year each get about 26 hours. So it seems like everybody's getting 26 hours with their doctor a year if on average, which would be a lot if you're texting and stuff like that, that only takes 15 minutes and you can multitask there. So tell me about the economics of the business. Is it as I was sort of thinking, priced too low to start? Because my understanding when we had talked or maybe I was talking to Tandis that you sold out immediately and you have almost no churn. And it's early, obviously, people can move or whatever come up here as a come up. But did you price this way too cheap? And then how does that affect both sides of the equation in this, you know, a deal? Because You know, can you get great doctors and great folks on a 700 K budget or does it really need to be five or six?### Assistant: Yeah, no, totally fair point. So obviously, our mission in building the Lambie was to ultimately democratize this level of comprehensive high touch. access that people really crave and need in order to get better, right. So we didn't want to just create another concierge practice where people have, you know, 50 patients under their their hair, and they charge about $50,000 a year, and they give them their cell phone number, and you can talk to them whenever that's, that's not what we wanted to create, we really wanted to build a solution that would allow us to scale this level of, you know, high touch comprehensive care. And so that's why we very much rethought how to be as efficient as possible from an operational perspective, from a tech perspective, from a care team structure, so that ultimately the masses can benefit from this type of solution. And so part of that is, you know, sort of the emphasis on, you know, shifting towards asynchronous chat, right? So we do offer unlimited visits, but 90% of the engagement that we see with our members today is done asynchronously, so via text or email. And so what that means for us is obviously we're addressing a lot of the questions that our patients have very quickly and effectively. But also it means that we're able to then handle much more patients at any given time. And so that allows us to, you know, bring down the price point because so much of what we're doing is being managed and triaged by the concierge manager, which obviously is not the same level as a physician. And so we're reserving the physician's time for those more complex questions. And really just again being smart about how we sort of structure that physician's day ultimately how we bring in the wellness advisor to focus on a lot of the preventive measures that we want our members to be Paying attention to and ultimately as we bring in tech, which again We've just started to do but we hope to really accelerate over the next year is we're really going to lean into that ongoing asynchronous proactive outreach where our members feel that support from their care team without the care team really lifting a finger. And so there's this ability for us to really sort of scale that personalization and really bring to life this care plan that we're already, as I mentioned, building for all of our existing members into a much more interactive experience. So sort of think about gamifying preventive medicine. And so to your point, yes, we could charge way more because we're doing so much. But the reason that we're charging less is because our mission was never to sort of create a service that would alienate the masses. Like our goal is to be just a bit smarter than the average doctor's office, which is typically built by a doctor who is not savvy in business and also doesn't have sort of any sort of systems engineering mindset tackling the issues. that are plaguing the healthcare system. It's very much an infrastructure problem. And so, yeah, right.

### Human: But talking to my friends who are general partners in funds, the thing that they are more than anything else is time poor, right? They have the startups that they are deeply involved in and they are deeply involved in making sure that those startups succeed. Yes, they're always looking for the next deal. But in order to, I guess, pop up above the noise level, you do have to be exceptional enough or have exceptionally good luck. So you're absolutely right when you talk about that zero sum. It's not cruel fate. It's really just that human beings are kind of limited and that venture capital has not, in the same degree, learned how to automate and scale itself the way the businesses it funds does.### Assistant: Then also, you know, it's a hit based business. So like anything else, there's a limit to what consumers can manage. How many apps did you download and say, Wow, this is wonderful and beautiful. And then forget you had them on your phone. Until you go to use it again. And Apple's like, Yeah, you know, I took that off your phone. Let me redownload it for you. Like, has it been that long? So it is. one of these things where there's attention is the gating factor, and you can gain more attention by simply hitting 10% month over month growth. And I and it's really, when you get to 250 investments, and you've seen the movie over and over and over again, it's, I kind of feel like I'm a studio head in your, you know, second decade. And I'm like, this film is not going to connect with audio instances, or I'm like, this is going to be a blockbuster, it's worth the risk, like spend more money on it. And it's very clear when you have that product velocity early, when you make great product early, you are going to make great product later, and you're going to be innovative later. I today I sat in on a hackathon for calm, calm the meditation app. And I started off saying, you know, Alex is just such a tremendous product executive. he did the million dollar homepage, he did calm, that you're very lucky to work for him, because he's pound for pound one of the 10 best product folks in the industry today. And then I watched these. Then I watched all of these projects. And I said, I just want to tell you folks candidly, like I would I would angel invest in every one of these projects are so good. And if the person at the top is greater product, everybody's greater product, the person at the top is driven, everybody else is driven, you cannot work for a hard driving person and not be hard driving, it just doesn't work. And you can't be cutthroat and hard driving in a company that is run in a very, you know, introverted, slow way, you know, or in a very quiet way, right? Because I just be like, Who is this guy making all this noise? So it's a wonderful time to be a founder, we did the all in podcast this morning, and we talked about the future of venture capital. And it is changing dramatically, dramatically, because there are so many funding sources, you know, the syndicates that I run with the credit investors, and I don't know if you saw, we have something, you know, equity crowdfunding here, reg CF, they call it and we up the limit from 1 million to 5 million, which then actually makes it worth going through all the audits and everything to do it. And then anybody, even non-sophisticated, you used sophisticated down on direct for accredited?

### Human: Okay, yeah, so tech meet is good to see you again. Yeah, it's been a while. I know. Well, we started in person and then switched to remote have about actually about three weeks in. So that was crazy. Yeah. What was that?### Assistant: And now here I am. And you know what? I'll save the fundraising question for our fourth segment, but spoiler alert, it went well. Okay. When we get back, we're going to hear from the second place finisher in the Launch Accelerator 17 class. Hey, everybody, are you ready to turn your amazing idea into a website? I know you are. Well, the best way to do that, the absolute best way to do that is how I do it, which is using Squarespace. Whether you want to blog or publish content, maybe you want to sell products or your services, all of that is possible with Squarespace. And it's so easy and it's so affordable. But most important for me, is that it's beautiful they have amazing customizable templates and they've added that powerful e-commerce functionality a couple years ago so you get the best of both worlds you get that great e-commerce combined with the beautiful templates that work and they're responsive if you're on a phone if you're an ipad if you're on a desktop if you're on a small monitor a big monitor you can even buy your domains there and choosing from over 200 extensions You get search engine optimization as well. You get their award winning 24 seven customer service and you get free and secure hosting. And here's an amazing example. Go to remote demo day.com. We built the site in minutes using Squarespace and it looks gorgeous. What is remote demo day you ask? It was just an idea to have six or seven companies present to a couple of hundred investors. And we needed a landing page and we needed a domain name, got that all set up in literally minutes. And that's what you're going to do right now. You're going to go to Squarespace, get that free trial. And when you're ready to launch your website, I want you to use the offer code TWIST, T-W-I-S-T, and you will save 10% off your first purchase. have a website or a domain name, or maybe both. It's an amazing product. I've been using it for I think it's getting close to a decade. It's beautiful. Anytime anybody says hey, how do I set up a quick web page? How do I get my e commerce site up and running? What do I do as a consultant? I just tell them go to Squarespace. It's the best and you know what they keep investing in it and they keep the prices low. while they keep the service high. Great job Squarespace. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. Hey everybody, welcome back. Next up in our second place for the launch accelerator, 17th class was Nicole Beals and she is the co-founder along with David Brock of TechMate and most of the people who come to our accelerator have two or three co founders, we invite one of them to come on the pod. And next up is Nicole, tell everybody, Nicole, what is tech meet?

### Human: I think it will become more and more manageable. Over time, there's going to be more early detection. There's going to be fewer cancer cases as as we treat more risk factors effectively for developing cancer, smoking being an example for lung cancer. That's quite important. I don't think it's going to be as rare as a plane crash. I mean, I think there's something about how fundamental making errors during cellular replication are and how important cellular replication is as you keep living life and dealing with all of these insults we're constantly getting on a daily basis from the environment, including sunlight and things we're ingesting down our GI tract and things we're breathing in and hitting our lungs. So cells get injured, cells need to proliferate and recover. Errors are made because you're trying to copy this enormous genome and you're going to make mistakes the machinery is going to start aging for finding those mistakes. And cancers will develop. And the question is going to be so. So it's like, it's way more fundamental than plane flight, which you don't do that often. And I don't know, there's probably technical ways to get around plane flights, I think cancer is sort of fundamentally tied to being alive for a long time. However, I think we can, you know, make the rates of it go down, start to prevent it, start to identify it early and manage it. We're already making headway there. And And there's some really bad cancers that we have made less headway on that we need to do even more. So I think we're still at the very beginning. And I do think it will become much more manageable over time with these advances.### Assistant: It's like a shock grenade or something, you shock the cancer cells, they stop growing, and then the immune system can do its thing and kill the cancer cells or get them out of there. Yeah. Listen, if you're in the tech industry, you've heard of Carter, right? The leading venture capital and equity management platform, you probably hear about them all the time because they manage cap tables for your startup or others, but they have some huge news to share. Carter now lets you syndicate an SPV, a special purpose vehicle, you can create your own syndicate through Carter. What's an SPV? Hey, you got 20 people, they want to invest in a startup, but they don't all want to put in 250k. So everybody puts in 510 15k, whatever they're comfortable with, under one line item on the cap table of that startup, or maybe it's your startup, and you want to do an SPV because you got all these friends, family, other founders, angels, but you want to have one signature to roll them all up, right? Well, Carta is used by more than 4500 funds representing over $120 billion in assets under administration. and they support you at every stage of the fundraising journey from your first syndicate to building your own global VC firm you can raise and deploy from anywhere because Carter offers us and international SPVs and fund locations. Carter provides an automated back office solution for you. so you can focus on finding a great startup and building those relationships. So here's a very simple call to actions, go to carda.com c a r t a.com and use the code twist, you get 10% off your first SPV. That's carda.com and use the code twist. This is extraordinary in your estimation now. Working on this, a lot of us like to say, Oh, yeah, cancer is going to be solved in our lifetime. There's a lot of reasons, treatments, measurements, early detection, do you think it's 2030 years before most camps because most cancers are treatable. Now, that was something crazy to think of in 1980. In 1980, or before 1980, you got cancer, you basically started your goodbyes and did your trust your will, whatever. Now, here we are in 2020, you get cancer, they say, Okay, here's, here's your options, here's the plans. And it's very rare that somebody gets a cancer diagnosis. And they say, hey, you know, now it's time to start your will and say goodbyes. It's that advanced. So amazing what progress we made in what, 50 years, I would say 40 years, maybe 40. You tell me, what is the next 10 years having stories? Is it possible the idea of dying from lung cancer and brain cancer will become very obscure, like dying in a, you know, plane crash kind of situation?

### Human: Exactly. They care.### Assistant: people care. And so I just try to, you know, and then when you want to like, you know, go to the restaurant, Jean George is the restaurant here. And then I also got a haircut here. So they had like a men's stylist haircut here. So I got a little haircut, you know, it's very convenient. So It's quite nice. Um, but it's also very good for meetings. I find it's a really good flex. So I'm meeting with the reality TV producers today. I signed my reality TV deal. So you'll be doing some cameos on that show. And so, you know, I'm meeting with them and then I tell them I'm at the Waldorf and, uh, you know, where I go up to the roof and I, you know, I'll order the lobster salad, $60 or something. And I just, you know, it's a little flex. It's a mini flex to make sure they know. And then people treat you differently when they know you're loaded. very full stop, you know, and I know that and so I do a little mini flex on them. Love it. And that's it. You know, listen, now that you're a venture capitalist, a lot of people were talking about you last night. They were at the party. Well, all the journalists were there. So, you know, I come up and I host this party with my friend, Brooke Hamerling. She's like the number one PR person and my friend, Skye David, who created Earthing. And so 20 years ago, Skye and I started playing poker and our friend, Brooke, um, who was representing Skye's Helio at the time, Skye created a, um, beautiful, uh, phone with SK telecom. a smartphone, you know, three years before Steve Jobs did, and it failed. But you know, he basically ran into the brick wall that was Steve Jobs. But in LA, all the celebrities had heliophones, because they were the most advanced. And so anyway, Sky and myself would play cards. And then our friend Mark Cuban, who was at the time doing broadcast.com, I was a journalist, we'd play basketball at this conference in Laguna. And then it became the all these conference. And anyway, basically, this series of events, it went across Industry Summit, which was Jon Patel's event, all things D. And then after it recode conferences. So we started with john Battelle's conference playing poker, and then we started playing a Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg. But they're ending it now. My friend Jim Bancroft owns recode and Vox and New York magazine. So I hung out with my friend Jim Bancroft last night. He's the one who bought weblog zinc off of me. So just a lot of, you know, 20 years of my career in this poker game. But I, I cannot have fun.

### Human: I mean, I believe you, let me just jump in here and say, I believe you. I think if we had stayed on or switched to nuclear in the 70s, we wouldn't be in the climate crisis that we're in now. And those are very clear projections. And also, nuclear meltdowns are really scary. So you can acknowledge that without... Absolutely. I don't, right? It feels a little condescending to say, you should just know that this is the case and these issues aren't real. I understand your job is to walk us through why they're not real. And I really want to get there.### Assistant: Molly, I two separate issues there. First of all, acknowledge thanks for the thanks for the critique. One was on are the plants aging, so they're not, they're not aging as such. There's only one country on planet Earth with plants that are aging so bad, they can't be replaced. That's just Britain. That's just the UK. Every other nuclear plant everywhere, even why sounds crazy, build them cheaply. So, you do a lot with startups and innovation. What do we consider an innovation and what do we consider a mistake or a dead end? Time tells, right? Looks like the Brits chose wrong. What happens is you can't get inside their reactor to replace parts that are aging. You can't do it. They built it closed, assuming that we would go to the next generation. Well, yes, but we're going to the next generation with no next generation ready in Britain in the middle of a generational energy crisis. It's kind of a bad situation. All their plants can age. On the subject of meltdowns in Fukushima, absolutely, they're terrifying. They're horrifying. But we have to say, are they horrifying because of the health effects of the physical things that come out of them? Or are they horrifying because of the learning to be horrified? So, I'm not just playing a word game. If I told you Chernobyl nuclear plant barely missed a day of operation and kept going for 14 years. What would that make me sound like? Like a crazy person, right? Because we know it's the worst disaster ever. It was devastating. It blew up. There was a massive fire. You couldn't even go there or you die within minutes. But Chernobyl nuclear plant kept operating. for nearly 14 years. But how? It's because if you know where the radiation is and you clean it up and you manage it and you take care of doses, then you can deal with it, right? And Chernobyl didn't close because it was old. It closed because the European Union made Chernobyl closing a condition of support for helping clean up the reactor number four that had blown up. And Ukraine, for what it's worth, demanded help completing another one of their nuclear plants and a big cash payment to do so. So, for the Ukrainians who were most hurt, most wounded, most devastated by Chernobyl, it wasn't even a reason to shut down. Chernobyl nuclear plant, right? Which means that we should respect the Ukrainian experience and say, why is it that they didn't even shut down the nuclear plant? And why is it that under Russian attack today, they still won't shut down their nuclear plants? And in that, in that moment, you find a little seed of truth that helps you understand, ah, because they believe nuclear is their best chance for survival, in which case it makes a different kind of conversation about the risks of meltdowns and other kinds of disasters. Is that fair enough?

### Human: And I said, Oh, has it already happened?### Assistant: Did they? And he said, you're so good. I said, what? He said, they literally just gave me a piece of paper with their board suggestions. I said, for the seats that you choose. I said, let me guess. They work with these people previously at another firm? Yeah, two of the three. I'm abstracting this a little bit. And literally, I was able to tell just from the behavior of this person after meeting them briefly. Yeah, that this was like one of these command and conquer, you know, divide and conquer command and conquer type a personalities that's going to try to take over the board. I've seen it. Yeah. So I said, Listen, I told him, I was like, Listen, bro, you know, I'm already successful, already made my money. I wish your earliest supporter. This is your most recent supporter five years later. Just understand, I just want to see you win. No matter what happens with this company is not going to move the needle for me. But it's going to move it's 99% of your net worth, it's going to be, you know, 1% at best of my network. I am here for you. And seeing you succeed. That's it. Yeah, this person has like issues with their firm with their partners that are had nothing to do with your success as a founder in this company. So you're going to need to balance this investors issues with your baby, and all the effort you've put into this company. And I'm here as your supporter. I'm your Obi-Wan. I'm your Yoda. You need me, I'll give you the advice. If you need me to take the lightsaber out, I'll take it out. But I'm just letting you know, I'm a Jedi. I've been at this for, I went through the fucking Clone Wars. I know what's up. I know a Sith Lord when I see it. And so may not seem like a Sith Lord to you. But there's some dark stuff going on here. And you're gonna have to, at some point, you know, exert some control here. And sure enough, yeah, you know, there. Oh, these are great suggestions for the board. We'll pick our own. Thank you. Oh, we have our own. We're going a different direction. And I literally gave him the language. So thank them profusely. Tell them how great each of the meetings was. then tell them, we've decided to go in another direction with this person, because we think they're the best person for these three reasons. But we really do appreciate the thoughtfulness of these. And we'll keep them in mind for future opportunities. And it was great meeting them, literally gave them the language, because sometimes a new founder doesn't know the language, right? That's how I handle it on board. It's a really great follow up question, actually.

### Human: And actually, we're going to talk a little bit more about buying in the down market with respect to venture capital in a minute. But continuing with the financial health of the first J trade investment here. Let's talk about revenue and profit. Net revenue in Q3 was $492 million. That was down about 9% year over year. COGS were $282 million, their cost of goods sold. So gross profit here is $210 million. Yep. Yep. Net loss in Q3 $78 million, meaning they lost 60 million more in 2022 than they lost in 2021. Adjusted EBITDA was $36 million. So basically taking out $31 million of stock based comp, plus some other minor things, left them this $36 million number.### Assistant: Not investment advice. Make your own decisions, obviously. Make your own decisions. Especially if you're investing in a company that's lost 94% of its value. You know? Recently, yes. Yeah. And to be clear, I'm investing an amount of money in this and all combined that I can afford to lose. So if I lose all of it, half of it, if I double it, whatever happens, I'm good. So just so we're all clear here, it's a de minimis amount of money for me, not a big deal. I mean, it's also it is skin in the game was like, I'm gonna put a million bucks, it's a million or 2 million bucks. So it's not it's not nothing. And stitch fix? No, no, no, totally. My goal is maybe to get to a million to $2 million deployed over the next six to 12 months, which I think is going to be the down market. That's my overriding thesis, Molly. We're going to be in a recession for six to 12 months. people don't want to buy equities, there's no buyers in the market. Therefore, maybe a good time to buy some things I might want to hold for 10 years. And that is my outlook. I'm not trying to make 20%. This year, I'm trying to make four times three or four times my money in 10 years. In other words, I want to beat the market. You know, significant would be my goal. It's been a hot as heck summer and I've been working my tail off. When I push my body hard like this, it's important for me to stay hydrated. And if you've got a crazy work schedule, you've got to be mindful of this as well. So if you want to up your hydration game, you need to check out Liquid IV. I've been mountain biking up here in the mountains. I've been going to the beach. I've been going for long hikes. Liquid IV has saved me and my recovery has been awesome. My chief of staff pressure loves it as well. You know, he's a long distance runner like I used to be when I was younger. And he definitely has an intense workout schedule. After he heard about liquid IV from this very podcast, he ordered a couple packs to try it out. And he loved it so much that he just ordered about 20 pounds of it for his runs all over San Francisco. Way to go pressure. mixing liquid IVs hydration multiplier in just 16 ounces of water will hydrate you two times faster than regular water. And there are amazing flavors watermelon, strawberry, and bottom line liquid IV gets you hydrated twice as fast and it tastes great. I'm addicted to this stuff. So grab liquid IV in bulk nationwide at Costco, or you can get it for 25% off at liquid IV comm with the promo code TW IST so they know you're fans of the pod.

### Human: Yeah, sensor technology became really, really cheap. And mostly because iPhones, the proliferation of phones made camera technology much cheaper.### Assistant: Ah, right, because the restaurants are now at 25% capacity or 50% by law. If it was if I'm a packed restaurant, and you're going for the big packed places, you know, doing this is risk, right? And it's change. And so that is always really challenging. When we get back, I want to know, when will the robots be on location? Or is that just way too complex of a problem we get back on this week in startups? SaaS companies with reoccurring revenue used to only have two ways, basically, to grow. You could sell your equity, shares in your company, or you could go into debt. And now there is a third way to grow without debt, without dilution, and that's Pipe. Pipe is a two-sided marketplace that connects SaaS companies, people who have reoccurring revenue, with institutional investors who bid to purchase these revenues for their annual value up front. It's like the NASDAQ, but for software contracts. This is a totally new category. It's never really existed before. And pipe is leading it pipe believes they are the smarter way to grow your business. And with pipe, there is no debt, no loans, and no dilution. I literally had one of the founders of a company I'm on the board of say, Hey, by the way, we're getting in advance of hundreds of 1000s of dollars, we just sold our yearly revenue on pipe.com. And They said, what do you think? And I was like, great. They happened to be a sponsor of our podcast as well. I was like, oh, that's where I heard about it. I was like, okay, great. Pipe is so confident you'll love trading your SAS subscription that if you sign up at pipe.com slash twist pipe.com slash twist, They'll eliminate all your trading fees for one full year. So you could save tens of thousands of dollars depending on the size of your business and the volume you trade. And it's your choice. You can get these bids and not do it. You could wait to get a better bid. That's kind of the market setting the price and the value of your reoccurring revenue. So happy piping. Sign up today at pipe.com slash twist. Let's get back to this amazing episode. All right, everybody, welcome back. It's the rising stars of SAS or RAS or HASS, whatever you prefer. Robots as a service today. And this may be a trend. Many folks are looking at robotics and saying, hey, well, how can this get rid of some of the most painful, arduous, hard to fill jobs in the world? Was there some technology moment that made robotics, you know, like the smartphone has made, made the drone movement possible, right? Because accelerometers got made on mass batteries got better. Is there something that's been driving robotics in a similar fashion? Because it does seem to be making a lot of gains.

### Human: But my point is, but you know what I'm saying? But we're getting content at a really high level. It's working. There are way like, I have to be honest, I'm finding and I was listening to your interview with Howard Linsman, Linsman, Linsden, Linsden, and there are so many of these conversations now happening about the way that people must work and the way that they are most effective in the way they feel loved and whatever. And I'm just finding the whole thing like, really patriarchal and insulting to employees. Like it's such a bizarre assumption that you can only be effective and successful and happy one way. yeah and that way just happens to be the boss's way and the boss is all these older white guys who are like i believe this is how you have to work because this is how i've always done it and if i can't see you then you're not real and your work is not real despite what your outcomes may tell me to the contrary and i think that's why the malcolm gladwell thing like went over poorly, let's say, he was getting dunked on.### Assistant: I do know a lot of people agree with him, who own businesses, or who are managers. And I think, you know, I always try to look at like the intent here. I think his intent is correct. I think for young people who need mentorship, being in an office, actually would be pretty dope. Now, do they have to be in five days a week or whatever? Is it absolutely necessary? No, we have people here Rachel's developing wonderfully. Nick is an extraordinary contributor. Previously, you know, we've had people here who've done amazing jobs who are first time employees, but it would be nice to spend more time in person with them. And certain jobs require it, like if you're building a rocket ship, or our batteries of an iPhone, whatever. But you know, what's gonna happen? I always think about what's going to happen? What's the path forward here? Yeah. And I can tell you what's happening in the big tech companies, the reports of abuse combined with the inability of management to know how to manage employees at scale is leading to management saying we got to come back to offices, and we got to figure out a way to negotiate this with employees. And they were given a crisis. this financial crisis is their window. Never waste a crisis. On the other side. This was the way for people who always wanted to work from home when COVID happened. It was like, see, I had a number of employees I had riffs with at this very company who wanted to work from home or wanted unlimited vacations. I said, No, never. not how I do business, we're always going to work in person. That doesn't change. This business is about founders, meeting with them in person meeting with other investors. And then you don't happen COVID happened, the entire industry changed. So now the my entire thesis suddenly became wrong overnight, which is humans adapted. And now the default is meeting over zoom not in person. So anyway, so I've been thinking about this a lot. because there are things that can I run to work from home companies inside and launch. So 20 employees at 130 at another, I'm really seeing where this fails and where it succeeds. It's so clear to me how this is going to work out, I think employees are going to start to be bucketed. And I think way founders are going to start looking at this is it's going to become hybrid in both ways hybrid a couple of days a week in the office a couple days out, and then hybrid with certain group of teams in the office and certain not. I think the standard is going to become the management teams. And we'll have an in office culture. Now, why is that? Well, because they can afford to live within 20 minutes of the office. And I think that is the key issue that nobody talks about. You brought it up in our group chat this morning to remind me. Thank you. Yeah, that's a cost thing.

### Human: You got him out of PR mode, the media training. Yes, you broke it. So I thought it was a good moment.### Assistant: I'll never come back on the show. I'm not investing his next cup. I don't know, Quinn, if I if if that was too much, I apologize. I just was excited to hear your answer. Let me leave it at that. Good sleep is the ultimate game changer. We all know that. And according to eight sleep over 30% of Americans struggle with sleep and temperature is one of the main reasons. I know this because my wife and I listen, we run at two different temperatures. I like it nice and cool. And she likes it toasty warm. And then we get into the thermostat worse. The thermostat wars are over and take out the app. And then I can set on my side, I want to be plus four, then the algorithm gets to work, it studies my sleep, and it knows what temperature I should be. And I don't know how the algorithm works, but I sleep better and I wake up more rested. And now eight sleep is offering a pod pro cover. If you already have a mattress, it's super easy. You just buy the cover, and you can still experience all the magic of Eight Sleep. That's one of the great innovations. The Pod Pro Cover is the most advanced solution in the market for thermoregulation. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating, then that biometric tracking. So you can look in the app, it tells you your sleep stages, biometrics, the bedroom temperature, and it reacts intelligently, creates that optimal sleep environment. Eight Sleep users fall asleep up to 32% faster. also reduces your sleep interruptions according to our friends at eight sleep by 40% you can overall get more restful sleep when I sleep on a bed that doesn't have eight sleep I don't sleep as well period end of story. So go to eight sleep.com slash twist to check out the pod pro cover get a special holiday offer. You're gonna love it. Just trust me. I love it so much. I put a little placed a little bet. I wet my beak. I invested a little bit in eight sleep. A lot of my friends are investors in eight sleep as well. Great job. Okay, funniest moments. Now we can get the other side. This is you know, the fans love when I do an impersonation. So the first one is my Melania Trump NFT impersonation. The second is the greatest CNBC hit of all time. You know what my favorite is? And three is Howard Linzen. absolutely busting my chops relentlessly. I believe he called me a Nazi or had a Nazi haircut or something. He's absolutely savage to me on Twitter. Let's just roll the highlights because there's so many funny moments. We're laughing on the show. The NFT is watercolor art that quote embodies Mrs. Trump's cobalt blue eyes providing the collector with an amulet an amulet to inspire also includes an audio recording of Melania Trump. And here it is a message of hope from Melania Trump.

### Human: What's interesting is that Saylor again is remaining executive chairman. This does not appear to be what you might think at first blush, right? Micro strategies loses a billion dollars. This guy steps away as CEO becomes executive chairman. Clearly, they're going to go in a different direction. Right. However, The new CEO, Fong Lei, said, I would like to reinforce our commitment to our customers, shareholders, partners and employees. And I look forward to leading the organization for the long term health and growth of our enterprise software and Bitcoin acquisition strategies. And as executive chairman, Michael Saylor appears to actually just be freed from the pesky work of building any of the enterprise software. Because he said on Twitter, in my next job, I intend to focus more on Bitcoin. We have to have Michael on the program.### Assistant: He slid into my DMS. Yeah. So we'll have him on. Are you a small business owner? Did you know that visas online small business hub has tools, discounts and resources to help you run your business. So whether you're a business beginner, or an entrepreneurial expert, find the solutions, tools and tips you need to help take your business to the next level. Plus, if you have a Visa Business Credit Card or Debit Card, you can get access to cardholder benefits like Visa Savings Edge, a savings program which can help you save on everyday business expenses like office essentials, travel, and more. When you enroll your Visa Business Card in Visa Savings Edge, you'll have access to valuable offers, which can help turn qualifying business purchases made with your enrolled Visa Business Card into savings for your business. learn more at visa.com slash small business hub. Once again, that's visa.com slash small business hub visa, a network working for everyone. I this is my prediction. They're going to sell off the SAS business and then make this a Bitcoin holding company of some type or they he's going to move up to exec chair, because he the person who is this new CEO, my understanding is he was president CFO, and they got a new CFO. So Michael was explaining on CNBC this morning, I happened to catch it, that now that this they have a CFO, and the president CFO can move up to CEO, president, whatever. So putting all that together, what I feel like is going on here is they are going to go on some sort of splitting this up, we're going into an M&A structure. So how would that work? Pretty simple. If they can make this an ETF, essentially, or some sort of Bitcoin holding company where they buy crypto Bitcoin assets, like let's say, there were tools or whatever in the Bitcoin space, he could those start buying those and then he could take this business and then sell it off and let it stand on its own and have its management team, etc. Yeah, there's something corporate going on here. Usually there's like, this is the first card. The first card was getting a CFO. The second card was him moving up, there's going to be a third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh card, you know, maybe seven cards here. And I think we know two of them right now. some more cards to come. And we'll keep an eye on it. But yeah, he might wind up being like, one of the smartest people in all of this crypto space, because Bitcoin is in enduring. And, you know, we sat here going, Oh, it's gonna go down to 5000. And I was like, Yeah, I don't know about that. But here we are, it's going back up again. in the face of this crypto collapse, Molly, I don't know if you're watching, but it was up to like almost 23,000 the other day. Oh, yeah.

### Human: Hilah, I could not, this was actually the first, this was my first John Doerr product, his book about objectives and key results. And we interviewed him about it for Marketplace Tech. And I remember being like, poof, this is like, because it's a pretty dry book, if I'm being honest. But then the concept just got into my brain and I could not stop thinking about it because it was like, this is like structure in an organization is a ladder that anyone can climb, right? It enables success. If you know what you need to do to succeed, and that is clear to everybody, and it doesn't change, then anyone can succeed. It's literally a ladder. And it's so freaking powerful. And companies don't want to do it. And I think the reason they don't want to do it is because they don't necessarily want to put out a ladder. I don't know. I'm just like, why are you so... I mean, it takes work, right? And you have to track it and you have to measure it, like he says in his book.### Assistant: It takes some intentionality. And you're right. Management has to want to do this. And Um, I am just getting to the point where it's like so clear to me, like what our objectives and goals are, and it's clear to me what I don't want to do. So it's just easier for, for us to have more frameworks as we scale. When you're running a 10 person or less company, you can kind of, since you're all sitting in the same room or you're all in the same like single chat room and it, it doesn't really matter. Like you can just be like, here's what we're going to do, we don't need to make big plans. But when you have multiple pieces in an organization, and they impact each other, communicating the goals over and over again is really key. And then codifying. And so I think this is one of the things that the modern day software is allowing in an organization that's remote especially, because remote is forcing my hand to think about this a lot because I can't manage by proximity and charisma and relationship to the extent I did when we were in an office. Like, oh, let's have lunch. Let me hear what people are thinking. I'll motivate them with that. And so just a little more clarity. And so what's nice about the modern day wiki and getting off of Word and Google Docs, which is a, you know, something I've been doing in both organizations, inside.com and launch. I just said, listen, please, any document, please put it on Notion. Now, you put it on Notion, or Coda, whatever you're using. Then by default, I want it to be transparent. So I'm working on this secret project in the organization called Project Plutus that you know about. And I realized I shared it with everybody because my intent is always to just share with everybody because it makes my job as a manager easier. And you talked about it being a ladder. I'm looking for overachievers. That's kind of my thing. And so if every document on your coda or notion or whatever, is by default public. The person who just joined last week, who is an ops person, is now like, oh, Project Plutus, let me read that. Oh, deal memos, how they're written, best practice. Oh, sourcing deals, best practice. Oh, how to do that. And they're like, I read everything. I understand everything. I took notes. Now, previously, if that was in Google Docs, you'd have to say, hey, can you share that with me? And then somebody who will be sharing with you be like, Yeah, oh, you want to learn about that? Let's talk about that now friction. And so I'm a big fan of this no friction, let people if they want to climb the organization and take on more results, let's go for it.

### Human: Yeah, certainly. Certainly. You know, my background, Jason, has been, you know, for the first 15-20 years, I was an entrepreneur building some cybersecurity companies. And so, like, that's what my grad school work is in. We built a company called Cypher Trust, and we built Pure Wire, and then PinDrop. And it wasn't until pin drop that I actually opened my eyes to, wait a second, there's a world where I'm not the entrepreneur, I'm helping another entrepreneur. And when I met Vijay and we co-founded that company, after it was going along well, and we were probably at the series B, I said, wait, there's more Vijays. There's more smart people that need help. And I met Vijay through Georgia Tech. And so, what I did then was said, I just want to get as close as I can to Georgia Tech's campus and meet students and professors coming out of there. And so, I first started this place called Tech Square Labs. And my whole idea was how do we have smart people walking the door and kind of co-work and I'll find ones to invest in. And we started doing this thing called Startup Battle where people would compete and $100,000 investment prize. And I did that for three or four years. And through that, through TechSquare, you know, invested in 30, 40 companies, many that are Atlanta or university-based companies through startup battle invested, you know, very early stage, kind of two people on a laptop. I mean, what we would call nowadays, you know, probably pre-seed or pre-pre-seed. But there's been some good companies we had the fortune of being part of through that. And then fast forward, I've been looking at over the last two years, like, okay, how to do that at more scale? right? How to be able to participate not only at Seed but across Series A and Series B but doubling down on that thesis of like Atlanta and the Southeast and things that are universities and things that are diverse. And so, I started building this plan to do Panoramic. Along the way, last year, a good friend, Marcel O'Clar, who leads SoftBank, he called and said, hey, Paul, we're going to start a fund dedicated to minorities. It's going to be a $100 million fund called Opportunity Fund and would you help with it? And so, I joined the investment committee of the Opportunity Fund and there's an amazing team there and it's a $100 million fund focused on Blacks and Latinos and Native Americans. And then just 2 weeks ago, Jason, we announced Panoramic. And I partnered with a gentleman named Mark Buffington. He ran a firm called BIP Capital that's been in Atlanta for the last 8 years or so. They're on fund 4 and been one of the most active firms in the region. And we partnered and we rebranded and called the firm Panoramic with the whole point that we look where other people don't. We take in a wider view. And so that is kind of where I'm investing. So I'm a managing partner at Panoramic. And then I'm on the investment committee at Opportunity Fund.### Assistant: So you even feel like Paul Judge has less bias in prejudging a startup, right? Absolutely. We all had some bias coming into it, like the ugly deck, maybe the awkwardness. They don't know the terms to use. They don't got the right connects to get to you. Now it's just like, I'll take the meeting, 20 minutes. And now I have three people doing meetings for me now, introductory meetings all week. So they're seeing 20 people 15 to 20 people each week. So i have 50 at the top of the funnel and then i get the top whatever 5 or 10 of that so it's like really starting to scale and it feels just like a lots you know flowing to the system like you're saying much faster. 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. 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### Human: And that section 230 where you're a common carrier and the platform is not responsible for how people publish to it, if they're not making editorial decisions, which YouTube was very careful not to do. I remember being an early YouTube partner. They would not feature videos. They would be very careful, like, hey, the algorithm would let things trend. And now we have some controversy, which you can talk about since you're not at Google anymore, with people, specifically Trump, saying, I want Section 230 taken down. I'm not happy with how people are using social media after being delighted with how it worked for him when he won. What are your thoughts on what is a reasonable way to look at section 230 to look at the DMCA and say, you know, well, Facebook does have an algorithm that surfaces content. Is that an actual editorial decision when you write an algorithm? Feels like it to me. How do you think about it as somebody who was in the eye of the storm?### Assistant: Yeah, I mean, I fall on the side. First off, I'd say, This legislation has very far-reaching effects. And so the idea of we're going to veto it based on sticking it to some other bill and so on, that seems crazy to me. I mean, all things can be improved. All things can be improved, but it's not so simple. And there are clearly extremes, right? Section 230 DMCA were created around the extremes of ISPs. And should Comcast be held responsible for everything going across its pipes? Of course not. That seems crazy. Right. And then on the other side, should the New York Times be held responsible? Yeah, probably. So there's some line you cross there. And so the DMCA has a particular threshold. They call it the right and ability to control. And if you can establish that you have the right and ability to control what is on your platform, then you have responsibility for it. And if you can't, then you don't. And just to be clear, I don't think it's It's not a thing that gets abused. It's just true. This thing with Viacom is a good example. It's just impossible. There's no way to take hundreds of hours per minute that are uploaded to YouTube and do anything that actually can be held to an approval-first test. It just wouldn't work. And I think the same is true of Facebook and Twitter and so on. Now, is there some better line of what should happen when somebody flags something? What should the recourse policies be? I think there are better lines. I actually think that Zak and team published the Facebook version of what they should do, most of which I thought was pretty good, actually. I mean, I thought it was a very thoughtful view of, hey, the principle should stay in place. But when something happens, you should be able to escalate to a real court. It should not be fickle when you deal with these things. So I think there are reasonable improvements. But the spirit of it, if you were to take these platforms and say, we're just going to assume they look at every piece of content and make a judgment beforehand, we'll end up in bad spots. Just to give you an example, these platforms all deal with laws in multiple countries. And one of the things I think people miss is that the US has one set of laws, but you have to build things for every country. We had We had a person in Thailand who went to jail, not because of her video, but because there was a comment on her video that she didn't moderate fast enough. And it happened to be criticizing the king of Thailand. And if you just think about what level, how would you feel if every piece you put out, this podcast could get taken down because of a comment that came on the podcast. It would be crazy. You would just stifle all sorts of speech. So we definitely don't want to be Thailand in that.

### Human: Now, when you look at it as an investor, when a company goes from zero to 20 million during a pandemic, how does one judge that investment opportunity? Let's say, I don't know if you had it or not, or if I had it or not, but how would one judge an investment opportunity in something that is being driven by the pandemic?### Assistant: Yeah, it's interesting to think about investor psychology. I think it's helpful for founders. I didn't invest in Hoppin, but I did a couple that benefited. Talkdesk, which is a cloud contact center, they went from $1 to $3 billion during the pandemic because everyone couldn't go into call centers anymore. They had to do them from home. And while at first Netnews struggled, two-year deployments got done in two weeks. and upgrades were off the chart. So the revenue just is crazy. And you can see it in public comps like RingCentral and others as well. It's not only them that benefited. So that's a quick benefit. Another one I did, I did a sort of a Zendesk for e-commerce called Gorgeous. They went from $3 million to $13 million this year because Shopify exploded, right? So, on top of that, what's the number one way to do customer service on Shopify? It's this little app called Gorgeous. And so, you look at those and I think when the pandemic first hit, investors were like, well, this is going to end and this is fatty and they're all going to return to normal, right? And maybe they will, but I think what we've learned in SaaS, I don't even think you and I knew this when we chatted the first time and met. And when I talked to so many longtime founders, we all underestimated the powers of brand. of brand. And Michael Pryor and I from Trello just caught up. And I said, where will Trello be in 2030? He's like, it'll be a lot like this. Where will it be in 2040? He's like, I have no idea what Trello, the app will be like, but the brand will be there. The brand around collaboration and the way we manage projects. And we underestimated that. And we look at all these companies like Zendesk is at a billion, HubSpot's at a billion. All of the ones we came up with are at a billion in revenue. Slack's at a billion. And these brands last forever. And so I think that once it got these boosts, The boost, like maybe it will decelerate, right? And we can even squint at some of Shopify's numbers and see a deceleration in the sense that five years got pulled forward into two months. So that growth, you can't have 200% of e-commerce be e-commerce, can you? There's a maximum, right? But the brands are going to go forever. So I think VCs figured that out and they said, look, we're going to play the game and we're going to do hopping at 2 billion. And we're going to do all these things because yeah, there'll be some deceleration, but they've been pulled forward so much. These have become winners and we're going to bet on those winners. That's what I've seen.

### Human: I say there's at least, there's many things you can do and I have just one point of view, but two things that I would say is number one, treat everybody as if they were your brother or even an extension of yourself. That's what I do. I look at everybody as an extension of myself. If I see somebody homeless or whatever and I have some money, I'll give it to them. If somebody reaches out to me and says they need help, I don't care if I'm busy, I'm going to help that person because that's what I would do for myself. So number one, Treat everybody as an extension of yourself. And number two, give everybody a chance when applicable. I'll say there's some times where you gotta be smart and you just can't give somebody a chance, but open your heart, know when it's right, and give that person a chance, whether it's a job, whether it's just Hearing somebody's pitch for their business that they're excited about. I mean, you know, there's so many times where people come and they're excited to tell somebody about something. And that person's like, I don't care. They just have that look on their face. Like, stop talking to me. Give that person a chance to be excited, you know? And, and I guess the last thing that I'll say, um, other than that, or the third thing would be continue to teach other people, no matter who they are, whatever, you know,### Assistant: So what I'm hearing in that answer is that perspective matters and how you frame your own story is critically important. You at no point during the story did I hear anything from you where you pointed the finger at anybody else You and I asked you I gave you multiple windows to blame somebody and I did that explicitly during this conversation because You know what? You probably had jerk bosses. Yeah, you probably had racist bosses Yeah, people probably saw a tattoo and said well man made a black guy a tattoo. Maybe I don't need this guy in my company you you you of anybody as you said could probably point the finger but what people need to know is And there's a very important lesson for everybody is that when you point a finger, you have three more pointing back at you. 100%. Just let it sink in, people. When you point your finger because your plan fell through, you got three more fingers pointing back at you. Chris, sharing the story I think is critically important because there's something I've been trying to say for the last couple years. Listen, Twitter's where we converse about this stuff. That's where you and I met. And I've been trying to tell people that I believe the world is unfair, and I understand that black men get treated a certain way in this country, and it's abhorrent, and it has to stop. But there's also opportunity that still exists. It's not fair. It's clearly unfair. It's difficult, it's hard, but when someone like you does it, I think we need to focus and celebrate how you did it and talk about it, and then think about what the blockers were in your story. And this is what I want to wrap on. I was thinking, at what points could you have received more support or help? And one of them is that Wi-Fi access came up, and a computer came up. And it's very easy for rich people, for privileged people, to not take a moment and just think that having a decent computer and an internet connection is a blocker. These were specific blockers to you. Not having an entry-level job to pay your overhead is a blocker. Because if you can't pay the rent and put food on the table as a blocker, watching television and wasting your time on bullshit that is not your career is a blocker for some people. You, for some reason, had a level of focus that you were able to get through these blockers. But when you look back, if you could remove blockers, I mentioned but a few, What are the blockers you think as a society, and I'm not saying, to be clear, I'm not saying to a black man in America who made it like, how should we fix America? But you have, you fixed your situation. How should we fix America? based on what you've learned because you have done it and that actually gives you the high ground for us to listen to you because you actually got to the other side. What should we do as a society?

### Human: That's amazing. So you were in the science fiction part of it, where you imagined a future that could be possible. And then that has become true within your lifetime, which is amazing.### Assistant: Well, well, that's it. That's a great way to start. And, you know, no one ever really begins something completely de novo, right? And I come from a family of doctors and engineers. And in a way, I guess I've been working on on this my entire life. My dad is a neurologist who specializes in electrophysiology, which is the electrical aspects of the way the brain and nervous system work. And my grandfather was an electrical engineer, a radio operator in the Second World War. Actually, my father trained to be an electrical engineer and was exposed to the very earliest forms of artificial intelligence. And in a way, that was how he made the transition to becoming a doctor. So, I grew up with electrophysiology and clinical neuroscience as part of the everyday. And by the time I was about 20, finishing college, the most interesting thing in the world to me was what was just becoming possible or just seeming to become possible at that time in the late 90s, early 2000s, which was the notion that even though for a long time it was possible to interface electrically from a scientific and clinical perspective, with the nervous system. And in fact, all through the 20th century, research neuroscientists and doctors had been using the electrical properties of the brain and nerves to diagnose and treat disease and to study the nervous system. the electrical nature of the brain and nervous system is kind of what makes it special in the human body. But it was not possible to do that in a kind of high bandwidth way until the very end of the 20th century. And what I mean by that is that you could maybe record from a small number of nerves or a small number of nerve cells at a time using specialty hardware. until the very end of the 20th century, it became possible all of a sudden, through some breakthroughs that maybe we'll talk about later, to record from many, many neurons at a time. And that change in the bandwidth of our ability to interface with the brain and nervous system made the current generation of brain-computer interfaces possible. And I saw that happening and to me it seemed incredible and I basically spent the rest of my life, have spent the rest of my life working in that space. And early on, very early on, scientists, neuroscientists, understood that it might be possible to restore function to paralyzed patients, amputees, spinal cord injury patients, even in some cases blind patients. And so, the promise of the technology has been around for quite some time, maybe 20 years now. But it wasn't until about the late 20-teens that there was kind of a general consensus that it was ready to emerge from academia into the real tech world to really translate what had been proven in academic settings into clinical reality. But that was something I had wanted to do for basically a long, long time. I and many others and that's what we're set to do at Precision.

### Human: My favorite example, which I try to bring up with sacks, who's, you know, one of my best friends, but we always have difference of opinions. And, you know, he's, you know, he's very anti war, as am I. But I do think fighting against dictators invading other countries, probably a noble pursuit. Yeah, obviously, you want to avoid it. But he frequently gives me new stories. And you know, hey, maybe we should talk about this on the podcast. Sure. We all work on the docket. And they're from sources. And I'm like, do you know, like, zero hedge, like a Russian source? And who's running zero hedge? Who's running this, you know, newspaper, who's running the sub sack, and he keeps giving this, like, Kohana the great or something like substack. And this person, I guess, blends, you know, fragments of news together. And I think this is the technique that the KGB perfected. And I think William Blatty and the exorcist said, you know, the devil mixes lies with truth. That's how they get with that's how he gets you kind of situation. And l Ron Hubbard this as well. He was a stage hypnotist. Most people don't know that founder Scientology. And And he would do this rabbit hole technique, fact, fact, indisputable fact, common knowledge, and then implanting an idea, fact, fact, fact. And it's like this rabbit hole hypnotist technique. And they did this operation infect Ian. And people can look that up. I n f e k t i o n. And the KGB in the 80s, ran a disinformation campaign that worked to get people most people, this might be before many people's times, to get people to think that the United States created AIDS. in a laboratory. And you know how they did it? The entire technique in this effect on or whatever was to plant a story in a pro Soviet Indian newspaper called Patriot. And they got this anonymous letter to be printed there. And then they got eventually, they flipped newspaper to newspaper to newspaper to all the way to the point of Dan Rather reporting on the CBS Evening News. And that has now that little KGB technique is the technique of journalists. Gawker was kind of like one of the first Hey, Tim Cook is gay, Anderson Cooper's gay. And I knew Nick Denton very well at the time, because we were competing. And he was like, Yeah, it's hypocrisy. We're going to out Tim Cook, we're going to out famously Peter Thiel, right, who ultimately was nice. And they use that tip line as a way to justify it. And they were like, send the tip line. And if people are talking about it at the bar, we're going to run with it. And then after a certain number of Gawker and whatever other, you know, blogs or social media covered it, then the New York Times, or let's say something in between like Business Insider or something like not as noteworthy as CNN, or, you know, New York Times, they would run it. And then you had the story became Well, there's a story about this. And sometimes it was the Harvey Weinstein story. And rightfully so. Gawker gets a lot of credit for running with that whenever the people are scared. Other times it was false information, right? Or it's just uncouth and unfair to how a gay man who was running a public company who wouldn't be allowed to run a public company, maybe at that era, where people might boycott iPhones, if they knew Tim Cook was gay, whenever when he was in the closet. So I just think that's like what's happened with press is that this unnamed sources and flipping Oh, in this publication, an unnamed source said this, and if you get enough of those, it's indisputable, right?### Assistant: And there's two, there's two, you know, kind of disasters there. One is, you know, certain just actually completely incorrect information gets spread. Um, and when it does come out that this source was this, this brand that you trust was really wrong about this and this, you stop, you stop listening to it. You stop trusting it. So even when it has created the boy who cried wolf problem. Um, yes. And, uh, yeah, it's, um, you know, I mean, part of it is it's, it's the structure right now, like in, in news is not media is just, it used to be in this, you know, 60, 70s, 80s. If NBC was notably wrong more often than ABC and CBS and people would make NBC would become a laughing stock and no one would want to watch it. Yeah. And, or if it were biased, if one of them were politically left or right biased, it would be, again, it would lose viewers. Kind of like Fox did, yeah. Now it's like, boom. Yeah, well, Fox and then a bunch of others pioneered this new model and said, wait a second. With cable, actually, if you really ramp up tribalism towards, if you just cater towards one tribe and tell them what they want to hear, and you do it quickly, That gets you money accuracy doesn't do very much for you doesn't really matter you know you can't like no clicks totally. Exactly so the ins is just basic incentive structures basic no business like. They became that the money direction of money just turn and so. Um, there has to be some, you know, some mechanism to start holding, um, you know, to start penalizing inaccuracy and, and, and, um, and also, you know, uh, uh, bias just, um, and. Maybe that's, you know, some AI, maybe AI can help. Maybe there's some kind of algorithmic system that AI, you know, even the little thing on Twitter, which says, you know, readers thought you people might want to know, and it gives you like some additional notes. Yeah. I think that thing is great. Like again, maybe that thing gets corrupted, but right now I'm like, I love that thing. And I'm like, what if that's the very beginning of like, you know, something like GPT that is scanning all new sources in the world. It gets pretty good at like, you know, it gets a very good track record. Yeah. That's, you know, and hindsight say, wow, that thing is right. Most of the time that can come in and say the bottom of an article, you can have a Chrome extension that says this article is 60% accurate or this journalist gets five stars because it tends to be always tends to be accurate. That could change everything because now there's an incentive system again.

### Human: I don't know when you think of it, like consent, I mean, I asked my, I, I asked my partner, like, can I use this? You know, but that's because like, I have 130,000 people that could potentially see what I'm posting and then send it to someone that he knows. Or find out where he's at. What if he told someone he was too busy to hang out and then he's out with me. It's just an invasion of privacy almost. My parents never went through my diary. They never went into my room without like knocking and slowly coming in. Like, I feel like it's kind of the same thing, you know, but we think it's just like really sweet because it's like kind of sharing your dog like, Oh my God, my dog looks so cute today. You know, it's, it's so humans are so complex, like And I think we just think babies are so freaking cute and I totally get it and no shame To any moms listening to this that want to continue sharing their kid I just think we should keep in the back of our minds and just like really take it back a notch on what exactly what we're sharing and like break it down and kind of put yourself in those shoes at like 18 years old If you figure it out that was happening to you.### Assistant: Yeah, totally and I remember like, you know being in middle school high school, um we obviously both of us grew up like really far away from extended family so my mom was one of those facebook moms loved posting on facebook and i remember being like i don't really want you posting that photo can you untag me and my mom would get upset because she was like i want to show like, I want to show you your soccer photos off or something like that. And I was like, yeah, but it's like a bad photo of me. And in her brain, she was like, I want to share because I'm proud of you. And on Facebook, it was mostly like our family that lived really far away. And that was important to her. And it was interesting because for her sharing was literally sharing to like, that group of people. And for me, sharing almost felt like... I was like, that's embarrassing. If there was a photo that I didn't think was very flattering, or just a photo that I wasn't feeling like if I wasn't confident that day. I even talked to my mom about this today, because I'm like, this is so interesting. And now I could care absolutely less than my mom posts about me or of me on social media. I'm like, mom, whatever. Talk on this podcast. once a week. And if somebody wanted to get a bad photo of me, easy screenshot. So I'm okay with it now. But as a kid, I'm like, you know what, that's like, I don't know. It's just it definitely does put something in your mind and how my mom sees social media even to this day versus how I do and not just my mom, but that generation is completely different than how we see social media. So it's going to be interesting seeing more and more of our our peers have children and how they approach that. And I do think, I don't think First off, I've necessarily had thoughts on posting about my own children or pregnancy for very long just because I haven't had that many friends yet that have had kids until literally this year. I'm almost 25 and I think this is like the age where I had a few partners that got married right out of... Excuse me, a few friends that got married, for example, right out of college. Some people that have just been dating their partners for a really long time and decided This is like, we have stable jobs now. So it feels like a natural progression for some of my friends to start having kids, which is so crazy to even think about because I don't feel that old yet. And now it's just starting to sink in like, oh my gosh, like this isn't like, it's not like when your friend calls you and says that they're pregnant. My initial reaction is that, oh my gosh, like I'm, I'm so sorry. You have to be like, I'm so happy for you.

### Human: It feels like historically, Twitter has chosen to be closer in spirit to Reddit than to Facebook or tick tock.### Assistant: Lots of remote employees are traveling this summer. And if you want to keep your employees performance high while they're on the road, you need to get them a Dell latitude laptop. And I'm going to give you an awesome discount code from Dell for startups. If you're a founder, you need to apply for Dell for startups. And here's why you'll get access to a team of expert IT advisors. These experts will provide you with customized solutions to make your tech stack world class. Dell will help you access capital for building out your tech stack and you'll get exclusive discounts. And you know we love Dell at launch. In fact, we sent every new employee a beautiful 39 inch ultra sharp curve monitor. And that's my personal favorite such a beautiful monitor. If you want to have that working remote lifestyle, you need to have the right equipment, and Dell is the best. So here's your call to action. Apply for Dell for Startups today, and you'll get an additional 10% off all Dell Latitude laptops and tablets. Just head to dell.com slash twist. That's dell.com slash twist. Hey, do me a favor, producer Nick. I want to get the latest Dell one. Can you get me one? Because I want to play a little video games as well. I got to get into Starcraft 2 and maybe play some Age of Empires. Get me a new one when I'm on the road. Oh, you know, building on our conversation from last week of how good the tick tock algorithm is, for better or worse, like, really good. What if Twitter, when you're a new user just gave you the best of, and then as you interacted with stuff, it just went full algorithm, and then said, you know, you could follow stuff. And then if you swipe left that, you know, they have like the people you follow, and they just, instead of trying to blend those two things as one, they just said, we're just going to copy tik toks approach, which is here's the people you follow. And then here's the best stuff. So take the Explore tab for new users and make the Explore tab for them. And then as they see stuff, and they interact with it, if they favorite it, you show more. So if you start favoriting MBA, you show more, as opposed to like Twitter's, you know, kind of legacy of separating those things, right? If you want to explore, you got to click on and say, I'm in Explorer mode. And then the algorithm kind of serves you what you missed. But if they kind of have hedged, it seems like going all in on one or the other is the way to do it. And if you wanted to go mass and double the user base, probably going the tick tock route would be the best way. You could Yeah, for me, but it would definitely be for the other, right, you know, whatever.

### Human: And they're like, it works here. Here's the code.### Assistant: Listen up, everybody, I got an amazing offer for you. LinkedIn is gonna give you a $100 credit, that's right, $100, a hundy, toward your first LinkedIn advertising campaign. Over 78% of B2B marketers rate LinkedIn as their most effective social media platform for reaching their objectives. Why do they say this? Well, they say this because there are over 62 million decision makers on LinkedIn, and they mean business. Imagine, you're about to launch your marketing campaign, it's well tested, everything is going according to plan except for that one thought in the back of your head how do i ensure the people i want to target will be in the mindset to receive my message and the answer is linkedin when you market on linkedin your message reaches people obviously who are ready to do business because they're on linkedin this means your campaign will work as hard as it can as soon as you launch it. LinkedIn equals business. Business equals LinkedIn. And LinkedIn can help you reach your short and long term business goals with tools for brand building and lead generation and targeting a professional audience down to their job titles is how you're going to get really that incredible ROI on your investment in advertising. And you're going to engage people who you know, based on previous visits and outreach, right? So you're gonna keep track of that funnel, do business where business gets done, and get a hundy $100 in advertising credit towards your first LinkedIn campaign. Visit linkedin.com slash this week and startups again, linkedin.com slash this week in startups, terms and conditions apply because they've given you a hundy Well, and then you'd meet somebody and they'd be like, Yeah, I know I have a computer too. And you'd be like, Whoa, and then you would just spend 10 hours talking about all the different things you're doing. And I actually, you know, when I get that sense, again, is looking at the crypto folks, it's almost like they know that the okay, the arc of history is going to this like distributed system is going to be on a blockchain, nobody's going to control it, there's going to be hashes, that's how you're going to do it. And it's going to change everything, they kind of see a future that if you're not writing that code, or you're not involved in it. And I feel like the biotech people like people working on, like synthetic biology, like, it's almost like they can see the future. And none of us actually understand what they're working on until they make the vaccine for the pandemic in two days. Yeah. And Mr. And I was just like, you know, we got you. here it is. And then we spend a year trying to figure out if it worked. And they're like, No, it works. We made it in 48 hours. mRNA is like a real technology. And everybody's like, how do we know it works?

### Human: But yeah, exactly. I don't know.### Assistant: All right, everybody, here's your CTA the old call to action twist listeners 20% off any plan for your first six months. Just sign up at open phone.com slash twist. And if you got an existing number, no problem to put it right over open phone.com slash twist o p e n p h o n e.com slash twist today for 20% off two excellent observations there. They hire these PhDs with the money they make from their network, and then they make a deal with them. Okay, listen, get people to click on more ads. And let's serve people ads that are so creepy. They think that we've got a camera in their house, right? And we're watching them make spaghetti. So we're going to, you know, offer them this spaghetti sauce, like, you know, that all the discussions like I was having a conversation at the concert, and then I came home and it was a Volvo ad. That's what you're experiencing there. So what you see in these cool, you know, you know, teddy bear painting a teddy bear and unicorns on the beach. That's what they're doing with AI. That's why it seems like the AI is reading your mind because it's got so many signals across so many people in your social graph. We discussed this before. Okay, now, they're terraforming. They're going to use AI to terraform. you know, the metaverse. Yeah, this is why Zuckerberg is so drunk on this. And that's what I realized when I saw this. The reason Zuckerberg has so much conviction is because he's put these two things together. We're really three. He understands the social graph, and he's mastered how to surface for you things that provoke emotion in you things that have emotional resonance. Okay, so let's just keep that one idea. I'm adding this to your to He understands the social graph. Okay, great. And he understands how to give you things. Okay, here's a bar mitzvah. Here's a Trump story. You know, here's whatever news that make you come back. So he's an engagement master. Okay, he's the advertising master, he knows how to get you what you want to get those clicks for those advertisers, right? Most powerful ad network, one of the top two most powerful networks ever built, Google and his. Okay, now we got those two things. Great. Put those two things together, you get social media, you get Instagram, you get all that good stuff. But now you add the virtual reality piece, as you're saying, and terraforming, what if he built for you a world in which you know, the rent the runway to do a call back to the rental runway ad that we're doing here. Yes, or whatever rental clothing company competes with rent the one way, give me a couple names here so that I can spread the love here and rtr.com slash twist.

### Human: I thought the also interesting in your book was Peter's sort of thoughts on immigration. I thought they were more severe than they actually were. I mean, he was not for closed borders. He was for the point based system that Canada, Australia, and a number of other very reasonable countries go by, which is hey if you are got a phd native speaker whatever you could bring to the system that would be positive we score up a certain number of points to bring you in. Show do you think is xenophobic or as rational as canada and australia about immigration.### Assistant: Yeah. I mean, I think so, but I think it's important to say that a lot of this stuff is still going on while like the, the, um, you know, the, the sort of alt-right as we understood it, you know, in 2015, 2016 is basically gone. Um, but there is this authoritarian movement that is very important and, um, and that, you know, you hear, and that is represented, you know, on Fox news and in some of the most, um, I mean, I don't say like that. It's like in the upper echelons of conservative media. And there is like it's not it's not really at the fringe of the Republican Party anymore. It's it's pretty much the center of the Republican Party. And Peter, I think, is making a play to be the patron to that to that movement. And maybe that's because it's like an opportunity or something like that. But, you know, he's like he's like going to be a major. He is already, you know, a major donor for 2022. Um, and, um, I think he's seen within that world as, you know, as one of a handful of, of rich guys who could be, you know, potential donor, basically like a Koch brothers, the way the Koch brothers, um, kind of, uh, like served as, as patrons to, and, and it sort of took over. The Republican Party, you know decades ago and and you had this like industrial company industries and this kind of political project that that the free markets libertarian stuff that that that really changed the course the Republican Party and and and helped kind of remake the modern GOP and I think Peter is doing something kind of similar with the sort of Trumpist Republican Party, where you have this post-industrial, it's not a post-industrial company, right? But like, he's a post-industrial guy. He's got, you know, investments in tech companies. Yeah. And he's, you know, pushing, you know... The hair biology guy is running, right? Absolutely. Yeah. With 10, 10 million bucks from Peter behind him and Blake masters, who's, you know, been one of Peter's like right-hand guys is running for Senate in Arizona with another 10 million bucks. And, and those candidacies are, um, you know, they're, they're, they're, they're running in the Trump lane and, and who knows, maybe, you know, Maybe maybe they're gonna moderate or and and it's all totally unclear whether they're actually gonna win because like I think there's some question about whether JD Vance really appeals to like Regular people or it's just somebody that like is good at getting elites, you know spun up But you know that it's it could they could have a lot of power in the Senate after 2022 especially if Republicans retake the Senate

### Human: And they're more precise. I mean, they're laser cut, they're using materials that can't be cut on site, right? And those materials then are You don't need to do a redo because the computer cut it. And I know a lot about this because we're investors in Blockable, which is doing like manufacturing of modular units that then stack, but it's for multifamily, which is completely different than what you're doing. When you think about this pandemic occurring, construction stopped, then people realized, hey, there's no reason for construction to stop. In fact, there might be an argument that construction should go seven days a week since You know, it's not going to be disturbing people as much. What happened to your business during the pandemic? And then what do you think it would seem to me that people moving to the burbs infill and the country even is going to be a boon for your business? How do you think about it? And how do you how do you measure your how do you measure your potential enthusiasm for this trend, not knowing if it's going to be sustainable?### Assistant: Yeah, so there's three different things that I would say were impacted by COVID. First, you think about actual on-site construction. And we were able to largely continue building all of our houses. We were exempted because many of them were fire rebuilds, and then construction was allowed to continue rebuilding. So we got to keep building. But there was a lot of sort of red tape to get through of, well, what are the guidelines and How do we, you know, above and beyond guidelines, make sure that our sites are safe. And so there was a lot of that at the beginning. Now we've got really clear process in place, and things are working really well. The second piece of it is around sort of the macro impacts, how people feel about construction, how people feel about where they're living, certainly a flight to less urban areas. And we're also seeing people like what you need in a house suddenly went from you need bedrooms and bathrooms and a kitchen and a living room, But you don't really need a bunch of offices. And now you have a dual working family, and you need two offices in a house. And so people are thinking about customization, and how do I create a home that's going to work for this new normal that may persist forever, or we're not really sure. And so there's certainly an opportunity for us to be building more for people who are trying to move to the suburbs when there simply aren't enough houses there. And so I think there's this macro opportunity for us to build more. But then The most important transformation that I think has happened, and has really accelerated the way that we're doing things is thinking about this shift to zoom being an okay form of interaction for people. So the vast majority of people before all of this happened, would strongly prefer to come into our offices, we've got design studios in person, you're meeting and reviewing, you know, paper plans. And we've always talked about how we want to do sales entirely virtually. And we want to do design selections and architecture meetings entirely virtually. And we felt like, well, that, you know, it's going to be a couple years before our systems are good enough, and we can really convince people to do it. And that happened overnight. And so the acceleration in our ability to sell people houses entirely virtually and finding the right technology to do that. So you know, we're doing drone photography and Matterport walkthroughs and all sorts of things that help people understand we know everything that we need to know about your lot. We have the vision for what it is that you want to build and we're going to be able to execute has really made it possible for us to separate ourselves from lots of other builders who just don't have that infrastructure. And so we think that the expectations and the abilities for homeowners to interact in a truly virtual environment while building a house has just been massively accelerated. We're really well positioned for that. So we're excited about that future.

### Human: Right. I feel like I completely understand this when it comes to international money transfer and remittances. Why is it better, like break it down why it's better for Starbucks. Like why is it better for them to settle money this way? Other than the delay in settlement? I mean, I know credit card processors charge fees, I assume there's a fee here too.### Assistant: Yeah. It's just unbelievably small, but we can- Got it. Yeah. So just to walk through in layman's terms, Walmart. I want to buy $100 of stuff from Walmart and Walmart banks at Bank of America. I bank at Chase. I swipe my card. The point of sale at Walmart is going to call Bank of America and say, hey, someone's trying to pay us and give the card info. Bank of America is going to realize that the first number is a three, that's a Visa card. And they're going to call Visa and say, hey, who issued this? Someone's trying to pay us. Visa is going to realize Chase issued it. They're going to say, hey, Chase, is Jack good for a hundred bucks? Chase is going to say, yeah, we'll settle that later. I think he's good enough. His credit score is fine. And then tells Visa, Visa tells Bank of America, Bank of America tells Walmart, out comes the receipt. I sign it like the Declaration of Independence and we move on. Now, this future settlement... Now, Walmart is beholden to the banks and to the card networks to actually get the money. And traditionally, they then take 3% of it. And it's very slow and inefficient. And then the more brutal thing is there's no innovation in there. That user story has not innovated for 60 years. And so it's kind of pain society, a lot of people in America, and then obviously around the world, billions of people are not included in the financial system that I have. And it's very expensive to the merchant. The merchant burdens the tax that our economy is run on debt and credit. And that's not fair. And so now if you're Starbucks, When I get the message someone wants to pay me, so the proverbial swipe the card, in there is also the money. In there is also a physical instrument. It doesn't mean you got to put Bitcoin on your balance sheet. Our software auto converts and just gives you the dollars. We interface with Bitcoin. But then you never have to be reliant on the banks and the card networks to settle later and take egregious fees and artificially inflate what they're doing. So Starbucks can even start driving flywheel consumer behavior and say, if you use Cash App and Strike to check out with us, we'll give you a free cappuccino every third one or whatever. But they're saving on fees, their money settles instantly, and they're getting more customers. It's more inclusive because it's a crazy concept that some kid in high school could be taking a programming class and build his own wallet and check himself out at Starbucks himself. no regulatory license, no bank, no sufficient balance sheet. It's because it's an open payment standard. So it means more business, it means cheaper fees, it means better access to capital, working capital constraints are lessened. Just a better world, really.

### Human: Steve Jobs like that. And that's his slow mind.### Assistant: Well, whatever. What's what would be your better term for a pro a platform run based on transparency, as opposed to financial incentive and growth incentives? Get neutral, neutral, neutral platforms per neutral platform. Yeah. Okay. So, okay, let's look at what's going on with the cap table. I think, you know, a lot of times when you want to understand what's happening, math is a good place to go. And if you look at Twitter's largest shareholders, obviously, people talked about Elon owning 9.2% at this point, which he's basically said in the letter, he would liquidate if he wasn't able to buy it, which I think makes sense. Why have him sitting around on the cap table if he wasn't, you know, going to buy it. Vanguard 8.8% Morgan Stanley 8.4% BlackRock 6.5% State Street Capital Street Street Corp 4.5%. So it's institutions own this company. And then if you look, those companies also have large holdings in Tesla, which is not uncommon Vanguard and BlackRock are both large shareholders in Tesla, they own 100 billion combined. So if Vanguard and BlackRock are roughly 13% of Twitter and have 100 billion. They're obviously familiar with Elon's work. And so I think you'll have a series of people who would very much shareholders in Twitter would very much like it to be an Elon Musk back company. Because I think they would see, you know, a company that for I think Twitter has been public for close to a decade now, it ended being a public company at 40 some odd dollars a share if my memory serves me correctly. may have gone out at 45, or peaked somewhere, you know, a little bit above that on the first day trading it closed at $41. And now it's trading or it's been trading when with Elon involved as an activist shareholder at between 38 and 45. In fact, yeah, I can confirm right now is that 41 closed at 41. So in other words, if you invested in this company 10 years ago, you've made $0 while the stock market has ripped, ripped. So if you're a shareholder here, so you think they do vote for it? I mean, you have to be a moron not to vote for it. The most talented CEO on the planet, the most talented product CEO on the planet, you know, only comparable really to Steve Jobs, Airbnb founders, I mean, if I'm being objective here, if you just look at the best products in the world, whether it's know, SpaceX is rockets, the Tesla autopilot Tesla itself, Tesla cars, and now Starlink. Those products are game changers. Twitter is the opposite of a game changing product. I think like Elon managing Twitter's product team, and, you know, them answering to him. It's literally like Steve Jobs managing an ice cream stand.

### Human: So we had three... And then the stuff just sinks to the bottom of the ocean, correct? Yeah, it sinks.### Assistant: I don't know if we've revealed this. My comms probably hate me. A hundred containers fell off. Crazy. And, you know, like, I mean, I feel terrible. It sucks, but there's not a lot I can do when the container falls off the side of the ship. Like, it's not our fault, but you want to have insurance for that purpose. And then our last revenue stream, and we'll keep adding more. Like one of the cool things about Flexport, it's really a platform business. And so you have your customers, you're managing these transactions. There's a lot of other services that you need on these transactions. One of the most important ones is financing. You mentioned that story earlier about the death spirals that I've experienced where you didn't have the paperwork lined up and you couldn't get your products out. And that has happened where I lost the paperwork. And that's just idiocy. And that should never happen because it should be digitized. But another reason that you can't get your containers picked up from the port, when your containers arrive, you only have seven free days. And another, the most common reason is you haven't paid your factory. And when I was an entrepreneurial hustler, like not venture-backed, I did that for like 15 years, just trying to run a business, not a venture capital thing. And we would often start selling the products while they were on the ocean, get cash, and then use that cash to pay the factory for them because we didn't have any money. And if that went wrong, and your goods arrived, you only have seven free days, and now you're in a death spiral because the reason you can't unlock the goods is you don't have any money. And you're getting charged $1,000 or $250 or whatever it was to get it out. So trade finance is a massive problem, especially for fast growth businesses, being able to buy this inventory and get good terms. So we have a group called Flexport Capital that does inventory loans to customers on our platform. Actually, one of my favorite things here is like, The capital product, we have a huge advantage because banks don't like to make inventory loans for inventory on the water because under ancient maritime law, older than the US Constitution, like we're talking old law, English law, the freight forwarder has first lien. So if you default and you go bankrupt, I have title to the goods as Flexport, as the freight forwarder. So banks don't like to give you inventory loans because they don't have secure title. And so there's a great opportunity for us to come in and provide great financing. We know a lot about you. We're shipping this stuff, we're seeing your margins, because you were clearing customs and seeing your wholesale price, getting to know you, do you pay us on time? Do you pay your vendors on time? Are you good people? Right?

### Human: Something in that range? $150 million sale was that.### Assistant: That's great to hear. When we get back from this quick break, I want to ask you, what is the core differentiator that you learned from talking to all those presentation users? And then what did you come up with for pitch as the reason why somebody would give up A decade or two that they invested in understanding PowerPoint. A decade that they've invested in understanding Google Slides. A decade in trying to be like Steve Jobs and create very precious keynotes. These are big competitors and I want to know what ideas you found out in order to base pitch.com on when we get back on the street and start up. Do you wish you were in on some of these amazing yum yum IPOs in 2019 and 2020? I bet you do. Well, with our crowd, accredited investors can invest directly, easily, and most importantly, early. You want to get in early. And our crowd, O-U-R-C-R-O-W-D, investors have benefited from companies going public like Beyond Meat or being bought by companies like Intel, Nike, Microsoft, Oracle. our crowds investment professionals leverage their extensive networks to review some of the most promising startups in the world. And they look at these companies and then they let you invest in them alongside of the our crowd team. Our crowds investment team has already invested hundreds of millions of dollars in over 200 companies with dozens of exits accredited investors can participate in single company deals for as little as $10,000 or one of our crowd funds for as little as $50,000. So today you can join our crowds investment in to Val. This is a company that's in the ag space agriculture, and they want to help people save billions of dollars a year by harvesting fruit that is left to rot on the vine to Val's AI powered flying robots pick then and prune an orchard. Think about that. How amazing is that? and they help mitigate the global shortage of fruit pickers while offering cost savings of up to 30%. Seems like a fascinating company. And you can get in on this investment right now by going to rcrowd.com slash twist. If you're an accredited investor, you can visit rcrowd.com at O-U-R-C-R-O-W-D.com slash twist to review all their current deals with no payment involved until you decide to invest. Hey, everybody, welcome back to This Week in Startups. We've got Christian Reber from pitch.com. What a great domain. He doesn't do a lot of podcasts. He doesn't talk about what he does, but... It's actually my first one. This is your first one, really? I mean, you don't really do them. And so thanks for doing it. I DMed you, I reached out, I told you I was a fan. You were like, all right, fuck it, I'll do it. So Wunderlist was great. You sold that for Microsoft. That was like, what, like 50 or $100 million sale?

### Human: Yes. The Wall Street Journal reported that JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon is leading discussions with CEOs of other major banks to help stabilize First Republic. Some quotes from the article include, the discussions, while preliminary, have focused on how the industry could arrange for an investment that would boost the capital's bank, according to people familiar with the matter. And by the way, like I said, this is from the Wall Street Journal. Among the options on the table, the people said is an investment in First Republic by the banks themselves. So we could actually see a couple of the top four U.S. banks investing in First Republic. And by the way, James Dimon is like the wolf of all wolves. He's involved. He's super serious. And it's probably good because he probably wants to make a ton of money.### Assistant: Yeah, well, these banks are now trading the equity in them is incredibly low. I mean, maybe it's a three or $4 billion company right now. And it needs 10s of billions of dollars to backstop it. So I think you would basically own that bank if you were to start investing in it. And, and this is going to have a big impact on startups. And what people don't understand is, startups can either do, you know, very basic banking with what's called a neo bank, like a digital bank, no storefront bank, And that's fine. You get your banking service, you can wire money, you can do payroll, or you can wire to a payroll service. And this is aside from the rails for doing payment, right? So if your startup has to do payments, you're probably using stripe or add yen, then you have banking services. So you can do payroll and, you know, put your money somewhere. Startups really don't need much from a bank just need to have it be easy to use maybe on the margins it's nice if you can get venture debt again i don't recommend venture debt until you have a cfo because CFOs know how to manage these things. And debt can get you in trouble real quick, because you're basically raising part of your next round, then you're telling your next round investors, let's say the Series B, you got to pay for my Series B and then invest in the Series B, it's just not a good device, unless you're at your Series D have predictable revenue. And you're using that venture data is like a way to build, I don't know, if it was cafe x, a way to build 10 machines that you have already sold, right, which would be called factoring in some worlds, taking your purchase orders and factoring. In fact, there was a company pipe.com that did that. I think stripe has a product that'll pay you in advance of future earnings. But you know, the ease at which you could work with First Republic Bank, the ease of which startups to work with Silicon Valley Bank is a true loss. There was I saw lemon.io also an advertiser on this program. And just for full disclosure, I have first republic accounts i have a silicon valley bank tiny mortgage at this office in fact from a couple years ago but we're selling this office they both have advertised on the prod on the podcast pipes advertised lemon dot i was advertised i mean everybody basically advertises on this product it's the number one startup podcast. So to say I'm conflicted, I mean, there's tiny little conflicts, but I don't have any exposure to them. But lemon.io had an interesting tweet, he's based in Ukraine. And they help that remote developers from Europe for American companies. In fact, I want to use it to build out the software around the syndicate.com. And the CEO had a series of tweets, maybe you can recap those.

### Human: It's so well, I mean, if you think about CNBC and its audience, and I find this fascinating, because now this is like the second or third clip we've seen where they literally laughed at you based on a prediction that last that that extended past the six hours of the trading day. Yes. And it's like, everything that's wrong with markets, is tied up in that that CNBC reaction. They're like, Oh, I'm sorry, we only operate in six hour mental increments.### Assistant: Oh, God, I just I hate looking at that, Jason. But I mean, I look like a linebacker, but okay. That's my best interest here. But let's hear if I got something right. gigantic business so i think they'll be actually four of these services that have a hundred million plus subscribers and that'll be you know the hbo hulu disney netflix and you know who knows who else will will get there maybe direct tv or youtube but multiple winners in the in the winner's circle for this one and disney will be either number one or number two they could even eclipse net uh netflix i know that sounds crazy to say right now But if we look at it with a 10-year arc, it's completely possible they'll catch up. I think it's probable they'll catch up, and it's possible that they could edge them out. I'm going to quickly explain one crucial type of insurance that all startups need. E&O insurance that covers errors and omissions, and it helps you scale your business. Because any major customer is going to ask you, hey, do you have E&O? You need to have E&O if we're going to close this deal. If you want us to sign on the dotted line and you want to get the do-re-mi, You're going to need to have E&L. So if you don't have business insurance, you've failed one of the first steps of being a founder. And startups should look no further than our friends over at Embroker. Embroker's technology saves you time and money. Prices are up to 20% lower with better coverage than the incumbents. You can go from sign up to quote and purchase in just 10 minutes. When you work with Embroker instead of the incumbents, you're not dealing with these large, slow corporations, and the signup takes days, not weeks. The process is totally transparent, and there's no opaque pricing. Because it's 2022, folks. There shouldn't be any opaque pricing, right? Save us time, save us money. That's what Embroker does, and you get a better quality of service. better, faster, cheaper. That's what it's all about. And that's what I'm broken does. So instantly buy custom built insurance for startups, go to in broker.com slash twist. While you're there, you can get an extra 10% off by using my promo code, which is TW is T twist, twist, twist, and broker.com slash twist. Literally, they laughed at me. And I don't know why this is not. Sometimes I'm just like, I don't understand why. When I make a prediction like this, it's not absolutely clear that It's so obvious, because Disney at the time owned Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar, and all the Disney characters. Completely obvious to me that if you have children, you have no choice but to buy the archive.

### Human: Yeah. So that's actually become a sales channel for us because the security guard business itself is kind of a funky little business. Their entire business model, with all respect to these guys that are doing their best, is they send in the A-team, they close the business at like, let's say 10,000 bucks a month. And then within three months, they move the A-team to the next account that needs to be closed. And you get stuck with not even the B-team, C-team or D-team. You get stuck with somebody who happens to have a heartbeat at that particular moment.### Assistant: A little kerfuffle in because in the building where I am, it's a, I guess they call it a condo when you have multiple owners, and then there's a management company. And they're like, according to our, you know, bylaws, like, you know, you can't put up security cameras. I was like, in our apartment complex slash live work loft studio kind of space. half the people have ring doorbells. So I was like, everybody's got ring doorbells. What's the issue here? And they're like, well, your sticks out. It's on the wall. I'm like, well, I don't care. Like, who cares? You know, and they're like, well, you know, and I was like, that's technically my space. And so we get into this like little back and this like one Karen who's in our building is like, well, you can see the neighbor and you can see the you see the neighbor's door. From the from my estimation with a camera, you can see the neighbor's door, and you might be able to see the elevator. And I was like, Okay, why don't you ask the neighbor? if they want me to take the camera from the right hand side and put in the left hand side, and they don't get the protection of the deep Sentinel. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no it has happened that people were lost in the building in deep central interfered and it was great for us and then I get an alert on my phone. My assistant gets an alert, a third person gets an alert. It's absolute magic. And it just shut the whole discussion down. And I was like, do you think we should get this for the entire building? Because we have dumb cameras in other places and packages are being stolen. And they're like, Oh, yeah, I guess we could do that. You know, because they're thinking about getting a security guard. How do you work with buildings that have existing security guards, but then also want this?

### Human: Yeah, at the macro level, Jason, it's a supply demand balance. explain what that means. Meaning for 10 years, I was the idiot yelling into the wind. And obviously, you saw a little bit of this, whether you know it or not. Because Wall Street and Main Street told you to set and forget, they said, you're dumb. Oh, wait, you should buy Vanguard, you should buy BlackRock, you should just fucking be dumb. Like they basically said, be dumb, right? Pay no fees. And for that we will deliver your 10% return a year. set it in for that, talking about the biggest con of all, first of all, it's great product. There's nothing wrong again, great product, but I think a shitty choice for millennials.### Assistant: The New Year is here. Thank the Lord. It's February. We're getting to work. Everybody is grinding and your business is growing. I know your business is growing. You're listening to This Week in Startups. You're getting these incredible culture tips and growth tips. And at launch, things are going bananas. The podcasts. are growing. And what does that mean? It means I need video editors. I need a community manager because nobody's managing the slack. It's chaos over there. We need a social media editor. We need an archivist. I mean, we need people. So where am I going to find my candidates? What am I going to do? I'm going to go to LinkedIn jobs. Of course, that's what I'm going to do. And LinkedIn is global. They're national, they're international, and they have over 722 million members worldwide. What that means is it's easier than ever for you to find great people because LinkedIn knows everybody's job description. They know the size of the company they work at. They know their soft skills. They know their hard skills. LinkedIn jobs is going to put your job in front of the right people. It's never been easier if you're using LinkedIn jobs to find the right person and to find them quickly. And that's what you're looking for. Just use LinkedIn jobs. And when you're ready to do that, you're going to get a free job listing. That's because LinkedIn Jobs has been a huge supporter of This Week in Startups and my podcast, Angel. Go to LinkedIn.com, A-N-G-E-L, and you will get to post a free job. There are terms and conditions that apply because they're letting you post for free. So thanks again, LinkedIn Jobs. We found so many great people on your platform. We love the product. We love the service. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. And what it does, which is really, I guess, paradoxical in a way we have these very paternal accreditation laws, if you make $200,000 a year, you got a million dollars in cash, whatever it is, you can invest in private companies. Now you can not invest in those private companies, but you can go to Vegas or, you know, bet on sports betting, poker, whatever, if you're the other 96% of Americans, then SPACs come out, and you take the same inventory of private companies that are pre launch in some cases, or, you know, have modest amounts of traction. And then you make them public. And now you can invest them as you know, somebody who works as a Uber driver, postmates driver or is unemployed and got a stimulus check currently or is, you know, whatever, a developer making $75,000 working from home, you couldn't invest in private companies now you can. So that is part of the magic is that you get to get in earlier on companies.

### Human: And let's talk about that for a second, open mindedly here, if you were to put some prompts in, and you put in the sequence of COVID, which isn't really a difficult thing to sequence, and said, come up with things more deadly, or come up with things that, you know, instead of affecting old people affect young people that have a longer incubation period, so they're harder to recognize or stop. AI could do that today.### Assistant: And, you know, it's a little complicated, because it turned out, one of the things that's totally bizarre, is that large language models are actually useful for understanding the structure of proteins. Yes, something has nothing to do with human language. It is, however, you know, what happens with proteins, you know, proteins are these long strings of amino acids, which is these kind of collections of atoms. And, you know, every protein is specified by some piece of our DNA, our genome. And it's, you know, a protein is a string of thousands to millions of amino acids. And actually, they don't usually get as far as a million amino acids. But it's a long string of these things. And then they fold up in certain complicated ways. It's been a long time problem to figure out given the sequence, how does the protein fold up? It matters a lot how the protein folds up because the way that proteins actually have significance for biology has to do with their shape. And so, is there a particular hole in the protein where some particular other molecule can fit in that hole or not? Does the protein kind of knit itself together to make a muscle? All these kinds of things. So, it matters what the shape is. And so, the question is, given the sequence, can you predict the shape? Then that's been a longtime problem. That was... A lot of progress was made on that using, well, initially, not quite large language models, but now large language models. But really, what's happening there is you take the protein where you take the sequence, you want to figure out what kind of shape its protein is, you then say, well, this piece matches this protein that we've already studied, this piece matches another protein, this piece matches another protein. Now let's figure out how to knit those pieces together. And the knitting those pieces together is something that's a little bit like this kind of puzzle piece thing that I mentioned for human language. It seems that knitting together is something that LLM seem to be quite good at. And so then you can do the more extreme thing that people have started to do, which is to use generative AI to say, given a bunch of words, make a protein that does such and such. So yes, the thing you're describing, I don't know, there are lots of issues and there are lots of computational reducibility questions, actually. But in broad outline, yes, it will be possible for sure to say, take this and with just a linguistic type prompt, you know, find something that does, you know, that works a little bit differently, and so on. And, you know, it pulls in perhaps something from some other, you know, genome database or whatever else. So yeah, I'm sure that will, that will be a thing that, unfortunately, perhaps, that will be about maybe fortunately, in some cases, and maybe unfortunately, in others.

### Human: Let's hope. So we can move forward now, I guess, with Apple, like you were saying. So Apple, just like Google, they also missed on the top line and bottom line, but its stock is actually up 3% today. iPhone sales really missed revenue estimates by around $2.5 billion and Mac sales missed by around $2 billion. Holiday buyers obviously tighten their belts a lot, and they were just not as active as Apple anticipated. And also, I'd like to note that the iPhone kind of came out around that time, like the holiday season, like it always does. And in my opinion, it just wasn't as impressive. And I wonder if that's like the 14. Yeah, yeah.### Assistant: I have 13. I went to the Apple Store recently. I just I my daughters were getting boba. And I was giving my daughter was out with one of her friends. So I gave them a little privacy to get their boba. While they were getting their boba and going to Sephora, I just walked the Apple Store. And I picked up the 14. And I looked at my 13. And I was like, I'm not a price sensitive shopper, I always like to get the latest thing. And for the first time, I felt not compelled to take out my credit card. I was like this 13 is enough. I don't want to have to unbox the phone, I don't want to have to set it up. And literally, not maybe a little bit in the back of my mind, austerity measures to downmarket I, I do think about austerity frequently, but it was more just like the act of unboxing it, having to return it and going through a half hour with the sales clerk. that was the friction for me that I was like, there's not enough here for me to go through that 30 minutes. I just want the 30 minutes of my life. So that is, I think, to your point, Rachel, it's not that compelling. And then I walked around, I looked at the iPad mini, I was like, maybe I got an iPad mini. I always like this. Nothing was super compelling to me. I look at the iPad. I looked at the new MacBook Air, which is amazing and extraordinary and beautiful machine. I was like, Nope, my am I am one. Yeah. MacBook is just fine. I got the big monitor on it. I'm happy. And so this is austerity. Now, I did, I do have to say I J traded last week. So on February 1, what is today's taste of their two days ago, I bought 500 more shares of Amazon 500 more shares of Apple 500 more shares of Disney. The Amazon trade is down a little bit. I guess I bought at $107 a share. It's at 105. I bought Apple at 145. And it's at 154. So I'm up on that one. And I bought Disney at 110. And it's at 111. So I'm up modestly on that one as well. But I just feel all three of those companies, Amazon, Apple, Disney, are just going to do extraordinary. And I'm not too worried about this pullback. The economy is obviously in a some type of recession, or we're in some sort of down market, even though it's not clear exactly, it's a definition of a recession, but people are spending less. And they're going to let their phones last another year, they're gonna let their cars last another two years. And just austerity across the boards is I think, the theme for 2023.

### Human: That's a good way to evaluate those types of Yeah, deals when they come in the door to Yeah, well, when we look at I, Nick, someone is a great, that is a great VC Sunday school topic.### Assistant: Yeah. And all of these letters of intent, LOIs purchase orders, you know, like if this company was going public, you remember the Niccolo controversies, the one that was making the vans for Amazon that Amazon on 10% of like, all of these letters have out clauses in them. Some of them are non binding the payment term. So if you were looking at companies, you really if you're making a J trade on a public company or doing a private investment, you just want to know but it's a it's a I say letters of intent are, you know, totally, I don't even count them as any revenue. Yeah, they're usually just press releases, to be honest. And so I think that's what this is. I'm not meaning to be cynical, but I don't really give this any credence, because you can back out of it. And it's just an option. Now, if they paid in full, or it was an amount of money that was significant to the individual, then you can look at it differently. I'll give you two examples. With the roadster, you had to pay upfront $150,000. And then wait three years for that Tesla Roadster. Dang for the Model S, you had to pay in full $120,000 and wait two years or three years, whatever it was. I'd have both of those I have the signature 16 the signature number one. But then when they did the model three, I think it was $1,000. I think so. And it was 1000. I think for the Cybertruck was 500. So you know, the full you Okay, that's not refundable, you get the cash in the bank, if the company goes out, you lose your money. So if that if that was the case here, great. And then you look at, you know, $1,000 on a $50,000 2%. So if these planes are going to cost 200 million each, or whatever, they 100 million, they're probably gonna cost 100 200 million, maybe 200 million, I'm guessing private jets like top out of 5060. And then the, you know, commercial jets are in that 200 range makes sense, right? You think about a 20 year lifespan of them, yada, yada, and what they can do in general or generate revenue. if they received but 2% the same as the model three, I would be super impressed by this, right? Because 2% would be 4 million per jet 4 million per jet 100 jets ordered 400 million in revenue. They may have collected that I don't know maybe to get your reservation and be a line you have to put down 2% 3% so there will be skin in the game and it would be non refundable. So that's what the devils would be in the detail.

### Human: It's been crazy. What's making the flywheel kind of go to the next gear.### Assistant: So we did a, we slowed down to speed up the show is not going anywhere, right? We're doing it for 12 years, I'm going to do it till I die. So I said, Okay, make a list. The 100 people who've been just incredible guests, you know, people you want to have on over and over again, right? So people always ask to have Chris Saka back on, although Chris Saka is a little upset at me because of Twitter. You know, it's my friend put Twitter I didn't buy Chris. And Keith Roboy, everybody loves when Keith Roboy comes on. So you got those, you know, let's call those like, people have been on the show, three, four, five times or more. And people just love those folks. And then there's aspirational folks we really want to have on like, I've been trying to have Mike Ovitz on for since his book came out. Yeah, it's just always been like, you know, problem. You're just scheduling. And then, you know, we got other ones like, I always want to have Charles Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks, Starbucks. So now, we're making a list of the aspirational ones. And then just like you might do a mail merge, if you were a salesperson, you say, Hey, these are my 100 targets, we start thinking about 200 targets at a time for the show. And then we start thinking about, hey, what would be a good time to invite them on and then we do a custom email to them. So you showed that CRM system the other week that would be writing like, yep, know, the emails, we don't like to do that. But if you make a list, and you say, Hey, for the next two years, let's work on these 200 guests. And let's really write them thoughtful emails, where we talk about what we want to talk about, why we want to have them on the show, the benefit of coming on the show, etc. And then we send them links to people that we know, they might know who've been on the show. So yeah, and we just can, you know, checkbox, checkbox, checkbox, you know, Glenn from Redfin, you know, and then we're trying to get the CEO of Zillow for two years, we just we got to stick with it. And so if you have a more systematic approach to the targets, that's what's driving it. Awesome. Yeah, that's it's and it's working, you know, as opposed to, hey, what should we do this week? You know, it's like, let's really be, I call it like the term paper kind of approach, as opposed to like, the pop quiz approach, we can always pop quiz people like we had the guys from Varda on, you know, space.

### Human: Average $15 million round.### Assistant: Yeah, ownership matters. Percentage ownership matters. So in the case of Airbnb, my understanding was Y Combinator had a chance to maybe sell some shares early of Y Combinator of Airbnb. And I think they took advantage of that. I don't have confirmation of that. That was one of these backroom discussions. But assume they started with 7%. They got diluted down to 3.5%. Let's say they sold 1.5%. They maybe had 1.5%, 2% of the company by the time it went public. Maybe even a little less because dilution happens, right? Um, and if they sold, they maybe got diluted a little bit more and they took some money off the table. So that means if it became worth a hundred billion, maybe they got 2 billion from it. Pretty good deal for a 20 K investment, obviously. Yeah. Um, but. When I went out to raise my first and second fund and I did meet with some of the big folks, they were like, you know, ownership percentage is, you know, what we really care about in winners. And they want to see 10 15% ownership. So when I when I did our launch accelerator years ago, maybe six years ago, I looked at what Y Combinator was offering and I said, hey, we'll offer to put 25K in your company for 5% when you come, which is my original deal, 25% when you graduate at the market rate like they're doing, because it's safe that they're doing. They still have their standard 125K for 7%. That implies a $1.6 million valuation. which is incredibly low as we talked about on Sunday show. Now you're getting this 12 week program. So other VCs are putting money and don't provide the 12 week program. So the difference, you know, if maybe that was a $6 million valuation, they're getting those other shares for providing the program, for putting their name on the company and for introducing you to investors. And it's well worth it, in my opinion, for a first time founder. If you're a second or third time founder and you've had success, it's obviously not worth it because you could raise or you could fund it yourself. First time founders why combinator text stars want to start it's a gift it's a major gift as an on boarding to kind of get you into the into the. The world really fast that the get you to the rooms where things happen. Three seventy five is on an uncapped note which means it'll if you do a ten million dollar round alone. 3.75%. If you do a 20, they're going to own 2. Whatever, you know, approximately 2%. If you do a hundred million dollar round, which has happened recently, they're going to own nothing, you know, basis points. So got it.

### Human: I think it's sort of a, I think fundamentally it's a false equivalency to say that we're having a conversation about unregulated capitalism. or socialism and nothing in between, right? Like we know that any organism that grows out of control kills you. That's the fundamental, that's what, that's cancer, right? Or like a small tree that gets too big, tears out your foundation. Like you can't have, right? You can't have organisms that grow unchecked. Right. Because they eat everything around them or eventually they get so big that they topple over because competition comes along. Like clearly, as I said to you when we had ramen, I believe in capitalism or I wouldn't be here. Right. But I also think you can and I think you can want capitalism to function better, to have more stakeholders who benefit from it and to have reasonable rules so that it doesn't trample over everything in its path. without being a socialist.### Assistant: I also think there's a chess game going on. This is what I know from behind the scenes, just based on, you know, knowing a lot of the principles behind the scenes, there's like a really high level chess match. And in poker, there's a concept called leveling. But leveling is is you and I are playing poker. And we both know that, you know, this certain betting pattern is indicative of having a very strong hand. So then I know, you know, that you've been playing poker a long time and you've both seen each other do it. So now I'm going to do it knowing, you know, that, but I'm going to do it knowing, you know, that and having a weekend, or I'm going to do it knowing, you know, that knowing that I probably have a weekend, but I, in fact, have a strong hand. And this leveling where you're trying to understand how the person perceives you or the rules of the game is what's happening. So I think Amazon knows Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Holmes, Elizabeth Holmes, Elizabeth Warren, the other Elizabeth I'm very fond of. Anyway, they know that they're, you know, really upset about the stuff and they want a minimum wage. So if you were going to level Bernie Sanders on a $15 minimum wage, Uh federally, how would you do that? Well, you just give everybody 15 an hour Before he was able to pass this legislation Which to be clear is still a sub living wage in most cities in america. Yeah, not all in some cities It's a great wage. Um, and you would give people benefits and well, I mean listen There has to be some entry-level jobs in the world, right? Like there's gotta be some first you know, at a call at a high school or, you know, GED, there has to be some entry level job. So if these are the entry level jobs, and they're $15 an hour, and they're $15 an hour, that's great. You're and you have two people in a household doing it. Or maybe you have two parents and, you know, one of each child and the of each child has no work, but they work at a factory and they can contribute a little bit. Yeah, it's not gonna work in San Francisco, but it's certainly gonna work in Mississippi, you know, or Atlanta or outside of Atlanta. So what's interesting about that leveling wise is they just neutralize their whole debate. So now what is Bernie Sanders? You know, what is their next thing? They're like, well, we need free college. Everybody should get a free education. I've already said it's much better than my Elizabeth Warren. And the one percent I kind of gets a little Russian once in a while to get a little Russian, you know, you don't Jason, you don't need the board to be in front of me. Exactly.

### Human: So right now i'm looking at my card. I have to sign up while we're talking and i said you know what i just bought ski gloves and goggles but i'm always losing them or forgetting them and i was like wow fifty dollars for really good goggles and like fifty bucks for or 30 bucks for men's ski gloves. I was like for 80 bucks. I mean, I spent 400 on those two things, those two items, like 200 each for the best ones you could get. And I'm like, for 80 bucks, I can have a backup to these. And then I'm reading the reviews. And they're literally people saying, like, I just spent 200 bucks on these things. And these are better, or as good. That's got to be a great feeling when people are basically saying, hey, these are as good as the ones, you know, that I paid 200 bucks for.### Assistant: In your experience? That's a great point. Um, so do we care? Yeah, I mean, 100%. This is something that I think, like anyone who works in manufacturing should and ought to care very deeply about we have their boots on the ground full time. It's pretty sizable operation now. And we don't just work with manufacturers in China. To be clear, we have a lot in Europe, a lot in the States. And We try to diversify from just a risk perspective. But generally speaking, I think what we care about most is finding the right partner for the category to work with. And that includes a number of audits. And also, it requires them to buy into trusting us as a distribution channel, really. We think of ourselves as a private label as a service for a lot of these manufacturers. And so we go into every single one. We audit every single one. 50 points ranging from labor quality, cleanliness, sustainability, craftsmanship, so on and so forth. We review the certifications, like you said, certifications are kind of interesting, because they can be viewed in one way as in a vacuum, which is just like, hey, company certified by UL or ISO or SGS or whatever it is. And that means they did a good job. But also you have to realize certifications can be bought and they can also... You have to pay a fee to apply. And you can prepare your entire factory to look good that day when that agent comes in and does the audit. So it's not always... It's helpful. I think people who... The manufacturers who care about it do get those ISOs and no ecotechs and so on and so forth. But it's not the end-all be-all. An organic is a great example of how that can go wrong in many ways. But I think in the most part, we care a lot about it. But the broader point that you brought up is do the customers care? In reality, I think they want to know that they are shopping from a good place. I think if we look at our own supply chain, and we put a lot of money behind our words, but at the same time, there's a reason why the biggest fashion companies in the world are fast fashion brands. People want a decent quality product at a really, really low price. And do they care about the manufacturing standards or ethics? Probably not. And you can make that argument pretty much in any single category. So I really think it comes down to the companies' diligence, the manufacturing supply chain, more so than the consumer. Because ultimately, we know by now, customers don't actually purchase directly against those boundaries. So it's a really tricky one. I can tell you with really a high degree of confidence, most customers do not care where a Nike product was made or where an Apple product was made. They care that they're getting a Nike logo on the brand or they're getting an iPhone. So it's tricky.

### Human: Anthology kind of, I think, thinks similar to you in the way that like banks are not doing so hot right now and they seem to be broken because although we weren't able to like hear anything that he was talking about during his discussion where he wore the slides, some Twitter users posted some of his key topics, which included banks are insolvent in the US. Bitcoin is going to go to 1 million in 90 days. He converted 99% of his net worth to Bitcoin. Oh, there it is. Yeah. which was tweeted. We can't confirm that though. We weren't there. This is by crypto underscore McKenna. Um, and her profile picture or their profile picture is a statue.### Assistant: Um, he also predicted that a civil us civil war is going to happen because it's dramatic or are we headed for, I would say if you were looking at this and you wanted to say that there are venture capitalists who are catastrophists, if you were to use that word, catastrophists, this would be truly catastrophizing. Most banks are insolvent. And the civil US civil war is about to happen. Now, if you were to look at reality and say, well, what is Balaji's point here? What if you were to steel man, his argument January six, certainly look like a civil war to me, you know, a microcosm of one Trump being arrested on Tuesday, tomorrow reportedly, um, for the hush money payments, uh, in that case, like, could that trigger some sort of, uh, civil war? I don't know, like civil war, the entire country goes to war. But it's certainly there's division. So going from division to civil war, that's a big jump. But you could see that the country is more divided now than it feels like it's been in our lifetime. BTC going to 1 million. That's him talking his book because he's 99% in BTC, hyperinflation imminent. I don't know if hyperinflation is imminent. Some people believe deflation is going to happen. Because people are gonna have no money to spend. So if people have run through, this is what smart people are telling me, people have run through their savings. consumers in the United States are in debt. And people are kicking on austerity measures, as I've talked about, like 2022 and 2023 being years of austerity. People are reducing their spend, you know, doing staycations, you know, not yoloing NFTs, etc. So, you know, he could be wrong on all of these counts, BTC might be trading for less than 90 days, most banks will be bailed out. High deflation could happen. And a US civil war will be averted because some new candidate comes out and says, let's stop fighting with each other. Let's balance the budget and solve these problems. I actually think I'll take the other side of this. I think most banks will be bailed out. I think BTC will be trading plus or minus 10% of where it is now. And let's just put a pin in this so that we can actually check back in 90 days. Producers put this on your calendar. I believe most banks will be bailed out. Two or three will be insolvent. btc will be trading plus or minus 10% in 90 days. hyperflation will not happen. If anything, we'll see some deflation. And I believe biology will convert from 99% of his net worth in btc to a lower percentage. And I guarantee you that a civil war does not happen this year.

### Human: There are only degrees of poorly that you can do. Airbnb nailed it. I maintain forever. Airbnb did it perfectly at the beginning of the pandemic, but yes.### Assistant: So you can, you know, nobody's complaining about the severance packages and all these TikTok videos and everything, people are like, oh my god, this is incredible, the severance. So great job there. But you do have to take people's access off. There seems to be some consensus in HR that like, you can't let people back into the building, you have to do it on Friday, you got to do it at like, whatever time, so that you don't have the office, God forbid, some office violence occurs, or some sabotage occurs. There seems to be some legal insurance best practice that's now been established that it has to be swift. And there is no goodbyes, there is no goodbye party, unless people self organize it, there's no hanging around the office, which is different than Google did in the past, when they did their last like little quiet riff, they had said, you know, you have like 60 days to find another job. So go explore other jobs. In this case, they were just sort of cutthroat about it. If you're a small business owner or you manage hiring at your company, you know that success in 2023 all depends on the team members that you surround yourself with. That's obvious. And this is why you have to check out LinkedIn jobs. With LinkedIn jobs, you can hire qualified candidates more efficiently. You know, they match open roles with the people who have the skills, values, and experience that you're looking for. LinkedIn has now, wait for it, 875 million members and they are the most qualified people at every level of employment. And if you have a strong following like me, you can add that purple hiring frame to your LinkedIn profile to spread the word that you're hiring. Watch how much inbound you get. It happens so quickly. We love their easy to use tools, screening questions that filters out the non-serious candidates. It's so simple. The most qualified people in the world are on LinkedIn and a bunch of them are looking for opportunities right now. So go find amazing candidates today. In 2023, you want to fill your team with amazing candidates you find on LinkedIn jobs because you need to be lean and mean. And that's exactly what we did at launch. We found some of our best team members on LinkedIn. Here's your call to action. LinkedIn Jobs helps you find qualified candidates you want to talk to and helps you do that faster. So post your job for free at linkedin.com slash twist. That's linkedin.com slash TWIST to post your first job listing free. Of course, terms and conditions do apply. But there's a cognitive dissonance here between why is a company that's so wildly profitable with so much cash making these cuts. And that's, I think, what she points out in her next video, which we can play here really quick, which is, why is this happening if they're so profitable?

### Human: No, you're good. I think that's where social comes into comes into play. Okay. For me, I like using Twitter and LinkedIn, I gravitate a lot towards writing. So I mean, obviously, social can include a lot of different things like tik tok. And now there's a lot of short form video. I'm honestly not a big fan of creating content in that medium. I just don't enjoy it. So I focus more on writing. That's part of the reason why I have a newsletter. But that type of content. I like Twitter and LinkedIn. I think LinkedIn right now in terms of organic reach is just absurd. Like it's very, very... Okay. I post on LinkedIn pretty consistently and I like to think my content is good but it's not like... Some of it is not that crazy and just consistently growth just keeps happening week over week and posts keep popping off. So I think if you're starting from scratch, LinkedIn is very promising.### Assistant: Gotcha. So I was just about to say, which one do you prefer? I have actually reached out to the Beehive team. If you know any of them that want to come on, I would love to talk because I'm fascinated by, I don't know if this is necessarily the resurgence of newsletters. I don't want to say that. Maybe this is just because when I was in university, the only newsletter I actually read was Morning Brew. So it's cool seeing Beehive come from the Morning Brew team, but it seems like everybody and their freaking dog is writing a newsletter. I love it. I'm a huge newsletter junkie. I know that's very amazing. That might be a hot take. I know a lot of people are like, you don't need more podcasts on world. We don't need more newsletters. I literally, I have this one platform. I believe it's called just, let me check on Twitter really quickly because I actually just tweeted at them. I used to use this one platform called Feedly, right? Okay. newsletters that I subscribe to, I could categorize in this different like, platform. So it's nice, like not clogging up my inbox, being able to organize them by sector I loved. But it is you have to pay for it monthly. And I was like, I don't know what like, I don't know about that one. So I'm experimenting on different platforms. And the platform I'm using now is called newsletters, but it's spelled kind of weird. And basically, it takes all my newsletters, creates another email address, and I just go to this website. It's basically like a different RSS feed, so it doesn't just jam up my normal inbox, which is already a little bit nuts to organize, I'm sure, for you the same way. So here it is. Newsletters app. Okay, it just has two S's and app, newsletters app, and that is its Twitter name. I highly recommend anybody that's looking to like clean out their inbox to check that out. Something that I've noticed is since like organizing and going through like all my newsletters is I don't think a lot of people are subscribed to some of the newsletters I'm subscribed to because a ton of them are honestly written by my friend. And I think my friends are industry experts. But how can these people scale their newsletters? And one of them I want to shout out, it's called Restaurant Adjacent by my friend Paul. Wonderful newsletter. He spends like, he is going to grad school in Columbia, such a good writer, has literally worked in the restaurant industry like as literally just like a horrible position like in the you know, back in, like, the kitchen where he has, like, horror stories. So curing his, like, perspective on the restaurant industry and, like, the stuff adjacent is so cool. But the newsletter isn't growing. What advice do you have? Sorry for that.

### Human: And then finally, what got you into this, the climate aspect specifically?### Assistant: Oh, easy answer. 2017, we had several hurricanes that hit the Gulf Coast and the Caribbean and South American Southeast. And for the first time, climate wasn't this esoteric concept. It was, hey, my neighbor in college, his family's house collapsed, and the roof collapsed on his grandmother, she lost her life. Or the restaurateur who was a family friend of my father's who had been visiting his restaurant for 20 years, it was completely taken off its foundation. or my friend who moved his all worldly possessions to his family's home in texas and started all in their garage including his new motorcycle and all of a sudden i was underwater and this happened in quick succession i was running my last company so what can we do to help out jj watt from the houston texans was raising this capital to, you know, go towards disaster relief. I had a high school classmate of mine who was on a Texans with JJ and I, you know, I reached out and said, Hey, we've got, we've got an idea. We want to put together kind of a distributed motorcycle ride for charity. And that's really what it was. And we raised thousands of dollars for disaster relief. And at the end of the night of this event, you know, we did an award ceremony and I was standing up on a, on a table, you know, with a mic and did my spiel. And as I was walking off, I, you know, we had just kind of shared with the group how much money we had saved. There was, it was so poignant. It wasn't a moment I was going to forget. It was like, after that company sold, I did a postmortem on the best things that happened in the entirety of my five and a half year adventure with that company. And that's one or two on the list. We had a customer write us a letter saying our product saved his life. I think that probably takes the cake. But I felt so fulfilled. I've been chasing that high ever since. So when the company sold, I said, I need to get into the world of impact. It's just unabashed capitalism is a great thing, but free market capitalism probably doesn't exist. And if I'm going to have my way, my legacy is not going to be how many zeros I have in my bank account. It's going to be the impact that I can help bring forth in this world. I wasn't sure what that was going to take what form. I just knew I wanted to do a climate, generally speaking. So I had some some time to kind of look at the problem. And, and like I said, I was I was out there kind of casually looking for a project I could I could get behind. And then that one random conversation with Dan, and, you know, we came up with the idea. And I just once once I picked it up, I couldn't put it down.

### Human: Exactly. People are fine with mediocre or like good enough.### Assistant: And by the way, little lady, it has to do with your agenda to a woman comes out a little lady's got an idea how Okay, little lady, let me show you how this is run. Yeah, you know, and you know, we try to cultivate here, or at least in the companies I run, is a culture of ambition. You know, I, I was encouraging people to go around the backs of their managers. And if somebody tells you like this company isn't investable, and you believe it is, well, you have my phone number, text me and tell me that your boss made a mistake or some, you know, if you're a researcher or an associate and some managing director, so I would never invest in this, don't even bring it to Jake out. You want to hop the fence, you want to go over their head. I'm here for it. Yeah. By all means, call me on the phone on a Sunday and tell me, you know, Molly got it wrong, or Savino got it wrong, or Jackie got it wrong. We need to fight for this company, please. I'm waiting for that phone call. Yeah, I love it. Yeah. And really, that's that bias for action. We talked about in the blueprint this week on the show. Yeah. And That really is in terms of self destructive behaviors, the number one interesting, not focusing, not focusing, distraction is one way to say it or lack of focus. And then conversely, what makes you succeed is focused relentless focus. Now, on the investor side, do no harm, how do we do no harm? Well, investors need to be clear with what level of service they're going to provide to the founders. And I have been delighted where I've had people tell me, I am a cash investor, If you need some help, you want to talk or have dinner, feel free to call me. But I don't I'm not coming to your office, I'm running your company. There's a limited amount I can do if you're looking for a cash investor. Great. If you're looking for a cash investor, who's going to roll up their sleeves and you know, hire salespeople for you. That's not me. So I always tell people like, I'm not going to do hiring for you. That's not that's not me. I'm not a recruiter. If you want me to, you know, help you close a senior person. Sure, I'll do a phone call or zoom with them or have coffee with them. I've done that before. I did it for the calm guys early on. They were trying to get somebody they're like, Jake, how you're a celebrity in Silicon Valley, would you help us close this top engineer and I did On the program today is Darina Kulia. She is the founder of Open Phone. Welcome to the show, Darina.

### Human: Because no one's looking, literally not paying attention at all. They're just like, we get it for free at the end.### Assistant: You can't see. And then what they started to do is to structure contracting so no one could see. So the first part of it is retail contracting. So what you do is you say, Mr. and Mrs. Pharmacist, you can never communicate price to the patient at the point of sale. Even if you could sell it at a lower price, I don't want you ever to say anything to my customer. And the retailers signed these agreements because they want access to patients. And they said, wow, these carriers are powerful. Let me sign this. And they lost control of the supply chain early on. I want to say retailers probably lost control of the supply chain in early 2000s. And basically, they signed these agreements so a patient could walk in. And remember, the pharmacist can see especially if they're the owner of the pharmacist or a store manager and they have some understanding of acquisition cost, they can get a sense of the buy and the sell side, which is I'm typing in the insurance and the insurance company is telling me to charge for a Torvastatin $65. And they're probably saying, I'd be willing to do this for 17 bucks, but I can't say anything. And so that 25 cents suddenly grew to $5 to $10 to $20. And the optimization, because I do want to make this clear. There's nothing technically illegal about what they're doing. You know, what they're doing is they're publicly traded companies and their fiduciary responsibilities to their shareholders, and they're trying to maximize value within the model that they've created. And so what's interesting is they suddenly said, hmm, I did this on retail. What else could I make more money on? And then you look at things like mail order. Be like, what if I made it mandatory mail? So if you have a script that's over 30 days supply, I'm going to say you must go through my mail order." Now, what did I do in this magic trick? It sounds like, oh, well, and think about it. It's under the guise of, I'm going to do what's right for you. We want patient adherence to be higher. We want to do this, but what they're doing is they're creating the largest pharmacies in the United States. So what's interesting is the largest pharmacies in America by volume aren't necessarily Walgreens or Rite Aid. It's United Healthcare and Express Scripts through Cigna because they have such huge mail, which includes specialty drugs, high cost biologics. And so, what you're doing is you're forcing utilization to your own pharmacy, which gives you now another way to make money, which is on acquisition costs. Remember, the pharmacy has a markup because they're buying the inventory, but now I can make double spread. I can make spread on my inventory because I am the pharmacy. and I can make spread on my customer.

### Human: The most interesting thing I've found is when you push it to become more creative, and you say, give me five more ideas. Give me five ideas that nobody's ever thought of before. Give me 10 ideas that are crazy. You literally use words like this, and it's like, okay, permission granted. Then the genie starts doing your wishes, and you're like, whoa, When you're the founder of a high-growth startup, things can get chaotic. We all know that. You face a ton of questions. You've got problems all day long. And you don't know the answer to everything, especially if it's your first time as a startup founder. But you don't have to face these issues alone. That's where Hampton comes in. Hampton is a highly vetted private community exclusively for founders and CEOs like us. Hampton's mission is to create the most valuable and engaged community for high growth founders. Here's why some Hampton members have already called it life changing. 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And on page two, of like the update to their members, the last like item before like the coffee and donuts or something completely meaningless in their negotiation was, we're asking for a ban of AI to write scripts, to ingest previous scripts and to use it in the future to create derivative works. And then there was like, what the studios said back to them, the studio was like, we will agree their counter was we will agree to do a yearly meeting on new technologies. And I was like, Yeah, you know what you need to do writers, and I just took, I asked it to come up with just for giggles and to, you know, put it on Twitter, I said, Give me like five themes about Biden and five themes about Trump, that a late night writer for a late night talk show, could use to brainstorm jokes. And it was like, yeah, Biden, you know, sometimes makes gaffes, and he loves ice cream. And Trump uses weird words, and he's a narcissist, and he's addicted to Twitter. And I was like, Okay, well, that nailed it. Then I said, Oh, do a Twitter, a Twitter exchange between the two of them. Uh, that's funny. And it started making some and they weren't zingers, like they weren't ready for prime time, but they were good brainstorms. And so I guess the question is like, did you get early access for your Twitter? Because you're hilarious on there. And like, what impact is this going to have on your joking on Twitter?### Assistant: Um, I think, um, I have not, I have not yet vetted, uh, uh, any, any Twitter stuff on, and, you know, Twitter is its own vector of, uh, of, of, uh, you know, kind of landscape right now, but, uh, yeah, on the, on the writer, on the writer's strike thing, here's the thing. I'm actually, uh, uh, super sympathetic to to any demographic that thinks that AI is going to have an impact on their job, simply because it is this foreign technology coming out of nowhere. Nobody wants to feel vulnerable in everything they've learned their whole life. So actually, I'm Like, I totally am, you know, of the view that these are super important conversations. There's not like an obvious thing of like, you know, Silicon Valley is really going to have to, you know, try and avoid the kind of like, like, oh, I, you know. Learn to code. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's just, it's like, it's like, we have to be thoughtful about, about these kinds of, of trends. The reason I'm optimistic is, is just because I think there's still, you know, um, uh, there's, uh, to even your point, like they weren't zingers, like, like, you know, and so, um, so I, I think there's a lot of, of stuff that, that, you know, is, is still in this, like it's novel because it's new. But it is not actually going to really be able to replace the level of creativity that a human has for the vast majority of ways that we actually pay creative people for today. And I think there's kind of a little bit of a divide. I think there's the use case that you'll see from something like mid-journey, which is which is really really compelling images and i think the scenario there is that we just end up having more ubiquitous creativity from so many more people but the experts get even better and the idea generation increases tenfold across the world because now. You can be you know. some random kid in high school and you could be ideating on a new product design that would never have existed in the world, but now you have this AI engine that can help you with that. So I think creativity just explodes because of this. And on more of the professional trade side, I'm just bullish long-term on humans really, really like other humans to create things. And there's some And it's just totally different to imagine going to a movie that AI generated from, you know, something that Quentin Tarantino made. And so I just don't think that our brains are wired to care about, you know, if a human didn't make it and the field is entertainment, I'm skeptical that that's going to replace, you know, what the humans are doing.

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### Human: And not for nothing, you were also navigating an acquisition at that same time, right? Hadn't the Walmart acquisition sort of started while all this was happening?### Assistant: We were at the beginning of a process of raising capital for, you know, raising another round and comparing that to strategic options. And there was an aftershock of that episode, what I would call like a A micro psychotic break, my doctor called it like a mini manic episode that happened in the middle of the deal process with Walmart the following year. We were under LOI, we were negotiating terms. It was six weeks before my wedding. and had a terrifying recurrence that I talk about in the book. Not as bad as the previous year's hospitalization, I wasn't hospitalized, but it was clear that I didn't have the medication dosages right yet. I hadn't developed a sleep hygiene regimen the one that I now have that actually my mom, it's my mom's innovation, which is every morning I send a sleep report of how much I've slapped a screenshot from my Fitbit to my doctor, wife, mom, and sister, because with my bipolar disorder, sleep is such a sign or a trigger. As sleep is getting lower, that means I'm ascending up in mood. As sleep goes up, that means I'm becoming depressive. My doctor says there's two kinds of depression, can't sleep and can't get out of bed. I'm the can't get out of bed varietal. So I still was on the journey of figuring out the mental health hygiene routine. The ramifications of that mini episode, it was a very destabilizing time and I shudder to think of what might have happened. And I don't think there would have been any recovering. If that episode had been more severe, if I'd been hospitalized, it would have been confusing because we were like negotiating the deal. Where did Andy go? And I was weeks away from getting married. So I was so frickin lucky to get through this whole thing. You know, to end up professionally with a great outcome for the company and a great owner, the financial outcome for all the shareholders. The fact that I was able to marry the love of my life who saw me through it, that she stuck with it, that I was able to get healthy. There are all these vectors of good luck that I don't think most people are fortunate to have that confluence of things. And that was part of why I felt so fraudulent. Just a couple years later, there was this Architectural Digest piece on my wife and me and the beautiful wife and son and the beautiful apartment. And I felt like such a fraud. I was like, this is just not the story. This is a airbrushed, photoshopped BS slice of my life that isn't even my life. And that's where I was like, all right, I'm selling this book. I need to tell the real story because the real story is so much more interesting and nuanced and textured and I hope ultimately more powerful and more redemptive and more inspiring for people on their own journeys with this stuff.

### Human: Yeah, 10 years.### Assistant: I'm, I really struggle with and you know, there's context and the subtlety of this is important. I mean, we're we're going to have to as a society as we resolve issues that are valid, of people being diminished, demoralized, attacked, we're going to just have to put some things in context. And it feels like, you know, you have, you don't have people walking out of Netflix because of Dave Chappelle, right? Like, are people quitting Netflix because Dave Chappelle said something? Okay, no, Netflix. But in Apple, an employee who you know, wrote something that is offensive, but nowhere near as offensive as what, you know, Chappelle says in an average show, or I wouldn't say even offensive, you know, you know, straight up, you know, challenging, triggering, whatever, like, there's gonna have to be some nuance here. And then we're also having TV shows, songs, and podcasts that, you know, Spotify and others, Netflix and Hulu are putting warnings in front of or otherwise taking off their services. And yeah, some context here would be better. He's going to have a heck of a lawsuit. I think he could sue them for five year, a five year settlement. And because he did. It's he's a published author with the New York Times bestseller. If they offered him and you know, he's the kind of guy who would get a job for 250 to $500,000. This is going to damage his way more than that. Okay, 500 to a million. He's literally is one of the world's million dollar, let's just I'm gonna put it at 500,000. Okay, but I'm gonna take a ballpark number 500,000 plus 500,000 rsus total comp a million dollars a year. He's now unemployable. They have destroyed his reputation by doing this. Yep. And now some people might argue he destroyed it. But these quotes were out there. We just played a clip of Kara Swisher, I believe at a live event, talking about this. So because Apple, I this is all just coming together in my head here, because Apple didn't do their diligence, or didn't think the employees would have this reaction. And because they gave to the employees, they have destroyed Antonio's ability to do commerce in the world, they will be responsible I think any it was Yeah, that was a clip from the Rico decode podcast in 2016. Shout out to Kara Swisher, for not suing me and Jeff Banger for not suing me for using it. I think it's fair use. That's fair. Anyway, I think your free publicity. Exactly. I think he was I think a lawyer would be able to argue successfully in court that they damaged his career and would be responsible for his salary for the next 20 years.

### Human: Great. It's interesting to his meetings. I mean, this is, I think this is addition by subtraction in the best possible way because the way that you get to efficiency is a hundred percent about figuring about editing yeah And he said, you know, it was quoted as saying the best thing founders can do is subtraction. Everybody knows that they have too many meetings, especially at like at a big company, at a big company. There are so many stupid meetings where at least half the people who are in the meeting don't need to be there. And it's just a time suck. And to take that away means that people don't have to work from six to eight p.m. because they just got back two hours that they were wasting. Like, this is great. This is great management. These kinds of efficiencies are key. And even just saying, like, I try my damnedest to make Friday and no meeting day because or to make it an only internal meeting day, because they're like, you have to make room for work. Timeboxing does that. Timeboxing says these three hours are just for me to literally do the work instead of talk about the work.### Assistant: as you said, in the early part of the show, when we're debating like 2023, like, this is part of the, we have to be more efficient. We got to do more with less. Yeah, we have to get growth back. I'm going to basically you said is I'm paraphrasing, but I'm going to go down swinging. I'm not going to have this anymore. So what all leaders are doing, I started it today with our sales team here this week and started to say, let's do a daily stand up. And over the break, I said, Hey, let's look at this CRM software we're doing. Are we using every feature? So if it's going to take twice as long for a sales team to sell half as much, how do you counter that? Well, you have to make you can make twice as you can make four times as many phone calls. you could be you could make better packages or upsell people for 50% more on their spend, you got to come up with some system to counter a slower market. And this is part of that he's saying, Hey, he downsized the company already. Now he's saying instead of laying people off, what if I were hiring more people? What if I just make everybody 20% more efficient? And what I'm hearing here is more like less reactivity and more work. how much of our jobs are responding to email responding to slacks, as opposed to time boxing and saying, I'm going to spend these two hours finding companies to email to invest in, I'm going to spend these this hour, you know, emailing people to come on the show, I'm gonna spend these four hours making clips that grow the podcast, whatever your businesses, time boxing, and we did a founder university episode on this, we've talked about it ad nauseum on this podcast. Everybody in your organization this week could become 10% more efficient. What that means is, if everybody this week can be 10% more efficient, not adding hours, adding efficiency, you've got a 20 person company, you just hired your next two people, or you didn't have to lay off your last two people. Yeah. So this is what everybody has to do a spree to corpse in a down market, get together and say, in your company, what's slowing us down, endless meetings, look at your calendar. And I did a calendar review in November, December with some folks. And I was like, Wait a second, this important person is doing customer service stuff, when they could be doing phone calls with LPs for fun for much before. Okay, let's, let's get that off of this person's plate and move it on to this person's plate who gets paid a third of what that person gets paid or whatever it is, to, you know, move this stuff around. And, yeah, be more efficient.

### Human: as many VC firms, by the way, do and now our marketing, I saw some firms on Twitter, I don't know if I should name them, but saying, Hey, sure.### Assistant: Okay, so just so we're clear, they did 30 billion in revenue. 300 million would be 1%. 30 million would be 10 basis points, 15 million would be 50 basis points. So Yeah, I think they need to maybe, instead of putting pledging 15 million, I think they need to just say, 12 hour days are the max. Any hours after that you get double time, you get, you know, it's a six day work week, and wages are at a minimum of this amount, and they go up 5% per year. Okay, I would negotiate if I was like, you know, the the public markets here, And then if the people who want to underwrite this also inherit this, so this is an important, this is my hot take on all of this, Nick, is you inherit, I'll go on my little rant here, you know, I won't do this as President Jason, I'll do this as Jason, the fund manager, because I am faced with this right now, raising Launch Fund 4. You can read the deal memo at launch.co slash memo. you inherit the worst behaviors of your partners. And that's a two way street, right? So we've seen this with the NBA with China and Hong Kong, right, Dara Mowry, just giving modest support for the Uyghurs and or for the people of Hong Kong, rather another situation. And we're seeing it now very acutely with Saudi. and the kingdom kingdom is doing what they're doing in golf, with live golf, we're seeing with VC funds, the Saudi investment corporation and other folks are listing their VC funds. So now if they list like they listed David Sachs craft there, and other folks. Now, every time David talks about international relations, somebody can bring up well, you have Saudi money. So if another Khashoggi, God forbid happens, then everybody who's taken money from the Saudi government has to answer for the Saudi government's worst moment, just like Americans, when we have something happen. Like let's say George Floyd, when I travel internationally, people will bring up George Floyd, they'll bring up the BLM riots, they'll bring up January 6. And does that mean you shouldn't do business? Should people not do business with our fund launch as an investment fund because of what happened on January 6? Well, I'm not the government, but I am, you know, operating here in the United States. But if you took money from the US government, yeah, you might have to address that situation. So the easiest thing to do, Nick, is just not take the money, right, then you can just have the high ground, I don't need to take the money. So I didn't take money from China, I didn't take money from the Saudi government. And, you know, end of story.

### Human: And I believe the best is that you're not going anywhere that you're not gonna, I mean, you're certainly not going anywhere at that level of investment. And then Nick makes the point, I think, and this is true. If Uber ends up breakeven on a net basis before the end of 2022, and shows a net profit early in 2023, and is trading at less than two times revenue. Yeah, this is not buying advice, but yeah, it could be it could be the setup.### Assistant: And so I think this is where, you know, the market and all this, you know, headwinds that we talked about. Now you have to make changes. And this is where layoffs can become a contagion. And I mentioned this over the weekend, right, right, right. You started to see people like fast.co go out of business, right? There was no time to do the layoffs, they waited too long, they should have cut the company in half or by two thirds, and still stayed in the game, they didn't. And then you see cameo laid off on deck laid off who else laid off a number of other companies have started the layoffs. Oh, I did a little thing here. Well, we know better had their own problems. Robin Hood laid off. So you're starting to see when you see layoffs in the 10% or greater, they're significant 5% a reorg. 5% means nothing. But 10% unless it's a huge number, like, you know, googling or 5% might be a very real number, but would be a company with 1000 people laying off 50. That's a reorg, you're supposed to cut the bottom 50 performers, according to jack. Well, when you see 10%, when you see 25%, that means we want to extend our runway by x number of months, we want to show profitability, etc. And so we're going to start seeing those signs. Now, this gives every CEO and every board cover to do the layoffs. Now you got cover to do layoffs, you consider them like reorgs, in some cases, because you know, you're not getting rid of the top performers, you're obviously going to start with the least least performance, there's 510%. You cut from any company, you don't do it for cultural reasons, typically. But if you have the opportunity to cut 10%, you're going to do it as a CEO. And so now everybody's doing it. Now the next phase happens, Molly, which is, if you don't do it, and it's a recession, then people start wondering, why aren't you doing And then that puts a unique, interesting pressure on the CEO. The CEO and the management team have to go to their board, they have to then think, even to their own teams, and to their shareholders, hey, the reason we're not laying off is because we are throwing off this amount of cash flow, free cash flow every month, we're profitable, and we want to hire more people, which is what Google did through the recession, they were hiring people during the Great Recession, because they were massively profitable. Anyway, it's this is the this is what the summer is going to be every company is going to do a layoff or a reorg cut 5% unless they have a really strong thesis of why they wouldn't

### Human: Yeah, so like you said, it's an insane bet between Bitcoin and the US dollar. And the bet is that Bitcoin will hit 1 million in 90 days by June 17. And the bet all started like on Twitter, which has been really cool to watch in real time, where a user named James Medlock tweeted the following on March 16. all but anyone $1,000,000 that the US does not enter hyperinflation. Anthology accepted the deal and stipulated the terms over on Twitter. Under the proposed terms, if Bitcoin's price does not hit $1,000,000 by June 17th, James Medlock will be winning $1,000,000 worth of USDC and one Bitcoin. And for reference, Bitcoin is trading at about $28,000 right now. If Bitcoin does hit 1 million in 90 days, Bology can keep the one Bitcoin and the one million in USDC. And Jason, can you kind of explain this bet a little bit more for us?### Assistant: All right so he's betting that bitcoin will hit a million dollars and so it's at and i think at the time he did this maybe was at 25 it's at 28k right now so he's basically saying it's going to hit that by then if not you get a million dollars and so why would you make a bet like this well it trended right and what he's saying is there'll be hyperinflation and that everybody will run to Bitcoin as a safe haven. And if there's hyperinflation, your dollars become worth less, etc. And so when you print up you print a lot of dollars, two or three times the amount, then you're going to have inflation. Everybody saw that coming during COVID. Remember, everybody was dropping money from the sky. You know, here's payroll, here's extended unemployment, here's stimulus checks, stimmy checks, all of that money dropped onto the economy was to save the economy when the economy was shut down because everybody had to quarantine in place. Obviously, that's over. People are getting back to work, but all that money still in the system has to be burnt off. that's what caused inflation. Many people correctly predicted that. And then the Fed had to fight to stop inflation, they said it would be transitory, then they were wrong. Then they did this incredibly fast rate hikes, the fastest in history, to try to correct this. So what Balaji is saying here is, there will be more inflation. And so inflation on inflation, I guess, in his mind equals hyperinflation, because now the banks have to be bailed out. So that's the bet he's making. Now, To think that bitcoin would go from twenty five to a million forty times right four times twenty five is a hundred thousand forty times twenty five k is a million. For him to be making that bet you have to say what that's that's that's not gonna happen right in all likelihood that would be a pretty violent run up and not really possible. so what i think he's doing here is i would guess biology has a very large bitcoin position and there is nothing by the way illegal about this there is nothing unethical about this you can make a grandstanding bet i would put this as a you know grandstanding bet So he has let's say a thousand bitcoins a thousand bitcoins would be worth at twenty five thousand twenty five million dollars that means. If bitcoin were to increase by one percent that would be two hundred fifty k if it increased by four percent that would be. million dollars. Yeah. If the price of Bitcoin goes up 4% because of his crazy bet, and this, I'll call it a grandstanding bet, you know, like a trending bet, something that takes over Twitter. He only needs to see Bitcoin go up 4% to cover the loss from the bet. Anything above 4% increase, he is profit for his Bitcoin holdings. Does that make sense?

### Human: Oh, yeah, it's great to be Jake.### Assistant: I did take lessons, you know, I did it twice. You got, like, a trainer? I was on Necker Island twice. And a friend of mine had rented it for his birthday, and I was lucky enough to go. It's quite nice. And I did kiteboarding both times. And the same thing happened both times. first day, I get out there, I learned how to use the kite, you have to be on the first day you're on the sand, just learning how to use the kite, because kiteboarding is like two things, you got to board, so you got to kind of learn how to surf, basically. And then you have to learn how to hold a kite. And when I say kite, I mean parachute. And the kite in when it's windy will literally pull you into the air 100 feet if you screw up. So it's incredibly dangerous. And the way the kite works is if you pull down on that bar, the kite gets more taut and catches the wind and you go flying. If you let go, then it loosens the tautness of the strings and the kite just falls to the ground and you don't go flying. everything in your system tells you to do the reverse, right? And now you're 20 feet in the air. That's why they have like the instructor attaches themselves to you and they have their hands on the bar, whatever. Then day two, you learn to drag yourself in the water. And then maybe someday afternoon, day two or three, you put the board on and you try to get up on the board. both days, the wind died that both times I did it, the wind died on the second day, I couldn't get to, you know, the promised land, except for one time, I got out on the water, and I got up on the board. And for six or seven seconds, it was the most magical experience like, in sports I might have ever had, where it's just all of a sudden, you're you're flying. And you've got the board, you got the parachute perfectly angled. And then the board lifts. And you're just skimming across it. I mean, you're you're going fast. I mean, it might only be 20 miles an hour, but it feels like you're going 100. That's so fast. And it was pretty great. And so there are places here in the Bay Area, like literally right in the bay between Oakland SFO airport, and then there's one in the east, if you go towards Sacramento, so I had an instructor from Florida reach out and he said, Listen, I'm a big fan of the show. I'm, I'm a kiteboard instructor, you tell me where I'll be there, free of charge, I'll be your personal instructor. And I was like, Wow, that's pretty great to be Jake.

### Human: It really has to write and now even the fact that they're doing a freeze, but warning of cuts is the same thing all you're doing. And this is this gets to Gurley's other point, right? He was like, I don't like a 10% cut because you don't save enough money. to make it worthwhile. And this is the important second part, you incur a morale. Yes, a morale hit that is unnecessary, and you didn't even get anything good out of it. This is just destroying morale internally. And you got to think at Facebook, your options are worth, what are we at half now, what they were last year, maybe less. And so your options are worth nothing. You're constantly under threat that you're going to be laid off. It's like living on the Dread Pirate Roberts ship, like I'll most likely kill you in the morning. You're not doing your best work. It's amazing that they managed to put out the like the auto generate the unicorns thing, because you got to feel like they're not that stoked about working there right now.### Assistant: perhaps it could be, which is a big question is at places where they have so much cash, they don't have to worry about this. Will they take the medicine because they want earnings to look good, right? So here's what's happening. You look at a company like Apple, you look at a company like Google, look at a company like Facebook, they have tons of cash. this is not going to save so much cash that they couldn't weather the storm. They have so much cash, they could weather it. So why would they do it? Well, if they perceive headwinds against the top line, right, people gonna spend a little less on advertising or advertising growth is going to slow. Well, if they get those headwinds, then what they expected their top line revenue instead of it being 12 billion, this quarter is going to be 11.5. Okay, great. So now we let go we cut billion dollars in expenses from employees and a billion dollars of marketing expenses, a billion dollars of whatever expenses offices. Okay, now we're going to be negative 500 million per quarter in expenses, therefore, the earnings stay the same, or maybe even the earnings improve. Yeah. So if your top line growth slows, how do you keep people buying your stock? How do you keep your stock at a certain price? You make the earnings look good. How do you make the earnings look good? You got to cut costs. So that's what's happening here is they're not making these because they fear they're running out of money or they don't want the employees or they don't want the resources the employees provide. They're like, you know what, we cut 10% we cut 20% everything's more efficient as we had in the gospel according to Bill Gurley on Tuesday. Yeah, the gospel told us like, do a riff like and it has to be significant. So you can actually get a benefit. Yeah, you got to get the benefit. So this is the beginning and you know, they I don't know why Sundar and Zucker so genteel about this, but they've taken six months to warn their employees and terrorize them. Oh, everybody's got to work harder, we got to perform better, we got to be more conscious of expenses. So like, hey, guys, make the goddamn cuts and stop torturing people about it. Like, if you're going to do the riff, just tell every manager you've cut your bottom 1.5 people. So you got to cut 15% you got a 200 person team, 30 people got to go, you know what you're doing, you run your department, you have to wake up every day and hit your goals, hit your goals, or better. with 15% less people, let me know who were letting go. That's it. It's been six months of this.

### Human: So if I'm reading correctly, freedom in the United States, entrepreneurship, in us being on the same page here in America, so that we can lead the West is a key component of this, which means we have to get past this insane bickering we have over minor things, or things that, you know, Dave Chappelle special, we could have a debate on it, or Trump and you know, the Russian hacks. But essentially, we need to level up the discussion here and to start thinking about the freedom of humanity here, and which side is going to win. there is an evil there is authoritarians. There is no just there should be no debate that North Korea, Iran, Russia, and China are not the society that humans should have to live under. And the better operating system is democracy in the West.### Assistant: Well, I'm very happy that you use the word victory because I think part of the issue is that we've been a little bit too hesitant to use clear, you know, plain language of victory and defeat, you know, in this geopolitical struggle. But I think it's, you know, unless we have a certain level of strategic clarity about the fact that know, this is a war, even if it's not yet a hot war, and there will be a winner and there will be a loser, just like there was during the Cold War. And we should do everything we can to be the winner. I don't think we're going to marshal the will and national unity and resources to actually rise to the challenge. I think to answer your question, I'm actually pretty bullish on our ability to rise to the challenge, and I'm happy to explain why. But I think that there has been a lot of people in the foreign policy community that have been in denial for a long time. And once they stopped being in denial, they moved very quickly to a state of despair. And I think part of that despair has been fueled by this notion. It's a population argument. It's the idea that China just has such a big population that if they have a GDP per capita the size of the US, their economy is going to be so massive that we just can't do anything. They're unstoppable, they're too big. But I think that what that argument overlooks and ignores is the power of ideas and human nature and that Yeah, they have a lot of people. But at the end of the day, you see Xi Jinping, just like a lot of other dictators surround themselves with airplanes and masses of armed men and tanks. And they talk tough and play tough, but they are absolutely terrified of words and thoughts, of words spoken abroad and thoughts stirring at home. And I think that is an incredible display of weakness on their part, that is their Achilles heel. and it's a representation of the fact that their system, at the end of the day, is not on the side of people's basic human instincts and legitimate desire to want to express freely their thoughts. And that is why we should feel confident about the fact that we, at the end of the day, are on the right side. There is a right and wrong in the world, and we're on the right side of history on this issue. And I think that with respect to our odds, I think we could win it, but I think we can lose. And I don't think we should be overly confident. I think we have agency, it's going to be a close contest. And I think we have agency to influence how events unfold. And I would obviously encourage Congress and our tech executives to take a lot of really urgent steps to collaborate much, much more closely, but also deal with this at a philosophical level, with the same urgency that they would in an actual war.

### Human: It's crazy. I know. And then it leads to like strikes in the hospitals, because the nurses that are already there don't get paid that much.### Assistant: I felt like he was benefiting from the system. And then, you know, found another angle to criticize it, whatever, I'm open minded to it. But I do like this idea, though, of what you're saying, you know, if we could get everybody aligned on the important issues is one of the things I you know, I've always tried to do is think from a little more first principles of like, what's the actual issue here. And if you look at the issue of immigration, which we keep talking about here, people keep sending people from Texas to Nantucket or whatever, Martha's Vineyard, like, or, you know, it's such a polarizing discussion, whereas it should just be a numbers based discussion and a logic based discussion. And we should separate it into like the three buckets, as I've talked about many times here. And I think like this script is because I'm looking up the deep canvassing and the first word was scripts. And I started while we're talking while you were talking, I pulled up the script to look at the abortion script I'm looking at right now, like how to talk to people about abortion and choice, or transgender issues. It's actually a really interesting thing. If you could just get people to a basic way of talking about this, which isn't, they want to steal our jobs. You're a racist, right? And that's what the immigration discussion is. And you know, both sides are they keep framing this, and I always talk about framing here is like, the framing should be for immigration is who do we need in America to make this country stronger? And who do we want to let in? Because it's the right moral thing to do, like, and then what can we reasonably how can we reasonably hit those goals in terms of having a plan? If you don't hear any republicans or democrats talk about it that way? What are the what are the what are the positions here that we can't fill that are holding back the country? Okay, we don't have enough nurses. Great. Are we recruiting enough nurses here? Are we making it equitable for people in America to get those nursing jobs? Okay, great checkbox? Yes. anybody in America who wants to be a nurse can get a free education as a nurse and get an ISA. That's actually true today, by the way, any American who wants to be a nurse can get that job and not have to pay for the degree upfront. They can get what's called an income sharing agreement and pay for it after they get the job and the job pays an absurd amount of money. It's so in demand that nurses are making a quarter million dollars a year when they go on tour, like when they will come from Alabama to work at Stanford, I was talking to somebody like they have these rotating nurses that they pay triple. traveling nurses get paid like three or four times the amount.

### Human: The only reason I didn't cancel Netflix the other day is because I started watching this dumb show called The Lincoln Lawyer and I'm going to finish that season. And after that, I'm like, I think I'm out. Quickster, by the way, was the name of the DVD service. They were going to like have Netflix and Quickster with a Q. Q-W-I-K-S-T-E-R.### Assistant: Listen, lots of founders are loosey-goosey with their personal numbers. They put them in company documents, they use them for sales calls, all this stuff. And to make matters even more messy, when you do that, you don't know who's calling. Is it a sales prospect? Is it somebody you're trying to hire? Or is it somebody from your kid's school? I don't know. It could be anybody. It could be an old flame. You don't want to get random calls during your summer barbecue. That's where open phone comes in, they let you create business phone numbers, you just go to their website, open phone.com slash twist, you can create a phone number and account in under a minute, I kid you not. And you give everybody on your team a phone number, then they download an app, and you're done. It really is that simple. You can also do round robin. So we have a general sales call number, and it goes from one person to the next to the next, or you can have everybody's phone ring at the same time, first person to pick it up gets the call. That's the way to do it for customer service. This isn't like the old days, we have to buy a bunch of hardware. No, this is all done in software. And that's why it's so affordable. Open phone has a starting price of just $10 a month. I kid you not. But twist listeners can get 20% off any plan for the first six months by signing up at open phone.com slash twist. If you have an existing number, the ported over for free o p n p h o n e.com slash twist open phone.com slash twist. What is HBO Max cost? I'm that's the other thing I'm curious about. So I'm almost talking myself into Molly right now shorting Netflix. Which I don't even want to bring shorting into JTrading because that's not my vibe. But I'm literally feeling like there is, you know, some hubris going on here with Netflix. And I just want to pull up one chart. And this is what I said on CNBC before Disney Plus even existed. I said Disney Plus is going to catch up and then exceed the number of subscribers as Netflix. I believe that's still going to happen. And here's the chart that proves it. Uh, here we are, you know, like from a cold start to now. Disney plus is 140. Oh my God. 140 million. Like they're literally Disney plus is the T-Rex chasing the Jeep in Netflix's Jeep in Jurassic park. Like this object, you know, appears a hug closer, may it be a closer, whatever that mirror thing is, then it may appear. Yeah. Like, That T-Rex is about to absolutely stomp on Netflix's Jeep. Netflix is screwed. Netflix is 220 million.

### Human: Absolutely. Thanks, everybody. And we will be back on Sunday.### Assistant: Well, you know, awesome. I have to say, I am in a mixed race marriage. And when I was married to somebody who was not a Caucasian, I did see Asian hate up close and personal where my wife and I would go and, I don't know, she'd be talking to somebody in the service industry or whatever, they'd treat her one way. And I'd be like, they would never speak to me that way. They would just diminish her. And then I go down to the front desk and be like, I need a late checkout. Oh, Mr. Calacanis, of course. She's like, you need a late checkout. The person's like, I'm sorry, I'm busy. So I think it is actually for empathy. Yeah. It's interesting, right? I'm seeing in these co-tweets different guys. And there are some weird dudes replying to you about some really weird, all right stuff. And I'm coming at you guys, so be careful out there. Also, I just want to say thanks to all the sponsors who make this show happen. Notion, we use it every day. We love it. Squarespace, the most beautiful websites in the world. Masterclass, making me smarter every day. I'm going to start taking the Steph Curry three-pointing shooting class because I got a basketball court here in Tahoe and I want to get some old man runs in. Imbroker, keeping the insurance tight and right for all my startups. Thorn, keeping us healthy. I got a couple of people in the company And I gifted them a thorn gift card because I just wanted to do something nice for employees. You should do that for your employees as well. Indochino for all my great suits and shirts doing a great job there. Microsoft, they support startups like you wouldn't believe. Masterworks, I'm buying my second fractional ownership of art there, Molly. And of course, Lemon.io. Molly, which one of our startups needs a developer? All of our startups need another developer. Lemon.io is going to help you get that developer. Policy Genius, so you can have life insurance. Vanta, get your SOC 2. Intercom, so you understand your customers and you reply to them in those little chat boxes and you get segmentation, all that good stuff. Bubbles. Bubbles Molly, so you can then... People are pitching on Bubbles now. They're pitching us on Bubbles. Do it. Brave, the greatest browser ever. And of course, iTrust. which gets your crypto IRA tight and right. I'm going to start investing for my IRA and I'm going to put a little crypto in there. You know, I still believe in Bitcoin and Ethereum. I think there's some good stuff out there. All right, everybody. Thanks to those partners. It really means a lot that you're supporting the show.

### Human: On their delis.### Assistant: I mean, listen, you could have a great, well, let me, let me rephrase that because the camera was like, you want to think through that one again. I wanted to talk about bagels and I lost my cameras. So the world is so unfair. FML. Okay. Listen, delis. I was probably out of line saying, here's the way to look at it. Yeah. Some great Amazon basic bagels could take over. And when they do that generic bagel cannot compete with some new local brand in Berkeley boy chick bagels, whatever it is, that makes something absolutely refined and delightful. So it creates another opportunity, which is, I'm not the generic cable, it's some unique cable in the world that does something different, right? And the innovation cycle starts again. But, you know, winning as a country and letting these companies run means I think, allowing them to continue to grow, making them pay taxes, making them pay great wages, right? So there are things we can do, which is the one thing I would argue Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have done well, which is the pressure they put over a sustained period of time on all corporations to, or the country to raise the minimum wage was heard loud and clear by the people who were running hard. They heard it and they were like, huh, These people will keep complaining about us. AOC is complaining this. Okay. What are they complaining about? Oh, how much we pay people? Well, could somebody just run a number here? What if we added four? What if we raised it 30%? Would they shut up? It's like, yeah, they got no choice but to shut up this where they asked for $12, $14, $15 minimum wage. Okay. Pay everybody 18 bucks and shut them up. Oh, they want to pay for a community college. How much would that cost us? Oh, only one out of 20 people are going to do and it's gonna cost a grand. Well, F and do it. And that's actually like, I think, what we're looking at, Molly, I think is a functional democracy and capitalistic society. People are complaining over here. People are taking action over here. Yeah, that's a vibrant debate and democracy at work, or how awareness drives change. So as much as I complain about Senator Karen, I do give her credit for creating a dialogue around minimum wage, creating a dialogue around taxes. And you know what, we've seen people sell some shares and pay a lot of taxes, record taxes have been getting paid the last couple years. And let's talk about like corporate taxes, like the fact that corporations do not have a minimum, and they can play shell games is unacceptable. It's insane. It's insane. Like just come up with a minimum tax. And I'm sorry, like, and no more loopholes.

### Human: Yeah, so about 90% of our acceptances are from Stanford alums. And we do have a 10% of our cohort that we allow from partner institutions, like Harvard, and Berkeley, and UCSD, and then from referrals. Of that 90%, there's about an 8% acceptance rate to get in from the Stanford people who apply.### Assistant: Tell me when we get back from this quick break, how do you select companies for the program and then how do you select companies to be invested in from the separate fund when we get back with Cameron from StartX on This Week in Startups, our Power of Accelerator series. Now more than ever, we need people with the right skills to support our communities, especially the frontline workers who provide resources and care for those most in need. To help, LinkedIn is offering free job posts for healthcare and essential service organizations that need to quickly fill critical roles with the people who help us all. How amazing is that? If you're hiring for one of these organizations, LinkedIn's active community of over 679 million members unbelievable how big it's gotten, can help you find the right people for the frontline fast LinkedIn jobs, screens candidates for the skills and experience you're looking for. And it puts your job post in front of qualified people who meet your requirements. So you can find the right person and you can fill critical roles quickly and properly with a talented person. Here's an example. Takeoffs.io is one of the companies we invested in and they build an AI enabled building materials marketplace. It's a really cool product. And last year, their CEO Chris was trying to hire an AI artificial intelligence engineer lead, which is really difficult. There's a lot of competition for these. It's a very unique skill set. Well, he used LinkedIn jobs to find a perfect candidate after hearing about it here on this week in startups. And he got a candidate with a PhD in computer vision. And that employee has been with them for over a year, and he has rolled out several major projects. So here is your CTA the old call to action when it's time to hire and find the right person. LinkedIn is there to help. Plus, if you need to hire for healthcare or essential services, you can post your job for free. That's awesome. LinkedIn, go to linkedin.com slash power for $50 off your first job post. That's right. linkedin.com slash powers because this is the power of accelerator series. Again, linkedin.com slash power terms and conditions of course apply because they're giving you 50 bucks. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. All right, the founder of Stardex, Cameron Tittleman, is with us again. He was on episode 518 if you want to see his first appearance five years ago. It's getting weird to have a podcast that's 10 years old because we have to go back into the archive to remember when we last had guests on and it was five years ago. A lot has changed in five years. The program has had over 750 attendees, participants, I guess, and 700 investees. How do you pick people for the program? Is it anybody at Stanford can just join or is there an actual process and what percentage of people do get into the program?

### Human: Gosh fifteen percent without even opening your email without just sticking your hand in there this is a couple things you're touching on first of all you articulate this. Budget to actuals build a budget but then also look at your financial results every month your accounting firm should be able to give this to you. And this is how you, like you mentioned a bunch of things, forgetting retainers, buying too much software, paying contractors who aren't doing anything. If you have a tight budget actual process where you review your financial actual results, you will see that in one month, not six months. You can waste so much money by procrastinating and not looking at those actuals because you see it right away. You take and then I think you probably see this. I know for me, the best founders take action. They don't dilly dally around or be of action. Yes. This is the time. And so, that is just so, so important. And then another thing you talked about was messaging to your venture capitalists and seed investors. I see companies, they're happy to send the message out, the monthly email when things are going well. And they drop off the face of the earth when things are not going well. And there's no way… You do this all day long, but how hard is it for you, if you haven't heard from an entrepreneur, to get that once in six months email and then they ask you for help. It's like kind of impossible, right?### Assistant: It really is like being brought in, you know, on the game day, and you're like, help me win the game. And it's like, the game that's starting in four hours. It's like we need to start four weeks or four months ago. To win that game, you needed to practice your shot, you needed to do more push ups, we needed to get your upper body strength, we need to get your sleep right. In four hours, I can only just give you a pep talk. You know, I can I can tell you like, hey, good luck in the game. I think you're awesome. But there's no real change in Here's another great thing, when you act against a plan and you have a plan, everybody who works for you feels a little bit safer, they work a little bit harder, they have a little more clarity, and then your management load goes down. People aren't as anxious, they're not as confused, they have a sense of purpose. And then what happens is, I've seen this all the time, hey, we didn't hit our number, we hit 87% of plan. We didn't hit our top line, but because we spent 42% less because we didn't find these two hires, we actually are ahead on our earnings and our cash is actually a little is 100,000 more than we thought it would be this month or this quarter. And you're like, okay, great. It's sort of like somebody saying like, hey, listen, we didn't hit the 30,000 feet of our cruising altitude. We only hit 20,000. But the good news is we didn't burn as much fuel. So we're in good shape here. We'll get to that 30. We just had some headwinds, right? And now you're having like a really thoughtful discussion with investors. They feel more credibility. They look out across their portfolio. They got 10 companies, let's say. seven of them are, you know, doing just fine, they got plenty of runway, they got three that have challenges, they have enough dry powder, as you talked about before, to save one. Now you're in that, okay, which one deserves to be saved, the credible one, the thoughtful one, the one who sends updates, the one who has a plan, the one who's taking ownership of their performance against the plan. Now's the time to be an adult to be a grown up, there are no more bridge rounds. There are no more plus plus plus rounds. There's no more. Find another new seed fund that's on their first fund who you can tell a great story to and they give you a 500k and they don't even on an uncapped note. These days are over. You got to be focused. You got to have financial discipline, period, full stop.

### Human: I think what I love about that too, is that it's a zag, right? Everybody's zigging to early stage, everybody, you see Tiger taking these mass like, because it is hard on a relative basis, to make back enough money on a massive investment to get what your investors want. And it's easier in some ways to do it early stage. So everybody's zigging early stage. And you're basically like, let's zag to the middle to mid stage, which and you know, a version of growth, which I think is is brilliant, because so many startups are going to all of a sudden, I think come out of early stage, and there's going to be a trough. Certainly, I've been talking to climate tech investors about this, how there's like, a little bit of a trough between you can have a million dollars and you can have $50 million. And right in the middle is where there's like a little bit of a death zone. Yeah.### Assistant: And so great place to be over there. Well, if you think about it, like being taking a head coaching position in the NBA, you know, if there's a team that's, you know, in the seventh or eighth seed, they got some draft picks, they got cap space. they got to the first, you know, they got to the playoffs for the first time. It's like, huh, well, there's an intriguing prospect. Like they did some things to get there. They're not there yet. They're not a championship team yet. But maybe we coming in could help make them a championship team. Yeah. So in that analogy, I think looking at looking for companies that it's not a clear winner yet. But they're showing signs of being a winner. So let me explain what that means. They doubled their revenue. they added a couple of good executives, but they need to add more executives and they need to triple their revenue. Okay. tripling is going to be really hard, but you're already doubling. It's not that much more. So okay. And oh, you got two good executives and need three more. Okay, how'd you get the last two? Oh, you worked your ass off to get them. I wonder how we're gonna get the next three. All right, you're gonna have to work your ass off to convince people. Okay, so we're gonna have to work harder. And you need a little bit more resources to work harder to and work smarter. Great. Could be a great investment. So if launch way of saying if you're out there, and you went from 500k to a million in revenue this year, and your other VCs are saying no, we might say maybe, you know, let's figure out, you know, if you have a way to do better than doubling your revenue, you know, you have a you have a strategy that you think could work. Yeah, sometimes it's just stopping doing something that's not working. A lot of times I'll see a company with like, they got four projects going on. I just had this conversation over the weekend with a founder I love. And they've got four business models they're pursuing. And things are growing, but none of them are, you know, it's kind of stalling a little bit. And I was like, If you can only do one thing, I did the Frank Slootman one thing, what's the one thing and they were like this marketing channel and I was like, You want to make a plan for taking all the budget of these three other things, and then putting it in the one thing? They're like, we didn't think about that. I was like, yeah, I know. That's why Slootman is, you know, Snowflake is doing so good. So I just, I did, I pulled the sloot.

### Human: And so you you finish that tweet for those who are not watching by saying that RSU is basically obfuscate or hide what is effectively salary inflation, because like you said, they're just cash. So it as so this sort of argues generally for what we've heard a lot lately, which is a return to austerity. But you're pointing out that stock based comp is maybe not needs to be a bigger part of that conversation.### Assistant: Yeah, I mean, so I think I think context setting, you know, I think a lot of people look at this year where, you know, the stock market's down a lot, it's been a tough year for venture, and they they think that it's an aberration. But really, this is normalization. Right. The aberration was 2020 and 2021 when the cost of money was free, when helicopter money was spraying out of Congress. And so what happens during that moment, you know, we've talked a lot about the age of excess, right, is that people start using proxies, Molly, for valuation that get further and further away from the truth. So over the course of the last 18 months, we've heard a lot about multiples of revenue. Right. Multiples of revenue for software companies, multiples of revenue for Internet companies. But what we have to remember is multiple of revenue or multiple of EBITDA is just a proxy for distributable free cash flow sometime in the future. Ultimately, this all boils down to I'm giving you money. How much can I get back in the future in terms of distributable free cash? And so what I was reminded of and tweeted about this morning is that, you know, it's that free cash flow. less stock based compensation, which is another topic I want to hit on today, right, which is something that in a world of free money, everybody largely ignores, because everybody's making money, right? Everything's going up. So you can ignore stock based comp. But ultimately, if we want to know cash on the barrelhead, I own 100% of this business, how much can I take out as a return on my investment every year, you got to look at your free cash flow less what you're paying your employees all in. And I said, that's the new EBITDA. Because forever, we've been talking about EBITDA as kind of this proxy for multiple. And while I said for early stage companies, stock options can be powerful, one of the things I'm really frustrated with and think attention needs to be paid to, and I think, listen, investors have a lot to do with this, is now we're giving established companies that are growing at 10% or 20% RSUs, Restricted Stock Units, to everybody in the company. These are just cash. They're a call option to the upside, but they're cash to the downside, but they come out of the owner's pocket. Right. And so, you know, we have to look at, you know, while stock options may be make sense for early stage companies, it may even make sense for a lot of public companies. You know, if you're giving away 40 billion in our shoes the way Facebook has over the course of the last six years, right, then then shareholders expect and should expect to earn some return.