SPEAKER_00: okay everybody welcome to the show we got a great show for you today first we're going to break down the 3ac situation where the founders were reportedly on the lamb mia for about 12 hours they've now surfaced and it's a really complex situation we'll try to make sense of it then

SPEAKER_01: we cover matt taibbi's awesome deep dive article on circle and i give some thoughts on a recent twitter thread about how to succeed as a low-level quote-unquote startup employee and then we talk about a very interesting m&a story from spotify and i'll tell you why companies there's really two lessons here why companies buy why large companies buy very small startups what is the thesis there

SPEAKER_02: and then why screens want to move and be clicked it's gonna be a great show stick with us this week

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SPEAKER_07: on the docket molly i mean look we have to keep talking about crypto we don't want to but it just keeps happening and this is like was a kind of bonkers 24-hour situation yesterday bloomberg reported that the liquidators who are in charge of handling this three arrows capital bankruptcy which of course we've talked about on the show have not been able to locate the founders okay it seemed for a moment that they might be on the lam their whereabouts were as of yesterday quote currently unknown and then just this morning as we were preparing to do the show one of the founders you shoe popped up on twitter nobody's seen his face to be clear but popped up on twitter and said because i've evidently there was this meeting with the liquidators where the two founders showed up on zoom but stayed on mute the whole time and nobody turned any cameras on so they were like that doesn't really seem to count as being here and then yeah zooshu popped up and tweeted this morning sadly our good faith to cooperate with the liquidators was met with baiting baiting what does that term mean baiting like link baiting like trying to trap you i think it must mean entrapment like they were trying to entrap us in some way and then this kind of mysterious hope that they did exercise good faith with respect to the starkware token warrants and then in the tweet zooshu included some screenshots of emails to the liquidators in the second email he excused the liquidators of agreeing to exercise this starkware token offer by july 15th 5th rather and then reneging on that offer without warning which caused the losses to 3ac's creditors it's got it unbelievably complicated as always but okay so i

SPEAKER_15: guess just my interpretation of this is they wanted to invest in this crypto company stark where stark

SPEAKER_18: where okay like tony stark and then software got it terrible name stark where his crypto names sometimes

SPEAKER_20: are just like it was a terrible name until you made up that mnemonic device and now it's a good name yeah

SPEAKER_15: maybe so it's like if tony stark made uh his microsoft competitor because starkware that's

SPEAKER_23: literally going to be starkware is going to be like a documentary uh inside of the marvel mcu

SPEAKER_15: that company recently raised 100 million a series d an eight billion dollar valuation you know that must have been like peak uh crypto valuations and 3ac was offering the rights to the token offering or maybe they yeah they basically make an ethereum blockchain more scalable whatever that means uh i thought theorem was already scalable but okay uh can always be more so i guess they wanted to do this deal in bankruptcy i guess when you're in bankruptcy molly you don't you no longer get to call the shots because you're bankrupt right and there is a liquidator who gets to make those decisions for you okay uh super complicated and we all know the background of all this this is all part of the terra luna collapse uh which then led to the 3ac bankruptcy yada yada yada i mean what it really

SPEAKER_07: comes down to we don't even have to go on and on about the details because what it sounds like is it's just going to be a really messy fight to get any creditors paid which leads me to you know the kind of easy and obvious prediction which is like hey a lot of creditors you're probably not

SPEAKER_15: going to get paid yeah and uh it these crypto folks i think sometimes think they're kind of they i think they have a lack of understanding of the law in some cases or they kind of flout it um or they kind of created well you know i remember the early days of crypto people were trading crypto and then at the end of the year they were like well listen i lost uh you know i i made this amount of money whatever but they didn't understand the difference that there was short-term capital gains and they're like no no but i i sold those shares and that i bought these three other cryptos and it's like yeah you have to pay tax on that short-term capital gain each time you sell whatever the profits is and they're like no i don't because i still hold it and it's like no no no no you that would be if you held the original asset so like there was a lot of this and you know i said i'm

SPEAKER_38: not dunking on anybody at short-term versus long-term capital gains is you know it's really complicated

SPEAKER_07: and there is not an obvious tax regime even for i mean it's complicated if you don't like get an accountant and assume that somehow your crypto is going to involve taxes because it's money

David Friedberg: yes like so it always does yeah yes and here we are when you go belly up you know you when you're in a

SPEAKER_15: bankruptcy you know a liquidation type situation you have to work with the liquidators to make sure you're doing the right thing for the creditors you kind of lose a little bit of control here

SPEAKER_07: right and it seems like they were sort of saying we still wanted to keep doing what we were doing yeah issue you know and getting on the starkware token for whatever reason probably to raise capital and now it's just all falling apart you know it's like i liked it when i thought they were on the lamb

SPEAKER_35: that was kind of exciting but maybe they're just back and it's part of the fight well if they're if

SPEAKER_15: they're not turning their cameras on they're not participating so that uh seems to be at the crux of this is that you know the the liquidators don't feel they're cooperating properly uh which means to me it's just all red flags that there there's stuff they don't want to come out um when the liquidators went to 3ac's office in singapore in late june to meet with the founders the office quote appeared vacant except for a number of inactive computer screens so yeah you want to assume good faith but a lot of this was done with such reckless disregard for the rules that you you kind of automatically do so i don't know about you but i kind of automatically default to these people were running a scam i i don't know that they were i want to give them the benefit of the doubt but you know it just reminds me of all the signaling i got with say theranos it was just kind of obvious to me from the signaling and uh you you kind of you kind of know just based on the behavior and this behavior of just not cooperating is typically a sign that yeah yeah there are things if you're

SPEAKER_07: hiding things they're usually things tied and if you're running away and not showing up and there's unopened mail like shoved under the door of your office you know these are signs well it's interesting too because they're sort of like there is this ongoing question of like what starts out as a scam and what becomes a scam and some of and that actually leads really nicely into this other story that we've kind of been waiting to get to because there's been so much news but matt taibbi spent a whole bunch of time like months like he was like yes i have been silent and it's because i have been deep deep deep researching the crypto crash and specifically circle and the stablecoin usdc which throughout the tara and luna collapse yeah had i think been held up in some ways as

SPEAKER_15: maybe a safer alternative clearly it's us-based right there's a bunch of signals yeah it's us-based

SPEAKER_64: it's run by you know a notable entrepreneur and they're going public so all of those things would

SPEAKER_07: mean playing by the rules more than tether right one would think and then matt taibbi started digging in and wonder you know trying to dig into like what are the details of this 50 billion stablecoin and published an article titled the financial bubble era comes full circle he it sounds like his experience trying to get answers from circle about how usdc works how it's backed um you know do usdc holders bear bankruptcy risk or not will they be making money lending their reserves that kind of thing he said quote i'm giving up the hunt for civilized and respectful with respect to like how he's going to talk about this company throughout that dog lived a long life but now it must be taken out and shot i've dealt with many frustrating institutions from bank of america to the press office of the fsb but none produced such headaches they are the mother of all black boxes and god help anyone invested in them whoa whoa subtle as always matt taibi yeah i mean listen he he's he's got

SPEAKER_01: a lot of scoops under his belt so again as we try to triangulate here on the circle uh hey oh you know let's

SPEAKER_72: uh i don't know why that pun was so funny to me but it really was but yes right it's the same thing

Jason Calacanis: that you were just saying it's a black box you can't get information and when he tried to ask them

SPEAKER_07: and and look matt taibi like he went deeper than almost anybody after the 2008 financial collapse and what i think is so interesting about the piece that he published and the conclusions that he draws is that he basically is like look it's never any different a savings and loan collapse in the 70s the 2008 financial crisis this it's just people figuring out increasingly clever ways to make money because it's available to them so they do it right it ends up you know badly for some great for others

SPEAKER_38: and a lot of this seems to be around this concept of the bankruptcy risk remember with coinbase we're

SPEAKER_00: like hey if they go bankrupt do you lose your crypto and if it's not your keys you don't really have it

SPEAKER_01: right that's that there's some expression they have some rhyme they have in crypto about if it's not your keys it's not your money kind of thing right um no wallet no to me no keys no whatever no anyway

SPEAKER_00: yeah anyway the point is uh when somebody's a custodian uh and they go bankrupt what happens i guess and so here uh he says i reached out to circle uh with simple questions do usdc holders bear bankruptcy risk or not

SPEAKER_15: will they be making money lending their reserves or not the firm at first was solicitous solicitous

SPEAKER_01: solicitous and seemed anxious to educate about their company structure then the answers became

SPEAKER_15: contradictory then they became nuanced so yeah not your keys not your coins okay yeah there we go bankruptcy seems to be losing your yeah because voyager there was voyager obviously and when you have somebody basically becoming a custodian you could lose your stuff is basically what it comes down to

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SPEAKER_15: there was a bunch of red flags that they had but you know on the other side i've talked to jeremy's been on the program and he seems to be doing everything he can to make this you know trustworthy

David Friedberg: so let's go through each of these and see if we can understand it yeah yeah totally so some of the red

SPEAKER_07: flags that type you found is that um and i think this is kind of what kicked off his reporting is that circle announced that its reserve fund okay would belong to the company not to its holders okay circle said quote shares are only available for purchase by circle internet financial llc taibi noted in the piece that that is like beyond unusual highly unusual and as a result in the event of bankruptcy customers would be seen as general unsecured creditors so someone who lends money without getting any assets as collateral meaning that if the borrower defaults on a loan the creditors have nothing to

SPEAKER_34: fall back on hmm yeah so i am trying to figure it out if people are protected or not uh here so and

SPEAKER_15: what are they doing i think is the other part of the story so in the story they were talking about

SPEAKER_00: well what are they doing with the reserves are they all in cash are they all in treasuries are they putting them into you know corporate paper and stuff like that to try and get a return on it

David Friedberg: and so that is the question where i think there needs to be super transparency and so and perhaps where they started is not where they are now right i think that's partly what happens is where you start

SPEAKER_07: like with these companies that you know probably are starting out with with good intention you know they they're not like this is not circle and usdc are not a ponzi scheme this is not a big scam but there are starting to be these uh machination these manipulations that are unusual to say the least right there's the registration statement about shares only being available for purchase by circle there's uh this kind of large question about how also the new fund that it raised which is 400 million dollars by the way this reserve fund would be permitted to invest up to one-third of its total assets in reverse repurchase agreements i don't even know what that i don't even know what

Jason Calacanis: that is but it sounds kind of bad you know basically what tayubi writes is the big tell always is when financial executives start giving what one analyst described to me as nuanced answers to yes

SPEAKER_07: and no questions and so when he started to say okay are people protected then all of a sudden it's like well it's not a trust but we hold the funds in the trust and usdc is is and is not simultaneously a virtual currency this is all from his piece and and in the unlikely event of a bankruptcy usdc holders would be shielded from circle creditors although nothing is bulletproof and of course there's risk and on you know like on and on and so he basically was like this is not none of this

SPEAKER_23: makes sense this is where regulation would be really helpful because what's happening is you have a company a corporate structure um that could get sued could go bankrupt then you have the creation of

SPEAKER_15: this new currency and people who are buying that currency are being told it's a stable coin it's you know completely uh backed it's a hundred percent backed and that it's secure okay so those words are those actually legal concepts or are those marketing concepts right right okay it's a secure wallet it's secured that to me secured could mean it's secured by the fdic it's secured by some insurance or it's

SPEAKER_23: secured because we have two-factor authentication you know like or we we don't allow you to create you know easily hackable passwords which secure are we talking about here and then when you say it's a hundred percent back yes it could be backed but what is it backed by you know if tether was backed

SPEAKER_15: by chinese commercial paper okay that's backed you know i could be backed by pokemon cars i could be backed by born apes i could be backed by gold bullion i could be backed by you know real estate in miami there's all different things that something could be backed by and that's where regulation transparency has to come to the space especially since people are pitching these things as new concepts right and there is there is novelty and new things here like you can trade the

SPEAKER_00: stable coin uh you know instantly and essentially for free so you know those are all powerful

David Friedberg: things to create digital money uh but yeah it's a good read i have to be honest like he seems to be

SPEAKER_15: going all over the place and banging on every single aspect which i think is good i love that matthew exists right because he's basically like this crazy stress test on these companies so to talk specifically about the reserves and they also have like a high yield uh product where you can make you know yields as high you know loans against your crypto now we said hey listen we get a 20 yield

SPEAKER_00: you know that doesn't exist in the world it should be a red flag if you're getting a 5 yield there's many places to get that in bonds or whatever okay that seems reasonable and then anything in between you got to really do some research here so here's what he said on the reserve circle discloses where

SPEAKER_15: some of its reserves are but not all and not how much of what is where okay that sounds like a

SPEAKER_23: dr seuss riddle that's not circle saying that that's what i tell you circle just it's be i mean he's such a beautiful writer is great yeah i could literally if with just some punctuation i could make this into like a literally a dr seuss which is what kind of makes it amazing right

SPEAKER_07: because that's what they're telling him and he's like i'm sorry what you know they're just watching

David Friedberg: in circles circle discloses where some of its reserves are but not all and not how much of what is

SPEAKER_128: where i mean right if you break it down two fish red fish blue exactly now circle separately features

SPEAKER_23: a yield program which offers guaranteed returns these were never as high as terrorists preposterous

SPEAKER_15: and obviously ponzoid there's a good word i mean right 20 guaranteed returns ponzoid it sounds like a video game from the 80s uh 20 guaranteed reserves returns which quickly attracted 60 billion that

SPEAKER_01: vanished even more quickly but the program exists nonetheless at one time at one time offering

SPEAKER_15: 12 month yields as high as 10.75 so in the time it's taken to write this piece the guaranteed return has dropped from six percent to one percent to point oh five percent in characteristic fashion circles webpage on the subject contains both the incorrect statement circle yields interest rates offer superior returns compared to traditional fixed income investments like one month cds and eight week t-bills uh this is no longer true and the correct statement in comparison to traditional fixed income investments products like circle yield can offer superior returns products like circle yields yeah

SPEAKER_00: you know and this is again matt taibbi is acting as like the compliance department at circle and going in there for jeremy and finding where they made mistakes like there might be like a bio on a social

SPEAKER_15: media site that has this old marketing information somebody may have put a tweet into you know a scheduled tweet in with the wrong information and matt taibbi is going to find it you know and this is where

SPEAKER_135: like this is like what journalism just for people who didn't know this is what journalism used to be yeah it used to be a guy or a gal who just would not take a side they would just objectively look at stuff and then they would try to be a good writer uh and make it interesting to read yeah and tell a good

SPEAKER_15: story he's not really embellishing this you know he's just catching them in misstatements or you know just

SPEAKER_00: not being buttoned up which you know when this happened to me when i was you know running businesses

SPEAKER_15: and never anybody said like hey you said this here and but you said this over here i'd be like oh yeah

SPEAKER_58: i gotta fix that let me go fix that website thank you for pointing that out i would just own it you

SPEAKER_07: know like thanks right yes that's no longer correct a 70 paragraph statement that's sort of like bleep bleep bleep bleep blark and creates even more confusion bethany mclean i'm one of my favorite examples of this is bethany mclean from fortune magazine who is famous for asking enron at an earnings call how do you guys make money yep and then they they gave her like a circle answer and then she went around and asked a whole bunch of people how does enron make money and no one could answer it and she wrote this like fortune cover story that that ended up being the like unraveling of enron and it was just this basic question that's matt type his point he ends by saying if every crypto company will struggle this badly to answer basic questions like where's your money or what's your risk then he writes the storm hasn't even started yet the thing that is great it's a

SPEAKER_01: great it's a great observation on matt's part we'll have man on the program uh man you know somebody

Chamath Palihapitiya: uh let matt know we want him on the program on dm dm him as well you know these basic questions

SPEAKER_15: we've been asking for the last 10 years you know and people in the the response from the crypto community is have fun staying poor okay boomer you don't get it yada yada we're all gonna make it not gonna make it you know all this like trolling and dunking it's all fine but if we were looking at this as an investment molly and this was people's money that they were going to retire with or put their kids through school with you know that stuff is incredibly inappropriate and and then i think if you were looking at this as you know gambling and you were in an illegal casino in the back of a deli in new york not saying i've been in one of those but if you were you know playing in an illegal

David Friedberg: car game in la where there was like a guy with a shotgun in a closet you know and two people outside

SPEAKER_09: you know these details are getting more and more specific it's so interesting

SPEAKER_145: like for example you might not expect to come out of that game with your money oh god you know like

SPEAKER_23: maybe if you go to get your chips and there is a shotgun leaning against the chip rack maybe you shouldn't be in that game that's what crypto's been you know like i went to that poker game when i was

SPEAKER_146: in la and like someone's like hey come play poker i was like sure i'll come play poker come play poker

SPEAKER_15: literally the guy's like how much you want i'll take a thousand dollars in chips and he's like great and i'm like is that shotgun loaded he's like oh it's not very useful it's not if it's not i was like

SPEAKER_23: fair point and i was like i literally did not come back to the poker game i played for like two or three hours socially i got out of there because i'm like yeah i know it's a rigged game right you know like

SPEAKER_15: and they're raking the game which means they take a little bit out of every pot molly but you know that there's three people in the game they probably mark the cards you know there's a whole thing where you can wear contact lenses or glasses and you can put a little bit of ink on the aces and the kings you put you know a little swipe of this liquid on the top corner for an ace in the middle for a king just even that basic knowledge would give you such a huge edge you would you crush everybody so it's a rigged game i don't think circle is part of that and circle is one of the the good actors but even the good actors need to make every edge case very clear and this is where regulators the press and good actors i believe jerry miller to be one i'm sure he is those three folks can sort of triangulate this industry out of this mess i'm going to be very quick today you need to understand

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David Friedberg: there you're gonna get an extra 10 off i kid you not by using my code twist twist so i see this as very constructive what matt's doing to be honest yeah i mean he's gonna have to do a lot better than

SPEAKER_07: this though like immediately like if if he is a good actor and he's trying to make things better in the wake of this piece in which matt you know draws quite the opposite conclusion yeah he's gonna have to get a lot more straightforward really quickly like i sort of feel like you know nick made the note that every time on this show that we covered a weird new crypto project like you would go through the docs and you'd read the terms of service and it almost never made sense and there would always be these people who are just like you're too dumb to understand this and that's just not that's

SPEAKER_66: never the right answer that is never the right answer i i am fine with some concepts being

SPEAKER_15: above my pay grade and i need to like study it for an hour or two to actually understand it and have two or three experts explain it to me totally you know reading a story or being you know on a

SPEAKER_00: podcast might may not be enough for me to react in real time to understanding something i get it right

SPEAKER_15: um but that's very small number of things in this world right reach that level those things are pretty straightforward like i loaned you my money you gave it back with interest over some period of time like uh when you when we had luna on and he's trying to explain to me the the or you know uh was it axi infinity um you know like both of those projects you know we can pull the tapes of and we should make like somebody feel free to make a supercut and send it to us but i'm sitting there

SPEAKER_151: i'm just like you tell them like confounded i'm like wait wait people are paying forty thousand dollars for this game and then how much do they make and i'm like how much and they're like well they can loan it out too i'm like okay they can loan it out to somebody else play but how much

SPEAKER_15: did they make playing the game and like whose money are they taking you know like who's losing the money it didn't make sense to me and the same thing with luna i couldn't understand like okay well this pool

SPEAKER_00: of capital moves in conjunction with this other currency but what but why don't you just and here

SPEAKER_38: there's a very simple concept there should be you know whatever is circle circle.com or i don't know what their domain name is if it was circle.com it should be circle.com slash what do they call

SPEAKER_00: their faq or oh yeah uh usdc it should just be usdc.com slash holdings or you just go to usdc.com and it just shows you the holdings on the home page in real time you know or as of end of business yesterday these are our holdings like i'm going to do that i just uh sold two million dollars worth of uh like uh index funds i had and i'm like gonna start actively trading i'm going to actively trade and like i'm gonna find one of these pieces of software that lets you show your portfolio i'll just screenshot it like if i can do that and just screenshot my robin hood account and share it like i think anybody can do it right like i don't think this is super complicated just put all your holdings out there what's the big secret of what the holdings are who cares what the

David Friedberg: holdings are unless you're trying to do something well it could be that you're taking risk if you are taking risk then you should tell people hey we're taking this amount of risk yeah if you want to be in

SPEAKER_15: circle you know you want to use usdc yeah 24 of our assets that are in a high risk category it's

SPEAKER_00: possible the potential downside is negative 20 um and so you could lose you could you could wind up with 80 of your dollar if we screw this up but we need to make money somehow so we're gonna you know we're gonna so at least you know yeah and that's how we by the way pay for the you know this uh lending program so you can lend your coins out and make money so we have we have to have something in there that has upside you can just say that to people right um and i think they would accept it i think

SPEAKER_07: they would and but this is sort of like this is where you get back over and over to the lesson of the last financial collapse and the one before that and the one before that which is that people can't seemingly cannot help themselves from taking more and more risk right once they've got this money and they see that there's like other ways to make money with it they can't stop themselves from doing that and then they're like well it's gonna be fine but people would probably freak out if they knew yeah so i'm just not gonna tell them until i've made them back all their money which is like the classic and now you're screwed because now you didn't make back all the money and you didn't tell people you're doing this in the first place and boom you're sued um one thing i will tell you that's

SPEAKER_01: happening here um and this is not a hot take but it's sort of like an insider observation a lot of times

SPEAKER_00: the comms department uh you know the ceo even they won't have complete information right they won't know every thing that everybody in the company said they won't know every web page or

SPEAKER_15: every marketing statement etc it's impossible for them to know that they're delegating etc so when somebody like matt taibbi with his reputation comes they start knocking it's like oh my lord and then they start asking question question question question question then you have to go back and figure out like why is he asking that question are we at risk did somebody leak a document is did we do something wrong did we make a mistake did we make an inadvertent mistake is there a bad actor inside our company whatever it is and so that's why you don't give straight answers is because you're trying to figure it out and so it can look like even if you're a good actor that you're being opaque and it might be you're just trying to get your ducks in a row and you're like okay

SPEAKER_00: let's get our ducks in a row make sure we have the right answers for here because this person is so good at their job matt taibbi that they're going to ask follow-up questions and if we screw up the follow-up if we answer this stupid the follow-up question is going to make us look even stupider we need to have a we need to have our story straight we have our ducks in a row and then you add on top of it well this could be actionable and you know with regulators or legal so now you got to get a lawyer on the phone now you're going to get a compliance person on the phone and you're like okay here's what we think we did wrong here's what he asked us and so you know it's that's another nuance of what can be going on here and matt could be experiencing you know oh you know they're not answering the questions crisply and it could just be you know a little bit of incompetence it could be mistakes it could be circling the wagons dot in the eyes and crossing the t's and

SPEAKER_135: making sure you don't give matt taibbi another opening to crack open and you know with another

SPEAKER_07: mistake you've made so that is a dynamic i see happen it happens it happens that you know i've had weird go rounds with founders for example or with subjects of interviews where i'm like no it seems like it's this and they're like it's actually this more complicated and they really may believe that it's more complicated but it really i mean i urge the audience to read the whole piece and read all of the statements that they emailed him and ask if you know like because that you gotta hopefully what they're working on now is the ducks in a row version of the answers to all of those questions yeah he's a suspicious guy too i mean you know to be fair oh suspicious yeah like you know i mean he's like he's like this sounds like this feels like this thing the 2008 financial collapse that's his comparison here for sure for sure yeah if ronan farrow or matt taibbi come for you yeah get your

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SPEAKER_00: about just a tweet storm and this is something i've talked about many times you know i talk to people about hard work pays off or you'll see me tweet no substitute for hard work anytime you do these tweets you can just count the seconds before everybody disagrees with you zach weinberg is an entrepreneur and angel investor he recently had some clips go viral where he was dunking on crypto but he had an interesting thread and he basically said hey there's a lot of noise about what makes a good junior or mid-level startup higher but in reality it's basically three things one extreme competence two willingness to work hard weekends and nights three positive attitude in ambiguous and difficult situations rises to the occasion so you could say like you have skills number one i would agree with that you have some skills uh some competence at some skill um you're a hard worker sure and then three positive attitude and ambitious and difficult situations rises to the occasion uh yeah you're

SPEAKER_62: conscientious you're resilient you can use other words for that but you're gonna if i give you a

SPEAKER_15: project you're gonna get it done basically accountability so if you looked at this skills uh work ethic

SPEAKER_00: accountability would be a way to summarize it and you'll hear some version of this from everybody and early stage employees also i would say is you know the ability to learn your skills or take on projects that you previously haven't done before because in the early days of a startup you will have um you know five employees doing 20 jobs then you'll have 10 employees doing 20 jobs then you'll have 20 employees doing 20 jobs and then you'll have 200 people doing 20 jobs right in other words you'll have 10 people on each job and those are then called departments but in the beginning one person literally in a startup will run sales marketing and accounting they'll have three job functions eventually those will be broken up into 10 person groups and that's kind of the fun and that's why going to work at a startup is so great but he kind of pokes the tiger uh in the second one you earn uh work-life balance and whenever you bring up work-life balance people are going to get triggered by working hard and learning early in your career eventually you are so effective you can accomplish things in half the time if you want work-life balance in your 20s that's fine and a personal choice but your career will be capped the more competent you get the better your balance can be in suspect it's a spectrum if you're really good at what you do you can get things done in fewer hours just takes time um so not too controversial um some kind of uh union style uh you know uh worker b then replied never work more than the contract says unless you're paid equity as a non-senior you're not never work weekends nights for someone's biz as a junior you could never have any kind of extreme confidence skip anyone who expects you to be responsible learn quick that's it so you know it's basically really bad advice um and i'll tell you why it's bad advice all of the skills and the work you put into the job accrue not only to that company sure they get the the output of whatever your labor is right so you made a nice logo you did some sales calls okay great they get the result of that they own the logo and uh if you land them a customer you get that customer but you also have now made your sixth seventh eighth logo you've signed your 10th 11th 12 customer you have that relationship with that customer when you leave and go to another company you have that portfolio of all those logos you can point to so it's not true that you know people especially in startups and in tech work knowledge work uh are getting the short end of the stick like say somebody who is you know picking grapes in a field uh or is you know digging ditches or you know is a bricklayer yeah when you're a bricklayer and at some point you hit some level of competence and you're just you know putting bricks all due uh respect to bricklayers i i love watching those kind of like amazing bricklayers who go really fast on youtube but the truth is they build the wall they build whatever they're building with the bricks they build the brick house and it's somebody else's house and that person accrues 99.9 of the value it's not like you are going to be able to then uh you know get some value out of having built that house you might have made yourself a one percent better bricklayer so the truth here is if you go to one of these early stage companies and you get all that responsibility you take out i would say on average a startup employee takes out for every year they work they take out four more years of work that somebody at a big company because remember what i said the person at the big company there's 20 job functions being done by five to ten people that means you're going to get exposure to all kinds of work that you normally wouldn't be given to you somebody might say like hey go find us an office space it's like well i've never done that it's like yeah go figure it out okay yeah and get us insurance we need insurance and okay great i'll go to a broker i'll figure out insurance i'll use the promo code twist you you have to go figure that stuff out and you figure it out for the first time now if you were in a big company like hey don't touch insurance we have a person in our operations team their job is insurance and they have two people who work for them in insurance that's what this is about and so it's always very triggering to people it's very entertaining um there are people who get triggered about these issues because of their childhood right maybe their mom or dad worked too hard and didn't give them enough attention uh maybe they feel guilt they're a parent now and they feel this tremendous and every parent feels this like oh am i working too hard for my kid and you've got it in your head i'm working hard to provide a better future for them so they can go to a good school i can pay for their tuition i can pay for their college i can leave them something maybe when i'm gone help them start a business and then you're like oh but i should be spending time with them too you know there's a i have a pretty simple rubric about this as parents did you do better than your parents and if everybody in society did twice as good as their previous parents we would have this amazing escalation in how good people were as parents in fact some people would argue that parenting some group of parents became so um doting on their kids that they kind of coddled them a little bit and that's what we're seeing here this is kind of like your childhood playing out in a in a tweet storm uh where people are like i'm not getting paid for overtime i i'm not working weekends uh it's it's triggering for some people right maybe they didn't get to see their parents on the weekends or something uh or their their parents went on business trips so uh i understand that this is triggering later in my life uh but that doesn't mean i still won't post it once in a while in fact i'll post today you can you can go see it at twitter.com jason i'll post today hard work always pays off right just that statement and then you all can look at i'll pin it i'll literally do it live on the air right now and this this is like my go-to tweet if i just want to entertain myself hard work always capital letters pays off and then just for good measure i'm going to pick a gift and i'm going to pick the gladiator gift because that is super super triggering to people

SPEAKER_34: and um i'll just do the are you not entertained yeah let's pick a generic gladiator image of him just sitting there huffing and puffing and you just watch twitter.com jason how triggering this is to

SPEAKER_00: people who who would ever argue with this point or take the time to argue with it hard work always pays off i kind of feel like that's not a controversial statement if you worked hard it'll have some payoff even knowing that you did a a good job working hard but this becomes like the raw shock test for people whatever issue they're going through in life they will respond to this based on whatever emotional state they're in has nothing to do with the words or the tweet in other news for startups uh spotify has acquired a wordle like daily game for your ears it's called hurdle interesting quote from the press release further down the road we are also planning to integrate hurdle and other interactive experiences more fully into spotify to allow music lovers to connect more deeply with artists and challenge friends and have some fun in the process okay so whenever you see m a of startups you have to ask yourself why is this company being bought it's typically not being bought for what the company is today it's usually not because of what it is today it's for what the acquirer thinks it can become so when google bought youtube they thought hey this could be something very big and what they thought it could be is well this could um be a place where we could have video-based advertising because search doesn't have video-based advertising and we can compete for television ad dollars and most people that seems obvious now but at the time there was really only two types of advertising

SPEAKER_15: the web you had banner ads and then you had clickable text ads uh specifically search ones and those two type of ads banner ads were terrible and annoying and ugly and search ads were the best ads ever created but we all knew that tv ads were very special and so that's why they bought youtube they

SPEAKER_00: wanted to take a slice of that business and oh boy have they done so and it seemed farcical that people would actually put you know a marvel ad an obi-wan kenobi and some incredible ad in front of a youtuber it was like really they're gonna put that in front of these like mr beast or you know lonely girl whatever and then all of a sudden now we go and it's like yeah not only are they putting ads in front of mr beast but they're integrating you know those brands into the experience when you look at this i have been consistently impressed by what daniel's doing in spotify and daniel come back on the program soon uh i haven't talked to you in a while um what's really interesting about what daniel's been doing is i noticed the app is moving more what do i mean by that well screens are meant to move when you look at a screen and things aren't moving on the screen it's kind of a missed opportunity so on the internet in interactive media the ability to click on stuff and the screen moving is really critical and now when you open spotify i don't know if you notice this but they have looped videos behind the songs it's quite annoying like if i'm in driving mode i have to you know like please stop playing this video i'm worried i'm gonna get pulled over because here i am playing you know some megan the stallion and megan is on my giant iphone 13 twerking and i'm just thinking at some point the other day i was driving to tahoe and i'm like i'm watching some video it wasn't megan unfortunately it was somebody else but you know it was like a really big huge giant video i'm like cops

SPEAKER_15: gonna come by here and think i'm watching tv i'm just listening to the song and then they added uh

SPEAKER_00: lyrics as you probably know you could swipe them up so the screen's moving again and you're gonna keep seeing this uh with podcasting they added their video podcast so now if you watch this weekend startups are all in producer nix connects those two things together and you can switch from audio to video gaming is a really good idea why is gaming a good idea well what are most people's behavior when they're using an audio app you go into overcast you go into apple podcast you go into google podcast you go into spotify you go into audible you play the track or audio book or a podcast you want to play and then you go to twitter or you go to instagram and you have it playing in the background spotify would much rather you keep that screen open so would audible uh and so would uh you know other podcast players so to do that they're going to need to have more media and more reasons for you to stick around such a great one such a great idea to have you play a game and then listen to songs or maybe even play a game with your friends so they also acquired a company called locker room last year this is a sports focused social audio app and they renamed it green room so they have spotify live i don't think that's doing particularly well this is kind of their um clubhouse competitor or their twitter spaces competitor and i hear like the ringer team kind of pitching it and it seems to have fallen flat uh but we'll see uh over time there i they could have more of an opportunity than clubhouse because they have all these artists there and those artists were really what drove clubhouse in the early days when somebody famous showed up on clubhouse everybody left twitter to go to clubhouse that could happen and when drake or other people do something on instagram right everybody gets a notification everybody races to instagram so it doesn't seem like spotify has done a good job with green room if i'm being honest i never see any high profile people there but they should get people to do more casual stuff uh and figure out how to incentivize that because you know if you did get kanye or you know megan or whoever to start doing instead of instagram lives and doing green rooms that'd be pretty powerful and then why not i mean here like we're talking out loud what if spotify allowed artists to post to their artist page you know photos just that simple thing you know and you go to megan the stallion or you go to mark knoffler and just like mark knoffler can post to twitter or his facebook group and i follow him there on instagram why can't he post those same things to his spotify page i guess it would make the spotify artist page ugly but it would be more interesting that's for sure i would go back to it more often so those are the trade-offs and balances um back to this game it's pretty simple you get one to two seconds at the beginning of a song and then you type your submission see if you got it right uh you get six tries each try gives you a few extra seconds to listen to the song so it's another one of these like little clever basically these all come from i think wheel of fortune or tic-tac-toe um you know are the origin of these this genre of games and congratulations to them if you know of any acquisitions that are coming and you want to uh tip us off producers at thisweekandstartups.com where you see an interesting acquisition and you want to tell me why you think this happened what is the reason why the acquirer bought the company just email me jason at calacanis.com that'll be my email for the rest of my life i love getting emails from the fans all right and uh just a preview of the week ahead tomorrow wednesday we are going to get the inflation print as they say uh print is just a fancy word for they're going to release this number uh and so we'll see if it's month over month like 0.3 percent increase and then 8.x percent year over year just one note on that um humans are very resilient creatures we have proven that over our evolution and you see it all the time uh i was just thinking today like people get used to higher prices and then they adapt so what is the adaptation for six seven dollar gasoline i was driving here in uh lake tahoe

SPEAKER_01: which obviously is going to have high gas because it's off the grid it's not on like a main highway

SPEAKER_00: and it's in california but i was just thinking you know six dollar and change gas people are going to get used to this very easily and the reason they're going to get used to it very easily is they have other options you could carpool uh you could take a bike you could take a shorter trip you could trade in your car and get a higher gas mileage car you could drive slower if you drive 85 miles an hour you're going to burn a lot more gas than if you drive 65 miles an hour i'm not saying that those are ideal solutions but and certainly we're all entitled and we want cheap gas and we've had two dollar three dollar gas for such a long time that we haven't even looked at the miles per gallon of cars um so as dire as the inflation uh seems keep in mind that we do adapt really well uh as but a small example and listen it's a stupid example i know but i was buying and i'm i understand like i'm coming from a place of privilege and i already secured my bags but i've been making iced coffee why do i make iced coffee at home it was really twofold number one uh i really like this you know chicory coffee from new orleans and um i just like the idea of making it myself and not the real primary reasons i don't want to order more bottles of it but i was ordering cold brew in glass bottles and i realized how much i was spending on this buying five dollar bottles ten dollar bottles of it and then i started making myself and i'm like okay well this is 80 cheaper right really simple stuff so if you're nervous about inflation realize that people react to it and when they react to it they take steps that lower their um spending which then leads to the people selling goods saying oh okay i gotta lower the price of this if i want to get more people to buy it and then the whole supply chain gets into a competitive marketplace and tries to lower prices to get customers back we'll start seeing that right what would happen you know if everybody wasn't traveling this summer everybody's going to europe this summer that's why you know all this yolo and i haven't been out of the house last year's covid vaccine summer was going to be the big traveling summer that was a bit of a head fake and now this summer everybody went but if people were really feeling the pinch they might say you know what i'll do a staycation uh or i'll you know do a vacation within x you know drive of uh my home and enjoy it just as much and so that will send all of this uh inflation in the other direction i believe now i know it's more complicated than that but uh when you see that number tomorrow the ramifications of it will be if it's high and it's higher than what they expect so if it goes up more than i think 0.3 percent is the consensus 0.3 0.2 0.4 those are the three numbers i heard

SPEAKER_200: people say now that's month over month not year over year if it stops going up month over month then people are saying oh the acceleration has stopped right okay we were speeding up we got up to 80 miles

SPEAKER_00: an hour really fast and now oh okay we're from 80 82 okay it's not going zero to 60 in three seconds you know like we experienced and year over year we're now at a higher base so next year it's going to be really hard to grow at eight percent year over year again if it's lower than people think well then maybe the fed will instead of doing the 75 basis point um uh interest rate increase be able to do 50 um and if it's higher and it blows it away if it were going to nine or something and it were to go up one percent month over month or something crazy like that this is for june number comes out in july july's will come out in august you'll see uh people freak out uh and so that's something we're going to you'll see tomorrow all right and if you're looking for a job here working with me and the team we're hiring three one two three video editor producers we're looking for video editors uh you've got to be great at cutting video and making short videos all that stuff but then also uh you know have your brain turned on and want to help produce the show come up with great ideas uh for stories for segments etc because we're launching two more podcasts this year so we have all in we have this week in startups and there'll be two more podcasts coming uh one of them will be a round table not just similar to uh the format that i do here when we did the uh tech news round tables and i kind of evolved the tech round table the news round tables on this weekend startups into

SPEAKER_01: all in and now i've got an evolution to that and the evolution will be you know everybody who's in our

SPEAKER_00: orbit but who's not on all in because all in has no guests really we maybe we'd have one every 10 20 episodes so this will be a rotating cast of characters maybe seven really good folks and you can guess some of them because you've probably seen them on this show or all in or they're popular on twitter that'll be launching in september and then i'll announce the second one we're going to make

SPEAKER_01: a show at a founder university so we need at least three more video editors and then we want to have capacity because i'm working on two reality style shows for real tv and so if you would like to come work with us uh you can just email me jason calacanis.com or you can send your resume to producers at this weekend startups.com your portfolio whatever later this week we're going to do a we're going to go over a study that was shared over the weekend particularly bad investments evidence from venture capitalists this is done by a behavioral science phd student from the university of chicago named diag i hope i'm pronouncing your name right d-i-a-g uh davenport uh we're going to invite him on the pod but we'll talk about his study either way i've been reading it and it just talks about the

SPEAKER_00: cost of bad investments and i think they use the pitch book data to find out that 10 of investments were predictably bad no newsflash there um but i have a lot of feelings on it a lot of people have feelings on it as well on twitter you know saying hey maybe the system is rigged and adventure is

SPEAKER_01: biased and everybody in venture capital is an idiot and then other people are like this is part of the system so we're going to unpack that study later this week all right everybody i hope you enjoyed the show make sure you follow us uh twitter.com mollywood twitter.com jason and twitter.com twi startups you can also follow us in our twitter group and you can actually talk with all the other fans this weekend startups.com tc for the twitter community and our discord is this weekend startups.com slash discord those will just forward you on and uh just a quick shout out to our third cohort of founder university this is our 12-week program this is the program that i'm going to turn into a weekly or two time a week podcast later this year and in this 12-week interactive course you get to build an mvp you identify customers and figure out your business model maybe you onboard a couple of users you test you iterate you explore the next steps of company formation to fundraising and i always say we're going to invest in one company 25 000 at the end of the program it turns out i invested in like five or six in the first one so the fourth cohort will be starting in november and i just wanted to preview it for you if you have an idea for a company you can start tinkering now uh and if you go to this program we charge you 700 to reserve your spot and if you come to all 12 weeks we give you the 700 back and the reason we do that is so we don't burn the spots and so people uh have a reason uh to keep going basically every week you get 50 60 bucks back so uh it's been quite it's a very unique um penalty system if you participate you get all your money back and it's free if you don't participate uh you have to pay this is how your gym should work you sign up for your gym membership they charge you 200 bucks a month if you go uh three times a month you get half your money back that'd be pretty cool right uh it would certainly incentivize you you'd be getting paid 35 bucks every time you went to the gym all right everybody uh so sign up at founder dot university not dot com because we got the dot university domain name founder dot university i also teach another course angel dot university

SPEAKER_40: where i teach people to angel invest and you go to angel dot university to see that if you want to

SPEAKER_01: invest alongside us go to the syndicate.com and uh if you're a credit investor you can sign up and we'll let you know about our future funds and you'll see my deal memos and uh you can start investing in startups with us read my book angel and i'll see you all next time bye bye