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### Human: I can't keep up with this level of believer. This should be like if Bernie Madoff gave a Wall Street Journal writer a condo in the Bahamas and $40 million in loans to give them great coverage. They're not giving $40 million loans, because they're in the loan business and the CEO of some crypto blog is a great customer who's going to pay back the loan at a high interest rate. This is payola. This is the only explanation you don't give $40 million to somebody running a publication that covers you covertly for any other reason that I can determine. Yeah, and I and I have a high level of expertise in these things. unless I'm talking about fraud. I mean, really, this is payola. Now if Semaphore wants to pretend it's an investment, and this is a rich dude, and that's been happening for all times and Bezos bought the Washington Post and people invest. Okay, you want to play that game? I gotcha. We can debate it. Molly, that's not this right?### Assistant: This is stone cold payola and a lot of it. I remember Many years ago now, I think a decade or so, there was like a New York Times reporter and it was uncovered that he had taken like $35,000 and somebody had helped his kid get in private school or something. And it was like the biggest scandal ever, ever. It was like, we have to like tear it all down, shrub the whole thing, like 35 grand. right now who took it help getting into a private school or something a New York Times reporter I'm probably getting these details wrong but I remember a little bit yeah people do stuff but you're talking about adding another three zeros right

### Human: It's so funny when things, I guess, first started getting significantly more remote is, like I said, when I first started freelancing and I remember hopping on my first Zoom call with somebody and how just awkward it was, like lining out all the tasks that I had to do. So I was like, dang, normally, this was also, it was called Limitless K9s and it was a small local dog training area, basically. And they were looking for somebody to do social media marketing. And I just remember feeling so blindsided. And especially in that contracting, that contract side, which I think screws over a lot of people. The fact that you guys automate the contract part of it, I think is really interesting. How do you guys do that?### Assistant: Yeah, it's so cool to see the different startups that hire on Contra, not only because they're finding successful matches, and those typically are the more fun jobs to work on. Not that small business opportunities aren't fun, but it's always fun to be a part of a startup and that growth story. But it's really interesting to see how people are using independence now. There's all these new jobs that are coming out, whether it's TikTok content creators. I think a future one that's going to come out is AI prompt writers for copy AI or GPT-3. But then you have things like YouTube content editing, then creative engineering, 2D animation, all these jobs that in the past were super, super niche and they're becoming more mainstream as both small businesses and startups need to think about digital distribution more than ever. And then things like Loom and Notion make it super easy to just communicate scope. like before everything was done via like Skype and it was really sketchy to like talk to someone, you know, maybe in California or like India or South America and tell them like, Hey, this is what I need you to do. But now you can create like a long form document, a loom and like, you're pretty much like good to go. So I think it's getting a lot easier to work with people in a project based capacity. So yeah, it's really, it's really awesome to see startups embrace this. And I think we're really just getting started.

### Human: Got it. Yeah. We started, what, September 2015? So, he may have even been around then, too.### Assistant: Hmm. Interesting. You know, I have this problem with launch. Everybody's like, oh, launch, fun. And I'm like, no. That's me. They're like, launch festival, launch conference. I'm like, also me. Like, got those trademarked. Can you pick something? Just a little launchpad conference. I'm like, too close.

### Human: Yeah, pick your metric of choice. And usually, as you move up market, it gets better. But we very deliberately chose not to allow ourselves to get pulled up and stay focused on SMB, which at the time was relatively controversial and hard to get funding around. It's now gotten better, including HubSpot, there's other companies that have succeeded in SMB. But back then, there were not a whole lot of software companies that had kind of built big global brands, multi billions of dollars of market cap, focus exclusively on SMB.### Assistant: Revenue per customer.

### Human: Yeah, and Kim is not just a lawyer focusing on reproductive rights. She is also an angel investor. So there's a whole bunch of tech and startup angle to this. Also, it's a great conversation. Kim was amazing. And then related today's startup of the day is Stardust, an end to end encrypted period tracking app, privacy for your period people.### Assistant: And today we're going to bring you Kim Clark. She's an attorney at legal voice. And she actually reached out to Molly over LinkedIn after listening to our shows, where we mentioned we talked about the impacts of the surveillance state regarding healthcare, privacy, notably, abortion. So we're gonna talk a little bit about Roe v. Wade at the top of the show.

### Human: Yeah, I think they will want to own that consumer business. Yeah. Let's see. Let's try it here. And let's see what it comes up with. We have Google Bart open here. I was going to use it for a different example. But we have it. Look, at the end of the day, the the thing about travel is, it is, it's highly monetizable, right? It's been probably in the top three or five monetizing areas of the internet since because there's transactions that are big. exactly and so i think you have to really take a step back think will they will they not do it no they're gonna do it the point is like. Yeah and look this is incredible right we have a startup over here in this tab that created this really nice exploring the city royal london and cultural and here we have you know sort of the top. tech company with unlimited resources, and look at their kind of morning arrive and check your hotel afternoon, take a bus, get a delicious meal at a pub. Right. And so, look, can they bridge that gap? For sure. But I think, you know, this is what entrepreneurship is about. And and maybe if these guys do a good job, or the company you're supporting does a good job, they get acquired and this is what makes it in there. So I think this is really an interesting time that this is not, you know, this is interesting and it does a half decent job, but it's nowhere near as good as what the co-pilot folks have done here.### Assistant: Yeah. And so you have to be prepared, I think, as entrepreneurs, the best advice we give people is build a sticky service, where, you know, you're putting in your notes, maybe collaboration. And then you constantly have to be adding new features and studying the customers. And you have to be bigger than the faster than the incumbents.

### Human: Yeah. It goes blue probably in that scenario. Yeah. So then it becomes about, but remember though, If trump is holding, um If he if he manages to hold michigan He could lose pennsylvania. It wouldn't matter. Uh, he had a little bit of a margin. He had what he had 306 electoral votes last time Uh, so if he holds everything he had minus pennsylvania Actually, he could lose michigan too. As long as he carried wisconsin. He has to have one of those two But I think Wisconsin's difficult.### Assistant: uh to be a early bellwether because look at that guys they can count 4.81 this is unbelievable unbelievable well what are we seeing here what's unbelievable so what that means jason is that uh in philadelphia there are 1 706 precincts okay of those only 82 have reported the their ballot tallies so you have 95 percent of the precincts in philly not reporting. If you take Michael's framework and say there's a swing of 500,000 votes, if it goes historically Democrat, as it has in the past, you attack on 500,000 net new votes to Biden and he ekes out a win.

### Human: It's gotten so what has it done this week? And it's actually just gotten so many Yeah, so it was one thing when Bard and chat GPT were just inventing numbers, right out of thin air and just making up facts like that was and by the way, apparently in the AI world, these are referred this is actually the technical term for this is hallucinations. They call it in the universe. Yes, they're like, Yes, the AI can hallucinate when it doesn't know an answer. So, coming up during Jason's trip, we have an interview with the CEO of Neva, AI.### Assistant: So many companies have had a freeze on hiring this year. Basically headcount is stagnant industry wide, but you still need to find ways to grow and innovate. You know that. So check out Contra. It's a commission free marketplace for freelance and independent creators. That's right. Commission free. All you have to do is pay a simple SaaS fee, and there's no percentage based up charges when you hire someone. And on the other side of the marketplace, if you're a laid off tech worker, you got all these skills, you got a lot of time, Well, Contra is an amazing platform for you. Creators on Contra keep 100% of what they make, no fees, right? Compare that to other marketplaces that are taking your money. They specialize in design, engineering, social media, video, writing, and AI. If you need project-based work, you have to check out Contra. Let's say you wanted to learn about social media. Do you want one person to give you advice? And do you want to hire one person? Would you rather try five different people in q1 narrow it down to the best three in q2 and then maybe in q3 and four, you get down to one or two specialists who you like to work with best. That's the way to leverage the freelance community but only pay for what you use some of the best people I know will only ever do freelance work. So get $500 off your first hire at Contra comm slash twist think about how much you could get done with five five hundred dollars worth of designer developer time right now. C-O-N-T-R-A dot com slash twist. Contra dot com slash twist right now to get five crisp undies. All right, it wouldn't be a Monday in the year of 2023 if we weren't talking about AI. So, what's the update on the deranged sociopathic parlor trick known as chat GPT, which is running amok. We're now in the official Hitler, you know, Terminator two mode of this new cycle.

### Human: So I guess I'll add some of the context that I had an atypical background in general. I didn't have a college degree. I tried College I tried community college. I did lamb to school for a little while and jumped and dropped out. I did MOOCs online. So All sorts of types of education and then obviously sort of more self-taught as well but I lived in DC at the time I moved up to New York recently and I I was interested in the tech community. I was very interested in machine learning, especially machine learning applied to healthcare and a lot of these newer areas of research. And so I realized that a lot of people got their jobs by not just having a college degree, not just applying through a job portal and started going to professional meetups all the time in DC. There's a lot of things to attend. There's a lot of things you can sneak into for free. And so I would do that and just ask people like, Hey, how'd you get your job? What do you do? What's the day to day look like? And then more specifically, I started putting a ton of white papers on Twitter. I found white papers for the industry super interesting. And then I also found that academic people are super willing to answer your questions. And so it's almost the better version of what LinkedIn should be, which is a lot of researchers posting what they've been working on. And they're super happy to answer any questions about what the research means. And so that was super exciting and started doing that more and more. And then Michael Dempsey, who's a GP at Compound, who... I've been mutuals with him on Twitter. I was job hunting at the moment. And I guess he has said that he was just intrigued by all the weird machine learning-related stuff I was posting. And so he reached out and said, Hey, we should have a chat about venture. Are you interested in the industry? I didn't know a ton of things about the industry at the moment. But I knew I liked Mike's writing and the approach of the firm broadly. So we chatted and learned more about compounds focus and the thesis drivenness of it, which I love. And the rest is history.### Assistant: It's awesome. I guess there isn't really a traditional path into venture anymore. Because every time I talk to somebody, I feel like it's radically different, including the way that you found your job. Similarly, I guess to your boss with how he discovered you post machine learning, I think one of the first tweets that I saw from you was in the quantum space. And definitely in the healthcare space, if it wasn't just in the quantum space, I would love to hear your thoughts a little bit about machine learning powered healthcare because your content on that is really interesting.

### Human: We haven't, we're actually going to be going out this quarter, because we just compiled all of our 2021 numbers. And the other headline number that we saw, again, it's right what you just said, our conversion rate, our close rate from proposal is 80%. Our close rate from a site walk is 90% right now.### Assistant: And you and I have been talking for a year. I've been a huge fan of the product. And I was just like, Listen, are you ready? And you're like, I think I'm ready. I think. But you haven't raised money since right. And

### Human: We were wrong. Yes. And you know what the thing is, if it used to be that investors would say, and you and I are new investors, but the people who came before us, they were just at the office every day and you had to make your run up and down Sand Hill Road, and that is how it went. You had to come in person. You had to come to the Mecca. You made the pilgrimage. You went up and down Sand Hill Road. And that's the way it's done. And if you're not committing to being in central road every six months and meeting everybody and updating everybody, then why are you doing this? And that's over to### Assistant: It's okay. I will. I will. I, I maybe I think that what has when you're a much more prolific investment than I investor than I have, but the investments, the, the B and later rounds that have happened in my portfolio since March, there has been, there has been the big checks. Okay. There has been a face to face. Now that face to face was what the mask on and it was during a walk. And it was at the end of the process, not at the beginning, or was before COVID or was already knew them before COVID. But I will tell you walk and talks for VCs happen all the time. I we moved to downtown Palo Alto. I will tell you how many VCs I see at the restaurants there. And I see them dining with founders. It's just it's not schlep to the office for the pitch before I get to know you that's dead. I'm going to do that over zoom forever. So it's more like- Can I get you a sparkling water, Mr. Kouladas? Can I sit you in conference room B7 while you plug in your laptop, trying to get it to work and pitch the VC who never even read your deck before? That's dead, right? That is dead and never should have happened, right? It was always lazy.

### Human: We don't know. She's like hero.### Assistant: Adventuring. She's like a faceless man. Assassining. Mercenary assassin. That's all I care about.

### Human: New York Times, New York Times did. I mean, you had Wesley and Oh, and Jenna and Jenna on still processing, which I love that podcast. Yeah, that's just like, you know, white guy in Silicon Valley just automatically levels up in terms of black culture, like, talk about like, just absolutely getting caught up on stuff like that, like Atlanta and you know, he's array like I just I these things were on the periphery of discussions, but they just really helped me highlight it. And Wesley had, I think he was working on the ringer network. So I guess they they brought him home. And now, the New York Times is actually, according to reports from journalists in the New York Times, which is getting kind of meta here, got a little freaked out about this. And then they put the former get Gawker editor, He's now running new york times version of substack. or newsletters.### Assistant: No, I mean, so here's the thing. I think that it's a very good thing. I mean, if you if you think about the last year, right, like 16,000 reporters have lost their job recently. And That is a huge amount of talent and writing and people, not to mention all of the people that never had reporting jobs, that are fascinating, interesting people and want to build their own newsletters. I think it's great. And I think that Substack offering these advances up front is a great way to basically help these people have a little bit of security where they can make the leap to go full time. I think if media companies are losing people to Substack, that's on the media companies. Media companies are losing those people's sub-stack because they're not providing a good financial reward for staying there. If you can make 10 times more money on sub-stack, why wouldn't you do that? That's a positive thing. That should encourage media companies to, I don't know, maybe value top writers more, pay them more, give them more of a split. If they do an in-house newsletter, cut them in on the deal. We saw this with podcasts, where a lot of journalists were starting their own podcasts. And so media companies, some of them, not New York Times, but some, I don't know,

### Human: Me and everybody on Twitter was like, esailrugs.com, the end. There's only one place.### Assistant: So I put this out there because I'm losing my mind. I grew up poor. We didn't have we had like one rug. And like, we didn't get rugs because these things get destroyed. And it will make you as a cheap person like I am, who has cheap DNA, lose your mind. Like, I love my kids. I love my dogs. But when they stain the rugs, and I have to go into dad mode, and I'm like, bad dogs, or like, daughters, I told you no ice cream while we're watching superhero movies. And they're like, but I love ice cream. I like watching superhero movies with you. Why can't we have both things? And I'm like, I find out both things. But they ruin these goddamn rugs, Molly.

### Human: Well, that that's where this starts to get really interesting when you start to think about coverage. So if I add another sensor. Yeah, we're going to go find some more folks. Got it. So you can see that there's these are this is actual actual data, but we're loading it into the system. There's actually not like I'm in my apartment. So this is not a real floor plan from where I'm sitting. But yeah, should be emblematic of what happens. So, I can just sort of populate as many, uh, sensors and this is actually a, this particular install, um, is, uh, 12 foot as opposed to 10 foot.### Assistant: The zebra count went up a couple of seconds. That's madness. So literally the, you now have gotten to the point where you've built a tool where anybody, the receptionist, somebody who works in facilities can map the space themselves and then report back how many seconds this phone booth was used. That's exactly right. And you could obviously do that. You could say what percentage of the time was this phone booth used during the day? Uh, and then you could also say how many unique people were in there, I'm assuming, or no. Would you know they're unique? I guess you don't have anybody tagged.

### Human: Yeah. Thanks Jason. So on PPP, I mean, if we all kind of transport ourselves back to March of 2020, it was a pretty scary time in the startup ecosystem. Like, Money had been flowing. Things are going well. All of a sudden, like someone grabbed the emergency brake and the car skidded to a stop. And I'll never forget, like it was such a scary time for a lot of founders. There's so many founders who are about to raise money but hadn't quite gone out. Then you have the founders who had just closed around who are just like happy as can be. And so the government in a response to COVID and the unemployment and the economic hardship, rolled out a program that I know it's taken a lot of fire, but I actually think was pretty good. And what they basically did was give businesses, not just startups, but all businesses in the United States, access to extra capital in the form of PVP. And essentially it was a loan that you could take and as long as you maintained your employment levels and didn't cut people's salaries by, I think it was more than 20%, something like that, you could actually get that PPP loan forgiven. And so fast forward to now, we have a lot of companies who took those loans and are now applying for forgiveness. So that actually, it was incredibly stressful at the time, there wasn't a lot of guidance, the banks were scrambling, the accountants were scrambling, but I think it was a pretty effective policy, especially for the startup world because I think a lot of people's first kind of thought at that moment is cut, let people go, extend your runway because there's so much uncertainty.### Assistant: That was my advice.

### Human: And I think like Peacock and Paramount Plus, like I do feel like on some level that's what's happening. It's not that they're that much worse than these other services, it's just people already had three or four and they were like, I'm good, I don't need it, I'm fine.### Assistant: I literally want to get like a beater up Jeep to take on the beach and stuff like that and in the snow at Tahoe, whatever. And I've really wanted to get a Corvette. You know, I haven't had one for over a decade. And for me, it's just like with cars. I'm like, you know, I got three cars. It's just enough. It's enough already with the maintenance, with the tires.

### Human: Well, if there are a little fired up, but there is probably, there are people cheating on their taxes. Obviously we should### Assistant: 10x the number of individuals like we collected all the taxes that are owed in this country, we have all the money we need fundamental, not yet.

### Human: Now, you know, I remember Doquan was like making some statements that he didn't deal with poor people or didn't, you know, he was like one of these crypto was like one of those crypto kids who was being a little toxic online. And he was like, Why should I listen to this person? Because they're poor, you know, and it's like, I've seen that before. I remember the dot com era, like I had somebody on stage at one point who was like, that's just like, an excuse for having like a sub $1 billion market cap. Like, he was like dismissing another CEO of a public company. I was like, well, there's a little bit of hubris there. Like, yeah. When you get into these measuring contests of net worth, and the net worth is not based upon any kind of reality or value in the world. Like, not good.### Assistant: Yeah, it could also be, as Nick points out, and he just cashed out $500 million and thinks he's invincible. Although those are probably related.

### Human: It's just getting rid of the junk. If you're not paying for the product, you are the product. And I think there's consumers that are willing to... That are just tired of all their data being sold and for selling the links to the highest bidder. And then in terms of the concierge, there... When you... There's this piece missing in Ecommerce right now where you go to a store, you have a sales rep who helps you and tells you, hey, you look good in that shirt, for example. It's completely missing from ecommerce. So the concierge fulfills that for those people who are just tired of researching online and want a personal touch.### Assistant: When I was writing about your startup recently, because I shared it with some investor friends, I you gave me a great example of somebody who'd actually use the service. Maybe you could talk about an actual use case without mentioning the person's name of somebody who wanted to buy something, I believe it was a sofa. They were having a particular challenge. And then your concierge saw that maybe you can walk us through how that happened.

### Human: The ease of use and the reliability, really, that is what made it. But it existed, that URL exists, just like the conference room exists. You know that conference room is on the third floor in this building. You know this conference exists at this, you know, URL. It just made you feel like it's got a reliability. We go to that room, and we're there.### Assistant: Yeah. It worries me a bit, because I often talk about this sort of the asynchronicity of things being invented and things becoming really usable, so that When video conferencing was novel, it wasn't much good. And by the time it became good, it was no longer novel. And that's why I made that caveat at the beginning of the call, which is that we like talking about novel things, generative AI. We like talking about maybe the metaverse, although that seems to have suddenly fallen out of favor. Yeah, okay. And we love talking about what's next, which makes us look forward thinking. And actually, there's a big role for backward looking thought, which is, what is it that was invented? I've got a terrible story, by the way, to tell about this, which is before the pandemic, I met a senior person from zoom. And we were discussing from a behavioral point of view what we could do to destigmatize and normalize video conferencing. And our best suggestion at the time was effectively to make Friday video conferencing day for everybody, kind of thank Zoom, it's Friday. So you'd at least solve the coordination problem. A lot of people working from home, it was kind of don't ask, don't tell. But a lot of people work from home on a Friday anyway. And what you do is you'd effectively make Friday the day in which people did their video call. And then we suggested that i thought was pretty good suggestion and just as she was leaving i said almost in passing of course what you really need is a major transport strike or a minor pandemic every time that was in august that was in august 2019 and every time i look back on saying this i'm kind of wow you cursed us this was your power rory you set it in motion So we'll put you in touch with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and they'll sort you something out.

### Human: Well, I mean, it's worth pausing for a second and looking back at what happened over the last decade, 10 years ago.### Assistant: Has anything happened? The market just went up and to the right.

### Human: Or even exactly what's going on right now where you've got some celebrities hanging out. But assuming that lots of celebrities are going to want to do that, you could open up a sort of event style model where you pay for placement and say, hey, if you want to reach this huge audience that's in Clubhouse, And you want to do a clubhouse with them, like, cool, we'll build you a stage here and we're going to charge you for it.### Assistant: So if you're Star Wars, Muma and the Lorians coming out, you have the director or Jon Favreau comes on and does a fireside chat and Disney pays for that and gets a link to Disney Plus to sign up for it.

### Human: The iPhone, I mean, they existed before the iPhone.### Assistant: Yes, it's all after they were public. And so, you know, it's a financial event. It puts us on a cadence that says, hey, every quarter, rightly or wrongly, short term or whatever, you're going to be judged for how you did. And if you did well, you're going to go up a bit. If you did poorly, you're going to go down a bit. And none of that's permanent if you can continue to do a good job. And there's no next question of like, well, when are we going private? When are we going double public? This is just a steady state now. Steady state. Just go to work. All right. Listen, man.

### Human: Let me ask you this. Have you considered dyeing... I considered dyeing my hair blue coming out of the pandemic. I've always wanted to have blue hair. And I was like, I'm kind of thinking about it. No better time, my friend. I'm kind of thinking about it. I think it would be ridiculous. That would be great. And I think... What do you... If you were going to dye your hair, what color would you go, Ben?### Assistant: I mean, it's already close to Rosenthal length, so... You've gone full Rosenthal, but are you going to dye it?

### Human: You've done a good job so far. Thank you. Ooh, the bait is just right there on the hook.### Assistant: It's like my kryptonite worst nightmare to not be able to talk. Not talking is my kryptonite. However. I'm not giving my opinion, it's my kryptonite. Very, very smart of you. And I'm not going to bait you any further.

### Human: at some point, you know, maybe when you hit 100, or 600, or 6000 products in your collection, where we are, actually, it's about 6000 6000 products across 60 companies. So there's a point at time where you could sell direct and or open like retail outlets, or even, you know, create your own products based on your learnings. Have you considered or done any of those? Or that is that the roadmap here is to get so big, and have so many products that you could actually be some overarching brand and Thrasio might mean something to people like Target does?### Assistant: So, one, I don't think Thrasio will ever mean anything to people. Thrasio was a name that was picked out of a hat for all intents and purposes because my partner and I like Greek mythology. I was about to say, it sounds like a Greek name. It's one of the Amazonian warriors, it's Thrasio. But we do have a brand called Zaba that, you know, we think of it as a bottom of the funnel brand because it's going to apply to everything from corkscrews to, you know, fishing gear or whatever it happens to be. And the idea is that unlike old school brands that embodied particular product attributes, Where do you live in now the brands aren't big enough to be able to capitalize on that scale and send that message out so what you really need is trust need quality need to have the ability to have an interaction with somebody over and over again where. each and every time you get what you want get when you want it it's a great experience and so the way we think about it is that you know all the different products that we have are from different categories but they all have one thing in common which is you know our commitment that they're great product that we're gonna do everything we can to make sure the customers happy All the things that every boring retail business in the history of times built on. And to the degree to which we can succeed at that, we can build a brand that I think stands, whether it's inside Amazon or outside Amazon, for a good customer experience and for trust. And in a world in which the brands are going to become less familiar, that's going to mean something.

### Human: By the way, just so you know- J. Cal's about to block you so he can keep the Biden campaign strong and not have your-### Assistant: Well, it's because they have too much power, and they're unaware of their own biases. They can't see this action for what it so clearly was. It was a knee jerk reaction on the part of employees at Twitter and Facebook to to protect the Biden campaign from a story that they didn't like. I mean, because if they were to apply these standards evenly, they would have blocked the Trump tax returns for the exact same reason.

### Human: I'm framing it as bold, by the way. I didn't frame it as crazy. I framed it as bold.### Assistant: I'm actually giving a compliment here to Tesla. I mean, to Elon, because every time he does something, you know, a lot of times for years, they would call him crazy. And then he proved it. And it's like, oh yeah, he's really smart. But what happens is like a year prior to going public, I told my board, we're going to go public. And they said, not a chance. You're an idiot. And I said, listen, you got to just trust me. We got to go public. We need to. And they said, no, never. And not for another many, many years.

### Human: Yeah. And there's no question that that does occur. But I mean, at the end of the day, it's a $68 billion market. It's a $1.7 trillion asset class. So it's not obviously only an insider's game. But it is, I think it is interesting that once you reach a certain level as an artist, it's very hard for you to kind of fall out of that position. It's really rare.### Assistant: I mean, a cynic would say that it's a rigged game with some of those artists, perhaps, right? And there's players who are playing the game at a higher level with better information than you and I, or certainly me, maybe not you.

### Human: universe and some general### Assistant: I don't know. I mean, I agree with what you're saying, but at the same time, if you look at the big successes D.C. has had, they're not necessarily all like you had Wonder Woman and Aquaman from that interconnected world that did really well. But then, you know, what about Joker? Like that Joker movie wouldn't have made sense in a interconnected world, but it made over a billion dollars. And it won, you know, festivals and Oscars.

### Human: It's okay, I'd rather talk about this than ApeCoin, if I'm being honest. Like, I don't give a **** about ApeCoin, but I do give a **** about this.### Assistant: I kind of want to dunk on ApeCoin, but we're going to go five.

### Human: How did that go so wrong for him?### Assistant: Right. So So I think, you know, Sequoia has endured so well because it has paid attention to that sort of internal management and sort of internal strategy. Like, do we want to be a global firm? Do we want to be just series A or should we be thinking about an internal hedge fund, which they've done? You know, so whereas Kleiner Perkins was kind of by default by around 2003, four, being run by John Doerr just because he was the best, sort of flashiest, kind of most charismatic investor, not because he was wanting to be a manager. And that turned out to be a terrible mistake. In 2001, If you looked at the Forbes Midas list, the number one investor in the world was Vinod Khosla of Kleiner Perkins, and number three was John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins. So they were really dominant. And by 2021, 20 years later, you could not find... I think it was only one person in the top 100 who was at Kleiner Perkins, and that was John Doerr, like around 73 or something. And so they really went from hero to zero. And the reason is that John, for all his fantastic vision as a technologist and his ability to kind of market that vision messianically and charismatically, he just didn't have the attention span or the bandwidth to sit down with somebody and tell them how to manage their calendar. He would delegate and then began just moving at a million miles an hour. And one thing which he did, which I write about quite a bit in the book, is that he had this view that the industry needed to hire more women. And of course, he was right about that. And I think it came from the fact that his wife was one of the few women engineers in the valley in the 70s. I'm married to a very smart wife. It tends to happen that you have lots of... She has lots of good friends and you hang out with terribly smart women all the time. And I'm always kind of like the dumbest person in the room. And I think John probably benefited from who he was married to and having a teenage daughter. And he just took women more seriously than most of his contemporaries in the industry.

### Human: You can put, I don't know. I think if you had poppy seed and sesame seed, if you had a garlic bagel, you know, like it is true that would mask it. So that would screw up the feedback. So I get that part. I agree on that. But I also think like part of the great feeling of a bagel is, you know, some people are just team sesame and summer or team poppy me. Yeah. Uh, you know, i'm team, uh all bagels. I don't discriminate against against any bagel. I like all bagels Uh, i'll even need a cinnamon raisin. I'm not down with the blueberry. That's a little bit strange But i'm team. Give me the bag The brown paper bag they all came in and I will shake out every seed and pour it on top of my bagel With butter and cream cheese, so i'm team everything. I love it all But I think those flavors are gonna really knock it out of the park I don't know putting rye in there and because it's something i'm making rye bagels now they're very nice pumpernickel like you can get some of those flavors going like the really tangy ones pumpernickel rye sourdough i think that's actually gonna help a lot because. you're gonna, it's just gonna help with the experience. So as soon as you can get those out, jalapeno cheddar is a good pull from producer Nick. I don't know if you've had the jalapeno, jalapeno cheddar bagels. But that's like a big thing in LA, which by the way, the bagels in LA are whack. You know, I dealt with them for many years. They're like six and sevens out of 10. And their best day. It's just, there's actually a really good one. Are you where are you based?### Assistant: We're not, and that's intentional. Oh, explain. So, you know, we have the recipes ready, we can start producing it, but what we really want to do is just highlight the innovation of the product in and of itself, right? And have people really taste it and really kind of appreciate the texture and how different and differentiated it is from everything else in the market. And rather than saying, you know, okay, well, here's X, you know, Y, Z, and here's everything, you know, and I think that the product right now even, well, one that also allows us to get clearer feedback from the consumer and pinpoint exactly where we need to iterate, but it's, you know, it's, it's such an innovative and novel product. Um, and we, I just, we want it to speak for itself for a little while and, you know, we don't need to mask any kind of flavor, right? Like,

### Human: And Rachel's back with OK Bloomers this Friday.### Assistant: Same, same. One of those things seems easier than the other, but I don't know if I recommend it. Exactly. And then we're going to talk about the former founders of MySpace raising $32 million from A16Z for their new video game venture. And Jason will let us know why, even though that sounds kind of crazy. It's kind of probably not.

### Human: Oh my lord, yeah, he should have been in the Zerg. Alleged. Bonnie and Clyde.### Assistant: Spoiler alert, season two, Billions.

### Human: So the funny conversation. Yeah, the funny, the funny conversation these days is is sort of, you know, I'm like, Okay, so we know we have a view one of the product. Can we agree that in three or four years, this product is going to be a lot better than it is today. Everyone's like, Oh, totally. Right. Yeah, reasonable. Right. And you're like, so in three or four years, we'll be embarrassed. We'll, we'll, we'll bring this product back up and we will look at it. We'll be like, Oh my God, this is embarrassing. This is dog. Exactly. Right. Why do we want to put dog in front of more people than we have to? Like, absolutely. We need to go out and get some market feedback. We need some people to use it. Like stuff happens. Like you learn an enormous amount of really great stuff. Right. But that's, honestly, those customers are more continued product development than they are really growth and scaling. Right. So that's one conversation. Like, what do I look like? Honestly, it's so funny. I was three or four years ago. There was a venture guy who said, well, we just did the analysis and first meeting to term sheet is now nine days. And And my response was, Oh my God, I think mine's gone to nine months. And it's all about knowing the people way better. Um, so that you end up looking for like something like 90% of the, of the leaders I'm involved with our first time leaders. Right. Um, and it's, they end up hopefully being long-term focused givers who have something to prove to the world, right? So that gets them working all the time, super focused on it, but it's not, they care way more about what their efforts are going to look like in 10 years than next year. Like a reasonable way to think about it is trying to figure out whether someone makes decisions consistently, based on the notion of what would their sort of 10 year future self be proud of?### Assistant: Yes, this sense of pride, mission, purpose, and that long term decision making will be reflected in what this product looks like every month and the product velocity and the care and craft that goes into it. Whereas a generation has learned some really bad habits, bad habits, you know, it's such a an adrenaline pop, when an unexpected term sheet comes in from some private equity firm for $100 million. And we didn't even ask them to give us this money. And they also want to give you know, 10% of it in secondary to the early investors and CEOs. These are new wrinkles.

### Human: It is super heartwarming. Jason's like, I just want to talk about the cars and the electric bikes. I'm like, dude, old people are getting friends. It's heartwarming. Good job. Good job. And shout out to Papa. Right. Shout out. Shout out to Papa. Up next on the show, because you think it's over, but it's not. It's not. Another edition of everyone's other favorite J trades in the blueprint just like hits. You're just the hit maker.### Assistant: There you go. This Week in Climate and VC Sunday School. Killing it. All right, everybody, welcome back to the blueprint. This is episode six, part six of a 10 part quick hit miniseries. Can you believe we're now past the halfway mark? Amazing. I want to get right into it today. I want to talk about how to get ahead of trends. how to master future mediums. I get asked this all the time. How did you get in early on Twitter, twitter.com says Jason, how'd you get in early on zines in the 90s? How'd you get in early on the internet itself? How'd you get in early on blogging and sell weblogs Inc. Before most people even knew what blogs were. How'd you get in early on angel investing and syndicates? How'd you get in early on podcasting? I get this question all the time. And so I'm going to give you a couple frameworks here, just different ways to frame how you look at the world, right? So framing is critically important. If you look up behavioral psychology, organizational psychology, you'll find something called framing. It's a school of thought. It's a technique, how you look at the world, right? So we I like to talk to people how they frame things. When you first look at something, and you spot something very early, let's say it's Tick Tock, your friend tells you about it, Uber, DoorDash, Airbnb, Twitter, podcasting, pick a trend could be net NFTs, right? blockchain, Bitcoin, it's very easy to look at something. And humans take a very pessimistic view early on. We're scared creatures. Why are we scared creatures? Why do we take a pessimistic view at the new? Well, we take a pessimistic view at the new for a reason. When you meet something new in nature, and you're like, wow, look at that big furry thing. And then it shows you these giant fangs. You're like, oh, that's a mountain lion, the people who would run up and be like, Oh, there's something new, let's give it a hug would get eaten, or they would be like, let's try this piece of fruit, and it would be poisonous, right? So we're conservative, being conservative in nature in DNA, avoiding new things. really does make you live longer. New thing might be a river that you come across, somebody jumps in the river, they try to swim across it, alligator gets him, the tide gets a boom, they just get pulled by the rush of the river and go off 1000 foot waterfall, you get the idea. So you have to retrain yourself. to be an early adopter. And there's this, of course, chart that you see all the time early adopters on one side laggers on the other and the and the majority, right. And there's like the faster majority and the slow majority of people when they adopt technology or trends. I like to, as an individual, look at these new trends, and instead of being scared of them, I like to be curious about them, right? And I like to look at them and say to myself, what if they work, right? And so you want to anticipate that these things that look like they're not going to work are going to become something big, and usually takes three, four or five tries for something to actually stick. That's one thing I've learned in technology. you know, we had things like six degrees of separation in the 90s. Then you had friends are in my space, you had all these attempts at social networking, and it eventually got to my space Friendster and then this knockoff company called Facebook that just knocked off what Friendster was doing. If you look at the original designs, it looks pretty similar. But Friendster couldn't be kept up and running and MySpace let people design their own pages like GeoCities did before that, which was another community and GeoCities and MySpace look sloppy and wasn't organized. So it was hard to get adoption. Long story short, those things basically were the precursors to what eventually became social networking. So if you were early to my space, but were cynical about Friendster and Facebook, you might have missed being an influencer or really leveraging social media and building companies in that space like Instagram, or now even Tick Tock. If you take the time between when Tick Tock showed up, and when six degrees was around, it's it's over 20 years, actually, or, you know, when my space was around, you're talking about the 2005 or 2006 era of social networking to now, you know, it's coming on 20 years. And then you have tick tock show up. So things can still show up later on, that become big. What I do when I see these things is I assume they're going to work, I assume Twitter was going to work. And I just totally engaged it. I was the number two user on Twitter at one point in time, I kid you not in the first year, it was Robert's global myself. And then this Senator Barack Obama, who was running for president, it was in the primaries, and was wowing everybody in the primaries. And he also had nothing to lose. And so he early adopted. So you want to anticipate that changes are coming, you want to look at the early projects and have a very open mind. Now you'd be like, Oh, J. Cal, you've been so not open minded to crypto. No, not true. I had Bitcoin and I wrote a story about Bitcoin when it was under $1. I was concerned about all the frauds going on. But, you know, with all those frauds going on, that was different than me looking at the fundamental core technology and saying, Hey, there's something interesting here, I still think there's some interesting things as in terms of more internet from it. So assume things are gonna work, you know, you don't want to give up on these new platforms, you want to be curious and investigate them. I did this a number of times I told you about Twitter, I also did it with blogging. And I did it with podcasting. When I started in podcasting, it was literally an iPod. And before I did, you know, you would you would basically upload your mp3 file, and then it would use a piece of software, which called the pod catcher at the time, which would take a download on your desktop of an mp3 and put it into an album, it would hack the iPod, and create an album called podcasting. And it would just put a file there, there were no RSS feeds, you know, with all the fancy episode numbers and everything back then, the standard was very, very janky. But Dave Weiner created that standard RSS in the 90s. Then they included audio links in it, then the Apple iTunes Store began supporting it. And that's where you see that famous clip of me asking Steve Jobs about Apple support of podcasting. We'll play that clip right now.

### Human: No, like coworking spots.### Assistant: I said, like a retail of these are like, you know, what actually is if you go now, I actually think it might be.

### Human: Yeah now we have a goat sneakerhead marketplace we were the earliest institutional investor there it's a public publicly released knowledge that it's worth three point seven billion dollars. And, uh, yeah, but what's crazier is the volume of business that they do. We, it was staggering. I know in the earliest days, Eddie and Dyshon and the board member from upfront, uh, who was a large part of why goat was successful in the early days, uh, Greg Bettinelli. You know, the biggest resistance they got from investors was how big of a market could this really be? There was a quote unquote, Tam problem, total addressable market problem. And I think that's the thing, the imagination of so many investors, which is that things are niches. I remember years ago, looking at a business called crunchy roll. Yeah, crunchy roll. Yeah, it was a Japanese media company. And Netflix, right?### Assistant: If I were to describe what it was Japanese content and Asian content.

### Human: It's like it's big and fun and exciting. Yeah.### Assistant: It's so yeah, he could make the he might he's capable of making a huge bet like meta did. And it being the mistake. So he could bet the house. I don't know. That's an interesting observation. Actually, you know, just saying this if this if I only can pick one risk factor I like I'll be honest, I kind of like that risk factor of somebody who would make a bold bet.

### Human: We're quite easy.### Assistant: And so that's why police don't respond dollars a year in service plus whatever you pay for the cameras, which is de minimis, you can have this kind of service, the equivalent of having a 24 hour shift at your house, or even if you just did it at night, let's say because you're home during the day. 12 hours security guards cost 30 bucks an hour, I think 40 bucks an hour, something in that range. Yep. You would be talking about, gosh, in whatever, if you just did 10 hours with 300 hours. Yeah, in the first month, it would cost that amount.

### Human: This is how it used to be used to go to like, they would have six screens, you'd be like, we'll see what what what we're interested in that starting next is what we'll see.### Assistant: I miss most about it. When people looked at it as cinema, and we would go to the Angelica in New York, on Broadway in Houston. We go down there. You've been to it. Yeah. And we would go. Yeah, we would go. And sometimes we go at like six o'clock, we'd look at what movies were available, because buying tickets, you didn't have the internet, you just go, you look at what's available, you buy a ticket for later that evening.

### Human: Yeah, some of them are going to go private for sure winners in the ones that are up to a small number that are Yeah, I'm starting to see lucids in the wild. And every time I do, I get really excited because they're so freakin futuristic looking.### Assistant: Top four performers in SPACs recently, MP Materials, up 259% CEO Jim Letitsky was at the Olin Summit, you remember him talking about minerals, Ipeak Energy up 108%. He was like, yeah, I bought a mine. Sure, Sarah Val therapeutics up 184 lucid motors up 80% 2060 specs are now down for down more than 90% over 60 or down more than 80%. So that's just carnage. And yeah, I mean, if you want to play VC, as a public market participant, as a retail investor, if you want to play VC, There's a reason why it's hard to get in VC and it's hard to keep your gig in VC. It's a hard. It's a hard business. And you know, you need to have 2030 bets. And you need to get in at the right price. And here, maybe people got in at the wrong price. And maybe they had three or four bets. And maybe they're looking at a one year window, not a 10. So Yeah, I think people are treating these like public companies with much more proven, you know, and that's the things consumers were not educated on to how speculative these are. But I bet you there's going to be some winners in those ones that are down 90% or 80%.

### Human: So oh, and relatedly, there's this nice note relatedly, Didi will be delisting from the New York Stock Exchange and listing in the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Kelsa Preece. Yeah. Yeah.### Assistant: I mean, it's all going to be basically all of these companies will just trade in Hong Kong and like the decoupling. We'll see how far the decoupling goes. It seems like right now. media finance, these things will be decoupled. And then, you know, manufacturing probably not. So, you know, maybe it was a bridge too far. Having, you know, our apps in China, we never got our apps in China, having their companies listed here, and then having less control over those companies, and those companies having more Western influence in them, ie the boards of the companies, etc. So

### Human: 35 million people, you get down to 10 million again, 20 million.### Assistant: Well, I, it kind of depends if there are other shoes to drop. Um, so, so I agree with from off that, you know, the state of the economy right now is terrible and it's divorced from the financial markets because of, you know, all the money printing and interventions that the fed and treasury are, you know, have been doing. Um, One way to think about it is, well, the stock market's denominated in US dollars. And if they just printed a whole bunch more of them, those dollars are worth less. And so the price of the stocks are going to rise. But but yeah, I think looking forward, um, you know, I it's probably going to be a two to three year process to get out of this unless some other shoe drops Which could make it much worse So you're you're betting on two to three years to get back to let's call it single digit unemployment Um, well, let's see we're at like what 15 right now or something like that. Um so

### Human: Also, what you can do, you can't type a new prompt directly in the editor just yet, but you can use all the other AI features that we've built over the years. You can also say, for example, we could actually go and pull out the all in summit existing website. I use that as a prompt. And use this as an example. So all in summit, I guess you already have one for last year. And you can take a screenshot of this and then go in with it and say, you know what, I want to create a new screen from the screenshot. And then basically start from again, something else than just a blank screen. And this enable our customers to just, you know, not reinvent the wheel when you already have something to work with. Oh, and ported as a mobile screen. Let me just do this again. We want to build this for the web.### Assistant: Fascinating. So I could pick five websites I like on the web, I could pick five other people's websites and say, Hey, these are ones that are inspirational to me. Let's start with theirs. So and that wouldn't be necessarily stealing, it would be a starting point, maybe, and you'd have to make it your own starting point.

### Human: So would it be unethical to then try to bring back is the Jurassic Park question you get all the time, Thanksgiving or whatever holiday? It does seem probable that we could bring back some species, maybe not dinosaurs or woolly mammoths, but some.### Assistant: You don't do that. Like cancer has been cured many times in mice, right? Like, you know, like, like the, you you you will you do, they are a place to learn what might work in humans. I think that's accurate, but they are not perfect models. And they certainly again, aren't something that I think you'd mess with. Yeah, I think probably the best thing you're gonna get is like, broad human genome sequencing. So you're gonna get all these little studies that like compare a bunch of people and on different genes, but like, you don't have to sequence everybody. It's just not that much data. There's only so many. What is it? Eight billion people? There's eight billion data points across a three-billion-letter genome with all these changes and the complexity of a body that also includes your upbringing and 50 other things. It's too sparse. It's too sparse to bet your kid on. I think that makes it – It's going to take longer than people think.

### Human: I can never, no, no, no. I don't think they want to hear us fighting.### Assistant: Come on, Antonio. I want to keep fighting.

### Human: It's exactly the right steps in exactly the right order.### Assistant: It's so good that I think a content farm answer that infected the top 10 results would not be this good. Therefore, I believe this is, I believe this is chat GPT. And i'm a little scared right now because i'm starting to associate a comprehensive thoughtful answer That's perfectly written As chat gpt, right? And that's like what what's your breakdown take me through your process for your answer? I'm, sorry. I went first both times you do the next two first.

### Human: breakdown again, you went by that pretty quickly breakdown again for me what types of data and why it's valuable.### Assistant: Yeah. So Arcadia is an energy data platform. We unlock all of the geographically limited monopoly utility data that is, you know, all around the world across 10s of 1000s of utilities. We plug, we uncover that data for companies in new energy companies, or carbon accounting, or all sorts of different sort of use cases. And that data is sort of, you know, it's incumbents that don't really have an incentive, frankly, to make it easy for, you know, companies to actually get access to the different energy usage data, tariff data, cost data of how energy is priced, and then payment details as well. And so our platform now operates across the world, across 10,000 utilities. And we make it super simple for anyone to get data from that incumbent utility, no matter where they may be.

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

### Human: Talking about investing in the arc of a career. Not all of them have been successful. You need only one to be successful to make that relationship work. Some some have gone great. Some have been terrible. And, you know, it's a friendship. Raj and I have a friendship that is, you know, my parents have effectively adopted him. I think they like him better than me and my brother. They like my brother better than me. My younger brother is the favorite son and then me, but I think Raj gets on top of both of us.### Assistant: Yeah, exactly. I'm like, I got 13 ski days in, and here we are in January, you know, first week of January, we're back at it. It's just as crazy. It's just as crazy, but relationships, building meaningful relationships, having thoughtful conversations, you can get through this. And if you fail, and you did your best. You just you brush yourself off, you get back up. It's one of the great things about our industry. We look as failure. If you worked hard and you failed, my lord, you get the respect of everybody who watched you do it. And then your chance to come back again is guaranteed. You said you had somebody you did eight businesses with.

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

### Human: It was a bit growth. Imagine, right. I mean, there's even a magical universe in which if if the economics are not in play here, your Wikipedia Like I tell people all the time that Wikipedia is actually my most trusted news source, like Wikipedia and weirdly Reddit, right? Like when you have competing incentives that are about like Wikipedia is devoted to truth and not money making. So can it be gamed occasionally? Will you go there like 10 minutes of every day? Is it totally inaccurate until it gets fixed? Possibly. But at the end of the day, the incentives for Wikipedia are truth. Yeah. And so if that it and like, I'm so fine with the conversation where we say the incentive for Twitter should be truth. And it should be un meddled with conversation. I'm like, here for that. I'm all right, let's totally deserve for that.### Assistant: I'm just I'm on like a very weird sleep schedule. And my dyslexia is going crazy. Anyway, we're getting a problem. I think what they should do is when you're somebody who's been brigaded, they should build an algorithm and offer it up to you. That's the anti brigading algorithm. So once you're brigaded, if they said we highly recommend you put on only your followers can reply by by default, would you like to make this your default Molly? whoever's getting brigaded on a regular basis, they could have actually solved the problem. Why don't they solve the brigading problem? To solve the brigading problem lowers engagement. Yep. And it lowers the scumbags, the fieriness, the outrage machine, that is what build which was one of Twitter's few growth areas. Brigading is nothing to do with free speech, which has nothing to do with growth. Yes. But you could stop brigading and you could make the place. I guarantee you if Elon controlled Twitter, it would be 100 times more sustainable, delightful, less toxic for people who are currently being brigaded. And that's trans people, women, people of color, he would solve that problem in 10 seconds, because the easiest problem to solve in the world, as you pointed out, as we've kind of beaten to death here. It's an economics based decision, totally not a moral base or ethics based decision. He's going to make that decision based on moral and ethics, which is the scumbag shouldn't be allowed on the platform. And he's a proponent of verifying people right now. What is verification about on the system? It's about anointing. It's about anointing celebrities, journalists, notable people, order to get them to feel special when they use the product. Great. They get the blue checkmarks. Now we give light blue to anybody who puts in their credit card. And we put the name of the credit card. This was my pitch from 10 years ago, I shared the tweets with my old blog post on it. If they made the very and obviously, Elon is very supportive of the same idea. And I think he came to it himself. I don't think he's got it for me. Which is verification should be available to everybody. If you have a verified Twitter then and if you had multiple clients, Molly would could come on and say, you know, I'm being particularly harassed right now. And they got rid of a lot of the bots, but there's still some scumbags left on the service. I'm going to check the box that I want verified by Twitter anointed and light blue verified by a credit card that's not a burner card. And the name on the card and the type of card visa. J. M. telekinesis was the name of the card. And yes, that can be faked. but it's it's work to fake is on my profile page, verified how verified by a phone number, verified by an email and verified by a credit card that had this name on it. If you put up those roadblocks to being verified, and then if it costs 10 bucks, or 100 bucks a year, or 50 bucks a year, whatever the half the price of Spotify, Is it worth it for people to pay for that? Of course it is. And does everybody have to pay? No, you can be free. But then when Molly Wood says I'm being brigaded, whoever's being brigaded, turns you off. Now you've got a revenue stream that I think would generate 300 400 $500 million out of the gate. Yeah, but it wouldn't do the growth thing.

### Human: Um, I like that.### Assistant: He also signals full contact deidre. She she knows she's like, I don't know what she really is But they told her to go full contact at some point and I was on and she was always like very jovial at me And she was just like but what about this? What about this? And I was like, well, if you let me finish I don't usually do that. I usually just talk over people, but I didn't want to just talk over her. So I was like, wait, if you ask me the question, you got to let me finish. And she was like, fair enough. But I was like, one of those contentious. You're like, huh?

### Human: And it's going to be I think some pain is going to occur across the industry here.### Assistant: Fantastic. So monthly, next month, the users will be able to see the metrics for followers on Apple podcast. So if somebody follows, I think that also means subscribe, you can see the number. That's great. And you can see the new followers.

### Human: They call him a steward or a busser. So we are only meant for high volume places like a Google cafeteria or a hotel and Instead of having that big rotating round of trays that you probably saw when you were at a college campus, instead, you're putting your dish into our collection system.### Assistant: So I'm imagining a cafeteria like experience in some cases where I bust my dish, you know, at the Stanford cafeteria, whatever cafeteria, I put it on that conveyor belt at Google's cafeteria. And it goes there. Or is this for a restaurant where the busboy or the waiter? I guess busboys? Yeah. What do you call what do you call what's the non gender version of a busser? Is that really it?

### Human: really Scott said, I'm going to do a specific voiceover for the 50th anniversary, I'm going to sell 1000 or 10,000 copies that have like, you know, the special commentary, it's going to be one of 1000, you'll have your number, it's a but the actual media is embraced in there. And it doesn't exist on Apple or Netflix, you just buy it directly from, you know, the movie studio, then you own that asset forever. Yes. And it's tradable. Because right now, like, what's the difference between a people being in there? and you know, some blu ray copy of this could be like an interesting thing for indie filmmakers and other folks.### Assistant: Well, we talked about this, I think, in one of the first episodes, right? But if you think about something like Royal does this, and there's like a couple of different platforms, right, which are allowing musicians to take their rights and make them available via blockchain, right? So that that's sort of the first step in the direction of what you're talking about. And so yeah, like, you know, why should you, if you buy a movie, why should it be limited to the iTunes ecosystem? Maybe in the future you want to move all to Google or you want to move all to Amazon. So if you've bought that right, that right should exist across platforms. And so I think this opening is really, really exciting. The things that you're talking about, I think can be enabled now. and say look like especially with things like you know file claim behind the scene where the actual asset will live in a decentralized storage and then they'll be nft that says okay that's my right to that thing living in a decentralized storage it's really really huge opportunities coming our way here i could just think of like a director if a director like really scott said i'm gonna make the blade runner final final cut you know the final cut is the best one but

### Human: Oh, absolutely. You've got to be seen at the thing and then it raises your own awareness in people's minds 100%. I mean, I can attest to the fact that on a way less famous level, that happened.### Assistant: Yeah. It's, it's kind of like unjustifiable. But then I also think on a marketing basis, like those courtside seats, we're going for 3040 the second row, obviously a lot less. But those courtside seats, I think on a branding basis, if you see Jay Z there now, Jay Z doesn't need more branding, right? But I wonder, yeah, when Jay Z is there, does more jay-z tickets sell, you know, for the next concert? Or if he had a record out, does he get more listens? Because you know how many people watch these finals games? Like maybe not for a standard Knicks game, but finals game. Absolutely. I mean, that's nationally televised. I think it's probably there might be some amount of marketing that, you know, jay-z value gets out of it. Right? I think so. Maybe that's why celebrities go. It's kind of like,

### Human: Most of the time, this is not ever about mechanics. It is only about philosophy.### Assistant: I did notice at the time, I will say four to five times when people have an issue with my moderation, I go look at their profile, and I look at their likes and their mag. One out of five times it is somebody who's you know, whatever neutral, left, right, whatever doesn't matter, but they actually have a good point. And so I'll take a note anytime as Steph Curry, moderating, by all means, if you can tell me how to hit another three pointer a game or increase my shooting percentage by one or 2%, I'll take it. Like that's why I'm Steph Curry of this. But make it constructive, folks, give me a specific timestamp. Even on this show, if I if I talk over Molly, whatever, I get excited. Just tell me, hey, let it breathe this timestamp that you know, and DM it to me.

### Human: Yeah. And so what's the game on the field right now? Yeah, and I think this is the part that people Yeah, like, like the game on the field. And so I think that if I'm someone working in a corporation and understanding it, you've got to understand the game and the temperature of what's happening on the field. Yeah. And as as a junior employee from my first job, like you're working if you're working in tech, which is most people listening to this, you work in tech, understand tech, Right. It's your responsibility. You just don't work for the company. You need to understand the landscape and the field because the more you understand tech, the more it's going to help you in every job you're doing.### Assistant: You had to play the game on the field, right? I mean, if you're against Google and Microsoft and Uber and Airbnb, giving huge option grants, you don't really have a choice.

### Human: But the first one was already 10,000 people.### Assistant: Yeah, I actually do know that this one is true. So Solace was correctly founded in 2008. And back then it was an initiative of five Finnish entrepreneurs. And they were worried about Finland in general, like the lacking attitude of entrepreneurship, the lacking networks of people wanting to build companies, and also the lack of venture capital available in Finland for Finnish founders. And they decided to organize a small event to tackle that. So a few hundred people in one room. However, these people were busy founders, so they didn't really have time to commit for this side project. So luckily, Peter Vesterbakka, who is one of the core team members in Rovio, the creator of Angry Birds that you just mentioned, met this young guy called Miki Kuusi. And Miki was back then a president of a student society. called Aalto IS, and he was extremely eager to have an impact and change the world. And this group of Finnish entrepreneurs ended up handing Slush, this small event, to the hands of this student association. The student association didn't really like the kind of small scale, so they started growing the event. heavily. And a few years after, it was 10,000 people, then 15,000 people, then 20,000 people. And now it is an extremely strong movement for over 10 years.

### Human: I watched a couple of clips. And now I'm pulled in. But you know, there's Kobe is going to the gym at five in the morning. And he's in the lobby, and this hotel in China, and like, or wherever it was. And maybe that wasn't when they were in America training for it. And Carmelo Anthony and LeBron and Dwayne Wade come in and they're young upstarts in the league. And Kobe's like, Hey, you guys go to the gym. And they're like, we just got back from the club. And he's like, All right, I'll be in the gym. And it's 530. And so then the next day, like at seven, they came to the gym the next day, 630. You know, and he did three workouts a day. I've been reading about him. And he's truly unique individual in terms of the effort he put in was just, just different, just very different. Anyway, that's, I think that's my opening salvo for this. I just this is one of the reasons I haven't hired a lot of people with too much experience in venture, because in a lot of cases, the people who are available, in venture are the ones who are not at a top firm, because we're at a top firm, right? So then you're getting the people who are available who probably got bounced from a mid tier firm. And I'll be totally honest, I look at their Instagram. And I'm like, does this person work?### Assistant: Or like, I look at you're having way too much fun.

### Human: Yes, I remember this distinctly, because we're talking about either boutique hotels or restaurants, and then you were showing me music. And I was like, wait a second, that actually kind of works. If you stayed at the proper hotel, you might, or you stayed at the standard, you actually might want like that kind of band or like, you know, sushi place.### Assistant: Totally. And I remember there was kind of this aha moment where you called me a dumb genius, which is still one of the nicest things anyone's ever said. It was very kind. It was in good spirit. But we suddenly realized there could be something big with this whole API thing. And at the time, APIs were kind of a nascent, it wasn't really a highly scaled SaaS model. And it was there was always kind of this issue with educating the customer and kind of pulling developer resources to look into it. But we started firmly down that path and what was amazing it was actually you and a senior product manager twitter at the time reached out for a product they were developing internally. But we just went down that path and basically started building this kind of omnibus for lack of a better word, recommendation tooling that can take into account entities. So, like a movie, a music artist, a restaurant, even just a geolocational context and basically in real time within milliseconds kind of give recommendations for any desired output category. And so the idea was to make it in a kind of a headless way that people could build all kinds of things on top of. But frankly, it was kind of a grind, as you know, for many years. And then what really became an accelerant recently was kind of GDPR and all the privacy regs. Because we were never in a privileged enough position to receive PII in the first place. Like we were talking to financial services companies. Yes. So for the folks at home, PII is just personally identifiable information. I'm so deep.

### Human: Yeah, like there are local organizers who are organizing to politically fight this or just to help women organizing to help women also to politically fight this. There are a couple like really interesting again, not to derail us, but there are a couple really interesting laws that have been proposed in some of these states that are like, oh, okay. Well, if you're going to outlaw abortion, then there has to be a corresponding statute that provides for the care of this child for the child's entire life. So pay for the child. Yeah, pay for the job. Take care of the kid. Okay, you tell me if you really care.### Assistant: Yeah, yeah, exactly. All right, everybody. Great show. We'll see you tomorrow. Bye bye. Bye bye.

### Human: Exactly. I definitely tried to get in contact with the right people there, but I think I got blacklisted quite quickly.### Assistant: And you made a public tweet where you asked them, please let me have it back. And what happened? I saw the tweet that you sent. You were like, I'm serious, Satya. Please let me buy it back. Keep the team and focus on Microsoft to do it. No one will be angry for not shutting down Windows. And you got thousands of hearts on that one, but I'm guessing nobody called you back.

### Human: We have that was the worst Bill Gurley impression I've ever heard. I get what you're trying to say.### Assistant: Bill's a Bill Gurley is a tall guy and speaks at a certain pace.

### Human: It is, yeah. And China's letting a rip with COVID right now, God help them. Here we go.### Assistant: Hottest take for 2023. Okay, hottest take. What is your hottest take for 2023? I have a hot take, but let's see if you have one. I could filibuster for you, or I can let you go.

### Human: Womp womp.### Assistant: Alright, I'm going to do a quick rundown on what is happening with the semiconductor economy because of course, the US has made this big push with the CHIPS Act to reshore semiconductor manufacturing, and, you know, foundry building and really creating resilience in this specific part of the economy. And there is only one minor issue with this effort. And that is that we don't have enough engineers, apparently, to build semiconductors. In fact, The estimates are that the US chip reshoring push is going to need 50,000 new engineers over the next five years. Now, obviously we have a widespread STEM sort of shortage, right, across the board in the United States. And now there's this kind of need for these specifically trained engineers in this area around manufacturing. So as a result, this act, as we know, let's just recap, is designed to boost competitiveness, innovation, and national security in the United States. and increase domestic semiconductor manufacturing. The CHIPS Act did allocate $200 million for worker training, which is great. Companies like Intel and the National Science Foundation have increased training. And now, Purdue, and I suspect that Purdue will not be the last, Purdue is one of the country's biggest engineering schools, and it's specifically expanding its semiconductor education, aiming to graduate 1,000 semiconductor engineers annually as soon as possible. This is, however, a big jump. First of all, it would be $1,000 a year. We need $50,000. I'm not trying to be a downer. This is great that this is happening at Purdue, but For scale, according to the Washington Post, Purdue currently graduates about 150 semiconductor engineers per year. And imagine how this happened. It's a pretty straightforward march, actually, even when you look at, you know, you can kind of compare it to venture capital and the tech industry writ large. It all went software and it all went apps. And so even students who are in STEM fields, and there are a shortage of those students, are primarily pursuing coding. And so now we're trying to shift to a different type of engineering. In some cases, it's going to be physical, they will literally be chip manufacturing, it may be a different type of engineering and coding that, you know, people aren't doing now. So it's a big overhaul in terms of curriculum and training. Purdue invited semiconductor experts to join a new advisory board to make recommendations on that curriculum and training. The Washington Post also reported that Defense Department officials went to Purdue to talk about workforce training, because again, this is seen as increasingly a national security initiative. According to salary.com, the average semiconductor engineer salary is $114,155. I would love to see actually how that compares to software engineers. And if that's going to go up, I would imagine that it is as this becomes a bigger and bigger push for the United States. It also I think, you know, we talk a lot on this show about the ways in which immigration reform is totally necessary to fill gaps across the economy, whether it's doctors, nurses, vets, semiconductor engineers. And I suspect that we will start to incentivize immigrants with new visas. We have some existing tech visa programs that yes, everybody agrees are flawed in various ways. But I would not be surprised if there are expanded visas for people who want to work in this industry. And then it's going to take a bit, you know, we've had decades now, right, at least one solid decade of learn to code as a mantra within the US economy that if you get into tech, this is a great way to make a great living. learn to painstakingly build and fabricate tiny little semiconductors is going to be a different, it's going to be a different kind of pitch. And it'll be interesting to see how we work to incentivize these incoming students and workers to do this kind of, in some cases, like I'm saying, physical engineering, and I have to be completely transparent here. I don't know that much about what goes into semiconductor engineering, I know that it's incredibly painstaking. And you have to work in like a clean room, you know, like those Intel commercials, and also in full transparency, one of our one of our producers said that it sounded kind of boring. But hopefully it is not boring to everybody. Nevertheless, there's going to need to be a PR push. Thank you. Producer Brian, the new guy looked up the average base salary in the United States for software engineers. That is 121,806 with usually additional cash bonuses of about 14,000. So total software engineer compensation $136,260. And in order to begin a career as a semiconductor engineer, you have to at least procure a bachelor's degree in material science and engineering, or applied physics with emphasis, emphasis in fields like computer science and electrical engineering. So pretty different path forward. I mean, I think it sounds kind of cool. And I hope that other people do too. But it is going to, it's going to get interesting really fast. And of course, this push to increase workers is coming, as Washington is imposing new export controls on the industry. Now, semiconductors made with US tech for AI for high performance computing and supercomputers can only be sold to China, if you get this very hard to obtain export license. US citizens and entities are now barred from working with Chinese chip producers except with specific approval. And this prompted the Chinese chip maker YMTC to ask American employees in quote, core tech positions to leave, because it now has to comply with these new US export controls. So disruption is hard, changing the path that our economy has been on for the last few decades of globalization is incredibly difficult. And I don't want to say we have the cart before the horse because both the cart and the horse have to get somewhere quickly. We have to do this on shoring push. I don't think anybody disputes that it's necessary. And given what we've seen in China and the Biden administration sort of hardening stance toward China, there's no evidence that we're on the wrong trajectory, but it is going to take a dramatic increase in workers to get us there. And I applaud Purdue for jumping on this immediately and making it a competitive advantage for that school. I hope that other schools will do the same thing very soon. All right, let's keep up with some international news here. I just get to I get to do all the international news by myself. India has fined Google $113 million and ordered the company to permit third party payments in the Play Store. So this is a big deal. because this is a huge market and potentially because it could set a precedent for other platforms even in the US who knows but here's the news as we have it so far the competition commission of india has slapped google with this 113 million dollar fine for abusing its dominant position of the play store The CCI ruled that developers are allowed to use a third-party payments processing service for in-app purchases or for purchasing apps. The case was opened toward the end of 2020. It said that Google's in-app purchase policy constituted an imposition of unfair condition. So this Indian antitrust watchdog has directed Google to introduce a series of changes to the Play Store policies within three months, including The following, Google shall not impose any anti-steering provisions on app developers and shall not restrict them from communicating with their users to promote their apps and offerings in any manner, non-interference basically. Google shall not restrict end users in any manner from accessing and using within apps the features and services offered by app developers, aka Google will just get out of the way and let you use the app the way you want to use it, including how you pay for stuff, presumably. And then finally, Google shall not impose any condition, including price-related conditions, on app developers, which is unfair, unreasonable, discriminatory, or disproportionate to the services provided to the app developers. Google also has to be transparent in communicating with the app developers about the services provided and the corresponding fees that will be charged and publish in an unambiguous manner, the payment policy and criteria for applicability of any fees. Google, of course, like many companies, has poured billions of dollars into the South Asian market over the past few decades. It's aggressively trying to find major untapped regions. Many companies, of course, are seeking access to the Indian market. It is gigantic. and a little less problematic than the Chinese market, although I think what they're finding is that the Indian market is not pushover, let's just say like Indian regulators pushed back hard against Facebook when it attempted to introduce that Facebook's Facebook basics, service internet basics, it was basically, they would offer free internet access within India in exchange, you know, for users using an app that Facebook had effectively programmed with its own pre chosen websites, including, I believe, its own service. And you see their antitrust regulators pushing back pretty hard companies coming in and kind of trying to do business as usual. I'm very curious to see the extent to which India may become a parallel to the EU a little bit in terms of regulation. This is, by the way, Google's second antitrust fine by this commission, the Competition Commission of India, in under a week. Google was fined $161.9 million for other anti-competitive practices. This was an investigation that started three and a half years ago, after a statement was released saying Google was requiring device manufacturers to pre install its entire Google mobile suite, and mandating prominent placement of those apps, India, not having it. Alright, speaking of app stores, and app store rules, Apple is cracking down on NFT functionality and social post boosts with new rules in its app store. So I think on a recent crypto roundtable, we talked about the fact that Apple is now enabling, in some ways, the NFT ecosystem. However, Apple has issued new rules with its software update in iOS 16.1. By the way, if you're like me and you've been waiting to install iOS 16, you now can. I always wait for the .1 update because I have been burned before. Anyway, with the 16.1 update for iPhone and iPad, as well as macOS Ventura, the App Store introduced some new rules, including limiting features that are unlocked through NFTs. It also mandates apps to, ironically, use Apple's payment method to purchase boosts for posts on social medias. First of all, we'll get to what that means in a second, but second, Did they roll this out in India? Because I'll be very curious to see how they respond to that. What social boosts are social media boosts? These are normally boosts that you'd be able to purchase inside an app, right? Like, do you want to boost this post on Instagram, for example? Now, those have to be processed in the App Store, presumably meaning that Apple will get its 30% cut of all of those transactions. This would only apply to apps that offer in-app tools for promoting your posts. It would not apply to back-end sponsoring through an ads manager because presumably that's less app based. And then when it comes to NFTs, Apple is really cracking down on payments being processed outside its ecosystem. Until now, NFTs may have been used as a workaround to Apple's App Store fees. We even talked about that on the Crypto Roundtable, that it could be like a little bit of a Trojan horse where you would offer an NFT for free, and then that NFT itself could be used as your ticket or your kind of purchasing opportunity outside of the ecosystem, a little bit of a hack. That will not be allowed anymore. I blame ourselves. I think it must have been because we talked about it on the Crypto Roundtable and now Apple has shut that loophole right down. It said that apps are allowed to list, mint, transfer, and let users view their own NFTs. However, the ownership of NFTs should not unlock any more features within the app.

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

### Human: Get out of here with that garbage.### Assistant: such garbage. All right, listen, in a totally non related story, Nike just acquired an NFT studio pronounced artifact spelt r t f k t. But it's pronounced artifact. The terms haven't been disclosed. But in May, the firm had raised $8 million in a seed round at a $33 million valuation from Andreessen Horowitz. They were behind the NFT project clone x with famed Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, his most expensive piece sold for $13.5 million in 2008. So here are the clone x NFT avatars and compared to board apes and crypto punks crypto punks look like they were made by a computer and aren't finished. They look terrible. Sorry, board apes are kind of goofy and I would say these are, you know, pretty nice TechCrunch call clone x one of the most popular ft drops the past few months. And since it dropped three weeks ago, the project has already seen 84 million in transaction volume according to crypto tractor crypto slam. I don't know if you can trust any of this to be honest, I think a lot of this stuff is people painting the tape and flipping these things and insider trading. We've seen some evidence of that the average clone x NFT is selling for around 4.7 ETH in December or $18,000 for painting, I guess, of an individual. So if you like art, and you think this is worth $18,000, there you go. I don't know if in this case, you get to own the IP of these ones. I think that you know, the intellectual property, in other words, you can make it into a TV character, a comic book or a t shirt. But here's a chart from Yahoo Finance tracking the price and volume of clone x NFTs over the past two days. And when the news of the Nike acquisition broke volume and price both spike, according to the TechCrunch article, Artifact has collaborated with other crypto creators to design items like physical shoes that utilize imagery and other NFT projects, including crypto comps and board games. So I think you know what's happening here. I think Nike likes to be part of the avant garde. They like art. This is a convergence of art and commerce. And so I think what we'll see is when you buy your shoes, and we talked about this before on other episodes, The idea of pairing an NFT with your physical object is kind of interesting. It's almost like the label or the certificate that comes with it. So let's say you bought some really cool pair of sneakers, Yeezys, whatever, or whatever the Nike equivalent is, and you got the NFT with that. Well, you could kind of trade the NFT with the shoes, or maybe the shoes are kept in storage somewhere. If you're a collector of these shoes, and then you have the NFT, if you trade the NFT, the shoe gets transferred to a person. I think that's actually kind of interesting. I know people in the wine space who collect wine, you know, we're investors in underground cellar, people just leave their wine at underground cellar or other people who are in the wine market will buy in fractionally to a wine collection to a vintage, two cases of wine. And so if we all wanted to buy a million dollars in a certain vintage, we each you know, put in $10,000. And 100 of us do that. We corner the market on that one, but we don't want to take custodianship of it. You want somebody else to be the custodian to be the responsible party. So I could see that happening here. And I think people will start because there's so much money in the world. And there's so many affluent people, they're not buying shoes anymore, to walk places, they're buying shoes, as art as collectors as items of status. as things that bring you joy aesthetically, just like wine brings people joy. So this is completely, I think, legitimate purchase by Nike, to do something interesting, and extend their brand into this new digital world. I've never really got people spending huge amounts of money on art, I do understand that it has value to some people. And I you know, also with the wine thing, like, for me, like some crazy expensive wine that doesn't do it for me. But you know, maybe a really expensive house or expensive steak does do it for me. So I will spend money on a Kobe or Miyazaki beef. That's I seem like an idiot because I spent $200 on eight ounces of, you know, beef when I could have bought the whole cow or half a cow that wasn't from Japan and massaged and fed milk. cream and whatever else to make them super fat so. very interesting purchase and related news earlier in December Adidas announced a partnership with the board a yacht club. Adidas purchased a board a NFT and will create a character around the NFT. The NFT was purchased in September for 46 ETH, just over 156 K at the time. And so, you know, you're gonna see Nike create 1000 limited edition versions of the Jordan one or Air Force One or other legendary shoes that you're not going to get your hands on that are too hard. Or maybe, you know, you buy the NFTs and it gives you the ability to come to those drops they do in the physical real world. So instead of people lining up, you got to have an NFT in your wallet, and you show that in your, you take out some sort of wallet and QR code and they scan you and you get to go into the store, right? So the stores are open three days a week to one group of people four days a week to the public, right? And so this NFT apparel thing seems reasonable to me, I talked here about doing this with tickets. So if NFTs because they're one of one, because they're traceable, resellable, and they have rule sets in them, kind of the exciting part about this, I think it's silly, ridiculous when they start trading. for tons of money. And there's all this painting of the tape and all kinds of shenanigans that occur. If one of my friends was advising me, should I buy these things, I would say only if you don't like money or don't care about losing money. You'd be making a crazy lottery style bet to buy these board apes or crypto punks, whatever. I mean, these, this is like, this is a new avant garde. I mean, this isn't like, taking something like a dolly or a Picasso, or a Warhol or Basquiat. you know, those have some decades or centuries of trading that you can look back on. In fact, masterworks, I own does that for a living. If you're buying into this cohort of NFTs, realize you're buying in in the first year or two of this trend, it could just as easily be beanie babies, the board, a yacht club could go down in history as like the stupidest beanie baby thing ever. Or it could be Warhol, right? Who knows. And so buyer beware, if you're doing this, please be careful. And only invest money you can afford to lose. all around the world tech companies are innovating and driving returns for investors. Well, our crowd analyzes many of these companies, they search across the global private market, then they select the ones with the greatest growth potential. And finally, they bring them to you from personalized medicine to cybersecurity, to robotics, one of my favorites, and quantum computing, and so much more, whether it's in a state of the art lab, a startup garage or anywhere in between. Our crowd identifies innovators, so you can invest when growth potential is greatest. And we all know that's early. Our crowds accredited investors have already invested over $1 billion in growing tech companies, and many of their members have benefited from 46 IPOs or exits. And now you truly diversify your portfolio by investing early in innovative private market companies that are crowd join the fastest growing venture capital investment community at our crowd.com slash twist. Once again, that's our crowd.com slash twist. And you can sign up for free and start reading all those deal memos and you can read those deal memos and get super smart. And then a bet if you're so inclined. All right. Nike is a massive company. And they're able to make big bets. They are a $261 billion company with $44 billion in revenue and $5.7 billion in income. So this is a very big company that can make crazy bets, and they do not want to be on the other side of somebody else taking these NF t's. This is what they're thinking inside Nike when they make a purchase like this for, I'm going to guess they had to purchase it for 10 times what Andreessen paid. So I guess it's $300 million purchase, perhaps. And that would be something that would get the founders to sell because the founders own 60 70% of the company. You know, they sold it for 300 million. Wow, big payday. Or maybe more, who knows. But here's the thing. Nike's looking at this and saying, Hey, you have this giant company, this giant franchise, what if the board, a yacht club decides to partner with a sneaker company like they have, right Adidas, and start making board a yacht club sneakers, and those sneakers become the dope thing that people want. you just can't take that risk. And so super defensive play. So when you look at acquisitions, sometimes people are making a defensive play. And sometimes they have a thesis on how they're going to grow something 10x. as but one example, when I saw weblogs, Inc, to AOL, and they bought it for $30 million. Reportedly, we had only 100 or 200 k in previous revenue, we had maybe two or 300. And, you know, contracts for future revenue, we had basically no revenue. And they paid 100 times revenue or something like that. They look like idiots at the time. But what people didn't know was they were getting $50 per 1000 views in revenue per page on AOL because they were sold out of cars and gadgets and consumer electronics. And we had a gadget and Autoblog and joystick and video game times, they were getting $50 to $100 for their pages, we were getting like $5 because we were just starting our sales process. So they looked at our inventory and said we can 10x the inventory, therefore we're paying one 10th of the price. So that's what you don't see sometimes as the public when these purchases happen. And they also said we can drive 10 times as much traffic to Engadget, and to joystick, and to Autoblog, because we have this giant funnel of traffic. So that's when an acquisition becomes what's called a creative. It creates it grows some incredible value. And so should every apparel company have NFTs? Well, certainly, if it's a collectible type thing, and we think that NFTs become the new bridge into a brand, that's a really good idea. I'll give you another example. there are items inside of incredibly expensive stores where I might not be able to afford the Tiffany diamond necklace, but the Tiffany charm bracelet, right, I could afford, or I might not be able to afford at the Ford showroom. GT for GT. So there was this Ford GT. And I was like, gonna buy a Ford GT when I made a little bit of money after the webloxing sale. I saw it and they that is like a showroom object of art that brings everybody in. And then they wind up buying a Ford Taurus, or a Mustang or whatever is reasonable. There are other things that work the other way around. So instead of being super expensive and drawing you into buy something low, you can't afford to buy Chanel stuff. Or you can't afford to buy an Hermes bag for $4,000. But maybe you could buy the little wallet for 500 bucks, right? So they like to have items that kind of get you started on the brand in case you become rich later and let you participate in it. So there are these items that are like the entry point for people. And I think that NFTs could be that. So if you could not afford a Bugatti, you could buy a Bugatti NFT. If you could not afford a Chanel dress, you could buy a Chanel NFT and put it on your, you know, avatar on your Twitter page or share it somewhere as your avatar on Instagram. It's just a way for you to affiliate yourself a brand. So yes, I do think that these NFTs serve that purpose in the same way. I explained some of those entry level items do or sometimes people will just have like a Ferrari poster in their room, right? Or they'll have a Ferrari keychain. And by the way, there's also this concept of burning NFTs, which is also kind of interesting and weird. So the idea is you burn it to unlock an asset. So imagine you bought these NFTs and it was either a sweepstakes or 10,000 NFTs equal to pair of you know, elite Air Jordan signed by Michael Jordan himself. And, you know, they burn all the NFTs, but one and you keep it or you buy an NFT that lets you get one pair of shoes from Nike in the next 10 years, when you burn it, you get to pick from their collection, right. So there's all kinds of interesting things to do in the burning of NFTs. which are just different features in the smart contract, smart contract, just a rule set that's inside of the code of the NFT. And then another concept that I was talking to producer Nick about was, hey, what if you bought a pair of these elite Air Jordans, Michael Jordan had signed them, whatever, and you own them. But then every time you sell that NFT and the ownership in it, Nike makes another 10%. And hey, maybe Michael Jordan makes 10% or whoever it is. And 80% of the money, you know, you get back. So I bought them for $1,000 an hour with 10,000. Somebody buys them for 10, I get eight. Great. I feel pretty good. I'm 80 times my money. And then Michael Jordan gets 1000 bucks that he doesn't need like craps. And Nike gets 1000 bucks that they don't need to build a bigger headquarters or whatever it is. Then when it's burned, the shoes are delivered. So you might have something trade hands like an antique car or a case of wine, like I explained earlier, but at the burn point is when the object is delivered. This is super interesting as a concept. It could be done today, obviously, with contracts, but legal contracts are hard work and the lawyers and the amount of money the lawyer would have to spend would be greater than the ability to do that. What's interesting about this permissionless society, and these contracts, is that you can do this hopefully at a very low cost. Obviously, the gas fees on Ethereum are a disaster. Supposedly, they're going to fix those and Solana and other competitors are going to fix it. Once those gas fees get down to close to zero or very small numbers, and de minimis, it could be even more interesting. So as I've said many times in the program store of value, not very interesting to me, Bitcoin, I get some by some people are into it. If you're in some crazy country where you have runaway inflation, like 8% a month, you know, just theoretically speaking, I'm joking about America, obviously, but Bitcoin seems to be correlated with America and our futures when the stocks go down. Bitcoin is correlated. So store of value, not very interesting to me. Money transfer, there's so many better ways to transfer money than crypto. Crypto is terrible at it. Just on like a first principles basis, like the actual core technology sucks. It's just too expensive. it's great if you're trying to do it semi anonymously or get out of a country. So yeah, on the margins, if you were a dissident or dictator or a terrorist, yeah, it's pretty phenomenal for money transfer. But for legal people, there's much better ways for like Venmo or, you know, cash app or PayPal or whatever. Third, NFTs, kind of interesting, right? I've been saying that from the beginning that there's something here, this is kind of interesting. And you got a lot of creativity going into it. But like anything else, when money's involved, and anonymity, there's going to be scams. So again, beware. just because I like NFTs doesn't mean I think you should go crazy. And then finally dows, everybody knows, I got the Dow bug. I've been talking to people about it. The legal framework is still screwed. I can't do anything anywhere near the gray area, because I got LPS and I don't want to go to jail. And I care about my reputation. And I would never do anything as a quick money grab. I'm not saying people doing dows is a quick money grab or NFTs is a quick money grab. It's a quick money grab. In a lot of cases, it's a quick money grab. Like, I don't want to be associated with quick money grabs. I want to be associated with slowly making large amounts of money off of non consensus bets. But first to not interested in next to super interested in here we go. Crypto in the second decade is getting very real. But be careful out there, folks. If you're trying to nail an important project before the end of the year, you might need some extra help. Fiverr Business puts a world of expert freelancers at your fingertips so you can get any project across the finish line and be proud of the work. They have everything you need to seamlessly integrate your new team members into your workflow. We love Fiverr here at launch. We've used it many times, and I've told you this story before, but I was going to another country, Australia. I wanted to find all of the founders and investors and capital allocators and technologists and journalists there. My team was like Jay cow. We got to book tickets and speakers and sponsorships. We got a lot to do. They went on Fiverr. They hired researchers. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. Now we've got 1000s of names and in some cases emails that this researcher got for us, man, we started on third base, we had a full house the whole time. You know, we probably wouldn't have gotten to it in the event would have been half the success it was. So thanks Fiverr. Stop wasting time searching for talent, just leave it to Fiverr business. They have a team of dedicated business success managers that will help match you with the best talent for your team. No more endlessly guessing and interviews. Plus, you can save and share your favorite freelancers for future projects like we did with the researcher. We actually did use that researcher to research other podcasts and their advertisers so that we could come up with advertising targets. So find the freelancers you need to give your next project the boost it needs to finish strong. Right now you can sign up for Fiverr Business absolutely free for the first year. You're going to get that one year free and you're going to save 10% on your purchase of Fiverr Business with the promo code Jason. J-A-S-O-N. Just go to fiverr.com slash business. And don't forget the promo code Jason fi v r.com slash business use the promo code Jason. Okay, quick update from tether. Hashtag tether investigation. usdt is now the official currency for a shadow government in Myanmar. This is very complicated international stuff. But basically, what you need to know here is this isn't a good sign. In May of 2020, the Central Bank, they're decreed all digital currencies illegal. And they have a national currency called the kiat. And the government threaten to imprison anybody or find anybody who violated this rule, they want to keep control of their currency, totally reasonable. You may not agree with that if you're in crypto, but certainly a country that's in this kind of situation really does need to have control over security and the financial system. In February of 2021, Myanmar's military overthrew the country's ruling party. And after the military coup, an opposition government of supporters formed and the opposition, the opposition group calls themselves the NUG, National Unity Government. So quoting the Bloomberg article here, while they don't control territorial hold positions of power in Myanmar, group has declared war that has led to an escalation of battles between the military regime and local resistance groups. Obviously, this is a messy, complicated situations, but the NUG is now accepting tether as its legal currency for domestic use. Why? They want to make transactions easy and speed things up is what they're saying who knows what their covert reasons are. Maybe they have some funding coming this way. Maybe they have some sort of special deal. No other details were given. Interestingly, tether has minted 3 billion of new tokens over the past two weeks, according to crypto slate. Again, you know, as much as there's open metrics inside of crypto, for every aspect of the crypto ecosystem that is more open, like a blockchain, there are an equal number if not more shenanigans that can occur. and opaqueness in other areas, ie who is actually making these trades? Is it one person with 1000 accounts? Is it 1000 people with one account? Is it 500 people with two accounts? On average, who knows tethers total market cap is now the fourth largest in crypto 76.5 billion. Here's a chart of tethers market cap over the past three months. And you can check out the spike in growth since late November. you know, what could go wrong, what could go right, just another reason to be concerned about tether. And there are some lawsuits that I see have been filed. And they didn't show up for some of these hearings where people are trying to get a deeper our government's trying to get a deeper understanding of the stable coins stable coins are competing directly against the US dollar, let's be honest, and it's going to give a lot of power to the companies and the people that control it. it is going to compete in a way and destabilize the dollar. If these things get really big, if it's easier to transact in tethers, or Ethereum, or Bitcoin, or Solana, or, you know, even circles, USDC, any of these things become easier and more stable, right? The other things fluctuate. So people generally don't want to use them. If they want to know how much money is going to get there by the time they send it, and the transaction goes through, These stable coins represent a challenge to the sovereignty of countries much to the cheering of independent free thinkers who want less government much to the chagrin of people who believe in the power of central authority. The truth lies somewhere between the two people should be able to do what they want with their money. And they should have privacy, of course, and they should have sovereignty over their wealth. And then on the other side, you really don't want people to be able to anonymously fund terrorist activities or not pay their taxes or otherwise not contribute to society. So there, this is a very nuanced discussion, basic, long story short, if you're going to be creating your own currency, you better have a lot of safeguards in place. And tether doesn't. USDC does. I don't have a horse in the race. I own neither of them. I have no financial interest. But I do think that the stable coins should be absolutely regulated to the health. And when I say to the health, I mean, seriously regulated, like people are going to go to jail, if they screw it up audits, making sure there's dollar for dollar money in the bank that there's insurance, and that there's a limited number of people who can create them. I know that sounds like I'm being an okay boomer. But, you know, some things are very powerful, and there should be a process of getting them. kind of feel that way about guns. I know some people different opinions on this. I don't, I believe in sensible gun control, like maybe you can buy a certain number of guns with a certain capacity. And after that, you have to have insurance for guns, like everybody could have two guns and have no insurance for, you know, rifles, pistols, whatever, 10 rounds or less. But then once you get over that, and you have more than three guns, or whatever, maybe you have to get have insurance, right? Seems reasonable to me, or maybe you have to take a really thorough test. So this falls into the regulation that I think they should have. So be careful. My producers had a really good insight the other day, they found out that director Todd Phillips made a massive amount of money on the Hangover movies. And they brought this to me that he made 75 million according to reports on the first Hangover movie and 150 million overall on the trilogy and the people who were involved in the film got the biggest paydays of their lives apparently, and all because of equity. this is funny because i've played uh cards with and i have mutual friends uh in the la scene uh with todd phillips and he's a really fun sweet guy super talented i thought the film he did the joker uh with joaquin phoenix one of my favorite actors was a masterpiece i know some people didn't vibe with it for me it was just chef's kiss perfection and style and substance and what it had to say about society and the media and psychology and weird people. I thought it was a unique vision that built on cinema from the 70s that I love, like Taxi Driver and Scorsese and, you know, King of Comedy and just any number of great callbacks, wonderful film, just tremendous. And The Hangover was hilarious as well. So according to an article that they found on the internet from celebrity net worth, which has got to be like the most wrong site in the world based on what I read about myself, and other people on it, I think they kind of just pick a number. The first hangover film made 470 million worldwide became the highest grossing R rated comedy of all time. And it started the three film franchise that grossed 1.4 billion. But in 2007, what eventually became the hangover was originally a script called what happens in Vegas, according to the story and multiple studies passed on the script. Because of R rated comedies don't have a great track record at the box office. Obviously, Todd had a different vision here. He thought that adult fare would work at the box off. So the highest grossing R rated comedy was Beverly Hills Cop. I didn't actually realize Beverly Hills Cop was R rated, but did have some choice language. And that did 316 million But that was back in 1984 at the height of Eddie Murphy's popularity. They were also a little worried that it'd be hard to license that title from Las Vegas. Eventually, Phillips got the script, loved it, and decided to pursue it at all costs. He had to deal with Warner Brothers and convince the studio to greenlight The Hangover with a $35 million budget. Really tiny. He pitched the studio, the trio of Bradley Cooper, Zach Galifianakis, my Greek brother, and Ed Helms to star in the leading roles. All three actors were relatively unknown at that point and the studio wound up paying the three actors under 1 million combined for the movie. What? Warner Brothers was still hesitant to give an R rated comedy with no name actors essentially a $35 million budget. So Phillips made them an offer. He would forego a $6.5 million salary his salary in exchange for 16% of the film's gross their top line. The movie was released in June of 2009. It was a huge hit, hilarious. Phillips wound up making around 75 million off the first hangover according to this source windows of true and 150 in total for the trinity. One last thing. Lead actors also got taken care of eventually Cooper Helms and Galifianakis all signed $5 million salaries and 4% of the gross each of the next two movies. According to this back of the envelope, who knows if it's true each took home close to $30 million $28.4 million from just a second hangover movie. And this really goes to show you what ownership does. Very proud to announce that a number of members of my team who've been with me are going to be getting carry. And everybody who is on the podcasting team and who works for me at launch in the swing startups is also included in our carry pool. And we just sold some shares in a company can't say which And I last night, from my former chief of staff and now managing director Ashley sent me the waterfall. And so not only am I getting my carry as I do as a GP, my entire team is going to get a little tasty poo, we're gonna get their beaks wet. And the great part about that, I was talking to a friend of mine, was who is concerned that I work too hard. He said to me, you work so hard, Jay cow, let other people do some work and, you know, get back some of your time. And being able to have upside equity participation really makes people feel appreciated. And nothing is going to make me feel better than having uh this great funnel of my carry flowing in not just to me but to the rest of the team so they all get a little taste and hopefully i get to buy everybody on my team eventually a condo or a house and my god what a great legacy that'll be when i retire if i bought all their houses That is my intent. So for everybody on my team, I do appreciate the hard work and you make me look real good every day. And this Todd Phillips story is also heartwarming, because he took a bunch of actors who were making less than a million combined. And then they got to get a $30 million Leonardo DiCaprio level payday. That's George Clooney money, or Zach Galifianakis, life changing money. So if you're not getting equity or upside in the company you're at, you don't have equity participation. If we learned everything over the last couple years, equity participation changes you from being a wage slave, maybe a little bit of charge language there. But if you're just getting a wage, you're can pretty much define your trajectory. 6% raises, you're making 20 bucks an hour on your first job and just 6% a year for 20 years, figure out where that puts you an hour. And then at some point, it caps off. I'm writing about that in my new book, actually, as I talk about equity as the path to being self reliant. So fight for equity, get equity and earn the equity, right? So understand equity, fight for equity, and then earn your goddamn equity, put in the work, do the work, and make your boss really incentivize to give you equity. I am absolutely thrilled give equity to my teams because it keeps them around longer. And it's vested over time. So what happened here with the hangover was, if they did not get paid well, and didn't have this equity participation, the studio would not have got hangover two and three and had that money printing machine, what they did was they ensured the band would stay together and the band, in fact, stayed together. that trio did all three movies can't say that for jaws or other films it's really hard to keep the band together sometimes and so one of the great things about venture capital firms is everybody gets their carryover investing schedule so you can't just pop in hit a winner and then bounce. you gotta stick around for a couple years. I think most GPs, their agreements are seven years or 10 years basically the life of the fund. You leave early, you lose that percentage. If you stay for seven of the 10 years, you get 70%. Say for five out of 10 years, you get 50%. So you got to stick around. And that's good, sticking around, if you're appreciated, and you got equity participation, really smart move for people in their careers, because now you've moved from being just, you know, a person who has to make a wage and the only way to really be to make it as somebody getting a wage is to be what I call a virtuoso. If you hit that virtuoso category, Steph Curry, LeBron James, Todd Phillips as a director, Steven Spielberg as a director, George Clooney, the virtuosos do get paid incredibly well, we would all agree. But that's the top 2% of any field. other 98% it just goes downhill from there. And then once you get past the top 30%, if you're in the bottom two thirds, you're fungible. In other words, they can the seventh actor in the film probably doesn't make or break the film, they could put anybody in there. That's why they can pay them whatever the day rate is, if you catch my drift. So you either have to be a virtuoso, you got to have equity participation. So just let that sit in your mind as you work on your career. All right, Uber eats was advertised in space. Go Uber Uber eats is awesome. Uber one membership if you don't have it. I'm talking my book here, folks. I still got a lot of Uber shares. Uber one is like Amazon Prime I ordered from Walgreens the other day came in under an hour. It was unbelievable. I needed soap for a load of laundry and I ran out of soap and I ordered it and I had the soap before the next load went in. And I had it I did have it on and you know, heavy duty cycle, it was like a 64 minute cycle or something. But point being, I got the soap before the next load. I do my own laundry sometimes. Yes. I like doing laundry. Actually, I find it like cathartic for some reason. This Japanese e commerce billionaire, you saw who may Zawa, you saw who may Zawa, also known as MZ. He's a fashion, you know, internet billionaire out of Japan. He just went to the International Space Station and delivered an Uber Eats order. Let's play the 25 second clip, and I'll see you on the other side.

### Human: I have three honorable mentions honorable mention to go on. Because I especially like the hyper local part of local closed rental. My number two is savvy team. I think there is such a use for tracking that specific you don't you don't have to rely on just people and their feelings about you. You literally have like milestones on the back end. That's outstanding. And then number one, so glad that Regina recovered its innocuous AI for me. That is incredibly complicated, and I hope you can actually pull that off. But if you can, people are going to pay a lot for that.### Assistant: Okay, well done. We had remote workspace, an old school palace like 2d chat space for business. We had innocuous AI, which we just heard from a no code DevOps platform for AI. We had savvy team, a SaaS platform that gives people a career path, your path, path, improve your skills, upskill yourself. And then we had got on or gone, which is to rent local clothes when traveling to a location you travel lighter, because clothes are waiting for you. And then finally, company 10, and the fifth in this cohort, Timewell. Capture family memories by adding voice to pictures. Let's go in reverse order. Molly, did you have a favorite two that you think could clear market and raise that million dollar round after going through an accelerator? The lens in which we're looking through. I just want three. I know that's why it's to Wow. You can give her we can give a honorable mention. All right.

### Human: Nope. Because people understand like in a non zero sum environment, everybody can be a winner. So I think the bear is going to have to suffer through more of catastrophic crisis before the politics that allow for blocking building change.### Assistant: Nobody and nobody tries to stop it.

### Human: I don't have $110 a month for the service. Yeah, I would not assume. One thing I would push back on is that I wouldn't assume that the $40 a month broadband pricing is actually available in rural areas like what you're dealing with is regional monopolies. A lot of times it's satellite, they can kind of charge whatever they want, and they do right so that you've got like maybe at&t some satellite service out there, and it's 80 or 100 bucks a month, because who's competing with them? No one and the infrastructure doesn't exist. So it is a combination. It's pricing, in some cases, and just simple availability, like there isn't.### Assistant: So let's say, you know, let's just go back to the envelope. This would be like $500 a year. of this will wind up being $500 a year, I bet, like 40 bucks a month, 50 bucks, 50 bucks a month, 40 bucks a month is where this is headed. Because there's gonna be two competitors to Starlink that are coming, right? Amazon's backing one, and there's another one. So I think this trends down to 40 bucks a month, which is 500 a year. I'm just thinking like two years out. Let's say of those 40 million homes, half of them choose not to have broadband, which I think is reasonable. And then half of them is because they can't get it. Let's just say of those five, the research on that, by the way, 6%.

### Human: You and I both.### Assistant: and then apply that and it's because that's what the LPs and their funds might be the high net worth individuals and their funds are probably doing it for some part of retirement play or for their kids and you know, That's actually a very clever way to stay in the game. But tell me how you are thinking about now that I'm an LP and I'm now on the LPAC.

### Human: Yeah, with all this stuff is trade offs, right? So if you're looking at pure efficiency, I'd say generally, the smaller the better in terms of just return on ad spend, but you can't scale that quickly. So you're not going to build a big DTC business, only working with influencers with 5000 followers. And so if you want to grow quickly, you need to be playing in sort of the next stage. So let's call it 100,000 to 2 million followers. And so that's usually where we're focusing. That's the right blend of efficiency and scale. Once you get beyond that and there's like four different managers involved and much longer contracts, it gets a little bit harder. And also that becomes more of a brand awareness play. So we're in that middle area. We do it mostly on Instagram stories and YouTube actually, and starting to explore TikTok as well.### Assistant: Got it. Your tick tock makes total sense. When the grocery stores must have come calling the Walmarts or the, you know, whatever Costco's, when they start calling, how do you think about them as a business? Are you going to take the same approach? And or is there just not enough margin for you to run a robust business? How do you think about them?

### Human: I want it filtered and I want it to have carbonation. Fantastic. Look at that. It's good looking too. So I think you have to make this very easy for people. If you want people to do this stuff, it has to be easier than ordering from Instacart or Amazon.### Assistant: you know, but there's no, yeah, I got a whole, I got a whole situation that the DIY guy made. That's like a, it's like a brewer. It's like a huge stainless steel canister filled with carbon monoxide with it. Yeah. And I mean, it works, but there's a company called grohe. G-R-O-H-E. And they make water filter kitchen taps that include carbonation. So it'd be expensive up front, but it's exactly what you're looking for.

### Human: I told you that.### Assistant: You can't be leaking that information.

### Human: However, I think that a great example, not to speak of our own stuff, but like Gavin case in Minneapolis on spoon and stable, and he started doing GK at home, which are zoom calls where you get a kit anywhere in the country, hop onto zoom, he teaches you how to cook it. He's killing it with that. And it is as vibrant as opening another restaurant. And at first, he was just doing the meal kits, then he added the video, he's got the lessons, then he's got the they're on file. So you can order the one from a month ago. And while you can't participate, you can see the recording of it. So you learn to cook. those sorts of things. Like there are tons of restaurants that are nationally recognized brands, and chefs and owners who are nationally recognized brands, whose food you can't get. And just shoving a bunch of bagels in a box and shipping them across the country is not an innovative way to do that. No, it's novel. Hey, you know, I'm gonna send you some bagels for my favorite bagel.### Assistant: However... Yeah.

### Human: I, if I can jump in, yeah. First, you have a great team. So impressed with Kelly with Prash with everyone I interacted with an acceptable job at this point.### Assistant: We don't like to give too much praise here. It's an acceptable amount of effort. I would agree. I concur.

### Human: Yeah, that'd be a kind interpretation. Yeah.### Assistant: Well, I think people are extremely jealous business, right? Isn't that just the business interpretation, like make Azure irresistible.

### Human: I'm learning a lot too. One of the recent learnings I had, so I'll rephrase this question, any recent learnings or, you know, in the last year or two. And one of the recent learnings I'm having is what a profound impact we can have on founders post investment. Uh, and I, I, I think I under index to this again, my own ego thinking I could pick people And that did work early in my career. But once we pick people, I've realized when we do a great job of teaching them how to do a board meeting, teaching them how to make a two year plan, teaching them how to think about customer acquisition, teaching them about accounting, silly stuff, or seemingly silly stuff. But founders don't know accounting necessarily. They haven't done accrual versus cash-based accounting. These are concepts that they may just not have run into yet. And so getting them focused on things that can build a stable, scalable business, I was like, yeah, everybody will figure that out. sometimes they figure it out and takes them a year. And we could have them figure it out in 10 days, with the help of a service provider with the help of another founder. And so that I underestimated, and maybe under indexed on as well. So I'm really thinking about supporting the founders post investment a bit more, and then identifying, hey, where, where is that? Where's the zone of excellence for this founder? And where are their blind spots? And so my ability to say this founder is so good at product, they're not good at hiring and, and finding, you know, people that'll level them up. Oh, this person is great at hiring incredible people and spending money. They're just not focused on the customer or whatever it is. Right. And that's something where every time we invest more in it, we see greater outcomes. So, you know, they, they get to their next round of funding. So I've just been thinking about that. And then also as your portfolio gets larger, identifying when the inflection point is, and that's something I'm really starting to study. And I have a new rule. It's 40 K a month in revenue.### Assistant: You have any? Yeah, I've, you know, I've just been continually impressed with just how deep the learning curve is for this business. Capital allocating. There's just so much to learn and I'm learning new stuff every day. You're a decade in. Exactly, yeah. Not counting your entrepreneurial career. I know. I agree with you. I spent a lot of time helping companies raise money and advising and doing this work before I did this work. It's great. The self-actualization of learning and becoming better at the job is still very, very alive. I think if that ever went away, I would be probably sad and probably just immediately retire. But yeah, no, it's, it's really, I'm really enjoying it. It's really fun.

### Human: Make your spatula last people.### Assistant: Well, yeah, I mean, I just the consumption is crazy. I, I have a garage full of stuff. Sometimes, like I order something. And somebody I don't know if you have this happening around. So somebody opens it puts it away. I forget I ordered it. Yeah. And I'm like, where's that thing? And I forgot I ordered it. And then I reorder it. And then my wife's like, Oh, it's right here. And she pulls out this proverbial spatula. Yeah. And she's like, and then and then we're sending stuff back because I'm such an idiot. So now I'm checking my orders on Amazon to see if I ordered something previously. And I'm just being more thoughtful about all spending. And I'm trying to work harder. So I'm, I'm

### Human: Um, and what is the pitch to consumers that it's going to be cheaper than a normal uber ride and safer?### Assistant: Have you written in one of these yet? I have not I got invited to the cruise beta. I just haven't had a chance yet. I think that these are still maybe five years away from being a mass product, but I was just using the Tesla full self driving. uh in a small town that had roads where uh you know when you go to some small towns there are some roads where uh you can fit like 1.5 cars and you have to like no divider no divider really and it's it's just a little suspect um And it nailed it and i was pretty impressed and i use self driving a hundred percent time when i'm on the highway. Because it's just more accurate than i am and staying in the lane and keeping perfect distance obviously it's going to be. But i've been ready to use it on my back roads or in towns. mainly because I don't need it in a town. And there are humans jumping out in the street. But what I'm starting to realize is it actually is the Tesla FSD is actually doing such a good job there. We might be very close to a tipping point where it's safer than me on those roads. And I think it might actually be safer than me right now. I don't have the statistics safer than a human. But I don't think that means they can take the steering wheel out and have driverless yet. The reason why crews can do this is they have a very confined corridor and they can turn them off. They're not essential. They're not your only option. So if there was rain or if there was a protest or if there was snow, there are conditions where like maybe you don't want these things running. You just turn them off. It's not a big deal.

### Human: Yeah. Across the board, one, we've been really focused on the growth of this ecosystem, so what's happened is speculation. What we've been really trying to bring products towards is taking the actual data and helping them grow. Whether it's finding lookalike customers with some of our algorithms that we have, using blockchain data for that, or basically finding other projects to collaborate with based on holdings that exist between projects, we do that type of stuff. Big companies are entering the ecosystem. You're seeing a lot of brands come in the NFT space right now. They want to understand who they should interact with, how the royalties are being generated. We do a lot of royalty dashboards for companies that are generating royalties for these NFTs that have been created. We've talked about that before. Royalties that are not being paid as well. Yes, we're basically acting as a de facto source, a trusted source within the crypto ecosystem.### Assistant: How can people learn more about that?

### Human: Yeah, that's kind of what I like the startup takeaway. That's kind of what I love about this conversation is that like, it's a different kind of building. But not everybody can be a founder. Not everybody can be a developer. Hardly anybody can be a brand genius at this level.### Assistant: Hey, Nick, this is something I wanted to do for ski season. I got some criticism somebody's like, Oh, I love Jay cow. I love this thing started, but they talk about the news too much. Not enough. I like the old days of this week and started with Jake, I would interview a founder for ski season. I want to lock in Nick to doing a series a solo dollar interview, maybe do it like Monday afternoons or something. Then we can book that for Thursdays or something. And then Molly and I get that day off. We don't have to do news that day. We recapture a day. And that means I can ski in the morning. Molly's giving me hearts. Thank you. I'm giving him hearts. I'm giving him what's in the news quickly.

### Human: Are they dead or are they preserved? Because I didn't see blasters, I didn't see arms chopped off. And then why are they here? I think they're there because they're going to try to connect this to Snoke Palpatine and like you got it getting or Grogu or pulling the force and doing biological clone experiments on them. This is like Kamino.### Assistant: Remember Kamino where they made the clone troopers? That's exactly what they did. I mean when we know Dave Filoni who did Mandalorian and Clone Wars This is what he does. He loves to go into these movies and then find the little connections and threads between them. And then like, that's where I'm going to live. I'm going to expand on this and make these connections stronger between these threads that are already in the movie. So I think that's clearly what they're doing is they're taking that throwaway line in Rise of Skywalker, dark science, cloning, secrets only the Sith knew, you know, Dominic Monaghan from Lord of the Rings says that. Uh, and I think they started in in Mandalorian a little bit where you've got who's that scientist who's working with grove who we need his blood We're developing. We don't know what he was working on now. They're preserving all these jedi. I think it's obvious They're trying to figure out the secret of midichlorians the secret of how to replicate force-powerful Users down the road and it is all going to culminate in well, this is how they cloned palpatine. This is how they made snow So does this mean molly?

### Human: I don't know if you remember exactly that moment No, I remember exactly it was on Facebook because I remember exactly was on Facebook Oh, it was an ad whenever you're searching Yep, whenever you're searching things that I got one of those little ads that just pop up.### Assistant: Okay the school that I Ended up going on going to so you see lambda You just from a Google search or you think maybe you saw it on Facebook. What do you think you ran into it?

### Human: Stick with us. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website. Go to squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain and LinkedIn jobs. A business is only as strong as its people and every hire matters. Post your first job for free at linkedin.com slash twist.### Assistant: First up in our Tuesday news today, some more trouble for Meta based on targeted ads. You may remember that Meta has already had to report over and over losing a lot of money because of Apple's changes in terms of targeting targeted advertising and app transparency tracking. Well, now via the Wall Street Journal, we have news today that EU privacy regulators have ruled that Facebook and Instagram cannot or should not require users to accept personalized ads just because they show up and start using the platform. Basically, they're saying that EU privacy law does not let meta just pop up in terms of service that you click through when you create an account that says, okay, so PS, now we serve you personalized ads. they're saying that should not be the default. Now, there are a lot of steps before this would actually be a serious problem. For META, the final ruling would be left in the hands of Ireland's Data Protection Commission to issue public orders and maybe fines. It shouldn't impact META immediately. And obviously, I'm sure they're going to fight it like cats and dogs. But it is if it is upheld, potentially a death knell for the idea of targeted advertising being a default business. And Meta has, of course, for years, let you opt out of personalized ads based on data from other sites and apps, i.e. you can disable the Facebook pixel that tracks you across the web. But it has never given you the option to opt out of ads based on your activity on its own platform. So that means whatever videos you watch on Instagram or games that you play on Facebook or interactions that you do on that platform. And those can be a lot. Like if you have Facebook loaded on your phone, right, it's tracking your location, it's sort of seeing everything that you do, if the app is open, seeing who you interact with your social graph. And of course, this is where all the money comes from. This is why Facebook is such a printing machine, because it's made a ton of money on targeted ads on Instagram also. But of course, it has struggled since the introduction of iOS 14 and its data privacy protections, that actually, Apple's new privacy policy, which, again, I want to clarify, made this kind of targeting opt-in instead of opt-out, as in you have the choice upfront, It's cost Meta 8% off its top line in 2021. Q2 of this year was the first time that ad revenue for Meta did not grow, ending a 10-year streak of growth. There are obviously other headwinds in the ad industry, but the primary issue is that when this sort of transparency standard was introduced by Apple, a huge majority of consumers when they were given the option not to be tracked, not to opt into targeted advertising, actually opted out. And here's the thing, It's become this default, right? Targeted advertising. And it's a bargain that consumers agreed to. Originally, I will come to your service, which is free. In return, I will agree to consume ads. You can advertise to me. that bargain has gotten completely out of hand over the years. Like you didn't agree to sites collecting all your personally identifying information, turning that into a deep profile about you that includes things you like, things you don't like, your emotional state. Metta literally studied whether parts of the newsfeed could induce certain emotional states in people and found that they could. You didn't agree that you'd be targeted by advertisers based on everything right forget about basic demographic buckets sure there's your gender and there's your age and where you live there's your literal location there's who you spend time with how much you exercise and then not just getting all that information this person is very likely to enjoy ferret-based content, right? Not just getting that, but sharing it with hundreds, maybe even thousands of other companies so that they can target you more and more and more precisely with ads that might make you want to buy something, might make you vote a certain way, might induce you to join a certain group that seems really fun and social and just happens to be storming the Capitol. That is not the bargain. that users thought they were signing up for when they clicked through the terms of service. So very likely what we're starting to see here is momentum away from a business model that has been abused. And remember, this is exactly what Apple did with app tracking transparency, and they got killed for it because all over Twitter, you saw Google and Meta lost a combined $25 billion off their market cap, Snap, Pinterest, absolutely hammered as a result of this, and then a whole bunch of small businesses, which found that they couldn't acquire customers as efficiently because that customer acquisition cost went up. They found that the unit economics of their business, which was built in a world where targeted advertising was the default business model, and every consumer who signed up for anything agreed to this insane Faustian bargain without even realizing it, started to go away. But it's very interesting because Apple may have just correctly read the tea leaves here. I don't know that this is a situation where Apple started this conversation. There have been privacy experts for years saying that outlawing targeted advertising was probably the way forward in the future, or at least having some ability for consumers to take back some of that power. It's also a big antitrust question. Meta and Google have a data moat now compared to other companies that makes them almost unassailable. If you want to get into an advertising business, and you don't have the data that Meta and Google have collected over the years, you are already at a huge disadvantage. So this is a pretty big deal. It's a big deal that this conversation is even happening. And again, we don't know what it's going to mean in terms of overall enforcement, most likely it would be enforced by fines, but privacy has become a bigger and bigger topic. I've given speeches, you know, this is one of my like speaking engagement topics is this idea that like, this is all changing. Everything that people took for granted as the default, consumers will always opt into this, this will always be fine, is really, really starting to change. And it's going to be very, very interesting to watch. The web needs new business models and it needs them stacked.

### Human: it is pretty amazing when the the clock ticking down is not making your decision making delighting customers is. And it really it is why when we syndicate a deal to the syndicate.com, which is like our previously was on Angeles, and now we do it there. Yeah, we specifically say, we will only syndicate you if you have a minimum of 12 months of runway, but we're looking more for 18 to 1224 months. And the reason we do that is we tell them like, we want you heads down thinking about the customer for at least a year, hopefully 18 months. So you don't have to pop your head back up and raise money. Now, of course, in this market, I was gonna say, we, we literally had to change our accelerator schedule. I'll give you some numbers on this. Sure. We have over 300. I've invested in 300 companies in the last decade. I'm not sure how many of them are exactly active, but let's say two out of three. So maybe 225 are still effect, you know, in effect. we have 65 companies currently raising money, we're in the process of closing out of the 225 out of the 225, one in three, basically. And there were more people who are closing before that and people who are thinking about raising money. But having that many in process, I've never seen. And it has broken our internal systems. Because when a fundraising happens, you go to your existing investor, you have to get them to sign off on it, read the documents agree and then decide do they want to take their prorata. it with 65. That means every business day, 20 business days a month, I've got to be making three or four decisions a day. And going over three or four sets of documents, the lawyers in our industry are now saying like, we need four days to turn around documents, we need five days to turn around documents used to be like we turn around documents and for two days, you know, no problem, just give us two days, maybe three. And now it's like, give us a week, we got just wait, I've never seen this level of activity.### Assistant: Yeah, you think founders are doing well with ample secondary in the markets, look at their lawyers, because lawyers are doing fantastically right now, because everyone needs them right about now at the same time, which means they have enormous leverage, great place to be.

### Human: Most of my friends that have children have left the city. They're there. They're done.### Assistant: Yeah, which you know, it's typically the case in August and late July anyway. So you might see people come back, but seems like a lot of people are moving out. You see the moving trucks and that phenomenon and people are moving out.

### Human: That was like pure trolling.### Assistant: Gab was like the really gnarly one that used the Pepe the Frog meme.

### Human: No, it's like, like, Again, just how things run on the internet, the amount of people who don't look into the context of things and are just going to take it at face value. Obviously, these conversations have already been had about AI. It's just weighing the net positive versus negatives. It's hard. Again, I look at AI as amazing with education and training, with the social element, there's It's a lot of mess and I wonder if it's a net negative situation, but it's also like we're coming towards this stuff. So right now we need to think of like the solutions and like the cultural barriers that we need to put in place so that everyone's kind of like on the same page and it's not such delusion between all of it.### Assistant: It, uh, it also gets me thinking like, Even after we saw the Anthony Bourdain movie using an AI version of him, people still went and watched it because they have a lot of admiration for Anthony Bourdain. And honestly, when I first listened to it, I didn't know it was AI. I just clicked into it because... It was a new movie coming out. I don't know. There's books everywhere. I was like, yeah, I'll check it out. In fact, I'm not sure if it was announced that when I was watching that trailer, if we already knew it was AI. It might have been right before. I did not know. I couldn't tell because I think I was so engaged in the visuals that I wasn't paying that much attention to the audio. Obviously, with podcasts, you're not looking at anything else. You're a little bit more engaged. So technology-wise, I could totally see people moving into moving into this fairly quickly. Imagine if you could hear Steve Jobs go through and read all those emails. He sent these beautifully scripted emails to himself. There's one that's really great. It's about... I believe he's reminding himself to show gratitude. And it goes along the lines of, like, I didn't create the clothes on my back. Other people made these. And it's just really a really great piece of writing. And I'm I'm not sure if he wrote it, but I know it was something that showed up in his emails to himself. How cool would that be to have those affirmations read to you by Steve Jobs AI? really soon. And coming around the corner, there's going to be a YouTube channel run by some faceless, nameless company that is like Steve Jobs affirmations. And it's those emails. You know what I mean?

### Human: This is the or something just won't be as valuable. You can make it more valuable by minting it on your own blockchain and controlling every aspect of it. Yeah. Okay. Sort of security. Yeah.### Assistant: My understanding, though, is you could sell them on other blockchains.

### Human: Let's talk about something nobody has any idea or credibility in it. Yeah, let's let's talk about something where macro economic economists don't even know what they're talking about. Yes, let's do it.### Assistant: So we haven't seen anything yet this way. Okay, can we go? Okay, can we like, we're starting to see like, the wind. Can we divert a little bit onto macro because macro?

### Human: Yeah. It's crazy. Let's say, well, what'd I put the odds that he gets out of Dodge? He's clever. The kid's clever. planes in Argentina. I think he sent his lookalike, I think he's got a lookalike with a wig. He sent a lookalike to Argentina, who is now walking around Argentina. And then I think he got on a, you know, like a scorpion, like one of those high speed boats, like a James Bond kind of little inflatable naval craft got out to sea. And he gave some North Korean shipping lanes. And I think he's he's with the North Korean shipping lanes right now, give them a couple of Bitcoin. I think probably a hundred Bitcoin gets the job done. Two million, something like that. Give him a hundred Bitcoin on a disc, on a thumb drive. Kids in Hong Kong right now, eating Peking duck, shaved his head, dyed it, wearing a wig.### Assistant: What did I see that there was a funny Vinny Lingham from the crypto roundtable, I think, tweeted, he retweeted himself from 2021, where he was like, I'm just saying that when these exchanges give an accounting of all the Bitcoin they seem to be holding as collateral, it adds up to more than 21 million. Just just throwing that out there. I was like, my God. This whole situation, it's just, it never, it never stops.

### Human: I love people owning the consequences. And the more you abstract away, consequences, the more the nanny state you're coddled into thinking that you'll whatever mistake I make, why didn't somebody protect me like some dopey kid jumped off a boat? I don't know if you saw this go viral over the weekend. But it was a graduation ceremony in the Bahamas. And somebody's like, Hey, dopey kid, jump off the boat. It'd be funny. On our like, graduation cruise, he jumped off. there's apparently a shark seen in the water, but he just gets taken out to the tide, apparently to be eaten by sharks. He's that he's 18 years old, frontal lobe not fully formed. We can't ban boats, we can't, you know, ban stupidity. No, we have to have people have ownership of behavior. And this is where I think like education, and licensing plays such a great role, educating people on gambling. If you had to go to Vegas, and in order to gamble, you had to sit through a one hour seminar, And it said, Here are the odds at each table. Here's how to calculate odds. I would be totally fine. Let people rip, they could spend their whole mortgage, but just one hour of education, you get a driver's license to play the tables in Las Vegas, then the same thing for, let's say gun ownership, which we have here in the United States, some states, you have to take a test them, you don't. But what about for startup investing in the UK, you're allowed anybody can invest in a startup, right? Anybody can put 50 bucks in, you can throw 50 quid in, I don't know if that's 50 bucks, we say quid, throw 50 bucks in, you know, what do you call it when you make about a toss or something? What's a various things, wager, flutter, flutter, you put a 50 quid flutter in, take it, lose it, people will bet on Manchester United, they can bet on a startup here in the United States, you realize we don't let people bet on startups. SEC blocks 96% of people, non accredited investors from betting on a startup. But you go to Vegas, the strongest cannabis, you go to Vegas, you could take 50 milligrams of an edible and then go put your entire life on a craft stable.### Assistant: where you're with the unfree country in some ways in that for example you know the number of states in which you need all sorts of qualifications to become a hairdresser or barber yes. I'm the UK is a pair of scissors basically qualifies you. Oh yeah, you have scissors? You're good. A pair of scissors and a fancy chair and you're in business. Okay. Now, obviously, if you're incompetent at it, people won't come back. Okay. But it has always surprised me that the Americans are both, quite rightly, I think, you know, committed to freedom in certain respects. Yes. But for example, I mean, not being free to drink alcohol out of doors. I mean, that's one of life's great pleasures.

### Human: Yeah. And it's a former guy from Teachable, I believe. And the experience is just really, really good. If you've ever tried to run a community in Slack, it gets really shitty really quickly. It does. It just feels like it was built for communities, which I think is really cool.### Assistant: to try this, you know, we've done this experimental this week in startup slack. And it's so much work to, you know, manage it, it doesn't make any money. And I'm just trying to think of how do I make something that would be worth it for people? And like, what will they do in this space, and have enough money coming in from it that people I can afford to put somebody on it to manage it, right?

### Human: And I think that's what we get paid to do. You get paid to do that as an angel and we get paid to do that in the place that we play. But I think, look, we've been around now for 27 years. And I think the way... And I hope as a firm, we're around for another 27 years. I think that you often are going to get really judged by what happens when things are tough. It's easy to get judged when things are good. Look, the flip side is I always say, look, we're probably never as smart as we look when things are good. We're never as dumb as we look when things are bad. But I do think that this is a time... And look, the hard thing... We obviously have a lot of people we've hired. Many of them have not been to the last two cycles. you know, one of the things that I want to try to remind them is how valuable 1999 was for me, right? Yeah, like that, that yet didn't feel good during the period. And I actually think this will probably be shorter than that 1999 period. But what the skills you learn in times like this are so valuable, right? We can all we can all high fives when companies are going public. It's not that hard. No, it's, it's, it's way harder. to be able to have to figure out, oh, wow, we don't really totally have product market fit. Or, hey, our cost structure really makes no sense relative to our business opportunity. And we got to figure that out. And being there in the trenches with the team. And I think, look, we're not perfect. And I'm sure there are places that there are founders who don't feel like we've invested enough time. But I think if you generally were to call our companies, we're there for them. And we're kind of doing what we said we would do.### Assistant: what's going to happen to the companies that raise that valuations 100 times revenue, 50 times revenue, we saw some SAS companies do that. So they're, they had 20 million in revenue, somebody came along, gave him a $1.5 billion valuation, they raised 150 million, they were spending too much money. Now they're not growing, they're flat, maybe some people, their product didn't have great product market fit had okay product market fit. So some people are canceling or So let's just say they're going to be flat year over year. And now the market's valuing them at 10 times top line or five times top line.