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SPEAKER_02: Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. It's your boy, Jay Cal, and I am so excited to have back on the program two of my favorite guests.

SPEAKER_03: Yes, Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal are back on the pod. You know them because they have a great podcast called Acquired FM, and they have a paid version

SPEAKER_04: of it, which is called The LP Show, which I listen to, because these two cats are smart, and they're opinionated, and one of them has a delightful radio voice, and his name is not Ben. David has that sultry radio voice. David, go ahead and give us that NPR welcome.

SPEAKER_06: Oh, yeah. Well, as my dad likes to tell me, I have a face for radio as well, so.

SPEAKER_10: I mean, you literally sound like you have double the testosterone of Ben and I combined. Ben, say hi to everybody.

SPEAKER_13: Hey, how's it going? I am the lesser half of Acquired.

SPEAKER_03: Ben, of course, is the co-founder of Pioneer Square Labs and Startup Studio VC Fund in Seattle. He's good at what he does, and David is the co-host and angel investor along with him. If you don't know about Acquired FM yet, go to acquired.fm. They do a great pod.

SPEAKER_16: We did a crossover episode, and we had great chemistry. I think we had great chemistry. Yeah, boys? It went pretty well.

SPEAKER_13: Yeah, I mean, we tell the story of epic institutions, and normally that's a company, but in your case, it was the story behind the Jason Calacanis Empire, so that was a special treat. That was fun.

SPEAKER_23: I was a guest on yours. Of course, we did a two-parter, and I love when you break down these epic stories on the pod.

SPEAKER_24: Now, when you break down an epic story of a company, is that only available to the LP listeners? Because I just paid for it at some point. It's in my feed, and I don't even know the difference.

SPEAKER_16: This is one of the problems when you have two podcasts, one paid, one not paid.

SPEAKER_26: No, that's for everybody. That's for everybody.

SPEAKER_27: So timely and appropriate, you're saying an epic story, because probably right around the time this comes out, we will drop our acquired canonical episode on epic games. Okay. Which we're also going to talk about here, I think.

SPEAKER_16: Yeah, we're going to talk about it right after I look up the word canonical. I think that means the history.

SPEAKER_33: Is that what the fancy way of saying the history, or the order something's in, canonical? Definitive. Official.

SPEAKER_14: Definitive. Okay, good. Love it. But anyway, I was listening to you, or I was driving back from LA, because I like to

SPEAKER_23: drive LA, San Francisco, when I was just, took my girls on a little beach vacation, do a little surfing with them.

SPEAKER_37: Did you do it on autopilot?

SPEAKER_16: Actually, interestingly, my wife took my Model 3, and I drove our minivan, which we have this beautiful Honda Odyssey, which is delightful, and it actually has, like, stay in the lane, and adaptive cruise control.

SPEAKER_04: It's a Cadillac minivan, so I was kind of rocking a minivan, and it was a good, humbling

SPEAKER_02: experience for me to not drive a Tesla for a week, but I was, I did listen to your Seven Powers. You had the guy from Seven Powers on.

SPEAKER_44: Oh, Hamilton.

SPEAKER_16: That's the best. That's a smart cat. I like that guy, and I think that's worth it. Two books I wanted to recommend to both of you. I just read a book called I Love Capitalism.

SPEAKER_14: Have you guys read that yet? No.

SPEAKER_04: It's the guy Ken Langone or something, the guy who did Home Depot. Oh, cool. And it's a pretty good book.

SPEAKER_14: I think you guys would like it, because it kind of has that canonical storytelling. That you're so fond of. And then I'm about a third.

SPEAKER_49: Is Home Depot venture backed? I think that's, like, rattling your mind in my head somewhere.

SPEAKER_16: What it is, that's the best part of the story. And we're going to have them on our pod, but you'll probably get them before I do.

SPEAKER_04: But anyway, we, it's basically a banker guy who is, like, an M&A guy, like an Allen and

SPEAKER_03: company type banker who was working with the previous home hardware stores and then put together with Ross Perot and other investors. And it's just like this, like, it's a, it's kind of like what the 70s and the 80s and the tail end of the 90s. And it kind of ends with Elliot Spitzer and hookers. So I'm going to leave it at that.

SPEAKER_53: Because it's so goddamn good. Wow. And I saw the name of the book, I Love Capitalism. And I was like, oh, I can't wait to read this one.

SPEAKER_54: This is a J-Cal book if there ever was one.

SPEAKER_53: Oh, God, I love capitalism.

SPEAKER_02: And then the other book I just started was The Hot Hand, which is about the concept of

SPEAKER_16: streaks. And it really is a very good book because it talks about people who've had streaks that have ended. And it goes into the history of Stephen Curry, Steph Curry, and him having that Madison Square Garden game when he was a bench warmer, and then he breaks out. And, you know, it's a lot of stuff that we've all heard about The Hot Hand and all this

SPEAKER_14: stuff. And is it real? You know, it's not real.

SPEAKER_57: Statistically. That's the... Not to be all Michael Malbison on you, but...

SPEAKER_59: That's what the book comes... Let's leave it to the...

SPEAKER_16: We have to read the book before you actually come to that, because there may be some things that are true about The Hot Hand. But let's get into the news.

SPEAKER_23: You guys, what are you guys reading this? Give me a book you're reading over the summer if you have one. You have any books you're listening to or reading over the summer?

SPEAKER_61: Man, well, tomorrow, as we say this, we're going to have our next Acquired LP book club meeting with Jason. You should join. I'll try and make it. With Will Thorndike, author of The Outsiders. Awesome.

SPEAKER_65: Awesome book.

SPEAKER_64: What is the book about?

SPEAKER_61: It's about... It's case studies of eight outsider, quote-unquote, outsider CEOs, CEOs who are often first-time

SPEAKER_27: CEOs, you know, didn't have MBAs, didn't do investor relations, but just like were amazing.

SPEAKER_31: Was there one that stood out to you as your favorite of those outsiders, those eight outsiders?

SPEAKER_13: I mean, Warren Buffett's on there, so... Oh, okay. Yeah, that one. It's John Malone.

SPEAKER_44: Catherine Graham from The Washington Post. Yeah. Henry Singleton, Teledyne. And like, this is like classic.

SPEAKER_02: This is what I love about having you guys on the show. It's just like we... If we were out at a bar, instead of talking about sports, we'd talk about CEOs and companies. Like, we're such capitalist nerds. It's ridiculous. Ben, do you have a book on your shortlist? We should have a podcast. We should have a podcast on this. But anyway, the two books I mentioned are in the This Week in Startups book clubs, which

SPEAKER_14: is Mondays at 6 o'clock once a month. You guys, of course, are invited. So, we're doing those two books, the next two. What do you got on your shortlist of summer reading, Ben?

SPEAKER_13: It's an old book, but I just finished reading Creativity, Inc., the history of Pixar.

SPEAKER_03: Oh, my God. It's somewhere right behind me. I had Ed Catmull on the pod for a two-parter. Or Nick, send the link. I will try and get his email and send the intro. When I kid you not, I'm going to give you, boys, a tip as your big brother in podcasting. This took Emmy award-winning producer Jackie 18 months. And I said to her, there's the book right above my head. See it right there? Creativity, Inc.? Boom. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I just was so taken by this book. And I was like, I need to have Ed Catmull on the pod. It was episodes 665 and 666.

SPEAKER_23: A lot of our people refer to the episodes as numbers because we've got so many of them now.

SPEAKER_02: And man, what a great book, huh?

SPEAKER_77: Yeah. I mean, I'm excited to go listen to those couple episodes because the thing that Pixar has nailed

SPEAKER_13: that is an incredibly difficult thing for any organization to do is being creative. So trying lots of stuff, but being successful repetitively.

SPEAKER_81: Yes, the streak, the hot hand.

SPEAKER_82: And did they not have a hot hand?

SPEAKER_04: And Disney previously had the hot hand. If you read the Mike Leisner book, did you read? I'm sorry, the Robert Iger book. Did you read?

SPEAKER_84: Ride of a Lifetime. So good.

SPEAKER_04: So good. And if you think about it, he talked about the streak of The Little Mermaid, The Lion King, and Beauty and the Beast.

SPEAKER_85: Yeah.

SPEAKER_07: But then they went cold. Tarzan.

SPEAKER_86: Oh, then it got weird. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: Lilo and Stitch.

SPEAKER_88: Those were the Katzenberg glory days.

SPEAKER_02: There was some whack shit in there. I'm sorry, Nick. I'm sorry to ruin your childhood. I'm screaming from the background there. Producer Nick's crying.

SPEAKER_94: Listen, talk to your biotherapist about her, okay? Not here.

SPEAKER_93: But your girls are probably right in Frozen age, right?

SPEAKER_04: You know what? They did Frozen for a heartbeat. And then I was like, you know what?

SPEAKER_52: I don't want my daughters on the princess industrial complex, as my friend Sokka called it. So I was like, they started getting into dinosaurs.

SPEAKER_03: I was like, this is literally to my four-year-old twins. I'm like, Jurassic Park is the most terrorizing movie for children. It's completely age-inappropriate for four-year-olds. You need to be eight years old to see it. And they said, can we please see it? And I said, sure. I said, but I'm warning you right now, a dinosaur is going to eat a lot of people. And it's going to be bloody. Are you willing to close your eyes if you get scared and we'll pause the movie? And to my daughter's credit, they did that. I have now watched all five.

SPEAKER_96: The three original Jurassic Parks, one, two, and three. One in the order is really one, three, two in terms of how good they are. And then Jurassic World, which is actually pretty fantastic. The Jurassic World series Fallen Kingdom. And there's another one coming out, Dominion, because they want to know what happens when the dinosaurs take over. So the final, the sixth one is going to be the dinosaurs have taken over the world and humans have to live in a dinosaur world with pterodactyls and moosasauruses and tyrannosaurus rexes just roaming freely.

SPEAKER_97: Yeah, there was no direction to go but there. I mean, that's the, like, standard Planet of the Apes playbook is we're now in their world.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah. So thanks for tuning into media selections for the rest of this stuff, for the pandemic.

SPEAKER_37: Wait, I thought that's what we were doing on this show.

SPEAKER_02: Well, it's supposed to be a news roundtable, but let me just preview for everybody as we do this. Oh, by the way, since we're doing it, let's just do TV shows. Let's just do TV shows and get it out of the way. And then we're going to get into the news.

SPEAKER_16: Best thing you binge watched, that's been great in pandemic, for whatever reason you like it.

SPEAKER_13: Yeah, I just finished watching Man in the High Castle, four seasons. Oh, really? It's a great show that ends so unsatisfyingly. So I just want to say that for anyone who hasn't watched it yet, like, you're in for sort of a Game of Thrones-like finish. And just know that going in, but enjoy the ride you're on.

SPEAKER_14: Okay. I started it, and I got into a situation with my wife, because we kind of have this agreement

SPEAKER_03: about, I don't want to cheat on my wife on which streaming. Let's just leave it on that. Because the new version of cheating is if you watch a show without her. And I started watching Clone Wars with the girls, and she likes Star Wars, and this has been like a big fight. This is what we fight over. What do you got for me, Dave? What have you been watching?

SPEAKER_107: Uh, my wife and I have been watching Schitt's Creek together, which is like the perfect quarantine. What is Schitt's Creek?

SPEAKER_109: I don't even know what that is. Oh, what is Schitt's Creek?

SPEAKER_110: Oh, man. Dan Levy, and he's the son of Eugene Levy. Remember the American Pie guy? Yeah. Super famous comic.

SPEAKER_44: Uh, they, well, it's all Dan, his son, created this whole show, and the whole family's in it. It's so, so good. What is it on?

SPEAKER_113: Is it an ABC, Netflix, Amazon?

SPEAKER_44: Uh, it's a Canadian show. They're Canadian. Uh, so it's on, it's on now. Netflix, uh, all except the last season.

SPEAKER_114: This is what I love doing, is finding those obscure shows on other networks. So, a friend.

SPEAKER_13: Let's not, let's not give this credit for being obscure. Like, this is an incredibly mainstream thing that just somehow, uh, you missed it, Jason, but this is like, this is like a blockbuster top ten show.

SPEAKER_118: A lot of great things are from Canada. But it's in the top left box of, of, uh, Netflix for lots and lots of people. Okay. Yeah.

SPEAKER_14: All right. I'm going to check that out.

SPEAKER_02: Uh, my pick is I May Destroy You, which is an HBO series, which deals with a lot of

SPEAKER_16: issues around, uh, race, uh, sexual identity and memory and drugs and assault or the gray area of assault.

SPEAKER_03: And it is a tour de force because the woman who stars in it wrote it, is a spoken word artist, and also seems to have an extreme talent for storytelling. And it is, it starts off a little bit like, where is this going? And then it just gets to a pace. It's not for kids, obviously.

SPEAKER_04: Um, but, and, and it's very kind of millennial slash even closer to Gen Z and its approach.

SPEAKER_122: But it's so, you know, HBO just knows how to spend money. Every time I watch an HBO show, I'm like, that's an HBO show. It's just, the quality is just too good.

SPEAKER_124: They spent too much money on this.

SPEAKER_13: And hopefully that keeps up. I mean, that's been the hallmark of their brand forever. And then AT&T bought it. And now they're like, well, what else can we jam into this pipe that people seem to love?

SPEAKER_114: I hope these guys don't screw it up. When we get back, we're going to talk about, talk about screwing it up.

SPEAKER_02: We're going to talk about Apple screwing up every single aspect of developer relations. We're going to talk about TikTok's, uh, CEO resigning and deciding he would resign from the Chinese Communist Party.

SPEAKER_04: Uh, we're going to talk about the bidding war from Walmart. And, uh, the SEC is changing accreditation laws. Oh, I love you, SEC. Thank you. Finally. Finally. It's been a long road. It's huge for you.

SPEAKER_53: But this is big for J. Cal.

SPEAKER_128: And I'm excited. Stick with us.

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SPEAKER_134: All right, my guests today are the co-hosts of Acquired.fm.

SPEAKER_14: You are required to go pay for Acquired.fm's LP if you are a founder, if you are an entrepreneur, if you care about the technology industry. They put a shit ton of work into every episode, and the LP stuff is the hotness.

SPEAKER_39: I think it's about, I don't know, I think it charges about, it's about $100 an episode. It's about $5,000 a year for that content.

SPEAKER_102: What do you guys charge? It is not. It should literally be $1,000.

SPEAKER_13: I don't want to mislead people to think that it's this thing they shouldn't go listen. It's the main show where we do tons of work, we do deep dives on companies. We tell the two-and-a-half-hour epic story of epic games. That's totally free and available to everyone. For people who are actively building companies and want to go deep into things like, how does a VC firm work, and who makes decisions there, and what do titles mean, and all that stuff. That's what we do.

SPEAKER_03: A lot of basics, but also deeper dives. Anyway, it's literally, honestly, if it was $100 a month, I would still think it was underpriced. Get it now, because I really think they should raise the price, acquire.fm. Our first story is Apple fighting Epic Games. For those of you who don't know, Epic Games is a publisher and software developer.

SPEAKER_16: They make Fortnite, which is, I believe, one of the most successful games in the history of video gaming.

SPEAKER_03: But importantly, they make the Unreal Engine, which is a video game engine that powers other games. The founder is Tim Sweeney.

SPEAKER_16: He's the founder and CEO, and he owns over 50% of the company. Tencent owns like 40% of the holding company. They got a $17 billion valuation.

SPEAKER_03: And in June, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney sent emails to Apple saying, hey, listen, Fortnite makes a lot of money. 30% heck of a take. Can we get a discount? Can we, you know, not pay for or change the take rate of the in-app purchases?

SPEAKER_141: Which also happened to be the subject of the, was it the Senate hearings? The antitrust hearings. Yeah, the House. The House antitrust hearings.

SPEAKER_16: And so this is front and center for everybody. Our boys over at Jason Freed and David Hanmeyer Hansen, both have been on the program in the last year with hey.com.

SPEAKER_03: They also got in a big fight with Apple. And Apple is getting horrible PR about this. And then Epic, from what I understand, decided, screw it, we're going to jump the fence. We're jumping the fence. When you ask to buy something inside of Fortnite, we're sending you to a website, which is ixnay on the rules nay, according to Apple.

SPEAKER_02: And Apple is like, we don't ever change the rules for anybody, except when I think.

SPEAKER_144: Except they do.

SPEAKER_02: Except they do, like where they had Eddie Q gave Amazon a better deal. And then, now they're in court.

SPEAKER_03: All of the developers are slowly lining up behind Epic. Quietly. Quietly, because you, obviously it's quietly, because you don't want to poke the tiger that would feature you. And you don't want to mix it up with Apple, which goes to show that Apple has too much power. If your partners are that scared of you, they're afraid to talk to you, and the only person who's not afraid is a maniac like David Hanmeyer-Hansen, whose pastime is starting fights. Or Epic, who's, you know, 50% controlled by a...

SPEAKER_146: Or Jason Calacanis.

SPEAKER_03: Or Jason Calacanis. Like, if the only people who are willing to fight with you are crazy people, that's one thing. But if all of your partners...

SPEAKER_147: Who have control of their companies.

SPEAKER_03: And have control of their companies. But if you're scared of them, that says something else. So, let me just drop it to you, David. What is your take on what is happening right now?

SPEAKER_16: And the insertion of Epic into the fight.

SPEAKER_03: As opposed to this being a fight with this little hey.com thing on the side. Which people can, I think, dismiss.

SPEAKER_16: But Epic dropping this bomb after those hearings seems to me to be a double punch that I don't think Apple is going to recover from. What do you think, David?

SPEAKER_06: Yeah, I think this is a huge deal. This is a major, major crisis for Apple.

SPEAKER_44: I mean, you mentioned a little bit about Epic and its CEO, Tim Sweeney. I mean, this is like... This is not a normal... You know, this is not another public company with shareholders. Of course, he has outside shareholders.

SPEAKER_27: But like, Tim is... You got to understand. So, Epic is based in Cary, North Carolina.

SPEAKER_44: It is a very, very large company. Of course, it makes Fortnite.

SPEAKER_71: Which lots and lots of people play and have heard of.

SPEAKER_06: 350 million players worldwide, I think.

SPEAKER_27: But more importantly, they make the Unreal Engine, which powers so many other things. Like, not only does it power other games. It powers PUBG, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. One of the other largest games out there. It also... Like, The Mandalorian. And we were talking about Star Wars earlier. Like, literally, the television show, The Mandalorian, was filmed on a soundstage. Is that right?

SPEAKER_44: All of it. When... With a screen, like a 360-degree screen in this room.

SPEAKER_154: Yes, yes. That was made in Unreal. I was talking to... The whole thing was rendered.

SPEAKER_04: I was talking to Jon Favreau about that, actually, and how he shot it and how he's able to do it so quickly and the cost of it. Because he did use real models for certain things, but the actors were on stage in this

SPEAKER_82: essentially...

SPEAKER_13: They call it The Void. It is a gigantic ring. Holodeck. Exactly. Made out of screens around you that is all rendered using the Unreal Engine by Epic.

SPEAKER_02: So, this is not just picking a fight, then, David, as I let you wrap here, and then we'll get Ben in on this. This is not just a fight with Epic and Fortnite.

SPEAKER_24: This carries with it the possibility that anything Unreal-related, Unreal the Engine, could get in on this fight.

SPEAKER_44: Yeah. I mean, they are in on this fight, whether they like it or not. And the thing about Tim, like... So, Tim owned... He owns a little less than half of the company, but he controls the company.

SPEAKER_27: It's a private company. Tim lives in North Carolina. He's not married. He doesn't have kids. He doesn't hang out with celebrities. He has, like, some fast cars that he drives every now and then.

SPEAKER_44: But basically, he just works on Epic, and, like, that's all he cares about. Like, he drinks Diet Coke, and he eats, like, Bojangles fried chicken. Like, he told the Wall Street Journal, like, that's mostly what he does. So, there's this, like, epic, literally epic YouTube video of, like, MTV Cribs-style tour with him from, like, 2008, right, Ben? And it's just so classy. He's just, like, an engineer.

SPEAKER_161: He's like, this is my dining room. I've never eaten in it. I just work all the time.

SPEAKER_82: He's, like, a legit principled guy is a way of saying this.

SPEAKER_24: So, how does that contribute, Ben, to his positioning of this? And do you believe that this fight was timed with Tim Cook, Tim Apple being, you know, grilled?

SPEAKER_02: Tim Apple. Tim Apple being grilled, barbecued.

SPEAKER_13: No comment on where Tim Apple comes from, but the, so, was it timed with Apple's antitrust hearing? Absolutely. Like, I think that is, they perfectly planned it. Uh, but is Tim a principled idealist? Tim Sweeney here. Of course, we have the battle of the Tims. Um, is he a principled idealist who's doing this for some greater good? Also, yes.

SPEAKER_168: Like, this is, uh... It's not just about money, because what percentage of Fortnite's rev...

SPEAKER_03: Because Fortnite is a desktop game, mainly.

SPEAKER_102: I don't know how many... 12% from iOS.

SPEAKER_03: All right.

SPEAKER_122: So, this is, this is chump change for him, because it's, if it's 12%, then he's talking about 30% of 12%, so it's 3%.

SPEAKER_13: It's chump change, but it's 200 million per year.

SPEAKER_169: Which is exactly chump change. It's 3%. So, he, it's not... In other words, if you were hey.com, you, if you're not on an iPhone, there's no way for

SPEAKER_03: people to use your product. It's your whole business. You're done.

SPEAKER_122: It's like, literally, it's your, it's 80%. This is 3%, right? So, he can fight this fight.

SPEAKER_27: So, no, what it's about for Tim, and he wants to give all that savings back to players anyway. He doesn't want that extra revenue.

SPEAKER_44: What this is about is having an open app ecosystem, app store ecosystem, and not just store, but

SPEAKER_27: like, all of the infrastructure and services to run games, to run experiences, to run entertainment. That's what he wants, and that's what Apple has not been providing.

SPEAKER_44: Like, there's a reason why the most innovative, you know, besides Fortnite and PUBG, which runs

SPEAKER_27: on Unreal Engine, the most innovative games and experiences of the past, you know, 10 years, League of Legends, Dota 2, Overwatch. There's a reason these things aren't in the app store, and it's this.

SPEAKER_43: Wow. So, this is amazing. I had an interesting idea. I want to run up the flagpole with you boys, see if anybody salutes. Okay, we'll put a little toast in the toaster and see if it turns brown.

SPEAKER_159: I want to know, this is a crazy power move.

SPEAKER_24: If Epic bought or partnered with something like, remember HTC phones, everybody loved those,

SPEAKER_02: where there's like the one phone that some Apple, some Android nerds use. I was thinking about getting one. I just kind of like the Pixel.

SPEAKER_16: Let's say there's somebody with an axe to grind against Apple. Oh, I know who's got an axe to grind against Apple.

SPEAKER_53: Android phone makers have an axe to grind. Inherently, they're at war with them already.

SPEAKER_10: If they made a Fortnite iPad competitor and a Fortnite phone, and it was, let's just say

SPEAKER_24: they partnered with HTC or Samsung, and if you use that phone, you would get a certain

SPEAKER_04: amount of, are they Fortnite dollars? What do they call them in Fortnite? V-Bucks. V-Bucks? You buy this phone. You get 10 V-Bucks a day. What is the value? What do people spend on average? Do we know? Do people spend a dollar, 10 V-Bucks a month?

SPEAKER_175: It's a whale's business. It's a whale's business.

SPEAKER_176: Yeah.

SPEAKER_82: All right. So let's just set the table here. You buy the phone.

SPEAKER_02: You get 10 V-Bucks a day with the phone for the first 100 days. You get 1,000 V-Bucks.

SPEAKER_24: Now, they partner with somebody for that, and the tablet, and they get that OEM, the original equipment manufacturer, to co-brand it as a Fortnite one, and it has one or two buttons

SPEAKER_16: that make playing the game even that much better.

SPEAKER_04: Would that not be the come-over-the-top moment for a $17 billion company like Epic that could crack the back of Apple? Answer that question when we get back after this break.

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SPEAKER_23: All right, Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal are here.

SPEAKER_02: Follow Ben Gilbert. You got the G-I-L-B-E-R-T on the Twitter. And David is D-I-L-B-E-R-T. What are you?

SPEAKER_186: D-J-R-O-S-E-N-T.

SPEAKER_105: Are you dropping fat beats, David? Is that what I get from that?

SPEAKER_93: In my radio voice.

SPEAKER_02: In your radio voice. All right, so before we went for commercial break, I had this interesting idea that coming up with a...

SPEAKER_04: I believe Fortnite is so powerful that if they came out with a tablet, it would be a bestseller, especially if it had a built-in number of bucks, V-Bucks, and it maybe had some buttons

SPEAKER_16: or, you know, hardware that was just a little bit more specific to it. Like, let's say the back of it had an LED reading that showed which of your friends were online. You know, some people are putting those, like, little quick displays on the back of phones. Imagine there was a quick display on the back that showed your friends who were online at the time or something. And you wouldn't replace your phone with this. This would be another thing you'd pull out of your backpack and you could play with.

SPEAKER_03: What do we think of this idea of them competing, or I should say, helping an Android manufacturer take market share from Apple? They're not going to beat Apple, but they're going to just stick it to them.

SPEAKER_13: No. No, why, then? Jason, you are the consummate founder optimist. Okay. I think you are dramatically underestimating the lock-in effects that Apple has on their ecosystem. Sure. They will take... There are a few people out there, much like there were a few people out there that went and bought the Facebook phone. These are the true believers in Fortnite who don't care at all about literally any other feature on their iPhone. It's an incredibly rare thing and a much smaller crowd. And I think another allegory here is in the podcasting ecosystem where you see the luminaries of the world say, you know what? Who? Exactly.

SPEAKER_157: People love this show so much that they're going to change their existing behavior to go and get this content on a different platform. And people just don't do that. It is an incredibly rare... Too much friction. Totally. And I think there exist apps that could do this. Another one is a different Tencent property, which is WeChat.

SPEAKER_13: So, I mean, you could imagine in China, if WeChat decided to pull off the iPhone, you'd have hundreds of millions of people that would leave the Apple ecosystem and go and buy whatever phone had WeChat. So, there are nuclear options. I don't think Fortnite is one of them.

SPEAKER_33: But you do think WeChat coming out with a WeChat phone in partnership with an OEM could have legs. So, there is something... In partnership with Xiaomi.

SPEAKER_24: I mean, yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. I like it. All right. So, I think we're spitballing here. David, get in on this. What do you think of this concept here?

SPEAKER_107: That's the other dimension of all this that I don't think people understand as much. You know, Epic and Tencent are major allies here.

SPEAKER_44: And Tencent is so important. Like, literally what Ben said is so true. Like, if iPhones in China did not have WeChat on it, Apple's market share would go to zero. Apple gets 15% to 20% of their entire revenue across the entire company from China.

SPEAKER_27: Like, that is the ultimate hammer at play here. And I think that's why, you know, there are many reasons why this is a big problem for Apple. Starting with, it's just like they've lost faith of a lot of developers.

SPEAKER_11: But that's like, there is way more at stake here.

SPEAKER_33: I have another idea for Apple. I want to run it by you too. And I want you to give it your consideration.

SPEAKER_02: And I have great respect for the people at Apple. I'll say that. And I think that there is a value to them curating the store. And I think there is a value to them having a closed, safe ecosystem.

SPEAKER_24: Especially if you have kids, you can kind of feel better about them being on an iPhone than an Android phone. And you can feel better about what's in the app store. And I think there is something to that that consumers want. And they should be able to provide whatever product they want. But I'm thinking, because it did feel unfair that subscriptions would be 30% year one and 30% year two.

SPEAKER_16: So they conceded 30% year one for your subscription, 15% for year two. I have another idea. What if they said, we're going to take 30% and then when you hit this threshold, it goes down. Just like a threshold might go up for a venture capitalist who hits certain marks. You know, you return three times the money. Now you go from 20% carry to 30%. I'm thinking the opposite of tiered carry, which is a discount. Like, listen, if you break it, it's 30% on the first, you know, 10 million. It's 25% on the next 10 million. It's 20% on the next 10 million. And then anything over 50 is 15%. And anything over 100 is 10%. They can make a very simple stage thing, which would be like what a supermarket does.

SPEAKER_03: If you move a lot of product in a supermarket, you know, you get a different price than if you don't move a lot, right?

SPEAKER_122: And there could be some easy concession here for Apple. But now I feel like Apple's been backed into such a corner that they have to go to the mat. And that's a bit of a problem for everybody involved.

SPEAKER_03: Is there an exit ramp, David? I'm doing this one, which is like a tiered structure. Is there a tiered structure exit ramp to end this madness? Or do you have one?

SPEAKER_211: What's the exit ramp?

SPEAKER_65: I think it's almost zero possibility that Apple will do this.

SPEAKER_61: But I think actually Epic provides a really good example of a tiered structure that works here, which is for the licensing for the Unreal Engine. It's 5% of the revenue of your game or experience, which is way, way, way less than Apple's 30%, arguably for a piece that's just as if not more important.

SPEAKER_27: But I think they announced this last year, they waive fees on the first million dollars of your revenue. So that means you let a thousand flowers bloom. Like if you're never going to get that big, well, Epic's never going to make that much money from you anyway. But there's no incentive not to use it. Like everybody can come on the store.

SPEAKER_16: So it's a tiered structure with generosity for experimenters. For the little guys. I love it.

SPEAKER_24: I love that idea. Now, you just popped another idea into my head, which is, well, if Unreal made a device that was for gaming that also happened to have phone service on it, and it had 5%, that actually could make an impact.

SPEAKER_03: Putting the Fortnite phone or the Fortnite tablet aside, an Unreal tablet, an Unreal phone with only 5%, and then make all other apps available on the phone available for 5%, that could be a game changer.

SPEAKER_44: Yeah, let's think about Fortnite, Roblox, PUBG, Minecraft.

SPEAKER_218: 5% across the board.

SPEAKER_27: Yeah, 5% across the board with half or more of those savings passed on to consumers. That's going to be really compelling.

SPEAKER_68: This would fall in line with the Epic playbook as well, because they started as a game manufacturer, and then they moved to the layer of making the game engine. And then they've since launched the Epic Games Store, and then they launched the Epic Online Services.

SPEAKER_157: So they're basically launching these sort of different components of the value chain, and what they expect the developers to do and the consumers to do is adopt them piecemeal. Hey, we're not going to bundle. We're not going to take sort of the surplus economics we deserve or could take for our monopolistic behavior of bundling these things all together and then forcing you to use the option that's bundled in. And I could actually, even though they're not a hardware company, I could actually see them being like, and another modular way that you can experience our experiences or anyone else's experience is through the Epic hardware. Jason, I don't think it's that crazy.

SPEAKER_03: Okay, so the mistake I made in my first iteration was limiting it to Fortnite, but to make it the Epic Unreal phone and the Epic Unreal tablet, and here's the kicker, Ben and David. What if for but $1, all of the game manufacturers could get all of Jason Calacanis's content?

SPEAKER_226: No, no, that's available for free for all time.

SPEAKER_02: Listen, this is a separate subject, but I do believe the only way to make paid content work is to have 50% or greater of your content behind a paywall, which is what you're doing.

SPEAKER_16: It's like one for one, or the Red Scare podcast is one for one, or 100%, which is what Sam Harris is doing, I think, 30%. You listen to the first 30 minutes and the other 60 minutes is behind. It has to be the majority in order for it to work on any level, but what I'm thinking here is, what if they said to all of their, all the games made and all the apps, for $1, you can put yourself on the phone, and then we could have up to 200 apps preloaded. We will then take $200 off the cost of the phone, and you get to permanently be on the phone. That app cannot be deleted.

SPEAKER_77: It's like the OEM model of flip phones. I sure hope we don't get back to that.

SPEAKER_04: Well, no, no, but here, it doesn't mean it's on the front screen. They'll all be like in the, it's like a feature listing on any other Zillow or Redfin or Yelp.

SPEAKER_03: You get like basically a feature listing. So you put whatever you want in your first couple of screens, but the third and fourth screen, if you choose to, instead of paying $600 for this phone, you can pay $400, and it comes with 200 apps.

SPEAKER_215: So this is like when you buy a Kindle, you can buy the Kindle with the special offers, and you get it for 20%.

SPEAKER_114: Yes, yes, I think this could actually work.

SPEAKER_24: So now, I want to flip the conversation to get back to China, and the fact that Tencent, and we sort of dabbled in their involvement in so many companies.

SPEAKER_10: And when we get back, as predicted, as I predicted, working for the communists is not a great idea for any American. And literally a couple of months after I said Kevin Mayer has lost his mind and is a traitor to America for going to work for this Chinese company, he has resigned.

SPEAKER_43: But he may not have resigned because of his realization that working for communists isn't the best look. He may have resigned because he was going to be excluded from the discussions about the acquisition that is inevitably, I believe, going to occur when we get back.

SPEAKER_39: We're going to get both Ben and David's opinion on the crazy hot potato that is TikTok on This Week in Startups.

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SPEAKER_16: Speaking of good design, let's get back to the rest of this podcast. All right, listen, we're ripping through a lot of important information at a very difficult time. And I just want to take this moment to say, I know many people are suffering from the pandemic and the economic aftermath that we're in the middle of.

SPEAKER_39: And to those people, I am very sorry for what you're going through and suffering through. And I hope as Americans, we can all do our best to vote for people who we believe are qualified for whatever side of the aisle is. But I hope you all vote. And I hope you vote up and down for people who are qualified to deal with a crisis. And I'm going to leave it at that. And then to our black brothers and sisters who are suffering under unfair policing. Again, this is not what this podcast is about. But I feel obligated to say it's just devastating to see what's happened. And we stand with you. And I am putting a lot of thought and time and effort into finding more black women, black men, and people of color to invest money in. And I'm very proud to say that our team, especially Jackie on my team, has a program called Founder.University

SPEAKER_23: that we taped that we did this week for 10 hours. And we had 260 black and brown founders, female founders, LBGTQ. And we found three or four. We always find three or four great investments. And I am working my ass off to work with my team to make this a top priority to bring not just, you know, I can't affect policing. I know that. I mean, I can vote, but I'm not going to be able to change these murders that are happening on the street.

SPEAKER_234: But the thing that's in my wheelhouse is investing in founders of color. If you're a founder of color, if you're a woman, and you want to spend time with me and my team, we are available to you.

SPEAKER_23: Whether you've just got an idea, we've got a prototype. And we're going to do it. And we're going to do it for free. And we're going to give you every piece of advice and support we can. That is our promise to you. And we do it through something called Founder.University, which we're hosting six times a year for women of color, Latinx, I think is the preferred term now, LGBTQ. Anybody who's underestimated and underrepresented, we want to work with you. And I just want to put that out there. And my good friend Arlen Hamilton, a friend of the pod, has started her own backstage syndicate. I implore you, if you're a limited partner in what I do, that you go sign up for what she's doing. And I've been mentoring her on how to run a syndicate. She's done two deals already, both oversubscribed. And I think she's a great human being. And I think she's a force of nature. And yeah, maybe she swings a couple of elbows here or there. But I swing twice as many and I get half the criticism. So go support her as well if you're an accredited investor. And we need to change this situation because it's goddamn unacceptable. I'm going to leave it at that. I don't know if David had been. I don't want to put you on the spot.

SPEAKER_235: Amen.

SPEAKER_23: A very hard time getting to sleep at night. And I consider myself one of those people who never, who could just power through anything.

SPEAKER_43: But it's very hard for me to deal with what I'm seeing. You know, it's heartbreaking.

SPEAKER_77: I mean, look, David and I, you're preaching to the choir here.

SPEAKER_13: I think one thing that we're, at least I'll speak for myself, in a way grateful for is having our eyes open to the way in which our country and our whole system has been broken for a very long time. Awful that the way that it's coming to light. But as hard as it is to watch and as hard as it is to talk about, I mean, these are murders.

SPEAKER_02: Um, I am grateful that I mean, that is the word exposed to it is the word it's it is the word and you know what, uh, if the three of us were in any of those situations, we would not have been murdered. And that's that's basically all you need to know.

SPEAKER_43: That's the beginning and end of the discussion. So anybody who's saying you shouldn't resist arrest, I would invite you to imagine that your neck was knelt on for nine minutes and you died or you're a black man and you saw that and then think about, well, would you resist? If you think that getting handcuffed is going to result in you being suffocated to death. I mean, that's the that's the level of insanity this has come to. And I'm from a family of police officers and firefighters. Right.

SPEAKER_23: And I know the overwhelming majority of people have good intent. And I know it's an incredibly hard job. But we as a society have to come up with creative solutions. Um, and we have to this has to end and we need to have leadership that is willing to discuss this and take measures. And, uh, I'm well behind Kamala Harris. I and I know that she's like the imperfect candidate and Biden's the imperfect candidate. Um, I wish Bloomberg had run. Uh, that would have been my preference. Bloomberg, Kamala, Bloomberg, Hillary, whoever. Uh, but things need to change. It's not a political show, but, uh, we need to have qualified people in office, period.

SPEAKER_13: It shouldn't be political to say that we shouldn't murder people in the streets.

SPEAKER_43: So, I, I, you know what, I, thank you for saying that because I do think that, you know, we live in this crazy bubble on Twitter where you and I, and we all hang out.

SPEAKER_03: And it feels like if you say, my God, this is a murder and people are like, oh no, there's a million reasons why that murder could occur, you know, and it's just, it's a murder. It's a murder. A murder is a murder. When somebody is unnecessarily, when there are other options, you take the other options. It's tackling a person when they say they can't breathe, getting the hell off their neck with your knee. Like, we, we need, there's a, there's a training issue here. Police in this country are trained for six months on average, I understand. Like, if people are going to be giving guns and they're going to be, yes, to get into the most crazy situations out there, let's increase their salary 50%. Let's move their training from six months to, you know, four years. And maybe they don't have a gun for the first two years. Maybe they're peace officers for two years and then they become police officers.

SPEAKER_23: If they can show a track record of learning how to use a gun in a, in a proper situation. And, you know, I did look at non-lethal weapons and those things and, and safety cams as a category for venture investing.

SPEAKER_03: Cause I said, you know, maybe there's a way, and I'm sure somebody will clip this and be like, oh, here's a white venture capitalists thinking to solve something with an investment. But the truth is there are ways that, and there are devices and there are things out there we could create that could make more non-lethal interactions.

SPEAKER_43: It's, there's a, there's training and there's equipment and there's procedures and all of those can play a part and we need to work on it.

SPEAKER_249: Um, and then the thing that just sucks is like, all that is true, but like this, it's the whole, the whole thing is just so broken.

SPEAKER_110: Everything is broken. Like this happened again in Wisconsin. How the, how the hell did this happen again?

SPEAKER_255: Like, that's the, that's such an important point because it must be in the minds of every police officer.

SPEAKER_122: What happened with George Floyd? What happened with Brianna Taylor? And now what happened? It's in their mind. They must have this. They must be having a morning briefing and, and, and memos and retraining and discussions. So for this to happen again, so brazenly, where you shoot somebody in the back seven times, I understand he's resisting. I understand he might be reaching for something, tackle the person, shut the door of the car, do something other than shoot somebody in the back seven times. It's an unnecessary use of force. God, it's just infuriating. I'm sorry for getting emotional about it. And, you know, it's very hard to shift gears. It's very hard for me to sometimes to host this podcast. I'll be honest with people. It's hard to talk about business when you see Rome is burning, but carry on we must.

SPEAKER_03: And I think actually talking about TikTok and talking about the Chinese Communist Party and what's going on there is also a human rights issue. We don't have human rights fixed in this country. And China is involved in, and a lot of people in our industry don't like to talk about this, genocide right now. You know, the, the, the Uyghurs are being round up. You've seen the videos. And I think we really start to need to think about the relationship of these companies to the United States through the lens of human rights, what's happened in Hong Kong, et cetera.

SPEAKER_39: And TikTok obviously is the first, you know, tip of the spear right after Huawei, I would guess, in terms of this discussion.

SPEAKER_16: Everybody knows Kevin Mayer, or if you don't, was Disney's head of streaming, and he ran Disney Plus, which is the most successful thing at Disney since, I think, Marvel.

SPEAKER_39: And I think it will ultimately have 500 million paid subscribers and will be the driving force of that company. Legendary CEO, Bob Iger, who wrote the great book we talked about, Ride of a Lifetime, is a lifelong corporate executive, let's face it.

SPEAKER_16: He's not a founder type, he's a corporate executive. And in February, there were two finalists for the job, and the head of parks, Bob Chapek, if I'm pronouncing it correct, got the job, and the head of streaming, Kevin Mayer, didn't.

SPEAKER_39: I think that's a mistake, without knowing either of them personally. Well, I'll fight you on that. It seemed to me like the, you will, okay.

SPEAKER_259: I'll definitely fight you on that.

SPEAKER_04: Okay, I don't know. So, let's just take that off the top. Who are these two individuals, and why did Chapek get the job over Mayer?

SPEAKER_49: Yeah, David, I want to kick it to you, because you know the strat planning story better than I do.

SPEAKER_27: Yeah, so, Kevin was put in charge of Disney Plus and streaming because he wanted operating experience and as part of his development as an executive within Disney, running a business line. But for many years, he was running the strat strategy and planning group, which is legendary at Disney and so important to the company.

SPEAKER_110: I mean, along with Bob Iger, the strat planning group, and Kevin did those, you know, the Marvel acquisition, the Pixar acquisition, the Lucasfilm acquisition.

SPEAKER_267: And they had to redo strat planning, right? Because strat planning used to screw up every deal.

SPEAKER_110: Well, that was under the Ovid. Under Eisner.

SPEAKER_268: Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_84: They were great for a while, and then the Ovid Eisner later year is not so great.

SPEAKER_16: Basically, what they said in the book was every time they brought a deal there, it died.

SPEAKER_270: And there was no boldness in strat planning before Iger redid it and took it from, I don't know, if it was hundreds of people down to like 40 or something.

SPEAKER_272: Yep, yep. Totally streamlined, and Kevin was a big part of that.

SPEAKER_44: But I think it's totally unfair to call Iger a, you know, hired gun executive. I mean, I think he is like- Oh, I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_275: Did he ever start a company?

SPEAKER_276: No, but he worked for 50 years in the same organization and ended up being the CEO of it.

Chamath Palihapitiya: Well, that's what I mean. No, no, no. But listen, there's a difference between a founder and somebody who runs organizations.

SPEAKER_112: I'm not saying one is better than the other, but it is two different career paths, clearly.

SPEAKER_44: I think yes, but in this case, he really, as close as you could ever come to having something like a founder mindset and DNA in a hundred-year-old company like Disney.

SPEAKER_110: Okay, fair enough. I'll give that to you. He spent his whole career, except for one year, one year out of college, and then he spent the rest of his whole career starting literally at the bottom and rising up to the CEO. Killer story. In the Walt Disney, you know, what became the Walt Disney organization. It's just amazing.

SPEAKER_13: So I want to take it on why Chapik was the right CEO. So Iger had this, like, for anyone who read the book or, you know, listened to, I'm sure Jason talked about this or us talk about this. Iger had this sort of three-point plan where he wanted to, and of course it's a three-point plan, but he comes in as CEO and he says it's about digital distribution, it's about international, and it's about owning first-party, just like unbelievable IP, Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar.

SPEAKER_03: So we got to own the IP, we have to go international, and what was the other one? International, own IP. Direct digital distribution. And direct-to-consumer, which they never had. It was always obscurified. ESPN, the customer of ESPN was a cable channel, not a sports fan.

SPEAKER_286: Got it.

SPEAKER_13: Yep, and I think technically it may have been more like we have to use technology as our future.

SPEAKER_157: It may have been a little bit broader than that, but basically saying Disney started because of technological breakthroughs in how to do animation, and we need to use technology to create innovation in the same way that was a founding principle of this company.

SPEAKER_68: Anyway, Iger comes in, he completely changes the strategy of the company and reorganizes everything, does the Fox acquisition in addition to those three big properties, Marvel, Pixar, Lucasfilm, and sets the direction of the company for the next 20 years.

SPEAKER_13: So he was the guy taking the boggle thing and shaking it, and then sort of letting everything settle out. And what you want to do after that is harvest the returns from that strategy.

SPEAKER_157: You want a person like Bob Chapik that's going to come in and sort of just execute, a COO type, a hammer, who is not going to come in with a brand new vision again and shake everything up again.

SPEAKER_179: Ah, so like you need a Tim Cook post-Steve Jobs, not a Steve Jobs after Steve Jobs.

SPEAKER_126: Absolutely.

SPEAKER_179: That's an interesting approach.

SPEAKER_44: That's so important is Iger was both of those in one. It's not like he came in from the outside, shook everything up. He had spent 30 years in the organization.

SPEAKER_110: ABC Cap City. Yeah, he was the COO, and then he was like, nope, what got me here isn't going to get Disney there.

SPEAKER_44: We're going to shake everything up, and I've got the cred to do that because I actually did this.

SPEAKER_16: And the crazy part of that story, I don't know if this resonated with you, was that the person who gave Iger the job was Michael Eisner. And Michael Eisner was the one who got Disney to a new height. And Michael Eisner was the one who said, do not under any circumstance buy Pixar or go down this path.

SPEAKER_04: That is the great blind spot of blind spots, is it not?

SPEAKER_33: When you think about being a great entrepreneur, the innovator's dilemma, the ability, and you said it, what got you here will not get you there. There's a great book by the title. Have you read it? What got you here won't get you there? Put it on your list. It's great.

SPEAKER_03: It basically, the concept of the book, and David, you said it without even knowing that there's a book written on it, is what high performers do typically is they put the weight of the project, the team, the problem on their back, and they will their team to win. And sometimes that works.

SPEAKER_16: And then sometimes you have to make the people around you better.

SPEAKER_24: In other words, your individual achievements and your individual ability is not enough to get you to the next level, i.e. Michael Jordan. He needed to make Pippen a great player.

SPEAKER_16: He needed to make Steve Kerr a great player. He needed to make Rodman a great player. And you saw that in that incredible documentary.

SPEAKER_26: Or it's like you see LeBron with, you know, becoming an assist machine now.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah. I mean, listen, I mean, J.R. Smith is like the ultimate person to lose a game for you. Like, and every time J.R. Smith makes a mistake, LeBron is like, it's okay, little brother.

SPEAKER_16: I know you're an idiot. I know you do stupid stuff all the time.

SPEAKER_39: We're going to just keep you on the team because we know you can hit four three-pointers in a row and you have no fear, even though you're untying people's shoelaces on the court for no apparent reason other than you're bored.

SPEAKER_94: J.R. Smith. I mean, he was one of the greatest Knicks ever because just we were so bad and he was just so dumb.

SPEAKER_04: Like, literally the only NBA player ever to block me was J.R. Smith because I tweeted, congratulations to the Cavs on losing another championship because of J.R. Smith.

SPEAKER_309: And he blocked me. Oh, so brutal.

SPEAKER_94: So entertaining. So, so entertaining. Where were we? What were we talking about? Oh, yes.

SPEAKER_311: All right, so you were telling us that, that, uh, okay, well, let's talk about Kevin.

SPEAKER_93: We were vehemently disagreeing that Iger was a corporate guy.

SPEAKER_04: So, but, so you're saying if, if I'm reading you correct, Ben, you're saying if you put Kevin in, he would have shaken the bog, the boggle, and then you got to do all the pieces again.

SPEAKER_16: When really what Disney needs to do right now is just solely focus on making Disney Plus have 200, have more subscribers than Netflix and the job is done.

SPEAKER_13: Uh, Disney Plus, uh, executing on making sure you continue to build great franchises like those three and then, of course, um, growing internationally, which is what Fox is all about. But yeah, like continue basically executing those three plays.

SPEAKER_179: Just execute. You don't need another idea.

SPEAKER_168: Cause you, no company can execute seven things at once. And they will, but probably not for five or 10 years. Right. You want to add something every couple of years, AirPods, the watch.

SPEAKER_179: You can't add the watch and AirPods and the glasses in the same year. You need a certain number of cycles to, to, you have to have focus, right?

SPEAKER_61: Well, and then, and then the other dimension is Iger didn't actually go anywhere. Like the only reason the CEO succession happened is one or the other of Kevin or Bob forced the issue. Clearly like Iger was not intending to retire.

SPEAKER_39: Well, he's also old now. So like, I mean, I guess when you're Bob Iger, is he 70 now? Somebody look it up, uh, Nick, producer Nick, put in the notes. I think he's right.

SPEAKER_44: But he had a plan in place that he wrote about in the book of, I think it was 2022. I don't know.

SPEAKER_43: Let me ask you guys a question. Cause we're all, we're all on the younger side here. I'm 49.

SPEAKER_02: I think you guys are like 29 and 34 or something. Um, can you imagine being Bob Iger and Bob Iger is 69 years old and not doing it for another five years?

SPEAKER_04: I mean, how does Bob Iger not keep going? It's so amazing. Or, or do you think he just wants to be president? I think he wants to be president.

SPEAKER_77: I think he wants to be president. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: I mean, I think only one other job that would be more challenging.

SPEAKER_77: Yeah.

SPEAKER_52: Or better.

SPEAKER_43: What's a better job. Give me the better job than being the head of Disney at this moment.

SPEAKER_168: Being the head of Disney last year. Okay. Right. Okay.

SPEAKER_122: Give me, I mean, but seriously, is it being the head of Tesla? No, that's going to be hard. Is it being the head of Microsoft or Facebook or Apple? No. What, what's a better job right now? President. That's the only thing I can think of to check a checkbox for a guy at Iger's level.

SPEAKER_77: I think you have a better job. Like, I think we all have better jobs than any of those sound to me.

SPEAKER_326: I think it depends what you want. Yeah.

SPEAKER_122: I'm talking about like, you know, we know the type of power.

SPEAKER_03: We're talking about an archetype that wants to do, wants to reach the pinnacle of business and personal achievement.

SPEAKER_122: He's not going to be the MVP of any sports league. It's too late for that. It's not going to be the head of the rolling front man for the Rolling Stones. What's left? POTUS. Yeah. That's it.

SPEAKER_286: That's all that's left. For Oprah and him.

SPEAKER_61: Well, I think it just depends how much you love what you do. Like Buffett and Munger, they're like, they don't want to be POTUS.

SPEAKER_110: They're loving what they do.

SPEAKER_331: Yeah, that's a really interesting one.

SPEAKER_13: They're unique. Yeah. The mental maze that I was going through is what is a, because we're talking about achieving some combination of money, fame, and power here. So we're not optimizing for quality of life. Greatness. Sure. And so I was navigating through what is an organization that actually, where it's sky

SPEAKER_157: high right now in terms of revenue or stock price or public sentiment that doesn't have

SPEAKER_13: all the downsides that a lot of the big tech companies have coming under fire right now. And like David, I said, Berkshire Hathaway is a very interesting one. I mean, I think that they have a, they're very good at what they do. They have product market fit and they've had the, the compounding of the last 60 years

SPEAKER_102: that they're now sitting on top of. It's a, what is the succession plan there?

SPEAKER_337: They've got some lieutenants. Yeah.

SPEAKER_339: It's Ted Coombs and Ajit Jain. Yep.

SPEAKER_244: Fascinating.

SPEAKER_33: I wonder if they changed the strategy. I mean, talk about what got you here doesn't get you there. So let's talk about.

SPEAKER_44: Berkshire has the best. They get free money from insurance float. Yeah. That's not going to change.

SPEAKER_179: That is amazing. When you think about it, everybody wants to be in the insurance business. I can't think of a worst, like most boring way to wake up every day. So Kevin quits.

SPEAKER_14: He resigns. What is our thinking on why he resigned? Cause it's unspecified.

SPEAKER_344: I believe, unless something broke when we're taping this, it's unspecified why he leave. Why did he leave? What's your, what's your, what's your best guess?

SPEAKER_157: Didn't he say, or maybe it was just reported that he got left out of the negotiations. Like that he was a fake CEO.

SPEAKER_347: I think that that's the rumor. He was being left out of it, but I don't know that he has, I don't believe there's

SPEAKER_122: a formal state from him saying that, but that seems to be the case. In which case that would confirm that he's just a hired gun. He's just a face of the brand. If you can't be in the discussions, then you're not important. You're expendable. He was made to feel expendable again.

SPEAKER_13: Yeah. I mean, I also think he realized that part of his job over the next, however many months or years was going to be testifying. And that sounds awful.

SPEAKER_352: If you want to break the spirit of any CEO or any leader, depose them.

SPEAKER_355: You guys ever been deposed?

SPEAKER_354: Oh, no. Hope never. Oh God.

SPEAKER_232: I got deposed one time for cyber surfer magazine. Uh, I got in a trademark dispute with the publisher. I, I created cyber surfer. I didn't have a deal. He thought it was work for hire. I brought the name and I trademarked the name. Sued me in federal court when I was 23 years old and I got deposed. Oh man. Yeah. You ever get 23 year old getting deposed? Uh, when you have a $4,000 in your bank account, that's kind of fun.

SPEAKER_16: Um, shout out star log, uh, brutal it's, it's, it's being deposed is one of the most painful and arduous things because basically a group of lawyers sit there and ask you mundane question over and over again. And then your lawyers object, but there's no judge. So they just argue with each other and the job is to try to tilt the person.

SPEAKER_314: Um, and so basically a mediator who decides at the end, that's the thing you can basically

SPEAKER_04: say, uh, my, we're not going to answer that. And the person like, you have to answer it. And the person like, well, I'm not going to answer it. And then they're like, okay, let's move on because then you have to go to court to say they wouldn't answer these questions. And then they have to mitigate if they are in fact have to answer it.

SPEAKER_39: So it's, it's almost like it's a good faith. Like I'm going to answer questions. You're under oath kind of situation. We have it here on tape.

SPEAKER_77: So it's like a Jan Levinson Gould situation that we're, it's like that from the office. That's how I should think about this.

SPEAKER_16: Yeah, it's, it's a very surreal experience because it feels like you're in court, but you're not, you're in like an office and everybody's just sitting around some like, you know, $90

SPEAKER_23: square foot office space with some view of some city.

SPEAKER_39: And there's eight lawyers in the room, two transcribers, a video camera backdrop. And if you watch any of the videos and it's, it's, it's, it's a, it's a surreal experience. So he didn't want to get dragged into that. I agree, which is by the way, the reason why Sergei and Larry put Sundar in charge is because they get dragged into so much stuff. They just wanted to say, well, we were just on the board, right?

SPEAKER_122: The CEO goes, you notice that they were not, you notice who wasn't in the firing line?

SPEAKER_368: No Larry, no Sergei. They're the smart ones.

SPEAKER_347: Nobody said they're not smart. They are, they're, they're, they're not smart. They're brilliant.

SPEAKER_122: Uh, so what, let's go through this step-by-step.

SPEAKER_39: Um, and I'll, uh, I'll, I'll, I'll, uh, treat you guys like witnesses.

SPEAKER_16: So, um, number one, Ben should, had a yes or no answer, should TikTok be banned in the United States?

SPEAKER_23: Ben, and I'll remind you you're under a, I think that TikTok should not be banned in the United

SPEAKER_99: States.

SPEAKER_172: Why should TikTok, which is owned by a company in a communist country, not be banned in the United States?

SPEAKER_13: Um, I think it is harmful to the American consumer and it is a shame, uh, that we can't get along to basically enable, it's, it's value destructive and not only value destructive to corporations, but value, value destructive to people's lives.

SPEAKER_172: Oh, let me ask you another follow-up question there, uh, Mr. Gilbert. Does TikTok use the phone, the phone's camera and the phone's microphone?

SPEAKER_374: Yes, it does.

SPEAKER_222: Does it use the GPS location?

SPEAKER_374: Yes, it does.

SPEAKER_222: And does the Chinese Communist Party have access to other companies' data in China? Yes or no?

SPEAKER_13: It seems likely I don't know.

SPEAKER_222: Did Yahoo have to give the names of dissidents over to the Chinese Communist Party, uh, when they were running mail servers and their services in China? Yes or no?

SPEAKER_77: I have no idea, but I would guess based on your question that yes.

SPEAKER_222: The answer is yes, I will submit this document. So knowing what you now know, Ben, that Yahoo did give over the names of dissidents and email addresses, do you, to the Chinese Communist Party, and they can will any Chinese company to do that at any time, and they have a history of doing that. Do you now feel comfortable with 70 million Americans having their microphones locations, what's in their cut and paste, uh, clipboard? Three, every three seconds. Every three seconds. And their microphones, do you feel comfortable with the Chinese Communist Party having access to 70 million Americans' microphones, cameras, cut and paste, clipboard, and their GPS location? Ben, yes or no?

SPEAKER_77: So now you're asking me a very interesting question, which is sort of like thinking as

SPEAKER_13: a patriot on behalf of America, is it the right thing for China to have this? And if that's the discussion we're having, it needs to go a whole lot deeper than TikTok, because I don't think it's just TikTok. I think there's tons of apps that have Chinese developers or data on Chinese servers.

SPEAKER_377: But we're talking about TikTok right now, the number one app.

SPEAKER_13: WhatsApp should be a part of the conversation here. Okay, great. I do think, and I want to talk about this, like, I think philosophically we all screwed up by saying how awesome it is that China will take all of our internet in, but will sort of selectively decide what they let in, and yet we are happy to take whatever stuff they put out on the internet.

SPEAKER_379: Should Twitter be allowed in China? Yes or no?

SPEAKER_13: Uh, sure.

SPEAKER_379: Mr. Gilbert, I'll remind you, you're under oath.

SPEAKER_102: I mean, now am I acting as if- Jason, I think you missed your calling here. As an American, yes. Like, if I'm acting on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party, like, I don't know.

SPEAKER_139: Is the Chinese Communist Party involved in the rounding up of millions of Uyghurs, as you see in these photos?

SPEAKER_13: So you mentioned this. This sounds terrible. I actually don't know much about this.

SPEAKER_04: I'm going to stop the role play. But anyway, the point is, you're a pretty freaking smart guy.

SPEAKER_03: And you are not convinced of what I believe should be obvious to anybody, which is any data that TikTok has, the Chinese Communist Party has, that already has. Probably. Probably. Probably. Okay. So now if that is not terrorizing to you as an American, then I think you need to pause for a second and say, these are these good actors or bad actors, good actors or state actors, they're communists. Did they or did they not just remove all freedoms from Hong Kong?

SPEAKER_122: They could be capitalists, but they can also be communists at the same time. So is Hong Kong an independent region anymore? And can people vote there?

SPEAKER_102: So this is why I'm like, I actually don't know. Like I'm just not up enough on my geopolitical.

SPEAKER_122: And so this is the problem is I think people of your generation don't understand what communists

SPEAKER_03: do with information and data. What they do is they round up their opponents and they torture them. And they spy on people. And that is the crux of the issue here. David, I'm not going to put you under the same grilling, but what are your general thoughts? That's not fair. Oh, it's not? Okay.

SPEAKER_397: I appreciate you playing along, Ben.

SPEAKER_53: I thought I was going to get off the free here. By the way, if this had been Taylor Lorenz from the New York Times, she would have been like, you're harassing me by asking me difficult questions.

SPEAKER_12: By the way, Jason, I love Taylor. Like I know you're in like a thing with her, but Taylor's great.

SPEAKER_168: I think she is great at reporting on memes. And I think there is a place in the world for memes and reporting on memes and style.

SPEAKER_03: I think that her position on the Chinese Communist Party and TikTok is idiotic. Literally idiotic. And I think her position that people who want to go to work are stupid in a pandemic is a very privileged thing to say for somebody who makes $100,000 a year writing behind a keyboard about memes and style.

SPEAKER_13: So, look, I don't know enough to really get into this argument. Which is why she deleted the tweet. I think Taylor's great. I think she's a wonderful person. I think she's one of the most talented reporters of her generation. And I just don't... Like I'm uncomfortable being on the show when you want to sort of end the discussion on and negative attack on her personally. Like it just doesn't... No, it's not.

SPEAKER_408: It's completely professional.

SPEAKER_03: It's completely professional. I'm only commenting... I'm sure she's a wonderful human being. I'm only referring to the complete insensitivity of a person who makes $100,000 a year writing

SPEAKER_122: that other people who are essential workers who have to go to work to pay for their kids are stupid. Which is what she tweeted. That was how the whole beef started. As I said, this is a stupid tweet. If people have to pay for their family and they're an essential worker and they go to work, that's not being stupid.

SPEAKER_03: That's essential. That's how the whole beef started, by the way.

SPEAKER_23: And the fact that she wrote that TikTok is like this super important thing to a generation and it's going to cause... And that it should exist. But anyway, let's put it aside.

SPEAKER_232: Let's keep going on TikTok. TikTok, yeah. Let's keep going on TikTok. We're not going to agree on the madness of New York Times reporters. On TikTok, though.

SPEAKER_27: So, Jason, hear all your points on that.

SPEAKER_61: But TikTok is owned by ByteDance. ByteDance is a Chinese company. Correct.

SPEAKER_44: However, 70% of the outside shareholders in ByteDance are US entities. How does that complicate things?

SPEAKER_221: Tremendously. Wait, are you counting Sequoia China as US entity, David?

SPEAKER_49: Yes.

SPEAKER_23: That's an interesting question because who knows who the LPs in that fund are.

SPEAKER_43: There's no transparency.

SPEAKER_161: I believe there is no transparency, but my understanding is, by and large, it's a similar LP basis.

SPEAKER_16: So, what do you think, David, is the best thing to do if the United States is not allowed to operate and there's no reciprocity in social networks, then what is the right thing to do in this situation?

SPEAKER_134: Is it for them to divest?

SPEAKER_61: Well, I don't want to say what I think is right or not right because, A, I don't know. But I can say what I think is likely to happen. It's certainly uncharted.

SPEAKER_420: It's uncharted territory for certain. We're all in a certain uncharted territory. We're all in a certain uncharted territory, yes.

SPEAKER_61: Here's what I think is likely to happen and probably the best outcome.

SPEAKER_44: I think a terrible outcome that is definitely not going to happen because all of the economic incentives on all sides are against it is TikTok shuts down. I think that is very, very unlikely to happen.

SPEAKER_422: That is a 0% possibility.

SPEAKER_44: Literally zero. Yeah. I agree with you. But I think what is likely to happen and what I hope happens, because this will be for the best, is that TikTok ends up, when all is said and done, as an independent third-party entity with the US, Canada, maybe Europe, Western operations being its own independent entity with its own data on its own servers, not in China. I think that's probably likely to happen.

SPEAKER_232: That seems like the overwhelming majority likelihood. I agree. Wait, David, what do you mean to two-putt? Yeah.

SPEAKER_27: I think the two-putt to get there is, all this news cycle right now is about a sale of TikTok, Microsoft, Walmart, Oracle.

SPEAKER_44: Somebody's going to buy TikTok. You don't, Walmart. Just throw them in there.

SPEAKER_427: Just Walmart. I love Walmart being in there. Let's add Walmart to Fang. Let's put it in there. It's Fang W.

SPEAKER_44: There's no way that that's the end game, though. That's just like the necessary required step to have a company come in with the infrastructure,

SPEAKER_61: data infrastructure, and server infrastructure, and cloud infrastructure to offload all of this data. Then, once the dust settles, TikTok gets spun back out.

SPEAKER_44: It's an independent entity. There's so much investor motivation for that to happen. I mean, Sequoia, General Atlantic, KKR, the big American shareholders in ByteDance, they

SPEAKER_110: wanted this to be the first step. It's just not going to be possible, but it is going to be the second step.

SPEAKER_432: And the first step is going to be one of these...

SPEAKER_433: Acquisition.

SPEAKER_432: An acquisition.

SPEAKER_222: So, there'll be some sort of acquisition that makes this an independent company eventually. So, a 2Pi is...

SPEAKER_44: It'll be part of Microsoft or part of Oracle, but it's more like they're giving it a home. Giving it a home. For a home to onshore.

Chamath Palihapitiya: What do you think it will wind up being valued at? There's 700 million global users, 70 million... We wrote a blog post on this. Okay, great.

SPEAKER_157: And we're only... I'm only like saying, ooh, because we've only ever written like one blog post. But the... What did we come up with, David?

SPEAKER_102: 30 billion.

SPEAKER_161: I think we said... I think we said about 30 billion.

SPEAKER_352: Okay. So, the 700 million users. Is that right? That was the global users? Well, that's global.

SPEAKER_44: So, you strip out China. You're talking about...

SPEAKER_61: Depending on which geographies are included in this, 100 million in the US. Okay, let's go with... Plus, call it another one to 200 million.

SPEAKER_132: Okay. So, let's say 250. Let's pick a number.

SPEAKER_122: 250 times $100 a user is 25 billion. I would say that 25 billion would be the high end of normal because the monetization, we already know that something like Facebook in the developed world, I think is the proper

SPEAKER_03: word to not get me canceled, is... I know third world will get you canceled. So, that's the emerging world. So, I actually...

SPEAKER_234: Somebody tell me what Facebook's current average revenue ARPU is in the United States. Is it $78 per user?

SPEAKER_13: Yeah. So, globally, it's $7.50. Facebook, I believe, does 5X that.

SPEAKER_442: So, it's $35 per user. Globally.

SPEAKER_347: The US is the number that matters. The US and Europe. Because the US and... The global number is like, in some countries, $2 or $3 per user per year.

SPEAKER_102: And I'm sorry, I messed that up.

SPEAKER_13: So, $7.50 is YouTube's global ARPU. But... And this is how we valued it. We basically said, well, if we knew YouTube's US ARPU, how would we value YouTube users?

SPEAKER_443: Because we think about TikTok users. Exactly.

SPEAKER_113: I would go 5... I would go somewhere between 5 and 10. So, between 5 and 10, 7 times 7, 49...

SPEAKER_16: Let's call it 50 bucks ARPU per user. That means over 5 years, you make $250 per user.

SPEAKER_69: If you have 250 users... You trying to do some discounting in your head on those future cash flows? Something like that. I agree with you.

SPEAKER_16: It is an easier way to do this. $30 billion seems really fair, actually. I think $30 billion would be a fair price for both parties.

SPEAKER_26: Let's just... Forget revenue in the future. Let's just say $50 per user now.

SPEAKER_44: Like, at some point in time.

SPEAKER_49: Are they making money now?

SPEAKER_44: They are. It's growing very quickly.

SPEAKER_39: Do we know what it is?

SPEAKER_221: Hundreds of millions of dollars just in the US.

SPEAKER_39: Yeah. So, you could just 100X that, too. I mean, that's the other possible.

SPEAKER_61: Yeah, you could 100X that. But say, easy. 50 bucks a year, that's easy. So, 50 bucks times 100 million.

SPEAKER_44: 5 billion. 5 billion. And then to slap a 10X revenue multiple seems very fair, given where everybody else is trading. Yeah. 50 billion.

SPEAKER_39: Yeah. 30, 40, 50 billion. And we could do that with the SPAC. Doesn't... Yeah.

SPEAKER_16: SPAC the hell out of that. Do you want to get into SPACs? Let's call Kevin and Troy. Yeah, let's go right to SPACs. It's a nice segue. Thank you for keeping me on track here. Well, from PitchBook's US VC Valuation Report, Q2 2020, and PitchBook now is an official partner of This Week in Startups. Thanks for doing that. It's a non-cash. They're not sponsoring it. We just decided they would give us data.

SPEAKER_272: Great Seattle organization.

SPEAKER_16: Yeah. Actually, the person, John Gabbert, who started it, worked at Venture Source, which bought Venture Report, which was one of my publications. Dow Jones. This is our shared history.

SPEAKER_23: Yeah, very shared history. And John was a really smart cat. I met him literally in San Francisco, and I got fired two weeks after they made the acquisition.

SPEAKER_110: By the way, these, tangent, but these data businesses, great businesses.

SPEAKER_44: There's a company called Market that merged with iPrio and IHS, publicly traded data company.

SPEAKER_82: Yeah, I mean, the problem with the data businesses, they can very quickly get to $20 or $30 or $40

SPEAKER_43: million in business, and then somebody makes some cheaper version of it, and there's a limited

SPEAKER_39: supply of people, and they can be highly profitable. It's very hard to get them to a billion dollars in revenue.

SPEAKER_77: You should ask John Gabbert about that, because I think PitchBook does very well.

SPEAKER_14: I wonder what PitchBook's at now. 60, 70? I think they do very, very, very well.

SPEAKER_26: But that's why what Morningstar, which bought, I think it was Morningstar, bought PitchBook and then IHS Market.

SPEAKER_27: What you do is you just aggregate all these businesses, because you need them in every single industry.

SPEAKER_16: Which is what Dow Jones did. Dow Jones had a group that had private equity, Venture Source, Venture Wire, Venture Reporter, and they just took all the brands and consolidated them, had one price, and then they started making them piecemeal, and then they went back to single pricing for it. So I want to talk about the accreditation laws. I want to talk about SPACs, and I just want to give everybody just a little feedback on where we're at. This is a verbatim from PitchBook's US VC valuation report for Q2 of 2020. While macroeconomic headwinds and the COVID-19 pandemic have battered the public markets, angel and seed stage valuations have been largely insulated from volatility, given how upstream

SPEAKER_222: in the venture lifecycle these deals typically are.

SPEAKER_16: This, of course, only includes angel and seed stage deals completed during this period of uncertainty. While angel valuations have held steady, the median equity stake acquired for angel financings in the first half of 2020 was 7.7%.

SPEAKER_43: That would be, I think, correct in my experience of people selling about 10%, and has been decreasing since its peak of 21% in 2013, indicating start its abilities to command similar valuations

SPEAKER_16: while giving up less equity and ownership in the company. While check sizes for seed stage companies tend to be considerably larger than angel deals,

SPEAKER_222: contributing to muted seed stage deal activity in H1, investors are still acquiring a median

SPEAKER_43: of 25% equity stake as many seed-focused firms continue to turn their attention to existing portfolio companies. This vibes with me. How does it vibe with you, Ben?

SPEAKER_168: Sounds right. Sounds about right. Are you doing more or less deals during the pandemic or the same?

SPEAKER_474: The same. How about you, David?

SPEAKER_161: Same. My aim is do one angel investment or company I advise a quarter.

SPEAKER_477: I am doing-

SPEAKER_161: Just keep that pace.

SPEAKER_02: I am doing double.

SPEAKER_329: Well, but you're a special man.

SPEAKER_16: No, I am not special. I just, I think that right now, because the accelerator, there's a very specific reason. I didn't think accelerators would be possible remote. And I think I was right. Nobody wanted to come into an accelerator remote when you could go to one in person.

SPEAKER_03: They thought it was stupid. Then we moved ourselves to remote, and I had a big fight with members of my team who are no longer here. And literally, two members of the launch team would likely have been here had I acquiesced to their request of work from home and doing remote.

SPEAKER_39: But I didn't, because I said, that's stupid. Like, what founder is going to go to a remote accelerator? It's so dumb.

SPEAKER_03: Like, the whole point is to meet people. Anyway, the pandemic forced 100% of people to go remote. So I just doubled the number of companies we're investing in, because half of the angel investors and venture funds I know very quietly told me that they are, I would say one there told me they're doing no deals until 2021, they're just going to take the time off and, you know, work with their existing portfolio. And then the other two there had said they're, you know, either going to do only their own companies and focus on their winners. And then one third said they're going to do new deals, which meant, okay, now is the time.

SPEAKER_27: Was that early in the pandemic? Or are you still hearing that?

SPEAKER_24: That was May and June and July. So that's been the last three months I've been hearing a similar thing, which is if we have a winner in our portfolio, we're going to give them the money, because there is a

SPEAKER_16: theory going around amongst that group of scaredy cats. The scaredy cats think that there is going to be a massive crisis and that this is going to go on through 2021, there will not be a vaccine until 2022, and that there'll be a

SPEAKER_222: prolonged recession, and that companies are going to run out of money, not this year, they're going to run out of money in Q1, Q2, and Q3 of next year.

SPEAKER_16: Therefore, they should reserve their dry powder for that window.

SPEAKER_03: That's what the scaredy pants think. I disagree. I think now is the time to double down on businesses that are close to profitability, which there

SPEAKER_16: are many, and founders who are mature enough to say if this does extend itself, like, let's say God forbid the virus of COVID morphed and became more deadly or something, and the viruses and the anti-vaccines don't work, like, that is a potential scenario. It's a hard one to think about, obviously. They would know how to shift gears, and they would be willing to cut their staff size by

SPEAKER_23: two-thirds to survive. And so I just have that conversation, frankly, with each one. Therefore, when we do remote accelerators, we don't need to have a location, which means

SPEAKER_197: we can do three times as many because the team doesn't need to go anywhere, and twice

SPEAKER_69: as many investors are showing up. And how do you maintain the quality bar when upping your quantity on accelerator companies?

SPEAKER_16: That is a very good question. It turns out the number of quality applicants has gone up roughly three to four X. So we're getting the same number of applicants, but people who wouldn't previously have considered

SPEAKER_03: an accelerator are now considering them because the quick 100K, and when we decide we fund, we ship the money immediately. Like, if we say we're doing this deal, like, I found a deal, remotehour.com, which is a pretty cool piece of software that you may have seen me playing with on Twitter yesterday where you can set up a room where you do three-minute or five-minute or 10-minute calls, and people just queue up, and you can just zip through them, and they can sign up an email. And when you say, I've got an hour, and you can embed it.

SPEAKER_122: So let's say you're a real estate broker. You could say, I have office hours between three and five, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. And then they're on your website. They click it, and all of a sudden, they're connected. It's almost like real office hours, but the countdown clock ticks. So I tell founders, you have three minutes or you have five minutes, and I have a button I can click that says, add five minutes.

SPEAKER_16: And then you can add Stripe to it, right? Amazing. And you could say, I'm charging for this. Obviously, I'm not charging, but I could charge and say, I'll give you 10 minutes.

SPEAKER_482: Could you keep hitting the button and charging their credit card?

SPEAKER_141: Well, it's sort of like that. It's early stage, David. It could do a number of things.

SPEAKER_39: Remotehour.com is just fantastic.

SPEAKER_16: And I bring that up as an example of, I was like, you know what? This is a founder who's awesome. He's not going to clear market. He's a Japanese founder who's a solo founder. He just added a second person.

SPEAKER_43: He's just amazing, but there's nowhere for him to go because he can't take 20 angel meetings

SPEAKER_139: because nobody's taking meetings. It would be very hard to get those meetings. And so that's my theory is there's more quality companies.

SPEAKER_61: That's exactly the thing that I think all these scaredy cats miss that I miss at the beginning of this. So many people, this is just like people just going to adapt like, like all the COVID

SPEAKER_27: is going to do is it's, is it's accelerating change that was going to happen anyway. I mean, there's a lots of terrible things that are happening. I don't want to discount that, but in terms of venture investing landscape, either lots

SPEAKER_110: of new companies like remotehour.com, which is amazing, are going to get founded to serve these new and different needs.

SPEAKER_487: And I'll get you in early.

SPEAKER_110: Yeah, get us in.

SPEAKER_23: By the way, I just want to let you two boys know any deal I'm in, I get you in. And since you're so good on here, if you want to do it, even a small like 5k bet through my syndicate, no carry for you to zero carry.

SPEAKER_234: You guys get a free ride. Whoa. Free ride. Okay. Free ride.

SPEAKER_77: Apologize to everyone else out there. Who's paying carry. I mean, fuck it, man.

SPEAKER_124: I'm not paying you guys to come on the show and you come on the show and you bring it

SPEAKER_03: and you're prepared. I can't tell you how many people want to be on the podcast. You probably have this yourselves. They come on the podcast and they just want to talk about themselves and promote some bullshit and they don't want to have a real conversation. They don't want to disagree about stuff. And here we are. We sit here. We disagree. We chop it up.

SPEAKER_493: I will disagree with you any day, Jason.

SPEAKER_122: Do the work. Do the fucking work. Okay. Do the work. The SEC is changing accreditation laws.

SPEAKER_03: We knew this was coming, but they released a document and it's a starting point. So it's not exactly where I want it to be, but the SEC.

SPEAKER_453: Because you said when you came on our show, you said you were watching the SEC like a hawk. Like a hawk on now. So you are forefront.

SPEAKER_244: This is it for me, boys. I am in love right now. This is a message to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

SPEAKER_500: I love you.

SPEAKER_222: I am in love with the SEC because there is a woman at the SEC who said Americans shouldn't have to ask the SEC for permission to invest, but today's accredited investor rule at least

SPEAKER_03: offers people a path to ask permission based on their education rather than simply telling them no, unless you're rich.

SPEAKER_122: This is from the SEC, which is what I've been saying since I started angel investing 10 years ago. I've been saying this. You can go to Vegas and bet, but you can bet on sports.

SPEAKER_14: You can do whatever you want with your money. You flip quarters for a dollar each. Right.

SPEAKER_157: And we know for a fact those things are expected value negative for the person betting.

SPEAKER_13: Startups at least have a chance of being expected value positive.

SPEAKER_24: Of course, and they could have the outlier of being generational wealth, which is, I believe, why the American dream is not believed in anymore.

SPEAKER_16: They're just getting started. They want to dip their toe. So they said the spousal equivalent. So basically, you can pool your resources with your spouse, which has always been an issue for my syndicate, Angelist, and others, which is, can my spouse read the deal memo? Does my spouse count? It's like, well, of course, if you're married, like you're a unit already. This is how the law looks at you. You file your taxes together, yada, yada. Members of an investment team, ah, a fund, can put money in.

SPEAKER_82: So if Nick, the producer of This Week in Startups, is sitting with me in all these meetings,

SPEAKER_03: and he doesn't meet the accreditation threshold, he can't invest in a syndicate, even if he wanted to make a 2K bet. But he can go on Robinhood, God bless him, and do 2K bets, but he can't do a 2K bet on Remote Arrow.

SPEAKER_157: Yeah. This is big. The way they used to describe that was using this ridiculous language, a sophisticated person.

SPEAKER_68: Do you know if they reused that for the, like if you worked at an investment firm, you were a sophisticated person, and therefore were able to invest.

SPEAKER_96: I love the word sophisticated. That's how they say it in Australia. That's their version of accredited.

SPEAKER_03: But I love sophisticated. But here's the kicker. And this is where I think I'm going to actually play a role in this.

SPEAKER_23: And I literally emailed the SEC commissioner yesterday.

SPEAKER_16: Those with a Series 7's license, which is hard to get, but 65% of people pass it on their first try. A Series 65, and there's another one like a Series 81 or two. I don't know any of these. I mean, I know of them, because kids I went to high school with tried to get their Series 7 so they can go work on Wall Street. But and other financial certifications are going to be able to be accredited.

SPEAKER_04: But there was no, like, here's a test from like my Angel University course, or the acquired FM course, or the Seamvest course.

SPEAKER_06: Yeah, that's the problem is like a Series 7 was built to be, you know, a trader on Wall

SPEAKER_61: Street. Like it was nothing to do with private company investment. Invest in private companies.

SPEAKER_222: Yeah. So what I want to make is my own test.

SPEAKER_16: And so I submitted to them the Angel University course and the book. And I said, hey, if people read the book, take the course. And I gave them a test. Would that count? And could I certify somebody who's an Uber driver making $50,000 a year to be allowed to participate in the syndicate for Calm.com?

SPEAKER_02: And I'm hoping that, you know, somebody clips this.

SPEAKER_453: Jason, shout out. Thank you, Calm.com. After we came on your show last time when you were talking about Calm, I became a member.

SPEAKER_511: It's great. Oh, thank you. Have you done the sleep story yet?

SPEAKER_27: I haven't been using it for sleep. I've just been using it for meditation. But it's what the scenes, the scenes. Yeah. David's a sophisticated person.

SPEAKER_329: So I'm a sophisticated Calm user.

SPEAKER_04: I would say if you're having a rough night sleeping, which I have, you put on a Calm

SPEAKER_43: story and you will, they literally study. I mean, I shouldn't say this probably, but they studied science of sleep. And let's just leave it. I thought you said this wasn't a political show. Exactly. They studied the science of sleeping and they designed the sleep stories, and I won't say

SPEAKER_16: how, with science to put you to bed. I'm going to leave it at that because I don't think they want the secret source revealed. But anyway.

SPEAKER_515: Do they work with the UC Berkeley guy?

SPEAKER_242: I don't want to say anything beyond what I've already said, but maybe Matthew Modine. Okay, okay, okay.

SPEAKER_13: Okay. So Jason, I'm curious on this because I think this would be a really good idea for you to do. And this could be huge for the syndicate. How do you manage? Like if I'm the chairman of the SEC and you come to me and say, I want to make a test. And I'm like, yeah, but you will financially profit from more people joining your syndicate. How do you manage the conflict of interest between like you would be incentivized to crank out as many accredited investors as you can versus making sure that, you know, they are sufficiently educated?

SPEAKER_332: I think if we took on the burden of the cost of the certification, that would be one thing.

SPEAKER_24: So if we said you can zoom into a call and we are going to pull up the quiz and we're going to ask you the question and we have a battery of a hundred questions.

SPEAKER_16: We have 25 important questions and we have four versions of each, right? So you can't kind of steal it or record it. And we will have one of our people do this 20 minute assessment with you. You'll pay $50 for it and you get through it. And we have a video recording of you saying, so there's an audit trail of, so there's an

SPEAKER_123: audit trail.

SPEAKER_16: That's what I, uh, that's what I would like to do is say, we'll take the burden on of accrediting it. And when we accredit you, we will have that video. We will give you a copy of the video of you taking the course, not you taking the course, you're taking the test of the course. So we're here. We are in our zoom. We put a type form or, you know, this is all these people who can attach a video to a, to a test, right? That's, that's existing for certification already.

SPEAKER_03: We take one of those platforms and we just walk people through it. One of my proctors, one of our employees does this. And then we save the video file and we put it in a secret location. Maybe we put it on wistia.com with a password. And then you, if the, you join the syndicate.com, but now you want to join seed invest, angel list or Republic, you can say, here is my certification of me answering questions.

SPEAKER_122: And we could ask a question like, what is pro rata? Please define for me the word pro rata. Please define for me what information rights are and why they're important.

SPEAKER_33: Please define for me, um, what, uh, what would be a good question?

SPEAKER_522: Uh, both, the answer to both of those questions is everything you're going to learn on the acquired LP show.

SPEAKER_13: The answer to both of those questions is it depends, which is the dangerous part of this racket.

SPEAKER_14: But okay. How about just define what pro rata rights mean? It depends. It depends. Right.

SPEAKER_43: Or, or, but okay, you could be pro, pro the, uh, should you review the dot?

SPEAKER_16: I mean, when I took my gun test to get a gun, they literally, I, I went to the gun store in Culver city.

SPEAKER_529: Natch.

SPEAKER_43: I said, uh, I want a GP 100, which is, uh, you know, pretty nice gun that you only have to fire once. Let's leave it at that.

SPEAKER_23: Um, and it's, it's, it's a, it's a service revolver for police officers for 50 years before they got into Glocks.

SPEAKER_16: And so basically you could throw a GP 100 in the bottom of your pool is what the guy told me. You could use it to hammer nails and then it would still fire. Like it's that rugged of a gun. And I was professionally trained on everything. But when I took the test, they handed me a test. It was, and the guy says, here, take the test. And I said, well, I don't, I'd never read a book. He goes, just give it a shot.

SPEAKER_24: I take the test. And it's like, I kid you not. It said the safest way to, uh, hold a gun is in the air, pointing it at the ground, pointing

SPEAKER_03: it away from the target in a holster with the safety on it.

SPEAKER_04: And you're kind of like, huh, let me think about that. I think I'm going to hold it in the air straight up. You know, like these were the stupidest questions. And I got, I got one or two questions of 20 wrong. You need to get like 16. And the only question I got wrong was like about the caliber sizes of bullets. It was like some obscure thing that has nothing to do with gun safety, but it's just like

SPEAKER_312: a driver's test.

SPEAKER_16: You know, it's kind of close to like a driver's test. Like when you, the only one that people get wrong on the driver's test is like, what do you do at a yellow light? And it's like, you're supposed to stop.

SPEAKER_52: And most people are like, speed up and go through it. And you're like, that sounds more dangerous than stopping. I'm like yellow light means stop.

SPEAKER_12: So is that a, is that a national gun? Like, or is that certified by a state?

SPEAKER_43: I think it's a California state thing. And then in other places you can buy them without taking the quiz.

SPEAKER_03: And then in California, they literally give you a little card and you sign it. And it says, I am certified to have a gun. The end. Like it's, it's so like, literally you can buy guns. You can go to Vegas. I think if I recorded a test where I asked you 25 questions about angel investing,

SPEAKER_16: and then what I want to do is I want to limit people in our syndicate to the minimum for the first 10 deals.

SPEAKER_269: Oh, that's a good idea.

SPEAKER_16: So I thought that would be a pretty good idea. I was to say, listen, if you're for your first 10 investments, our minimum is 2k, you can only put 2k. So then if there's a super crater, and I always talk to my team about this, the average size right now for our deals is $4,000. I think for $4,000 to $5,000 for each deal is the average size. And they get some people who are well, so put in 50 and 25. And you get some people who are just like, I'm going to put the minimum and hope I hit a com.com or a density or whatever. Um, and so this is, this is big for me because imagine if I was on this podcast right now, and remember, I talked to you about remote hour. If I was able to say, Hey guys, I got 5k for each of you in remote hour and anybody listening

SPEAKER_03: who wants to be involved, you can put in $500. Uh, you know, and you can do this, you can do $500 up to five times a year. And then if you show us your tax return, uh, or your accountant sends us your tax return,

SPEAKER_39: we will let you invest up to 20% of whatever your tax return says. That's the way I think it should work, which would be like if you went to Vegas and they're like, how many chips can you buy? And they're like, well, you can buy 500 at a time as much as you want. But if you want to buy more than 500, you either need to be an accredited investor, or we have to have on file your tax return. So you can't blow your whole life savings. Right.

SPEAKER_339: So you're saying you, you want a threshold amount even without having whatever hoops, you know, the hoop has been lowered now.

SPEAKER_26: Yes. The bar has been lowered. Threshold amount that you could do without it and no hoops.

SPEAKER_82: I would say some, there could be some common, I'm thinking out loud here.

SPEAKER_16: There could be a combination. So if you want to not have a cap, you have to take the course and you have to have the video recorded test and you have to have 23 of 25 questions or whatever. It's reasonable.

SPEAKER_61: Yeah. If you want him for this, like, uh, you know, Vanguard, the wealth managers, like you want to go buy equities, like, sure. You want to trade options.

SPEAKER_26: We're going to have to talk to you.

SPEAKER_290: Exactly. And, and, and by the way, Robin hood, one of my great investments of all time, you know,

SPEAKER_16: they are going through a process now because tragically there was a suicide that occurred. Um, and you know, we don't know the details of that. So you want to be very cautious commenting on it. I have to be extremely cautious as an investor because when you have a pool of 13 million people, some number of people commit suicide per a hundred thousand. And I think the number in the United States sadly is increasing.

SPEAKER_23: Um, yeah, we live very long and, uh, suicide is becoming a tragically an option for some people. And so we don't know in this situation, it, what role, if any Robin hood played, or, you know, there are, I'm in the professional gambling space with my poker playing. I've seen people lose millions of dollars. I've been at the table when I've seen people lose more money than they can afford to lose. I've seen people go negative. I've seen people be on $500,000 payment plans for 10 years.

SPEAKER_03: I kid you not. And these are poker games.

SPEAKER_16: We're not paying, you know, might not be a great life choice. Um, and I've seen people sign over titles to cars. I've seen people, you know, like serious shit, like crazy shit, um, in private home games, you know, like, and these are rich people.

SPEAKER_24: And so I think having any rules of the road, just like you have probably seen your friends even in college gambling with a bookie.

SPEAKER_04: For sure. And there's nobody telling them like, by the way, can you pay this off? The bookie's like, yeah, I'll take that action.

SPEAKER_546: Yep.

SPEAKER_04: You know, like they're not, I, the way I look at this is I'm going to be successful either way. And I want you to have a great experience.

SPEAKER_16: I want you to only bet the amount of money you can afford to lose. And I use the word bet all the time. And I say in my deal memos, which you guys read my deal memos.

SPEAKER_141: Can you make, make sure you're both accredited, correct? Yes. Well, now I am for sure. Okay. Can we make sure they're accredited and get them on?

SPEAKER_16: If you, if you, if you email join, if you email join at the syndicate.com, Heidi, who works with me, we'll make sure you're accredited. I want you guys to read my deal memos because I always put the bet I am making on this company. The risk I am taking is that they're able to do the following. And then here's their deal memo. And I force everybody to do a webinar. And I use the term bet all the time because it is a bet and only bet what you can afford

SPEAKER_03: to lose. And then people ask me what percentage and you know, what percentage? Well, it depends on how old you are, how much you need the money. Do you have three kids in private school? But if you were a single individual making a hundred thousand dollars a year, you know, post this changing, I'd say 5% or 10% of your net worth would be the upper bounds of what would be acceptable if you were doing this and it was your passion and you wanted to make it a career because if you lost 5% or 10% of this idea is a good idea.

SPEAKER_44: I like guardrails. Anything else is just paternalistic.

SPEAKER_27: And like, I mean, the thing is like, this is the thing about regulatory capture. Regulatory capture exists to serve the current market leaders, not to explain regulatory capture

SPEAKER_28: for people who don't know what that means.

SPEAKER_276: Like, so like these, these regulations.

SPEAKER_556: Now you're trolling me. I love you bad. I love you bad.

SPEAKER_560: For anyone out there who might be wondering, for the nature of the audience who don't understand

SPEAKER_562: what the word regulatory capture is, can you define that while I'm looking it up on Wikipedia? I have an idea because Bill Gurley says it all the time.

SPEAKER_61: So I don't know the history of the accredited investor rule, but like who does it actually protect and who does it actually benefit? It actually benefits all the large financial institutions that have used the fact that you

SPEAKER_44: need to be a, well, let's see, there's a accredited investor, but then there's qualified institutional buyer. Qualified purchaser, QP. Yeah. Something like that. And that's $5 million in assets. You have to be rich.

SPEAKER_27: You have to be rich to invest in venture capital funds. To get rich. To invest directly in startup. Like, yeah, markets are supply and demand.

SPEAKER_61: And if you're artificially limiting the supply of capital to go into the highest growth assets, you're capturing it for yourself. Like, that's what's going on here.

SPEAKER_13: Yes. Yeah. And more abstractly, regulatory capture is just that the it's kind of like when two lawyers see each other in court all the time. So they have reason to be fraternal with each other based on that long term relationship more so than the people they represent. At the end of the day, these regulators have been regulating the people in a certain business for a long time. They get to know each other really well. And you can make really compelling arguments when you're the one being regulated that the rules should change in some way. And they like the regulators tend to listen to you because you've built up this relationship over a long time.

SPEAKER_03: It's like real estate broker should be another one. Like, is a real estate broker working for you or their client buying the house, the seller, or are they working for each other?

SPEAKER_68: They're playing an iterated game, not a single turn game where their relationship with that person across the table, they need to preserve for future transactions.

SPEAKER_98: Right. And the person we're talking about here is the other real estate broker, not the buyer

SPEAKER_33: and seller in all cases. Like, and they're doing all kinds of shenanigans. I had my real estate broker, I'm going to leave it at that, who was like, listen, Jason,

SPEAKER_03: I think this is the right time to accept this offer because Joe Biden, you know, is going to get an office that's going to change this. And I said, I'm going to stop you right now. So don't ever give Jason Calacanis financial advice. Don't ever give Jason Calacanis regulatory advice. I gave you a copy of my book. Your job is to get me the highest price. Don't ever sell me on anything.

SPEAKER_43: I don't want a piece of advice from you other than like, what's the best new restaurant to

SPEAKER_23: open? And he, I said, capiche. And he wrote about capiche.

SPEAKER_03: And my wife was like, you're too hard on him. And I said, no, these brokers are always trying to work you because if they sell your home for a million dollars, 900,000 or 1.1, they make, you know, whatever that is, the two or three points on that, it makes no difference.

SPEAKER_249: So this is actually, I heard this.

SPEAKER_27: I can't remember where I read this the other day, but somebody had this great idea, real

SPEAKER_61: estate transactions and real estate agents and brokers, perfect use case for tiered carry. So like you sell my home for a million, you get, you know, 3%. You sell my home for over 1.2, you get 5% of the ups there, or you get 7% of the ups.

SPEAKER_10: 100% they should get 1% of the million. They should get for it.

SPEAKER_16: Once you pick what price the, you know, Zillow and everybody agrees is the right price for this house. Let's say it's a million. Okay. You get 1% of a million, you get your 10 K. You get 2% of anything from a million to 1.1, and then you get 3% of everything from, or

SPEAKER_03: it could even be more, it could be 10%, right? It could be, you could get 1% on the first million and then 10% on everything past then.

SPEAKER_574: I think it's cute that the three of us are sitting around talking about- But they won't do that.

SPEAKER_23: But I sold, the other house I sold recently, I did a buyer to buyer transaction. You know what my legal fee was? $12,000.

SPEAKER_295: It's a lot better than 6%.

SPEAKER_33: This is on a significant house too, gentlemen. Like this is not on a $1 million house. I'll just leave it at that. We're shocked. Yeah. I mean-

SPEAKER_580: You've been in this game a little longer than us, Jason.

SPEAKER_33: No, boys, you're going to be there because I'm getting you in remote hour and we're going to ride that into the sunset.

SPEAKER_582: I love it.

SPEAKER_03: I got a couple, I got a couple. We got to do some deals, boys. We got to get some deals going, man. You guys got my phone number?

SPEAKER_04: Let's get on a little phone thread going here. Try message. Let's just start sharing some deals, making some money. Let's get some conflicts going, conflicts. How about it happen to SPAC?

SPEAKER_03: Well, that's the next topic and we'll close on this.

SPEAKER_16: SPAC, IPOs per year, special acquisition, special purpose acquisition companies, corporations. One of those two words. My friend- What is corporation? Corporation. My friend Shamath brought these back to life three years ago. I was at the poker table talking to him about him when he did IPOA, was looking for

SPEAKER_43: a company, as you can see, in 2016, we had 13 of them, 2017, 34, 2018, 46, 2019, 59, 2020, 80, and counting.

SPEAKER_141: And so this is taking off. And you can see the chart there if you're watching the video, youtube.com, subscribe to This Week in Startups to see the video.

SPEAKER_43: And I just literally had a wonderful moment. My friend Rick Fulop DM'd me and said, I need to talk to you. And I was like, okay, here we go. We sold Desktop Metal, which he got me a little yum yum slice of in the early first round. And he said, I got some good news. I said, hit me. What's the price? And he said, we're going public. And I said, what? And he said, yep, let's backing it out. And that was announced yesterday.

SPEAKER_23: So now JCal has Uber, Desktop Metal, and a little company called Waiter that we have a de minimis number of shares in. But at least I get three IPOs online.

SPEAKER_587: These are your public companies?

SPEAKER_23: These are three public companies in the first hundred investments. So 3% gone public.

SPEAKER_590: Plus, it's still early. Who knows?

SPEAKER_23: Maybe it's the first 150. I'm not sure if the Desktop Metal occurred. I'm losing track. But I mean, obviously, Robinhood, Calm, there's a couple of other companies that are being

SPEAKER_16: speculated, thumbtack, data stacks that are being speculated. But these SPACs are changing everything.

SPEAKER_39: And our good friend, Bill Gurley, who has been lobbying against the wealth transfer that occurs during regular IPOs, he was on the direct listing.

SPEAKER_03: Regulatory capture. The regulatory capture. He was talking about direct listings, which Spotify did, but are very hard and painful. SPACs are very easy and painless. And he just wrote a blog post, which I'm sure the two of you read, called The Third Door.

SPEAKER_39: And he is now on board. I would not be surprised. I do not have any information.

SPEAKER_16: If Bill Gurley, who is on his last fund with Benchmark, would pop open a couple of Benchmark SPACs. I don't know that. I'm completely speculating there. But my best DC, Chamath, is now on his third or fourth SPAC.

SPEAKER_232: And I don't have any inside information on those, but I would never bet against Chamath or Bill Gurley. What are your general thoughts, David, on SPACs?

SPEAKER_26: One question. First, Chamath literally brought this thing, well, not back from the dead.

SPEAKER_61: No, he did. He did. He to Sophia one. Yeah. What inspired him? Where'd he get the idea?

SPEAKER_296: That's a great question.

SPEAKER_43: I think, you know, he at one point, we had a deep discussion about this. You know, he grew up very poor.

SPEAKER_39: We came from Sri Lanka. He had nothing. He worked his way to where he got. He got a series of lucky events. We were both at AOL at the same time. We were both at what's called an SVP, which is below an EVP, which means you're basically, you get to go to meetings with Ted Leonsis and, you know, Steve Case or whatever. But we were basically in charge of nothing. Like, he was in charge of ICQ as it was crashing into the ground. I bought Weblogs, Inc., which became basically the entire AOL business after that when they bought

SPEAKER_16: Huffington Post and TechCrunch and a bunch of other content sites. So, we were there. We were kind of hungry. He went to Mayfield. Then he found out about Facebook. He took the job there famously. I started Mahalo, which became Inside, and then I became the first Sequoia Scout. So, a series of lucky events occur.

SPEAKER_43: And we had a deep discussion about how we were both meeting as we were raising our funds over the last five years. We had all invested in each other.

SPEAKER_02: But, you know, we were going to the, let's call it, the halls of endowments, right?

SPEAKER_43: Like, all the classic LPs that you wanted.

SPEAKER_24: Yeah, you've been there. And you think you want that money. And you want that. And then what we realized is what we were both looking for was validation.

SPEAKER_272: Right?

SPEAKER_43: And we had a deep discussion about this.

SPEAKER_272: If Harvard, if Princeton, you know, invests in your fund, then you're like, oh, great.

SPEAKER_43: I always tell everybody, I went to Harvard twice. I went to Harvard Business School twice. And both times, I tried to come back the second day, and the visitor pass didn't work. Like, and I interviewed Chamath at Harvard Business School.

SPEAKER_39: We got 15 minutes into the interview, and he said, you're all morons for, you know, putting 250K in this, and four teachers walked out of the room. You did that.

SPEAKER_65: I was at GSB right shortly after you started social, a year or two.

SPEAKER_242: And I think, you know, we both got to the points in our career where the idea that we would be tap dancing

SPEAKER_16: and putting our hats out and saying, please validate us, institution, we started to realize, like,

SPEAKER_24: well, maybe that is more work than just building your own brand. And that's why maybe you saw Chamath follow me onto CNBC.

SPEAKER_03: And no, and I'm not saying that I took credit. I literally told CNBC, CNBC called me and said, we saw your interview with Chamath, because the CNBC producers watch this podcast, and they say, can you put us in touch with Chamath? I'd like to have him on. And I was like, you should have Chamath on all the time. He's amazing. And those performances, you know, he went from having 50,000 followers. He's a money printing machine. Now he's got more followers than I do.

SPEAKER_43: And I think what happened was the disillusionment with begging the institutions for your very existence. I think for guys and gals who are outsiders, it's a little demoralizing.

SPEAKER_24: To get where you get, and then you're kind of, you know, bending the knee, you know? And it's like, why am I bending the knee in service of some institution that's existed this long? Like, if anything, shouldn't they be bending the knee to me for tripling or quadrupling their money? And that's why he famously, when he shifted gears, said, you're welcome to all the LPs I made.

SPEAKER_43: All this money for it, you're welcome. And he just came out gangbusters.

SPEAKER_16: And when he found out about, when he, and he'll tell his own story when he's on your podcast, and I'll help you get him as a guest if you want. You just email me and I'll CC you. And he, I think, with the SPAC thing, found out about it.

SPEAKER_03: He had known, we'd all known about it, but it was always Fugazi. But then we started realizing the size of these deals were getting so big, that going to these big institutions and begging them for crumbs,

SPEAKER_24: and then having them run you through the grinder. I mean, the way they brutally grind you for your $50 million or $25 million check, well, if you're a personality like he is or I is, or I am,

SPEAKER_03: I can just say, I'm investing in this company. Does anybody want to come along for the ride? And my syndicate says, hell, yes, we do. Right. Hell, yes, we do. You actually, you're good at what you do. And the same thing for him, except at a bigger stage.

SPEAKER_13: Right. This gets to, I mean, this is why Warren has to announce his investments after he invests, because he moves the market. I mean, in a very micro stage, that kind of happens with you in early stage investing, where you're actually value creative to a company,

SPEAKER_157: but because when you decide you want to put your $25,000 in, the company gets a hell of a lot more than $25,000 more valuable by the nature of the other capital you attract, the legitimization it brings to it. You know, it's the argument that the tier one venture firms the world have been making for a long time,

SPEAKER_13: and that we bring more value to you. Ignore our platform for a minute, but your company gets more valuable by taking our money more than just the cash investment. It's almost like a momentum trade.

SPEAKER_141: It is, I always tell people, you're like putting a stamp in your passport.

SPEAKER_16: And when you go to the next place, they see the other stamps. And whether that stamps YC, Techstars, Launch, Jason, Sokka, whoever it is, it just makes the next stamp get stamped a little bit faster, and you get that momentum. But what's really happening, I believe, is there's a new lane that's opening up. And it's a Hyperloop. And the Hyperloop is syndicates. It's accelerator, syndicate, SPAC. And this is going to be a new lane that's going to open up.

SPEAKER_03: And I have two of the three. I don't have SPACs right now. But I literally got a phone call. I wonder what you guys think of this. If somebody said to me, have you considered SPACing what you're doing with your accelerator and the syndicate? And I said, I don't know if there's an equivalent of a venture fund accelerator going public, but tell me more. And I'm literally going to have a meeting next week.

SPEAKER_622: Oh, so dude, that's literally not at all what I thought. Not you raising a SPAC. Yeah.

SPEAKER_13: I was like, you should totally raise a SPAC. But this is interesting. Is there enough internal enterprise value in the entity? Or is it more of an investment holding company?

SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that's the question. And it's like, let's say I was sitting on $300 million from a SPAC.

SPEAKER_43: And then you value the company of that $300 million. And then, I don't know, put $100 million in value on my enterprise. They got $400 million in value there. $300 million in cash. Then I deploy that cash.

SPEAKER_16: And we get 20% of the returns each time. Now we've got our own holding company SPAC. Yeah. And then you can buy shares in the company. And then we just disclose what our holdings are. So now you know, oh, we own 5% of Com. Oh, we own, you know, this many shares of Uber. We know, you know, it would have to happen from this point forward, obviously. Right.

SPEAKER_27: But the idea would be... It's not that there's enterprise value in you as an operating company. It's that you're an investor. This is your fund.

SPEAKER_04: It's kind of like a fund and it would be rolling. So, okay, we just keep investing that $300 from the SPAC.

SPEAKER_16: The money comes back. Do we actually then deploy that? Or do we just own more of future businesses?

SPEAKER_157: Do we just blow the mind of VC Twitter by coming up with the name Rolling SPAC?

SPEAKER_04: Rolling SPAC. Hold on a second. Before we publish this issue, can you get rollingspac.com immediately? I'm not joking. Rollingspac.vc, rollingspac.com.

SPEAKER_03: But it would be like a rolling SPAC, right? And I did consider it. One thing I love about what I do right now is I answer to nobody. And nobody knows exactly what I'm doing except for what I explained to you guys on your podcast of The Grand Vision.

SPEAKER_23: Amen, brother. Which is, you know, if you pay $100, you can hear The Grand Plan for two hours.

SPEAKER_533: This is why it's better to be UNS than it is to be Bob Iger.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I mean, and it looks like right now, the backlog looks like, and I'm going to go through the companies here about the notable tech IPOs. I don't know which ones are SPAC, which ones aren't. But we got Airbnb. I want you guys to think these through. And I want you to pick your top two. In terms of not at what price, like, okay, I want you to pick your top two. Let me think of the question here. Your top two that if you could only own a million, you know, you have $2 million and you get to put a million dollars into each one at whatever price they wind up going at it. We just assume each one goes out at the reasonable price. Okay. So assuming they go out at the right reasonable price, SPAC or whatever, you have to put $1 million into each of these, and you get to take that $1 million out 10 years from now.

SPEAKER_16: But you cannot touch it. You have to choose between Airbnb.

SPEAKER_23: And I think we understand it's going to go out at $30 or $40 or something like that. You have Asana, ThredUp, Qualtrics from Ryan, who was on the pod, was acquired for $8 billion by SAP, and now they're going to IPO it again, I guess. It's Palantir, Peter Thiel's secretive intelligence company with $742 million, Ant Financial, which is a Chinese mobile payments company I don't know much about.

SPEAKER_641: It's formerly Alipay. Oh, Alipay. Okay, right.

SPEAKER_23: Alipay, right. And the J-Cal SPAC. So those are your choices.

SPEAKER_643: You got the J-Pal SPAC. Okay.

SPEAKER_02: Do you want to be invited back? No, leave mine out. Leave mine out. That's literally a joke. But okay, here we go. I'm going to do it again while you think.

SPEAKER_43: You guys can use your pens here. Think it through. Airbnb, Asana, ThredUp, Qualtrics, Palantir, Ant Financial, formerly Alipay. You put a million dollars into two of them. You get to take it out in 10 years. So now you're making a bet here that which one will increase in value the most, and you have to take the money out in 10 years. So you're making a 10-year bet. Would you make a 10-year bet on Airbnb, Asana, ThredUp, Qualtrics, Palantir, or Alipay?

SPEAKER_645: Do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do.

SPEAKER_43: You're looking up, and that means you know the answer. Who is your number?

SPEAKER_270: Who is your first choice? Just pick. Just tell me one, Ben.

SPEAKER_49: I'm putting both into Ant Financial. Oh, all in.

SPEAKER_04: Wow. He went all in. You took your, you took your river, you took your turn and your river bet, and you added them to your flop bet? That's a power move.

SPEAKER_69: You shipped, you shipped it. I am on the wrong J. Cal podcast, apparently.

SPEAKER_128: No, that is an all in right there. Okay.

SPEAKER_24: Well, then that leaves it to you and I to do the hard work, David. Who is your first that comes up that you?

SPEAKER_107: Well, my first is Airbnb.

SPEAKER_61: Why? Well, I think there's two important dimensions, many important dimensions, but two really important dimensions in investing, long-term investing. There's what's your IRR hurdle? Like what's your, how much compounding do you think? How much room to run is there in this company?

SPEAKER_110: And then the other dimension is your margin of safety. And margin of safety gets expressed in the price. You're talking about the bottom.

SPEAKER_654: In other words, losing money.

SPEAKER_44: Well, it means like, because you could be wrong. You don't know what the future is going to hold. Sure.

SPEAKER_61: And so the margin of safety, like if you're buying into something that is at a very, very full price, you have a very little margin, very low margin of safety. Yeah.

SPEAKER_44: If you're buying at an undervalued price based on your estimation of what a fundamental value of the company is, then you have a high margin of safety. So I think it's likely Airbnb is going to have a decent margin of safety, given everything that's going on right now. They're already bouncing back.

SPEAKER_23: I heard, by the way, and I don't know if this was public or not, if I heard a whisper, but the whisper was they had the best July ever in the history of the company. Was that publicly known?

SPEAKER_31: Somebody said it to me at a party.

SPEAKER_658: I think that was reported.

SPEAKER_659: Yeah. I'm not sure if it was reported or not.

SPEAKER_31: And it was said to me, either I read it online or somebody read it online and said it to me at a party.

SPEAKER_168: Can't remember. It's material, possibly public information.

SPEAKER_23: In other words, I may have dreamt it as well. I think I heard at some point, don't trade on anything I say.

SPEAKER_44: So then there's the like, what's the upside, what's the compounding potential? I think there's probably going to be more margin of safety in Airbnb right now on the price than any of these others.

SPEAKER_61: Beyond that, gosh, it's so hard to say. I'm not familiar enough with any of these names. I'm tempted to say Ant Financial like Ben, but I'm really worried about WeChat Pay, which my understanding is taking huge share away from Alipay in China.

SPEAKER_44: Now, I do think Ant Financial has a very robust and growing wealth management business, but I just don't know enough.

SPEAKER_27: So I think that's probably my number two, but I need to do more work.

SPEAKER_668: Okay.

SPEAKER_23: So if you had to pick your number two, you're going with Ant Financial at this time. All right. I, too, was attracted to the Airbnb possibility, and I do think that that's a company that will be here in 10 years.

SPEAKER_222: However, I do think they will face competition at some point. I do think they are fully valued here, and I'm going for return. I'm not going for safety because I'm looking for big returns. I need something that moves the needle for me.

SPEAKER_16: I believe that Qualtrics is run by an absolute beast of a CEO, and that's my first choice because I think that that business is just going to continue to be a juggernaut and is run so professionally it's crazy. And then that leaves me with Asana and Ant Financial and the fully valued Airbnb. ThredUP I don't know enough about. And, you know, Palantir is interesting, but it's tiny, and I think if it was going to break out, it would have broken out already. I kind of feel like maybe that's a niche business and it doesn't have a lot of room for more customers, right?

SPEAKER_43: So I'm going with Qualtrics because they're the professional of the management. And then I don't like the idea of investing in opaque Chinese companies because they don't trust the market. I'm floored. I'm shocked. So you may find this shocking, but I don't like to play in a rigged casino, and I consider anything out of China is a rigged casino. So I take Ant Financial out for that reason.

SPEAKER_347: But I do applaud you for being a maniac who wants to shove all his chips in in a casino where you could be using a marked deck or the value of your currency could suddenly change rapidly.

SPEAKER_43: Now, I love the product, Asana, and I feel like that could become the standard for what they do. And I do love Airbnb. And so it's really now down to between Airbnb and Asana.

SPEAKER_24: And my gut tells me Airbnb is very valued, will be here, but it's not going to be 100x return.

SPEAKER_43: I think in 10 years, it's going to be a 3 or 4x return. I do think Asana has the chance to be a 50x return. So therefore, I'm going with Qualtrics, which I think is a 10x return, Asana, which I think is a 50x return. I'm going for cash on cash return.

SPEAKER_16: I am going to, in my bet, Nick, I want these bets put on a long-term betting site. There's some betting site where you can put a long-term bet. Longbets.org. So we're going to go to longbets.org. I'm putting Qualtrics in as my number one. I'm putting, no, I'm putting, yeah, Qualtrics in Asana. And I'm going to even stipulate that I think I could 10x Qualtrics and I could 50x on Asana in 10 years. So let's make that bet. Do you guys want to put what you think your cash on cash multiple will be?

SPEAKER_679: No, I do not. I have no, I mean. I don't know.

SPEAKER_53: I mean, it's the end of the daily. This is what I say in poker when somebody, when I shove all my chips in and somebody takes their time to think about it.

SPEAKER_684: This is why I don't get invited back to certain poker games.

SPEAKER_65: This is a complaint, though. Can we talk for a sec about, like, what we'd actually do? I think what we'd actually, what I'd actually do is just put the 2 million bucks in Amazon.

SPEAKER_44: Companies growing 40% year on year. They have unlimited cash. Unlimited cash. Incredible cash flow dynamics in the largest markets known to man.

SPEAKER_685: Hard to bet against them.

SPEAKER_110: So it's growing the same. It's growing faster than all of these companies while being much larger and much more defensible.

SPEAKER_13: It is actually crazy looking at the performance of Amazon over basically any venture vintage. Like you look at, like, I don't know, the third, maybe fourth quartile.

SPEAKER_157: Like anybody but the top decile venture investors probably underperformed Amazon in the last 10 years.

SPEAKER_16: And so then the question becomes, is it become overvalued because people are looking for a place for safety, much like New York and San Francisco real estate?

SPEAKER_39: And so that is an effect I think that people need to be wary of is in a crisis, there's a flight to quality and things people think will grow and sustain. And when the Chinese and the Russians were looking for a place to hide money and to wash money, they went to New York and San Francisco and bought places.

SPEAKER_13: Which, by the way, that is the exact description of what the early stage funding market looks like right now. Like when we were talking about that earlier, I think this is the most succinct way to describe it. The same amount of capital being deployed in the top tier, quote unquote, top tier of companies at the highest prices. Clubhouse. Flight to quality. Clubhouse.

SPEAKER_39: Well, no, I mean, Clubhouse would be the one that you would say is had the highest, most insane valuation. A $90 million valuation when they were at 2,000 users and they're not even in the app store yet.

SPEAKER_16: By the way, boys, I have talked to no less than 10 founders of companies that have products either in market that are being pivoted towards Clubhouse and spontaneous audio.

SPEAKER_39: I have test flights on my desktop and I have mock-ups from serious, you know, entrepreneurs who are not to be trifled with.

SPEAKER_16: And they've all got quite a different spin on Clubhouse. But Clubhouse has inspired, like House Party, if it hadn't gotten sold. Because did House Party get bought by Epic? Two Epic Games. Yeah, great. Yep. If House Party hadn't been sold, I think it would have gone public. I think it would have been one of those companies that, just like Twitch would have been a public company right now, would have been SPAC'd out. And this is an important lesson, right? Like, these things would have, if SPACs had been here five years ago, Twitch is SPAC'd hands down.

SPEAKER_168: House Party gets SPAC'd. We would have had a SPAC attack. But House Party has no revenue, right? They could. I mean, House Party is what?

SPEAKER_43: The 18th most important thing that Epic does? Like, how does House Party ever come on the radar of the CEO of a company with Fortnite under it?

SPEAKER_61: Well, I think it's, it's, see, I don't think Tim Sweeney actually cares, like, this is going to sound wrong. I'm going to say, I don't think he cares that much about Fortnite. Of course he cares about Fortnite, but he cares about what it's all accomplishing, which is bringing more gathering and creative acts and creators into an online environment that Epic's infrastructure is powering. That's what Fortnite's about. Got it.

SPEAKER_696: And House Party, same deal.

SPEAKER_39: What makes more money, since you're doing this on the Acquired.fm breakdown? Yeah, we just went real deep on this. So, if you go to Acquired.fm and sign up, you'll get the full detail. But just in the abridged version, Fortnite is what percentage of their overall revenue?

SPEAKER_168: So, it's a private company.

SPEAKER_698: So, we don't know for sure. Oh, so they wouldn't tell you.

SPEAKER_102: No, but Fortnite has- Obviously, it's double digits. So, well, so I think Unreal does- I believe it's about 50%, right?

SPEAKER_13: Yeah, about a little more than a billion and a half in revenue. And Fortnite did over two billion in revenue a couple years ago. It's come down a little bit. So, I think it's- They're comparable businesses with Fortnite being a little bit bigger right now.

SPEAKER_33: Got it. Okay, so Fortnite is designed to prove how great the Unreal Engine is and just did too good of a job.

SPEAKER_69: It's like- I mean, that's not wrong. Well, yeah, I think-

SPEAKER_44: I think they thought about it like Amazon is AWS's first and best customer. That's kind of how Epic thinks about it.

SPEAKER_27: It's like, we are making this whole suite of tools from an engine to online services to live ops to payments to a store.

SPEAKER_351: They turn their case study demo into a money printing machine.

SPEAKER_215: Yep.

SPEAKER_706: There you go.

SPEAKER_14: It's like, oh, yeah, we can demo our software. Oh, by the way, our demo makes more money than like the top five video games. It's like, oh.

SPEAKER_44: Again, not that dissimilar from Amazon.

SPEAKER_14: Not that- Exactly. Like, Amazon's like, what costs us money? Oh, the servers? Great. Let's make money off them.

SPEAKER_03: And it's like, that's just such an amazing concept is to look at your business and be like,

SPEAKER_43: my God, you know, this podcast makes so much money that it was what underwrote my first five years of angel investing is because this was so profitable. It was a very interesting, bizarre turn of events. How are you guys doing with the money on your podcast? Does it make money? Does it make enough to sustain you two guys? Or is it pocket change? Is it rent? What is it? Where are you at?

SPEAKER_493: That's a great question.

SPEAKER_13: I mean, it, so it is not enough to sustain us. I don't want to pretend it's like our day jobs. Right. But the way that we sort of think about it is that the LP show is a huge leg of the stool. It's around half of what we make. The sponsorships are the other half. And we've been sort of like insanely curatorial on sponsorships to date with the idea that anybody who's sponsoring the show has to be value creative to the content. And that's, you know, it's probably held us back from full monetization potential.

SPEAKER_311: But that's how we thought about it.

David Friedberg: I call it whitelisted advertising.

SPEAKER_16: So we turned down, you know, all these guys doing these like payday loans against your SaaS revenue. I don't know if you saw me getting into it with them on Twitter. I was getting into it with a guy with the guy from pipe.com who's created a marketplace.

SPEAKER_43: And he's like, your bestie, David, gave us money. How could you not like us? And I was like, listen, nice try. But we're trying to ask you what the percentage is that you charge and you can't answer the question.

SPEAKER_16: And then this other one, I'm not going to say the name of it, but they were charging. One of our founders just had a very bad experience with them, but they were charging 6%.

SPEAKER_43: And they were like, I was like, okay, you charge 6%, right? They're like, no, no, we charge $6,000 on the 100,000. I'm like, that's 6%. They're like, no, no, it's just a $6,000 fee. I'm like, over what period of time? They're like two months. I'm like, okay, what is compounding interest 6% over six time periods? That's 100%. No, I'm sorry, it's 50%, right?

SPEAKER_122: Or something like that. It'd be 50%, I think. Because the rule of 72 is if you divide 72 by 6, it would take 12 months for it to 12 periods for you to double your money.

SPEAKER_03: So anyway, it's like 50% a year. So I was like, do credit cards charge that much? And they're like, oh, no, no, this is just a flow. Don't worry about it. It's just a flow. It's just a flow. Your receivables. And I was like, wait a second. That makes no sense to me. If I have that much in receivables, VCs are going to throw money at me at a high valuation. Why would I do this stupidity?

SPEAKER_122: And I literally, they begged to be on the podcast. And my salesperson is ready to get a big commission. And I just said, you know what? I can't get behind it. I can't get behind it. I'm sorry. If one of my founders tells me they had a shitty experience, and you can't explain to me. But the Pipe one is very interesting.

SPEAKER_43: They take, let's say you sold your SaaS product for $100 a month per seat.

SPEAKER_39: And you had somebody who had 100 seats. So they were paying $10,000 a month. You had $120,000 in ARR. But they're paying you monthly.

SPEAKER_16: You could put your $120,000 on their marketplace. And then somebody could say, I will give you $100,000 now for $120,000. And then you could bid, I'll give you $105,000. They take the $105,000. That person makes $15,000. So they're making 15% interest, essentially.

SPEAKER_168: If you're still responsible.

SPEAKER_157: I like anything where you create a market price.

SPEAKER_114: Like that's a great.

SPEAKER_16: That's why I like that one. That's more interesting. I might let them advertise. Because that to me, I said, if you give me three customers, they gave me one already. Because they asked publicly on Twitter. I said, if you get me two more customers, I'll, and they, because the first customer loved it. They said, listen, Jake, we're charging this amount of money. We put $40,000 in this contract. We got, you know, whatever it was, I don't know, $36,000 now. I can put the $36,000 now into my funnel. I know I'm not going to lose that customer. And if I lose one out of three customers, I can deal with it. So they do some sort of formula. They don't let you, like, put all of it in. You can put a portion of your ARR in or something. And then they make a marketplace. And I was like, well, I might actually want to bid on this.

SPEAKER_43: I want to make 15% on a million dollars and put a million dollars in here and buy some ARR. And they don't take warrants or anything. So I was like, oh, okay. Well, this seems pretty cool, right?

SPEAKER_12: Wait, Jason. So I want to turn this, the question you asked me, I kind of want your advice on it.

SPEAKER_157: So we do Acquired as a side project. It's a labor of love. It's learning in public. So much from doing the show. And, like, I love investing in companies. And I love the work that we do at PSL starting companies.

SPEAKER_77: So, like, how do you think we should think about Acquired and what it is as a business and kind of what it is in our lives? Yes. Okay.

SPEAKER_39: If you need the – I'm just going to guess you are – eventually we'll have 1,000 people paying $100,000 a year for it. I'm just taking a guess.

SPEAKER_43: Am I in the ballpark?

SPEAKER_717: In the ballpark. Past that? Yeah. Past that, but – Not much. Okay. Call it order of magnitude.

SPEAKER_43: Okay. All right.

SPEAKER_16: So if you're making $200,000 or $300,000 a year from the paid one and you get, you know, another $100,000, $200,000 from advertising, whatever, so you make a half million dollars a year from it. This is what I would do. Take a little bit each to keep the lights on, pay for your lifestyle. Then I would take 10% of it and 20% of it and put it into marketing of the podcast and see if it grows, see if it has the possibility of growing.

SPEAKER_03: We will do that with our clips. Sometimes you'll see us put clips on and sometimes you'll see they're boosted. So we'll put a boost behind a couple of clips because I'm always wanting more people to get access to the content. And if you love doing this – and, you know, listen, we've been talking now for two hours and we could go for another two hours because – We're passionate about what we're doing. Now, if this was a podcast about politics, I would want to kill myself and I would want to be off the podcast. So as long as you love what you're doing, keep doing it. Keep it high quality.

SPEAKER_43: And it's deal flow. It's community building. And you enjoy it. Like what could be better? And if it monetizes, if it breaks even, it's great.

SPEAKER_16: When I started 11 years ago, we just did – I would just – it was called Calacanis Cast. I did like 40 episodes and I literally would take a recorder back when it was tapes and I still have the tapes. And I just put on the table, Ron Conway was like, can I visit you? And I was like, sure. Can I tape an interview with you? He's like, what for? I was like, a podcast. He said, what's that? I was like, ah, it's Dave Weiner's doing this podcasting. And I recorded. Ev Williams was doing audio, so he knew what podcast was. I was like, I want to tape you for the podcast. I'd tape it. I'd hand it to somebody. It's like, digitize this and let's go. And then we had a digital recorder, obviously. We would put two of them on the table.

SPEAKER_23: And we're literally recording it on open microphones. And now we've got $150,000 studio. And I bought it for $1,700,000 and it's a 3,000-square-foot studio.

SPEAKER_39: Like, it's a professional operation now. No, there it goes. Look, that's what it makes. That's what it makes.

SPEAKER_720: Behind the scenes.

SPEAKER_39: That's what $1,700,000 looks like. No, I literally bought a loft in Soma to record the studio out of so that I'd have a permanent place in the pandemic.

SPEAKER_23: But anyway, I think Peter Rojas at Engadget told me something that was the success of his success early on with Gizmodo.

SPEAKER_39: Then he created Engadget. And he said, what's the secret to blogging?

SPEAKER_43: And it really is the secret to podcasting, which is showing up.

SPEAKER_222: And you just, it doesn't really get interesting, I think, as a performer, as an interviewer, until you get to year three or four. How many years in are you guys? How many episodes? Five, and I would completely agree with you.

SPEAKER_03: Right. So this is why you guys are good at it. Like, when you guys came on the pod, I was like, these guys are magic. Get them on all the time. And, you know, Keith Raboi is magic, right? There's some people who are just good at this. And when you get to year four or five, you two can get on a podcast, and I could put a mystery guest on, and you'd be able to interview them with no show notes. And it would be a great fucking interview. Like, literally, I could just take a founder, put him in the seat, and all I have to do is ask him, what are you working on? Listen, and then do it. I specifically told my assistant six, seven years ago, no more lunches. I'm never going to lunch with anybody. Anybody says, can I go to lunch with Jason, tell them. Jason doesn't do lunches with people because he's got to get home in time for dinner with his family. He doesn't do lunches. He eats a little something at his desk. But, but, if you want to come on the pod, he'd love to sit with you for an hour on the pod, and you can get a cup of coffee or a burger. I'll have a burger delivered afterwards. And so then I just exchange lunch in my schedule for this. And if you guys were in town, I'd love to go to lunch with you, but fuck it, let's just do a pod, and then I'll order some ramen or some Belcampo burgers, and we'll pound those after we get off the show. Done. So, keep, just keep doing it is the bottom line, and you do it twice a week or once now?

SPEAKER_110: No, we do it twice, about twice a month.

SPEAKER_122: You got to get to weekly. Frequency is also important. So, I think you're not, I think the other thing you could do is you two could separate.

SPEAKER_03: You could do an interview each and do shorter episodes that you put less into. So, I wouldn't be afraid to experiment. You've locked into something that works, but try a quick hit. You find a founder you love, and you just do a 30-minute one. I don't know if you saw me do the emergency pod where I talked about the house.

SPEAKER_725: Oh, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03: The antitrust stuff. I just did an emergency pod, and I said, Nick, these are the clips I like. Give me four other clips. I played the clip. I gave my two cents on it. I played the clip. I gave my two cents on it. Nick put it together, and I, well, I copied it from Bill Simmons. And I used to do emergency pods, and I called them emergency pods back in the day. And I don't know if Bill Simmons copied it from me, but. For sure, yeah. Let's go with it. No, I don't know. I don't think so. I think it's an obvious idea, which is some breaking news happens. You run to your microphone, and you record.

SPEAKER_33: And so when I remember when Kawhi Leonard got traded to Clippers, there was like, you know, a little bit on ESPN, but, you know, it happened on a Sunday.

Chamath Palihapitiya: And Sunday night, Bill Simmons, you know, is on. Emergency pod. Does an emergency pod, and he talks for 45 minutes.

SPEAKER_03: And you know what? That's what I want. So you guys need to do a little more experimenting. I think you should try doing a solo one each. So you can just fill in between, because I, if you notice with This Week in Startups, you're getting three a week from us now, I think, is are pretty consistent. And then I added a fourth, which is I do a weekly recap, which I just started, which was talk about the three people who were on this week and do a highlight episode. And then the people who hit the top of the charts, Ben Shapiro, Joe Rogan, are five days a week, six days a week. So frequency matters.

SPEAKER_442: But you don't want frequency to fuck with quality.

SPEAKER_44: Well, I think this is what we've been thinking about. We need, like, we need to do a few different formats already with the IP, with the LP show

SPEAKER_27: and the main show. But our main show episodes, we do weeks of research. We want it to be like, we just did Epic.

SPEAKER_02: We want to know more about Epic than anyone. Those are, you know, your hardcore, like, foundation of what you do.

SPEAKER_43: But that doesn't mean, you know, like, that's the stake, right?

SPEAKER_16: But that doesn't mean you can't have a little side order or, you know, an amused booze or a special dessert or some petty fours at the end. Like, give yourself permission to experiment, right? Because some other things might hit. Ten questions, four. Boom. And Tim Ferriss does this pretty well. Like, Tim Ferriss is like, I mean, talk about Lean Startup. He's like, you know what? I get paid so much money for this podcast. Let me have somebody else do it. Naval, do me a favor. Answer 20 questions. Naval's like, sure. I'll get your entire audience and answer 20 questions. So Naval, instead of doing his own podcast.

SPEAKER_740: It's a great deal.

SPEAKER_16: It's a great deal for both parties.

SPEAKER_02: And then, you know, he has the audacity, Tim's a friend, to be like, oh, fuck it. I don't want to do another episode. Can you come on? I know you were a guest. And just tell me the 10 books that you love.

SPEAKER_16: When we did an experiment, I stopped it. But after people were on the podcast, I let them do an AMA with the, on a Zoom call within

SPEAKER_33: the Slack, just so we both have Slacks. And they didn't come out great. They didn't come out bad.

SPEAKER_537: But they did, you know, like a little AMA. It's a tough format.

SPEAKER_742: Yeah.

SPEAKER_537: I think it's a good format for Reddit and text.

SPEAKER_16: Yeah. It doesn't work well when you have professional people doing interviews versus the audience. Because we can ask questions and frame them, listen to the answer, and then ask a follow-up

SPEAKER_33: question. Whereas an AMA is just, it's kind of one-dimensional, I think.

SPEAKER_744: Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_157: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Well, cool. I mean, Jason, I appreciate it. Always great to get your brain.

David Friedberg: Listen, I do appreciate you guys coming on the pod because you bring so much. And it's just, you know, listen, like I said, you know, if we were in the same city, we'd be, we'd go get ramen together or burgers and just chillin'. I'm here in San Francisco. Oh, you are? All right. Well, I was just saying that to be nice. I'm not going to take you from the pod. I get it. I get it.

SPEAKER_16: No, no. If you are in San Francisco, I got the ramen place for us. And if you do want to get ramen. No, no, no. You got to come down to San Mateo. There's a place called Taishoken. T-A-I-S-H-O-K-E-N. They just opened up last month, the month before, to do outside seating. And I went there. It was delightful. You make the trip down to San Mateo. It's my treat. I know the owner. And Taishoken started in the 50s in Tokyo. And they specialize in the Sukiman ramen, which I never liked ramen, but it's dipping noodles. Yep. So you have buckwheat noodles on one side. And then you have this thick sauce, which is, you know, ramen is just like this watery soup.

SPEAKER_23: I never liked it with those like terrible noodles in them that are like from the dried out noodles.

SPEAKER_39: Not for me. These are fresh pasta noodles that they make on-site buckwheat noodles.

SPEAKER_43: You dip them into this like anchovy dip, thick, riching sauce. It's like thick, yeah. It's thick. And you slurp them up. And then you have a little bit of sauce left. And then they come with a hot water kettle.

SPEAKER_16: And they pour hot water in at the end. And they top it off and make it, you know, two-thirds with hot water. And then you drink that like a soup. Marron. We are going to literally we'll do it. And then we'll talk about it on the pod. Thanks again to our sponsors. Thanks to Ben. Thanks to David. I want you all to just listen to your boy, Jake, right now.

SPEAKER_39: And let's get another couple of hundred paid subs for them at acquired.fm. Well worth it. And we'll see you all next time on This Week in Startups.

SPEAKER_748: Bye-bye. Stay safe. Bye-bye.