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Remyx AI 13

### Human: So I'm just, I'm not saying those people are not- Yeah, I mean, to be fair, you shouldn't just sit there being like, I have a super idea like a queen. or whatever. And then like, there's something with someone go do it. There's something in between. There's something between the two statements here.### Assistant: I'm trying to just saying that you have to if you don't know how to, you know, if you don't know how to like literally build your product from scratch and be in the code, don't even bother because that's, I think, not quite what we're the thing that has happened that I noticed is for just for the part of this we can start to startups is during a hot market, you can have three idea people start a company raise a million or 2 million bucks and you're like, okay, yeah, one's, you know, All three, none of them are actually building the product or product expertise. And the market might allow that, that when the market contracts like this, and people really clench up, and they're going to invest in one startup every quarter instead of one a month, the one they'll pick will be the one with the builder founders, and the two they'll pass on will be the one with the idea people. So I'm not saying to journalists, learn to code and trolling them, but learn to code. No, I mean, copywriting is a valid skill. I'm a copywriter myself. But yeah, I also like to mix it up. So just learn those skills if you can. And your chances of or find two people to be your co-founder. That's the other thing is the solo co-founder also is going to become less attractive in this market. Having three co-founders, two of which are builders, one of which is an idea person, right? Could be a better mix. So anyway, just a tip for you. Listen, life insurance, very important and getting it will create massive peace of mind for you, your loved ones. Hey, and when you're a founder or startup employee, peace of mind can be hard to come by. So check out policy genius. It was built to modernize the life insurance industry. It's an insurance marketplace that makes it easy to compare quotes from top companies like AIG and Prudential. And you can do that in just a few clicks. It's really easy to use and it's going to help you find the lowest prices. With PolicyGenius you can find life insurance policies that start at just $17 per month for $500,000 of coverage and PolicyGenius has licensed agents who can help you find options that offer coverage in as little as a week. And this helps avoid unnecessary medical exams. And these agents work for you not the insurance companies plus PolicyGenius doesn't add on extra fees and they won't sell your data to third parties. So here's your call to action. Very simple. Your loved ones deserve a financial safety net. You deserve a smarter way to find and buy it. Head to policygenius.com or click the link in the description to get your free life insurance quotes and see how much you can save. That's policygenius.com Well done.

### Human: this goes back to the axiom of what got you here may not get you there. What gets you to a billion in revenue is having somebody like Stewart and create this incredible family of Slack employees and this mission, but you really need somebody like Jeff or Benny off at Twilio or at Salesforce to then go into that second stage entrepreneur and say, I'm going to build a collection of brands here and i'm going to scale it that way correct yeah i mean it's salesforce the crm product is their slowest growing cloud it's very slow going so if this is the case why hasn't zoom with their massive market cap gone on an acquisition spree i thought zoom would buy slack i thought Zoom plus Slack would be an incredible combination. Am I crazy?### Assistant: Well, first of all, I mean, until you've been acquired, as I have a couple of times until you've been a vice president in a big tech company where I was at Adobe, you don't really get how it works, right? But it takes most companies, this is why the Jeff Lawsons to me, I think are bad RCOs, okay? Most of them, it takes time to build up to big acquisition. I remember in the early days of Adobe Sign, Echo Sign, my last company as a founder, Salesforce wanted to buy us. And they called us up to one market to chat. But Salesforce's market cap was like 4 billion, 5 billion at a time. And they said, we want to buy you, but the most we've ever paid is 16 million. So eight is the highest we can do for you. I said, well, eight, I mean, it's early. I get it. But like we raised three. So eight's not enough. Like I need 30, like even to get out of bed to talk about this. So that was 16. They'd done this, this thing that got them their mobile products and then they built it up. Right. And then, and then, and then their jaws dropped at the, at the MuleSoft or even exact target to something billion to buy email. People thought Mark was crazy. So that's the traditional way. It takes folks time to build up to these big acquisitions. If they don't come from that DNA. You have these crazy CEOs who I love. I love Jeff Lawson. He's one of my favorites. He's like, I don't have time, guys. Like, I need scale tomorrow. And they talk a lot about how, when he looked at SendGrid, he said, look, if I don't buy SendGrid, I'm going to buy something small and put a thousand engineers on it. But I want scale tomorrow. I don't have time. I'm growing 100% at a billion, almost 100% at a billion in revenue. I want to buy scale. But most CEOs can't do that. And I think for Eric, I mean, I know him a little bit, but I've never talked to him about M&A. I don't think it's his mindset. So it takes you a while. It takes you a while. And it often comes out of fear, right? Or Mark seeing that Salesforce CRM would never be big enough. He knew it would never be big enough, right? But I think it's just one of ServiceNow just bought this AI company out of Canada Elementum that raised a couple hundred million. Anyhow, ServiceNow is founded in 2004. That's their biggest acquisition ever. So that's the third biggest cloud company, right? Second biggest enterprise. That's not their DNA, is it?

### Human: He was literally the day We're taping he was on CNBC all morning talking about it explain what that project is one more time. So we all know it### Assistant: It's an easy answer. That's why because white executives have networks that lack diversity. And so you host a party and all of a sudden you have 90 white people at the party and one black person. And then when you go to recruit a black engineer, you're like, God, I can't find a black engineer. Well, no shit. You don't have the network. So it's not a pipeline issue, it's your challenge and my challenge. And that is on us to recognize that the reason we have that challenge is there is systemic racism. The reason venture capital and private equity and technology companies are dominated by white men is because there is systemic racism in the system. It's not an accident that the fifth generation kid from Yale got the job. it's not that he is just way more talented than the black woman from alabama it's just that he's been given every advantage in life and there's some real truth to born on third base so it's on especially the white allies who are in positions of power with networks as big as yours or capital bases or companies to find what are the things that I can do personally. Where do I have power? Where do I have a voice, products, capital, influence to change the game? Because Opportunity is not equally distributed. Talent is. And we know this. So my challenge and one of the things we did early was to say, hey, let's make our board of directors one where when you look at their faces on the screen, you're proud to say you work at that company. You're proud to say our CEO gives a shit. about providing an environment that is diverse, where there is equity and inclusivity is a top priority. And what I have found is that employees want this. I wanted this when I wasn't a C-suite executive. I wanted a place where people were treated fairly, where the company was decidedly anti-racist. And we have a long way to go. I am not taken a victory lap by any stretch. We are not diverse enough, we do not have enough black and brown people in positions of power, but we're taking every step we can with our pay and promotion practices, how we're hiring. I spend as much time and money on this as I do on evaluating our products or hitting our sales goals. My message out to every Every CEO out there is like, you're a CEO, you have influence with your board. If not, they're going to bounce you from the job. So take this opportunity to say, I want our board of directors to be diverse. I don't want five white male venture capitalists on our board. And today, kudos to our friend, Brad Gershner, and to Kinderson Cassidy for launching the board challenge. 42 companies, including SurveyMonkey, committed to putting at least one black Member on the board of directors and I think issues like this and I saw that today.

### Human: So there's some shared resourcing that's different in terms of life science or hardware uh where you might need fabrication machines and y combinator doesn't have to pay for if they have 200 plus companies per cohort and you had two or three desks each you're talking about 500 600 desk facility at 150 square feet a person i mean this becomes a ginormous space### Assistant: Yeah, so I mean, they can basically have their events as they do. It's kind of like a banquet hall. They have, I guess, a Wednesday night dinner or something. They have some super famous person comes in, gives a speech. But it's not that same sense of community that you'd get if it's a 40 or 50 person sort of cohort that's all working together with some help with all the mentors. SOSV has a very different model than most accelerators because we do like, you know we have electrical engineers if it's a hardware thing we have electrical engineers and and design for manufacturing engineers and you know so let's start with that what are the verticals that you are focused on the two biggest ones are life sciences and hardware and those both require specific hardware to be available what's the standard deal is there a standard deal you put a hundred thousand in for five six percent Well, actually, it was interesting when you said that. Most of the deals, if you look at some of the popular deals, they get 5% or 6% for the common for what's considered their intellectual contribution or their networking capabilities or their fundraising capabilities. And then they get, say, that $100,000 or $150,000 note is a convertible note. which then converts at whatever the CLN then converts to later. So if you look at, you know, some popular deal would be say like 6% for common and then $100,000 at a presumed 10 million cap. If you end up raising it a 3 million cap, then that becomes whatever, 3%. So actually even that 6% is not really a 7% deal, which is the 7% deal that you hear about is presuming that all of the startups that come out will get a $10 million valuation, which they never really did. But there was always the prospect that you would. So that's why they said that, because the safe or whatever was set at a $10 million cap, theoretically. But then when you actually get funded, it ends up turning out to be a little bit more than that. So yeah, so we have traditionally, you know, 6% sort of common, and then we have a note, just like the others do. But the note is a little bit more. And so we give the companies, typically in the hardware space, we give them $250,000. And then we give in the life sciences a similar amount. Another difference, I guess, is that we also are very active in following on with our companies. And so it's very, very typical for us to just put the first check is actually only about 25% of the capital that we deploy into all of our accelerated companies. So we save most of the money for follow on checks, which range from a couple hundred thousand to a million and a half or even $2 million.

### Human: Josh found a thrive without Jared. Okay, I know that he was involved. I don't really know.### Assistant: But he was involved and that became a little bit of a back channel amongst venture circles. Because remember, now in the tech industry, I'd say it's 80%. liberal moderates and maybe twenty percent conservatives i'm just painting with a really broad brush here but if you want to do a survey at google order now you go to the venture class i think it's maybe sixty five thirty five. moderates and liberals, putting them into one bucket, and then maybe conservatives would be 25 to 35%, amongst the venture capital class, because they have, obviously, maybe more into finance and less government, less spending, balancing the budget kind of thing. So just a broad brush here. there was this, are we going to ever do a deal with that firm? Because it's got the Kushner name, and people saw Trump is an existential risk, yada, yada, yada. So there was a backchannel Molly of like, how would you would entrepreneurs take money from that firm? Really? Yeah, I mean, it was people felt very scared when Trump got in office. I mean, for good reason, you know, closing the borders and some of the, you know, stuff he did. So that's where this like politics stuff, I think, getting too close to the Trump brand. You know, like, if you're here's the thing about the Trump brand, if you're a nobody, if you're Bannon, if you're I'm just speaking just strictly on a brand affiliation basis. If you're Bannon, if you're Roger Stone, if you're Alex Jones, if you're like some standing next to Trump, who's president that lifts up your image, right? you're Bob Iger being two steps removed, or one step, one step removed here, if you're, you know, anybody who's just good in business, and it kind of became a little bit of a liability, Peter Thiel, another perfect example, right? Like, I think people were like, I'm not going to work with founders fund, because Peter Thiel supported Trump. And I think there are people who would never take money from founders fund for that reason. And I think that's why you saw Thiel kind of not talk about founders fund or do speaking gigs about founders fund for the last six years. Right and then you saw is teal off the facebook board now he announced it i don't know if he is oh yeah i don't know if he's actually so that caused a bit of a problem right peter tales and big brand peter tales really smart peter tells a great investor great executive brilliant person. And like, that was like a big reputation cost in Silicon Valley, I think. And so that that's the only thing I'm talking about here, putting politics aside, you do have to think brand wise, when you're making transitions, what brand you want to be associated with? Absolutely.

### Human: We are here. Thank you so much, Jason and team. I'm pumped to be here with you and Alan as well. And really excited to be on. I'm here.### Assistant: Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. Welcome to another season of Scaling Your Startup. This is season two, episode one of Scaling Your Startup. This is a series that we created. We did season one a couple of years ago. This was an attempt for us to answer all of those questions that we get over and over and over again about how do I grow my startup. You've got a product in market. You've got some customers. You want to grow it. We did a great job, my team and I, in that first, I think, series of doing fundraising and creating a low burn culture, hiring communications, all that good stuff. You can find that all out this week in startups.com. That will have the playlist for not only season one, but also this season, season two. In season two, we decided to up the ante and we've decided that we will invite one or two founders each week and they're going to go through a deck. It's going to be very, very tactical. There will be strategies as well. This is something that a lot of founders learn over time. There's the big picture and the vision of the company. Then there's strategy and then there's tactics. And the idea is the vision doesn't change that often. The strategy changes, but not that frequently. And tactics, well, they can change frequently because certain tactics will work for one company, not for another. A specific marketing or growth tactic might get burned out. A channel might get burnt out or get too expensive. And so you really want to learn a lot of different tactics and be able to deploy them in a coherent strategy. I'll be back at the end of the episode to do Q&A, but today we are really lucky to have two amazing founders from our portfolio share what they've learned. The first up is Craig Zingerlein, and he is one of the best growth instructors in the industry. He teaches a course with us at launch called Growth University, and he spun it out and made his own company. You can go see that company at growthuniversity.io. He'll be joined at the end of each section with Alan Chen. Alan Chen is from a company called FitBod, which you can visit at fitbod.me, F-I-T-B-O-D.me. Alan has the fastest growing startup to ever come out of the launch accelerator. They very quickly got to Eight figures in revenue, maybe in two or three years, he'll explain. As Craig teaches these growth topics, you're going to get to hear from Alan, who has actually put this to work. At the end, we'll do a Q&A, and you can learn how to deploy these tactics in your startup, hopefully, or if you haven't started your company yet or at a big company, it's good to know these tactics as well. Welcome to the program, Craig and Alan. Are you there?

### Human: Look, I think if we can get you to have fun, we prefer it. But at the end of the day, you've got to think about it a couple different ways. Number one, a host-read ad is always going to beat an ad that somebody else writes and inserts into your show. 100% of the time, that's why as we get more dynamic insertion, you'll see bigger premiums for the host-read. Now, when you're doing a host-read, Does it matter if you believe in the product? We know that it doesn't hurt. It's not always a straight line, though, correlating from your passion to the performance. And Bill Burr is like the great case study for that, because he can do an ad where he is insulting the advertiser the whole time, and it will work fantastically well. He does that? I didn't know that.### Assistant: Ohio, but I listen to Howard, but you listen to Howard as a kid. I'm not sure how old you are about 49 I'm Gen X. So you maybe listen to him in the 90s or whatever. And he would listen to a Snapple commercial, and he would belch in the middle of the commercial. He would make a joke about Jackie. And I always try to have a little fun. And what I do, my secret, and you know this, Dan, is we have whitelisted advertising on this podcast, because we were lucky enough to be sold out, and I don't need to make money from it. So I said, I'm only reading ads for things that I feel like I like. And in the early days, I just said, if you wanna be on the podcast, tell me what your product is, I'll go buy it and try it and use it. And I would actually do that, and then I'd say, okay, you're okay to be on. And we turned down so many, I turned down like, I don't wanna mention too many names, but like LifeLock, and then we may have done a short ad with them, or Backblaze, no it wasn't Backblaze, it was some other backup software. Anyway, all my users complained about this backup software, it wasn't Backblaze, I take it back. I can't remember which one it was. But the problem was my users were power users. And they were trying to back up a terabyte. And these things would be like unlimited backup until you got to 100 gigs. And then they would narrow you down to uploading at, you know, five kilobits or some bullshit. And I was like, guys, I can't read your ad. It's just too much blowback. And that really, I think, sort of helped it. Dan, what do you what are your thoughts on the what makes for a sponsor that ad because my secret is I whitelist the advertisers I say no to one in five, maybe two, maybe one in three, I just like yeah, no, I don't want to read that ad. And then I always insist on doing an onboarding call with them. And I say to them up front, do you want me to freestyle the ad? Or do you want me to read the ad? And if you want me to read the ad, I don't think it's gonna work that good. But if you let me freestyle a little bit, like I do for Dell, or I open a crisp course, light or Zen desk, or LinkedIn, whatever it is, Zen desk, you know, we always have a great experience with those advertisers, NetSuite, etc. What what is your best practice for the advertisers with the host read ads? So fun or don't have fun, Dan?

### Human: What do we lose by being remote? What do you think will be the counter? Because there's always a counter swing, right? We talked about getting your Amazon one day a week and Amazon Day versus Amazon Prime in same day or second day. What will be the counterbalance to work from home?### Assistant: So, first of all, even me as a fairly much, you know, I occasionally call myself a Zoom Zionist, in that I believe that this is our natural homeland to work remotely in this way, okay, and that it is our future and our, you know, our entitlement in a sense. The interesting thing there is that even people like me didn't propose that this was a five-day-a-week thing, I think. And it obviously is different meeting people remotely versus who you've never met before versus meeting people remotely who you know. It's not that different. I was talking to Laurie Santos at Yale, who's originally a primatologist, and she was saying it's a surprisingly good, the research seems to indicate it's a surprisingly good approximation of human contact. Because as I said, when I go to a conference and people wanted me to fly, at one stage someone wanted me to fly to Singapore to talk for 20 minutes and then fly home. Yeah. What do you want to smell me? I mean, what the hell's going on here? Right. Okay. That's a terrible use of time and fuel and everything else. And I I think office spaces need to change, but in an unexpected way, and I've been writing about this a bit. They need to become what Nassim would call a barbell, which is two extremes, either highly sociable, coffee shops, meeting rooms, places for accidental or predetermined human co-location and sociability. And then a chunk of it needs to be like a library for people who don't like working from home, but do need to escape. Because I think the modern open plan office is a classic example. In my book, one of my bits of advice is don't solve for the average. Right. And the open plan office is neither sociable, nor it's neither sociability, nor is it solitude. And it creates a halfway house, which is actually the worst of both. And experiments bear this out, which is that when you put people into an open plan office, bizarrely, the volume of face to face conversation goes down. And the volume of electronic communication goes up by something like 60%. By the way, Nobody, as far as I can ever see, has ever done a test on whether email, in fact, improves productivity. Have they? No. We took this technology. We thought it's free and it's instantaneous, so it has to be good. And of course, for the sender, that is good. But for the recipient, it means that your inbox is essentially open to the whole world 24 hours a day. Is that good? It also means that what's important and what's urgent. Have you ever read the Paul Graham thing, maker schedule versus manager schedule? Yes. He's a Brit, I'm proud to say. He's actually a Brit, isn't he? I'm proud to say.

### Human: I'll level with you. I did, too. I've been very down on this whole thing all along. But look, it's a much better version of that movie than the one that they released in theaters years ago.### Assistant: Folks who listen to me know I'm crazy about the Amman Hotel. Why? Because the customer support is second to none. And if you want to think about elite customer service, you need think no further than intercom. And they just launched a fantastic new product. I got to tell you about it. Because It's a connected inbox for your customer support team. So what does this do? Well, it integrates your intercom messenger, you know, that little box you see at the bottom of all the best websites, where you can talk to somebody and get your questions answered and basically be treated like the great customer you are. Well, imagine you took all that feedback that comes through intercom, and then you combined it with email or any other integrated channel, you know, SMS, people like to do the SMS these days for customer service. And it's a real game changer. The layouts beautiful, it's super efficient. And it's going to make your team bionic because the intercom team is just great a product. And they'll make your product better, right? It was kind of makes sense when you think about it's got all the quick keys and all that great stuff. So here's your call to action. If you're an early stage high growth startup, you're probably using intercom already. But if you're not go to bit.ly early stage 22. bit.ly slash early stage 22 you know how bitly urls work bit.ly early stage 22 now where is this going to send you it's going to send you to intercom's early stage academy where they will give you a 95 discount intercom is the goal standard, they want to support you early if you're listening to this week and startups are a startup. And so just go to bit.ly slash early stage 22 and get in on one of the best tools you can use at your startup to delight your customers. It's that simple, folks, or you can just email them because they want to talk to you startups at intercom.io. You don't create an email, startups at intercom.io. If you don't want to talk to startups, they love startups over there. And I got my friend des trainer, he's been on the show 10 times, one of our great guests of all time. He's the guy he's kind of the genius behind all this along with his team. And they just do a great job. So go ahead and check it out. And thanks again to intercom for supporting the show over many years. And most importantly, for supporting all my startups I invest in with this great early stage Academy. All right, first up, though, we've got to talk about what's happening in streaming. Zack Snyder, you know, made filmmaker Snyder cut of the Justice League, which I like the Snyder cut, if I'm being honest, more than the original.

### Human: The math is the math is the math. And I think there's another big piece here. It's just the internet, right? Oh, yeah. I forgot about that one. As you mentioned, Zoom classes aren't working, but there are still benefits to tutoring where children can get access to.### Assistant: That is the weird part is like people get locked into this position that public education needs to be a certain way. Well, if our results are bad, which they are, public education is not doing well in the United States. For some, for some, and we're, but I think overall, on a global perspective, we're paying more than most countries per student in getting less results. So you have to ask yourself, well, if we're spending this much money and getting bad results, it would indicate that you might want to run some experiments and try some different things to increase the performance. And the way we're seem to be locked in this dialogue is you're either like a classist or a racist if you want to try something different. And that, that to me is the major problem here. And I did experience the blowback personally, when I talked about the micro school, which was, you're a racist. And I was like, I'm I have a mixed race family. I mean, my wife is 100% Korean. My kids are half their mixed race. I know that Asians don't count as a minority, even though they are. And even though they're treated poorly and people don't like to think of them like that. I am in a mixed race family, we have faced racism, because of how Asians are treated. Maybe not to the extent brown and black people are. But man, it was just very weird, systematic, like a attack on me for it. And I don't care. But I did find it interesting and wanted to be aware of where those people were coming from. the results of smaller class sizes are undeniable, how undeniable correct? Yes, undeniable. So when we look at micro schools, it's an obvious way if you get rid of overhead, and you have efficiency, which is how we think as founders, yes, well, this just makes more sense. Because for the same price, and this is where the math didn't add up to me. Seven students, let's just take a teacher salary of I don't know. What do you think the average elementary school teacher salary is in the United States? 40 50k. All right, let's go with 50 round number. Okay, 50k. And we know the average student is spending 50k 15k. If you had seven students, seven times seven is 49. Put an eighth in there. Let's let's put it all the way up to 1010 students. That's what 10 instead of 25 in the average class size, you know, you've cut the class size to less than half. And you could pay the teacher more or the teacher could have more resources like an assistant half the time or something. So it's undeniable that we could have half the class size, or maybe a third of the class size for the same price.

### Human: Sure. Yeah. But I mean, my take is that I just don't think that we should feel like being Jewish is a low down dirty deal. There's so many times where somebody sits down next to me on a plane or I walk into a venture capitalist office. They're like, you look like you really enjoy a pastrami sandwich. And I'm like, Oh, yeah. So I get a little fun with it. It works both ways. Um, and I feel especially uncomfortable excoriating the black community because there's some folks there who worry about how society is rigged against them, and sometimes the Jews are always implicated in that. If I were a member of the African American community, I believe in all sorts of conspiracy theories. What's crazy to me is that all the white people believe in conspiracy theories, when a lot of times it's the black people where there really has been a conspiracy to inject him with syphilis or do terrible things to him. And that's just the stuff that's in hiding, not the stuff that's happening in the open. I don't know. Like, I don't know why Kyrie Irving did that crazy thing. And I wish, I wish she would stop doing it, but I'm going to be okay either way. Yeah.### Assistant: Yeah, it's, uh, I like your positive attitude towards it. And I think having the empathy is like big. Yeah. It's easier to, you know, just be upset about it, but to actually have empathy and say, Hey, listen, this other group of people, maybe they also got a raw deal at times. And, you know, maybe we could all heal together and move forward. Uh, and so I hope, I hope that's the direction goes in. It's just hard to see, you know? Um, but listen, you're, A true mensch. You always give me a little bit of time. So much love. Thank you. And thanks for coming on and, you know, just time to grind. So let's do the grind. Time to grind. Thank you, Jason. One year of grinding. It's going to get better, folks. All right. We'll see you all next time. See you in a few months. Alright, maybe there are two or three apps my team can't live without. And one of those is happier, which makes you so much happier. It's a simple, no code way to connect all your apps. You hear the word API all the time, all of the apps out there have APIs, whether it's the Google suite of products, Slack, Shopify, pipe drive, which we use Webflow, all of these Salesforce, they all have an API, but you need to write a recipe. What's a recipe? It's a way for you to make these two ingredients, let's say Slack, let's say Typeform, SurveyMonkey, Zoom work together. We do all these repetitive tasks that a human used to do with Zapier. And they have all these templates, recipes, whatever you want to call them, scripts on the website. So if you start using something like slack, you can go and see what are the most popular recipes, there are all these crazy ideas that you may not have thought of. For example, we have open scouting calm, we ask anybody in the public, hey, tell us what companies you love that we should meet with what we then use a Zapier to trigger a slack notification, which gives the task to somebody to review that application. And then we might pump that into a database. So we have the record that we contacted that founder, the average Zapier user saves $10,000 in recovered time every year. That's why over 1.8 million people in businesses use Zapier. This is your secret weapon. See for yourself by teams at Airtable, Dropbox, HubSpot, Zendesk, Inside.com, Launch, This Week in Startups. Use Zapier every single day. Zapier.com slash twist. Z-A-P-I-E-R.com slash twist. I love this product. Chef's Kiss. 10 out of 10 from J-Cal.

### Human: So I like nearly all of that, but I want to clarify a point on the on the use of chat GPT, because one thing I think a lot about is GitHub Copilot, which is the thing that helps you write code. And what I'm trying to figure out is, are we getting to the point where self driving cars are today in terms of Copilot? Because my my Subaru can stay in the lane, it can tell me when to slow down. It can't do intercity stuff. Okay, fair enough. But it's still really great. So is copilot for GitHub going to be like my car or is it going to be like self-driving autonomous vehicles pretty soon and actually be able to do whole things for me or just assist? And if it's the if it's the whole thing, then I mean, I fire half the staff. But if it's just the help, then you're right. 30% back, everyone's more efficient. But it's not like a sea change. It's more of a acceleration.### Assistant: Yeah, so I think your analogy is correct. We're at level two self driving, where you kind of take two functions away. So I have adaptive cruise control at seven car lengths, three car lengths, like even my backup ice engine suburban that I have in case my Tesla's are, you know, something against the fan, and I need to get out of Dodge with gas because a zombie apocalypse. Sure. that has, it doesn't have lane control, but it does have adaptive cruise control, right. And then you have on your Subaru both. So highway, you're good, you know, like a chance, chance of getting an accident on the highway, if everybody had that is pretty low, and does give you back, it's just less arduous to drive, right? That's what I find is I'm less exhausted. After two or three hour drive to Tahoe. I do think your analogy is correct, except on the low end tasks, it does 100%. So trying to think of the right analogy, highway driving versus city driving, sure. But there's a lot of like, items of research that we do as journalists, or, you know, I was doing a research of LPS, because I'm having my angel summon up in Napa. And I want to say, you know, I'm gonna write some of the big endowments or whatever, see if anybody wants to come and know, I asked her for the large endowments, then I put it in a table, then I said, sort it. And I was like, this is something I'd pay somebody 35 bucks an hour to do, I might use your space for. So I'm paying a subscription, and it's just kind of doing it. And then I playing with the playground on open API. And I'm like, Okay, give me the people at the Ford Foundation, I want the Twitter handles. And then I'm like, you know, what I really want to do is I want to follow them on Twitter. And then I want to follow them on LinkedIn. I want to like a post or I want to dm them or email them. Now I can't do those last two or three things. And that would be the left hand turn into an intersection. Right. But I had 17 developers show me they did it in an hour. When I said, this is the next piece I need to do. They're like, I wrote the code for you already. It's like, it took me an hour. So I, this weekend, I'm going to start playing with some of the dev, you know, sandboxes, and I haven't done development since basic and Pascal and, you know, the 90s. And so I, you know, I, I do think it's gonna go faster than self driving is my long answer to your short question.

### Human: Yeah, I think, first of all, there were multiple deals that I had to pass on last year because I was told that if I wasn't going to be a lead or co-lead, I wasn't entitled to the data room. So that is, yeah. Wow. So that is, to your point, even if you're writing a million, $5 million check, if it's a $40 million round and you're not putting in the most of the money, people were very tentative to share data rooms. And I think that that's a function of the other side of the coin that you just brought up there, which is a lot of people If you actually looked at their data rooms, there wouldn't be a lot in there because they haven't really accomplished much. They would be thin. They'd be super thin. And I think that they would actually, in a lot of instances, if you had to have a structured data room put together for a lot of these companies, it would in fact work in the opposite way that it was intended to, in the sense that you would kind of see the emperor without any clothes. And so I think that in a lot of instances, not only was it because people felt like there was some benefit to being extremely secretive. But I also think that it was because a lot of these companies were raising on promises that aren't necessarily visible through traditional financial diligence means. And so, when you're betting on kind of like the exuberance of the market and the promises of things to come in the future, it honestly doesn't even make sense to have a data room because what would even be in there?### Assistant: Exactly. I mean, there could be a couple of checkmarks, like you've actually incorporated, you have an employee stock option plan, you have IP assignments, these are the things in a, you know, pre launch company that you just want to make sure are in place, right? But you're correct. There's no chart in there. There's no you know, projections in there necessarily the if there were projections, those are future. So you're just making sure you're like actually investing in a company that in that case, just has like their IP assignments and basic legal x's and o's done properly. But this is like really indicative of a hot market when when a founder can turn away money, because they want to look in there. But to your point, what are you gonna see in there? And that to me was the red flag in crypto. Of course, I had many people on my team, my investment team did 57 introductory calls last week, that doesn't count second calls or third call. So just introductory calls 57 in a week, Mr. exits. And so we meet with every we'll meet with anybody, right? We really want to meet a lot of people and kind of put plant a flag, like, hey, we met them, and we'll check in with them later. It was just amazing to me over the last couple of years, the evaluations of crypto companies that didn't have products in market 50, 100, $250 million. And like you're saying, there's, there's no if you were to open the data room that would show no customers by some estimates over 90% of startups will go out of business in year one. That's why Microsoft created the Microsoft for startups founders hub. This program provides founders at any stage with up to six figures in resources. Wait until you hear about this ridiculous list of perks, you're going to get up to $150,000 in Azure credits based on your stage and size, you can get free access to get hubs enterprise tier, technical advice from experts at Azure and Microsoft Cloud, one-to-one mentorship from their mentor network, exclusive benefits and discounts from companies like OpenAI, huh? Very nice. And the best part is there are no fundraising requirements. So unlike others in the industry, the Microsoft for Startup Founders Hub doesn't require startups to be investor-backed or third-party validated to sign up and access benefits. It's truly open to any founder, like it should be. And it's not about who you know, it's about what you're building. So any founder at any stage can get up to six figures of value by signing up at aka.ms slash this week in startups, take a minute to write this down. aka.ms slash this week in startups, no spaces, no dashes, make sure you use that URL so they know you're a fan of the show.

### Human: So the first thing I'll tell you is what it's not. It's not an advertising network. It's not a platform where we scrape data and sell ads against it. We could probably make a lot of revenue if we did that. A lot of the people at Citizen came from those types of businesses and have zero interest in ever building that again. So we are in the process of testing and soon to be launching a subscription service, which is, I'm so excited about this. This is the most powerful personal safety service ever created. Citizen free is amazing, people are getting tremendous value out of it. But there's only so much we can do in a free product. But citizen, I can't even give the name yet. But when this comes out, I think it is going to be an absolutely essential safety service, both for your individual level as well as for families.### Assistant: Yeah, it would seem to me that you would go through each data type, Okay there was a shooting okay there's a fight okay there's a domestic disturbance and you have to think in each situation I was thinking about this with preparing for the interview with you. I went through every possible situation there was no situation where I thought. gosh, you know, people in the community shouldn't know about this or there's some downside to it. Um, and it is, I can only think of upside. And obviously if you're a citizen going into a situation where there is police activity, there's a certain amount of risk to that. And you might buy into that risk. You might not. That's a choice that each citizen gets to make. Right. And if there's a car accident, some people run to the car accident, some people run away. They don't want to be involved in it. Right. And so that, that's a, that's personal choice. Uh, one thing that I'm super curious about, and I think a lot of people are wondering is what's the, what's the business here? How eventually, or how are you making money? When we get back from this final break, I want to know about what is the business of citizen. One of the toughest parts of building a company is choosing which tools and providers to use. You want to pick the best solution for each department to help your employees succeed because they deserve the best. You want them to do well. But there are so many functions in a startup and each space has endless vendors. You got sales tools over here, marketing tools, email tools, accounting, HR, payroll, project management, of course, customer support, the point of sale, e-commerce. It goes on and on. There are so many different pieces that you end up with a Frankenstein of tools, the Frankenstack, in fact, of tools that cost a lot and they don't integrate properly. Well, Odoo is here to change that, O-D-O-O. Odoo is a fully customizable and a fully integrated suite of software products that allow you to build and scale your stack as you build and scale your business. It's simple and modular, so you use what you need and all their apps integrate perfectly with each other. Plus it's open source so you can spend that freshly raised capital on talent instead of expensive software. So here is your call to action. Your first app is free forever. And right now Odoo is offering a $1,000 credit on your first implementation pack. Go to odoo.com slash twist to check it out. That's odoo.com slash T W I S T to get your thousand dollars in credit right now. All right, Andrew frames here from citizen. Go ahead and download citizen if you haven't already. Andrew, what's the business model assistant? How do you make money?

### Human: As a spiritual junkie, how do you deal or reconcile that our business, what you and I do every day, is based on extreme capitalism and extreme wealth creation and financial, aggressive financial betting? How do you reconcile that with, yeah, just the spiritual and namaste side of all this?### Assistant: Well, now we're going to just dump... Let's get deep. You're going to take the red pill and just go down the rabbit hole. Let's do it. Let's go down the rabbit hole, yeah. I mean, this is the essence. So I was raised in a Hindu tradition, which is sort of more of like the Bhagavad Gita tradition, and that's the canonical, even though there's no Bible in Hinduism. But there is a canonical allegorical story called the Bhagavad Gita and the premise of this is that you have the protagonist who has to basically do this thing that they don't really want to do. They have to actually kill their cousins. And then God in the form of a charioteer comes in and gives some advice. I think it's a similar analogy here in the sense that what you're getting at is that how do you live a spiritual existence when you're doing all this crazy capitalism. And the essence is to If you can build, and I think this is actually what the markets teach you as well, is that if you try to chase money, even if you succeed, you fail. So one is that you may not succeed. I think everybody knows that viscerally, where if you put all of your attention on the end and not the means, it tends to not work out. And even if it does work out, it's a shallow end. You really don't get joy. And you can look at, I think this is also, if you want to go down Sand Hill Road and meet with all the venture capitalists who have more money than the top half of the top half of the top half of the top 1% of people in the world, they're not necessarily happier than people who you would see elsewhere. And so I think the essence of this whole entrepreneurial journey, and for you as entrepreneurs, is entrepreneurship is a bifocal exercise. If you just think about the process and you don't think about the end, you'll hurt. But if you think about the end and you don't think about the process, you'll also hurt. And the essence, I mean, I don't want to crystallize Hinduism, but the essence of Hinduism is to be passionate about the process but detached from the results. So, you know, ultimately you want to do something for the sake of doing it because you enjoy it, and then at some level you need to surrender to whatever happens and You know, some things might become Justin TVs, they may become Twitches, and become these huge things, and then other things might become web vans. But the real success lies in if you can make entrepreneurship itself a practice, like meditation, where the very act of doing it is enjoyable, and it's fodder to feed your soul. So, I mean, that's, I think- Let's do it right now.

### Human: So I'm super excited to kick off sustainability Sunday as we're calling it so far. Although Danny knows my secret plan is to eventually transition it to this weekend climate startup. My first guest Here as baby climate investor and co-host of This Week in Startups is Danny Kennedy, chief energy officer at New Energy Nexus. And for those of you who don't know, Danny's already been like a little bit of my guide. He's been my Yoda into the world of covering climate tech and climate solutions, and then also into like making this leap into the investment side. Danny, thanks for being guest number one.### Assistant: He's in Oakland. Oh, perfect. Awesome. So that would be a great collaboration. Maybe he has a great company that we can syndicate at some point. I think he can be some feedstock. Not gonna lie. Well, I mean, that is it is a, as we say in the business, this is a team sport. So when you find a great collaborator, like I have in Sequoia, or with Saks and Chamath and other folks, you all of a sudden just start riffing between other capital allocators about companies they're investing in once we are and how can we collaborate to make them successful. And so that's, that's awesome. I can't wait to hear it. Let's hear the interview. startups need a central hub to store information and collaborate on work more than ever. That's why right now I'm reading this ad read in my notion page where I have this week in startups, all the guest notes, all of the previous episodes, all the ad reads, everything is centralized in notion. as is my entire life at inside.com and my entire life investing in companies. That's why you need to try notion, especially in this new remote world. It's one place for notes, docs, projects and everyday work. It goes well beyond a wiki and When we went fully remote in March of 2020, Notion became our internal knowledge bank. Here is one of my producers going through our pod notes page on Notion, where we highlight the top lessons from past episodes. And we're going to ramp up our pod notes in 2022, so you can look at any episode of This Week in Startups and see all the lessons you can learn. Doing this in Notion is so easy, and they keep releasing new features. It's such a beautiful product. Every team, from engineering to sales, can work together seamlessly. and they have 500 integrated apps, including Google and Slack, you collaborate in real time, and it tailors all the workflows to your needs. Hundreds of 1000s of teams worldwide are already delighting their employees with notion. It's so great to have a right first culture and then everybody feels like things are less chaotic because you're writing important stuff down and not losing all those great ideas for your checklist, etc. They have a worldwide community of millions of people creating templates and tutorials. Now you're going to find incredible templates for everything you're doing, whether it's a podcast or investing or building a product. The product is constantly improving. I can't say enough about notion. I really love the product. go to notion.so and use the promo code twist to get $250 off their annual team plan. It's super affordable. Once again, notion.so and use that promo code twist TWI is T so you get that $250 during checkout. Great job notion. Love the product sincerely.

### Human: Even a lot of the yellow shades, right are risky, but potentially investable. So you could imagine how this would translate into what the Wall Street Journal calls mixed messages. Because it's sort of like, yes, there, there are varying levels of risk, like there always have been, maybe some of the risky areas got a little bit riskier. But they're all still fundamentally investable, maybe just in different ways than they used to be.### Assistant: Now, you get superimposed both sides of the table. You're a founder, you've been working on your company, Molly for seven years, you haven't sold any shares in secondary. Mm hmm. 99% of your net worth is in this 100 million $250 million business that you own 30% of right, you know, 30% of the business, $60 million, it's $300 million, whatever it is, you're looking at this going, Whoa, I need to be careful here, I need to get into like a blue zone here or a green zone, I don't want to be in this red zone. Now, let's say you're a venture capitalist. this is one of your portfolio companies. Let's say you have in your portfolio, you already have a company that's returned your fund. So your fund is now or you got two companies in there that became unicorns. So your funds to x already, but you know, you really need to have a three x fund, right? And you got like five companies who are in this kind of decision making time what do you want to do with those five companies what you want to go for the gold you may very much want them to really swing for the fences and. know, have you have a four or five x fund because man, all that profit just goes to your LPs and to yourself because your fund is in the black. Now your fund is underwater, you haven't returned the cash that you deployed. And it's your first time fund, you're just trying to get to three x, two x, so you can still be a venture capitalist. Right. So this is where a board can get ripped apart. This is where a company can get ripped apart. And from the outside, the press or commentators, of which there are many, and people giving advice of which there are many will get very confounded. Because they're like, why are you doing this? why would you take this kind of risk? And we saw the company fast and bolt fast, right? So the everything what did the fast board do? Like what were they thinking? You know, and they might have been thinking like, okay, well, let's swing for the fences here. If it happens, it happens. And if it doesn't, okay, I get another zero, I know how much I've lost, I lost, I put 10 million, and I lose 10 million. Right. But if I don't want to play this game and be on this board for another five years, Molly, to get back my 10 million. going to put my effort into this. Let's swing for the fences. Yeah, let's turn that 10 into 200 million. And if it's not going to be that I'd rather know now and get off this board.

### Human: But, uh, so what is, I want to go back to David, but let's define that term first. What is J trading?### Assistant: So J trading is the act of learning public market trading from your audience. So this is not investment advice. My goal with J trading is to learn, I have a couple of goals. But number one is to become a top quartile cop 10% public market investor to really understand how to identify lasting companies with great products, great talent, the same way we do in the private markets. Now, why do I want to do that? I believe that one informs the other and that to be that this is kind of like learning PLO if you're a Texas Hold'em player, you learn a new poker game. It's different, but some things are the same. The ranking of the hands is the same, right? Okay, this is, you know, a full house, this is a flush, this is a straight, okay, they have different values. But the frequency of them is different. And there's a lot of nuance. So that's what I'm trying to do is, and if you look at Bill Gurley, he started as a public market analyst, and then did private. If you look at Masayoshi San, and we'll talk about SoftBank today, he does publics, he does privates. So I believe And now you look at Sequoia, our boy Ruloff is now got the Sequoia fund, and they're going to be managing public market equities. I think this is the future. And I have struggled, candidly, with when do I distribute these public shares that are coming in lucky enough to have uber go public desktop metal, Robin Hood, bunch of different things. And should I be selling before they go public in that mezzanine kind of round? Should I be selling when they hit a billion dollars, $10 billion? When should I be selling? When should I be liquidating? When should I be holding? And you know, I have to, you know, do that. And so as a goal, the other goal was to learn from the public, maybe come up with some theories as to what might work, and to just publicly do those and learn from the audience in public. as a goal, I'm going to put a million or $2 million into this, and I'd like to 5x in 10 years. So I set a very aggressive goal, which is what I have done. Or, well, listen, without making any future statements, past statements, let's just say I've had funds that have been in the top, top, top, top. That's what you expect from your private market investing, I would say my private market investing, you know, net net net, I'm hoping I'm a 5x cash on cash. fund manager. That's my aspiration. And you know, I have hit that. So those are all my goals.

### Human: That's cool.### Assistant: That's all you need to send. And that's good. I mean, I literally just had a CEO take over a company from the founder. They sent an update with no numbers, no charts in it. You know, their personal bio, everything they've done in their career. And it was like, Oh, my Lord. And I just wrote them back this morning. And I said, Listen, Congrats on the new job. Here's what we need. And actually, this will be interesting. I'm going to read you what I said to a founder. This will be like a first live read. I'm not going to say the founder's name, but this is my writing. So I'm entitled to do it. Let's see. So here's what I said. great first update, but a bit heavy on the text and no real metrics. Yeah, I'm candid, I got a big, you know, seven figure investment in this, please send us for q2. And going forward, number one, monthly revenue spend and burn in a chart and a table for the year. So folks can see the trend. Please include quarterly performance for the past eight quarters. Again, so folks can see the trend. Yeah. Three, please include our target for the quarter and year and how we are trending toward it for headcount five cash in the bank at a specific date and runway based on that. Very simplified bullet points there. Now, if you're running the company properly, you have number one, the monthly revenue and spend your account, let's give it to you. Number two, you have quarterly because you do board meetings, and you have to show that at the board meeting. Number three, you should have targets. If you don't have targets, and you're a Series A company, like what are we doing here? Like if you're an accelerator, but you don't have customers yet, maybe you don't have targets, headcount. If you don't know your headcount, you should be able to get that in 10 seconds, and then cash in the bank at a specific date, you just open up your Bank of America or Wells Fargo, whatever your jam is, and you take a look. Yeah, yeah. runway, you look at your last three months burn, you average it. Now you know your runway. This is simple stuff, folks. Now, the update I got, I kid you not was over 1000 words. So 1000 words, but didn't include any of that. And that makes you terrified as an investor. So that's the other thing as a founder, you do need to know when you're scaring the out of your investors. And that long, long email without any numbers means things are screwed in the mind of investor, we could be wrong. But that's what we're thinking.

### Human: I mean, it is interesting like I think it's worth looking at why Twitter might be dying. Like, I still use Twitter a fair amount. But my usage has certainly declined. And because because it's not fun, right. So I was listening to the all in podcast, and obviously, like a whole lot of the conversations around this involve this concept of free speech. And you know, I always roll my eyes when people call it that because censorship is a tool of government. not private companies. But also, I was thinking about why I have this reflexive response, and many people I know have this reflexive response. And it's because for women, and women of color and people from marginalized groups, The speech on Twitter has never been free, right? It has always come at a high cost. You get brigaded, you get yelled. Like I have long since censored myself on Twitter because it sucks to be on Twitter if you got more than, you know, 20,000 followers and you're a lady. And so this idea that like, that like, the rich white guys who are left just discovered that sometimes it's not that fun to be on Twitter, and they want more free speech. And a lot of the speech they seem to be advocating for is disinformation or harassment.### Assistant: They haven't thought about Katy Perry and those kind of people. I think he named check both of them. And you know, if you look at those two, anyway, let's look at Tick Tock. I responded with a Tick Tock screenshot. And I was like, Look, Tick Tock puts Bieber's tracks right on his profile. If Twitter was like, run properly over the years, and it has not been run properly ever. I mean, that's why I completely agree. Yeah, I mean, that's, that's why the clown car that drove into a diamond mind, like put merch on your profile page, put tracks on your profile page and let people sell their tickets. And all of a sudden, those people would be super engaged again, they can make that in a team of five developers and five product managers, it's just a SWAT team of 10, literally a million dollar team, that $2 million team get paid well, their $2 million team could build this in six months, and then iterate on it every three months. And they can be the best platform for musicians. the team of 10 people and $2 million a year, and that would generate, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for those artists, and they would be there, but they're not being courted. If you're an accredited investor, you need to know about special purpose vehicles. So what is an SPV? Well, it's an investment vehicle that allows up to 250 investors to invest up to $10 million by one entity on a cap table. So, if you're an angel investor and you've got a bunch of rich friends like I do, you could start your own syndicate and power it through an SPV. Here at Launch, we love working with the team out of Shure. They power all of my syndicates, which is the largest one in the world, with over 10,000 members, and we've done hundreds of deals. a short is the leading providers of SPV and fund administration with over $2.5 billion in a UA assets under administration, and they've done over 5000 completed transactions and they've developed an innovative software program called glassboard. This automates the entire investment experience from entity formation, all the way to an IPO. Ashley and Heidi on my team who manage the syndicate.com love the interface and use it every single day. And not only do investors love it, but founders love it as well because it keeps their cap tables nice and clean. No messy party rounds over here. No, they also manage the entire process over the life of the investment. So to get 20% off your first special purpose vehicle SPV, want you to visit ashore.co slash twist. That's a s s u r e.co slash TW IST get 20% off your first SPV.

### Human: That is so awesome that you mentioned MicroRequire, because that's one of my favorite Twitter accounts, actually, specifically Andrew, the CEO and co-founder. They also advertise on Twist, so we were big MicroRequire fans. But I find that his method of building a public and kind of posting those one-sentence blurbs is easily digestible for somebody that wants to break into the startup community. And it's also just really cool how public he is on pivoting and how often he iterates on his work. I really, really look up to him as somebody that creates content online as a founder. And Casey Neistat was actually on The Speakin' Startup and it was one of my favorite episodes ever. I wasn't on the show when it happened, but Nick, producer Nick was on the show. So that is cool that you mentioned both of them. It's something that, it's crazy to think about the internet too, where Casey Neistat was on, if you think about it, like you're on the show, the same show that Casey was on. The same show, you know, that like Mike required, Jason mentions them all the time because they're a twist advertiser. How close the, you know, the world of startups is incredible now because of podcasting, because of the media. And you're totally right. Like there really is such a small difference between media and tech. Now, I think Jason is an incredible example of the intersection between media and tech. And I guess. For my last question, I do want to pivot a little bit because I do want to talk about being a Canadian founder because Presh and I bonded over you so much. What is it like in the Canadian startup setting as a Gen Z founder?### Assistant: So we're really we lost half the audience no i'm kidding you know i think i can't speak for every canadian jenzy founder certainly not but i would say that there are a few tailwinds that are very interesting and that made the promise of building a large canadian company i'm or a global company that happens to be based in canada more more possible. So the first one is certainly remote work. It just matters, quite frankly, where you are less. I think that's kind of universally true. I'm not saying anything new. Jekyll talks about it all the time. I would say the second is the rise of Shopify. Shopify is extremely well respected in the Bay Area and happens to be a company in Ottawa, Canada, which is not Toronto. And yet that has not held them back in any way. They are very, very prosperous. And so i would say those two kind of forces right having a large company that you can look up to that's internationally respected and having the location where you where you call home where you where you work just just less relevant i think those two kind of factors. i'm come together and yield this really interesting ecosystem where you have a bunch of programs and a bunch of interesting young founders or young jenzy start up folks becoming interested in the space because they're able to look up to shopify and they're able to follow their favorite people people on twitter and they're able to listen to podcast because i don't need to make their way down to ask to go to in-person events And so the distribution of information via the internet has made becoming interested in startups a lot easier. And quite frankly, Toronto is not a small city. There are a lot of people interested in tech in Toronto. There are a lot of people interested in tech all over Canada. And I have plenty of friends who are Canadian. who either live in cities in the US or all over Canada who are interested in startups and technology. And I would say that wouldn't be... I think it just wouldn't be as prominent if it weren't for the rise of remote work and the prominence of Shopify. So that's just my take. But there are 100 different people to talk to about this topic as it pertains to Canadian startups. But I think it's just... It's really inspiring. It's great to see. And again, when I downloaded TikTok in February of 2020, I barely knew anyone in tech that was young, right? Like I think the youngest person I knew, maybe it's like 25. And now that's just not the case. Now there's so many young people in tech who are choosing not to go to college, choosing to take their education into their own hands, get jobs, getting employed by amazing startups. And I think that's really awesome. I look up to kind of the Canadian Gen Z community in startups for sure.

### Human: Well, it's I mean, it's, you know, it's disappointing, right? For sure. Right. Like, and I wasn't just disappointed for myself. But I would say that, you know, it's one of those things that you certainly know, great people around you when you're in a wartime setting. And you know when myspace entered the first phase which was like mass layoffs and mass reconstruction the business the second phase which was a highly publicized launching combat you know combat with facebook in the third phase the kind of realization where we are you had some incredible people that dedicated their lives to that mission. And it's disappointing that we didn't succeed in that mission. But I think I felt that disappointment of the entire team being like, look, it's not going to work. But there was a sobering moment being like, look, there's a lot of good reasons why this isn't going to work. And no matter how much time and capital we put into this, I don't see a recovery coming. So then let's just move into this model of like, let's extract value. How do we extract value, preserve as much as we possibly can, and let everybody walk away with some level of pride at the end of this journey.### Assistant: All right, when we get back from this quick break, I want to know what you saw in Dollar Shave Club, and then what your broader perspective on is with the flood of D2C products that have tried to follow their path to becoming a unicorn when we get back on the sweet service. Have you been itching to upgrade your workstation? Well, I do it all the time. In fact, I just got this brand new Dell that's a Chromebook because I love Chrome OS because it helps me focus and it's really stable. And now Dell makes Chrome laptops. And this one comes with an HDMI port, an Ethernet cable port. It comes with a memory card. It comes with a SIM slot so I can put a data SIM in there and never have to connect to my phone and have that working all the time. It's amazing to get all my ports back at a great price with a Dell laptop. And Dell for Entrepreneurs wants you to have the same experience I've had, which is saving money and leveling up all your hardware. Dell for Entrepreneurs was created to support founders by providing resources and tools that help startups grow and scale their technology. Scaling your company means more than just hiring, you know that. It means getting high quality laptops. network, storage, and printers to provide your employees with the best tools to succeed. I love these curve monitors. That to me is a super unlock. Everybody on my team has to have that beautiful 34 or 38 inch curve monitor. I have a 49 inch monitor at home and it makes me super productive. And actually these two huge monitors I have in the studio, these are amazing 4K Dell monitors we got and they look amazing. Founders that register for Dell for Entrepreneurs have a wide range of free resources for startups such as free IT consulting from experts who are ready to help you with any IT related questions. They'll analyze your cloud spend and they'll find ways to save you money because you're likely spending too much. And you'll get access to capital for buying hardware with Dell Financial Services. Founders can qualify for financing their entire IT project and they can pay it back in low monthly payments so you don't burn all that cash that you need to build your business. Of course, they give you great rewards like up to 6% cash back on all Dell products. Here's your call to action. Every founder should take advantage of this program right now. Level up your hardware today and save up to 43% by going to dell.com slash twist and registering for Dell for entrepreneurs. That's dell.com slash twist to save up to 43%. Thank you Dell for supporting the program. And thank you for making these awesome monitors and laptops that I love and use every day. All right. Our guest today. Oh man, Mike Jones. Been doing this for a while now, Mike.

### Human: If only 1000 or even a few hundred more friends had told me about the risks of putting my entire savings into coin, I might not be where I am today said Branton.### Assistant: I love the onion. So I saw this clip of Michael Saylor, and it's him doing an interview with Angelo Robles, who is the CEO of something called Family Office Association. Family offices are rich families, they typically have 100 million in net worth for the family, and they have to manage multi generations, you know, having access to this money. And this has been, this has been clipped, maybe unfairly to Michael. But it's important people know MicroStrategy CEO, Michael Saylor, has like a software company that then he started, he got Bitcoin religion, he started buying Bitcoin from this company, micro strategy, which had nothing to do with Bitcoin. out a bunch of loans to buy a ton of Bitcoin, and then essentially created a backdoor ETF, right, an exchange traded fund, because micro strategies main asset is their Bitcoin holdings. So that I don't know, I don't wanna say that's fugazi, but it certainly was notably strange. And he started buying a lot of Bitcoin. And, you know, he was one of these people who was super vocal. Now, was he toxic? Or was he just absurdly enthusiastic, but, you know, I think people are reporting now he's lost a billion dollars, because he has some average price in the 30,000, you know, Bitcoin price. And because it's a public company, people know a lot of these details. They're down market strategy, micro strategies on 70% year to date 74% over 52 weeks. And I thought we'd present this clip in full. And then we'll do the numbers. So I want to just play this because I've watched various versions of this clips going around and people are editing it. But I think you have to be very careful when giving financial advice. And we you know, I talk about financial stuff all the time on this pod about angel investing, I teach a course angel dot university, I wrote a book about angel investing, I've got 11,000 people in the syndicate, I take it super seriously, I'm very careful I'm super careful to say only bet what you can afford to lose. And if you're an accredited investor, which means you're, you know, the top 6% of the country, Molly, I say go as slow as possible, be as informed as possible, try to be diversified. And if it was my brother, sister, cousin, a great friend, I would tell them start at 1% of your net worth. And if you love it, and you're enjoying it, maybe you go to two, you know, after a couple of years, and then if you get really good at it, you can raise a fund. But just be there's no race here, right? You get rich slowly is always my advice. Let's start this clip.

### Human: Yeah. I mean, that's the that's the theory of sanctions, I would, I would actually, the only thing I would push back on is I don't think I actually don't think We have gone nuclear on sanctions just yet. Like you do have companies pulling out, but it's a small part of the Russian economy overall, right? It's a small part of their business. You are absolutely seeing the war is hell impact on ordinary Russian citizens of economic sanctions. There's no question. But I would only say that I think so far we have not, we haven't come close to going nuclear, right?### Assistant: It's hard to say. this is where I think what we're seeing is unique. You know, people talk about the nuclear option that Putin has. I think this is the economic version of that. We've gone nuclear with the sanctions. And it's beyond just saying we're not going to let you export oil or people can't buy your oil in the West and the free world is just not going to buy stuff from you. This is saying the West is no longer going to participate in your economy. So it's like an economic nuclear bomb. And the fact that corporations are doing this proactively, and that universally the the Twitter war is pro peace. It is to me like a new phenomenon. I don't know if this feels different to you than other times in history. But if the United States went into Iraq again, or other places and, you know, did a little bit of, you know, maybe unjust wars, if we consider Iraq and unjust war, and maybe Afghanistan was just since they attacked us, you know, hard discussions to have, I know. But if the entire world says, Listen, we're not going to do commerce with people who start wars, this can be a beautiful new approach to humanity and how the world works. And it does feel qualitatively different. I'll give but one example that was shared with me in a group thread. And you know i again this is a tweet so who knows what the whole circumstances is here but i'm sure that this is happening more than once and this is from. Commander underscore ivy lena apparently is her name commander underscore ivy square handle so paypal stop working in russia today and twitch will no longer pay russian streamers. Thank you very much for cutting my only source of income i'm sure this will solve the world problems so. Here is an example of what we talked about last week, Molly, which is the Russian people are going to suffer. Here is somebody who makes their money. I'm assuming streaming video games on Twitch. I read some of her other tweet streams. And after this, she said, Well, now I can't make money. And I can't do I can't use my visa card. guess I will have to work for food. And I think as an I don't know if Coca Cola, Pepsi, McDonald's are still operating in Russia, but I think they'll pull out eventually. So now we have we're going to be left with this concept of, hey, the Russian people are gonna suffer. And that's going to make them look on the internet and figure out why this war is occurring. From what I understand. Russian people don't actually have clarity on this war, they think that the Ukraine is run by Nazis, and white supremacists, and that they're going in on a noble mission. So I think that this could break the information barrier.

### Human: Yeah, and the newer, these newer systems that we use, they're actually, they're hollow, so they're very light, and the screen element itself is very thin, versus the ones that I brought to your studio a few years ago. They had big old blocks on them, so we're kind of beyond that point. And so, the business model is to sell hardware, like the looking glass displays, and to sell time. so time that you're chatting with these conversational AI holograms. And we're focused, obviously, giving folks a taste in their home. So people can buy a Looking Glass portrait for 400 bucks right on our website, lookingglassfactory.com. They can give Lightforms, the platform, a try. And there's some sample characters in there that people can have conversations with and see what it's like to chat with different characters with different personalities, different holograms with different personalities. And then for enterprises, we charge for time. And so the more you chat with the light forms, the more you pay.### Assistant: If you love snacking like I do, You gotta find the perfect snack. It's not easy. You want one that's gonna remove cravings, that fits your dietary goals, regulates your blood glucose levels, and gotta be something you look forward to eating. And you know what I love? I love macadamia nuts. What a treat. They got so many health benefits. I'll give you the highlights right here. They are the only nut that is rich in omega sevens that's linked to natural collagen production, reducing inflammation, stabilizing your glucose levels and healthy fat metabolism. And the folks my friends at house of macadamias are obsessed with making the highest quality macadamia products available. Chocolate dipped macadamia nuts are my favorite. But I also sometimes I get that coconut craving you ever get that they got a chocolate coconut macadamia bar that is amazing. And it hits the spot. It's not going to spike your glucose. It's something healthy, but it's a treat. It's a treat and they just launched an amazing cold press macadamia oil with a buttery flavor and a high smoking point perfect for drizzling over meals or cooking use the code twist 20 get 20% off. And for a limited time, they're giving a free bottle of premium cold pressed extra virgin macadamia oil with any purchase, go to house of macadamias.com slash twist, and use the code twist 20 house of macadamias.com slash twist and use that code twist 20. So they know J Cal sent you Well, and it's really interesting. You got into this, if I remember correctly, like this is, yeah, you've been at this for eight years. You said earlier, um, you did a Kickstarter once or twice raised a couple of hundred thousand dollars from that. And then you did seed rounds and series a, and you've been just grinding and grinding as this product, which is a hardware product to have the hologram looking glass. That takes time. But then, suddenly, you have AI catch up in that time period, which makes it super interesting because you must have seen there is a TikTok influencer charging a dollar a minute to talk with her. And so, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that, hey, you could have a Marvel character, an influencer, and you could start a virtual relationship with one of them, or Now people are starting to speculate, well, you could take grandma or grandpa and, you know, have whatever, if you did 10 interviews with them and you had 10 hours of conversations about their life, you could create an AI where you could at times, instead of looking at just a picture of grandma, you could ask grandma, you know, hey, what was it like in the Roaring Twenties? And she might give you an answer.

### Human: Some of these, for people who are not familiar, like some of these are things we've been talking about a lot, I think, in society, like introversion, you know, I versus Z, introvert versus extrovert has been coming up a lot. There's a lot more sort of awareness, I think, about the introverted personality and what that can mean. The other letters are S, for sensing, I for intuition, T for thinking, F for feeling, J for judging, and P for perceiving. And then you get this sort of four letter personality type. I wonder, Talk to me about the matching then and where that comes from, because I'm assuming it's not, it's certainly not a one-to-one. I can tell you, I, you know, recently tried to date an ENFP like myself and that didn't go, you know, it's like a hot mess. Nobody's in charge of anything.### Assistant: Yes, and you're definitely not the first person to say, why hasn't this been done before? And we were really surprised. So my sister is my co founder. And when we were kind of talking about this idea, we googled and we're like, why? Why is no one doing this? It makes so much sense. It's such a popular personality test. People love it. It's used extensively in a kind of work environment. And so, yeah, basically, we chose that because I used to work in finance, I worked at Morgan Stanley for five years, worked in London for the majority of that time. And I dated someone who was Australian. And we ended up moving to Australia together after like a couple of years of dating, which was yeah, incredible. Love Australia a lot. Yeah. And so I got a transfer with Morgan Stanley, which is also amazing. And yeah, was there for a year. And then unfortunately, the relationship didn't work out and I was leaving my job at the same time. So these two natural ends happened. And I had been super into personality types and personality tests, particularly the 16 personality types framework for a long time but had mostly been using it in a work context. And when these two natural ends happened, I was like, right, I'm just gonna take a bit of time out, like backpack around the world, just, you know, had been working super long hours in investment banking. I was like, I'm just gonna read about things I'm interested in, you know, it's like very lucky to be in that kind of position where I could do that, right? Like not everyone gets that opportunity. So yeah, and because I'd had this breakup, I started applying personality types to like love, dating and relationships. And I spent like, yeah, I can't tell you how many hours kind of researching it, but it was the trip ended up being a year. And a lot of it was spent looking into personality type compatibility. You know, I met lots of people when I was traveling there, you know, spent a lot of time on Reddit. There are people posting all day, every day on, you know, like ENTP forums, ISFJ forums saying, you know, I'm dating this person. this personality type, this is why it's great, this is why we're having challenges. So there was a lot of information out there, I guess, is my point. And I just saw really strong correlations between which types were, I guess, more natural fits and relationships and which weren't. And then I got back to London and I was telling my sister about this over some drinks in Soho. And, yeah, we decided to go for it because, yeah, like you said, we were kind of wondering why this hasn't been done before. Yeah.

### Human: Yeah, it's a good question. And, and I kind of had a bit of both I trained first as a pathologist and then did, did the machine learning after so at least I've worked very closely with pathologists. for a long time now. And I think pathologists truly come to work every day wanting what's best for patients. And the one thing that would keep a pathologist up at night is giving the wrong diagnosis and not having the best diagnosis for, you know, their own parents or your parents. I mean, that is what why everyone comes to work every day. So, I don't think that's the big barrier. I think it's more technology hasn't existed for that long to really move all these images around to have this network of pathologists connected through technology through a platform is very, very new. Of course, the deep learning and image analysis is very, very new. And in And just the overall incentives for making that transformation happen in the healthcare system is also a challenge. So I don't think it's individual pathologists who are barriers to this. Yeah, I think it's, you know, really, you know, getting the technology out, getting the hands of users. And I think, you know, I think the future you outline, we could do that today, we even without algorithms. And we do do this in clinical trials in terms of having consensus of experts who support a diagnosis. And that really has been unlocked by this technology platform, because literally before people were doing this, and even still today, people are sending around glass slides. So imagine how long it would take to send around glass slides to 10 people, you know, versus distributing the images.### Assistant: So if you don't want to get a new mattress, you but you do want eight sleep, you just get the pod cover, it's going to keep you cool all night all the way down to 55 degrees. And it's going to improve your sleep by automatically adjusting to the temperature on your side of the bed. And you know, your partner spouse, they get to set their own temperature. So no more bad battle with your partner or your spouse over the thermostat. Nope, it's going to adjust based on you and your partner's preferences and you get personalized sleep reports. Eight sleep. I love it in the winter. Oh, I keep it nice and toasty. But in the summer, I like those cool crisp sheets. And I don't want to have to blast the AC in my house and burn all that extra fuel. No, I just use my eight sleep. I dial it to exactly where I like and you know, I get a better night's sleep temperature really does correlate with a good night's sleep. So go to eight sleep.com slash twist to get 150 bucks off the pod cover. Stay cool this summer with eight sleep, please. And they're now shipping not only in the US, but Canada, and the UK. and some other countries in the EU and Australia. So eight sleep.com slash twist for $150 off the pod cover. Can't go wrong. I would suppose one of the solutions here would be to give your 500 people participating I'm curious if you would give 10 of them the ability to mark up the same patients. Or if you do this, the same patients slides, as it were, and then see if you can find some sort of trends of 10 doctors, because this is what we all want as patients. If I had some loved one, God forbid, with lung cancer, or my dad has prostate cancer, my mom had breast cancer, both survivors, which is extraordinary when you think about it. 30 years and 15 years for each of them. 45 years combined, wild. But imagine, I could have had 10 folks look at my dad's samples, and then give their opinions. And I can say, well, five are saying this, and three are saying this, and two are saying this. Yeah, is the when you come as a technologist, and listen, you're, I believe, a PhD yourself on this. And you talk to medical professionals, do they have a God complex or do not want to be one of 10 people giving blind advice on something and then having you as a technology company, second guessing it in their minds? Obviously, you're not trying to second guess that you're trying to save people's lives. Where's the spirit and culture of this? hey, we should get better at our jobs. What's the resistance in this field?

### Human: Yeah. Yeah. Does that work? Yeah. So, the way the cameras count people is by looking for changes in color. It's a Depends on how sophisticated the camera is. Also depends on how sophisticated the software company is. But the way that most of these systems work is it's looking for changes in pixel color as someone moves, contiguous color changes. And that allows someone to draw a box around or do computer vision to detect do object recognition as like this black shirt moves past a brown floor. Now, when you don't have high enough contrast between those two colors, you end up with data quality issues. In fact, there's a technology called stereoscopic vision, which is how our eyes work. So two cameras that are sort of set next to one another. And as someone walks beneath, you can estimate depth You don't get actual depth. You sort of see as a person moves from one field of view to the next. The problem is that if you stop moving, you don't get a depth reading because they're just flat images. So, all cameras are two-dimensional. Most cameras are two-dimensional. So, you've got an X and a Y, which is why color matters so much. So, you have all these issues and then you deploy them and you get pushback from people who they're observing. And so, I My opinion on cameras is that they're not... I don't think cameras are inherently bad. I just think that there are places where there's a reasonable expectation of privacy. And when you're in a place where there's a reasonable expectation of privacy, there ought to be a system that is not continuously surveilling me. And that's why we care about anonymity. We also think that the market for anonymous products is substantially larger than... There's essentially like blind spots to buildings that cameras can't go into. Yeah. Because as soon as you try to scale them, you run into privacy issues.### Assistant: Wow. So it overlaps a bit in these circles. And then now you've just seen the whole thing lighting up. That's right back on this break. People have talked about doing this with cameras, cameras are ubiquitous. They're they're they're cheap. I want to know the argument and what you hear from your customers about cameras in workspaces and that big controversy when we get back at this week in startups. The colorful days of fall are now upon us and Your small business needs to evolve. Despite the current uncertainty, having the right people on your team is that feeling of just putting that warm blanket on, having a little hot cocoa. And when your business is ready to make that next hire, LinkedIn Jobs can help by matching your role with qualified candidates so you can find the right person quickly. LinkedIn has over 706 million members worldwide. Think about that, over 700 million members worldwide. And getting started is easier than ever with new features to help you find qualified candidates quickly, manage job posts, and contact candidates from a single view in that familiar linkedin.com interface. You know how to use it. All the functions are streamlined into one simple screen. You get these nice email updates when you got candidates. and everyone on the team is on the same page. Super important when it comes to recruiting. You can identify strong candidates with their efficient rating system to help you get your job in front of more qualified candidates. And now, you can do all of this from your mobile device, no matter where the day takes you. Hiring is time consuming, unless you use LinkedIn Jobs. Here is your call to action. When your business is ready to make that next hire, I want you to go to LinkedIn Jobs And you will get $50 off that first job posting, go to linkedin.com slash twist linkedin.com slash TW IST and get 50 $50 off your first job posting terms and conditions, of course apply. Because LinkedIn is giving you that $50. Welcome back to this week and startup Andrew Farah from density.io is here. The company's density, but you can go visit density.io and see these incredible Obi-Wan, incredible Obi-Wan. I've told that story. Wow. So, you talked to, oh, you didn't tell the Obi-Wan story, but I also want to know about, like, when you talk to your customers, it's got to be somebody in every IT department or facilities department. It's like, why don't we just throw up some drop cams and, you know, we already have these, like, security cameras in the hallway, so why don't we just put them everywhere and then we'll count on there and there's got to be some computer vision software. What is the reality of that? Are people doing that now? You know, just counting people with computer vision on cameras?

### Human: It has better intent It's here to help just like all ai how it always starts. All right producers### Assistant: No, it does not change producer Nick, because they're going to make money through fees. Micropayments, chat GPT is a micropayment processor. Yeah. And so it's going to be a subscription search engine. I'll tell you right now, the business model chat GPT is going to, um, partner with, uh, I'll just tell you what's going to happen. Okay. After we get this answer, did we get it right or not? Okay. So right now Sundar, I have Google shares. I'm going to sell my Google I'm making a J trade right now. I'm going to make a J trade right now. I'm going to get out of my Google shares. And if Google doesn't release a competitor in 100 days, I'm selling my Google shares, and I'm buying Microsoft shares, because my understanding and I'm going to get my producers to tell us on tomorrow's show. This is an assignment from now on, we're doing assignments for tomorrow's show or Wednesday show, I want to know the relationship between Microsoft search and open AI, I know this investments, I know a list of the stuff they're using Azure, I understand as their cloud, I want to know if they have the exclusive right to search, I need somebody to either tell me or leak me, whatever, don't break any laws. But if somebody has information they want to give to the TWI startup or producers at this week and startups.com from an anonymous account. I think Microsoft Bing has the exclusive on this for search, if that is the case. And if Microsoft, if Google and Sundar do not release something competitive in 100 days, I'm selling my shares in Google, and I'm moving them to Microsoft. This could be the Google search killer. Now, that's going to be hard to happen. But you know what, there was a time when people thought Google was a toy, and Yahoo Directory was the winner. And we all saw that movie, and it happened faster and more violently than we thought. This is red alert for Google. Google needs to fire a third of its employees and tell the other two that would skip back in the office and to make a competing product. This should be an existential moment for Google and I don't perceive them taking it serious enough. I agree. I think if you own Google shares right now, you need to have your finger on the sell button. I'm hovering over the sell button on my Google shares. And I'm hovering over the buy button. Mark 100 days from today, I want a 100 day clock. Producer Nick, remind us every 20 days or so to talk about this. And I'm going to make this trade in the next 100 days. I'm going to double my position in Microsoft and sell my position in Google.

### Human: So like, I try to have no meetings on a Friday afternoon, because Yeah, otherwise, you're literally drowning, you've been introduced to seven great companies by other VCs. And you have no page three of the inbox, you know, yeah, so so getting through I was about that was exactly where I was going.### Assistant: Cutting off the past, which is my email box has the next 50 companies we need to meet with. So I do need to get in there for half an hour every. Yeah. And just sort them. I mean, it's literally just sorting them. Do I know the person introduced me? Do I need to respond all that stuff? Yeah. So putting this all together, I just had this great realization that there is a way for this to work for both parties. Managers always have this fear that people are not doing their job. And that fear comes not from the 80% of people who are doing a great job in your company and all like that it comes from the 10% who are bad actors who are being off and not doing their job, please tweet bleep out the F word. My mom listens. And then the other 10% are people who are just inefficient. And maybe in your company, it's 60 2020, who knows what the percentage is. But that's the fear you as a team member should know about what bosses are thinking of. That's why they make a snap decision like everybody come to the office. That's why or three days a week, because they want to know at least they have some engagement going on. And there are other reasons to be in the office like physically making products that are physical in the real world and collaboration and relationship building. Put it aside for a second. Let's just talk about getting rid of that fear that managers have, there's a very super easy task for this, which is, if you're intentional about your calendar, you share your calendar with your boss, and you say, Hey, look, here's what I'm working on. Does this sync with you? Because I looked at our team here and I realized like, the booking of gas or researching of gas, it always seems to fall way behind on the priority. So I said, Rachel, I don't want you on air for the show. When we're taping, we'll have another pretty we only need one producer to be on air while we're taping, right? You the second the show notes are done at 10am. Get off the show. for this week, three hours of researching guests, I just want you to find us guests, rank them and get to 10 a day. In one week, you'll have 50. And then I want you to tell us the five to 10 best and I was actually going to ask you Molly to time bank maybe on a Friday, a little mentoring there of half an hour, maybe you look at her results and say, Hey, here's what I think of these guests. And maybe you pick your favorites. And I'll put a half hour. Here's what I think. Or maybe we'll just do it all together.

### Human: This would be like taking the author of a book and being like, you know what? We found that somebody wrote in the back page of the book in the library, something critical of President Trump and you're the author and you didn't print this book, but there's a million copies of the book in circulation, but you're responsible for this. What specifically about? algorithms, do you think? Because this seems to be a very interesting place. I don't know if you saw Jack at Twitter said, hey, what if you could roll your own algorithm or pick your own algorithm? Because we do know that the algorithms are taking a bunch of data and it really is just about um, increasing the, the, the mantra inside of YouTube was just time on site. How much time, how many minutes did you watch? And it's kind of blind to what it's, uh, sending you to. And then there was this accusation. It was sending people down this like dark, you know, uh, alt right conspiracy. There is when we get back to this quick break. What do you think about the idea of when you go onto a YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, whatever it is, it says, here are some algorithm choices for you. Here's one that is going to increase time on site. Here's one that's going to send you towards pages that are and content that is more verified from more trusted sources. And this one's going to be a free for all or you'll just have time based when we get back on this week in startups. Listen, 2020 was a crazy, hectic, insane year. My God, it was like a decade in a year. And there was a lot of uncertainty, let's face it. But we're going to minimize our uncertainty in 2021. And we are going to start the Roaring 20. So let's switch to a smooth and painless payroll and HR system. Gusto is that system. And it wasn't just built for small businesses, it was built for the people behind them. That's you and me. Their online payroll is so easy to use. 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All you have to do is go to gusto.com slash twist. That's g u s t o.com slash twist. Welcome back to this week in startup shishir is here from coda. You can go check that out at coda.io, which we're going to get into in a minute. But since we have you here, and you have so much knowledge about the history of all these things, what do you think of that pitch by jack that hey, you could bring your own algorithm to the party or none at all?### Assistant: I'll say I'm a little skeptical. Okay. Why? So we ran one of our sort of famous moments, my time at YouTube, we set this goal we call the billion hour goal. And the basic idea was that we set in 2012, I set a goal that YouTube would get a a billion hours a day of viewership. And at the time, we were at less than a tenth of that. And so it was a big audacious goal. It would take us four years to get there, and so on. At the same time, and we knew that this was going to cause a big change in our focus on time on site. And like you said, it was very clarifying. It meant we could make all sorts of decisions where time on site became a way to decide between things. But we I like to say that every time a lot of companies will talk about picking a Northstar metric. And I think when you pick a Northstar metric, you always want to figure out what your compensating metric is. What is the thing that takes whatever harm you might find and you'll compensate for it. So we had this discussion about it and we call this the nutritious versus delicious discussion. And a very simple idea is that we can choose to be a company that is just delicious, and all we do is get people to eat more, or we can focus on being nutritious. And we used Whole Foods as an inspiring analogy for this. I'm not so sure how true it is in the past few years, but certainly at that time, Whole Foods was this emblem of a company that was both a pretty good business and stood for nutrition. And we actually set about to try to measure this. Now, just as context, at the time, this was back in 2011, 2012, the concern was less about some of today's concerns. Today, what people are worried about, about fall down the rabbit hole and some of the echo chamber effects that we're seeing. At the time, we were mostly worried about time wasting. We were worried about, were we a good use of people's time? So we started running this. this survey, and we did it in the product. So what would happen is YouTube has this, one of the things we built is famous ad product, the skippable ad unit, where you see the ad and you can skip it, we call it TrueView. So we replaced that for a certain percentage of users with a little survey, and it would ask you, the question was, which is a more, which is a better use of an hour of your time? And the options were, see if I get them right, reading a book, going to the gym, watching television, watching YouTube. And the goal was not to win. I mean, it was obvious we were not going to.

### Human: Yeah. So it's definitely something that we've given a lot of thought about, and I think we will be involved in in the coming months.### Assistant: Yeah, it's. amazing how tweaked they got that you were just saying stocks go up when the entire concept of Wall Street is if you hold stocks long enough, they go up. Correct. I mean, it's literally the premise of all financial money management. You have some equities and that equities go up 7% every year on average and just don't sell when they're down and you're having fun with it. I looked at it and said, this is fucking fantastic. Young people who have no financial literacy are going to open up a trading account and they're going to figure out what options are and puts are and just what stocks are. So you're basically doing the financial education that parents didn't do with their kids. A couple million people get onto Robinhood or whatever app they want to use. 2020 has proven to be a year of many things and 2021 is the year you are going to switch to a better payroll program and Gusto is the way to do that. Gusto wasn't just built for small businesses, it was built for the people behind them and their online payroll is so easy to use. We use it. It can automatically calculate your paychecks and file all of your payroll taxes Three out of four customers say they run payroll in 10 minutes or less, which means you'll have more time to run your business. Heidi, who runs HR here at Launch, says Gusto frees her up to do more business-critical tasks like running our syndicate, as an example. Plus, they offer unlimited payrolls for one monthly price. There's no hidden fees, and Gusto can also help with time tracking, health insurance, 401ks, onboarding, commuter benefits, offer letters, and of course they provide access to HR experts and have tremendous customer support. If you're moving from one provider to another, they can transfer all your data for you. And it's no surprise that 94% of customers are likely to recommend Gusto. Here's the best part, because you're a twist listener, you'll get three months totally free. That's right. Twist listeners, three months free. Just go to gusto.com slash twist, g-u-s-t-o.com slash twist. Again, that's gusto.com slash twist. I'm telling you, you're going to love it. Get started today right now by going to gusto.com slash twist. Why didn't you make Barstool Finance? I mean, this would be like the, I mean, you have the DDTG brand, but I mean, this feels like a category that you could keep going all into, and there are so many endemic advertisers, and it's never going to end. The number of public companies because of SPACs are going through the roof. I mean, this could be like a whole second chapter of the empire here.

### Human: Yeah, that's what we're learning. That's, I think, with the going back to work issue is really interesting. Because i think you said it well i get will that come back or not will people be more efficient or not that's what i'm thinking about cuz i look at. Something like facebook or uber or google and i'm like you know what i don't think those companies. could have been built during their high growth periods without a campus and everybody in the room, you know, like grinding on that and that grinding culture. And while I do think people enjoy working from home and that flexibility, I also think people are going to get kind of stir crazy and they're going to, some group of people are going to want to be in an office. I'm already seeing that myself personally and across a range of people. Well, especially if you're kids. And this is another order of homeschooling. Is that going to be on the table for people? I've been thinking about that. What do you think happens to cities? I'm curious, because you are an international by design, remote by design enterprise. So you obviously bought into this. What do you think happens to cities? And do you see some trend with what cities are overrepresented in, say, Pioneer Labs that were underrepresented or not overly represented at your time at YC?### Assistant: Yeah, I mean, so in terms of what Pioneer sees, I will say, you know, it's quite it's quite international, about half the traffic is just, you know, non US global world. Yeah, the half, which is interesting, the website is in English, we haven't really done any growth work period, you know, internationally, you know, maybe maybe some slivers and phone calls, but not that much. And it has quite a spread. And so And even a lot of the American traffic, it's not SF, it's someone in Indiana. So in terms of representation, I think we see the standard things you'd expect. All of the other kind of technology hubs of the world, there's a lot of activity from obviously Europe, there's a lot of activity in India, there's a lot of activity in Nigeria, there's a lot of activity in Eastern Europe. And so, you know, that kind of remains alive and well. I think there's a very interesting question about, will 2021 be, will Silicon Valley and San Francisco in particular be the capital of technology in 2021? That I feel like right now is the question on everyone's mind. And, you know, my worry is that the city for a very long time has been mismanaging itself. And You know, just like we mentioned before about Eternal September, cities also go through effectively three stages of development in my view. All communities, all scenes go through the same three stage. It starts off as a frontier where it mostly has interesting people who wouldn't go there normally, who go there. It becomes famous and it gets kind of your kind of normies. And then over time, things do tend to fail. Now, for internet communities, this could happen in a matter of days. For companies, it takes years. And for cities, maybe it takes centuries. I do wonder, If San Francisco is kind of obviously in this middle state now where it's famous, it's attracting both great founders and just like a lot of normal people. As the city continues to mismanage itself, you know, at what point does the founding kind of tech scene break up into other parts of the Bay Area or into other parts of the world? That I don't know. But that's a huge question on my mind. We are thankfully, Agnostic, Pioneer can float to whatever the real-world capital is, but I think, just personally, almost everyone who works at Pioneer is in the Bay Area. We're kind of wondering, if we want to be able to greet the door to our best pioneers as they arrive off whatever the future Ellis Island is, where should we be? Should we be in London? Should we be in New York? Should we be in Cupertino? I don't know. I don't know that it'll be SF.

### Human: In the short term, it works and he wins over Rich Sommer from from Mad Men plays one of the Google engineers to come over someone show who's an old school YouTuber plays another one of the engineers who comes in. I was nice to see him. So they come on board and they do start to figure out this problem, how to condense the data so they can get a lot more people using their blackberries all at one time without expanding Verizon's network any further. They can't control that. They don't have a power of that. As well, Jim brings in Charles Purdy to come in as CEO. Oh, we already mentioned Michael Ironside as this sort of gruff, hard-ass. And that really is this moment where the culture behind the scenes at Research in Motion shifts. It was this very community-driven, developer-driven culture that sort of Doug was sort of sitting on top of. A lot of fun, a lot of movie nights. We see them hanging out watching Raiders of the Lost Ark together, even during a high-pressure moment for the business. And this is when Charles Purdy comes in. He's like, that's over. No more movies. We're not goofing around. This is a business. You're here to work. Yep. And lays down the law and sort of that way and it they what they wind up solving the they wind up solving the problem in terms of connectivity, the stock jumps 400%. So they have successfully fended off palms sort of takeover threat. But the culture of the business is fundamentally changed, probably forever. And that that sort of wraps up the 2003 segment.### Assistant: And this is another important point. what got you here won't get you there is one of these credos. It's one of these heuristics, one of these best practices here in the valley. And so if what got you here was, you know, a bunch of folks who come up with great ideas, and who have great culture will work for small amounts of money, they're new to the business, they got fresh ideas. But then you start having millions of people and servers and contracts, you need people who've done this before. And this is one of the hardest things. And Mike goes through this where he's like, Hey, this guy's my best friend. right multiple times when he wants to take him to New York. He's my best friend. And this is one of the hardest things in business. I see it over and over again, where three great friends build a company. And then all of a sudden, one of them was charged a product, one of them was charged of sales, one of them was the CEO. And then all of a sudden, the person who's doing sales, they don't hit their numbers. They've never done sales before. And then you got to bring in somebody who's a VP of sales who's done it before, who's had 50 people working from this person's never had anybody working for me, I got 12 people working for him. And those people hate him because they don't know how to, you know, run the department. And this is that moment where the company moves from trying to figure out product market fit, and then becomes an at scale company. The people who run an at scale company lawn are very different people than the people who create products, and who get a product to market and even create a category like this company did to create a category, got to be a bit of a pirate and you're very experimental. To be part of the scale team, you have to have a very narrow focus. At the start of a company, you got 10 people, and each one's doing five jobs. And then when the company gets to scale, you have 50 people doing one job, like literally 50 people in a department working on this one aspect of the phone, you know, the keyboard, and literally everything gets atomized down to the point at which it would be very boring for some of those people to be there. And that's this moment. And for me, that was one of the it's always one of the sad moments in a company, but it's bittersweet, because it's a sign that you're growing, that you're outgrowing people. just like sometimes personal growth in a relationship. Sometimes people outgrow each other, right? And they get divorced, or they don't, they don't stay friends. Yeah.

### Human: I mean, $6 billion in cash is a really big moat, as you've been saying. The stock is up over 13% today as a result of the reduction in forced noose. Investors do like that kind of discipline. So you might have missed your chance to get a deal on the J trade.### Assistant: no discernible that we can see the brilliance of the Robin Hood team, they cash themselves up when they could, when you can get cash in the bank and sit on it, you know, like Apple, Google, Amazon, everybody who's got this cash laying around. you know, you don't have what's called the risk of ruin. And bankroll management is one of the keys to being a great gambler. You have to know how this is one of the reasons I haven't really gotten hurt playing in high stakes poker is because I have an idea of what my bankroll is, I set goals for myself, and you know, I become more cognizant of it, I have other rich friends. maybe are less cognizant of it. And I at times have been less cognizant of it, because the money doesn't matter to me. But you know, it's, it's big numbers where you're playing a big cash games. And you do need to be, you know, eyes wide open. And you shouldn't play in games where you have what's called the risk of ruin. So if your net worth was $100,000, and you were, I was playing in poker games where I saw people buy in for $100,000, like their entire net worth was on the table. So they can have the best hand on the flop, or even on the turn, and then the other person has one out, you know, so somebody's got a set of aces, they have three aces, the other person has a set of kings. And, you know, you got all your money in good, and then that person hit the king on the river. And now you've lost your entire net worth. Now, if you were playing with 10% of your net worth, the chances of that happening that what's called the case king, the final king in the in the deck, it's a 2% chance of that happening. Well, you can survive it because you have the other 90k. You played perfectly, you want to be in that situation, you're a 98% favorite. great, but you do have to watch out for the risk of ruin. And like companies like Peloton and BuzzFeed, as we've been looking at them as potential J trades, do have the risk of ruin because they could run out of cash. Yeah. And that's really the danger. And that's one of the reasons why I'm still long Robin and I didn't sell my shares, I might buy more shares. You know, I think they're a brilliant product, brilliant team, still the best product in the market. And I think they will get bought. Potentially, hopefully, they can defend themselves against getting bought and keep building this for 10 years. That's my hope.

### Human: Oh, well, back to the New York Times, back to the New York Times, we are taking at face value the idea that vacay is worried that journalists are spending too much time on Twitter, that their perceptions might be warped by what they see there that they're no longer part of the real world, which again, a decade too late. And also, they just had this like absurd back and forth with Taylor Lorenz and other, you know, big name journalists, like essentially attacking her on Twitter. It's it is probably just as much reputational damage that McKay is trying to control for here as it is time and a warped sense of reality. But the warped sense of reality on Twitter, I think, should be the basis of all of this. Like it is not good journalism, to be taking to be getting outraged by stuff you see on Twitter, and then turning that into outrageous stories.### Assistant: This is I think, keyboard point, if your goal is to tell the truth to the audience, then it's not, you're not telling the truth. If you're mitigating through the work lens of social media, that is not reality, how people behave on Twitter is crazy. And like, you know, the other thing that's damaging to the New York Times brand, so there's one is Okay, the input, your view of the world and what you're going to write the input is up. Now, here's the other thing that gets totally screwed up is the perception of the paper over time. So Sarah, john, yeah, jo and g. Yeah. I guess she's not part of the New York Times anymore. She remember when they brought her on that somebody went through her tweets, which is what happens every time. Mm hmm. Let's look at your tweets. Now if you but if you were on Twitter, like in the 2008 to 2018 period, it was a chat room. It wasn't really like a people didn't know you were going to be like pulling their tweets and their job interviews. People were pretty loosey goosey. And she said like all kinds of crazy stuff like white men this and whether she was joking or not, or you know, I don't really care if people have like cheeky opinions or their full contact. But the New York Times, it just gave ammunition to critics, every time she wrote something that she's anti this group, anti that group, super woke, whatever. And I'm not just calling her out. This happens on the right as well. And it happens far right, far left, right. Everybody's got some tweet comedians, whatever that didn't age well. That's the problem is like, I think the paper wants to be respected for doing good work. So if you're got a warped view of reality, and then you're acting cheeky or crazy, or, you know, your comedy doesn't land because you're not Dave Chappelle, but you're trying to make jokes on Twitter, and it doesn't land and it offends people. You're not in a comedy club. right? The context matters in a comedy club. You say a joke, people go, Okay, it's a joke. It was good. It was bad. It's a one to 10. Okay, I laughed. I didn't. Let's go on to the next joke on Twitter. They're like, Is that a joke? Or do you actually hate white men? Or do you actually like to use you know, this word that's not appropriate? Like, or do you use that word all the time? Is that like who you are? And yada yada. Part of it is the perception of New York Times journalists is bad.

### Human: suburbs could win a big part of it.### Assistant: Yeah. And I mean, also, we've talked about this just in our investment careers, asset light versus asset heavy businesses. And go puff has chosen asset heavy to get some advantages in speed. And then the question is, if you're a door dash Uber eats and you're fulfilling from Walgreens and CVS, and you're doing it in under an hour, which is a better business to be in? It's going to be a dogfight and it'll be interesting to see. 2021 was a huge year for IPOs. Over 1,000 companies went public, but two-thirds of those companies are now trading below their offering price, according to research from our friends at Masterworks, and reports of raising interest rates are causing some investors to adjust their portfolios. That's why some people are allocating more capital into blue-chip art. MassWorks is the investment platform that lets you invest in shares of pieces by legends like Picasso, Monet, and Banksy. In November, the Wall Street Journal published an article titled, Art is Among the Hottest Markets on Earth. They reported that art owned by the wealthy has potentially appreciated even more than their other asset classes. Back in May, a Picasso sold for $103 million. That's a 1400% increase from its original auction price. So with Masterworks, you don't need to be a billionaire to own a Picasso. And Masterworks is letting Twist listeners skip their waitlist. Just go to masterworks.io slash twist to cut the line. That's masterworks.io slash twist. See important disclosures at masterworks.io slash disclaimer. All right, let's do our next story. And this is in the we live in the future W Lit is our acronym lit AF is Cruz just opened at San Francisco robo taxi service to the public and announced a $1.3 billion raise from SoftBank, which is, you know, like a quaint raise from SoftBank. I know exactly. I was like, that sounds like so much money, but not 10, not five, just a billy. Remember, Cruz was acquired by GM back in 2016 for 580 million. They raised over 13 billion to date, both before and after the GM acquisition. Cruz was recently valued at $30 billion. So let's talk about this robo taxi service. They're starting with a small number of users. California DMV gave cruise a permit to test fully driverless vehicles in 2020. Right now it's going to be free. And in December 2021, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency pushed against cruises proposal to charge rides citing safety and vehicles ability to follow rules like picking up passengers at the curb instead of in the middle of the road. Uh, so, uh, let's take a look at this, uh, passengers. This is some B-roll of.

### Human: How is it changing people wanting to invest there? We saw Sequoia Capital, uh, and before them, uh, IDG, Pat McGovern was the first venture capitalist there really in the 80s. And then shortly after that, Sequoia, other folks coming into China having incredible returns, incredible runs. Are private equity, public market investors, venture capitalists going to form new funds to address China? Or are they going to be wrapping up shop at this point?### Assistant: Why is doing it? It is wild. And I think one to 10 wild. I mean, it's really, really why it's not I mean, it's not quite to me, it doesn't rise to the level of China's about to declare war on Taiwan in terms of the repercussions for Americans. But it's wild in what it reveals about the Chinese system and what's going on inside of the country. And so I think that, you know, the interesting thing is, I've spoken with a few of my friends that work in the intelligence community and I don't think there's anyone in the US anywhere that ultimately a characteristic of an authoritarian government is that knowing why they did this is really about knowing why Xi Jinping did this. It's about knowing the intent of a single person, and nobody in the US really knows what his motives were. But what we do know is what is the impact of what he did. And so we know what the effect was. And what the effect is that it was a massive consolidation of power. And so to me, what that says is, this was, you know, Xi Jinping, an autocrat that saw an alternative power base forming inside of China, where you had very, very powerful you know, celebrity pop culture phenomenons in these tech companies and their CEOs, that he felt threatened by. And at the end of the day, it, you know, with Xi Jinping, all roads lead back to power and control. And this was just, you know, yet another manifestation of that. The other- Was it a mistake? just going to be like a big mistake on this part. Yes, I think it is. I think this, I think this is an example of how we're seeing China starting to repeat some of the self destructive habits of past dictatorships. When they grow paranoid, they start to go after, you know, all of their industries. I mean, for a long time, the Chinese miracle was justified by, wow, they have an autocratic government, but man, the trains weren't on time. They're capitalists, you know, they are pro business. Things are really booming in China. Now, it's really just becoming vintage circa dictatorships from Soviet style. And as you point out, he basically nationalized an entire swath of its economy. Now, if you're a Chinese entrepreneur, if you want to start a company, this has changed what success looks like. It's like success is no longer, I want to be the next Jack Ma. Success is, Uh, if I'm really, if I'm too successful, I might end up in jail. So, so it's, you know, I think it's, it's really kind of changed. Yeah. It's a fine line. It's changed the basic bargain of Chinese society in a lot of ways.

### Human: Sure, so I believe you have to do the job yourself to really understand it. And so we just started to look at how do dishes get processed? How do the dirty dishes come in? How do they go through a traditional dish machine? How do they come out and then go back into service? And we broke that down into a number of steps. And then first rights for everyone at Dishcraft is actually washing dishes themselves. And so we... Then broke into all this different steps and said, OK, let's let's. Do each part on its own and then stitch it together, because again, with robotics, as long as you can simplify it, it just makes everything much, much easier. So what we do is we dishes come in, they go into a collection system that is nice and tidy and clean and saves a commercial food service place space. Those dishes are really going into carts. We take those carts and bring them over to the robot, and it almost acts as a cartridge. And when you push the cart in, then the robot takes over from there. It picks up every single item. It recognizes, is this a bowl or is it a plate? Is there something on it that could harm me? And then it goes through, does a pre-rinse cycle, and then it inspects it for cleanliness. If it's past inspection, it racks it, pushes that rack into a traditional dish machine. And then on the other side, we now have a robot that will pick it out of the rack and put it into clean carts.### Assistant: All right. So when we get back, I want to know how does one even start to create a robot to clean dishes and model. Obviously, you worked in these restaurants. So I want to I want you to unpack that story of working there. And then how your brain works to say, what, how do we construct this process when we get back on the street of startups? Listen, I have invested in over 200 startups, I've advised even more, I've been in the startup game forever. And one of the key things you want to do in a startup is you want to minimize your burn. And you need to maximize efficiency because startups are always under-resourced versus larger competitors, right? So I look for people who can take a nickel and turn it into a dollar of value. Well, how do you do that? Well, look at all the different software products you're spending money on and how much time and energy your team has to put into integrating them all together. If you look at those two things, you're gonna say we're spending too much money and it's too much integration time. Well, Odoo is here to change that, O-D-O-O. I want you to go there now and get $1,000 in credit. I mean, I'm not joking, $1,000 in credits. It's becoming a little bit of a competition here on the show of who can be the most generous. odoo.com slash twist, and you will get $1,000 in credits for their fully customizable and fully integrated suite of software products that lets you build and scale your stack as you scale your business. It's simple, it's modular, so you use what you need and all of their apps integrate perfectly together with each other. Plus it's all open source. You can spend your time on talent instead of expensive software. You need to spend that money building a team. So go ahead and get $1,000 from Odoo at odoo.com slash twist right now. All right welcome back to this week in startup so many you're telling me about your thinking about your next startup vacuum robots for consumers they work. They're cheap to get the job done they don't need to levitate but dishes when i heard you were doing this that to me seemed like wait a second we have dishwashers but. you know, they're kind of rigid, and emptying and filling the dishwasher is so brutal that that is the first task we give to any child as a chore. One person's got to load the dishwasher, the other one's got to unload it. When you when you went into those restaurants, and you asked your friends to go work and then what, what was going through your mind as you were conceiving this as a product? And then what is the product of dishcraft? And how does it work?

### Human: So this is just some magical thing that VCs came up with and started writing into contracts that basically means like, we know our job is risky, but we decided we don't want it to be risky.### Assistant: Participation means you get your money back times liquidation preference, or you get your percentage return. Not both, you get one or the other. That's to protect the downside. Here, if you look at the exit value of 2.5 million, If you had a liquidation preference, because sometimes you don't have a liquidation preference, but if you had a liquidation preference, 1x is standard. So let's take the same scenario. I put in 500k at 5 million, but the company sold for 2.5. So everybody's sad, right? People invested at 5 million, they bought 10%. The company's only selling for 2.5. Well, what that means is if you had a 1% liquidation preference, you would take 500 off the top. Or if you had a 1.5, you take 750 off the top, a 2x, you take a million off the top, right? And you would get that at a minimum. Or you would get your 10%. So if you had a one x liquidation preference, would you take 10% of 2.5 Molly 250k? Or would you take the one x your original investment? Which one would you take? If you had to choose? Of course, of course, you take the bigger number. Now if it sells for five, which will you take the 10% of 5,000,010% or one times your investment 500,000? Right? Which would you take? Which 500,000 would you take? Right, totally. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Right. So at a $5 million sale, it doesn't matter. Okay, now let's go to the $10 million sale. At a $10 million sale, 10% of $10 million is $1 million. $1X is $500,000. Which would you take, Molly? The 10%, $1 million, or the $500K, $1X liquidation preference? $1 million, for sure. You take the 10%, right? So when you do, a liquidation preference is non-participating. The liquidation preference or the percentage is your choice, whichever is greater. Okay. This creates what's called downside protection for an investor. They don't have a chance of losing their money. If the company were to sell for but $500,000, it was a short sale, as we call in the business. It was a disaster. The company gets liquidated. It sells for just 500. What would the investor get who put in 500? All 500. All 500. What would the founders get? Bupkis, nothing. The founders and the team get nothing.

### Human: Yeah, so, well, initially my biggest challenge was answering the questions very concise and quickly. That was a weak point that I felt that I needed to work on throughout the entire process of the accelerator. But my strategy, Nicole and I actually talked a lot and I really loved her theory on getting to the nose, but I just, I took a lot of notes. I loved how you guys really were like an accountability partner and that there was this funnel idea you know, stage one, stage two, and so forth of where we were with investors and actually keeping up with the updates. I really try to be diligent about updating investors, which got me further along in all of my conversations.### Assistant: All right. When we get back, we'll talk to Nicole, Aaron, and Armando as we wrap up here on Speak & Serve. I love modern furniture. I am a modern furniture snob. And what I love most about modern furniture is it looks so clean and gorgeous. And I found a brand that I am obsessed with. It's called Modloft, M-O-D-L-O-F-T. Now some of you are saying, oh, I know Modloft. Of course I know Modloft. Well, I found out about it maybe two years ago because I moved from a house that was like kind of an old Mediterranean style to a modern house, and I needed modern furniture. And I kept doing Google searches and I was on Pinterest and all roads led back to Modloft. And I bought all this Modloft stuff. And I had some other, you know, expensive, like from Italy, fancy, modern stuff. And people like the Modloft stuff better and it's more affordable. Modloft is now sponsoring this week in startups and giving you 15% off and free shipping if you go to mod, M-O-D, loft, L-O-F-T, modloft.com slash twist. You can finish your entire home. Bedroom living room dining room outdoor outdoors really good and of course they have office stuff too and it's risk-free at home trials you can just order it try it out if you don't like it they take it back delivery in days not months and that's super important to me because a lot of this furniture i found out is like bespoke and it takes six months. I'm team in stock. If it's not in stock, I'm done. It's gotta be in stock. And you know what, Mobloff, everything's always in stock. And these are spectacular pieces that have won international design awards, and they'll even do some free interior design consulting to fit your style. The customer service is second to none. I've gotten them on the phone, I've gotten them on email. Super responsive, they know what they're doing. Mobloff.com slash twist for 15% off. I love this stuff. Go ahead and check it out, I know you will too. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. All right, we met three great startups here today. TechMate, Nude Bar, and Solo Trucking. And now we're just going to a little roundtable discussion with the founders about what they learned during the accelerator, and about being entrepreneurs, and what it's like to be an entrepreneur in the time of COVID. Aaron, maybe you could talk a little bit about fundraising and what you learned. You heard Nicole talk a little bit about getting to 60 no's so they could learn and iterate. What was your strategy in terms of raising money?

### Human: Yeah, pretty close, actually. I mean, I think we, we segment a little bit around if you overlay the games, right? So like families. So like, I would argue that in Utah, you've got Monday night, which is kind of a family night, and then the weekends. And so if you took your weekend games and the families and dates, and you said, okay, then you have the business folks, which are typically Monday through Friday. Yeah. And then you would have kind of the big game goers, like in LA, this would be like the stars are out, like this would always be the marquee matchup, the marquee game. And then if you overlay that with another variable or vector, which would be like, where do they want to sit? So if you look at like, big game, marquee matchup, you know that those floor seats are going to be high premium, right? Or you've got the diehards, they'll sit wherever and they just want to go and they go to every game, this is the way it is. You've got families who are typically going on the weekends, right? Because that's when they can, I mean, those school nights, this and that. And then you've got you know, events or people that are coming in or big groups or large groups or everything else. So I mean, you know, they're pretty good. And so yeah, I think historically, what you've done is you've said, Oh, we've got a $3 million marketing budget, we're just going to attack that group. And it's like, wait, that's not one group. No. So actually divide up your budget and go figure out how to creatively attack all of them. And you will end up a lot further.### Assistant: Yeah, no, it's great. I mean, Draymond has I've had many conversations with Draymond before he started his pod during his pod. We talk podcast every couple of weeks at the poker game. And I mean, talk about a game changer. And people don't know this. Mark Cuban was investor in my blogging company, and we set up blog Maverick for him. He famously wrote the post about Steve Nash getting traded and why he didn't give him like an extended contract or whatever. That freaked ESPN out. They were like, they wouldn't even link to Cuban's blog. uh and now like folks don't want to link to draymond's podcast but it's like draymond's talking about the game in a very real like tangible way after a playoff game in his hotel it's incredible i thought we were going to see this last year i thought we were going to see the um the in playoff game when he got kicked out of the game i thought we were going to get the in playoff game pod 2000 I set this, uh, my partner, Brian, uh, he came up with the name blog maverick. Oh, yeah. And then this is the post he wrote. And Mark emailed me the post. He wrote it on his BlackBerry or sidekick. And he emails it to me. Hey, post this. And I get it in my thing. And I'm like, Mark, the commas like you putting a space then a comma, like it's always comma then space. And he's like, leave the typos. And I'm like, but you're using like an ellipsis wrong here. He's like, I want people to know it's me. I'm I just I wrote it like stream of conscious. I read it once just post it. And I'm like, Are you sure? He's like, I'm sure go. And this like broke the NBA when he wrote this. Do you remember this? Yeah, I remember it. It's crazy. Yeah, it was just like, go direct. I mean, that is the overall, like, concept of media is consumers want you to go direct. They want to talk to you. You mentioned five personas. I know corporates one. I know the diehard fans who've had season tickets for in their family for like 2030 years. That's the other. I know there's like the tourists who come in, and they just want to catch a game. They're casual, that's three. Then I got to think there's groups that come to the arena, who are like, you know, like a school or something like that. And then I guess there's the people who you don't have, who just casually, maybe get dragged to a game. Did I get all five?

### Human: Right. So but it sounds like that schedule can be variable. And this was what was kind of interesting about Sam lessons tweets. He tweeted Tuesday and said, I've gotten a staggering number of VC capital calls in the last week, it seems like everyone has been desperately holding off calling capital. And everyone just caved all at once in the last week. And then someone in the replies asked why he might why this might be happening. And he said, I think everybody spent the last six months stretching capital and coffers to not call more because they know all LPS have just lost a fortune in the stock market, we assume, and would appreciate not having to pay out more, but they could only hold on for so long without calling. So they all just folded and called. Is this a thing like are the schedules variable? Or are they set?### Assistant: This happened during the dot com recession. Yeah, it happened during the Great Recession. And now, in our speculative asset recession, that I have dubbed the SAR, We had the dr.com recession, we had the gr the Great Recession. And now we have the speculative asset recession SAR. During each of these people who are the LPS are licking their wounds, their portfolio went down 30% 40% Who knows, some cases 50%. And so they're sitting there going, Oh, in order to fund this capital commitment, I got to send cash. Where am I gonna get the cash? Oh, I got to sell my Facebook shares. So let's say this family office was sitting on 25 million Facebook shares. And they just lost 80% of their value because yeah, Zuckerberg decides he wants to be the guy who makes ready player one a reality. And he's just torched that 25 million is now down to 5 million. Now you're asking him to sell that at the lowest point it's been order to fund your stuff, and they're bummed. So what you might say is, hey, I'll just take it easy here. Instead of taking down the million in February, I'll take down to 50 in September, and I'll just take down what I need. I'm not going to I'm going to slow down capital deployment, which is why in a down market, startups can get caught in this. For this six month period. They don't have a bunch of cash on hand. Now they have that dry powder commitment, but they don't want to call on the commitment. So you have startup founders going, wait a second, I just saw you raise $250 million fund, we're part of a $250 million fund that you just raised last year, why can't you give us the money? And they're like, well, we're, you know, going to take a wait and see approach, we're going to stand pat here, the numbers aren't where we want to see them, whatever. They'll make it a drawn out process. And they'll just fund the most essential there was to become very discerning. So they're taking down one out of the $4 they thought they were going to do. Instead of taking down the 20 million, they say, we'll just take down five, just as a courtesy to our LPs, because we know the market's going to rebound, and we'll make it a little easier on them. So this is like a trickle down, maybe a second order effect, or a third order effect, we would call this in the industry. The second order effect of the down market, the market collapsing is VCs don't take down the money that they're entitled to. So the LPs don't get squeezed.

### Human: Right? My parents didn't let me have an iPod touch or like a phone. iPod touch I think was middle school and phone, like a smartphone. I think I was like a junior in high school and I always told them like, if I'm a slow typer, because of you guys. So that is really awesome. I would love to know more about how a TikTok account gets acquired. I we obviously we hear that term all the time in the world of startups, but I've actually never heard of somebody acquiring a TikTok account. Can you run us through that process? And maybe even what you do today for them if you can tell us that.### Assistant: Yeah, it's very interesting. And quite frankly, the context I would say leading up to the acquisition was, when you start a tech company, I assume that it definitely crosses the founder's mind that an acquisition could happen if things go well. But I didn't start the TikTok account for it to get acquired. I didn't even know that was possible. So it was as much of a surprise as it was to me, as opposed to building a startup where that could be on the roadmap. Nonetheless, the account was growing, we surpassed 100,000 followers, and I was starting to feel like maybe this tech news thing is interesting, but it will be nice to kind of work on something else soon. And I got introduced to the folks at Workweek, which was a stealth kind of brand new media startup at the time. Adam Ryan, who's the CEO of the company, this really brilliant media operator, former president of The Hustle, and then Becca Sherman, who is also a manager at The Hustle and just really smart. They're both really, really smart. I got introduced to them, and it became clear that having a TikTok account to drive distribution is very helpful. when you're building a media company. TikTok does organic distribution really, really well. And the conversation quickly kind of turned to perhaps we use my account as a launchpad to kind of launch various kind of media projects within Workweek. And what we actually settled on was a wonderful podcast called Just Raised hosted by a Workweek friend named Joe Sweeney. And he kind of was doing a lot of the same stories, longer form stories that I was kind of doing on my TikTok account. It was not uncommon to see a video on my TikTok account that led something along the lines of this startup raised X money to do Y type thing. Or this startup raised X to do Y. And I would say that is basically what Joe's podcast was doing. So the synergies became very clear. So we rebranded the account. And I'm sticking around at Workweek as an advisor, helping them transition the account. We're making more videos with more work we creators. So I'm not necessarily going away. It's kind of, we're just kind of increasing the content load, which is nice for the audience because they're going to get to see more videos. Um, and nice for me because I get to be part of something bigger than myself as it pertains to, to a tick tock account and a personal brand, which is just really difficult as a creator to build something bigger than yourself. So, so that was obviously nice. And it will be cool to see the account kind of live on in a way that doesn't eventually necessarily involve me 100% of the time. So yeah, that's kind of the backstory.

### Human: Yeah. If you've been in the kitchen and you've cooked and you're talking to another chef about what you're making, you're going to have a different conversation than talking to the reviewers who review the restaurants for a living, who are completely cynical, who have eaten at the best places for the best years. And they're not thinking about the heat of the oven and the spice or whatever you're going to use and the cooking technique. And the fact that you broke it apart I thought is really super interesting. And connecting your Stripe... I know Stripe bought the website. We'll get into that in the next segment, or bought the business. But they leave you alone, which was interesting. But you had that idea before that. There's somebody else who does that. Bear Metrics, I think, allows people to just share their metrics publicly. There's this weird group of people who are building transparent companies. It's another movement Would you know what the name of that movement is? It kind of fizzled. Open startups. Open startups, yeah. Maybe 10 years ago, five, 10 years ago, open startups were a thing where I would just talk about everything I was doing. It's almost like put your Slack public and just talk about what you're building. It never really worked. I don't know if there's a big example of it, but There was a company called Buffer that became famous because they made 10 million in revenue and they just published it on barometrics. But you broke down into the component steps, how to do this, and you really put a mission statement at the website. And I think it's worth pausing on for a second. When you click the Start Here button at IndieHackers, when you first come to the website, you see all the discussions. So that's great. But when you click the Start Here, which is where a new person would go, It defines what an indie hacker is as somebody who's building an online project that can generate revenue. That's very intentional, because you see this as a business proposition here, and a person seeking financial independence, creative freedom, and the ability to work on their own schedule. So again, back to that personal freedom. I think that's super cool. And whether it's 500 a month on the side or 10,000 a month so you can quit your job, it's never easy to draw in income from your own projects, follow the steps below to get started. It's really intentional to be capitalistic and to be about freedom, which, by the way, is kind of what America is about. Tell me about that sort of intentionality of telling people like, you're here because you're going to make yourself independent and free of work, of financial freedom, basically the American dream. Why have you chosen to fight and make your life's work to show people how to build the American dream in the 21st century?### Assistant: I think it's just a natural thing for people to want. This is not something where I'm having to convince people that this is a good dream to have and people are resistant. A lot of people are almost constitutionally unable to work for a boss, or they feel really down about having a nine to five job, or they feel like they could do something bigger and better with their lives. And there just isn't... There haven't been traditionally great avenues for doing that. And the internet is this great democratizing tool. Anybody can get on the internet. And again, there are no gatekeepers. Just because there are investors who have money, doesn't mean you need to take their money. Anybody can just get on the internet and build a transformative business. And I think it's naturally inspirational to lots of people. When I was reading those threads on Hacker News, I was inspired by the thought of what I could do. And when I looked around my tribe, for example, when I was in Y Combinator, Someone in my batch sold the company for like, I think $2 million, like a few months after starting it, which I thought was amazing. Like, holy crap, you could start a company and make millions of dollars in a few months. That's life-changing. It doesn't happen anywhere else. And everybody else around me was kind of like, oh, they sold out way too early. I can't believe they didn't have the right ambition. And that was bizarre to me. And I didn't want my values to become like their values. I think your values can easily come in from whatever tribe you're a part of. And that's kind of like the high-growth startup mindset. You go big or you go home. When I introspected about my life and the people who I respected and the people who I wanted to respect me, I thought about, well, I'm a software engineer. I could sit down and code something that there's no reason it can't make 10 or 20 grand a month. And then I can pay all my bills, pay my rent, and do literally anything I want with my life. And that would make me happy. I'm pretty sure everyone that I know would be like, that's cool as shit. I would love to do that too. And then I can decide if I want to go bigger or I want to go to a new career or a new profession. And a lot of other people have the same mission. They want the freedom. They want the financial independence to have the optionality to choose what they want to do with their lives later on. And so it wasn't this flash of insight like, oh, aha, I know what people want. It's just obvious that people have this desire and they want to build their own business.

### Human: I'll skip on the web three. Like it was a it was a blip in time. And like, you know, there are real people who know their stuff, who are still believers. And I do think that something interesting will come from it. But I don't think that it was for all of us tourists to play with. Let's put it that way. And I don't think the consumer was there. So if the consumer is not there, it doesn't really I don't think it ultimately is ready.### Assistant: It seemed the only consumer use case was gambling, like literally speculation or if you prefer speculation. The only one I really thought was, would stick around, and it has was store of value. I mean, people are still talking about, hey, Bitcoin is a great way if you are in a fiat that you don't trust, whether it's the US dollar today, or, you know, Venezuelan dollars yesterday, like, oh, you could put a little bit in Bitcoin, and maybe it's not correlated with your local currency. I love getting that whiteboard out, having three or four people in a room jamming and modeling out, you know, important things. And when we're building businesses, venture funds, products, and you know what, we kind of lost that in remote, didn't we? Well, here's a tool that'll bring that magic back. It's called Miro. It's spelled M I R O. Miro is so much more than a simple digital whiteboard. When you think Miro, think zero to one. Building your startup from scratch needs input from everybody on the team and Miro democratizes collaboration and inputs, but it's really visual collaboration that has really evolved to tap into what the power is when we're all working from home or remotely, which is asynchronous, right, we can all collaborate on our own time, we can collaborate at the same time planning, researching, brainstorming, designing feedback cycles, all of that faster inputs, equals faster outcomes. It's very simple. And the velocity of your product and your business model and the internal growth of your company is how you actually beat the bigger companies. Miro is zero to one. It's going to do it faster for you. And here's the best part. Miro has a community of power users that build thousands of world class templates. You can go see all of those templates and start on second or third base, right? So you don't have to sit there with a blank sheet and go, Hmm, what should I do? You just go to Miro.com Miro.com slash Miro verse. m i r o v e r s e. So here's your call to action. Go sign up for Miro for free at miro.com slash startups. That's miro.com slash startups to sign up for free. You're an angel discord. How did that come about? That's an incredible bet. I mean, you bet on a chat room. Wow, that takes some conviction. Very easy. I say that in a joking way. Because I bet on a meditation app, you know, like, oh, you bet on a stock trading app, like, there's always something more than just the generic description of it. So what was the something in discord that you saw that led you to place that conviction bet?

### Human: Yeah, this is these are these are the moments when I'm so delighted not to be a journalist and excited to be an investor. because this is a wide open lens to apply to this topic as opposed to the narrow lens of I thought it should look like this by now this guy can do this and that did this and that right like when you get to imply apply this and and listen I wish more journalists could when you get to apply this big huge wide lens what is this what moment are we in and what could it mean then an entire universe of possibilities opens up to you. You start to say, okay, what does the world look like and what are the businesses that can be born and the products that can be built when the cost of creation goes to zero? When we talk about wanting to back technical founders, what do we even mean anymore? do they have to know how to code? Because I'm pretty sure machines and to be able to do that, right? So like, what do they actually just need to know how to harness? You know, I mean, granted, I sort of wish you'd stop talking about cities tumbling. That metaphor is a little like, on the nose.### Assistant: Yeah. And so what what I think is happening is watching his team talk about each of those components, and they're building models to test scenarios. They're trying to figure out the world depth, height, all of these things. And each one of those is taking years for teams to topple. But as they topple each one, each subsequent one gets easier. Just like when you put a bunch of cloud computing stuff in and you build the tools to publish to the cloud, it gets easier, easier, easier. And a startup being launched today costs 100th or maybe 1000th of what it would cost in terms of engineering hours than it did in 1995. happening big time in AI and machine learning. And so I think we're on the cusp of something very big. That, like you talked about bankruptcy happens slowly, and then all at once. Yeah, gradually. And then suddenly, it's gradually and then suddenly is what's happening right now. And it feels like this is going to be a more profound. This could be as or more profound, I suspect more profound than the difference between not having the internet and having the internet. Listen, if you're a startup, you need to sign up for Notion right now. I want you to head to Notion.com slash twist and sign up for free at launch. We run our entire organization inside of Notion. Now, Notion is an all in one team collaboration tool. You can think of it like note taking, document sharing, like a spreadsheet, a database, a wiki, all of those things put together. But with communication and teams built into it, it is a gorgeous product and the design is stunning. It's easy to learn how to use. But once you learn it, you start uncovering all these incredible features. Now, we were looking at CRM systems, and I looked at a lot of them. And I wanted to have like a CRM for all the companies we meet. And it turned out we built our own deal flow CRM inside. of notion I was able to do all this and build it in six weeks I had looked at other solutions it would have cost me 250k to build it as custom software which I was going to do I was willing to bite the bullet and spend a quarter million on it and instead I did it in six weeks with my team without developers no code inside of notion and listen not all work collaboration tools are created equal some help you organize your company's information others allow you to manage projects together notion does both. It's one tool for your whole team to do it all. And it's so beautifully designed, everyone will want to use it. Learn more and get started for free right now at notion.com. Take the first step toward an organized happy team today. Go to notion.com to get started today.

### Human: Before we get into the ad, let me just tell you straight up linkedin.com slash twist your first job posting free. I'm not kidding linkedin.com slash twist your first job listing free nothing to lose. Okay, now on to the ad. Too many small business owners are busier than ever. They spend time searching for an interviewing the wrong candidates for a job opening and it would be much better for them to spend their time growing their business. That's why LinkedIn jobs has made it easier to get the candidates worth interviewing faster. And that's why they're giving you the first job listing for free at linkedin.com slash twist. They know it's going to work. Here's how it works. You create a free post in minutes on LinkedIn jobs, and you reach the world's largest professional network with over 750 million people. I remember reading this ad when it was like 150 million. My god, they're growing. It's like one of the biggest growth stories inside of Microsoft, in fact. So they focus on candidates with the skills and experience that you need. And you can use screening questions to get your role in front of the most qualified people. We love LinkedIn jobs at launch. And in 2021, we've hired a third producer, a curriculum designer for founding university, and two more researchers. And we're still hiring for three more positions using You guessed it LinkedIn jobs. So LinkedIn jobs will help you find the candidates that are worth interviewing faster. Every week nearly 40 million job seekers visit LinkedIn. So post your job for free at linkedin.com slash twist terms and conditions apply because they've given you something for free. Okay, let's get back to the program. So let me just put this out here because I want to get into Amazon the business. I think that's like the most fascinating part. But having known Jeff, not personally, but you know, been in the same room with him and having mutual friends and this kind of thing. Did he have some crazy midlife crisis? Is that what's going on the last five years when, you know, he got divorced? um he starts dating i mean he essentially steals his friend's wife uh i think is the only way to say it right and he pretty much goes out there unabashedly dating another guy's wife and i don't want to make this salacious but on top of that then quits his job starts flying helicopters, he looks like he's on performance enhancing drugs, or he's working out like eight times a day. I mean, he's just colossal, like you've seen the memes. And, you know, the Hollywood thing seems to be on track as a business. I don't think that was the midlife crisis. But certainly, quitting and then saying, I'm going to go do what Elon does and make rocket ships is was quite a turn of events, was it not?### Assistant: It's remarkable. And Jason, you'll appreciate that. I started working on this book in 2018. So I didn't anticipate any of this that that my my tame little business book would take a left turn into, you know, the National Enquirer, dick pics and a salacious Hollywood scandal like that. I did not anticipate that. But you know, like, I'll say a couple things. One, you know, it, first of all, we can't, I was very wary of assuming that we had all the facts that we could know all the facts, people's private lives or the details of a marriage, you know, are somewhat unknowable. They're very private people. I ultimately don't know the extent to which, you know, his first marriage was over before it became public knowledge. At the very least, there was some questionable judgment in, as you say, being so open about the relationship at a time when public interest in him, because he was the wealthiest person in the world and the CEO of Amazon, was so high. There was clearly an error in judgment. Then I tell the whole story about how he kind of, in some ways, weaponized his ownership of the Washington Post to attack the National Enquirer and did so very successfully. Is it a midlife crisis? My sense is that as he got wealthier, as he became more of a member of elite society, he determined that he enjoyed it. And he enjoyed the trappings of the super yacht St. Bart's lifestyle, going to the conferences. And I know for a fact that Mackenzie, now, you know, now, formerly Mackenzie Bezos, did not enjoy that lifestyle. She's very private, right? And and so you can kind of see their stars moving in opposite directions. And she's obviously, you know, created quite a mystique for herself now as a as a philanthropist. But yeah, it seems to me that like, I don't know if it was a midlife crisis, as much as it was him wanting to really continue living a life of public adventure. um you know or or and enjoying his wealth um the one thing the one quick other thing i'd say is you know he had the space vision before elon. Blue origin you know precede spacex but he executed it horribly and i have a chapter on this and in my book and you know elon runs spacex bezos has always administered to it from a distance and and sewed all kind of dysfunction because of that and so now we see him trying to catch up putting himself at risk to take that flight. filing lawsuits against SpaceX, it's going to be interesting drama to watch. Bezos doesn't like to come in second on anything. And with space, I he's he's maybe third or fourth at this point.

### Human: And that's what I really wonder is less about investing, right? Less about what's being invested, but who, who is on the LP side, and whether we will start to see more big firms say, you know, we want to clean that up, or we have cleaned that up, or we have no Russian money there. It's kind of like this question of how deep the, you know, the purge is going to go.### Assistant: You know, I don't think I would say if you went to American company, American venture capital firms, I would think very few had any Russian oligarch money or certainly not. You probably couldn't take you certainly couldn't take Russian money into a venture fund directly. an oligarchs money you probably would get a call we talked about this previously i think she talked about it yeah different countries with kyc uh know your customer rules would probably get stopped and i think there are funds of funds i met with a fund of funds and i asked them explicitly like know, where's the money? Where does your money come from? And they explained that I said, Do you have any, like Saudi money, as an example, or Chinese money? And they said, No, not from the government. And I said, Well, what does that mean? So we might have, I think we have like one family that is of Saudi origin, you know, that is in the fund, and, you know, they're less than 1%. So then you're left with, as a edge case, if you disagreed with taking money from a authoritarian country, there was a family from an authoritarian country, that was well to do, would you and they were in a fund of funds, and they were less than 1% of it, would you take that fund of funds money if the other people in the fund were good people? So that's where it gets a little dicey. And do you even know, right? Yeah. And so, and then because of various clauses, you know, in these kind of arrangements, you probably don't have the right to disclose to anybody who's in the fund for privacy reasons. So, you know, you're kind of left with this awkward situation of like, hmm, do I fund my fund or not know who's in it kind of thing. I think this is actually on billions right now. Billions in the hedge fund. Michael, I think his name is Michael Prince. He creates something called the Prince list, a little spoiler here, but not major. And he says, instead of just taking money from anybody, I am going to create a list of who's approved to give me money. Right. And he creates the Prince list, which is these are good people in the world who I want to make money for, which by the way, as I talked to Doug Leoni about Sequoia is funds, I think 90 cents on the dollar or something or nonprofits. giving scholarships and doing work in the developing world and all that stuff. So they get to pick and choose. So why wouldn't they if they had an ability to add LPS, or give LPS a bigger chunk, start with the Ford Foundation, or, you know, some scholarship foundation. So I think totally.

### Human: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think it it is a it was a huge fight. We've done it with cigarettes. We've done it with alcohol. We do it with voting. Like we do it with driving. Yep. And unquestionably, I think this we're starting to see the possibility that there is as much harm here as there is with those products. And we also know that in the case of meta, for example, it has specifically been designed to addict. Like all been designed to design put a like button you put follow cigarettes. And every time, you know, and then it's like, you should take that away. And this sort of this artificial cottage industry has been built up around getting those likes. And it is, without a doubt, dangerous. Let's do a little though, I'm kind of curious about the back of the envelope math about if you imagine that Meta is trying to do this to recoup lost revenue, as a result of its privacy, the privacy changes, like, if you are when they were talking about Libra, I wrote, you know, that remember briefly, for those who do not recall, Facebook was trying to do a cryptocurrency called Libra. And I wrote a piece that did a little back of the envelope math before I even knew there was a name for it. That that pointed out that even like when Facebook rolls out something that is considered a failure, it could still have as much adoption as the US dollar, right? Like, at least in terms of the US, like a tiny number like 1%, right, would be 300 million users.### Assistant: Ah, that's interesting to put those two things together. Yeah. And you, you and Rach producer Rachel talked a little bit about the selling of databases. The other week, I wasn't on that episode, but I listened to it. And you were talking about, hey, they were selling like, hey, here's a list of people who are, you know, have depression medication. So this medication or that medication, there's a lot of scrutiny coming. And we tend to trail what happens in the EU, the EU's tighten things up. So it's a new revenue stream, it'll make the service better. And I think what's happening here is, you know, Zuckerberg's never viewed Twitter as competition, really. Yeah. They were kind of like, as he called it, the clown car that drove into a diamond mine. I think was his quote. Interesting. Very different products, right? Very different products. But even still, there are social networks where people share content with each other. And he is now responding to users and engaging, which obviously is one of Elon superpowers. And so here you see he somebody's like, Oh, this should be part of the clear. This person mark is like, this really is just be part of the core product users should not have to pay for this. Clearly, it's known by meta blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And Mark Zuckerberg is like, we already provide protections and some support for everyone, but verifying government IDs and providing direct access to customer support for millions or billions of people costs a significant amount of money, subscription fees will cover this and also will also pace how many people sign up. So we'll be able to ensure quality as we scale. And then you know, somebody's challenging heads 144 hours, but I have not seen Zuck mix it up with like, customers. So I think this is a new era where people are going to start taking ownership. I would like to see them take ownership of the fact that young women are suffering from depression, anxiety, feelings of hopelessness at a rate 2x than before social media and phones existed. And I think it's time that we have the discussion of what is the appropriate age. I bought my daughter an iWatch this weekend, an Apple Watch, sorry. not a phone, but she's 13. I got her the watch to start to do text. So we know where she is, because she's going on a field trip, etc. And we want to stay in touch. I think we have discussed what age is the right age for social media. I think the age is 16. Some people might say 13. But I think we should pass legislation, have a thoughtful discussion about all social media being banned until you're 16 years old. Yeah.

### Human: Yeah. I mean, that's amazing when you think about it. And then how many of these surgeries do you need in order to feed it into an AI and say, how do we do this better? And it's probably somewhere between 50 and 100 surgeries. I'm guessing the AI can start to have enough data to meaningfully give feedback. There's nothing like that going on in the world right now. Nobody's feeding an AI model these surgeries and saying, how can we make this surgery go better? Or does that exist?### Assistant: So, we get everything from the surgery. So, go back to Elon's master plan, part one and two, right? Yeah. Let's make a car, let's make it really fast, and then let's work our way down the stack so everybody has one. Okay, now we need a satellite and a charging station. We've got to put all those pieces together. So, effectively, that's what we're doing here, is we have invented the sort of tip of the spear surgical navigation platform, and it must be great. It must be the best. That earns us the right to be in the operating room capturing all these data. Of course, we can drive deep learning models and we can train AIs with the best surgeons to perform better and better and better over time. That's very exciting. That would be enough of a cause to build a company. It's a very profitable enterprise, et cetera. But I don't think that's enough for Proprio, and that's not why I'm here. I'm here to drive the company towards a future that is very data-driven and where the entire industry has to react. And what I mean by that is the whole medical device industry is very focused on selling expensive capital equipment. So think about a robot that performs a surgery, or an MRI machine that costs $2 million. Or they're very focused on selling you a screw that goes in somebody's back. And that screw costs $1,000 $1,200 a piece, and they make it for two bucks. It's the most lucrative razor razor blades model maybe in the world, right? To break that model and reduce the cost of care while increasing the quality of care, we have to invent things like proprio, the paradigm, take it into the operating room, and perform and improve all these surgeries, right? But where you can break the business model is say, well, now I know what it takes to perform the surgery really well. I know who does well in what circumstances. I know what products, both hardware and software, can be used in that surgery to improve it. So now you have more than one customer. You're not just going to a hospital whose finances might be challenging and saying, you got to write me a $2 million check, and maybe the most innovative thing is a capital as a service model. Now you're saying for everybody else who benefits from that surgery being performed, it's something approaching perfection. I can see the gears turning. You're going, well, when do the insurers pay these guys? When does the revenue cycle management company that goes and collects the bills for the hospital start wanting access to this data? When does the Medtronic, the implant maker, go, well, these guys can make my implant more effective and tell me how effective it was?

### Human: Yeah, and people seem to underestimate the size of the coalition that would oppose China. So China seems very scary. because they have been had a pretty amazing run the last 2030 years in building their society advancing their society. But if you just look at the tonnage of our navies, you know, three and a half million tons, you know, we China's 700,000,000 700,000 tons, we kind of dwarf them in terms of our Navy, correct?### Assistant: Like, could this happen at any really bad? Yeah, it's really, really bad. One to 10. I think it's like a nine and a half. Oh, wow. The reason is, I mean, if you just... I think part of the challenge is that it's so bad that a lot of people almost don't even want to think that it's true or really happening. Denial. But I think there is a lot of denial because the thought of being at war with China is so unfathomable. But Winston Churchill wrote in The Aftermath of World War II that Great wars have a tendency of sometimes happening very suddenly, and he obviously lived through World War I and World War II, so he saw this twice play out in his lifespan. And here, I mean, if you just look at the facts, You have one of the biggest military buildups in the world going on concentrated in one geographic theater in the Taiwan Strait from China, 350 ships. As you point out, they have been conducting almost daily incursions in Taiwan's airspace. Xi Jinping is blatantly saying that he wants to unify Taiwan with China, He's 68 years old. So when we think about when he wants to do that, it's probably going to be in the next 10 years. And the defense minister of Taiwan says that it could be as soon as 2025. So if you kind of take those facts and think, gee, if these people are actually right, if Xi Jinping, if we're going to believe what he says, and if we're going to believe what the Taiwanese Minister of Defense says, that means that we, the United States, have less than 24 months to decide whether or not we're going to do anything to prevent and deter a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan. that is a really unattractive position to be in. But the position that's even worse is not doing anything. And then the choice is the choice that we face is, okay, China, we wake up one morning and China's invaded Taiwan. And then we either basically send our own troops in to throw the Chinese out of Taiwan and we're at war with China, or we don't do anything at all. I think if people that want peace and that don't want to go to war with China basically have two options, either we don't do anything at all and we just accept it, or we prevent the invasion from happening in the first place. And the way to do that is to deter it. I think, you know, the old saying of you have to be respected by your allies and feared by your enemies is true. I don't think that being inoffensive and unprepared is going to be our ticket to peace and safety in the Asia Pacific. And I think Xi Jinping is proving that every single day.

### Human: Yeah, so what I say to my founders is the moment that a VC gives you a term sheet, the traction just flipped. And so before you were asking, now they're begging you to take their term sheet. So now you're in the driver's seat. And so what you want to do in that moment is you actually want to slow down the process. because you want to make sure you're making the right call. And so what I do when I'm looking at a VC firm is I start with their portfolio companies and I go through every founder in the portfolio companies and I get an introduction, not from the VC, but from somebody else to the founders of those companies being like, Hey, what are these guys like to work with? And then I go down the list and I'm looking for every single contact point I possibly could have with that VC firm. Not just the partner that I'm going to work with, but who are the other partners? Because like you could spend a hundred hours diligencing your VC firm and it probably wouldn't be enough. Like you really want to know who these folks are because there's some people who are going to ruin your life and you got to make sure that you pick the people that are### Assistant: Yeah. And so there's nothing like a cornered animal like they're super dangerous, right. And I think this is a very important point. And this is a great yin yang moment, which is sometimes you have to fold. And sometimes you got to go all, you know, and it really depends. And it's situational, right. And Travis just said, I'm all in, you know, if I'm going down, I'm going to go down fighting. How much money does your startup spend on various software products and how much time does it take to integrate them all together? Let me guess, way too much time. Well, Odoo is here to help. Odoo is a suite of business apps that runs your entire company on one platform. If you're currently using a Franken stack of individual software solutions that aren't talking to each other, then you're wasting time, energy, and money. Odoo streamlines your workflow and brings all that information together your workday will be more productive because Odoo's integrations eliminate repetitive tasks and data entry. Plus, if you only need two or three apps to optimize your workflow, that's all you pay for. Odoo won't stick you with the bill for apps you don't use. Odoo has an app for every business need. They offer 30 main apps that are updated regularly and another 16,000 from their active community. Open source for the win. For instance, Odoo offers a suite of financial software that will keep track of your books tight with accounting, payment tracking, invoicing, and more, and their sales and CRM apps provide a clear and organized view of what's in the pipeline to make forecasting easier. Your first app is always free. And right now Odoo is offering $1,000 credit on your first implementation pack. Not a joke $1,000 off. Go to odoo.com slash twist to check it out and get that $1,000 odoo.com slash twist. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. Sasha from YouTube says be careful everyone don't just take money from anyone can't believe he isn't saying anything about doing your diligence on your VC firm. Well, actually, I'll put that in the form of a question. How does one should one diligence their VC firm? I think it's an obvious answer. Yeah. So I'll, I'll expand Sasha's very good point. Thank you, Sasha from YouTube, and say, how does one diligence a venture firm? If you're a nobody in the industry, you're just getting started first startup, you just got accepted to an accelerator. Now you're at demo day, you got 20 meetings, you're starting to get some term sheets in how does Sasha or whoever it is, actually do diligence on a VC firm.

### Human: One interesting one to start with would be a company called Roboflow. I believe their website is roboflow.ai. They just raised, I think, $2 million round today. So they're quite topical. They're one of the earlier pioneers. The product is kind of obvious. We quickly touch base on it. The high level gist here is that pretty much every business application, I think initially went through a wave where it was powered by an abacus and then kind of software hit the world and it was powered by SaaS and software. where and there's this kind of next revolution where it's going to kind of get powered by machine learning. And really what machine learning means when we think about it today in terms of like what AI can do, it's really computer vision. That's like the main thing computers can do today that they couldn't do previously. Now the issue is the abstractions for using computer vision are not really that great. It's kind of reminiscent of the steve wosniak era of computers where it's really only for nerds and these guys have basically built a fairly simple piece of software that lets you train and deploy models into your business into whatever business logic that you have. And I actually am of the personal belief, be it RoboFlow or another company, this will be part of every single piece of software you have. The fact that the computer can just understand and use images. My proof of this is basically that's how humans operate. The visual cortex is the most powerful part of our brain, I believe. So they have traction from a lot of companies, large and small. And There is kind of another interesting. So basically, I think the businesses, the business case is extremely obvious. This is just like the next revolution in software.### Assistant: Right. In some ways, what you're saying, Cortland, is the founders start to game instead of customers or build for customers, they start building for investors. And that is a path to disaster. When we get back from this quick break, we're going to do a little round table here. Cortland and Daniel talk about companies that they've invested in or they're working with on their platforms, and why they are super obsessed or inspired by them, and what lessons they're learning from them. And I'll include two as well. So by the time we get to the end of this episode, we're going to have talked about six companies and what we think is really interesting about them, maybe even a couple more. We'll see if we throw a couple in when we get back on This Week in Startups. Last year alone, false declines cost the US, UK, French, and German markets over $20 billion. False declines are what happens when an online purchase is declined when it should have been accepted. And that's why if your business takes payments online, you need to check out checkout.com. Right, a great domain name, checkout.com. They de-silo the payment process. Their modular cloud payment platform is ideal for businesses looking to delight customers and unlock new revenue streams. Checkout.com will give you the insights you need so you can optimize your customer experience, get more out of every transaction, and gain a granular understanding of how cash flows in and out of your business. And with checkout.com, your business can innovate, adapt to your markets, create outstanding customer experiences and make smarter financial decisions faster. Big brands like Adidas and Samsung trust them. But checkout loves to support growing businesses. That's why they're here on this week and startups and support their digital transactions. So they just raised a $450 million Series C at a $15 billion valuation. They're not going anywhere. They know what they're doing. Learn more at checkout.com slash twist and see if their payment solution works for your business. You can even create a free test account to see how their dashboard works. And it's very beautiful and elegantly designed. So go ahead and check out checkout.com slash twist. Make sure you go to Checkout.com slash twist. Welcome back to this week in startups. We have two amazing guests here who are doing the hard work of working with founders when they are just getting started with their companies. Courtland Allen, he is CSA LLEN on Twitter, and he is running IndieHackers.com. Daniel Gross is Daniel Gross on the Twitter, and he is running Pioneer.app, P-I-O-N-E-E-R dot A-P-P. All right, so let's start off. Maybe Daniel, you could tell us what's one of the startups you're working with right now that you find super inspiring and why?

### Human: Yeah. And if we're not where we need to be, and the numbers show we're not where we need to be, then work needs to be done, right? It's just it's really is that simple. The outcome isn't where we want it yet. And it's just as an angel investor, anecdotally, it's been great to see over the last five years, the number of female founders of founders of color, you know, increase dramatically. And I think, you know, dramatically, it's, we can take that as a win. But there still needs to be a ton of change. We get back from the final break, I want to talk to you about zoom. And why did that product succeed against go to meetings cisco skype slack had video messaging and audio meetings in it and every other possible google hangouts and somehow this new company one. The space and one the day in a space that was crowded in every single company had an offering how did that happen we get back from this on this we can start. Right now, it's critically important to make sure your company is in a position to grow quickly and efficiently. You need to be efficient. You need to deploy your capital and your time intelligently. And if you want to drive new revenue fast, well, you can't afford to waste time on the wrong sales prospects. You need perfect leads, right? And the face-to-face meetings are a thing of the past. We all know that. You need to quickly adapt your sales strategy if you want to stay ahead. And the best way to do that is with targeted, targeted personalized sales. How do you do that? You know the answer already. LinkedIn Sales Navigator. It is the tool designed to help you master digital selling and social selling, right? You've got your profile. They've got their profile. You get to meet them on LinkedIn. as well as all of those 700 other million members in the LinkedIn network. Well, LinkedIn Sales Navigator gives you 20 of those monthly email messages, the ones that go right to the top of people's email boxes. You get lead recommendations, unlimited searches, actionable insights, and access to free courses on LinkedIn Learning. All of this is bundled in the LinkedIn Sales Navigator product. Our sales team at launch, Matt, basically lives on LinkedIn Sales Navigator. This is the secret weapon of all sales executives. They want to give you 60 days for free to try it out. Visit linkedin.com slash SAS, S-A-A-S, linkedin.com slash S-A-A-S. We'll go ahead and get LinkedIn Sales Navigator for free for 60 days and learn how the pros do it. Go to linkedin.com slash SAS, S-A-A-S. All right, Jason Lemkin's with us. I was amazed when I loaded zoom. I was a little reticent because of the sort of Chinese servers and the developers and I'm I am concerned about security from China looks like they cleaned that mess up was pretty vocal about, you know, hey, you probably shouldn't use to talk or zoom if they're going to be rooting your operating system and they're going to route the calls through China. I don't trust communist authoritarian countries. They seem to have fixed that. That was obviously a snafu, but they won the day. How did they win the day versus Google Hangouts, Skype and all these other competitors? I don't understand, you know, how they are the 20th meeting software major platform to come out in the last decade. And they just crushed everybody. What was it about the product?### Assistant: Well, I don't claim to be quite as much of an expert on the topic as others, but I've certainly studied it. Um, and I've interviewed Eric about it. I've talked to him about it. I've read a lot of things. And what is interesting is there's a bunch of things that are interesting, but if you, if you hear Eric, even up to a hundred million ARR, right now they're at 3 billion now and growing triply. I mean, it's off the charts, right? It breaks, it breaks, it breaks everything. He will say the competition was intense. intense. Let's not overstate it. The collective wisdom of Zoom was such a magical product in the early days that it won on this magical experience. And there's some truth to that. And we can talk about technology, but it was brutally competitive until it won and then it won, right? It was brutally competitive. And I think You know, there's I think there's a couple pieces to it. And there's obviously some luck, right? First of all, if you want an argument, Eric was a first time founder, but a second time doer, he was head of engineering at Webex. So when you get and everyone I know at worked with him at Cisco, right, including my wife and many other folks, I know Dan Scheinman, who was the first angel investor, they all say Eric was one of the smartest and nicest, smartest and nicest people anyone worked with at Webex. I mean, it's Cisco, right Webex off the charts. on the team. When you have a guy like that, that wants to do it again, you write him a check. Right, of course, of course. Now people didn't he struggled to race. He was not a business guy. He had he, it was a crowded space, perhaps there's some racism and other things and someone like that it was Dan Scheinman wrote him a check and Qualcomm and, and other angels, but it took him a while to get for the VCs to pay attention for a bunch of reasons, right. But I think, you know, and I think he was haunted by the quality of service and other issues that had deteriorated WebEx. So we're on a Zoom right now. You and I, depending on how people watch this, the ability of this app to scale with QoS is unprecedented. Everything else runs on a crummy background or they run on WebRTC, which doesn't scale. You know, when you are on WebRTC and you get a bunch of people on, it gets blocky or the audio separates from the video, which, you know, that's horrible. Have you ever had the audio and the video separate into Zoom?

### Human: I think the same with conferences that always sell the tickets, you know, on the year before the actual event. One year out, yeah.### Assistant: Yeah, exactly. It's a great way to do it. It works. Yeah. Listen, we work with super early stage companies at my investment firm launch, pre Series A, maybe got a couple $1,000 a month in revenue, you've raised a couple $100,000, maybe a million dollars, right? That's the early days, year one or two of a startup. And I'll be honest, a lot of times startups, they don't have their insurance. They haven't set that up yet. They haven't set up their accounting properly. They're getting things cleaned up. In fact, I was recently had a great startup, but they didn't have DNO insurance that basically protects your directors and officers. That's the D directors, people on the board, officers, the people who work at the company, right? Directors and officers insurance is super important. So what do we do? We sent them right to Embroker. Our friends over at Embroker are a business insurance company that's built specifically for startups. You just fill out a simple application, right, and then startups get four quotes for four lines of coverage in 15 minutes. Four quotes, four lines of coverage, 15 minutes. Easy, breezy, lemon, squeezy. That's right. They connect you with one of their expert brokers for unmatched service. that goes beyond your policy. And listen, you might think, oh, it's too early to have insurance. It's not that expensive. It's not that complicated because in broker makes it easy. So here's what I want you to do. Try and broker today with the code twist and you'll get 10% off their startup package at in broker.com slash twist. That's in broker.com slash twist. We love in broker. I use in broker. They're an amazing team. They do a great job for startups, whether you're in year one or year five, go use in broker.com slash twist. So What do you think about competition? Now that you have you you've already started to see Adobe has their own stock image generative AI product, Canva lets you replace images and do some AI on them. Figma will obviously release things. It's part of Adobe. Adobe's got a big push on AI. So how do you think about competition? When the world now is on to AI, and applying it to every vertical and certainly applying it to design, because generate design really, is a function of topography, copy images, illustration and layout. and not much more, right? So all of those things, logos, stock images, those things are all being iterated on. So how do you survive and carve a niche for yourself when all the big lumbering elephants are right behind you, and they're going to release products?

### Human: Famously. Once Teams did that, everybody on the board, he said, kind of saw this coming. And I think Slack actually made out great selling to Salesforce for almost $28 billion when it did, because Teams just came in and basically killed their growth. It looks like. I mean, we didn't get any numbers after 2020 because that's when Salesforce stopped reporting or Slack stopped reporting and sold to Salesforce. But what do you think about this?### Assistant: So I think this is what Lena Khan should be working on is tactics, because she was put into the FTC. Because she was anti big tech, she was anti, you know, the power of these. And you know, that was a great way to get the job, I think, because it spoke to the Biden administration. they felt tech was like lording over them to powerful social networks, Trump getting into office, all this stuff was like very present in their minds. And, you know, politicians don't want to have to answer to Zuckerberg, or previously to Jack at Twitter, or YouTube, you know, all of these things were very concerning to them. And the problem is, Mina Khan's premise, which sounds really interesting is I want to preserve competition in the future. So we have to get to these monopolies before they become monopolies, we got to stop them. Now, have you ever seen the movie Minority Report? It's a little before your time. That's your homework assignment. Minority Report. I need you to watch it. Because when you do the news read next week, I want you to I want to discuss it with you. There's a concept of a precog. And what precogs do is, they can see into the future, the near future. And they know when somebody is going to commit a crime. And then they send the police out to arrest you before you do the crime. And this seems like, wow, society is safer and better. But it's also kind of like, well, wait a second, this is profoundly unfair. Where's free? Well, I'm not going to kill this person. I'm not going to rob this house. And it goes against all of our ideas about justice, right. And so she can't predict the future. But she wants to believe she can. And this resonated with people who were anti big tech, which I would say, you know, there's Republicans who are anti big tech, and they're, you know, but the problem is, the FTC executes laws, they don't create them. They're, they're the umpire, not the league. You know, the league has to create the rules, if you want to have hand checking, or, you know, whatever rules, you know, zone defense, whatever, you got to have that in committee, you set the rules, all the teams get to adjust, and they play the game on the field. She's got to call fouls and balls and strikes, not decide, you know, how many runs are scored or how many bases there are. The cases that she's picked, she's just going after people because they're big tech. This going after Facebook over this tiny little, you know, VR app when VR is not unlimited.

### Human: Several years ago, I interviewed the CTO of Burning Man, of the actual company. And it was such a fascinating conversation. And I was like, so basically, you're when you think about what you're qualified to do, if you ever want to not do this job, you're basically qualified to be the CTO on Mars, like the way that she described, you know, the the sheer infrastructure challenge of doing and by the way, she's amazing, right? Like a six foot something like we're the same height, like six foot tall, Amazon, like big dreads, just like super punk rock looking. And she's like, Yeah, I mean, you know, you're installing you know, communications towers and like 100 mile an hour winds and dust is blowing you off the thing. It's pretty nuts. Anyway, so if Mars ever needs a CTO, she's the lady.### Assistant: Yeah, hopefully our producers have found like three of them right now on Instagram. But they were making the Burning Man if you don't know the Burning Man, it looks like a pagan kind of statue of a man with his arms raised. And they burn it at the end. And so they make it out of neon. And And then they did a firework show for 20 minutes. It was incredible fire show, best I've ever seen. And then they burned the man with this giant, you know, explosions. But then before and after that, they had a drone version of the burning man walking across the playa, Molly. So we're driving in an art car or an electric bicycles, listen to cool music. That's like cyberpunk music. Like I was playing the Blade Runner Esper Edition on my art car. Yeah. And so I'm on an art car playing like the secret version of Blade Runner that never got produced. It's called the Esper Edition if you want to look it up. And, uh, I'm not feeling much pain, you know, me with my VUV. I've got a little VUV Clicquot popping. I'm like a maniac. People are like, is that J. Cal? I'm like, yeah. They're like, oh, I saw the VUV Clicquot bottle. It just happens to be what I like. Okay. Don't judge me. So I'm drinking VUV Clicquot with a giant straw, like a maniac, sipping a VUV Clicquot bottle on the playa, dressed like a maniac. playing the Blade Runner Esper Edition. And there's a Burning Man walking across the playa. That's insane. Made of drones. And then it pulls out a cowboy hat and puts a cowboy hat on. You're just like, whoa, this is awesome. And it was great. I saw a bunch of friends. And, you know, like I tell everybody, it's a great thing to do. And the principles, I think, are super important. We talk about client adaptation here. You're subjecting yourself to the harshest climate in the world, I think. It's 110 degrees during the day with dust storms. You cannot breathe when they dust storm it whites out. I mean, it looks like Tatooine. It's no joke. Like you have to if you don't have a mask with you and goggles, you need to get on the ground, cover yourself with whatever you have, hold a towel over your mouth, or you will start having a coughing fit. And you might need to go to the hospital and get like asthma medication or an inhaler to get the stuff out of your lungs. You might be hacking and sneezing black dust for a couple of days.

### Human: It feels to me that the real, that we genuinely are on the cusp of the most important realization, which you have pointed out several times, which is that impact is not concessionary. That in fact, it is the only way to do business going forward.### Assistant: Yeah. So one of the other businesses we set up between 2007 and now is this Osmosis Investment Management Fund, which is a $15 billion asset manager, which works in the public space. So I am very familiar with how that works there. Yeah. When people say that the ESG strategies don't work, right, we have to define what is an ESG strategy. Because if an ESG strategy is taking any strategy that you had already intended on executing on and then retrospectively labeling it with an E and S and a G, which shouldn't even be labeled within the same portfolio anyway but that's another conversation, then of course that's going to crash because you're just labeling something. So it is literally putting lipstick on pigs, right? So that is never going to work. The movement that people want to get to is have a more genuine and I would say more upfront intentionality around if I invest and it is a little bit more difficult in public markets because your capital is not directly going into the company, your capital is going to move what the company had originally raised around its secondary trading. If I buy your Tesla stock, Tesla does not get my money, right? So for that reason alone, Investing in public markets is less intentional, it's less impactful, right? It might help a company indirectly with having a better access to more investors because people want to own the stock and therefore can raise money better, but it's not impactful directly. And I think that's a really important distinction to make. That we're not going to change. The only thing that we can change is that on the basis of which investment managers like Larry Fink choose to choose certain companies in their portfolio used to be just based on negative elimination. We don't do drugs and gambling and fossil fuels. But it's moving towards can we get information from these public listed companies that actually showing something positive, right? Do they have a positive? So that's a trend that's already happening. And we believe that as that trend gets reinforced, that trend will perform, right? Because more investors will want to see that in their portfolio, and therefore positively select for companies to do that public markets. On the private market side, you're right. The jump that needs to happen in both cases, by the way, is that we move away from reporting to performance. So if this data, if a company is driven to improve their resource efficiency, if the company is driven to improve their diversity, because it makes business sense, and the investor therefore chooses that company because that makes investment sense, we're there. And I think we are very... I always think we're very close. I've been thinking we're very close for 15 years, but I honestly, genuinely now think there is no excuse anymore not to behave in that way.

### Human: No, it's of course, that's I mean, they're there. They're also voting by being there. We were weirdly missing that part of the letter. But yes, he said it was the famed investor Benjamin Graham, who said this, what I think is interesting about this, this email is that like, it opens and it's like, you know, ouch, and it's very honest. And then it's like, got this, you know, the nice voting versus weighing metaphor. But it's also like, it's so Jeff Bezos, because it's just like data, data, data, here are all of the here are all of the data reasons why the data is super and everything is fine. And if you compare that to, like, you know, Barry McCarthy's letter, Which is there's no sugarcoating this. It's a bitter pill. In my experience, though, the sting has a long half-life. Like the hard truth is either revenue had to grow faster or spending had to shrink. I'm here for the comeback story. That's why I think we can pull it off. The love of our members. It's personal, right? Like it's actually, it's like an inspiring, exciting speech. Like you would have your like, ah, let's go get a moment after it. Whereas Jeff Bezos is like, the data is great. It's going to be fine.### Assistant: Okay, so this is brilliant. What he's referencing here is there is some famous line about ultimately, the stock market is a weighing machine, right? It weighs your customers and your earnings and your cash flow and all that kind of stuff. So first people vote on your stock. And what that means is they're voting, like you're gonna complete the mission and you're going to take this vision and make it a reality. So people vote with that IPO, right? But then over time, they're kind of just looking at the numbers and weighing it versus other things in the marketplace of stocks. Yeah, there were a couple of numbers here. And you got to love the brutal honesty of just saying, ouch, right? I know, because the stock had been, I think, did we mentioned how much the stock had tanked here? It was down 80%. Yeah. So this is very similar to Peloton or zoom in this moment, right? But I think those were in that well above 50% collapse. So that's why this is kind of instructive of how to deal with the stock market and your own employees, because this letter goes to your employees, and your senior management, as much as it goes to your shareholders. you're really trying to look at this concept of stakeholders, your customers are stakeholders, do they care about your stock going down? Some might, that might have some perception, right? The can't be good to be a peloton own a peloton like we do I do, and see the stock crash and the CEO go out and you're like, Oh, is my peloton should I buy another peloton, a stock crash can spook people from buying and engaging with your product. So you do that's a stakeholder that matters, right? For sure. Your employees have options. And this is a Shackleton leadership moment. Are you going to define reality? And are you going to define reality and an intellectually honest way? The reality is, your stock and your future is worth 80% less VP of x EVP of y in your company. We know that you and your partner and your kids were thinking about going to Hawaii, buying a second home, you know, getting a jet card. I know this sounds silly. But the leaders of these companies are the ones who have to fight the battle. Your generals just watch their $10 million in stock or 100 million in stock or 5 million in stock or some, you know, director who had a million in stock, they just sort of go to 200,000, or that 10 million go to two, and they might have been making life plans based on having a $10 million net worth or a million dollar I know boohoo to senior executives, but that can get in their head.

### Human: I get him. I get it.### Assistant: Here's the thing. There's there's two things I think that he should have done. He should have worked with dealerships, first of all, to service his vehicles, maybe not sell them, but service them. And then the second one is, is that, you know, if you think about if you think about OEMs, Yeah, I was going to get back to the service though. But if you think about the manufacturer, I was going to cover something in the service, but don't worry about it. The OEMs, building these vehicles is a nightmare. He had a great relationship with Daimler and Daimler could have come in and helped him solve all of his manufacturing problems with vehicles. And it would have been a walk in the park and he would have been building twice as many cars as he is today. And now it would have required him to give up some of the company, but who cares? So what we did is we said, you know, we don't want to do our, you know, we think it's not smart to do our own service and we don't think it's smart to actually own the fight or to build the trucks ourselves. We want to partner to help us. So we, when we partnered with Iveco, they're the fifth largest truck OEM in the world. They have 50 years, five decades of, of heavy duty trucking experience in cold weather, Arctic weather, heavy duty roads. and all over Europe. They're just huge. And so they came in and they said, look, Trevor, we have one of the best trucks in the world, but we have no technology. We said, well, that's good because we have the best powertrain technology in the world, we think, but we have no expertise in the truck chassis world. We partnered up with Iveco and they spent four years and billions of dollars building a brand new truck platform. In Europe, all the trucks are the same. A battery electric truck is identical to a diesel truck in Europe. They have to be because of length restrictions and everything. So we partnered up with them and now we have the first ever zero emission truck coming to market. It's got 720 kilowatt hours of battery and it goes over 300 miles. And so we know battery as good or better than anyone in the world. And we're even beating Tesla to the market with our semi truck. That's why he just recently went out and told his team to full focus on the semi truck because we're beating them to the market. So on the freeway or within the cities, battery kicks Hydrogen's butt within the city a lot of times, almost every time. But as soon as you get on the freeway, that's where hydrogen makes sense. So we do both of them.

### Human: Do we have thoughts on that rumor? I think... I think a lot. I think a big earthquake just hit Google. And that earthquake is named Chad GPT. Like, no, I do not. I think they thought they had all the time in the world to keep on incubating the cool stuff, the deep mind, the whatever. And it was like, all of a sudden, you don't.### Assistant: Listen, you know I'm a bulldog guy, but us dog owners, we've been totally spoiled with the ridiculous number of dog sitting and dog walking apps that are out there today. There are a ton of places to get a great dog walker or to have somebody watch your dog when you're away on a business trip, on a ski trip, whatever it is. But what about my cat people? Well, I've got the purrrfect solution for you. It's called Meowtel. It is the number one cat-sitting app available right now for you on iOS and Android. Meowtel sitters have over 60,000 5-star reviews from happy cat parents. And they really are parents. You know cat people. And you're probably one of them. All sitters. are fully vetted and insured and they offer once or twice daily drop-in visits or overnight stays in your home so that your cats can enjoy playtime and cuddles in the comfort of their regular environment. A meet-and-greet is included with each reservation so you can ensure the perfect fit. And your sitter will send detailed updates and photos of each visit to let you know how your feline friend is doing. Meowtel provides a 100% satisfaction guarantee and a team of support specialists will help make sure you have a purrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr open AI, just codified the partnership with Microsoft, like as we were getting on air. And so all the stuff we've been talking about over the past couple of weeks about, hey, this was an a nonprofit company, for profit company. Basically, that's been answered. There was a series of blog posts today, they're going to have open AI as a for profit company that is owned Somalia, maybe you could tee this up for us just what's going on now with open AI and Microsoft.

### Human: And in theory, you could also double up, right? If you end up in a house that has rooftop solar or a house where you're allowed to buy energy directly from you, you could still you can still engage in this sort of token arbitrage, if you will.### Assistant: And, and then there's a fourth problem, which is effectively the solar technology itself, right? So solar, the peak production of solar happens around during the day. And noon... Well, depending on the angle of the panel, but around... Let's say around noon. Whereas the peak demand for most people is actually from 6 to 9pm. When you come off... When you get off work and you turn the TV on, we put the kettle on. From what we see... From analysis we've done, solar can only cover up to 30% of your demand. And even with batteries, that's... That can increase by maybe 5%. So the rest of the time, from 60% to 70% of the time, it basically becomes a financial product. So what happens is you're exporting... During the day, you're exporting your excess solar back to the grid. And you get a very, very bad rate, usually, for what you get. And at night, you're basically importing. So 30% of the time, it's basically like an energy hedge. 70% of the time, it's like a financial product. It's like a savings account. So it's not... An ARPAN is not that effective. So what we want to do is we want to take, effectively, a hybrid technology of utility scale of wind, solar, and batteries, and in the future, more renewable technologies. And we want to tokenize it and then basically give a virtual solar panel to the customer. with 50% better economics and rooftop solar, much better UX. So you don't have to get someone to install it. It's hassle-free. You just press the button. You can buy and sell anytime. So if you don't have, let's say $15,000 upfront to set up a rooftop solar, that's fine. You can start with as little as $1 and then you can build it up. You can swipe some of your money from Payday every 2 weeks to this virtual generator and then you can start building up more and more over time. And offset more and more of your energy bill over time. We've seen this in a lot of fintech players. We can do exactly the same. And then let's say, for whatever reason, you need some liquidity, you can sell immediately and then cash out and then later you can put it back up again. And most importantly, if you, let's say, decide to move house, right? I mean, a lot of young people like to move house nowadays, right? If you want to move, that's fine. Like you take your virtual rooftop solar with you, right? You don't have to sell your house and then, you know, install rooftop solar again, right?

### Human: Yes um we've we put out a call for that uh kind of expertise a few months ago and even um you know we have a an open job listing for like a chief ethics officer to help us through navigating uh this specific possible elements of our business going forward because keep in mind. This is something that I think out of all the things we're working on, we're taking our most time with this sort of element of the technology that allows you to reconnect with a lost loved one. So this is not something we're going to rush to market by any means. And it's not something we've even released yet to allow other people to do it. And I don't think we're going to do that until we get a study done on its effects. Because you know, the demand is there. I mean, we're getting every week, we're getting hundreds of emails from people who hear about actually, of course, the Karen AI, because that's what went most viral recently. But they're reaching out because they're saying, I want to create an AI of, you know, my mom who, you know, just got diagnosed with cancer. And, you know, this is the first time in human history, where this generation, you know, yours and my generation theoretically can live on forever in AI form. Um, if you were to make this decision to, you know, upload yourself into AI, you know, similar to what I did, uh, you know, with my father, um, now that sort of self-serve system, uh, is not out yet. Uh, but again, I think we won't, we definitely won't do that without, without conducting a study first.### Assistant: I mean, there are stages of grief. And then the question would be in these studies, are these stages of grief? Are these going to help people process through those stages of grief? Or are they going to stunt people's process, right? And then where do you introduce this? Anger, bargaining, this can't be happening. he must be alive, they must be alive, guilt, I could have done something, depression, denial, shock, anger, all this stuff, like there's so many different stages. And I think there's 567, you know, different people have different stages. This one could maybe delay people from accepting what's happened, or it could help them accept it. And maybe reduce some of the guilt or confusion, the anger, you know, their depression about it and just be like, Hey, this person was special in the world. And now I get to memorialize them and have some time with them. And again, it all exists on a spectrum. I don't know if you've seen people are making photos. You can take old photos of people. I've seen ads for this on like Instagram, you take an old photo and it will look at you or smile through AI and you can make it slightly more dynamic, right? It's not kind of talking to you yet or giving you advice. Probably the most common challenge I hear from founders is related to building. Either they aren't technical and are searching for a technical co-founder, or they can code, but they're just spread too thin. This is one of the first major obstacles you're going to face, and I know how discouraging it can be. But there is a solution. Do you have a great idea, but you don't have a technical co-founder? Well, CrowdBotics can be your CTO as a service. Boom! Just like that. This means you can focus on building an awesome product and delighting your customers, rather than wasting your time on infrastructure planning, architecture, compliance, and all that boring stuff. Crowdbotics also offers professional scoping to help you flesh out your project at the MVP stage and beyond. So cut out the hassle and get back to building that perfect product for your delighted customers. When you think Crowdbotics, I want you to think getting your time back to focus on product. product drives everything in a startup. So let the folks at crowdbotic show you how it works. Schedule a free scoping session and get your detailed build plan at crowdbotics.com slash twist. That's crowdbotics.com slash twist. Is there a product for people to start uploading video and make their own? Or are you just going to start with the high end personalities for now because that will keep the lights on and then we'll talk about the paid product now.

### Human: I had used ones. I know I had, I just had a coffee with someone. I was like, yeah, just get a like a Kia Niro or a Hyundai Kona. And she was like, you're adorable. Have you looked for one of those lately? And I was like, no, luckily for me, I locked in my EV a couple months ago. Because yeah, you cannot get you cannot get them.### Assistant: By some estimates, over 90% of startups will go out of business in year one. That's why Microsoft created the Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub. The hub provides founders at any stage up to six figures in resources. Wait until you hear this ridiculous list of perks you're going to get. Technology benefits like free access to GitHub's enterprise tier. up to $150,000 in Azure credits based on your stage and size technical advice from experts at Azure and Microsoft Cloud one to one mentorship from their mentor network exclusive benefits and discounts from companies like open AI and The best part, there are no fundraising requirements. Unlike others in the industry, the Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub doesn't require startups to be investor-backed or third-party validated to sign up and access the benefits. Nope. It's truly open to any founder. And it's not about who you know. Any founder, at any stage, can get up to six figures of value by signing up at aka.ms slash This Week in Startups. Once again, aka.ms slash this week in startups to get six figures in benefits right. I when you get to a certain point, you've lived through these super cycles. Yeah, you kind of are at peace with them. Because it's not like I'm going to stop angel investing in companies. I invested in Uber right at the bottom of the market. I invested in, you know, calm at the bottom of the market. Yum, yum. Yeah. And just keep investing in great companies. And the earlier you are, the less it matters. Because at the inception point, like a 10 person company with 2 million in the bank, like, does it matter what's going on in the stock market? No, it matters what their five customers think of their product. They just have to focus on the customer. So block everything out if you're an early stage founder. And if you're early stage investor, you can look for value, right? Look for value. I think that's one of the things I'm going to do over the next year or two, not to tip our cards too much, but in our internal meetings, our team has been looking at our existing portfolio. And is anybody in our existing portfolio tripling their revenue year over year if they are? Why are we investing more money in a company we already know? Yeah, if we know that company's good, we trust that management team. And now they're doing, they're thinking about doing a series a or they did the series a they're thinking about doing a series B, maybe we can sneak another million or $2 million and own another 5% of the company or whatever it is 2% 10%. And just, you know, as we say, or sacks has said ride your winners.

### Human: What impacted the What impact did the early days of covid and everybody being at home shopping and stocking up and having steamy checks and their nft and their bitcoin going up and everybody just being flush with cash did you see like what you know twenty nineteen to twenty twenty what a revenue jump. Two x three x ten x yeah that was.### Assistant: It almost looks like you have a look behind the scenes because all of that and above is true. I think, as a business model, we're not here to be friends with the brands. We very literally are saying to the customer, hey, this is the same quality product. You don't have to pay this really expensive price for a label on, let's say, that puffer jacket. which really is what inflates that price so high. But instead, you can get that same quality product for a much, much lower price point. So obviously, as a brand, that's directly counter to the value proposition and brands have to sell the story that expensive means premium. On the flip side, though, you also said It's a different customer base. And I think that's fundamentally true. In my mind, at least, we're not here to displace brands. Brands will always be around. And they're super powerful more today than ever before. But at the same time, over the past 10 years, that's the fastest private labels have ever grown in the US and the West alone, in literally every single department or retailer store that you can think of, including Amazon. So I think in my mind, the emotional purchases you make in your life, you're going to pay a premium and you're going to go buy the branded version of it and the rational... I guess a good way to put it is if you want to buy a Chanel bag, there is no world in which you're going to buy the italic or unbranded version of that. But if you care about a value purchasing decision in a specific product or category, an italic actually does really well to fit that. And you're totally right. Brands certainly have the ability to go to the manufacturer and say, hey guys, don't do that or don't work with Metallic. There's a lot of ways that they can bite the hand that feeds them. They can put some pressure on them. Yeah, for sure. But on the flip side, there's only so many great manufacturers in, let's say, sunglasses. There's a handful in the world that meet those quality bars that these premium brands want to hit. And if they go back and say, hey, we're going to drop our business and move to somewhere else, it's actually a very high switching cost. So I think for us, obviously, we're at the of whatever our manufacturers want. And we're here to serve our customers and our manufacturers. So if they're like, hey, you can't put this brand name on, like, by all means, we'll do that. But generally, it helps them, their business. And you're also right in the sense that we're so small right now, that doesn't really matter to the bigger guys.

### Human: Yeah, absolutely happy to. So LLCs, a limited liability company. So what does that mean? The primary feature of that is that they have limited liability. If you contrast that with a partnership, which we very, very rarely see in our world, LLC members are not liable for the debts of the entity, whereas in a partnership, they are personally liable. So that's where the limited liability part comes from for the LLC. The other important feature of an LLC is how they are taxed. So, it's commonly referred to as a pass-through tax treatment. That essentially means that the entity itself is not taxed, and instead, the income or losses are distributed down to the individual members who then report that income and losses on their personal tax returns and pay taxes that way. For that reason, that pass-through tax treatment That's why VCs disfavor LLCs. It doesn't really work with their fund structure, right? Like the way VCs are set up, they don't like that pass-through tax treatment. They don't want to receive income losses each year on every single portfolio company and then have to figure out how to distribute that down to their LPs. It's just not tenable. So if you are an LLC and you have a VC that's interested, they're going to ask you to convert to a corporation. So then what is a corporation? So, um, basically the, you know, other than the, well, let's, let's talk about the tax treatment of, of the corporation to, to contrast that to the LLC. Um, when a corporation has income or losses, they report that income loss on their entity tax return and pay taxes. Then the corporation would turn around and pay employees a salary. And the employees also pay taxes on that salary. This is what we commonly refer to as double taxation and why a lot of people say, Oh, I don't want to be a corporation because I don't want to get that double taxation. Well, from a practical standpoint, most startups don't have a lot of income, don't have a lot of reason to pay taxes once you do. and you have investors, okay, it's not a bad problem to have, right? You're in a good place.### Assistant: Put them in the category of high-class problem that we're paying dividends. There are dividend-paying stocks in the public stock market. And so what really is, and I think it's a perfect explanation, and an example of it might be, for my podcast, This Week in Startups, I own 100% of it. I do it as a side hustle. It's just me and a couple of people. It is, in fact, an LLC, because I'm not going to sell it. I'm not looking to have investors in a podcast. That's not what I'm doing. And if there is a profit, and there's a profit the last couple of years, and there were in the first, I don't have to pay double taxes as the host of the show. So if the show throws off $100,000 in profits for the year after 150 episodes of me doing this, I, Jason Calacanis, pay my taxes, but I don't pay the corporation and I don't have to pay taxes, right? That's how an LLC works. But if I was running, I don't know, a network of podcasts or a podcast software company, and I wanted investors, if those investors came in, and let's say the average round has 10 investors in it, and you do four rounds of investing, and now, it's not uncommon for you and I, when we look at a cap table of a company, to see 40, 50, 60 investors, correct? And that's a decent amount to manage. Now, if half of those, if but half of those are funds, 30 of them, They typically have, like I have in my launch funds, I would say 150 LPs. Some people have as few as 50. Some people have dual fund structures. Let's pick a number. I don't know, would you say 100 LPs is a reasonable number of LPs in the average fund? Yeah. Now you've got 30 names that have 100 LPs. Not each one of those LPs pays the same amount. And in fact, those funds would on average have, I don't know, would you say 50 investments per fund? At least. At least, maybe let's make it the number 75. So now you got 30 funds which have 100 investors. 30 times 100 is 3,000. Now you add 75 investments. If but a third of them, 25, have to distribute money, and we're talking tiny amounts of money because those are all these h companies, you're talking about 75,000 legal documents, accounting documents that have to be distributed. And that was your point about the untenableness of it, wasn't it?

### Human: So, but my question was just, this idea that investors are paid to deploy capital, they want an excuse to deploy capital. And this is a good one. Like, do you you see that as a persuasive? Like, do you think there's what I would say you have a fund?### Assistant: Yeah, so it's you're getting close, you're close. And as a person who's outside as a journalist, you're actually keying into something. it's not that they're paid to deploy. And they need to put the money out there, they know they're going to find an investment, what they need is high quality investments that they think will return and allow them to raise their next fund. That's really what goes through everybody's minds. And I'm raising my fourth fund right now. And I'm doing it publicly. And I'm taking a year to do it because I want to kind of democratize venture capital a bit. And it has made me go back to launch fund one launch fund two, which were like on paper, five x funds, and I got to turn that paper returns into realized return. So I'm like, in that mode as an investor, now five x is extraordinary. That puts you in like very elite standings and but it's down from my Sequoia Scout performance. But I think now it's like really highlighted it for me. You know, I got to be really cutthroat about how I deploy capital. every bet matters, every follow on investment matters. Because things don't always go up into the right, right. And I think that's what's going through people's minds is, oh, man, if I deploy capital in 2021, and 2020, will I even get that money back? Will I be able to return one x? maybe two x right and stay in the game and get my next fund. Now, I think LPS are reasonable. They know there could be a vintage that performs better or worse by definition. So they'll they'll stick with people who have multiple funds. But yeah, people are looking for things to invest in. That doesn't mean they're going to make stupid bets, though. I think it's top of mind for people that entry price matters, right? Right. And so even though you're seeing all this like crazy stuff on the margins, last like three, four or five investments we made and we're seed fund, we're all at five to $15 million valuations, I think in 2021, they would have commanded two to five x that in terms of generative AI companies? Well, one of them was, but it was a previous founder who were just seeding, you know, with a kind of prototype, you know, hey, here's what we're thinking. And it's, you know, first money in, okay, figure it out. Go try and find product market fit. So those are high risk bets, but at lower amounts. And so I think that's the, the strategy people are going to deploy. And you'll see what you're saying.

### Human: Yeah, and then shortly thereafter, I invested in something called Wellfleet Communications, which was a router company. Of course, the router. Yeah, and so Cisco and Wealthfully were the two routing companies kind of in you know, in that in that period of time, which was kind of a late 80s, early 90s. And then, and then they also invested in a seed company that was selling equipment to telcos called my digital access, which ultimately went public and, and then got acquired by somebody else.### Assistant: So funny. In the early 90s, I was fixing laser printers. And then I was at an IT company. And this is how I paid for college. They said, Hey, I'm you should come work at this company land systems in New York. And Mike Savino, who works with me now as an investor, hired me just because I had gone to a high school and I came in and they were putting in welfare routers. And we're putting in banyan vines, ethernet, all this stuff was just coming out. People forget that before the internet, you had computers where people were just trading floppy disks inside of an office, and then you could connect them and law firms were like, wait a second, we don't have to run this document up 12 floors or down to the office. And Wellfleet would have these $50,000 routers. And we would set them up between the two with the hubs. And you could then have a document from Sherman Sterling's office in another city in that same city being worked on the same day. It was mind blowing to attorneys at the time. listen if you want to crush it this year you're not going to do it alone nobody gets there alone you need to fill your team with the most qualified people and the best way for you to find those candidates is where almost a billion users are hanging out all the time and that's linkedin jobs now with 875 million users and Think about all that talent hanging out at LinkedIn every day, networking, updating their profiles. Everybody coalesces there. They hang out there and they're in that work mindset. Well, here's the best part. You get to post your job for free right now. That's right. Your first job posting is free if you go to linkedin.com slash angel. From my personal firsthand experience, we've hired some of the best people here at launch and inside.com from LinkedIn, and it's amazing how awesome the inbound job applications are since I started putting the purple hiring frame on my profile. When you have that, people know you're hiring, and they're going to give you better candidates, and they're going to do it faster. And that's what you need. You need to get the great candidates, and you need them now. Small businesses rate LinkedIn jobs number one in delivering quality hires versus their leading competitors. So post your job for free, F-R-E-E, can't beat that price, linkedin.com slash angel. has linkedin.com slash angel to post your first job for free terms conditions apply because they give you something for free. That's right. But yeah, then the crash happened. How did the crash did the crash impact the venture scene? Because at that time, man, the the the PC era and the networking era was a boom.

### Human: He should be a no brainer in Brooklyn. There's also this pretty interesting trend to pay attention to, which is now that we've reached economies of scale in cell phones, it means that we've had to get unbelievably good at some of the components at very large scale, and it drives costs down. An example of this is lithium-ion, so batteries every year get whatever it is, eight or nine percent better in terms of battery density, battery life. And you compound that over the last 20 years of sort of smartphones really coming and becoming a thing that billions and billions of people have. So in addition to the batteries, you also have image sensors. We can make really, really good cameras now with for very cheap and the software stack that is sort of the Industry standard now that runs on top of them this computational photography to then feed into these computer vision algorithms It's riding this interesting trend of what did the smartphone make much more economically viable much more reliable? um Something that can last much longer because the batteries this is I do some space investing And this is something we see in space all the time with like the the company planet for example that has these really cool image sense Earth sort of sensing there's fancy ways to describe it, but they take pictures of the earth They orbit the earth and take pictures with basically a bunch of smartphone cameras in them. It was just unbelievable Yeah, it's it's there's so many things that sort of come out of the maturation of smartphone components### Assistant: just and the software, this is not limited to hardware. But when, of course, whenever you make a billion of something a year, the price is going to go way down, the resiliency of that product, the ability for it to have a great lifecycle is going to go up, right, they're just going to be grinding on a billion cameras, a billion GPS units, a billion accelerometers, a year. And that means every company, whether it's Samsung, or, you know, HTC, or Apple, of course, or Google are just saying, Hey, make it do this, make it do this. And we can spread the cost of the next version of this across a billion. So if we spend, I don't know, a billion dollars researching accelerometers this year, it's $1 per phone, no big deal. Yep, it's just wonderful. And then all that trickles down. And, of course, software now. I don't know if you've been following the AI stuff. But, you know, Facebook made that tool where you can give it a sentence or a couple of words, and it makes a five second looping video. This is of course, after Dolly, where you give it a couple keywords, it makes a picture, which of course, is after GPT three, where it finishes your sentences, and you know, yada, yada. all these AI machine learning deep verticals in particular, yeah, it really is amazing how this is going to make something like cocoa delivery or anything else. So so much easier if you, you know, really, the only thing left for these is I think regulation and people, you know, which cities are the most lawless and will have these things being vandalized. This is now down to vandal vandalism. This I don't know why this doesn't exist. Massively. I think it's also unpopular. I gotta be honest, having invested in a couple of robotic companies like cafe x, there's a bit of anti robot sentiment out there. Yeah, which I think is being now trumped by the frustration of not being able to get a cup of coffee in under five minutes. So when consumers basically realize, you know what people don't want to come to work in these jobs. They had their chance, they raised the salary of these jobs. Now you can't get a job for less than 15 to 25 bucks an hour working in retail. And people still don't want to go. So I think consumers and, you know, do-gooders who are like, oh, you know, what about the people in their jobs? The robots are taking our jobs are like, well, nobody wants those jobs. So let the robots have them. What do you think of that theory?

### Human: Let's go to pattern recognition.### Assistant: Look, you have a rubric in your head when you're meeting an entrepreneur. It's team, which is like you say that word, but man, is that underrated. And it's important to understand what that actually means. So team, market, idea, product. Those are the four areas that you're looking at. And then why is, in essence, what you're trying to ask, why is this team the best team to build this product right now? And do we care? And that do we care comes back to us. It's a taste thing. Like, am I interested in this business? If they're right on everything they're saying, like, does it matter? Is this something I want to invest in? And that's something you never push on to the entrepreneur. But that's your internal, like, taste judgment. Do I want to be involved in this? Yeah. And there's sometimes when a founder makes you care. Like, I don't really care about what they're building, but I have to give that person money. And that's a different lens of it. And that's when the team spikes so big that you're like, here, hope this works. I don't really care, but you care enough to make this important. And then it comes back to team. And to us, the biggest pattern I've taken away is you need to fund people who are strategic thinking, geniuses and genius is not this academic implementation of that word it's a you have to find the best the only companies in a space that are going to work with the best companies and so is the founder that you're funding the best and is the team that you're funding the best. If we see a deal what's the risk of that deal is the risk of that deal technology product marketing sales team building. And you identify that risk, and then you say, is the person that is going to solve that risk in the room right now? So three business people building a technology risk company were out. On the flip side, three technologists building a sales company, if they are not aware that this is a sales company, well, you shouldn't probably fund them. And you have to sort of drill it down to what's the risk of what they're going out to do. And finding businesses that are tech risk, which I think is where you lean heavier into just the engineer-driven founder, those are different than, I think, a lot of the software-eats-the-world businesses you see today, where go-to-market and product become vital. And that technical team needs to have an appreciation for those areas. It doesn't mean in DevTools you need to have a magical designer, but it does mean in bottoms-up SaaS, something like Airtable, it's a product company.

### Human: It's just bananas. Yeah.### Assistant: And they get to deploy capital for talent acquisition for marketing for R&D. You know, in a down market, you're probably getting two or three for one for each dollar you spend, then in a peak market. So that just solidifies the winners. We started with Facebook and Uber, and Airbnb during the down market, we started during these crises, they just were able to spend through the crises and grow. It's been hot as heck this summer, and I've been working my tail off. You see me talking about it. You see my photos. I've been out there on the mountain bike. I've been doing hiking. And you know what? I've been at elevation. And so I have needed to stay hydrated. Also, with this crazy work schedule, if you want to up your hydration game, there's only one thing you need to do. You just need to get Liquid IV. It tastes great. Reading this ad is the easiest thing in the world because I am addicted to Liquid IV's hydration multiplier. 16 ounces of water, two times as fast hydration. I've been loving the watermelon, the strawberry, so many great flavors. I just rotate them. My chief of staff, Presh, he has been doing liquid IV. He heard about it here on the podcast. He just ordered 20 pounds of it for his runs all over San Francisco. And here's your call to action. It's super easy. Everybody shops at Costco, right? you just grab liquid IV there in bulk. It's an incredible deal. And there's another deal that's just as incredible. If you don't want to go to your Costco, you get 25% off at liquid IV calm and just using my promo code twist TW ice tea. Think about that 25% off that is hugely generous liquid IV calm promo code twist 25% off. Thanks liquid IV. So let's go into what you think of all of it. We'll talk about the downturn here. All of these big companies saying hiring freeze. And Sundar saying, I don't know if my employees are that productive here at Google. Maybe everybody needs to work harder. And then Zuckerberg's like, Hey, everybody, if you're not coming to the office, or if you're not working hard, you know, there's not the company to be and then somebody in the back of the room is like, Hey, can I take my COVID days, I'm gonna have COVID days. And he's like, What are you talking about, like COVID days COVID over, like, you don't get emotional days anymore. You need to come to work, we need to perform our stocks been crushed. What do you think of this work from home trend combined with this down market, specifically around talent and young people?

### Human: That's awesome. So is there any way that you apply this to your own life or was this something that maybe you saw somebody else like what inspired that?### Assistant: Yeah, yeah. And thank you for the kind words. So in that blog post, I'm trying to figure out why certain kinds of things that young people do seem more impressive than other kinds of things. So to give you an example, imagine there's a two high schoolers, both of them are trying to apply to selective colleges. One of them says on their application, I joined all these clubs. I'm on the varsity tennis team. I'm the president of these 4 make work organizations. That takes a lot of hard work. That's many dozens of hours a week. Now imagine another high school student. He says he started a business. Maybe he's got a 4-figure or 5-figure contract. He's been even able to hire a few of his friends to help him out. That seems much more impressive. And it may not even be the case that he worked harder, or he's necessarily smarter or something. But there's something more impressive about that. And I was trying to figure out why is that the case. And the hypothesis I came up with is... Maybe we can model this as an option. So I'm sure many of our audience might know about the Black-Scholes formula for pricing options. One of the elements... Two of the elements in that formula First is volatility. Well, first, I guess maybe we should back up and talk about what an option is. It gives you the right to buy an asset at a predetermined price. And one of the things that makes an option valuable is the volatility of the underlying asset. That's because if you hold an option on something, you're entitled to the full upside But the downside is limited to what you paid for the option. So you want a highly volatile asset. And the kid who is starting his own business in high school, he's telling you that he's incredibly volatile in this way, right? So the best case scenario for him is he becomes the next Patrick Collison or something and found Stripe. And the best case scenario for the kid who joins four make work clubs is that he works for Patrick Collison. And so that's one element. The other is... One of the other things that's important in measuring options is age to maturity. So how far away are you from the time that the option can be exercised? Because again, the further away you are, the more time the option has to... Or the underlying asset has to experience large fluctuations in value. Um, and that's why we find young people doing more impressive, right? Uh, you know, why is a high schooler writing about our blog posts way more impressive than a grad student writing a blog post? Uh, well, because you have, uh, the high schooler has more time in which he can do some really cool.

### Human: And Jason, because of the available information is so robust compared to private investing is an excellent learning experience as well for $10. And you learn how to analyze a balance sheet, which 90% of people I certainly didn't learn how to do that again until after law school, right? So it can be### Assistant: looking at life things I will say is a superpower of your platform and other platforms including my own is when you have 100 or 250 or 10,000 people investing in a company. Now you've got 100 pair of eyes 250 5000 or 10,000 pairs of eyes on it. It's under much more scrutiny. One of the problems with their noses, you had a very small number of very rich individuals investing in that company. They weren't even Silicon Valley venture capital firms. There was no Silicon Valley venture firm on there. I think Tim Draper was personally on there. But it wasn't like Draper, Fisher Dervidson was on the board made a $10 million bet. And so a larger number of people putting more light on it. And because crowdfunding has to do audits and make this stuff public. it actually is safer in my mind. And I do see this when I syndicate a deal, I'll frequently have somebody say, Did you know about this? Did you know that this person left the company? Did you know that they had this action against them or whatever? And I'll say, Actually, we didn't know about that. And we have to go then to the founder, that's probably happened a handful of times where we've been made aware of stuff that we didn't know, or after we've made the investment, they don't send an update for three months. And then I don't have to send an email to the founder saying, Hey, can we get an update? I've got, you know, 250 investors in that company, and seven of them read the monthly updates. And they're like, you missed January, February, March, the last one I have is December. It's now April, when am I going to get an update? And they CC me. So this many hands making for light work, and this public nature of it, I would argue makes this you know, a little bit safer in terms of information than private investing where you could have an you although you have sophisticated people, you could have a Theranos like sister situation or even Bernie Madoff is a perfect example fraud exists in the world. So let's not pretend that fraud is not gonna happen. Bernie Madoff had the most sophisticated, richest clients in the world. And he was able to do a three or four decade long Ponzi scheme, like fraud happens. And real businesses can be turned into frauds, frauds can be turned into real businesses and any combination of those. So buyer beware, never let one investment be the majority of your net worth. Only invest what you can afford to learn and go slow in the beginning and get diversified as quick as possible. I think we share a lot of these concepts in common. Yeah.

### Human: We we have a little over 100 people.### Assistant: All right, when we get back from this quick break, I want to know about traditional content and if that will ever play a role here, i.e. would an HBO give you Game of Thrones or might the NBA let you stream the playoffs if you could guarantee a certain amount of revenue when we get back on this week's service? You need business insurance for your startup without insurance. You failed one of the earliest tests of being a CEO of a company and being a founder because what if you get hacked, and you don't have cyber insurance, you will face an existential crisis of your company going away. And what if you're trying to get board of directors, members, and you're trying to have directors who are highly qualified, and you don't have directors insurance, and officers insurance, you don't have that you look like an idiot. Okay, and then finally errors and omission insurance, you maybe never heard of that. But that covers you when you make a mistake. And any big customer you're going to have is going to ask, do you have you know, insurance? Do you have director's insurance? And do you have cyber insurance? These are just simple checkboxes. It does not matter if you do everything perfectly. somebody can make a mistake and people can sue you for no reason at all. It happens. I've seen it up close and personal. So what you want to do is you want to go to in broker.com slash angel e m v r o k e r.com slash angel in broker p m v r o k e r.com slash angel. And while you're there, you need to get 10% off your insurance by using the offer code angel tech and you can go from sign up to a quote and purchase in just 10 minutes. You're not dealing with large slow incumbents. And the signup is just going to take a couple days, like I said, not weeks, and you don't have weeks to wait. The process is super transparent. And there isn't any opaque pricing or nonsense, you're not going to have to deal with, you know, getting the runaround and that sticker shock when you get the price, okay, they're going to give you a great price. And it's 20% lower than most of the other coverage you're going to find out there and you're gonna get that 10% off by going to in broker.com slash angel thanks to the broker team. Make sure you use that promo code ANGEL10. And let's get back to this amazing episode. Hey, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. Our guest today is Ben Kieran, and we are talking about caffeine, which you can visit at caffeine.tv. How many people you got at the company now, Ben? What's the footprint like?

### Human: Yeah, I'm the populist in the building.### Assistant: So here, let's let's just embrace the dynamic. We'll play it out. Exactly. We'll play it out. I looked at it. And I said, you know what, Before he does his riff, which he's gonna do, he's saying, hey, here are my concerns as the manager. And the way he said it wasn't, I'm dictating to you cogs in the wheel. He's saying really thoughtful questions. are we overwhelming them? Where's the tribal knowledge? Are the managers not doing enough? You know, what, what's what's not working here? And he actually put a little bit of a joke into it, to, you know, to create a little levity here. It's a serious topic, but he said asking for a friend. I like it. I give that and listen, I'm, you know, I like Benioff, but I'm not a simp or anything. I barely know the guy. I've asked him to come on the show no less than 10 times. Yeah. And Benioff has never come on the show. One time Benioff came and spoke at our events and then didn't let me interview him. He had selected his interview. It's the one time in the history of my events that I let somebody do it and I regret it to this day. But I wanted to have Benioff at the show. I needed him at the show because he's a headliner. He was very popular at the time. Yeah. And I felt like his PR people were a little heavy handed with me, if I'm being honest. And they're like, you can have Benioff, but, you know, we pick the interviewer. And I'm like, it's my show. And I was really, I'm going to be honest about it right now, because I know this is going to get back to Benioff. I was a little insulted by it because I really wanted to discuss Benioff's career with him. Yeah. And I felt a little bit like they twisted my arm. Um, so that's, that's the context of which I'm coming at this. I'm not like a Benioff apologist. I'm not a Benioff critic, right? I like Benioff. I respect his career. Um, and I think it's a cool dude in many ways. Um, in terms of his philosophy of running companies, I give him an a plus on this because the easier thing to do is to just be like, y'all aren't working hard enough. Here's the riff or just here's the rift, whatever. But you were a little bit like, uh, so what's about, I know it's true.

### Human: And so, the only way to be confident in our decisions is to like have turned over as many rocks as possible, debated these things, argued about them, thought them through. Of course, right, not everything is going to be right or make sense. But I think it's really important that people have the space to kind of work through these ideas. And so, online, this takes the shape of people. like saying ideas that they may not even believe yet. You know, I know I personally do this, right? I think while I talk, right? I can't think without talking. And so, I have to say a lot of bad ideas to like find the good one that I actually believe in. And I think that's natural, we can't. And so, restricting speech is like, it's like restricting thinking. And I think that's real. Obviously, that's a bad thing.### Assistant: Listen, I work with super early stage companies that launch like literally year zero, they haven't even incorporated yet. And then we hit the series a people have 1000s of dollars in Mr. And they maybe they've only raised a couple 100,000 before that series a and they don't have their insurance set up. And in fact, we recently had a great startup that didn't have DNO. And we had to really stop everything because they were having board meetings, they were making massive decisions, there were legal issues. And they didn't have the basic DNO insurance that protects directors and officers. So we send them right to a broker. And broker is business insurance built specifically for startups. A single application will help your startup get four quotes for four lines of coverage in 15 minutes. Think about that four quotes, four lines, 15 minutes. And they're going to connect you with one of their expert brokers for unmatched service that goes beyond your policy. We use it at launch. It's easy peasy lemon squeezy. It's easy breezy. What more do I need to tell you? I use it. I love it. A lot of our startups use it. They love it. Try and broker today with the code twist. And you'll get 10% off their startup package in broker.com slash twist. That's e m b r o k e r.com slash twist and use the code twist for 10% off. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. So there's a perfect pivot point. You see generative AI, we've obviously been following this for years. And it was unimpressive or modestly impressive. You know, a couple years ago, you see Gmail, you know, predicting like, would you like to have dinner? Would you like to whatever, you know, you're like, Oh, wow, you can guess the next word. Congratulations. Good for you. or, you know, your Reddit for you page, you know, guesses I like the Knicks and Mark Knopfler gives me a little bit more. Okay, yeah, this is great stuff. But man, the jump it made, it's pretty miraculous. So I guess, step one, what are your thoughts, generally speaking, on what we've seen in the past year, in terms of the advances, which seem to be coming, you know, at an incredible pace and super inspiring. So I'm curious how you think about that as a technologist and a founder. But then part two, when did you realize everybody was using your data to build these models? And how did you come to the conclusion? You know what, this is this data has value, people should pay for it. Take it in either order you want.

### Human: This is JJ. You still think so? Hi, JJ. Hi, Mom. I really love the suit jacket. Well done. Yeah, I had to throw it on. I had to throw it on. Look, J Cal's already raising everybody's game. Here we go. Really? You still think even in the remote universe that we live in now? I mean, we had a first-time fund manager on. It didn't matter for the last two years. It certainly didn't matter. J Malik, he raised $10 million on Twitter.### Assistant: JJ wants every advantage possible. Well, yeah, okay, then. So I look at it as full court hustle, you do have to go to the full court, he wants to do a full court press, he wants to skip some steps. If you want to skip some steps. I mean, if you're hanging out in Palo Alto and Sand Hill Road at Stanford, You know you don't make a lot of collisions man i was i was hanging out to stanford mall this weekend i did like five selfies you know i'm walking through the campus and went to like one of their gardens there they have this beautiful cactus garden i went to. And uh you know i appreciate the botanical arts as everybody knows and uh yeah i'm just getting stopped constantly talking to people every conversation is about technology and it's probably similar in austin and miami so. But I do think over the last few years, it didn't matter because nobody could go out. But I think it's going to be the opposite. Now. I think it's going to matter more. Yeah, because people are going to be still doing the most people keep doing the remote thing. And then a few people are going to network. What if you ran into me one day, and I offered you a job, you know, like this, a distinct possibility. And now you've proven yourself. Oh, I know J Cal, I know 20 minute VC, I know the required guys. I know Molly what I worked at on deck. I'm considering my options. I mean, 21 and you're considering your options, Jesus. But you know, you learned the really great lesson in life, early on reciprocation effect, showing interest in other people, which was codified in how to make friends and influence people, the seminal networking book, if you're interested in other people, they will be interested in you. And then number three, you are creating not waiting. And Rachel, who works for me and Justin both had their own pods. for the work for me and i told rachel you don't like six or seven episodes is this like a solid seven like a six point five podcast come work for me i'll teach you how to be eight and a half and now she does every friday something that a large group of people are absolutely you know anticipate listening to which is rachel reporting is okay boomer segment you may have heard of it on friday She's kind of building her own little brand here. And she's an 8.5. I've given her now 7.5 8.5. Now she's moving up, taking a little mentorship from Molly and it's going well. All right. Great job, JJ. Can't wait to meet you. Get the hell out of Minnesota. Absolutely.

### Human: Not at all. We believe we have all the right folks until Series B.### Assistant: Perfect. All right. I like it. A little austerity. We got the right team. We just need to put our heads down and build. It's not about the size of the team. It's about the impact the team has. Very good. All right. Continued success. And we'll see you all next time on this week in startups. Bye bye. Trovata is a cash management platform that helps keep tabs on your runway, all of your financial data, and it prepares you to answer investor questions, right? And this increases your credibility when you're a startup. It's basically the cash command center for your startup, and it's going to let you analyze, report, and forecast your cash position like a pro. And here's the thing. Many startups are using multiple bank accounts, sweep accounts, to increase the FDIC insurance. Well, Travata makes it easier than ever to manage multi-bank data with a single source of truth. And Travata can scale with you, from your seed round to Series A, B, and onto your IPO. Fast-scaling startups should not be managing cash in a spreadsheet. Cash is your lifeblood, so let's treat it that way. With investors like Wells Fargo and JP Morgan, Travata has pioneered a massive library of corporate bank APIs and companies like Carta and Fanatics trust Travata to gain visibility into their multi-bank data. So here's what I want you to do. Go try it out. Travata.io slash twist to get started for free and use the code TWIST for 30% off. premium features for one year like AI forecasting and reconciliation. Start managing your cash like a pro with Travata. That's T-R-O-V-A-T-A dot IO slash twist to get started for free. Okay, everybody, Tony did a great job on the show. You got a lot to think about. But I want to get into some tactical work now. Kelly, from my founder university team is going to show you a nice tactical talk on how to build a CRM, a database of people so you can manage those relationships inside of Notion. And by the way, if you enjoy these tactical demos, you're going to love the founder university podcast, I'm going to put some founder university podcasts at the end of this week and start up so you get familiar with them. But all those tactical talks are available on YouTube or your favorite podcasting app, just type founder university, go subscribe. If you want to rate it and write a review, that would be super helpful to me. I'd really appreciate that. Or if you go into the descriptions here at this week and search, you'll find all those links tucked away for you take some notes, pay attention, stick with us. This is a great tactical talk.

### Human: Absolutely. Yep. Can you talk about investments that you've made so far? How long have you been deploying?### Assistant: I can talk at a high level about a few of them. We had an interesting process. We're seeing a lot come in. And we decided to run something we call an Ocean MBA, which is a week-long class we run in partnership with MIT. That's a bunch of the curriculum you get with an MBA with a very salty, oceany spin to it. And I teach a bunch of it. The guy who runs Energy Ventures at MIT teaches a bunch. So we brought a bunch of the professors in to teach it. It was awesome. We had 24 entrepreneurs come in. They learned a lot. We learned even more. We had breakfast, lunch, and dinners for these entrepreneurs while they're learning. We got to know their tants or go to markets, pretty much everything about their businesses. They pitched us at the end. And then we funded 4 of those companies. I can tell you about a couple of them that I like. Yeah. There's one in particular I like that there's two women from the desalination industry, which is unfortunately a very fast-growing industry to keep up with the freshwater demands of the earth. It turns out the ocean is full of just dissolved lithium and dissolved magnesium and dissolved very important metals. All these are just washing through these desalination plants. So they've created a specialized filter that will effectively turn every desalination plant into a lithium mine. That's one that I like a lot. There's another gentleman, an MIT professor is leaving his job and he's starting an MRV company and being able to sell carbon credits in the ocean, whether that's a mangrove project or a giant kelp farm or whatever the project might be that you're running in the ocean. Can I interrupt you for a second? What's MRV? Oh, I forget what it stands for, but it's monitoring and verifying the information in the ocean of what's going on. And people are doing this on land, like there's a terrific company called Pachama that uses satellites that will look at tree stands and see, okay, how much carbon dioxide are really being absorbed by the trees. So he wants to build a monitoring and verification system for the ocean. So let's say you're building a kelp farm or you're building a mangrove project and you're selling carbon credits off it. Are you really sinking that carbon dioxide to the bottom of the ocean? Are you doing something weird to the fish? Are you throwing the pH balance off of the ocean? He wants to create the moodies for the ocean to do that kind of thing. So those are the types of companies that we're looking at investing in early stage stuff. And so far, so good. No shortage of opportunities. I think this is going to be a winner.

### Human: That's what's crazy about momentum. Momentum is dangerous, but momentum is actually real. So Bitcoin has yet to be forced to prove that it can operate in the real world as like a currency, right? Or as a mainstream product. However, Bitcoin has proven quite conclusively that it can kick a lot of ass as an asset class. And it's not going to go anywhere because it has intrinsic value. I mean, it's like the dollar, right? We only believe, Kairos Dahl is a fan of saying, that it is the full faith and credit of the United States that makes the dollar the world's reserve currency. That's a leap of faith. And I would argue that investors the world around have taken that leap of faith on Bitcoin and Ethereum and the blockchain, and they are confident that those markets will eventually be found, and that that confidence alone makes this safer than it should be given the fact that, yes, it's like a total invention.### Assistant: Well, here's the thing, you know, when you talk about and Kai talks about the dollar, like people, you know, project into it that it has some core value, because it's the United States. It's a proxy for our our value in the world. Well, if you look at our value in the world, we create the best companies in the world. And we got the biggest army in the world. So those two things combined, make it easy to buy into. So now why would you buy into Bitcoin? Well, the answer would be, a lot of other people do. Yeah, a lot of other smart people do. And there's a finite amount of in the technology seems to be rock solid, because this technology has not been hacked with the exception of like 10 points, which are different than hacking. It's like somebody leaving the car unlocked. So if people leave their cars and their keys in the car, that's that's not the problem with the car or the key. So here, you know, maybe you're making a bet that bitcoins built to last stability, is why it's worth this. But even still, I would rather own the other five companies. But I mean, as a gambler, you might want to own Bitcoin. But yeah, it does seem to me that a lot of the most recent people who bought and this is what I've heard from like, there are these on chain analysis people. So what they look at, and I, you know, pomp does a podcast about this. where they look at who is selling and it turns out the original holders you know people have very low cost basis in bitcoin you know under ten k under twenty k they don't sell. Is there you know in the money and they just sit there and then if you look at the latest people who bought you know people bought at seventy sixty fifty forty they're selling. So there are the bag holders, like the most recent people who bought into it are like, Oh, this is bs, I lost half my money, I lost 30% of my money, I'm gonna lose it all, I'm out of here. But the early people are, they're not yet expanding their positions, which is kind of cool. So they look at the wallets, and this could be easily manipulated. So take it for what it's worth. But the early wallets that bought Bitcoin early, are not expanding their position, nor are they selling it. So they're kind of neutral. What we've seen in the past is those early ones maybe add to their position, but they just may be out of capital, they have enough Bitcoin that they don't want to expand it. But the latest wallets that bought in are having the paper hands and they're getting paper cuts.

### Human: I was, yes.### Assistant: Hey, everybody. It's our Power of Accelerator series here on This Week in Startups. What's an accelerator? What's an incubator? You probably have that question as a founder or a prospective founder. Well, an accelerator or an incubator, and we refer to those terms interchangeably, helps a founder get through a number of the issues which they're going to face becoming a startup founder. Now, what are those issues? In an incubator, those issues are building the product and getting it to market. Other issues around that time, company formation. Do you make an LLC, a C-corp, an S-corp? A lot of blocking and tackling stuff. Creating a stock option plan, finding a co-founder, designing the product, hiring the first couple of employees or team members. That is how accelerators used to work. They were called incubators. But incubators are not very important these days because people can build a product and they know how to start a company really easily. A lot of that stuff's been productized, like AWS. It makes it really easy for somebody to set up servers. Now, setting up a company, really easy. So most of what we see in the market better fall under the category of accelerators. So they're accelerating certain things. And that's why we call this series The Power of Accelerators. But you can think of those two things interchangeably. Accelerators help people who have a product that they've finished, or maybe they have an MVP, minimum viable product, or perhaps even a prototype, a very raw product that maybe people are testing. And they help them raise money. help them get customers, help them grow their product. So that's where we're at in 2020. And we thought we would do this Power of Accelerators 10-part series and talk to the people who run accelerators and get their perspective on what they're doing at their accelerator to help founders grow. And out of nowhere came an accelerator called StartX, startx.com. And you all know about it if you've been listening to This Week in Startups, because my guest today, Cameron, Tittleman, I got it correct, right, Cameron, your last name? Yeah, Tittleman. Tittleman, ah, I do that every time. The E, it's, just drop the E. I went with the E that time, it's really the I, Tittleman. And Cameron, you were on the podcast back in February of 2015 as a guest, episode 518, you were a panelist on episode 644 back in May of 2016, and you were CEO of Stardex until 2017. Were you the founder of Stardex? I'm trying to remember.

### Human: Yep, totally. I mean, listen, every time you hear someone say it was a two or $3 billion fire season, that means two or $3 billion was spent, right? Like it was spent chartering helicopters, like nobody's afraid to spend money fighting fires.### Assistant: I know you just got to MVP, but yeah, so we we right now are I this doesn't really exist as much in government sales, but you see it with dev tools companies like a GitHub or a cloudflare or, you know, any number of companies that will first give the tech away for free and demonstrate their value and then over time as it goes up the enterprise chain they'll start charging and so same thing with us first we just want to make sure that we are having an impact we build something that people love people want and uh you know if we never touch it again at the end of this fire season we want to build something that will you know actually be really solving a problem and become the gold standard in firefighting and so step one is getting that market penetration Step two is really how I think about charging in a way that is not predatory or not taking advantage of them, but actually helping them continue to build on our theme of digitizing and automating all their tools. There's five pillars to the control, to the ICS system, and that's command, logistics, operations, planning, and finance. And so there are things like, if I'm a firefighter, and I want to check in to a fire zone to actually start getting paid, I have to go in and manually sign in on a clipboard. That clipboard then somebody will take to my fire chief. He'll sign off once I've checked in and checked out. That'll be taken to the finance team or person in charge of finance. And then they will, you know, do their thing and digitize that and run that through to ADP, which is like their payroll. Barrel processor. And so it's like, is that something where we'd be creating value if we, you know, made a digital check in check out and automated that whole process? Yes. And is that something where it's not actually immediately having impact on firefighting? Yeah, so can we like feel good about charging for that while also like, you know, not just not removing any core features from the product. Yeah, so it'll be things like charging on a per seat basis charging for firefighters for the extra services that we're adding on as bolts to the core app. And so we would like to turn on that monetization engine at the end of this fire season once we've gotten market share. So we can show, hey, look, we've created value. We've shown we can take in your feedback and move fast. And here's our product roadmap based on what we've heard from all these different people. You know, let's start by paying on a per seat basis. And then let's, you know, once we land, let's expand those contract sizes in a way that's mutually beneficial for both of us.

### Human: So how important so so the Knicks can attract young players. Now, the Warriors, they're obviously the best team in the league over the last 10 years. But besides that, one, one attribute of that team and where they're based is that there seem to be like venture investing opportunities available to NBA players who show up there. Yep. Just like by being in the scene and meeting people who have seats that but that's like a hidden advance. It's not hidden. That's like an advantage that your team has to attract talent, right?### Assistant: Well, I, you know, I'm a diehard Knicks fan, but since we're not in the playoffs, I also don't worry about that. Yeah. So I'm friendly. I'm, I'm, I root for the Warriors. I like their style of play. I'm friendly with a couple of the Warriors. Um, uh, very good friends with Draymond in fact. And so, and my friend Shamath, uh, owns part of the team. And so I developed relationships with some of the players through Chamath. And then, you know, I go to the games, you know, I went to all I went to all the playoffs and finals games are incredible to see. And then I saw you. Yeah, I was I had courtside for one. Ironically, I had courtside for one, which somebody gave me the ticket, I didn't pay for it. And I sit down and who am I sitting down next to Sheryl Sandberg. And so everybody's like, Oh, Cheryl and Jay Cal are going to the game. And I've been so critical of Zuckerberg. So that was a very funny moment. And then I took Molly to the second row, I paid for those seats. And then I have a friend who has the tickets right behind the bench of the Warriors. So I go to I sit in those all the time, which is my favorite seats because I can see right there and I know staff and so staff will say hi to me or whatever. And everybody kind of freaks out or whatever. But the funny story was when I first started going to the games, I was sitting in Chamath seat. And they're playing the Knicks. And I was not friends with any of the team players yet. So they're going up 30 against the Knicks. And I say to Steve Kerr, you know, like, what are you doing? This is Bush league, like, get the starters out. What if, like, Steph rolls his anchor and Andre Iguodala tells me to shut up. Bogut tells me to shut up. I start telling them, listen, you guys can't even beat the Clippers. You need to shut up. you're up 30 on the Knicks, you're not getting past the Clippers. This is before they had won any games. And so then I became good friends with Bogut, good friends with David Lee. And I play, you know, it's a small town here. So we play cards, we hang out or whatever. But I got to go to three out of the four years they went to Vegas to celebrate So three out of those three years, I went to them with them to Vegas. That's just a lot of fun to, you know, with them.

### Human: So that makes a lot of sense, especially considering what you said when you were on in the business of fashion article that I read, where I actually found you off that article to have you on the show. But in that article, you said, quote, the wires Herrera stated that the syndicate is aggressively focused on any DTC company to prove community retention, attention and adoration before considering anything else. And adoration, in this case, I'm assuming, kind of means respect. And from this, I have to ask you, do you only invest in companies that you respect and care for, or are you willing to go against your own ideologies if you see something worth investing in?### Assistant: Yeah, it's such a good question. And I think as we're getting a lot more excited about Gen Z women as a focus rather than being investors or being founders or being consumers, I've had to have a mental shift of just investing in Gen Z women versus investing in companies that are going to create an ideal Gen Z women experience. And I can solidly say for the rest of my investing career, I'm not going to put money or put human capital or attention behind any company or founder that I don't... I wouldn't sit down and have a chat with. That's, I think one, just a lot of my personality. I just grew up like that. But two, I'm finding that that's a pretty common theme amongst other investors right now. And also just individuals as consumers. It's the same thing as if you're going to repost something. People in our age group are more likely to go and check out their profiles and see who they're associated with. And that goes back to just a hyper awareness of someone's identity that I think our age group has. But I think right now, I'm personally at a standstill for wires because I'm trying to figure out... There are so many wonderful D2C companies that hit pain points of different facets of being a Gen Z woman. But then there are also the facets of being a digitally native woman or a digitally native individual and really researching like what is the actual difference. And so, I'm finding that there are two interests that are pain points for a lot of digitally native women. One is a pre-professional to professional transition. So that's like really early future of work stuff. There are so many new jobs and there are so many different communities. And How the heck would the majority of people even know things like Contrary Dorm Room, what a syndicate is, GenZVC? How do we actually get everyone on the same page? The gig economy... How do you showcase to a professional that you know how to do content? Or... Mm-hmm. Your passions in an appropriate way that can really match even an early manager to an early career individual. So you see trends like that with TikTok, making their TikTok resumes. A lot of companies are looking at Home From College or Pineapple or Ladder. Those are companies that I'm really interested in. And then second part being alternatives to investment. So that could be things like, how would someone who's super hyper-connected start a syndicate and create a thesis? Things like Republic, which is an investment platform where you can back a couple of dollars behind... You're totally right. I know. I find a lot of people in our age group are aware of things like Republic, which is something that my parents definitely didn't think about.

### Human: Totally totally and drivers are our customers right we have a driver app we run that app just like we run our rider app and it's in our interest to attract the customer to give them a great experience for their earnings to be excellent for the flexibility be there and then for them to stick around. And our competition is exactly what you said, the warehouse, Amazon warehouse worker, or someone who might work at Starbucks, etc. And what we offer is flexibility. I've spoken to so many drivers who, I remember one was a, she was an actress and her mom got sick and she had to take care of her mom. And she's like, this is a pretty cool gig. And now she's an actress, and she works on Uber as well. I rode with a driver who, during the day, she'll drop off her kid. During the day, she drives people, and then in the afternoon, picks up her kid and hangs out with her kid and delivers for Uber Eats. Like, these kinds of stories would be impossible. with other full-time jobs, and they're possible. So it's not for everybody, but there's a self-selecting group of people who want the freedom and want the flexibility, and we've got to be there to give it to them.### Assistant: Are you launching a new product? Developing a new prototype? Maybe you're rolling out a new campaign? User testing lets you see, hear, and talk to your customers to understand how they experience your brand, products, and services. Put yourself in the customer's shoes with real-time video feedback. The user testing Human Insight platform allows you to target your exact audience Ask them any question or give them a task to perform. How interesting is that? It's a tech platform that connects brands with their target audiences in order to get feedback on any experience. Testers can get paid $10 for their time. These users aren't doing this to get rich. No, they're doing it because they really want to help make your products and services better. So watch, listen, and observe their reactions so that you can connect the dots and keep improving your product and service. Feedback within hours and strengthen the relationship with your coveted customers. User testing is used by startups and the world's most innovative brands, from Alltrails, Grammarly, to Microsoft and Capital One. Here's a testimonial. Chubbies is a men's casual apparel brand that gained valuable insights by asking some of their customers to explain why they love chubby shorts. They also asked for new product suggestions to guide their product roadmap. Think about how brilliant that is. It builds fiber between you and your customers because they feel heard, and we all want to be heard in this life. Experience what your customer experiences by using user testing. Request your free trial at usertesting.com slash twist, usertesting.com slash twist, and get the fast human decisions you need to make more informed business decisions at scale. We talked earlier about getting used to something in society, like low wait time for a car to transport you somewhere. People forget 20 years ago, there were people who needed to make money this weekend, because they, somebody got sick, they missed a rent payment, credit card was due, you know, maybe they don't have a big savings, and their car blows the transmission. I, you know, I grew up in this situation, where my parents had to like have the car pushed across the street from side to side, because they had to wait to have the money to fix it. This happens to people. Travis's early idea was, you push a button, you can work. You just think about what an amazingly meaningful contribution that is to society as a safety net. Forget about a welfare safety net and people getting free money, UBI, unemployment. How about people are empowered, they can press a button, and if they needed a little extra cash, a little extra cheddar in their pocket, they can get it for what their need is at that moment. Do you feel sometimes people underappreciate this massive innovation?

### Human: So called logical decision making. You have to look at the field, the game on the field, as you're saying. and pick up make a plan and execute as well as you can against that plan. And that that does sometimes mean cutting the staff in half, retreating and extending the runway. So I literally got an email third riff from a startup, they finally got the message, you know, 10 5% 10% 20% riff, we should have just done a 40% riff at the start or whatever it was. And, you know, I think they're going to make it, they have, you know, 12 plus months of runway, and they've got a good plan. And I think they can get to break even with the money they have. But it was literally one year of having this discussion. And so they could have made these cuts at the beginning a little more severe and had 24 months of runway, but it is what it is sometimes founders going to take their time on the cuts. And, um, you know, some, some individuals do their best work when their back is up against the wall. Yeah. And that's just human nature.### Assistant: I mean, so I think in today's market, I think there's a couple things going on. This happened to a number of my companies and we're working through it right now, which is like you raised, you got to a million in revenue, the business was doing really well. And then in 2021, some crazy VC firm came along and here's 20 on 100 posts. And everyone's like, woohoo, $20 million. Yay, we're gonna be able to do a lot of shit with that. And now, they're at a couple million in revenue, a few million in revenue, hopefully. But the valuation, the multiple that they're seeing in the market is not going to get them an up round. And so then the question then becomes, do you pivot just change your business entirely, which is dangerous. And in my last business, I did that a number of times. And it's a non-trivial thing to do. Do you take more product risk, which I'll come back to, or do you basically try to sell or shut down the business? And my argument for all these founders today is like, look, we seem to be at a step change with AI changing the game on the field in a substantial nonlinear way. So you can think of the last decade, the technology is improving over and over and over again, but we haven't had a major step change since mobile. AI appears to have done that. And And I mean, I like to argue that AI probably is the real web three. So the crypto fraudsters based like web three, web three. Oh, we all know that. But but AI appears to have totally changed the game. And so I think for a lot of those founders, this is the opportunity to take the capital that they have, and this new platform and make a bet on it and try to figure out how to basically get a step change in their business. And some of them will succeed and some will fail. So for instance, in my company, we had raised like a million bucks in 2008 from Reid Hoffman and the Google Analytics founders and all these amazing founders. And we had this business and literally Lehman happened and we were like, Oh, we're so And we saw this new technology at that point in time called real-time bidding, which is what we had just gotten started. And we were like, well, let's bet on this thing. If it works, like we'll survive. And if we're f***ed anyway, if it fails, because like our core business wasn't going to make it through. And so we we bet our entire business on this new protocol. And it worked. And that became a success. And I think AI gives a similar opportunity.

### Human: Thanks, Rick. When you're selling into the 50 plus market, having relationship with AARP gives you a bunch of credibility. Of course, in the meantime, you can go learn more about the Age Tech Collaborative at Age Tech Collaborative. dot org slash twist. And join us later in the program, you hear more about the H tech collaborative and how they help innovative startups succeed.### Assistant: So I have a little bit of a hot take around this because there are a couple other lawsuits and a partnership, which are taken on. Well, okay. So as context for my take, GitHub, I'm sorry, another lawsuit has been filed against GitHub co pilot, which is sort of the code creation tool. Yes, there's an announcement that meta and shutterstock have partnered so that Meta can train its AI on Shutterstock's catalog of images. And so Shutterstock is going to make some money here. But what I would say is no matter how this shakes out, and I think you're right that there will be a lot of lawsuits, Getty didn't create any of this stuff, it owns neither did Shutterstock, like creators are going to get screwed. Once again, this is exactly reminiscent of the digital music wars back in the day. And in fact, Getty CEO likened this whole thing to Napster and Spotify and saying, well, Napster was just stealing, but Spotify negotiated these deals. And so Spotify figured out a legal way to do this. And that's what we want these AI tools to do. And they probably will. And there will be a Shutterstock model. And then Shutterstock will make money and Getty will make money. So when I was in college, I covered the Unabomber arrest for my school newspaper, like I was there on the mountain, when they brought him down. There was a team of four of us, three photographers and myself, and a white Bronco like mysteriously came down. And we were like, well, that's weird. What's that car about? And so our two of our photographers were like, we're going to follow it. And I was like, great, go do it. So they follow this Bronco all the way from Lincoln, Montana, this little town to Helena, and they proceed to get the first photo of Ted Kaczynski post-arrest. Wow. A couple of college kids. Good guess. At which point they start getting calls from Getty and companies like them. And the AP being like, you have to give this to us for free. Otherwise, you'll, you know, be dead to us in this industry. And Getty being like, we're going to offer you the lowest possible amount that we possibly can and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. And they negotiated the whole thing. And it was great. And I think they got college paid for, and it was awesome. I think they ended up selling the photo to Getty. But when that photo ends up in the AI output, and Getty gets a royalty, They will not. So like, I just, this is a really bummer dystopian take. Well, they sold the image. But the content aggregators, sure.

### Human: And no, Nat and Daniel invested in their $220 million Series B alongside Nvidia.### Assistant: Again, back to no conflict, no interest. Here's how what I learned how things worked in the valley. everybody's kind of competing and collaborating. And like, if a deal comes up, and I can get you into the Uber deal, or you can get me into the, you know, DoorDash round, or DoorDash is competing with Uber, but you know, cloud kitchen, you know, everything becomes like very murky and overlaps. and Y Combinator, perfect example, Sequoia and their reach, perfect example, you know, Sequoia is an LP and our funds, you know, Roloff and I are great friends for over a decade now, Saks and Roloff work together at PayPal, right? So you see these like little, you know, gangs form, right? Yes. And then now with all in you have like the all in gang, and then, okay, this, there's like three or four other podcasts that have come up with little clusters of you know, investors and entrepreneurs. I think my friend Dave Morin, from path.com, who I've always thought very highly of, he started like an all in competitor, not competitor, but let's call it inspired by all in. And it's pretty good. You know, it's, it's not great. It's not bad. It's just like, okay, they have their opinion now over here. And then PirateWire guys did theirs and Moment of Zen did theirs and three cartoon avatars did theirs. These are all like little balkanized tribal things. And like Andreessen Horowitz doesn't like all in, right? Like, he doesn't like me, he doesn't like Chamath, we've been super critical. I wonder why. Well, I mean, whatever. We've said critical things, right? Yeah. But I mean, he's good friends with Sax and Friedberg, right? So you have this like very weird tension that can occur. Okay, is he blocking Chamath and myself at this moment in time or not, right? And so what I've learned is like, enemies accumulate, over time. And you don't want to miss opportunities. So to this extent, you can squash beef. And you know, New York's got New York Jersey's got Jersey, you know, maybe somebody who's got upstate New York, South Jersey, Philly, South Jersey, Philly, you know, Rhode Island, Providence, a little different than Boston, you know, but maybe they overlap. These families can kind of like do business together, but they could also get into spats, right. And that's what happens in tech. And then sometimes you got somebody who hits like a home run like this, like having their own cluster.

### Human: And by we should be we should be clear when you say 1500 shares, you mean stitch fix. That's why we were in case that wasn't obvious. The reason that we were talking about stitch fix is because that is the first J trade, which we should be clear is not investment advice.### Assistant: And they also did maybe a 15% cut last quarter, in terms of getting rid of some employees away off. And the stock price is about five bucks and change. And the market cap is 600. Now think about that market cap is 600 million, my understanding is they peaked at about $100 a share. In the boom times, it had $11 billion market cap. So 95% of the value has been wiped out. 94% I think, to be exact. Yeah. From its peach. Yeah. So this is one of those companies that's absolutely been decimated. I've been talking about on the show, I'd like to start trading and buying some shares in companies over the next year, because I've never traded. I've never been an active trader in stocks. I've always done index funds because I didn't have the time to put into it. But I frequently on the show, pick winners, in fact, all the time, and we do this really deep dives on them. I think I'm qualified to do this, especially with 10 years of private market investing. And since I met a lot of these companies when they were private, had them on this very show, etc. I think I have some unique insights. So I decided I would sell 2 million bucks of index funds, and I start trading them here. So I'm going to start that process today. And so I'm very frustratingly, I haven't like been trading, I'm gonna have a Robin Hood account with some dogecoin in it. And a bunch of had a bunch of free shares, because I guess you get a free share for every time you get a member. So I literally had gone hundreds of members. And so I had hundreds or I shouldn't say that I think they kept me at 75 shares. After that, they wouldn't give me more free shares. But because I tweeted about it early on, I literally had hundreds of people know, join the app, which is my job as an angel investor in the company. So I literally had to sell just to clear out my account, I think 75 shares in all these little pharmaceutical companies and other things that I didn't even know. So I was literally swiping, swiping, swiping. So I cleared out my account. I have some more money coming into it. But I decided I would make my first J trade in this company. So I just bought 1500 shares today, not a lot. I think it's like whatever $6,000 $7,500 worth. And I may buy more, but I'm going to pursue a couple different strategies. And I'm going to explain them here. My strategy here is I want to get to know the company.

### Human: I mean, what gymnastic accounts? Way more, probably.### Assistant: We are. So Silvic's been building all this stuff for years. We've got all this infrastructure to do verification. Pretty much, I'd say, 99% automated, 95%. Obviously, we throw out exceptions. We have to review those. But what we do more importantly for NFTs is we do uniqueness. And so what uniqueness is basically is your face, without having to do identity and who you are, your face is used to create a 3D kind of map, a topographic map. We know what your face looks like. We don't store your images. We just have this map. With that facial recognition, you can link multiple accounts to that. Now, when someone wants to know that it's the same person or it's unique to you, you have to produce your 3D face. No one can go in there with a picture and try and pretend to be you. That's how we do it. We're trying to create this uniqueness infrastructure. Now, if someone requires that you're a US citizen, then you have to produce some documentation, scan your ID, those sorts of things. But for general NFT usage, if it's just, is the person unique and not a bot, we do that with uniqueness testing and so forth. A lot of NFT mints are using us because what Kevin Rose did really well, it's worth noting, When he did the drop for Moonbirds and Proof, etc., it was like one per person. He had the raffle system and a whole bunch of other things built into it, but he was trying to make sure it was the most well-distributed NFT product in the world. He did a really good job, I think, at the time, given the resource they had. We want to make it a step further where we can do a drop to 100,000 people and 99% of them are just unique individuals. Because of the problem, and Elon talks about this all the time. I mean, the problem with Twitter right now is that the bot problem is real. I mean, Elon's not kidding. People think Elon's like, you know, it's actually real. We have a major bot problem in Twitter. And the only way you solve this problem is by having it wiped. What percentage do you think it is? What percentage is it? I think it depends on how you define it, right? Because I think they probably look at banned accounts as being not there. And so as a percentage of new accounts, I don't know. But I can tell you now, I'm pretty sure that on most Twitter profiles, 15 to 25% of the followers are fake. The 5% number is BS. Ridiculous. Ridiculous.

### Human: Mm hmm.### Assistant: Let me do a public service announcement for anybody who doesn't know what they're doing a traffic stop. Number one, the second you're getting pulled over, you hit your hazard lights. Now your hazard lights are blinking, you've sent a communication to the police, you understand you're being pulled over. Now you're going to put your blinker on and slowly change lanes to the right hand lane. You're going to put your car at exactly whatever the speed limit is 6555 you're at exactly that speed limit. And you are going to wait for a safe place to pull over typically that is not the highway unless there happens to be a giant full size place for you to pull over under no circumstances are you stopping in the right hand lane. But if there is a double wide, you know, place for you to stop, that's fine. But you're most likely going to stay 55 miles an hour and pull over at the next exit. When you get off the exit, you're going to make a right turn, you're going to open both your windows, turn off your radio, listen for instructions from the officers. The officers will tell you, you know, where they want you to stop. If not, you're just going to pull over directly when you get off that exit, because it's all likelihood not going to be a dangerous place. And just pull over. put your hands at 10 and two right at the top of the steering wheel. Do not go in your glove compartment while the police offers coming. You can go if your police officer is still pulling over, you can get your paperwork ready and put it up there and close the glove box. That's fine. But opening the glove box is something you do at the request of the police officer. That could be something that could trigger them that you're getting weapons. So just be careful there. Then you say yes, officer. No, officer. I understand, officer. That's it. Yes, officer. No, officer. understand, officer, I'm sorry, officer, you can throw in if you want to get out of the ticket. Do not get into it with an officer in that situation, because they're scared than you are. Because that is how most cops, if they are going to get killed in the line of duty, the one out of 100 times they or one out of 1000 times they pull somebody over. It could be somebody who's a felon who's on the run, who has 8000 pounds of meth in the trunk, and shooting a cop is better than going back to jail for 20 years. They're scared than you. So just make it completely less charged than it needs to be. That's your job as being someone being pulled. Yeah.

### Human: Well, how come these diligence periods like diligence is coming back? It's the new trend. So diligence will happen diligence is back. Why?### Assistant: Yeah. And for people who haven't heard the term KPI, key performance indicator, if you hear a bunch of buzzwords, at a startup like hack, or LTV, these are, you know, customer acquisition costs, lifetime value of those customers revenue per whatever, you know, different ratios, whatever. Yeah, average revenue per user. These are things that management will set out so that everybody can work towards a goal. Hey, let's reduce the amount of churn, let's increase the average revenue per user. But if you create an incentive, people will abuse the incentive. One example was next door. I love next door as a site provides a ton of value to me, but they disclosed when they did their spec, that they count an active user as quote, unique members who have started a session or opened a content email over the trailing 30 days. And that last part like, okay, I got an email because I had signed up for next door. And I, you know, was scanning through my emails. And now I count as a user. I found that one to be a little bit shaky. Now it's not outright fraud. In this case, they had 95% were fake. So actually, that's 19 of 20 million. I think I said 19.5. Yeah, it would be 19 of million of 20 million were faked, which is just insane. This person's gonna go this person's gonna go to jail, by the way. All right, listen, you know, my team runs on notion. I've talked about it 100 times I use notion all day long. I use it personally. I use it at my companies. I use it in collaboration with our founders. I've talked about this hundreds of times notion runs everything at my company smoothly, we do a right first culture. And we also have a lot of projects we're doing. And now it turns out notion is about to make project management, not even better, but perfect. Today, I'm excited to share that they just launched notion projects, which includes new powerful ways to manage projects and leverage the power of their built in AI features to notion projects combines project management with your docs, knowledge base and AI. So you can stop jumping between tools and stop paying too much for them to notion is again, a critical part of my life. Can't live without it. And so Do your most efficient work with notion projects. You can try it for free today at notion.com slash twist. That's all lowercase letters notion.com slash twi st. When you use our link, you're supporting this show and our ability to make great content for you founders, investors and technology enthusiasts. Go right now notion.com slash twist. But what about diligence?

### Human: Yeah, I don't I don't know. It feels it feels potentially very destructive. Maybe not. Maybe not.### Assistant: But I would rate the meeting makes more sense to me. Like, is this meeting was this meeting worth it? was this part of the meeting productive. And so Nick wrote something interesting is if everybody in the meeting has low scores, is that indicative of the meeting should have just been an email or a slack message or you know, a coda or a notion page like a punch list. And that's what I'm always trying to get at. Does this need to be a meeting? Or can we just write in our, you know, corporate wiki, a page and a punch list, and just edit and refine it. And I'm really getting into this writing things down culture and writing down the best practices. And I prefer the Google okay, ours, KPIs combined with the Amazon, right first culture, six pagers, and the checklist manifesto. So I think as a founder, and a team, you got to come up with your own secret sauce, for me, checklist manifesto. So Amazon working backwards is like, hey, you write the press release, you write the FAQ and internal FAQ and external FAQ. And it just creates massive clarity because writing is clarity of thought. That's why people who are not experts should not write a book to become an expert, because they're not going to be clear because they don't understand the why behind everything. So checklist manifesto means you don't make mistakes and skip steps and crash the plane, or up the surgery. So and then Amazon, working backwards, working backwards from the press release working backwards from a six pager, where you explain why you want to build this product and what it's going to do in words, not images and performance. Which this seems performative. And the third piece... The writing culture. Oh, and then Google's KPI system. Oh, and then OKRs. OKRs and KPIs, yeah. No rules. Does that factor in at all? um, no rules rules, freedom of responsibility is a nice credo. So no rules rules. The you know, the Netflix culture, but the Netflix culture, I think it's a little too cutthroat. I don't think having people fear for their jobs every January and having to reapply for them is a great long term tool. I do understand it's probably has resulted in some higher performance, but I think long term it could create mistrust. But the no rules rules is like autonomy, make the best decision you can, given the information you have, have a good thesis of why you did that. And better to make a decision, which you've seen me do with people is just I want you to make a decision and then come back to me with that decision. I'll tell you if it's a good idea or not.

### Human: Uh, I think she, my mom is pretty nice in jail. They do good, uh, steak and fries. Uh, so that's, that's pretty nice. Yeah.### Assistant: I gotta check that out. What's your favorite restaurant in San Francisco? It's funny you mention this. I really love Japanese food. I just got back from Japan. I couldn't go for a couple years. They had a lockdown. And there is a, um, a specific dish, um, called katsu, you know, like, yeah, yeah. And so not everybody's into it. It's basically like a fried cutlet. Right. And there is a place called cafe Okinawa, uh, like the island, uh, and, and it is, uh, on Townsend street. Uh, so it's, it's near you if you're in Selma and, uh, they make, a sando a sando is short for sandwich. And they use thick white bread. So when I was in Japan, I got pork tonkatsu sandwich, but then, you know, they put some, you know, nice cabbage with it or something like some shaved vegetables, but you can dip it into curry sauce. So when you have katsu and curry, so they have this sandwich, oh my god, I'll take you for it at some point when I get on your cap table and I get a little slice of that, put a little investment in there, slide a little 250k from my fund into Galileo, you and I can have a celebratory tonkatsu sandwich. But they have the katsu sandwich over there. And it's mind blowing. And you know, this is one of the great things about San Francisco, people can talk about the problems. But the absolute creativity and the food scene is just in the even in the bay area, you go to Berkeley, or you go to Napa, or you come down to San Mateo area where we have a lot of great Asian food. And so every time I go to the city, now I find myself going to Cafe Okinawa and getting their chicken katsu. They also there's another weird dish that they do in Japan, where they make fruit sandwiches. Oh, again, with this white bread. So you know, like Wonder Bread is like a really weird bread here in America. Yeah, they have a better version of it in Japan, they make their like their own white bread. And then this concept of a fruit sandwich I had when I was in Japan for the first time, they put like a whipped cream, but not too sweet. And then they put strawberries, or I had one with mandarin oranges. And so they have a strawberry one there. So you literally imagine strawberries with a very like not too sweet whipped cream. On white bread. Oh my lord, you would think it's like a weird thing. It tastes delicious Uh, sounds very good.

### Human: Yeah, it's a great question. I know you guys have talked about this a little bit already. But generative AI and copyright law, and who's the real owner of IP? What happens when you mix these things? It's a really fascinating question. But I do think there's something to be said for having access to proprietary data that lots of people care about. If Google is able to maintain the proprietary nature of YouTube data, of certainly your G drive data, your Gmail data, and help you have a personalized algorithm based on your private data. That's going to be really powerful in terms of an experience, right? But then, it remains to be seen whether that personal experience is a complement or a substitute for a broader search experience. But I do think that for some of the most interesting areas for innovation and potentially for investment are, how do you take the foundation models and combine them with proprietary information? What's the infrastructure needed to do that? And then how do you make that accessible in a product experience that is differentiated because of that proprietary data? I think that's where there's room for innovation.### Assistant: Okay, we're about to announce the winner of our second show us your space competition. Elise runs a digital sports nutrition business built on Squarespace called whoa, sports nutrition. You can go check it out at w o h e sports nutrition.com w o h e sports nutrition.com Congrats, Elise, you're going to enjoy $1,000 in Squarespace credits. And if you want to be an amazing entrepreneur like Elise, or start your side project or anything in between Squarespace is how you do it from personal projects to giant tech startups, anything. can now be built on Squarespace. We love it so much. We use it for remote demo day and many other projects. Here are some amazing Squarespace features that founders love. You're going to get unlimited e commerce templates, analytics, inventory management, all of that stuff built in SEO, 24 hour, seven day a week customer support. everything just works inside of Squarespace. And of course, it's optimized for mobile, you know about the gorgeous templates, but you can also sell content, their courses, etc, appointments and save the 15% tax that other platforms are taking from you. That's your money. Don't give it to a platform, use Squarespace instead squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. We love you Squarespace, and they hold the belt here at This Week in Startups for our longest running partner. Thank you so much for supporting This Week in Startups and our mission to support founders and inspire innovation. You could very easily drop a Google the Google's chat results, AI chat results into a search, you could do a search on YouTube, and you have the entire corpus there of YouTube's transcripts. Do you believe that these pools of data will be balkanized sealed off from each other and then google could have an advantage in that. My gosh they have all the that youtube information they have all that gmail information google docs information and other places like say chat gpt wouldn't even have access to it. So what are your thoughts on the pools of data being the new oil Reddit, Twitter, and Cora, I believe we're all used to train chat GPT. I believe all of those have now said, Hey, it's nay on the using us as a training data. So that stuff's going to have to be ripped out of GPT four. So based on what you know, and we live through in terms of fair use of content, what do you think the outcome is here in terms of who gets to scrape whose data and train their model on it?

### Human: Let's break down, we're talking about sort of parallel technologies working together and then parallel sets of problems to solve with each one of those technologies. So let's go back to Google for a minute and talk about the problems with search that you wanted to solve and dive into those a little bit more. We can start with privacy, but it's a longer list than that.### Assistant: Yeah, so I would broadly put them into two buckets. And the irony does not escape me that I certainly had a large role to play in one of those buckets. One is that ad load just keeps going up. Text ads are one of, you know, it's pretty much the most incredible business invented. No one in their right mind for like the first 10 years of this decade thought that Google would make more than $100 billion of revenue just in search ads. It's remarkable, but that's the business it is. And it's also a reflection of our times that, you know, there's no limit to expectation. While Google is a very successful business, it is still judged by how much it can grow. And so, as I said, I approved many of the decisions that increased ad load, But I also felt ultimately that there was no limit to it. It would just keep going up and up unless some externality like the one we are going through happens. And then on the organic side, they are hemmed in their own way by the ads model. The dirty secret behind the ads model, and this actually goes back to even TV, is that ads have to stand out. And so, broadcasters, for example, would increase the volume of the ads as they started playing because they knew that that would get a little bit more attention. Similarly, you can't make organic search too attractive because that's going to kill how much money you make on the text ads. It's the same reason why on your Facebook feed or Instagram feed, you're going to see video ads interspersed with mostly pictures, because moving video gets more attention than a static picture. It's the same theme. And so it's hard for the organic team to say, we can create the best product that there is. while they're constrained by but don't kill ads monetization too much. Right. These are some of the problems the ads ecosystem, you know, with things like the double click acquisition, essentially, Google became like this purveyor of ads for the entire internet. The other side of ads is measurement. is conversion tracking is basically measuring to see which ads are successful in getting the customer to take the action that you want. And that sort of unleashed a whole ecosystem of thousands of companies, keeping track of every single thing that you and I do. And Google's a big part of that. And that's what people talk about when they talk about this rampant loss of privacy. every single thing we do goes into all of these databases to be used for sort of monetizing at a later time. And so, you know, a lot of Neva is really about, okay, start with a clean slate, start with no constraints, focus on the product, what can you create?

### Human: Yeah. Again, like we're, you know, I'm not surprised. It's, you know, that's less than three months away, that type of functionality.### Assistant: Yep. at Thanksgiving last year, when this came out. And at that time, I told everybody in our company, if you're not using this every day, you can't work at this company, go buy it for 20 bucks, get chachi before everybody get on the train, get on the elevator, we're going up. And, you know, I, I think, I asked my team, I like to talk about how I manage my companies, because sometimes people find that helpful. I told my team now, because of share GPT, being built into chat, share icon, and then people can pick up your thread and go with it. Yep. I said, include your links to your shared GPT. Yeah, in your end of day report. So as a remote company, we do a five minute start a day, you say what you're going to work on in Slack, we trust you to do the work. We're not monitoring, I don't do keyboard clicks. Although I do have some data, it's interesting to think about. And then at the end of the day, I ask you to reply to that and say what you got done and just share it with the team. So everybody knows five minutes in the beginning of day five minutes in today, and then you get to work from home. Yep. The other thing I added to work from home is you got to come to a stand up with your camera on and be dressed for work. And you know, yeah. showered, shaved, whatever. I mean, I technically don't know if you're showering or whatever. But you have to be presentable on camera, I guess is the ask. Yep. So at a certain time, you have to start work a certain time, you got to end work. And you got to say what you did. I think that's reasonable. And you get to work from home. Totally. And now people are starting to include them. And somebody did a search for the sales team of Hey, all in has sponsorships this time around, we're gonna try to sell a couple sponsorships. Yep. And in the sponsorship stuff, they just said, Hey, what are other conferences that compete with all in summit or other big tech conferences and business conferences, who are the sponsors put in a table, put in a CSV. And, you know, we don't have the ability to compare it to our pipe drive, which is our CRM. But eventually, I want to be able to just say, which of these companies are not in our CRM? Or just I had somebody doing this already. Who are the advertisers on other business podcasts? Tell us if we've ever talked to them. Yep. That'll be automated. You know?

### Human: If they all got pushed out, that's their issue. Or it's their issue and that's why. Either way there's an issue.### Assistant: And people spin this stuff. Right, Alex. So you'll as a journalist have had this experience, Molly, as well. CEO will tell you this was totally voluntary. The leaker will say, Yeah, you know what the board was at their wits end, you know, and they gave them an ultimatum, get somebody on board. And then on mass, they said, Okay, well, we'll just all resign. And so the truth is probably between these two extremes. Yeah, what I will say is, there's two things to note here. They started to search for a CEO. So just in terms of lessons, if we may move to the lesson part of this, If you're a founder or a co founder, you have three co founders, and you're searching for like a CEO to do operations, one of the three you need to buck up and get the operations dialed in. Stop with this like CEO CEO stuff. There's three of you get control of the ship. Stop going to parties. Stop living the life in Miami. go to the office, don't leave the office, work 18 hours a day, seven days a week until the ship is tight. That didn't happen here. I can assure you that these three founders were not at the office seven days a week for 18 hours a day. Be dogged. Is that your Miami party move? This is my Miami party move. got to be hardcore when your ship is having a problem again, back to if people are, if the ship is if the plane is hitting turbulence, if there's an engine out, that's when you become the goddamn CEO, CEO, that's where you do whatever it takes. And I don't feel like I know, based on what I'm reading here, that there was not a hardcore, let's write the ship. And this idea that we're zero to one builders, not at scale operators, if you can do zero to one, you can do the operating stuff. Okay, it's just a focus issue. It is your personal preference. So I don't want to say there's some entitlement here. But this feels a little bit the screams a little bit of entitlement. I want to do the zero to one fun stuff. I want to build product. But I don't want to put out the fires. I don't want to figure out what's wrong with the engines. I don't want to fly through turbulence. You know what Henry, Harry, Buck up. If in fact he did bail. If they all jumped out with parachutes, golden parachutes in fact, not cool. If they were pushed out with golden parachutes, okay, that's not their issue. So I'm gonna give both messages.

### Human: Are you seeing that? Like, is there competition slash coopetition for what you're doing? I mean, it seems like digitizing this, it feels like you know, and I mean this with respect like that feels like a pretty obvious first step like that's clearly got to happen.### Assistant: It's a far so last year, in Tahoe, for example, where Jason is right now, there was the Caldor fire, right? The Caldor fire alone, they spent over $2 billion fighting that. The Dixie Fire, the largest fire in California history, burned over a million acres. They spent over $3 billion fighting that. So that's two fires, right? There are, and right now you look at it as far as like, you know, if you want to talk in business terms about growing Tams, like this time, and I checked this last week, so I may be a bit out of date, but this time over the last 10 years, on July 27th, the historical average for land burnt in the country was 2.7 million acres. Right now, we burnt over 5.5 million acres, right? Already this year, right? Yeah. And we've really got fire season really picks up end of August, September, October, right? Like that's really its peak. And so it's some we obviously right now we've got the Electra fire. We've seen the Oak fire. We've had a couple of these larger fires, but we haven't had anything on the size of the Caldor fire or the Dixie fire or the CZU complex like these massive things. And if the listeners would like some fire science real quick, which is something we talked about before the show. Basically, the reason these fires are getting so bad is there are a couple of things. One, if a fire burnt, say the Caldor fire, burnt all the way up to the South Lake Tahoe, for the next seven years, historically, that area would be considered safe. Now, because of it, like safe from burning again, right, like, right, because there's a lot of just underbrush that needs to regrow, there's a lot of fuel that needs to restock. Now, that same area is considered a fire risk within two years. and so you're not giving anybody any time to like do any sort of treatments to like remove the fuels if they need to like they can't do prescribed burns there's nothing you can really do and as this drought continues to just drag on decade after decade now um you're going to continue to see what's known as soil erosion where and it's this vicious feedback loop where basically once it starts the soil gets drier so the top soil starts basically evaporating into the the sky. blows up. And so that's the problem we're going to start seeing more and more. And so it's really important that Fionn isn't just the only company attacking this from a software angle or from a hardware angle, and it really needs more and more people.