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### Human: Clubhouses, chief clubhouses, spaces, spaces. We're obviously on a podcast, so you can't see it. But I'm in one right now. You can see the background. Yeah, I mean, I think for us, spaces have have served a few purposes for us. We, when we launched a few years ago, and I hope we've changed some of the perception of this. But when you said, we're starting a women's professional network, what was created in people's minds, it was not necessarily a very aspirational brand. You say that, which is really unfortunate, because you say that and you're like, okay, so it's name tags, pantsuits, and warm white wine. That's what comes into your mind. Definitely yoga.### Assistant: I've been to those conferences. |
### Human: Whatever old stuff they can license. I mean, Amazon set up free like They've had their version of this forever, too, because they're trying to get in on it as well. And yeah, Fox held on to Tubi, which is another big one. I think another great thing about this is a lot of the time you want to watch something new, hot, like a like a hit, like a big premium peak TV show. But there are some times where you want to watch an old movie or some random old TV show you like. And these services are great for that. Like I had watched a bunch of the Hellraisers because they're the Hulu had the new one.### Assistant: And that's really interesting because they pop up on your like Roku, you know, I have a Roku TV like a lot of people who don't spend tons of money on TVs have. So all of us who bought TCLs, and it was a lot of us, are like, so you see these services on your Roku homepage, basically, and you're like, is this legal? Is this real? And then you start clicking on it for fun. And you realize like, there's one called Fossum, which is free, awesome. And it's just like crappy, like Sharknado style movies galore. It is so fun. |
### Human: Thanks so much for having me, Molly. I've been a fan of the show for a while, so I'm excited to be able to participate.### Assistant: Awesome. Well, let's start with the basics. Tell us about PearPop and what it does. |
### Human: Absolutely. Well, it will be a pleasure to do it. And thank you so much for having me Jason. This is amazing.### Assistant: Listen, if you want to be an entrepreneur or start a side project, Squarespace is an amazing place for you to start. Squarespace is the platform where you can build or sell anything. You all know about it. I've talked about Squarespace forever, but there's so many great features that they've been adding year after year. That's why we use them here at launch for all our websites, remotedemoday.com. You can see one of our latest websites and Here are some of the features that you need to know about because Squarespace has not only the tools to make a beautiful, well-designed site that's responsive on mobile and iPads, it also has e-commerce built in. And they do inventory management APIs, advanced analytics, in addition to those beautiful templates, plus they now have something called member areas. What are those? These let you generate revenue through exclusive members-only content. For example, you can sell a subscription to a cooking class or custom recipes or your photographs, whatever it is, If you can think of it, you can build it on Squarespace and you don't have to give 15% of your top line to those other platforms, which is really greedy. That's way too high of a take. They also have appointment scheduling now, so you can add online booking to your Squarespace website. Head to squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. all of that in one simple platform. And when you're ready, you can use the offer code twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. We love you Squarespace. Thanks so much for being the longest running partner here at this week in startups. That means a lot to me. Hey, everybody, welcome to this week in startups Molly. it is thursday therefore we have this week in streaming with lon harris it has been an eventful eventful week for us this is the most eventful week in the history of this week in streaming because last week i uh was a little offended a little bit by A.O. Scott, the famous movie critic, cinema critic at the New York Times for making a top 10 list of films, the 10 best films of, unbelievable. |
### Human: Oh, yeah. Yeah, we're gonna be the alpha for very long. Yeah, I don't know, man. This feels like, um, yeah, all very slowly. And then all of a sudden, is what's happened.### Assistant: It really is like it's happened. So I mean, we've, it just feels like generative AI. And maybe it was, I mean, do you remember that, like, not very long ago, Google fired one of its AI researchers who were like, it was like, it's alive. Yeah, literally, like, Yeah, the guy was like, it's alive. And he started sending emails to his colleagues being like, it is sentient. And they booted him because Google AI is weird. |
### Human: He says, raise what you need is what I say, even staying small, but I think appropriate is really like, there's an optimal number here. And if you go too far above it, because you can, yeah, you just be careful, I think is what Bill's trying to say here. So I just love this first concept here.### Assistant: And you have to get we've been talking about this so many times like the multiples get unmanageable. If you have a billion dollar fund and you have to return 20 billion dollars, it's so much harder. It's really hard. It's really hard. So anyway, yes, also staying small, love it. |
### Human: People weren't digging it.### Assistant: It was like, fine, weird scooter things. Alright, here we go. Now, let's get into notable people. Everybody loves the people. Best Twitter follow of the year. Okay? Best follow of the year. That guy, Casey. Casey... Casey what's his vibe? |
### Human: These people haven't bought you yet. I think they're banging the door down.### Assistant: We'll never, never say never, but you never know. Maybe somebody is listening. always open to fireside chats, but we're we've been pretty heads down operating and still so based in Manhattan, we have an Amsterdam presence through the through the taste of acquisition. But yeah, as you can tell, there's cast iron buildings behind me. So we're on Crosby right now and they get a couple jobs. Absolutely. Yep, absolutely. Sales, data, data science, API, devs, infrastructure folks. DevOps, the whole deal. Yeah, we're, we're, we're actively hiring. |
### Human: And I saw recently on Twitter, I think Jeff Bezos recently followed you. Is that right? Oh, yeah. That must feel... Yeah.### Assistant: I wish I could. Um, the, the, the, yeah, there isn't, you know, I've been asked this question before and I really should have a better answer. What is a podcast about? There isn't a central theme. I would say I just like to interview people I'm interested in. A lot of them end up being, um, economists or scientists or philosophers. And I try to ask them questions that somebody who has read all their work would ask them who wants to go deep into their ideas. |
### Human: And then the question becomes, what does that look like, though? What does it look like for the Biden administration, too? Because you know that behind the scenes, Apple, Intel, right? Hollywood, all of Hollywood, the NBA, like you look at how private industry has caved to China over and over and over because they need this market. Like, you know that they're in these rooms saying to the administration, like, just can you can you go as far as you can with sanctions, but not like too far?### Assistant: Or at a certain point, we say it's not worth it. And I think that's the moment we're at. Because if you look at it, I think now the NBA has a player, Ennis Cantor, who is now renamed himself Ennis Cantor Freedom. And I DM'd with him recently and I've been retweeting his stuff. He basically said, like, listen, I'm just going to go and he's, you know, his His uh employment by the nba is not certain. He's not like a top 50 player. He's a top 200 player 150 player um, he Uh has been very vocal and he has not been ostracized now. Whereas darryl mori, um, Who did say, you know, very innocuously we I support hong kong Yeah, you know was admonished and you know I I'm reticent to pick out specific people to say You know, LeBron James or Tim Cook or any other folks are supportive of human rights violations. I think a lot of those people think engagement with China is going to lead to change. I don't agree with them. I think we have to put our foot down. And now China's basically said, you know what? we're going on our own anyway, we're not going to let you invest in these companies, all the IPOs are going to be in Hong Kong, we're not going to let jack Ma be a national hero. So they have become insular. So now I think actually, it's reversing, everybody is going to offshore and reduce their dependency on China, whether it's Apple, whether it's Tesla, whether it's any of these companies, you're going to see a disengagement process start. I think that's what's happening right now. Because It's very hard to disengage after 30 or 40 years of Apple being there or the NBA spending 20 years with Yao Ming and other folks trying to build this relationship. But if China doesn't want the relationship with the West anymore, now the great decoupling happens and Japan is paying to Japan is subsidizing factories leaving China, or subsidizing companies to do that. And I think what we're seeing is the great uncoupling and it's going to be messy. But I don't want to put, you know, Tim Cook under too hard of a microscope here. I want to give him time to get out of China, basically, and become less dependent on it. |
### Human: Yeah, exactly. It's still early. OK, well, talk to me about speaking of our future co-investments, how Terawatt spawned Keyframe Capital.### Assistant: So just, you know, yes, excited about the things that have happened over the last year, but, um, relative to 2017, like we were buying property where that had good inner interconnect. And some people were like, what are you doing with your lives? So, you know, um, the last year, you know, uh, yeah, I think the, the, the IRA was, is, is, is so exciting for, um, for energy transition in a lot of ways, but I think for, for vehicle electrification, specifically for fully electrification, it's kind of more like a, like a rising tides thing. There's like a, there's a couple of, you know, tax credits that are nice, but we're already moving at max velocity because of what I said before about, um, the timeline for infrastructure development. I mean, it takes 18 months to two years to develop anything material. And the RA has not addressed anything about, um, you know, permitting or didn't give any additional resources to utilities to work on, you know, interconnection, queue backlogs or anything like that. And, you know, I think having more public charging stations out there and more people driving EVs will bring positive sentiment to the fleet manager that I mentioned earlier, who might, you know, not have been that interested in the conversation earlier. But there's a lot of... There's significant blocking and tackling that has to happen. But it's such a... It's early days in a market that is just so big and exciting. Yeah. Yeah. I feel lucky and excited. And it's a really fun team to be working with. Yeah. So... I don't know what's EV in the climate syndicate yet, but hopefully you have some fun things as well. |
### Human: Yeah, there's a certain part of the market where we're just not a good fit for like fine dining that has a hundred different little tiny dishes. But there's this other great part where there's a lot of consistency and it's simple and we can handle that.### Assistant: Yeah, getting people to adopt the technology. I guess some people might want China or like maybe certain types of plates. They want fancier plates. Are there any Roblox? Yeah. |
### Human: It's not Glenn Gary.### Assistant: David Mamet didn't write this bad boy, but you get what I'm saying. In that it feels like an attempt to sort of riff on that style of storytelling or the social network. I mean, that Fincher film and Sorkin's style in general, I feel like they're kind of cribbing. |
### Human: Honestly, you can't. And in a world of a Cubanist, more Cubanist activists, Americans, unfortunately, are fortunate. Well, I think it's all fortunate. I'm Canadian living in America. So when you walk into a Walgreens, there's just too many choices, like we're paralyzed, right? So you go find a bandage, should I get a Power Rangers bandit or a super bandit or a big bandit, this one colors and ribbons and, and, and that's the stock market too, right? Like, so at the end of this long bull market that we've had, can argue about a lot of things, but we had a really good bull market. And most people's portfolios by last year were just spread too thin. We had too many ideas. We had too many companies. We had too many stocks. We had too many stories. That's when bear markets get you. And it'll end up pruning you down anyways, because after 6 months of losing money, you go, why the fuck do I own this? And so those few times during a bear market where markets truly get correlated and everything goes down together, you realize that owning 50 things just didn't diversify you at all. So I think the best thing is whether it's 30 stocks or 20 stocks, whatever your goal is, then once a month or once a quarter with your financial advisor yourself, go through it and be honest with yourself. It's just the best use of these 10 or 15 or 20 names. And And it's like gardening. If you don't garden, your weeds will take over and it's your portfolio. It's really the same stuff.### Assistant: Yeah, this is what I'm starting to realize about the streaming services. So I did. And then we'll move on to some of the other names that I've been picking and, and some other parallels with the streaming services. It feels to me like we have never seen a billion subscription service. I was trying to figure out what are the largest subscription services in the world, right? |
### Human: Fountain is just... It's so good.### Assistant: And then more recently... Do you know who was supposed to star in the Fountain? |
### Human: Hereditary was terrifying.### Assistant: It's terrifying but in a weird gets in your head unsettling way exorcist kind of way right not in a michael myers is stalking teens through suburbia kind of way which is what a lot of harvest a lot of harvests they just want the conjuring that's what that's what horror is it's a it there's a there's bumps in the night and you're looking at and then something jumps out at you and it's a demon and that's it i think this is a theme though this jason blum guy is pretty smart because have an other |
### Human: Also, I just looked this up while we're talking, going to get Spotify and Shopify, which I think could be pretty interesting as well. Just as a side note, like what's happening with shopping and what is going on at Spotify?### Assistant: Oh, I haven't checked my Fidelity account or my Vanguard account in some time. No one wants to know. |
### Human: Obviously, like, much get all those cars off the road and replace a lot of them with electric scooters. Boom, you're talking about a massive traffic and environmental impact done.### Assistant: Well, and you think about it as an investment. It's like people, it would be like a new product for Americans, you know, and so that means you have to educate them, it's risky that it up, but it could also be exhilarating and fun. And you could get behind a new trend where people say, I don't want a giant car taking me home, I want to save money, I want to save gasoline, I want to have less of an environmental impact. I don't want I want to get there quicker. Yeah, because these things just can go right to the front of the line, they're allowed to split traffic. So the revel scooters, and some of those electric scoot, I guess, with the other company, those became a little bit of a phenomenon in New York, whatever. |
### Human: Good question. I don't think we ever really wanted to keep up. But there's a there's a gap. There's like some ban. Let's say we're 25% more disciplined or whatever. We can't be 50% and still work with the best founders on the planet. So I think there, there was, you know, some pricing pressure that the people who weren't feeding prices definitely posed a real challenge to our normal discipline. We're not immune from the entire world. That said, They offer a different value proposition. Tiger's offering you money. And for the most part, I don't think of my job as offering founders money. It's really not solely money. I expect to provide... I think founders expect me to provide advice, counsel, wisdom, feedback, interview assessments of executives, closing help on assessments. Tiger does literally none of those things. Yeah. So the pricing of my dollars investing shouldn't be the same as Tiger's in any possible scenario anyway. But I think they were basically pursuing a portfolio strategy, which is you don't really care about the price of any one asset. You care about the portfolio construction as a whole. And in a hot market, let's say a decade-long hot market, which is 2010-2020, having the right portfolio will trump a lot of micro pricing decisions. We at Founders Fund are in what we call the... Like our brand, we're in the business of backing the most extraordinary founders on the planet, period, what we call internally N of 1 companies. So Elon found SpaceX. That's the N of 1 company. Nobody else in 2005 was going to build SpaceX. That's what our job is. So we're trying to get the alpha, not trying to have a beta portfolio.### Assistant: Here's another prediction for you dovetails nicely back in February of 2019. Episode 905, a classic, you can listen to right now in the archives, keeps that his biggest concern was how the Fed would react in the next crisis. We're definitely on borrowed time, you said 35 minutes into the program. Another quote, the government has the Federal Reserve and a bunch of decision makers have turned most of the dials already. So when there's a blip, the tools at their disposal to modulate the blip have already been used. So what that means is the ability to sort of soften the blow of some crisis isn't really available. We've sort of spent that capital and hence the reaction is going to be much more severe, because we won't be able to deaden the blow. And that scares me. And it scares a lot of my smart friends because they know how valuable those tools are and why they've been successful. So That's a pretty good analysis of 2019 considering in 2020. |
### Human: You know, so when I started this, I was I think like 20 years old. And, you know, obviously I didn't have your background or Paul Graham's background. And so we kind of just did it like Steve Blank taught us where at Stanford, which is, you know, you put your product out there, you iterate, you listen to customer feedback. And what we ended up finding is that there are these kind of three categories of entrepreneurs. There's the very first time ones that are saying, I don't know what to do, help me please, like I'm, or they act like they know everything, but they're secretly terrified. Then there's the second, you know what I mean? Then there's the second time, there's the second time entrepreneurs who, maybe they had a small exit, and they actually do think they know everything. And they generally fail, because they don't ask for help, or try to learn new things, because they think they just know how to do it. And then there are the really experienced entrepreneurs, who have succeeded multiple times, And they know that they constantly need to be learning. And so it was interesting because we had these very hyper-successful entrepreneurs who came to us and said, hey, can I join the program? We're like, why would you want to join our community? You're so experienced. And they said, well, the reason why I'm so successful is because I try to learn things quickly. And when I'm a mentor to these younger entrepreneurs coming out of Stanford, I get much less high quality unfiltered information than if I'm their peer. And so, yeah, it was really interesting. And so they basically, they were telling us they were learning as much from, you know, how to, you know, what the new development stacks are, what the new business models are they're teaching in school, also the recruiting networks. You know, when you have a bunch of these kids out of Stanford that go, they work at, I don't know, what's the, like Stripe or, you know, back when I was starting this was like Palantir and Facebook. Those are excellent resources to have to recruit from their kind of the younger people's networks because they kind of have their executive networks. But digging into those younger people's networks to grow their team is also significantly helpful.### Assistant: And now, let me ask a simple question. I understand why a first-time founder would come, very obvious. I understand why somebody who's part of the community and maybe very early in their life of their company, even if it's their second time at BAT, let's say, would come. Great to have the network, great to have that camaraderie. and get a little early feedback with somebody who's in that phd category sold their company already third or fourth time come to the program what do they hope to get out of it why are they doing it |
### Human: You know, it's a bit of a patchwork on the different jurisdictions in which, which exchanges are regulated where and how and these things. So I'm not sure I can sort of comment credibly on those things specifically. But I think In general, there's a lot of ways to figure out what these addresses are. And there's also even a trend towards people more self-reporting, you know, tying it to their Twitter account. When it comes to NFTs, it's a lot about social signaling, and it's like your dart on your internet wall, right? So you really do want to be public and more and more people have these Ethereum names that are also in their Twitter profiles and all that, right.### Assistant: So there's like a myriad of ways in which this activity has more context, really, when that wouldn't that be interesting, Molly, if you could take the coinbase ones, and then some offshore account, and then just compare the Solana holdings, the NF, you know, board apes, you know, pick a major project, just Bitcoin trades for people who are legit, and then people maybe who are hiding. So what are the people who don't want to be known doing with their Bitcoin versus the people who are don't care if they're known and are regulated and do pay taxes be really fascinating. I'd love to see some of those reports. |
### Human: Accepting people in these early stages means you're going to make a lot of mistakes. That's part of the game, right? If you're going to get in early, you're going to accept people who you will eventually regret having accepted or, you know, who might disappoint you. How do you deal with having your name on a company where you're no longer rooting for the founder? where the founder has disappointed you or behaved badly. How do you deal with that as an accelerator with them as a graduate with your logo in their deck?### Assistant: The only way a founder disappoints us is if they act unethically. Which happens. Which happens, but it's very rare. So it has happened to us, but it's probably happened once out of the 300 companies that we've funded, just to be clear. So I just want to make a distinction between that and not succeeding. So we actually think that it's not necessarily a failure if you didn't financially succeed, as long as you as long as you did it with all of your heart. And the reality for us is that if we had 100% success, we're not taking enough risks. So we want to be constantly, quote unquote, failing. We want to be exploring new markets. We funded an anti-matter company called Positron. Positron's great, and you guys should check them out. But that's going to be a path to figuring out how to build anti-matter to get to Mars. And the timing on that may have been different than Rigetti, which is a quantum computing company. But I love them both because they're both really true entrepreneurs. They're not starting a company because they want to be a founder. They want to actually change the world. |
### Human: And so I was on just laid off 18,000, 8000 employees total, a white collar, they laid off 10. And then another 18.### Assistant: No 10 and eight, I think, I think the 18 number is the total, or there was 10. And then they added a It's for a total of 18. We'll check. We'll check. I'm 99% sure about this. |
### Human: Right. Like, again, understanding how to navigate your way through. Now, the positive thing in this environment comes back to the emotional question you asked, right? There's a lot of people that actually can be quite helpful with this, including many of the investors sitting around the tables of many of these companies. The key, though, I think, from a CEO's perspective is to force the people sitting around the table to think hard about your business with you. rather than you as the leader just sort of deal with whatever platitudes are coming your way. Yeah. And use this as a moment to forge tighter relationships with the people sitting around the table, both your leadership team and your investors. Because you're trying to figure out how to navigate out of a challenging environment. And then the last is for companies and there are many companies plenty in our portfolio that are on very solid footing. I did plenty of capital, their businesses are working reasonably well, they were proactive in terms of their cost structures earlier in 2022. Or maybe they didn't have to be because they didn't get as far ahead of themselves for whatever reason. Like, in some cases, the companies actually this environment works better for them because of the demand characteristics of other things that are going on. whatever the reason is, those companies all of a sudden, can pick up lots of market share in this environment, because of the distress of their competitors. So it's understanding each company. And as a leader, figuring out what your company needs to do over the next couple of years, assuming that it's going to take a while before things get easier.### Assistant: Yeah. |
### Human: Should have said he went on.### Assistant: Yeah. And he's a W and K alum. So I guess that is one of the agencies. So this actually, I think, is the most interesting part of it. You know, they probably pay them a quarter million dollars a year to come up with ideas, they came up with the ideas. And what probably happened was all the ideas get put in a bucket or a database or you know, a document somewhere, maybe without attribution, or maybe it's in the back of somebody's mind. And they say, Hey, yeah, remember, we were talking about that QR thing, let's do that. Sure, they never attributed it. So it probably wasn't done out of malice. And then the victory lap was done without full knowledge. So it was unintentional. But I didn't exactly like Brian's response. Brian should have named the agency. Yes, exactly. |
### Human: I mean, let's go with early.### Assistant: Early in the life cycle, you probably are going to end up spending more of it outside of Amazon than inside because the way in which the Amazon search algorithm works impacts the ad algorithms. Much like Google has a quality score, that impacts how much you pay for no cpm or cpc is when you're bidding if amazon's never heard of you and your product just showed up it sometimes can be more expensive to advertise there than once you got a little bit of a track record so you might start with google actually or. You know with you know even spotify i mean there are a lot of places that you can do it the reality is that almost everybody who knows what they're doing can make money With amazon advertising it's that the system is frothy enough that there's just enough returns there i'd say less than ten percent of the people who are on amazon are good enough to be able to consistently make google advertising work for them on amazon. |
### Human: Because it's the same kind of idea where it's like a separate subscription that sort of lives within Apple TV plus.### Assistant: And if you're a subscriber, okay, so Apple, of course, acquired the rights to stream Major League Soccer, which is not that big here, but huge everywhere else. Let's remind everybody, like the biggest sport in the world or whatever. And there will be a discount for Apple TV plus subscribers. Major League Soccer is not a big deal around the world. That's the like US League. But the in the US, a much more important NFL Sunday ticket streaming deal is what's coming up in 2023. So the way it's going to work for consumers, the MLS pass is that it'll be 15 bucks a month. or $99 a season. But if you're an Apple TV plus subscriber, you get a discount. So it'll be $13 a month exactly or 79 bucks a season. And so we could imagine if they did that per Sunday ticket just |
### Human: It's also notable that a lot of the people in the film, not Lydia Tarr specifically, but a lot of the other people around her are supposed to be modeled on real life people. So Todd Field is making, like, the one that's really notable is Mark Strong. Mark Strong is playing a guy named Elliot Kaplan, who's a- Oh, he's great. It's amazing. desperately wants to be a composer. There's a real guy named Gil Kaplan. That's basically his story. He's a very wealthy banker who sort of bought his way into the conducting world and he's conducted Mahler's second symphony, but it's not very well regarded by people in the world of conducting. So if you are a classical music aficionado, you right away clock to Mark Strong is supposed to be That's the real guy. This poor guy. This gentleman passed away in 2016, so he doesn't have to see much of a play of it in a movie. There's also examples of conductors who've married their violinists from their orchestras. A lot of the elements of this movie, Todd Field must be a classical music fan.### Assistant: He's sort of lifted from real life. That is the other note too, which is that It's so interesting that this is such a generational study, because I think any Gen Z reviewer, like, if you put a Gen Z review next to the Richard Brody review, they are going to be completely different reviews, right? They're like totally different storylines, depending on what age you are, and what mindset you bring to this movie. However, the composer universe, the density of the immersion into the classical music and specifically like composer reference universe. Yeah. That's a big wall for somebody to get past in those first few minutes. It's brilliant. Like the, it's pitch perfect, no pun intended, but like to open a movie with a New Yorker author playing himself, interviewing her, that is so freaking referential. It's that I was like, okay, this must be a version of satire, but it's also so dense, that I could imagine a Gen Z like just turning it off. |
### Human: To make video games faster.### Assistant: Yes. Well, it turns out to make 3D graphics, you just have to crunch a bunch of relatively simple math really quickly. In what AI is in parallel, in parallel, then that's what makes it quick. And that's what AI is. You know, it's very funny, all these, um, All these startups raised all this money to go try and compete with NVIDIA, the data center. They were not aware of my water of life principle when it comes to competing with NVIDIA, the data center. And they had, like on every deck, it was like, how likely is it that chips that were developed for video games are good for AI? And it's like, well. 100% likely. |
### Human: Yeah, like, how do you stop that? With lawsuits? Yeah, lawsuits become the backstop. And once you once people see the possibility of the existential, basically, demise of their business, which YouTube did, that's, I mean, they would have been an independent company had they not had those lawsuits. Those lawsuits force you to settle and you will lose them. I think that it's I don't I don't think it's that that the law isn't codified is that the law is designed to not give a bright line so that there's less abuse and so that the market works it out. I think that's why it's like that. But it also depends on which market you're in. I think this might be filed in the UK for a reason. They may have started there because they know they're going to win there. And they know content protectors, just like people will jury shop here in the United States and they know California juries are super anti-capitalist and Texas ones and Delaware ones are super pro-capitalist. Yeah.### Assistant: And so, on the plus side, if that happens, then the data sets that the AI is trained on will be necessarily way smaller, which could extend the life of humanity. So, win-win, win-win. Also, it will just take longer for them to get smarter than us and kill us. |
### Human: This week on the Inside Transportation Podcast, Jason and I talk about whether it was acceptable for two electric vehicle companies to accept Paycheck Protection Program loans. We talk a bit about Anthony Lewandowski, Tesla's upcoming U.S. production facility. And Jason shares a celebrity story from the Cybertruck unveil event. Stay tuned to find out more. The Inside Transportation Podcast is sponsored by Ford Motor Company, built on the belief that freedom of movement drives human progress from connectivity to autonomy, AI to machine learning. Ford has one simple goal, to improve mobility for its customers. To learn more about Ford's work in mobility, autonomous vehicles, and their corporate efforts to improve mobility for its customers, visit corporate.ford.com. That's corporate.ford.com. The Inside Transportation podcast is also sponsored by Fenwick and West. Fenwick and West is one of the world's first and leading law firms dedicated to technology and transportation. Learn more about how Fenwick can help companies tackle the complex legal and business issues of autonomous transportation at fenwick.com. That's F-E-N-W-I-C-K dot com. Hello, everyone. Thank you for listening to the Inside Transportation podcast, a production of Inside.com, a newsletter company. This is our weekly podcast where we discuss transportation trends and news that you need to know to stay ahead of the curve. My name is Johan Marino, and I'm the writer of the Inside Transportation and Inside Electric Vehicles newsletters. And I'm joined here by my co-host, the king of Clubhouse, angel investor, podcaster, and Inside.com CEO, Jason Calacanis. All right, here we are, episode two. Yeah, so before we run through the most important transportation news stories happening right now, I have a few requests to our listeners. If you haven't subscribed to our podcast on your favorite platform yet, like Overcast or Apple Podcast, we will be releasing a new episode every Thursday. I want to make sure you don't miss out on it, so go ahead and subscribe. Also, if you love the podcast and want to help other people find it, be sure to leave a five-star review on wherever you listen to this podcast. I heard Jason may even bake you a loaf of sourdough. Absolutely. Yeah. Or tweet about it. Maybe even tweet Drake and the Kardashians. Write a letter to your friend. Tell them about this great podcast we're putting together on all things transportation. I think they would enjoy it. So let's head into the news here. Yeah. As I'm sure you know, Jason, the Paycheck Protection Program is Very big news story right now. As thousands of small business owners have struggled to pay rent and keep their employees on staff, two electric vehicle companies, one of them backed by a venture capital, the other one publicly traded, have applied and received Paycheck Protection Program loans from the Small Business Administration. Faraday Future received a $9.1 million loan from the program, which is close to the $10 million ceiling allowed by the SBA. Workhorse Group also received a $1.4 million loan. which the company says will be used to cover payroll costs. The company employs about 81 workers. Keep this in mind, though. Workhorse lost nearly $38 million in 2019. The company, while not very well-known, specializes in selling electric trucks to fleet and enterprise customers, and their future revenue is highly dependent on a contract to develop a next-generation electric mail truck for the U.S. Postal Service. Faraday Future, as I'm sure we're all familiar with, their struggles have been very well documented. And it seems that every few months there's a new story discussing how the company's existence is hanging on by a thread. Last year, The Verge reported Faraday Future lost $2.15 billion since the company was founded. It was saved by a $45 million loan from a restructuring firm and the company said it paid that loan back. Jason, do you think these companies should be getting these loans?### Assistant: Yeah, so it's an interesting question. The Trump administration and Congress did this PPP program in record time, so I think they deserve some amount of kudos for that. For some reason, they got this done, but they couldn't get testing done on a federal level for the coronavirus, so that to me is bizarre. But Putting that issue aside, it is extraordinary given that the stimulus packages we did in the 2008 financial crisis took six months, a year. It was a lot of back and forth. This was done very quickly. I think people knew that there was going to be a shock to the system and the point of these loans were to help small businesses keep paying people, right? And I think the way it was calculated was two and a half times or last month's payroll or something to that effect. So it's not meant to be like a year of payroll. It's not meant to supplement unemployment insurance. It's meant to just keep a company from laying people off. And there was a little bit of a lack of clarity of who should get these. we want them to go to small companies that are in danger, in my mind, of going out of business and people losing their jobs permanently. I think that's kind of the spirit of this, right? And it wasn't exactly clear, but there was another company, Shake Shack, Danny Meyer's company, that got a $10 million, the cap, and they returned it because they had been loan shamed. And Harvard got $9 million. They have a $42 billion endowment or something like that. And Chamath, my friend, a venture capitalist, he loan shamed them and said, that's insane. So, I think the public and journalists, including yourself, are on top of this and looking at it and saying, is this fair or not? So, just thinking about a company that has had billions of dollars invested in it, why would they even take it? It makes no sense. Why would a publicly traded company take it? It makes no sense. And I'm an angel investor in 200 companies. I've got a small investment firm here in Silicon Valley. And of course, a lot of my companies were interested in this. And not because it's free money, but because it would keep them from laying people off. And it would let them keep people employed. Because nobody really knows how long this coronavirus quarantine is going to last. We're in week five or six of it here in the Bay Area. I'm not sure what ... Where are you, Johan? I'm not actually sure. I'm in Texas. You're in Texas. |
### Human: So 190,000 employees, I think that number was inclusive of employees they've cut, right? So you're coming up on on 200,000 employees, and you want to streamline operations and make things move faster. Is that a thing you can do? Is that like, is there a corporate story where a company that's that's this rich, and then that large and human kind of capital has managed to actually become more agile, because poor companies can just cut tons of stuff because they're out of money. Google is still incredibly wealthy. And so I wonder if there's like a natural inertia to just being that rich, and that makes it harder to actually make the hard choices to get faster.### Assistant: When you're sitting on ungodly amounts of billions of dollars, 10s of billions or an apples case is hundreds of billions of dollars. it's kind of hard. And when Sundar is taken down, whatever 10s of millions of dollars in stock, hundreds of millions of dollars. Yeah, it's it's a hard message to say, we need to get rid of this entire group, we need to lay these people off. And did you see the tick tock reaction when Google made these? I mean, it just every person who six months ago was making here's my day at the Google office in New York, and I'm getting a matcha latte with soy. And then I went and I got a back rub. And then I did yoga. And then I did some email. And then I went home. And you're like, I I think non work that work. Yes. But okay, sure. Maybe I'm just an old gen X or who like to grind. So yeah, there is communication issues. I'll be honest. They did none of these companies because of their cash positions. It's a really interesting point you kind of alluded to there. None of them had to make any of these cuts. So you say, Hey, why are they making the cuts? These are sacrificial cuts. These are motivational cuts. These are entitlement cuts. Great irony of irony. Google created entitlement country culture. They were like, let us do your laundry. There's a coffee bar on your floor. And guess what, there's gonna be a coffee bar on the other side of the floor. So you can walk half as far. And yeah, we upgraded the beans to blue bottle because Facebook has fills. I mean, entitlement culture was bonkers at the peak, we lived adherence in the Bay Area, you lived it, you saw it. It was nuts. It was great. It was awesome. Until it went away. Well, and I think people and I don't blame employees for when somebody says, well, do you dry cleaning for saying, okay, I mean, just to say, okay, when somebody offers you something is nothing wrong with that. But I think they want to scare employees into performance, perhaps back to the office eventually. And it is a power play. I think it is as much about getting people to perform as it is about getting the bottom line. So removing m&ms, or whatever sacrificial, you know, services go away, massages, whatever. That's good. Getting some costs out is good. But I think it's really just to motivate people to work harder, and to maybe take back power. Because the power dynamic was flipped. |
### Human: And I think Slack is still winning, but it's close, right?### Assistant: And then we're stretching for some alternative universe, right? Now you're in alternative universe land. Has Microsoft made Slack better? Of course it has. Microsoft teams made Slack 10 times better. That was like a kick in the ass they needed. Now they have to justify their existence. |
### Human: Exactly, you nailed it. John Lennon would have been banned on Twitter from day one. He would have gotten himself banned like day one. You want me to take a vaccine? Yeah, right. He would have gotten in trouble immediately. But that was what you were supposed to be like if you were on Twitch with Yoko Ono and Pat.### Assistant: There's no mystique anymore. Which classic rock star, if they were alive today, on Twitter? which you most want to follow. Wow. That just comes right out to my head. John Lennon would be banned from Twitter. |
### Human: Yeah, I mean, you, you, you really in that watching you as well, you know, develop and go from last to first was just a great, great for me and the team. I know everybody was just thrilled to watch you. And you did the syndicate as well. And it came in massively oversubscribed to x 3x times what you wanted to raise.### Assistant: Yeah, it was great. Yeah, we were so nervous going into it, too. But yeah, was it double what you had 134% over subscribed. |
### Human: Would you take a three-hour train ride### Assistant: you know in the united states from you know philly you know new york philly quarter from new york to dc i would i would um not with the kid but i would on my own yeah just because controlling kids would be hard |
### Human: And there's precedent for this, like Vanguard, the wealth managers, you wanna go buy equities? Sure. You wanna trade options? We're gonna have to talk to you.### Assistant: I would say there could be some, I'm thinking out loud here, there could be a combination. So if you want to not have a cap, you have to take the course, and you have to have the video recorded test, and you have to have 23 of 25 questions, or whatever's reasonable. |
### Human: I'm retargeting slightly less inflammatory, which I don't to be clear because this is going to make the metaverse absolute hell for anyone who comes in who is not, you know, a 15, 35 year old guy to be a wannabe MMA firefighter, right? Like, this is this is the same. This is the exact same crypto to PR playbook as whatever you would do for crypto. Like it's only a matter of time for the metaverse buys a stadium, and you start seeing metaverse ads in every sporting event, which is where this is leading hell for anybody else who wants to be want to know where this is leading.### Assistant: He looks too much. Zuckerberg looks healthy. That's not right. It's a good look. It's a good look all around. Yeah, he looks good. Two hours on, he went to Joe Rogan. He went to do Lex Friedman. He's doing the full in cell, you know, toxic masculinity tour. Yeah. This is the toxic masculinity tour. It's the TMT. User privacy is one of the biggest topics in tech right now. And if you care about your privacy, you need to check out Brave, B-R-A-V-E. Brave is going to shield you from trackers and ads and cookies and all the creepy stuff that track you across the web. And they have three core products you need to know about. The one the fastest browser you've ever used. Their core browser, the Brave browser. And they have an amazing search engine. It's not going to track you and do anything creepy like those other search engines. And they have a browser-native crypto wallet. Brave's browser has over 60 million users, including me, Jason Galaganis, on my mobile phone, on my Windows, and on my Mac desktop. I love my Brave browser. It's all built on Chromium. You know, that's the open source Chrome project. It's amazing. All your favorite Chrome extensions work easy breezy, lemon squeezy. I got all my Grammarly and all my other extensions to just work, boom, like that. And they don't bog you down with all those slow ads crashing your computer. You can import your bookmarks. You can import your passwords and all your settings from Chrome or any other browser with one click. I did this. on all my machines. Brave search is a truly private and independent search engine, the brave browser, second to none. So download brave today at brave.com slash twist brave.com slash twist to browse faster, search privately and so much more all in a single click. Please use our URL so they know we sent you brave.com slash twist. |
### Human: I wish I had said that out loud.### Assistant: Rachel, that's the crossover nobody asked for. You tricked me. That's the crossover. And breaking news while we're here, Chairman Powell, has, as predicted, raised the Fed's rate by 50 basis points, half a percentage point, is what basis points mean, one basis point, I'm sorry, 100 basis points equals 1%. So when they say 50 basis points, what they're saying is half of a percent. So one two hundredth in this case of a dollar. Yep, the biggest hike in two decades. So they're really, and this was expected. It was. And so I don't know what the market reaction here is. But that means NASDAQ is probably going to be down a little bit or it kind of expected it. |
### Human: I will, but I miss you guys already.### Assistant: All right, bye. Send us photos. Bye bye. We'll see you tomorrow. |
### Human: You know what? At this point, I think everybody's got a good Zoom setup now, and so I've gone 100% remote, and I have this million-dollar studio in the city, and I don't use it anymore, so I'm thinking of deprecating it and just staying home. Listen, stay safe. Everybody go listen to Capital Allocators. It's Capital Allocators podcast, or you can just search for Capital Allocators. When the book comes out, please buy it. Ted Seides, great guest, great job. You can follow him on the Twitter, T-S-E-I-D-E-S. Maybe at some point, yeah, when I go out next time, I'm going to need your help because I, the other thing that they ding me for is I'm outspoken. And that's a little problematic for them. So I literally had a meeting get canceled. Because one of them saw me on CNBC. And I said, the President is a moron for saying that Apple I'm sorry, I said, I said, the President, this is the President is a moron for saying that Amazon doesn't collect sales tax, the only five states where they don't collect sales tax. And those are the ones that don't have sales tax. The other ones have been collecting sales tax forever. This is like he's like four years. Moronic. This is when he was first in and literally the endowment canceled the meeting because somebody on the investment board saw that they were meeting with me and said, fuck that guy. No way we're backing his fund after he was anti-Trump.### Assistant: Jason, let me leave you with this one little tip. Okay. No matter how big you get in this business, you're not going to have every LP in your fund. You're not? So just find the ones that find that outspoken nature endearing. |
### Human: Exactly. Albert Wenger from Union Square Ventures argued in his book and talked about it on the show the idea that I should get to program my own YouTube and YouTube should make an API. So that I or somebody else can create an agent to act on my behalf to go and find the the yoga videos that are all I ever want. So stop giving me all these weird YouTube bros.### Assistant: Yeah, they're here's what they could say. And other countries could do this, which is they could say, turn the algorithm off. Or the algorithm is off. Because remember, defaults matter. The algorithm is off by default. If you want to turn the algorithm on, you have to pay for YouTube premium, and you have to click the button to turn it on. In other words, if we're going to break our 230, because of this, we're going to have a paid product where the algorithm works on your Chrome browser, it works on your desktop, and you're doing it right. So I can take whatever contents on my phone, And I can put it into this app that I'm using that turns text into speech. That's my right to do I can edit a web page on my desktop, I can do whatever I want with it on my desktop, I can't republish it. So you could say if consumers choose to take the action of doing the algorithm, that's up to them. Therefore, and that is a possible path forward, Molly, is that you could say, hey, consumers, if you want to do this, you can turn it on. You can do it. We sell an algorithm over here, you can buy the Google algorithm better yet. |
### Human: precisely. So, it's awesome. Makes total sense. I don't know if it applies to every industry. I'm not sure it applies to every person but there you go. Right. You know, sure, maybe. Why not? I mean, if you're, I mean, some people are introverts. Some people are not good at writing.### Assistant: Well, same with our same public race, right? Like, several VCs who raised their entire funds on Twitter, we're going to raise a not insignificant portion of our funds from these webinars that you tweeted about. |
### Human: And people are going to move on at some point.### Assistant: It's just somebody pitched me on Portugal. Portugal is like, we want more J cows. We want more besties. Can you guys move to Portugal? I was like, never been to Portugal. Kind of a tough sell. But the beaches were beautiful. |
### Human: Oh, we haven't even gotten started as well. Oh, yeah. Think about it. So all the commercial real estate in downtown San Francisco, like we just showed in the earliest graph is like probably 3030. That's like 30 30% occupancy right now. all of those buildings are going to go bankrupt, all of them. And the tax base that supports that all of that is going to basically just grind down. And it's a long, slow process. It doesn't happen overnight.### Assistant: And the city, the city has leases are what on average, those big leases are five years on average. |
### Human: Um, me, I started, uh, October, 2017.### Assistant: We got to pivot the conversation because you actually got your job in a really cool way, right? |
### Human: This Week in Startups is brought to you by Cast AI. If you run cloud-native software in the cloud and it's been a significant cost driver, listen up. Cast AI automates cloud cost reduction with client saving an average of over 60%. Twist listeners can get a cloud cost audit with a personal consultation free of charge. Visit cast.ai slash twist to get started. Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC 2 report fast. Twist listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com slash twist and OrgSpace. If you're a startup and you aren't building a performance culture, your competitors will eat your lunch. Get $2,000 of credits on pro plans with a 30 day free trial at orgspace.io slash twist.### Assistant: Okay, everybody, welcome to this week in startups. It's time for our crypto roundtable with two of the smartest people I know in Silicon Valley, we're going to widen the aperture here to talk about all of the things going on with banks right now, and what is happening in Silicon Valley. Because of that, Sonny Madre, Vinnie Langham, welcome back to the program. |
### Human: Yeah, but there are concert venues and bars and restaurants where people are there late until 2 in the morning. And so it's not like this is a desert absent of any vehicle or pedestrian traffic. They're out there. But we wanted to start somewhere. This is the best, lowest risk, latest place to do it. And we're pretty confident in the performance of the system because we actually test with people behind the wheel in the entire city 24 seven. So we know what the most stressful situations look like. But our approach has been a test in the difficult areas, and then deploy starting in the least risk areas just to build some confidence and make sure that all of our testing and all of our assumptions and all of the homework we've done matches up with our observed performance when there's no one behind the wheel. Because until you do that, you don't truly know. You can simulate and estimate and make all these assumptions about performance. But at some point, you actually have to do it, measure the results and start that feedback loop of learning from real customers.### Assistant: tell me what happens in these edge cases where a pedestrian decides to stand in front of the car and or a double park car on both sides of streets not able to navigate that. Do you have people watching in some command center somewhere who can say, you know what, let's get a driver out there or somebody to navigate this? Sometimes you know you you run into that as a human you sister no police activity on a block ambulance pulls up some crazy person decides to leave their car and block the whole street these things do happen in cities. So what happens then in these like edge cases cuz. driving on a grid or I use autopilot basically every day I go to Tahoe, you know, on the on the ad I can use my Tesla's autopilot the whole way no problem except for maybe some of the windy streets at the end. But the edge cases seem to be the where we're at in the industry, correct? |
### Human: Yeah, the other fascinating thing about jobs is the obvious pick here, too. And I think what's it's also that the birth of like the keynote being the spectacle. Yes. The idea the movie really shows us everybody's watching that Apple keynote in real time. And this is a landscape BlackBerry sort of helped to create is making gadgets such a big thing that people were interested enough to watch a business person doing a keynote. But of course, you think about today, you know, Comic Con, the Game Awards, we're constantly watching keynotes. It's, it's an entertainment vehicle, just like anything else now. And I that that really drove that home that that's a Steve Jobs creation. He was, I'm going to come out and make this keynote itself a part of the product launch. I'm going to you know, this is this is the introduction of the marketing when I come out on stage and tell you what it's going to be.### Assistant: I got to go Steve Jobs in this. I know Jim is the easy choice to make because he's so ballsy, busily, but I got to go with Steve Jobs. He was relentless with that phone. And I mean, just getting singular and then the next network, the nets network, and the pace at which they came out with new ones and their commitment to it. I think like, sometimes the first person up the hill takes the arrows is another business lesson. And if you look at Yahoo, they ran up the hill, they took the arrows and Google came after them. They had Friendster and MySpace. And Facebook came after them, right? For Tesla, you had the what was that Evie one, which company it was, but they destroyed all the cars. Yeah, and Tesla came after them. Like so sometimes there's like people who try these things, but it's too early. And that was another very important part of this film is timing. Timing is so critically important. Timing can make the company the entrepreneur, or it can break the entrepreneur. |
### Human: And this is where the users I'm talking about these retail users who got into this ecosystem. Yeah, believing this stuff is real.### Assistant: not in the hedge fund. I don't think there's nobody will give a hedge fund in crypto insurance, right? Like who's taking that insurance. |
### Human: Obsessive-compulsive fandom mode. One thing that's really amazing about the era that we're in and my co-founder, Ken Miller, he often talks about how we're entering into this age of cognition now with artificial intelligence and how it's giving us these kind of like, you know, these new superpowers and in the way in which we are now able to kind of surface, you know, conversations and ultimately ideas. There's all sorts of weird and wonderful things that now become possible. We've actually talked about that very thing ourselves. You know, we have found with Fathom Um, when we are just kind of scrolling through our feed of recommended content, there's all sorts of interesting conversations that you come upon that you're like, Oh, this looks awesome. I can't listen to it right now. You know, but you, when you like it, you know, it kind of, it just pops in your little like collection and you can go back to it later. But now I have like hundreds of episodes that I have not listened to. And, you know, wouldn't it be awesome if we also then just build a tool that allows us to listen to the, you know, most relevant parts for us from Yeah, for me, because the AI has a, you know, we call it like a thought vector or a taste vector for you, you know, in this hyper dimensional space, it kind of knows a lot about what your interests are based upon what you've listened to. And it's, you know, auto selecting kind of intelligently selecting portions of a conversation so that, you know, you're kind of able to trim down how much time that you are that that's required to kind of you know, get to the to the meat of the of the conversation that which is most valuable to you.### Assistant: Yeah, one thing I'm, you know, looking at the test flight right now, test flight is how you test new applications. And I think fathom will let you at fathom.fm join the test flight. I wonder if you know, like the album art is such a wasted amount of space in the UI. Just like this giant takes up half the screen or a third 40% of the screen. I wonder if like, you replace the marketplace or the all in piece of artwork with your semantic chapters that you created. And then you would be surfacing all this data would just change the entire experience from, you know, like the cards to just here's like a list of all the moments and hey, we're dropping you into the third moment and you can watch your status bar. And have you seen that an overcast when you swipe right if you do have chapters, which they bury the chapters to I think they should have chapters be at the top. Somebody should put chapters at the top so people know it exists. It was just such a better experience. |
### Human: So This is probably going to last up until the point when there's too much money coming into this system that POS yield need to come down. Right. So, you know, these yields won't last forever. It's, it's basically, it's, it's either because the risk is higher, or because the market is inefficient. But what we're betting on is that that rate is still going to be much higher than whatever commercial banks are going to offer.### Assistant: Right. That makes total sense. When you talk to people who are on the inside of crypto, like you are, And the turn and the the project tether comes up. What do people talk about? You know, wherever y'all crypto people are talking on discord or some secret telegram group or whatever. What do the insiders who are the most credible in your world think is going on there? Because we as outsiders who don't really understand crypto, are looking at it going, this feels like it's a scam, and it's going to collapse. And these people seem really shady, because the CEO and the CFO are nowhere to be found for years. What are people saying on the inside of the crypto world? Because I've heard from a couple of insiders that they think it's a black swan, and they're very nervous about it. Are you nervous about it? What are people saying? You know, privately? |
### Human: No, this is a killer idea. If somebody makes the commitment and then they bring people in, they should get a little taste, a little taste maybe. That would be a killer idea. Affiliate program would be great. I can't get any special treatment as the host of This Week in Startups. I love it. But affiliate products, yeah. Listen, continued success. I love what you're doing. I'm super sad I'm not an investor, but I think you're going to be super successful at this, so congratulations. You're already getting competitors, because when I tweeted about how brilliant I thought this was, I had somebody from South America and somebody in Europe are already doing the same idea, exactly the same idea, exactly the same website. So put your foot on the gas and keep going, brother, because this is a killer idea.### Assistant: This would be killer. |
### Human: I got you, man. I got you.### Assistant: I was going to ask you for a connect. |
### Human: So right now we're investing out of Canaan 12, which is $800 million in size. We are series a focused for the most part. Um, if I were talking to you in 2015, I would have said, all we do are series A's. We want to lead those rounds. We want to take 80 to a hundred percent of the rounds and we want to be the largest investor on your cap table. Today, that's changed and it's changed over the last couple of years because we've had to be flexible to deal with market conditions. It was just far too competitive of an area or a space to go into it with that strategy. So, you know, now we're a bit looser, but Series A and C is still the sweet spot.### Assistant: How big is Canaan's Fund? |
### Human: Yeah, there are good times to short crypto as well. It's not always a long, long.### Assistant: What do you think's happening right now? Because clearly, we hit some crazy peak, there was a lot of enthusiasm. And now we're down 50% across the board, generally speaking. And it feels like people are a little concerned. And we saw this happen before when Bitcoin hit 20, and then went down to 3000. We're now at 30, we hit 29,000 from 63. Do you think we still have a long ways to go? Or that, you know, it's going to be another one of these, like three years sideways kind of situations, what does your gut tell you? The possibility? |
### Human: I would love, like, I don't know if you've been watching Yishan Wang's tweets about this. he is was formerly the CEO of Reddit. Yeah, bring Eshaan on. Plus he's doing climate tech now, which is awesome. But like, there is no other there's nothing harder to moderate than Reddit. Yeah. And he was like, people and it's been very, I think, measured because he's like, you think this is going to happen? And then this happens. And it's just as really a very measured look at how moderation gets out of hand.### Assistant: All right, for next Wednesday show, here's what I want. Give me the top seven producers. And nobody's can help by emailing producers that this thing serves the top seven actual real world banning, censoring, however you want to phrase it, but let's call it moderation actions that have occurred on Twitter or Facebook. |
### Human: And it and it reminded me of, you know, you'd be at a party or you'd be at a bar and somebody would pull out an iPad, like in the early days when the iPad was first out, people would crowd around. What do you do? Do you get games on there? What is it like? It really they capture how that really does happen very organically when you bring these kinds of gadgets in.### Assistant: is another lesson for people, you know, technology used to, you know, not be essentially part of your life. In the real world, you use technology at your office, maybe on the margins at home, either got a video game console, or, you know, whatever PC, you know, in your den, But you know, it was it lived on two different desks, you know, like a little nook in your house, your house, perhaps, you know, by the kitchen, you had a shared computer, and then you had a computer on your desk at work. Yeah, it wasn't like this, having gadgets with you in between. |
### Human: don't need an education?### Assistant: Like, what is why are you putting us through this? Like, you know, painful thing to watch. These songs are too abrasive. This is like, get over, you know, they would just be like, why are you singing this? Like, can you just can't dance to this? I was just sitting in there watching your show. |
### Human: I think you and Rachel should do like this week in crafting.### Assistant: We'll do like a... Rachel and I are like mother and daughter. We're like into all the same stuff, which means I'm too old. |
### Human: It's been decades. Like they're just iterating.### Assistant: They've been iterating for AirPods on the watch. |
### Human: Do you see this as a premium product? That you're going to charge for it sounds like you know based on a subscription here based on a per beverage So you consider a high-end thing or do you consider this a way to save money? like people who make those soda streams, right? The promise of a soda stream is you have all your soda at home, and it's going to cost one 10. I think they maybe say a quarter of buying Coca Cola or buying your own.### Assistant: It's save money, save time, save space, taste better, infinite variety, better experience. That's what we have to hit, right? Like, it's got to save you money. It's got to have better does it? |
### Human: Awesome. So this is another, you know, interesting kind of demo that stable doodle, yes, stable doodle by stability AI, which is, they create one of these image generation models. And I want to talk about two different things here. One is sort of the capabilities. So we've always, you know, done this in a meeting where you're doodling something and say, I really need like a, a chart that shows something like this, right. And it's a And they'd say, you know, they kind of say, this is a this is an example of a chart that's rising. So I just doodle the chart here for the folks that are listening. We do this in meetings all the time. And then I gave it a quick description of what I'm looking for. And then I hit generate. And what it will do is it will generate images that are, you know, generated based on that chart. And this could be useful, you know, if you're doing a presentation or something like that, and you not able to quite describe what you're looking for, you want it in a in a particular### Assistant: Holy cow. Yeah. This is really good. Yeah. So I started drawing the worst drawing of a bulldog ever. Oh, wow. That is like, you know, the jowls of a bulldog. And then I used English bulldog as the prompt, but it got the perspective I was looking for. Yeah. And like, this is pretty good. Yeah. That was kind of the perspective I was looking for. Yeah. Um, and this one's not bad either. Yeah. And, uh, You know, not bad. |
### Human: But that's my point is I don't think it's one thing, right? I'm not sure that it's someone goes into the hospital with coronavirus. And they've also got severe diabetes, heart disease, cancer. They're on chemotherapy. I mean, you could list the other things that they might have. What caused their death? You know, you can't as a corner, it's very difficult to say this one thing caused the death. But when they test that person, and they find that their coronavirus positive, that number is now being counted in the statistics that say that was a coronavirus death that day. And coronavirus is so prevalent in the United States right now. It's such a significant part of the population. It's also very difficult to say, hey, guys, like, you know, these deaths are... So I'm not trying to belittle the fact that people are absolutely dying, and they wouldn't have died if not for coronavirus. That is absolutely happening. But it's very difficult to say what is the net effect on life right now. We're still learning a lot about how this virus interacts with different people based on their genetics, and based on their disease state and other factors.### Assistant: Let me ask you one more way for you, Friberg, and then I'll give it over to Chamath, which is, Friberg, in your estimation as a scientist and somebody who's, I would say, a man of science on the call here, Are you optimistic about us coming out of coronavirus in 2021 and what's your best outlook for a return to normalcy? If you had to pick a time when it feels like we can go to a Warriors game or play cards regularly or go to the World Series of poker, Wendy, do you have a time period where you think that could possibly happen? |
### Human: Which is one of the reasons to go. I mean, don't ask me, but that feels right. It can be any number.### Assistant: So you and I met, I'm trying to remember where we met, but it was amongst my our mutual friends in the tech industry, maybe five or six years ago. I think it was Miami, which I'm guessing I was there for Art Basel. |
### Human: Take care. Okay, another very notable voice. It's film criticism. He was Moriarty on ain't it cool news. If you remember going back that far. Dang. Yeah, I know Moriarty.### Assistant: Of course, I've read that Moriarty dink doofus. I love it. I love it. Doofus. That's a, that's a good, um, construction. It has alliteration. Yeah. Basically, I, I basically came at |
### Human: Well, you could open one that delivers to my house. Because again, I'll do it. Pardon my language. I'm on my second location in Oakland where I cannot get dominoes. This would be a funny thing to do is this week in startups to open open like a personal one. Like you know what, it's just for me.### Assistant: So I'm gonna put poor precious. |
### Human: I've got a test flight for something that is going to launch in a couple of weeks that is... Okay.### Assistant: Oh, really? Yum, yum. You got a test flight? Jason at calacanis.com. Let's go. Test flight me. |
### Human: I'm like, I'm trapped in this like, my house. And I'm like, I'm not technically trapped, but I don't have a reason to leave.### Assistant: Yeah, I'm about to rejoin. Like I used to belong to this like sort of swimming tennis club that's around the corner from my house. Now I want to be clear that I have a pool and a home, like at least like a bike and workout gear, you know, like you just want to see Jim's |
### Human: I do. Okay, well. oh no we're not to photos yet but okay so other things for planning our twist new year's eve party music i noticed on the part of full invite that you made that you created a spotify list that people could contribute to this is the first year i've ever done the the collaborative spotify where Like I have a couple of girlfriends who are really good at making playlists and I was just like, help because I'm not, you know, and we had a whole, it was a whole conversation about the hour of like chill music and then the gentle transition like to like jazzy and then the dance chunk and then the wind down and we were placing songs literally like we got it in the dance trunk with Purple Rain and then that, you know, it was whole. Yeah. But seriously, I don't know. Does everybody just do all your friends know you can use Spotify like this?### Assistant: I don't know. And I actually got thinking about this. So again, the first party I did this for is my birthday. And it's because I am not confident enough to be the DJ. I am of the small minority that enjoys country music in my area of New York. And that is not going to fly at my birthday party. I'm listening to a bunch of Kenny Chesney. So I was like, OK, I'm going to make a Spotify playlist. Nobody's going to want to listen to my music. And it went over really great. But like you said, this was the first time you did it. This was the first time I did it. I got the idea from Spotify blends, which is another feature. So basically, Spotify takes the music that you like and whoever you're blending with, like your friend, and it makes a playlist curated to both of your types of music that overlap. And you can actually do this now. I've seen influencers doing it with fans and celebrities. And I'm like, how interesting of a way to get closer to like the people you care about. And I'm like, well, if like these influencers are doing it and creating like these playlists and playing it like in the back of their videos and stuff to connect to fans. I feel like that's like music collaboration is a space, a feature, I guess, that is going to blow up a lot more soon. So super pumped to have that at my party. |
### Human: If your oars, it's what you just said.### Assistant: What does it mean, your oars in the water? |
### Human: Oh, they have to phase it out for environmental reasons that vary by state in the United States, correct?### Assistant: Yeah. Well, it's because of lease cycles. So they have a three-year lease cycle on a truck or whatever, and they have to phase out those diesels when ours come in. So if they miss that, that window has to be within one or two months of each other. And if you're off, you're going to get sued. It's a very complex thing. It's not simple just to go switch out from one truck to a whole brand new one. It's a complicated mess. |
### Human: Yeah. I mean, I've thought about this a lot and I kind of, I mean, I kind of hate it. Like, I think that, I think that, I mean, there's sort of an obvious history here of like, of journalism and journalists covering kind of the first wave of tech, sometimes in a very promotional way, ultimately being kind of embarrassed and feeling like they'd overdone it. And, and, and for a variety of reasons, to me, the main one being Donald Trump's election turning incredibly adversarial. I think that tech founders for reasonable marketing reasons, often like to portray themselves when they get really successful as basically like political figures, philosophical figures, you know, men and women of like great principle, where like fundamentally they're mostly entrepreneurs, like at least at their root they're entrepreneurs trying to build businesses. And I think to some degree the media took them at their word and started covering them basically as political actors, and like interpreting decisions as primarily like, does this help, you know, did Facebook make this algorithm change to help Republicans? And it's unreal. Genuinely misunderstood. No, they did it because they were getting 3.3 seconds of engagement. They're trying to get 3.5 seconds of engagement. Like, to some degree, like, I think there was a real misunderstanding and mistranslation. And then I do think, like, the sort of how did we get Trump produced a wave of journalism that looked for culprits. I mean, by the way, I think Facebook screwed a lot of stuff up and like a lot of those stories were really good. Other stories, like iconic stories, like Cambridge Analytica in particular, were really like fundamentally not correct. And like that didn't really affect the election and got and went everywhere. And then I think founders and tech people both felt, you know, both rightly and sometimes wrongly, like sometimes they did bad things and got caught, felt really, really burned and misunderstood. develop their own kind of counter ideology explaining why journalists do what journalists do that was like from my point of view, like at least equally deranged. And like, yeah, we're in this place where like, people are speaking totally different languages.### Assistant: I do too. And I think your take is exactly correct. I think Trump broke a lot of people's brains. And it made people feel disempowered. And people felt like maybe I think that's where advocacy journalism really started to click in, which is we need to fight against this force of evil, which I do think Trump is an evil figure, and a horrible human being. But I think that's when people felt like, like the journalists are not covering this down the middle, or, you know, reasonably down the middle. |
### Human: But anyway, you know, look, I know what I think about that sometimes, because I could have put 50k instead of 25k into Uber. And then you know what I did? And look myself in the mirror and said, Don't get greedy. Get back to work. Don't sweat the small stuff.### Assistant: I agree. And look, I think I learned a ton of taxi magic, and we built a great company, even though we made a ton of mistakes. And, you know, I'm taking a lot of those learnings and doing things differently now. |
### Human: They paid the Tolkien estate. So they own the rights to Tolkien's writing, not all of Tolkien's writing, just Tolkien's writing as it relates to some of these aspects that they're developing. So, you know, but they didn't, this is not New Line. So like, they don't have the rights to Peter Jackson's films.### Assistant: Do we know is the Lord of the Rings the rings of power using the same IP? And do they have the rights to that IP, you know, the aesthetics, the armor, the look and feel as the original series, because I'm looking at it and I'm saying, those are the same orcs. Those are the same elves. It's the same look and feel to me, almost exactly. |
### Human: Oh, that's right. I mean, certainly we hard code them into ours. So whatever as you did, they're just there forever. And that was always my philosophy on it. So you got, I think, to write it a little bit about doing the Super Bowl ads, those cost millions of dollars to both produce, I think, and Yeah, to run. Are they effective? I mean, I would assume you don't do them if they weren't. And are they effective in driving response? Or are they effective in sort of building a brand that can then attract talent to come work for your company and to go public and to, you know, introduce investors.### Assistant: So they're definitely not direct response, right? We don't think people, you know, on their whatever drink are going to stop watching, you know, the Super Bowl to go make a website like in that moment. That's not what we're aiming at. We do see, I mean, of any, so I'll say a couple of things. One, it's the only time people want to see advertising. |
### Human: Arjun's very smart by the way. We'll start that story out here. Arjun Sethi is a, he worked with Chamath at social capital. So he's a smart cat. I know him.### Assistant: Yeah. Speaking of that, speaking of crypto raising appetite out here, is there. Oh man. Okay. Apparently I know Arjun. |
### Human: I guess. But you know what, that's where you like to spend, like that's worth it. And for me, I just don't, I seem to not get the same rush. And look, like, I know it's virtue signaling. I show status in other ways, you know? Like the car is just not the way in which I show status. Do you know this is an SM 58. This is what Bono used in 85. Oh, wow. Fantastic.### Assistant: So you also do the same thing with microphones. Well, here's the thing. I agree with you. And I the thing that has hit me is I'm trying to make things last longer. For two reasons. One, the environment and to the overhead of the unboxing overhead is a new thing for me. uh the amount of time it takes to swap out your phone to swap out your car all of that is time i want to spend with my children my spouse on my writing on you know skiing and so i'm like you know what I don't want to upgrade my boots. I bought my downer boots. I love my boots. These are the downer boots. They're going to bury me in these boots last 30 years. My, my Crockett, you know, my I have a special specific type of James Bond shoe I like to wear. They're now 10 years old. They came out when Spectre came out. No, when I'm Skyfall came out, I have the same shoes you weren't Skyfall, Crockett and Jones and these things are incredible. Yeah, And so I now I'm buying pans. So nutty I am as a consumer. I am buying the pans knowing which ones last the longest. That's my goal. I want the pan that I don't have to replace. So I'm buying skillets or La Crusade, you know that thing? You know, and I'm just that's, that's what I'm focused on. That's it. That's it. Crockett and Jones. These are the shoes I wear. Let me see if my producers can do this. Crocodile Jones, James Bond shoes. uh they're incredible jason this must be hard for you in real life when you when you want to just like um say words and have have someone like pull something else you're like oh my god my my super power doesn't work with me no i have a producer with me at all times with a laptop so when i'm like just out at the club or whatever i'm like you know like the crockett and jones shoes and then the producer comes up and just brings the laptop over look those aren't the ones but those are another crockett and jones shoes but those are timeless yes um the ones i have are the uh Yeah, there was uh, one of the james bond shoes or well, no, no, this is them I'll tell you there are i'm trying to have them mind read me because actually he's worn five different pairs of these So this is one pair of the crockett and jones 007s Uh, but that's not the ones I have but there are other ones that are you scroll down, you'll see 007 and the soul does not it does not but there's a whole group of them. This is the like oldest shoe manufacturer, I believe in the UK and man these things they may cost like 800 bucks. The ones I bought were like 800 bucks, but I literally have had them for 10 years and I send them I send them back. to this company to refab them, like once every seven years, and they're perfect. And it's just it's really just because I don't want to have to think about what are the greatest dress shoes that you can own the trash is I can wear them with jeans, Ben, I can wear them with the tux and anything in between. And they look dynamic. That's great. Interesting. All right, listen, I think it's enough show for today. Maybe any other plugs or things that are on your mind these days that you want to share? |
### Human: I mean, the second you're trying to get a passport, that's a bit of a red flag.### Assistant: here are not something we have to do. Tell you what, that's not a Sunday school. |
### Human: Yeah, I mean, just the the act of pitching and putting together the story was familiar, right? Because I had done it before as a founder, I had helped other founders do it. I had seen a gazillion pitches at 500 startups. So, you know, being able to get the story right and figure out the elements of the pitch that were going to be exciting to people. And we're really going to tell the story. Well, definitely drew from that experience. Um, and then, you know, in the day to day dealing with founders, I think that former founders have a lot of empathy for, you know, a founder pitching you, um, these days over zoom, but you know, whether it's over zoom or across the table, you know, it's, it's a hard, it's a hard thing. It's, it's, it's a weird thing and it's a weird thing to have to do for anyone. And so I think that certainly, founder empathy is an important part of what I think I bring to the table.### Assistant: And you had been a founder before, and then, of course, were involved, a co founder of black founders. So At least you had that starting point, right? Like, do you think that other first-time fund managers and would-be venture capitalists don't have that same level of, like, empathy? How did it help you being a founder who had probably already had to pitch, right? Or help other people figure out how to pitch? |
### Human: They're a huge factor. Yeah, yeah, they're, they're a huge factor. And then the other one, you know, there are two parts to this. There's the reality can't deny that there's less rain than there used to be the seasons longer, and it's hotter than it used to be. Okay, you know, I don't, we don't need to get into why that is and argue about it's just true.### Assistant: And the fact is, it's hotter. Yes. And it's drier. And if it's hotter and drier, that creates more kindling. Exactly creates fuel, which is fuel. And from my Boy Scout days, you know, I learned pretty clearly the small amount, the smaller these fibers, the smaller the twigs, you would start with small dry things, and then build up to bigger logs. it's not that we have bigger logs everywhere. It's that we got a bunch of this small debris everywhere, which is just absolutely perfect for starting these fires up. So we're basically creating massive, massive amounts of kindling, which led to this cavalier and statement by one of our former elected officials that we need to rake things up more like Norway or other places. which seemed cavalier and silly, but also seemed to ring true that keeping some of this kindling and cleaning up the you know, the underbelly the the the ground under trees would help because we know that that is factually correct. Is it factually correct that if we swept up? I mean, it's a stupid way to say it. But if there was more D, what do you call the act of taking the kindling out or, or waking up? Is there a term in the industry for that? And is that actually a viable thing? |
### Human: And so when it's produced as an ingredient, how would it be sold? Who would the customers be then?### Assistant: We are making products that meat eaters love. The ingredient is an interim state. It's our unit of innovation is why we're different. And then we're taking that all the way to making products that meat eaters love. And the reason why it's meat eaters is, as I said before, meat is the biggest culprit when it comes to the climate issue and environmental issues. And so we want to address that by making products that my husband loves. I'm a vegetarian, but my husband is very much an avid meat eater. And so if we can make things that deliver that experience he's looking for, then we're successful. |
### Human: Mm hmm.### Assistant: It's Yes, that is a big number. That feels to me like that just feels to me like a moment in time. I wonder if they can keep that up. |
### Human: Maya Knight.### Assistant: Okay, Maya Knight's the name of the mom. But yeah, Scout and Violet, I get those all the time. They're the cutest little twin babies ever. And they're so cute. |
### Human: Oh, wow. You're a fan of the pod. You started listening. I understand back when ship CEO Kevin was on. Yes. Episode 431. Did you work there or something?### Assistant: Yeah, Jason, thanks so much for having me. And it's so cool to hear your voice live after all these years of listening to the pod and you so thanks for having me. |
### Human: And I'm just going to say, I'm going to tell you who's going to steal the show is when John Carreyrou shows up. I'm not sure who's playing him, but when John Carreyrou shows up, that's going to be the big one. Yeah. Would it have been better with Kate McKinnon, Lon?### Assistant: Uh, I mean, I don't, I don't know. I think, uh, you know, she's, she's a good actress. Like she, she probably could have gotten the voice and the look and whatever, but, uh, I don't, Amanda Seyfried's just killing it. I don't know if I would put anybody. What about, um, you know, Adam McKay and Jennifer Lawrence are still circling. They've got their bad blood movie about this same topic still in development. So I think, do you think she's going to be as good as an Elizabeth Holmes? |
### Human: I mean, people are looking at we didn't really this week, get into the Facebook, Oculus, the new lens, we were going to have Alex on, we just couldn't make it work. We had such a busy week. But you know, I kind of feel like it's still do I, I feel like people don't want these headsets, I feel like there's no use case. I think across the board, they're increasing the fidelity, they're making it faster. But to what end, if there's nothing for people to do, and then there was some memo earlier in the week, where Facebook was like, Listen, you guys got to use this product, we're building it, you know, I need you to use it. And that's like when you know, Google was like, please use Android phones, people are showing up to work with iPhones, we need everybody here to use a Chromebook, we need you all to use Android phones. And I'd be at a party and I'd see, you know, Google executives and like, two out of three would have an Android and one out of three would be like, Yeah, I got an Android in my backpack, but I use my iPhone. when I'm at the office, like literally somebody told me when I'm at the office, I don't take out my iPhone. I take on my Android when I'm at an industry event, I take on my Android.### Assistant: I think what it really comes down to, too, is like, if, if at this point, a founder came to us, let's say somebody, you know, we've asked people to come and founder university and like, bring an idea. If your idea is, I am going to build a virtual land company in the metaverse, or I'm going to build anything for the metaverse at this point. Yeah. we're gonna tell you, mom, you see how this thing shakes out, like, it's a little too early for you as a founder, probably, to get the kind of traction that you're going to want. |
### Human: Blair Witch Project?### Assistant: Sure. Well, it's just like a very experimental, very low, low budget, not really narrative driven, just like the experience of these two kids getting increasingly freaked out in this dark house by themselves and using a lot of like sound and other kinds of small, subtle elements to make it scary. But a guy like that who can turn in a movie for 20, 30 grand, imagine what he could do with 100 grand. It would make perfect sense for someone like that who's got this viral fan base now to like, yeah, fund the next movie entirely from the internet. Why take A24's money? |
### Human: But if you need to get away with your family, we have a show for you. Yes. Or are you going on a bike ride? You might want to listen. There you go. Exactly. On this week in climate startups, I talked with Matt Duesterberg of OMConnect, which is a super interesting startup letting consumers save energy, but then also become almost a decentralized energy provider themselves. Fascinating, kind of complicated energy markets business, but comes down to at the end of the day, you get a $50 gift card from OMConnect for like turning off your air conditioning for an hour during peak usage.### Assistant: But first, we're going to do VC Sunday school, we're going to break down how to identify and answer the question is this startup venture scale. This is an important topic for people investing in companies. But it's also happens to be a very important topic for founders to understand if their business is venture scale. And maybe that's why they're not clearing market with investors. |
### Human: Acetate is the best quality of sunglasses.### Assistant: Got it. And I guess the ones designed in Italy are the super best. Yeah. And it's like, it's 10% of the price of Oliver Peoples or it's yeah. Fifth of the price of Persols. Yeah. What do you think of that? Like the value brand concept and do young people like that or do they still want the Prada logo and they want to. |
### Human: It's not you. It's us. Right? Yes. And I'm like, Yeah, I know. It's you. I guess. Clearly not me. Obviously. Clearly not me. But yeah, I mean, a lot of them are very apologetic and don't want you to feel like you're wasting their time. And I never looked at it as, you know, a waste of time. I realized that this is a relationship business and the more relationships you have, the closer you get to, you know, a level of success with getting to a yes from these endowments and larger investors.### Assistant: You're really raising money for the whole thing of it. It's interesting you say this, because I took the same exact route. And I could see some of these endowments, especially the younger folks on the team, they were very apologetic. They're like, we kind of do this all the time. We meet with everybody. It's our job to do our diligence and meet with every single fund manager. We know who you are. We love your podcast. This track record is amazing. We're not going to participate in fund two. We're not going to participate in fund three. We realized that this means you might not, you might be upset that we are not going to do fund four. And I'm like, No, funds closed. Anyway, we got the we got it done. Sure. Of course, we'll talk for fun for but they were I don't know if you had that would be super apology, super apologetic. |
### Human: Oh, what else you got for us? Okay, next one. Um, this one is, you know, kind of inspired by some making sure my windows right here, inspired by, uh, you know, for me, there's the guys that take the all in pod and then turn it into like these tech talks. And so, um, you know, earlier today on our chat thread, I asked Nick for a little video and all you do is you upload the video, it'll transcribe it. Uh, you can make some design choices around fonts and colors. And then it'll even give you a description for posting. So this is a little short little video. So I'm going to play it's only like 15 seconds long, right? Yep. And the company we're reviewing here is sub magic.co.### Assistant: I think I love most about this is like, we have this Oppenheimer film comes out all of this energy at the same time, of people who are just really stoked to do material science to do basic science to figure out, you know, what we're seeing here is a typical tick tock stories type tiktok or Yeah, what do they call them on YouTube shorts? Sure. And so it's like a shorts or a tiktok video, but it puts the subs on it magically. And you can pick the colors, etc. So you know, that would be something that would normally take you know, an editor, when he minutes to do properly, maybe even 30 minutes. So the fact that you can do this quickly, is pretty magical. And the bill, I get pitched every day by people who want to, for $100, a clip $50, a clip 20 bucks an hour, 30 bucks an hour, 50 bucks an hour want to make clips of stuff. And I think the level of clips they're making, which is to say they don't understand context and put a ton of time into them. and kind of are of minimal impact. The ones that make great impact is where they understand the context and they put supplemental video in and they edit it and they really are thoughtful about constructing a message. So again, I think this is like, going to create a bunch of clutter on the internet to start. And because you just point any clip at it, And then if you could auto post it, I could just literally make a Joe Rogan clips or Alex Friedman clips or an all in clips or a twist clips channel and just have be automated and just throw garbage out. Just take every section of the show. And who cares if you flood the zone with a thousand or 10,000 clips, if one of them clicks, they click. |
### Human: The problem with this startup is, I know they're going for subscriptions here, is if this works, somebody in China is going to just copy it and knock it off and make a better version and just sell you a $50 amazing compost grinding and you're just going to throw it into your compost and you're not going to go through sending it back for chicken feed or whatever.### Assistant: Right. Community backed NPR chickens. Exactly. Everybody has a mug and a tote bag and you carry your chicken feed in your tote bag. |
### Human: I don't know. No, I mean, I'm literally starting meetings and saying, insert pleasantry here. Let's get down to business.### Assistant: I mean, it's one of the nice things about the East Coast is that people just get right to the point. Out here, oh my lord, people are like, hey, yeah, what camp in Burning Man are you in? And oh, yeah, you know, just like, oh, wow. Yeah, it's a little bit too much repetitive banter. There's a big discussion right now. And any time we have a crises, it'll never be the same. Life is going to change forever. We're never going back. The new normal. What do you think? post-coronavirus, assuming we beat this, and I think we're going to beat it, and I think we're going to beat it in 2020, I think we'll beat it and we'll be back in the third quarter, you know, and full steam in fourth quarter. That's my personal belief. People can debate it. I'm sure there are people smarter than me who will nail their timing better. But are there going to be things that you personally believe will change forever, or do you think we're going to go back to largely the same life? |
### Human: It does. Yeah, this is one of the weird things about Silicon Valley is when you get everybody gets post money so quick here, or a large number of people get post money so quick or just based on the size of the salaries and, you know, people hitting lottery tickets.### Assistant: That's that's new. That's relatively new. I feel like he's I mean, then again, it's still like the 10 year overnight success, too. |
### Human: It starts with technical excellence. And I don't mean published papers or PhDs. But the attitude that we're going to have the best technology in the world. And that enables us to recruit and retrain the teams that will build a really great first electric vehicle. So technical excellence is one. The second is a commitment to outstanding management. And that's when the co founders really are determined that it's going to take a team of people bigger than themselves to change the world. The third is strategic focus on a large, unmet, unserved market need. Jeff Bezos had this at Amazon. Books were the very best first item to sell via e-commerce, but his vision wasn't limited to books, I'll assure you. Not long after we invested, he and I were walking the aisles at Fry's and answering aloud, well, what is there here in Fry's that we wouldn't ultimately sell in Amazon, whether it's CDs or television sets? Well, we wouldn't sell firearms, that's one. And we wouldn't sell live animals. But other than that, This was all really pretty suitable for Earth's biggest store. What else? Reasonable financings, that's an important factor. And then finally, the fifth is sense of urgency. Now, no venture, no founder possesses all five of those in equal measure. But if you believe you wouldn't mind getting in trouble with her, and that we can build the strengths where they need to be added as the venture grows, then you've got a real shot at changing the world.### Assistant: We'll talk about climate history here. Exactly. Or just give me some of them off the top of your head. |
### Human: And where we should be clear, like, it's not a luxury, it's going to be a life saving situation as these kind of wet bulb heat events get more common.### Assistant: That's right. Yeah, we really see air conditioning as a human right and a necessity to continue having the type of developed standard of living that we've grown accustomed to. |
### Human: Very nicely done. Very nicely done. So you workshop that. Took a little time.### Assistant: Took some wordsmithing. Got some whiteboarding going. This is a subtitle that clarifies it a little bit, but yeah, yeah, it was a big endeavor. |
### Human: Hi, Molly. Thank you for having me.### Assistant: No meat in the whole apartment. That would actually be great. Can you imagine if they had vegan only flow places? I mean, for the climate conscious out there, that's actually not the worst idea. People would totally go for it. Anyway, super interesting. It's a it's a great business. It's a really interesting interview. Arjun Shokin coming up right now. So the launch accelerator just completed its 25th cohort, I am going to sit down with some of the founders over the next few weeks to dig into their businesses. Up today, Arjun Shokin is founder and CEO of suede at suede.ai.com. Welcome, Arjun. |
### Human: Maybe slow down. Yeah, exactly. Maybe like, make sure it was real.### Assistant: Slow down, slow down. Probably more accurately. But yes. |
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