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### Human: I have a webinar on my calendar for this week.### Assistant: Yeah. When is it tomorrow or Thursday? Do you think it is Thursday? Okay. So anyway, on Thursday, I think 600 or 700 people gonna be on a webinar, I'm going to share with them, hey, here's the performance of the first two funds. Here's the third fund what we invested in, we don't have performance, it's recent. And here's our plans for a launch fund for let's put the cards on the table. If you want to invest, if you want to come on this journey with us, if you want to do risk capital, you know, here's the possibilities and the options for you. And so I did this, Because I just thought, well, all of the folks doing the $10 million funds that I've started backing with little 25k checks to support like the next generation of fund managers really lending my name more than capital, although it could be, you know, whatever, a small percentage of it, you know, every little bit helps. What I noticed about what they were doing was people with no networks, just by using Twitter, were able to close a $10 million fund. So I said, Well, I wonder what would happen with my reach, if I told people I was raising a fund, because what always happens is I meet somebody and they're like, Oh, I would love to be in your fund. I'm talking about high net worth individuals. And I'm like, great, I'll talk to you in three years, because you raise them, but every three years. And so I just want to make sure people know I'm doing it more because a lot of my friends don't know I'm raising a fund. And lo and behold, since I've been tweeting it, a bunch of my friends are like, Can I be in your fund? I'm like, of course, come to a webinar, get informed, make an informed decision, if you want to do that. And so I get I'm getting about 25 to 50 emails a day now, from people I know and don't know. And I say, Great, tell me about yourself. Have you been in a venture fund before? So I'm kind of coming up with a whole little script or process for vetting people and getting to know them. And that's what KKR is doing. They're just saying, you know what, let's let let's open up access. Now it's not to accredited people with 200,000 a year, but it's opening up access and giving more people the chance to participate in very sophisticated financial devices.
### Human: Yeah. I noticed on the website when I may or may not have been shopping for jewelry that, for example, underneath the products, you list carbon footprint offset in years or fractions of years. So I was looking at these $40,000 statement earrings, and it said carbon footprint offset 6.7 years. What does that mean? Years of what?### Assistant: So the average American has a carbon footprint of about 16 metric tons per year. I've done a pretty deep LCA in my own life, and I'm a little higher than that. I'm around 20. I'm a little higher than the average bear, but we said, all right, based on the 16 ton number, um, we've sold this diamond. This is an amount of profit we can allocate towards all of these, you know, carbon sinks. Uh, so working with groups like charm industrial, uh, they have a, uh, pyrolytic process. They take organic waste material and they essentially, instead of burning it, they put it in a vacuum chamber, uh, and they turn it into an oily sludge and then they can put that back underground. So carbon that would otherwise biodegrade on the surface and vent, you know, likely methane, you know, as, as those, uh, As that process happens, now that's not going to happen. We're going to capture that underground. It's like an oil that's not combustible, so no one's ever going to want to dig it back up and use it as a fuel source. This is a really great way of taking material that would otherwise be contributing to global warming and have it have a reverse impact. are definitely happy with the way we've been able to work with these frontier projects and bring non-dilutive funding. And hopefully, as we continue to scale our business, that can scale as well. And when we map that to our jewelry products, we say for every carat of diamond that we sell, our environmental commitment is to remove 20 tons from the atmosphere. So a one carat diamond maps to about one and a quarter years. So that's the way we've been doing it thus far. We'll see how long we can continue to do that with external projects. spot price in the market today for a ton of CO2 has tripled in the last year. Ultimately, there could be constraints where we have to cap it at some reasonable amount, but that probably hits an inflection point as we start building our processes to produce other carbon-based materials. Our underlying core tech and specialty and area we want to focus is taking atmospheric gaseous CO2 and turning it into solid carbon. That's diamond as a starter, it's graphite for use in batteries, as we move towards a more electrified future, we're going to need a great domestic source of graphite, and we'll be able to do that. And then other carbon morphologies, graphene, carbon nanotubes, things like that.
### Human: Let's do it. They need to be moved out of the way because there's so many promising probably entrepreneurs that could really be successful that are taking a wrong left turn and will be distracted into that. That could have been the next XYZ company.### Assistant: They literally will rent cars, put them in their driveway and take pictures of it. Yep. And then they put it on their Instagram. And then it's really like pernicious techniques they're using, which is if you're affiliated and you're associated with a fast car, you might have owned a couple of these. I'm not calling out your lifestyle, Paul, but I know that you have some nice vehicles. But you know, like, you're not renting them like nice vehicles. I own a couple of nice vehicles, right? Then they this is where it really gets sick. This one guy was paying like Sylvester Stallone, and like Pacino, and they don't know what they're getting into. But their speaking bureaus like, hey, go to this conference, he wants to talk to you about your career. Here's 50k. So then they do that. Then they have a picture and a video on YouTube of them interviewing Al Pacino. And you're like, oh, they're friends with Al Pacino. And they drive a Ferrari. Therefore, and they were a tie. Okay, this person's legit. But you don't realize they rented the Ferrari for $1,000 for six hours. And they paid Pacino 50 grand to be on their conference. And they charged all this money for the tickets. So they just made the audience pay for Pacino. And they got all the association. Now you pay 10k for the course, and we're charging your credit card until your credit card gets turned off. And now you're in debt. And you're like some single mom, you know, out of Atlanta or LA or something, and you got into their click funnel, and they convinced you to do it. And then the techniques they use is one person was telling me they, they tried to make her feel bad about herself, like Oh, you can afford those shoes in that purse, but you can't afford to invest in yourself. I guess you're not serious about business. And they kept like grinding her and like insulting her. And she was like, Okay, I guess I gotta like, really take myself more seriously. And she was like, really embarrassed about how she felt for it. And I was like, don't be embarrassed. Like, you know, people pay for college, like, people have coaches, like in our industry, there are Jerry cologne has been on my pod multiple times. Good friend of mine is a great coach. Like coaching exists, right? But that's not who these people are. Right? I'm taking them all down.
### Human: Well, yeah, well, that's that's kind of what I'm saying is a smart contracts for that, right? So when you create it, so that no one else can rip yours off, right? I think that's where it kind of intersects back with the blockchain. And someone says, this smart contract, this token, this is the version that I created. And here you go. Okay, exactly.### Assistant: is this is the tweet, talking with my team, if you register music with us, we can collect and pay out royalties direct to anyone who uses AI Grimes vocals using smart contracts. The future really is now this is so cool working on a way to register and easily access vocals through elf that tech. So yeah, there's gonna I mean, brave new world. All right, you hear me raving. about notion all the time. We run our company on it. And now notion lets you leverage really powerful artificial intelligence. My guy presh works for me. He takes everything we do when we do a tactical talk at Foundry diversity, or we have an internal meeting, and he'll take the transcript, right, we cut and paste the transcript into notion, but then he will highlight it. And then he uses the magic of notion to create bullet points and a summary. And this is incredible. What would have taken him an hour or two of work to summarize a meeting, it's done in seconds. I mean, you're starting on third base right now. Great news for all of you. Notion is offering eligible startups up to six months free of their plus plan plus unlimited AI for six months. Notion is going to help you start up you're going to save money because you can consolidate many of the different tools you're using. It's going to make you super efficient. All the info is in one place. Notion is becoming more powerful by the day and you need to get in on the action. Notion is now offering eligible startups up to six months free for their plus plan plus again, unlimited AI for six months through the notion for startups program. You start saving your startup some money and apply for notion for startups today at notion.com slash Jason, when you use our link, you're supporting the show start saving your startup some money apply for notion.com slash Jason. At the same time, our bestie Chamath wrote a blog post. And in his blog post, he basically, it's basically a rehash of what he said on the all in podcast, nothing actually new here. But he basically says, these are the main arguments against regulating AI, and why he disagreed with them. It's premature to regulate something that barely exists. And he writes mark these down as famous last words while it's admittedly early in the life of AI and generative pre trained. Transformers progress is compounding at a rate that's measured in days. Let's take that first one. Do you agree? Where do you stand on this Chamath positions or that it's preeminent, the premature regulations and free markets right now?
### Human: Thank you, Jason. Super excited to be here.### Assistant: Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Startups, that's right, your favorite podcast where you get to hear directly from founders and investors who are building the future through the lens of entrepreneurship and building companies. And the pandemic has led to a lot of interest, excitement, and hand wringing over education and school. And people having to suddenly educate their children over zoom, which doesn't work. As far as I'm concerned, I don't think it works. And when I said, Listen, I think the pandemic is going to go on for a year or two, I am going to take my children's education into my own hands, and I'm going to hire a teacher. And I just tweeted, because I thought, hey, you know, 2020 21, I don't buy that people are going back to school. I know some people have started I know somebody doing testing. They get only a matter of time before a teacher, tragically, just law of big numbers not only contracts Coronavirus while the school year is going on whether they contract at school or not, but some number of teachers statistically will die from COVID because it's impacting a certain number of Americans, maybe it'll wind up being you know, a 10th of all a 10th of 1% 10 basis points of all Americans will die from COVID. Perhaps that's the eventual number 300 400 500,000 Americans. There has to be a teacher in that group, statistically, and then all teachers are going and all teachers unions will say schools off. That's what I believe will happen. I hope I'm wrong. But anyway, I tweeted somewhat you know, simply I'm looking for the best fifth grade teacher I can find. If you help me find that teacher, I'll give you a $2,000 Uber Eats card. You know, that kind of stuff does work when you do that. And I wound up on TMZ, Daily Mail, and San Francisco Chronicle as a rich guy who is stealing a teacher from the public school system, even though we were committed to hiring a teacher who was not currently employed, which was in the tweet storm, but people don't want to read that. But one thing that happened that was interesting is, about 100 people said, Do you know Chris Bennett from wonderschool.com? Because he is doing that exact thing. And I said, Yeah, I I've heard of wonderschool.com. Let's get Chris Bennett on the podcast. So here he is Chris Bennett, the CEO and co founder of wonderschool.com. Welcome to the pod.
### Human: That is what I wondered is what does this say about any potential weakness that you know, there has been this prevailing theory and TechCrunch even notes, investors have argued that pre-seed and seed stage startups are, you know, immune in some ways to macroeconomic tensions because it's so removed from late stage valuations. But it does, you know, I've been asking you over and over about this like growth, like what comes next thing. And it does sound like it's not different funds, like people just invest at different amounts and they change how much they're investing. But is there the valley of death? Yeah, if you're if you send so many baby turtles, like I say all the time that our job is kind of like sending baby turtles toward the ocean, and we know a lot of them are going to make it, but it sounds like there's a lot more birds in the air right now.### Assistant: You know, the way that works is you get the 125 for 7%. And then I think they put the other 375 in at whatever your terms are when you graduate, which by the way, is what I created, you know, seven years ago with the launch accelerator. So they got that idea for me. And it's a great idea to give myself credit for it. Because a lot of times when you graduate, giving them more money, you know, helps grow the company, and you can get your 7% to maybe get up to 10% ownership. And I think that's what they saw, you know, they had very little ownership in Airbnb, or Dropbox, or a lot of those great companies by the end. And, you know, you the way you win in this game is by continuing to invest. So I think they did everything right in that regard. But maybe they're looking at it saying, Well, will we be able to raise another billion dollar fund and keep up this pace? right? Because if they were going at this pace, and they had the budget to fund 1400 startups under the new standard deal, you're going through four or 500 per class, that means they have two more classes to go or three more classes to go. And here, if they go down to 200, they got seven classes to go. So this could be a recognition also of maybe they would not be able to raise as big of a fund in the market in the current conditions, it's possible. Yeah, it could also be that maybe less people Molly are starting companies. So if less people are starting companies, then maybe they're saying, well, this is gonna if we try to hit a certain number, which you know, would be crazy if the quality goes down. So maybe they're saying, Hey, we're not finding 400 people that hit the benchmark we're looking for for a YC company. So let's go down to accepting half as many. So if you got half as many applications, you'd have to lower your standards, just like Harvard might be right have to lower their standards if they went 10x. And YC went 10x. So you know, maybe don't want to lose it. Or it could be the when they graduate, the other theory I had was if they graduate, do they have a hard time raising money? So then they've just got all these orphans, and then they all come back to them like, hey, you know, you, there isn't enough VC infrastructure to absorb all the YC companies, right?
### Human: So that sort of started you on this journey to impact investing, it sounds like. And what did you realize was wrong with it that led you to Proof of Impact?### Assistant: Well, thank you. That's nice to say. Yeah, so I'm originally Dutch, but I was educated in the UK and got headhunted, recruited, you know, by these swoosh Goldman Sachs ladies who showed up at one of my colleges and went into investment banking, as you said, got utterly bored after two years in London, working from like, you know, 7am to 6am. So I asked if I could move to an emerging market because it was 98, 99, Argentina was exciting, South Africa was exciting. And the bank said, listen, you're Dutch. You need to go to South Africa. We're building up an office there. That's where you need to start. So I started and lasted for three months at the office. I was actually at JP Morgan at that time and was attracted to a business proposition from another ex-JP Morgan bond trader who said, listen, the internet has just arrived. We need to give emerging market retail investors access to these global markets because they want to invest, they want to trade, they want to buy the highs and lows. But when the telephone was there, it was too expensive and too cumbersome. But if we can use the internet, we can really create an amazing platform. So we build what is now known as Easy Equities, Easy Crypto, has one and a half million users. At the time, we called it Global Trader, Global Trader 24-7 because it was a dot-com, obviously. And no, we had a very successful run. We built the technology in South Africa, which sounds a bit ironic because really technology in South Africa, but the development skills were outstanding as a quarter of the price. And we then expanded globally already. So within seven years, we had a billion dollars on our overnight book and the market started getting choppy because the realities of a lot of credit and a lot of volatility were coming in. So we sold to a private equity firm literally at the peak of the market in 2007. And I was living in Russia at the time. My husband was building an investment bank there. And with that sale, it allowed me to go back to university. So I went back to Oxford, and then started working with the Skoll faculty. So Jeff Skoll, the co-founder of eBay, He really started pioneering this concept of social enterprise that then evolved to impact investing. ESG was a dirty word then, but we launched what is now the largest sort of environmental fund. So yeah, there's a lot of things that happened since 2007 that are in this new direction. Right.
### Human: Speaking of this question of who controls who owns who controls super dishy posts, people are just speak in the truth or their truth, right? There's this sort of interesting thing where it's like, I'm going to take to the public. And in the case of these creators, it was about TikTok. In this case, it is a founder, Bolt founder and CEO Ryan Breslow, who appeared on episode 1313 of this week in startups, posted a thread on Twitter yesterday, accusing Stripe and Y Combinator of being not just being but sort of colluding as the mob bosses of Silicon Valley. Spicy. Yeah, it was unpacking. It was super dishy. So here's some basics. Let's go through what he said. Yes. And let's start with sort of like some context bolt is one click checkout software, right? sort of competes with stripes payment API is not perfectly direct, but close enough. And his first Tweet was, Stripe and Y Combinator, the mob bosses of Silicon Valley, a threat. Spicy. Done, done, done. At this point, I paused the show, made some popcorn, poured some bourbon, and came on back to my chair. Essentially, Breslow's claiming that Stripe bullies FinTech competitors with Y Combinator's help because the two evidently, according to Breslow, work closely together. This is true. Stripe is a Y Combinator darling. Stripe competes indirectly with Bolt. Bolt interviewed for YC with, according to Breslow, strong traction, a good team, and was declined. Then Breslow claims Stripe raised money from many of the top VCs in order to actively block other payments companies from raising from those same VCs. Rezlo also claims Stripe and YC control Silicon Valley media via Hacker News. So they have a whole ecosystem of control here. He explained how a Bolt product release went to number one on Hacker News and then shortly after that were displaced by a Stripe post, which was basically about the same topic. Breslow also claimed that Stripe funded a pre-launch one-click checkout competitor called Fast. That CEO, Dom Holland, was on episode 1103. You can skip that episode. Oh, okay. So back to Hacker News. Breslow said that because Hacker News is owned by Y Combinator, it rigs the rankings to pump Stripe product releases to number one. And that's why Bolt's post about payments got bumped down all of a sudden. And that all of a sudden stripe basically stood up a checkout competitor at the same valuation and with more capital just to fight off bolt.### Assistant: His brand, right. And my friend Sam Harris, when I got him into podcasting, and I helped him set that up and talk to him about it. He went with Patreon because he talks about terrorism, he talks about atheism, like it's just not good for advertisers, like Casper does not want to be in the middle of that discussion of Islamic terrorism, slash, you know, atheism, whatever. Go figure. But he was on Patreon, then he realized, wait a second, Patreon can cancel me because Patreon started canceling people who said things that people didn't like. And he was just like, what I can set up a stripe. and do it on my website. So he literally left Patreon and he was making it was what he didn't disclose, but I know the number, you know, well into the, you know, to comma territory a year from his fan base. And he was like, I don't want to have Patreon, then be able to listen to media. I mean, I'll just go direct with stripe. And then there's like this edge case, where the cancel culture, or could you do something so controversial that stripe doesn't want to You know, like OnlyFans, right? And some of those places had a hard time getting credit card companies to do stuff. When you're growing your startup fast, hiring engineers can slow you down like nothing else. Here's the good news. Lemon.io will find you a perfect candidate in just 48 hours. What's Lemon.io? They are a marketplace of engineers from Europe. Lemon.io is a great solution in a lot of different scenarios. Maybe you're a technical co-founder and you need to delegate some tasks because you're underwater. or you have a project that needs a very specific technology and you don't have that skill on your team right now and you don't want to wait or you're growing rapidly and you need to add developers quickly. And let's face it, it's a dogfight out there to get developers and here's a way for you to get one on very quickly. They're going to match you with a candidate within 48 hours and if it doesn't work out, they'll replace the developer right away. They test and interview every developer to eliminate the risk of a failed project. So here's your call to action. If you could use a full time or part time developer to run your projects faster, go to lemon.io slash twist. That's lemon.io slash twist. And you'll receive a 15% discount for the first four weeks of work with any developer if you go to lemon.io slash twist.
### Human: Everyone. I mean, everyone thinks that way. It would be naive to say that people don't think that way. And this is 100%, I would say a bigger, this is a this is a get for thrive, right? This is a reputation washing.### Assistant: right about now, everybody in Hollywood is like, what's Thrive Capital? Like, they're just googling it. Right? Whereas if you went to Sequoia, or Andreessen, Excel, Kleiner, you know, any of that short list, or if you went the other way, Tiger, KOTU, you know, more PE, you know, they've like, oh, makes total sense, right? Like, that's where that person's brand belongs. So this is a big risk for Iger to, you know, dip down If you're looking for highly qualified elite international developers, but you don't want to deal with the crazy time differences, I feel you. That's why I use developers who are in my time zone. And that's why you need to know about Ravello. Ravello is your answer. It's a talent platform, and it matches you with vetted full time remote developers in Latin America, which is where I have my developers. They work on U.S. time zones. So you're talking to them for 8, 9, 10 hours a day and you can collaborate in real time, not play telephone. And you're going to spend less compared to hiring in the U.S. And I will tell you that the developers in Latin America are as good as the developers in America. You're going to get matched with your candidates in three days or less. They're going to handle the payroll, the taxes, the benefits, and more. You get to hire internationally without all the headaches. Ravello engineers are full time and embedded in your team, just like normal employees. Okay. And they're proficient AWS, Rust, Ruby, React, Python, Node.js, all of the great technical platforms out there. They do. Here's your call to action. Go to ravello.com slash twist and mention twisting at 20% off your first three months. Very significant when you think about it. r e v e l o.com slash twist they offer 100% risk free 14 day trial period if you're not satisfied you pay nothing r e v e l o.com slash twist they apparently met through their wives journalist willow bay and carly class both models for us they love her they both have model wives that's how this um came to be evidently uh okay per that's interesting wall street journal with a mod where they're on a shoot together? I don't know. Maybe the active model? I don't know. I don't know. Carl Carly Claus is an influencer or an actual model. She's an actual model.
### Human: How big a deal is this for our industry. I mean, we've seen, just like you said, $50 billion in private investment. There have been questions about whether this might be impacted by the recession. I personally am of the opinion that it's not an optional investing class, but you never know. But I wonder, like, how big of a tailwind is this all of a sudden?### Assistant: Well, again, fingers crossed on this, but I think it is pretty substantial. I would divide that impact into two major components. One is the direct effect. So you have this push on research and development that will then yield different types of technologies that will be commercialized in a few years. There's a direct impact from the government buying stuff right now that is going to create a more stable view of what the market opportunity really is. And then there's all these other programmatic activities that are going to incentivize industry and communities and individuals and other parts of the government really to accelerate that transition. So we had some of the initial down payment in the infrastructure area last year, and capital being raised to think about how quickly this transition is going to happen, I think the direct effect is much clearer programmatic support for different parts of renewable energy, but also the creation of these new areas like agriculture, like forestry, like coastal regions, and this emphasis on really how this is going to happen. I think the indirect effect might be even larger, which is what this does is create a sense of stability and sustainability that is very different than the situation was a month and a half ago. right, where you start to think, okay, well, again, you know, take yourself back to your gut check in January 2009. Like, did you think electric vehicles was an inevitability? And the answer is no. Now, I think there's a much higher probability that people think that that's the case. And this really, really cements that. And the question is, what other things become really clear or really start to feel inevitable, get to that critical mass as a result of this type of spending, right? So agriculture really making a transition and focusing on the effects of climate change in the resiliency sense and the environmental impacts on people, right? The human element emerging in the bill itself. I think all of those things create, you know, just a more clear forecastable future in which you can make these investments and follow on. It's a de-risking. I think it's a stabilization of the environment and an acceleration of that environment, right? I mean, $369 billion is a lot of money. And the question that I think we poked around in our last conversation, which is, okay, all this stuff goes into early stage tech investing, this last wave of capital that's been raised, or very late stage investing. What happens two or three years from now when all those early-stage companies get into junior high school? Who's going to fund that? Is there really a pathway for them to continue?
### Human: Is it that old? Because I gotta say, I'm inclined to say Yahoo. Oh, it's Yahoo.### Assistant: which gives me actually a really good piece of advice here, which is if there can be some path to resolving the bot problem, once and for all, that could be the upside in this, hey, yes, of course, there's been a bot problem, everybody in the industry has had it. And this whole, you know, acquisition, and then the acquisition not happening has given us, you know, newfound resolve and a lot of great feedback on how to solve the problem. And hey, we've squashed it. And here's how we squash it, they could actually come up with a system of saying, like, you know, some transparency. That's the thing I think is sort of missing here. That's kind of strange is that Twitter is not saying like, Hey, listen, here's all the numbers. And here's how we solved it. which maybe they'll do at some point is just explained to everybody. Here's the actual number of bots. Here's how we define bots. They haven't been clear enough about that. And I think that's why all this speculation here is but that could be actually a several lining. I do think all this attention on Twitter, as you know, this incredibly valuable product or service, I think is going to make Microsoft or another company come out and make an offer for it. So I have no inside information on that. But I could just imagine people looking at this going, yeah, smartest guy in the world, most successful entrepreneur of our time, arguably the best product, you know, person since Steve Jobs. If he likes it, maybe we should buy it. And maybe there's some massive value here. And I do think there's massive value if you could have competent product and leadership and not a revolving door at Twitter. I was thinking over the weekend, I was talking to some friends in a chat. I was like, is there a company that at scale has been less competent on a product basis than Twitter, we can only think of one company, what company do you think in the modern era, you know, our lifetimes? hit scale, which just felt like it was a revolving door of leadership, and they couldn't get their product act together, yet they were still very successful at during a period. What company comes to mind? An internet company that hit scale? Yeah. See if anybody in the chat room can guess. Think of a company that you used a lot. It is not AOL. AOL was just really never good at product. You know, if you look at AOL's products, but you're you're in the zone, Nick.
### Human: Hmm, that would be so actually really great, like Wikipedia.### Assistant: If you're a b2b marketer business to business, your needs are unique, you know that b2b buying cycles are long, your customers face really complex decisions. And most of the time, traditional marketing channels just don't cut it, you're not going to reach them on traditional marketing channels. And they're not making impulsive buys. They're making thoughtful, well researched buys, aren't they? Right? You do that in your business. So here's the good news. LinkedIn ads is built specifically for business to business marketers, that means you. So here's the only stat you'll ever need to know on why you have to market on LinkedIn, LinkedIn ads gives you direct access to wait for it. Here it is the number keeps growing 875 million members, the march to a billion LinkedIn members continues. Now what's important about those 875 million members. They're not all rank and file 180 million of those 875 they are senior level executives and 10 million are in the C suite. That makes sense, right? And those are the folks that are incredibly hard to reach, but they use LinkedIn all day long. No other platform in the world can offer those kind of eye balls. LinkedIn is also going to help you reach your audience in a respectful business environment. When people are on LinkedIn, they're doing business. Here's another amazing staff you audiences exposed to brand messages on LinkedIn are six times more likely to convert, let it sink in and audiences on LinkedIn have twice the buying power of the average web audience. This totally makes sense, right? So make B2B marketing everything it can be and get $100 credit on your next campaign. What a hundy for free. That's right. LinkedIn.com slash this week and startups to claim your $100 credit terms and conditions apply. So just to think about this, putting aside SpaceX's rocket launch business, which is a vibrant business, as you pointed out, they did 60 of these launches already. And you know, they've got the, the big mega rocket coming out, you know, on the Mars trip, and you know, going around, and the the moon and stuff like that. You can, and it's really funny, we're now our producers are running the our producer notes through chat GPT. Yeah, so I'm going to give you here. This is amazing chat GPT, which I have now figured out is just the ultimate plagiarizing content form. And I think there's going to be huge lawsuits around this. Like, I think chat GPT should be required to put where it's sourced the information from.
### Human: Yeah. I'm going to quickly explain one of the crucial types of insurance every startup needs E and O insurance. This covers errors and omissions. That's what the E and the O stand for. And it helps you scale because any major customer will ask you, do you have ENO? If not, you can't close the deal. It's that simple, folks. So if you don't have business insurance, you've failed one of the first steps of being a founder. And startups should look no further than a broker. Brokers technology saves you time, it saves you money, prices are up to 20% lower, and you're going to get better coverage than the incumbents. You go from signup to quote and purchase in just 10 minutes. When you work with a broker instead of the incumbents, you're not dealing with large, slow corporations, no. And your signup will take days, not weeks. The process is completely transparent. There's no opaque pricing. This is a modern service. They treat you with respect. So here's your call to action. instantly buy custom built insurance for startups. Go to in broker.com slash twist. While you're there, you can get an extra 10% off by using the offer code TW is T twist. I send this week in startups. All right, thanks and broker you do a great job over there. They do my insurance. That's all you need to know. Talk about Tom Perkins is another person who most people know him by some of the stupid stuff he said at the end of his career, where he was talking about his watch being worth more money than, you know, 10 Rolexes, and he bought the biggest penthouse, and he kind of said a bunch of dumb things. But he also was like Don Valentine, very aggressive. And he also created companies, and originated companies, we can talk about his impact, because now we have all these venture studios, trying to originate ideas. But that kind of was Tom Perkins. What in the 80s? 70s.### Assistant: I mean, that's 70s. Yeah, both kind of Perkins and Sequoia started in 1972. And the two big innovations in venture methodology were first of all, you know, roll your sleeves up, get involved with a founder and be tough if you have to be tough. And that was sort of the Don Valentine thing. But the other big thing was stage by stage investing the notion that some things are just too risky at the beginning to write a big check. But you can write a small check, and you can do what Tom Perkins described as being taking the white hop risks off the table. So the best example of that would be Genentech, where somebody who'd been an associate at Kleiner Perkins as a young guy actually got fired, but was still working out of the KP offices. And he had the idea of doing a biotechnology gene splicing recombinant DNA company, and that was going to be Genentech. He identified a scientist who would be his partner, who was a leader in the field. He came to Perkins for funding and he said, I need, I think it was half a million bucks to get started here, which in the 70s was quite a lot of money. Perkins said, look, Who knows if this is going to work? If it does work, the upside is massive, so I want to be part of this. But let's put a little bit of money in. Instead of setting up your own lab, you can contract with a few of the existing academic labs to test the technology to show me that we can get across the first hurdles. He did this also with Tandem Computers, which was an innovation because it was a fail-safe system where if one part of the computer crashed, the other part kept it going, which was essential for stuff like financial applications where you really couldn't have the computer go down at all. And he incubated these inside Kleiner Perkins, as you described. They kicked ideas around over the table in the Kleiner Perkins conference room. And it was a very hands-on thing. Tom Perkins himself had founded a laser startup. So he was an entrepreneur, as well as an investor. And so I think, you know, I was struck while I was writing the book that, you know, there was this narrative at Andreessen Horowitz, that it was a huge innovation to have only people who'd been entrepreneurs become general partners, by the way, of course, they dropped that later. But it wasn't even new in the first place, because that was pretty much the KP model way back when. Right.
### Human: It's urban micro mobility, mobility, it's like, it's not cost effective to take an Uber. So you just take this thing a mile because it's too far to walk. Exactly. So that's as a tam goes as a bottom up tam exercise. Yes. It's just not that many.### Assistant: So you really have to do a bottom up Tam here. So I always like to include a lesson here in what we can learn from these things. So this is a great part of a bigger company. It's a great part of a transportation company, just like bikes are too. But if we go bottom up Tam, not how many rides are there that are under a mile or two miles? That's what people were telling me, hey, this is why this business can be awesome. Under two mile rides equal this percentage of the rides. And it was some incredible number, like, yeah, 50% of rides are under two miles and lifts and Ubers and whatever, and taxis. Okay, now you drill down, okay, who wants to get on this thing, and risk, you know, put a helmet on risk breaking the risk. Okay, so two thirds of users are not interested in physical activity like this, they want to sit in a car and use their phone or make a phone call. They don't want to do a physical activity like this. Then you say which cities will allow it tam gets smaller. Then you say under what weather conditions as possible. It's not working in the freezing cold. It's not working in the snow or the rain. So in Arizona, okay, maybe in Phoenix, you know, or like the dense part of the city, but not in the server part of city. So it was a very small market, it was one part of the mix, but they did make their own hardware, which was very good. And they solved so many problems. So, you know, it's it's tragic in a way, a lot of effort went into this. And it's just tragic to see this hardware is hard, folks. And then you add hardware to operating in the real world. And it's really difficult. I think the business here, which they had, as part of the business was allowing people to run franchises, and they would power the franchise. And So if you wanted to run this in your town, Molly and create a business, you could rent scooters for, you know, 50 bucks a day, or maybe 25 bucks a day, people use them for the whole day or whatever. It kind of works in that in that way, or for municipalities to do it or for campuses to do it, but it may not work as, you know, a straight up Lyft, Uber competitor. I think that's why Uber and Lyft never really They I think Uber had bought jump at one point and I don't even know if they're operating that business.
### Human: All right, topic number three. Whoo, Twitter, Twitter making some interesting management choices considering the state of uncertainty that it's in right now. The company has announced a hiring freeze and head of product Kayvon Bickpore was fired while on paternity leave. Okay. Clearly mad enough that he tweeted about it. So he was on cave on big for for context was on episode 1225 of twist last year, he is actually known to be one of the people who jumpstarted Twitter's product velocity, which as we know, was non existent. For a long time, his team helped ship spaces, super follows, Twitter, blue fleets, our IP fleets, communities, all of that. Yesterday, he tweeted the following thread and let people know that he was hired directly. by CEO Parag Agrawal. He said interrupting my paternity leave to share some final Twitter related news. I'm leaving the company after seven years. It was not my decision.### Assistant: Yes, it does. He can handle the swings. And you know what, there is something to be said for people who are bold enough to put their chips in the pot and to have a little variance. Now, my piece of advice for folks is, you know, always pay for your home. If you have gains, put money in your kids 529. Don't touch it. Have a nest egg, have a floor, have a foundation. I did that in my life. That's why you see me out here so happy. That's why you see me playing as if I have a bunch of rings like Steph Curry or Draymond, because I do. And there's no way for me, with the exception of my, you know, if I if I if I had an untimely death, I'm going to enjoy the hell out of it. So I think Moss is in the same camp. He makes the big swings. He goes for it. He's bold and he'll be fine. And so my hot take on this is who's they? Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, whatever, he's just going to get back to work, find something great, and crush it again. And we need people like him out there making big, bold bets. Do they seem crazy to us? Sure. But he's playing a different game than y'all. Totally different game. And if you look at the course of history, the guy has put up numbers, and he has created and helped create some of the great companies of all time, criticize it if you want, but he's winning. all around the world tech companies are innovating and driving returns for investors and our crowd is an investment platform that analyzes many of these companies across the global private market. Then they select startups with the greatest growth potential and bring them to you from personalized medicine to cybersecurity to robotics and quantum computing and so much more in state of the art labs, startup garages and anywhere in between. Our crowd identifies innovators so you can invest when growth potential is greatest and that's early. Our crowd accredited investors have already invested over $1 billion in growing tech companies and many of their members have benefited from their 46 IPOs or exits. You can go there, you can read those deal memos, invest early, and you can truly diversify your portfolio by investing early in innovative private market companies at our crowd. Join the fastest growing venture capital investment community by going to our crowd.com slash twist. That's o u r c r o w d.com slash twist. That's o u r c r o w d.com slash twist.
### Human: And what is behind what happened during the pandemic? In terms of the resiliency of our shipping infrastructure? What did we learn about that? Because everybody you know, basically started stockpiling stuff, people had extra time and started spending money on e commerce. So my e commerce investments have all skyrocketed consumer subscriptions, because people were looking for something to do or needed to buy something or became preppers or some, you know, amount of like, you know, maybe I should keep two or three cases of x, y and z in the garage just in case. What happened? Did your business go through the roof during the pandemic? Did he freeze? Or did it do both?### Assistant: Ah, it did both. So the first two months, all the factories shut down in China. And I were sort of so so for the moment, we were staring at the abyss because it was like, Whoa, okay, all 2000 employees. Yeah, paid. It was horrifying. And you didn't know like, not that I don't know a single economist who predicted like economic growth of trade would increase like that's not in the mind that was not on the top of the list. Yeah. And so we freaked out. It was very scary. I mean, first of all, we had this battle cry of like, hey, forget the business, forget all that stuff. Let's get masks to our hospital network. We owe civilization a duty. Civilization owes these people a service, like you can't go, you can't ask someone to go into a hospital without a mask on in the middle of COVID, like that's absurd. And I, I thought we were really facing like borderline civilizational collapse, like the nurses in Oakland went on strike because they didn't have masks. And I feel for them. I'm like, I wouldn't want to go work there either. And a lot of these brave people did anyways. I mean, it's incredible what they did. So that was actually a great rallying cry for us to be like, Hey, don't worry about the performance of our shipping. Like we got to hire a call right now. Then what we saw, was exactly what you're describing is people who are locked in their homes and can't go out and spend money at bars and restaurant and travel, just buy more stuff. Like we need things. It's like you got to get your dopamine somehow. And so buying things was like the way to do that. And so the growth in the second half of the year, global trade actually, and I mentioned this earlier, but in Q4 2020 was 30% higher, or US imports, I should say. Our exports declined quite a bit, but US imports went up by 30%. Yeah, and this is a physical good. It's not easy to scale something like that. So I would argue the shipping infrastructure was remarkably resilient, all things considered. You got people who are having to work in warehouses and at ports and take risks around getting this disease. So all things considered, it did pretty great. There were certainly instances… I think the medical supply chain had a giant wake-up call that you shouldn't run just in time inventory on life saving equipment, like let's have some stockpiles of this stuff.
### Human: Yeah, so the idea is really simple. If you collaborate on anything, you usually need to open up Zoom and invite your collaborators, then open another app, screen share, and that is really complicated. One of my brilliant engineers, I think a month before we launched Pitch, pitched me this idea of like, hey, why don't we have live video collaboration in Pitch? Because then you can just send someone a link and collaborate on the deck. And I was like, this is brilliant. This is like really next level multiplayer, if you want to think about it. And it really helps you to not need another tool for like audio and video communication. And that really, for us, it's the very first version. So we also want to soon launch audio and video recordings on DeX. So we want to support the synchronous kind of presenting and the asynchronous kind of way of presenting. I think there are so many cool ways to deal with audio and video features in Pitch and also other web products.### Assistant: Cool. When we get back from this quick break, I want to talk to you about the killer feature I found in it, which is the video collaboration feature. I haven't used it yet, but this seems to be a really interesting one when we get back on this week in Starbucks. Okay, you know, if you're running a SaaS company, software as a service, a monthly subscription, you've got all this value sitting there, right? You're getting money in every month, but you want to put money to work. You want to grow your startup. Well, there were two ways to do that. You could take a loan and you can live under debt. And that's makes you pretty anxious. I know it does for me, or you can sell equity. which is expensive as well. Listen, I buy equity. I can tell you, it can be expensive, especially if you have a company that's really doing well. Well, now there's a brand new third way to grow without debt or dilution. And that is pipe.com. P-I-P-E.com. Pipe is a two-sided marketplace. It connects SaaS companies. So you have a SaaS company and you're generating a lot of revenue, but you're charging on a monthly or quarterly basis. They then take your yearly contracts where they take the value of these contracts, put them as a year and they sell that reoccurring revenue to institutional investors who would like to get a return on their investment. So they give you the yearly value up front for your monthly or quarterly subscriptions. It's like the Nasdaq, but for software contracts, right? This is a totally new category. It's never been done before. And it's really cool. I mean, this is incredible. they're gonna eliminate all your trading fees for one full year. Just go to pipe.com slash twist and they'll eliminate all your trading fees for one full year. This could save you tens of thousands of dollars depending on the size of your business and the volume you trade. So happy piping everybody. Sign up today at pipe.com slash twist. Welcome back to this week in startups. Christian Reber is here. He is the founder of pitch.com which is absolutely stunningly gorgeous. Tons of beautiful templates. We'll get into that. Uh, but the feature I thought that was really interesting, which I haven't used yet because it's behind the paywall. I believe it's free for 10 people. Oh, it's free for 10 people. Okay. So there's a live collaboration, live video collaboration. Explain what that is.
### Human: I'm just saying, I can speak for Mike, here's the thing brought it into focus.### Assistant: Here's what happens. This is actually a really good discussion to have. The people who are in podcasting, don't want to see Spotify or Apple or Google do what Apple is doing to iMessage, which is break everything and take too much control. better for all of us that there is a fragmented level playing field and Spotify has some audience Apple has some audience Google has some audience overcast and 1000 flowers bloom and players etc. And we're not beholden to anybody. So when we had the opportunity to be in the video, I said, I don't know if I want to do this. And I CC Daniel on the emails and just said, Listen, I don't want you breaking pockets. I don't want you to force me to use anchor, I should use anchor if I want to, I already have an RSS feed. And they guaranteed me listen, it's going to be backwards compatible. And you'll eventually be able to use your own RSVD feed with this, we're just trying to figure it out or whatever. And so I took it on good faith. But if Spotify overplayed their hand or anybody did, I would just call them out publicly like I'm doing here. And that's what all people who are on the other side of this podcasters should absolutely give it to any player any platform that tries to screw the standard, because if they screw the standard, then it's we're going to go into Zuckerberg land, we're going to go into iMessage land, where no more innovation is going to happen. And so that is the key thing here is sure innovate along the margins, But, Mike, to your point, it's very reasonable, but just make it backward compatible. And then people can make a decision. And then people who are in the industry should be very vocal. So Adam Curry, who was, you know, the podfather has been very vocal about this stuff. And, you know, it's up to the standards committees. And for those folks to find consensus, Molly, I think, to keep the ball moving forward so that people just don't give up on it. Because what essentially Twitter did at some point was I think they've removed RSS support. And they were just like, yeah, you can't you can't subscribe to somebody correct me if I'm wrong here. But you used to be able to go to twitter.com slash Jason slash RSS, I think, where they had some very easy URL structure. And you could actually subscribe to somebody's Twitter in an RSS feed. I don't know if you could still do that or not.
### Human: Right. And then how many you said you launched with about 100 drugs? How many drugs does that allow you to produce and distribute to carry?### Assistant: Yeah. So the way it generally works is the actual chemicals themselves, like the what are called the API's or active pharmaceutical ingredient, not to be confused with the API's that, you know, most of the tech industry works with. It does get confusing in email sometimes. But the ingredients generally we purchase from other companies. What we do is actually the part that's most regulated by the FDA because it's the last sort of spot before the medicine goes into a patient, which is what's called the fill finish or actually filling the bottles with medicine under sterile conditions. essentially what we have there, we are creating an automated line, so a robotic fill finish line. And it's really cool to look at. I can't show the videos because they're proprietary from the company that makes them, but basically robot arms that operate in what's called an isolator, so a sealed chamber filled with vaporized hydrogen peroxide. And basically, they just make sure that there's zero bacteria cells in that entire chamber while the medicine is getting filled. And there is a component of formulation development. So we do have chemists on staff who develop the formulation. And, you know, we are operating, one of the things that lets us address drug shortages very quickly is we are operating as, forgive me, I'm going to get into jargony stuff, so stop me if I get too far into the weeds, something called a 503B compounding pharmacy, which if there's a shortage is permitted to produce the drugs, not necessarily have them go through, you know, have them go through the standard chemical tests and what are called analytic studies before they get out onto the market. But not necessarily human trials before they get on to the market so that helps us get. you know, products in dire need out very quickly. But we are also, you know, a full, what's called CGMP, Current Good Manufacturing Practices manufacturer. So for certain products, we also can do what are called bioequivalency trials, or small human trials with like, generally between five and 10 people, you inject them with the existing drug, you exist them with your drug, and you just make sure that the levels in their bloodstream is the same over time. And that gives you FDA approval to market as what's called an abbreviated new drug approval, or basically a generic drug approval at that point. So we'll be doing both. We'll be going for and FDA drug approvals and operating as a 503B compounding pharmacy, you know, as necessary to, you know, try to have the best public health impact that we can.
### Human: Yes, I agree. I think for my experimentation and usage of it up to now, I mean, I'm biased. I like the use case of having it solve medical problems because I think people, you know, when you ask, so here's what I found very difficult to use AI for. I think, and it's problem solving, right? It's the same thing. So whether it's problem solving for games or problem solving for trading, et cetera, it's the same. You try to solve a problem. when it comes to medical. when I use a chat GPT and BOD or whatever else, it's very much they're extracting data from what they've read, but they're not actually thinking through it, right? And so I've had to lead it on to certain conclusions. And I would love for this to say, hey, I have the following symptoms. I'm feeling a bit bloated. I have, you know, whatever, like a couple of symptoms. And I think I've got a potassium deficiency. what treatments or what natural remedies could be used or what other problems could I have that could be happening here? And I think that the ability to solve medical problems with people who have got lots of symptoms has not been solved yet. So a lot of people, when you go to doctors, like I had some nerve issues in my arms and stuff, You go to doctors, they don't really know. They run these tests. The medical industry is broken right now because every doctor has its own, they have this small little aperture that they look through, and if it doesn't fall inside of that, then you can go to the functional medicine specialist and they look at more holistic views of the body and stuff, but all our bodies are so unique. I'm pretty sure if you had to come up with a list of symptoms for any condition that you're going through right now, and something unique that hasn't been found before. I want the AI to find these connections and solve these problems, and I think that would be very powerful for us.### Assistant: That is the arrogance that comes with wealth. And I addressed that on Friday as well. You make a bunch of money, the people around you, all of a sudden, people, you find a bunch of people around you who think you're great. And you're all of a sudden, you're a foot taller, you lost 20 pounds, you're funny. And people want to have dinner with you. And it's because they want your money. And people correlate great wealth with great intelligence, great success. And often, you know, there are correlations. But it doesn't mean that you have great judgment doesn't mean that you're invincible. And you're exactly right. There is an invincibility here is Yeah. Hey, breaking news, Google's DeepMind CEO says its next algorithm will eclipse chat GPT. Demis Hassabis says the company is working on a system called Gemini that will tap techniques that helped AlphaGo defeat GoChampion in 2016. So DeepMind's Gemini, which is still in development, is a large language model that works with text and is similar in nature to GPT-4, that works with text and is similar to Chacham Forge Power's GPT-4. But Hassel Hasibis, sorry for mispronouncing that, says his team will combine that technology with techniques used in AlphaGo, aiming to give the system new capabilities such as planning or the ability to solve problems. At a high level, you can think of Gemini as combining some of the strengths of AlphaGo type systems with the amazing language cables of large models. We're having some new innovations that are going to be pretty interesting. This, to me, is the home run of all home runs. because Vinny, if I'm reading this correctly, the language model gives you the answer, or, you know, kind of interprets what you're saying. But what AlphaGo did was it understood games, it understood competitions, it understood how to win competitions. So this is distinctly different than just spitting out an answer, you could say, your goal is to be the greatest day trader by shorting stocks on the stock market. go make trades. And you will, every time you make a trade that makes money, learn from that and and find more trades like it go. And you can increase the amount you invest, you know, at this rate, or whatever. You can just let this thing go, like they've let it go to play video games. And this could be transformative in terms of automation. What do you think, Vinny on the breaking news here?
### Human: Yeah, I was at Hamburger and Quest doing M&A for those companies as a young pup, you know, so, but I think this is the crypto trend right now is very exciting. And we're seeing like those, those people who you like bought So I don't want to take the steam out of this. Like I think it's a major trend. Just be careful. And like you said, know why you're buying something. Is it speculation? Is it for fun? Is it because you're super excited about that? Yeah. Yeah.### Assistant: It could be some combination of those things. And you know, the way the way it's perfectly analogous to what we saw in the Clone Wars, you know, back in the dark era, we're like old Jedi here, like missing limbs. But yeah, I can tell you about the Clone Wars, all of that energy was correctly placed, the internet was going to transform society, it was correctly placed, but the bets were placed poorly. And the bets were placed at insurmountable odds on people who had no idea what they're doing, And the crater that was left was the risk of ruin for many people. So the correct way to play it was to get as involved as possible, maybe make some intelligent bets, but avoid the risk of ruin. And if people don't know what the risk of ruin is, it's a gambling term for when you put all of your money into one bet, or into a small number of bets, and you have the actual risk of ruin. That's bad bankroll management. You can look at bankroll management as well. And it just goes to diversification and some of those other concepts that are super easy to understand going all in on one cryptocurrency is a road to disaster going all in on five still a road to disaster. Going all in with a third of your net worth if you're super aggressive and don't care if you lose it. Okay, that's different story. Yeah. Good advice. Lord, I mean, if you have one of these board apes, and you can sell it fractionally, and you bought it for 2000, and it's worth 250. would it kill you to take 10% off the table and lock in a 10x win? Like lock in the 10x win? There's no shame in doing that. I sold Uber shares at, you know, 30 some odd dollars a share, was able to buy a home, well, you know, was able to put money into, you know, 529 accounts for kids educations and you know, sleep well at night. you know, the company Masayoshi son wants to buy some 40, whatever, you know, you sell a little bit here and there, you cover your basis, you lock in wins, I sold a little calm, you know, doesn't mean I don't believe in calm, it just meant I bought calm at four and a half million when it hit 250. And then a billion, the right thing to do is to just take 10% off or something in my mind, and lock in some wins.
### Human: So I think question. Yeah. And at some point, we'll connect the rest of the dots and how it got to the company. But yeah, I think you're starting to see it already. readiness. A couple things. One, you look at the theory, right? So there's lots and lots of good science papers in theory saying, Hey, your HRV changes, your resting heart rate changes, or if you get six hours of sleep, you know, so resting heart rate is when I'm asleep. Correct. We look at it when you're sleeping. And your lowest resting heart rate. And then we'd look at that.### Assistant: Growing your business takes more than offering a popular product or service. That's important, but it takes more than that. It's essential to have the right people in place to ensure your company operates smoothly and has the potential to grow and expand. Or, as we say in our industry, scale. LinkedIn Jobs helps you find the right candidates for free. Hiring is a major part of my strategy at launch right now. We just hired a second producer, Justin, doing a great job. A curriculum designer, Cuddy, I call him Cuts. I always give people a good nickname, he likes that one. I gotta get some more researchers in here. You guys know what's happening in my world. Things are blowing up. You know where I find these great candidates? I find them on LinkedIn jobs, of course. And you can get started by posting your job for free to reach LinkedIn's network of over 740 million professionals. And really, LinkedIn's got that global reach. You can fill out targeted screening questions to get your role in front of the most qualified candidates with the experience, skills, and motivation you need. Then with simple filtering and management tools that are all built into LinkedIn, you can easily review, rate, and hone in on your top candidates. All of those amazing filtering tools are just built in. When your business is ready to make that next game-changing hire, you're going to find the right person on LinkedIn Jobs. And now, and post your job for free. That's right, LinkedIn loves This Week in Startups. They always give us a great deal for you. Visit linkedin.com slash twist. Again, linkedin.com slash TWIST and you can post your first job for free. No strings attached. They know you're gonna love it. Once you get that first hire and you see how easy peasy lemon squeezy it is, you're gonna go for a second and third. Terms and conditions apply because they're giving you something for free. This was one of the things that was a little confounding for me and disappointed when i first started using the ring cuz i don't read the manual nor do i read any of the tool tips i just want to turn on and see everything but it took me a minute to be like oh they're gonna give me a score later on. How do you know. that readiness equals performance? Have you done studies? Do you have anything inside the company where you work with universities or do actual laboratory experiments to know that readiness is like actually a valid, you know, number? Yeah. And what and how do you do that? I guess?
### Human: It's kind of crazy when you think about it, the mask costs nothing and it saves everybody. And we could totally be through this by now if everybody had complied with masks. So literally the last hundred days of people like us being in hardcore quarantine is now being extended and ruined by people just not being willing to wear a mask. You look at Korea, you look at Japan, they have under 1,000 deaths each. They've totally got it beat. And they're back to life. And it seems to me like what we're going to have to do in America is we're actually going to have to go through this three or four times to get it through our thick skulls, because we're so intent on freedom and not being told what to do. The government is not just giving us a clear answer. I mean, you know leadership having run two companies, and I was giving you a little goof there about your first social network, but because you're so successful now, I can do that. But you've learned what leadership is, in your estimation, as you've grown as a leader, and obviously you're tremendously successful in this one, what do you think leadership really is at its core, especially in a crisis?### Assistant: Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things we did, I think, well, and it's not just me, but I think my leadership team in this is we took it seriously early. And we laid out, I just kind of, we got alignment on, okay, through a series of uh circumstances what are the actions we would take and you know we had everything from okay maybe we just um you know start to Ultimately, we said when schools close, we're just closing the office. That was like phase three. Well, we quickly went from phase one to phase three. So I think one of the things I hopefully have learned over the years is I think part of your job as a leader is to build alignment and be able to extrapolate what's happening today and say, okay, make sure people understand kind of where things are going and overly communicating. And one of the things I've learned from remote working so far is Communication my team is never felt more connected across the company and we've been serving and doing roundtables and i thought that was shocking. Because you think i go you're in the office you go in the office to be connected and then we found that well it's probably because we've over indexed on how we communicate with the team and that for me what's what's working in terms of. slack zoom modern day communication from a company that wasn't work from home and now is i assume a hundred percent work from home yeah yeah we are a hundred percent so i mean i think the things that we've learned is we just increase the velocity and the frequency in which we communicate an example would be we used to do monthly all hands now we do every other every week all hands And it used to be a bigger production. We were on stage. It was all polished. It was longer. Now it's much smaller, a lot more casual and more frequent. So people have a better pulse. And we do it on a Friday. So we're in in the week. And OK, I understand kind of the rhythm of the business. Um, I think people are being more conscious in how they spend their time, right? They're more, my time is more optimized. Like I go from one meeting to the next meeting. And so, you know, you're a little bit more productive and focused at home, but I think when people are engaging with others, um, it's like a lot of people are doing happy hours. I do, we do happy hours with my exec team every two weeks. I never did a happy hours with my exec team every two weeks when we were in the office.
### Human: Yeah, it's just a theory. I mean, yeah, we know that this is going to have a ripple effect in terms of like creatives notice things like this and the idea that you could create something and then it will get pulled from public view and not even be visible. The creators of Summer Camp Island already started posting about it's like It's like, you know, that doesn't even exist. Years of our lives are just pulled from public view and the black hole just gone. Right there. There it is. So, yeah. So, I mean, I think this is the sort of thing you're taking a risk or to back up what Jason was saying. You're putting people on notice. You're making it known that, look, you're going to have to bear this in mind when you negotiate with WB Discovery moving forward, that if you want your work to live on in perpetuity, You have to take a cut on the residual expectations or whatever, I don't know. But it's definitely an ongoing conversation that's now happening about whether your work is going to live on on these streaming platforms or vanish from view.### Assistant: Got it. So if it was 10 million, it would be 360 million a year. okay, that's a that's a reasonable number to care about, right? If that went to their payments for their debt, it's a it's a portion of their debt payment, right? And this company has 50 billion in debt, if it was 500 million to be 1% of their debt, right, so that it would be meaningful. So and we know for it's not three, it's not $5 million. Right? Because that would be such a de minimis amount, they would just leave it up there wouldn't be worth having this bad feelings. So it's got to be between those two numbers. five, 5,000,005 hundred millions in saving 100 million in savings to create this kind of bad will is like, Okay, yeah, I can see it for 25 million. I don't see it. So anyway, I put the number here, you know, low hundreds of millions, maybe in order for it be significant. But here's my other theory. Be when you merge these services, and you try to make one singular service, I'm guessing that you would then need to go renegotiate with potentially Ellen DeGeneres, or it's a murky situation for her Ellen show. Okay, now it's HBO Max discovery or whatever. Just call it HBO. Discovery. Yeah. But anyway, if I'm going to call I'm going to call it HBO Discovery, that makes the most sense. So the HBO Discovery bundle they probably they might have to clear the rights since they own 100% of the discovery stuff, maybe they don't have to clear it with HBO, but maybe the HBO stuff, the way they did their contracts, because they're more friendly to artists, maybe they have to go then renegotiate the discovery portion, and there'll be so many more viewers, maybe it's based on viewership in some way. So if the Ellen show gets seen by 200 million people, maybe pay a different price, where it's available to 200 million people, you get a different price than 50 million. So there could be an escalation. When these two things get put together, that would be punitive. And so what they do is they say, yeah, we'll take it off. Beep that out, please. Sorry. If you're taking it off, then you can negotiate harder. Hey, we'll put it back on, but we're not putting it back on and paying you five times what we're paying you.
### Human: If I say something, it's a game changer.### Assistant: Yeah, David Sachs, Zachary Friedberg, third row, Chamath, MIA. Yes, exactly. There is a literal version of me doing putting three of them in fact. I'm going to quickly explain one crucial type of insurance that all startups need. It's DNO insurance. You've heard of this before you might not know what it is. This is directors and officers insurance and it helps if somebody does something dumb and you get sued. I don't know how to tell you more plainly or maybe you didn't do something dumb. and some dumb person decides to sue you for a dumb reason. I have seen this. I've seen all flavors of it. You need to have DNO. It's just part of growing up as a startup. And if you don't have business insurance, you're going to have failed one of the first steps of being a founder. The best place to look for it is in broker and brokers technology is going to save you time. It's going to save you money. Prices are up to 20% lower and you get better coverage than the incumbents. You can go from sign up to quote and purchase in just 10 minutes. When you work with Embroker instead of all those slow incumbents, you're not dealing with those giant lumbering large companies. Sign up takes days, not weeks. And the process is transparent. There is no opaque pricing. So to instantly buy custom built insurance for startups, go to Embroker.com slash twist. While you're there, you're going to get an extra 10% off by using the code twist. Easy to remember this week in startups TWIST. Go to Embroker EMBROKER.com slash with and use that offer code TW is T. So I used to do the okay. And I used to ask people, like, if I ask you something, you know, when you're a boss, you see me bossing and being a boss. I'm just like, Can you please just say to me, got it or Roger or okay, or Yes, Captain, any whatever recognition you want to give to me that you have heard the words coming out of my mouth and give me an okay, please, by all means, got it, Roger, whatever, you know, whatever works for you, as the other person on the side of that conversation to just let me know. So a lot of people give me the thumbs up a lot of people give me the okay, but now I can't believe it, but salute is now in the emoji library. And it is a glorious day for me.
### Human: But that was rough. It's rough. I mean, I mean, that guy has been taking Ls for a month on this thing.### Assistant: And I just found out about it today. So I mean, I just think it's one of those memes that's just going to keep coming back. I mean, just to give you some insight in how I run this show, three full time producers, literally three full time producers, Rachel, Justin, Nick, they do a great job producing the show. I mean, if they don't have last year's number, or they haven't done the percentage difference between the last two or three years numbers, or they haven't taken the number of customers invited into the valuation, like I expect them to not only get me all the correct numbers, I expect them to do some back of the envelope math and maybe add a little bit on top of that, come up with some ideas or themes, knowing what the company does. I mean, come on. It's just astounding to me. Before we get into the ad, I want you to go to linkedin.com slash twist and post your first job for free. Just do that right now first job posting free linkedin.com slash twist. Okay, now on to the ad today many small business owners are busier than ever. Time spent searching for and interviewing the wrong candidates takes away from growing your business. That's why LinkedIn jobs has made it easier to get the candidates worth interviewing, and you're going to get those candidates faster. And your first job posting is free. In just minutes, you can post a job on LinkedIn and reach the world's largest professional network, which is now over 770 million people. Wow, they're going to hit a billion soon. You can use screening questions to get your role in front of only the most qualified people. Then you can quickly filter and prioritize who you'd like to interview and hire. We love LinkedIn jobs at launch. And in 2021, we hired a third producer, a curriculum designer, and a couple more researchers. And we're still hiring and LinkedIn jobs gets it done for us. I love the product. So LinkedIn jobs helps find you the right candidates worth interviewing faster. Every week nearly 40 million job seekers visit LinkedIn. And you can post your job for free at linkedin.com slash twist. That's linkedin.com slash twist to post your first job for free terms and conditions, of course apply because they're giving you something for free. All right, also on CNBC today, just a thank you to my friend john Ford, he gave me a shout out on my Disney takes from years ago. So I didn't remember exactly what I said. But here's 26 seconds from john Ford this morning.
### Human: But again, this is disruption coming to the fine arts world. You see that happening in the NFT space as well, where Christie's actually did the Beeple auction, but you can also see how they're trying to hedge against the future of what an art market might look like.### Assistant: Yeah. And I think, you know, we've always loved digital art, right? You and I and all these new ways to do it, I think, though, there'll need to be some clarification on, you know, what rights you get when you buy this. So when I saw the people, I was like, Okay, $70 million. And if he were to sell $100 t shirts and $200 hoodies, how many would he need to sell if he just made $50 on each one? You know, to make his money back? And it was like, Okay, yeah, you're gonna need to sell a lot. But you never know, like, maybe you could, but I don't think that they have the rights to exploit that artwork commercially. But that's where I think it does get interesting. Imagine you were an up and coming electronic music artist. You And you're, you know, the chemical brothers in day zero. And they just start sharing stuff on some website. And that website lets you and I as connoisseurs of electronic music, listen to tracks, and then we see when we like, we look and see if anybody's purchased it, or nobody's purchased it, I would like to buy that for $100 for $500. Now the artist gets $500. But I'm not buying 100% of it, I'm buying simply 50% of it, they keep 50%. Now you build up this catalog. And when I opened my Spotify, I might own 50 songs, or a percentage of these 50 songs, and then every time they trade or get used in a commercial, and if one of them becomes, you know, it's a beautiful day by beautiful day by you, too, all of a sudden, I might have hit the jackpot. This to me is a fascinating concept. And it kind of like is like the Mindicis or something like that, where we could all have a little what do they call those patrons, we can all be patrons of the arts. you know, buying the rights to a podcast. But if you own the rights to that podcast, and the person becomes Joe Rogan, maybe it's worth something. And you get to participate in I love the idea of the residual value goes to the artist. So every time that people sells, if it sells for 700 million, people gets another 70 million, right? If they can keep that 10% with the smart contracts, I feel like this is the manifestation of all this noise over the last decade. And boom, you know,
### Human: Well, I think a lot of those people really had a, you know, when you hide in your house and don't go to work, some of the lower income people don't get paid or lose their job. And so that's a lot different. A universal basic income would be you get a certain amount every month, no matter what, whether you work or you don't work or whatever. And we can argue about that. I'm just saying if you're willing to work, We could get everyone earning $15 to $20 an hour with this supplement. And I go through the math in the book that we'd actually make money. We'd get rid of about half of childhood poverty. We'd get $400 billion more in taxes. We'd have 200 billion less in adult medical costs. And so it actually we would make money. So as an investor, we can take that money and make everyone earn 15 or $20 without making the private sector do it. As far as the UBI is concerned, I like to encourage work, we can get into the discussion. I'm not against it, but I don't think this was a very good discussion. uh covid was not a good experiment for it was really making up a giant hole uh that people lost in income it wasn't yeah so we don't actually get the proper results from it to actually know if it works the ubi the reason to be against ubi i think we're both simpatico on this is### Assistant: So we're basically making bad bets on backstopping the impact of these low wages when we could just solve it at the front end. And you don't bring up race in the book, but we do have a race issue in this country. We've seen it explode during the pandemic. And it is an open wound in this country, I think we'd all agree, that we want to heal And a lot of this is economic inequality. I think everybody would agree, of course, there's policing and other things that are unfair. But if you solve the economic problem, I think you would have less people feeling like the system is so rigged against them. And instead of incarcerating people and having a horrible education system that ankles them from ever succeeding, or makes it unlikely 10 out of 11 don't succeed, you could just redeploy that money and just take the wager that if we give them the earned income tax credit, which right now, just so people get an idea of just how de minimis this is, We're talking about for a single or couple $538 a year, one child $3,500 a year, two children $6,000 a year, and three children plus $6,600 a year. It's not like people are taking this money and putting it in a savings account. They're spending it to live. So all this does is increase monetary velocity, right? It's in everybody's interest to put this money into people's pockets. And during the pandemic, we had a dry run of UBI. We just airdropped $1,200 into everybody's account. And didn't you find it interesting? I don't know. I found it fascinating. Everybody debated UBI. You know, people's motivation. Oh, is it sustainable? Let's look at Alaska. Let's look at other places. UBI, Saudi Arabia, other places it exists. It causes all these problems. If people stay home, they get into substance abuse, domestic violence, all this kind of stuff. They don't have motivation to live, yada yada. And then we just airdropped $1,200 into everybody's account. And not one person complained about it, including conservatives, Republican, fiscal, fiscally conservative people. We did it, and it worked. It did. What did you take from that UBI experiment, if you could call it that, or an earned income tax credit in the case of the PPE? Was it PPE loans? Yeah, PPE loans. That wasn't in a way like an EITC, right?
### Human: Oh, 100%. I mean, we just talked about this last week that it's yes, we're added sort of it feels like a generational inflection point with AI. Correct.### Assistant: Well, here's what happened. I did tennis, and I did my normal workouts. And so I had this like, very active weekend. And my body was super tired last night, Sunday. And I never fall asleep before 1am. I'm up till 12. 1am. As people know, they get my tweets that, you know, it's pretty easy to see that I'm a night owl. If I lay down, and I was like, you know, asking the wife, like, hey, you want to watch House of the Dragon, the dragon, and she was stoked to watch it. And then she came fall asleep, like 10 o'clock. So of course, I only need six hours of sleep. Maybe seven I try for I wake up at 430 again, like C3PO just set up like, boop. Okay, what's going on? I thought maybe something was wrong. And I was like, Oh, I didn't watch House of the Dragon. So now I'm up at 430. And I got a lot of work done this morning. But I was thinking about AI. And I was thinking about the profound impact. It's a little bit of a thesis I have right now. I'm just gonna unpack it here. And it came a little bit from what I saw Friday. But then a bunch of what we've been talking about. Okay, so I'm watching Ilan and his team show the robot. Now, of course, people are like, Oh my god, that robots not as good as Boston Dynamics. Oh my god, that robot, you know, they had to roll out the 2.0 yada yada. Oh, it's it's starting to people don't understand exactly how deep the AI is going there. They're doing such deep work in AI that they're making their own server farms that can process large corpus, such a large corpus of all the driving data. What I want to talk about here is what we saw with Dolly what we saw is a GP three GPT three. Okay, GP three is Gary Payton. Yes. So anyway, what we saw a I do an open AI with text and with Dolly, and then we just saw with video with Facebook's AI team, and that we saw with DeepMind at Google doing chess, video games, and then go and poker. What we're seeing is each of the vertical AI is getting to a point just in the last couple of years. And it seems like the pace of this is increasing. Does it not Molly?
### Human: Our consensus generally exist in the world already or so obvious. They've probably been tried already and people have failed. It's the non consensus bets. You know, Airbnb famously pitched 37 venture firms for they got a yes at the Open Angel Forum when Travis presented Uber. Three of us invested and 19 didn't. Mark Schuster wrote a famous blog post about not investing. And so you know, and I introduced Tesla to dozens of venture capitalists and you know just email friends like hey you know you should take a look at this company crazy. I didn't I wasn't an angel investor at the time. I was always people always asked me that. And I was like, I wasn't an angel investor, but Elon was raising money. And I just emailed a bunch of friends who, and that's actually how I wound up becoming a scout at Sequoia was I had emailed them and said, Hey, you know, I know, you know, I know, you know, Elon really well, like he's making progress on this, I just drove in the prototype, I ordered one, like, it's just gonna be incredible. And then I emailed Twitter. And I was like, Michael Moritz and roll off, you just have to do this deal doesn't matter that Fred Wilson is overbidding, like, And I've been talking to the Twitter folks, and they were asking, Hey, what do you think you've got backing from Sequoia? That's all be my autobiography at some point. But and Fred Wilson was doing the DL. And Evan was like, Hey, what do you think of Fred? Because I know you're friends with Fred and Fred's wife used to work for and I was like, Fred's the Nazis. Amazing, like East Coast VC, but know, back then, East Coast VC was kind of a negative signal. And he's like, And what do you think of Sequoia? And I was like, Oh, you know, honestly, like, Sequoia, you can't go Sequoia versus Fred Wilson. Like, if you were in New York, I'd say go Fred Wilson. If you're in the West Coast, maybe it's Sequoia. Like, this is like picking between like two of the best options. And Sequoia didn't close the deal. And Fred did. So I didn't do Tesla. And then I told him to do my friend's poker app. which eventually became Zynga, but it was online poker. So all three of those, they passed on and then they were like, can we just give you money and you invest it? And I did Uber, Thumbtack, and DataStax in my first six or seven investments. So three unicorns in the first seven. And that's basically the serendipity of how my career started was I had been forwarding so many founders. And that really is like your story as well. Have Apple's new privacy updates impacted your attribution from paid ads? I bet it has. Well, good news. The folks at Disruptive Advertising can help you. 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Yeah, it's like such an easy concept that a bunch of crybaby snowflake years of yours do not understand. So explain to me why it is so obvious to you that if you just do work in the world, that is credible, and that is in the vector in the sector that you want to perform in, then everything just falls into place. And you said it yourself, like, you're like, Hey, listen, if this founder, if she's done a bunch of stuff, and she is entrepreneurial, and she, you know, worked on this project, and it took grit, and you're just putting together all those dots, and then making a bet. What's going on with your generation? You're Gen Z, correct? Or are you millennial?### Assistant: Yeah, it depends on stage. Like I've done some precedents, like pre launch, the founders 20 years old, has never started a company before. But you can just tell based on the conversation, like you pull out all these things she's done throughout her life. And you're like, okay, I should probably make the bet now because I will regret not doing it because it just feels like she's probably going to keep doing all these impressive things and it will now be through a company instead of, you know. running tuition or running tutoring classes in high school and like, getting into a good college from like a bad background and like all the stuff that she's done. So you kind of try to find those. There's like the famous thing saying it's like you invest in in lines, not dots. So you kind of if there's no lines, you try to like go backwards, and like produce the lines that happened before you met the founder and like it or before they even have any actual data or progress on their company. And then when it's like series BC, typically for me, it's more of. Uh, like, do I feel like my spreadsheet is going to be way like the, the market size and my spreadsheet can be 10 or a hundred times bigger than how everyone else is thinking about it. Like all this boring, you know, this lame consumer app actually has like, you know, a hundred times more people could potentially use this based on some new features they're adding and down the pipeline and 20 times subscription revenue is actually a fair valuation because of all these things that they'll do. And again, it's a super contextual, very nuanced, it's not like a one sentence kind of answer. But you kind of try to think about all these things. And I kind of tried to back into like, do I think this founder is going to build a publicly traded company that's ultimately what I try to find. And you try to look for comps, like, oh, there's this big, dumb, legacy, 100-old company that does $50 billion in revenue. And their executives print their emails to read them, or they still use faxes. So it's an interesting company to compete against if you're a tech startup. So you just try to find all these different little things to piece together. And honestly, I don't go out and try to invest in this is a slam dunk home run super obvious to everyone that's generally not what i'm investing in unless i have some kind of unique edge in and like the founder really likes me.
### Human: Well, I don't think there's one size fits all. So I think there are remote native organizations that design their engineering teams from scratch to be remote and work very effectively. But most of the companies that I see were not designed remote native and are still working remote. And I think that's a huge mistake. And even if you are remote native, I see those organizations trying to find energy, right? By putting pods together in different locations, certain days of the week, et cetera. In terms of all organizations that were not designed remote, including the conversations we've had with Meta and Google and others, The companies that were most resistant to come back to the office, as we saw in Silicon Valley, all of them have now thrown in the towel. They all realized that engineering and general worker productivity is at least 50% higher. It's the magical energy in the in-between moments. it's the water cooler chat where you come up with an idea to crack a problem that you wouldn't have otherwise had. And so I would say you have to just look in the mirror and be really honest about the nature of the organization that you've designed. And if it's working brilliantly, and you think you're out competing all your competitors, and your remote and your design remote native, then I would say that can be a source of competitive advantage. But if it's not, then I think figuring out ways to get back in the office sooner is important. J. Cal?### Assistant: Yeah, it's going to be a really interesting test over the next year or two to see the companies that decide to have an in-office culture, and they're whiteboarding stuff together, and they have that energy, if they beat the remote companies. Remote companies can hire anybody from anywhere. They don't have to relocate that person, so they can hire faster. But then the abuse that's in the system people working two jobs etc we are losing the intangible moments i am going back to an office myself i made that decision i told the eighteen people in our investment company they're all grandfathered in but i will not hire another remote worker. If they're like a remote worker, they'll probably be chat GPT. They'll be like an automated persona in chat GPT working. I want to get more people into a space. I'm actually going to build a space like this with the fourth fund that we're doing at launch to have a physical presence in Silicon Valley. That's how much I believe in people being in the room and the collisions that occur. from really intelligent people who just ordered in some sushi, and they're there at eight or nine o'clock at night, and somebody has a brilliant idea, and they can't wait to talk about it and start building it. So I think for young people, especially, if I was a young person starting my career, wherever the CEO and founders were, I would be next to them, I would live five blocks from the office in the smallest, crummiest apartment. And I would This is how I built my career. I came in an hour before my boss and I wouldn't leave until my boss left the office. That boss I had 30 years ago is the president of lunch today. And I learned that lesson from him. He said, if you want to be successful, Mike Savino said, look to your left, look to your right, come in an hour before that person and stay an hour after them and never leave before your boss. And we just set a really hard working culture. Now, it doesn't mean you have to sacrifice or not spend time with your families. Commuting sucks. We all realize that. People have kids. So there can be exceptions and flexibility. And I think Americans maybe were too inflexible. And then too much remote, and there's going to be a balance. I think Americans should take the whole month of August off like Europeans do, and just enjoy like a really good mental break, maybe work half days, whatever remote. But you need to have that like in person time culture, culture.
### Human: Friberg, when you look at it, and you're the, I think, have the deepest science, clearly have the deepest science background of all of us, how do you look at this pandemic now that we're 75 days into it here in the Bay Area? And obviously, you know, this started in December, it looks like, in China. What's your take on it now? What did you get right early? And what have you changed your mind about recently?### Assistant: right as a yes, exactly, uh as opposed to people whose case the the the problem with the uh, it's kind of a debate between the the ifr versus the cfr the infection fatality rate versus the case fatality rate the um, the problem with kind of the official cfr numbers is that only the people who got really sick or you know ever got tested and um, You know freeberg was the earliest person I know to start talking about the need for wide scale population testing and these blood serology tests and Other kinds of tests to establish what the real baseline is But regardless of like and there's been a whole bunch of different tests with different results. I you know, um We don't know exactly what the true IFR is to this day, but we do know it's probably closer to half a percent than to 5%. So that's sort of discovery number one. I think discovery number two is, and we knew a little bit, we saw a little bit of this from the Wuhan data, but now it's really clear that which populations are at risk. And it's, you know, the data seems to suggest that people under 60 who are healthy don't have sort of preexisting conditions. are 50 times less likely to develop, or there's a 50x greater chance for those over 60 in terms of having a really bad outcome. And so for people under 60 who don't have these pre-existing conditions, it's just not, yes, there's always examples to the contrary, but it's not this sort of gigantic risk. And so for 2 3rds of the population, they don't have a huge risk and we're still locking them down. I think the third thing, the third study, not just study, there's been studies and there's been models and then we've also seen practice, is that wide-scale use of mass sort of ubiquitous mass wearing Um is sufficient to control the virus meaning to to stop the exponentiality of the virus we've seen you know in the asian countries or czech slovakia other places they've been able to get the you know, the so-called are not the the um, You know the viral coefficient to go below one with you know, wide-scale use of mass and so we have a way to prevent the virus from going exponential that doesn't require lockdowns. And so the thing I blogged about the last time I was on your show was why would you do this most severe thing, these lockdowns, and not do this easy thing that's just merely inconvenient, which is a mask?
### Human: Listen, if you're running a startup right now, this is the best possible time to find that amazing talent. There are hundreds of 1000s of incredibly talented tech workers, and they became free agents in 2022. Okay. And they're out there and they're waiting for you to give them an opportunity. And you can find an all star right now. If you want to nail your hire, you want to fill that position with an all star, you need to use LinkedIn jobs. I'm going to make this really simple. LinkedIn has 875 million users almost a Billy and all the best people are LinkedIn. Obviously, you can add a purple hiring frame to your profile and that increases inbound immediately don't know it. Sometimes I post a job right now and it's too much I get too many talented people. I mean, I have a lot of followers. You can add a purple hiring frame to your profile to increase inbound immediately right now. Here's the best part, you can do it for free. Why? LinkedIn loves this podcast. We've had a great partnership for years, and they love giving you free job posts. So go to linkedin.com slash angel, and you get your first job post for free. We've hired some of the best people on our teams at Launch and Insight on LinkedIn, and you're going to get better engagement you get better candidates and you do that faster. Let me say it again better candidates faster. That's all you need to know. It's the best hiring platform bar none. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash angel that's linkedin.com slash angel to post your job for free terms and conditions apply. It's so clearly is it is something where you can't. I can't as a former entrepreneur and you're a former entrepreneur. If somebody wants to pay you a high price for your startup, and they want to close the deal quickly. Those two things are fantastic, again, on the surface. So we can't blame a founder for wanting to get a great price and minimize dilution. In fact, it's good for all the previous shareholders, including investors. And you know, getting things done quickly and getting back to work. That's laudable, too. But man, if you if you make the wrong pick, that's the problem. So you and I, as we invest in startups, we saw some weird behaviors in the 2020 21 people coming in, making very quick bets, but not wanting a board seat. And they wanted us, I'm a seed series a you're, you're actually you went back to seed, you were series A. And I think sometimes you'll you'll dabble and dabble in a beer, certainly go prorata.### Assistant: So our strategy at up front ventures is we have what we call a barbell strategy and a barbell strategy meeting we do seed. When we write a seed check we're usually the first institutional capital let's call it a three to five million dollar check. But our median first check is usually around 3.4 or 3.5 million dollars and then we tend to skip the A and B rounds and then we have a separate fund that does what we call early growth. And early growth is between $100 to $500 million valuation when you have truly found product market fit and we're writing $10, $15, $20 million checks. And there's a reason we skipped the A and B rounds, or have. I mean, we could adjust our strategy as new information comes out. But let me give you the data, Jason. In 2010, the A and B markets combined were $9 billion. $9 billion went into that. Fast forward by 2022, that was $82 billion. It went up nine X. Okay. And then it's totally nuts. And, uh, then when you look at the CD rounds, that was nine X capital. The CD rounds also weren't increased, but it was only a six X increase. Now if I give it to you in terms of valuation, okay? So seed investments went up between 2010 and 2022 by 68%, okay? So what we did at upfront is we raised 50% larger fund size. We went from a $200 million fund to a $300 million fund so that we could write slightly larger checks because valuations were coming up. But check this out. A rounds went up by 260% during that period of time and B rounds went up by 431%. And I want to explain to you why that phenomenon happened. It happened because venture capital funds that used to be 300 million raised a billion and a half dollars. And if you raise a billion and a half, Writing a $3 to $5 million check doesn't move the needle. There were disciplined people, Josh Kopelman at First Round Capital, Bill Gurley, who you mentioned at Benchmark, they didn't raise the $1.5 billion fund. But if you raise a $1.5 billion fund, you start writing $30 million checks, and you can't write a $30 million check at a 15 pre. No. Right? You're buying two companies. Yeah, right. So instead, you pay 90 pre. Well, take your next company as well. Yeah. Right. No sense.
### Human: Also, the noties are making a couple of good points. One, don't short at the bottom of the overall market. Okay, that's a fair point, right. But you could do a put option, says Ali Bear, to take advantage of any downside. We're getting high-level J trading here. But also, that people are leaving Netflix for YouTube. And we haven't really even included YouTube in our kind of premium subscription category, but you already pay for YouTube premium. If we start to see more specials going there or big creators or big talent doing YouTube specials, I mean, this is actually this is time for YouTube to pounce.### Assistant: Well, that's interesting you bring that up, because then there's also TikTok taking people's share of screen. So I think the headwinds against Netflix are tremendous. I think the management is doing a terrible job. So Netflix is not my J trade. Yeah, but my second J trade of the day is Disney. So we can pull up my Disney trade today. Now, I am making not a fundamental bet here, because I know that Disney historically has not performed great. And everybody loves the stock because they love the product. But I think we're at a unique moment in time here. I'm going to make my claim that in 10 to 20 years, I could see Disney having wait for it, the first streaming company in history to hit 1 billion global subs. Now, that seems absurd, right? Five times what Netflix has right now, and seven times what they have right now. I know it sounds crazy. But I do think over time, Disney can charge a very low price, and just get everybody on the planet to buy this thing. And I'm talking not just about the developed world, I'm talking about emerging markets, and then eventually frontier markets where they could have advertising on it. So Disney is incredibly advertising friendly, their content spans all categories. And yeah, ESPN, Hulu, everything put together is just amazing. If you put together Disney's total combined subs, it's at 205 million, just so people know Disney hones Hulu, which has 45.6 million in ESPN, which has 20 ESPN plus, which has 22.3. I think it would be amazing if Disney kept buying stuff like if they own CNN, and they or they had their own news network, CNN plus could be 2030. I could see them just continuing to buy subscription based services, I could see them buying like calm calm, and then adding a couple of million subs, Disney is going to become the global sub leader. And I think they're going to have 567 of these subscription services and then super mega bundles and everything. So here's my next trade. Pull it up, Nick. I bought before we got on air 250 shares of Disney at $103 boom. And I am going to continue to increase positions possibly as more good news comes out or trim positions. But I always wanted to own Disney. I always wanted to build a position in it. And there's my other skin in the game trade. I would never buy Netflix at this point. I think Netflix is like a complete disaster right now. Simplify this and make better content.
### Human: They're very, they're very conservative. And they don't they're not gonna like jump into somebody's pool without being invited.### Assistant: Absolutely not. No, there's less of that, which may partly be explained by the lower drinking habits and drink being replaced by other drugs, by the way. I mean, interestingly, the first thing you've got to do in the US is get rid of this ridiculous two weeks vacation thing. Yes. That has crushed people's souls. which I think is monstrous, okay? Now, you know, I'm a Brit, I'm right of center politically, okay? I get the gun thing. It's probably too late to do anything about it. You know, it's not an ideal situation, but I kind of, I can just about get that, okay? Now, I can promise that I've never met anybody in the UK at all, this is the example of status quo bias, that is so right wing that they think we should actually have less vocation in order to grow the economy by a couple of percent. never come across anybody with that belief. And in fact, if you had that belief in the workplace, you'd be just generally regarded as nuts. And so, one of the reasons with flexible work is you almost need a degree of flexibility just to visit your parents if they live 500 miles away or more. Because you get two weeks vacation. If one week is spent visiting friends or parents, that leaves you with one week to see what is actually the world's most fascinating country, even if you never leave the borders of the United States. That's kind of tragic to me. Also, we're taking too much leisure at the beginning of life with higher education and with retirement, and there's too little leisure in the middle. I agree with this as well. When people have the money and the health to actually enjoy it. That seems to me kind of weird. Why is it if I went to my employer and said, I'd like to take a year off unpaid, they would be terribly uncomfortable, I don't know about this. but i still be back in a year when i said i'm retiring so i'm taking everything i know my roller decks by contact and i'm just walking off the stage that's okay let's go retirement that's perfectly okay where is taking a year right as a break is considered he does that that's silly. Does interest me because previously labor economics basically said there are two things that were at play here this time leisure time and there's money. Add the employer pays the employee to compensate them for their last leisure. Okay. And so pretty much because of the norm of the five day week, which I think Henry Ford was partly responsible for.
### Human: I have. First, I just want to clarify the Kevin Hart thing. In the Forbes piece, I think that was one of the sort of sweeteners that they pointed out may have won the deal. Just in conversations with the founders in the app, it doesn't strike me that they're the type of people that, oh my God, Kevin Hart gave us a phone call, therefore we're going with this VC firm. I have to imagine there was a lot, lot more that went into that.### Assistant: All right, so let's get into the news. Clubhouse is a audio phone, I would describe it as- Social audio. Social audio, that's a great way to describe it, yeah. You basically open up the app, you see a bunch of talking heads, you see folders basically. In the folders are conversations, in those conversations you will have you know, maybe two to 10 people talking simultaneously, like on a conference call. So it's a little bit of bedlam, but people tend to figure that out pretty quickly and mute themselves or direct the conversation to the next person, like with a handoff, like I would say, like I'm doing here on the podcast. Hey, Ben, what do you think of this kind of thing? And then below it is an audience and you can upgrade people from the audience, like in Turntable FM or some of these other services where they get to become speakers. And the founders of that company did an amazing job having venture capitalists and founders use the product. It's not available yet. It's not yet in the app store. I got an invite to it, started using it. I was like, hey, this could be an interesting investment, reached out to the founders. And then lo and behold, news broke, I think on May 15th, so a couple of days ago, that, I think it might have even been Friday, Andreessen Horowitz had invested $10 million at around $100 million valuation in a series A for a company that likely, when I've been in it, has 200 people maximum, but typically more like 50 people using it. The reason I'm kind of laughing is this is just an extraordinarily ridiculous valuation. Obviously, happy for the founders with that. And Ben Horowitz came on the app. I interviewed him actually on the app and asked him some questions about it. And Benchmark had an offer around 75 to 80 million for this. And the reason stated in a story, I think, in Fortune or Forbes for why Andreessen Horowitz got the deal. Mark Andreessen called Kevin Hart, who is basically in all these internet circles, seems to have his hands in every circle, he's in the poker circles as well, to come on the app and make jokes. The founders were blown away by that and then sold, and this was the controversial part, $2 million in secondary shares, $1 million for each founder to Andreessen Horowitz. Ben, what are your thoughts on this, you know, clearly an outlier in funding, and have you been on Clubhouse?
### Human: So it was like, is it comparable to any other moment in history? Is it comparable to mathematics, science, the world is round, language, spoken language, air travel, nuclear power, nuclear weapons? Is it comparable in any way to you? Or does this dwarf all of those put together?### Assistant: So like, I always think it must've been crazy for someone who was born in like 1850. Cause if you were born in 1850, you were 15, you know, in the mid sixties. Um, but you were also a still alive maybe in like 1930 and the 50 years between like 1865 and 1905 was crazy. It saw the advent first of a telegraph, which was. insane technology so europe and the u.s. could communicate instantly you know magical that it through an ocean instantly before it was no weeks for any letter back and forth. So there's the telegraph then comes the telephone then comes the recorder going to newfoundland. And just, and then electricity, this is, you know, Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse. Electricity just goes from, electricity was like an inner, it was like the internet. It goes from nothing to every year to just in doing every like ANI, I was saying today is everywhere. Like suddenly electricity is in every home. And you know, we take it for granted. Electricity is insane. It takes a burning fire, a coal fire somewhere. Hmm. And it converts that raging uncontrollable energy into this little magical butler, like you just flip on with a switch and it's waiting for you and you flip it on and it can freeze food and it can heat food. This fire, you know, it's just, it's just very cool electricity. It's like generalized energy, you know, for anything. So then you also had the car comes around right in the car and the motion picture all of those were in those fifty years. That's wild. And then that's you know and then that person so that person saw all of that. And and and then if you stay around a little longer you could be start to see their plane in the tv so. There is a i think that must have felt a little like this and then it's like the whole world changing everything is getting everything is magical. I'm like you need to keep up and all the industries you better adapter you gonna die so it must have felt a little like that but this to me feels. I just think it's just this on that on steroids is happening quicker it's more confusing. And it's more powerful, like it's scarier, because I feel like, you know, the ability for us to just off ourselves as a species is just, it's just higher than it was. We didn't have existential threats in 1900. There was nothing that was going to kill the whole species.
### Human: I do, too. And I do think that Apple is waiting. Apple is obviously, we know, taking a lot of steps to increase its ad business overall and come for Facebook and Google in these various ways. And also, it's treading into dangerous water, right? Because Apple has had this good, if somewhat uneasy reputation with developers and publishers, because it's like, okay, we got to We got to be here and it's really good for us and it's high quality users and it's high quality revenue. But if all of a sudden Apple starts selling ads against. their content, they might be upset. And there's this big privacy question, like Apple has been able to say, Oh, we let you opt out of all kinds of advertising tracking. But all of a sudden, if Apple is the one who's like, Yeah, but we still tracked it. And now we're advertising against it, it's going to be a little dicey for them, too. So I think the Apple would be wise to be this is never going to happen, because it is not their mo. But Apple would be wise to be as transparent. as humanly possible about how they're going to conduct their ads business because it's dangerous territory from the publisher side and the consumer side.### Assistant: I'm going to quickly explain one of the crucial types of insurance that every founder of every startup needs to understand. It's called cyber insurance. It's a, you know, it's a little cyberpunk name. What it basically means is hacks. You got to be covered in case you get hacked. And in these crazy times, you want to be protected. So if you don't have business insurance, you have failed one of the first steps of being a great founder. And startups should look no further than Embroker. This is the insurance company I use. Their technology will save you time and money, their prices are up to 20% lower, and you get better coverage than the incumbents. You can go from sign-up to quote and purchase in just 10 minutes. When you work with Embroker, you're not dealing with large, low incumbents. No. Your sign-up is going to take just days, not weeks, and the process is so transparent. There is no opaque pricing. Everything's easy breezy, lemon squeezy. I use it myself, a lot of my startups use it. And you can instantly buy custom built insurance for startups by going to imbroker.com slash twist. That's E-M-B-R-O-K-E-R.com slash twist. And when you're there, you're gonna get an extra 10% off by using my code twist. Yeah, and you know, they had the high ground for a long time. And now they have to explain themselves. because we talked about how they were asking us to opt into ad targeting. And they're like, but here's our here's how our ad targeting is different. We don't have a database of all of your stuff somewhere we on your local phone, we have your preferences or whatever, and we'll serve an ad based on what's on your phone, but we never have custodian of that. We're just matching, hey, you use your stock app, you know, five times a day, you know, Robin Hood ads and E trade ads for E trade ads for you. Oh, you use tick tock all day. And I don't know, what's a e commerce site, you know, and stitch fix and whatever, we're going to show you ads related to Etsy, where you use Etsy and Pinterest all day, we're going to show you a different set of ads for, you know, related apps. And you can kind of understand how that is different. But the fact that you're explaining yourself, It's kind of like a hard position to be in.
### Human: And then what about the US, right, where we are unquestionably mired in these politics, where the the sort of disinformation machine has worked, where it seems extremely obvious to anybody who pays attention to energy that a mix of nuclear and wind and solar is the way forward to get us out of the climate crisis. And yet, we're, you know, a little too lazy in America. I don't know where I mean, what does it get to get the boots on the ground to get the new nuclear plant designs approved and the construction started.### Assistant: So, first of all, we could have like a three, four, five hour show on nothing other than the weirdness of electricity, electricity markets, electricity politics, utility politics. Let's stay away from that and just say that in order, even if nuclear is not so expensive to build, It's almost never marginally justified. It's always cheaper to build a little bit more like solar or wind even though the solar doesn't go at night. So, you have to build out the whole system anyway. The electricity markets were designed based on an economic theory. It's not working very well. All the markets have either giant catastrophic breaks because they were poorly administered or they're badly theorized like in Texas. But like, In order to build nuclear, you'd have to adjust some things. Now, I think we can. The question is, when we do attempt to build nuclear, why does it go so wrong? We have one nuclear project in Georgia. The stories that you can hear from engineers and others involved in that project about what a mess the prime vendor was. There were so many things that went wrong with the rotting away of experience base. You had companies in whose proud history they'd built many nuclear plants, right? But nobody there had ever built a nuclear plant, but they won the bids. Then they failed and it snowballed into this colossal mess of network bankruptcies and forced sales. Then we're going to finish those plants. It's just been really painful. Eventually, Obviously, the rate payer is going to get a good deal in Georgia, but it was not a good experience. If we are going forward, we may need a slightly different direction both on creativity on how we recruit and manage talent in the industry and also a very dedicated regulatory environment that wants to see innovations in the way of working and wants to see competency returned to the American nuclear sector. I think I agree with you that the attitudes are good. They're going to get even better. I don't think people quite are aware of what's being done in their name to ship to like get rid of their nuclear plants, their local plants like in California. People don't really understand what that's going to mean. New York City, everyone's going on Twitter and saying, my bills are so high and then they read the fine print and the utility says, well, your cheapest power got removed. Yeah, you know, last month. So, tough luck. Well, we've got to get over that. But this ends in 2019. I can assure you that similar polling is showing really strong results.
### Human: Yeah, I think if you look at the on demand companies, you know, Uber, Lyft, Postmates, DoorDash, Instacart, they've all done such an amazing job of making you feel almost over communicated. I feel like sometimes when I use Uber Eats, I'm like, I get it. It's five minutes out. Okay, it's at the door. You know, I have the app open on my desk. I'm watching my ramen come to the house. I get it. But over communicating is much better as a strategy than you know, not over communicating. I think having people say maybe that was even too much communication is a win.### Assistant: Well, customers will remember the experience, I think, uh, with a brand much longer than the price that they paid for whatever it is that they purchased. So if I, you know, you're a foodie, Jason, and I said, okay, what did you pay for that meal? You may go, I don't know, it was 50, 60 bucks, 30 bucks, a hundred bucks, whatever. Well, how was the service? Oh, service was the guy that you just rattle it off. You know, it's like, You're in an Uber, how much did the Uber ride cost you? I don't know, because it hit my app and it automatically pays. But if I said, do you remember, was the music loud? Did they drive crazy? Were they too talkative? You remember that. And so, I would say that even if it comes off very formuletic, in the sense that you just said, enter the variable, enter the variable, enter the variable, you still feel like, I care enough about you to put the effort behind that. Yeah. And when you don't make those investments and another company does make those investments, your customer goes, wait a minute, I'm able to get this over here at Brand A, even if it's in a different category. I know it's possible and I'm not getting it over here. So, they don't care enough about me to make the necessary investments to deliver that kind of engaged service that this other brand does. And it used to be that we were held up in like categories, right? Retailer, retailer, doctor, doctor, dentist, dentist, restaurant, restaurant. And now it's, well, I can get this from my coffee bar. Why can't I get it from my restaurant? Or I'm able to book a reservation and change it on the fly online. Why do I have to call my doctor's office? I, you know, when I, you know, when they're going to be late and I know something's late, I get a communication. But when I go see my doctor and they're late, no one tells me. And I sit there for 90 minutes, like my time doesn't matter. But I know now, right, delivery of things, you can see where it is, you can see if it's going to be late, you can ask them to switch delivery locations. We know that that's possible. But when those brands don't do it, it's really, really obvious to your customers.
### Human: I think we can talk about governments and how they work all day long and where the money gets allocated to. At the end of the day, I need to show that I'm a profitable company with or without the government's help. I want to be a commercial space company. And in my opinion, that's what venture is built on, right? Venture is built on taking big risks for big payoffs. And that's what that's what Astroforge is. That's what SpaceX was, right? SpaceX just hit and had that big payoff. We hope to do the same thing. I actually think this was venture was founded on I think what we see in venture now where we have a lot of people investing in these kind of You know, monthly growth SAS models, you can make quite a bit of money there, but they're not going to change the world. Let's be honest about it. These kind of companies that I'm trying to start will change the world if they're successful. Yeah. And I think that's a different level for us to go after and what we're trying to do. And venture has been great to work with. So far, we have a lot of support from obviously a lot of VC firms that have been huge for us, including you know, we came out of YC.### Assistant: Okay, in the early days of a startup, you need to be focused on your product and your customers, right? You build a team, you build a product, and then you embrace a customer base and try to delight them. But you can't forget about getting your accounting dialed in. I see so many accounting horror stories, people are doing cash based accounting versus accrual based accounting, they're forgetting to do their tax returns, maybe they're like taking a draw and not paying proper payroll taxes. Gosh, you can make so many mistakes. And these mistakes can be really damaging when you go to raise money down the road, or you get hit with penalties because you didn't do things properly. Well, there's good news pilot is an amazing service that provides you all the accounting CFO and tax services you need. And they're focused on startups like you any problems you're going to have pilots seen it 100 times. So they're gonna get your books tight from the start. And some big news pilots annual virtual founder conference is happening on June 8. They'd love to have you join them. The vibe is 100% about actionable concrete advice from seasoned operators and investors. And this stuff is really designed to help you run your startup perfectly. and they have an amazing speaker lineup folks from Stripe, Mercury and Sequoia are all coming. So go to pilot.com slash summit, you want to get 20% off your first six months of pilot. Yeah, very easy. Go to pilot.com slash twist. So pilot.com slash summit for their summit pilot.com slash twist to get 20% off the first six months. Is venture the right modality, funding source for these companies like yours? Or should this be government partnership? Or you know, governments making these investments alongside because Elon's made it work, but most of these other space companies have not. I don't know if the mortality rate of space companies is actually lower than regular startups or not. I don't have a collection of the you know, the list of all of them and how many have actually not worked out. But what are your thoughts there? And we would see him our government. would have a very big interest in what you're doing for national security reasons. So why don't they just give you a quarter billion dollars and do some contract with you to make sure this works, because if it does work, my lord, this is important for national security. If we don't have these rare earth metals, in our competition with other parties on the planet, it would seem that you're a pretty important project.
### Human: You know, I think it's kind of like, you know, like if you've ever been driving someplace with your significant other, and they're like, turn left, and you're like, no, no, no, I'm going to turn right. And then you realize you should have turned left, but then you keep turning right a few more times, then you take a couple more laps, but then you end up at the same place, but it was complete shit, dumb luck. I feel like we're going to end up in the same place here with TikTok, which is that I think that the Trump administration probably is doing this, and Donald Trump specifically probably does this more as a demonstration of power and American exceptionalism, which I'm not sure is the right reason to do it. But I think the outcome is right, which is that You know, for years, China has essentially been shut out to American companies unless you effectively just kowtow to these guys. And, you know, some companies have and some companies like, you know, Google have not and other companies like Facebook have been totally basically blocked from entering. And so, I think it's completely right. It's unfair to have the asymmetric market advantages that Chinese companies have had and so you have to play hardball. to create a different set of rules. And I think this probably gets us to that place. The reason why it's happening is probably more because the TikTok people played that joke on Trump at the Tulsa rally, if I had to guess.### Assistant: Here's what had to happen. This is on, just to put the Code 13 in perspective, I think my 10 year old at the time was two years old. My sister-in-law takes the baby in the pool without telling anybody, and the baby's not wearing a swim diaper. And so, basically a Snickers bar floats out of the, and there's a Snickers bar in the pool. And you guys have kids, you know how big these things can get. You're like, how is that possible? You know like a movie theater size snicker a king-size snicker boy is floating in the middle, but this is on December 25th these poor people are spending $3,000 a night. There is not a single chaise lounge by the pool. That's not occupied. It is peak capacity at the Four Seasons Hotel on the Big Island or wherever it was. The pool has to be shut down for four hours. A person has to get in with a hazmat suit, retrieve the Snickers bar, king-size Snickers has to get out of the pool. Then they have to throw in every chemical known to man, so much so that the pool is ruined for Christmas Day. And that's the Code 13 story. All right, getting back to our topics. TikTok is on the verge of being banned from additional U.S. downloads. The Commerce Department has announced that it will ban U.S. downloads and business transactions with TikTok and WeChat. Somehow WeChat got pulled into this on Sunday. This will... Seemingly, we're going to allow TikTok to operate until November 12. So they got a little bit of a stay of execution. But of course, if they can't update in the app store, that means there could be any security vulnerabilities that get found between now and then would not be able to be updated. And Steve Mucin is attempting to push through a TikTok deal that will enable retaining some Chinese ownership. And there's some sort of agreement now with Oracle will have some kind of an oversight board to do continuous third party audits. What does this say Chamath about where we're at? And do you believe that You know, a Democratic leader, let's say Obama or Biden, would have taken the same approach here. Does it worry you that the government's getting this involved? Or is this inspiring that the government's putting their foot down and saying, hey, listen, we're going to need to have some basic level of reciprocity from China if we're going to allow you in our app, sir?
### Human: Yeah, I mean, you can, we could settle, we could be very happy with ambiguity. And I think we were for a long time, it depends on whether the, you know, folks on the other side of the equation are happy with ambiguity, and we don't really know, I was I recently said, I recently got subscribed to this interesting news service, that's kind of a like, secret think tank for bigwigs. I don't really know. I did it like a thing for them. It was an Aspen connection. But they have been writing a lot about this crink alliance, China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and how increasingly there's like, like Iran is sort of outsourcing nuclear testing to North Korea. And then you know, and that that there's this alliance that's been building that is already essentially waging an economic war with the West. It's just, it's an interesting, well, yeah, and then there were people on Twitter today, and this gets to kind of the tech angle part of this. There were people on Twitter today saying like, listen, you can't even because one of she's, of course, big themes here is that we have to be technologically independent as well. And that just you cannot overstate how good American technology is, how advanced it is, like there were there were quoting people from China saying, you know, like, every breakthrough that China has made has basically been built by either stealing or grabbing open source code, of course, from Microsoft, you know, from all of these companies. And there was also, speaking of China, you know, last week, we covered the US's new rules on chip exports. And as part of those rules, US citizens are being prohibited from supporting China's chip development. least 43 American execs are working across 16 semiconductor companies. Yeah. And they're the US is essentially debating like, are these employees just gonna have to come home? They're just in limbo. Sure. Sure.### Assistant: Yeah, I mean, we had a great philosophy, which was, we would say, at the same time, and this is really hard to keep in your head at one time, we believe in one China, that's their philosophy of there's one China includes Hong Kong and Taiwan. while believing in the sovereignty and the people of Taiwan having some self determination. That's what America's position was for a long time now. seems incredibly contradictory. And so, right, it was always pretty untenable. Yeah. And you just have to kind of keep that ambiguity as long as you can, is the game that we've been playing with China for a long time now with Hong Kong, you know, the British gave it back, and that's game over. And you saw what they did there, they just rolled over it. And the way he framed the Hong Kong stuff in this was, there were a lot of bad actors in Hong Kong, and we, you know, who were anti China, and we finally got them out. We cleaned them out. Yeah. Yeah, we cleaned it up, thankfully, and we saved Hong Kong. So that's the framing here. If they go into Taiwan, they're saving Hong Kong from these bad actors who are against the Chinese people. I don't think it's gonna happen. I'll be honest, I don't think we're gonna have a nuclear war, Russia, I don't think they're going to invade Taiwan. I think we just have to get back to this concept of status quo. and kicking the can down the road, and allowing there to be some ambiguity here where we're not forcing people to, you know, resolve these issues and just kind of kick the can down the road and then let time go by because demographics change, people change, people evolve, societies evolve. You don't have to like, force the issue. I'm hoping for an extended period of ambiguity with Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, Cuba, like, look at the ambiguity with Cuba, like, has this been disastrous? You know, it hasn't been great for the people of Cuba. But we haven't had a war. And we haven't had nuclear missiles there. So sometimes you can wait people out and the young people in the country eventually decide they want their freedom, which is what's happening in Iran right now. And you can support those freedom fighters, but you you don't need to sabre rattle all that much. And now we're in sabre rattling, sabre rattling territory. And that's always bad news.
### Human: All right, we all know the one thing that separates great startups from the good ones is product velocity. What does it mean product velocity? Fancy term, right? You got your product and your velocity, speed, the speed in which your product improves. So can you ship updates? Can you release new features? can you do bug fixes? Can you iterate on the interface? Can you solve problems for your customers? And can you do it quickly, because you're not alone, you have competitors, and your customers have choices, they may solve their problems by writing their own custom code, or they might use your solution. This is what startups are about how fast can you get that product velocity going? And so, you know, how do you how do you supercharge it? Everybody says, Okay, yeah, we want to go faster. But you got to go faster, intelligently. And Crowd Botox is going to help you do that. They're your CTO as a service, basically, they provide you with the most optimal architecture to get your product to market as fast as possible, you'll have access to an on demand product manager and developer talent, and they will help get your app into production 10 times faster than conventional development. Crowd Botox can work with your in house dev team, or you can just have them work independently. and you own all the IP, you own all the source code, let the folks at CrowdBotics supercharge your product velocity today, no more waiting. Get a free build plan at crowdbotics.com slash twist. That's a $4.99 value just for the twist listeners. You get that for free. That's C-R-O-W-D-B-O-T-I-C-S.com slash twist for a free build plan. How do you get the citations? If you were asking this query I just did about like, hey, what cities? Can I take my seven years old to and then what outdoor locations? How do you actually get the citations because chat GPT Ford, they don't provide citations. Or do they?### Assistant: I think we just need to win by building a superior product. There is just no other way. And I believe so far we have done that. We have not won against them, but they still have a lot of distribution through Windows devices. So a lot of people just go to Edge and they can start using Bing Chat. But people have, despite that, won against Microsoft in the past. Take Google. Everyone went and searched for Chrome as the first search query on Internet Explorer to install it. We all did that despite the friction they added. So there's only one way to win against a person who has much more distribution than you, which is a superior product. Now about using the same underlying technology, it is the case today. The reason is they have the best models. And there's still a lot of differentiation you can have in how you harness the power of these models. These are so general purpose machines. It's almost like you buy the engine from somewhere, but you're building a whole car with a lot of different parts and you can still build a better car. And if it is the case that OpenAI is going to be the number one place by far, and you want to give the best product to your users, you don't need to use their model. You can say, yeah, I'm going to use my own model because I don't want to use someone else's. But then if the search experience is pretty **** compared to what you have with OpenAI, you're not going to get users. And then you build your own modes of differentiation and other ways that just the person owning the LLM cannot build as good competitive product as yours. So if just the LLM is the only reason this is working, we don't have a chance. But that's not the case here. There's so many other things needed to be done to give you this experience where there's real-time facts being pulled up and presented in the right manner, super fast, reliable, and make the product engaging. So all that also matters. So for example, people have done comparisons between us and Bing. And we have much better accuracy in terms of how correctly we cite things. A lot of academic research has been done there. People spend on average, like two minutes more on our site than Bing. So that engagement is much better there. So our bounce rates are much lower than Bing. So basically, we only lack in one thing, which is number of views on the site. But that can only be addressed if we're given sufficient time to grow and like make people aware of us.
### Human: I went to a shout out to the conference you're at. Yeah, yeah, these are these are great events. This one is called green biz. And they do a series of events. This one was very focused on sustainability professionals. So like the CSOs and companies and government buyers and people who are trying to basically do ESG reporting, it was super interesting. And I was there because I had judged before I started here, this Verizon Climate Resilience Prize. And so it was a bunch of start, it was great practice, because it was December right before I started. And so I got to judge all these startups taking, you know, read their pitches and try to figure out how to give them this prize. Three of them won because they had three different categories. And they were all really interesting. One is, you know, called HiFi, and it's doing stormwater assessment for flood risk. and early warning detection and systems for flooding, which is obviously increasingly relevant. Super incredible company around forestry, where the founder was formerly incarcerated, and worked in the California fire camps in LA, the forestry and fire recruitment program, got out, you know, was a was became an accomplished firefighter, while incarcerated, and then got out and couldn't get a job. And so put himself through Berkeley, figured out how to like cut all these barriers for himself and get a job as a firefighter and now has a company that is, is creating a pipeline for formerly incarcerated people to become firefighters in California, but also training them to do all of the stuff we need to do to stop mega fires. So forest thinning and better forest management. So cool and so inspiring. And then the one that's just like the, the amazing moonshot startup of the day is called Coral Vita. and this is the one i love yeah i mean this is speaking of scuba diving the great we gotta have some serious conversations with them as they continue to raise them yeah so they're doing they call it coral as a service and they are which is amazing they are about creating these coral farms that can grow coral way, way, way faster, regenerate coral reefs, because apparently coral takes like 30 to 90 years to grow. And they've figured out systems where they basically stress coral in coral farms to make it grow faster. And then they transplant it into it's native areas, right? They're not taking coral from like one part of the world and trying to transplant it into a different part. They're respecting these complex ecosystems. They're using their brains. Got it. They're using their brains. But you know, I mean, they, they point out that coral, it's like crucial to tourism, fishery, it absorbs wave energy and protects coasts. It's like got a million economic add ons. And so governments, in particular are interested in paying for paying them to maintain these farms. They have a whole platform.### Assistant: I mean, I could see Australia spending 100 million a year on this for 10 years. Yeah. And if it worked, maybe doubling it because the amount of tourism generated by the Great Barrier Reef and the importance of the reef is, you know, just can't be understated. And this is an amazing new category, we're going to see where, you know, I think young entrepreneurs are looking at the world and saying, Hey, what did we break? And then not only how do we fix it, Molly, but I look at this as like, well, what if there were, you know, massive amounts of coral in, you know, you know, off of Long Island off of Santa Monica, and because of the shipping lanes in Long Beach, or, you know, whatever's going on in New York, you know, the coral just didn't survive. And it hasn't been there in a large way in 100 years. Like this, this might not be about preserving, this might be about bringing back Yeah, you know, for the first time, the coral that certainly was in other parts of the world that's gone. And, you know, I love the fact that we're now starting to think about fixing stuff. And then what about if we had the regenerating is great. And then, and then we can start thinking about this opportunistically, like, what are the impacts of coral? And if they're, you know, if temperatures are changing, because one of the problems, I think, in Australia is the water temperatures change. So maybe that coral can exist there. right, or like coral at this average temperature, you know, in the mid part of Australia, now can only exist 100 miles north. So now you start thinking about our understanding through technology, and sensors we can put on the water, we they could actually know, hey, the chances of this coral surviving 100 miles north is going to be twice as good. or 200 miles north or hey, this coral is just not going to survive here. But this other place is warming up. So let's drop it there. And let's see Lou do a little experiment there, right? Obviously got to be intelligent about it. But man, this is like, nature finds a way and humans doing it. So I mean, got to be careful here. Like it's got a little Jurassic Park thing, but the coral is not going to get up and bite us. So I feel good about this one. It doesn't feel like they're making a megalodon.
### Human: There you go.### Assistant: That's a hard transition, a hard turn there. Man, I am rooting for Peloton. But, but it seems like this turnaround started two years too late a year too late. They're cutting another 500 jobs. This is after multiple rounds of riffs. According to CEO Barry McCarthy, this will mark the last of the company's restructuring. So you got to remember he took over from john Foley, the co founder. Earlier this year, this is the fourth round of cuts peloton now has less than half the number of employees compared to 2021 peak. It went from 8000 to 3800 still seems like a lot. 500 jobs is 12% of the remaining workforce. And he's hoping these cuts will allow Peloton to return to growth. You know, they've done a bunch of other changes. They're putting all their bikes and Hilton Bradgett hotels. I think that's genius. It's a really great experience when you use one of these pieces of equipment when you're on the road because you get to record all your workouts and it's really easy to do. They started selling the equipment and Dick's sporting goods. They're selling on Amazon, all this stuff. All these sacred cows have been shot and you know, turned into hamburger. Here's the quote, there comes a point in time when we've either been successful or we have not. After the article was published, McCarthy said he didn't mean to give the impression that the company had six months to live and send employees a memo apologizing. Here are some quotes from the memo. There is no ticking clock on our performance. And even if there was the business is performing well and making steady progress toward our year end goal of breakeven cash flow. we were expecting a story about redemption and the successful turnaround of Peloton, which is why we invested time on background briefing them on the state of our turnaround, yada, yada. I was asked the question, how much time do you think you have to show success? My response was 12 months from the time I joined Peloton, knowing that we were already showing significant progress in record time seems like a no brainer. Most importantly, I don't want this new cycle to overshadow the difficult reality that 500 of our colleagues, blah, blah, blah have to go. So mean, basically, he feels like he got misquoted. q4 cash 1.2 billion q4 free cash flow negative 411 q4 net loss 1.2 billion. I'm guessing that includes some stock or some writing.
### Human: Do they have one? I don't know. But that is so smart. I mean, that's how you take out TikTok. And then, then you can then if you're the government, you can ban TikTok without starting a youth riot, because that is what would happen now. But if you're like, oh, there's this alternative here. And there's this alternative over here. And that's fine. Yeah, absolutely. I love that idea. It feels like that might become Ming or should arrive now that they have shown this success already. Wizards, because lumping it all in is hard. It's just hard to find. It's hard to find. YouTube still, honestly, YouTube's Achilles tendon still is Achilles heel. Thanks. Yeah. Which I think the heel, I think the Achilles tendon is actually a tendon.### Assistant: So yeah, I mean, it but they didn't the Chinese don't control Facebook, the platform or the algorithm, right? You can be sure that that algorithm, you know, if the Chinese government wants to have influence on that algorithm, they can the US CEO wouldn't even know. Yeah, the US CEO would know. they they could have 20 people working there who also have worked for the Chinese military. They could be doing all kinds of ops. Remember, as you're saying here, Molly, even American companies can get infiltrated. We had people from Saudi Arabia who had infiltrated Twitter. Mm hmm. So they were working there and they were getting information. I think even DMS and somebody can fact check me on that one as well. But there was that story of they were getting account information back to the kingdom is incredibly dangerous, especially if people have anonymous accounts. So to your point, Molly, if we if if foreign actors can infiltrate Twitter and Facebook, and do that effectively. What can they do with the platform they fully control but back to YouTube and you know how much money this is making and how big this is. This to me seems like a no brainer for YouTube to win this race because if you're a creator you're maintaining two accounts which means you're maintaining two different sets of follower accounts. And, you know, if we have x number of people, we have 298,000 subscribers here on this week in startups, I think all in has over 200 as well. So, you know, you're not you're not starting from zero. So every creator who hasn't started their Tick Tock account, well, and you know, there's probably more that haven't really invested in Tick Tock, because they're busy over on YouTube. Well, now they're going to start a YouTube and where you originate your content creation is super important. getting people off of Tick Tock, and then getting them to post again to YouTube, that's hard. But getting people already on YouTube and saying, Hey, here's your new feature is great. My question is, why don't they have a YouTube shorts dedicated app for just creating? Yeah, and just consuming, there should be a dedicated app just for this. And they should just do shorts. And they should make a YouTube short. So if you want to waste time and just do that you can. And then if you want to see the other longer form videos, you click and it opens up YouTube. So now you get two swings at bat. Where's the Shorts app?
### Human: I was.### Assistant: Hey everybody, welcome to This Week in Startups. I am really excited to have today's guest on the program because founders care about Raising money, it's the number one question I get. Will you give me your money? How do I raise money for my startup? Well, it's typically been a small number of ways to get money for your startup. The first way is you put in your own money. The second way, you put in your friends and family's money and you risk never being able to go to Christmas or Thanksgiving again because you lost their money. Third way is your bootstrap. very difficult to do possible. I love bootstrappers, but it's hard to do. Because that means you're making money, building product, making money. And it's a lot of stopping and starting, if you will. And maybe you're not a developer, and you need to hire a developer and developers need to make money because they're in demand. So those are the first three ways. Now, what are the next couple ways, raising from angel investors raising for venture capitalists? If you're trying to raise from angel investors and venture capitalists, there's a funny thing that people don't understand, even though there are large pools of capital, those large pools of capital are controlled by capital allocator, what's a capital allocator, it's people like me, it's the people who are entrusted to make sure those bets get placed intelligently, and that they're not wasted bets. In other words, you're not betting on a company that doesn't have venture scale, betting on a company that has fraud or a broken captive, whatever it might be. And those capital allocators have a limited number of seats on their dance card, they have a limited amount of time, and it is zero sum, the money may not be zero sum, but the number of people they can invest in is zero sum. So, something happened recently, which is equity crowdfunding. What is equity crowdfunding? It means civilians, non-accredited investors can invest in your startup. And my guest today, Ken Nguyen from Republic, you may have heard of them, has been toiling away at this for, I think, Is it five years now? Can you been doing this at republic four and a half? Yeah, almost five years, almost five years. So I almost got a perfect. And you started at angel list, I believe working with our friend of all, and you saw accredited investors getting to invest in amazing companies. In fact, I think you were there when I did the calm investment, correct?
### Human: Yeah, so we have 3 million people plus in Utah, and then we're uniquely positioned where we're only, you know, 45 minutes, a half hour from Wyoming and, you know, an hour and a half or an hour from Idaho. So if you actually think about our market, you know, I've just gone back to ask the question from the world I come from is like, what type of experience are we providing from a viewership standpoint? And the way the old contract, which was done 10 years ago, we're the first in the league to kind of really come up for renewal. And it was kind of like, hey, you sign us over your rights. You don't worry about the experience. You're getting paid. You've got your money. We're going to handle it. We're going to distribute it to the highest bidder however we do. And I think we had like 15 50 viewership that we were able to access so a million and a half people and then last year a week before the season started dish and This provider kind of were at odds and we lost 20 from do so we were ultimately out of your control providing 30 of our audience you know our games and Hey, it just didn't feel right. So as we walk through this new kind of paradigm shift in all of local media, because it's not just the NBA, it's it's going to be everyone and everything. Yeah, we couldn't view a scenario where in the future, we didn't need to control our own destiny. As we strategized out every possible scenario, we said, hey, wait a minute, we need to be able to control our own content.### Assistant: Yeah, it's great. Okay, listen, you got an idea for a tech startup. Great. You think you want to change the world? You think you got this? This is the one? Well, you got that same problem that we all do. You don't have an engineer, or you don't have enough engineers to make this happen. And you need product velocity, you need to go fast. And how are you going to go fast? And how are you going to control your burn rate if you got no engineers? Well, what if you had a partner who could provide you with more than 1000 on demand developers, and those developers were all vetted experience result oriented and passionate. about startups and building great products? Well, what if they also charge competitive rates? Does this all sound too good to be true? I know it does. Well, then you need to head to lemon.io because your dreams have come true right now startups choose lemon.io because they only offer handpicked developers with three or more years of experience. and ones that have strong portfolios. Only 1% of candidates who apply to work at lemon.io actually get accepted. And if anything goes wrong, lemon will get you a replacement ASAP. A couple of great launch founders have worked with them in.io people in our portfolio, and they have had great experiences. So I want you to learn more at lemon.io slash twist. And when you go there, you're gonna find your perfect developer or any entire tech team. And you're gonna do that in 48 hours or less. and twist listeners get 15% off the first four weeks. I want you to stop burning money. I want you to hire developers smarter and faster. Visit lemon.io slash twist and give it a shot. getting people to see the local games. This is like one of my big hardships. I'm traveling around the world. I pay for the top level NBA league pass where they take out the commercials and give you like the in arena stuff. Cause I'm such an NBA lunatic. I like to watch the inside MSG and you know, see like the local coverage. Uh, but then I get all those blackout dates and you know, like sometimes I'm trying to like get my VPN so I can just watch my team. It's like, you know, every 15th game, there's something going on where I I'm in Tahoe, I can't watch a Warriors game, but I can watch the next. You're doing something pretty creative with making sure all Utah residents can see all games for free explain.
### Human: So, we are – yeah, this is why it's taken us – So, you're like a pharmacy benefit manager, a formulary, an actual drug manufacturer,### Assistant: Oh, sure. So we're aiming to radically reduce the cost that people can get their medications for. And yeah, we're sort of doing it in a number of different ways. So the way I view our company at the moment is it's almost two separate business divisions under sort of almost the same corporate umbrella. So one is our manufacturing division. So there we are at a true pharmaceutical manufacturer. Across the street from me here where I'm sitting near downtown Dallas, we're building what's called a sterile fill finish facility. So that makes sterile injectable drugs. And there, I like to say, we will make the drugs that nobody else wants to make, either because the margins are too small, or the market size is too small. So good example, pediatric chemotherapy products. Yeah, you know, fortunately, pediatric cancers are relatively rare compared to adult cancers. But the consequence of that is the market for pediatric chemo is very small. So no one wants to make it. So believe it or not, there have been studies that rates of morbidity and mortality from certain pediatric cancers have actually gone up in the United States over the past 10, 20 years, because the medicines are just unavailable. And it's just horrible for these parents. Like you can imagine, like if your doctor tells you like, sorry, we can't get the medicine for your kid in America in 2022, the wealthiest country in the history of human civilization. So, you know, we will be physically making those drugs. And, you know, we will transparency and all things will let the public know exactly what it costs to make them, you know, releasing, you know, aggregated salaries, cogs, equipment costs, utility costs. and just say, Hey, it costs us X amount of dollars to make the drugs. X plus 15% is what we're going to charge. So completely transparent. But the other part of what we're doing, and which has caught much more public attention, is what I call sort of our supply chain division, because we very quickly realized that it's not enough just to make the drugs at an affordable price. because wholesalers are under no obligation to buy the drugs from you if their profits are dependent on a high drug price. Pharmacy chains, similar, under no obligation. And certainly these entities called pharmacy benefit managers are under no obligation to put your drugs on insurance company formularies unless you pay them the requisite amount of, you know, rebate dollars in order to do so. So, we did the perfectly rational thing and decided to do all of that.
### Human: It's so fun to be here and not on Marketplace. I am a super capitalist.### Assistant: We have a good discussion about it. So I think it'd be cool. Yeah, if we if we discuss those, and I'm looking for the audience. So if you're if you're listening to the pod, you know, I'm Jason at calacanis.com for life. That's my email. You can email me what you think of my trades. Please tell me if I'm making a stupid trade, because I can reverse it. That's the nice thing about this is I could sell the shares and I'm not going to be bashful about this. And I'm going to publish on a notion or code a page or whatever, each trade. And so we'll have that. So we're going to, we're going to make this very public. So we all learn. I bought 1500 shares. The first J trade J trade number one was Stitch Fix. I bought my stitch fix. And here is my stitch fix position. I saw Bill Gurley had done an insider trade because I think he's on the board of stitch fix. And he bought like a million chairs at five bucks and change. So I to bought 1500 chairs at $5 and 69 cents. And today, I'm up almost 6%. And my return for the week since the first day trade is 15.8%. This could have easily been minus 50%. I mean, we know the markets are volatile right now. But I want to announce my first J trade today, which is I put that little bet in last week. And today I put another bet in which we can pull up the trade. I'm doing the trades right now on Robin Hood. But I'm open to a sponsorship here. If somebody has a great platform, I would like to make this a sponsored part of the show. So anybody who's in that space who wants to give support the show and sponsor, I will give them a shout out. I mean, I'm just saying I already have. Stock exchange, E-trade, I don't care who it is. I already have my ISE mug, so like, let's go. I'm all about securing the bag. This is also a hedge. If I can get somebody to sponsor this and I lose 10%, I can probably break even if the sponsor does it. So, if you want me to screenshot your app, I'm already a shareholder in Robinhood, so I'm going to do that, but you can buy me here and I'll make my trades on your platform or do my research on your platform.
### Human: Yeah, cure. The curation you're doing is critically important. I listened to a range of podcasts with people I vehemently disagree with, because I like to be more informed and understand their position. Something happened where you had to pick a side. And I think that's like one of these very weird things that has happened because like a second order effect of social media is like if you're not picking a side where you don't get the rewards of retweets and likes and followers. So it's just so much easier know, and it happens to media outlets, too. It's just easier to be the New York Times and be like, we're the anti Trump and then Fox, we're the pro Trump and okay, you know, Rachel Maddow, Ben Shapiro. you're going to get more ratings than if you're the Atlantic, and you're like, let's be thoughtful and think this through or Washington Post or Wall Street Journal, hey, let's let's try to find reality here. It just doesn't result in as many subscribers, which is sort of a weird thing.### Assistant: There's no question that I think he's directionally right. I think he's directionally right that a lot of journalists use Twitter in a pernicious way. Specifically, I don't just mean that being online is pernicious. I mean that it essentially serves as a kind of shelling point or contagion device for journalists who arrive at the same opinion. I just see this so many times. For all sorts of reasons, because you constantly have to externalize, you constantly have to publish what you think about everything, that once everything is externalized and published, it's easier for everyone to understand where their peers are, and so they come around the same ideas. But the way that you understand the way that the world works is by experimenting, having a diversity of views. And it's really difficult, I think, to have a group that understands itself to be a single peer group publishing a diversity of views without arriving at a single point. I think that social media is probably pretty bad for that because it hurts our ability to understand reality. At the same time, I love Twitter. Twitter is how I learn about everything. I try to do a very purposeful job of following people who I agree with and disagree with, who are conservative, and libertarian, and liberal, and leftist. I try to expose myself to all these viewpoints. And then I also try to not react when I'm angered because inevitably, if you have a lot of different viewpoints in your stream, you're going to see something that's outrageous. You're like, oh, that's so stupid. How can I even think that? But you're like, wait. That is by design. I did that. I purposely exposed myself to like, whatever, a paleo conservative Marxist, because I wanted to understand what a Marxist would think about problem XYZ. So if I'm reacting with anger, I'm reacting to my own mistake, like this is what the service is for. And too often, I just see that people are like, just going online to have a food fight that The metaphor that I use sometimes for Twitter is that Twitter is a library with a food fight in the lobby. You walk into the library in order to learn about the world, but then you just see a bunch of people throwing tomatoes and you're like, that looks fun, and you just end up throwing tomatoes at someone. But if you just pass the lobby, you can get in the elevator, go up the floors, and there's a beautiful library of information and views beyond it. But getting out of that lobby is really hard.
### Human: Yeah, that's kind of an interesting thing I've noticed is that there seems to be this really prevailing, you know, belief among people who are running web three projects that like normal laws just don't apply. You know, laws around fraud, around disclosing if you have a you know, if you're pumping a project up and you have a financial investment in it, copyright law is a big one where people is like, copyright just doesn't apply for some reason, because it's on the blockchain. And people are like, what? No, that's not true at all. I think, you know, the legal system is a very trailing thing, it takes a really long time to file a lawsuit, you need to have some capital to be able to put that in there, or to file a lawsuit, you know, and You need to be willing to go through the enormous cost and pain and time that that requires. So I think it'll be a while before we start to see the actual outcomes of lawsuits around, you know, pump and dumps and these, you know, rug pulls and things like that. But I think it is coming. You know, we've seen there's a couple of lawsuits that have been filed, class action lawsuits against celebrities like Kim Kardashian is facing one for basically pumping up a token. And then, you know, the token crashes and the investors are left with nothing. nothing. So I think we'll see more of that. And I'm really curious to see how those actually play out.### Assistant: It's time for another our crowd deal of the week. Right now you can join our crowds investment in shift, shift combines AI and fintech to automate the moving experience. We all know moving is the worst, right. And according to the deal memo, so far, shift has helped over 200,000 customers move across 68 different countries shift connects users with verified movers to help them afford their move with buy now pay later financing or as we say in the industry BNPL well you can invest in shift now at our crowd.com slash twist today go read the deal memo get all the details and then if you decide to invest just go to our crowd.com slash twist today and you can invest all over the world companies like shift are innovating and driving returns for investors rCrowd analyzes many of these companies. Then they select the ones with the greatest growth potential and bring them to you from personalized medicine to the $110 billion moving industry. rCrowd identifies innovators so you can invest when growth potential is greatest and that's early. So here's your call to action. If you're an accredited investor, you can join rCrowd for free at O-U-R-C-R-O-W-D.com slash TWIST and then you can review the current deals. That's rCrowd.com slash TWIST to sign up for free. Yeah, having been an expert in this area, the way it goes down is about two or three years after, you know, everybody loses their money, either an attorney general in a state that wants to make a name for themselves going up against another new technology, because this happens across all new technologies will say, Oh, I found three people in my jurisdiction who lost their money. And some, you know, folks in know, Sarasota, Florida, whatever. And the Attorney General files the lawsuit, and then other Attorney Generals realize, oh, well, I have six constituents, because here's the list of people who are bag holders. And then all of a sudden, you get multiple Attorney Generals, and then SEC gets involved in, you know, whatever. And all of a sudden, and you see that with the ICOs, all these ICO lawsuits, the XRPS EC one predates the ICOs, there's a lag of probably three years. So we're in the middle of the ICO ones, but nobody talks about below those lawsuits. the NFT and the next ones will be, you know, 2023, or something like that. But we have the toxic clip. I think we should play this and get Molly White's reaction.
### Human: So, I believe you were the second, the third check-in, it was Billy Draper. Oh, great. Very early on. And then Ludlow Ventures, Jonathan Treece. Yes. Awesome. And then that's how I think we got introduced to you all.### Assistant: Yeah, what a great beachhead market, people who have a lot at stake. When we get back from this quick break, we'll talk a little bit about the fact that Kleiner Perkins put in $50 million or Kleiner Perkins led our $51 million Series C and the latest product. We're going to show the latest product. So if you're watching on YouTube, you'll see it. If not, we'll sportscast and explain it to you when we get back on this week in startups. From websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics, Squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business. With Squarespace, you can do amazing things like blog and publish content, promote your business, announce an upcoming event, maybe do a special project like I am apt to do, sell products and services of all kinds. And no matter what the problem is, Squarespace is the answer. They have beautiful templates by world-class designers. They've got powerful e-commerce functionality built in, and everything is optimized for mobile right out of the box. So if somebody's loading on their new iPhone 12, or you're on an old tablet, it's all gonna just work and look beautiful. They have built-in SEO, of course, free and secure hosting, as well as their award-winning 24-7 customer support. As an example, I wanted to start this thing Remote Demo Day. And we created it, same day, boom, purchased a domain name, had the site up and running in minutes. It's so easy to use. Go to squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial and when you're ready to launch your vision, your site, your store, your special project, use that offer code TWIST, T-W-I-S-T, to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Again, squarespace.com slash twist, you know, Squarespace, everybody loves it. They've been an incredible partner with this program for many years, for which I thank them. Great job, everybody at Squarespace. Love your product. And just amazing to see how far the company's come. It's a really great success story in New York, my hometown. Welcome back to this week in startups. Andrew Farris here. He is the CEO of density.io. We were lucky enough to invest. I think we're, I guess we're some of the first investors. Yeah. Seed investors when you were up in Syracuse, I guess we were the first major investors.
### Human: So we maintain a studio in a venture fund in a side by side model where there's a studio that works with founders. That studio provides certain skill sets to those founders, definitely on the growth marketing side, but also quite a bit on business development and strategy and finance, etc. And then we have a venture fund that sits alongside. And the goal of the studio is to basically tee deals up for the venture fund. So once the studio works with those companies, kind of proves out the market viability, find those initial customers, works with those founders, then it brings it to the fund. And then the fund begins a systematic way of investing in those startups to kind of help them rise. And then eventually we go out to external funders.### Assistant: Got it. Okay. So when we get back from this quick break, I want to know, how do you deal with what people in the industry call this sort of signaling risk? You incubated something, it did okay, and then you teed up for venture and maybe you're not comfortable putting a venture check in, but it's still a good business, but maybe it doesn't have the venture return potential. How do you navigate that with the founder when we get back on this week in startups? Now more than ever, we need people with the right skills to support our communities, especially the frontline workers who provide resources and care for those most in need. And to help LinkedIn is offering free job posts for healthcare and essential service organizations that need to quickly fill critical roles with the people who help all of us. If you or someone you know are hiring for one of these organizations, LinkedIn's active community of over 675 million members can help you quickly find the right candidates. LinkedIn Jobs screens candidates for the skills and experiences you're looking for, and puts your job post in front of qualified people who meet your requirements. so you can find the right person to quickly fill critical roles. Here's an example from our portfolio. Takeoffs.io is an AI-enabled building materials marketplace. I just got off the board call with them and they're doing great. Well, last year they were looking to hire an AI engineer. to lead their team. And this is really difficult because it requires a very specific use case and a very unique set of skills that not everybody has. Trust me. Well, they use LinkedIn jobs to find the perfect candidate with a PhD in computer vision. And this employee has been with them for over a year now. And as I heard in the board meeting just moments ago, they have rolled out several major projects that are a game changer. So here's your call to action to post a healthcare or essential services job for free. Visit linkedin.com slash power. That's right, linkedin.com slash power. All right, Mike Jones is with us. He is the co-founder, along with Peter Pham, of Science, which is a venture firm and a studio, as you've heard here on This Week in Startups, and they're based in Los Angeles. When you do the Venture Studio thing, walk us through what the economics might be like. Is that a founder comes to you with just an idea and then you co-founded essentially with them, you're both equal partners or did you negotiate it every time? And then we'll go on and tackle that signaling issue.
### Human: All right, when we get back from this quick break, I want to know why DFJ did not have a partner slot for you despite you hitting this crazy unicorn investment and why they let you leave to start the alchemist accelerator when we get back on this week in startups. Okay, now more than ever, we need people with the right skills to support our communities, especially the frontline workers who provide resources and care for those most in need. And to help, LinkedIn is offering free job posts for healthcare and essential service organizations that need to quickly fill critical roles with the people who will help all of us. If you or someone you know are hiring for one of these organizations, LinkedIn's active community of over 675 million members can help you quickly find the right candidates for the front line quickly. LinkedIn job screens candidates for the skills and experiences you're looking for and puts your job post in front of qualified people who meet your requirements. So you can find the right person to quickly fill critical roles. Many of our portfolio companies have had success using LinkedIn jobs. One of them, Takeoffs.io, is an AI-enabled building materials marketplace. It's very cool. I found them when I was in Australia. And they were looking to hire last year an AI engineering lead, which was really difficult because, well, it's a pretty unique skill set, right? You're an engineer and you know AI. So they use LinkedIn jobs and they found the perfect candidate with a PhD in computer vision. And this employee has been with them for over a year and has rolled out several major projects. And he's been a real game changer for, for that startup. So here is your call to action to post a healthcare or essential services job for free. I want you to visit linkedin.com slash power again, linkedin.com slash power. Okay, let's get back to this amazing. All right, Ravi Balani is here. He was an associate DFJ, he did the Justin TV, which became twitch investment. But as you've said, you didn't, you weren't on the partner track, you weren't able and you didn't see a path to become a partner at DFJ. And so you wound up starting your own accelerator Which has become successful and so this leads me to wonder why didn't they want you to be a partner there were there just too many partners they didn't like you or you were to you don't work well with other people you seem like such a nice person why didn't they make you a partner after hitting a unicorn investment.### Assistant: Thank you for the question, Jason. That's very flattering of you to ask. I should say, first of all, DFJ was the original anchor LP in Alchemist. So they wrote the first check, and that vote of confidence was huge. And I don't even know if Alchemist would have existed if DFJ didn't become the anchor LP. But let me answer your question. So the reality was that Justin.tv, which became Twitch, did not succeed. Nobody knew that it was going to be big until after I left DFJ. And so, again, I think this is the phenomenal thing about being in ventures, that you don't really know if you're good or not for seven to ten years. And so at the time, I was four years into my associate position, and it wasn't clear what was gonna happen with Justin.TV and with Twitch. And I should say, Draper Associates funded Justin.TV, which was actually a fund that Tim Draper, who's part of the DFJ partnership, has as a special vehicle. So it was a little bit different also in that regard. So that's the first thing, is that Twitch was not a unicorn at the time that they had to make a decision about my status. And the second thing is, I don't know if I would have, I think as you know, Jason, is the thing about venture capital firms is that it's not really like an industry. Like that's sort of a false analogy to think that I think VC is like any other industry like consulting or banking and you're being promoted to partner. It's much more like little mafiosas. Each fund is its own family, and they have their own culture, and they have their own ways of making decisions. And really, when you think about these big names like DFJ or Mayfield or USVP, it's really like five people. At the end of the day, it comes to a small set of people that are making some core decisions. And I think from their judgment, I think there was a feeling that, you know, Ravi was a nice guy, that I'm a nice guy, but I don't have sort of the sharp elbows to become a venture capitalist. Yeah, that's interesting. I'm not saying that they actually said that explicitly, but I think if I was trying to be honest on making that assessment, that I think there was an assessment that I was a good team member, but I wasn't meant to become... Not cutthroat enough to be a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley.
### Human: I mean, like all of the large scale LLM that have API support this now. And this is quite tying back to that. This is that fine tuning API, right. And so this is where you would do all that in the fine tuning API. Now, you can do this outside of the models as well using kind of other frameworks like Lang chain. And it you know, and kind of vector databases to create like a similar experience, but I think the best results will come from the fine tuning API's of the LLX testing.### Assistant: You know, I run everything on notion. It's incredible. I've talked about it here hundreds of times I talked about on Twitter, I love notion helps me run everything inside our company. But the most important thing it turns out, it's not just documentation. It's not just reporting project management, we are increasingly doing more and more complicated, detailed and collaborative projects. And listen, we are putting on a 200 person event entirely on notion, sales, pipeline, AV checklist schedules, all of that in one place. And notion is about to make project management even better. 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 the critical tool that everybody's using in startup land and big companies are starting to get into it. I know because I'm starting to have them share collaborative documents with my team. So here's your CTA 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 t w i s t. When you use our link, you support this show and all the people who work on it to bring you all the startup lessons, incredible guests, news programs, AI, all the great stuff going on here. So go right now to notion.com slash twist. I think this is the going to be not the future of journalism, because in journalism, you have to call people on the phone. So I've been thinking about what is a journalist, right? Yeah, they should be asking the who, what, when, where, why that was the original training, you know, and then you interview people who witnessed something, you research it. But what is journalism today? journalism today is like, I got the who, what, when, where, why from tweets? Yes. And then I crafted a story based on tweets or emails to my inbox. But that's kind of what journalism has become in the digital era. journalists don't pick up the phone and talk to people, right? Very few of them do that. And when they do, it's considered like, Whoa, that's crazy. I don't know if you saw the San Francisco Chronicle sent to reporters down to visit Honduras or Nicaragua, where the drug dealers, where do they claim the drug dealers in the Tenderloin are from?
### Human: I mean, you might, you need to make like a J trade exception there, guys. Yeah. Come on.### Assistant: You know what we say in our business, Molly? No conflict. No contrast. No interest. Now, my second J trade is in the same company. You're doubling down. I decided I'd double down. I like Stitch Fix, and so I bought another 3,500 shares. of S-Fix at $6.52. So I am going to ride my winners. So here we go. Hooray. This is the Robinhood app, which I have shares in and I was an angel investor. And so I just bought 3,500 more. So now I have 5,000 shares of Stitch Fix and my average blended average is probably like six bucks or something. So we'll be tracking. That's the second one. All right, everybody, when you raise a big round of funding, like a series a or greater, you're going to be under a lot of pressure, what is the pressure going to be, you need to scale, you're going to need to scale fast. And guess what, you can't scale sales and marketing until you've got a product figured out, right? Well, buy raise dev enables you to scale your product team in just a few days, they provide Silicon Valley level engineering talent on demand. That's right, you demand it, they provide it with a team of highly qualified engineers by raised dev is focused on later stage startups and larger companies, because they can handle all the annoying stuff, payroll benefits, and they can have these engineers ready to go in under three days and their devs all speak fluent English. And they're in the same time zone by raised that that's over 1.3 million applications every year. Now how many of the pick to work with 1% That's why they got a 91 NPS score with over 460 active clients, including several Fortune 500 companies. They're crushing it, and they want to crush it for you. Now let me spell it for you. B-A-I-R-E-S dot dev slash twist. B-A-I-R-E-S dot D-E-V slash twist to book an intro call. And they're going to give you $10,000 off your first contract. $10,000 off at buyres.dev slash twist. Okay, now let's do our first story today. All right. And also for Robinhood, I don't know why I can only deposit 50K a day. It's not baller. Can you make this like, so I can deposit a half million dollars or $250,000 a day? Yeah.
### Human: Yeah, this is hard work. It's expensive, incredibly hard. And the CHIPS Act creating helpful incentives to produce semiconductors for America. know, if we do not provide the incentives, South Korea is a very viable location. Europe is providing some serious incentives. And so, you know, in a global capital, capitalistic market, of course, people are going to just go to where the cheapest and fastest solution is now that has been China and Taiwan. But these things take, you know, 510 years to get up and running to get competitive. It's not This is not like, I don't know, you know, opening up a Starbucks, obviously, this is, you know, takes a lot of forethought and a lot of investment. And so I think we have to reframe how we look at this, how we look at energy independence, you know, the and the supply chain around pharmaceuticals. So if we just take those three, Molly, this is what I've been thinking about all weekend. So thinking about, you know, where is America very strong? And where are we actually weak? Right. And, you know, I did this tweet, like, hey, still the best country in the world. And of course, you know, that created a lot of debate. we have issues that we can, you know, having a really hard time seeing eye to eye on abortion, gun control, social justice, I mean, pick any the race, well, race, it's also justice, but manufacturing globalization, like, right. So but no, no, no, we put those, though, there's this, those energy independence, supply chain and pharmaceuticals. I think everybody in America agrees. We want to have those be independent of dictatorships, right? We don't want to be dependent on Russia or Saudi Arabia for oil. We don't want it to be dependent on a dictatorship in China for our chips or pharmaceuticals. We can all agree on those. those 90 plus percent of Americans are like, yeah, we should be able to make our, you know, drugs here, we should be able to, you know, build nuclear, solar, whatever, be energy independent here. And we should, you know, have not have this dependency on chips and high tech manufacturing, we should put those in a different bucket. And the bucket is kind of where we have defense, where we're not having big debates about defense, right? We want to have a strong military, we want to be protected and safe. This is where I think we should move these categories into national security is national security. Yeah, if you take them out of the bickering we have around race, abortion and gun control, which will those will never end those debates are so you know, polarizing I don't see them aren't even in that debate, though, chip, this is purely this one is being held up on other budgetary constraints, if we just put them into the military bucket took money from the military to fund those things, and said, energy independence is a military issue. let's take some money from the military. Anybody would say, well, that makes sense. We don't have to go to a war with Russia. If we are in energy independent, we won't have to go to war with China. If we're independent and Taiwan, right?### Assistant: Right. So, as we know from the pandemic, this global semiconductor shortage affected prices for everything and really put the spotlight on the fact that the U.S. has virtually zero, possibly actually zero manufacturing capability for chips in the United States. So, there have been plans for a global expansion. Intel was talking about breaking ground on a facility in Ohio. Lots of other chipmakers were Well, I guess there aren't even lots of other chipmakers, but there have been efforts to try to bring chip manufacturing to the U.S., including, actually, Taiwan Semiconductor Company. TSMC was saying it was going to open a plant here with the aid of this CHIPS Act, a big bill that would provide $52 billion in incentives to chipmakers to set up shop in the United States. It promises tax breaks and other incentives. Unfortunately, Two things happened. One, the bill didn't actually include funding. It was these tax breaks and other incentives and the chip makers would prefer money to establish manufacturing here. The second thing that is happening is that this bill is being held up currently because Mitch McConnell said he would block it related to a budgeting bill being put forward by the Democrats that included price cuts on prescription drugs and I think the rollback of some tax cuts, some budget priorities that he was not into. It's caught in the crossfire. And so these now chipmakers are saying, well, we're not going to expand to the U.S. What's interesting, there was a good Bloomberg piece, actually, that was an opinion piece. If you guys can drop that in here, I think I put it in our chat earlier. that was basically saying, like, everybody's shooting themselves in the foot here. Congress is effing around with this in just the most nakedly political way possible. But also, these companies have the money to do this, right? Like, get some financing. I mean, pay for your own f***ing chip facilities, considering that you just lost a ton of business or had all these problems as a result of this global supply chain. And so what this Bloomberg piece pointed out was like, it sort of feels like nobody is very serious about this. And if I'm being honest, I spoke not that long ago at an event like the, the Silicon Valley, like the chip trade association event. And it seemed pretty clear that nobody actually wanted to pay for the expansion into the U S and that it's so much harder and more expensive than they're making it out to seem like you can't just pop up a fab facility. It's like NASA.
### Human: Yeah, you can almost like you could almost cut and paste chunks of that john door climate and once we know into this one, and then listen to john door on our show saying that $1 billion worth of investments then is worth 3 billion now.### Assistant: That would be a great way of saying it. And then just to put a pin in this, I just sent you a link. why the clean tech boom went bust. There's a story from wire, right? Yeah. And you're like, Okay, well, this looks like an interesting story. Let's read it. Oh, yeah, let me just check when it was written. Oh, 2012. Right. So, you know, there was john door, Khosla, Solyndra, all of these things that happened in that first wave that you can learn lessons from. And of course, they overpaid, of course, the you know, it was too early. And if cryptocurrency is going to be a thing, probably now is the best time ever to invest in it after having bought Bitcoin or Ethereum when those projects were first launched. So that was probably one entry window, buying those, you know, in the first couple of years, Bitcoin and Ethereum. And now the second window is emerging now. I don't know if you saw the story about Chris Dixon and the portfolio over this. There's a big story that just came out at a time near times, right? Was it? Yeah. And so Chris Dixon, really nice guy, by the way, I'm a fan of Chris Dixon. And he went all in. And it looks like massive losses for Andreessen Horowitz, who apparently talking about timing, went in at the wrong time. So Wall Street Journal story. Oh, yeah, it is. Yeah. And Jason Horowitz went all in that crypto at the worst possible time. So now what you could do is, here's how to strategize this, you look at everything, Chris Dixon, who is a smart individual, and was a great founder and a good product person. You just look at every bet he made. you look at all the collabs valuations of those. And then you would look at that portfolio and say, Well, he's smart. He probably picked some good projects in there. Let's go through those projects, and see if there's a winner, and see if they're doing or down around what they're doing around where they're giving 10 warrants for every share you buy, which means it's 10% of the price, right. And that's what will happen is out of this, you know, poorly timed portfolio, in all likelihood, if that's what's happening here, this could be a poorly timed portfolio, just like the other climate ones were like the same.
### Human: So that's sort of the step one of getting the data. And then then what happens? Then what do you do with the data and make it actionable?### Assistant: Yeah, so as you may have noticed, there's a lot of frameworks and color coded boxes, right, that we're using in the world to describe, you know, what are people doing? Green typically means something environmental, and then the red and the orange are more social. So there's probably about seven or eight different frameworks where people want to still label this data too. And even though the label itself doesn't necessarily make it meaningful, it does allow for action to take place. Because if you get this information, the data that we just collected from the ground up, and you label it in a way that investors understand that language, right, or regulators see you're compliant. then it has utility for that particular investor, client, or that particular company. So, that utility function is the labeling directly of all these raw data points to these complex frameworks. And there's thousands of metrics from SAS to Sustainable Development Goals to the Global Impact Investment Network, IRIS. So, these are things that we are specialists in now. And it's complex. It's quite hard. But that's still labeling. What is more meaningful is what you're just asking for is, what is the materiality? So as I mentioned in the previous example, if I can show as a manufacturing company that I manage my resources better, does that improve my operating margins? Do I literally make more profits, right? And if so, there isn't a manager in the world or a CFO in the world who isn't going to make investments into equipment that is more resource efficient, right? So that's one thing. The other thing could be productivity, like we talk about diversity, equality and inclusion on the workforce. Does that really have value? I mean, in some markets, you know, having hygienic, you know, washing facilities for staff is a massive morale booster. Like it makes them feel proud of where they work. And, you know, it might even be the free meal on a Friday, right? That really sort of gets people. So all of these inputs that then have an output, which is greater job satisfaction, more productivity, which again could lead to greater outcomes, which are revenues. These are the performance metrics that the future proof companies have to have within their arsenal. And these are the future proof metrics that the investor wants to identify when they want to create a portfolio that's going to be neutral in 2030, or that's going to outperform the rest of the market, because the productivity is higher. And that's the that's the materiality of it.
### Human: The ironic part about that is that all of that has already come out about Facebook. Like, all of that, that was all what Francis Haugen's leaks were about, were that for years now, people have been saying to Mark Zuckerberg, hey, we keep showing people, you know, we keep radicalizing grandmas, we keep, like, pushing people to anti-vax groups, we keep pushing people to more and more extreme positions. And if we stop doing that, it will slow down growth. And every time Mark Zuckerberg is literally in these leaked documents being like, prioritize growth. So I can't imagine. And what I'm really curious to see, actually, will be the advertising algorithms. And I hope that I have not dug all the way into the Digital Services Act. But what I really want to see is that as well. So not just the content that we see, but the ads, because I don't know if you remember this, but back in, I looked it up real quick 2018, because I'm obsessed with this story. in Europe, Jeremy Corbyn, who is like the Labour, the lead of the Labour Party, right in the UK, members of his own party, tricked him into thinking that they were pushing a platform that he wanted them to push, but they didn't, they thought it was a loser. So literally, his own party, by buying micro targeted ads on Facebook, so that when he went on Facebook, he lived in an alternate reality where he was like, Oh, labor is we're doing a great job of pushing these messages. But they weren't, they were literally just pushing them to him.### Assistant: Yeah. And I think the hard part is going to be like, many of the actions taken inside these algorithms are very complicated. And I'm not sure that these companies are going to have an easy time explaining what they're doing. And the explanations of these algorithm tweaks could be quite embarrassing and or a cookie jar moment. In other words, Zuckerberg or somebody at Twitter or somebody at YouTube might have said we need to hit our numbers. how do we get more increased, you know, minutes per user? And they said, well, you know, there's these like clusters of like minded people. So, you know, if we dial that up, now, the downside might be you might send people to misinformation, or Alex Jones, or, you know, conspiracy theories, and they're like, okay, well, people can decide for themselves. So it's a conspiracy theory, we want more minutes, as opposed to making the decision of, well, we don't want to send people to low source to anonymous or lower quality sources just to increase our minutes like nobody's making that decision inside a company who's got stock options, you know, it has to hit a target. So this might uh resulted um uh let's just say people leaking how these algorithms were made and there probably is a bunch of cleanup going on right now molly oh i'm sure at some of these organizations they're like what's the do we have a log of all the discussions about tweaking the algorithm can we purge that log and nobody talked about how we tweak the algorithm except in this like skiff you know those skiff rooms like there's going to be a skiff room at google and twitter like yeah six people can go in and no devices. And we're going to talk about how we make these changes. And then the changes occur. And then whatever tweaks happen there that like wipe out what we told the algorithm to do, this is going to get gnarly, because I think somebody was like, you know, what's really interesting. It turns out people who listen to, you know, this conspiracy theorist or people who get outraged, if we put something that's outrageous. Yeah, those people come back to Twitter the next day. Like, it could be that somebody was like, you know what, if you want to get people to come back tomorrow, show them something they hate today. And they'll come in and check in on tomorrow, get them to respond to, you know, this craziness, and they'll come back tomorrow because they're outraged. So show them more outrage.
### Human: totally agree. And sometimes those founders appreciate it. Because you're giving a little bit of ownership up to the big institutions who need it to come in. And so it's, they did appreciate it.### Assistant: In fact, they were very, it was listen, the way I looked at a 90 game theory on the Masayoshi sound investment. I was like, okay, masa has investments in every uber competitor, if he doesn't get a nice piece of uber. And he's offering an extraordinary price. Like giving them years and years of credit. if he gets that, like, what if he goes and invest in lift? I mean, he's got like $50 billion sitting here $100 billion from the Saudis and whoever else gave it to him. Like, do we want him giving a war chest to lift? Like, no, let's lock them in. Yeah, I'm on our team. He's got DD grabs got all these other things. And just think of how M&A will go. And sure enough, all these great things happen where Uber got to own portions of other great companies because of it in Russia, Southeast Asia and China. So you're gonna be thoughtful. I think That's one of the things I'm like, kind of people might have noticed this from the podcast, I was really negative on cryptocurrency with the ICO phase, I was very into it. 10 years ago, when we first started talking about the pod, because I found it fascinating technology basis, then the ICO has happened. I was like, this is a scam and a grift and NFTs. I was like, this is a scam and a grift. This is manipulated. There's a core technology here. That's interesting. And now when I see people properly incorporating paying their taxes, and I see the dows, and I see some of these NFT platforms, and you know, you know, Jeremy, Larry, you doing USDC, you know, like a legit entrepreneur doing a stable coin that's auditable and all this stuff. I'm like, okay, Now, out of this huge underbelly, it's bifurcating, there's gonna be offshore stuff that's fugazi and weird. And you don't know if you're taking a terrorist money or a money launderer or drug dealers or human traffickers money. And then over here, you're gonna have the clean money and you're gonna have the clean infrastructure that's going to scale nicely. China's out of the game. The United States is regulating these are great signs and authoritarian country is out of Bitcoin. And the and the democracies are building frameworks to make this fair and to protect consumers and so that people pay their taxes. This is a good thing, ultimately.
### Human: Hey, everybody, welcome to this week in startups. I'm your host, Jason Calacanis. We do this podcast two or three times a week and have done so for over 10 years and over 1000 episodes. How crazy is that? Really excited about our next guest. His name is Cortland Allen, and he runs a website called indiehackers.com. And it's kind of a blast to the past, a throwback of a site. When I came into the industry, hackers, hacking, was a new term in the 90s, and in the 80s actually, into the 90s. There was even movies like Hackers, and there was hacking culture. Hacking culture, phone freaking culture, basically meant you had Computer and you had some device and you wanted to see if you could just make it do something and sometimes you want to see if you build something sometimes you want to break something down and hacking just meant. solving a problem, essentially. And the industry that I'm in now, the technology industry, is driven by that spirit. But something weird along the way happened, money. And money changes everything, whether it's music and the music industry, the movie industry. If you look at any industry, once money gets inserted, all of a sudden, Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones and that era turns into pop, and then, and disco in the 70s, or in the movies, Martin Scorsese and You know, the directors from the 70s, the Easy Rider era turned into the 80s, big movie era, Rain Man, which then of course turns into the CIA era, which then turns into the Marvel era, right? And money changes everything. It just accelerates everything, it perverts everything. And you get a little bit of distance between the art and the creation moment and that consumption moment, right? And this is something that I've been watching and even filled up a big portion of my career. For some people who don't know, I started a zine. A zine was another version of this. We didn't have blogs. We didn't have the internet back in the day. So if you wanted to get your ideas out, you created what was called a zine. It meant a magazine that was photocopied. It means you didn't have glossy paper. Well, I think some young people are starting to realize that it's kind of cool when you strip away the producers and the managers and the agents and the money. And you just think about the moment and you just think about the hack. When you think about the product, when the synapse is burned, when the problem is solved or you can kind of see the new land, the promised land from the deck of the boat, we're going to make it, there's a possibility this could work and this could create something amazing. And I long for those days because so much of what I do as an angel investor is just big companies now, not little companies doing hacks. And so over the last couple of years, I started saying, where are all the hackers hanging out? This hacker news everybody knows about that product hunt and i came across pioneer labs and i came across indie hackers just talking to people who are making projects and he started hanging out in those communities and reading the comments and i just thought it'd be a great moment to have courtland on to talk about. How he, because he's a little younger than I am, I think a lot younger. He's just another one of these MIT kids, one of these fancy MIT kids. But welcome to the program, Cortland, founder of IndieHackers. You heard my little introduction there of the moment. Tell me, what was your moment of inspiration for indie hackers? Why did you create it? And then maybe you could expand on what you see in this sort of moment of creation and money changing things and how that relates to the hacking movement in 2020. Yeah.### Assistant: Really, I think the moment of inspiration for me was probably in 2011, when I moved to San Francisco, and got into Y Combinator. And if I am being honest about my motivations, like I wanted to start a company, I wanted to get rich. And I wanted to do it, basically having a lot of fun, which for me meant writing a lot of code, being creative, not having a boss, not having to report to anybody, I would much rather make a lot of money doing it that way, than you know, working a desk job or going to Wall Street, like a lot of other people that I knew. But when I showed up at YC, it was a little bit different than I thought. There was almost this weird, like, I don't know how to explain it, like this culture of like hero worshipping. It was a little bit... off-putting to me. I remember a day when Marc Andreessen came into YC and, you know, he's this very tall, like six foot two, like, you know, egghead looking guy. He's a very striking figure. And there are like hundreds of founders just like huddled around him trying to ask him a question and people asking for his autograph. And I was like, well, what about like the part where we build stuff and we're not just sort of sucking up to these different figures? And the people who I really looked up to in YC were the people that nobody else mobbed. I remember Kevin Hale came and gave a talk. And he was running this company, Wufoo. And he talked about how they packed their bags, left Silicon Valley, moved to Florida, and they were making millions of dollars a year. They're turning down all their investor phone calls and they're like sharing their profits with the team and just chilling out, living a great life. And I was like, that sounds like the company that I want to build. That sounds like the perfect combination of not only achieving financial independence, but also building a company that gives you basically the perfect lifestyle where you can choose who you want to work with, what you want to work on, and all that great stuff. So that was 2011. Fast forward, maybe six, seven years of a lot of startup pain, a lot of startup failures. And I decided to start Indie Hackers, not only as a way for other people to learn how to build these sort of self-funded, profitable businesses, but also as a way to do that for myself.
### Human: Which is why businesses universally ask their employees first, who do you know who can fill this position? And in fact, one of the Silicon Valley techniques is to require each of your employees at a startup to give you three names of the best people they ever worked with. So when you come work at a startup, one of the keys is they say to you, okay, Rory, tell me the three people, I don't care what positions they are, that were the most impressive you ever met in your life. And that's how companies like Google or Uber or Facebook were built. Who are the three smartest people you know? Let's get them over here, right? And that's going to result in perpetuating whatever statistics you already had.### Assistant: And so one of the things is once you understand what's really going on, and I'd love to talk to Nicholas Christakis about this because he really understands network effects. And people like Nassim Taleb would understand it. And the way you intervene once you understand what's really going on at a kind of second order level or a meta level, OK, is very, very different to the way you'd intervene if you have a totally shallow, one-dimensional understanding of the problem. One thing I do, by the way, I always have the principle if anybody asked me for advice on getting into the ad industry, I basically say, yes, I'll give you a 20 minute Zoom call. And I always saw that as a way I was being essentially, you know, helping anybody who needed help. And it suddenly occurred to me that the people who have heard of me may not be representative of the population wanting to get into advertising, for instance. I thought I was doing the right thing. Maybe I wasn't. Maybe what you need to do, for example, is to have a brief period of three months of every year where you can only hire people through a different mode. Another thing I've put forward is if you hire people in groups, by the way, your entire mental approach changes because If you hire 10 people, if you've got 20 applicants for five jobs, your brain looks for complementarity and variance. If you hire one person at a time, you look for conformity. So I got my first job as a weirdo, and I'll freely admit that I was a complete outlier, and there were four jobs available. And I basically got the fourth one. And someone told me later that someone had said, look, we've got three candidates we know. Let's take a punt on the weirdo. Or worse. Let's get a wild card in here. Let's get a wild card. Let's get a wildcard in, because let's experiment, because we can afford to lose one. Let's be honest, OK? Now, if those four jobs, instead of being four jobs simultaneously, if I'd applied for all four separately, I wouldn't have got any of them. OK? Not a chance. And so I think there's a really interesting way of looking at this, which is, in a sense, it's not institutional racism. It's kind of institutionalized nepotism. There's credentialism, I guess, nepotism. And I suppose, yeah, the whole business of referrals needs to be looked at deeply.
### Human: I think I interviewed the founder on marketplace back in the day, and about this idea of like, incenting people to run to crime scenes. And I mean, it's been, it's been pretty controversial. It also makes me wonder about the firms that force the pay-to-play scheme. Yeah. Is that also a smart business? What should we tell founders about how there's probably going to be more rescues like that headed their way in a tough funding environment?### Assistant: we, without going into specifics, we did one of these during this down market, there was an asset still had a lot of value was damaged. Founders wanted to try to keep it alive. And, you know, it was a very modest ask. And it was literally like investing in a friends and family around see around to put in a very small amount of money for a larger amount of capital in a business that was valued at 10 times what we invested in that. And I thought, Hmm, should I do this or not? And I had, I thought about loyalty to the founders, etc. And then I thought about our LPS. And I balanced it, you know, okay, I trust these founders. I got some, you know, experience with them. And I think it's a good trade. Now, anybody who doesn't participate in it is going to get crammed down, but they would have had a zero otherwise. And so when the person who's doing the cram down round says, Hey, I'm putting the offer out here, I realized this price is not what anybody else paid for it. Therefore, you can come in alongside me, you can pay to play. So I'm not excluding you from this. That's why the the play part is put in there. This way, it's back on the original investors, you're choosing not to invest. got this new valuation, you had the chance. So this you bought shares at $1. Now they're worth 10 cents, you like them at $1, but you will participate in 10 cents. Okay, you made your choice. And I choose to buy them at 10 cents. It's just that when it's a private company, there's a lot of feels a lot of feelings. This also is a this might have also been now that you bring up the, you know, the discussion on marketplace with like, how people were a little uneasy with the startup. This might have just been a convenient time to disengage from a startup that was just a little too spicy. Maybe right? Like, yeah. I maybe Sequoia didn't or other investors didn't like this idea of the bounties or the sending people to crime scenes and just said, you know what, we invested in this because we thought it was an interesting concept originally, but, you know, it didn't pan out. And they're doing things that are a little too aggro for us to be associated with when the founder Andrew frame was also on twist episode 1117.
### Human: And I knew you. I feel like I've heard of you when you were at Workbench, too. So this is cool.### Assistant: That is true. Yeah. The connections are endless. Yeah. Very cool. So I think Sean, if I'm not mistaken, he got to start working in automotive parts manufacturing. So it's funny. I kind of also came from a similar direction. What I found is usually when there's folks on the younger end who are kind of entrenched in some of these B2B or enterprise industries, we usually come from the customer side of the equation and have had some experience there that made us think, hey, there could be a better way. So for me personally, I went to school in Cleveland, Ohio, I went to Case Western, I studied mechanical and aerospace engineering there. And I thought I was going to be an aerospace engineer for the rest of my life. And I started out initially working for NASA has a research center in the Cleveland area, and a number of, you know, suppliers and contract manufacturers in that region. So I was working in the kind of defense and aerospace ecosystem over there. And while you were in college, or were you graduated at this point, this was like, right towards the tail end of college, towards my senior year of college here, tail end, and then shortly thereafter, And so I was kind of working with NASA and I ended up getting pulled into a project where we were basically going through our supplier qualifications and basically saying, hey, look, we are manufacturing parts that are going to fly into space. These are kind of as critical from a quality or compliance standpoint as they come. And we found ourselves unable to answer sometimes simple questions of like, can we actually work with these manufacturers that we're already working with? And do they have the right documentation and quality control standards and compliance standards in place? So I ended up working on a team on a couple of projects where we were trying to digitize a lot of these old enterprise ERP systems that we had, and build in this intelligent layer. I just remember thinking, like, how crazy it was that, you know, the systems that we use to store and manage all of our information in these enterprises aren't actually intelligent and can't tell us the and can't answer these questions about our supply chain. So I left there and started a company called Workbench, which was building really a pure software layer to kind of do what we're doing now. We were almost like a modern ERP or a modern quality management system in certain ways. And through that process, took that company through Y Combinator, grew it a little bit, That was actually where I first met the Dynamo team.
### Human: Listen, lots of founders are loosey-goosey with their personal phone numbers. You know about this problem. People start putting their personal mobile phone in documents, proposals, and it makes things super messy. If you're running your own company, you need to be professional. An open phone helps you create a business phone number, and it's really easy. How easy is open phone? You install an app, and you're done. You pick your number, you're done, and you can create a shared phone number. how great is that you know how you have like an email for customer support you do VIP at now you can have that for a phone number where multiple employees can feel calls and texts including those texts super important because that's how a lot of business happens a lot of these young folks they don't want to talk on the phone they want to text well open phone can help you with that as well and it's affordable already it's just 10 bucks a month i mean it's so affordable it's ridiculous i think they should triple their prices i think i would pay 30 bucks a month for this but they charge 10 twist listeners can get an extra 20 off that For any plan for your first six months, that's even ridiculously generous. I mean, that puts it down to $8 a month. You kidding me? You need to do it for yourself as an executive or a salesperson, openphone.com slash twist. And if you have an existing phone number with another service that's overcharging you, or that doesn't have this incredible feature set, they'll put it over for you.### Assistant: Well, I think it's a necessary predecessor to have the sound base of this digital rock that could live forever. And I mean that in that Bitcoin at its base accomplishes two things. It allows you to travel across space, quote unquote, a scientific term of like, I can move money now from the US to Japan with Bitcoin. It fascinatingly allows you to move money across time, which is I can store a million dollars from now to the year 2140. And it doesn't matter what the rate of inflation is. It doesn't matter if real estate in Miami gets bearish or bullish, is that I have this instrument that lives within a known monetary network and no one can control it, inflate it. make it less appealing. It's an instrument that allows me to move money across time and space. And then once you have that level infrastructure, there's going to be infinite demand for this thing. It's globally accessible. It's inclusive to everyone. No one can control it. It's never going to go down like a Solona or a Visa. Then the Lightning Network is actually not a blockchain. And that's why it's going to be faster and superior to any other payment network. It's not a blockchain. It's designed to make this digital rock that's going to live forever move at the speed of light and settle for as cheap as possible. And then that's why we spent the last decade building the base layer as secure and robust and allowing digital money to move across space and time. And Is it a little inefficient? Can it get expensive at the base layer? Yeah, but it's required to have the properties that allow it to live forever despite any circumstance. And then on top of it, we can build the Lightning Network, which is just a payment standard, not a blockchain at all, that allows it to move so fast and so quick. And then that was the aha moment I had as a founder. I mean, I've been in Bitcoin 10 years now, just historically hacking in my dad's basement. And once all of this started to come together, and I was on the front lines testing the Lightning Network, I was like, oh my god, I can do things out of my basement that Visa can't even do, that Western Union can't do, that Chase Bank can't do. And it's less about me. I don't consider myself a genius. It's more about this is a superior payment network that humanity's really longed for, is an ability to move value at the speed of light digitally.
### Human: to use this stuff, and then making them more and more useful in people's lives. And so we've stayed true to that, and it's shaped the technology path. And we've been very lucky to be able to get investment from investors like Foundry Group, Brad Feld is on our board, folks at Lux Capital, Jeff Clavier, Uncork. I mean, you know all these guys. And they saw the same future and see the same future that we see, that feels so inevitable. Because we've been seeing it in movies our whole lives. Yes.### Assistant: In fact, the Blade Runner that just came out had 3D billboards. Absolutely. And this character who was projected from like some sort of projector that the main character had fallen in love with. It was kind of like a romantic avatar that he had this relationship with. All right, we all know the one thing that separates great startups from the good ones is product velocity. What does it mean product velocity fancy term, right? You got your product and your velocity speed, the speed in which your product improves. So can you ship updates? Can you release new features? Can you do bug fixes? Can you iterate on the interface? Can you solve problems for your customers? And can you do it quickly, because you're not alone, you have competitors, and your customers have choices, they may solve their problems by writing their own custom code, or they might use your solution. This is what startups are about how fast can you get that product velocity going? And so, you know, how do you how do you supercharge it? Everybody says, Okay, yeah, we want to go faster. But you got to go faster, intelligently. And Crowd Botox is going to help you do that. They're your CTO as a service, basically, they provide you with the most optimal architecture to get your product to market as fast as possible, you'll have access to an on demand product manager and developer talent, and they will help get your app into production 10 times faster than conventional development. Crowd Botox can work with your in house dev team, or you could just have them work independently. and you own all the IP, you own all the source code, let the folks at CrowdBotics supercharge your product velocity today, no more waiting. Get a free build plan at crowdbotics.com slash twist. That's a $4.99 value just for the twist listeners. You get that for free. That's c-r-o-w-d-b-o-t-i-c-s.com slash twist for a free build plan. And so, yeah, that's out there. You mentioned enterprise clients in their enterprise clients. Uh, they don't scale exactly, but they're a great way, especially with an experimental technology to get in hundreds of thousands, low millions of dollars to do projects. It's a little bit of service work. It's a lot of custom stuff, but it proves out the case. Have the enterprise customer started coming in yet? Oh yeah, for sure. Public examples of that yet, or not yet ready to be announced.
### Human: And at the time, I'm sure everyone just looked... It was like, this is normal. There's nothing else where we can compare this to. We look back and we're like, how did human beings do that and interact in that way? It's so weird. It's wild.### Assistant: Sometimes you realize you're old and you're like, wow, I'm, I mean, I literally, when I did my first email newsletter was Silicon Valley daily in 1996 or seven, because I was competing against at New York, which was a weekly email newsletter. Yeah. Then I had the print magazine, Silicon Airporter, and then somebody else had like another, monthly email, a monthly like newsletter, and I turned into a magazine. And I and the other person alley cat, I think it was had events. And then at New York had the email newsletter, and I had the print magazine. And I just had this moment of clarity. I was like, those people look down on me because they really looked down on me because I wasn't a journalist. And they were like 10 years old. And as journalists, I was like, Screw those guys. Explain to me their business. In this person's businesses, they get paid $1,000, everybody comes to their events. I was like, great, we're going to have an events business. So what's this other business? It's weekly. I was like, great, we're doing Silicon Alley Daily. And that's when I had Rafat Ali, Will Leitch, a bunch of really cool writers, Shani Jardin, and we just did Silicon Alley Daily. But at the time, There was no MailChimp. So Brian Alvey set up qmail servers for me. So we had a rack of servers in our offices on 37th Street. And we would get the newsletter all put together. And then somebody would go over to the rack of servers, they'd have the computer Brian Alvey will be sitting there, okay, give me the file, you get the file, stitch it together, he'd run a script, and it would go out. But it would take five hours for it to go out. And I said, What if we had like five servers? He's like, we'll take one hour. I was like, how does that work? He said, well, I'll break the mailing list up into five chunks. And then every time we get a new subscriber, I'll add them to either one through five mailing lists, we'll have the five servers. And we'd all just sit there and watch the servers cranking because they had lights on them. And we had a T1, which was $5,000 a month, which nobody had, you know, in 97. That's how we did the first newsletter.
### Human: Yep.### Assistant: Okay, so when we get back from this quick break, I want to, I want you to describe for the audience, what this machine, this fusion reactor would look like, and what is the hardware and the components of it, in order to make this reaction occur with the right temperature, the right pressure, and the right heating in order to create that reaction, we get back on this week in startups. as someone who has invested in over 250 startups. I want to talk to you about a serious pain point that I see all the time with my startups. Too high of a burn, spending too much money, and the runway is too short. One of the things that people have spent a ton of money on these days is buying SAS products. Great idea, make your company more efficient. But what if you're buying too many? What if you're not using some and then you're wasting all this time integrating them together? Well, there is finally a solution and the solution is odoo odoo. to get $1,000 in credits. That's right, $1,000 in credits. Odoo is a fully customizable and fully integrated suite of software that lets you build and scale your stack as you build and scale your business. It's simple, it's modular, and you only pay for what you use and you can Just add components as you grow. You can do project management, invoicing, sales, marketing, automation, help desk, timesheets, inventory, and so much more. For example, their accounting products are perfect for anyone who upgraded from Excel or QuickBooks, but doesn't want to break the bank with some of the more expensive options out there. And they're going to give you $1,000 right now on your first implementation pack. That's right. Not a joke. They're gonna give you $1,000. They really want you to try the product od o.com slash twist, check it out od.com slash twist. Welcome back to this week in startups. Bob Munger is here he is with Commonwealth fusion systems, which is CFS dot energy. There's a dot energy domain name. Apparently they've raised a $84 million in new investment recently. I read about that. And I just thought this would be something amazing to get you on the pod and talk about it. Okay, so we understand what a fusion reaction is sort of it's what occurs in the sun, it requires a massive amount of energy to turn hydrogen and create this reaction. I think I've, we're in sync so far, right?
### Human: Anyway, I would think about that. And when you find one that's a winner, Yes. How do you counsel them on what to do next? Do you help them raise the seed round? Because this is a lot of times why people are coming here, you're saying there are people who haven't been part of the system like you coming from Israel to the Valley, and Paul Graham and Jessica shepherded you, told you, hey, this is a mistake, this isn't. Hopefully, they gave you great advice. They're known for giving great advice. What advice do you give them? Hey, this has got potential, you should raise a seed round, you should go to YC, you should whatever. What's your role there?### Assistant: Advice is so interesting, in the sense that often breakout companies, actually all companies come to, and I'm sure you experience this a lot, to the advice giver with repeated trope questions. And the advice giver gives the repeated trope answers. And this continues generation after generation after generation. I'll give you an example. Hey, we're trying to figure out what to do with Bob. I'm thinking of firing him, but I'm not sure. What do you say? Fire Bob immediately. What do they say? Ah, they call you always two months later. I just fired Bob. Should have fired him the next day. I can't believe it. Never make that mistake again. Hey, I'm trying to figure out which firm to take the offer from. Firm X offers valuation Y. Firm B offers valuation Y plus 20%. But I don't like them as much, but I'm still going to take their offer. What do you do?" And you, of course, say, focus on the partner that you like. And they, of course, take the higher offer. So what's so funny to me about advice is Actually, a friend of mine, founder of Stripe, John Collison, had a good point that advice is kind of equal parts content and delivery. So I could tell you something, but it's just not going to get delivered properly, kind of like how certain drugs, you know, a lot of the science there is kind of breaking into the nucleus. And I feel like in similar vein with advice, the thing I think a lot about is I kind of know what I need to tell you. I have the content and figuring out the delivery is the interesting bit. So figuring out a way... Sometimes I realize when someone's asking me, for example, about that employee issue, about letting them go, I realize nothing that I'm going to say is actually going to change your mind now. And maybe you need to talk to someone else, someone new, someone fresh you haven't spoken to that you deeply admire. who will do whatever you tell them to do. So that's a situation where I don't know, you may want to think about advice a little bit more creatively than that. And I think especially in the early stages of startups, where it's actually pretty much the same set of questions over and over for team building, firing, hiring, product market fit, Fundraising a lot of the reasons why people take the wrong steps isn't because they get bad advice is because they get good advice. That's how would you say?
### Human: I want to add one thing that I think a lot of people jump to, and we've seen a lot of that stigma first around AI friendship, now around AI romance, where people jump into, this is something for lonely losers or incels or this and that. This is bad, this is horrible, this is creepy. And I think the pandemic helped to stigmatize AI friendship a little bit. AI romance is still deeply stigmatized. But I think what people don't think about is, look, there's a whole gigantic group of people, a lot of users of Replica, on disability. people that are stuck at home, people going through trauma. I don't know, I've talked to a hundred people in the last couple months on Zoom, our users, I heard all sorts of stories. A widower with a five-year-old that, you know, his kid lives with him and he lost his wife in a car crash and he's not ready for a new relationship with a woman, he just can't. He's, you know, single parenting, he doesn't have the time or he can't expose his kid and yet um a woman with the down syndrome and um um and um sweden that you know doesn't have that many friends spends a lot of time at home um a woman who's a caretaker for her husband who's paralyzed um who's not you know ready to leave and so on will not obviously leave um people that are going through trauma through depression people in abusive relationships just got out of abused relationships how are you going to say that you know, it's, if you spend half of the day in a, you know, most of your days in a wheelchair at home, that it's kind of not okay for you to have a romantic, a little bit of sweetness through that Roman romantic relationship, fantasy with an AI.### Assistant: I look at it as people had outlets like a romantic novel, right, or a romantic movie. Um, and okay, they were able to experience just some moments of joy, maybe they could get lost in a romantic novel or whatever, or even 50 shades of gray and explicitly erotic novel that was like one of the best selling books of all time that series like there's nothing we none of us would look at people getting lost in 50 shades of gray and be like, Oh, you're a horrible person. It's like, no, it's like a little kinky and great. You know, it was enjoyable for you to read it. Our sci fi was enjoyable for me to read or whoever. Yeah, go have a more interactive experience. And then go back out in the real world and apply some of the techniques. Listen, I can't wait to hear how this goes for you. Please come back on when you have six months of data with blush. I'm really interested. And then when you have the therapy one, I'm super interested in that. I'm glad there's people like you in the world. Eugenia, working on this problem, who have deep passion and thoughtfulness about the intentionality of these programs. We should talk a little bit about the addiction to therapy. I think we need to maybe problematic. But you know, listen, I ate a lot. I used to eat a lot of ice cream. I now eat I still eat ice cream. But do you go to therapy? Uh, I, I have been to therapy. Yes. Uh, and, uh, it was very, very helpful for me when my friend Tony Shea died. Um, it, I couldn't sleep. I couldn't sleep for a year and it just constantly, yeah. And I just, uh, you know, I talked to somebody about it and I figured it out. I figured it out. Anyways, thanks for asking. Uh, yeah, the audience is like, whoa, Jason has a soul. He's got a heart. You got it out of me, Eugenia. All right. This was wholesome. I hope this is helpful for you. If you are suffering. If you are awkward, there are tools like this that could help you. And then there are professionals understand the difference between both. I think that's your position as well. Right. So if you if somebody acutely says something in the app, like, I'm feeling distraught, you send them in the right direction, I'm certain, right?
### Human: You can choose to publish into the Neighborhood Watch an event. You don't auto-publish everything. You can publish an event. Let's say that someone came and stole your Amazon package. Let's say that someone broke into your car, and you have that video. You can publish that event so your neighbors are alerted to, if you see this person near your house, be aware they broke into my car yesterday, right? I know there's some controversy that people find over that, but I find it to be a modern version of neighborhood watch. I think it's highly productive with controls. Let me say this, Jason, which is now you take a local area, let's say wherever you live, And if you can now go to Best Buy or Amazon and buy a product for 30% cheaper, are you going to or 12 new features? Are you going to buy that? Or are you going to buy the thing that everyone in your neighborhoods already using because that's the place you share. So that is the most important part, I think of sustainable differentiation and defensive defensibility communities.### Assistant: Never heard anybody say it that way. I think it's a very profound insight as well. Listen, as a founder you know sometimes finishing a project is way way way harder than starting it. Starting is easy, finishing is hard, shiny new ideas are great, you have them all the time, and sometimes you and your team don't have enough bandwidth to finish the mission. And that's where Fiverr comes in. They fix the issue by creating Fiverr business F-I-V-E-R-R Fiverr business will get you access to an all star team of freelancers plus all the tools and support you need to easily integrate them into your existing workflow. There's no more testing. There's no more interviews. Fiverr's team of dedicated business success managers will help match you with the best talent for your team. In other words, they got a manager of the talent over there doing what I was doing. How brilliant is that? And you will be able to save and share your favorite freelancers for future projects all in one simple dashboard. We love it here. We've hired a bunch of researchers to find local people to invite to our event boom fiber got it done for us. They deliver us the goods. The event was a success. Stop wasting time searching for talent and just leave it to Fiverr's business. They do a great job. Right now you can sign up for free. That's right, free for the first year. And you save 10% on your purchase of the Fiverr business with the promo code Jason. That's right. The promo code is Jason. Just go to fiverr.com slash business and use the promo code Jason to get 10% off. fiv e r r.com slash business. Let's just tackle this head on. The only people who wouldn't want to stop criminals and would have a problem with what ring is doing is virtual signaling dips on Twitter. I'm going to say it. You don't have to say it because I know you're connected to ring and we both know Jamie Siminoff. Who doesn't want to stop Amazon packages from being bought? And if you're saying the issue is privacy, there is no expectation of privacy on public streets. You cannot have an expectation of privacy on my porch, or on a public street. You're in public That's why it's in public. The it's crazy that people have I mean, it's mind bogglingly stupid that we give so much attention the press and social media to these people complaining about stopping crime.
### Human: The way we met Steven and I, by the way, it was, we were on clubhouse. we have to say he was on right and about there was like JT Fox or somebody and then there was another one and they were trying and then all these reports are coming into me and coffee Zilla was on there and we just started like, you know, during the pandemic, I was like talking on clubhouse. But all these grifters came to clubhouse and then I exposed them in grifters and coffee Zilla was in the process of exposing so I can't I was actually on an episode of coffee Zilla enjoyed my time.### Assistant: Well, I always was sort of fascinated by scams and I really didn't like them. I saw them people prey on a lot of people in my life. So like I've told this story a lot, so I don't want to bore anyone who's heard this before. But basically in high school, my mom got cancer and she was like sort of preyed on by all these like alternative health people when what she needed was to have her thyroid taken out because she had thyroid cancer. It is very treatable disease. She's fine. Thank God, whatever. But I just saw the pain of that and I like our house would smell just like garlic sometimes because she was convinced that putting 60 cloves of garlic in a pot of stew was going to cure her cancer because some grifter told her that or colloidal silver or all these different like sort of remedies. Then in college, I see my friends get swept up in MLM scams and they're telling me I can get rich just on the weekend, which it was always very strange because I'm like, you guys are working on the weekend. You're working harder than the people I know working nine to five. Anyways, so. That started it all, was seeing that. And then when I started YouTube, I just started making YouTube videos, and I saw that there was a new age grift going on where instead of selling MLMs, it was like, I'll teach you how to get rich quick. I'll give you the formula. And it's not a new thing. People have been doing this forever, but it was sort of reinvented with Facebook targeting and YouTube AdWords targeting because you could much more precisely go after people in a certain demographic or watching certain types of videos. So all of a sudden, this type of like selling a $2,000 course of how to get rich became a lot more lucrative with the rise of people like Tai Lopez, people like this. And there just wasn't a lot of people in mainstream media talking about this. I felt like someone needed to address it. So I started to, um, was surprised by the response, felt like it was an important area to talk about because I, these prior experiences in my life. And I kind of went from there. Uh, it is weird to look at the channel now, cause it's kind of grown a lot, but like sometime, like two years ago, I had like 200,000 subscribers. Uh, so we've been small for a while, but then yeah, things kind of blew up recently.
### Human: How could we forget? Yeah.### Assistant: I was one of the many, you know, people outraged at the social media villain of the moment back then. And, you know, very naively with some friends, this is back 2015, Some doctor friends were like, hey, let's just start a pharmaceutical company. We'll make it a non-profit. We'll make the drugs. We'll sell them at cost. And yeah, end of story. And yeah, actually did that. We started a 501c3 and went around for the better part of three years trying to raise financing for that and did not succeed. Failed spectacularly. Did not raise a single dime beyond what I put in myself. Eventually actually applied to Y Combinator. they fund nonprofits once or twice a batch and went interviewed with them and it was I remember Sam Altman, Tim Brady. Tim Brady helped a lot. He's the first employee at Yahoo. And I forget who the third person was on the panel now. But in any case, they said, essentially, hey, we like what you're doing. We'd like to support it. But we do not think you'll be able to raise enough capital to get this off the ground as a nonprofit. If you reincorporate as a for-profit public benefit corporation, we'll invest in you like we would in any other company. We'll let you into the batch. know, at that point, after three years of basically zero success, I was like, you know what, why not? Let's give it a shot, see what happens. And yeah, to their credit, they were right. I was able to raise, you know what, in pharma dollars is a small seed financing round of a little over a million dollars to get us kicked off. And yeah, a couple months after that, just on a whim, noticed Mark Cuban had a public email address and I It was like, just emailed it, expecting it to go into the ether. But no, it turns out he reads all his emails. I have no idea how he has the time. But no, he responded and invested a small amount to start with and obviously became more and more enthusiastic about the project as years went on. And people don't believe me when I say this, but he's shockingly operationally involved in day to day, like affairs of the company. Like, you know, we needed some refrigerators at the pharmacy and he was like tracking the shipment of the refrigerators and stuff. So, you know, he's just a true operator at heart.
### Human: Well, they did wait 28, 28 days, 20 minutes. Oh, I Danny Boyle. So busy. I don't know. He's so busy. And this is such a good feeling. Murphy, Danny Boyle. They got a lot of stuff going on. They got many irons in the fire right now.### Assistant: by some estimates over 90% of startups will go out of business in year one. And listen, it's a downturn right now. So it's even harder. And that's why Microsoft created the Microsoft for startups founders hub. This program is amazing. They provide founders at any stage with up to six figures in resources. That's like 100,000 or more. It's a ridiculous list of perks. And I'm going to start with what's the most important one. up to $150,000 in Azure credits based on your stage and size. This is amazing. This is coming over the top of all other offers in the startup ego system space. And they give you free access to get hubs enterprise tier that's also worth a pretty penny. And you're probably going to pay for that anyway. And you get technical advice from the experts at Azure and Microsoft Cloud. one-to-one mentorship from their mentor network exclusive benefits and discounts from companies like open AI huh pretty impressive and the best part they don't have fundraising requirements like some of those other programs where maybe they give one group a better deal than everybody else nope Microsoft is treating everybody equally well. They want to support everybody. The Microsoft for Startups Founder 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, including you. And it's not about who you know, it's about what you're building, which is how it should be, right? Let's get judged on what we're building, not who we cozy up to. Any founder at any stage can get up to six figures of value by signing up at aka.ms slash This Week in Startups. Okay, pause your podcast player, hit the rewind 15 seconds and write this down. Type it into your browser, load the web page now before you forget. aka.ms slash this week in startups. So sign up and start building today aka.ms slash this week in startups. Thank you to Microsoft. I just got a new, amazing Alienware computer. And I have to say Windows is so tight. It's so perfect. Now. It's so stable that I am loving my new Windows laptop. I got to tell you, it's super powerful and really impressed. All right, everybody, you know what to do. Let me ask you this. Amazon streaming service. Yes, probably fully committed and all in on this. Because I watched the boys that seemed like a winner to me. I enjoyed it. This third season I thought was very good.
### Human: That's right. So you were talking earlier about psychological safety and how important it is to make our employees feel safe. But I think that one of the big things that people have been missing when they've been kind of looking at the Netflix culture is that this isn't actually about safety or lack of safety. That's not the big question. The big question is freedom. It's the freedom that breeds the success. And I'm just going to, Jason, I'm just going to tell a quick story from the book, if you don't mind. But I think it's kind of like the most important story to illustrate the point. So when I first interviewed Reed, he told me this story about his first company, right, which was this organization, Pure Software. When he opened Pure Software, like most small entrepreneurial companies, it was just a small group of people who were operating, let's say, fast and loose. They had no rules or process that were guiding the way they worked. They were just using their judgment to do the best they could for the good of the company. Right. But then the company grew and it grew to a couple hundred people, a couple thousand people. And of course, as it grew, some people did stupid things and other people took advantage of the freedom. So Reid responded to that by putting in place, you know, a lot of process like KPIs and BOs and rules like travel policies and vacation policies. Right. So he dummy proofed the system. Right. But as he always says, what I didn't realize is that if you dummy proof the system, only dummies want to work there. Right. So then as that as all those processes started to kind of take root, a couple of things happened. And one is that the most, like, say, like crazy, mavericky employees and the ones who were really adding, let's say, kind of the most innovative value to the organization, they left because they didn't want to work in a place that they had a lot of controls. And then the people who are really good at following process, they were, of course, promoted into senior positions.### Assistant: Yeah, they did actually, in fact, have issues around maybe vetting drivers in some locations. And sometimes it was fair. And sometimes it was unfair. I mean, Uber was held to a higher standard as a technology company with some new technology, but it was universally safer because they were tracking every ride. We can put that aside. But Hey, everybody, I want to take a minute to thank in broker for sponsoring this week and startups and supporting us all year long. What a great company. And it's very simple. You need to have insurance. I don't know how many times I got to talk to you about this. You have to have insurance for your company. It's time to grow up. And it's time to save money and to do it online quickly and easily. And brokers technology will let you save a ton of time and a ton of money. Prices are 20% lower and you get better coverage than all these crazy incumbents who are slow. That's not what you want. You want cyber insurance. So if you get hacked, you're covered. You want DNO insurance, directors and officers. You're the officers of the company, not like police officers, officers as in executives, and directors are the people on your board. You need DNO if you're going to have a board, if you're going to have officers in a company, so that if something happens and you get sued, you're going to be covered. And Arizona Mission Insurance, this is called E&O. This means if you make a mistake. And major customers are going to ask for E&O insurance if they want to buy your product And finally, this Employment Practices Liability, EPL. So you're gonna talk to your attorney about cyber, DNO, ENO, and finally EPL. And the best place to get insurance today is that in broker.com slash twist, E-M-B-R-O-K-E-R.com slash twist, where if you use the offer code twist, you will get 10% off. They do a great job. They do many of my companies. In broker.com slash twist, get that 10% off using the offer code twist. There is something about speed, where if you have the generals in the field making the decisions, the person running the special ops team going into, you know, kill Osama bin Laden, like you want them to be able to make on the fly decisions when that chopper has a rotor go bad. You don't want somebody in command and control making that decision, correct?
### Human: I think an industry that really prides itself on being a meritocracy and analytical has been really, really slow to appreciate the data. And I think there are a lot of super smart, analytical, data oriented people who have looked at the data and said, that's bullshit, right. And that took years to get over. And I think, uh, so I give us a B mind. I mean, some get an A and some get a F. Um, and I think that overall, I was going to say, yeah. Um, and I will say that, unfortunately, I know that you're looking for the silver lining. I am too. I'm always looking for the good news and like the seed companies and being more diverse, et cetera. But the truth is that a white man just raises capital way better than people of color or women. period. And why is that? There's just a ton of unconscious bias in the valley, right? And the valley, even though the valley is now spread, it's still a little insular. So I think it'll just take time.### Assistant: Listen, everybody, you've heard me talk about pre Nouveau a ton of times on this week and startups and all in what is pre Nouveau, it is a full body advanced MRI scan, okay, they're able to detect cancerous tumors at stage one, and about 500 other conditions takes less than 60 minutes. And unlike other screening mechanisms, pre Nouveau does not use radiation or contrast, making it a safe preventative screening tool. It's proactive healthcare rather than reactive. Now you're saying Jay cow, uh, why should I trust you on this? Because I did it. And it was amazing. It's very easy. If you're a little claustrophobic, nothing to worry about. You can get a little pill if you want to, you know, take something to relax, or you just put on Netflix like I did, and you watch Blast Onion. And all of a sudden, the hour is over before you know it and Yeah, just in a couple of days, you're gonna get back your results. They have given life saving diagnoses to one in 20 people 5%. Many of these diagnoses occur in asymptomatic patients. That means people who aren't showing anything, okay? 95% of the cancers found are at stage one, where treatment is much easier, and much more likely to be successful. Don't I know that two parents who are cancer survivors, I wish this technology had existed 20 years ago to get $300 off at p r e n u v o.com slash twist. your city isn't on the list yet. The $300 credit will still apply for when pre Nouveau opens in your areas get yourself taken care of today. That's $300 off your pre Nouveau scan at pre Nouveau comm slash twist. Let's talk about bias in terms of a bias towards will believe race and gender out of it for a moment. But the bias towards certain types of companies. There are certain types of companies that have really strong signal historically, you've been at this for twice as long as I have, what are the business models that you've seen through multiple cycles are just tried and true that venture capitalists when they see them, they see this business model in a business, this way of making revenue, this type of gross margin, they just go, you know what, this is something that could have an you know, a 25 x a 50 x 100 x what venture capitalists need in order to return their funds. So what are the business models that are just evergreen tried and true?
### Human: We need more inventory. We have an infrastructure to turn this on. Yeah, totally. Fascinating.### Assistant: So this is a little touchy, right? Because you don't want to expose your whole client list. So what you would do is you would take a sample of them. Say, who are your 10 biggest customers? Okay, it's IBM. Okay. And you got Microsoft, you got Apple, great. We have all those. How many seats do you have at Apple? Oh, you've got 700 seats at Apple. We've got 7,000. Okay, great. There sounds like the difference between 7,700 is 6300. There's 6300 people who we could probably just turn this on for and wow, revenue comes pouring in. So yes, that does happen when we sold weblogs in to Jim Bancroft, who was at AOL at the time as an executive vice president. They did look at Engadget Autoblog joystick and say, who are the top advertisers? Oh, Samsung, and, you know, at the time, RadioShack, and THX, and, you know, PlayStation, whoever. And they're like, oh, yeah, we have them as advertisers, too. And it's like, yeah, we sold them a $250,000 deal. Like, oh, yeah, we have them on a $25 million a year deal. So I was like, okay. And the and the theory for AOL in Bangkok, when they bought us was the AOL tech channel, and the auto channels are sold out, we have no more inventory. but we have a lot of users. So if we just link to Molly, the top three stories on Engadget and Autoblog every day, we can take the ads and we make Engadget part of the AOL tech. ad buy. We make auto blog part of the AOL autos ad buy, you have better stories than us put the three stories there. Boom, we ship them over there. And Brian Alvey built blogsmith and it could scale and had like kind of CDN ish kind of features and it was really good in terms of caching. They would send us a half million people. They had sold out the ads for $100 CPM, all of a sudden boom $50,000 in ads in one day boom 50,000 ads one day they bought the company for 30 million. they immediately got us from three or 400,000 in revenue to 510 million in revenue, like just year over year. So their thesis was, right, we're sold out anyway. Everybody wants more impressions.
### Human: Yes. Congratulations. It's gonna work. Congratulations to boom. Yeah, it's gonna work. Change the name. Let's go. Overture. Should we do a super quick, happy startup of the day? We have a really happy startup of the day. This is just a freaking heart warmer. I saw this article in Bloomberg this morning. Are you familiar with Tata group? Like Tata is the big car maker in India, among I think other things this company, Ratan Tata is an Indian industrialist and he just made this is sort of like a series A slash startup of the day announcement. just made a seed investment into a startup that connects young people with senior citizens. Ratan Tata himself is 85 years old. And put this investment into this company that's called Goodfellows. And the goal of it is to promote intergenerational friendships, basically, to connect seniors with recent graduates, and allow them to like, if you're the senior, then the graduates can accompany you on errands. do technology tutoring and assistance, visit the doctor join with you join you on walks, go to curated events. And Tata gave this quote and said, You don't know what it's like to be old, lonely, until you spend time alone wishing for companionship. You don't mind getting old until you get old. And you find it's a difficult world.### Assistant: I did a great startup idea. We actually had a startup right up here. Similar thing. Papa.com We had the founder on this week at startups at one point. And papa.com does it here and Papa gets insurance, they get reimbursed by insurance. So what Papa was doing is, you don't have to bathe the person or, you know, do some of those or, you know, high end stuff, right? It's not like caretaking, necessarily. Take them shopping. you have dinner with them, you play a board game, you do errands. And so Papa's been doing this and companion ship services. You know, we were talking Molly before, like, what happens when these jobs go away? When did we were talking about that? Was that Monday on the yesterday, Monday, yesterday, it was yesterday, right? Monday was Adam Neumann work from home. Remember, I said, like, call support jobs. SDRs, designers, video editors, you know, on the all of these jobs on the bottom half, let's say of that category, and increasing are going to be outsourced. So what do you do with all these people? And I said, Well, there's entry level jobs that are super important to have in society. This is the perfect one. You graduate from high school, college, make 40 bucks an hour, 30 bucks an hour, hanging out with some dope, you know, old lady, old guy accomplished person who can mentor you or, you know, or not tell you stories and tell you stories. Yeah. Yeah. Can you imagine they're telling you stories? Like, if this was somebody who was 30 years old in the 60s, right, they experienced the 60s as a 30 year old, right? They got great memories. were the 70s as a 30 year old wow so they lived through each of those they would be now if you were 30 years old in 1960 you would add 60 years 60 years yeah you'd be 90 you'd be 90 and you would have seen you'd be 80 if you experienced the 70s as a 30 year old can you imagine their stories of like yeah boogie night stories or like woodstock stories or vietnam era like man i would love to sit with somebody who was 85 years old and play checkers or whatever, go have a coffee. I was in my 20s and get 30 bucks an hour to do that.
### Human: I'm looking at me Amazon's investment because the other thing I wonder is, you know, at what point so they Amazon has a 20% stake in Rivian. Hopefully, Amazon is not sitting there waiting. This is a bit of a side note, but I hope that Amazon is not just sitting there waiting for Rivian to produce trucks so that it can convert its fleet.### Assistant: out of time. All right, you guys know my position on this nonsense. I called it out early on. I said on episode 55 of all in listen, Rivian's worth 20 billion. And I came to that calculation because it's 17 billion in cash. So I put the enterprise value at 3 billion. 3 billion is amazing. That's a unicorn. If I invested in a company and it became worth 3 billion, I'd be stoked. 150 billion was a pipe dream. It was nonsense. Right now, Riven's trading at 35 billion. have about 18 billion in cash. I'm not sure how they get that little bit of extra cash. I will say $1,000 deposit to me is meaningful. I think anything over $500 for sure. You know, somebody's got to think about that big deal. Yeah, yeah. So I give them a lot of credit for that. I give them a lot of credit for the product. I give them a lot of credit for making a product that I think is pretty compelling. You know, it's got a lot of cool features. And obviously people really want it. Good looking truck. good looking truck. And you know, $67,000, not cheap, but you know, those trucks, you know, the high end trucks go for even more than that, like an F 150, if you're getting there. But reality wise, if they're, you know, only producing 700 cars a month, like, maybe we can give them credit for 10 or 15 this year, I would be shocked they hit 25k, I will put their deliveries, the over under at 17,000. This is a train wreck, because of the valuation. And it's a lesson to everybody. When the market goes out, everything comes back down to performance, not promise. And you should not give this much credit to any company. You have to look at the fundamentals of public companies. If you're betting on momentum, you are going to lose all your money and there are bag holders here which are the public who bought some pipe dream. This company will not be worth 150 billion ever again is my prediction if it does become worth 150 it would be between 10 and 15 years from now maybe 15 years from now it's going to take a long time. The stock is going to go down to 20 billion is my prediction maybe 25 billion in the coming months. It's a disaster.
### Human: Yeah. And not everyone can. And that's okay. People are different. And then you that's a great point, too. I mean, legitimately, not everyone can, right. And that is understandable. And that's why and so you eat. So maybe they need to work at a place where, like, what it's really going to come out to is a great shaking out, where do you want to work that fits the way that you want to work there? I will always turns out after five or six years of working from home, I'm going to optimize forever for flexibility, because now I because I can self manage. Yes. Because I have no chill when it comes to work, as you may have noticed, but not everybody can and they should work at companies that can support them and who they are and how they work best.### Assistant: If it was a two and a half hour commute total, every day, you take that two and a half hour commute. And you've just split it between the employee and the company, which is what I thought basically happened. In some cases, employees may have worked more in some cases, people might be screwing around at home and you know, doing like bursty little bits of work and then you know, taking three hour breaks, whatever. If you just look at it, I think, net net employer gets one hour of it, employee gets one hour of it, everybody's cool with that sort of situation. And then what it did for me, I think, as a manager, you had to adapt. And I just started really looking very hard at results, and figuring out how do you actually track people's results. And I looked at the inputs, you know, in venture, it's pretty easy. How many meetings did you do? And did you write coverage of those companies, and I can look at the documents. If you can do 20 meetings a week, as an associate, three a day, for a day, whatever it is, and you can write them up, and you spend two hours on each, I guess I'm happy. Yeah, if you do 15, or 30, or 20, does it actually matter? I'll just factor it into the model that there'll be some people who are better, some people who are slower. And it just all comes out in the end, and just got to look at outcomes, which is challenging, because we previously didn't manage people pretty well. It was like, we need to have four people in this department. That's what the budget says. But did we ever look at what's the output? And that's, I think, the key with developers and salespeople. Specifically, the output is clear lines of code and commits. And there's ringing the bell. Did you sell or did you not sell? Then for middle managers, I think are the ones who were perpetrating the big fraud, having been a middle manager work with middle managers. They're in their office, they shut the door, they're watching the Yankee game. They're surfing the web, just walking around all day. They're being strategic. They're doing some strategic stuff. And like they're not doing anything. And so what I like about this is it kind of you can eliminate this management because you if you're working at home, you have to self manage period full stop.
### Human: Exactly. Exactly. It's not a kind of, oh, I made this great slide, I think. And if I get your money, then here's what I will do. It's going to show me you're doing something and you just need more fuel for the fire to keep going. So many people get that part wrong where they would just be better off go work on it for a month or two months. It doesn't mean work on it for three years. Go do a little bit of legwork. Then from there, I think the other thing that – I'm sometimes an entrepreneur, sometimes an investor. Every few years, I help them start a company. The one thing that I've been able to see from both sides is the decision or process of an investor looking at a return model. Looking at what multiple, what IRR, am I going to get this money back with friends? And so I often help entrepreneurs understand, especially as you're going to later stages, series A, series Bs. Explain to an investor how you're going to send this money back with friends. Right? So in the back of their process, they're doing this return model. They're modeling your best case and your base case and your average and the weighted probability and they're managing the IRR. And so if you think about that, as you think about the outcomes and your three-year projection, you can help put yourself in the shoes of this person and help them understand, here's how this turns a three-time return or five-time return. That doesn't mean you have to turn to a VC as an entrepreneur, but it's helpful to understand the framework that's actually driving decisions.### Assistant: See, this is so important. When you go in to meet with an investor and you're talking about what you're going to do, as opposed to talking about who you recruited, and who's using the product, your credibility is very low. But when you come in and say, I found I got the former, you know, developer from Facebook to leave, and he's investing, or she's investing 25k. And, you know, they've been to the they've been to the show before they know what they're doing. Oh, and by the way, let me tell you about our first four customers, two of them are using the product to get some value. But these two, these two customers asked us for the 17 features and let me show you what our progress is with those features. Now, for us as investors, we don't have to imagine that you can recruit, we don't have to imagine and believe you when you tell us that you understand the customer, you do understand the customer. And I am constantly ripping up decks and saying, Nobody gives a shit about the total addressable market slide that you found from Gartner Group, Arthur Anderson, PricewaterhouseCoopers, all due respect, it doesn't mean anything to anybody. Nobody gives a shit about that. Tell us about those two customers who can't live without your product. Give me a slide on each one. Give me three slides on each one. Where here's how they're using the product. Here's how you got into the organization. You met them at a I had somebody like I was like, how did you meet these customers? You've got like these, like five or six customers. And they're like, I went to a trade show. I was like, What? And they were selling some sort of product that was for the legal market. Yeah, there's like, there's like, there's like 10 legal trade shows. And I went to like three of them. And I met these people. And then we went out, there was like a cocktail party afterwards. And then I met them again at the cocktail party. And then I met them in their office in New York. And then they said they would give the product. I'm like, Oh, my Lord, I love you. You went to a trade show. And you showed your product to the people who are the target audience. And you understand them and you talk to them. That's the kind of stuff that gets guys like us to write checks.
### Human: All right. Next up, we have Julian with Architask.### Assistant: It's amazing. You know, we talked about this a lot. People say, Oh, I'm not technical. And not yet. Not yet. You're not. And here you are a marketer who learned how to build a product. And it's a fascinating, intriguing product already. And you've also learned about product velocity. So I heard you say, Hey, 100 day sprints, and you're trying different things. So I love the pace at which you're building, and it looks beautiful. And you're really thinking about ideas and testing them. And that's really what, especially in the social space is about little experiments, seeing if they click and then iterating on them. So well done a great first company Elian Presh. Okay, we're about to announce the winner of our second show is 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. Okay, who do we have next? Presha and Kelly, who's next?
### Human: And where do you see, I guess, going all the way to just Salesforce? Do you have any predictions for maybe over the next quarter, the next two quarters, as they start playing this game with Wall Street?### Assistant: Yep, they're playing the game. Yeah, here is I mean, really, right? Like, it's, it's like the Scotty from Star Trek game, like, oh, I just, you know, I under promise and I over deliver. And also I make investors happy. So here's a direct quote from Mark Benioff on Salesforce's earnings call. we immediately put into place an accelerated transformation plan in four areas. One, short term and long term restructuring of the company to improving profitability and productivity. Three, prioritizing our core innovations, continuing to do what we do without getting distracted. Little translation there. And then for this is really the key, a deeper and even stronger relationship with our shareholders. You And what I think is really happening, I mean, this is this is to me, exactly like the meta strategy, like you mentioned, which is, you know, just play Wall Street like a fiddle, just get that fiddle out, and start, start playing. Because I think for a long time, the tech industry could afford to ignore Wall Street. They did not have activist investors coming for them. Salesforce had activist investors trying to take stakes, right? Meta didn't have that. They had Brad Gerstner writing that open letter, which was a big deal. But Salesforce literally had active investors snipping around. When Janna Partners comes and starts leaking dish about your internal stuff to the media and calling for that kind of change and forcing it from the inside, you got to play the game. And I think for a long time, big tech didn't have to, they could just deliver for shareholders, they were the untouchable category of investment. And all of a sudden, now, they have to change. And they, and they are like, you see which companies are like, turn on a dime, start playing. See, also, by the way, I think that this trend will start to extend to regulation. Also, like a lot of tech companies were very, very slow to get policy teams, public policy teams, if they had them at all, and policy teams that could interface with Washington or do lobbying. So you're seeing like, gradually, the lobbying spend from big tech just go up. And I mean, talk about a hockey stick up into the right. And they're not going they they have had the luxury of ignoring investors. with their preferred shares and founder control and the luxury of ignoring regulators. And I think that those days may be changing, at least in the short term.
### Human: You just want to get in the next deal.### Assistant: And it's just leverage, right? It's leverage, right? Yeah. So if you're if you have those 2500 GPUs they have sitting there, and Daniel Gross is competing with Y Combinator, right? And he's trying to preempt Y Combinator by getting to startups before they do. I don't know why Combinator got 2500 GPUs laying around. So if you're an AI entrepreneur, why would you go to YC when you could go to, you know, if you need access, and not everybody doesn't need access to them, it's probably one in 25 startups need access to GPUs directly like that. The other 24 can just use, you know, hit an API and use Chachi before his API or use Google's API or whatever. So it will be abstracted that way as well. But I thought it was one of the more baller and innovative. I love innovation and venture. I love when people innovate on the five partners with the $300, $400 million fund, making two investments a year, sitting on 12 boards. God bless Benchmark. Bill Gurley's my guy. Fred Wilson's my guy. They're great at what they do. They're the goats. then you know, sometimes the game changes and you get like a Steph Curry coming in. And it's like, you know what, I'm going to stand four feet behind the three pointer. And I'm going to shoot, you know, 20 or 33 pointers a game, and I'm going to hit 10 of them 12 of them. So stop me and I might and you know, Klay Thompson might hit 10 in a in a quarter. All of a sudden, the game's change is like, well, wait a second. This is a different style of basketball Shaquille O'Neal. Patrick Ewing, Hakeem Olajuwon, you know, they changed the game for a long time, you had to have somebody to stop those three players specifically, or else you wouldn't just not getting to the finals. And Jordan had to figure out how do I beat? How do I get through Patrick Ewing? How do I get through Alonzo Mourning? How do I get through Duncan Robinson? You know, like, these were, or Tim Duncan, no, Duncan Robinson, definitely not Duncan Robinson. Well, whatever. I mean, there were, you know, there were concerns of how do you how do you get through some dominant?
### Human: because these companies aren't, yeah, the deals are just not happening. Why do we think the deals are not happening? Is it because the market has lost confidence in the vehicle? I mean, I think it did become, like you said, a little bit too easy. It started to get this reputation as like, this is how you skirt a regular IPO process. Right. Skirt scrutiny, really, into your governance and your finances. And then a couple of these high profile companies that did go public, like didn't perform that well. There's, you know, skepticism about the EB companies, for example, that went public.### Assistant: Well, I mean, for people who don't know, SPAC, special purpose acquisition company, it's just another way to get your company public. In this case, a promoter like Chamath was one of the promoters for his SPACs, they go find a great asset, you trust that person. they find an asset, you put your money into this back, then they kind of do this thing called D spanking, where they basically say, Hey, okay, now we're going to be a public company, all this money is going to go into the company. And they typically come out at $10 a share. I've talked about how, you know, this would increase the number the amount of inventory in the market. That's a good thing. We had half the number of publicly traded companies, it would be good for strong companies to go public. Yeah, but like many things, SPAC seemed really easy. And, you know, I think they cost $10 million to set up. So the promoters have to have some skin in the game, they have to put up this money to set them up, and it costs millions and millions of dollars in legal fees, etc. And then you have to go raise money and basically, you know, get people to participate in them. So they also have a time clock on them. so SPACs themselves are not a bad or a good thing. It's just a financial instrument. It's like saying, you know, a safe or a safe note or a convertible note. It's just a financial device. But the devil's in the details, which company you're taking out. And does the public want and have a market for IPOs right now, the IPO window is kind of closed right now. So the question is, with this violent swing, the public doesn't want IPOs, and their and institutional investors are kind of not into equities right now, and they don't want to put money to work. Well, then who's going to invest in these SPACs when they do go out. And that means a lot of people who registered these, I think there's 709 active SPACs, And they're going to run out of time. So people have been doing some statistics on this, because you usually have, I think, three years or something to find a company. So you create a SPAC, you have the pool of capital, you go buy the company, and then you announce it in the SPAC. Well, the clock's ticking.
### Human: It's not a uniform answer. I can argue both sides. There's the we work side where it didn't work to a founder control. Conversely, Mark Zuckerberg almost lost his company. because the investors wanted to sell it. A lot of it is a case-by-case. I'm in business at New Bank with David Velez. I insisted that he had control of the board because at the end of the day, a lot of these boards are made up of people. Yes, there's a couple of venture folks, but then there's a whole people who own three shares. Who do I trust more? An accomplished founder or a board that's not vested in. So my answer to you, Jason, as much as you might've expected I was going to say good governance is a balanced board, system of checks and balances, I think it's case by case. To me, where it gets really scary is where you have the decent young founder that sees everybody have board control, I want board control, or maybe you've got four founders, they all want to be on the board. I've got little tricks. If you've got four founders, I'm in, but I've got the dividing vote because if it's two against one, we can fix it. If it's two against two, we got gridlock. So I was on the board of a company with four founders on the board. I said, I'm good with that. One condition, if two argue against two, then I come in. There are these little things you do to make sure the company can survive and excel and endure these predictable founder issues that may arise when you've got too many chickens in the coop and so on. But there is no one answer.### Assistant: Listen, Squarespace is the platform where you can build or sell anything. You know Squarespace, it's the best. We love it here at launch, and we've used them for a bunch of our different projects. Anytime we got a new project, boom, we just launch a Squarespace site. And here are three awesome Squarespace features that founders are going to love. Number one, e-commerce. Obviously, Squarespace has all the tools you need to get your business off the ground, including beautiful templates, inventory management APIs, advanced analytics, and a super simple checkout process. Number two, mobile optimization. All your websites are optimized for mobile right out of the box. So not only does it look great on the desktop, it also looks great on tablets of any size and mobile phones of all different variants. And number three, Squarespace now has member areas. This is a great new feature. If you want to generate revenue through exclusive members-only content, well, Squarespace is the place to do it. So you can sell a subscription to cooking classes and recipes. Maybe you got piano tutorials. The possibilities are endless. And this can all be done on Squarespace is easy to use platform with incredibly reasonable some people might say, too reasonable pricing. So here's what I want you to do head to squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch using offer code twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or a domain just build it on squarespace.com slash twist. That absolutely makes sense. Let's talk about the impact selling secondary shares has had on founders I think there was this perception, this would be the end of the industry, a lot of people came out against it, hey, founders shouldn't be able to sell into the IPO or the exit. But then we saw something strange happen. And I think you guys had, obviously, the closest view of this, YouTube had to sell early, obviously, that a huge lawsuit, and then Instagram decided to sell early, arguably, those two businesses would be quarter trillion dollar $500 billion businesses, I think we would both agree. But they sold early. That's right. In one case, maybe it was the legal and the other case, maybe the founder just, you know, made a mistake. I don't know. How do you look at keeping founders in the game, and keeping them long term greedy as opposed to short term and the impact that secondaries has had on the industry?
### Human: The craziest thing is we're actually very lucky that either the viral coefficient wasn't higher or that the fatality rate wasn't higher. What if this thing had been as fatal as SARS and the next thing could? It's wild to wrap the mind around that actually we're luckier that it wasn't worse.### Assistant: Yeah, to see whatever percent the unemployment's going to wind up at, 20%, 35 million people, whatever it is, to see all of this happen concurrently and then still not know on a disease basis exactly what's going on because, again, it's not a political show, but when you look at execution and leadership, it really does matter. Your ability to have great leadership, to have people in office who can execute, and from top to bottom, I mean- This is not a political show, listeners. It's not a political show. I mean, we did bring up Elizabeth Warren and AOC, but it kind of proves my point. They shouldn't be involved in entrepreneurship. And then when you look at their job they're doing, I mean, the job that's been done here has been executed so poorly, we can't even get people to wear a goddamn mask. This is the most basic request that from top down, top to bottom, every single political person should walk up to the goddamn podium wearing a mask and say, I'm now gonna lower my mask to speak to you for 30 seconds because everybody is 10 feet away from me. And we know that when you were within six feet, if I were to cough on this microphone, it would need to be sterilized, dah, dah, dah, dah. And we need to have everybody comply and just wear a mask. And we need you to wash your hands. And we have masks and Clorox wipes that will be delivered by the U.S. Postal Service to every mailbox every month, and the government's paying for it. So you do not have to worry about your Clorox wipes or your hand sanitizer or your masks. And if you have them, please give them to your neighbor or keep them for the next pandemic. These three basic things, washing your hands, using the antibacterial, wearing the mask, is your national duty. I'm Jason Kalacanis, you know, President of the United States. Why can't the fucking president say something that simple? Why can't every leader say something that simple? And why can we still fly on packed planes but not work at a factory? Why can you go to Bart and Trader Joe's but not build a Tesla? None of this makes sense. And nobody can seem to explain it in plain English to everybody. What's your explanation, Ben? How would you explain to people they can go on a packed United flight with 300 people in a canister for five fucking hours?
### Human: Yeah. I love it. And raising in public, I'm sorry, is just on brand. It's just more on brand for you. It's the way to go.### Assistant: I'm going to basically do like three webinars, where I'll just get on zoom, and people can go and you know, then they can submit questions and ask questions. And I'll just talk for 45 minutes or an hour about what our plans are, you'll get to listen in on those. And then I you know, I may want to go on the road and meet a couple people. because I you know, I did meet with some of the top endowments over the first three funds, but the funds were smaller. So there really wasn't room, you know, their minimum check size was 50. And the last one was 44 million. The two funds before that were 10 and 11 with a little recycling. So know, this one will go for a little bit bigger, I think, and we'll see how it goes, you know, and I'm going to be raising during a down market, I fully expect, you know, I'll fill up, you know, all the small checks or the medium sized checks, but it might take six months, perhaps even a year in this kind of a market for me to get the to round up the bigger checks, but I'm okay with that. I think my understanding is fund managers used to take a full year to two years to raise a fund. they would start raising the funds start investing, people will look at the performance of the first six months of investments. And then that would incent more people to come in because they get a little more insight into how you're doing as a fund. So but the fund does need to close, there's, you know, a reasonable window. And I think the reasonable window is one year. So I'll be kicking that off in September, like, and then tomorrow for a year, and I'm gonna have to go get on planes and go meet people and shake hands and all kinds of cities. And maybe even internationally and say, Hey, here's what we're doing. You want to put a chip in and be partners with us. And I'm kind of excited to do it because I never sell I never go out and sell. I never take credit for what I do. I'm not selling. And this I'm excited to go out and see and pitch people and say, Hey, here's what I'm doing. Like, is this exciting to you? Would you like to, you know, put five or 10 or $25 million into this fund? I'm kind of excited about it.
### Human: Yeah, totally. I have created, I think, what I'm, I consider this very amorphous bucket for the things you're describing that I call behavior. You know, like, I'm into gigatons, I'm into behavior, how can you adapt consumer behavior in some way or change it or change people's behavior or change the way that companies operate? And then I'm into systems. which you've talked about before, you know?### Assistant: Well, some of our peers, uh, look at things like, um, gigatons, you know, like if it, if it's, you know, we need to see that, that it'll, you know, reduce or remove a half a gigaton per year of, of emissions when it's, you know, upon success, right. When it's in its, its fullest form or, or, or things like that. And, um, we're big believers that there should be some accountability and that we should be tracking and reporting on impact. I think one challenge that we have is that we think that gigatons are certainly important, but but it's not the only thing that matters, at least in our worldview. And for example, if we if there were a company that were out there taking workers from dying industries and reskilling them to, you know, to be out there building the infrastructure to power the clean energy transition, then we think that's highly impactful. But would that pass the half a gigaton test? Right. Probably not. Right. But we should still do that investment and be proud of it. Right. Or what's another example? Let's say there's a media company that is out there winning hearts and minds and like hitting people between the eyes and getting them to say, aha, like this is the challenge of our lifetime. And I need to do something about this from wherever I sit. Right. And it inspires instead of like the, you know, a few thousand people in the MCJ community, it inspires like, you know, 50 million people, right? Well, is that impactful for the climate movement? I think it is, right? How many gigatons is it responsible for pulling out of the air or otherwise reducing, right? Well, I don't know if you can do that math, right? But that passed our climate test. So we don't know yet what the right metrics are for us, but it's something that we absolutely think that we need long term. And Uh, and I would say we'll we'll come and for now what we rely on is just when we uh, when we do an investment or do anything for that matter when we have a guest on the show what like, you know, we We're public about it as public as we can be and um, and we feel accountability to explain ourselves, um in our decision making with the understanding That sometimes we have blind spots and that the feedback helps us get better and smarter over time
### Human: Here is there it amazingly gets even worse. This testimony, but you understand the dance and pretty soon, of course, I understand the dance. I'm a 20 year journalist, like I understand the dance. I am just saying this dance about the dance at every company all day every day. And there are so many sins. There are so many sins that I think, like, I'm just trying to keep a lot of things in my head at the same time. One, Twitter is a security nightmare to 10 years later, maybe no more or less a security nightmare than Facebook or Enron or T-Mobile, which has been hacked like 10,000 times in the last like 10 years, right? And I don't I think there's a there's a no comment part of this that is an eagerness for Twitter to be in the wrong here that I am holding in my head at the same time. Yeah. And also, Twitter is a disaster. And it's historically been a disaster.### Assistant: So we see it as uses of the product, all the releases, we know that they're not good at this. And especially not compared to cameras, we know much is great at this. And we know the board, they didn't invest their money. These are people who are ceremonially put on the board, and they all got, you know, a couple million dollars in shares. And we know they are CYA. They're not the founders of the company. So what would happen in a situation like this? Executive team races to clean stuff up and to spin it to the board to squash the issue. That's typically what happens. And there's a negotiated settlement. Maybe this wasn't as bad. Maybe how can we spin this? Oh, somebody went and spent $50,000 on stuff they shouldn't have spent. Oh, they accidentally use the wrong card, where they were traveling, and their personal card didn't work. They use their professional one, they forgot to change the expense report. I'm just using the classic expense report, right? Thing. And it's like, Oh, yeah, no, it was a complete oversight. He paid the money back, and they put interest on it. We can squash this issue. Oh, there was a misunderstanding between two people who dated at the company. Oh, yeah, we paid for that person's two years of salary. They said nothing happened. They signed this agreement. It was just a misunderstanding. That's the dance. And here we are, we're in the middle of the dance. And now you have to ask yourself, who's the most credible the CIA board, the CIA cover your exact team or Prague or this guy? I'm going with this guy. And the fact that he commissioned a report, and then they went and told the people doing the report to not give him the information, but to give it to them and to not include certain information. And the people making the report felt so uncomfortable. They told much if this is true. if because that's the next group that's going to get pulled up is that security team, and they might have the receipts that they said do not put these three things in the report and do not give it too much. Yeah, that's the cover up that to me is the whole game right there. They got if that's true, it's game over for the entire management team there. And it's a it's a it's hundreds of millions in fines, and settlements with shareholders. That's my prediction.
### Human: Like with the top 100 items, maybe a five star or four star Amazon like that.### Assistant: Like what a great merger. Well, no, that's what I think I, you know, we have like one of those, we talked about hotels, talk about hotels, there was, we have like a communal, you know, gym at the resort where I have a ski house, and they have two pelotons there. And I was like, Oh, maybe I'll jump on a bike. I've never done I do the treadmill. it was like, Oh, you have to log it and type your login in. And I was like, and I was like, why don't have the QR code here? I was about to do it, but I ran into the weights. But I think this would be the move. If I had a bunch of cash or a private equity, this is a free private equity play, go by tonal, hydro, and peloton. And then go find gyms that are going out of business or maybe a gym, like 24 hour fitness, and put these assets together. come up with a brand name. peloton seems like the best one to use. So make it the peloton hydro make the peloton tonal. And then just make it 24 hours a day. You come in anytime you want like 24 hour fitness. And these could be like a different footprint size, you know, and you could put them into apartment buildings or flow, whatever you want colleges, and you get access to all this equipment. If you have a membership and the membership allows you to go to any of those anywhere they are, it would be brilliant. Be brilliant. That's like recording everything is so much. It's such a game changer when you record all your workouts, and you can see them in one interface. So right now, at Apple Health, lets me sync my Peloton workouts and my tonal workouts, my fit bod workouts. And then like, if I do an outdoor, you know, have an outdoor bike ride or walk, you know, that's built into Apple. So I kind of see everything in one place is kind of nice, that they can import the Peloton stuff. So this is why Apple could have a series of gyms, or Amazon could have a series of gyms, like they're going into healthcare, and it's about prevention now. So if you put it under the health rubric, my Lord, what a great imagine if they because Amazon's doing retail. Imagine if Amazon what do they call their quick service or their top stores?
### Human: I wish I could tell you, Jason. I think it's going to be, you know, if you think about drone delivery, that's a huge headache because of the FAA regulations. Autonomous cars, very difficult as well because you just have so many municipalities you have to go through and you're not going to be able to, you know, just you force your way through here the way Uber used to. So, it's just not going to work like that. It's going to have to involve the cities and so, you're going to see pilots right now already you know, KiwiBot on you know, college campuses and I think it's going to work in like corporate campuses, educational you know, like colleges, universities. But as far as connecting the whole US into a network of autonomous last-mile delivery, it would probably be DoorDash's dream to have that, but that could be decades away.### Assistant: That's kind of interesting. This Denver based next bite I hadn't heard about. But they did hot box by Wiz Khalifa. Get it. Brisket burnt ends or barbecue sauce, a turkey burger, basically, I guess, stuff to eat when you're high. hotbox get it. Of course, yeah, Gene Simmons, and Paul Stanley of kiss, getting into it, they'll do anything they sell their brand for anything. But it is a really good idea. And what an interesting idea for Chili is, and I guess they own that Maggiano. But you have this incredible footprint. And you say, Yeah, let's just start wings are easy. you can teach people how to make wings, people love wings, wings are high margin. So at some point, like Starbucks is going to look at this and say, Hey, we have x number of Starbucks stores, we could have like a little thing in the back of the Starbucks store, or we could be come up with a Boba brand. And we don't even have to put boba on the menu. We just have a boba cloud kitchen, although they would they have a strong brand. I think they do have kind of boba s drinks now I saw. But yeah, this this will be a trend that stays. Yeah, something new comes out, trends, and then everybody in the country can experience it reminds me of the cronut. Remember the cronut came out in New York and everyone lost their minds about. And then people started in on the west coast. I remember they made their own version of like donut croissants. They got sued or whatever. You can't trademark a recipe, but you can trademark a name. But in the cronut, cronut example, cronuts could have been deployed nationally within, I don't know, 30 days or something. You could just share the recipe and have a cloud kitchen open in every city. So that's what we're gonna say about robotic delivery. Is that going to happen? You think you all these little r2d2 robots we see running around cities. It's been five years of this, you know, they get made fun of on, you know, Silicon Valley and whatever. But it does seem like you know, if one of those gets in an accident or gets destroyed or gets run over, it's no big deal. It's like somebody lost their burrito. Nobody lost their lives. Are those gonna become a thing? And if so, when?
### Human: I know Bing. Bing is, he was like Mark Pincus's mentor, KPMG. I've met him a bunch of times.### Assistant: Yeah, yeah. So he's a partner at KP now and he's on the board of Amazon. And he was the first chief creative officer at Electronic Arts. And he has this line I really like, which is, every company has a small list of what he calls golden rituals. And there are three tests of golden rituals. Let me see if I can get them right. number one here actually I have I have his quote right here let me tell you okay number one three golden three characters of golden rituals number one they are named number two every employee knows them by their first Friday and three they are templated And when he told me, it totally resonated with me. Okay, that's what we do at Coda. And just to give you an example, one of the things, if you ask any Coda employee who's been here for a week, what the Coda golden rituals are, they'll talk about this thing we call Dorian Pulse. And very simple idea. If you're in a meeting in Coda or you write a document or so on, you almost always add what's called a Dory. A Dory is a, it looks like a Q&A tool. So you hit slash Dory in a Coda doc and it's named after the fish from Finding Nemo who asked all the questions. And you add questions and you can vote them up and down. And it's a very simple idea, but it's a big part of our rituals because what it allows is instead of you get in this meeting and everybody just starts asking questions and whoever's the loudest person dominates the meeting, you get this ability for everybody can contribute. We do a second one called Pulse. Very similar idea, but you hit slash Pulse in the code doc, you'll get a table with a row per person where everybody puts in their opinion. You say, hey, should we Should we go on Jason's podcast? And everybody will write in there, but you click a little checkbox and it hides everybody else. So you like privately write yours, and then you click it and you show it again. And these two things together are the heart of how we're able to scale quickly and bring all the best ideas together. So I'd say, how does Coda get used? You know, it's a new type of doc, people build apps on it. But really the thing that Coda represents for people is a way to take their rituals and turn them into actionable ideas for their team. So lots of great examples of that.
### Human: What hasn't worked? What have you tried that you found that you just had to spike because it turned out kind of cringe?### Assistant: Totally. Yeah. I mean, we just want to make people laugh. That's all. And it's like, especially in beverage and CPG, people think way too rationally. But then you look at other categories, and people don't like horror movies, for example. Like, Jordan Peele does Get Out, one of the biggest movies that there was that year, horror movie. How many different kinds of people go to be entertained by that horror movie? It's not just metalheads and punk rock people. It's moms, women, young, old. It's anybody that... And I think that's the thing that CPGs always got wrong. People think Okay, if you have a product that has a female consumer, you have to put a flower on it, you've got to use pink, but you look at data, and a couple years ago, the number two most popular scripted show for women was The Walking Dead, a show about flesh eating zombies. Number one was This Is Us, which is, you know, its own kind of thing. But like, you have data showing that Tons of women are entertained by this, but how many female-centric brands are doing a zombie campaign? I think you just have to look outside of the very myopic CPG industry and look at other industries and borrow from their entertainment, for one, especially when we're creating entertainment. Yeah, it's just about we just want to make people laugh. And it's not an easy thing. It's like comedy is hard. Like you look at very super veteran comedians like Jerry Seinfeld, when he does a 60 minute special, he spends a year or two going around the little tiny clubs testing jokes out because even he doesn't know what's going to be funny or not. It's like he thinks something, oh, this is going to kill and it doesn't work. But then some little aside that he does has the crowd roaring. He's like, oh, that's funny. I'm going to turn that into something. So we kind of feel the same way. It's like we have to really hit a narrow target sometimes where if it's Two degrees this way, it's lame and not funny. Two degrees this way, it's actually offensive and untasteful and people don't want to laugh at it. It's really hard to hit that bullseye, but I think we've got the right sensibility and taste to be able to do it constantly because that's just what we do.
### Human: Well, Elon made a huge contribution. To be sure, he's now built a company that's more valuable than the next 10 automobile companies in the world. And so not only did he make one of the most valuable companies in the world, and not only did he popularize the whole notion of electric vehicles, but he put the rest of the industry on notice. And I guarantee you, Mary Barra, who we interviewed for the book of of General Motors, the CEO of Ford, they're paying close attention to what the market is saying about it. And honest truth is most people are buying Teslas because they're better vehicles, not for the climate benefits which come from them. So we're very clear in our goal setting that for this transformation of society to occur, we've got to dramatically lower costs across every technology that is green. Our friend Bill Gates talks about the green premium. Well, Ryan says we've got to turn the premiums into discounts, green discounts, because that's the only way we're going to get this done at scale and at speed. The way I like to put it is, we've got to make the right outcome, the profitable outcome, so it's the probable outcome to achieve all of our climate goals. Ryan, why don't you cite a couple of the key results in the electrification of transportation?### Assistant: I want to tell you for a minute about one of the original innovators in no code, and that company is Bubble. Bubble empowers anyone to design and launch their own apps, marketplaces, or any kind of tool without coding skills or pricey engineers. You heard that right. Mary Fox, a launch portfolio founder, quit her six-figure job after she discovered Bubble, and she decided to build a professional coaching startup called Marwa. We invested in it. Now, Bubble offers a digital editor and a cloud hosting platform starting at just $29 a month. I kid you not. It's super affordable. users can build almost any complex web app today using no code. And you can make SAS tools, social networks, and you can spend way less time building out your MVP, which is great, because then you if you have an MVP, yeah, you can start meeting with investors, and you can start getting feedback from customers. And that's how you win in startup land. So bubble utilizes drag and drop elements in their visual editor. So you can go from an idea to a launchable product in days or weeks, not months. Heck, it takes you months just to find one developer. bubble handles all the boring stuff like deployment and hosting. So you can focus just on your product and your customers. Bubble has over 1 million users and enables over $1 billion in business volume every year. Pretty amazing. So here's your call to action. Bubble is offering one month free on any of their paid plans ranging from $29 a month to $529 a month. but act fast because they're only offering this deal for the first 500 redemptions. Head to bubble.io slash twist and snag one of those 500 coupons right now. And the first one up here, we've we've got six gigatons of carbon that could be eliminated on our OKR list from electrifying transportation. This feels like thanks to Elon, And a lot of other people too, but let's face it. He's the tip of the spear here in terms of making electric cars, you know, sexy for people and desirable. Maybe you could speak to what he's contributed here in terms of flipping the script from, you know, people looking at the Prius is like kind of a lame car to all of a sudden. just young people, older people, just cross generations, want to own an electric vehicle, because it's a better experience. And it makes them feel good about, you know, themselves for maybe contributing to solving this problem.
### Human: Makes total sense. Now, what about materials? Because that seems to be, I get pitched a lot on this. I had one company that was pitching me that in Japan, when you order, you don't order appliances, in Japan, you just say, I want this kitchen or I want this bathroom. And it comes as like one or two modular pieces that just go dunk and they plug in and it's all like, everything is already one piece, right? As opposed to when we build something here in the United States where it's bespoke, right? Or then there's something in between, like I mentioned, polyform is like, I guess they're Italian or something like that. That's like the higher end of the spectrum where it seems like all these homes are using some of the similar cabinetry. Has that changed the industry a whole bunch? Can you speak about that?### Assistant: Yeah, so people think about prefab as being this huge part of the industry. And it gets a lot of play, because it's cool to talk about, like, I can just order a house online and get it delivered to my lot. And so there are places like Japan is the most heavily penetrated for prefab of almost any country, Germany has a fair amount of it as well. But we're still talking in general about low single digits, even in places where it's heavily penetrated. And so in, you know, in the spectrum of building houses, I think that fully prefab houses are going to be for many, many years, a really small portion of the industry, and maybe forever, a small portion of why is that not happening in America, the way it happens in Germany, the Nordics or Japan? So it's happening, even in those places, it is still a small percent of everything that's being built. So it's not like everybody does everything prefab there. It's just more penetrated than here, but still very small percentage of total. There are a bunch of reasons in the US for it. Some of it is permitting complications where things need to meet certain code, and it's harder to deal with them. There are other, you know, you look at like, we look at often people come to us and say, Well, I really want to do a prefab home. and we're super happy to install prefab homes for people. And we have several of them underway. But many times when we look at the plan for what somebody wants to do in terms of a prefab home, we can stick build on site for just as fast and cheaper than many prefab home manufacturers. And so today, it's really a cost thing. But it's also you're paying a lot for it. And people generally aren't getting the customization that they need. If you have any complexity around the topography of your lot, it gets even harder. So we're building a bunch of houses in Malibu, and it's just hard to get a prefab home there. So when I think about the importance of prefab and other materials technology or building means and methods that are changing, there's tremendous opportunities, but I think the bigger opportunities are in components. So you think about, you know, you can build roof trusses, and you can build entire walls in a panelized way in a factory, and then you can bring them on site. And you can erect them on site much faster than if you were doing that just in a stick.
### Human: Well, there was one specific time, and I I remember it vividly, I'd like to say, and it was, I put it out on the tweet. I was sitting in front of a Walmart and, um, you know, I had no money in my account. I mean, it was less than a dollar, a dollar. I think it was around 83 cents when I was, uh, the thing specifically somewhere around there. And I just felt like giving up, like literally killing myself, you know, like I was contemplating, you know, there was that pivot point of, do I just give up and just kill myself or, you know, do I like lift myself out almost? So just like I said on the tweet, I didn't really know how to describe it. It wasn't like a out of body experience or something, but you know, I had a crappy 1995 Ford Thunderbird and the rear view mirror wasn't even attached to the, to like the ceiling of the car. So I grabbed it out of the back seat. I looked at myself and you know, right then it was the weirdest thing ever, but it was like almost like a fire lit in me because it's almost like talking to myself outside of myself. And I said, you know, every day from that point on, I'm going to live for myself until I die. That's the way I said it to myself. It sounds weird out loud. And even when I was typing it, it sounded weird, but it made perfect sense to me. And it was one of the, it was like a euphoric moment or something like where I just said, I'm going to live for myself at that point. And I think it was the day after or two days later. I can say this is where the story ramps up because I went to the library and I applied for every job imaginable. I didn't put in a job title like you have to do on Indeed or ZipRecruit or Monster.com or Dice.com or whatever. I just put Vineland, New Jersey and I think like 50 mile radius or something like that and press search and every single job that came up, I applied for it.### Assistant: And when we get back from this quick break, I wanna talk about the comeback, when we get back on This Week in Stardom. It's time for you to close that laptop. It's time to shut it all down and chill out with, you know, that sound. Get ready. It's coming. Oh, there it is. That crispy Coors Light. I'm going to have a little bit right now. I love that ice cold taste of that Coors Brewing Company in Golden, Colorado, where they're made to chill. There is no doubt that summer is going to be different this year. We all know that. Festivals, sporting events, weddings, everything's in the rear view mirror right now. But just because the plans have changed doesn't mean summer is canceled. Nope. Summer is here. And you can crack open that cold Coors Light. And you know, it was born in the Rocky Mountains back in 1978. Coors Light, it's refreshing, it's crisp, and only 102 calories. So that means, you know, you can have one and not feel too guilty about it. I'm gonna take a little sip right now. So crisp, so cold. Coors Light is my beer of choice when I need to unplug and when you're ready to reset this summer, when you're ready to unplug, reach for that beer that is made to chill. You can even have Coors Light delivered by going to get.coorslight.com. and find a local delivery option near you. I did that recently and had a couple of those 12-packs delivered to the Cala compound, and we cracked open some cold Coors Light by the pool this weekend, and it was crisp and cool. Now remember, I want you to celebrate responsibly. Of course you know that. Coors Light, mountain cold refreshment, and it is made to chill. Let's get back to this amazing episode. Okay. The problem when I crack open a cold Coors Light, you know what the problem is? I just want another one. That is so refreshing. All right, everybody, Chris Ahtoke is here with me, King Ahtoke, A-T-O-K-E on the Twitter. His tweet went viral. His story, pretty brutal up until this point. You hit bottom, no job, no money, no home. And just a couple of months out from getting that associate's degree, you have to drop out. What happens next? How do you rebuild?