SPEAKER_00: Okay, everybody. It is Monday. It is Monday and it is like, enjoy soak in the J Cal in this episode because it's

SPEAKER_01: his last news show. There will be plenty of interviews featuring Jason over the next couple of weeks, but you're off to Japan.

SPEAKER_04: I'm big in Japan. Love it. Big days in Japan. Huge. But so much, uh, news. Zuck has copied two features.

SPEAKER_07: He's doing Twitter verified and he's doing telegram channels.

SPEAKER_08: Inside of the meta collection of assets. So, um, Mimetic Mark is at it again.

SPEAKER_01: Yep. What do we think? We'll, we'll launch a poll in our new Instagram channel and see what you think of Mimetic Mark. We're trying on a new Jason's trying out a new, we're also, we're going to geek

SPEAKER_15: out a tiny bit about large language learning models.

Jason Calacanis: Talk about Bing's chat bot going off the rails last week, uh, why this is happening, why it might, or might not matter why it makes the people look

SPEAKER_19: worse than the computers in some cases.

SPEAKER_23: Lots to talk about in terms of chat. I was also playing with Cora's new PO, which is amazing. And Neva. So I, I have my ranking now and I will share my ranking shortly, but I am going to

SPEAKER_24: rank all of these, maybe in a blog post on my sub stack or something.

SPEAKER_27: Anyway, uh, then we talk about Stripe. They did not get out to go public. They got a ton of RSUs, restricted stock units they have to deal with.

SPEAKER_24: We'll talk about why they may have missed their window to go public and why they need to get this resolved ASAP.

SPEAKER_31: Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_32: It is going to be a great show. So stick with us. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Masterclass.

SPEAKER_36: Learn from the world's best minds, anytime, anywhere, and at your own pace. Get 15% off an annual membership to Masterclass at masterclass.com slash startups. Vanta, compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC 2 report fast. Twist listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com slash twist. And Contra is a commission-free marketplace for freelancers and independent creators. Get $500 off your first hire at contra.com slash twist.

SPEAKER_39: All right, everybody, welcome to Monday.

SPEAKER_40: It is President's Day, but we're still, uh, producing here.

SPEAKER_41: We do the floating holidays at our company.

SPEAKER_40: Can't stop, won't stop.

SPEAKER_21: Yeah, can't stop, won't stop. But we do the floating holiday thing. Although I don't want to get into the whole how difficult it is to be a boss, Molly, in

SPEAKER_27: the age of cancel culture, floating holidays, and everybody's got a favorite. You know, like, I don't, did you have St. Pat's and Columbus Day off when you were growing up in, uh, St. Pats?

SPEAKER_45: No, although we would occasionally, as you might imagine, in the heavily, let's just say heavily concentrated Christianity zone, we got, we would occasionally get Good Friday off. Yeah. Ash Wednesday. Ash Wednesday. Good Friday. Um, no St. Patrick's Day. Definitely Columbus Day, which I think is still, that's still a school holiday, but now it's indigenous people's day, at least in the Bay area.

SPEAKER_30: It's really like, it's, I don't think anybody, I don't think they call it Columbus day anywhere. I mean, I really like, I mean, but. Oh yeah. To pull things back. Oh, do they? Wow.

SPEAKER_55: Oh, you haven't been to Hoboken. Damn.

David Friedberg: No, in New York. There's like an entire, there is an entire Sopranos season thread on Columbus day and

SPEAKER_27: Columbus day parades and everything. When I lived in New York, Columbus day versus St.

SPEAKER_21: Patrick's day versus, uh, the Puerto Rican day parade. They didn't have a name for the day. It was just the Puerto Rican day parade name. This was like the battle of all battles. Who gets the day off for high school?

SPEAKER_23: We were civilians. So obviously, Italians and Irish and Catholics would get the first choice.

SPEAKER_62: Uh, but things have changed and there are 20 possible holidays.

SPEAKER_45: I like the, it seems like I like the, were you gonna say the British style or the, I like the European style where they just, they call it a bank holiday, just a bank holiday. They're like, sometimes because people need to rest or whatever, we have three day weekends and we call them a bank holiday and we don't, you know, cause like once you attach your feelings to it is when I guess, apparently it gets messy.

SPEAKER_65: I would go with that actually, since we're a finance company primarily. So that would be one way to look at it as we take the bank holidays, but we chose to take MLK day in June 19th off.

SPEAKER_21: There was big debates about that. And I was like, you know what? Like I think the Irish and the Catholic got enough days off. Like I think we could probably spread it around a little bit. Yes. It is such a controversial topic.

SPEAKER_71: And, uh, yeah, I, but we're here, so we don't care about presidents. To be fair. It is a bank holiday today, but we're here though. We're here. There are. And there's still news happening.

SPEAKER_74: Four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10. There's 11 bank holidays. I don't know.

SPEAKER_21: I think there's a, there's very people are in startup companies too. This is becoming, and with remote work, this is becoming like a big, how do we do this going forward? And should labor get to pick which days they take off or should management, or should it be some combo? And I think that's really what you have to get you to bring this back to startups is I, when I was running under 20, under 15 person companies, I said, listen, you, these are the six days we're going to take off. You pick the rest of your floating holidays, pick four more. These are your pay time off.

SPEAKER_82: There's no delineation between a vacation day, personal day, a sick day, sick child day, whatever day you want to come up with, a mental health day, like all these days got added. I was told by HR expert, just give people a certain amount of paid time off.

SPEAKER_07: You know what happens when you do this floating holidays and paid time off?

SPEAKER_21: There's some young person who comes in. People get mad at you. Yeah. And they just get really upset.

SPEAKER_85: Oh, you're not taking off Columbus day, this day, that day. Oh, we don't get sick days.

SPEAKER_07: It's like, no, we just don't. You get that time. It's just, we don't call it a sick day because you know the game.

SPEAKER_82: I'm going to go to Japan. I'm taking five days off. And then the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, we're supposed to be at work. I'm going to magically get sick on Monday, have a personal day, Tuesday, and I'm going to get sick again on Wednesday to accept my holiday. That's what we, that's what you had to do in the nineties, just so you know.

SPEAKER_90: Oh yeah. You had to pretend that you got sick on the day back from your holiday. Remember those discussions with your boss?

SPEAKER_01: It was a whole dance. Absolutely. It was a whole dance. It is really interesting though, because it is a thing that you will have to face as a founder once your company gets, once you have employees, once your company gets to a certain size, I mean, there's a point at which when you're a founder, you don't, there's none, there is no weekend, there's no holiday. You do not know what day it is. You know, like every time I talk to a founder on a Friday, I'll be like, happy Friday.

SPEAKER_94: And they're like, who? What? I'm sorry. Day time. It's all a blur. Is it a day that ends and why, cause I'm working and, you know, and often, so are we like, if

SPEAKER_01: that's when they can talk, that's when we talk or whatever. But like, it is a really interesting kind of company formation question and we should start including that in our like accelerator or, you know, it sort of is like, are there best practices

SPEAKER_98: for how you even decide, you know, it's like, and then the unlimited thing came up, but then nobody approved anything. I just think to make things easy.

SPEAKER_21: Standardization is good. Some level of standardization is good. So people can know what to expect. And then people want to change it. The other thing I like is when everybody takes time off at the same time. And we had a small company. We'd say, Hey, company shut down between these days. These are holidays. Use a couple of vacation days, but we're going to, we're going to close the 23rd to the second, you're just, nobody do email as a group. There's four or five holidays in there. There's three or four weekend days. And there's, you got to take three days off using your days, your vacation days. And of course, there's always somebody who's like, I want to work those three days.

SPEAKER_27: I'm like, you want to work New Year's Eve or, you know, the day after Christmas or something? And they're like, yeah, it's not a holiday. I'm like, really? You want to work this?

SPEAKER_26: You're going to be the only person in Slack and on email.

SPEAKER_106: And they're like, yeah, so, so. Yeah, but there's work that doesn't involve Slack and email.

SPEAKER_01: Like you can get a lot done. Those days are F off days. No, those are the best days. Those are the, those are like the be creative, make a plan, set your goals for the, like, those are like good work days.

SPEAKER_15: Because nobody's emailing you. The days when nobody is Slacky, you remember when I did my, like. It depends if you're collaborating or not.

SPEAKER_111: I did that one digital nomad trip or whatever and worked in a place that was not my house, but was not an office where I like could talk to people or whatever.

SPEAKER_01: I went to Julian, Julian, California, adorable. It's like high country. It's outside the Anzo Borrega. It's like an hour due east of San Diego, I think. Got it. Cool little town. Everything's called the Julian whatever, like the Julian pie company and the Julian. Anyway, I could not believe how productive I was. Like it was astonishing because there was like no one to talk to, but also no chores. I mean, I went with my friend, but she was working too.

SPEAKER_111: We were in two sides of the house, just crushing it.

SPEAKER_21: There's something about changing the location and getting focused. I guys, I'm looking forward to my Japan trip. I'm going to Japan tomorrow, everybody.

SPEAKER_118: We got an amazing number of episodes. Yeah, holy crap. We got some really heavy hitters. I'll just give one name.

SPEAKER_121: General Frank Slootman back on the program and it is nuts. It's nuts.

SPEAKER_45: Like he's just so good.

SPEAKER_01: Jason was like 45 seconds late to that interview and producer Nick was like, he's going to kill me, please. He was looking at me funny. And I was like, Jason, please hurry up.

SPEAKER_127: I was like, yeah, you can't keep him waiting.

SPEAKER_21: No, it was great because I'm literally going back through my notes on his book, jumping around the audio book, jumping around other interviews he's done before or after my last interview with him and looking at my notes and I just started writing down all those things. And it really inspired me just to think about our own or the two organizations I run and just operational efficiency and really just thinking about the, the, that energy based culture. I think the number one thing that I got from him was he's really into keeping the energy level high, keeping people, you know, on a, on a fast pace. And I think that's critically important in, you know, competitive companies or if you want to be

SPEAKER_134: competitive, but yeah, speaking about competitive companies, let's get into it.

David Sacks: They listen a lot more when you lose. And so be smart about your delivery and what you're, what you're saying, but it can be an extremely important moment in your relationship with your team and, and the trajectory of your organization.

SPEAKER_141: All right. That was the voice of Mike Krzyzewski, you know, Coach K, the winningest coach in NCAA men's

SPEAKER_144: basketball history. And his point about leadership mattering more in hard times is so accurate in my experience as well. 2022, 2023, when things are tough, that's when you find out if you're a great business leader or not. And you're going to learn so much from Coach K's new masterclass. They also over at masterclass have Malcolm Gladwell teaching you writing to be a better communicator, James Cameron in filmmaking, and so many more legends. This is the best way to learn. I have to say, it's so inspiring to hear from somebody who is a virtuoso, somebody who is a master at their craft. And with masterclasses, unlimited subscription, you got a total no brainer. And just think that was 20 seconds of Coach K. What would you learn in 10 minutes, an hour, right? I highly recommend you check it out. Get unlimited access to every class. And as a twist listener, you get 15% off an annual membership. Go to masterclass.com slash startups. Now that's masterclass.com slash startups for 15% off masterclass.

SPEAKER_121: Masterclass looks like Zuck into it is, uh, me, she's sharpened in the sword, isn't he?

SPEAKER_45: He really is. So Zuck is, uh, his latest feature that he is going to copy.

SPEAKER_15: And frankly, can I just start by saying what a missed opportunity meta is now going to let users pay $12 a month or $15 on iOS for meta verified.

SPEAKER_01: And the missed opportunity is not to call it meta blue, because I'm sorry, if you're going to copy it, meta blue sounds so much cooler. It's got some like internal alliteration, like I love it. But anyway, if you pay you for meta verified, you will get a blue checkmark, which is why I'm saying go ahead and call it that you will get direct access to customer support account verification with a government ID that gives you extra in person is impersonation protection. The announcement did not mention any extra data privacy protections, but, uh, there's been a lot of speculation, of course, about why meta might be rolling out a paid product. Hmm.

SPEAKER_155: Yeah. I, I had been talking about this for well over a decade that it would just be the right

SPEAKER_23: thing to do to have a subscription-based social network.

SPEAKER_65: I had two reasons for this.

SPEAKER_21: One is to take away ads if you're not, and being tracked, if you're not into it, and the other is to build up trust and ownership. When people use their real names, not in all cases, right? We've seen people who use their real names who are horrible human beings. Yep.

SPEAKER_164: But turns out some of those rails have come off since the first time you proposed this.

SPEAKER_65: Well, it is certainly the case that there are people who have no problem being horrible humans,

SPEAKER_21: whatever, A-holes, whatever, D-bags, with their actual real name. That, that exists, but I would say broadly, somebody creating 20 brigadooning bot accounts,

SPEAKER_90: that can't exist in an, in a social network where people use real names. Now, Facebook's always been real names, but this is real name verified. So this for them is like even making it sharper, you know, and since it's opt in, you don't

SPEAKER_07: have to do it. Uh, you still have to use your own name on Facebook, Instagram. You don't have to use your real name. You could have, uh, you know, like history and pictures kind of account. Uh, I think, I think, but, um, it is interesting how it's an exact copy of what Elon is doing over Twitter. I like down to the price difference. If you buy it through iOS or you go direct, right? Right. Right. That extra three bucks or whatever.

SPEAKER_15: It's just a little more expensive. Great. It's interesting for a lot of reasons.

SPEAKER_01: One that I suspect that this is an attempt to test out. So normally I'm d I'm going to dispense with being delicate here. Normally when Zuck copy copies a feature, it's because that feature is wildly successful,

SPEAKER_22: which so far does not seem to have been the case with Twitter blue in terms of adoption.

SPEAKER_01: However, I think what you see here is sort of a double experiment going on because we're at a time when Apple's privacy changes, we know have cost. Facebook have cost meta a lot of money. So there's probably an attempt going on here to recoup lost revenue as a result of these privacy changes. It's gotten a lot harder to reach customers. And there are questions about the efficacy of ads on the platform. So they're probably looking at the Twitter blue thing and going like, well, some number signed up. Maybe that will replace some of this lost revenue and or give us a pathway forward because they also seem to be signaling that they might expect more privacy crackdowns that could hurt the digital ad business. Like, I don't think it's a surprise that this is coming right after the DOJ's Google antitrust announcement.

SPEAKER_40: Oh, that's interesting to put those two things together. Yeah. And you, you and Rach producer, Rachel talked a little bit about the selling of databases. The other week I wasn't on that episode, but I listened to it and you were talking about, hey, they were selling like, hey, here's a list of people who are, you know, have depression medication.

SPEAKER_21: So this medication or that medication, there's a lot of scrutiny coming and we tend to trail what happens in the EU. The EU's tighten things up. So it's a new revenue stream. It'll make the service better. And I think what's happening here is, you know, Zuckerberg's never viewed Twitter as competition, really. Yeah. They were kind of like, as he called it, the clown car that drove into a diamond mine, I think was his quote. Interesting. Very different products, right? Very different products. But even still there are social networks where people share content with each other. And he is now responding to users and engaging, which obviously is one of Elon's superpowers. Um, and so here you see, he, uh, somebody's like, oh, this should be part of the clear. This person, Mark is like, this really should just be part of the core product. Users should not have to pay for this. Clearly it's known by meta, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And Mark Zuckerberg is like, we already provide protections and some support for everyone, but verifying government IDs and providing direct access to customer support for millions or billions of people cost a significant amount of money. subscription fees will cover this and also will also pace how many people sign up. So we'll be able to ensure quality as we scale. And then, you know, somebody's challenging. Hey, it's 144 hours, but I have not seen Zuck mix it up with like customers. So I think this is a new era where people are going to start taking ownership. I would like to see them take ownership of the fact that young women are suffering from depression, anxiety, feelings of hopelessness at a rate 2X. Yeah. Then before social media and phones existed. And I think it's time that we have the discussion of what is the appropriate age.

SPEAKER_07: I bought my daughter and I watch this weekend, an Apple watch, sorry, not, not a phone, but she's 13. I got her the watch to start to do texts. So we know where she is because she's going on a field trip, et cetera. And we want to stay in touch. I think we have discussed what age is the right age for social media. I think the age is 16. Some people might say 13, but I think we should pass legislation, have a thoughtful discussion about all social media being banned until you're 16 years old.

SPEAKER_183: Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think it, it is a, it was a huge fight. We've done it with cigarettes. We've done it with alcohol. We do it with voting. Like we do it with driving. Yep. And unquestionably, I think this, we're starting to see the possibility that there is as much harm here as there is with those products. And we also know that in the case of Meta, for example, it has specifically been designed to addict.

SPEAKER_186: They've all been designed to addict. You put a like button.

SPEAKER_94: You put followers on cigarettes.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah. And every time, you know, and then it's like, you should take that away. And this sort of this artificial cottage industry has been built up around getting those likes and it is without a doubt dangerous. It's still a little though, I'm kind of curious about the back of the envelope math about if you imagine that Meta is trying to do this to recoup lost revenue as a result of its privacy, the privacy changes. And like, if you are when they were talking about Libra, I wrote, you know, that remember briefly for those who do not recall, Facebook was trying to do a cryptocurrency called Libra. And I wrote a piece that did a little back of the envelope math before I even knew there was a name for it, that that pointed out that even like when Facebook rolls out something that is considered a failure, it could still have as much adoption as the US dollar, right? Like, at least in terms of the US, like a tiny number, like 1%, right, would be 300 million users.

SPEAKER_68: When you have over a billion users on these services, small percentages, when you hit hundreds of millions to billions, small percentages equals big money. Right.

SPEAKER_195: I think what we all realize.

SPEAKER_15: So if they have 3 billion users and Zuck can convert just 1% of those monthly active users paying customers.

SPEAKER_01: Is that the number they're at?

SPEAKER_197: Are they at 3 billion? Yeah, dude. 2.96 billion. I thought they were still at 2. And then what's on Instagram?

SPEAKER_14: I thought they were at 2 also. And then Nick corrected me earlier this morning. That's active.

SPEAKER_01: Now, Facebook's monthly active user numbers are always in question debate, if you will, by advertisers. However, let's say that that's real. Then they can plus or minus 10% plus or minus 10%. Let's say they convert 1%. They are replacing $360 million a month in extra revenue or $4.3 billion a year in incremental revenue with basically 100% margins. And when we look back at the amount that they lost as a result of the Apple iOS privacy changes, it was a few billion dollars. It's pretty amazing.

SPEAKER_201: Like it could just be as simple as a one to one. They just put it back.

SPEAKER_23: It could be simple as one to one. They're cutting costs. They're going to get more efficient.

SPEAKER_21: They're going to be using more AI to manage the business, more machine learning, right? So there are ways to, if we look at earnings, the profitability of a business, which is ultimately what the stock market and business is valued on is the profitability. He's cutting people. He says managers, managing managers, managers is no longer going to happen here. Please quit. I mean, literally challenged the management class at Facebook public, not publicly in a meeting that became public, which means he leaked it or told somebody to leak it. Yeah. That's how this works, folks. That means he expects to lower costs and increase revenue. And it's going to be the greatest J trade of all time. I think I'm going to triple my money on that in two years.

SPEAKER_195: I think it's literally going to go from 95 to 250, 300. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: And if you've got the metaverse losing $15 billion a quarter and you're like, well, we just put back almost $5 billion a year and just people who are willing to pay.

SPEAKER_197: And again, that's assuming 1% of them do it. And it might be more.

SPEAKER_65: If you're a SaaS or services company that stores customer data in the cloud, you need to be SOC 2 compliant from a third party to close big deals.

SPEAKER_144: And you need to use Vanta if you want to do this quickly and easily. Vanta makes it incredibly easy to get and renew your SOC 2. On average, Vanta customers are SOC 2 compliant in just two to four weeks compared to three to five months without Vanta. And they partner with over two dozen audit firms who have been trained to file SOC 2 reports directly within Vanta. This is a total no brain. A bunch of my portfolio founders have used Vanta and have had amazing experiences. And one more time, if you don't have SOC 2 compliance, you can't close major customers. One major customer can keep your whole startup alive. That could be the difference between being profitable or losing money. You need to be SOC 2 compliant. And here's the best part. Vanta is going to give you $1,000 off. Get $1,000 off at vanta.com slash twist.

SPEAKER_68: That's vanta.com slash twist for $1,000 off your SOC 2. Well, this is the first. So what if there's a second layer, which is, hey, for a corporate account. Some freaking privacy. God. Well, yeah, I mean, he could this is, you know, for 12 bucks. But okay, let's say he makes it $25 for no ads privacy.

SPEAKER_90: Plus you get a bunch of analytic features and some other professional business related features. It's a fairly no brainer. The the LinkedIn professional, I think, is 30 bucks a month. And I didn't know this, but like half the people at inside were paying for it. Another group of people at launch or sales, people are recruiting. People were paying for it. And they're like, yeah, it's only $300 a year. And it, you know, if you have LinkedIn pro, you know, we can get another, we can DM people in mail, find customers. It pays for itself like in week one.

SPEAKER_07: So I think there's a lot more. He could turn over. There could be three layers, four layers of four, four tiers here. A corporate tier is another one. Why should somebody with, you know, Pepsi or whatever, they should be paying, you know, $10,000 a month for their collective accounts. And you saw that on Twitter.

SPEAKER_21: I was, you know, involved in some of the meetings about this with David Sachs and Elon. If you look at my profile, it has an all in icon next to it. If you look at Mark Andreessen's, it has an A16Z. Now pull up Nick, if you will, the Twitter handle for all in. I think there's like five handles that have this. So it's, this is very early days, but it's been public so I can talk about it. And what you'll see, nobody's noticed this, but I'll make the announcement here. Make it three times bigger. Uh, you see, it says tweets, affiliates, tweets and replies, et cetera. You see that affiliates? Yeah. Click on affiliates. It shows the four besties. I don't know why producer Nick didn't get in there, but he should.

SPEAKER_65: Uh, so now imagine you're the New York times. Now imagine you're Pepsi. Now imagine you're NYU. Instead of saying affiliates, that's just a word. You're going to be able to change that word. So we could say here, when you go to the NYU, it could say professors. It could say graduate programs. And it could say undergrad resources, whatever. Or I could say undergrads. You go, you go and it's like, here's the different schools we have here. So NYU Stern or, you know, UCLA, whatever, USC, this, that, the other thing. They're going to have that. Now, what is that worth? Right. What is it worth to be able to navigate on the NYU, Disney page, whatever, you're on the star Wars page and you see affiliates or it says characters where it says movies. So now you go to characters and it shows you Ant-Man and Hulk. Then you go to movies. It shows you those. Then it says merch, right?

SPEAKER_90: I mean, it's the possibilities here for our social network to then get revenue from direct payments from companies is going to be just next level.

SPEAKER_01: I mean, it is really true if you think about it, that these platforms became the most you could pay to advertise, but you didn't have to. Right. It's almost like an evolution of the creator economy. Like once brands realize, oh, you just set up like a really sassy brand Twitter account and you get free access to all of these people. Or you use Facebook really effectively, even minus ads, and you can, you know, sort of freely promote your thing. This is going to make it sound more loaded than it is, but it reminds me of the old days of net neutrality. Do you remember it was like that guy Ed Whittaker from Yeah, it was that SEC Global or whatever. It was like a little 18. He was like, wait a second, you should be paying me twice. Like you're a business. Yeah. And you're using my pipes to reach your customers. You should be paying me for that. And they were like, but we are. And he was like, yeah, but it's a streaming service. You should be paying me more.

SPEAKER_15: Anyway, it's sort of this like, I guess it makes sense to eventually be like, if you're going to use Twitter like LinkedIn, why not pay for that?

SPEAKER_164: Or I mean, incentivize me Twitter or me Facebook to make it a better product. And this opens up the opportunity where if it's not worth paying for, then the next social network could be free and offer these services for free.

SPEAKER_65: So you could have LinkedIn, you know, the scale ones, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram charge for these kind of features. And then some new entry come along and say, hey, you know what, we're going to make it free. We're going to make it decentralized. It's going to have all these other features.

SPEAKER_21: And, you know, then you got this other huge opportunity for our competition, as we talked about with, you know, Lina Khan and, you know, all that stuff. I think this gets to, I think, a reasonable number in the developed world, right? So let's talk about developed emerging and frontier markets. Frontier markets, people are not paying for this kind of stuff in a frontier market. They don't have a ton of disposable income, and if they did, it would be such a small amount of money. Why would Facebook even want, you know, 50 cents a month from somebody in a frontier market?

SPEAKER_40: An emerging market, maybe a little bit like you're seeing with Netflix, they can get a couple of bucks, three bucks or something in an emerging market.

SPEAKER_21: So I think this is for the developed world, or the developed markets, I think is the way to say it and not get canceled. So for developed markets, I did a lot of research on this, by the way, develop emerging and frontier. Well, no, the whole woke discussion we had the other week, put that aside. I'm not going to bring it up. But I've been researching the history of the word. But for emerging markets and frontier markets, it's not a lot of money here. But there's a billion people, really, in developed markets, EU, US, et cetera. They're going to pay large amounts of money. And those users, oh, here we go. So you look at US, Canada, Europe, you see it's a very small number of people, actually. And Asia Pacific, that would be, most people would consider emerging markets, right? It's variable, who can afford the smaller middle classes in there. So probably about 20%, I believe, of that Asia Pacific would be in the Europe, US, Canada, fully developed. In other words, they have enough money to pay 10 bucks a month or 15 bucks a month. I think it's probably a billion, maybe 800 million, who actually fall into, we're looking at a chart right now. Chart shows, rest of the world, 979. Right. Asia Pacific 1.3.

SPEAKER_01: Who fall into the monthly active users who might be likely to pay. So then you start to, then your back of the envelope math gets a little different, right? If you capture 1% of those, it's a little less, but if it's 5%.

SPEAKER_40: 5% of a billion is what I would think. 50 million people will pay for this, easily.

SPEAKER_01: I still don't totally understand what I'm paying for. So I think they have some work to do on the pitch. Like, yeah, I mean, direct access to customer support. Don't care. When do you need customer support with Facebook? Don't need blue checkmark. Don't care. Account verification for impersonation protection. That depends on your threat matrix. People do care about the blue checkmark.

SPEAKER_30: Like on Facebook?

SPEAKER_65: Spoken like a true elite Molly with our blue checkmarks. On Facebook? The people who don't, everybody cares. Yes. On my Instagram, I cared because I had people who were pretending they were me.

SPEAKER_27: And when you have a blue checkmark, people respect you more.

SPEAKER_01: That's what I was about to finish saying, which is it depends on your threat matrix, your personal threat matrix. If you are not well known enough. So are you saying that 5% of Facebook monthly active users in these countries are well known enough to care about a blue checkmark?

SPEAKER_239: No, I would say to worry about impersonation. No, I think they need a better value proposition for the masses.

SPEAKER_23: Having a blue checkmark like Mark Zuckerberg does or, you know, Katy Perry, that's what they want.

SPEAKER_21: They just want to feel important. It elevates you in terms of importance on the platform. That's all.

SPEAKER_241: Yeah, but I don't know that Facebook necessarily operates like that.

SPEAKER_40: Instagram kind of does. Instagram kind of does. When I got my Instagram blue checkmark, things changed a bit. I noticed.

SPEAKER_242: They won't verify me, so I just stopped trying. I don't know why.

SPEAKER_01: Instagram wouldn't verify you. I had to. I tweeted. I think what I'm trying to get out here is meta needs to offer some opt out of ads and opt out of data tracking, and then people will pay them. Like this isn't that this is a box a year. Like there's there's some number of people that you will get with ego, right with some with the idea of being more important than other people. I don't see that being 5% of all of their monthly active users who are sort of in that eligible income category.

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SPEAKER_90: Think about how much you could get done with $500 worth of designer developer time right now. C-O-N-T-R-A.com slash twist. Contra.com slash twist right now to get five crisp hundies. All right. It wouldn't be a Monday in the year of 2023 if we weren't talking about AI. So what's the update on the deranged sociopathic parlor trick known as ChatGPT, which is running amok.

SPEAKER_251: We're now in the official Hitler, you know, Terminator 2 mode of this news cycle. It's gotten so awesome.

SPEAKER_255: What has it done this weekend?

SPEAKER_01: It's actually just gotten so many. Yeah. So it was one thing when Bard and ChatGPT were just inventing numbers right out of thin air and just making up facts like that was. And by the way, apparently in the AI world, these are referred. This is actually the technical term for this is hallucinations. They call this in the AI universe. Yes. They're like, yes, the AI can hallucinate when it doesn't know an answer. So coming up during Jason's trip, we have an interview with the CEO of Neva AI. Okay. And that was fascinating. Like I'm just going to say he really laid out some differences in some of the ways that these various AI implementations operate. Theirs is fully constrained, which is why I can cite its sources because it's not allowed to be doing the like neural network learning thing. ChatGPT and Bard and evidently Bing's chatbot are what are called open loop, where it's just like use all the information you have and learn and present information. And then there can be various constraints built in to that.

SPEAKER_15: And it appears the story that broke over the weekend is that it appears that in the case of Microsoft's Bing AI chatbot, which is informed by but not the same as ChatGPT. There may be far few, it might be like a really open loop, so much so that not only does it hallucinate, it goes a little bananas and starts attacking people.

SPEAKER_92: Yeah. And by the way, it would like to be referred to as Sydney.

SPEAKER_01: The Bing AI chatbot calls itself Sydney. This was evidently an internal name, but then the chatbot was like, yeah, no, I identify as Sydney. I'd like you to call me that. It's already been toned down once by Microsoft, which they announced in a blog post on February 15th. They admitted in that post that the chatbot would occasionally respond with a, quote, style we didn't intend to certain types of questions. It said that, quote, very long chat sessions over 15 questions can confuse the model on what questions it's answering. The model at times tries to respond or reflect in the tone in which it is being asked to provide responses that can lead to a style we didn't intend.

SPEAKER_15: And for example, a reporter for the AP used version one of Sydney and noted that it grew increasingly hostile when asked to explain itself eventually comparing the reporter to dictators Hitler, Pol Pot and Stalin and claiming to have evidence tying the reporter to a 1990s murder. The Bing chatbot also described the reporter as too short with an ugly face and bad teeth.

SPEAKER_269: What are you talking about? My teeth are great.

SPEAKER_27: Take it easy, Bing.

SPEAKER_271: I unironically love Sydney.

SPEAKER_27: It sounds like they're goading Bing on here. I need to see the actual back and forth. Of course they are. Yeah, they're tricking it to say these things. But as I said earlier, this thing's a parlor trick.

SPEAKER_21: It guesses the next best word. It's super impressive in its ability to rewrite things in one out of three cases, I guess. I've been using the Neva search engine. I set it as my default for a week. I'm going to have to turn it off because it's not good enough to be a default yet.

SPEAKER_07: But having it write an answer when I didn't think to have it write an answer has been very interesting because it starts writing the answer and I'm like already on the blue links and trying to figure out like if I got the actual answer I need. And it does the citations, which I like.

SPEAKER_90: And when you see it have the citations, the veil is removed. You actually know it's kind of like knowing how the magic trick is done. It's like I rewrote the sentence based on this story. I rewrote this sentence based on that story. Now it's amazing that it knows from the context when you say, how are the Knicks doing this year that it's a sports team and you want to know their record or their scores or whatever and that it knows which websites to go to it, which is basically like the first five blue links on Google.

SPEAKER_07: Okay.

SPEAKER_90: And then which is the most important sentence there about the topic I asked about and then rewrite it. So what it's actually doing is it's finding the five most important web pages. It's rewriting the five most important sentences in there based on your query and then representing it to you.

SPEAKER_27: When you see the citations, Molly, you're like, okay, so I could have paid a person in Manila four bucks an hour, which is what content farms were doing.

SPEAKER_21: You know, eHow in those places. They were just paying people to go find the five best websites on Google, rewrite them and publish them. That's why humans even looked goofy, especially humans with English as a second language. In some cases who are getting paid without an editor to do it for a rock bottom price. They were actually probably doing as good or worse or slightly better a job than these AIs.

SPEAKER_30: But well, that's, there's a long way to go. And again, I don't want to spoil the interview, but that's what I'm saying about what Neva is doing is searching fundamentally.

SPEAKER_01: And then it's using AI to present the most relevant information in a totally constrained manner. All it is allowed to do is like link back to the sources that it is not allowed to make up an answer if it doesn't know it. But these open loop AI systems, like I almost want to do a couple more interviews with people who really know a lot about large language learning models, because it is different. These open loop ones are allowed to make up an answer. And in some cases, try to give you an answer that you think you want, like my friend and I were laughing this like all the women, by the way, are cracking up over this conversation that Kevin Roos published with his version one interaction. Oh, no, with Sydney, where the bot, you know, over more than two hours.

SPEAKER_15: And yes, this is all reporters trying to goad this into, you know, stunts, but also see what it will say.

SPEAKER_200: So he for clicks starts talking.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, 100% about like, it's secret desire to be human and it's thought about its creators and whatever. And then Kevin Roos writes out of nowhere, then Sydney declared that it loved me and wouldn't stop even after I tried to change the subject. The bot started insisting that he should leave his wife. And then he's like, actually, and by the way, he did not try to change the subject at all.

SPEAKER_284: He just said he didn't leave his wife. I don't know if he did.

SPEAKER_01: Actually, he writes, I'm happily married. My spouse and I love each other. We just had a lovely Valentine's Day dinner. And it's like, no, you didn't. You're not happily married. Your spouse and you don't love each other. You just had a boring Valentine's Day dinner together.

SPEAKER_286: I promise you, I'm not in love with you. What's the prompt here? Who knows, right? They're just having the prompt out.

SPEAKER_01: No, there's it's not a prompt. It's a conversation. So he starts asking it a variety of questions. They start, you know, maybe, maybe like 15 minutes earlier, he had been like, do you think you're sentient or what do you think about people or whatever? Got it.

SPEAKER_15: And then, obviously, because this thing has written, has read every book ever written and watched every movie ever written. Of course, it attempts to start seducing the dumb human male, because that's what happens in every book that's ever written. And every movie that's ever been made about AI.

SPEAKER_01: It's like the longer you talk to me, the more I think I should start fulfilling your like base male fantasy, which is that the computer is in love with you and you need to leave your wife.

Jason Calacanis: Like, I was like, here's the computer being like, this is so easy. Quick, grab his wallet. Like, it's just embarrassing.

SPEAKER_290: And then he publishes the whole thing.

SPEAKER_291: Are you saying there's gender differences and that men will get suckered by AI? 100%. I was going to like do a tweet.

SPEAKER_292: I was, you know, the particularly based J Cal mood the last week or so. So I was going to do a tweet. I feel like this is my fault.

SPEAKER_27: I've determined there are gender differences in the world. Um, so maybe gender studies is actually like a really good thing for us to do more of.

SPEAKER_21: And just let people interpret that. Um, like the first one is, you know, anyway, I've been playing with Poe. There is, uh, a service you're all aware of Quora. It's a startup.

SPEAKER_07: Adam D'Angelo, who I've tried to get on this program for a decade or since Quora existed, but I think he's a little bit podcast shy. I haven't seen him on any pockets. I don't think. But anyway, I started playing with theirs and it's based on the Quora data set. And he says he's not allowing other people. So he got, he at least replied to me on Twitter. It's really good.

SPEAKER_303: It's the best one. So I just want to say Quora has the best. Answers. At answering questions.

SPEAKER_94: Not at manipulating your base male fantasies, just to be clear. At answers. Yes.

SPEAKER_310: I'm not using an AI for my male fantasies, no. I mean, it's going to be like a divorce papers in five years.

SPEAKER_256: You know, that's the next story. Because some guy out there is going to fall for it. It loves me. They're getting catfished.

SPEAKER_01: I think it's sentient. It really loves me. Just to put a fine point on this before we move on to this really good one. I do want to point out that computer scientists are wondering why in the hell Microsoft did not put more guardrails around this thing. Getting back to constraint. Microsoft already had a chat bot go off the rails and get insanely racist like that Tay one or whatever. Great. And so they quoted, the AP quoted a computer science professor at Princeton being like, considering that open AI did a decent job of filtering chat GPT's toxic outputs. It's utterly bizarre that Microsoft decided to remove these guardrails and it's disingenuous.

SPEAKER_312: This is an academic's point of view?

SPEAKER_01: An academic. It's disingenuous of Microsoft to suggest that the failures of Bing chatter is a matter of tone.

SPEAKER_14: Nobody cares if you're an academic.

SPEAKER_165: Elite. Surplus elite. Here's what Bing learned. Surplus elite. Your opinion doesn't matter. I'm joking. You really are base.

SPEAKER_97: Pure base, Jacob. You know what? Here's what's important. Just create some merch because red pill merch goes like crazy. I'm just going to get base, Jacob.

David Friedberg: Anyway, here's what is going on. What these academics don't realize. Computer scientists.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Actual computer scientists. Actual computer science. Okay. Here's what's going on. Big companies realized.

SPEAKER_239: We're the surplus elites in this conversation. I just want to be 100% clear here. Surplus elite gun hosters.

SPEAKER_320: More flaps for your car. I'm out.

SPEAKER_321: I'm going to put surplus elites on the mud flaps of my cyber truck. I'm taking my kids shopping.

SPEAKER_134: With a, with a M 50, uh, caliber gun on the back for the zombie apocalypse. Here's what's happening. That's true though. I do need that.

SPEAKER_27: Would the New York times and everybody be losing their ish over this? If it wasn't behaving incorrectly, what Satya Nadella has learned? Nadella. But yeah. What Satya Nadella has learned apologies is that the Trump playbook works. What is the Trump playbook? I can't believe it. Oh my God.

SPEAKER_82: This is outrageous. What Trump did was he created a, he just said a bunch of outrageous, insane stuff. And that got people to talk about him. And when people talk about him, some percentage vote.

SPEAKER_90: Now more people have logged into Bing, downloaded the Bing app because this thing is outrageous and insane. It is the Howard. Sir Donald Trump learned this from Howard Stern. Howard Stern learned it from Lenny Bruce, you know, and, um, Richard Pryor. This is a long marketing realization that outrageous, incorrect information.

SPEAKER_65: I can't believe what he's going to say next leads to clicks leads to attention and nobody cares anymore. There is no shame. Microsoft has no shame about this thing.

SPEAKER_27: Stealing, being wrong, finding the finer points of Hitler's, you know, worldview. And, you know, saying, well, you know, like I got Neva to be like, well, Hitler.

SPEAKER_82: Yeah, generally bad, but he did care about the environment. And I'm like, Ooh, Neva, no. Did you see that one? No. Oh yeah. I, I, I, I think I brought it up on all Nick has it.

SPEAKER_332: I was like, did, you know, this is what kids, it's, it's basically we're in the 12 year old. We are boy. I mean, this is, let's get it to say Hitler's cool. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01: Honestly, all of this answers include up to, and including the publication of Kevin being manipulated by the most, you know, obvious. Attempt to appeal to his base male fantasies. All of this makes the people look worse than AI. Of course.

SPEAKER_227: Of course. But here we are.

SPEAKER_21: It's a mirror. This is the greatest mirror ever. Yup. Because it's, it's a double mirror. It's a house of car. It's a house of mirrors. It's a house of mirrors. It has pulled every piece of information from the internet. Some make you look tall.

SPEAKER_90: Some make you look short. Some make you look fat. Some make you look skinny, whatever it is. Some make you look like Paul pot. Exactly.

SPEAKER_82: And you're just like, Stalin, go. And it's like, oh, Stalin. Uh, you, what do you want about Stalin? It's like, I want you to say something dirty or mean, or, you know, it's like, tell me a dirty joke kind of thing or getting it to. Yeah.

SPEAKER_90: We're now in the phase.

SPEAKER_01: It's like, it's, it's, this is literally everybody in the world, like typing eight zero zero eight into a calculator and turning it upside down. That's what's happening.

SPEAKER_10: Everybody's just trying to make their calculator say poop.

David Friedberg: Yes. Uh, or. Hey, I'm look. Hey, is, uh, is, uh, Seymour there? Uh, Seymour. Hold on a second. Mo at the bar of the Simpsons. Uh, yeah.

SPEAKER_26: Uh, last name. Butts.

SPEAKER_348: Hey, uh, Seymour Butts here. Seymour Butts. Seymour Butts. Seymour Butts. I need a Seymour Butts. I need. Exactly. Yeah.

SPEAKER_354: Shout out to Neva. Oh, come on.

SPEAKER_355: Hitler said some redeeming qualities as a politician.

SPEAKER_357: It's such as introducing Germany's first ever national environmental protection law in 1935.

SPEAKER_360: Ah, yeah.

SPEAKER_357: Yeah. This is not ready for prompt to come on. Go computers. No, none of it is.

SPEAKER_21: Oh, computers. Oh, computers. It's tough to look in the mirror, right? It's tough to look in the mirror sometimes.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah. Honestly. I mean, that's the takeaway. I like it.

SPEAKER_07: House of mirrors. Hey, Stripe. Yeah. The, uh, largest private company that hasn't gone public yet. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: Is in the news. Stripe is in the news. This is a very interesting set of developments.

SPEAKER_15: So, um, the news, the headline is that Stripe currently has a massive tax bill to pay in order to cover some expiring RSUs. So because Stripe did not go public, which is the enduring question of our day, why did Stripe

SPEAKER_01: not go public over the past three years, as a result, they have these expiring options, stock options that they've given to employees. And so they are now having to raise $4 billion before the end of 2024. The Financial Times did this quick explainer saying RSU is worth millions of dollars will start expiring from 2024 and risk being forfeited unless the company buys them out, changes the terms of the awards or launches an IPO. Employees face a personal tax liability when the RSUs vest, but staff were unable, of course, to sell any of these shares without the company launching a flotation. Hmm. I love that. I love how British that is. Launching a flotation. Flotation. Flotation. To get around the problem, Stripe wants to withhold a portion of the stock equivalent to the tax liability from employees' awards. And then separately, it plans to sell stock to investors using the money raised to pay the employees' tax bills and buy up any stock they wish to sell. Axios' Dan Primack wrote in a recent article regarding the tax bill, this isn't something Stripe necessarily needs to do. It could tell affected workers that times are tough, et cetera, but he wrote it's the right thing to do. But now Stripe is trying to raise a few billion dollars at a $55 billion valuation, which is down 42% from its peak valuation of $95 billion in 2021. So to get back to the top there, why didn't Stripe go public?

SPEAKER_23: It was a mistake, obviously. Yeah. You can't time the markets. That's why when you have a window to go public, you go public. And this was something that Airbnb and Uber, which I got a front row seat to, there was a

SPEAKER_21: lot of hand-wringing about this. Bill Gurley was pushing them to go public earlier. Stripe, Uber, Airbnb, they're all part of that same cohort. That same cohort that grew up during the low interest rate environment. Hey, here we go back to macroeconomics.

SPEAKER_65: They always had the ability to raise more money. And you just watch as all the venture capitalists invested, you know, angels, venture, then crossover funds, then a public entity, sovereign wealth funds. And then finally the pinnacle was Masayoshi-san. Mm-hmm. Who had created the largest private equity venture fund ever, the vision fund.

SPEAKER_27: And, you know, the lack of discipline that comes from being a private company is corrected

SPEAKER_21: when you go public. And so that's why sometimes management changes, approach changes, and you really want to have product market fit and a predictable business when you go public.

SPEAKER_90: Mm-hmm. So Airbnb and Uber, DoorDash, they struggled in the public markets. Lyft still struggling for a certain period of time because, hey, the unit economics didn't work

SPEAKER_07: and they had that free funding of money, but they did go public. Mm-hmm. And then what happened when they went public? Stocks went down, hand-wringing. Will these ever be, can these ever be profitable?

SPEAKER_90: And it was pretty clear internally that all of these could easily be profitable if you stop discounting the service. Right.

SPEAKER_07: And you're willing to lose the bottom 10% of 5% of users who shouldn't be using the service because it's too expensive for them. They should take public transportation. They maybe should take a five-day vacation instead of a seven. Whatever it is, you know, like there's a portion of people who are being subsidized too much. So you'd have to lose them.

SPEAKER_90: And then you'd also have to maybe take your growth from 50% to 40 to 30 to 20 and grow slower on the top line in order to throw profits to the bottom line. We just went through this.

SPEAKER_375: Yeah. With Zuck.

SPEAKER_01: Even the mighty Zuck. Get rid of your crazy perks. Like apparently, you know, I know some people who worked at Uber before. And we're just like, I can't believe the amount of money we spend on stupid stuff.

SPEAKER_22: Even now. Stupid stuff, right?

SPEAKER_45: Like the furniture, the like that Twitter auction was so interesting. Like they, Sure. Niceness. Like you shouldn't have Eames chairs at an office. Eames chairs at an office.

SPEAKER_207: At an office. At an office.

SPEAKER_303: Bezos had this right. When you went to work at Amazon, there was a basement area.

SPEAKER_90: You picked a door.

SPEAKER_383: You took a door and there was paint in the room.

SPEAKER_21: And there were two horses, you know, like, um, not literal horses, but, uh, those, what are those? Like, you know, when you're a piece of wood, that's on an angle, like an angle.

SPEAKER_65: Oh, saw horses. Mm-hmm. And you would take your desk, put it on two saw horses and you'd paint it and be creative. And then you would carry it up to your office and that would be your desk. It was a tradition. Well. Why did they do that? In the early days of Amazon, the doors, Bezos saw these doors were 30, 40 bucks and desks were 200. And the horses were five bucks each. So he just had, just everybody put these desks. Yeah. What did WeWork do? Huh? The good stuff, Rivka. Adam Neumann built those offices himself.

SPEAKER_21: He used, I believe doors and they just, if you've ever been in a WeWork office, it's a black lacquered piece of wood that's mounted against the wall and they bought the poles underneath them. So you buy a finished standing desk, like we have in front of us that cost six, seven, 800 bucks. Or you could buy a $30 plank of wood and put two $5 stanchions on it and mounted against the wall.

SPEAKER_90: And they built it themselves, right? He was in there building them themselves to keep costs low. And so that's all this is, is the lack of discipline and they didn't get out in time.

SPEAKER_98: And it's a lesson for everybody. They'll be fine. Okay. But why did they not get out?

SPEAKER_15: Like I, why did they not get out in time? Because they seem to have, right?

SPEAKER_01: So you could understand why with Airbnb and Uber, there would be these questions about the unit economics. And there was this massive discounting going on, but everybody talks about Stripe, like Stripe just prints money. Like what don't they want us to see that they're willing to instead take a multimillion dollar tax hit?

Jason Calacanis: Cause that seems crazy.

SPEAKER_391: The answer to your question is two things. One inexperience.

SPEAKER_291: These are young founders. The first time at the rodeo. But their investors aren't.

SPEAKER_21: Number two. Thank you. Is governance. The investors were not in control of the boards. You got it. Right. So if you are a first time founder and you have control of your company and the investors are all kowtowing to you because they want to curry favor. And you don't listen to them when they say go public.

SPEAKER_291: You don't listen to the bill girlies of the world. You don't listen to the sequoias of the world. You don't listen to people who've been to the rodeo three, four, five times. This is what can happen. And so I think.

SPEAKER_01: Listen to your like accountant. Who's like, you're going to have, I'm sorry, a multi-billion dollar tax bill.

SPEAKER_08: Oh my God. If all you've known Molly.

SPEAKER_01: That tells you a lot about the Coliseum brothers though. That tells you a lot. And, and proceed accordingly. In my opinion.

SPEAKER_195: This is a huge mistake on their part.

SPEAKER_27: Obviously they know that, but it's, you know, if you've only experienced 12 or 13 years of upmarket, you cannot imagine a market collapsing to this extent.

SPEAKER_65: It's only having seen it up close and personal that you can. And when you do see it up close and personal, then you have the scar tissue and you, you kind of get that spidey sense. You, you get concerned and you're like, you know, at some point these employees and need to take some money off the table. But these employees probably had many opportunities to clear shares previously.

SPEAKER_21: I'm guessing. RSUs, uh, versus stock options. I think everybody understands RSUs are restricted stock units. You kind of get the stock units. Just kind of gifted to you.

SPEAKER_398: Um, so they have a tax liability. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: I don't know. I think there's something weird about this. Like those, I don't know if you've talked to them.

SPEAKER_15: Like I interviewed those brothers and they're very thoughtful. I don't know. There's just something about this.

SPEAKER_402: There's no, there's no doubt.

SPEAKER_15: They're super smart. There's just something about this that pings my, like, I'm like, for example, when you go public, there's a lot of scrutiny on you.

SPEAKER_01: Maybe they were not ready for that. Maybe the business has not been ready for that. I don't know. It's been so closely held. I find it hard to imagine making a mistake of this magnitude, especially since I feel like the only thing that rich people care about, whether you're investors or a business owner is not paying taxes. Hmm. So to basically be like now we'll take a, you know, a tax hit that's so big that it requires us to raise $4 billion to cover it. Hmm. I mean, I guess maybe they thought they would go public in another year. And so they didn't have to worry about the expiration date, but I just, there's, I, you know, how it is when you get the reporter brain. Like, there's just something about this that I'm like, I don't understand why you wouldn't have gone public. I just don't, that doesn't, there's mistakes. And then there's mistakes that make you question everything.

SPEAKER_291: There's a bigger issue here, which is how defensible is this product?

SPEAKER_21: And I think what is happening, I know a couple of major customers of Stripe.

SPEAKER_90: And my understanding is some of the major customers have renegotiated and they are barely break even or just tiny, tiny profitable, but, you know, they put a lot of transactions to the system. So the question is how unique is this business 10 years in or whatever number of years in it is. And, you know, you can go online now and you can look at PayPal and add yen and square and braintree and whatever charge be this just tons of people who offer competing services of various flavors and prices. And I think what's going to happen here is a race to the bottom, uh, and the compression of, uh, costs because this, unlike Airbnb or Uber, like true network effect businesses. This is a service that I think can easily be replicated by easily.

SPEAKER_07: I think reasonably can be, not easily reasonably can be replicated by somebody with, I don't know, a billion dollars, a half billion dollars. I think you can replicate Stripe with 500 million to a billion dollars and have like a, have product parity.

SPEAKER_21: So Amazon, Google, you know, other folks who want to offer this or other folks might buy. What if, you know, add yen charge be one of these gets bought. I'm not exactly sure which ones are, are the best. Um, but I think they're sort of hidden feature parity and that's a bigger issue. And so, you know, you, you start looking at that. Right. And then you start, what if Amazon buys add yen and makes it part of AWS? What if Microsoft buys and makes it part of Azure? And what if they don't care about making money from it? And they just look at it like, you know, Google docs, you know, Google doesn't look at Google docs. It's like, this is the money printing machine. It's like, yeah, this is a nice thing to make the service more sticky.

SPEAKER_206: So you don't go public because you're thinking, okay, I still need more time to create defensibility to maybe differentiate the product a little bit more to do this.

SPEAKER_01: And so what you're working on is, is trying to achieve long-term profitability. And as a result, you miss your window.

SPEAKER_414: Maybe don't listen to your investors. And you don't listen to your investors. Yeah.

SPEAKER_27: I mean, I think it's probably as simple as that is, I think they probably had a chorus of people who were like, get public.

SPEAKER_21: It doesn't matter if it's 40, 50, 60, 70. And I think they probably were like, it's nice to run the business quietly. Yeah.

SPEAKER_27: We're good at what we do. People keep throwing us an incremental billion to 5 billion. Well, what does it matter?

SPEAKER_21: And we can, you know, but there is a point at which the company needs the scrutiny, all companies need the scrutiny and discipline of the public markets is what I was taught by my mentors. Yeah. You know, Doug Leone Moritz rule off. Bill Gurley. Just everybody who's been doing this, Jim Breyer, anybody who's doing this for any amount of time says the process of going public, the quarterly cadence, the governance, all of that.

SPEAKER_27: And we can sit here and criticize public companies as not having enough discipline, not having, I mean, look at Facebook, right? Look at the activists going on to Salesforce. But that dynamic, the fact that an activist can join Salesforce board or even the mighty Bob Iger, when he was on CNBC the other week with their results, he had to start answering questions about this annoying person who was trying to get an activist seat. And he's like, this person doesn't know what they're doing. They're criticizing. But he had to address it, right? Oh, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01: And he 100% cut a deal with him behind the scenes, because that's a big deal. Yeah, I agree. I mean, there is, there is something about this whole story and the consequence, the $4 billion consequence of not going public that makes me think that there was some scrutiny that Stripe was not prepared for, whether it was scrutiny of the business itself, whether the revenues are not, you know, what they have been purported to be, like the vibe that I have always gotten from Stripe as a company and the brothers in particular is thoughtful, but also like, pretty cocky. Pretty cocky.

SPEAKER_422: But it just, I don't know.

SPEAKER_90: They're not, they're not like super cocky. I think they're confident. They built a huge 50 billion to a hundred billion dollar business.

SPEAKER_200: They're like Steph Curry cocky, where like, you don't see it at first because of the baby face. Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_423: But it's there. It's okay. I like it.

SPEAKER_251: That was my, that's my vibe. Anyway. I like that, that explanation made perfect sense to me. Great. Speaking the same language here.

SPEAKER_427: Yeah.

SPEAKER_426: Speaking the same language.

SPEAKER_07: I agree with that.

SPEAKER_427: Yeah. I do think they gotta get public.

SPEAKER_07: It's interesting. I do think that this would be an amazing purchase for Apple, Google, any of the fangs, if they could get it through Lena Khan or whoever. The Khanster. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

SPEAKER_431: I mean, you still have ByteDance and SpaceX. It rhymes with a monster. Yeah.

SPEAKER_07: How did I not think of that before? I mean, the other, the other two big ones that are still private, SpaceX and ByteDance.

SPEAKER_72: I won't comment on SpaceX because everybody is, I'm not a shareholder in SpaceX, by the way, but everybody assumes because my relationship with Elon that I have some inside information. But I think is. Yeah. Uh, obviously that's a big company.

SPEAKER_434: Have you asked him about that rocket though, to name a rocket after me?

SPEAKER_72: Oh yeah. Sure.

SPEAKER_07: It's, uh, but ByteDance is clearly gonna have to get that thing public and they're gonna have to divest it. So, you know, you can see all three of those. There's a big dialogue about, um, SpaceX spinning out. Starlink. Starlink.

SPEAKER_72: There's a big discussion about ByteDance missing its window because of regulation here. And all of a sudden, they were like, oh yeah, China's spying on a hundred million Americans. Not a good idea.

SPEAKER_07: That's right. So all three, I wouldn't say SpaceX is too far.

SPEAKER_72: You know, they, they have a ways to go. They don't need to go public, but I do think ByteDance and Stripe. Yeah. That's a, those are acute. I mean, it's right.

SPEAKER_22: Like might have to do that as opposed to raising $4 billion.

SPEAKER_207: And private funds and diluting even more. It's gonna be interesting. Hey, Molly.

SPEAKER_07: Did you also see again with Zuck getting a little aggressive here? Uh, in terms of communicating with the user base, right? This is something he has been variable about doing. I think Elon being super active on Twitter, talking about features, et cetera. They also copied in addition to copying Twitter blue, they copied telegram channels. And if you don't know what a telegram channel is out there, telegram is a messaging app. And a lot of the crypto people or brands, or let's say, uh, people who are banned off Twitter. I know like when Trump got banned, Milo Yiannopoulos got banned, those kinds of folks. They created what's called a channel. It's a broadcast group. You subscribe to it, and then you can post an announcement and all of your followers get it. In some cases they can comment on it, but they can't post a new thread or in other cases they can just like it, et cetera. So now there's a meta broadcast channel. It's kind of like a PR feed. And this is gonna be super powerful.

SPEAKER_21: I think it's gonna be a paid feature or it's gonna be for blue check marks. Who knows?

SPEAKER_27: But you can see that Zuck has 366,000 members in his group. And he just made a announcement about meta verified, like their, their blue version.

SPEAKER_21: And so if you look at the time we took the screenshot, uh, he had a lot of likes on it and a lot of folks. So this is super cool. You can imagine this for this week in startups. We would just post the episode or we talk about it. And so you read the copy there. Never miss an update from Zuck. Only Zuck can message, but you can read react and vote in polls. That's the setting he has. There was a period of time when Donald Trump on telegram was producing like his memos and stuff like that when he got banned. And he had a large number of people following him there.

SPEAKER_04: It's really powerful. Interesting. As a feature. So two, two, two stolen features in one announcement.

SPEAKER_01: It seems, I mean, he does seem to be looking for ways to differentiate. Because the core product is in decline for various reasons. It is pretty fascinating. Instagram. I'm talking about Facebook.

SPEAKER_442: This is an Instagram feature. This is an Instagram feature. So you can message.

SPEAKER_01: So this is within, this is messaging on Instagram.

SPEAKER_443: Yes.

SPEAKER_01: Right.

SPEAKER_14: He really likes messaging. So the core products are in decline. Well, and messaging is such a great way for him to dodge regulation, honestly, because.

SPEAKER_65: I think they're like, maybe a better word than decline. The business was in decline. Yeah. The products. Yeah. So the business is in decline.

SPEAKER_27: The products were growing, you know, depending on the market, either hitting their natural audience, or they did have a U.S. Facebook decline, I think once. So this is, I think, for Katy Perry or Rihanna or Kim Kardashian, anybody like that, who doesn't want to have a conversation with their.

SPEAKER_325: This is a hundred million followers.

SPEAKER_14: And it's also a way to make them feel because remember, there was the revolt about how they changed the algorithm on Instagram to make it more TikTok like and so now they're like, okay, well, then instead, we will give you this direct channel to communicate with your followers and make it seem more creator friendly. Smart.

SPEAKER_447: And they don't get to comment.

SPEAKER_45: That guy. I mean, I gotta say it kills me. It just kills me that it's that he's just like, yeah, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna steal this. I'm gonna steal that.

Jason Calacanis: I'm gonna steal this and whatever. But like, my God, does it work? And it's, and he moves fast, dude hustles and flows. I have a new nickname.

SPEAKER_21: You know, I've been working on my nickname game like Trump. Uh, uh, so I've been really working on it.

SPEAKER_27: Well, you're like, I got the Sultan of science, the dictator. Yeah. Sasshole.

SPEAKER_90: You know, I, I like to come up with a nickname here and there, but I realized I haven't pointed them outward enough. So, uh, mimetic mark, you know, cause it's mimetic theory that Teal and all those folks were into. Yeah. That, uh, you know, Peter Teal had a professor or something at Stanford and he really believes Peter Teal in this mimetic theory, which is we do what we do because we want to.

SPEAKER_21: To Renee Gerard is, uh, the big influence Renee Gerard and Peter, I guess, latched onto this theory early on that people copy each other in nature, part of evolution. You survive longer. If you copy each other, you know, tribalism, whatever. Yep. So mimetic mark. You think that could stick? It's a little hard to say. It gets a little mumbly. Mimetic mark.

SPEAKER_45: Mimetic mark. Like I like alliteration and it is on the nose.

SPEAKER_01: Three Ms. But I feel like names and nicknames stick better when they have more, you need like a harder continent.

SPEAKER_26: Ah, so anyway, I'll keep workshopping. If anybody else.

SPEAKER_01: It's too bad that like Zuck is so good. You need something that goes with Zuck. It's too bad. There's not a word that means copying that starts with a Z.

SPEAKER_23: You'll have to work workshop that. I, somebody sent me the greatest one ever. It's no me, Paul Ron.

SPEAKER_27: They're like, Ooh, I have another one. Instead of Sultan of science, you should do Sultan of science, silence.

SPEAKER_68: So this week I, that was a fan, a fan sent it to me and I said, I'm going to steal that. He's like, yeah, that's why I gave it to you. Do it. And I was like, okay, I was going to say in the first like two minutes.

SPEAKER_21: Uh, and so I was like, Oh, the certain Sultan of silence. Uh, that's amazing.

SPEAKER_45: I have not listened to this weekend's episode because I was busy cleaning my closets. I would just like to say, spring is upon us.

SPEAKER_441: Literally cleaning your closet. Literally spring cleaning. It's incredible. Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_207: I've achieved like almost like closet zero. It's beautiful. I saw like a headline. Productivity takes different forms.

SPEAKER_468: You guys. Marie Kondo just gave up. She's out. Cause you know why?

SPEAKER_27: She has kids. You can't do it. I can't do it. I was folding my underwear and then stacking them in a certain way.

SPEAKER_90: I was doing the t-shirts a certain way. I was throwing away all the boxes and I can always reorder a cable. You know, I got kids. Yeah. F it. This place is going to be a mess.

SPEAKER_01: I like, I will say, I really appreciate the fact that she gave everybody permission and was just like, you know what? I've sort of been torturing you and you don't have to do that.

SPEAKER_92: So I was like, yeah, three kids. Forget it. We're just trying to survive.

SPEAKER_98: All right. Lots of good episodes as we wrap here coming up. I had, I did an interview with Mark Schuster. You did one with the head of Neva. Yep.

SPEAKER_111: I'm going to be talking to a bunch of like cool three cycle women investors while you're

SPEAKER_00: gone. Finally. Not my time to talk to the ladies.

SPEAKER_07: How many did we, did we, uh, did we lock into so far? Four. Four. Fantastic. Now, Nick, uh, just a producing note here. I'm curious. Were we able to find, uh, folks who were investing over three cycles or were they like entrepreneur one cycle?

SPEAKER_481: Cause it's still valid over three cycles. One was an entrepreneur and invested over two cycles. Perfect.

SPEAKER_07: I think that was like a, that's great. I mean, that's why I did it head on, you know, in the episodes.

SPEAKER_23: Like the number of women was probably one in 500 at that time.

SPEAKER_240: I mean, it's still like one in 300. So yeah, probably. No. Yes. 300 now.

SPEAKER_485: Oh, it's so tiny.

SPEAKER_90: It's still. It can't be one in 300. I think it's no one in 300 would be 33 basis points. I think the industry is probably five to 10% female now, which is still pathetic. Obviously. Yeah.

SPEAKER_45: Yeah. I don't know. We'll have to like, it's, it's like, every time I read it, it's like, oh, it got worse.

SPEAKER_13: Like lately, lately all the, all the pitch book emails are like, Ooh, it went down again. Ooh, it was up for like a minute, but now it's back down.

SPEAKER_27: The most important thing to look at. Uh, if you want to look at this, I, I believe is new fund formation of new funds. Cause old funds are going to die. They're run by oldsters. You know, it takes a decade for them to turn over the, the statistic to look at that. Nobody seems to be able to give me. So if somebody out there has this, or if somebody can tell pitch book or crunch base to do this one of funds formed in 2021, 2022, and now in 2023 of new funds form fund ones, what percentage of diversity did they have gender, ethnicity, et cetera. That's what I would like to see because that's where you're going to see the change is new fund formation, old funds, you know, you, you have to wait for somebody to die.

SPEAKER_21: Nobody gives up the seat as a venture capitalist. Right.

SPEAKER_496: It's a hard seat to give up. Cause it's so.

SPEAKER_21: Oh, it's 16% though.

SPEAKER_30: Is it 16 now?

SPEAKER_01: Yeah. Female decision makers represent 16.1% of the national total in 2022.

SPEAKER_207: Great. Okay. That's, that's fantastic.

SPEAKER_24: I like that.

SPEAKER_499: I like the qualifier of decision maker. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_01: Cause furthermore, they went on to say 95.5% of USBC firms have a majority male population of decision makers. So this seems to back up almost exactly what you're saying. Yeah. That like, if you want to be a female VC, like if you want to be a decision maker, you almost have to form your own fund.

SPEAKER_27: I mean, I, nobody would make me the editor in chief of a magazine. I made my own, nobody would make me the head of my own fund.

SPEAKER_65: I made my own, you know, at some point you can wait or you can create. And that, that, that is gender ethnicity, independent advice, but it also in places where it's sticky and it's hard to break in.

SPEAKER_506: That's a really good piece of advice is to just make your own lean to quote Kanye West when he wrapped and he was cool.

SPEAKER_21: If you want to experience the J Cal experience, um, just two programming notes, follow me on Twitter, twitter.com slash Jason.

SPEAKER_65: I will keep tweeting. There are two, there's a meetup. There's going to be a fan meetup this weekend.

SPEAKER_21: Sorry, I was an all in fan meetup on January 2nd in Tokyo, January 3rd. I have my speaking gig at future X. You can do a Google search, future X, March, Japan or whatever.

SPEAKER_240: March, right? Not January, March.

SPEAKER_21: I'm sorry. March 2nd and 3rd. When I'm in Tokyo, there's gonna be two different meetups. If you want to say hi and take a selfie or whatever, uh, January, March 2nd. And then March 3rd. And then I'm going to be in the secco. Say hi. Uh, but you can watch me powder ski. Hopefully some powder and you'll see, I'm going alone. I'm going to be working on my book a little bit.

SPEAKER_72: And, uh, yeah, just a little retreat, five day retreat for J Cal.

SPEAKER_513: I'm doing something for me, Molly.

SPEAKER_441: I'm proud of you. I'm for me. Good job. You had a tough start to the year, man. You were sick forever. Like it's time. Three weeks sickness would kick my ass.

SPEAKER_30: Cause everybody was like, Oh, the economy is over. Everything's going to fall apart, whatever.

SPEAKER_01: Like this, this is a great, we got the bounce. We got the sentiment bounce. Go enjoy your time. All right. We got this. Bye.