SPEAKER_00: it's uh friday we made it i'm sick as a dog i was gonna say jason's crawling toward the

SPEAKER_01: finish here but he did it literally literally crawling uh i am so weak right now but there

SPEAKER_02: was so much amazing news i felt like i couldn't uh not show up today netflix earnings were

SPEAKER_04: spectacular and google stock is surging because they laid people off uh so two ways to win in our industry today either crush it on your uh earnings and subscribers and performance or

SPEAKER_08: just cut 10 000 people and your stock will go to the moon same same one of those things seems easier

SPEAKER_09: than the other but i don't know if i recommend it exactly uh and then we're going to talk about the

SPEAKER_07: former founders of myspace raising 32 million dollars from a16z for their new video game venture and jason will let us know why even though that sounds kind of crazy it's kind of probably not and rachel's back with okay boomer it's friday you know her mom is now sending her pictures every

SPEAKER_09: time she sees okay boomer on like a billboard or something the branding is working for producer

SPEAKER_17: rachel it's gonna be a great show stick with us this week in startups is brought to you by crowdbotics great ideas can change the world and crowdbotics is the fastest way to turn those ideas into code get a free scoping session for your next big app idea at crowdbotics.com twist mixpanel mixpanel helps startups find product market fit faster by offering powerful self-serve product analytics apply today to join mixpanel startup program and get fifty thousand dollars in credits at mixpanel.com startups and house of macadamias house of macadamias is the next big health trend get twenty percent off your first purchase at house of macadamias dot com slash twist by using code

SPEAKER_24: twist 20. all right looks like netflix is back netflix is back baby you were right feeling this

SPEAKER_07: advertising thing might work and so have they rolled that out yet well anyway we'll start with the news and

SPEAKER_27: then yeah well i think the advertising questions yeah i saw the stock price go up i thought i think

SPEAKER_02: the advertising thing and the um stopping the sharing stop the share was like a big also those things that have dramatic impacts on the business because it does seem they were quite generous how many people they would let use a netflix account yeah i guess so so netflix uh in case you

SPEAKER_07: missed the earnings yesterday had big news and a pretty big beat mainly on the thing that i think

SPEAKER_09: really matters which is subscriber numbers like they came in uh right on target on analyst target i think in terms of revenue but added many more subscribers than people expected and then of course the other big news was that reed hastings is stepping down as co-ceo after like a pretty like a run for the ages really bloomberg had a really nice roundup of all the things that he did right which of course it's that time to talk about all the things that he did right at netflix but from like using the post office as the delivery mechanism the literal distribution mechanism for the dvds waiting and waiting and waiting until broadband penetration was right to launch the streaming service like not springing it on the labels and then pivoting to their own content at just the right time so he is um that's a good read it's going to be in our uh our show notes do we have shown anyway he's going to leave the co-ceo position and become executive chairman the current coo

SPEAKER_37: greg peters will be taking his spot alongside existing co-ceo ted sarandos they've been working

SPEAKER_02: on that for a decade they've been talking about this transition forever so that's why i think the market was like yeah we know uh yeah totally market was like well i don't think they ever expected that hastings was going to be doing the content right that's sarandos and um yeah they've always had a culture of excellence and you know a very demanding culture if you look up the netflix culture deck or you read any of the books about their management style they have been you know amongst the most hardcore uh uh in terms of you know management and they they did release this uh advertising tier um but i don't think that they have broken it out yet so it released sometime in the fourth quarter like november so i don't think they have the data they have the data but they're not sharing the data

Jason Calacanis: yet on what's going on with that advertising right and that's not the that's not a free advertising

SPEAKER_09: tier that's the seven dollar a month ad supported tier right yeah what they said was that it was off to a solid start and will quote soon bring in at least three billion dollars in annual revenue they were

SPEAKER_50: asked actually about the potential to do a totally free and supported tier uh ted sarandos basically was like i don't think so he said we're open to all of these different models but we've got a lot on our

SPEAKER_04: plate this year okay that means he's doing it i can translate really yeah i'd say so yeah um if they were not going to do it they would have put their foot down immediately and said yeah we're never going to have a free tier because when you open this up it could freeze the market a little bit where people say you know what i'll just wait to pay they're going to come up with a free tier 100 free but it only makes sense uh if you think about it the ability to when something goes viral like squid games right and you think you've captured all the paid customers in the world to then be able to if they do have these advertisers who want the rest of the world to say hey we've got

SPEAKER_02: a hundred million people 200 million people who can't afford to pay for netflix but they might watch

SPEAKER_55: your ad this week that money is going to be just too yum yum for them to turn down i think you're

Jason Calacanis: totally right and they will probably have better i would imagine they'll have better metrics they'll

SPEAKER_09: be able to offer advertisers better metrics than tv and tv is sort of declining in uh viewership compared to streamers so it it almost becomes like a home for because you know these agencies ad agencies and big companies i remember like you you remember when we first when when ads started cropping up online what a concept it was so annoying because you could only get a 30 or 45 or 90 second or even two minute ad because they had made these really expensive ads for tv and they didn't want to recut them or have different kinds of ads for the web and now i think all these agencies and brands have these really really expensive tv commercials that they don't necessarily want to

SPEAKER_37: blow on youtube respectfully yeah and maybe they they just can't wait to send this to streaming

SPEAKER_60: they can't wait they they've already got these ads made for hulu you know with clicks in them and

SPEAKER_02: designed for phones ipads desktops apple tvs etc um yeah and so i think now the the real competitor to netflix is youtube and so what we'll see is a lot of young people who maybe can no longer use their parents login some number of those young folks are going to pay the 7.99 or whatever it is for the ad supported plan and then a larger group of them are going to be like yeah i'll just watch some ads it's cool yeah and they'll download the free one eventually and those people are valuable too but this will be a money printing machine three billion in annual revenue that is just going to be super accretive and that's high margin revenue it's not really going to cost them all that much and if they add a hundred million people to a a truly free tier 100 free tier which is what i guess they would get to i think they get to a hundred million people in year one of a free tier which

SPEAKER_69: sounds insane but i mean you have not really using youtube right exactly yeah it's free i mean i think

SPEAKER_09: that seems a hundred percent possible and it you know it you when you go back to the conversation we had with lon about netflix's strategy of like trying to replace all tv with content at every single tier

SPEAKER_07: all of a sudden you do start to imagine a world where that could happen netflix is all tv yeah i mean

SPEAKER_60: q3 youtube ads 7 billion so they're on a 30 billion dollar youtube run rate for ads and so what could

SPEAKER_09: netflix do i mean netflix netflix q4 top line revenue was 7.8 billion yeah so let's say they add i don't

SPEAKER_72: know another seven billion dollars a quarter in ads that would be youtube's revenue yeah they they could

SPEAKER_01: conceivably do half of youtube's revenue maybe so at three yeah yeah now you're at 10 billion i think it's going to be huge for them yeah uh dang it'll be great for advertisers like they really want these

SPEAKER_04: you they really want a global platform so if you're disney if you know and you got a marvel film coming out you're literally going to ship your money to netflix to promote it even you know though it's uh

SPEAKER_02: and if you're apple and iphone 14 is coming out or pro or new mac minis whatever it is you know wow can you imagine being able to target people with iphone 12 or below with one message iphone 13 with another

SPEAKER_60: message you know this ability to target and tag that you can't do on broadcast television is going

SPEAKER_90: to give them a massive advantage do you have a great idea but you don't have a technical co-founder

SPEAKER_92: well boom crowdbotics is your cto as a service you know how it is a lot of times these amazing ideas you have well they fell in the planning phase crowdbotics will make sure that doesn't happen to you they offer pre-built app templates to help you build your mvp your first version of your product faster faster than anybody else can this means you can stop building from scratch and start using the same architecture that all the industry leaders do there's no reason to reinvent the wheels not when you have a great partner like crowdbotics you can go from idea to spec and spec to code super easily because they do this for a living and if you're not sure where to start well crowdbotics offers professional scoping this helps you flesh out your project at the mvp stage and beyond and here's why crowdbotics really gets this done in an awesome fashion they have automated devops maintenance security updates and app store publishing you don't have to worry about all that blocking and tackling they do it right right from the start and the best part is you own the source code you own the ip so let the folks at crowdbotics show you how all this works you can schedule a free scoping session and get your detailed build plan done buy crowdbotics at crowdbotics.com twist that's crowd b-o-t-i-c-s dot com slash twist again it's free you got nothing to lose and you got everything to gain

SPEAKER_93: crowdbotics.com twist they can play all kinds of funky games like if you haven't seen oranges the new

SPEAKER_02: black ozar or squid games and they know that you're on the free tier let's say a truly free tier 100 free and you watch season one of squid games and we know you watch it to the end of every episode and maybe you watch it twice now squid game two comes out are you gonna wait six months if they window it which is what they should do on the free tier so if you windows three months or six months

SPEAKER_77: and this person's already watched squid games they're gonna they're gonna pay the 7.99 partial ad

SPEAKER_07: uh tier they really are yeah i think it becomes like they're freemium and then you start to wonder could netflix become the only freemium service that has the the flip right like i think net spotify it's only like six percent of subscribers pay or something but netflix is bad will have backed into this with the opposite situation where the majority of subscribers pay i wonder what those numbers

SPEAKER_50: are gonna look like in a couple years the free ad supported or the cheap yeah is that people would go

SPEAKER_02: from pay to free right watch the exactly you know and uh that that that is a a reasonable fear and

SPEAKER_09: that's why they have to make it really painful make you watch a lot of ads like i have like if i'm putting on my consumer hat and you know i'm so cheap i actually even drop down to the like two dollars cheaper netflix level now the only reason i pay for netflix is because my mom was using it so like now my mom can't use it so i either pay for her to have netflix or i just say like sorry mom you're out of luck

SPEAKER_08: and get the cheap one like i might be a drop down yeah maybe like most people though wouldn't most

SPEAKER_07: people are lazier than that yeah uh yeah anyway it's interesting and i but i still maintain i'm super curious to see i mean i guess i guess this sort of sarlacc pit of content creation is not

SPEAKER_02: hurting them no i mean they have plenty of revenue coming in and they own that content for all time and then all these free users will get to consume it they window the new stuff and i i do think we kind of hit peak production and now austerity measures kicking in you know tightening the belt productions getting less money actors directors writers everybody getting a little less money uh and maybe doing 20 less shows it's not going to change their fate i don't think um so everybody's going to do belt tightening and that should uh go to the bottom line as well

SPEAKER_01: because it's not like they're discounting they haven't lowered the price of netflix's top tiers

SPEAKER_07: i don't think i don't think so no and i don't see them doing that even youtube premium just did a huge hike if anything like i got the youtube premium hike yeah i don't know me too and i was like sure no

SPEAKER_02: problem i mean it's like am i going to sit here and watch you know 10 ads on youtube a day i think youtube premium is like the cheapest and i think that's probably a good road map there's a group of

SPEAKER_60: people who use youtube regularly whatever billion number of people it is and at some point it's just

SPEAKER_02: the ads are so frustrating that you just you're tired of waiting five seconds to skip ad or getting ads inserted into the middle of videos i i wasn't even aware they were doing that and it's just so

SPEAKER_120: obnoxious like the video all of a sudden just stops and you don't know what's happening and then

SPEAKER_50: an ad comes operating profit is 5.6 billion it's like about a 20 margin yeah yeah and they'll be able

SPEAKER_02: to dial that up and down i think so yeah i think so they've been on a good run i think good content

SPEAKER_07: congrats the wednesday show seems to have done great yeah oh yeah i mean they also i think they hit a freaking gold mine with the harry the harry and megan stuff oh is that a gold mine yeah i i'm i'm

SPEAKER_126: very proud of the fact that i did not play that i did not play that i have not bought the book i've

SPEAKER_07: sort of been ignoring the whole thing my mom went on this weird rant about harry the other day and i was like who's harry is he someone i went to school with like i literally was like who are you talking

SPEAKER_129: about literally don't care yeah evidently for a lot of people i know apparently everybody else cares like that book is like a massive bestseller and the i guess it's just like the netflix yeah harry

SPEAKER_09: and megan set a netflix viewership record for a documentary title with viewers worldwide spending

SPEAKER_134: 81.55 million hours watching the first you're never gonna get those minutes back folks you're really not

SPEAKER_30: people you're really much better off watching you know some comedy specials or something i mean who

SPEAKER_50: cares about these people honestly yeah so i'm so i'm so with you and i'm not trying to be i'm not trying to be like too cool for school here i do not care like yeah i'm not even rejecting it i literally

SPEAKER_09: have no zero interest and i'm actually getting mad about it now now i'm starting to be like

SPEAKER_08: oppositional defiant about it where i'm like don't talk to me about harry and megan i don't care

SPEAKER_04: i mean they're figureheads in an empire that's no longer an empire right with a b or i'm sorry like c or d level reality celebrity is if i'm understanding correctly so this is like the second son and the you know d level reality star complaining about life and spilling tea it's just the whole thing is so boring gross and inane yeah i don't know why people care like what is the palace intrigue here there's so many more important things going on in the world that are interesting in science technology comedy

SPEAKER_02: art i mean documentaries why would you waste your time like even a single episode of this preach who

SPEAKER_93: cares about these people like living in santa barbara complaining about their privilege and like grandma's a racist or somebody old is a racist like you just described every family like yes the older people are more racist than the younger people the younger people are more woke than the older people rich people rich people have a racist we know yeah it's like who cares about your gossip

SPEAKER_50: like we fought an entire war not to have to care about the monarchy people let it go let it go

Jason Calacanis: um oh awkward transition alert speaking of letting go oh that was rough i know i'm sorry sometimes

SPEAKER_07: the brain does what it's gonna do and you just can't stop it alphabet transitions are hard you know i'm a trained professional and even i sometimes just make it as horrible as possible alphabet google's parent company will be cutting 12 000 jobs or about six percent of its total workforce if twitter is to believe though be believed those layoffs have started today i think i saw one or two tweets this morning from people saying like i just got laid off from google we should however take this moment of course microsoft also cut about 10 000 jobs this week so even the wildly profitable big tech giants are cutting i would almost say presumably to at this point just like juice the stock price right or just take this opportunity to be like get rid of the low performers all of the things we talk about with layoffs and google it is worth reminding everybody that as of q3 2022 google employed about 187 000 people

Jason Calacanis: that was up 24 and a half percent year over year google had doubled the number of employees since 2019

SPEAKER_09: doubled this is like this isn't even a haircut they're just doing a little trim yeah on the big old coven hairdo that they grew out it's a it's a it's a large number of people

SPEAKER_02: yes it is a small percentage um and it is the first cut first cut uh is the deepest uh what you will see is next come the performance these are going to be the easy ones these are going to be i would guess yeah the recruiters right so a lot of times these companies would have a thousand or two thousand recruiters this is going to be sales marketing uh operations people who you know um you can what was the term we used yesterday quiet hiring quiet hiring right you can hire their jobs you know those

SPEAKER_22: yeah totally oh yeah you're in sales and marketing okay we're gonna do 20 less sales and marketing

SPEAKER_02: therefore uh yeah we'll just you know get rid of 40 of people in that group and everybody the rest of the

SPEAKER_155: the 60 that stay will do whatever 20 more work each at the end um and they can't get people to come back

SPEAKER_02: to work here people at google are notoriously hanging out on the roof and resting investing so when the performance comes in and there's this rumors that larry and sergey might come back i i heard that on my own really yeah i i i think wow yeah i think there's like they put up the bat signal and there's been

SPEAKER_01: rumors about this for a while that uh sergey's come back uh and larry too and you know maybe something to

SPEAKER_166: prove kind of situation are has like done it for me so no you know you could be a great steward of a

SPEAKER_02: money printing machine tim cook andy jassy uh sundar satya you know we can really just when a market's going up and you put somebody in charge who's a great operations person and they don't screw it up fantastic a lot of that has to do with the absolute velocity that some of these businesses had like they

SPEAKER_55: just know but as long as you don't screw it up they're going to grow but in a sale market when like and then now it seems like and you need ideas competing you need and you need ai yeah like you

SPEAKER_09: need that you're i mean honestly it would make a ton of sense for larry and sergey to come back

SPEAKER_07: because it's kind of that level of thinking that google is going to need right now to because we have literally almost overnight entered an entire new era in computing google's been preparing for this era for over a decade in terms of ai and development and buying deep mind they're there all the pieces are there but it seems like they lack the will and maybe the creative energy and maybe the willingness to buck the stock price right like it i think they got kicked in the seat of the

SPEAKER_02: pants kind of situation this is one of the interesting things about technology somebody puts out a proof

SPEAKER_04: of concept and all of a sudden it's like whoa if it's really good um now chat gpt i just tried to get youtube's revenue from chat gpt versus the producers doing it and i got all wrong answers

SPEAKER_180: oh interesting and then i was like wait a second well i think it's because chat gpt was trained

SPEAKER_152: on a data set up until a certain date yes exactly and so it's not google yet it's not google yet but

SPEAKER_04: google is google already so this is like the kick in the pants sometimes uh everybody's working on

SPEAKER_01: something and then somebody says hey look here's an electric car that goes zero to 60 in three and a half seconds like when the roadster came out and all of a sudden like the entire ice industry before

SPEAKER_04: they saw that tesla roadster like yeah we know we can do that we released the ev1 like we we know we

SPEAKER_152: can do that but once it's out there in the public it's like hands on it and they won't shut up about it exactly you got a problem you didn't make it a story and it's a story now chat gpt is a story and

SPEAKER_04: it's captured the public's attention like nothing since crypto uh i mean i can't believe the friends who

SPEAKER_09: are coming to me to like i have a friend who is a stager like a long time interior designer yeah and she

SPEAKER_07: was over for brunch the other day and she's like can we talk about chat gpt because whoa that is

SPEAKER_195: crazy we're using it for everything like and i was like what like you're my art friend how do you

SPEAKER_72: how are you up on chat gpt she's like i can't stop there's two reasons everybody does research yeah you

SPEAKER_60: know reads researches learn stuff number two everybody writes there's very few job functions in the world

SPEAKER_04: that do not involve reading and writing in some capacity whether you're writing an email or posting a blog post you know doing a proposal whatever it is writing a letter uh building a website so you're

SPEAKER_72: saying the utility is immediately evident i suppose to crypto right now if you look at something

SPEAKER_47: like venmo or paypal they too had that moment paypal was like oh yeah i do have to send money to

SPEAKER_02: people it would be good if i didn't have to do a wire transfer yes this is cool yeah yeah so i think that's the reason that it's captured everybody's imagination and then once you have it capturing everybody's imagination and all these use cases come out that gives the forward momentum for funding which we've

SPEAKER_01: now seen um and sky's the limit right this this uh this race has been started chat gpt started a race that i don't think anybody was expecting this race to start i think you have no choice but to join the race

SPEAKER_92: if you're google yeah yeah two things we always talk about on the show number one how to build the best product possible that's critically important you want to have a great product it's obvious but number two you have to find product market fit fast right speed is what startups are all about and those things usually go hand in hand but relying on your gut is not how you should do it many vcs they don't want to wait around for that it's not about your gut right you need to have data investors are looking for founders that can use data driven solutions to find product market fit faster so you need to check out mixpanel right now and they will give you 50 000 in credits when you join their startup program they want to help your startup find product market fit and they want to help you do it a little bit faster by giving these powerful pools self-serve product analytics that's what it's all about you can get insights in real time with the help of mixpanels pre-built templates and if you're a data-driven founder that's going to make the best investors in the world respect you more apply today to claim your 50 000 in credits at mixpanel.com startups that's m-i-x-p-a-n-e-l dot com slash startups that's startups with an s plural and if your startup was founded under five years ago has raised eight million or less and isn't currently on any of mix panels paid plans you're eligible to apply terms and conditions do apply because they're giving

SPEAKER_122: you 50 000 in credits one last thing on google yeah there's one company that hasn't announced yet

SPEAKER_55: that's apple yeah and that's gotta be coming right i mean just apple get away with not making i mean i'm just doing gentleman's riff and just making a performance base i don't know but i don't know

SPEAKER_215: microsoft and apple doing microsoft and google doing it in the same week

SPEAKER_07: yeah i mean i think the there's sort of i think it's these two things right like there's no question

Jason Calacanis: that these companies are bloated they definitely are they've dramatically overhired i don't even i frankly find it embarrassing for a ceo to come out right now and say we hired for an economic condition that we thought would never end like seriously you like you really thought that the black

SPEAKER_09: swan would last forever that is a failure of strategic thinking at a truly astonishing level like what is true today has never been true tomorrow did you just arrive on the planet so i think i

SPEAKER_08: find those i find those like ceo the speeches at this point like embarrassing that's embarrassing

SPEAKER_219: but they were rewarded by a stock price and that's exactly what i'm saying so now they're cutting yeah

SPEAKER_07: to juice the stock price because the stocks have been going down and apple i think has done such a good job of maintaining stock price performance with buybacks and metrics that they probably are sitting there like i don't have to do this like we don't need to do a riff just to do this google and

SPEAKER_02: microsoft didn't need to do it either they have tons of cash they could have weathered the storm but i think the optics become too great and if revenue goes down then earnings are going to get collapse and so this does help earnings at some point it does it totally does it's more like when brad gerstner's going out there saying like i don't want to own the stock unless you make some cuts and you get fit and then and they hear that from enough managers there was that one manager who wrote about this that the height of the salary is like hey people are making 200 grand here 300 grand here for positions that are getting paid half at other tech companies they were like remember that i forgot which fund that was was pointing out the non-technical salaries were out yeah when you start getting

SPEAKER_07: those letters and they're public yeah it's just apple may be i did do a little news search here apple you know it's funny because there's a piece from cnbc that's literally like they didn't over

SPEAKER_50: hire apple grew more slowly and doesn't have to do layoffs but there's also a story as of just maybe about an hour ago that says that some of the retail channels are starting to they're laying off some

SPEAKER_09: non-seasonal employees in the retail channels but maybe they just don't need to do a big yeah exactly they

Jason Calacanis: don't need to be do a big announcement and a big riff because they didn't double employees from 2019

SPEAKER_02: to now no wonder larry and sergey are having a fit yeah i mean it's all fine in a low interest rate environment uh where people are buying your stock and it's going up into the right i think for these companies if the stocks go down the executives at the top own lots of stock right and eventually they're going to say you know what my self-interest as the owner of 10 of this business 20 of this business and the leadership's ownership and their entire net worth is in this business we can't have

SPEAKER_09: the stock price collapse forever what does them well and also stock-based comp i mean i you know have a pretty close friend who works at amazon whose salary whose effective monthly nut has been cut in half because amazon's compensation is all based on stock they've got that base level compensation and then the rest of it comes from stock and so you you come in and it's like you've got this salary level but right now that salary level is half of what it used to be and so people so like if you're doing stuff to juice the stock price then you know you rightly point out it's about pay and stock compensation for your most talented employees yeah and your executives and that's a big deal you want to keep motivated

Jason Calacanis: yeah all right on to a fascinating frothy startup of the day oh yeah yep play labs p-l-a-i

SPEAKER_09: is a new company by the former founders of myspace yeah building social platforms using ai and web3 is what they're doing crystal wolf right yeah do we have the names yeah yeah chris crystal wolf and aber whitcomb co-founded myspace which sold to news corp for 580 million dollars in 2005. they co-founded the mobile game studio jam city which remains privately held but claims to have over 30 million monthly actor users it was going to go public via spac but instead raised 350 million dollars in 2021 and now uh they've come along with a quote social platforms using ai and web3 they did it all in terms of buzzword and have raised 32 million dollars in a seed round

SPEAKER_30: yeah led by a 16c crystal wolf knows what he's doing when it comes to games yeah he's been at

SPEAKER_02: games since he left myspace and even at myspace the games that they were starting to integrate into the platform were one of the big wins uh people love casual games and if you can tie them to games of skill uh or a social graph they can be quite sticky and yeah the whales in the system spend large amounts of money uh so you know if you've ever played this doesn't seem crazy to you

SPEAKER_93: sounds like no no these things are kind of it takes a lot of money to make games even web-based

SPEAKER_02: games even app games like it's not uh those tier one call of duties which cost hundreds of millions of

SPEAKER_254: dollars but these they're like millions tens of millions to to make a an app store game maybe 5

SPEAKER_04: million 3 million to get something really good in the app store then you spend an equal amount

SPEAKER_02: marketing it so it's kind of like indie films like i think the app games are like the indie films

SPEAKER_01: version or right what used to be indie films 20 30 million dollar films equivalent here is two or

Jason Calacanis: three million dollar titles um so once we were trying to do this math what do you think is the implied valuation of a 32 million dollar seed round my guess was like 150 oh 20 20 yeah on our

SPEAKER_07: producer call i was like well the way you would do this is you would say they're going to try to sell 20 of the company to see ground because you don't want to sell more than that and then we backed

SPEAKER_10: into it and i was like dude yeah or 25 you know something like that 20 25 would probably be

SPEAKER_02: what you would expect that's what the vcs want to own and so they're just betting they can 10 20

SPEAKER_27: excess if they 20 exit you turn that 20 million into 400 million if it was a 400 million dollar fund

SPEAKER_01: you would return the fund all right so some people talk about returning the fund as like dragon egg uh not a unicorn but just you found a dragon egg game of thrones style and the dragon pays for the

SPEAKER_155: entire fund once you get the entire fund paid for you're in the black and it's you know you have

SPEAKER_07: had it's all gravy after that exactly i like dragon egg i definitely want to start using that

SPEAKER_267: over unicorn unicorn feels kind of tired yeah um and yeah a lot of them aren't unicorns anymore but uh he knows what he's doing it's uh they call it a seed round it's really this is just

SPEAKER_77: video games are in a unique space uh they they're capital intensive but they also are guaranteed to make money they're guaranteed to make some amount of money uh yeah i think and they and you also have to

SPEAKER_01: make a collection of them because it is a bit of a hit space business so you don't want to fund a single game for three to five million if you're going to do it you got to really be funding like 10 games hoping that two of them break out right yeah although come on you got you got nothing to say

SPEAKER_09: about how it's going to port in existing nft characters i you know about how many buzzwords are

SPEAKER_278: involved in this pitch i i do think portability of gameplay items and the ability to trade them

SPEAKER_01: i mean it's always a good idea digital goods yeah should be portable digital goods have always been

SPEAKER_02: right like um something worth there there's a market for them because you have actual utility you play

SPEAKER_222: the game you do better on the game so yeah i mean look at fortnight look no further than fortnight

SPEAKER_02: skins to yeah show how much money people spend the games it gives you a reason to try the other games so if your outfit or sword or persona can go from you know the harry potter game to some disney game or whatever yeah that's interesting i think uh yeah the last company they did i'll give it to you

SPEAKER_27: some i think licensed games is another big thing here so if you've ever you know um if you play

SPEAKER_02: casual games you'll start to see ads for like a star trek game that has the same mechanics of like age of empires you know harvesting and fighting and so they'll take the same game mechanics

SPEAKER_24: they'll license five different pieces of ip and they'll do the harry potter version the star trek

Jason Calacanis: version the star wars version etc right um so awesome all right well we got okay boomer coming up in a minute but right before that we have a favor to ask of our audience because knowing more about

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SPEAKER_27: uh team out here listener of the show uh yeah give it a shot yeah it only takes a minute so it only

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SPEAKER_09: end there reset it after we yeah we reset it don't worry and then it's friday so you know we have okay boomer uh all right uh enjoy okay boomer everybody yep mike o'brien a tech reviewer on youtube with over 385 000 subscribers an engineer and a marketing specialist we i believe you and me jason laid the

SPEAKER_07: groundwork for the mike o'briens of today with our work in media over the years uh so enjoy this yeah

David Friedberg: enjoy this interview with rachel let me tell you about house of macadamias yes this brand has a

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SPEAKER_305: you so much mike for joining me today on this segment of okay boomer uh for those of you who don't know

SPEAKER_307: mike o'brien is a tech reviewer over on youtube he's also an engineer and a marketing specialist and your youtube channel is pretty big i started watching you probably when i graduated college in 2020 and i know you've been making videos since 2017. now you have over like 385 000 subscribers so kudos to you that's been awesome yeah thanks for having me on rachel so for those of you also who have been tuning into okay boomer um mike's brother has actually been on the show too nate o'brien which is kind of cool i did not find you though through nate's content i found you through tech reviews when i got my first apple watch um really i did so i was like oh wait what the heck um didn't realize it until i was on twitter one day and i saw you guys chatting and i was like wait wait what the heck um so that was pretty funny but how did you actually get into reviewing tech on youtube i think that's a

SPEAKER_315: really cool um kind of niche to be in yeah it is so when i started it was already pretty saturated there was a lot of tech creators since like 2012 or whatever um but i actually didn't start off in tech i started youtube kind of like you said nate had a channel a little bit before i did and i was studying engineering senior year of college and i had a little bit of extra time and nate was saying like mike you gotta try this like he already had his channel for about a year then so i thought well i don't know engineer that's like the opposite of a youtuber like i i was not good on camera i was not good at talking to people but i thought whatever i'll do it at least i'll get better at public speaking so i made a channel senior year and about like four to six months later i was able to monetize it so i thought oh this is actually kind of fun um i graduated started working as an engineer for a while but like in the summer i was really focused on like my original channel was like academic type stuff and that like really dried up in the summer so i thought this is not going to work i need to like kind of pivot and so i thought well like my audience is like kind of students like maybe they'll need some new laptops so i started talking about that and like the videos did a lot better and i kind of just moved into tech from there partially because i was really interested in it and also just because it was like a much better niche than what i had yeah i actually had no idea

SPEAKER_305: that you were even doing academic videos what do you mean by academic videos like sat prep

SPEAKER_315: kind of yeah exactly i hide those videos they were really embarrassing back then i was much worse on camera so as soon as i had like a good foothold in tech and i had an audience that was more tech than it was like the old audience i just made all those old videos private they were just so embarrassing

SPEAKER_322: i feel like it's good though like getting in reps and learning to be comfortable on camera is also like a skill like do you have any advice about that yeah so that was like the one thing

SPEAKER_315: that i always did when i started was it's very different when you're like alone and you have a video like you're just recording yourself it's very different from talking to a lot of people when you're starting everybody thinks it's like i'm talking to 200 000 people but the truth is when you're filming like you can edit the video you can cut out what you don't like and so i just had to always tell myself that and even in the days where i was like i just don't want to film today i thought well i'll just turn on the camera and then i'll delete the video later it's better to do it than to not do it and just more experience makes it a lot like a lot easier and it also helps with

SPEAKER_326: public speaking in general yeah and you kind of hinted and said that you uh were doing engineering

SPEAKER_307: before this was it anywhere like on the same like hard tech kind of like wavelength like did your engineering background help you become like a better tech reviewer it did in some slightly different

SPEAKER_315: ways than i think i expected so um i worked at a company that made smart home devices so now it's like kind of full circle i even cover some of their stuff in some of my videos um but it was like smart home devices light switches things like that which was like really fun i liked doing that but when i first started reviewing things like i tried to tie in engineering as much as i could but for the most part it was it was really it seemed really different um but where it was similar was more on like the back end of it analytics on youtube diving into the numbers stuff like that it's a lot of the same thought like thought process the same structure and so that kind of framework really did help me to figure out what was going to work on the channel and grow it from the back end does that make sense

SPEAKER_307: totally i mean you're also like a marketing expert and i have seen um some of you and me um some of you are nate's content related to marketing isn't marketing like a natural gene of yours like is this just something that you're really good at because i've noticed both of you are great at scaling um channels i went through and did some research before the show i saw you guys even had like travel channel that looks kind of cool that you used to make videos on and even that had like a pretty substantial

SPEAKER_334: amount of people watching those videos what has been this like recipe um in marketing that's really

SPEAKER_315: worked for you so i think i mean different parts of marketing are more and less interesting i think for me one of the reasons that like first of all youtube was interesting was because they give you like really good real-time analytics and so seeing the numbers was so interesting and that was like a big part of it that's why um i became interested i think nate was pretty similar as well but yeah we have a bunch of other channels now and it's really just been like whenever we do something it was just like fun to like film when i was traveling that's why i started that one um and it's really transferable i think once you kind of figure out like one platform it really is easy to transfer because generally you're doing the same thing you're trying to capture the interest of some audience so whether that's on twitter or any other social media or your website or like a blog whatever it's really kind of the same

SPEAKER_337: concept it's not like you got to win the favor of the algorithm it's really just like all

SPEAKER_305: algorithms are usually doing the same thing yeah totally that makes sense and have you been able to use like your marketing knowledge to go to other platforms or are you somebody that's pretty like

SPEAKER_315: youtube central so i mean i think yeah some to some extent it's like a limit of my time and and like currently one of the larger struggles is like growing a team like it's so hard to like find people to hire and then hand off certain tasks to them um so i yeah i've definitely like you know messed around with twitter and instagram and stuff like that and other platforms and like nate and i've started some blogs found some success with that but really it was like time thing and so youtube was what i know best and what i really like doing so that's why i've been focusing a lot on on youtube almost yeah probably at least 85 of my time is youtube when did you decide to become a full-time tech reviewer that's a great story so i was okay so i was working at lutron like i said um i loved my job it was great engineering was really fun i liked my team it was a great place to work but i found that i was like at lunch going out to my car and editing videos on my laptop i was like showing up exactly at eight leaving exactly at five and i kind of realized like clearly that's what i prioritize it wasn't like engineering i really wanted to scale my own channel so once i got to a point where like financially it made sense that i could leave and it wasn't like a super high risk um i had a meeting with my supervisor probably not the best way to do it like i don't know if you're supposed to like write a letter or whatever first i just had a meeting i called the meeting update and he sat down and he was already stressed because he got a new project and he was going to staff me for the project and he's like so what are we going to talk about and i said like this is great working here but i have to leave and he was like oh you got you got a good offer somewhere and i said no i'm doing my own thing and so it was a weird conversation but um it just like it had to happen and i don't regret it at all it was it was a perfect time to do it i think yeah like how far

SPEAKER_305: along was there certain like subscriber number that you chose to like be like okay now that i have this many subscribers or was it like finally being able to monetize your channel was what was your metric for

SPEAKER_315: being able to do this full time it was definitely based on the financial side of it subscribers like were fun and interesting and all but um that was more like subscribers are more for like my own personal ego whereas like the revenue is what really mattered so when i was able to like afford my rent and all of my expenses with youtube that's when i said like all right i don't need like yeah there's a lot of volatility and changes like seasonally and monthly it was still like if i could do that then i'll be able to put in more than just like a couple hours a day i could put in a whole day into

SPEAKER_327: youtube and scale it up from there so really the minimum was when i could like afford my rent okay i

SPEAKER_347: like that that's a that's a good uh good rule of thumb and also like so like i said i saw you

SPEAKER_307: through i think it was like an apple watch review i'm waiting for you to do an aura ring one i don't know if you've done one but like you got to do an aura ring one because your apple watch one was pretty good i saw you had another apple watch one that i think even dropped like today that i watched i'm not gonna lie oh i put yeah i did point out today yeah yeah yeah another one i was like what are the odds but it was good um you've done a bunch of different categories though of reviewing i know laptops are another one that's super big especially like going back to school that was like another sector that like i really like um you working in what is your favorite product or like area i guess to make videos about

SPEAKER_315: so i think there's two answers to that there's a favorite product that like a favorite category that i know will do really well and then there's a favorite that like i was just personally really interested in um and they're they're like very different and i'll explain why so this like the one category that does really well is like anything that is like really made by samsung for some reason my audience like really latched on on the samsung side just not a lot of people covered them so like a lot of like samsung wearables like watches and earbuds just like did really well so i like those videos because they always do well um but like i've been making a lot of the same content for a couple years now not the same but like the same category of content and so recently i kind of decided like i want to make a video that would just be fun to make and so um i reached out to a bunch of electric scooter companies and i made a video about the best electric scooters and i have like six electric scooters now that i thought i got to keep um and so that's that was my favorite

SPEAKER_327: one the video did not perform well yet i'm hoping it'll it'll pick up i'm confident over time it will but i just had to make the video that was like the most fun one to make that is so cool

SPEAKER_354: we actually my um roommate's aunt i think i think it's like his aunt gave us a scooter because she

SPEAKER_307: could no longer have it like in our apartment building and it's been really cold out but we still take turns scooting around manhattan and going over the bridge a little dangerous in our area but i have to say i will be watching a video because we are a big fan big fan of their work um and you were attending ces were there like anything that really caught your eye were there any cool

SPEAKER_358: scooters there there were a lot of scooters there no what there were actually surprising a lot of

SPEAKER_315: scooters there a lot of the scooters though are kind of like i swear they're made in like two factories like so many of them look so similar they have a lot of the same parts a lot of the same like everything so no like super interesting scooters but there was a lot of interesting stuff at ces um it was definitely way better than last year last year was like so empty because you know the whole like covet thing like nobody showed up um but yeah this year it was like a lot of cool stuff that i think is going to be bigger in the future but it's always so hard to pick through at ces because there's so much like concept stuff that'll never exist like a lot of the electric cars there like sony had one that had like a display on the front of the car i was like that'll probably never come to market but i thought the one thing that really stuck out to me was like the 3d displays like not like in the past that were always like kind of janky 3d displays these actually looked like really good um so i'm excited to see those kind of start showing up what do you think a good use case for a 3d display would be so they had a lot of like demonstrations there where they were showing like maps and like healthcare stuff and whatever and i could see all that would be useful and i really think like industry is going to find more use out of it first but i think it's going to kind of be an alternative to vr so like vr is great and i think there's a lot of situations where people want to use that for 3d stuff but it's not always feasible to like pass around a vr headset or get a

SPEAKER_327: bunch of vr headsets um like obviously you know if you're like a doctor you don't want to like be passed around like a dirty vr headset like a 3d screen could be like a lot more useful for that

SPEAKER_305: i think yeah but definitely definitely i think i can see it happening in medical i feel like there's always like ncis and shows like that that make them for like crime scenes and things so i'm like okay that would be interesting is there anything like overall maybe even outside of ces um that you're

SPEAKER_307: predicting hitting the consumer tech world or even like the smart home world anytime soon

SPEAKER_315: yeah so definitely one thing that i was super interested in this past year that i think is going to be like a little bit of a breakthrough in the next couple years is related to vr but not in the way a lot of people think so i think when people look at vr they're like oh either like the zuckerberg vision of like everybody's an avatar in meetings um i don't think that's going to be as popular as quickly as they assume i think it's really going to be used more for like different things so for example i used like the new um meta quest pro headset to replace my monitor like for my laptop so it was cool like the technology is not like perfect yet but it was really interesting to be able to like if you're in a smaller space if you're traveling like on a train if you live in a van whatever um to have like three giant monitors around you and still see like your keyboard in your hands and like whatever else in this kind of augmented reality that like i think that has a lot of potential and people were really interested in that as well like i made a video about it a lot of like positive comments a lot of excitement around it so i'm excited to see where that goes have you ever had

SPEAKER_305: like a video get a lot of negative comments due to like its adoption like people being like oh man like that's just like a stupid idea like why are you even reviewing this um yeah so a lot of negative

SPEAKER_315: comments usually lead to like well i don't know if it's like a controversial video like it'll get a lot of views but if it's like a dumb technology that gets a lot of negative comments um usually it doesn't

SPEAKER_327: get a lot of views um not as much but yeah i've i've had a couple that had a surplus of negative views

SPEAKER_307: or negative uh comments yeah do you think i guess i was hoping you would say like like the metaverse like goggles or anything like that because i feel like even that i get pretty motion sick oh yeah i got

SPEAKER_315: so motion sick yeah and i mean yeah that that's another reason that i think like a 3d like display might be useful so that like you don't get motion sick from it because like i was just like i don't know i was messing around with it playing like a bunch of different games some of them are fine like beat saber no problem yeah but i was playing this one basketball game and like something about like the avatar running but i'm not moving just made me feel so motion sick um plus like you know i was jumping around i punched my ceiling pretty hard so definitely some pros and cons with

SPEAKER_307: vr for now yeah i get that if you have any advice um for other people looking to break into the tech

SPEAKER_315: review space what would that be so i think the most important thing is to not do what other larger channels are doing because that's what worked for them and like that space is probably already saturated like one of the reasons that i was able to get into the tech space is because i didn't focus really heavily on phones i focused a lot more on like earbuds and smart watches which at the time like a lot of the big channels didn't really cover so the fact that it was like a rising technology wasn't heavily covered um gave me an opportunity to start covering it capture new audience and um

SPEAKER_337: grow from there so anyone who's looking to start like you really need to find like a new emerging

SPEAKER_305: technology and focus on that awesome i think that's great advice i'm super looking forward to watching more of your videos like i said i don't know if you've done an aura ring video but i will

SPEAKER_336: have it i plan on doing one in the next couple months i've been trying to yeah i'm working on it

SPEAKER_305: okay good good i just got one for christmas i i like it a lot but i want to see from your standpoint i feel like you have a pretty good uh pretty good judge of uh character around these things oh yeah i

SPEAKER_379: look forward to making that video i will make it soon awesome great thanks mike yeah thanks so

SPEAKER_02: much for having me all right everybody we made it jason go to bed you know i i um i have been so sick this week i don't know what i got it's not covet again thankfully my covid i i would love to have had covet again compared to whatever i have right now my covet was so easy it was like 24 hours of hot sweats and then next day i was done with it and i was out skiing a couple days later so yeah this is

SPEAKER_07: sorry well rest or difficult i think your rsb i don't know what that is that's my theory it's not good it's not good but the main thing is it's friday and hopefully you're gonna like knock off and go

SPEAKER_04: to bed now love my i am uh you know i have like two more meetings today and um yeah then i can sleep

SPEAKER_77: or whatever uh i've been doing the steaming that seems to be if i steam i do a little mucinex i put

SPEAKER_27: the eucalyptus in the steam i have uh one of the showers in the house has a steam button you can press the steam comes out so i just sit in the steam good that seems to open me right up that i think that'll

SPEAKER_300: help love a neti pot oh a neti pot yeah i should do that i've done that before um yeah but yeah take

SPEAKER_27: care of yourself everybody out there and have a great weekend we'll see you on monday with more this

SPEAKER_07: week we will i missed it don't forget it felt so good i've started it and i'm gonna finish it this afternoon because i was like this is just i needed to like literally clear the decks for it because it's

SPEAKER_09: such a good listen i found myself like doing the 30 second skip back over and over and then i was like all right just carve out some time and if you really want to hear who have done three uh if you

SPEAKER_60: have people who have worked through three boomba cycles please email producers at this weekend specifically people who are not white dudes who are 60 years old because that seems to be the bulk of them the good news is the season before of angel was first time uh fund managers and that was

SPEAKER_402: incredibly diverse so i'll beg the audience's forgiveness if it really shows you how times have changed doesn't it like when you go back to your three cycle let's own it yeah yeah it really

SPEAKER_60: does you know massive diversity in season seven and we may have zero or season six i think it was we'll have no diversity season seven please put the two together and average them out before you do

SPEAKER_72: better because we can't go back in time and change the fact that the industry was nine out of ten white dudes heidi roisen that's who we should call from threshold i'm trying to get you know and

SPEAKER_09: i'm gonna write that down she's incredible i mean total grand dame she was dfj and now threshold

Jason Calacanis: like she did she did that what's that mac software that was kind of like a spreadsheet before like excel came along i don't know she can't remember anyway we'll do it we'll we'll do this we'll do this

SPEAKER_155: offline uh we'll produce people were talking about it online i saw there was a thread back when i was

SPEAKER_27: asking and so i just want to i always like to address these things head on and so if you have people producers at this we can start up stock on we're all yours but go ahead and reizen uh

SPEAKER_09: tea maker tea maker which made software for cpm and ms dawson later for the mac and then she has been

SPEAKER_93: a an investor for ever she's amazing yeah that would be great and even if yeah even if they were operating a company and then did a vc stint i think that would count too you know you operated through

SPEAKER_07: those three things but she came into vc as a managing director at south bank venture capital in 1999 amazing she's seen it exactly from like the exact moment that's like when i came here moved here and gone into tech in 99 it was like yay oh well i mean it's and then a lot of folks you know

SPEAKER_02: one of the problems too is if you're a vc independent of gender or race you you get through two cycles you probably hit something and you're like you know what do i want to do a third cycle oh it's exhausting and you retire so that's the other problem is i think a lot of people there's a certain group of vcs hit one cycle retire and then some hit two retire and then what's the point of sticking around

SPEAKER_04: for a third you either love the job or money or you didn't hit so you're still at it right and that that's what i'm sort of learning from the first two is that they both the first two interviews were off the charts excellent so i don't regret doing three you know cycle uh vcs i think it will turn out to be something very special but they all love the job i think you

SPEAKER_01: have to really really really be committed if you're going to stay through three cycles so i think it's

SPEAKER_09: will wind up being a great decision so fascinating all right uh and then while you're taking a little time for yourselves this weekend please just one more reminder to fill out our audience survey for

SPEAKER_00: the chance to win a 50 amazon gift card this week in startups.com slash survey this week in startups.com survey survey you fill it out maybe you win a gift card and uh but if you don't you

SPEAKER_30: still win our eternal don't don't do like three things i get to fill up the whole things it's really

SPEAKER_07: short yeah you can see one minute it tells you exactly how long it takes like this is not a like a major commitment you don't need to like make a pot of coffee from this no but it's super helpful for

SPEAKER_253: us okay thank you everybody thanks bye-bye see you next time bye-bye