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SPEAKER_03: All right, with me again for Ask an Angel is my pal Zach Coleus, and we're going to do a series of questions from the audience.

SPEAKER_04: If you would like to ask us a question, just email askjasonatlaunch.co, and we will get your question, or you can DM the TWI Startups account on Twitter or Instagram, and we'll get your question there. If you submit a video, bonus points, and you get even a little more credit because we might shout out your company. So, Niren says, I have a marketplace idea.

SPEAKER_05: Can the take rate be very little to prove a consumer behavior slash traction to get seed funding, or is it a red flag? Zach, I'll throw to you for the first one.

SPEAKER_08: Yeah, so, I mean, I think if you've looked at, especially Chinese marketplaces, it's all over the place. Like, there's been some very successful startups in China that have huge marketplaces that have tiny take rates, and there's, you know, obviously, Alibaba takes a large take rate.

SPEAKER_11: I would look at the take rate as less important when I look at marketplaces. What's way more important to me is the value to the sellers and the value to the buyers and what their comparable options are and how they think about that on a relative basis. Because if there's a huge amount of value, then clearly we can increase the take rate, but if you're basically like an exact copy commodity, then you're in bigger trouble. And so it doesn't really help you.

SPEAKER_15: 100% correct. This is another example of a founder being focused on the wrong things.

SPEAKER_05: The take rate doesn't matter.

SPEAKER_04: The way in which you solve for the supply side and the demand side, that is the actual question of a marketplace. And to Zach's point, what other options do people have?

SPEAKER_05: And if you look at, you know, 2021, if you were going to make a marketplace for used cars, well, you're going to be up against a lot of people who are doing that already, who have the supply, and they've been marketing and they have tons of email lists that they've developed over decades.

SPEAKER_04: So you've got some serious moats there, what you're doing is a classic founder mistake, which is, you know, just focusing on something that is actually not relevant, other things that are not relevant, being in the 30 under 30, or the 40 under 40, other things that are not relevant is you won a startup competition, or you've been selected for, you know, this cloud computing platforms, you know, startup program. Like, when we see a deck and a founder puts in this kind of nonsense, we're like, what is your reaction? Do you just shrug or just go, oh, they don't understand what's important?

SPEAKER_11: I mean, I mean, I was there, you know, I spent I spent my years in the trenches doing, you know, making the, you know, continual number of mistakes. And I have a lot of empathy for, you know, when you're trying to pull something out of thin air, you're trying to make something from nothing, you grab on to anything you can grab on to, and it's really easy to get distracted by the things that are close to you and easy to grab startup competitions, signing up advisor number and plus one, you know, getting, you know, your, your logo someplace, it seems really cool.

SPEAKER_07: Um, and I think the best startup founders are the ones that learn quickly that like, the most important things are not what's easy to grab the most important things are what's hard to solve.

SPEAKER_04: Figuring out the hard stuff, right, do the hard stuff and focus on that, even if it's a de minimis amount of progress, getting from four to six customers is better than winning another startup competition. Yeah, that's fifth and six customers. So please stay focused founders on what matters. Another question coming in, this one will take live from Carlos on YouTube, I have been placing small bets over the last 12 months, between $1,000 and $3,000 in pre seed to seed, how should I be thinking about my follow on investments, a great question that Zach and I, both of us, I think, you know, now finishing up our first decade of investing are having

SPEAKER_28: having to contend with and strategize around where where do you come out on advice for Carlos.

SPEAKER_30: Yeah, so I think there's, there's three things that you want to do that's super important.

SPEAKER_08: One is you need to understand that early stage investing and follow on investing has a very different practice area.

SPEAKER_11: There's very different return profiles, there's very different sort of ways to think about the problem. And you need to basically have your strategy for early stage in one box that you continually improve on. And you need your strategy for follow one another box and understand that they're very separate.

SPEAKER_08: And the most important thing as far as I'm concerned for follow on investment, this is all about information. So if you're deeply involved in the business, and you have a lot of information, you can make really smart bets. If you don't have a lot of information, you need proxies. And so the best proxy is who's leading that next round. And so if you see Bill Gurley showing up writing a big check into the next round, I'm going to put as much money as I can in back all day long and be super happy about it. On the other hand, if it's a bunch of people coming together and writing a follow on no name angel check, you need to be scared. Because if you don't have good information there, that's a good way to lose money. And you don't have the same return profile in that later stage follow on investment that you do in the early one.

SPEAKER_11: And so you need to be really careful. And just the last thing I would say is, remember, as angel, it's not your job or your responsibility to keep the company alive. That's not your job. The company goes out of business, that's fine. It's totally okay.

SPEAKER_34: That's I mean, this is such good advice. And you took a totally different spin than mine, which is why this is a great pick and roll one two game we have going here and tag teaming.

SPEAKER_05: You're right, there are two different disciplines. Making that first bet is different than making the second bet. And certainly you want to make sure that if it's a bridge financing, that it's not a peer or a dock, that it's an actual bridge to somewhere. And information is critical in making that second bet. I'm going to put those two things aside right now. And I'm going to take a different spin, which is bankroll management. Since you said you do one to three, I'm going to average it to two, then I'm going to add, okay, you're making these small bets, and you're doing 2k, I'm going to tell you, I think you need to get to 25 bets to have some level of diversification 2000 times 25 equals $50,000, I'm going to make another jump that you have a $1,000,000 net worth, and you are putting $100,000 into angel investing, which would be aggressive, but not outrageous if you have a job, and you have something to pay your

SPEAKER_04: rent, so you have a $100,000,000 bankroll, you put $50,000,000 into 25 companies, I'm going to assume five of those companies meet the criteria Zach Coleus has outlined, which is a Bill Gurley or another notable investor is leading that next round. Now you have $50,000,000 left, there's five bets to make $10,000,000 in each bet.

SPEAKER_37: What does that mean, it means in the five best companies you deployed 60% of your capital, the 2k original investment times five is 10, and then five 10k bets.

SPEAKER_04: So when you look at portfolio management, if we were playing poker, and these were your five best starting hands and or connections on the flop, it means you got 60% of your dollars into hands that connected with the flop.

SPEAKER_05: If you don't know what that is, you take a course on poker, any feedback since we're doing this one to game back and forth, Zach, on my advice?

SPEAKER_40: No, I think that's spot on.

SPEAKER_11: I think that's the right way to think about that. Do you do the the secret in the early stages to search for winners. And that's a discovery process. The secret to follow on is to pile into winners. And that's about basically information and understanding what's a winner and what's not and avoiding losers. Because your your follow on is that's where you can lose real money.

SPEAKER_05: But you can make real money too, right? So the in my bet, okay, you missed the flop, you're up against three players, there's an ace on the board, and you have, you know, 910, the board comes down with an ace and a king, you know, you know, you know, that you're beat. Yeah. And now you're gonna try to take a swing at it with three other players, you're gonna waste that 10k follow on, it would be better to put 20k in another hand.

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SPEAKER_05: Thank you for supporting the show. Let's get back to this amazing episode. Let's take a live question from our friends at LinkedIn, which now has live streaming services. Thanks for including us in the beta.

SPEAKER_04: A Nash from LinkedIn asks, How do you prioritize products when you have a suite of products for one single industry, but you don't have the bandwidth and resources to sell all together? Okay, so how do you prioritize your products? When you work in an industry? I'll let you interpret it as you will.

SPEAKER_08: Yeah, I mean, I, I live by the sort of the mantra one, one, one, one, one, you only have one, like, and it really comes down to a value delta, which is like, people heard me say this before, but I'll say it again, if you can't cold call a customer at nine o'clock at night, while they're putting their kid to bed on their cell phone, tell them what you do in one sentence and have them say, Oh, my God, I want that instead of saying, Why are you calling me? calling me? You're doing the wrong thing. You need to find that value where the customer is like, Oh, wow, that's amazing. I won't talk to you tomorrow. And a suite of products invariably will never at least for early stage startups will never achieve that suites or products come from companies that find that one thing, get massive amounts of distribution. And then once they have that distribution, they can build a suite of products underneath that umbrella. But like building a suite of products in the beginning and trying to level them up. I've never seen it work. Like there's it

SPEAKER_05: It cannot work. You are 100% correct. This is the death spiral of most founders, a lack of focus trying to do too much fighting too many wars on too many fronts. And they always say, Well, Google has YouTube and Android and Chrome. Okay, Google is in their second decade. Google has unlimited resources to your point. And Google added one product, I think in the first five years, which was Gmail, then another five years later, YouTube, they didn't actually build YouTube, they didn't actually build those, they did do Chrome internally. And then we go to Amazon, you know, aside from their delivery products, they added AWS, probably in the second decade, they added Amazon Prime video, again, in the second decade, I think. And so, if Jeff Bezos, and Larry and Sergey are focused on one thing for the first decade, you can stay focused on one thing for the first decade.

SPEAKER_04: So if you don't have founder, have founder ADHD, it will lead to pain and suffering. If you are a founder, who cannot help themselves, then what you need to do is start a company and put somebody in to the captain's seat, to sit there at the controls and run that company while you go off and do your next company. And then we have examples of founders who do that, right. You know, you know, this is a quick way to run out of capital, and not get excellence. Jeremy from YouTube asked is $1 million in ARR too big for guys like you.

SPEAKER_37: Zach? No, I don't know. That's our sweet spot.

SPEAKER_64: Hold me up. Let's go. That's right. I hit the cover off that ball all day long.

SPEAKER_04: Absolutely put that in that's in our strike zone for sure. And I think both of us, you know, I don't know where you started, but I was writing the 25 to the 50k check on average 11 years ago. And now I don't know, my last three deals were in the 1.5 to $3.7 million range in terms of total amount of capital into each company. Where are you at in that sort of where were you 10 years ago? Where are you today in terms of average check size per deal?

SPEAKER_07: So I started with an angel of syndicate. So my first deal was 200k of other people's money. I put in 1k of my own because I had no money back

SPEAKER_08: then.

SPEAKER_69: That's the 200 to 1 ratio. Yeah, yeah, no, it's a lot of people were like, Oh, we don't like people complain about that. You're right. That's a good side.

SPEAKER_71: People hated that. But it was like, they didn't think you had enough skin in the game, right?

SPEAKER_11: Yeah, people were really mad about that. But it was in the beginning. My first deal was NEA. My next deal was spark lead. The one after that was

SPEAKER_70: rackets and lead. So then people were like, Well, we don't know what the Zach guy, but these guys are great. And so they, they joined the round because of that when you're

David Friedberg: making if at the time you were making 100k a 1k bat after tax money was real.

SPEAKER_08: I didn't have any money that I had no job then. Like literally, like, we just sold Trigit and I was like wandering around like a lost wet little puppy trying to figure out what to do with what my

SPEAKER_15: Functionally unemployable. And so what's the check size now last three or four deals?

SPEAKER_11: So early stage, I'll do 500 to a million. I'm pretty flexible. I'll go as little as you know, I've read, I wrote a 50k check like, you know, a couple months ago, which was fun.

SPEAKER_07: And I'll write,

SPEAKER_78: Do you still write those? And under what circumstances?

SPEAKER_07: I did. So this one was into a company in a space I wasn't smart in. And a bunch of my sort of other investor friends were investing in it. And smart people I know, we're like, this is a great deal, you should, you should do it. And, and I was like, Oh, okay. Oh, it actually was 100k 100k total. I wrote 50. So it's a fielder bet.

SPEAKER_11: Yeah, it was like, I like the founder. Educational. Yeah, I'm like, Okay, let's just try it out. And it's, it's marked up 10x in three months. So

SPEAKER_82: All right, crazy time we're living in. It is crazy time we're living in.

SPEAKER_83: Well, you know, sometimes you know, it's, it's, I think some people do have like, I can't write that small of a check syndrome.

SPEAKER_05: And, you know, I understand that because I did say no a couple of times where people were using me, who wanted the suite of products that I provide, you know, I want to be on the podcast, I want to keynote the next event, I want you to find me a CTO, I want you to and I have 25k available to you in this $3 million round. Yeah. And the audacity was, I want you to prove to me that you can be a good investor. So I want you to do pick two of these five things to do them to win the deal. Yeah, like the Andreessen Horowitz kind of won the deal from Benchmark for clubhouse famously by getting celebrities on and I was like, Yeah, you know, I don't, you know, I'm in year 11 right now, I've put over 100 million to work. Thank you. But I'm not jumping through hoops to prove myself at this point. But it does show you where founders are out. Also, I told them it was a podcasting startup. And they're like, move your podcast over here and do stuff. It's like, Listen, pump the

SPEAKER_04: breaks. Like, I'm not here to solve your product market fit or your marketing problems. I'm an investor who may do that. But I don't know how you feel about this weird nature now where people are looking to their investors to kind of solve their, their, maybe too many problems, right? Like the, you know, clubhouse King can club can Andreessen Horowitz get Kevin Hart on clubhouse kind of sets this new benchmark that we're responsible to do recruiting. What are your thoughts on that?

SPEAKER_08: I mean, I think it's a balance. I think you've got to like, you've got to find your cadence with the startup in terms of how to be most helpful, but in a way that fits into the way the business works. Like, so I've invested in, you know, 50 companies. So there's a certain amount of time and energy I can give to each one. And some of them use me more and they get more out of me. And some of them are like, great. We love the fact we never have to talk to Zach. He's an idiot. And they just, they just do what they do. And like, it's totally great. Whatever is best for the company. But yeah, there's certain things where they're like, Oh, we want you to do X, Y, or Z. And I'm like, look, I'm not smart there. I'm not leveraged there. I'm not the guy. But if it's something that I can do easily, like, oh, I need an introduction to, you know, Jason, I'm like, well, I can try to get you that. We'll

SPEAKER_55: see. He's a busy guy. But I can send an easy one for you. Of course. I mean, if you introduced me

SPEAKER_99: to somebody, I'm going to get on the phone. But I wouldn't make that ask unless it was a good one.

SPEAKER_05: Wow. I mean, please make that ask. That's, you know, this is the thing when your friends actually, your friends are the ones you want to get the ask from, and then the least likely to ask you. So just to my people who are actually my friends, please ask because people who write me these emails, and they're like, Oh, J Cal, I need your help with this. And can you I'm having a non pro I'm doing a fundraiser, can Elon Travis, be the host of it with you and the besties too. And I'm

SPEAKER_53: like, Yeah, I don't know, can they like, I'm your fundraising committee for your kids high school? Like, are you kidding me? Richard from YouTube asks, Is it possible to get angel funding while

SPEAKER_05: working on a startup part time read second full time job? What if there is some juicy traction metrics? Ah, there's a rub here. Yeah, I just dealt with this for my business insider profile. They asked me the same question. Because we have on our website for the launch accelerator, we want you to we don't accept people who are doing side hustles, take our $100,000. Quit your

SPEAKER_04: job. And your job will still be there if you lose our 100,000 over the next six months, trying to make the startup work. And we're okay with that. What are your thoughts, Zach?

SPEAKER_105: I mean, I think if if the if the traction metrics are that good, then you should be ready to quit

SPEAKER_08: your job. And yeah, I mean, look, if you send me traction metrics that are that good, and you're like, Look, I need the funding to quit my job, I'd be like, Okay, here you go. But they've got to be

SPEAKER_07: that good. Right? Right. And I think, generally, it's most people think and the reality, there's a big delta there. So, um, yeah,

SPEAKER_04: I agree with you. And great metrics are awesome. Side hustles are awesome. I really love what people

SPEAKER_53: are doing. Daniel over a pioneer app. And Indie hackers. I mean, there are great places to sort of work on your side hustle. And if you're a bootstrap or side hustler, to me, that is like, super, super

SPEAKER_05: appealing, because it means that you're creating not waiting. And if you're creating and not waiting, and you can work two jobs, and you start to move the needle on metrics, you get to that, I'll even say five to 15k a month in revenue, 1000 people using your product every week and getting actual value from it. For sure, reach out. Okay, let's take another question. Yannick from YouTube, how do you find investments? Do you also, in quotes, ignore cold contacts, and only focus on startups that have been suggested introduced by someone you know, the classic question, Zach, how do you handle cold inbound? And

SPEAKER_12: yeah, what's your deal flow?

SPEAKER_08: I read every cold inbound I get, I respond with pretty much a forum response to most of them because I'm not that literally my form responses. Thanks for reaching out. This seems cool. Sadly, I'm not smart enough in this, like, which is 99% of the time I'm not. So I just can't invest in stuff that I'm an idiot in. Good luck. Right? You know, if you're if you want me to invest in your, you know, aerospace company, I'm like, like, I don't know anything about aerospace, or whatever. The majority of my deal flow comes from my friends and my network, people who I've, I've known for a long time, it's easy to invest in them, or they send me stuff. And it's easy, they've filtered it. So it's, it's a much higher quality. And some of my deal flow comes from really random places. So someone will send me a deck and they'll be like, Hey, I saw this deck somewhere. And I'll be like, Oh, I want to meet that founder. And next thing you know, invest. And I've done that. And, you know, some of it comes from you, like, you know, I wander around, look at all the great startups that you bring around you. And every now and then I find one I get

SPEAKER_105: excited about.

SPEAKER_05: Sure. I mean, that's how the industry works. We, the filtering process is so much work that we rely on each other to share the pre the filtered companies. And we know that early stage is a collaborative sport as opposed to maybe the Series A or Series B zone, where you might have some investors who want to take the whole round. In terms of myself, when I was a solo operator, I'm a solo GP right now. But I've got a team around me and we have five researchers slash associates at this point, who do about 15 introductory calls a week, also reach out to companies. So I am forwarding the majority of my cold emails that are coming in now to them. And I just forwarded to a group email address, I let them evaluate it now, if it is anywhere remotely close to being in our zone, we do what's called a we

SPEAKER_04: offer a 20 minute introductory call. So if you have an idea, maybe not. But if you have a finished product or an MVP, and it looks reasonable, you're going to probably get on to an introductory call, which is recorded on zoom. And it's 20 minutes, seven minutes of you presenting to us, seven minutes of q&a back and forth, maybe five minutes of cleanup or any, you know, next steps, then it goes to the managing directors, anything that's in our zone, they then send to me, I download the video, put it on 1.5 speed, and I watch it with VLC player, and I've got my own little system now. So that's how I deal with this ridiculous amount of deal flow. So I'm just giving you a big secret here. Zach, even for yourself, as you build yours, you know, you can find somebody who is a researcher out of school for a reasonable

SPEAKER_05: amount of money. And I just put up a website how to get a job in vc.com explain, I'll pay you 250 K for four years of work. And if you do the kind of work, I'm talking about research associate kind of

SPEAKER_53: work. And I hire, you know, what I'll just say blue collar, people who didn't go to Stanford or Harvard, and who want to break in and who want to put in the 5060 hours a week it takes to do this job properly. And I love cold emails. I mean, some of the greatest investments I've ever made, were people

SPEAKER_05: stopping me in the street or a cold email. So please, please, please keep sending them. You probably

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SPEAKER_34: Harris pecks from YouTube says why is the investment landscape still very insular? The old boys brigade is still

SPEAKER_122: too prevalent. Do you agree with that Zach? No, I don't think that's true anymore. Yeah, that's not

SPEAKER_07: true at all. I think you can look around there's there's a lot of young guns going after those old boys and we are tearing their guts out right now. Like you've got you got Tiger who's definitely not

SPEAKER_08: the old boy network coming down from the top just like attacking the late stage phones and then you got folks like me and Jason and others coming from the bottom attacking like if I was a VC fund on Sand Hill

SPEAKER_04: road right now, I'd be like, Oh, we're in trouble. I mean, they're fighting. They're getting they've got a guerrilla warfare going on with rolling funds syndicates, and all types of accelerators incubators on one front and scout programs. Then they're fighting, literally, you know, an air war from tiger who is just dropping bunker busters on people. And so if you're in that mid tier, unless you're Sequoia, unless you're craft, unless you're, you know, Bill Gurley, you know, and benchmarking you have a brand, man, those those series a folks are just they got giant bombs landing over here. And then you got people like us just, you know, kneecapping them, you know, or setting little booby traps, it's going to be harder and harder. This, you could not be more wrong, your information is correct. In 2000. And it is not been correct since thanks to I think that I

SPEAKER_05: would if I really wanted to give credit here, I think Naval and Angel List, and Paul Graham and Y

SPEAKER_53: Combinator into a lesser extent. You know, the sort of angel brigade brigade of Zach, you know,

SPEAKER_05: Chris Saka cyan myself, we just kind of got really aggressive about writing checks quick, and getting that first 500k in which you know, the VC said, it's too much work, there's too many startups. So they basically gave us the job of sorting startups. So they basically wanted to write the 510k check and whatever we were doing, and then another 20k check. Well, guess what, we grew up. And now Zach and I can write one $3 million checks. I was having a conversation with a friend of mine. And they're like, you're doing series A's now. And I was like, just led three series A's. And if you want to co lead, I'll co lead. And they're like, Oh, I guess the person literally said to me, Zach, I guess we're competitive now. Yeah. And I said, Are we? And they said, Yeah. And I was like, Okay, bummer.

SPEAKER_64: Welcome to the new party. It ain't like the old party. It's it's a and you know what, the winner in

SPEAKER_04: all of this society, because there'll be more funded startups, employees, because there'll be more jobs, and most of all founders, because they will have more funding sources to do it. Heck, you and I are now going to have to contend with Republic and seed invest and equity crowdfunding where there is no, yes and no. But I mean, yeah, yeah, I saw, you know, when you saw gumroad, you know, this 10 million, this $5 million gumroad deal, I looked at that and said, you know, that could have been that could have been a syndicate and a seed fund. Yeah. And instead, there's no lead. Yeah, that's just Sahil going direct to his customers. So if you have customers who love you, there's going to be a next generation. And this is why capitalism in America is so great, you can beat that out. It's so great, but we have in this free system and competition

SPEAKER_37: because it never ends. Josh from LinkedIn. What percent should you sell to an angel? If you have an

SPEAKER_04: MVP, but before a customer, what percent after you get some traction and a little money, I'm going to

SPEAKER_05: say a little bit of revenue. So there's two questions there. You got the MVP, no customers. How much should you sell? And then and I'll even put like at what valuation will come up with a dollar amount and a percentage. And then let's say I'll say a little bit of money is 10k a month in revenue.

SPEAKER_113: In today's market 2021. I'm going to see the MVP is good. I'll give you a little more information. So it's a

SPEAKER_45: good MVP. Like the product feels snappy and crisp. Crisp MVP. No customers.

SPEAKER_07: Yeah, I mean, it's so all over the board, right? Because it's like, you know, it could be as low as a 4 million free. And it could be as high as you know, like I just saw 20 free deal that was not that far away from that. And was it a serial founder? No, no. Wow. That's bonkers. Well,

SPEAKER_11: it's great traction and a great team and great validation in the market. And

SPEAKER_55: okay, so they did have customers or people using it but not revenue. Yeah, users. Okay, so a little

SPEAKER_05: different. But so I agree with that on the early stage, I would say, you know, if you're in a major market, and you've got a snappy MVP, three, four or $5 million as a cap on your note, raising 250 to 500 would be reasonable. In other words, you're giving away 10% of the company to the angels. Now

SPEAKER_113: let's take the second one you got to 10k in revenue 120k a year, let's make it reoccurring revenue 120k

SPEAKER_28: and reoccurring revenue, you want to raise how much and what valuation in today's market?

SPEAKER_07: I mean, I'm minimum. Yeah, I've, I've, I've seen, you know, call it eight free would be sort of like low end, and then to the moon on the high end. I mean,

SPEAKER_04: I literally was gonna say eight. Yeah, I was gonna say eight to 10. Yeah, yeah. And you really, the velocity also matters. So if the 10 turns into 20 month over month, or the 10 turns into 10,200,

SPEAKER_37: that's another determining factor. So how much are you growing month over month,

SPEAKER_28: but you're looking to sell in those angel rounds 10, no more than 20%. Because you have to be prepared for three more rounds of funding. So great question. Let's see, I'm going to go to Twitter, Joe Timmons 79. I didn't know there were 78 other Joe Timmons. What is that he was born in 79? What is the biggest missed investment opportunity? You're willing to admit? And why did you pass on them? And looking back? Were you wrong about the company's prospects? The anti portfolio classic question? I always talk about Twitter and Zynga. What are yours?

SPEAKER_07: Yeah, so that the one I like to talk about, I'll give you two, I'll give you the one I talk about is,

SPEAKER_08: is Uber. So like, I met Uber when it was an idea. And Travis and I had this huge debate about whether or not he would be able to make it work. And I was like, Look, the taxi lobby is going to crush you. There's not a chance like you're, you're fighting with laws and corrupt bureaucrats here, you're going to get killed. And he's like, I'm a fighter, I'm going to win this. And it actually

SPEAKER_83: taught me. You identified the key. You literally identified the key risk factor.

SPEAKER_11: Yeah, yeah. But the thing for me that taught me is that like, the best, most exciting startups are the ones that have really clear normative violations. And the normative violation was, can you succeed in violation of the rules that these dumb cities have put in place and the corruption that they have? And he demonstrated that it's possible. And so now when I look at other deals that have like normative violations like that, I think, Okay, maybe this there's this thing that obviously is going to cause them to die. But what happens on the other side, and there it was super clear, like you push a button and you get a car, oh my god, that's like the most valuable thing ever. And so the other side of the normative evaluation was just unlimited value creation. And so

SPEAKER_08: like, when I see startups now that have that, that's where I get really excited, because that's

SPEAKER_45: when the real money gets made. And see, what I love about this is what we're talking about here is not

SPEAKER_05: having an axe to grind or being depressed about our mistakes. But we're talking about here is refining the process, and trusting the process, and thinking about how to make your process better. So if you are an investor, I encourage you to just look at your process and say, How can I be 10% better every month, every six months, whatever it is, and I am constantly looking at my process, and just saying, you know, what have I learned over the years, and one of the things I learned over the years was that, you know, a founder who wants to take a really competent founder who wants to take on a really difficult task, to your point, Zach is a founder worth betting on, for two reasons, one, they're competent, and two, if they are able to solve something that seems unsolvable and insurmountable,

SPEAKER_45: the prize is generally huge. The other thing I've learned is not to obsess about losses. And this took me a decade. And I'm really only just getting there now. I don't, I really did not accept defeat

SPEAKER_53: in a good way. Now I look at it. And when I see the staggering nature of certain returns, Palm, Robin Hood, and Uber specifically, and emerging ones like FitBod, Steezy grand, some of these ones from the

SPEAKER_05: last five years, I just say, You know what, I, when when somebody shuts down, I give the founder a big

SPEAKER_04: hug, virtual or otherwise, and say, you know, lick your wounds, enjoy your one year at Facebook, you know, in your act you hire, and come back to me as quick as possible with your next idea. Because you learned a heck of a lot, you worked hard. And I, I, the quicker I have eight companies fold, the more energy I can focus on the two that didn't. Now, that sounds cutthroat. But the truth

SPEAKER_03: is, that is also true for founders, isn't it, Zach? Yeah, the quicker they say, you know what,

SPEAKER_05: Triggett's got, you know, an ups, there's a certain cap to how far I can take this thing, or Mahalo has a certain cap to how far I can take this thing, I need to move on to the next thing, right? The opportunity cost though, I would, I would be very careful there. Like there's there's

SPEAKER_08: a there's a yin and yang to everything in life. And the yin and yang around this one is that cutting

SPEAKER_11: your losses when it's a loser is just as critical as not giving up when you can fight your way through that that wall. And so like Travis fighting his way through the bureaucracy. Yeah, most founders would have given up when the cease and desist showed up. And that's when Travis started fighting,

SPEAKER_101: like, yeah. And so there's nothing like a cornered animal, like they're super dangerous,

SPEAKER_05: right. And I think this is a very important point. And this is a great yin yang moment, which is sometimes you have to fold. And sometimes you got to go all, you know, and it really depends. And it's situational, right. And Travis just said, I'm all in, you know, if I'm going down, I'm going to go down

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SPEAKER_52: get that $1,000. Odoo.com slash twist. Okay, let's get back to this amazing episode. Sasha from YouTube

SPEAKER_34: says, be careful everyone, don't just take money from anyone. Can't believe he isn't saying anything

SPEAKER_04: about doing your diligence on your VC firm. Well, actually, I'll put that in the form of a question. How does one should one diligence their VC firm? I think it's an obvious answer. Yeah, so I'll,

SPEAKER_28: I'll expand Sasha's very good point. Thank you, Sasha from YouTube. And say, how does one diligence

SPEAKER_04: a venture firm? If you're a nobody in the industry, you're just getting started first startup, you just got accepted to an accelerator. Now you're at demo day, you got 20 meetings, you're starting to

SPEAKER_28: get some term sheets and how does Sasha or whoever it is, actually due diligence on a VC firm?

SPEAKER_11: Yeah, so, so what I say to my founders is the moment that a VC gives you a term sheet, the, the, the, the traction just flipped. And so before you were asking, now they're begging you to take their term sheet. So now you're in the driver's seat. And so what you want to do in that moment is you actually want to slow down the process, because you want to make sure you're making the right call. And so what I do when I'm looking at a VC firm is I start with their portfolio companies, and I go through every founder in the portfolio companies, and I get an introduction, not from the VC, but from somebody else to the founders of those companies being like, Hey, what are these guys like to work with? And then I go down the list, and I'm looking for every single contact point I possibly could have with that VC firm, not just the partner that I'm going to work with, but who are the other partners? Because like, you could spend 100 hours diligence in your VC firm, and it probably wouldn't be enough. Like, you really want to know who these

SPEAKER_08: folks are, because there's some people who are going to ruin your life. And you got to make sure

SPEAKER_53: that you pick the people there. Yeah, you remember that? Um, what's his name from? Uh, uh, Ryan callback, and he had the collab fund, VC, and he wrote that huge letter of the board member and then released it about this guy just tortured him and just was abusive towards him. Yeah. And I think the backdoor reference is what I'd like to highlight in Zach's example, which is do not ask, you know, me or Zach for which founders to talk to. Now, in our cases, we take the work seriously. And I can tell you, you know, you can talk to any of our founders, and we'll give you ones that,

SPEAKER_89: you know, are likely to call you back. But uh, here's a little trick for you. Go look at the

SPEAKER_05: logos on the person's website. And if you're really seriously going to take their money, and then look at their crunch based profile, and find companies that are no longer listed on their portfolio page,

SPEAKER_185: because they probably took them off because they had a falling out. And if you email somebody and

SPEAKER_53: say, Hey, can I can I get your candid feedback? I'm thinking about working with, you know, this collab guy or collaborative fun guy. I've got what episode that was somebody will give me the episode

SPEAKER_05: in our right now. But um, you know, you're going to get the the candid feedback. Now, there's two sides to every story. It is quite possible for a founder and a VC to have a falling out and it for it to be the founder's fault or the VC's fault or just a bad match. Yeah. So do keep that in mind. Um, Ryan

SPEAKER_53: called back, called back was on the program on episode 1141 from circle up and he had a disastrous VC watch that episode it is required reading and I'm just going to ask um, uh, producer Justin to maybe put that on the lessons learned and give it to cuts for the founder university stuff and let's put that on pod notes. Um, we are making post podcast notes on every episode on a notion instance right now. We may move it over to Rome or Wikimedia. But if you go to bitly.com slash twist notes, bitly.com slash twist notes, I think we've done about 20 episodes. These are the cliff notes, the spark notes, you know, your smartest friend in college who took really good notes. These are those notes and you can contribute to them. Um, and if you do, and you do three, four or five of them, your chances of getting a cup of coffee with me go to 100%. Okay. Access is everything baby. It is.

SPEAKER_04: It's true. Okay, everybody. We're going to touch the third rail. We're going to go there. We're going to talk about cancel culture. We're going to talk about misogyny. We're going to talk about Apple and Garcia Antonio Garcia Martinez who was recently fired over comments in his book chaos monkeys, which is actually a great read. If you don't know, the verge Casey Newton, a bunch of folks over there

SPEAKER_05: and business insider reported that Apple had fired and rescinded a job offer for Antonio who previously worked at Facebook to go work at Apple. On May 10th Business Insider reported that Apple had hired Facebook's ads PM Antonio Garcia Martinez, who is very outspoken, highly intelligent, very funny, and they helped him to lead their growth ambitions in the advertising space. But on May 12th, the verge reported that over 2000 Apple employees signed a petition for an investigation into Antonio's hiring in the petition the employees. I'm going to read a quote here in the petition the employees expressed concern about Garcia Martinez's views on women and people of color. His hiring quote calls into questions parts of our system of inclusion at Apple included hiring panels, background checks, and our process to ensure our existing culture of inclusion is strong enough to withstand individuals who don't share on inclusive values, they wrote, we are deeply concerned. Now I don't think this is

SPEAKER_53: Apple writing this, this is in the petition. So just so we're clear, we are deeply concerned about

SPEAKER_34: the recent hiring of Antonio Garcia Martinez employees wrote in the petition his misogynistic statements in

SPEAKER_05: his autobiography such as, and here's the quote that will be on his tombstone, and that he will be known

SPEAKER_04: for for all time. Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted, I think is how you pronounce that word and naive despite their claims of worldness and generally full of sh it directly oppose

SPEAKER_05: Apple's commitment to inclusive diversities regarding that quote. In let's just play the quote. Antonio read it on Kara Swisher's in an interview with Kara Swisher back in 2016. And he actually explained and put it in context. So after the other side of the quote, I've got Zach Colias with me who knows Antonio has been on this very podcast on the news roundtable with him. And, and Zach has some feelings on it. So we're going to play this two minute and 20 second clip because it does give you the full context of

SPEAKER_52: the quote, and then we can have an intelligent discussion after the two minutes and 20 seconds.

SPEAKER_192: Here we go. Because they don't wear button down shirts and whatever, and they like the gays. Right, exactly. But they are complete reactionaries and very conservative and not nearly as liberal and

SPEAKER_197: tolerant as they think they are. So let's talk a little bit about that. Because you know, you've gotten dinged for it and deservedly because some of your lines in the book are a little misogynist. I think to be fair, very misogynist actually, the one about trading women for guns, which was interesting,

SPEAKER_199: which is true. Well, you have to put that quote in context, I think.

SPEAKER_197: Well, here it is. If there was an apocalypse and you had a choice, your wife is not someone you would trade for guns. Is that correct?

SPEAKER_201: Well, hold on. Well, I could, well, I could almost feel like I could probably almost read it. I want you to read it. You want me to read it? Okay, I've got it marked off.

SPEAKER_192: Good. Because this thing is going to go on my tombstone, frankly.

SPEAKER_201: Yeah, it is. Yeah, that's okay. So this is about the woman that had my children. Right. And I'm, this is like, you know, I'm sort of praising her. The British woman. The British trader. Right. She had wild green eyes with unnatural red spots in their irises when you pulled close, reminiscent of that Afghan girl from the National Geographic cover. Her personality was flinty and rough and as leathery as her skin. She had spent years between various jobs backpacking around the rougher parts of the world. She was an imposing, broad-shouldered presence, six feet tall and bare feet and towering over me in heels. Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive, despite their claims of worldliness and generally full of shit. They have their self-regarding entitlement feminism and ceaselessly vaunt their independence. But the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they become precisely the sort of useless baggage you trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel. And this is the important thing to put in context. I am contrasting this broad overgeneralization to the reality of the woman that I was falling in love with. Okay. British trader, on the other hand, was the sort of woman who would end up a useful ally in that post apocalypse, doing whatever work, be it carpentry, animal husbandry, or a shotgun blast to someone's back required doing. Long story short, you wanted to tie your genetic wagon to the bucking horse of her bloodline. Okay. So if I'm going to be quoted, it'll be quoted in context.

SPEAKER_210: I read the whole thing. It was very funny. I couldn't believe someone said that. I've heard it said,

SPEAKER_201: but people that won't say it in person. So like I said, it's the reviews have been all over the place. One has been, uh, you know, I don't like your book because it's everything that's wrong with Silicon Valley. And it's like, so they're blaming it. It's like, well, of course, it's like looking at Picasso's Gernica and say, Oh, it's everything wrong with war. Like, yeah, that's the point.

SPEAKER_212: Exactly. Right. Like, and like you're saying, I'm only saying things that everyone says,

SPEAKER_83: but just never says in public. All right. So they have it. Um, you know, when put in context,

SPEAKER_53: you know, I think it is not like this quote was, um, a quote in the New York times about women in Silicon Valley. Um, it was him going extremely hard on Bay area culture in order to praise the mother of his children. And obviously he is taking a, I don't know, Hunter S Thompson, Jack Kerouac, Hemingway asks, you know, and listen, I didn't study English literature or any kind of literature to be that we totally honest here, but he's obviously, um, you know, being a wordsmith here, trying to, to be super, super, um, evocative and, and obviously interesting and controversial.

SPEAKER_05: Zach, what's your, hey, on the quote itself. Um, and, you know, on a scale of, you know, it's misogynistic without the context, and let's call that a 10 on misogyny. Now, um, women are stupid, women are weak. It actually sounds as hardcore as that when you hear it out of context,

SPEAKER_131: in context, where does it fall for you? Um, you know, does that not matter?

SPEAKER_11: Like, I, I really don't, I think the more interesting question is we've moved away from a contextualized sort of dialogue, the, the, in, in context, every, like, so I, I tweeted about this and I told, I said it, it, it made me sick that people are trying to get him fired from his job because he wrote a book that was a New York Times bestseller, and he wrote it in a, like you said, a Hunter Ed Thompson way, and some of the things he did in there were great, and some of the things in there were terrible, and, but in general, people, lots of people thought it was a really well-written, exciting book, and he made. And it was a big issue with this publisher, right?

SPEAKER_45: Um, from what I understand, and he sought out people's feedback on this specific quote, is that true?

SPEAKER_83: Yeah, yeah. And he kept it in, but were you one of the people he sought out for advice? Is that?

SPEAKER_11: Yeah, Antonio and I talk about a lot of things, and, um, he, he, he made the choices that he made about trying to make a book that was truly exciting and interesting, and, you know, it's, that's a balance. I'm not a writer, and like, I'm not an expert in that balance, and I don't claim to be, and sometimes, in order to basically have something exciting, you have to go to the edge. You can't just write in, sort of like, you know, graduate seminar, sort of like, politics writing language. You have to basically say, how do I basically try to explore, you know, the, the sexism that we all live amongst? How do I explore the racism that we all live amongst? How do I explore these questions in order to, to share a broader view of a world of a time? Because that period that he was attempting to capture was, you know, a really important period in human history, and, and the story is a difficult story to tell. Um, but my point is, I'm less interested in the, the, the quote, because I think the quote in and of itself is not true. Like, most women that I know in the Bay Area are not like that. It's not what he believes. I've known him for a long time, and that's not something he actually believes to be true. And I think it really was intended to be in context, a way to really like, push up how amazing this other woman was. And so I struggle with this world where the Twitter sort of fight is not about the context. It's about that one little blurb in a much longer paragraph that I really, I really hate that. I think that sucks. Like I have nuances, what we

SPEAKER_222: should strive for, and we're going in the opposite direction. Yeah, I mean, here's what I would say,

SPEAKER_83: if you cross out, um, most women, and you say most men in the Bay Area are soft and weak. Yes, so true. That's I mean, say in the zombie apocalypse. Yes, there is almost nobody. There's no guys in the Bay Area. I would want on my team, I would take you, I would take Chamath,

SPEAKER_224: I wouldn't take Sachs, I might take Friedberg. Sachs might be really good for science and you put him in the Bay Area. What's that? Sachs? Sachs? I could have won Sachs in my team. Sachs is not going to be

SPEAKER_63: good in a fight, but he might be good. No, but we don't need him for the fight. We need for everything else. There's a whole bunch of other things. Yeah, but strategy, but he's, you know what

SPEAKER_03: he's like on The Walking Dead? You know the guy who makes the bullets? Um, who? Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: There's a guy who like is like a real genius, but he's, he's kind of, I want to say, I'm not saying Sachs is a coward. I'm not saying that. I don't think Sachs is going to do well

SPEAKER_05: against a horde. But we played poker with Sachs. But he would be like, he would rebuild society and come up with the new law, so he would be good to keep around for that. We need to keep Sachs. Um, I think, I agree, most women in the Bay Area are the exact opposite of soft and weak. I mean, if you're a woman and you survived in the tech industry, which was pretty gnarly, and it was a boys club and, and still isn't a lot of ways. And still is in many ways. You're actually strong.

SPEAKER_04: So yeah, you know, it's the quote doesn't make a lot of sense. I think he was going for artistic license here. And he's talking about a zombie apocalypse. What I will say is what I tell all founders, which is if you're funny, and you're the funniest guy at your poker game, your company, you're still not Chris Rock, you're still not Dave Chappelle, you're still not Jerry Seinfeld, and context matters. Yeah, he wrote this in the context of a book. He did not write in the context of, you know, a slack room. Yeah, totally. And the problem is, you know, if you try to do both,

SPEAKER_83: in today's charge environment, this is the result. And so maybe this can be the start of a dialogue of,

SPEAKER_05: is there room for people to either change, you know, restate, clarify, or be contrite about a quote, and say, you know, it didn't come out the way I meant, just like when a joke doesn't land. And I'm a funny guy, I make jokes all the time. But I throttle myself, I don't tell the same jokes on the pod that I might tell, you know, at three in the morning with a bunch of friends having beers, I mean, you have to understand context. Yeah. And so I wonder, we have not heard and you know, calm that I put this in the area of him doing comedy, he was trying to make

SPEAKER_04: jokes in the book. And he's a great writer, I give him that, even when you're carrying his description of hit, you know, the mother of his kids. Oh, wow, it's like a really great descriptor. He just stepped in it with this, you know, correct quote, that actually is kind of hurtful. And I have three daughters. And you know, I don't want them to live in a world where people think like this. And it didn't land. And so now are we going to be about our people at Apple? So feel so unsafe by Antonio that he can't work there? Or is this an opportunity to have a conversation about it? Apparently, you know, you're on both sides. Now, it's either going to be Coinbase where you can't talk about the stuff, where it's going to be Apple, where if you tripped up at any point, and you said

SPEAKER_05: something out of context and a quote, you're done. And I think as a society, we need to create a dialogue. And that dialogue should somehow be about, you know, what we're talking about here, Zach. And that's, I think that's why I was, you know, was delighted to hear because I know you guys are friends that you would talk about this. Like, what if he apologized for the quote, you know, and Apple explained the quote in context and said, it's a learning moment, like Obama did. I don't, I don't know if you

SPEAKER_241: remember that beer summit moment. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the beer kind of feel like there's a beer summit

SPEAKER_05: moment. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I also feel like, you know, things are so toxic right now, that we

SPEAKER_53: should just move on and he'll get other work. This is only going to increase the value of his next book

SPEAKER_243: deal. I'll be totally honest. And, you know,

SPEAKER_07: yeah, the best idea I've heard about this is biology suggested that every employment contract should have a 90 day cooling off period in it for basically things like this. Now I don't know the

SPEAKER_08: legal language is going to be really tricky. But it's like, okay, if something like this occurs, there's a cooling off period where the arbitration. Yeah, yeah, I don't know. It's like,

SPEAKER_11: where both sides can basically like, maybe dig a little deeper and take a little more time. And the the company in this instance doesn't feel pressured to make a decision, they can't make a decision. And they can, they can evaluate what the right answer is. And, you know, like, for instance,

SPEAKER_08: like, if Antonio basically, was to apologize for the fact that he stepped in it there, which he did,

SPEAKER_216: right? But like, I didn't actually see an apology yet, or I he's, he is, he's definitely right now,

SPEAKER_11: right? We have not heard anything publicly from Antonio. They gave him a they gave him six months

SPEAKER_40: severance. And I will not talk about it. I will not say anything until he wants to make it go away. So I'm sure Apple is going to give him six months or a year of salary, which is going to then tweak

SPEAKER_53: the other side. But I mean, think about the hypocrisy here, as well, as April has, and I don't think I've addressed this on the pod yet. But Apple's recently been accused, and I don't know if we could make a definitive ruling to your point about cooling off periods, that some of the suppliers to their iPhones are using Uyghurs and slave labor. So somebody did a really, you know, provocative tweet where they were like, I'm gonna burn all of Antonio's books in front of the slave labor that

SPEAKER_251: Apple is using to build iPhones pretty interesting take. I mean, look, this is the company that made

SPEAKER_11: Dr. Dre a billionaire. Dr. Dre basically said women ain't . But he used to be a word. And then just like, I mean, come on here, like, like, like, I think that things get really complicated really fast. And that's okay. We live in a complicated world. But what's scary to me is that we're solving problems, not by nuance and complexity and really thinking these things through. But instead, we're going to get a head on 140 characters, taking things out of context, and then attacking people for like, that and destroying their lives. Because the thing about Antonio that really sucks here, and this is the thing that really makes me angry. So the reason why he went to work at Apple, it's not because he didn't have other choices. He had a bunch of other choices. He went there because he wanted to get a job, he could do something interesting. That's great. But more importantly, he wanted to spend time with his daughter in the Bay Area. And so he literally sold his compound up on the islands of outside of Seattle to move down here to buy a house to spend time with his

SPEAKER_216: daughter. Oh, now that I think about it, he has a hell of a lawsuit. His whole world, he literally

SPEAKER_11: just like he just he traded his whole world for the opportunity to work a boring ass corporate job at a boring ass corporate company, just so that he had the income so that he could be with his daughter And so it's like the irony of this this moment where he's attempting to be this very mature man doing like something really, really, really, really important. And instead, he gets cut down by a bunch of like, people who are attacking him, like for something that was public information. I'm, I really

SPEAKER_131: struggle with. And you know, there's context and the subtlety of this is important. I mean, we're,

SPEAKER_53: we're, we're going to have to as a society as we resolve issues that are valid, of people being diminished, demoralized attacked. We're going to just have to put some things in context. And it

SPEAKER_05: feels like, you know, you have, you don't have people walking out of Netflix because of Dave Chappelle, right? Like, are people quitting Netflix because Dave Chappelle says something? Okay, no, Netflix, but in Apple, an employee who, you know, wrote something that is offensive, but nowhere near as offensive as what, you know, Chappelle says in an average show, or I wouldn't say even offensive, you know, you know, straight up, you know, challenging, triggering, whatever, like, there's going to have to be some nuance here. And then we're also having TV shows, songs, songs, and podcasts that, you know, Spotify and others, Netflix and Hulu are putting warnings in front of or otherwise taking off their services. Um, and yeah, some context here would be better. Um, he's going to have a heck of a lawsuit, I think he could sue them for five year or five year settlement. Um, and because he did, it's, he's a published author with the New York Times bestseller, if they offered him, and you know, he's the kind of guy who would get a job for 250 to $500,000,

SPEAKER_251: this is going to damage his way more than that. Okay, it's expensive to a million.

SPEAKER_04: He's like, he literally is one of the world. So let's say you got a million dollar, let's just I'm gonna put it at 500,000. Okay, but I'm gonna pick a ballpark number 500,000 plus 500,000 RSU's total comp a million dollars a year. Um, he's now unemployable.

SPEAKER_37: They have destroyed his reputation by doing this. Yep. And now some people might argue he destroyed it. But these quotes were out there. We just played a clip of Kara Swisher, I believe at a live event,

SPEAKER_04: talking about this. So because Apple, I this is all just coming together in my head here, because Apple didn't do their diligence, or didn't think the employees would have this reaction.

SPEAKER_05: And because they gave to the employees, they have destroyed Antonio's ability to do commerce in the world, they will be responsible. I think any it was Yeah, that was a clip from the Ricoh decode podcast in 2016. Um, shout out to Kara Swisher for not suing me, and Jeff Becker for not suing me for

SPEAKER_53: using it. I think it's fair use. That's fair anyway. Come on. Yeah, I've given your free publicity.

SPEAKER_83: Exactly. I think he was I think a lawyer would be able to argue successfully in court

SPEAKER_05: that they damaged his career and would be responsible for his salary for the next 20 years. Yeah, I'm not 10 years. I'm gonna say I'm gonna say he gets a set I think if he hires the right attorneys, and he goes to the mat on it, it could be a $10 million settlement. Because they they he's

SPEAKER_131: a New York Times bestselling author. They can't say we didn't know he wrote this book. Yeah. And he

SPEAKER_273: they can't say that they hired him from this position and didn't know about the Kara Swisher

SPEAKER_131: interview. They can't say that. Well, yeah, they they're gonna give him $10 million is my best

SPEAKER_251: guess. Five to 10 million is a settlement. Okay, listen, Zach, I appreciate you touching the third

SPEAKER_11: rail with me on this. This is the point. I think that's the thing that makes me sad, right? This shouldn't be a third rail. This is something that we should be able to talk about openly and try to come up with like nuanced positions. And like, we don't I don't have to be necessarily I'm not right here. You're not right here. No one's right here. It's like, how do we figure out how to deal

SPEAKER_05: with this problem going forward? I mean, I, if you told me somebody said that and you said, uh, you know, they're gonna come work for me. Um, without the context, I would not hire them, right? With the context, I would have to have a conversation with my team and say, this person said this, here's the full context. I have a lot of women who work with me, I would say, you know, do you want to talk to him? Do you want to go down this road? And I would have had a very inclusive discussion about, hey, is this like a risk we want to take? Right? Like I at one point in my career, I hired somebody who was a hacker inadvertently, who had a felony charge, and I had to own that. And it was difficult. And, you know, employment is, it's another thing we have to think about, like, we have massive compassion for somebody who comes out of jail after 20 years

SPEAKER_161: for armed robbery, maybe even assault murder, and they try to get back on track. Yeah.

SPEAKER_37: But somebody writes a quote in a book that's offensive. Nobody would argue it's not offensive.

SPEAKER_04: And they can never work again. So that is, I think something we're going to have to contend with is, like, what is the path to redemption here? If he wrote a statement that he was sorry about the quote, he disavows the quote, he restates it, whatever goes to therapy, or, I mean, I don't know if we have to get ridiculous here. But there should be some path to this person being horrible. Again,

SPEAKER_53: Paul Graham, who, you know, this is probably pretty triggering. AGM is actually a good guy.

SPEAKER_05: I believe that it's true. Yeah, he might write the occasional shocking thing for effect. But he'd never, for example, organize a petition to deprive someone of their livelihood. So that's a nuanced take. Stripe employee says we turned down many people that tried for saying much less. Doesn't matter if somebody is a good guy. This is a response to program. Many good guys don't get hired. It's a bad idea to hire people who say things for shock value, especially if those things alienate half the population. That's, that's also a valid point. That's, that's a pretty nuanced take. And David Sachs is take given the number of woke millennials and zoomers who claim their safety is threatened anytime they encounter a dissenting viewpoint, work from home may be common necessity, just to prevent spurious HR claims. I think that this has nothing to do with

SPEAKER_53: this Antonio quote, but he had just said that recently. And I think that actually maybe that is the nuance. I don't know. But I tell you something. Antonio is going to get five to 10 million

SPEAKER_05: bucks and a million dollar book advance for the next book, where he savaged his cancel culture or whatever. And really, I mean, Apple should if these Apple employees are serious. I don't know where

SPEAKER_131: they did they fight against Dr. Dre becoming a billionaire? I don't know. That's a really good

SPEAKER_290: question. I think that or did they? Yeah. That's, that's no, we won't have a misogyny.

SPEAKER_171: Come on. I mean, rap lyrics. I mean, and then the misogyny rap lyrics run so deep. Do you should,

SPEAKER_285: should, would, should all rap be erased from culture? Yeah, maybe Apple music should certainly

SPEAKER_122: be able to press play on rap music. And according to the Wall Street Journal, actually, uh, Apple's upcoming foray into television is back from 2018. Dr. Dre

SPEAKER_53: Biodrama series Vital Signs got the axe from CEO Tim Cook himself because the show's adult themes, which include characters doing lines of cocaine and extended orgy in a mansion and drawn guns. So, uh, Tim Cook, uh, I think probably was able to correct his own mistake in engaging with Dr. Dre,

SPEAKER_05: uh, for these character issues. So I think we, yeah, this opens up a whole can of worms. All right. Uh, they have it folks. These are not easy subjects to talk about. Thank you, Zach,

SPEAKER_28: for talking about them with us. Um, and, uh, let's, as a society, try to move forward.

SPEAKER_295: Let's just figure out how to have better conversations. That's what I want.

SPEAKER_10: Better conversations, yeah. Better conversations would be good for everybody. Let's, let's,

SPEAKER_11: let's let people like Antonio own their mistakes and let's let the people who have problems with those mistakes point them out and let's have conversations about them instead of all picking up our swords and attacking, attacking, attacking. It's just like. Yeah, there you have it folks.

SPEAKER_28: Uh, all right, listen, this has been amazing. We'll see you all next time on Ask an Angel with Zach Coleus and Jason Calacanis.