SPEAKER_00: okay everybody welcome to this week in startups for a friday it's a solo dolo jason news day i'm back to going solo because molly has a well-earned vacation we're going to do a full coinbase breakdown ahead of their earnings report next week we'll also cover that but we're going to talk about their stock having a massive comeback and this new partnership they have with blackrock for institutional trading just when you thought crypto was over it looks like coinbase is making some progress then we're going to cover another amazon acquisition amazon is now buying roomba maker i robot and we'll go through some of the other acquisitions that amazon has made and some of the ones i think they should make then finally we'll wrap up with the debut of jtrading.com yes i have a domain name we bought the domain name jtrading.com and we're breaking down the early trades i made and one of my four trades stitch fix amazon disney and warner bros discovery one of those four is down 17 i'm getting slaughtered by this trade and we're gonna find out if i'm gonna double down stay the course or i'm gonna make my first sale and then of course it's friday so you get another amazing okay boomer segment from rachel reporting it's gonna be a great show stick with us SPEAKER_01: this week in startups is brought to you by lemon.io need to speed up your product development without draining your budget hire vetted engineers from europe at lemon.io go to lemon.io twist to get 15 off for the first four weeks helpware helps you outsource the tasks that slow your team down from data entry to world-class customer support helpware can help make you bionic go to helpware.com twist to get one thousand dollars off your first invoice and bubbles guess what you don't have to be in back to back calls all day or get continually pulled into quick syncs by using bubbles async collaboration tool you can remove a minimum of two meetings a week from your schedule get your point across with unlimited screen and video recordings for free at use bubbles dot com slash twist all right everybody SPEAKER_06: in our first story blackrock is partnering with coinbase to make it easier for institutional investors SPEAKER_08: to manage and trade bitcoin apparently people still believe in crypto and people love bitcoin it's SPEAKER_09: amazing to see bitcoin be the one cryptocurrency that seems to weather every storm and we're going to cover a little bit more about coinbase's performance because they're gonna have their quarterly earnings SPEAKER_06: report next week when markets close on tuesday so today's friday on tuesday next week uh today's the SPEAKER_09: 5th 6 7 8 9 on the 9th tuesday coinbase to report their earnings i'm really interested in seeing what happens with those earnings because who's trading crypto right now right i mean who would trade into SPEAKER_08: this if anything people are selling or don't want to open the app and look at it right this is what robin hood and coinbase uh their big challenge will be in a down market when people don't have stimmy checks when they don't have free time when they can now go back and spend their money going out or wagering on sports all that stuff is back online you're going to lose i don't know 25 maybe 50 percent of the looky lose the people who are trying out trading as a uh pastime or maybe they just were greedy and had or had fomo any of those things are possible and now they can have other pursuits because the pandemic is over isn't that amazing we don't think about the pandemic all that much anymore but there was that year when we were locked inside and couldn't go out and they had to wear masks and all this crazy stuff that we went through thank god it's over and then on wednesday i'm gonna have my friend sonny madron to talk about crypto because he's deep in the weeds on he's building a crypto startup he's been in it from the beginning and i'm looking for one more person to have on a lot of people are away for the summer so if you have suggestions of somebody who's actually trading and buying crypto right now that would be interesting for me uh you can email producers at this SPEAKER_12: week in startups.com so as we know sec uh the sec is investigating coinbase over selling unregulated securities on its platform um and i think i didn't cover that because i was out uh on my rafting trip but molly and i think deirdre bossa did talk about that now let's just quickly go through what's going on here coinbase has had a crazy ride since they went public via a direct listing in april of 2021 they didn't do the standard you know ipo roadshow tour they did a direct listing and when you look at this SPEAKER_08: chart my lord it was at 77 billion dollars as a market cap uh you know you're talking airbnb levels bigger than uber today but you know kind of uber at its peak um now this is with you know a lot of SPEAKER_09: crypto mania going on in november of 2021 and of course it's plummeted since then and this is SPEAKER_06: the really hard part about being a public market investor in a or a private market investor for that matter in a really hyped up market if you were a vc if you invested in coinbase my lord you SPEAKER_09: know you should have distributed all the shares and you know since they unlike say robin hood where i was locked up and the shares were really high during the lockup and then they came down after we were all unlocked private investors typically have a six month lockup coinbase because it was a direct listing you don't have a lockup the shares just start trading uh spotify did this as well bill gurley has been a proponent of this because the fees are lower and you get to the organic price of the stock almost immediately or theoretically you do immediately so they could have distributed at these crazy market caps and then took that win and man they should have so uh this is one of the big SPEAKER_08: lessons i'm trying to understand with jtrading.com tm i am trading stocks here because i want to be really good at knowing when to liquidate and when things are overvalued when they're undervalued and so that i can use that to inform my private market investing to inform my liquidation and cashing in my chips during before an ipo after an ipo you know and when should i liquidate as an early stage investor and then when should i hold right and look if i had bought a ton of uber when it was at you SPEAKER_09: know 19 20 just a couple of weeks ago i would have a 50 gain that's nothing to sneeze at right but maybe you held on to them and you know now you could be looking at you know the destruction of man 80 of your returns uh 86 i think was peak to trow bottomed out at a 10.9 billion market cap eight SPEAKER_26: months later in july of 2022 we're sitting here on august 5th so just last month but over the past SPEAKER_09: five days miraculously coinbase's market cap is up 50 percent from uh about 14 billion to 20 billion SPEAKER_18: now this is very misleading because when you lose 86 of your stock right it's going back up 50 SPEAKER_00: that doesn't get you you know to close to 86 because remember you have to grow a lot more so if you SPEAKER_09: were to go from down 86 percent you don't just need to go up 86 percent to be even again right 86 on 14 billion uh you know you'd be at 24 billion or something right you're not going to be anywhere SPEAKER_08: near that that peak and just that's just fun with percentages right because the percentage decreases from the high number the percentage increase is from the low number it should be obvious to everybody but this is why holding on when you're in a dog of a stock is a really hard thing for people to do because catching up can almost seem insurmountable but this is very interesting people who are bottom feeding right now i started j trading at the beginning of july almost will be at a month i think since my first trade and um because i believe and i said this in june that we're bouncing along the bottom i thought the summer would be kind of a bottom moment but that we might retest those bottoms over the next six to 12 months which made it a perfect time i think to start j trading start maybe looking at what the value is i'm not saying coinbase is one of these actually i wouldn't touch SPEAKER_12: coinbase um because i think cryptocurrency could be having um what i would consider an existential crisis SPEAKER_08: here because of these sec investigations but look at this chart coinbase's quarterly revenue ripped SPEAKER_29: from 190 million in mid 2020 to a peak of 2.5 billion in q4 2021 that is bonkers but in q1 revenue SPEAKER_12: dropped 35 year over year to 1.1 billion and i think this is all the retail traders are just gone SPEAKER_09: if you look uh year over year at this chart it is um a pretty crazy swing as a public company when you're supposed to go public when you have predictable revenues right that's what the public markets are for people are looking to really understand your business it should be robust and predictable but i don't think people could predict i mean i did but i don't think most people could predict that crypto would get hit this hard i knew this was coming only because i didn't think there was a fundamental intrinsic value in uh almost all of the cryptocurrency projects out there not coinbase but the things that are traded on coinbase and i thought there was also a risk of regulatory issues uh including and up to things being banned and here we are uh coinbase um had a an issue with insider trading people were front-running the markets and the i believe it was the new york's um southern district i think went after those individuals and now we have uh coinbase reportedly SPEAKER_08: being investigated uh by the sec because they believe the coins being traded are stocks i believe SPEAKER_09: they're closer to stocks than they are to chucky cheese tokens or airline miles or utility tokens so i think uh if we're being intellectually honest just my belief i know people disagree certainly cryptocurrency exists somewhere between you know chucky cheese tokens you know this these random tokens that allow you to do something right they have some utility you can use them as airline miles you could use them in a video game and then there's stocks people buy them to appreciate other people have SPEAKER_00: control over this whole howey test you know and i guess we're having this debate uh do they exist as airline miles where they would be unregulated or do they freely trade and it's obvious they freely trade SPEAKER_09: coinbase operates and you know even robin hood they all of these tokens are trading as if they were SPEAKER_08: uh stocks if you're trading them side by side in any of the apps and i don't want to just single out coinbase here any of them they trade just like stocks now should the sec have been more clear of course they but i think a lot of people also suspended disbelief in this regard and it needs to SPEAKER_09: be cleaned up and the cleanup process as we know can be messy i don't think this is existential for coinbase at this point but it's acute i think it's a very acute situation um i don't think coinbase is going away because some things like bitcoin with no ownership no central control ethereum um you know those feel differently than these crypto projects which i believe the tokens were a proxy for shares in the company and i think people did that knowingly in most cases last quarter its revenue growth was negative down 35 percent and um yeah live by the gun die by the gun it's pretty amazing to see this come apart 9.2 monthly transacting users um in coinbase's last quarter and that would be the number SPEAKER_44: you really want to watch going into q2 because that's when the market really got scary uh scary in SPEAKER_09: q1 it was like really scary in q2 things were really really down uh and just robin hood reported i was an early angel investor in robin hood i was not a private market investor in coinbase but if we're being intellectually honest here we saw robin hood which i think peaked at 21 maybe even 22 million monthly active users they're down to 14 million so you know down a third maybe or 25 at least 1.1 billion in quarterly revenue last quarter for coinbase and that was down 35 percent uh loss of 430 SPEAKER_08: million um they were very profitable in the 2021 quarters right people were buying up cryptocurrency they're getting a vague on everything a little piece of the action and supposedly they have uh around six billion in cash and cash and equivalents but they have 3.3 billion in debt you net those two things out you know they're sitting pretty on 2.8 billion but the key stat uh 235 billion dollars of the 309 billion in trading volume on coinbase was by institutional investors about 76 percent that was last quarter what does this mean well this relates to the black rock news the people who are actually trading not the trades but the volume of the trades right in dollar amount so you could have a lot of people trading you know a fraction of a bitcoin or a couple of solana's here and there that's SPEAKER_12: different it's very different than large chunks a billion dollars in bitcoin uh which we saw uh tesla held or 500 million dollars 250 million dollar chunks that is uh i guess coinbase's speciality uh and i think that's probably the future of the business and that's why they've done i think you know uh or they'll continue to do cuts and resizing of the business to focus on institutional because institutional does still seem to believe in this three-fourths of the trading volume on coinbase in q1 was done by SPEAKER_08: institutional investors as well so that makes sense to me people stopped speculating the reopening happened so not only is the volume institutional but the trades has now flipped over to institutional SPEAKER_12: i'm sure last year uh when you had just a lot of people at home trading and certainly in 2020 second half when when people were before they were getting vaccinated against covid sure there's a lot of SPEAKER_09: trading going on i'm sure by retail so this always happens retail comes into the market they become the bear holders then they disappear institutions come back they buy when the market's down although i think with crypto buying when the market's down could be the worst advice you ever get because it it could be down before they turn the lights off right people forget the lowest the stock can go is zero the lowest crypto can go is also zero so i think many of these projects could circle around the drain and just stop trading there just might not be any volume in them and we have seen that actually with crypto projects not the top ones but i could see the bottom for the mid-tier ones just there being no trading and so if you own them you essentially own some beanie babies or some you know rock and roll t-shirts from the 80s that nobody wants to buy at this point in time who knows maybe someday people want to trade crypto assets that are uh really old let me tell you a quick story drew fabricant is a SPEAKER_00: launch portfolio founder and he runs a company called scout it's a lead gen platform he's super talented but he was recently under the gun to hire a developer with a very specific skill set and lemon.io delivered a great candidate quickly and they were a pleasure to work with according to drew take it from me hiring developers is hard i see this all the time founders struggling with it and so many founders struggle with doing it quickly well lemon.io is going to help you hire better developers faster just like they help my portfolio company and friend drew they have a network of engineers from europe and latin america and every candidate has been tested and interviewed by their team that's how lemon.io can make your engineering team bionic no wasting time with unqualified candidates that's one of the biggest problems and easy access to global talent they can get your developer up and running within a week and of course it's more affordable so go to lemon.io twist to get 15 off your first four weeks that's 15 off your first four weeks at lemon.io twist blackrock is SPEAKER_09: obviously the largest asset manager in the world they manage 10 trillion assets and here's some quotes uh blackrock chose to partner with coinbase because of its scale in the market and role in providing trading custody services prime brokerage and reporting capabilities the services will be available for SPEAKER_24: clients and both companies all this trading volume uh in q2 was institutional investors so SPEAKER_09: it makes sense blackrock's focus of the partnership with coinbase will initially be on bitcoin since that's the closest thing we have to digital gold and people seem to want to hold it it seems to be enduring i mean if you're blackrock do you really want to advise people to be buying the next 20 cryptocurrencies xrps in a lawsuit with the sec uh maybe the other ones are in fact securities and the sec is going to start i i would guess the sec is going to start going after each of these individual SPEAKER_06: crypto projects and making them pay fines or start only allowing them to be traded amongst accredited SPEAKER_09: investors now i want to see accreditation open to everybody but i do think if we're being again intellectually consistent honest um and have a level playing field if you want to trade in these uh cryptocurrencies you should have to be since they're not publicly registered uh they should either get SPEAKER_24: publicly registered and or they and do all the legal work over again or they should only sell to accredited investors and they should be those those trades should be obviously done uh the way we trade shares in private companies which is there's a decent amount of friction you don't just trade them like SPEAKER_57: on a stock market why blackrock is interested in this i'm not certain they seem like smart uh SPEAKER_24: individuals but in april they joined a group of investors in circles usd coin that's the tether SPEAKER_09: replacement i think uh seems like circle is doing uh reporting in the way i said tether should do it which is just put out your trades every day here's our holdings every day so circle is being very upfront about that i think that's why as a stable coin they'll be the digital dollar for now until the us SPEAKER_24: dollar is available on a blockchain or trading so uh clearly blackrock has something uh interesting SPEAKER_09: here my biggest holding now in j trading is amazon i think this company is firing on all cylinders they're just excellence across the board and here we go another acquisition i've been saying in a down SPEAKER_00: market if you got a lot of cash there's gonna be a lot of companies that might be available that previously weren't available or the prices might be marked down and so what do you do when things are SPEAKER_09: on sale well bye bye bye as jim craig would say and i think amazon is with one medical and other uh companies out there gonna buy stuff you know i think they should buy uber and i'll just move my uber shares into amazon shares since i love both these companies but i mean uber is the natural home for amazon in my mind i don't know why amazon just doesn't come in and buy uber lyft doordash any of those uh but i would obviously if they were going to do it they should buy the leader and for a hundred billion dollars it'd be pretty no-brainer deal for amazon can you imagine uh SPEAKER_08: what that would look like if all the uber drivers could deliver amazon from the fulfillment center SPEAKER_06: in addition to what they're doing and uber eats could be upsold and your membership in uber eats or uber one SPEAKER_09: would be part of your amazon prime i'm not sure if regulators would like this but seems like a pretty SPEAKER_00: good idea to me so this is the fourth largest uh ever acquisition for amazon um they're buying SPEAKER_08: roomba maker i robot and people seem to be over the moon about roombas uh you will know a roomba owner because they will tell you about their roomba in the first 15 minutes of meeting them SPEAKER_12: they absolutely love this thing uh i somebody gifted me one i never set it up so i gotta go find it in the garage but this is uh like i said their fourth highest largest you know in dollar amount acquisition number one whole foods 13.7 billion fantastic number two mgm aka james bond they also own rocky robocop uh 8.45 billion and then one medical recently 3.9 billion and these all have been in the past couple years so if i'm you know google if i'm apple i'm watching what amazon is doing and SPEAKER_24: making these very strategic you know i would say mid-tier they're not huge acquisitions even 13.7 billion is not huge you know there are 50 billion 100 billion dollar acquisitions that occur as of 2020 SPEAKER_00: irobot it's sold more than 30 million roomba robotic vacuums and its history ruba uh sales make up SPEAKER_09: eight nine percent revenue um they also make robotic mops and pool cleaners they have a subscription SPEAKER_00: program and you know they also bought ring so i do think that amazon likes hardware they have a unique SPEAKER_09: insight into what people buy because of their marketplace uh they like automation they like tech and so makes totally uh makes total sense to me for them to buy something like this this would be SPEAKER_00: as if apple was you know more acquisitive they might have bought tesla when they had an opportunity to buy SPEAKER_09: it for 50 billion right when it was a young company they could have bought uh ring themselves and had home automation they should have bought should still buy sonos and peloton there are all these like modest acquisitions 10 billion or less that apple could make and they just don't do it its founding ceo colin angle is still at the company and will remain on board as the ceo post acquisition like they did with my friend tony shea rest at peace uh mr tony uh and they're keeping the ceo and company culture intact that's consistent with their m a strategy uh as well with keeping jamie simon off another friend of mine at ring so congratulations to amazon makes me want to buy more shares they also bought kiva systems back in 2012. those are those warehouse and fulfillment robots so i've always known that automation is big on jeff bezos's uh shortlist he's always loved this stuff and they're starting to do those um drone deliveries and it makes total sense amazon made a smaller move into home robotics with the launching of astro um which is a household robot for home monitoring thousand dollars uh was the introductory price and it basically like an alexa on wheels that rolls around your house uh this thing is brilliant i want to get this uh i didn't even know this was out i literally want a little robot dog that goes around my house and checks everything amazing so smart homes is a big SPEAKER_00: part of what amazon wants to do remember they had um the little button i forgot what they called it but SPEAKER_09: you could put in your it was an iot device you could put it in your um let's say your laundry room and it would say tide on it and you just press a button and it would order your tide those little buttons uh i don't think they exist anymore but these are the kind of things that amazon likes to play with and try things and listen they tried their own smartphone and tablets i think the tablets are still available fire but the phone isn't they also crushed it with um the kindle so one of the things i love about amazon is they're not afraid to try really hard ambitious things and they're also not afraid to turn SPEAKER_00: them off amazon's market keep uh market cap peaked at 1.8 trillion in november that was the top of the market dropped 40 to 1 trillion in june but since mid-june stock is almost up 40 1.4 trillion uh will SPEAKER_08: it reach its uh previous high i would think so and i made a big bet on it uh when who knows but it's just SPEAKER_00: one of those great companies for the ages you hear it all the time but it's true time is money and money helps keep your startup alive that's why you need to check out helpware helpware calls itself people as a service basically they are going to help you outsource the tasks that are slowing your company down from mundane things like data entry more complex tasks like world-class customer support and even ai operations here's an example imagine you're a product-focused startup executive and your schedule is perfectly optimized at the start of your day your tests are schedules meetings are books zoom links are sent and all you have to do is show up and focus on what matters the product this is possible with a health where scheduling assistant and help where is a worldwide operation SPEAKER_09: they have 13 global locations and they cover 26 languages that will come in very handy when you start shipping your product in multiple languages and you need customer support the bottom line is you're SPEAKER_00: going to save tons of time and you're going to become bionic and your startup will become bionic if you use helpware so here's what i want you to do if you need to outsource if you need to have support for your different departments go to helpware.com twist to get 1 000 off your first invoice that's right h-e-l-p-w-a-r-e.com twist for one thousand dollars off now uh on a j trading update uh we can pull up SPEAKER_08: j trading.com and i'll show you uh the new website i was able to get the domain name j trading for i think i SPEAKER_00: paid five grand for it somebody was sitting on it so last week i bought j trading.com for five thousand dollars and uh this is going to become maybe its own podcast or show on cnbc or bloomberg i think SPEAKER_09: if i get good at this and we're doing trades every week or every day this would be a really interesting SPEAKER_08: show um that we could spin out and we'll see if the audience really enjoys doing this with me but i'm enjoying doing it because uh i want to become a world-class investors and i will debut here the point 0.1 of jtrading.com i am going to list all my trades and what you'll see here that i wrote SPEAKER_09: on it this is not investing advice obviously this is more for you to give me advice that's my goal for j trading i have a four-part goal here number one i want to become a world-class public market investor what would define world-class i beat you know the indexes number two i want to find companies that'll be five times bigger in 10 years i do believe amazon could be five times bigger disney warner brothers and stitch fix all of those believe could 5x in the next 10 years if they execute really well that's my basic premise is that there's a chance of that happening and that i want to SPEAKER_00: really combine my private market wisdom i've been pretty good at identifying early stage startups and building positions in them over the last decade i want to combine that with public i've always been SPEAKER_09: like public is too hard it's too complex i don't have an edge well i think i might be overthinking it SPEAKER_00: i'm doing this podcast every day this week in startups and all in every week everybody around me is really smart and all the public companies i know were friends of mine or people i knew or had on this podcast when they were private so what's the difference between them well now i have more data so i'm thinking about i'm like well maybe i could be good at this too because i really understand product so that's my third goal i really want to be uh able to take what i've learned in private markets and see if that what what of those lessons apply to public markets right and i talk about the lessons i've learned here product manager matters delighted customers um the product velocity and so do those things still apply to public companies i think they do uh operational excellence is something that matters dramatically in public markets in private markets operational excellence is important but really product market fit and innovating is what's most important right because you're up against these big lumbering old companies but when you get big operational excellence matters you have to be able to scale SPEAKER_08: the business as we saw apple amazon google facebook etc have done my belief is if i become an expert on SPEAKER_00: public markets that'll inform how i make private market investments in other words can i see this private company ever hitting the scale that would be necessary to the union economic war work unit economics work i was evaluating a company and i said listen based on what i'm seeing with stitch fix based on what i'm seeing in public markets with clothing why would anybody do this clothing startup and i it was like really eye-opening for me and then i was like yeah and based upon the delivery and what i know about delivery from uber and doordash i don't own doordash but i do own uber based on what i know from delivery and the cost and the margin i don't see this business as a marketplace because SPEAKER_09: the delivery cost would be too high there's too little at stake and it was just a really great unlock for me so that's really my third goal there is can i take my private market wisdom and have it apply to publics and what i learned in publics could that apply down into the private markets and it has already and number four i just want to learn from the audience my feeling is if i put these trades out here you'll tell me if i made a mistake and so going through the first four trades stitch fix disney amazon warner brothers discovery stitch fix uh and now if you were to go to the website jtrading.com and you click on stitch fix uh you open it up you'll see i just wrote a little synopsis at the top i'll do this for all of them and then i'm going to continue this discussion and writing on the website and by the way i'm using notion uh one of our sponsors here to build this website SPEAKER_00: and so you see here i wrote um i made my stitch fix trade based on my follow the insiders thesis so i'm going to define my thesis we haven't done a second follow the insiders yet i am looking SPEAKER_08: for other insiders buying shares so if you know of somebody um that would be a good thing to tip me off to bill gurley was the early investor that we saw do that we made the j trade boom that's been a great j trade for us it's up let's go back um in fact can i see where does it show here what we're what we're up we're i think we're pulling live data here so my average share price is five dollars and 69 cents it's at 6.45 oh we're not calculating it so we'll calculate uh where we're at it was showing it earlier today so i'm not sure why it's not showing now but we're up on that trade SPEAKER_09: about a dollar per share we're just under and so probably have four grand on that one and amazon SPEAKER_22: is that we've got in at 131 average share price and we're at 140 now so we're up on that one as SPEAKER_08: well disney we bought a 103 and it's at 106 so we're doing great on that trade and then the only whiff i've got so far is i bought one of brothers discovery at 16 bucks and 26 cents about 50 grand SPEAKER_09: worth 3 000 shares it's the second biggest position uh because i believe in hbo and it got walloped lost 10 so that's our next discussion here uh because so again i'm not looking at this week to week i mean we will discuss it week to week obviously and actually i will be looking at it every day but my goal is 10 years from now can we see stitch fix be a 50 share price can we see disney be a 500 share price amazon can we see that being 650 and can we see warner brothers uh you know at 80 a share right 5x is what i'm looking for and so we'll just see if that journey happens and if we don't think something is on that trajectory intellectually i want to be honest about maybe we move the money out of warner brothers and put it into paramount or disney or netflix or whoever we think is going to beat each other and so let's talk about this warner brothers yesterday on the show we had lon talking about some of their programming decisions around canceling the batgirl film that was a little SPEAKER_00: quixotic and weird but i did like what i heard from zaslov that's my guy david zaslov he's a wartime ceo i'm betting on him and i'm betting on the brand or brands i should say plural you need to have excellence and operations at scale warner brothers has not had that hbo has always had that cnn has not had that trump gave him a huge bump cnn plus was an absolute disaster uh and there's everything in SPEAKER_09: between discovery has been an amazing business that zaslov has run the collection of i and dc has been a SPEAKER_00: complete disaster with moments of excellence but a disaster when compared to marvel which was SPEAKER_08: probably the greatest uh moving image startup ever created if you just look at what they did over the SPEAKER_09: decade i mean what a money printing machine so here we go uh warner brothers discovery which is a collection of hbo discovery uh dc comics um warner brothers which owns the matrix etc this conglomerate is a mess 3.4 billion dollar loss 1 billion due to complications with the merger but q2 revenue 9.8 billion but a loss of 3.4 billion as we're saying but they got 3.8 billion in cash they got a billion in debt total subscribers 92.1 million subscribers they expect 130 million global streaming subs by 2025 so that would put them behind obviously uh our friends at netflix and disney one bloomberg analyst SPEAKER_00: said we knew it was going to be messy but this was pretty awful so right after i make the trade i'm getting this kind of feedback one of brothers discovery please said expects to slash three billion dollars worth of costs over the next two years so that's what zaslov is doing he's coming in he's going to make this one service hbo discovery so basically hbo max plus discovery and then all that stuff you pay one price boom easy peasy lemon squeezy you get everything i am not dissuaded i think this this messiness is the opportunity i have a pretty full position here at 50 dimes but i think i'm going to put a million or two million into the j trading portfolio and if i that means it would be either two and a half or five percent of the portfolio i think having 20 names would be probably good so 20 names either at 50k or 100k each i can keep that in my head i think i can keep track of it SPEAKER_09: so uh we want to pick these great winners this is my uh you know bet here and it's not a feeler bet i would say the feeler bets are those 10 to 25k bets where i'm just trying to get my attention focused on it and so we can build a position over time we might buy more shares of this i'm tempted but i think these streaming businesses are going to be juggernauts i think disney is the first that SPEAKER_12: will get to a billion and then it's going to be netflix or hbo max discovery that will get to a billion after them and so if you have a billion people paying six bucks a month i mean 72 billion SPEAKER_08: dollars a year in revenue these things really have not existed in the world the analysts are split we've SPEAKER_00: got some analysts saying they're going to keep their price targets other ones are cutting it SPEAKER_08: and the bloomberg analyst says i don't think they're going to be the number one streaming services i agree disney's going to win that and it could be netflix is number two uh but she says but that's okay as long as they're able to make money and that's i think my belief as well i think there's SPEAKER_09: going to be a one two and three here i wouldn't discount amazon there'll probably be three or four and i think disney's clearly going to be number one so that means it's a race for number two i think we already own the gold medal winner in amazon so do we want to own netflix or do we want to own SPEAKER_84: hbo max discovery this warner brothers discovery uh conglomerate i think i'd rather own hbo max so SPEAKER_09: uh that's my update on the j on the j trade if you have ideas for j trades i'm gonna try to do two a SPEAKER_00: week on the show and i'm looking for ideas of businesses you believe will be five times bigger and we are looking at businesses that we uh believe in management we see product velocity and we see delighted customers so this is the lens i want you to thinking on this is the exact lens i use for two person companies or five person companies so i really want to see you know put these two things together and then there's one mitigating factor which is the balance sheet so in these public companies SPEAKER_06: we really need to be sensitive about the balance sheet how much cash how much debt how much profit and SPEAKER_00: that really falls to the leadership is the leadership able to scale and run a business to be profitable whereas the thing i'm learning about the difference between private and public market investing is the these operationally exceptional people who can scale these businesses they don't have the brains to make killer product you know the tim cooks are not making the iphones the steve jobs make the iphones and there's very it's very rare you can find somebody who can do both you know i think elon falls into that he can build a very big business he can operate it but he SPEAKER_08: also is a product genius very hard to have both of those things isn't it right i think bezos falls into that category jobs fell into that category rest in peace but most people don't let's be honest most people don't and what's necessary to run a business at scale might be different than building SPEAKER_12: great products and some people can have both skills most people can have one is my belief and SPEAKER_08: you know i'm testing this thesis if this is a sword we want both sides of the blade to be sharp okay so this isn't like a one-sided sword this is like a serious weapon we want both sides to be equally sharp i gotta i got a really sharp private market and we're sharpening the public market one okay SPEAKER_34: let's have producer rachel join us for okay boomer listen i want you to go to use bubbles.com twist SPEAKER_00: right now download it do a quick product demo and then tweet it to me or email it to us at askjason at launch.co and i will personally watch your product demo and we might even put you on the show bubbles is an async collaboration tool that allows you to do teamwork on your own time bubbles helps you get your point across by creating a 3d conversation that includes screen audio and video it is incredibly beautiful and i have been using it when i'm giving feedback to my team about inside.com instead of me having to write down oh i want you to do this this and this i show them this ability to communicate in real time straight from your browser with no download no app required and one click sharing is amazing this product is super elegant and it's perfect for code reviews q a strategy walkthroughs and basically faster decision making no more useless meetings just use bubbles bubbles was built for SPEAKER_08: remote workers by remote workers and that's why it is so flawless in a recent survey 90 of survey SPEAKER_34: users said bubbles helps them make better decisions so visit use bubbles.com twist to start using it SPEAKER_00: that's it it's free to start using just head to use bubbles.com twist and send me your product demo what do you got to lose maybe i'll invest there are some people who are a level of charisma that is just preternatural like you you meet them and it's just like i mean when i met i told you the story you can leave this in the show i was uh helped hillary with SPEAKER_08: when she ran for senate in new york and uh as a thank you they invited me to a dinner i didn't have to pay or anything like just like this you know maybe 50 people 100 people at this beautiful loft and i come to the elevator and they take my phones i had two phones on me and they were like secret source like why do you have two phones i'm like and they put me in a different line and i'm like well this is my international one you know and this is for girlfriends and then this is for the other SPEAKER_09: girlfriend and i made a joke and the guy's like come over here and he literally takes my phones apart he didn't like the joke and i was like no no this is literally for internationally travel and this is for domestic travel this is a gsm phone this is a cmda phone whatever uh anyway long story short they put me in the elevator i get to the top of the elevator rachel the doors open and i kid you not seven feet in the elevator is bill clinton staring the eyes and just bill clinton and SPEAKER_94: he goes jason calacanis i just want to let you know how much it means to me and our family chelsea and hillary that you supported her run and this victory is as much yours as it is ours and we're going to do great things for the state of new york i was just like whoa and then i just leaned in SPEAKER_09: and i kissed him no i didn't but it was i was i felt so in love with bill clinton at that moment he and then i realized what happened because then i you know i go in i walk into the party i look behind me because i'm like well that was interesting and he's still standing there and SPEAKER_95: somebody comes out whispers in his ear and they disappear off to the side literally they're telling him who's coming up the elevator the name of the person what they did so they could greet them i was like this is the most next level power move i've ever seen what did you call it uh the one hotel that SPEAKER_00: you love it's like that level amon amon level amon level all right everybody so rachel has been doing SPEAKER_09: a great job she's been with me for a year now is that right you had your one year anniversary oh i'm SPEAKER_34: so proud i did have my one year anniversary and uh listen you went from doing your own pod which was a SPEAKER_00: solid seven out of ten i told you when you when i hired you but you had no resources and now here you are you're doing this segment every friday may i ask uh in the new york city in my old haunting ground um uh do you get recognized do people know you are you starting to get become a little micro famous in the tech circles people know what you do yet anybody recognize you a little so i actually try SPEAKER_105: not to say too much if they don't know what i do i try not to tell anybody because we don't we don't SPEAKER_107: take pitches on the show so i never want people asking like oh can i be on it because i like i don't know i feel like that's something that um we've done really well you should you should totally SPEAKER_09: tell people what you do of course yeah you're representative of the show you're on air uh but SPEAKER_105: it is true uh that you know you're weird about it sometimes so i'm like ah you're just trying to SPEAKER_09: it's fine to get the picture what you say to them is i don't actually if i pit what you should say SPEAKER_00: to them is if i pitch you to be on the show to the editorial group your chances go down if i know you yeah so you know you actually just want to earn it and so if you just keep me informed of when you do great things in the world what we do is we share really interesting products or services or funding rounds and then we work backwards to is this an interesting person to have on the show we SPEAKER_09: don't use relationships to have people on the show we we use what people do in the world which is the SPEAKER_08: truth right yeah it is yeah i have my friends all the time ask me oh can i come on the show and i'm like what have you built and they're like well i want to talk about this and this i'm like what SPEAKER_06: have you built what are you working on like tell me what you're working on and then we can have that SPEAKER_105: conversation right yeah and i i think that's something i'll i'll have to start stepping up then but it's definitely been i i was actually thinking about this um with everybody talking about working remote and stuff i feel like living in new york city i moved here in january this has helped my career way more than being a full-time remote employee and not living in a target city because now um with a lot of the okay boomer guests and other people with startups i try to do our pre-interview calls in person whether that be like a 30-minute coffee chat before the workday starts or just hopping on a zoom and being based in new york city um like this week's guest marcus milioni he's a new york-based founder of a brand called minted and i was able to get coffee with him before he came on the podcast what does minted do so marcus has his brand called minted it's actually like a dual-sided thing there's minted health and minted new york minted health makes stuff like pre-workout if you go and you check them out on tiktok and things like that you can see he is obviously really into working out and running long distance and minted new york is where he makes clothing mostly it's men's clothing but i did hear that there might be some women's clothing coming out in the future very cool yeah so i was able to talk to him about how he's been able to grow his company through his own personal brand on tiktok and unlike our other okay boomer guests um i've really been trying to focus a lot on people that are putting themselves out there especially online because i think that's a big thing now especially with founders but unlike nato brian or natalie he actually didn't have that big of a personal brand before starting his company so it's been really cool to see his brand kind of blow up on tiktok and we were able to talk about all things minted well if you think about it SPEAKER_00: if you can master an organic channel like tiktok youtube email twitter whatever it is that you're great at it could be quora it could be reddit if you can master one of those channels to get attention and build your brand then when you do launch your you know pre-workout drink you're going to start on second base right and you you may get those first hundred or first 500 customers and those are in SPEAKER_09: fact the hardest ones to get this is why being of action we talked about on the blueprint you want to have a bias towards action it seems like a lot of the guests you're having especially the social media SPEAKER_00: folks they're of action they're doing things they're making stuff every day and it's very easy to SPEAKER_22: dismiss them oh you're just taking pictures yourself working out or you know in some fancy clothes or you SPEAKER_127: know at some fomo event but if a thousand people like it you know i i told you the story of meeting SPEAKER_08: uh uh the super influencer who's an actress i think she has her own weed brand now bella bella thorne bella thorne yeah uh bella thorne is like come i am completely obsessed with her fan base like who are these people who are following everything she does and she wants to be a mogul SPEAKER_105: like yeah she was actually a disney star before she was like an influencer incredible crazy yeah she's SPEAKER_107: done everything she's definitely a powerhouse and i think it's also like consumers now don't just want to see like a pretty instagram page they actually want to see the community behind it so uh with these creators and obviously like you've killed it with that like we always uh get to hear about your experience like prior to the twists that i know today about how much especially pre-pandemic i guess how there are all these events and things happening and how that really helped like distill like your first base SPEAKER_134: of community and now oh i forgot about that yeah yeah with the help of the internet you know i feel SPEAKER_00: like it's only getting bigger it's really interesting how many people got their start on i didn't realize ryan gosling was a disney star hayden panteri britney spears uh lindsey lohan obviously kristin stewart misha barton zach efron i met him actually at the same party uh well yeah at the same party with SPEAKER_09: bella thorne i met zach efron for the second of their time uh he's friends with a friend of mine um very awesome fergie selena gomez zendaya i knew zendaya um it's incredible and i think when they SPEAKER_00: the issue i think is with a lot of the these folks is they don't have an actual community they have fame but what does their fame how does it manifest into a community i guess is the issue what i'm seeing based on your reporting rachel is and we should keep pulling the string and see if we can understand it and maybe see if there's a business opportunity here for us is who can become like mr beast or kim kardashian where once they hit some amount of scale they can manifest it in a product right um and their audience stands for something like what does mr beast's audience stand for having fun like it's kind of goofy and fun but it's also challenges like he has to actually manifest it into something right and so chocolate bars if it's kids kids like candy so okay great product alignment uh but what are if SPEAKER_09: bell are the ones fans are into cannabis great that's that's legit uh my dream okay boomer guest kills SPEAKER_105: it at this emma chamberlain anybody has a connect that will be my dream okay boomer guest but she was a emma chamberlain she founded uh chamberlain coffee because that was a big uh thing that she used to do SPEAKER_107: in her youtube videos back in the day now she does things like she's the face of louis vuitton she's one of those influencers i feel like it there's like a level of influencer where i feel like you hit SPEAKER_139: celebrities does she have a specific talent other than making coffee her videos now are just really SPEAKER_105: well edited and she's known for editing her newer videos and she has a really good view of that SPEAKER_107: she's so she's like a casey um casey nice guy yeah very he's a casey nice similar super duper similar to that like going from like being an influencer to celebrity like common celebrity i feel like status but she she was wonderful at bringing her influence in her community and you know pioneering and pivoting off and creating a brand off of it and she doesn't even post that much anymore SPEAKER_124: on youtube but i know where coffee brand does does incredible that's really interesting so somebody uh SPEAKER_24: who knows emma chamberlain yeah she's a school dropout she did online videos SPEAKER_13: fascinating emma chamberlain 18 is the funniest person on youtube what does she do so far the content of her videos has not been the point she makes cupcakes or tries her hand at sewing like uh phoebe SPEAKER_42: waller bridge of fleabag that's a great show an artist close to twice her age she interrupts the proceedings constantly to speak to her audience that's where our videos actually happened cool i'm SPEAKER_79: gonna have to check her out so she was a just video agrafer basically right doing that yeah vlogging SPEAKER_105: we used to call it exactly yeah so she was like one of the first big vloggers in the lifestyle space SPEAKER_107: before um i feel like she's actually there's another girl named uh victoria paris that i think will probably be the new face of like being one of the first influencers that kind of pioneered tick tock i think emma chamberlain was one of the first to pioneer like the lifestyle vlogging of youtube SPEAKER_00: fascinating well you know i this is the thing it has to manifest itself in something so you can get attention for making these but yeah if she's like really into coffee or i do j trading or eventually SPEAKER_09: you find something that specifically you like you know photography or something you can really start to make that into um you know you can productize it right i always thought casey needs that should come up with his own video equipment or line yeah like that would be amazing if he had his own you know camera bags and lenses or whatever that he made or you know gimbals or whatever SPEAKER_08: or a school you know if he had a school for teaching people how to make videos like can you imagine we would be the first people to hire from there we're like yeah he's teaching techniques uh amazing and SPEAKER_09: the one thing i one thing i'd like to put you on assignment for is the video structure of winning tick tocks and youtube videos somebody broke down and i had seen this uh i think i saw a tick tock about SPEAKER_00: a mr beast video and they said and i had talked to uh jimmy mr beast about this how much effort they put into editing a video he said they can spend like weeks on one video wow that is just a couple of minutes long and that they sometimes have like 40 different video techniques in the first 15 seconds or 20 seconds of things happening in the video that make it impossible for you to look away whether it's characters being drawn or a filter or a cut it's like supposedly a level of insanity and detail that you don't even notice it's like almost subliminal how much change how much the video is changing to SPEAKER_42: keep you from scrolling past it yeah so that is uh it's crazy because don't you remember wasn't there SPEAKER_105: like three like you're supposed to stay on a shot for three seconds minimum like if you take a video SPEAKER_107: class like an entry-level video class there's like like oh stay on this one shot so people can actually see what's happening before trading off and now you're starting to see the mr beast content of SPEAKER_140: different it feels like different shots every every split second a lot of this now i think has to do SPEAKER_00: with also people's propensity to pause or change the speed of videos so this has also dynamically dramatically changed video consumption patterns i believe people are now doing all these videos where it's kind of required to time the pause to see like the outfit change or the uh you know whatever they're going to do some flash of something and then you know if you listen to podcasts obviously speeding up or slowing it down or when you're watching a trailer for the new marvel film they're putting easter eggs deep in these and they're cutting them so fast that slowing it down and putting it at 0.25.5 speed lets you say oh yeah that's captain america shield in the background or that's you know this star wars character from rogue one but it's going by so fast that literally i watched some of these star wars maniacs who have youtube streams live and they'll watch the trailer for something like android that just came out and they sit there and they hold the scrubber and they move the scrubber one at a time to look at each frame and then pause it oh see this that's what this is and they were like trying to this lightsaber you know is this person's a lightsaber or the hilt of this one is probably this sith lord and the color it's pretty crazy so anyway i want you on assignment for explaining to us video editing for you know mr beast and some of SPEAKER_12: these other you know great tick tockers that are doing a fast thing and how they do that all right so i'm looking forward to hearing your latest okay boomer let's go okay boomer i understood the SPEAKER_169: assignment thank you so much marcus malonia for coming on today's segment of okay boomer you're a new york SPEAKER_170: based founder of the brand minted and i found you actually over on tick tock which was really cool for me you're running content but that's not the only content that you're putting out there um you are also posting a lot of content about minted so thank you again for coming of course thank you for SPEAKER_173: having me on it is a pleasure awesome so i guess the first question is is there's two sides to minted can you please explain what minted is and what the brand kind of does for the community SPEAKER_176: yeah so um i guess i can't really talk about anything minted without talking about a bit of SPEAKER_179: my social media started around beginning of quarantine lockdown uh at the beginning of covid and started to use social media kind of as a creative outlet i was working in finance at the time and stuck at home with my parents and as much as i love my whole family and my parents i needed some way to like get the creative juice flowing so uh just started to post around things that i enjoy very much like fashion and fitness type content and then the brand was kind of born out of people wanting certain things that either i was wearing or it started with jewelry and then it moved into apparel and then just being infinitely curious um i'd always been using kind of supplements on the sports side of things just because we like i spent a lot of time uh either in the gym or running certainly running right now and um so i started to figure out how to make sports nutritional supplements and so both of minted health and minted new york were kind of just spawned out of my love for fashion and fitness and my curiosity trying to figure out how things work or how things are made SPEAKER_173: i guess would be the the summary i love that that's really cool and from what i know i know you were SPEAKER_170: actually doing a full-time job that was a that was a remote job but you were doing a full-time job while you first started minted how did you know to take the leap and like how long was that that SPEAKER_185: crossover period while you were founding this company and working at nine to five i would spend SPEAKER_179: my mornings and nights mainly building minted new york at first minted health hadn't started on top of all of this of like creating content and building the brand i was you know you still want to perform highly at your job you don't want any of that to slip and you don't want there really to be any overlap it took about eight months of us doing minted new york full-time before i felt that i could not full-time but like working full-time and doing minted new york then i felt i could jump and make the leap finally after uh i set myself like a little revenue goal if we do x number revenue over three months then i can quit ended up doing that whole entire three months worth of revenue in a SPEAKER_193: day and i put in my two weeks like three days later after i got caught up on all the orders that's SPEAKER_173: awesome so you are have always been really interested in business um i know that because we were able to SPEAKER_170: grab a coffee right before chatting for this interview which i absolutely love doing so i actually SPEAKER_173: got to meet marcus irl which was awesome but you told me that you've always been really interested in business so for where do you think this side of your love for business came from and how do you SPEAKER_170: think your passion for business prepped you to become a really good founder i think you can be quite good SPEAKER_193: if you just are curious about a lot of things right because you know there really is no uh roadmap on do this and then this and then you know you'll see success over x period of time right it's more like SPEAKER_179: try to figure out how things work and you're gonna run into a million and one roadblocks along the way but it's like get on google you know start trying to figure out how either businesses or people before you dealt with that or figure out ways that it's been you know figure out ways that it can be um taken care of and i think yeah it's just that curiosity i remember growing up you'd look at um i always had to think for like service-based businesses i don't know why but i was was interested in that whole entire model and how they worked and it's very much like your business is almost as good as your people especially in when when you have service-based people client facing um and so i think that's kind of where my customer comes first always mentality comes from and i always try to teach sean who i have is my younger brother who is uh working with us as well as clay who is our uh is one of our designers and it's just like listen people are working to make money and they're choosing your business to spend money at so take care of them like you've i i feel a a visceral obligation to do my best to make sure everything is right on their end regardless of you know maybe we got to take a hit SPEAKER_193: of like sending refunds or replacing product it's just is what it is that's business SPEAKER_202: yeah that definitely makes sense you are also a giant reader i know i've asked you for like SPEAKER_185: your audible recommendations of what you're reading is there any book in particular that really stuck SPEAKER_200: with you um that has been about business kind of cliche i feel like they're on everybody's list lean SPEAKER_179: startup is extremely good uh there's also zero to one yeah i think those are probably my two favorites i'm like glancing over here because i have them stacked on my desk yeah as far as like strictly business goes those two are are probably my favorite i'm i have the e-myth revisited on my list i know that's SPEAKER_208: like the holy grail for a lot of people uh i'll get to that this year at some point yeah no my reading SPEAKER_173: list honestly is like so freaking long especially this summer i feel like everybody in the past two SPEAKER_170: years probably because of the pandemic has just been ripping through books and i've gotten so many good book recommendations out of it but now my my to read list is getting a lot longer than my has has has read lists this summer to be honest with you but i've always heard yeah but lean startup obviously has made a huge impact on on a ton of people so that's really awesome that you were able to check that out and you're an extremely hard worker obviously working those two jobs at the same time must have just been not super duper fun um and something that i notice a lot is the difference in which kind of being a founder and working for yourself difference like presents itself differently on different platforms so on tick tock i see a lot of people glorifying the life of founders and working for yourself um whereas on twitter i kind of see this more like gary vs kind of energy where people are talking about hustle culture and how like you won't get anywhere if you don't like grind grind grind like work hard which side of business do you think is more accurate to being a founder in your case you SPEAKER_179: know what i think it's a balance right i i think that with social media you run into the issue of people glamorizing being a founder or being kind of just an entrepreneur in general like you'll i mean spend any time on any of the social medias and you'll see it's like always people selling courses and they have the lamborghinis and like they're going out to like the clubs and all and all of that stuff and they're essentially just selling you on a lifestyle which like i think if you're young and impressionable can be convoluted because then you associate that with just being an entrepreneur working for yourself it is what it like work hard play hard type like that whole thing whenever i make videos about especially like day in the life videos are pretty uh common especially on tick tock and it's like i'm behind my computer for a lot of hours on the day right like i get up early i have to deal with manufacturers overseas you know i have manufacturers and on thailand like on the thailand time zone and um you're just always dealing with something and i think like well you can certainly enjoy it when you're a founder especially when you have people on payroll you're now responsible for their livelihoods right so you have this burden that you can't really ever shake and so i think that sometimes um founders can run into the issue of trying to escape through not the healthiest means and ultimately they end up run down and then like work performance suffers all of that and they're just you know so i just try to give an accurate representation i don't have a lamborghini you know business is extremely strong but at the same time you just have to keep building like you got like i you can't ever think that you've arrived right you always have to kind of keep climbing and climbing climbing so i guess it was a mix of like hustling all the time and trying to enjoy what you've built but at the same time like it's it's i would not say glamorous yeah why do you think that you're so SPEAKER_170: geared into business like you seem like you're an absolute just for lack of a better term beast in the space so when you say you wake up early you're not just talking about like the regular 6 a.m earlier like when we first started talking and about this recording i was like yeah like feel free to schedule in the morning i wake up fairly early in my cell thinking 6 6 30 was early and you're like yeah me too and then as the conversation for like kept moving on i realized that you're early meant 4 a.m right um so you're waking up at 4 a.m you're dealing with people in thailand you're still able to keep like a stellar workout routine and you're running a business where do you think this like strong um first off i guess phenomenal time blocking um where do you think this little time blocking is coming from and also like where are you getting this energy to keep going yeah i think it's probably SPEAKER_179: twofold right like i have um extremely hard working parents uh my dad is the one who kind of uh i watched growing up get up extremely early um i mean to this day he wakes up around 3 45 so um he starts early and then i think it's kind of like as you get older you figure out when when am i gonna do my best work right like there are people that work best at night so that's kind of how they're they tailor their routine for them for me most creative and um you know in my flow state when when everybody else is asleep and like the world hasn't really woken up and i i love that time emails aren't pouring in you know it's like there's no fire drills i can just like bang out work and then i think the other side SPEAKER_200: of that coin is like i don't even know if it's good to admit but like there's this crippling fear of SPEAKER_179: like are you going to ever reach your potential like where is the ceiling right and i think you can see it manifest in uh the way i've approached running and just kind of like slowly like checking off boxes of okay we do this this fast like what's next and it's like okay let's just push it until we either break or we break through and so it's as it's so it's like this weird dynamic and it's all inside of my head right but um that's yeah that kind of just like lights the fire it's just like i almost view it as a game within myself yeah i don't know i get that i get that it's a gamifying SPEAKER_173: your life which i've actually seen a really good uh productivity video on that i'm a productivity SPEAKER_170: junkie i'm not sure if you are but i'm definitely one of those people that is constantly like a bunch of the books i read are self-help books a bunch of the videos i watch are also about like optimizing my time because obviously it's the one thing you can't get back so the same way that like finance is really interesting to me because it's like a finite resource in like the case where i grew up like in college like i had a minimum wage job so money wasn't something that like was flowing in um your time is something that also feels right now at this point in my life something that i kind of have to structure a lot more than other people because i do work west coast hours so i wake up really early because the morning i'm again happy you said the flow state even because that's again i mean that's i also where i feel um the most i don't know necessarily creative but definitely the most driven and inspired is early in the morning so that's when i get things like my grocery shopping done and that's also when i get things done like personal projects if i want to start writing a lot more if um i know we're going to be having like a taping later in the day that i have to write notes for i'd rather sit that down get that knocked out really early in the morning when i have no distractions and i'm 100 on like my coffee first hits and i'm good to go um then a little bit later in the day where i'm kind of feeling dragged on and the video um by the way that i'm talking about that talks about gamifying your life i believe is by this youtuber that goes by better ideas and i would highly recommend anybody checking him out better ideas is a wicked awesome account i really really like a lot of his content and most of it's about productivity um some of it is about like how he battled social anxiety and things like that but that was the first place where i ever kind of heard about kind of treating your life like a video game and just learning to level up and do you have any advice um to people listening especially people that are young and want to become founders on how SPEAKER_238: they can level up i think it's hard right like because if you are just starting out you're kind SPEAKER_179: of looking for either answers or maybe someone to tell you what to do specifically and the way i've always looked at it is like if you if you break out your days into blocks right like or bricks and like you just slowly work toward your end goal whatever that may be and you'll find that when you get there ultimately the goal post is just going to move a little bit further away but you just keep continually stacking bricks you know after a while you're standing on this extremely sturdy foundation of positive days right so you might get knocked back a couple days like you know stuff happens and that's just part of life but you still have your foundation built up and as long as you maintain a healthy routine just give yourself the most amount of chances to make the right decisions and either have enough time after you do make a mistake to rectify it or you know just like keep plowing forward um and yeah i think a lot of people get hung up on the analysis paralysis type deal just start right start fall on your face get up dust yourself off like keep going and start again you know like why not um don't then and don't really fear failure don't feel uh any sort of maybe insecurity about about other people looking at what you're doing like in the beginning when you start anything everyone's always just going to call it oh you're like little project until it actually goes somewhere and then they're like oh you're doing something don't worry about it you know yeah keeping on blinders is SPEAKER_185: obviously really really difficult uh especially when it feels like a lot of the times your whole life is um almost on i feel like now it is i feel like a lot of founders especially the ones i guess SPEAKER_170: that i've been speaking to lately have been putting their lives on blast right so your life um whether that be like what you're doing outside of work along with your job those are both posted on tick tock how were you able to kind of like keep those blinders on and really focus in on what you're doing and being like okay i don't care what like people from college are saying about my tick tock account like i'm doing me right now like where how do you how do you focus in on that and kind of drawn out that SPEAKER_179: noise i think it's easier if you're making content that's just true to who who you are right as soon as you start to try to fake a personality or you know fake being something that you're not then either people that actually know you it becomes like awkward if they know about your stuff and like so i always went into it of if i end up ever meeting people that watch my content i want them to just be like this is exactly how he is online right so um it was always just like stay true to what you do and SPEAKER_225: what you enjoy and don't get caught up in thinking you're something you're not just you know head down SPEAKER_200: focus on your work and i don't know just don't don't don't do it to the point where you lose the SPEAKER_179: creative spark but make sure that like you're putting effort or providing value in anything that SPEAKER_170: you are doing yeah it's been really interesting to see your online presence grow along with your business because when you first started um minted you said you had around 40 000 followers i believe on tick tock what's that number now and i would like after you say that number can you tell us a little SPEAKER_198: bit more about the importance of personal brand yeah so uh we're a bit over 300 000 now and as far SPEAKER_179: as personal brands go i know that we had um probably pretty much just going to say what i said at uh at coffee um because i think it's really important right like companies now and i think this is a bit of like um archaic thinking where you have these corporations that they don't really want you to build a personal brand outside of work uh for probably fear of losing you know top talent and i think that the companies that succeed in the future are going to encourage um people to build personal brands outside of work not only that but like if you have a big personal brand outside of work and you are attached to whatever company you are working at it reflects well on the company i mean i guess if your personal brands like decent and not like you haven't totally trashed it but it reflects well on the company and like like the company used yesterday triple whale they're an analytics platform they're doing insanely good stuff but i know their entire marketing department and the way that they encourage their whole team to build personal brands outside of you know working at triple whale it's been incredible to see and i think that that that's kind of the way forward for a lot of companies especially now like as a lot of stuff has shifted to work from home and um you're not just like stuck in the office all the time like people have lives outside of work that's that's how it is and that's how it should be so SPEAKER_233: they should be able to build personal brands and around the things they enjoy yeah and my boss has SPEAKER_173: been very open he actually spoke recently um jason along with molly also touched on this so molly is SPEAKER_170: the most recent host to come on um this week in startups and obviously she had a very strong personal brand previously she killed it npr killed it at um marketplace npr hall of fame like this woman is a beast so she had a personal brand coming into this weekend startups which has definitely helped their show because she carries that along with her and jason also has added that he supports people who work on his show to have their own personal brand he's very okay with me um having you know like tweeting like i let i let my bosses like follow me on twitter which might be like a little bit different than most people and being like tweeting about my my job and having my my bosses interact with like obviously i'm not out here saying like oh man like my my boss is not gonna hate it here but like my my bosses definitely can see into like that portion of my life and i think it's really interesting because obviously um having a personal brand in this kind of field is helpful and at the same time i think um kids or people that are gen z that are feeling like oh man like i i wish i could like have more of a personal brand but like my my bosses won't let me i also think that they should take into consideration that i i'm not seeing a lot of people create like this barrier between their life and their social media presence and as good as having a personal brand is i'm always nervous about like pioneering and maybe going off a little bit more on social media and trying to cultivate the personal brand idea more because i like having like that separation what advice do you have on people um for people that want to build their personal brand but also keep their life to themselves SPEAKER_176: yeah i mean it's kind of uh there's a dichotomy there right because if if you want a personal brand SPEAKER_179: that's pretty public uh you have to be willing to share uh stuff publicly i think that when you start to post on social media you lose a bit of your not maybe not your right but you lose a bit of your um kind of sense of separation and that's just all part of it right like you don't you don't build up a community by being super closed off like people know about what you're doing like things you're going through or what you're working on or you know if you're building up a community and you're known as someone that's really really smart in a certain field and you're tweeting out all of this important stuff i think maybe that's probably a bit easier to keep it separate because it's not it's almost like you're not just a lifestyle type um creator and you're more just like you know information based but i i think it also depends on the medium like you could be putting out newsletters right super detailed like crazy good newsletters uh that's a much different connection than if you're lifestyle vlogging on youtube or tick tock so maybe pick your platform and see you know what is it that you really want to get out of it do you want to be vlogging your life or you want to be just writing SPEAKER_170: articles uh on a newsletter where can people find minted and when you guys expect like your your next SPEAKER_179: place or the next time people can actually order clothes from you so all things apparel uh is minted new york.com uh everything else from the health side is minted.health and uh so we have a huge collection of athletic apparel i just actually got the top samples which is the stuff they pull off the production line came in yesterday that is going to be it's being loaded into a cargo container right now and then probably release around the beginning of september nice granted i don't know you know we got to get it unpack it get the warehouse ready ready to ship everything yeah there's a million places SPEAKER_228: where all of that can go wrong um will the athletic stuff then though be with um with the health side SPEAKER_271: or will that be with new york because it's still clothing that's that's minted new york okay yeah so SPEAKER_179: uh outside of that we have trousers that were made here in new york city three different um colorways also releasing i don't know when probably beginning of uh august the the thing is like i think a lot of people expect us to follow the normal fashion calendar fall winter spring summer that type deal we just release as we get it because we're just i feel like always playing catch up like i'm just constantly spinning my wheels trying to get my feet under me and then we release and it's like all right SPEAKER_173: well we'll just like do it again yeah yeah really cool that you um like had the trousers made in new SPEAKER_170: york too we had a previous person come on the podcast named eric button and he has a fintech company called the contrast um debit card i believe if you have the debit card it gives you cash back when you buy made in america products so if people are interested in checking out marcus's pants also check out the contrast debit card i can absolutely just plug that um so that works awesome and then also where SPEAKER_176: can people find you i am across pretty much every social media platform um instagram i think it's SPEAKER_179: marcus underscore milioni uh tick tock is just marcus milioni twitter marcus underscore million i don't SPEAKER_271: even know my own handles um yeah and then in any of those profiles there's the whole link and bio thing SPEAKER_281: which has a ton of links to my other stuff minted new york minted health the minted minutes newsletter SPEAKER_170: all everything you could possibly want amazing so by the way everybody you spell his last name because i had problems pronouncing it m-i-l-i-o-n-e thank you so much marcus for coming on this SPEAKER_177: segment i'm super excited to see when you guys drop your next line of clothing yeah it was a pleasure SPEAKER_08: thank you uh for having me on it was a good time okay everybody thanks for listening tune in sunday SPEAKER_12: when molly and i are going to do an amazing vc sunday school and another this week in climate SPEAKER_42: startup interview enjoy your saturday off i know i sure will and we'll see you on sunday bye