SPEAKER_00: okay everybody it is monday we have a weekend's worth of news for you okay and first up big news

SPEAKER_01: from my friends at sequoia a shout out to doug leone who just did a killer episode of this week in startups you can search for doug leone this week in startups on youtube to hear it uh sequoia's launched a new catalyst basically an accelerator but probably for seed stage

David Friedberg: companies not early stage companies like y combinator tech stars and launch accelerator and we're going to break down the implications because this is groundbreaking news for startups

Jason Calacanis: yeah and then we have groundbreaking news for climate startups the sec as we are recording on

SPEAKER_06: monday is discussing and potentially even going to vote on mandatory climate disclosures for public

David Friedberg: companies this is huge groundbreaking day for sure and we are sticking to our roots every day trying to get a startup of the day in you can submit your ideas for startup of the day to producers at this week and startups.com our startup today is in the climate space and it is a company using limestone

SPEAKER_12: limestone like the the brownstone i grew up in brooklyn to take carbon out of the atmosphere

SPEAKER_13: yeah this is i mean it's such a good climate day but also we're gonna have a little leadership talk

SPEAKER_06: we're wrapping with some interesting ongoings with incoming disney ceo the new guy bob chappack and former ceo bob eiger and we break down the difference between the bobs how new and different management can impact a company it is going to be a great show stick with us this week in startups is

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SPEAKER_21: first six months that's open phone dot co twist so our first news story i'm super interested in your

SPEAKER_06: thoughts about this sequoia debuts arc which is a london and silicon valley based program to find and mentor outlier startups they're calling it a catalyst not an accelerator although as i heard on the equity pod with alex wilhelm today it sounds a lot like an accelerator program what is interesting is a couple of things one this sort of outlier founder mentality they're looking for seed stage companies and when they seed those companies they're going to give them a million dollars each per cohort and the cohorts will be 15 companies so a 15 million dollar investment 15 companies at the seed stage to go through this program where they sort of intensively get to meet ceos they get a field trip to a legendary company to sort of see it all in action um their first on-site visit will be to clarna where startups will spend time with ceo sebastian simitowski and other executives and it'll be co-run by sequoia partners jessley and luciana lissandro what do are we worried uh well this is great and it was

SPEAKER_09: we i just went on a rant i think it was on vc sunday school with people complaining about super pro rata and i said listen work harder do more work if you uh want to compete please compete and i said literally i actually invoked sequoia i said you know i i uh don't expect to win every deal versus sequoia if somebody's doing a series b or a series a and uh you know this competition is great for ultimately founders and ultimately for innovation uh so this is an accelerator let's not mince words but sequoia does like to uh you know based on my knowledge of working with them uh which is pretty um deep they do like to do new innovative things in fact the scout program which gave me my start in investing i

SPEAKER_01: was the first sequoia scout um famously in the and uh did a bunch of investments there i think i did 17 or 18 and uh three became unicorns uh pretty good track record i did three of the first seven

SPEAKER_09: became unicorns so they do very innovative things and they like to brand them uniquely i remember having a conversation with ruloff and he said we're going to call it scouts and i was like i want to be called a ranger so i'll do it if you change the name to ranger this is what an idiot i am i was like debating this incredible no i'm not gonna do it i was like i don't know if i want to be called a scout and he's like well you know like in baseball they have scouts they look and they look for talent and i was like okay yeah fair enough um so i was like the name ranger better but in hindsight scouts

SPEAKER_36: better you're a content guy through and through man exactly i said the first thing i can think of

SPEAKER_09: is the branding um so arc is a good name i like it it's an accelerator another thing i like about this is the size of the program it's going to be approximately 15 so maybe they'll do 10 maybe they'll do 20 who knows i guess they'll look at the quality that comes in 15 is a lot um i would have kept it at 10 maybe but you know they have resources so the million dollars is great for how much what's the valuation here so that's left out i don't see that anywhere here i'm going to guess they do 10 of the company for a million and then what stage are they going to accept people so they're asking for you know uh outlier founders so that's branding right who doesn't want to be considered an outlier we're looking for rebel founders we're looking for you know this is just uh you know kind of like branding uh and trying to get people to apply but this is absolutely a shot across the bow of y combinator because y combinator said we're going to give this uh 375k note and i said you know when we talked on sunday right molly that gives less room for the other seed funds and so here if y combinator is going to move upstream and compete with sequoia on series a's or seed rounds and arguably we do that too everybody's just going to do everything and we'll see if they stick to it that is i would say the hardest thing about an accelerator is being able to keep up the energy to do it it is hard to do you got to staff it uh jess i know she's amazing so i think uh they've got a great person they're leading

SPEAKER_40: it i like the visit to a legendary company we do something similar in fact we bring our startups to

David Friedberg: two different venture firms uh for them to meet them and i think it's great it's great if you're a founder i would love for the founders coming out of our accelerator to go to this one and i think why combinator companies could go to this one so this seems like because of the amount of money putting it being put in that it would go for more seed stage companies uh but you never know they might have people who are previous founders who want to do this and that's probably something that sequoia heard over and over again as a theme and then by the way they did used to incubate companies at sequoia so like dropbox famously you know was based at sequoia um for you know the first year or something after they went to y combinator so i wonder if they had founders who they had invested in or people who were on at companies like a door dash you know the number seven person at door dash and they said i'm going to go to y combinator and square was like oh but we could have invested in them you know so if we had a program we might have been able to give them their first million dollars so great job sequoia and i wish them great success with it and then the question becomes does sequoia do the next round or not and then the signaling issue so sequoia puts a million dollars into your company you go to this one then it's time for series a and you're going to raise you know 5 million just sequoia sequoia doesn't invest you spent eight weeks with them ten weeks with them what does that say to the rest of the market so the signaling problem has always been the issue and i don't think it's insurmountable but i do think it's something for founders to be aware of if we as launch fund and you know launch incubator stop investing in a company

SPEAKER_01: people don't expect us to fund the company you know through series a we very rarely will even

David Friedberg: co-lead series a as we do but it's not our bread and butter so that will be the issue um is that if you go through this program and then you don't get the series a from sequoia what does that say it says

SPEAKER_06: you're maybe not good enough for sequoia right right and it also raises the question of is sequoia going to do something similar to what we do and what yc does which is the so yesterday by the way on vc sunday school in episode 1413 if you haven't heard it yet you almost want to because it is becoming like the pre-reading for this episode because then it does raise it so there aren't very many details about for example what percentage sequoia takes with that million dollars and whether they have follow-on rights that they take um and i think those are both open questions but you don't like you don't see this as competitive and i mean i know that like let's just say if i were not if i were having this conversation with someone who wasn't hadn't been a sequoia scout and didn't have a deep relationship with that company i'd be like are they coming for us like are they on our territory because the founder like is a founder really going to want to take you know however much from us or yc and have six percent of the company locked up and then go to this million dollar accelerator program for some other percentage that we don't know but i would imagine kind of high

SPEAKER_18: for a million bucks like is it really a follow-on accelerator or is it competition we'll find out

David Friedberg: um you know it's a small number of uh companies but all is fair in capital allocation so absolutely you know everybody should be going after everybody everybody should uh provide products and services that support founders that's what we're in the business of doing and i do think you know the the real

SPEAKER_48: person this is competitive with and i think this is really a shot across the bow of y combinator i

SPEAKER_09: think you know people don't know this but sequoia saved y combinator at one point paul didn't have

David Friedberg: any money um and sequoia became like a major lp for some period of time and uh you know was a huge backer of yc and then yc didn't want to have wanted to have like maybe not venture uh vcs because they wanted to have that marketplace and i think maybe you know yc you know investing more money in these companies is going to be the future and i said it you know like on the podcast like well why should we invest in and help mentor a company and then not be able to participate in the seed round it seems

SPEAKER_09: unfair so you know for founders they should play these uh programs off of each other you should try to get into techstar sequoia yc uh and launch accelerator and if you get into one great do it if you get into two pick whichever one you think works better for your startup at what stage it is and you know if you think that's why combinator sequoia or launch festival go for it you know launch accelerator last year i interviewed coda ceo shashir on episode 1160 and we spoke about the productivity renaissance going on in big tech right now and that's what coda is all about in coda your text and tables live together in the same document and it helps any team collaborate more efficiently they've got thousands of templates to work with or you can take the playbooks published by some of the best innovators out there and you can use them for yourself coda works right out of the box and is completely customizable so you're going to create a wiki or a knowledge hub for your team you can onboard new hires quickly and you can adapt fast to any major or minor change in your business here's how we use coda at this week in startups my guy presh made us an upvoting system on coda for questions and topics for twist you go to this week in startups.com questions and you can submit questions and topics that our producers might include in the show and people can vote them up and down how awesome is that and you can go find that template on coda's website and you can start your own q a for your podcast or maybe an internal meeting you're having that's the power of coda they're going to start you on second base third base you're going to be on the way home in some cases coda has an amazing startup program they're going to help you optimize and support your docs just go to coda.io twist and you're going to get a thousand dollars in credits i love this thousand dollar credit coda.io twist coda.io twist and get that thousand dollar credit now i don't know how long it's going

SPEAKER_06: to last it is interesting too i will say one last thing about arc before we move on is that they are um they are also deliberately putting out a more international focus which i think is interesting they're debuting in london they're saying they're looking for founders from all over the world they're going to accept applications from everywhere in europe including russia fyi um and so yeah wow

SPEAKER_12: well i mean let me think that through what do you think of that molly except applications for a

SPEAKER_09: russian company or russian founders but they would be ones who are not operating in russia

SPEAKER_06: i don't know if they i mean they didn't really make that distinction she said we're going to accept applications from everywhere in europe including russia this was lissandro i think saying this um what was when that interview was great founders come from everywhere this is in tech crunch

SPEAKER_60: today okay so they specifically asked her about that given what's going on yesterday sunday so i guess

SPEAKER_09: they asked so i would say if i met a russian founder and they were building the company in london which i think where this is going to be based part of the time would i have a problem investing in a russian founder no okay would i want to invest in a russian founder running uber in russia no

SPEAKER_64: so i think it that would be that's just a business risk at this point yes well there's

SPEAKER_48: the business risk and do i want to support the economy of russia during a time when we talked about

SPEAKER_06: sanctions having a profound impact right ice queen from our noted gang says they corrected themselves and said only russian founders who are in europe not in russia well that's interesting of course like

SPEAKER_47: of course fine right it's not we're not we're not doing the full-on mccarthy situation like i have

SPEAKER_09: a much i mean i not only do i think we should invest in russian and chinese founders north korean founders saudi founders i actually think america should recruit those founders out of those countries exactly and bring them to the west because every time we take some legendary world-class mind founder ambitious person out of those countries and put them into america where they can be free to pursue stuff without being worried about their company being taken from them uh by the authoritarians that run their countries uh that builds up our case for democracy and freedom and it builds up our balance sheet so i think that should be that's like the most american thing i think a fund could do or a college is to recruit the smartest people and we should go on that should be like an american uh imperative new imperative get the smart ambitious people out of those countries as quick as possible okay here is

SPEAKER_74: a uh story that i know any other questions or on the sequoia thing congratulations to sequoia i think

SPEAKER_09: it's great congratulations super interesting choices yeah we love it i would like to find out what the percentage is because i wonder if they're going to negotiate each million dollar deal as if it's a seed round so what this would i think that's what they're doing actually now that i think about it i think they're doing seed rounds rounds basically i think they're doing well they put a cap on whatever so you could say i want 8 million i could say i want 10 another person could say 12 another person could say seven so if they're actually doing that and then that's the accelerator great and then what is the goal of the accelerator to raise money to finish their product to build their team company design

SPEAKER_06: which is the part that's the other like kind of interesting wrinkle here is that it's super focused on this idea of company design like how you put together the company right which is what we do

SPEAKER_40: we do a big part of what we do we basically have them build plans which i got from doug leone right

SPEAKER_09: doug leone taught me hey build a plan and i have all of our founders build a plan so yeah i love the fact that they're doing it i i love competition it's fantastic for everybody well i mean pricing

SPEAKER_40: each round would be whatever pricing each round would be very innovative because when you run an accelerator if you open up the can of worms of everybody gets to negotiate their deal it's just

SPEAKER_09: chaos yeah so we don't negotiate those deals and if we say if you want to negotiate a deal you want to start the fundraising process let's just move you over here to doing a seed round and not coming to the accelerator because then you'd have people you know sitting in the same class and one person negotiated a deal twice as good as the other and okay that means we you know think twice as

SPEAKER_40: much of that founder because they're a better negotiator it's just a little bit hard to manage that but if it is a seed round they can easily manage it so if it was a seed round with an eight week

SPEAKER_09: uh architecture of your company i would say this isn't competitive with yc tech stars and launch accelerator i think that might be what's going on here interesting okay see yeah i'm glad we're getting

SPEAKER_06: to the to spend a little more time on this because yeah it does feel i mean details are slim right i read their blog post and it is they don't say anything about percentage they don't say anything about round they don't say anything about how they're going to treat each individual company but it very specific i feel like given the money involved and the specificity of the program it would make more sense if it is i could tell you what and they're saying it's seed stage they keep saying seed stage over and over

David Friedberg: oh okay so then that's what it is so i can tell you what the first thing i'm doing after we stop

SPEAKER_09: taping this podcast is i'm gonna dm jess and i'm gonna say hey here are three companies from our accelerator that i think would be perfect for your arc program exactly look at this as graduate school so if we're undergrad this is grad this is like me running you know like a really good undergraduate

SPEAKER_48: school and like they're you know oxford or something some graduate school and i'm like yeah let's send our smart kids there that would be amazing for us because a lot of that's what i was

SPEAKER_13: wondering about the best friends thing is like how can we yeah yeah be a feeder it's like harvard to gsb

SPEAKER_105: or whatever harvard to gsb look at you hey it's time for another our crowd deal of the week right now you can join our crowd's investment in did according to the deal memo did has patented reenactment technology and their tech uses ai and deep learning to turn still photos into videos did does this for fortune 500 companies and they also have multi-million dollar deals with movie studios social media companies and online genealogy platforms according to their deal memo and you can invest in did at ourcrowd.com twist today all over the world companies like did are innovating and driving returns for investors and our crowd analyzes many of these companies then they select the ones with the greatest growth potential and they bring them to you from personalized medicine to cyber security to the 50 billion dollar video and synthetic media industry our crowd identifies innovators so you can invest when growth potential is greatest and that's early so if you're an accredited investor you can join our crowd for free at o-u-r-c-r-o-w-d.com twist and review the current deals that's our crowd.com twist to sign up for free and this next story uh which i think molly's gonna love the sec will

David Friedberg: vote on mandatory disclosures of emissions and climate risks for public companies according to the wall street journal the proposal would force public companies to report number one greenhouse gas emissions from their own operations two emissions from energy they consume three uh and two which i guess would be energy coming into your power plant and where the emissions came from and to obtain independent certification of their estimates okay there's going to be a good business for something like ernst and young and in many in some cases companies would have to report greenhouse gas output of both their supply chains and consumers known as scope three emissions wow the downstream and the upstream of their emissions seems sounds very comprehensive the sec started considering the proposed

SPEAKER_09: rules in a meeting on monday morning companies would have to include the information in sec filings such as quarterly and annual earnings reports currently the sec's four commissioners include three democrats and one republican the lone republican is hester pierce who was on episode 1136 back in november 2020

SPEAKER_13: she's very pro crypto uh what are your thoughts and then we'll get into some more details this is huge

SPEAKER_06: huge so i um when i was at green biz this conference in phoenix a couple of weeks ago i don't know time has no meaning um one of the sessions that i tried to go to was about sec reporting requirements and it was beyond standing room like if people could have taken out the door with a sledgehammer they would have because this is the market maker moment right here so a lot of companies have been pitching me on various measurement techniques right a dashboard for this and a way to measure three emissions with you yeah yeah there are tons of them and the reason that there are tons of them is because they know that there is going to be some kind of requirement like this europe already has reporting requirements around scope one two and three emissions and those are you know as you describe them the ones that you directly emit that is scope one effectively the type of energy you consume is scope two and scope three are these kind of like big broad what's in your supply chain what do your employees do how do they get to work stuff like that that's harder to measure the second that rules like this come into place businesses are going to be born like you cannot believe like they're already planning for it they're already pitching around this they're already saying if you're a big multinational you're having to do some of this anyway or like your you know lp in a venture capital fund is saying hey you told us that your portfolio was going to be such and such percentage carbon neutral where's the proof yes and i just i i think this is like this is what jumpstarts economies

SPEAKER_09: yeah and so according to the wall street uh journal sec chairman gary gensler mentioned in the past that investors and institutional asset managers representing tens of trillions of dollars have asked the sec for standard climate disclosures in the past companies had self-reported climate impact data on their own accord you see that with apple all the time and google uh buying all these solar farms they they are

David Friedberg: proactive about it i think because the founders of management and the disclosures were always inconsistent from company to company making them hard to compare so if all this becomes standardized of course you know that will help if you measure it you can manage it of course it could lead to

SPEAKER_09: gaming it but it's going to lead to i think overall more awareness of this which is always good if a majority of the agencies for commissioners vote in favor which i guess would be three the sec will open the proposal to public comment for at least two months before working to finalize the rules so that would be great we can go take a look at that the sec does move very

David Friedberg: slowly on these things as we learned from things like uh the jobs act which allowed more crowdfunding equity crowdfunding and accreditation the sec is very very i guess slow or charitably thorough yeah they

SPEAKER_01: they really take their time on these things like years and sometimes they even have to be pushed by you know uh congress i guess to to get these things done but um it seems like a good idea and it

SPEAKER_09: doesn't seem like any public company would be too much of a burden and i'm sure they could do this over

David Friedberg: time in other words like hey this year we want you to report them this year we're going to review them and then this year we're going to audit them and so you know when you're executing on these things the devil's in the details and i do like the idea of companies also being responsible for

SPEAKER_09: upstream and downstream i thought that was the most interesting part of this what do you think of that piece of it having to at least maybe not take ownership of but at least be aware of what happens when your product goes to your customer or when you bought your batteries or you bought your inputs whatever they were just having to know like was that built in some factory in india pakistan

SPEAKER_121: or china and what is their view of throwing carbon into the you know atmosphere yep absolutely

SPEAKER_06: i mean there are a couple pieces of this that i think are crucial the measurement of the scope 3 emissions like has been a dot you know way that companies try to get out of accurately measuring anything for a long time right they were like our campus uses buys offsets or our campus has solar and we you know our actual like on site we recycle this much of our trash and then never acknowledged like we're in a you know coal-fired factory in china or we're using like the least efficient you know airplane like cargo planes instead of ships or something to get our goods here there are a couple like one europe is really pushing this this is one of those situations where the sec is moving because europe already has and and because this is starting to become a conversation about uh investment and also risk so i wouldn't be surprised if at some point we also see the fed move in this direction because they have made you know jay powell has made some like baby comments about how it is very possible that there need to be requirements around companies to report their actual financial risk related to climate whether that's because they're in danger of losing entire facilities to excess weather events or because you know they have people who live in like fire prone areas who i don't know can't work

Jason Calacanis: they have productivity issues like there's a lot of financial risk that goes into addressing climate so

SPEAKER_06: the fact that we're seeing movement on these two things are um is it's a big deal and it's look for us as investors it's a huge deal because policy drives markets governments become buyers policy incentivizes companies to get in the game where previously they wouldn't have had like a good reason to get in the

SPEAKER_48: game what's an example of that like if you if this was you know we fast forward three years this is a

David Friedberg: standard this stuff is audited yeah you know and it's costing you know these public companies whatever a million dollars a year two million dollars a year to do this putting aside that like there's some industry in preparing these reports what would be if you think it through an example of a company

SPEAKER_105: having to change their behavior some meaningful way uh because of this as a result of this kind

SPEAKER_06: of reporting yeah i mean they will there's sort of one but i want to hear yours yeah right i mean there's big and small there's one you might have to actually start buying either renewable energy offsets or like get solar on your building that's the like super local scope three though you might have to change factories like you literally might have to use a different manufacturer to create your products like it could really have major impacts throughout the sort of like global supply chain or you start emphasizing shipping over air freight but shipping is really expensive so your costs

SPEAKER_64: go up like there's sort of a lot it's a complicated ecosystem for sure yeah i think that's really

David Friedberg: interesting you brought up shipping because the my what came to my mind was okay the press decides here are the biggest defenders here's our top 10 list of the people who are doing the worst job possible and here are the 10 people who had the best climate uh responsibility over year over year right we talk

SPEAKER_09: all the time here doing back of the envelope math we're going to be able to do back of the envelope math and say hey look uber was talking about their inputs and their outputs and lyft and doordash and one of their things is their drivers and what percentage are using hybrids what percentage are using evs and they have inputs the restaurants fried the food whatever it is uh cloud kitchens so now you would have people starting to do the press uh stories about this here are the people who are the big offenders okay now we're on the big offender list and now some you know greta thunberg um you know comes out or whatever the next person is and they're like we're going to sit on the front porch of this

SPEAKER_39: company and to highlight the fact that they suck and they need to suck less yep and they need to start sucking carbon out of the atmosphere and then that person goes you know what they're hey i heard that startup on this wing startups that's taking kelp and putting in the middle of the ocean can somebody

SPEAKER_09: just call them and give them 25 million dollars to put some kelp out there so we can get off this

SPEAKER_48: goddamn list of you know being one of the top 25 offenders and the other one i thought of was

SPEAKER_09: transportation like you were talking about okay yeah um flexport uh is tracking all this stuff and you know there's a series of ships that are using that old oil that ryan peterson talked about that is just like this slurry mix that just pollutes the air i forgot the name of this oil from ships but they basically use one type of fuel to get out of port that's not so polluting and then when they're in the open ocean and nobody's watching they just spew this disgusting horrible oil slurry that i can't remember the name of anyway that slurry uh that they have uh they'd be like you know what let's find somebody without the slurry and then they'd go to the ships that don't and the ships that don't have it wouldn't be used and they'd say you know what okay we'll upgrade the engines because we're losing

SPEAKER_40: business so this i think could have wonderful impacts of just raising awareness and uh i like it i

SPEAKER_06: like it a lot you also start to get it's related to that actually you start to get the concept of you know you get sort of carrot and stick like this is a little bit this is like you need to report this stuff pretty soon you could start to attach sticks to that like you could start to say hey you're a climate criminal like we're going to create a you know new jurisprudence around this when companies continue to like flout the law and do whatever they want and it just like these are the these are the boring bureaucratic moves that actually have massive massive massive impact so i i like i got very

Chamath Palihapitiya: excited about this story today because it's a big deal and it's bunker fuel is the stuff that bunker fuel that's right bunker fuel container ships use this super dirty fuel talking to a company that

Jason Calacanis: is interested in measuring emissions from ships on a ship by ship basis and helping them understand that because it's also a competitive advantage like you don't want to waste fuel

David Friedberg: many cargo ships i'm reading from wired still use bunker fuel the sludgy dregs of the petroleum refining process sludge the noxious blend it's the noxious blend is dirt cheap making it possible to charge next to nothing to ship goods internationally so there you go it's like literally these are the dirty the dirtiest vehicles in the world are this horrible

SPEAKER_143: bunker fuel and like how we have not banned it is because these ships are you know chinese

David Friedberg: uh or from countries that don't care chinese companies i don't know and they have a different worldview and you know well who knows somebody could fact check me on that but i think you know the developing world maybe sees anybody who can go cheaper is going to go cheaper and this is why

SPEAKER_06: these regulations start to matter and so do carbon taxes because it won't be the cheapest thing to use the

SPEAKER_105: sludgy dregs yes because the shell game of well we just outsourced that to a company we didn't know

David Friedberg: we don't i mean we don't know what they're using you know and now it's like well you do have to put your inputs so if you got that's you know your if your iphones came here on one of those yeah well you know you now have to put that in there and i wonder if apple actually and all these iphones coming from china if apple is letting slurry ships you know slurry fed ships ship our apple products

SPEAKER_01: here because they want to save a dollar per phone but this is great i you know it's one of the things i love about having you here passionate about the climate stuff is i'm learning and scope 3 is really really cool um that they can uh start looking at the inputs and the outputs listen lots of founders

SPEAKER_146: are loosey-goosey with their personal numbers we all know that they put it on company documents

SPEAKER_09: they use it for sales calls and more and that's where things get super messy you don't know who's calling you right is it a sales prospect is it a co-worker or is it somebody from your kid's school is it spam well open phone helps you create business phone numbers for you and your team and it works through an app on your smartphone very elegantly or on your desktop you just pick a number you install the app and you're done there is no need to carry two phones like i do and there's so many features you're going to love including you know how we all create catch-all emails like support at our company name.com well you can do something similar for a phone number you can have a shared phone number with multiple employees fielding those incoming texts and the calls what a brilliant idea see what open phone can do for you it's already affordable at a starting price of just ten dollars a month per user so affordable and twist listeners can get an extra 20 off any plan for your first six months by signing up at open phone dot co slash twist and if you have existing numbers from another service no problem easy peasy lemon squeezy open phone can port them over for free just head over to o-p-e-n-p-h-o-n-e dot co slash twist today open phone dot co slash twist today we should go to

SPEAKER_48: today's startup of the day which is air let's do it related this is super related so today's start of the day is heirloom it's a climate tech company which uses heated limestone to remove carbon dioxide what

SPEAKER_12: the atmosphere explain this to me jason's like wait limestone we i i grew up in bayridge brooklyn

SPEAKER_09: there were brownstones and there were limestones and they would put limestone on the front of the buildings because it was beautiful and i don't know the rest of the history of it but i grew up in

SPEAKER_06: a limestone wow really yeah could have been a carbon sink this is yeah this is amazing it's heirloom like the tomato um spelled like the tomato but it is a carbon capture company because the big the big secret the dirty little secret about a lot of our climate goals like the net zero goals that the you know world has agreed to um they actually depend on technology that does not yet exist to capture carbon dioxide from the air and store it somehow we are currently unable to do that at scale i think elon musk funded a contest to reward a company who could come up with the most efficient direct air capture so there's a couple ways that people try to do it one is like capture the emissions as they come out of a plant but another is to try to like suck carbon dioxide out of the air and store it somewhere it's a super hard problem to solve this company announced a 53 million dollar series a from breakthrough energy mentors which is the bill gates fund and microsoft climate innovation fund to try to uh do this capture suck it out of the air and then they use limestone which is cheap and widely available they heat it super hot 600 degrees in electric furnace powered by renewable electricity electricity that's key the process then releases carbon dioxide which is captured the leftover calcium oxide is spread out i'm just going to go through the technical details here spread out in these trays that are stacked 20 feet high and exposed to the air like cookies on a baking tray and then over this long process months to years calcium oxide gets converted back to limestone as it absorbs carbon dioxide from the air amazing yeah it's very so and and you know you know that my metric is gigatons right i like to talk about like don't talk to me about tons or even hundreds or millions the california based startup plans to remove one billion tons of carbon dioxide a gigaton by 2035 amazing possibly i

SPEAKER_40: think this carbon capture i have questions but possibly you know and the uh x prize is is running the hundred million dollar prize for carbon removal uh that bestie e i guess underwrote which is super cool yeah teams of people here's how to win to win the prize teams must demonstrate co2 removal at the 1000 ton per year scale model costs at the million tons per year megaton scale and present a plan to sustainably reach gigaton per year scale in the future in the first phase of the competition teams must demonstrate the key components and i guess the number i want to know is how many gigatons do

SPEAKER_155: we need to remove um 50 50 tons 51 0 is what we're looking at 50 per year yeah with our currently uh

SPEAKER_06: we emit 51 oh okay gigatons so you're saying we could be carbon neutral if we took 51 gigatons out

SPEAKER_64: yep got it so here's just another that's like the bill gates metric does he is he calls it 51 0.

David Friedberg: so there is reduce having putting less into the atmosphere and there's taking out and we should be going for big big swings at both yeah is this a bit this is a big swing this is potentially a big swing

SPEAKER_06: now what's interesting about this process is and this is also in the bill gates book it's a really everybody should go read i can't remember what it's called but the the climate book that bill gates wrote is just profoundly digestible you know it's just like a really easy one to get the big concepts like 51 to zero and and it also lays out and plenty of other works on climate have done this too that there are a couple things to look at when you evaluate a new technology and of course cost is one of them thank you nick how to avoid a climate disaster like does it cost more than the existing solution but also the one of the big questions is how much space does it take how much physical space does it take to do this at scale and so when they say oh okay so we have these huge baking trays of uh calcium oxide stacked 20 feet high and exposed to the air and then we can pull out a gigaton in 13 years one gigaton in 13 years and i don't mean to be disrespectful about a pretty remarkable technology doesn't get us that far so like how do you scale this without needing massive amounts of land and getting those gigatons out

SPEAKER_105: faster right so all of these is about scale all of these become scale we know that you can take carbon out of the atmosphere carbon sequestration sequestration sequestration is proven technology we can do it we need to figure out how to do it at scale and have the energy it takes to take it out of the atmosphere not cause more damage yep right so like you could burn coal i guess to run these fans

David Friedberg: that pull it out or whatever but that's not helpful because you're burning more than you're taking these

SPEAKER_06: they're said they're using this furnace that's powered by renewable electricity that's great it's also renewable electricity like that is it i talked to this really interesting company that's like pre-seed right now but what they're doing is they're creating a manufacturing technology that's purpose-built for cheap renewable energy which isn't always consistent now i'm just nerding out but you know how like solar and wind the sun doesn't shine all the time so you gotta make batteries and then

SPEAKER_60: batteries there's a car there's a carbon cost of building batteries right they're literally

SPEAKER_06: creating a process that's purpose-built for intermittency got it and so like if these guys were doing that if they were like we know that there's intermittency but we have designed our process to work around that that's like it's again it's like layer stacked on layer stacked on layer kind of like these baking trays haha accidental metaphor anyway well love it i love that it's happening because we have to have this we will not you know like message to germany if you want to turn

SPEAKER_09: off all these nuclear power plants well why don't you leave them on and let the carbon folks uh who are doing this sequestration set up camp there yeah so they could have like really cheap energy because

SPEAKER_06: these things are already paid for i saw a story over the weekend that made me think of you who is it it's a belgium belgium is going to extend the life of its nuclear reactive reactors by another decade

David Friedberg: i'm just a super pragmatist and you know i was actually going to make a note of this at the beginning of the show we are going to talk about ukraine on the show but we're also going to keep

SPEAKER_01: talking about other things and our hearts prayers wallets everything are you know obviously thinking about and uh praying for the people of the ukraine and that this resolves itself quickly and it's

SPEAKER_09: yeah beyond our mandate to sit here and talk about politics if you want to talk about politics i have

SPEAKER_50: another show you can talk about it on there uh or there's a lot of other places but we will talk

SPEAKER_44: about things in relation to ukraine since we have to do be able to do more thing more than one thing at

SPEAKER_06: a time we really do and we can nobody can afford to put the climate crisis on hold exactly yeah like

SPEAKER_01: there are thousands of people dying in you know this war and other wars and then there's also the existential threat of millions of people dying from climate so we have to fight many wars sadly

SPEAKER_40: uh as humans on planet earth okay long time disney ceo bob eiger and his replacement bob chapik have

SPEAKER_01: had a falling out according to sources since eiger stepped down as ceo uh cnbc uh reported this they said uh they noted a dozen anonymous sources spoke to them for the article i hate this anonymous sources stuff but generally cnbc has a pretty high benchmark for this and they took a made a point of putting a dozen up there so hopefully these are sources inside the company i would give cnbc the benefit of the doubt i think you have to think about every publication i might not give that to say business

SPEAKER_50: insider or huffington post but i would to cnbc based on their track record of getting things right

SPEAKER_01: according to the story they're saying iiger was an eq genius uh warm great leader people person that seems on track with what you see publicly from him uh and reading his book and the fact that he was able

SPEAKER_40: to manage talent and also manage the talent that owned the ip that he wanted to buy uh right of a

SPEAKER_01: lifetime great book to read about this um chapik is a great operator but according to sources not uh especially a great people person at least when compared to eiger so there's been some backlash over his decisions that uh we'll go into later in the story there was the public spat over scarlett johansson's contract lawsuit and uh consolidating all the p l sheets across all disney's entertainment branches under one group which people always hate and that was scarlett johansson's contract black widow it seems

SPEAKER_06: like there are sort of two things happening one is chap x management since he took over but the other is the origin of the spat which is you know as we know bob eiger stepped down as ceo in february 2020 he intended to continue on at disney as an executive chairman and direct creative projects it sounds like though he just has had a really long goodbye so a few weeks after he stepped down covet hit the park started closing and ben smith at the new york times interviewed bob eiger who essentially said you know this is a huge crisis with its impact on disney obviously i'm gonna have to actively help bob chapik new bob bob too and the company contend with it particularly since i ran the company for 15 years now let's compare and contrast bob chapik's response to let's say uh our bestie barry over at peloton because this by this according to this account bob chapik had like a fit over this really yeah this is what caused the rift is bob eiger saying i'm going to stay on and help you run the company during this massive crisis now there were a couple ways for bob chapik to respond right one is thank god nothing like this has ever happened before i welcome all of the input from the guy who ran this company for 15 years who's beloved great we are going to do this together and then you you know you like look you you you're feeling out your office you're peeing on your territory like i get it you want this job and you've worked a long time for it but evidently he just could not take this he was so i don't know i mean he got tweaked by it maybe insecure yeah he got so tweaked by it that their relationship has deteriorated ever since huh that's strange you know that reminds reminds me of what

David Friedberg: happened with ben simmons at the uh in the in the philadelphia 76ers where they'll you know and bead was like here's all the things that went wrong in the game and yeah we missed the layup was like one of the 10 things that imbead pointed out of why they lost that game um and that tweaked ben simmons and he said i'll never come back so people are very sensitive these days but if they're saying

SPEAKER_09: if chapik is not if he's a hardcore guy with low eq then maybe he would just be like yeah whatever he's helping me you know like what does he care so he doesn't seem like he's like a snowflake or like some

David Friedberg: you know uh really soft person but maybe like you're saying zego was bruised or something but it seems like a super overreacting but you know this is like the he said she said nonsense that like

SPEAKER_06: who knows what happened we have no idea we have no idea eiger bob one had postponed his retirement three times already so if you put this in succession terms right he's logan roy bob iger is logan roy yes and kendall is there waiting for the job and he keeps on not leaving yeah and then finally he gets the job and then logan roy is like i'm back you know so you certainly you could understand why that would be difficult however it has just continued to get worse and worse and then on top of that you have these sort of moves by chapik where people don't think he has good eq where there was that kind of like pretty ugly stuff about scarlett johansson and her contract about black widow and then also and i personally think this is just like a kiss of death move as a leader the ultimate king move of taking away that p l from each individual division and centralizing it under one i mean that's like business weeds i know but having worked at several house of brands that's a mess and it makes people furious because you effectively say to a bunch of grown-ups who are running their own businesses within a business sorry no we took that all away it's a stupid move i you

David Friedberg: know i when you're running brand ip you need to let people have excellence in units so as an example aol bought engadget autoblog joystick and other blogs and they had also bought tech crunch and a couple of other brands and they were keeping it together then when jim bankoff left to start verge uh they started consolidating everything and doing this exact thing conde nass learned long ago you give vanity fair their own floor and you give vogue their own floor and vogue has one culture and vanity fair has another and the new yorker has another and they're like three independent organizations they have their own accounting they have their own hr whatever it is they you know and i don't know if they

SPEAKER_09: exactly have hr and accounting but they have their own cultures and ways of operating and they're not um forced to be under the same p l or whatever this is what like authoritarian ceos want to do yeah just turn creative people into widgets it doesn't work no because they then become like well

David Friedberg: why should i put any work into this if it's just going to be the corporate overlords are gonna just roll me every time i want to do something interesting i'll give bank off a lot of credit

SPEAKER_09: he seems to have kept you know at vox and verge he's got a sports thing over there i think sb nation is his and uh you know all these different networks he had curbed for a while they did consolidate i think some things into new york magazine when they merged with it but he's been able to keep these brands somewhat independent right and i think it's a real art to do that so you really want marvel and star wars and pixar all doing their own thing having their own fiftoms and then you get to have five great leaders in charge of five different sets of ip that's better for you because then if somebody does a great job the other people can look at what they did copy them if somebody's not doing a good job you fire them and it doesn't affect the other four units all that kind of stuff it's just

SPEAKER_00: easier to manage so it it does require though spending more money per unit because you need to have redundancy you have duplicative duplicate you know for sure people so but you know if you

David Friedberg: put the same person in charge of the star wars franchises as marvel that person is going to be like marvel's working star wars citizen i'm going to just start working more on marvel and the person working on star wars doesn't have to sink or swim you want people to sink or swim there needs to be one person in charge the buck needs to stop so what they should be doing is naming the ceo of pixar

SPEAKER_105: a c they should be doing the opposite they should if i was running it i would have a ceo of marvel i would have a ceo not president ceo which is what they did with uh susan mojacki at youtube they gave

David Friedberg: her the title of ceo for a reason that thing was so freaking big and was such a juggernaut they said okay we'll give you the ceo title that's the power move there should be a ceo of whenever a unit hits

SPEAKER_105: some level of scale make a ceo and then the scarlett johansson one seemed particularly lame

SPEAKER_156: because this was the first time i believe they did a standalone uh with a female lead am i correct

SPEAKER_06: in that someone's in captain marvel it was less about that but it was sort of more i mean it it it added a layer of particular horribleness to what was a pandemic induced decision in some ways right so this they said the studio because they released black widow simultaneously on streaming and in um theaters and her pay was dependent on box office performance she sued and claimed that the studio sacrificed the film's box office potential in order to grow the disney plus streaming service a decision partly driven by the pandemic and then disney was like no you got paid 20 million dollars yes and like yeah so it just didn't it just was a bad look all the way around because it was sort of like well that's probably less than everybody else got paid and also they just handled it very poorly and very publicly and it was just sort of a pile-on of bad decisions yeah you know

SPEAKER_105: what they don't they didn't even get credit for the fact that they gave her this by by creating this

SPEAKER_09: tension and not settling it quickly and quietly she got paid the same i just looked it up as captain america and uh thor so yeah and i'm i'm looking at that right now they they basically paid her the same

David Friedberg: as uh evans and hemsworth for their single which makes sense in today's day and age like why wouldn't they and then they should get some base pay and then it should be performance and so if more people see

SPEAKER_48: black widow than or black panther or thor like you know there should be some bonus based on performance it makes total sense nobody can argue with that they just changed the performance metric

SPEAKER_44: by putting it out on streaming first since the performance metric had always been box office but now what they put in people's mind i think molly you tell me if your mind goes there because when

SPEAKER_09: there is a vacuum of information people's minds will go to dark places and some people will be charitable and go to a positive place given the history of pay discrepancies in hollywood most people's minds would reasonably go to a darker place than a charitable place and so i would say in my mind and i'm a pretty positive thinking person would they have done this to iron man would robert downey jr exactly have to fight for his money like this i i think i think the answer is no now i also understand that he's a better actor than all of them and he is the anchor and all that could be true but i do think you have to this is where the eq might come in is that there's been a history of incredible pay differences and you know sometimes it might be based on boxers but other times it might not be so you

SPEAKER_93: have to take that into account that was my reading of it oh no absolutely i mean these i to me these are

SPEAKER_06: all of a piece these are all chunks of the same story like you take away p l from division heads that's the ultimate like king move right you want to get rid of siloing find a way to do it but but being like the king is bad you get so like tweaked and triggered by eiger you know effectively offering to help you sure he hasn't gone away for a long time but there's a way to handle that without ruining the entire relationship and then finally instead of understanding all the layers that go into something like this like sure scarlett johansson got paid 20 million dollars the same base pay as these co-hosts but the back end pay is all based on box office performance so you acknowledge hey this is a really tough time to be making a decision like this because we know it could look like this and we want to reassure scarlett and everyone else that this is not about inequity it's a hundred year pandemic right and instead of just being like she got paid the same what's the problem like it all adds up to a portrait of a guy who isn't that good at people and what i actually find super interesting

Jason Calacanis: like on top of all that the cherry on the cake is like bob eiger picked him that's his hand chosen

David Friedberg: successor yeah well he ran parks i think this guy had run parks which is a key piece of it and he's an operational machine so i think maybe the thinking was he was tim cook-esque and would be a good

SPEAKER_105: like uh steward of the brand maybe he doesn't close the you know pixar deal but maybe he doesn't also

David Friedberg: have the iphone not ship on time you know uh or have supply chain issues so i think a lot of times and you have to look at eisner took this company i think it was like a billion dollar company when eisner took it over and they were doing stupid stuff and eisner made it unbelievable he you know 10 20 30 x the market cap but he was against the pixar deal because he and jobs couldn't get along and he didn't want to concede that pixar had beaten disney animation which was obvious it had

SPEAKER_105: and then it took eiger to come in and create a super aligned a super alignment with jobs and a lot of

David Friedberg: humility to to get to pace with jobs and really connect with him to get him to sell it and once pixar had sold it made it easier for lucas to sell because he saw pixar and marvel have great outcomes

SPEAKER_01: and lucas then was like okay i can trust them with my baby i want the cash before i die kind of situation yeah but remember eiger wasn't eisner's choice eisner was going with ovitz um the ultimate deal maker and that would have been

SPEAKER_26: pretty amazing because i wonder if ovitz would have gotten the pixar marvel and star wars deals done

SPEAKER_01: sooner than eiger or if he would have been you know worse he's the ultimate deal maker so we'll never

David Friedberg: know these counterfactuals but i think the history of disney needs to be made into this would be the

SPEAKER_09: ultimate series somebody needs to make a disney series not approved that goes from walt and like an anthology series from walt disney creating it and then time splicing it back to eisner to ovitz to eiger and back and forth marvel and just show that arc over you know that could be like fascinating an amazing you know the 1940s to 2020s how many years is that 80 years of disney oh my lord fascinating i

SPEAKER_10: mean you got a real they are also the company that effectively like invented ip as a weapon so you got a little bit of ip issue with wanting to do this but i do like no no no no you can tell

SPEAKER_39: any historical story that's true you know what this would be a great thing for us we would i always

SPEAKER_09: love the acquired fm guys doing these like two hour episodes where they explain the history of a company we should do our own week where we do each decade and do like a decade retrospective of disney

SPEAKER_00: what they accomplished each decade and we'll just read all the books and like that's phenomenal and then we've created the ip for the show that's it oh look at us ip a little like a studio a little

SPEAKER_06: pipeline i mean studio over here it also like just as a company building to go all the way back to our sequoia's story like as a company building exercise it is such an interesting uh example of all of the ways in that leadership can actually be a make or break like how you structure your company how you think about empowering leaders like amazon single threaded leader thing compared to you know the consolidation of divisions like eq versus iq it's just all in there it's freaking fascinating

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