SPEAKER_00: bud light has never been a politically charged brand and their core consumer is just it's the run-of-the-mill guy that watching the nfl that is their core consumer it's bros right like i want to have a bud light when i'm at at a football game that's you know beginning and end of it yeah that's it and and and i appreciate their attempt to go younger but like it doesn't make sense you're an alcohol brand you know if you went to a 30 year old consumer it's not like they're anti anything they just don't participate in that conversation and they just honestly all they care about is football and racing and basketball playoffs it's a very simple-minded consumer and so i thought it was like inappropriate for bud light from a marketing strategy to do anything

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SPEAKER_05: at openphone.com twist all right everybody got a real treat for you today i don't know uh last year somebody texted me or dm'd me on the twitter and said hey this is a podcast they were just talking about you and they stole the format of all in and i said okay let me go check that out and i checked it out and i found this amazingly fun podcast called group chat that's been around for two or three years

SPEAKER_08: longer than all in so quite the opposite it seems like we may have inadvertently stolen your format and

SPEAKER_10: uh one of the three hosts of that is d murthy uh he's also an entrepreneur and uh i thought i would have him on the pod welcome to this week at startups d thank you for having me and it was so

SPEAKER_13: nice when you guys launched all in because it was like peak covid we were coming to the office to record the podcast and it was it just felt like this like amazing time for content not an amazing time for the world but yeah it was it was you guys came at such an important time and i think in people's lives

SPEAKER_14: it is interesting and you guys talk about your show a lot on the show because podcasting builds community

SPEAKER_10: uh just like you know i had this experience as an author and i tell people who are becoming authors and writing books you know books are are basically communities and you got to kind of build a community around your book and meet them and then they bring other people into the community and podcasting uh is very similar now you've got a company called ghost uh backed by my friends over at union square ventures

SPEAKER_18: uh and you've been in um i believe like clothing marketing or creating clothes right for a long time

SPEAKER_20: long time i've been in fashion for 20 years building and operating probably a dozen brands

SPEAKER_22: all right so i heard at some point you say we're spending all this money on marketing and we're just dumping buckets on facebook instagram whatever and i'm not getting famous and nobody knows who i am i should just do a goddamn podcast put some money into that and then see if i can build like

SPEAKER_05: a community around that and so maybe you can just tell the origin story of group chat and how

SPEAKER_06: your business thinking behind it and then did that actually happen or did other things also happen

SPEAKER_13: yeah really interesting story so in 2016 um for my business five four we were about to do a transaction with a private equity firm and we were at the finish line 11th hour term sheet was came life-changing money for me and my business partner and so we're doing 75 million dollars in business finally been grinding it out since we were in college finally this is our moment 11th hour term sheet gets pulled it's long enough it was carlisle yeah so i'll tell you who it was yeah they pulled the term sheet and at that point obviously everyone else in the market now smells blood why did the term sheet get pulled yep and there was no real rationale around it and so you know we we ended up not doing the fundraise and just going back and focusing on our business and what i realized at that moment is that i had no clout i have zero clout as a founder and it was that moment when i was around like the the tech scene in la san francisco new york and i would see like how people looked at uh travis from uber or how they looked at emily from glacier or katrina from stitch fix and i was like those founders have clout like people view them differently than they view me and so i was like i have to change this because if i was a founder with clout maybe that term sheet wouldn't have been pulled because they want to with me yeah and and so i was like how do i change that and so i need to have a voice i need to have an opinion like even when we pitched our business we were bootstrapped 75 million dollar business and no one knew who we were crazy they didn't know our didn't know our business we were always private we just ran our business and you know minding our own kind of way of life and we didn't do press we didn't do anything and so i realized like it actually does matter how you communicate your business to the outside world because it does create an energy

SPEAKER_00: around your business like and i'm sure you've seen investing and things like that like where people want to be around you with you when you're doing well and you have like a a story to tell so i started going on this journey of like how do i become famous and and and and i didn't mean it in the sense of like the rock i didn't mean the sense but you know i wanted to be known in my community and to the people in my industry and so i started thinking to myself i had an assistant at that time we were like let's go post pictures uh on instagram with all my famous friends no one cared about that it didn't resonate with people i'm like we should start a daily vlog and i'm like no one cares about a married guy with two kids that's not gonna work um and then uh my partner in young and reckless which is a streetwear brand we started a long time ago was had started a podcast and he was like we should do a podcast together talking about basically he would walk into my office he's from ohio came from akron ohio at age 21 became a reality tv star on mtv called fantasy factory and he was like i ask you about all these things all day what are interest rates what is investing what is this let's just talk about it so we started doing this podcast and it took about a year till we realized anyone even paid attention because the first episode i think 35 people downloaded the second one i think 27 so we lost 20 of our listenership on the on the first week and so but but i think the the fascinating part of it was that one day like i was promoting something about one of our brands and it was like one of our most successful days ever and i realized oh my god there's actually a community here and people actually care what we have to say because it actually translated into the business right and so that was like our journey of of the podcast kind of story and like as you know like the power of the community when when they're engaged like podcast is the most intimate form of media in my opinion it's like it's like your alone time in your ear your relationship with the audience is so crazy yeah and and it's like we've seen it firsthand and now in my new business

SPEAKER_13: ghost so many of my suppliers and buyers that are on the marketplace are listeners of the podcast right and and you know investors i meet they're like oh we listen to the pod we want to take a look at your next round and it's so fascinating and full circle it's happening right like what i thought i

SPEAKER_00: could do six seven years ago it's now coming into fruition yeah it's pretty amazing i think you hit on

SPEAKER_35: the the key factor which is podcasting uh it takes a long time like you got to do it for a couple of

SPEAKER_22: years to get good at it to build an audience to figure out a format that actually works and you figure it out a good format like a news roundtable situation and that works and people who are actually friends with each other which is part of the secret of all in so there's some like camaraderie people like that as well um but it's so intimate because it's in your ears i have like my my little ear monitors in right now like a newscaster you have your airpods in or whatever or you actually are old

SPEAKER_16: school man you got the you got the wired ones in there uh i'm a boomer batter yeah i'm a boomer uh

SPEAKER_39: no i think you're like millennial slash gen act right yeah i'm 42 so i'm on the i'm i'm on the on

SPEAKER_41: the i'm on the class on the bubble you're on the bubble who do you align with more um sometimes music wise i'm gen z okay um so you like drake and the other nonsense like i love nonsense rap music got

SPEAKER_13: it okay i'm a coachella guy uh and then uh i would say now that i have kids i feel more gen x on a lot

SPEAKER_41: of issues yeah like your back hurts your knees hurt you're tired all the time yeah even just like i never cared about crime now i do right i never cared about homelessness now i do because it affects my

SPEAKER_05: daily life uh when you have to protect those kids yeah it becomes acute you're like i can handle myself okay i can handle myself and my partner and then all of a sudden you got two kids or three kids and you're like okay i gotta defend three or four people it becomes almost like instinctual um yes but it's really interesting like how the fans feel because you're in their ears maybe they're listening to the pod before they go to bed they have a dream about it again weird comments all the time for people i had a dream about you last night i'm like were you listening to pod when you fell asleep they're like yeah i'm like i think those two things are related in any way they're like i never thought of that or they go for a run or you know whatever their workout and so you're you're just with them

SPEAKER_35: all the time and they hear your voice and i don't know if you've had this experience yet but you're you order your starbucks and then somebody turns around and they're like d yeah group chat yeah i mean it's

SPEAKER_64: i mean especially like you know your guys is you have such a large audience like your voices

SPEAKER_13: are in our heads all day yeah so it's like if you heard it in the wild you're like oh my god

SPEAKER_00: you know it's like oh i know that voice i know that it's like tom broca of this era you know what

SPEAKER_10: i mean like it feels like that correct yeah like people and also it's habitual that's the thing other

SPEAKER_22: people don't realize is once you put that into your you subscribe to it and you get the next issue you you know this was the power of rss really simple syndication uh shout out dave weiner um man it's just the fact that it oh there's another one okay yeah maybe i'll have another one sure you

SPEAKER_05: know it's like the bartender bringing you a refill to your drink without you asking for it it's like

SPEAKER_72: oh it's there i might as well have a sip listen we work with super early stage companies at my investment firm launch you know pre-series a maybe you got a couple of thousand dollars a month in revenue you've raised a couple of hundred thousand dollars maybe a million dollars right it's the early days you're one or two of a startup and i'll be honest a lot of times startups they don't have their insurance they haven't set that up yet they haven't set up their accounting properly they're getting things cleaned up in fact i was recently had a great startup but they didn't have dno insurance that basically protects your directors and officers that's the d directors people on the board officers the people who work at the company right directors and officers insurance is super important so what do we do we send them right to and broker our friends over and broker are a business insurance company that's built specifically for startups you just fill out a simple application right and then startups get four quotes for four lines of coverage in 15 minutes four quotes four lines of coverage 15 minutes easy breezy lemon squeezy that's right they connect you with one of their expert brokers for unmatched service that goes beyond your policy and listen you might think oh it's too early to have insurance it's not that expensive it's not that complicated because in broker makes it easy so here's what i want you to do try and broker today with the code twist and you'll get 10 off their startup package at imbroker.com twist that's imbroker.com twist we love imbroker i use imbroker they're an amazing team they do a great job for startups whether you're in year one or year five go use imbroker.com twist

SPEAKER_10: so how has it affected business uh i don't think you have advertising on it i don't remember hearing

SPEAKER_05: ads but you have something called like a chatty kathy club which i which i think is a discord which i

SPEAKER_79: think people pay for but you kind of don't explain it on the show which i think is interesting

SPEAKER_05: and you also don't talk about your own business on the show so you don't talk your book too often so i didn't know about ghost i knew about the other stuff you were doing because when somebody sent

SPEAKER_16: it to me i just clicked the links in the show description but someone's like yeah no fred wilson or somebody you know uh your friend backed them and i was like oh really what's that so what's

SPEAKER_35: what's the philosophy of the format and making money from it or not uh you know how do you look at it

SPEAKER_13: yeah i think on the on the format it it's meant to be as um a casual conversation amongst friends about the things that i feel like people should know in their daily conversations the one caveat that we've changed is we've removed politics from our discussions oh it became very polarizing with our audience where my dms were like either it's like visceral reaction either way on so many topics during the last election that we felt like we aren't political experts like you guys are much more knowledgeable about politics than we are um we're very familiar with local politics but like national politics i would say we're not experts and definitely not policy experts which just offend people when when you don't have the the perspective around it so we we kept politics out of it and then what's happened is is our downloads are great for a a podcast with a very culty community if you were to go out to like the top 10 podcasts we don't have the downloads of those millions of downloads

SPEAKER_00: an episode and so what we found is our advertisers are our listeners and so there are people in our ecosystem that want to reach other listeners of the podcast and so that has been our best way to monetize it so the folks at ledger had a year-long sponsorship with us um and and like there's been a number of other businesses and brands like car trackers which is a way to sell your car like these have been incredible partners of ours that help kind of support the cost and and you know pay all the people that work on the show monetizing it for us probably similar to you guys it's not our core business so we're kind of we're not too sure how we want to go about it because we're not going to be active on social media promoting other brands and promoting other businesses so we've taken that approach but we do want to give back to our community so we did create basically we don't want to call it an nft but it is a technically an nft it's called the chatty kathy club where we've charged 250 it's it's an access to the community and what we're rolling out are a series of events of what i believe would be a cooler more fun version of a networking event similar to what you guys did with all in summit yeah we are hosting a series of events over the next couple years where we bring our community together we have changed so many lives we've made people like quit their job go learn how to in code double their pay we've gotten people fundraising we've made business partners people have started dating people have gotten married people have you know there's so many different stories like i'm sure you guys have heard of yours you've made such a big impact on people's lives and it feels really really good to do that and so yeah we want to crystallize that and so this is our way of like doing it in a more in a more like kind of organized fashion so we created the club we created some merch around it and we just want like it it's nice when i wear our hat and like people just walk up to me at the laker game or the dodger game they're like oh what's up chat or at the airport or something like that it's just a way of crystallizing the community and i think that's how we feel about monetizing it i think if i didn't have another this full-time business i would i would go all in on it because i think it is so powerful if you can control like there's you know i always joke like you look at how much rush limbaugh i used to make it's crazy terrestrial radio like this is a more powerful medium

SPEAKER_10: people yeah don't realize how big those syndicated radio shows got now the numbers are a little funky

SPEAKER_22: uh but you know over uh you know it's in the 10 million range uh in terms of like their reach was 10 20 million howard stern at the peak rush limbaugh and i i think some of those like crazy

SPEAKER_05: folks still exist on like terrestrial radio but i i think it's only boomers who listen to it and then

SPEAKER_98: i saw today howard stern trending on twitter and i grew up a huge howard stern fan i'm like huge i wonder what's going on why you know did he get canceled again or what and and it was like oh

SPEAKER_05: the nba players don't recognize me at the knicks games and they come over and they talk to tracy morgan and chris rocker sitting on either side of me and they don't say hi to me and i was like that's what happens when you go behind a paywall like if it was joe rogan or yeah you know so i mean

SPEAKER_22: i go to nba games and i know a couple of players because they listen to the pod and they're into

SPEAKER_100: venture and investing and like you go behind a paywall you secure the bag and i think he went down to probably a million listeners from like 20 or 30 million so you just think about cultural relevance you get hundreds of millions of dollars from a small group of people one or two million paying

SPEAKER_18: a hundred dollars a year two hundred dollars a year for their sirius xm and then you don't get recognized uh at the nba games uh which is yeah pretty crazy tell me about ghost what is ghost what is

SPEAKER_16: this uh the premise of this business and congrats on getting fred wilson i'm i i wonder if your experience

SPEAKER_107: on the podcast uh was uh you know one of the reasons they invested yeah it's really interesting um

SPEAKER_13: so during covid we saw this enormous amount of supply chain disruptions you know you know everyone was talking about everyone was aware with it goods were coming in late and in apparel when you receive jackets in the summer you're basically out of luck there's nothing you can do you have to hold them

SPEAKER_00: for a whole another year and so what we started kind of struggling with is the piling up of inventory during covet that we just could not liquidate and what i found was i've been in the industry for a very long time know all the characters whether it be retailers middlemen

SPEAKER_13: brokers you know small brick and mortar retailers and i found it very very painful to actually liquidate the product and so started doing a bunch of homework on the space and realized like there's been basically no innovation or uh investment at the end of the product life cycle when it comes to like venture particularly and just to put into context most people in america shop at the end of the product life cycle at

SPEAKER_00: discount retail really that oh i see that does make sense like so tj maxx yes tj maxx a 60 billion dollar a year business burlington code factory 10 billion dollar business these are massive massive

SPEAKER_13: retailers where america shops 99 cent store dollar general this is a liquidation inventory that ends up there even sam's club costco all these people buy this product and so we were like there's no like

SPEAKER_00: focus or connectivity from those brands to those retailers these retailers are scouring the world

SPEAKER_13: for inventory tapping on the phone and fax machines and email yeah literally facts still and and and like

SPEAKER_00: messy spreadsheets and like weird shady characters saying they have 200 000 lipsticks of revlon in

SPEAKER_111: new jersey you gotta maybe it's real maybe it's not i could have fallen off a truck and tony said the

SPEAKER_13: person's name might be soprano yeah exactly who is a lot a lot of a lot of that going on and inventory is all over the world like the best brands have inventory stuck in switzerland amsterdam china australia so we were like how do you build the pipes to connect all of these sellers and buyers and so what ghost is a private b2b marketplace it's private because the best brands in the world do not want to let anyone know how much excess inventory if you look at the nike stock six months ago they came out and said that their inventory position ballooned to nine billion dollars 20 drop in the stock overnight yeah and so it is so sensitive to the publicly traded companies and so what we wanted to do is build a platform where the seller controls who has access to the inventory so the seller when they list a lot they can select a brick and mortar versus online retailer only japanese retailers if that's all they want to liquidate in got it so the power is all in the seller and then the buyer has the ability to make offers and and then we have tools like financing and logistics that help facilitate so it's this huge you know market that basically has been forgotten by technology yeah and so it was a way you know being an insider we kind of knew what product that we had to build to make it easy for both sides so yeah we ended up uh raising our seed round uh in november of 21 with equal ventures and eniac okay and then um peak market got a good valuation i got a good valuation

SPEAKER_41: there and then i raised april of last year which was pretty tough yeah brutal market but sideways

SPEAKER_13: valuation perhaps yeah yeah we actually we we got we actually got a pretty good markup because with a lot of tailwinds in the business and union square ventures came to the tables a woman named rebecca caden who sits on our board just absolutely been transformative for us and what's funny is

SPEAKER_00: is we're you know we're in that process again right now so it's interesting how climate uh you know evolves with uh what's happening in the macro world okay everybody you know all of the complaints about

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SPEAKER_10: your customers uh but there's a you getting investors if you're a money losing business and you're investing in the business to grow it you do have to understand the cycles and valuation and despite us as you know

SPEAKER_16: me as a former entrepreneur or an entrepreneurial investor i guess is how i describe myself and a

SPEAKER_22: journalist previously i try to explain this to folks like i know you can get the sick valuation you raise 10 million on a 50 million post and you don't have a product in market yet and there's like some first time fund that wants their crypto you know blockchain investment uh but we you know have fun for two years but make this money last there'll be pressure for you to spend it um i would make sure you hit some revenue milestones here so that you can backfill reality because there will come a time when the public market comps will be brought up when it comes to your evaluation and oh yeah now it's happening

SPEAKER_88: oh yeah definitely and it's funny is that you know what's funny is is just seeing the climate from you

SPEAKER_13: know what you hear from folks is venture has always been the most optimistic form of capital right they are looking they're they're believers in the future they want it to work they're looking for

SPEAKER_00: every reason to say yes whereas today venture is looking for every reason to say no so yeah i'm sure that's just an over correction from the last couple years

SPEAKER_22: it is um probably the new entrance into venture of which i am one you know i started investing right

SPEAKER_05: after the 2008 cycle um which was incredible like to start after the great financial crisis would be like starting investing this year which by the way would be a great time i'm like raising my fourth fund right now watch one four and um it's like amazing because i'm deploying capital in companies that are incredibly focused capital efficient and who have expectations of valuations that are incredibly reasonable and they know they have to hit milestones in order to hit get the next

SPEAKER_16: funding round not you know put on a great show and do some sizzle and some tap dancing and then be like

SPEAKER_135: ta-da and people are like okay can i see a spreadsheet what's your percentage growth and you

SPEAKER_100: know it's just this is the best time to be an investor or a founder i as i tell everybody fortunes

SPEAKER_135: are made in the down market they're collected in the up market so i agree i mean i'm so excited about

SPEAKER_13: being a founder right now because it also like the best businesses are rising to the top too yes if you if you have execution you have a real business and you have a real team you are getting deals done and maybe it's not at the price you want but you're still getting deals done and you get to go build your business which is a is a privilege in itself i always tell founders like if you can send a chart

SPEAKER_16: like send uh this is your email to a vc dear fred wilson uh big fan of your blog i love this blog

SPEAKER_143: post uh we have figured something out in this marketplace of uh you know discounted goods that are you know off season and uh yeah we're growing 37 percent quarter over quarter and uh here's a

SPEAKER_22: chart would love to catch up with you sometime i'm going to be in new york next week i'm available

SPEAKER_135: anytime for a 15-minute coffee and i give people this like little script and they're like that'll never work i'm like humor me send 10 emails so like i got nine responses i might send the 10th one another

SPEAKER_16: response and say didn't hear back from you uh we'd love to catch up like i got all 10 but you know how i did that i had met bezos jeff bezos at an event uh at a dinner and i told him what we're doing at weblogs inc and he said if you're ever in seattle come by and we had in gadget joystick these couple of

SPEAKER_22: blogs and i told my partner brian alvey i was like we're going to seattle next week uh be prepared uh i'm going to get us a meeting with jeff bezos so i emailed jeff bezos and i said jeff great to meet you we're launching our second and third blog and we just got samsung uh to sponsor the video

SPEAKER_16: game blog for you know six months and they're paying us in advance i'm going to be in seattle next week would love to meet you and your team for 20 minutes and uh his assistant responded immediately wow i lied we had no hotel we had no tickets i wasn't in seattle next week and i was like if i

SPEAKER_10: could meet jeff and he just on the spot offered to put in uh 500k wow crazy wow and then that's insane

David Friedberg: but i mean if you give them the green light hey i happen to be in town i'll meet anytime and then

SPEAKER_16: you give them i could show you what we're building next for 20 minutes it's like you're being respectful

SPEAKER_10: of their time etc um and uh you see that's a lost art that's a lost art jason like a lot of the younger

SPEAKER_13: people i think they feel like they're owed the time not really earned yeah i i think they're just like i there's a humility of like what i'm i remember like early internet everyone's email was on their website sure you could email anybody and and i would email people and be like can i um get five minutes of your time it'd be so great if i'm a student at usc and people would respond i'd literally take five minutes i'd send them a thank you card and you know they were very respectful

SPEAKER_55: today it's like people like yo let's meet i was like for what no i get those emails and i'm like

SPEAKER_10: is this like i just assume it's phishing or spam and i didn't realize it's culturally uh it's

SPEAKER_168: cultural stupidity i mean yeah no it is people are just dumb and yeah self-awareness is not

SPEAKER_167: it's not it's not a big uh trait these days i would say guess what like reality is here now and like

SPEAKER_135: you you better have a chart you better have an mvp you better have a squad you know two co-founders people email like i want to talk about my ideas i'm like uh yeah great talk to your pals like ideas like i've got 300 emails from people who have you know two years of revenue who want to meet like i

SPEAKER_104: got to get through those first yeah if i get to the point at which like the mvps and maybe i guess i

SPEAKER_100: could get to the idea group um you seem to understand marketing really well um and i think your content marketing is really cool and then you also did you do the run club or was one of your

SPEAKER_104: other co-hosts no i i do it so explain this because this also seemed like you just natively understand

SPEAKER_100: something about community or people i guess you're like an entj on the myers-briggs if i had to guess

SPEAKER_185: you know did you ever take that the myers-briggs um i i think in college i don't remember for men

SPEAKER_16: yeah yeah exactly how you can think about it but yeah you're definitely you're definitely highly

SPEAKER_126: extroverted so tell us about the run club thing you did and did that have any impact on the business

SPEAKER_188: oh my god the run club is is like the most amazing thing i've ever done so five years ago uh we were

SPEAKER_00: starting a running brand uh in our in our core business by four and you know wanted a way to to market the brand and one of the guys i worked with was like hey you know i know you run all the time would you ever do a run club i was like i would love to do a run club i don't have the bandwidth to like promote it but like yeah i would do it and so he's like great he's like just post it on your instagram tell people to come run so saturdays we used to meet in west hollywood and every saturday we'd come meet no agenda except to run and you know pre-pandemic we were getting a hundred plus people to run up sunset boulevard every saturday morning wow and it was the most amazing founders investors actors just college kids it was just like this insane community so many friendships were formed businesses were started and then unfortunately the pandemic ended up killing like the momentum of it and then a lot of people moved and people got older and kids and whatever but then when everything kind of normalized maybe end of last year i was like i'm still showing up to the spot every saturday on santa monica and doheny anyone wants to come please come nice people started coming again and so and what i realized and and how it really picked up was i would on the podcast say i'm in new york city i don't have time to meet everyone for drinks who wants to go for a run friday thursday at 6 p.m and 50 people showed up then i'd be in paris hey and it's freezing cold snow anyone one of me five people showed up miami denver texas tennessee wherever i was that was my way to like because the problem is is i do think like inherently everything generally evolves around

SPEAKER_95: alcohol yes tragedy i very much enjoy drinking tequila and it's a big part of my life but like i don't

SPEAKER_35: want always want to be forced to go have a drink if you're an entrepreneur uh and you make that like

SPEAKER_10: another focus of your life uh you're going to get beat by your co by your competitors who are not doing shots on a tuesday i mean yeah exactly so i was like the productivity killer exactly so i would

SPEAKER_13: be like how do i meet all these people and and give them all some time and and build this community so we started this run club and it still goes i mean i push a stroller with my two-year-old in it my six-year-old's biking it's like a family thing now and it's the power of meeting people in person is just irreplaceable like i agree and and i think that community building is so important to me and you know i'm so die hard la west hollywood that like when i walk down the street on sunset like i know everybody and it's like something i pride myself on i want to make you like to start

SPEAKER_199: up forrest gump yeah exactly and then one day i decided to stop yeah exactly he just stops and

SPEAKER_203: everybody's like uh and now what do we do in the middle of nowhere it's like running across the

SPEAKER_10: country it's like i think i'm gonna stop and they're like but you're a guru and you haven't shaved in a year they just all have to figure out what to do with their lives uh it's hilarious yeah but it's awesome it's fun well i mean i am literally looking to get a space in uh san mateo where i am uh because i'm

SPEAKER_22: having so many founders who want to uh get together and so i did it at my attorney's office last week i had like seven of our accelerator companies come to fenwick and then i had a hundred founders from our founding university fly from around the world for one hour at wilson cincini so i made it like two or

SPEAKER_98: three hours because i was like these people flew in from like hong kong estonia uh wow and so now i'm just gonna like your run club i'm getting a physical space and i'm just gonna do like a this week

SPEAKER_16: in startups episode which is just q a so i'm just gonna tell people open q a open pitches it's like open mic night for startups yeah i'll just be there here's a microphone here's a microphone for you you get one minute to pitch i'll give you some candid feedback if you got our actual product you can do two minutes if you got a product with revenue you can do three minutes so like i'm going to come up with some sort of format like you can pitch your idea for one minute if you got a mvp you get two minutes if you have revenue you get an extra minute you can show your charts you know what's

SPEAKER_13: you know why that's so special is because my view on the world was always like i grew up in in l.a in the san fernando valley went to public school and when i got to college at usc i realized that um based on you know where you grew up and what high school you went to your life trajectory is very different and your access is very different and what i always prided myself with the run club or the podcast was like i want to level the playing field for everyone yes because going to

SPEAKER_00: stanford is the only way people used to be able to get venture money of course yeah and like the people that come to your event are people that would never get in front of a traditional vc zero chances we know the biases of venture community yeah they're like oh he went to stanford i'm like well what does that mean yeah you're good on a standardized test oh you're a

SPEAKER_98: developer okay you're probably an introvert like yeah we understand code's gonna move the world but

SPEAKER_22: now with like what i'm seeing with ai uh from the inside i think all developers get 10 times faster and the new coding language is like it's not going to be like ruby or c plus plus or whatever you're

SPEAKER_98: using python it's like the new programming language is called english yeah and you're just going to

SPEAKER_22: talk yeah yeah i mean prompt engineering it's like actually working and i have everybody in my company using it and i got of 20 people in the investment company i'd say i got five who are actually doing meaningful stuff and two weeks ago or two months ago it was zero two weeks ago it was one or two

SPEAKER_16: and i think i'll get 15 out of 20 by the end of this month because i just keep telling them like if you don't use this technology you're done not not that i'm going to fire you i i just think you're done in your career it's kind of like the people who i don't know if you caught the tail end of this but people who didn't know how to use microsoft office or windows or a computer and email and they

SPEAKER_22: were like yeah my my secretary will print out my emails for me and you're like first we don't use

SPEAKER_135: that word anymore they're executive assistants and two like do you really want them printing out

SPEAKER_222: your emails and killing trees like it's crazy stop using your personal phone for your startup in 2023

SPEAKER_125: you have to stop doing this it's such a common mistake that founders make open phone has totally rethought every detail of what a business phone should look like in 2023 and it's so affordable you have no excuse they make it super easy to get a business phone number for everybody on your team it works through a beautiful web app on your phone or your desktop and i can tell you it's amazing because our

SPEAKER_126: sales team and our ops teams use it daily recently found so much value using open phone for our angel summit communications open phone is the number one rated business phone on g2 for customer satisfaction and twist listeners are going to love it brian jagger he's the co-founder of startup called athlete he tweeted the following i'm literally cash flow positive from listening to this week in startups for

SPEAKER_72: listener deals and he explains that he previously got open phone money from this incredible discount that they give to this weekend startup founders and he says i'm not paid to say that i don't know jason pure honest feedback and appreciation and you know what i love to hear this because there's so many people who listen to this podcast we're founders and you need to use these tools but hey listen you you might be cash constrained or you might want to put that cash into your product open phone is already affordable at a starting price of only 13 per user per month but twist listeners can get 20 off any plan for your first six months at openphone.com twist and if you have existing numbers with another service no problem open phone will port them over at no extra cost so head to

SPEAKER_22: openphone.com twist to start your free trial and get 20 off you understand marketing really well i had

SPEAKER_143: a really interesting conversation uh about this bud light situation and i thought i'd bring it up here not because any of us don't think trans people shouldn't be have incredible protection rights obviously we all think that but there is something bigger going on here with regard to consumers feeling empowered you know maybe marketers not understanding who their actual consumers are or people politicizing everything and i thought you had some very good points on it and i think i gave you the free pass here yeah you believe everybody has a right to love whoever they want and to be whatever gender they want and can use whatever pronouns they run obviously we all think that so i mean i don't know if we

SPEAKER_100: all think that but i think anybody listening to this podcast thinks that i mean there might be some people who are like stuck in some you know religious funk or something and they are basing their lives on a book that's 2000 years old and you know favors stoning and beheadings but putting all that aside

SPEAKER_18: what's your take on the consumer activism and what we saw there in terms of engaging influencers etc yeah

SPEAKER_00: i think the the interesting thing that i've always noticed with brands is if activism is not rooted in your brand then it's very very hard to choose when you jump in on the conversation and so patagonia ben and jerry's nike they've always been vocal people in their way they market like right when like that is their that is their part of their marketing strategy as a brand and so it's very comfortable for them to speak out on any issue and not get any backlash from their core consumers like when when nike doubled down and colin kaepernick they knew their audience is gen z they care it's always about the youth for nike so they don't care what anyone else thinks ah they know their and they know

SPEAKER_10: their audience so some boomers hate this kneeling thing and these protests and they really feel strongly about the national anthem and this is completely inappropriate they're like we can lose some

SPEAKER_22: boomers they're not buying that many shoes and these gen z's are buying you know in the app

SPEAKER_61: two three pairs of shoes a month that app is addicting by the way that nike app is crazy exactly and they

SPEAKER_00: know and look as much as it is about activism this is a business decision nike knows all matters is care to the youth so if the youth want to support colin kaepernick so is nike and so they know that and they are doubling down on that bud light has never been a politically charged brand and their core consumer is just it's the run-of-the-mill guy that watching the nfl that is their core consumer it's bros right like i want to have a bud light when i'm at at a football game that's you know beginning and end of it yeah that's it and and and i appreciate their attempt to go younger but like it doesn't make sense you're an alcohol brand you know if you went to a 30 year old consumer it's not like they're anti anything they just don't participate in that conversation right and they just honestly all they care about is football and racing and basketball playoffs it's a very simple-minded consumer and so i thought it was like inappropriate for bud light from a marketing strategy to do anything outside of

SPEAKER_239: the fairway which is just stick to what you know the brand is so iconic and now like when you read the headlines that their sales are down 26 in the last week what is happening there because is this like

SPEAKER_10: yeah i don't know if you uh monitor like ben shapiro uh the the you know podcaster on the right yeah who is clearly like the smartest kid in your classroom um who like raises his hand and shouts out the answer before anybody so he's clearly like very insightful um but also like uh he really has been going after brands as a strategy so yes i think he might be like one of these major factors in this because he keeps

SPEAKER_143: talking about it and his other guy who did um i don't know the other guy's name but there's a guy

SPEAKER_100: who's like super anti-trans who did this documentary what is a woman and he just is on twitter all day long you know he just he's got very strong catholic or i think christian uh feelings about this issue

SPEAKER_10: whatever but they created a razor brand because some razor brand stopped advertising and so they

SPEAKER_22: counter-programmed by creating a brand so you didn't have to use woke razors and i'm like whoa and

David Friedberg: then he's been going crazy like that elsa from frozen frozen in frozen three four five whatever it is is going to be a lesbian and i'm like who cares like yeah and they're like well there's no sexuality in these like disney movies there's no you know gender and you know this is something they're bringing up for the first time i'm like i'm sorry did you miss the complete disney princess industrial complex for the last 50 years of like you know handsome prince handsome prince prince sexually assaulting like sleeping beauty and kissing her without permission like and then he's like really wild up about uh

SPEAKER_242: i think like um the little mermaid's gonna be black and that's tweaked him oh yeah oh yeah so where do

SPEAKER_05: you stand on disney having representation that seems to me to be a finding to be on brand about to show different characters like that's something they've been doing they did uh they've been going right down

SPEAKER_00: the line with representation yeah i think disney has a challenge because the consumer is actually the parent because they're the ones spending the money but the person consuming the content is a young person so it's a really it's a really interesting dilemma that they face which is very different than a bud light yeah so like the parent now may be saying hey i don't feel comfortable with this content that disney is putting out whereas the children don't care they're happy to just watch the content and i think like when i look at like even my children they don't see color right they don't see the same things that like we saw as children and so they're being exposed to things at a younger age which i don't mind i think there's a time that they should be exposed to all walks of life and and they should be able to understand it i think disney just has a tough balance because the person spending the money is an adult yes the person consuming the content is a child and if the adult doesn't feel

SPEAKER_247: comfortable with that that is the tough part for disney yeah and so that's generational like

SPEAKER_22: do gen x people i think that's an interesting one you know boomers might be like i don't know let's keep it yeah you know yeah yeah they had a gay character though in uh the the the guy josh gadd played

SPEAKER_10: oh yeah he the gaston's like number two guy yeah who's clearly really into gaston i mean he sings a song about him and that was i think their first like you know yeah uh gay moment there uh in in absolutely it's pretty uh that's funny yeah tell the audience how influencers now are impacting fashion

SPEAKER_22: cosmetics like we know about mr beast we obviously know about the kardashians but it seems like sometimes these things work incredibly well yep and then most time most of the time they just seem to be just a complete disaster and train wreck so what makes this work when it does work yeah i think the

SPEAKER_21: thing and it's such an overused word but like exact authentic usage of the product actually makes a

SPEAKER_00: difference if you can't just go and keep promoting something that you don't actually use and wear so like if you're a celebrity or an influencer and you do youtube videos and you're talking about like a brand that you love but you're never seen wearing it then like when you're on the couch watching tv you need to be wearing that brand otherwise it doesn't connect if you're out um getting your makeup ready like the the most influential woman on tiktok right now is alex earl she's a young woman um from miami okay she is just a powerhouse in in marketing right now beauty brands to deal with victoria's secret like she moves the needle but her videos on tiktok are her like in a camera in front of her mirror like getting dressed up getting ready for the night i'm wearing this lip gloss i'm wearing this makeup i'm wearing this top and then you see her out at night partying wearing that outfit looking like that so the consumer is like oh it's real she went out to carbone in miami wearing this outfit and so you relate now the consumer is like i'm along for the journey a really and the kardashians are the best at this because they've translated the marketing to real life really really well whereas someone like a beyonce who pushes promotes products we never see beyonce in her casual setting right we don't see her on the couch watching tv with her kids so we don't know if she's really wearing this stuff or not and it's a reason why like rihanna or uh you know some of these stars sell more product than someone like a beyonce it's because it's just like authentically not shown to

SPEAKER_22: the consumer it's feel like it's pushed on that makes total sense um and this generation looks at marketing something completely different than gen xers i think like the idea of getting a brand sponsorship for boomers like the rolling stones they literally like we're like we do not want our music the doors the beatles in any way used in any marketing and then at some point the money just gets too big and like the rolling stones you start me up famously for like the windows 95 launch and it

SPEAKER_10: was like oh my god they used it in a commercial these guys are sellouts yeah yeah yeah but how does this

SPEAKER_22: new gen z group uh look at selling out because it doesn't seem to be selling out to them

SPEAKER_00: no i i think there's no rules anymore you could do whatever you want in in the gen z world like they're just everything can be perceived cool or everything could be perceived corny the problem is is that everyone has an opinion now before it was just on tv you saw the commercial maybe you'd hear some chatter in your local you know coffee shop today the moment someone put something out like to your point earlier about what's happening with bud light and a lot of these uh disney things is it actually all comes back to community if you scream something loud enough there are other people who think that and now you feel like you belong to something so that mob mentality becomes community yeah and so they're like we all recognize we're not going to drink bud light anymore yeah you go to the bar you are now part of a group of people that resonates with now you're friends right same thing if you were like if you were a lakers shirt and you go to a bar in la then everyone's like oh the lakers you know whatever and so it's the same thing with like activism you found in on the internet tribe yeah yeah you find your tribe so easily you start screaming crazy there's like 10 000 other people

SPEAKER_61: that are also like i agree with your bad crazy thing absolutely i'm crazy too let's go for a run yeah

SPEAKER_272: yeah let's let's go it's like when can we get together because i i saw somebody share it's so

SPEAKER_22: interesting how influential like an image or a video is in today's world like you must have seen it as

SPEAKER_10: well but there was a video of like i don't know a boston baseball stadium and there's like a ton of people in line and then there's like a dedicated bud light you know like sometimes brands have their

SPEAKER_242: own like uh stands yeah yeah and there's nobody online at the bubble i went now we don't know if there's nobody working it and it's closed yeah exactly or it's before it opened even yeah like

SPEAKER_278: maybe it's just like it but they're like look at this nobody's online but then they showed like the

SPEAKER_10: hot dog line is like packed and i'm like is that because there's nobody working that but man it is incredible what a video can do to just yeah reinforce something or friend yeah it's because people just

SPEAKER_13: grab they want to grab onto something and just run with it because they want to stay relevant for the moment so like you have like people like clay travis who just grabs anything that's like you know a topical where he gets a lot of attention especially on like conservative views and he knows it works every single time he's smart enough to know that if i just jump on this it'll resonate with a bunch of people and so yeah that's how the unfortunately that's how media works now yeah i think that's ben

SPEAKER_143: shapiro's thing too he's like yeah oh biden misspoke okay this brand is woke yeah misspoke woke go bro

SPEAKER_100: let's go and he's making something like 100 200 million dollars with that business now oh my god it's

SPEAKER_143: it's bonkers uh yeah it's just like wow the power of these podcasts and just direct to consumer

SPEAKER_22: is uh extraordinary as we wrap up here uh with ghost uh luxury brands my understanding is once they go down market they're trapped they can't get back up market again it's like swimming against the tide and so is it true that like the top brands would rather shred like last season's purses and create more scarcity and just burn them than to sell them on a marketplace like yours and so there's like just i don't know the top 10 of brands are just never going to participate and people like rip their logos off stuff and offer like hey this is an armani jeans but we're going to just take the logos off and you can sell them on whatever jeans you want yeah historically that was

SPEAKER_188: very much the case it would burn or shred the product today because of sustainability laws globally

SPEAKER_00: especially in places like france and italy those laws are becoming pretty strong where you cannot do that so now they are forced to find channels where they can't liquidate like if you went to a tj max in in la in the middle of town there is gucci there is saint laurent there's montclair there are the best brands in the world they are there and so those are very particular locations because of the demographics but like you are but the good thing now is that there's so many different channels in which you could liquidate you can liquidate on the real real or stock x you can you can liquidate on a live streaming platform you know like whatnot there's a thousand places now that you can quietly move your inventory without hurting your business that's the difference between today and 20 years ago you would be stuck only going to tj maxx which for some people is tough yeah you ever see this website italic.com

SPEAKER_05: yeah it's great i know them about well yeah i had them on the podcast this is like the craziest thing i ever saw um they'll take like these sunglasses and they're like we're going to make these sunglasses

SPEAKER_22: we'll find the factory in vietnam china india wherever yeah and then we'll find the factory that makes super dry or chanel glasses we'll put uh like oh these are the past clients of that factory how long they've been operating and then we'll have them make their own cool glasses for 45 bucks

SPEAKER_05: uh which is the sunglasses i sent you and they're like yeah these have zeiss lenses in them these are incredible they have obe hinges and i'm like okay i know what a carl zeiss is i don't know what like

SPEAKER_143: yeah mesolucci acetate is okay designed in italy whatever that is acetate is the best quality of

SPEAKER_286: sunglasses got it and i guess the ones designed in italy are the super best yeah and it's like it's 10

SPEAKER_05: of the price of oliver peoples or per it's yeah fifth of the price of pearls yeah what do you think

SPEAKER_143: of that like the value brand concept and do young people like that or do they still want the prada

SPEAKER_188: logo and they want to yeah i think there's definitely a large enough consumer base that just wants really high quality products um and they're very much appreciative of it so the good news is this market is so big there's something for everyone so there's people that are going to appreciate what italic does and they make really high quality products and that's what matters to them and they're willing to accept a non-branded version of a high quality product then there's a lot of brand

SPEAKER_00: whores and they just want logos like if you walked around suburbia america all you see is logos every t-shirt's a logo every hat's a logo every shoe's a logo like it's just what americans want we love logo it

SPEAKER_167: could be under armor it could be louis vuitton could be saint laurent could be montclair we want logos and so so funny yeah it's just it's just that showed up for all in with this montclair hat

SPEAKER_22: he's like i don't want to take showers anymore i think that's the kind of thing but he's like i'll just put like a 1200 hat on or whatever the hell that thing costs so that's a joke i was like i went

SPEAKER_293: to like someone works for us like can you find me like on you know one of these chinese sites or

SPEAKER_10: whatever like yeah uh or etsy like some fugazi montclair logos and they're like yeah it's like

SPEAKER_22: 10 bucks for 10 logos i was like yeah order it yeah and all of a sudden from france i get hand stitched or machine stitch that somebody was making in france of the montclair logo spelled slightly

SPEAKER_10: wrong but you know you would never know and i literally just put it on a like my uber hat put it on my shirt put it on my jacket and then i just show up like on the podcast or like at a dinner at his

SPEAKER_314: house with six montclair logos on everything that's a goof i thought it was like the greatest

SPEAKER_315: oh my god that's good you could completely do that right uh oh yeah i mean that and that's what people

Chamath Palihapitiya: want i was i was so bummed i bought this eastia blazer which like everybody was like sweating these

SPEAKER_143: eastia blazers like oh those were gorgeous so i went i got one on sale because i don't like paying you know so i waited for the sale i go i buy it it's like a four thousand dollar jacket i get it for like sixteen hundred it's like my go-to blazer it's got the beautiful eastia pin pin falls out

SPEAKER_10: now i just got a jacket supply which i love you know like a hundred dollar suit supply jacket with no eastia logo i'm like am i really going to be that guy who goes online or goes to the eastia store

SPEAKER_05: and says listen i bought this jacket but i lost the pin can i get a pin and replace i would do that i would do that kind of i kind of screwed up all right listen uh you guys are like uh i feel

SPEAKER_143: like you guys are my baby bros uh yeah on the pod and so it's just awesome to see the great success

SPEAKER_16: for having uh and thanks for the shout outs it's very kind of you uh you guys mentioned the show once in a while and it's great to have you on continued success you hiring people now are you trying to

SPEAKER_325: get some people into this company yeah we're always hiring okay what do you what do you need

SPEAKER_326: what are you looking for and then how can people reach out um uh ghst.io we have our careers page

SPEAKER_21: there we're always looking for talented engineers that have had marketplace experience that's very

SPEAKER_327: important so you worked at etsy you worked at kickstarter patreon somewhere where you put two

SPEAKER_22: sides like uber or dash any of those yeah marketplaces are it worked to get them cranking right yes but

SPEAKER_293: when they go they go yeah what's the most number of transactions you have on the buyer or sell side have you got like somebody who's just doing this like as their entire business is just moving stuff

SPEAKER_188: yeah we we've kind of gotten some retailers that now do a hundred percent of their buying through us oh wow yeah that's significant like and our aov is high right like so we have people doing like nearly seven figure transactions on the platform now oh and you get five ten percent of that or something

SPEAKER_336: higher yeah oh yum yum well done well done all right well i can't wait to do group chat i'll let

SPEAKER_05: you know when i'm in la please have a little dinner we'll go for a little run we'll do a pod it'll be great yeah tell the other boys tell drama i said hello and then wait who's your third drama my brother

SPEAKER_264: anand anand yeah so that's your is that your baby bro who's your cfo yeah yeah baby bro cfo i like it

SPEAKER_247: well now he was a very successful angel investor so he's done uh he quit oh he quit yeah no i heard

SPEAKER_343: you guys going uh i heard you guys going in on uh apology i guess you guys invested in his thing and

SPEAKER_346: it didn't work out yeah i was like oh my brother's still heated he's heated over that still oh oh over

SPEAKER_247: you guys calling him out for uh no my brother my brother was just my brother was just bummed about

SPEAKER_293: how that deal turned out that's all it is a bummer when people yeah don't yeah whatever the situation is but yeah they secure the bag and like at the expense of other folks if that seems to be what

SPEAKER_00: happened would you think of his billion it was million dollar bet great for press i think you know yeah he he knows how to play the internet he he's like he's playing the game of the ben shapiro's of

SPEAKER_22: the world yeah i was like for if he i just like if he had if he has like 5 000 bitcoin this thing goes up 4 000 covers the two million dollars so and i think he did it when bitcoin was at 23 and then it spiked to 28. yeah and he was like no that's not it you know you're you're making that up i'm

SPEAKER_49: like how many bitcoin do you have he's like i can't say i'm like is this would it going up 20 be material to your bitcoin holdings i think so i think you're a millionaire so but i also thought

SPEAKER_143: it was pretty great it'd be like me being like i'll bet anybody that uber goes to a hundred dollars a

SPEAKER_192: share yeah yeah exactly and if it goes up ten percent yeah you're like okay

SPEAKER_362: all right man talk to you soon all right thanks for coming on