Datasets:

salma-remyx

/

startup_advice

like 0

### Human: All right. You're right. You're right. You're right. It is. It is getting awkward now because people who watch this podcast, assume that we do everything together. Literally, they're like, well, you guys go grocery shopping together, you go on vacation together, you guys live in the same TikTok house. Yeah, that's not how it works. I think the first thing we should talk about is just this amazing moment in time when, because of science, and this podcast started during the pandemic, we have had, as predicted by Friedberg, who gets to take two victory laps, He said by the end of the year, we'd have vaccines and they would have, because of this mRNA, if I remember correctly, 90, 95% efficacy. And sure enough, the week after Trump wins, I'm sorry, loses, sorry, Sachs, he lost actually. The week after Trump lost, I know you didn't vote for him. The week after he lost Moderna, Pfizer, then the next week, Moderna and then the next week oxford And I understand johnson and johnson is about to announce something and all of these have 90 to 95 efficacy And that there are going to be 40 50 and 60 million doses in december january and february just from the first two in america alone So friedberg if you were to put a number on when? Herd immunity hits because probably 20 or 30 percent of people have had it 20 30 percent of people have some natural immunity, how long is this going to take? And could we be doing this from a Warriors game next year? When are we going to be able to do this in person?### Assistant: I don't know if it was Fauci or someone that's closer to the operation shared that they do think they can get 70% of Americans immunized by May. So, if you'll remember a few podcasts ago, I think I tried to explain a big part of the budget that went into this Operation Warp Speed was to parallelize production of these vaccines while they were being tested. And so, we've been scaling up the production and the manufacturing of these. And if they weren't going to work, we're just going to crash them, right? A couple billion dollars, who cares? It's a good option. for the American people. So we've got a ton of doses that have been produced. It's about packaging and distribution now. And that's, you know, supposed to be kind of underway with the plan to be that on December 11, or 12, when they give the emergency use authorization, these doses start showing up.

### Human: Yeah, totally. And you had mentioned actually even when we were chatting before this that You could, I could imagine there being like you said, you could imagine there being tick tock challenges for parties. Like I would like to see. I'd like to see Spotify integrate karaoke. Oh, that would be so cool. Or part of full, like bring in karaoke. Cause I feel like the thing that these party apps often miss is that they let sure you can plan the party. And then you can get your photos after, but like, what do you do during the party? What's that game? Like, part of folks should add a premium feature that lets you pay for like games and karaoke and stuff. Yes.### Assistant: Hello. Wait, what's that game where you can ask a question and then the group has to answer on their phones and they get pulled up and, oh my gosh. Yeah, Jackbox. Jackbox TV. Oh, top 10 game. That is a top 10 game. Put that on anything. That, you're right. That is actually such, Molly, that is a punch up. We need that. We need that. Partyful needs that. We need that.

### Human: Smashing Pumpkins is incredible, elite, perfect. I'd say most underrated rock band in the last 30 years is definitely Smashing Pumpkins, 100%. Totally, yeah. So you, how do you, what do you find in the millennial workforce that's different, if at all, from the approach that we took as Gen Xers who wanted to like, you know, take our seat at the table and kind of that was enough? Do you feel there's anything different? Or do you maybe all these like self selecting founders, they're all the same founders?### Assistant: It's funny, I actually can't really tell. When I talk with people, sometimes I can't really tell what age they are.

### Human: That level of exposure feels a little high to me, but what I would definitely say is divide it into five chunks. You want to put 50k in? Great. Put 10k into 10 different piles in your mental buckets, and then wait for Bitcoin to drop a certain amount, like dollar cost average it in. So every time the value of Bitcoin falls 5%, go buy 2k. or 10k, you know, and think about, you know, buying mini dips along the way and you make it screwed. And, you know, it may be at 100k by the time you put your fifth tranche in, but you may also save yourself a huge headache and sort of danger on the way down.### Assistant: That's the thing I'm wondering here is, does this have escape velocity now like clubhouse? And do does it ever go back down? Right? Good. Now these guys are saying 250 500 k. And I'm like, that doesn't make any sense. But I didn't when it was trading at 304 5000. I was like, be careful, people like this could go to zero.

### Human: Moderator some value to being a moderator. Yeah.### Assistant: You're going to have this within 30 to 60 days. If not, you can already do it right now. So what auto GPT and there's a whole category around it, baby AGI, there's a few of these projects in the space. What they're really doing is they're taking the reasoning abilities of LLMs, and they're adding the ability to chain them together with agents. And so what you do is, at the high level, you describe a set of tasks. Those set of tasks for an LLM alone can't be solved because of, you know, limitations of the LLMs not connected to the internet, or it can only go back so far in history. But what these projects have enabled is for the LLMs to give instruction to the agent to go out to the internet to go get the answers. And so in your case, if you used auto GPT, and this maybe we should just try this as a fun experiment. I can try it later this week. Where you would describe what you did in the exact same way you described it, and then one of the agents would be like a Twitter API agent, so it would know how to interact with the Twitter API. And that's, I think, all you'd really need, right? That's all you sort of asked for. And so, when you asked in the prompt to say, hey, go get the top tweets from these folks, it would know how to use an agent that interacts with the Twitter API in the same way we saw the plugin interact with Instacart. It would go get those tweets, and then it can do the summaries and all that on its own. It already knows how to do that without that. So it's the really open AI plugins are like a sort of a version of what we're seeing with these auto GPTs. It's allowing the, the LLMs to have agent capabilities outside of its constrained world that it lives in.

### Human: Yeah, this is a very exciting one. And then we're just going to go full spreadsheet, because we do not need to make it easy on ourselves just because we're exhausted and potentially hungover. We're talking about Joker potentially raising $50 million and a massive breakdown on a dirty little VC secret known as liquidation preferences. Super interesting topic that I have been trying to understand since I started. So yay.### Assistant: We are going to do the work and open a Google Sheet and show you the impact of liquidation preferences. This is something that's very hard to understand. Most people just defer to their lawyers and then when their payday comes, their check is a little bit shorter than they anticipated. And so we're going to break it down and give you every possible scenario. If you're a founder, if you're an angel investor, this is a must understand, not must watch, must understand the TV.

### Human: Yeah, very awesome. Well, thank you guys so much for joining. And I'm looking forward to using both in the future.### Assistant: Amazing. Thanks for having us. All right, everybody.

### Human: Oh yeah, for sure. And I still liked how it didn't feel like it was being pushed into a narrative. It felt like we were following Frances McDormand's character and it didn't feel like it was rise and fall, this happens, then this. It's more just like the rhythms and patterns of her life and like a year in the life of this woman. And I really did, I like that sort of rhythm of it.### Assistant: Well, that was the thing I found super interesting was I was thinking about my parents, which one does when you start to think about people in their 70s or 80s, when you're of a certain age. And I was thinking, well, what if my dad or my mom had to do this, right? And they needed money. And this was an option they found to go work for three months before Christmas may, you know, work seven days a week, whatever 12 hour shifts, and the 70 year olds packing Christmas toys, and whatever for the holiday season, And then living, you know, like this very nomadic lifestyle, like in a parking lot, essentially, in a campground. And I was trying to think of if like, the humanity of it, you know, and it kind of messes with your brain a little bit thinking about the humanity of that, doesn't it? Like,

### Human: I just always found it weird. We might be more interesting than to go 100 to one. Why don't we go all the way and make it a $6 share again. And then everybody's like, Oh, it's only $6 a share. It's on sale. And Even though it's not true, there's 100 times as many shares, but okay.### Assistant: Isn't it all? I mean, isn't the whole stock market just ultimately like it's all like mostly feelings?

### Human: Right, and every computer on the planet in 1990, in all likelihood. 98% of people in America have phones.### Assistant: I mean, it's

### Human: Yeah, we had a pretty crazy time before we joined the accelerator. I think we had a lot of talks with potential investors, but I think, you know, the nature of the accelerator process really helped us refine sort of how we're going after investors and how to value certain, you know, investors over others especially. I think it's, as you said, a crowded market, crazy capital going around, and I think For us, we really wanted to have the right fit that's going to be with us in the trenches and is going to be with us long term in that sense. And I think that's really what we sort of knew how to identify. I think once you speak to so many investors, you really start to value what kind of value add they can bring as well as opposed to capital, capital intensive raise was something we didn't want to do. So yeah, I think that was, I think the biggest sort of wake up call for us is, you know, it's not just Crazy markets don't necessarily mean good capital. So I think that was something that really sort of woke us up and sort of listen, you know, value these leads and value these investors you're speaking to. And yeah, I think it's just got more crazy. A lot of investors I think we spoke to, you know, as soon as we saw they were sort of part of Accelerator, that's sort of a new reason to speak, new reason to open conversation, which was great. I mean, I think it's good for, it was a great sort of process, even during the Accelerator and post and pre.### Assistant: What's one of the great things when you're in an accelerator, I recommend obviously ours because we run it, then there's also y combinator and tech stars, which are also very good. I think the drop off after that, for these is pretty significant. That being said, joining any accelerator, as long as you're not giving away more than six or 7% of your company for a brand new company is not a big deal. Because it will start the conversations you can even flip a local accelerator, you know, in Miami or in London or wherever, into going to one of the big three. And that actually then okay, you know, diluted 6%, 7%, depending on the program, you have diluted 15%. But boy, your network has exploded. And now you raise a series a or a big seed round, and you'll make it back with that. And it does open up all conversations. If you're in an accelerator, especially the top three, people assume you have a relatively good chance of closing around a funding, which means they're going to take it seriously. Because Oh, if I don't get into this round, clocks ticking, I may never get into the startup. That's really the value of these, I can tell you, My Lord, starting an accelerator is very easy and running one is extremely hard and painful. The amount of work it takes for our team to do this, to sort through all the companies applying to spend 16 weeks with them. My Lord, it is hard. And I think a lot of people think the accelerators are like really easy to do. Tell you I thought that and I was wrong. It is a ton of work. And we like to put a lot of work into it. So I hope you guys had a great experience.

### Human: I think people find it very challenging to really think through situations where one deliberately puts another human life at risk, and even though implicitly we do it every day, and I used to teach decision theory when I was still a professor at Stanford, and point out that whether you explicitly acknowledge it or not, you make I mean, society makes decisions all the time that put people knowingly at risk without but just don't think through the consequences. So, for instance, when you make a decision that you're not going to do a full blown maintenance on every airplane after every flight, there is no question that that would increase the safety of airplanes. It would also increase the safety of your car if you were to change the tires every four weeks rather than once every four years. And yet people don't do it. Even though it is clear that by doing so you would improve the safety of that mode of transportation, but somehow people refuse to do the calculus, even though implicitly that trade off of time of money or time for risk happens implicitly all the time.### Assistant: I mean, I look at it and I say, well, there is a financial equation here for a human that people make all the time in terms of what's a dangerous job. And then there's the benefit to society. So there's, you know, all these risk rewards that we do every day. And it just seems like even broaching this discussion, somebody could clip this and say, like, I'm saying people should sell their organs or something. I'm not saying that. But, you know, it does make sense that if, and you saw this with these challenge trials, that these people are very brave for doing it. They might very much want to be a hero and do these kind of things. And if they were compensated at some very large level, Boy, that could be an amazing deal for humanity, right? Because we don't want to have one person die from some of these trials, these challenge trials, we would rather see millions of people suffer from the disease every year. I mean, that's kind of what we're saying. It's very hard, I guess, to look at this holistically.

### Human: honestly, that's what I'm sort of waiting to see is I wonder if it'll solve a lot of problems for people. I'm curious to see if that will be the case. I hope so.### Assistant: Well, it's certainly going to educate people as to the algorithm and give them agency. Right now. We are we have zero agency when it comes to the algorithm. There is no choice but to accept the algorithm from Tick Tock as is

### Human: No.### Assistant: Is Airbnb going away? No. Google, Facebook, Instagram. Are these things going away? Amazon, Netflix. One of the things that happens in startup land is when you get escape velocity, you have now made it to orbit. If you make it out of the Earth's atmosphere, the chances of you coming back down to Earth are very slim. You have made it to orbit. And that's what Robinhood, Comm, Facebook, Instagram, Tesla, these companies made it to orbit. it's very hard for them to come back down to earth in fact yahoo and aol it's taken them 10 years to come back down to earth and they still got bought for a couple of billion dollars so even when things are going poorly you know for like companies that are clearly in the rearview mirror like aol and yahoo It takes decades. They still have a billion people using their services. Very hard when you get escape velocity. The old guard TD Ameritrade $130 billion market cap. E trade owned by Morgan Stanley $150 billion market Charles Schwab $130 billion market cap. Fidelity $13 billion market cap. So Robinhood is the the Charles Schwab, it is the E trade or Ameritrade for this next generation. And it's a better product and it's easier to use. They obviously make money from this order flow payment for order flow, which people are opting into kind of like advertising where you give a little bit to get something for free. But There's a $5 optional membership to Robin Hood gold, gold payment for order flow makes up 40 to 55% of Robin Hood's revenue, according to business of apps. So if you split the difference, we'll call it 50%. You got 331 million payment for order flow in q1 of 2021. According to securities filing, And if that's half of total revenue, that would put their revenue at 662 million for the quarter, you times that by four, you got about a $2.6 billion run rate. That's if it doesn't grow in 2021. And or maybe it slows down, who knows. But it's fine to just take four quarters and times it by four and let's call it 2.6 billion. If you had a $40 billion market cap, that would be a 15 times revenue, which is pretty reasonable in this market. So I think 30 to 50 billion is where this will wind up and I could see trading double and it could be a 60 to $100 billion company out of the gate. And if you're going to buy stocks, obviously do your research. My belief is you should buy stocks that you're willing to hold for 10 years. If you're willing to buy the stock now, you should be willing to hold it for 10 years. That's my personal philosophy. I've been an Uber shareholder for I guess 11 or 12 years, 12 years now, maybe I like to hold things for the long term. If I love the company, I love the management team. And that's the case here. I think there'll be a great singularity. I think Robinhood, Coinbase, Wealthfront, all these services are going to provide everything eventually. I don't have any inside information, but if they're doing crypto and stocks and managing your cash, You know, I wouldn't be surprised someday if Robinhood gave mortgages or Robinhood had bank accounts and checking accounts and all this other stuff. You could see all that being one singular service. And I think I mean, I'm talking my own book here. I think Robinhood will be a trillion dollar company in the next decade. That's my personal belief. I'm long the company and have been since I met the founders. In other amazing news, Squarespace, my friend Anthony Castellanos company, Squarespace did the direct listing on the New York Stock Exchange, you can see the founder Anthony on episode 112, not 1012. But 112. That was over 10 years ago back in January of 2011. And he's gonna come back on the pot soon. We know one person who was super excited about this direct listing, right, three ways to go public. Basically, you do a traditional direct listing or a SPAC direct listing, all the shares go out at once at this one price. And everybody can freely trade it. And you don't have people flipping the shares or insiders not going along. which my good friend Bill Gurley, who you can follow on Twitter at B Gurley, his tweet, another direct listing tomorrow. Great to see so many courageous and intelligent founders look after the interest of their employees and shareholders smarter and more elegant approach. Sure beats giving away equity for free. Say no to 30 times oversubscribe. And what he's talking about there is what he's been preaching, which is the people who get screwed when the banks oversubscribe these deals, and then have this first day pop are the employees of the company who have to hold typically for six months, the investors in the company have to hold for six months plus, and who don't flip their shares. And The company sold shares at $30, let's say, and then it triples or doubles. Well, they would have gotten twice as much or three times as much money, it would have been more capital efficient. The traditional IPO seems to be waning. And I think we will see more people taking this, this brave approach, like Spotify did or the SPAC approach, you can follow the ticker sq SP, I love Squarespace, it's an amazing site, and amazing service. And I've watched them grow and add services to it. They started just as beautiful websites. Then they added e commerce functionality, SEO functionality, you've heard me read the ads here on this week in startups for close to a decade, they've been a great partner of this podcast, they assigned what's called a reference price of $50 a share, which puts them at a $6.8 billion market cap. They recently raised 300 million at $10 billion valuation. So this valuation is a little bit lower, but there's usually conditions in there, if it does go back, that the investors in that previous one get extra shares, who knows if that's the case. A lot of investors like Tiger Global, Dragoneer, Excel, General Atlantic, T. Rowe Price and Fidelity dip down into that private funding. And we covered Tiger Global's aggressive strategy with Everett Randall on episode 1207. You know, he wrote that great blog post, one of those young guns who we like having on the podcast. 2020 revenue, 621 million. 28%. That's a high growth company from 485 million in 2019. And it's a software company, and it's a subscription company. So it only gets better. That's why subscription companies do great, whether it's consumer subscription, like calm and FitBot and Steezy, a musician tone base, or it's SAS, like Slack, or Salesforce, or Zendesk subscription businesses are amazing businesses, because every month you start with somewhere between 90% and 110% of what you had last month, whether you have high turn, or you have land and expand happening. So 94% of their revenue is subscription based and they're they added 700,000 new subscriptions in 2020. That's phenomenal. Like is it Netflix or Spotify? Of course not. This is a business service, but it is doing amazing Squarespace was profitable in 2020 recording about 30 million profits. which is crazy, like, why are they profitable, they should be in growth mode. But you know, that's a pretty healthy sign of management can make a profitable, that's a big debate, should you be money losing and growing really fast? Or should you be profitable, they chose profitability, that's fine. But their valuation would put them at 10.9 times the $6.8 billion valuation of their revenue to their multiple. So that's, again, pretty reasonable in today's market. Squarespace, you know, had a tiny loss of 10 million in q1. I think people would like to see them invest probably more. And this is the craziness of being a founder of a public company, you'd have one group of people saying, why are you profitable? Take an Amazon or Uber or whatever like approach Tesla to build, build, build for the future and get to scale and see how much market you can capture. while other people are like be boring and you know, show profits and you know, be a money printing machine. Both of these models work and typically they work at different points in time. Squarespace 2021 run rate 750 million pretty great. You have some other competitors like Wix, which is at a $1.2 billion run rate, and they have a $12 billion market cap Shopify, obviously, a $3.9 billion run rate. So there's a great cohort here. Go Daddy obviously does domain names. I think they started long before. Squarespace, but Squarespace is in the domain name business. You have Weebly, which is owned by Square now, and they had 625,000 paid subscribers at the 2018 acquisition. So web publishing is a great business. And it's a great cohort. Congratulations to the team. It's crowded, but it's a fantastic, fantastic market. And one has to wonder, when does WordPress go out automatic owns WordPress, Tumblr, and their last public valuation was 3 billion, which is probably, you know, grown now by four or five times that we had met Mullenweg on Angel season four or five. And so I think he talked about possibly spinning out and doing SPACs when I pressed him on it. So I wouldn't be surprised if we see a WordPress or some of their other products spinning out and going public. So congratulations to the team over there. Hey, everybody, I just wanted to put a little end note here, a button, a cap at the end of the podcast and let you know that I love talking about what's in the news and giving you my opinion. And you've responded that you really enjoy when I talk about the news, I get that all the time. So we've hired another producer here at This Week in Startups. And I've decided that every day at 10am, I am going to spend some time in front of the camera talking about the top two or three news stories every day. The podcast is now four days a week or so. And obviously on Fridays, I do the all in podcast. So I'm a five day a week podcaster. So check your podcast reader and your downloads because I'm going to comment on the top three news stories for news stories every day going forward. going to try to get to five days a week. And thanks to all the sponsors and partners who are making that possible for us, you can show your love by clicking on their links. And when you buy their services using the twist code or whatever it is, and thanking them on Twitter, that's super helpful for us. And if you made it to the end of the episode, here we are in the second data second decade of this week in startups. And I named it this week in startups, so I could do it once a week. And now it's basically becoming a daily show. So we're not going to change the name. But Like, you know, some people who do the daily at the New York Times or Ben Shapiro or Scott Adams, those people doing a daily news show. I'm committing to doing that pretty much till the end of this year and see how it goes. If you like it, please tweet it, please retweet us, tell your friends about the show. We're still going to do interviews. So the format of the show will likely be some news up top, followed by an interview, or some other content like ask Jason, etc. But we're always going to start with that news and chop it up between us. Okay, thanks for tuning in. Love you guys.

### Human: On episode 1150, Pitch CEO Christian Reber describes his focus on design and working with Metalab's Andrew Wilkinson.### Assistant: No, I love running marathons, but 50 miler was too much. But I had a near-death experience. My dog died. I ended up with a kidney stone. I had surgery. A bunch of shit happened. And along this period of time, a couple of people in the entrepreneurial world committed suicide. And there was this if you sort of track back and look around in 2013, there was sort of a flurry of articles, suddenly about mental health and entrepreneurship. And Jerry and I were in a bunch of them because I was very open about my depressive episode. And as I was open about it, many entrepreneurs reached out to me. Less investors, but many entrepreneurs, lots of ones whose names you'd recognize. And in a lot of cases, I was the first person that they'd reached out to, or they'd say, you're the first person other than my therapist, or other than my wife, or my husband, or I haven't talked to anybody about it. I'm afraid to talk to anyone about it. And through these conversations, what I realized was a couple of things. One was the stigma associated with mental health was really pernicious, and was a real problem in our industry. And for anyone that wants a quick hit sort of experience with this, not in our industry, but in a powerful way, should watch the HBO documentary, The Weight of Gold. which getting Brett Rapkin did. I got connected to it by Jeremy Bloom, who's CEO of Integrate, which were investors in Jeremy was a Olympic skier. Michael Phelps is the narrator. And it talks about the stigma of mental health in professional sports. But the parallels with entrepreneurship are profound. And so I started thinking about this a lot going back six or seven years ago, and had as one of my own internal things to help eliminate the stigma associated with mental health. And that led to another thing. And that's the answer to your question, which is, Jerry had been a Buddhist for many years. And I was always interested in Buddhism, intellectually, not as a religion. And, you know, there's interesting debate about whether Buddhism is actually a religion or not. But not really as a spiritual practice, more as a philosophy. And about three years ago, I started to really dig deeper into that and learn and understand it. And one of the powerful things that comes out of that philosophy is sort of the essence of suffering and the notion of attachments. And I had been talking about the idea of non-attachment for a number of years. My therapist that I go to is professionally trained, but also a Buddhist. And I didn't really realize that, you know, by using that phrase non-attachment, I was linking to a very powerful construct. And the construct is this, and it goes back to your question, like when you have failure, you want less of it, right? You wanna get away from the failure. You wanna have success. When you have success though, you want then to have more of it. The success only lasts for a little while, and then you want more of it. You become attached. And the negative reaction that many of us have, especially in the Western world is detachment. I don't give a shit, or I'm not gonna let that bother me, or you sort of push away from it. And the pushing away from it is the similar behavior to the attachment. And the real trick is this non attachment. It's not whatever is going to happen is going to happen. But you accept that it's going to happen. And instead of seeking more good or pushing away from the bad, you focus on trying to do whatever you want to do and can do sort of in the moment and in the context of all of it. Now, I'm not trying to be a Buddhist philosopher here. I'm sure I'm butchering the essence of it for anybody that's listening. Buddhist capitalist. Yeah, Buddhist capitalist. For anybody who's listening, I'm sure I'm butchering the essence of it. But sort of in that for me, over the last six or seven years, a lot of what I have tried to learn and understand and adopt and become of is this notion of non attachment. You know, do I enjoy things that are successful? Of course, do I dislike things that are not successful? Of course, right. But I try not to be attached to those experiences, but rather exist in this experience I'm having. And I'll just end with having just clicked over to 55, right? Like, you know, at 55, you still might be able to make the argument that you're not quite at midlife yet that you might live to be 101. When you're 55, it's pretty hard to say you're not at solidly at life. Right. And all of a sudden you're like, holy shit, like, you know, this is a finite phenomena. And, you know, especially in the year of COVID, I mean, I've had a few friends die, you know, there's plenty of health issues in and around my direct world. Several people who are really close to me who are in their 80s, one died this year, one is very ill, you know, on and on, right? So you start to have this recognition of, yeah, this thing's pretty finite. And all of a sudden, this notion of striving, which again comes back to this Buddhist essence, like striving for what, striving for more? And Jerry has this magnificent book. I'm sure you, I think the podcast you did with him around the book was, was powerful. I don't know if you talked about this in the book, but he has a section where we're sitting outside one day, just talking and a couple of years ago while he was working on the book. And I said to him, I think I'm just fucking done striving. Yeah. Like I'm just done. Like, yeah, sure. I'm sure some more things will happen that are good. I'm sure there'll be more things that happen that fail, but whatever.

### Human: So, uh, I don't know if you all attended to, uh, attempted to attend the live stream of Donda too yesterday at stem player.com, but. It went okay. And probably weirdly sold a bunch of these little $200 speakers called the STEM player. So I'm obsessed with this story because Kanye, of course has a new album out Donda too. And the only way. for you to listen to that album other than the mediocre live stream from yesterday is on this $200 speaker, the STEM player. He's trying to, and this is very interesting because of our ongoing conversations about streaming. Kanye is trying to diversify his revenue stream away from Spotify and other streaming services. He's also, he says, trying to bring attention to how little musicians make on platforms like Spotify, because of course, when they first start out, Lots of musicians are happy to have anybody listen, right? At all. So making any money is better than nothing, which is how Spotify generally is able to pay so little. So, so basically Kanye is like, no, I'm not doing this. We'll talk about the economics of how Spotify pays artists in a minute. But I want to ask you, Jason, like, what do you think about this $200 device, which is preloaded with his album?### Assistant: It's genius. Yeah, I immediately saw this and said, Kanye West is a genius. I believe he's a genius. Obviously, he has moments of mania. I'm not clinically describing anything here. I'm talking about just straight up description of his behavior when he gets like manic or mania. But you know, I know a lot of artists, and they sometimes hit a chord. No friend attended. Yeah, I mean, or, you know, like, you know, he, if you look at his music, sometimes he'll have a bar that is so perfect. You just wonder if this guy is Bob Dylan, reborn, right. And his his early albums, to me, are perfection, you know, late registration, graduation, this stuff is just, people will look back on it. And I think it'll be like, they'll kind of revere him like Bob Dylan in, you know, the early days. And this is such a transcendentally brilliant idea. Can you ask somebody to buy me three of these producers take a note, buy me three of these, and then seal them in a plastic box. And I am going to sell them for $10,000 each in 20 years. If Pink Floyd had done this, with a, I don't know, let's say Pink Floyd decided to make a vinyl player, or Dire Straits had decided to make a CD player. Yeah. Dark Side of the Moon, or say, making movies Brothers in Arms. And you would have, instead of a million people buying your album, let's say you had a when they when they sell those albums, let's just do a little back the envelope Matthew. I think the average artist trickles down like two bucks when they sell an album. Somebody fact check me right now. Don't get about the CD era. They sell a million of these CDs, let's say they make two or three bucks. It's two or $3 million. Okay, now you sell something like they should make $150 in profit. 150. How many do you have to sell? Right. And you know, now we're talking about 10,000. which is 1%.

### Human: Well, yeah, that's what I was thinking. Yeah, if it's 5% on six months, and you compound that six times, I mean, it's, it's a big, it can be a great business.### Assistant: And it really is value add, like one of our early customers for this product was had landed this purchase order to sell, they made like phone accessories, and they landed a deal with T-Mobile stores. And so this is a deal that they're going to make 200 grand on, but only if they get deliver it. Yeah. And so they didn't really care that they have to pay, you know, like, it's not about interest rate here. It's like, am I enabling them to make the 200 grand or not? Like it's a binary thing.

### Human: I buy in year 10 and I buy a Toyota or a Honda.### Assistant: All right. Okay. Now you're just, that's just virtue signaling. You're trying to be low key. It's not even, but it's all about health. You buy a 10 year old car, you're eventually driving a 2008 Honda CRV. My Lord.

### Human: Yes, correct. You can't unsubscribe.### Assistant: The companies you know are abusing you and you can't unsubscribe from.

### Human: Yeah. Talk to me about the business. So it's water, there are flavors now, but it still is like pretty ingredient light, right, compared to soda, or tea, or something like that. Like, what are the margins end up being on water in a can? Well, I mean,### Assistant: We haven't luckily done anything cringe. I think where we found things is like, we built this brand as an internet first brand, like social media. That's where everyone spends their time. That's where you can command attention. It's literally created movie stars, pop stars. It's the place if you can really be powerful there, you can win. And I think we started with the very, you know, we made all these internet kind of videos. I think, you know, as you get bigger and you start, hey, we're going to work with this little ad agency to do something. And it's like, oh, let's do this really produced thing that's got production value. And we're like, okay, cool. We go and spend. 60 grand to make something when we never spent more than five before. And you put this high production value thing on Instagram. It's like, that thing we spent all this money on performed one tenth of the thing we shot with an iPhone last week. And it's just like, sometimes there's those moments where like, oh, right, let's get back. Let's not get ahead of ourselves. And let's remember why we're doing things and what works in the space that we're in and not just let what typical marketers gravitate towards, like try to sway us into places. I think that's where we, you know, maybe we've seen things where like, oh, maybe we should have done it differently.

### Human: And then there's this other commodity, people say it's a commodity, right? So I don't know what the difference would be there. You know, like, still kind of passes.### Assistant: And then even if it started that way, it unquestionably is being used as security. And, and you could even argue has just become one has transformed from its original purpose into a security.

### Human: And when you look, just to wrap up, when you look at your career, and a lot of young people listen to this podcast for inspiration and lessons, what do you think the leak in your game was early on? And what do you think the strength that you've now developed, you know, 25 years into a career is?### Assistant: You know, I think a lot of people say this, but I've always believed that there is no quitting and no stopping. So, um, I believe in the, I call it the rhino principle. You can look at this up on how rhinos, when they want something, they're, rhinos are very good at running the straight line. They'll just take anything out. Um, I've also been chased by a rhino before, by the way, and you have to say, what's that like? Uh, scary. You need a zigzag run in a zigzag pattern. Cause they're not very agile creatures, but if you stand straight in front of it, you know, good luck. So I don't know. I think the thing I've learned is hopefully as I make mistakes, which anyone, everyone will that you learn from those and you just never stop and never quit. And I think. There's been plenty of times for anyone that starts a company that you're looking at death's door. I mean, that was the first two years of OfferUp. It was, we were lucky if we had three or four months of operating capital, but we didn't stop. And I think a lot of people tap out and they say, oh, it's not going to work. I just, I think I've always thought longterm. I think very, very, very long in the rest of my life. And I think I say, okay. And when you think long, then you look at the next hurdle in front of you and it just, it doesn't seem that significant when you, when you put it in perspective. So.

### Human: What? I don't know what you're talking about. Okay, well, you'll have to talk to HR about that. Amazing. Our second behind the scenes emoji slash sub tweets. One of my favorites. I remember the day I think I dropped this into your chat and you were like, what is this?### Assistant: All right. We have number one is what I have to repeat myself. All of these are basically subtweeting me. But when I have to repeat myself for the third or fourth time or something goes wrong, I use the slapping your hand on the face emoji. But also, the producers have adopted it. When when Molly maybe takes it too far.

### Human: I definitely agree with you because I think the three buckets that were most focused on before community really came in were obviously product, team, and customers. And I think community is probably going to be added to that. And the thing that I think is very cool about that is community will probably start coming out before product. I mentioned a really cool startup that I saw and I believe it's a dating app, but I don't even know that much about it because they started building community before their products even launched. And I followed them on TikTok and they had really hilarious stuff they were posting. And I went to check them out and they said they were pre-launch. I was like, how do you have this many people following you already? And there's like that phrase where it's like, what is it, build and they will come. And I feel like they didn't have to build. They first, they kind of did a reverse where they went to the people before launching. And I think that's also nice, because they'll probably avoid a lot of bumps in the road in the future by seeing what people want first. And before we did like user testing, obviously, we have a small pool. But with being able to create an entire community, it kind of branches out user testing a little bit more.### Assistant: All right. And if anybody wants to pitch Rachel on a an idea for Gen Z and the okay boomer segment, you can just email producers at this week, in startups.com producers at this week and startups.com with their ideas for the show. Great job. And we'll see you all next time. Here's your interview for okay boomer for the week.

### Human: Oh, I can't just come? Oh, **** that.### Assistant: I don't know. You would not believe the extent I have had people offer me, like, I'll pay for your buy-ins at the game if you can get me into the game. And I'm like, yeah, no, I can pay for my own buy-ins.

### Human: It's not maybe like, uh-huh. Yeah. Auditable.### Assistant: Like, you know, there's a lot of people running around, you know, saying, you know, all this stuff is mushy, etc. And it's like, all right, here's the data to make it work. And so, yeah, I think I think our platform should become sort of the standard for the built environment, you know, you know, you should not be able to do carbon accounting unless you have that raw utility data, primary source data. And it should, you know, we, we're simply the data provider. So we, you know, we provide data to companies like Salesforce's net zero cloud, we're working with Persephone, watershed, all the major sort of full ESG providers, we're just the data input so they can produce produce accurate reports.

### Human: Oh, there's your clip. All right. I guess the baby face assassin.### Assistant: Oh, you know, I never watched Mad Men. I never did either. I just started.

### Human: I mean, of course there are. Yeah. Um, Matt Stoller had a good piece too, about how all of the, all of the times that, that various members of the media like boosted this. And I, I really do think that the skepticism went away because of the trolls. And the boosting happened as some sort of like, like you said, psyops situation. I mean, honestly, we can, I think all agree that the biggest chili pepper in the room right now is CZ. Yeah, he's pretty spicy.### Assistant: This is i'm starting a new segment, which I know was not spicy enough for you, but these were spicy But as far as i'm concerned I didn't need a glass of milk for either of these takes these were spicy takes But I could have I could have a second bite of the same spice He's going on looking for spicy on the way out like spicy ones You want the tenth wing and hot ones you feel the next day spicy, you know i'm saying I want the spiciest of spicy on these takes I want I can't breathe spicy. There, there must be people.

### Human: Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I don't want to be cynical. I do think this is a new like, we've seen throughout history, these kind of Like, I'm trying to think of a better word. I'm trying to think of a less loaded word than McCarthyism. Like, we're seeing an extreme, you know, we're seeing a huge reaction, a lot of public pressure to make these moves. And yet, we've definitely seen companies stay, companies and investors and all kinds of people stay in uncomfortable relationships, let's say, with human rights abusers, you know, with the, like, Saudi funds. I would like to think so in the case of these companies, because this really is like, kind of an all hands on deck response to Putin's aggression so that it doesn't spiral out of control, if that's even possible. So I would hope that those companies would have made that choice no matter what, simply for the fact of not wanting to enable any further aggression.### Assistant: And Yuri Milner came into this because he famously had an oligarch's money. And that's how he did his first two funds, I believe. And that's how the Facebook investment happened. And now subsequently, I think he doesn't take any Russian money after that point. So then you have to be like, hmm, as a former Russian person, or Russian citizen who had invested all their money, but hasn't for seven funds, you know, is their money tainted? Are they going to get canceled and all of this? And then I thought, this is all very interesting. We talked about this last week. I think we're economically creating a massive impact on Russia. I mean, I think and we talked about this being painful. And so really hard to be like, wow, the citizens of Russia can't use PayPal or visa, or Netflix. I saw a note, maybe the big tech companies that are leaving Russia are leaving 1% of their revenue, maybe 2% of the revenue on the table. So it's pretty easy to do. Mm hmm. it's also the right thing to do. So we can kind of make a decision if they're virtual signaling because it's convenient, and they're only losing one or 2%. If it was 20%, or 10%, it might be a little bit bigger of a sting. I'm curious if you think you know, Netflix had to pull out of a market where it was 10% of the revenue if they had done it. Do you think they would?

### Human: That's the cheapest energy. And I was like, if you're going to generate renewable energy just for Bitcoin mining, that's not additional. Like if you're going to generate renewable energy, power school with it, right? Don't use it for Bitcoin mining. So this is the mindset with which I come into this interesting conversation with Daniel Seacrest, who is one of the co-founders and CFOs at Nodal Power, which builds independent power plants. in landfills. And you know that landfills obviously off-gas a ton of terrible emissions, 50% of which is methane, which is like 80 times more warming than CO2. The mission is to create this next generation of independent power plants. And then what they do is they co-locate Bitcoin mining facilities at these landfills because the revenue from the Bitcoin mining incentivizes the power plants to run all the time. And then they sell renewable energy back to the grid.### Assistant: We have a way I okay, just to reiterate my understanding of this. because because Bitcoin is a race to find the cheapest energy, more the theoretically, what people are saying is, oh, you know, it's going to drive people to make cheaper energy. I don't know, that seems a little cause correlation, right? Seems to me that if you could find some coal and burn it on the slide, you might do that as well.

### Human: That's right. And so if I move backwards, I'm sitting on a couch right now, kind of tethered to my laptop. But you can actually see that we fill up that particular digital asset. And if I decide to move to a chair, it should light up. I can't really see my screen.### Assistant: Got it. So you can pick little zones that if somebody were to go into this zone, uh, you would know and it could trigger something. So if somebody goes into this area, yes, this area is a sofa. This area is a cubby. You know, we have these open floor plans. Sometimes you got like a little beanbag area or a video game area, whatever. So you might want to know that two people are on those beanbags specifically.

### Human: This news came out yesterday in all caps, and I frankly did not actually believe it at first. But it appears to be true that in one of the most shocking stories in tech and business since at least last week. Shout out to Nick on that one. Shout out to Nick and Bob Chapek. We hardly knew ya. Pulling a Liz Trust. He is out as CEO of Disney and Bob Iger is back in charge. What? And this is one of those where we don't want to brag, but we have literally been covering the story from the jump.### Assistant: Well, it's immutable though, Molly. Just always remember. The blockchain is immutable. It's immutable. It's out there somewhere. I'm sorry, is that immutability? How does that help me? But I'm like, okay, you can't change it. Because that was how the databases used to work, you had to redo the database, it was immutable, and then we made them so you could change them, and it was easy to change them. And they didn't go down, like it's immutable as a feature? Okay, anyway, let's do this chaser. Listen, lots of founders are loosey goosey with their personal phone numbers and that causes tons of downstream problems. You start putting your personal phone number in company documents, you start using it for sales calls, and that makes things messy. You won't know who's calling. Is it a sales prospect? Or is it someone from your kid's school? You don't want to get random calls. Open phone helps you create a business phone number for you and your team in minutes. It's very simple. You download the smartphone app, you download the desktop app, whichever one's your jam, or both if you're like me. Just install the app, you get a number, you're done. No need to carry two phones anymore. And by the way, we use this at our company because we wanted to have customer support phone numbers. We wanted our sales team to have numbers. And OpenPhone is really good at filtering out all the spam and the scams. And you can do all kinds of interesting routing things. If you got an existing phone number, they'll port it over. No problem. It's their pleasure to do that. OpenPhone, they say it's affordable. I say it's too cheap. based on the product I'm getting, I would pay triple. But hey, listen, it's their business, they can charge what they want. They decided to start at 10 bucks a month twist listeners on top of that, since open phone, love startups are going to get an extra 20% off any plan for the first six months. But you have to sign up at my URL open phone.com slash twist. And if you've got existing numbers, again, just port them over and start saving money o p e n p h o n e.com slash twist today open phone.com slash twist today. Great job. It's a killer product.

### Human: Anyway, let's keep going here. Like in case you're wondering how loathsome this tweet really is. Let me help you understand.### Assistant: Okay, here we go. And then here's a New York Post pansexual Florida teacher can for discussing orientation. with students. Okay. So I guess that's the don't say gay slash parents rights kind of post to be. I mean, there's one where I feel like you tricked me today.

### Human: And what we found was that there's a huge number of people just like that. We had zero problem hiring. As soon as we opened up positions, we'd get hundreds and hundreds of applications, far more than we could hire. And it was really just an interesting way of seeing that you have this difficult few weeks where Twitter is just going bananas, right? Um, well, not just Twitter, their press reports and all these other things. And then you come out on the other side and you think, oh man, we're destroyed. Right? Like I had a moment of darkness from there where you just think like Twitter's reality. There's 10,000 people telling me I'm the scum of the earth. Yeah. Do you know what? I don't know.### Assistant: And then you come through that David would, if 10,000 people tell you like, Hey, you're terrible. A reasonable person who's not a sociopath would say, wait a second, if 10,000 people are telling me this, right, let me meditate on it for a second. Maybe there's something here that I can learn from. That's a reasonable response. But the fact is those 10,000 people happen to be wrong in this case, they're just piling on to get retweets.

### Human: Or you opt into sharing it with your network? I think it originally was by default, I might still be I turned it off a long time ago. It's only the default that is good.### Assistant: Yeah, what I heard from a lot of people was people were like paying their weed dealers on Venmo. And then people are like, yeah, that's my weed dealer too. It's not quite legal in your city yet.

### Human: It's a tough business. And I've been, you know, I was at Politico when we started, started some blogs when you were starting blogs. So I've been doing it a while. The one thing you, I mean, it's also, it's a slow moving business where the institutions move slow, but the audience moves fast. And so in these moments where things are changing a lot, and I had left Buzzfeed really mostly just because I was burned out and gone to the times, had kind of a front row seat to everything that was happening as the media columnist there for a couple years. And you can just feel again, like how much things are changing. Like the whole social web is sort of going away. It's being replaced by who knows what, like right out of the drench report is like, again, really influential, which is entertaining and wild. And the one thing is my partner, Justin Smith had been the CEO of Bloomberg, CEO of the Atlantic. And one thing that I think I have eventually learned is that there isn't some like one neat trick to make news a great business, but like really smart, experienced business operators who execute really well. you know are the kind of people you want to be in business with and so and i don't see myself as a business guy and i think whatever flirtation i had with that at buzzfeed like was not the best data um and so yeah so so i think we're trying to like the i would say the two big things that drive. If you ask people, like, are you happy with the news you're getting? And the answer is mostly no. I think the things that drive people most insane are that they feel totally overwhelmed by just like the sheer amount of incoming. And then simultaneously they don't really know who they can trust. And aren't turning to like faceless institutions. They're looking for individual journalists who know what they're talking about. who will tell them deliver them facts and also try maybe read a lot of what else is out there and put it in one place for them and so, our model is to sort of build around like liz hoffman a great finance reporter when she was really the best wall street reporter at the wall street journal brought her in, read albergatti who broke the lance armstrong story in his day covered covering a i primarily out there and, know, these are experts on the subject who can break news and also can tell you what they think, but might be wrong about what they think. And they're going to include other voices and other points of view. That's the basic model. And we also think there's a big global opportunity for this. These are sort of like totally global issues. And the best stories, COVID, social media, the rise of the far right are global stories. So we launched in the US and in sub-Saharan Africa, obviously.### Assistant: Well, that is peculiar as a second market. So explain. You know, the U.S.

### Human: Great. No, they didn't know you'd pay a million.### Assistant: That's what you got to do with the time I would have paid 250. But you got diapers.com. That's a million dollar domain.

### Human: We will only learn with businesses like Calibrate, right? We will only learn with real world evidence. We will only learn by practicing this type of medicine and seeing if we can set a new standard of care here. And so, so far we have titrated off, of the population we have titrated off, 97% have maintained weight loss of greater than 10%. By the way, that is not how much weight people want to lose. There's an amazing guy at Penn named Tom Wadden. He's been keeping track for I think about 40 years of how much weight people want to lose. It varies. It's bounced anywhere from 10% to 30-35% over the years. Right now, it's around 15-20%. That's what people want to lose. There is no evidence yet suggesting that people can do that sustainably. There is no evidence suggesting that once your brain has gotten used to a fat mass, a body weight essentially, that it can truly recalibrate at a much lower set point, which is why bariatric surgery is broadly considered a failure because even most people who go through it end up gaining weight back to a point where they're still at significant weight loss. 10% is wildly significant. If you have a BMI, and BMI is not a perfect metric, and we can come back to that. But if you have a BMI above 35, above 40, and you lose 10% of your body weight, we are talking about reversing 90 plus percent of type 2 diabetes, 95% of NASH. We are talking about serious medical savings and serious quality of health improvement. But that's not what people want. They want to lose 30% of their body weight forever. And that's where the business Back to the Mission is about changing the way the world treats weight, changing the way we think about it and talk about it, helping people recalibrate their expectations, and saying, I always say, calibrate is not the quick fix. you google right now how to get a glp1 you'll find a bunch of quick fixes it's not calibrate it's not showing up to a coaching appointment live on zoom it's not committing to a one or two year program it's not committing to making long-term lifestyle change but what we do is we say for the people who are ready to commit and who are focused on their health let's do it let's go and so a lot of our members have recently been diagnosed with diabetes or pre-diabetes a lot of our members have recently had a health scare that makes them think that existentially, it's very important for them to be back in control of their weight and their health.### Assistant: how okay if the goal is let's keep talking about the science a little bit if the goal is to get people off of this medication like how do we know that it really does i mean change your metabolic physiology is something that has i think it's that has sounded like the dream forever And then it's like, I don't know, I get to be 47 and my body's like, yeah, we're not doing that anymore. Your metabolism's totally changed. Or, you know, it's like, is this really possible to change that in a way that lasts?

### Human: Come on. Everybody we're talking. Well, I guess there are some young people who haven't been through a boom bust cycle. It's true.### Assistant: Well, I mean, to be fair, this is 14 years, Molly. How long has this boom been? 14 years? 13 or 14? 2008? Wow. We're getting up there.

### Human: I don't know who's so they were like, the algorithm is not made in the US. It's made in China. All the back end, all the infrastructure was built there. Now they're slowly saying, Okay, let's store the information here. But how would we even know? Right? What information what metadata was even making it to China. They don't know the Americans don't even know the American traders working at this company. And I consider them traders. I'd be dead honest. Because to work for a Chinese company to get paid off with these massive stock exchange stock options, and know that the Chinese government has the ability to spy on American citizens and influence stuff. Man, that is just gnarly. And I hope it's worth the options that all those people are getting there. And I know people are gonna make fun of me and say, like, oh, it's just cat videos and dancing videos, and you use it. And, you know, all in talk has 100 million views, and you retweeted that, listen, I could love the format, I could love the product. While still in my consciousness, know that this thing needs to be disconnected from the Chinese Communist Party. It's the group of people who have put their own citizens under surveillance, and then finds dissent and sends them to concentration camps. This is not hyperbolic, hyperbolic statement. This is a statement of reality. They spy on their own citizens to the most granular level. And now they have a tool to spy on our citizens at the most granular level. And anybody who works at tick tock is enabling that. you work there, you're enabling the Chinese Communist Party to spy on Americans. Now, if they've turned the switch and started using it, who knows, none of us will know. But it's far too dangerous. That's why India kicked them out. And any logical person would say, this is too powerful for a communist country to have access to if you let's run it through another lens. If North Korea had access to this, or MBS, and the Saudi government had the same tool, would we feel differently about it? If Putin had this, would we feel differently about it? Putin owned it, how would you feel? You'd be like, No, I mean, I get it.### Assistant: who I consider traitors. I thought that story showed that some data was flowing to Chinese servers as they tried to test how much data was flowing to Chinese servers.

### Human: I'm doing great. Every Monday, we try to talk about our meetups. The meetups are by founders for founders, we're gonna let some angel investors in as well. But we've had some great success. We started this program, I think in September, it's now October, or maybe it's November just passed. Yeah, it's November 1. So I think we've been doing this for under two months, which cities have completed mission one and explain what mission one was for meetups.### Assistant: Hi, I'm doing well. How are you?

### Human: Yeah, the Stockton and Malone days where people are staying in one spot or the Steph Curry, I mean, Steph is such an anomaly, right? It's a joke. It's getting someone who's going to spend possibly their entire career in one spot. Ideally, you could do that, but it's super, super difficult, especially with the new CBA that just came out, that was just signed. I think that's going to increase the player movement. I mean, we had 50 something players move at the trade deadline last year. And so as you go through that, but there's a lot of teams, I think the teams over the next five years are going to be different than the ones that you see now. I mean, you can see Oklahoma City, you can see some of these other teams, you know, with Detroit or Houston or ourselves, like really rise up as some of those who have had a good run, like the Warriors or others. I mean, it's hard to maintain a 20 year run.### Assistant: is, it does seem like if you do have a window to go for it, that the, you should take a swing, right? Because the, there's no dominance anymore with LeBron at the, you know, end of his career, the Warriors, you know, still dominant, but, you know, certainly beatable, uh, as we've seen, uh, you know, it's, it feels like anybody, it's so wide open right now that everybody's got a shot. I mean, even my Knicks made it to the second round and, you know, we're, we've, we're kind of in a similar situation to you with a lot of young, great draft picks and a ton of, uh, a lot of young talent, a lot of picks, and a lot of reasonable salaries. It does seem like that's the other key is the flexibility you have, right, to wait around for because so many stars move now. It's not like when we were kids where Ewing or Hakeem Olajuwon or whoever is going to stay for 10 years, you know, or 12 years or whatever it is, it seems like the players move around and everybody's kind of accepted that, right? It's like, yeah, it's just the way it is.

### Human: So another heuristic we have is that we'll never invest in a round that doesn't have a lead investor. Explain why. When we were a fund, we were often that lead or co-lead investor, and now we are less often. And the reason for that is we believe that if there's a responsible party as lead investor, then we know that somebody is paying attention. And just as importantly, we also know that there's somebody that the founder feels responsible to outside of the company. And if they're willing at the earliest stage when we typically invest to have that kind of obligation, responsibility relationship, we think it says something about their perspective on company building, and on the time and energy it's going to take to build this company over the long term, that is indicative of the kind of founder that we want to back and is likely to have the most success. So that's a heuristic that we've always had. I love that, by the way. And then to your 4x4, or Don Valentine's 4x4, Our largest companies, Chime, Plaid, Gusto, Shield, Bowery Farming, I would say that all of those founders fall in the high intellect, high EQ box. None of them are in the cantankerous bucket. Now, it's hard to know if that's selection bias or if it's something that has been a predictor of success for them or what it is. But we haven't had the experience that you've had in terms of the Kent Anchorage folks who've knocked it out of the park.### Assistant: if you're not almost going out of business, you're not audacious enough in all likelihood to be an outlier. So Uber existential moments, Tesla existential moments, Airbnb, they had the crucible moment when the person trashed the apartment, and they had it later in their life with COVID. I mean, these companies have so many existential moments that you have to deal with. In terms of psychology, what have you learned about founder psychology? Have you started to have, we're talking about our mental models, things will never do the heuristics. We like we like to think about thinking as investors, but let's just go to archetypes of founders. A lot of people want to believe there's one type of founder and I do have this archetype and this heuristic. We're not going to invest in abrasive people who are just cantankerous and just brutal to deal with. Unless they're incredibly high performing. In You know, and it's like, high performer. If you do the four quadrants, like high performer, low performer, easy to get along with difficult to get along with Don Valentine did this quadrant famously, and he was like, Where do you think we make our money? And it's like, high performer, hard to get along. It's almost always the case. Where the archetypes that you found, and the ones you love working with, and the ones that maybe founders can learn from that this type of founder fails often.

### Human: Yeah, I think, oh man, a few different ways. Honestly, I've always been interested in philosophy and tech, which is maybe a little trite to say at this point. Obviously, machine learning and AI communities have gone through this whole ethical reconciliation moment where everybody's like, how do we do this better? How do we create rules about using these things better? But I think it's just another tool in your toolbox of how to think about the world that you want to exist and how to approach that as a starting point of like, what is the world missing? And there's lots of things that would be great businesses. But do we want that business to exist? And how would it help people? And how would it help a number of different types of people? And so yeah, I think it just helps you develop frameworks around thinking about these technologies.### Assistant: I agree. And I keep talking about your Twitter and you got your job off Twitter. I got my job off Twitter. It seems like a lot of people these days are getting their jobs off Twitter. What advice do you have around trying to build a personal brand for young people that really want to get into VC?

### Human: I mean, listen, people can disappoint you in all relationships. This is a business partnership, customer, employee, founders, management team, investors, service providers, people can disappoint each other. There's so much opportunity. My best advice is if it's not working out to just say, Hey, for the sake of just being professional, this isn't working out for me. I'm guessing it's probably not working out for you. Why don't we move on to this type of relationship, right? Listen, we all know hiring world class freelancers is a game changer for your startup. Or even if you're working in a big company, you want to have a great talent marketplace, we can find these people, but then you're always worried, Oh, my God, am I it's all my money going to go to commissions? Well, we found a new solution for you. It's called Contra c o n t r a. Contra is a commission free marketplace for freelancers and independent creators. That's right, commission free. And there's no percentage based upcharge when you hire somebody. How does that sound? Well, that's great. And if you're on the other side of the marketplace, let's say you're a laid off tech worker, you got a lot of experience, well, now's your chance, join Contra, and start getting freelance gigs that pay well, and don't have the marketplace taking the money that you're earning, you get 100% of what you make, no fees. What a fascinating way to disrupt the market. Contra specializes in design, engineering, social media, video writing, and AI. It really is the easiest way to get solid talent quickly. If you need project based work, you have to check out Contra. Listen, we have great success with freelancers. We're hiring them all the time. And Contra is the best way to do that. You're gonna get $500 off your first hire at Contra.com slash twist c o n t r a.com slash twist. Think about how much you can get done. with $500 worth of designer or developer time Contra comm slash twist right now go get that 500. Okay, from the live chat, Vicki asked what's a concept you thought was true early in your career, and that you followed and that you now think about differently you have a credo or an assumption a heuristic Zack that you believed early, but you've now changed your mind about or you've evolved on I don't know. It's a really good question. One thing that came to mind was, you know, that I could read founders like a poker player. And I really thought I could look into people's eyes and know if they're going to be a winner or not. And I do think I do that better than the average investor. But I think that I may have over indexed in my belief of my ability to do that, because so much of my deal flow came from my network. And my network was filled with so many amazing people. So my attribution was early on. Look at how great a picker I am. And it was like, Yeah, this is like, things that are floating around your immediate circle and your immediate circle. is well, you know, people I'm friends with, these are all, you know, high end entrepreneurs who are doing incredible stuff in the world and capital allocators, of course, it's gonna be like high end stuff, right? Yeah. So I, you know, Bob Dylan's like, wow, you know, I can pick people to sign for my record label who are really smart. It's like, well, just everybody's hanging out with Bob Dylan in the 70s and 80s. They're all in his orbit. So now, I have moved to let's look at what the customer has to say. in addition to what I think. So because and I know what I'm finding, frequently, the people I'm able to read people and how good they are at building a simple product that solves a problem in the world and being obsessed with customers. And then when I talk to customers, it's clear they're obsessed with them. And it's clear they're building stuff for them. Yeah, so here we go. Right? Yeah. Yeah.### Assistant: Yes, I had abstracted, abstracted, you know, so I had one, um, where they, they were just doing a really poor job communicating. And, um, and I, I literally, you know, I called the founder up and I was like, look, just to let you know, I've asked multiple times for these things. You've chosen not to do them. I'm not asking for a lot. Um, and so like, I'm stepping back. They didn't have the money to buy me out, and I wouldn't have asked for them to. But I was like, look, I'm writing this to zero. And as far as I'm concerned, luck." Now, I subsequently actually just recently met the guy who went in and helped turn around that company. Now the company is doing great and there was a leadership change and they turned around everything. So I met the VC from the bigger VC firm who went in and did the work, helped him rebuild that business. And he was like, oh my god. And I was like, you did God's work, my friend. Thank you. Because it was bad.

### Human: I think we bet barbecue. I think we bet a barbecue lunch.### Assistant: I'm just going to go ahead and own that now. Like I am losing that bet. Luckily, I only ever bet in $2 increments because I'm not very good at betting.

### Human: question from April, who is the founder of future identified what happens if you find a great startup to invest in, but you already have invested in a direct competitor or a company that could be considered a competitor? Great. If you are a venture firm, you are going to be investing in maybe 30 names, 30 logos 30 companies per fund. don't want to have two companies in that fund in the same space, you don't want Uber and Lyft, you've already placed a bet on a market. So you're gonna pick Uber or Lyft. Now, sometimes you may have invested in a food company like Postmates and DoorDash. And you invested in Uber. And then Uber says, by the way, our plans are to launch a competitor. That's not your fault. That's not the venture capital firm's fault. It's nobody's fault. And in that case, as an investor, you would create a firewall between the two companies. One partner would be on the board of one company, the other would be on the board of the other. And they would not share information, they would keep it at arm's length. And you can generally trust a VC firm to be professional about that they have no interest in causing problems or having reputation damage. Now, in an accelerator, Y Combinator launches accelerator founded university, you might have hundreds of companies a year tech stars. And so you do not have competition rules. If you're going to an accelerator, do not expect there to be any rules about competition. There's just too many companies and the companies are so nascent, they're so early, that they're going to pivot, they're going to change their business plans. what frequently happens this happened to us in a space called influencer marketing. We had companies like grin and captivate. And we had another one called status sphere, all three of these companies had completely different influencer marketing products. One of them was a marketplace, one of them was doing SAS, another one was doing micro influencers. over time, they all started to overlap a little bit in terms of providing software to people who were hiring influencers. So we've had to okay, if they're all three of them went through our accelerator, they all kind of found the same answer, which was we should charge for software. And on the margins, they overlap a little bit. So we just have to be careful not to share information between those companies. And those companies, I think, understand, hey, they were part of an accelerator. That's what's going to happen here. You do as a founder want to research the venture firm and make sure that they haven't already invested in Uber, if you're making an Uber killer. If you're making a slack killer, you don't want slack as got one of slacks venture capital firms who's on the board don't want to go pitch them, you want to take them off your list. And if they ask you to pitch, you say, well, we think it's you just tell them straight up. Don't you think this is competitive with SOC, we're building another communications platform that competes with it. So just understand that. And that's your job question from Helen founder of jovial. What is the ideal amount of slides in a deck when pitching investors? What are some pitch deck strategies to help founders raise money? Okay, great question from Helen. Generally, people are today sending a short deck, which could also be called a teaser deck by email five to 10 slides, gives you the overview of what the company's doing, but keeps you wanting more. So it's enough to tease you into taking a meeting, just like a three minute pitch, like you'll hear at an accelerator. We call it the trailer of the startup. it's like a trailer of a movie. It's not intended to give you the full experience of the movie. But boy, it's so exciting, you're probably want to go see Lord of the Rings, right? The trailer is so good. And so that's the goal of a short deck, five to 10 slides or a teaser deck. And then the full deck, I think people generally are looking for a 15 to 20 minute pitch. And a 15 to 20 minute pitch means some people think a slide should move every 30 seconds, other people think every 20 seconds or a minute. I like one slide having one message. So if you're going to put four different messages on one slide, consider breaking that up. If that slide with four messages on it would have taken a minute to explain, you were going to do for 15 second slides, people have all kinds of different opinions about this. I think what's important is that the deck does not have superfluous information, superfluous information should go in an appendix. So if you have 15 slides, and they explain the business perfectly great. Then if you have market research, or if you have a detail like our product roadmap, you can put that into the appendix. So okay, you get to the 15th or 16 slide, that ends our primary slide deck in the appendix, I have some things you can look at like market size, the competitive analysis or a deeper competitive analysis. So you can go there. And I think that is the state of the art today in terms of decks, make sure your deck is gorgeous and simple. clean. And remember, one other tip I have for people is in addition to one slide one point, you're making one point per slide, not eight or nine is don't make slides text heavy. Some people take their notes a paragraph and they put it on the slide and then they start talking about 10 different things while there's a paragraph on the slide. It's too much information. If you find yourself wanting to write paragraphs, that's another format for raising money. It's called the deal memo format. you should do both, you should write a deal memo. And you can look up YouTube's deal memo, that's the internal document written by venture capitalists to their other partners in the firm. And some founders correctly, so are writing deal memos to explain to people what they're trying to do with their startup. And so a deal memo can be a great way for you to write a lot of copy, you know, maybe two or three pages, maybe 1000 words in, you know, call it 567 sections. And that's like a narrative version of what you're doing. The visual version is the deck. Some VCs are obsessed with decks. Some VCs are obsessed with deal memos. Some folks like me want a quick product demo and then I want to talk to you. Every VC has got a different style. If you have each of those available, you're going to look really sophisticated. So if you say to a VC, I've got three choices for you. I could run you through my deck, I could do a product demo, a live product demo, or I have the deal memo. We could just read the deal memo right now together and just take two minutes to read it. It's a two or three minute read, and then we can have a discussion. If you do that, you look like you're super confident and competent. And that's what you're trying to do when you're meeting with investors is look more competent, more capable in the fundraising process than other founders do. If you look super capable and competent, When you're pitching your company and during the fundraising process, your diligence is great, your deal memo is great, your terms are reasonable, you've got a great attorney, all of those things signal, hey, this is a great investment for me to make. This is a great person for me to partner with on the next 10 years on this business. So I hope that was helpful. And we'll see you all next time on Ask Jason. Hey, everybody, I'm here with my pal Tom Eschbacher. He is the senior sales manager at LinkedIn marketing solutions. And today, we're going to talk about marketing for startups and LinkedIn did a great new internal report called today and startup marketing. Welcome to the program, Tom. Thanks, Jason. One of the main topics covered in the report is validating product market fit. That's so essential. So how does marketing play a role in validating PMF?### Assistant: This Week in Startups is brought to you by LinkedIn Marketing. To redeem a free $100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign, go to linkedin.com slash nextunicorn open phone. As a startup founder, a lot of mistakes are easy to roll back, but using your personal cell phone number as your company number isn't one of them. Open phone makes it easy to get business phone numbers for you and your team right on top of your existing devices. Visit openphone.com slash twist to get 20% off your first six months. And BlueGround is revolutionizing the rental game with its global network of designer furnished apartments that can be seamlessly booked for a month, a year, or longer. Get up to $10,000 off your booking with BlueGround. Visit promos.theblueground.com slash twist for more info. Feel at home, free to roam with BlueGround.

### Human: Apple is has announced that they are returning to offices this time for real, three days a week in September, whether you want to go back or not, we're gonna have a little debate about this actually, about the manager perspective, the worker perspective, but then I think we do a really good job of broadening out and talking about what this means for the future of work. You thought that was like the most boring topic that was totally over at every conference. But it turns out, just got a lot more interesting.### Assistant: Yes, but we're gonna make it and we have big news.

### Human: We go deep into podcasting our history with podcasts. And then, of course, a startup of the week and a request for an all new startup who among you can fix Amazon and RFS requests for startups.### Assistant: Stick with us. It's going to be an amazing episode.

### Human: That primarily on the sidewalk, we're really on the sidewalk.### Assistant: And then how do you look at scaling? Are they I assume they're on the sidewalk, right?

### Human: I'm all the way down the block right now.### Assistant: And it trends. All the way. This is the problem on my Twitter. Speaking of Twitter, Lady G trends. I'm like, oh, Gaga dropped a new track. I'm a Gaga fan. And it's always Lindsey Graham speaking. I don't understand. Okay, I'm gonna put that aside. Lindsey Graham teaming up with Elizabeth Warren is like the Riddler teaming up with Robin from Batman and Robin. Like what is going on here?

### Human: Well, yeah, I mean, look, the one thing let's level set as we get into this conversation, right? Because, you know, you're dancing on the grave a bit early here, J. Cal.### Assistant: I don't want to dance in the grave. I'll explain my position in a moment.