SPEAKER_01: Hey everybody, it is Tuesday. It is. We got some Tuesday energy today.

SPEAKER_04: Spicy Tuesday. Spicy Tuesday. What are we talking about today? Is anything on the dial? We have a long talk about the Labor Department's new proposed test for gig economy workers.

Jason Calacanis: It sounds so you would you think that like labor policy is not that interesting, but it turns out

SPEAKER_09: it relates to startups in a big way, right? 100%. 100% does all the startup labor laws

SPEAKER_12: are critically important, whether you're hiring a freelance designer, or your company is based on gig workers. And it's a big issue for America. And we chop it up for longer than I expected to get a

SPEAKER_11: little bit of spice in there. I'll be honest, medium spice, just if you want to understand what

SPEAKER_14: we're saying, listen to all the words, everybody, I'm just gonna tell you that up front. Listen to

SPEAKER_15: all the words, and then minus your assumptions. And then we will talk about robots. Eventually, we will get to robots. We're gonna talk about bear robotics, a startup building self driving food, running robots. We're going to talk about when robots can work, and when they try too hard.

SPEAKER_19: Yes. And finally, we'll do some M&A talk. It looks like the instant delivery space, which Molly has been a bit skeptical about, and I don't disagree with her. There's some consolidation coming. Gidear is looking to acquire gorillas. So consolidation is what we see in a down market.

Jason Calacanis: It's healthy, it's painful, and it's upon us. And should you want to understand J Cal's worldview? Seriously. Yes. It comes from his life. And we just get a great 1980s Brooklyn story from Jason. That's just another peek behind the curtain. Just another layer of the onion. Just stay tuned for

SPEAKER_11: that. It's gonna be a great show. Yes, it's paradoxically about gig workers. Just a different

SPEAKER_23: type. Yeah. Stick with us. 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 this week in startups. Policy Genius. You could save 50% or more on life insurance by comparing quotes with Policy Genius. Options start at just $17 per month for $500,000 of coverage. Head to policygenius.com to get your free life insurance quotes and see how much you could save. And Revelo. Looking to affordably scale your product development with global tech talent in US time zones? Hire vetted remote developers in Latin America with Revelo. Get 20% off for the first three months at revelo.com slash twist.

SPEAKER_28: All right, everybody. It's Tuesday. Molly is back. How's the speaking gig, Molly?

Jason Calacanis: I'm back. It was amazing. I get a little nervous. Keynotes. I do a lot of panels, do a lot of moderating. I don't do a ton of keynotes. So I was a little like, ah, so I really prepared. And I just

SPEAKER_14: got some feedback that the the get the initial response from the audience is that I was the best

SPEAKER_35: keynote speaker they've ever had. Oh, wow. That's fantastic. I'm like on cloud nine right now. Keynote

SPEAKER_36: achievement unlocked. I am going to write up a keynote. You know, I'm going to be teaching Founder University, by the way. Yes. So I have this incredible. Do you guys all know this,

SPEAKER_38: by the way? J. Cal is going to be teaching it himself. Yeah. I decided, you know, sometimes like

SPEAKER_42: Prof. J. Prof. J. Prof. J. If you will. Anyway, um, I just realized we are finding incredible companies

SPEAKER_47: in Founder University. And we've invested in 18 of them or something to that effect.

SPEAKER_46: And I like to go earlier. And so the inception point where people decide I have an idea has

SPEAKER_42: not been the purview of venture capital or funds. It's too much work. Let's be honest. And too much work when I hear too much work. You know what I think? Let's go. All right, great.

SPEAKER_35: Totally. It's just like opportunity to me. Wow, exactly. It's like, you know, if you look at Y Combinator and Techstars and Launch Accelerator,

SPEAKER_55: most funds will dabble in an accelerator. In fact, Sequoia is doing one right now. It's not exactly accelerated. It's a three week program where they kind of teach their growth philosophy. So it's not even like 16 weeks or 12 weeks, like some of the other ones out there. But every firm

SPEAKER_10: at some point says, Oh, we should do that. And Sequoia is called ARC, by the way. It's amazing. I highly recommend it. I think it's like sort of a PhD program, maybe, you know, if we're graduate school, and then there's other places that are undergrad, just kind of like, you know, PhD program or professional development kind of program. But anyway, putting that aside, Molly, the fund starts

SPEAKER_57: an accelerator. And then you know what the fund managers realize? Oh, my Lord, this is work. Yeah.

SPEAKER_42: Yeah. When you have one company that has 100 customers, and 12 employees, and their accounting is nice and tight. They're serial entrepreneurs. You know what that is for an investor? Easy, easy, right? That's easy. Yeah, rubber stamp. Yeah, you're kind of go to the board meeting, they present everything nice and tight. It's a very fully baked, refined team. It's like,

SPEAKER_55: you know, somebody who's been a restaurateur for 20 years, they come to you with their latest fast casual concept, I'm going to make a burger joint, here's what it's going to be. And I'm bringing my chef from, you know, this Michelin star restaurant to do the menu. And then we're going to train people and we'll have some supervisors from our other Michelin star places come by every weekend and train the staff. Okay, easy peasy lemon squeezy, no work on the VCs part, especially if you're

SPEAKER_10: investing in that founder for the second or third time. Wonderful. Now, you find somebody who's like, I want to start a food truck. And I did a pop up and I couldn't get that. People paid 50 bucks to come to my pop up. And I couldn't even keep up with the number of people came I didn't collect, you know,

SPEAKER_55: I didn't collect the money in advance. People stiff me people walked out I service was a disaster. It's kind of like the bear. You see the TV show the barrier. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So remember in the bear, he's dealing with like a bunch of raw talent, who nobody's ever believed in. That's kind of my jam. I kind of like that energy. I kind of like it. Yeah. And so we're now like sort of embracing that with founder university starts November 14. It's 500 bucks to go to this. If you come to all 12 weeks, we give you back the 500, which by the

SPEAKER_71: way has costed me 1000s of dollars. I just found out that we have to pick up the like refund fees,

SPEAKER_20: we know, yeah, so I'm actually losing money. But anyway, but no, we're not in the program, not in the long term, because we're doing the work. Precisely. It's an investment. But anyway,

SPEAKER_55: this is the somebody just wrote a wonderful review and did a YouTube video on this. So founder university is going to be the big investment for me personally over the next couple of months,

SPEAKER_77: because I just want to meet founders earlier. Did you say you're also going to turn into a keynote? It's a TED talk. Thank you. So you're welcome.

SPEAKER_42: I'm we I created this curriculum with our curriculum designer, Charlie, who's amazing,

SPEAKER_62: but I'm going to kind of 2.0 it as we go there. And so I'm going to do the curriculum. But then I

SPEAKER_10: decided it could be like a freestyle after because when I went to Stanford on Friday and unpaid speaking gig, I took nine pitches. And it was an hour and a half. But then I took an hour and a half of questions and then had a dialogue with the audience. And I was like, wow, this is great. And of the 150 people who packed into a 75 seat room, 100 of them came for burgers and beers afterwards. And then we

SPEAKER_42: talked for another two or three hours is like six hours. I came out at 1130 at night, I was so pumped, couldn't sleep till two o'clock had a million ideas. So that's what I'm going to do with this

SPEAKER_10: founder university, I want to find a classroom where I can actually go teach it in person and let some people come in person to amazing. Yeah. So anyway, it's got my creative juices flowing. I'm very excited about it. I wish you would if you're listening to this apply, here's what you need a work ethic and open mind. And maybe or maybe not an idea. But you got to come to all 12 weeks. If you miss a week, we keep your 500 bucks. I mean, if it's a death in the family will make an exception

SPEAKER_86: or something like that. It's a kids rehearsal, you know, obviously, I get it. But anyway,

SPEAKER_04: I'm excited to do it. Based on yesterday's speaking gig, I would like to say if you are considering coming to founder university, I have a request for startup. Okay, which is hit me data lineage. So the talk I gave yesterday was about the data economy, the kind of precarious state of

Jason Calacanis: the data economy, there's a lot more regulation, we now know that targeted and targeting and retargeting technology and too much information leads directly to disinformation, right, like helps propagate that. So there's a lot of risk now, in the way that people have always done things with respect to data collection. So after, which is like you said, the best time is always like the q&a. And then after when everybody's like telling you the real scoop about what they're dealing with, a lot of these cybersecurity executives are dealing with this question of data lineage, like how do you even do an audit that technology doesn't really exist yet. And I'm like, this is

SPEAKER_77: like, the most what's another word for lineage? Right? Like, it would be kind of like if you were

Jason Calacanis: lawyers going to trial, and you have to create a chain of custody of evidence, like you're basically just tracing it. So you'd be in the case of a data audit, it would be like, okay, how much data is here? What is it? When did we collect it? Where did we put it? How is it all classified? Like, it's literally just a freaking card catalog system for the data that an enterprise has, which right now a lot of times is just like a big pile of unstructured data because storage data is really their storage is really cheap. Sounds like it could be a use case for blockchain, but it doesn't have to be

SPEAKER_94: provenance. Probably don't it's a database for data.

SPEAKER_55: Yeah, I mean, there are databases that are much faster and secure and changeable. Like, you know,

SPEAKER_62: blockchain is for immutable when the public needs to see it, everybody needs to have access to it. It's kind of a different use case. And from a privacy perspective, that's actually not good.

Jason Calacanis: Because a lot of times if you're doing this data audit, what you want to find out is what you can delete. Because having all this data around forever is just a privacy violation waiting to happen.

SPEAKER_100: I mean, this is the key thing I think we have to get to as a society, the French I remember reading this, you know, the wonderful group of people very unique in their outlook in life. They were like,

SPEAKER_102: why do you need to have phone records for more than a year?

SPEAKER_42: Yeah, they're like, Well, sir, we need to have your phone records for the past 10 years. So if you dispute the bill, you know, we can pull up the phone number or whatever. And they say,

SPEAKER_104: Why would I dispute the bill? Three years old, you don't need to dispute this three years. Life

SPEAKER_102: is moving forward. It's extreme. We're not going upstream to see the bill from 2019. What's the

SPEAKER_42: point? So anyway, they don't I gotta work on that. They don't work like on they don't keep they

SPEAKER_55: don't allow the phone companies to keep records past a certain point. And they don't you just say

SPEAKER_106: to Google, we should say any search that's over 100 days old, the default should be gone. Yep. Any profile data over a year old default should be gone. And I should have to opt in. Would you like

SPEAKER_55: to keep your data? We currently keep your search history for 100 days currently keep this for a year? Would you like to turn them off? Exactly. Those kind of common sense defaults would be a wonderful thing for people do. And some people, you know, are like, why are this this data becomes a liability. So I think it's a good idea. Like if you were had a way to audit data or just let people know, hey, look, we looked at all your databases. We found phone numbers over here. We found dates of birth over here. We found keywords about health over here. You just be like, here are the things that will get you in trouble, right? So security numbers. It is a massive opportunity

SPEAKER_04: right now because of the way the regulations are changing and all of that. Yeah, this is a huge opportunity. So founders, I'm talking to you. The name and the name of my talk ironically is

SPEAKER_109: it's minimum viable data. Minimum viable data is a great idea. Yeah, I mean, and then you know,

SPEAKER_62: where does the data reside? I think I really like this idea that on my phone, Apple knows my

SPEAKER_10: preferences. And this relates to our discussion about algorithms the other week, which we had one on all in and you and I've had that conversation a couple times here, just if I if my profile,

SPEAKER_55: my phone would tell me, hey, on a topic spaces, here are the topics we see you going to in the

SPEAKER_62: Apple News, Apple Music, and your apps writ large. So Netflix, this thing. So we know you like Queen's Gambit, we see you use the chess app, we have you pinned as like into chess and poker, and the Knicks and the Warriors, yada, yada, yada. Would you like to delete any of these? And I could say yes, you know, I don't want people to know I'm into chess as much as I am. It could be another

SPEAKER_10: topic, let's say that maybe you know, I'm kind of fronting here that I'm into chess, let's go with

SPEAKER_112: chess, but you're into hmm. Yeah, no, I got I got you picking up what you're really listening to a lot

SPEAKER_115: of Britney Spears and liking a lot of Britney Spears. There we go. You're spending a lot of time on

SPEAKER_55: Britney Spears post on Instagram, and you're listening to a lot of Britney, I just say, you know what, Britney is like my own personal obsession. So I am going to say, not only delete Britney from my

SPEAKER_42: algorithm, which is private, and my preferences on my phone, I want you to permanently never record my

SPEAKER_55: Britney activity. This would be something humans are capable of. Yeah, but we're sitting here going, oh, humans are just not sophisticated enough to do it. It's BS. It's BS. And this is, this is where

SPEAKER_42: empowering consumers is always the right thing to do. I think my operating philosophy when I create my political party, common sense party, whatever I'm gonna call it. Oh, dear. Empowering individuals

SPEAKER_106: to have agency and choice is going to be a core tenant of this, because I think it's something

SPEAKER_109: that's been lost a bit. That kind of leads into it certainly has in the tech industry 100%. Even all

SPEAKER_04: of the privacy moves that Apple's making like that's lovely, but I don't see Apple giving me the tools that you just described, which is let me edit my own algorithm, if you will.

SPEAKER_124: But they do they did screw up the retail business by not letting people retarget people. So they do seem to be absolutely sincere about it. Oh, they're 100%. You know, there's there's still

SPEAKER_04: this outstanding question is like, is what they're doing with my data better? But they're very serious about it as a business as and that tells you Apple knows a little something about business and consumers that tells you what's going to happen going forward. Like if you have not disrupted your,

SPEAKER_62: your data as usual plan. Now's the time. It does seem like Apple is skating to where the puck is going, as jobs are always say from the Wayne Gretzky quote, because they see it as an inevitability that consumers will take control of their privacy. So why not start that process early? And they don't make

SPEAKER_42: any money from this stuff. So what's the point? You know, it's empowering individuals, I think,

SPEAKER_10: is a big part of what gig work has done. Let's talk about this controversial issue.

SPEAKER_134: Hey, everybody, I'm here with my pal Tom Eschbacher. He is the senior sales manager at LinkedIn marketing solutions. And today, we're gonna 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. We all know organic reach, super important. You make great content, you get your likes, you get your shares, you get your comments. But what people don't know is that you can boost organic and it creates a bit of momentum on your site. Can you unpack that for people? Definitely. So organic is just

Chamath Palihapitiya: going to go to the audience who's already following you, and then a smaller group of members who are connected to any of those audiences. So what we often encourage is keep an eye on your organic engagement metrics and who are the people and companies and segments that are engaging most frequently with your content, and then amplify that reach via our best in class paid advertising targeting. So what that means, and what we've seen, especially for seed and Series A companies is by boosting successful organic posts with paid, it results in a 13x lift in unique reach. And that's really meaningful insights that can help inform your product and go to marketing strategies

David Friedberg: and open up new audiences for you. You can go to linkedin.com slash this weekend startups and get

SPEAKER_04: the report for free, as well as a hundy $100 from Tom. There is reporting out today from the New York Times that the US Labor Department has announced a new proposal that would change the classification test for gig workers. So you may recall that under the Trump administration, the Labor Department created tests for how to classify gig workers. And that is whether they are contractors or full time employees. Yeah. And currently, the the test is under that those Trump Trump era Labor Department rules that there are two main factors to be considered when you're determining if a worker is an employer or contractor one, the degree of control a company has over the worker. And to the extent to which a worker can increase

SPEAKER_14: their income by taking entrepreneurial initiative like marketing their services. So this was like, pretty broad. It was considered pretty broad, right? It suggested that, for example, gig workers like Uber drivers would likely be considered independent contractors. And, you know, people representing gig workers thought that it was too broad because it allowed companies to classify all kinds of workers as gig workers when they should have been employees. So now, Biden's Labor Department approach, which I believe is not yet confirmed, but that they're thinking about, is would argue that more factors have to be weighed when you try to figure out a worker classification. And among the additional factors are whether the work being performed is central to a company's business. So this would 100% reopen the Uber question in terms of drivers, for example, and then what kinds of investments workers make to do their jobs, such as buying their own equipment, right?

SPEAKER_55: This used to be very easy. We had a 20 point test the IRS used to do. And we would just run through this test back in the day if they're freelance or full time, you can look up 20 point test, it's

SPEAKER_106: it's it's deprecated now. But the 20 point test, I'll just give you a couple of them instructions. Does the worker need to comply with employee instructions on how, where and when to work? You know, where and when to work for gig economy workers will expand it beyond Uber, which I'm still sure holder and but just for any of that gig work. And if you included freelance writers,

SPEAKER_13: where and when they work, nobody cares, right? Who cares how you were depends, right? I mean,

SPEAKER_04: well, it depends on who's hiring, like, the question of contract work expanded to all kinds of things. So people would be hiring contractor engineers. Yeah, who would they who they would effectively classify as gig workers, but say, you have to come into the office and write code for us

SPEAKER_62: every day? Yeah. And so that would break the rule of where and when. So once you put a shift on it, and a location, you've broken the number one and the 20 factor test. So this is where Microsoft used

SPEAKER_55: to put people on contract. And they had a thing where like the duration of it, like three months or six months, and then you would cancel the person was a contractor, and then you have to rehire them and do a process again. So this was all open to interpretation. Training does the worker receive periodic or ongoing training performing services rendered? Well, no, of course not like a, you know,

SPEAKER_62: if you're a freelance writer, if your hair stylist, barber, if you are a real estate broker, there are a number of categories like this where people could provide services integration and business operations as a services rendered by the worker, a core business activity, this is one of those tests that they're still struggling with, there's a business, businesses success heavily rely on the workers performance. Well, of course, it does. And this is like a very general one. So you could

SPEAKER_55: fail this one, but pass the other ones and still be considered a freelancer. And you can, you know, set hours for work was the big one, right? Is it mandatory for them to work at a certain time? Is full time work required? And, you know, what we see is when you have a Republican in office, people are very much in favor of freelance and people having agency and being able to choose when you have old school Democrats in like Biden, who are very pro union, they're kind of living in the 1950s, you know, where they expect. And this is the problem I have with this is they are dictating to people how they work and where they work. Can you know who I think suffers the most from this? I think women suffer the most from this. This is living, I will tell you my position, you can fight it. I believe that this is incredibly anti stay at home parent, which statistically, more often than not, is a female. This is a lot of women who come back to the workplace, do it through freelancing. And that's why when you look at real estate agents, this was a primarily female, at least in California, way to get back into the workforce. Or if you had kids, and you were the stay at home parent, some pain with a broad brush here, but the statistics are the statistics. That was a job that many women would take to get back into the career freelance writing, another one and increasingly with gig economy, you're seeing that I think that people should be able to make their own decision. And companies should treat these employees really well. And if you look at what Uber did, Uber picked a third way to do this, they started giving people a contribution, if they worked more than 15 hours a week, this seems perfectly reasonable to me, there needs to be a place between being a pure freelancer, which is your right as an American to be a freelancer, or being full time. And the issue here is benefits. And the other issue for certain people is, can we increase the number of people in a union? Because they get put in office by unions.

SPEAKER_10: There's the end of my rant. Go ahead, Molly, you can, you may have strong feelings otherwise. Um, take down what I got wrong if or what you disagree with.

SPEAKER_162: I'm gonna try to go for it. There was so much in there. Go for point by point. I've been on this

SPEAKER_42: issue as a hire of freelancers. You can't hire freelance writers in California anymore because

Jason Calacanis: of this insanity. I'm aware that you can't hire freelance writers anymore because of this insanity. I think that in order to- Wait, you said you don't care or you do care?

SPEAKER_90: No, I'm aware. I am aware. That is true. So, so there's okay. So there's the one issue of policy.

SPEAKER_14: On the one hand, uh, there was a rise in gig work. Some people like the freedom and agency that

SPEAKER_04: they get from gig work. However, many, many companies abused the gig worker status.

SPEAKER_14: True. Underpaid people hired. True. Contractors and gig workers instead of employees. And therefore, because this is what we do in the area of policy and politics, we overcorrected to solve for those abuses, which were real. Unfortunately, the way that we have overcorrected is to try to reimplement the way that work has always been done. So nine to five, 40 hours a week, doesn't work for stay at home moms or all kinds of people who want some sort of work flexibility and maybe a scenario that would allow dads to like be more involved parents because they would have more work flexibility. What we do need is it is disappointing to me that we keep coming up with policy that doesn't address this kind of third way that if there were pooled benefits, if we were able to solve the question of healthcare, you could give people

SPEAKER_04: a more flexible work environment in which to operate that is not either one or the other, right? Gig work,

SPEAKER_14: You are at the mercy of whatever happens to you in life for the most part versus you will show up and be exactly where your boss tells you all the time with absolutely no flexibility whatsoever. I really, really want there to be a compromise position and I would have loved to see the labor department take some steps in that direction. I do think that asking these fundamental questions, do you have to buy your own equipment to do this? And then asking this question, is the work being performed central to a company's business? Those are, those sound like common sense questions in terms of determining, okay, hold on. You said I could go do my rent. Okay. However, I will not accept the framing that somehow this is like about Republicans wanting more freedom. This, the reason that we are having this debate, the reason that Uber did Institute some, you will have to give back some, you know, you can, you can contribute if you drive 15 hours is because many, many, many companies abused and misclassified their workers as gig workers. There were some not. So this idea that like, then Democrats come in and it's just like a union thing. It's like, no, are they defaulting to old thinking with respect to employment? Sure. Of course. Yeah. But I'm not going to sit here and say that workers have not been wholesale class. And look, the media, Oregon, the culture media was terrible about this. Terrible. Like public media in particular was excoriated because we constantly hired contractors instead of full-time employees constantly. What you're saying was

SPEAKER_115: hypocritical. You would have somebody like NPR or New York times hiring freelancers constantly,

SPEAKER_55: constantly not having, because they didn't want to have to pay benefits. And then they would be riding the gig work economy while they were on the other side of their mouse, hiring freelance editors, engineers, fact checkers, et cetera. I'm saying every industry was doing this.

SPEAKER_14: Yeah. And that is why now we can't even really have a reasoned conversation about it because it like was, it started with an over, it started with abuse. It ended with overcorrection. Yep. We need to get somewhere in the middle and frankly, universal freaking healthcare would solve almost all of this. Like it would solve 85 freaking percent of this.

SPEAKER_189: A hundred percent. Yeah. I do like your framing of this. I think it's very intellectually honest. There was abuse. There was hypocrisy and it became political politicized.

SPEAKER_190: All right, everybody. Listen, life insurance is so, so important and getting it will create amazing

SPEAKER_12: peace of mind for you and your loved ones, your coworkers, your investors. And when you're a founder or a startup employee, peace of mind, it's hard to come by, right? We've got a lot of anxiety, a lot of things we got to get done. So I want you to check out PolicyGenius. PolicyGenius was built to modernize the life insurance industry, which if you've ever gone through this, which I have, it is not modern. It's an insurance marketplace that makes it easy to compare quotes from top companies like AIG and Prudential in just a few clicks. And this will help you easily find the lowest price and the best policy. With PolicyGenius, you can find life insurance policies that start at just $17 per month for $500,000 in coverage. And PolicyGenius has licensed agents who can help you find options that offer coverage in as little as a week. And this helps avoid unnecessary medical exams. And these agents work for you, not the insurance companies. Plus, PolicyGenius doesn't add on extra fees and they won't sell your data to third parties. Your loved ones deserve a financial safety net. You deserve a smarter way to find and buy it. So head to PolicyGenius.com or click the link in the description of this podcast to get your free life insurance quotes and see how much you could save. That's PolicyGenius.com. I think if you just think from first principles, when does a person

SPEAKER_55: deserve to be a full time employee? What would be a benchmark that is reasonable? Because saying that they contribute to the business? Well, that's anybody who's working for businesses contributing to

SPEAKER_115: the business, you can that's a very hard argument to make like your outside account that you're outside

SPEAKER_94: lawyers, they're saying central, central to a company's business, for example, drivers for Uber and Lyft.

SPEAKER_55: Right. And so and real estate brokers and hairdressers. So that when you say central, that means all freelancers are basically cut out. Because any engineer,

SPEAKER_14: a hairdresser is not central to a salon. I mean, like an individual same thing,

SPEAKER_11: hairdressing is central to a salon. Yes. But the salon, like if you've got one person, you're a salon.

SPEAKER_202: Yes. And if you have one driver, you're, you know, DoorDash. The point is, if you have no drivers, you're not Uber, DoorDash or Lyft. And if you have no hairdressers,

SPEAKER_115: you're not a salon. No, you can you, you can be cutting hair. Yes. And then so every hairdresser

SPEAKER_55: has to then start their own entity. And that's not what hairdressers want to do hairdressers want to pick their hours. They want to work Monday, Wednesday, Friday, they want to have their book of business, they want to have their equipment, they do not want the equipment given to them. And they don't want to come on a shift. They want to pick their times. And then those are industries that have been,

Jason Calacanis: those are industries that now had a model that worked fine for everybody, sort of, right? I mean,

SPEAKER_14: hairdressers will be like, I pay 70% of my profits to this for the seed, and that could be abusive on its own. But what it's just a question of scale. It's like once the abuses get to a certain scale, then you got to overcorrect at the same scale. And unfortunately, we haven't yet seen, I don't think, a really forward looking purple. Well, I mean, it's the only the one it's universal healthcare.

SPEAKER_189: Uh, the the really the industry police itself, I talk about this on the podcast all the time,

SPEAKER_62: if you want to, you know, have great success, you should have great responsibility. And you should try to do more than what the law is asking of you, right? The problem is, the law is so politicized, with one side wanting no regulation. And that could be because of abuses, or just being free market monsters, or just believing wholly in the free market. But there's some people who don't believe in a minimum wage, they believe the market should set it. And then on the other side, people who just want the union roles to grow because the unions vote in unison. So putting those two things aside,

SPEAKER_55: it's a pretty simple test here third way. It's very simple. You just look at the number of hours a person works. And if they are forced to come to a location and work on a shift, that that's what defines an employee. And when you control their time, when you control how they do their job, and they work over a certain number of hours, that's a full time employee. And it's somewhere around 30 hours a week, commonsensical. And do they have other jobs that they can work? In other words, can you demand they work for you today? You know, Uber, and Lyft, and DoorDash, we've all seen it, people will have two phones, so they can keep both ops up on the same time love an Android phone with Lyft or whatever. They can leave at any time and work for a different service. And most of them will take calls from multiple services depending on the spiff and that they give them the real problem here, Molly, which people don't understand is very nuanced, you have to pick one, you're not allowed to have two different modalities, or else you break the law, you have to treat all employees the same. What employees should do is every three months, they should elect, I want to be full time, and I commit to this set, I will wear the Uber logo on a polo, I will pick a shift from the open shifts, and I'll get benefits and the LaCrue and I'll get time off, yada yada. Or they say, I'm not wearing an Uber or, you know, DoorDash hat and looking like a dork. And I'm not putting a DoorDash logo on the side of my car. And like, you know, with a metallic thing, like dominoes, people have to do. No way am I doing that. I don't want that. I just want to go out,

SPEAKER_19: do three rides before my kids get home from school, so that I can pay for it, whether you're the mom, dad, or both. That is the easy solution. But you're not allowed to implement that solution, you're not allowed to let could you're not allowed to let individuals have agency. That's the screwed

SPEAKER_55: up part. That's what I object to. I object to individuals not being able to make their own decisions, not be entrepreneurial. And you know who they do this to, they do it to the people who are up and coming. They carved out lawyers, they carved out real estate brokers. So if you're rich,

SPEAKER_221: I want to be super clear, you're specifically talking about AB five, right? California. Okay,

SPEAKER_62: well, and then in general, when these laws are enacted, a group of people who have lobbies and

SPEAKER_110: money, which tend to be the real estate brokers, the lawyers, etc, they say, Yeah, we can't be part

SPEAKER_62: of that. And whoever's doing it says, Okay, yeah, sure. We'll let you out of that. And then who do they force to do it? They forced to do the entry level jobs, because those people don't have representation. And they're like, No, you have to join you as a driver are not smart enough, don't have enough agency, you don't get to choose, you know what, they do have the intelligence to choose. And there is a free market, and they should be able to choose.

Jason Calacanis: I mean, I guess that the counter argument is that those are also the workers that need the most protection because they have the least power make the least amount of money and cannot organize into a

SPEAKER_14: lobbying and don't necessarily have the same earning potential as the lawyers and the real estate agents. I'm just saying, if a law like that is designed to protect, it might be the

SPEAKER_106: least powerful among us. And I think that they don't need protection is the point. I think they can leave Uber and go to Lyft, they can leave Lyft and go to DoorDash, they can leave DoorDash and go

SPEAKER_62: to Starbucks and Starbucks and go to Target, we have six if this was a situation where we had no jobs available, we still have 10 million job openings. We have 62% labor participation.

SPEAKER_13: But it wasn't that was not the case when these laws were it was it was not when

SPEAKER_55: 85 was conceived? Oh, yes, it was we were at 61 62% labor participation. This has been the big issue is people don't want to work full time work, Molly, they don't want that job. And that's why people participate. People don't want to go to 40 who wants to go drag their ass to target and work an eight hour shift and get there at 6am have to put their makeup and take a shower and put on a dorky target, be a Walmart reader. It's it's it's oppressive when compared to doing three DoorDash rides in the afternoon. This is why we don't have labor participation because we're not giving people

SPEAKER_231: enough choice. Maybe I'm crazy. I just feel like people should make their own decisions in life.

Jason Calacanis: I mean, I hear you. I just also think that like, if you made a living wage at Target, and you got health insurance, you'd be fine with it, right? Like, why is it a terrible, awful, horrible grind? Because you get paid nothing and you could get let go anytime and you don't have health insurance. Like, there's, you know, there's this sort of alternative idea or question about why people don't want to work. It's either they're lazy, or they don't get paid enough, and they

SPEAKER_14: don't get enough protection to make it worthwhile. There's actually multiple things going on in this

SPEAKER_55: regard. You have rich kids who have rich parents, and this is big wealth transfer, what's going to happen. They're being subsidized. The second one is people have enough ways to make money as freelancers, that they refuse to take the oppressive jobs, and they would rather make less money or have less benefits, but have more flexibility. And that's a choice humans can make, you know, like, do you want to work 510 hour shifts at Target? Would you rather work 30 hours going across the different, you know, gig works, and people have chosen, you know, people are making their own choices, choices in real time, they're making their own choices, but they're still in a

SPEAKER_14: situation where if something bad happens to them, they die because they don't have health insurance.

SPEAKER_236: Like you're choosing, you're still you're seeing you have agency, but you're not necessarily choosing

SPEAKER_11: like between two awesome opportunities. And this is where looking at what Uber

SPEAKER_238: just want that third way. I just want that one thing solved. It's the solution. It's the solution.

SPEAKER_12: One fact that you need to know about startups, finding engineers is super time consuming and super expensive. It's the biggest pain in the neck in startups. I would say raising money is easier than finding great developers. Well, if you're looking for qualified international developers without the crazy time differences, or if you just want to scale without sacrificing on quality, well, Ravelo is the answer. Ravelo is a talent platform that matches you and your startup with vetted full time remote developers in Latin America. They work in the same time zone as you in the United States. Plus, it's more cost effective than hiring in the US, obviously, and you'll get matched with vetted candidates within three days. This lets you hire internationally, so quickly and so easily. Ravelo's engineers are of course full time, and they're embedded in your team. Just like normal employees, they're proficient in all the things that you probably have in your stack, whether it's AWS, Rust, Ruby, React, Python, Node.js, and more. Ravelo's customers, wait for it. GitHub, Foursquare, Carta, Indiegogo, Kickstarter. I mean, this is a who's who of successful companies. So go to ravelo.com slash twist and mention twist to get 20% off your first three months. Plus, they offer a hundred percent risk free 14 day trial period. If you're not satisfied, you pay nothing. So head to ravelo.com slash twist and mention twist to get that 20% off. And then if you look at this Uber

SPEAKER_241: thing, you know, this is came out a while back. But you know, Uber, specifically, you know,

SPEAKER_76: I know this because I was, you know, obviously discussing this with the founders and the team,

SPEAKER_57: they have guaranteed minimum earnings, they have injury protection, they basically got ahead of this,

SPEAKER_55: and they did a health care stipend. They weren't forced to do this stuff. They did this proactively. They were going to the government. They were going to specifically the Democrats on that side and saying here, how about this? And they said, Nope, the only thing we'll accept is a union. And to be treated and have shifts. That was the only way is that Democrats would do this, or is Democrats and you and that was the only way they refused to do any other way. I know this up front. I think this is a leak in the Democrats game. They are actually working against that I have

SPEAKER_150: never heard. I've heard that the Democrats were like, No, it has to be full employment. And it was this really and it was very interesting to be union. Yeah. That was their position. And I watched

SPEAKER_62: it up close and personal, especially in California, they were absolutely rigid. And this is where the

SPEAKER_12: Democrats I think are losing this contingent of individuals. Those people don't want to be part of a union, and they want to make their own decisions in life. And this patriarchal was a parochial is what's the better word for making this parochial, this parochial, like, I'm going to make the

SPEAKER_42: decision for you, I think is why some of those people are going to the Republican Party and secretly like Trump. And like, it's just really bad, you should give people choice. Don't force people to be in a union, don't force people to work 12 hour shifts, they want to work four hours and go see

SPEAKER_14: their kids. Let people have choice. I mean, this is 100% agree. I think there is some perception that I don't agree with you when I say over and over and over and over. And yes, I'm talking to you notice, I want there to be a third way for employees. Yes. Like, I want them to have choice. And I want them to have protection. And I do not think that anything about that is some sort of radical leftist

SPEAKER_106: opinion. I think what for God's sake, people see you as being default democratic when you're actually

SPEAKER_10: well, I think you are my perception of you and how you're perceived is that you are an independent

SPEAKER_42: critical thinker who has strong feelings about employees having protections and you're looking at the history of them being abused and saying if there's abuse, well, that's the price you pay is that

SPEAKER_14: you're going to get regulated. If you get ahead of it. I think like I can most accurately be described as a populist populist. Okay. Yeah, like before populist became a dirty word. I'm just a populist. I'm for the people. Like, yeah, yes, you should have choice and flexibility. And no, you should not be forced to like die in a gutter if you get hurt because you don't have any health care. Like this is

SPEAKER_130: not hard. Well, I mean, then see, this is the argument that the challenge, the challenging part of

SPEAKER_106: being a populist, I think is our unions in their current execution in 2022. What does populism have

SPEAKER_201: to do with unions? Well, I'll tell you, is it doesn't to me? It doesn't necessarily. But when looking

SPEAKER_55: at unions, do people who are do people who are being forced to go into unions want to be in unions or not? And is it a populist view, which is the more populist view, let people have agency and make decisions or force them to be in a union? And I think this is one of the defining issues of our time is are these unions actually helping or hurting the people who are in them? And are they acting in their interest, the union's interest, and the politicians who benefit from these unions? Or are they acting in the individual's interest? And I think it's is a case by case basis.

SPEAKER_14: Yeah, I mean, this is where I would say I would just reframe the question is the rise in interest in unions, and is the kind of up equal and opposite reaction of the Democratic Party to say everybody needs to be in a union? Yeah, is that the equal and opposite reaction to worker abuse? It doesn't mean that unions I am sitting here saying again, over and over and over, I don't think unions are the better answer. They're not. No, I'm that's what I keep saying by third way. Third way. Right? Not

SPEAKER_62: this open to the idea that the unions are not acting in the best interest of their employees

SPEAKER_14: of their members at all times. I don't understand how I became in any way some sort of a mouthpiece for unions. Like, I want there to be a third way there needs to be a third way. The reason that everybody is pushing toward things like unions is in reaction to worker abuses, and they can't come up

SPEAKER_280: with a better solution. But I can tell you, I can tell you, and universal health care, as I said,

SPEAKER_62: pretty clearly would solve 80% of those. Because I watched as Uber and all these folks offered the third way. And the Democrats and the unions held the line and said, No, that's totally true. I'm not

SPEAKER_14: saying it's not an overreaction. That's what I just said. It's an overreaction. It is an overcorrection. Yeah, that's what we do. I'm disappointed that the administration didn't come out and offer a third

SPEAKER_10: way. Okay, there we go. And so what this means for you, if you're an if you're going to do gig workers

SPEAKER_62: is you better limit, you better look at these tests and just anticipate. This is the takeaway for startups. Yeah, make sure that the people who are freelancers for you feel so good about being a

SPEAKER_12: freelancer that they will fight for you and with you against these things, which is what ultimately happened with the drivers and the delivery people. They actually were like, please don't screw this up. Please don't make me work shift work. Please don't make me put a uniform on. Please don't tell me what hours to work. And that's why Uber won over and Lyft and DoorDash every that whole group won. Because

SPEAKER_62: they were so good to the drivers. And I know people have this perception on the drivers hate these services, they do not. They may want to get paid more money, of course, they may want more rides, of course, but they are voting with their time and their support of being freelancers and their actual behavior. The average person, I don't know the statistics today. But back in the day, Molly,

SPEAKER_55: the average person would who worked like 15 or 20 hours this week, would work five or 10 the next week that the variability of like it was like 70% of people would switch by 50% the number of hours they work per week. It was really crazy. And it turned out people use this to pay acute bills in their life, or they had more free time, because of school or kids or whatever. And they the variability was bonkers, people would disappear from the network for 10 days, then they would work 10 days in a row, they would do with, you know, three hours a day for you know, every other day, and then they would do 10 hours a day for three days, it was really weird. And it turned out they were trying to game the system. Eventually, what happened was the equilibrium of where demand was, the drivers as a group collectively started gaming the algorithms, they'd say, I'm not going to work these hours, I'm going to wait till Friday

SPEAKER_76: and Saturday night, I'm going to get those, you know, those premium rides that are, you know, where I'm only going to do airport rides, they actually became very entrepreneurial in how they approached using it.

Jason Calacanis: But what a mess. What a mess. It's a mess. It's gonna stay a mess. This is we should be clear, these Labor Department guidelines have not officially come out, it's intended the proposal as an interpretive rule that does not have the legal force of a regulation specifically authorized by Congress. So it would be different from the existing IRS rules. The Labor Department guidelines, what they often become, though, the thing that people hire to, because you don't have to be the

SPEAKER_04: person who like, explains to a judge why you didn't. And the states tend to follow these

SPEAKER_19: guidelines. So they do have major influence. Anyway, yeah, trade employees well, and give

SPEAKER_76: people choice, I think is the the basic interpretation. And I think to certainly cleaning up

Jason Calacanis: cleaning up the criteria, setting aside unions and all of that other noise, cleaning up the criteria will prevent abuse, that will hopefully lessen the kind of extreme responses to the topic. This is like, make it clear, just make it clear when you're an employee, and when you're not,

SPEAKER_04: and then anybody who skirts it is in trouble, you know,

SPEAKER_62: the the the area where you get into trouble with this was there was a company called TaskRabbit, I don't know if it still exists, but TaskRabbit was particularly

SPEAKER_12: Did they really? Right? Because one of the major thing for TaskRabbit was put together IKEA furniture. Now, here was the problem. People would say, Hey, I want you to come do this task. And then they

SPEAKER_62: would auction it off. Okay, sounds fair. I want you to build these three IKEA things for me. Great. I'll do it for 50 bucks. Molly says, I'll do it for 40. Somebody else says, I'll do it for 35. They

SPEAKER_10: really need the work. Mm hmm. They show up takes four hours. Okay. Now we're gonna pay nine bucks an hour. Or something in that range. And the minimum wage in San Francisco is 15. Federal minimum wage might be eight, then the person complains about it. And you know, and you have this back and forth.

SPEAKER_55: And this is what happens with a lot of what are they called? You know, like handymen, but there's a non sexist word for handyman handy people. Anyway, people who do projects, project based, you know, whatever. They give you a price based on the project. And sometimes the project takes longer, and it's their fault. Sometimes it takes shorter, and it's they get the benefit and you feel like you're overpaid, whatever. But TaskRabbit made this into such an efficient system. And there were so many people looking for work in these tasks that too often people were under minimum wage. That was the main

SPEAKER_301: issue. So TaskRabbit is that guy here. I, I think it was a really great idea to have a reverse auction,

SPEAKER_19: so that consumers could get the best price and you have price discovery. The problem was they never had the foresight to say, with a minimum of $15 an hour. So this cannot go below if they just put that in the terms of service. You know, you can, people can battle it out for how much they'll pay to do this. But the other one was, by the way, Amazon Turk, remember that one mechanical Turk? Mm hmm. So mechanical Turk

SPEAKER_76: would put in like, hey, tag this photo and tell us three things in the photo. Oh, that's a orange and

SPEAKER_19: a flower and a vase. Should you be able to have that be the lowest possible price globally? Or do you need to have a minimum wage there? Because if you did one of these every if you made, if you said, I'll do

SPEAKER_76: it for five cents. And you did, I don't know, three an hour, 15 cents. Yeah, you might get to like seven

SPEAKER_19: bucks an hour or something. Yeah, maybe, you know, if you're in California, you're now broken labor laws, should you be able to put that kind of task on the web on a global basis? I don't know how you feel

SPEAKER_57: about that. If people are opting into it, should they be able to do that? I think I think what I

SPEAKER_14: said, I think there were lots of abuses over here, lots of over correction over here. I think we're

Jason Calacanis: still trying to figure this out. This is a pretty nascent tsunami in the in the labor world. But it's

SPEAKER_19: not a conversation that's going away, obviously. Yeah, that's the one that I try I struggle with is mechanical Turk, because it's like anonymous work that people are doing while they're at work.

Jason Calacanis: In a lot of cases. All right. Because that's what it really comes down to J. Cal just can't stand

SPEAKER_301: it. He's like, you know, anyway, okay, let's do it with it. I mean, it seems to me like if you were the security guard, and I guess you were supposed to be looking at stuff. Anyway, I just the free

SPEAKER_57: market person in me believes like, yeah, the people, it would be kind of cool if people in, you know, I don't know, Alabama and people in Manila were both, you know, able to do mechanical Turk at home,

SPEAKER_76: but the people in Alabama deserve to get paid more than people in Manila. I don't know. It's it's a very hard that when you get to globalization, it gets pretty hard.

SPEAKER_15: Yes, that's true. And that is a conversation we do not have time for because we can do that all day. Startup of the day. Let's just talk about this adorable. Freaking startup bear robotics. This is so first of all, cutest name ever. Bravo bear robotics, which makes these adorable little self driving robots that run food in restaurants, which is also this is also a labor story. But

Jason Calacanis: exactly. Here we go. Back in March. I'm telling labor is everything. Back in March, bear robotics raised an $81 million series B at a $481 million valuation led by the private equity

SPEAKER_14: firm IMM. Back in 2020, you had dish craft robotics CEO Linda Pouliot on the podcast to talk about

Jason Calacanis: dishwashing robots. Yeah, this is like all of a piece in 2021. Miso robotics CEO Mike Bell came on to talk about burger flipping robots. Yes. And then now as we know, restaurants are having a hard time hiring dishwashers and bussers for the low hourly rates. So can it all be done by adorable little robots? This is the if you're watching us, by the way, you're seeing the flippy, which is the burger

SPEAKER_90: flipping robot. Yeah, it's coming robots have taken a long time. Well, yeah, I mean, I guess that's the question, right? Does like robots are expensive to produce, they have to get it right

SPEAKER_172: every time in a restaurant environment or anywhere, especially actually even more in a mission matters

SPEAKER_71: is what I learned. So the mission matters. So the complexity of the mission is, you know,

SPEAKER_55: and then time is what matters. So, you know, obviously, we're big investors in cafe x, you know, making somebody a drink, literally cafe x arm takes a cup of different sizes, fills it with ice, then pours an espresso over the ice, or pour some milk in there, gets the espresso on top of it, then does foam from another machine. So you can do any combination of those things, you could pull the tap molly and get green tea, then you could do a little foam on top of it after getting the ice, and then you can get some cookies. So the reason we invested in that is because when I looked at the dishwasher, when I looked at the pizza, zoom, the burger, there was a full burger place, it was flippy. I also looked

SPEAKER_19: at tea, smoothies and ramen, I looked at all of these five, six years ago, there were only two that did the whole mission, the dishwashing robot, because they use their specific plates, they

SPEAKER_55: narrowed the mission, it was only for cafeterias, you had to use their plates. So when their plates came across the conveyor belt, the robotic arm had a magnet, and that knew the size of it, boom,

SPEAKER_19: we put it in, it wasn't China, it wasn't a wine glass combined with a glass combined with a, you

SPEAKER_270: know, you get the idea. Yep. conveyor belt system. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, now look at this one,

SPEAKER_13: bare robotics, what's the mission? The mission is take plates around, right? It seems like over here,

SPEAKER_12: they look like just for people who are watching r2d2. And they have sometimes multiple platforms on them. So imagine r2d2, but with three shelves on it. Now when you're in the kitchen, this is what I believe happens. You know, the four of us go to lunch, there's two burritos, there's a chimichanga, which I think is a deep fried burrito, kind of like that one. And then somebody gets the frajitas. Perfect. Boom. Okay, that's got to get from the kitchen to table number two. It's a booth. They put those on there, it goes to the table. Now what I'm unsure of is, does the server take

SPEAKER_11: them off there or just the customer? But in the video, it looks like the customer is just like,

Jason Calacanis: grabbing it. Although there is also some video where the server can do it.

SPEAKER_334: So apparently it does both. Yeah. And you can really tailor it probably to your specific restaurant,

Jason Calacanis: right? Like, do you want? Yes. Just to bring it to the server and the server does it or, and then you can put the dirty dishes. This is a mate. This would actually save a lot of server time and let servers be much more interactive because then you could put the dirty dishes. I mean,

SPEAKER_14: it's literally just like the running. It's the bussing and the bringing it out and the taking it back.

SPEAKER_04: And you have this ring fenced kind of environment where the robots are like, I can only go to table three, six, nine, 10, 15, you know, limited missions. You've narrowed the mission. What I like is

SPEAKER_19: the busing is a really good one too, because you imagine the bus used to be called the bus boy. What do you call them? Busters? Busters. Buster. Okay, the buser comes. You remember, sometimes you go to a restaurant like a TGI Fridays, and they bring the bucket with them. And you're like, but you know, usually you have to leave and they bring the big bucket and they put everything in and then they bring it to the kitchen. Well, here, the robot comes next to them. They fill

SPEAKER_55: the robot. And the robot leaves. That's kind of cool. When you think about they don't have to carry it

SPEAKER_62: back to the kitchen, right? And this is for running. So what a lot of I don't know if you're seeing this experience, but because of the lack of servers running is becoming a thing now where you order at your table, and then your food just comes with a runner. Now if you had an ordering system like toast is the one I see come up most often. You order from toast on on your phone, and then this would come and you take your plates off. There's never an error. This eliminates the error of like, hey, here's your food. And then you start eating. You're like, I didn't order jalapeno poppers. And it's like, Oh, that was other tables. Keep it. So this is going to reduce a lot of errors. I love this idea. It's a great investment, but it's a great idea.

Jason Calacanis: Yeah, it's, it's obviously a lot of technology and hardware, and sales and deployment. And you're gonna, you know, you're gonna have the labor disruption question, but I do love it. And it is

SPEAKER_55: the future without a doubt. Are you concerned about the food being open, and coming to you on an open robot?

SPEAKER_20: I'd be coming to me in someone's open hand. I guess that's right as an alternative. Yeah,

SPEAKER_19: they are doing room service. By the way, I seen I've seen room service robots for this that makes

SPEAKER_12: the most sense to me. Imagine you're in a hotel. And I slide in in a clothes thing. You know, your eggs benedict. Yeah, waffles, whatever you get in there. And then it's outside your door, and it rings

SPEAKER_62: your bell automatically because it's you know, why not? And it's like, it's outside the door, and then you open it. The things open, you take your food, boom, easy. I desperately want that because room service

Jason Calacanis: is one of the most awkward human interactions of all. And like, they're like, Can I come in? And you're like in your bathrobe? Because that's because I always get breakfast. That's my one room service thing. I have a whole system, your bathrobe, and they're like, Can I come in? And then you'd like, you know, they're like, the tips already been written into there. But then they're standing there. And like, it's just I just want that to be a robot. And then you got to figure out how to like, get the tray outside and hold the door open and not have the door close on you while you're trying

SPEAKER_347: to like get so that please bring me the robot. But nobody wants these jobs. These jobs suck in

SPEAKER_12: America. They suck everywhere. Yeah, I mean, some jobs just suck. And you know what, like, I, if I could go to a Michelin star restaurant, and not have to deal with the server, and just order from my phone, I would prefer it. I know that sacrilege to people. I'd love ordering on my phone, especially when you have kids and they want more special, or they want an extra order of deviled eggs, and I can just bang order it, I don't have to find a server. Yeah, when you have when you have two six year old

Jason Calacanis: raptors like I do. That's what I want at every other restaurant. And then at a Michelin star restaurant, I want like the best nicest person who knows everything about the food, and they tell you exactly how to eat it like this thing. It's molecular gastronomy. So it looks like a leaf. So it's actually food and you can eat that. And you know, like, give me the like, give me the then make it a VIP server experience. And they don't have to worry about taking plates back and forth because robots doing that, then it's perfect. Yeah, Nick's pointing out that this

SPEAKER_55: one doesn't eliminate the server, it could it I think what these robotic companies do, they're

SPEAKER_19: very concerned about the eliminating jobs angle. Yes, because every time the press calls them, and I saw this with cafe x, it's like, Oh, so you're eliminating jobs. It's like, okay,

SPEAKER_55: I think everybody realizes right now, like, that ship has sailed. Nobody wants to go into fields and pick strawberries, let robots do it. Just like we, we used to have humans, like, pulling wheat out of

SPEAKER_71: the ground. Like that used to be done with a sickle, right? Like, this was backbreaking labor. Like, just everybody knows. Okay, everybody knows robots. Fantastic. Mar-a-lago are robots. All right,

SPEAKER_356: let's move on to the next. Just in case you wanted to drive home here. But no,

SPEAKER_358: the point is point of view today. The point the point here is exactly the point here is why you're

SPEAKER_360: being so baby. I'm not trying to be I just behind the scenes, by the way, J cow called me a Karen before we even started rolling today. I didn't. I said, you know what is this like 30 hair? It's

SPEAKER_364: like a setup. It's like you set me up to fail today. He was like, yes, Karen, your hair cut before we

SPEAKER_19: even started like you're zero dark 30. You look like a CIA agent. He's like, who's the mentally ill

SPEAKER_368: woman on? Who is the union guy? He's out here like he's out here like Molly's Jimmy Hoffa. Who's the

SPEAKER_19: mentally ill woman on? I don't know. I don't watch it. But I love where this is going. You didn't watch Homeland? Oh, the woman's got schizophrenia and she's the greatest CIA agent of all time. It's

SPEAKER_370: amazing. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. And my haircut does look like hers. Yeah, Claire Danes.

SPEAKER_371: It looks exactly like her. I'm not saying you've got suffering from schizophrenia or anything. So that was the best part of the schizophrenic Karen who just wants everybody to be in union.

SPEAKER_375: That's my role here today. Apparently, it's not don't do that. No, you look like

SPEAKER_36: Who is the woman from zero dark 30? That movie was incredible. That one killed Osama bin Laden.

SPEAKER_76: Yeah, that's the vibe I'm getting with the black turtleneck, or whatever the black sweater and the perfect hair. Yeah, that's it. Maybe I do feel a little murdery today. All right. Anyway,

Jason Calacanis: let's do one quick M&A before we got to get out of here in startup. Yeah, there's like a consolidation happening. This is one of those good simultaneously. Yeah, exactly. This is a like bouncing along the bottom like you've been saying. Yeah, combined with exits of a type.

SPEAKER_14: consolidation is the key to like shaking out a healthy industry. It's painful, but it has to happen. And it's starting instant delivery startup get here is in advanced talks to

Jason Calacanis: acquire its competitor. Gorillas. These are both rapid delivery companies primarily operating in I think Latin America get here is Latin America get here is based in Istanbul. Gorillas is Berlin

SPEAKER_14: based. I guess they must operate in those markets. Also, I would imagine get to your last raised. This is amazing. This is Sequoia joint last race 768 million dollars. at an 11.8 billion dollar valuation in March. Sequoia is an investor not the lead investor. Gorillas last raised 950 million dollars at a 3 billion dollar valuation in September 2021. Gorillas has previously held talks with competitors about merging or selling its business. The startups both reportedly had trouble raising from investors in 2022. Because they were burning cash fast for expansion.

SPEAKER_201: Yeah, I mean, listen, everybody's not doing right now. Everybody copy the Uber playbook, which was,

SPEAKER_62: you know, get to as many cities as possible, have a decentralized organization and move quick. That's great. When you have free money, we don't have free money anymore. Therefore,

SPEAKER_12: you have to hit profitability. Before you fight a war on, you know, 1000 fronts or dozens of fronts. You know, that's a that's a capital intensive, inefficient way to do it. And you give up the efficiency molly for speed. Mm hmm. Now the market wants something different, even for the mighty Uber and Airbnb, everybody else, they're like, show us the money, show us the profits. Yeah. And that's why, you know, the idea of like, hey, we're gonna fight a war on all fronts is over. And what this consolidation does is, it stops the wars where people are discounting and using VC dollars to gain

SPEAKER_19: market share and they fight this battle, which, you know, like many wars, you know, and this is not more people dying. So I'm not making light of it or anything. But in these battles between companies, they both lose, because they're both losing money each time. And it's not healthy, it's fine for a while. But it truly becomes unsustainable prolonged wars like this, everybody loses. And this is a healthy part, you know, like, they can't get more money. So you consolidate that you're not discounting each other. And this should have happened with Uber and Lyft. There was a moment of time where Lyft almost went to Uber, and we're DoorDash almost went to Uber. And if that if one of those two had happened, all of these companies, the entire sector would be looked at, well, kind of like it's being looked at

SPEAKER_71: now, which is okay, it's going to be profitable. But it wouldn't have had this five years of this can

Jason Calacanis: never be profitable. Is that and I asked this sincerely, is that how people are looking at instant delivery specifically? Because I feel like there still is not a proof point for delivery

SPEAKER_389: being profitable. Like we're, we're not sharing. I was looking at ride sharing food delivery, which,

SPEAKER_19: you know, now it's proven that it can be profitable. Instead deliveries. If I think it can be. So your

SPEAKER_20: question was, do people look at it that way? No, they still have to prove it. Right? Because it has

SPEAKER_391: issue ever been so far. So right? Yeah, we talked about one point. You can deliver food profitably,

SPEAKER_71: for sure. You can do ride sharing profitably, for sure. Mm hmm. This one, I am not sure that people will pay. I don't know. I'm not sure how many missions there are, where people are willing to

SPEAKER_19: pay 20 or $30 on top of their $30 711 bill, or their Walgreens bill, right? Real delivery costs,

SPEAKER_12: I put at $20, $30 per order, because that's what you wind up paying, right? If you use Postmates, Uber Eats, DoorDash, it winds up being plus $20 to $30 for the consumer. That's fine on dinner.

SPEAKER_76: Is that fine for deodorant and soap and a gallon of milk? Probably not. So I think this is a very narrow use case. You're in a city, you're a young urban professional, you need cigarettes and booze, deodorant, shaving cream, quarter milk, whatever it is, diapers.

SPEAKER_94: Uh, yeah, I wonder if that go puff guy would come back on. I just still think the jury is out on this whole business model and spent out since 2001. You know, it the jury's out, I think, because nobody

SPEAKER_12: needs something that quickly, or the times you do need it that quickly are are few and far between. Yeah. You know, like, I don't know how often, even with like, Uber, I want to use Uber for delivery of like soap and, you know, other stuff. But I kind of have it on Instacart and subscribe and save the items I use most frequently. So I find I don't as somebody who's a planner, not a prepper like you, but a planner, you know, like, you're way ahead of the curve. I'm kind of like right behind you. This is for like, I think millennials who are like young people who don't do any planning, right?

SPEAKER_14: Yeah. Or it's like, you want it you all of a sudden decide you want to make something and you need the ingredients that happens right now, because my son is going through a cooking phase,

SPEAKER_04: like that. So that's kind of cool. Maybe we'll do this. It's pretty right. Exactly. We need lemons. And like, you decide you want to make pecan pie the other night. So we're like, Oh, let's

SPEAKER_400: door dash some stuff. Yeah, no, it's a real fun phase, by the way. And thanks to the bear. This is

SPEAKER_109: why it's happening. Oh, really? He watched the bear and he got into cooking. Yeah, we watched it

SPEAKER_71: together. Now he wants to cook. It's the best. I just love that series. I mean,

SPEAKER_403: is there going to be a second version of that? Or is that a one and done? I don't know. I hope

SPEAKER_19: there's more. I love the season two coming. Actually, the guy who was the brother in that, or the cousin, the tall guy. He's in Andor. He's in Andor. And I love him. And he was in girls.

SPEAKER_412: And he's same personality. I still don't know his name. He played John Carreyrou in the dropout too.

SPEAKER_24: He did. That's right. Oh my God. Even boss something. I love this guy. That's right. He's going to wind up getting great. This guy's going to win an Oscar. Somebody's going to put

SPEAKER_62: him in something good. This guy's getting some good scripts. I bet you he gets nominated for an

SPEAKER_90: Oscar next two or three years. He does this type two really well. This kind of like crabby, slightly damaged, neurotic. Yeah, he's got a type. Yeah, it works. It works.

SPEAKER_420: It's just the fact that he's dealing. Wonderful. He's dealing blow out of the restaurant. I mean, I'm like, go right back to my childhood. Literally, this is my childhood, Molly, like,

SPEAKER_12: at my dad's bar. At a certain age, it all became revealed to me. Bookie, coke dealer,

SPEAKER_19: loan shark, hell's angel, cop, cop who could solve problems for you. Like, literally, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, this whole cast of characters who I knew and would like run and get cigarettes for. This one guy, he would give me, he'd say, hey, kid, come here. How's your pop? Good. Okay. Go get me two packs of Marlboro Lights. Marlboro Lights were $1.50 at the time. He gave me a $20, sometimes a $50. I would go run. He'd say, run, get me two packs of $50. He'd like to see me run. I run, I get two packs of Marlboro Lights. I bring him the change. $17, sometimes $47. Say, keep it, kid. I keep it. I love this guy. I'm not

SPEAKER_12: going to say his name. Rest in peace. This guy was running. He had services that were available. And in Brooklyn, every establishment had services available. Now my dad wasn't running the services, but he wasn't also kicking the people out. And so as part of the keeping the peace, he would tip the proprietor of my dad's kids who were working in the restaurant with extraordinary

SPEAKER_430: tips. He was a bookie. He was the bookie. I never told you the story of this one. So one time,

SPEAKER_10: and this is great for the show. Anyway, I go to the bathroom. I had to clean the bathrooms in this joint. So I go to the bathroom to, yeah, every couple hours, I go clean the bathroom. Go clean the bathroom. Place is a mess, whatever. I'm like 13 years old. I look on the side of the toilet, and there is a wad of cash with a rubber band around it. We call this a knot in Brooklyn.

SPEAKER_19: There's a knot. And you could always tell like a serious knot. Some knots have around them, like a broccoli rubber band. Some knots are so big, they got a little thin rubber band around them a couple times. Anyway, this is a big freaking knot of money is a couple of Gs. So I pick it up. I bring it to my dad. My dad looks at it like he's looking at like an oyster or something. And he like kind of does a thing with his hand where he kind of weighs it. He looks at it from like one or two angles. He goes, Oh, that's Artie's. Hands it back to me. Give it to Artie. I'm like, he's not here. He's like, he'll be back. So now I'm holding $7,000 in my pocket. All of a sudden, he already come through the thing. I said, Oh, Artie. And he looks at me goes, Yeah, let me have it. He knows I have it. Because he knows nobody's gonna take that. Right? Because in Brooklyn, you know, who's not it's not because you see people take these knots out, you know, this is already not. So I hand it to him. I kid you not. Good kid pills off 100 off the top gives me it was all hundreds. There wasn't a there wasn't a 50 in here. He literally this is in 1982. He kills off a Hyundai for J. Now. This is when I was like, Well, money's cool. All right. That's it, everybody. This week in

SPEAKER_20: Brooklyn, stories from the 70s and 80s. What a show. I'm J. Cal. She's zero dot 30.

SPEAKER_15: Lot happened today. Lot happened today. Oh, my Lord. Tomorrow. We got crypto roundtable. We got another big show coming tomorrow. Nothing controversial there. Nothing controversial

Jason Calacanis: there. Any perp walks this week? I read a super fun story about how all that energy savings from the ETH merge just got rolled right into Bitcoin's highest energy consumption ever. True story. Yeah,

SPEAKER_04: we'll talk about that tomorrow. We're gonna have a good time. And then we got another episode of the next unicorns. One of the most fun interviews I've done in ages with Liquid Death CEO, Mike Cesario.

SPEAKER_124: Good time. Oh, yes. Liquid Death. I want to hear that one. All right, freaking great. It's gonna be a great show tomorrow. We'll see you then. Bye-bye.