SPEAKER_00: hey everybody hey everybody it's friday we're gonna have a couple of drinks molly and i uh it's been that kind of week slash month slash quarter slash year so why not we pop some bottles and we're starting off with some vc talk there is a story about vcs hiring ghost riders for thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars to write their tweets and then really interesting story molly about vcs investing vcs like sequoia and anderson hearts investing in publicly traded

SPEAKER_01: companies now because hey maybe it's a great opportunity or they can't find great late

SPEAKER_04: stage deals for their growth funds yeah use this bounce along the bottom to scoop up the companies you wish you had invested in the first time around very interesting then we're going to dive into a little bit of metaverse talk with a possible warning for founders it turns out that at least one highly capitalized and got a lot of press startup metaverse startup decentraland doesn't have that

SPEAKER_09: many daily users let's just yeah it's a little rough a little rough and they you know these these

SPEAKER_14: web3 projects sometimes they have incredible sales when they sell the land or the tokens of the nfts and then they don't actually have user adoption and that's really put in the cart before the horse you're making the money and then you're you're trying to get product market fit it's usually better

SPEAKER_16: the other way around finally netflix has got their ad tier out and i think this might even be worthy of

SPEAKER_18: a j trade dare i say dun dun dun you know soon enough and then rachel comes on she's got another

SPEAKER_04: segment of okay boomer to talk to saturday founder cliff learner and this idea that just keeps coming

SPEAKER_21: around of just using your location to find your friends so i love it yeah every two or three years

SPEAKER_23: another company tries to take a stab at this and we'll see if this year uh if it actually works

SPEAKER_25: it's gonna be a great show stick with us this week in startups is brought to you by odoo is a fully customizable and fully integrated suite of business apps that lets you build and scale your stack as you build and scale your business your first app is free forever and right now odoo is offering one thousand dollars off your first implementation pack at odoo.com slash twist that's odoo.com slash twist a shore is the leading provider of special purpose vehicles and fund administration with over 5 000 completed transactions and 2.5 billion dollars under administration twist listeners can get 20 off their first spv at ashore.co slash twist that's ashore.co slash twist and house of macadamias is the next big health trend get 20 off your first purchase at house of macadamias.com slash twist

SPEAKER_28: by using code twist 20. all right everybody it's friday molly and i are ready to get this party started

SPEAKER_31: cheers molly cheers clink clink yeah we're having a little happy hour taping i have to tell you my man

SPEAKER_36: chamoff uh palihapitiya he got me into this vin santo he's a vin santo i like how you say his last

SPEAKER_39: name we've heard of him yeah we know who you mean this is castellan uh villa it's an italian vin

SPEAKER_00: santo which is uh essentially like a dessert wine you know fortified dessert wines ports and those kind of things i am a big fan of these um and he uh put me onto this one and then you know like like my friends are apt to do he sent me like a case of them i was very nice of him it's not absurdly expensive

SPEAKER_40: and you know in terms of the chamoff cellar but you know very nice to get a case of those and um i like to sip it it takes me a little while to get through a bottle but since it's fortified it lasts a little while like a port bottle will list are you drinking something special or just like uh

SPEAKER_18: five dollars like you know what come on it's like fourteen dollars i love i had no judgment i love a

SPEAKER_44: thirteen to twenty dollar like and if you buy a california wine between thirteen and twenty dollars

SPEAKER_48: is gonna be good yeah yeah it's just it's a red blend i love a red blend nice i'm not gonna buy

SPEAKER_50: a case of it but it's just working great now i see you're not at home in the uh in the normal

SPEAKER_04: studio where are you it's true i'm gonna i'm be i'm having a digital nomad adventure i am just a little bit east of san diego i'm in southern california i can see the salt and sea from here oh wow it's kind of just because what's weird about that is that it's a super like mountain cabin we're in the mountains like up a little bit high it's like a girl's trip i was i came here because i had read that it has amazing uh fall foliage nice which i'm sure that it does a month from

SPEAKER_57: now they got you they got you so i'm looking at a beautiful green valley oh well i'm glad you know

SPEAKER_36: it's nice that we have this nomadic lifestyle and um yeah nice get a little weekend for yourself

SPEAKER_16: and your girlfriends i love it uh we just taped the uh we just taped the 100th episode of the all in

SPEAKER_00: podcast quite nice i think it's going to be a big hit it was good we were like in a very loving you know it was kind of like an anniversary you're kind of thinking about all the good times and one of my co-hosts there david sacks if you've heard of him craft ventures he's very passionate about

SPEAKER_40: russia's invasion of the of ukraine god i keep saying the we were raised on it it's hard to shake

SPEAKER_00: it's a hard to shake yeah thing but i'm i am aware of it and i'm working on it so i correct myself every time like i'm sure a million other people do every day but it was a interesting moment

SPEAKER_40: because i asked him three times three one two three do you support the united states forcing

SPEAKER_68: zelinski and ukraine to the table in order to get a negotiated settlement before this becomes to world

SPEAKER_00: war iii and you haven't heard it yet it's being edited as we tape this and it was a you can't

SPEAKER_69: handle the truth moment where sax says we're the daddy we're america these are our weapons we have

SPEAKER_00: and it was like a real profiling courage of him saying like you know put aside how we all think

SPEAKER_12: about this it's very hard to understand what's going on over there there's a lot of history

SPEAKER_14: it's a very complicated issue obviously i'm no expert on this stuff um you know and uh you know he's added some expertise but a very interesting moment in time uh where he put his foot down and said that's it you know like i think we have to uh force the settlement here and say listen by this date

SPEAKER_00: you can do what you want as ukraine but you know we need you to settle this you know uh and we're not

SPEAKER_58: going to endlessly fund this war through weapons i think it's going to be a pretty uh interesting

SPEAKER_74: moment i'm on the internet looking forward to hearing it it will be many interesting moments on

SPEAKER_04: the internet i'm sure i'm sure a lot of chit chat on the internet about a certain collection of guys and

SPEAKER_78: their uh and their sudden expertise let's just say well you know it's one of the things i encourage people

SPEAKER_00: is you know uh to start their own podcasts if they have strong feelings uh i think podcast a great medium and i also encourage people when we're talking about capital allocation on that podcast uh markets finance macroeconomics even startups certainly uh poker on the margins to delight and absorb take notes even uh on our expertise and then for other topics you are welcome to join the

SPEAKER_80: discussion as civilians and participate as you see fit yeah maybe you could get like a little sting you

SPEAKER_04: know how sometimes we say this is not investment advice you get a like this is not geopolitical advice

SPEAKER_58: except that it totally is which you know as a former market commentator uh as co-host of marketplace

SPEAKER_14: feels like the market is uh bouncing along the bottom huh big inflation print today it is yeah big

SPEAKER_85: i know that was disappointing i think it probably puts the lie sounds harsh i think it will probably

SPEAKER_04: prove vinny wrong he said in a crypto round table he thought that the the fed raise would be 50 bips

SPEAKER_88: instead of 75. no no chance no chance no chance that's off the table it's 75 if not a full point

SPEAKER_58: i say here it's a one in five chance of that oh my lord i do think this is like bouncing along the

SPEAKER_04: bottom i think so too i think we will have one to two years of negative impacts my friend who i'm here with today is the big wig in the content and media space and has been saying you know you know she's like i expect our business to improve a roughly a year from now spring of 2020

SPEAKER_88: is when kind of you know like i think you said advertising is like the first to go and the first

SPEAKER_00: to bounce back maybe it'll be first to go advertising first to go uh and then slow to bounce back and then if you there seems to be a series of you know capitulation in the markets you know and some things are a little bit sticky like uh housing we talked about here many times uh people can live in houses so unlike their holdings in crypto or in a growth stock in peloton you know they can get out of their peloton stock they can sell their bitcoin you know your house takes a big considered sale you got to find a buyer all that stuff so those things tend to take a little while the thing that's very interesting to me is we had a million two jobs i think burn off in august we'll see what happened in september shortly those numbers are trailing but that was a big amount of burn off there and i think the fed really wants to see jobs correct and in order for jobs to correct you know where would you look for a bellwether for that i think you look to microsoft google uh and apple and other

SPEAKER_14: companies that have so much money they don't need to do a riff and we've talked about the gentleman's rift here on this bottom many times but you are hearing the saber rattling right you hear sundar saying like hey we got to be more efficient you got apple saying you got to come back to work you know knowing that five percent of people will quit when you do that so it does feel like we're in the

SPEAKER_01: end game i think so it doesn't i don't i mean we should be clear when we say we're bouncing along the

SPEAKER_04: bottom that that the bottom is in some ways the beginning of the pain right it's the reg it's depending on who you are the fed is inflicting this pain now the indicators of the pain will be trailing meaning that the pain will get more intense like the beatings are not going to stop immediately a 75 or god help us one yeah yeah basis point raise would be would cause a lot will cause a lot more pain either of those will cause a lot more pain so it's sort of like if we're at the bottom

SPEAKER_81: now then there's going to be the plateau i think that's rising along the valley for a while you

SPEAKER_00: know it's a long slow climb out low tide will happen and when low tide happens um you know it's we're not gonna be able to surf the the big waves anymore but it's at least not gonna you know uh i think it's gonna be prolonged bottom i agree with that too yeah so i'm thinking about some j trades i was watching amazon seems to i don't know sorry uh andy um jassy jassy some of his comments leaked i guess or some of his notes and he said listen we're going to do more with less and we're not going to have hiring freezes and we're going to get rid of people and i encourage you to think like a startup and basically be more gritty i think that's exactly what the market needs is for those companies to say we're going to try to give people growth and show people we can grow and have great earnings even in a down market so the proof as i told one founder today you are in the show me market not the tell me market you have to show good results or else you're not going to get funded because they were wondering she was like hey how come i'm not getting funded and i said well do you have a 10-week chart that shows increases of two three four five percent week over week yes or no no okay stop everything you're doing and just make that happen if you want to get funding or

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SPEAKER_118: chaos there's meshuggah i don't know if you saw this story but i love it i saw this story and i was like what and then matt levine wrote about it and i was like wait is this real i think it is i think it is why

SPEAKER_117: don't you queue it up and then i'll i'll drink my uh my little vinsanto here explain this meshuggah to

SPEAKER_04: me i mean i will do my best okay so an anonymous writer told business insider that they made two hundred thousand dollars last year ghostwriting tweets for venture capitalists this ghostwriter claims uh that he can write a tweet that gets as many as four million impressions can't we all his clients accounts range from two thousand to two hundred thousand followers he says he takes on about 20 to 25 clients at a time wow and spends five hours a week on it notes that the smaller clients end up paying more because they're the ones who need the distribution and prices have ranged from a hundred thousand dollar threads to one hundred dollar single tweets or this person claims some vcs just pay per month it's like a retainer they charge five to ten thousand dollars a month to write ten original tweets and the rates go up from there because every vc wants to be you and me

SPEAKER_14: basically yeah i mean uh they always said aaron from box had a writer or a team writing his tweets because he's so funny it just turns out he's actually funny and witty i don't think he has a yeah a writer i think he might have somebody who edits with him like on his comms team or whatever uh aaron from box who by the way just let's producers take it out i saw aaron the other week um when molly and i did our fireside chat we should have him on the pod soon we should it's not crazy to think that somebody would put a ghostwriter on retainer for blogging that's a thing and so why not for tweets it makes total sense um 20 25 vcs seems like a lot uh the hundred thousand dollars for one thread i don't buy that i don't think that's a correct number maybe they maybe the journalists

SPEAKER_00: transcribed it incorrectly but yeah i i could see people paying 5 000 a month for a retainer who cares if you're a vc you probably have like 100 200k budget to do content or you know to travel to

SPEAKER_04: events or whatever so i mean it does let's assume it's true let's just like stipulate that we think this is true sure it's true what does it say to us about how important it is to have effectively a content marketing strategy no matter what your product is even if your product is you as an investor or you as a firm like would this ever have happened before if you're a new vc if you're a new

SPEAKER_134: vc you need deal flow yeah so how do you get deal flow is the question people have watched me blog

SPEAKER_14: they watch me do podcasting uh they saw other people like fred wilson mark souster and brad fell were in that early vc investor podcast blogging and then podcasting and so i think people have said

SPEAKER_00: you know it's kind of a prerequisite to have some social content marketing strategy it's not i think actually i would think it's kind of the opposite right now i think since it's so flooded and i think actually just being old school if i was going to do it i would just do meetings with other investors constantly to try to make deal flow and then you know tweet like maybe not that often but sure i think there's one of the nice things about social media is there's a scorecard likes retweets follows and so you do see you know folks we had mac uh the vc on here and he got he created a following and then raised a fund off of it so it's definitely a strategy i look at twitter as like the new uh you know conference circuit it's a new circuit where you would meet people build deal flow meet lps and instead you don't have to leave your house and so people now perfected it the thread is like for me i don't do threads anymore because it's kind of like the threat of death i find it like oh god when i see that thread logo i'm just like oh my lord who wrote this and like what startup advice is this that you know it's commodified i think there's a lot of commodified startup advice and so when you're the the bigger important thing molly for me is how should founders take all this advice and i think they should take it with a grain of salt write it in a book maybe if it sounds notable but you know you need to get advice from people who've actually done the job built a company

SPEAKER_140: or done the seo or done the whatever it is the specific thing you're trying to do it does make me

SPEAKER_04: wonder about the use of other platforms like this i actually asked you the other day i was like okay i'm close to publishing you know it's been almost 10 months i'm i'm having some thoughts about thesis companies that are appropriate for me and us as a firm like i think i'm ready to write up sure this thesis in this one page and i was like where should i publish this and there's a real strong argument that i want to publish it somewhere that i can link to so someone can find it again but really

SPEAKER_143: shouldn't it just be a thread at this point i think a thread that will be a hundred thousand

SPEAKER_00: dollar thread people i mean a thread a blog post medium linkedin come to mind you can link to the fuller version you know if you just take the headings of what would be your blog post if there were eight headings you could just do the headings as you know really concise tldr too long didn't

SPEAKER_48: read so yeah but it has to be a twitter thread that's what i'm saying like you gotta have both you

SPEAKER_58: can't do probably yeah it's a weird world it's been growing my twitter's been growing quite nicely yours has been growing quite nicely it has twitter's still the water cooler for our i think certain

SPEAKER_12: industries are very sticky on twitter mvc happens to be one of them i think it has to also and

SPEAKER_154: journalism ironically both those two probably more than any other i would argue yeah those both have to

SPEAKER_01: do with networking in order to get deal flow or information and they also are um industries where

SPEAKER_14: you are self-directed in terms of your time therefore you can slide in twitter and leave it up all day and participate in it all day and justify it now if you were a video editor and you're freaking around or you're a salesperson you're screwing around on twitter all days your boss is going to come to you

SPEAKER_12: be like should you be editing videos shouldn't you be talking to customers but when you're a vc or you're

SPEAKER_14: a journalist it's like yeah i'm talking to sources no i'm sourcing deals so really on a sourcing

SPEAKER_12: networking basis it's really good for people who have to source stuff and then i don't know if you saw elon the other day you know tweeted about his burnt hair perfume he sold 10 000 in an hour and now

SPEAKER_14: it's up to 20 000 so you know if you have a big fan he obviously has the largest following but people with very big followings can and that was a joke you know like you can really move stuff i'm doing this founder university story on november 14th i'm teaching it i tweeted about it three times and

SPEAKER_00: uh we're now at 400 people and the record before was 200 and we're still weeks out and i'm like i

SPEAKER_58: got maybe we'll go for 600 or 800 people in the class yeah founder.university if you want to join the class 12 weeks i'm teaching every monday night at 6 p.m pacific well same with our public grace

SPEAKER_04: right like we've talked to several vcs who raised their entire funds on twitter we're going to raise a not insignificant portion yeah of our funds from these webinars that you tweeted about

SPEAKER_58: precisely awesome it's awesome makes total sense i don't know if it applies to every industry i'm not sure applies to every person but there you go right you know sure maybe why not i mean

SPEAKER_00: if you're i mean some people are introverts some people are not good at writing now

SPEAKER_04: matt levine did raise the point that like what if you you gotta have your persona on twitter even if it's ghostwritten cannot be that far from your real personality because if people then meet you or invite you to conferences and you are nowhere near that charming and funny it's going to be a problem yeah you gotta like you gotta modulate you can't like put you know i'm trying to think of someone hilarious that we can't put wanda sykes out there and then be bill gates like no no it has to be brand

SPEAKER_00: yeah it has to be related to brand and if you're a writer who understands capital allocation you

SPEAKER_14: understand tech and you have just a little bit of wittiness or cleverness for sure you could do this what i want to know is and uh if whoever this writer is i'll give you 500 bucks to give me the proof of who you did this for so always send this whoever has this information i want to know the list of customers i want them to out for me who's not writing their own tweets if somebody gives me that list i will i will ship you 500 on venmo or whatever you're using in private you mean in private i'll totally do it yeah somebody leaked this information to me i'll give you 500 bucks cash no questions asked just leak it to me and just prove it somehow like give me a screenshot of you dming

SPEAKER_185: with the person or whatever but yeah give me the leak i want to know who it is i want to know who is or just mention who you think it is if you're an accredited investor you need to know about special

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SPEAKER_16: super accurate i saw this wall street journal story i think i sent it to you as well about vcs

SPEAKER_01: not being able to find investable late stage deals so they're looking at public market deals and saying

SPEAKER_14: better than some of the late stage private companies i'll just put my money in a public company

SPEAKER_04: we've talked what i feel like is happening with this wall street journal story is something that we've talked about now several times which is that you have really big firms spinning out a public equity arm you know or allocating some of their capital toward buying public companies and and kind of scooping up like taking advantage of what is really like a big sale in the stock store and maybe you missed out on a deal the first time around but you have now this equity fund alongside your venture fund which is a trend in vc that we've talked about before so i wasn't i couldn't totally tell what about this was exactly new although i do think it's an interesting part of the kind of like how do you deploy capital yeah and if you're maybe thinking to yourselves there aren't going to be that many private companies at the stage we're at when i gotta shove a hundred million dollars into something yeah when going public seems like the right yeah investing in a publicly traded company already

SPEAKER_00: that's undervalued you have all the data um you know a number of firms have are now registered as investment advisors as opposed to under this venture capital uh exception in the venture capital exemption you can only put like 10 or 20 of your funds um capital into um non-traditional public market equities whatever you had to all be private companies under a certain age or something it's a kind of a wonky rule but i know that sequoia and adresin went through this specifically adresin did it i remember because they wanted to be involved in crypto which didn't fall under this and the tokens and whatnot um so this is for me i'm i'm thinking about doing some j trading now i am i said when i started the j trading process it's going to be like a bottoming out process so i want to pick some names maybe double down on some names i think it's gonna be an interesting place maybe to to look for ideas so i would like to find out um who sequoia is investing and i see that they purchased over 2.5 million shares in data analytics firm amplitude um and then they bought 574 000 new shares of doordash and sequoia was largest shareholder in both of those companies before they went public so this is very interesting for me to watch happen i think that this as a trend could be a super interesting way for public market investors i don't know just to know smart people are looking at

SPEAKER_202: that so now if they bought amplitude i'm looking up their stock here amplitude stock if they want that

SPEAKER_88: in q1 what do we think about the fact that before they went public sequoia was the largest shareholder in these companies and then now they're buying a bunch of stock like is that a prop up well uh i don't

SPEAKER_39: think they would use investor money to prop it up no right um because these companies you have to drill

SPEAKER_04: down how much cash that's my other question yeah right my only other my other question too in addition to of course they've drilled down on these companies they probably have better hopefully not better public information the information part of this gets tricky because sequoia the front right what kind of firewall do they have information they have historical information and they know the founders

SPEAKER_14: they understand the business because they've been in it for five or ten years totally and so it

SPEAKER_04: probably is like a vote of confidence but my other question is is it the same lp's could you can you do this with the same lp's like you have a public equity fund well they said they're going to do the

SPEAKER_00: sequoia fund where if you're in the sequoia fund and let's say you had they invested in doordash and then that went public you could take your money in and out of the sequoia fund every year or something yeah in a redemption period and so yes they could be taking that investor money and just increasing their position in it and if you look at this company that they mentioned uh if i have the right one here amplitude amplitude was trading uh january 3rd at 52 a share and then it came crashing down and uh they had a 60 stock drop in february and it's been bouncing along the bottom at 14 a share since then so it looks like yeah yeah so they were like we know these guys we really like them

SPEAKER_04: we have great historical information on them and so we're making a bet now that there's a discount

SPEAKER_217: and they might even be on the board of this company you never know so you know this is the

Jason Calacanis: really interesting like it gets tricky like if you're on the board can you do that well i guess

SPEAKER_40: members can increase their positions there is a process for doing that right they have to file that

SPEAKER_92: they intend to do that so if we look at the board of directors of amplitude about us amplitude let's

SPEAKER_219: take a look and see who's on the board um i'm going to guess um here we go board of directors let's see anybody from sequoia yep pat grady from sequoia quoted in the article there you go boom so this

SPEAKER_134: makes sense to me you know um yeah and i like it and this means to me that i'm going to put a ga trade in i think on amplitude uh i think following into i mean it just seems i'm going

SPEAKER_92: to do some research on it before i do but i'll put it on the docket for monday so if we could uh

SPEAKER_00: producer rachel can you put on the docket uh just to go over amplitude and do a deep dive on that doordash i know uh they're doing great um and i understand that i wonder if indresen horowitz

SPEAKER_202: made did in the story did they talk about indresen horowitz making any um they did they did i mean

SPEAKER_00: here's the thing molly we know that the growth stage investments before ipo last time were in

SPEAKER_14: some cases not great investments and the stocks went down from their last private company rounds right so before the ipo happened and the and you could buy public shares the private rounds were higher than where they're trading now and so if you believed in it then why wouldn't you believe in it now and if you're looking for a place to put money why not as an example oral birds raised out a 1.7 billion dollar private valuation in september of 2020. he's got a four billion dollar market cap now it's worth 478 million i don't know if i want to be in that but it does show you that it's trading at

SPEAKER_04: one quarter or one third this is interesting too it looks like andresen in the first quarter bought a million new shares of block out of its five billion dollar growth fund square previously square and market andresen has once has apparently said in the past that failing to back square which it was known as then as a private company was one of his regrets as an investor and then andresen also purchased over 1.4 million shares of doordash out of the same time so doordash seems to be the winner here people

SPEAKER_165: are triangulating on doordash just well if you look at people have been talking about doordash and i'm

SPEAKER_208: team i'm team doordash uh we people look at both uber and doordash as undervalued they've become kind

SPEAKER_00: of like they are the google yahoo whatever you whatever the code word is here you know google facebook would probably be the better analogy with you know uber obviously having two businesses and being much larger uh but facebook having like a really carved niche for itself that became a duopoly

SPEAKER_240: in uh advertising and this seems to be a delivery duopoly yeah that's forming it's kind of interesting

SPEAKER_04: like historically nobody would have looked back at that i think four years ago and thought uber and doordash would be head-to-head competitors maybe you and travis did but other people well we knew that

SPEAKER_28: and uber almost bought doordash um i don't know how public those deliberations have been but there was a there was a moment um interesting where they could have got it done for about 10 billion from what

SPEAKER_244: i understand i don't don't don't re-aggregate that but that was my memory serves me correctly it

SPEAKER_40: was a 10 billion dollar number probably would have been a good idea for both companies but even still

SPEAKER_00: both companies are making money now and they both have significant user bases and people are addicted the product market fits there now people are looking at the union economics saying check that works and now we're out of the you know burn money free market environment so there's no choice but to be profitable you know if you got to lose 10 of your top line or customers to be profitable those

SPEAKER_58: businesses are going to do it and they seem like their top line and bottom line is growing at the same

SPEAKER_00: time so anyway it seems like a really interesting way to go about it it's interesting signal um i think it's also going to make them better private market investments you think about you and i as private market investors we have to think about it every company we have how is this going to fare as a public company eventually and you know unit economics and the quality of the revenue is super important in the private markets you can kind of not worry or you should worry but you can kind of suspend disbelief you're like well it's growing the top line eventually there'll be a bottom line

SPEAKER_12: with uber bill girly i and a couple of other people travis we had looked at the numbers was like yeah if you add a dollar to every ride this thing prints money if we lose a dollar per ride now that's a two dollar swing is anybody going to not take an uber or a lyft or a doordash for two dollars yeah five percent of the market is probably that price sensitive the other 95 isn't if they become addicted to this and sure enough that's what's passed prices went up things became profitable and

SPEAKER_14: you know the end of story but you know in private markets we see a lot of companies who only focused on

SPEAKER_12: top line is it profitable um they are cash flow profitable now uh you have to you know there's

SPEAKER_14: a thing with the stock compensation and then special one-time things either write downs of um write downs of um holdings like diddy you know a lot of those things cause chaos uh and so did so there were write downs write-ups and write downs and cashing outs that were occurring and then there's a stock-based comp but on a cash flow basis i believe the cash position is growing don't quote me on this but i think uh and i don't have inside information but yes both of these

SPEAKER_58: businesses are now uh in the profitable kind of phase i would say awesome depends on if you believe

SPEAKER_00: this is another issue if you believe stonk stonk stonk compensation for employees should count you

SPEAKER_111: know stock compensation does impact the shareholders of the company i kind of don't care i kind of care

SPEAKER_34: about the actual revenue of the business or whatever i don't care right you probably do at

SPEAKER_00: some point have to rein in crazy silicon valley sock compensation which got out of control and that's actually happening i don't know about uber but other places are like yeah you're lucky to have a job we're gonna you're not getting you're not getting tons of money right well i mean remember

SPEAKER_34: the days of like you know hey i have an offer from google i have an offer from facebook i got an

SPEAKER_00: offer from apple yeah and i could have offers from airbnb and uber but um i have too many offers to even consider at this moment in time therefore i'll work for your startup if you pay me like half

SPEAKER_58: of the money you just raised and it's like yeah go work at apple please we can't i beg you can't

SPEAKER_40: absorb you please don't be having this all right listen this brand has a special place in my heart the founders brandon and carmen are twist listeners they've been for a long time and they told me they

SPEAKER_111: started this company i kid you not after listening to the pod and reading my book angel oh my god that warms my heart in fact their first angel investor wound up being a big hit what do they do with the money they made they use the returns from that investment to start a macadamia nuts business i am

SPEAKER_271: crazy happens to be my favorite nut i love it with dark chocolate and you can see this graphic on the screen not all nuts are created equal this is why you need to get it on macadamia nuts compared to peanuts almonds cashews and walnuts macadamia nuts are higher in omega-7s that's what's been linked to fat loss and natural collagen and they have more healthy fats they also have less carbs because you know listen i'm trying to lose a little weight here and the product is vegan keto and paleo take it for me i eat these macadamias all the time they're totally delicious and i love the bars they have spicy ones they've got dark chocolate covered ones here's what i want you to do here's your call to action get in on macadamias i'm all in on them house of macadamias.com twist right now for 20 off just

SPEAKER_28: for being a listener the nuts are delicious the bars are amazing and of course the dark chocolate dip packs are my favorite house of macadamias.com twist friday variety show goes on turning to the world of

SPEAKER_04: web 3 and the metaverse yeah just a quick little update on a drama throughout the last couple of days decentraland which is a blockchain what is decentraland oh it's virtual land a virtual land metaverse that i believe uh they spent like two billion dollars on disputed claims that it's billion dollar virtual land metaverse had only 38 active users in one day they said that's absolutely not true for example from october 6 through the 12th the platform averaged 7 000 unique visitors per day and put a dashboard out but i would say even though there's a large delta between 38 and 7 000 if you spend a billion dollars on a product and that's where you landed might be a slow grower there's

SPEAKER_12: a thing called uh dap radar this shows you like the sales and stuff like that it's worth pulling up the

SPEAKER_14: chart here and looking at it um if you put it at 30 days and you look at the transactions and historical activity my lord the volumes and transactions have just hit the floor on this thing um yeah and uh yeah it's it's just going to be rough on all of these things that don't actually provide value in the world

SPEAKER_111: now if it was a startup and the startup failed to get traction you'd be like okay no problem but if a startup has sold whatever amount i don't know what the actual amount of real estate

SPEAKER_00: that they grifted on to consumers uh is but people bought a lot of this stuff you know and just like people bought a lot of nfts and so that's really the challenge here is

SPEAKER_289: people bought so much into these systems you know millions hundreds of millions in some cases you know

SPEAKER_04: maybe even a billion i think what it really comes down to too is like if if at this point a founder came to us let's say somebody you know we've asked people to come and founder university and like bring an idea if your idea is i am going to build a virtual land company in the metaverse or i'm going to build anything for the metaverse at this point yeah we're going to tell you mom you see how this thing shakes out like it's a little too early for you as a founder probably to get the kind of

SPEAKER_00: attraction that you're going to want i mean people are looking at we didn't really this week get into

SPEAKER_58: the facebook uh oculus the new lens we were going to have alex on we just couldn't make it work we

SPEAKER_00: had such a busy week but you know i kind of feel like it's still doa i feel like people don't want these headsets i feel like there's no use case i think across the board they're increasing the fidelity they're making it faster but to what end if there's nothing for people to do and then there was some memo uh earlier in the week where facebook was like listen you guys got to use this product we're building it you know i need you to use it and that's like when you know google was like please use android phones people are showing up to work with iphones we need everybody here to use a chromebook we need you all to use android phones you know and i'd be at a party and i'd see you know

SPEAKER_14: google executives and like two out of three would have an android and one out of three would be like yeah i got an android in my backpack but i use my iphone when i'm at the off like literally somebody told me when i'm at the office i don't take out my iphone i take on my android when i'm at an industry event i take on my android but i'm using my iphone when i'm not you know and now global market

SPEAKER_04: share of android is much much much larger right than iphone like that it's so it's not to say that the metaverse won't ever get there but if i were gonna start a company now it would not be based in

SPEAKER_307: the metaverse the problem i have is the metaverse has been here for a long time and it's boring and

SPEAKER_00: there's no use case and people don't get any value from it i did watch uh boz the cto over facebook tweeted a couple of the videos and i watched one of the videos and it showed a woman at her desk with

SPEAKER_111: a keyboard and mouse wearing the headset and just like we have these multi-monitor setups that we love with rigs and floating monitors she had the three floating monitors and she was typing on a key a real

SPEAKER_34: keyboard i think or could have been a virtual one it was hard to tell but she did have like three

SPEAKER_111: screens up and i was thinking hey you know you're at your airbnb here what if you could bring your

SPEAKER_00: headset or you were on a flight and you had three giant screens and you were you know a day trader or you got your slack and your spotify and you're just rocking out without having to have a setup you know that's kind of dope you know if you were on the google if you're on the google bus or an airplane or i don't know you're you're sitting in like a park and you know you're on this you're on the ski lift going up for 10 minutes you're in a gondola you put this thing on and you can pop up your

SPEAKER_228: desktop i mean it's kind of trippy i don't know if i want to that i think i'd want to enjoy the view but

SPEAKER_04: as much as people you know it's funny because everybody jumps out like there was a big announcement with microsoft that like teams and all these the microsoft productivity suite is all gonna happen in the metaverse and you know satya's like i'm all in on this and it's funny because it's easy to dunk on it but the best use case for vr right now is work and that may be boring but it turns out it's made microsoft detroit a lot of money and so yeah i like fine right that's okay if it's kind of boring and it makes work way cooler and you can actually collaborate on stuff and you can do designs together in a space and like there's some awesome work possibilities that can be done it's just that

SPEAKER_18: you know when you get up and you have like this big event and you show it off and you got mark doing

SPEAKER_04: his god king dance and whatever it's like just make it for work like you don't have to sex it up it's how

SPEAKER_00: much of their how much of their lack of success is attributable to or i don't want to say the people making fun of it because that's obviously in large part due to zuckerberg's personality but somebody asked me this do you think the thing would be people be rooting for it a little more people would be more apt to try it if it wasn't zuckerberg and his bad reputation do you think it has any impact on

SPEAKER_04: the adoption of the product itself i do i 100 do he has fallen into the i mean it it is not the case that everything that is being built in the metaverse and for the oculus quest is actually just a universe where mark zuckerberg gets to be the god king but it's way too easy to come away with that impression because he has made himself i'm not even say there's no they here he has made himself the face of this thing he is sitting here saying i'm the steve jobs of this whole universe and presumably some version of him thinks that people like him enough to want to buy what he's selling the best

Jason Calacanis: thing like facebook has a narrative problem the best thing they could do is get him the hell away from this totally put somebody else trying to make him the steve jobs of it because he's not

SPEAKER_00: i mean they just never i don't think they understand the product market fit here what they should be doing is they should have somebody who's like a real expert at productivity you know and workforce stuff and then somebody who's a real expert at art and then somebody who's a real expert this is what i would do if i was suck i'd have somebody who's an artist and really good

SPEAKER_208: at art somebody who's really good at education somebody's really good at work and i'd say listen

SPEAKER_00: i uh you know as a technologist i'm obsessed with the screen and i'll tell you all about you know how we are investing in the hardware and the platform but let's be honest the apps are what are going to define this and i would like to introduce you to the greatest artist and she's going to show you the art she's using and by the way mit has some of these great courses and uh stanford as well they're going to be doing their biology courses and they're going to be doing their engineering courses now inside of this let's let the teachers speak for themselves and and the artists uh speak for themselves and in terms of productivity you know uh communications is everything you know here's zoom and they should bring zoom on and say here's you show it yeah

SPEAKER_328: here's satya yeah using yeah right he's got brand value like if he's up there i'm like oh okay i'm

SPEAKER_04: this is real and i'm into it but just don't have zuckerberg do any of it i know that sounds kind of harsh it's his baby or whatever but the more the further you get him away from this the better

Jason Calacanis: specifically even from a public shareholder perspective because if that's all you see is him just only caring about this instead of the money printing machine pretty soon you're like

SPEAKER_331: is that thing going to keep making money because this thing is going to fail so bad

SPEAKER_332: um because of his leadership i think i think his leadership is really bad and he doesn't have

SPEAKER_12: people around him to tell him like this isn't going to work dude education is the most impressive thing you'll ever see on this stuff and he keeps thinking that it's walking around talking to people and he thinks what happened on facebook is now going to happen here i don't buy that none of us buy that none of us want that there is not a facebook equivalency to the metaverse the metaverse is going to be i want to learn how to do open heart surgery i want to learn how to you know do mechanical engineering i just want to understand biology because i'm taking a biology course man when i'm in there i'm learning faster okay i want to travel uh i'm going to be traveling to

SPEAKER_00: this area of the world i aspire to go to paris and europe i'm going to do a highlights and then i'll plan my trip to europe based on the places i visited there that i actually want to see where i want to visit the louvre i'd love to walk around the louvre or pompeii you know there's places you're not allowed to go through anymore right you i don't think you're allowed to go on all the parts of the acropolis but you could make a digital acropolis where you could spend time there i

SPEAKER_259: actually saw a startup that was doing its own version of a digital acropolis you could actually

SPEAKER_111: really spend some time in the acropolis and then go back in time and hit a slider hey show me what happened in the acropolis a thousand years ago two thousand years ago this stuff gets really fracking interesting and he doesn't get that he doesn't understand what this is going to be used for his use case he's so blinded by the use case and he's going to sink this company they need to split it into two companies put 50 billion dollars in cash into oculus and spin it back out and let it sink and swim on its own and then bring cheryl sandberg back and let her do the collection of advertising based stuff and make her the ceo of the facebook corporation which runs instagram and whatsapp and split them split them they do they're not the same thing and you need to have an app developer community that trusts you and he burned that bridge so many times that no developers are going to build for him because they know what's going to happen if i built that acropolis app you know what's going to happen he's going to lord it over you he's going to cut your throat he's going to replicate it he's going to copy it and he's going to take 50 of your revenue at least with apple you know like yeah they'll copy some stuff every six seven years later they'll steal some whatsapp feature or snap feature to put an imessage but they kind of give you a seven year window to exploit stuff and

SPEAKER_40: they only add it to imessage when they have to because people are like why doesn't this thing have gift support you know yeah anyway end of rant yeah no 100 you got me on the vincento endorse

SPEAKER_04: last thing in the lightning round we have a follow-up from a thing that we've been watching for a long time breaking news today beep beep boop netflix announced pricing for its new ad supported

SPEAKER_18: tier called basic okay so let's call you basically literally called basic basic it's for basic i know is for basic bees i know you're dying to buy this already i'm not gonna say okay so if you know

SPEAKER_04: that netflix lowest tier currently costs 9.99 and it's like the resolution of a vcr it's like 480p or something 720 super embarrassing 9.99 i think yeah how much do you think netflix is charging for its ad supported tier called basic well because i think they're stupid about pricing and they don't

SPEAKER_23: get it they're gonna charge 7.95 i don't know but i'm guessing 7.95 6.99 you're close okay yeah 6.99 is

SPEAKER_354: pretty cheap i mean is it compared to 9.99 for no ads i mean granted what they should lean over

SPEAKER_40: the lens i have an idea for them okay make it 39 a year screw it yeah just let people buy by year if you want this you have to buy it for two years for 99 boom done pay in advance they get all that cash up front even basic is capped at 720p i don't mind it so much i don't i don't know if people can change the but you got to give people something for upgrading i guess so wait we're at you got basic

SPEAKER_89: you upgrade to get no ads right okay but if you're a basic b yeah you pay seven bucks you pay seven bucks

SPEAKER_30: a month if you're a mid what do you pay you pay 9.99 you pay 12 if you're mid you pay 9.99 assuming they're going to keep that tier got it i don't think they announced that they're going to change the right

SPEAKER_244: i'm dopey lux i'm luxury and i pay like 17 for i don't even use like 4k yeah same i'm an idiot i was

SPEAKER_04: no i was paying the 19.99 a month and then i realized that's ridiculous because there's like

SPEAKER_44: hardly anything even in 4k and it's not like i can see it i can't see it i'm almost 50 for god

SPEAKER_89: this is going to drop down to 15. i gotta tell you right now this is going to work big time i might

SPEAKER_117: need to j trade i'm going to j trade some netflix i can see so many people who currently are on netflix and they're going to be like oh six bucks a month you know they don't even put the 99 in there your mind just has six bucks that's like a latte and a croissant you know even if you're a dunkin

SPEAKER_118: donuts person you're like yeah it's two duncans i think if they're going to do this they should get

SPEAKER_04: rid of the 9.99 tier because the thing is if i'm thinking six dollars or nine dollars and the difference in resolution is exactly the same but one has ads and one doesn't like it almost feels like a trick to just get me to pay the 10. you know you know i think this is the dunkin donuts

SPEAKER_14: i see we have to use the proper coffee here this is the dunking crowd i love a good dunkin donuts

SPEAKER_323: donkeys donkeys this is like for a dunking crowd it's like the boston guys and you do you like all the

SPEAKER_372: sugar you want all the sweet you get two donuts and a nice coffee for like you're in and out for six

SPEAKER_69: bucks five bucks you know and you go to starbucks you get a school you get a scone right you go to starbucks you get like a four or five dollar coffee and a three or four dollar scone because i get the sous vide egg bites it's a little fancy you know like boston guys don't want sous vide nothing and they

SPEAKER_146: don't certainly want a scone because they're not british they're getting like a scone in a flat white

SPEAKER_69: that's not happening yeah no that's like nine dollars you know if you go to dunkin you're in and out for five six this is for the dunking crowd that's i'm convinced it's great pricing i think

SPEAKER_04: it could be six if it's going to be 720p and it's going to be ad supported you do 5.99 because then aren't you in the isn't disney plus still in something insane no they're going up they were

David Friedberg: seven they were i think when they started they were saying launched at like six or seven yeah yeah but

SPEAKER_128: that's going to be their ad tier now so that'll be their ad tier and uh yeah the pricing is now so if

Chamath Palihapitiya: it's right in line standard premium yeah basic with ads basic standard improve i mean can somebody

SPEAKER_111: just give us two let me tell you something anything that's more than two choices is two choices too

SPEAKER_140: many is one or two choices too many yes they got to simplify this just make it premium make it ad and

SPEAKER_74: premium oh it was apple tv that i was thinking okay so apple tv plus is still 4.99 well that's because they

SPEAKER_146: do two shows a month that's insane they're dabbling discovery plus is 4.99 i mean they are right in

SPEAKER_04: line disney plus without ads is 7.99 but then netflix is saying pay me a buck less for ads i just think it could have been a little cheaper or they get rid of the 9.99 tier whatever but you know what i'm just i'm nitpicking at this point if the good news is they launched it now we see if they write the ship on it yeah all right there it is yeah there you go that's our lightning round now we got uh what

SPEAKER_151: do we got we got okay boomer right oh yes okay boomer rachel what do you got this week i got to

SPEAKER_393: speak with cliff learner um so if you guys don't know it is new york tech week and during miami hack

SPEAKER_394: week i spoke to the creators of dive chat which is the chatting app that we used there now there's a new chatting app it's called saturdays and i like this one a lot because it has a map feature in it so any group chat you're in you can see where people are on a map which is really really convenient during weeks like this i turned my mouth off i'm in ghost mode for everything including snapchat and we discussed the safety features and everything like that in the episode but cliff has experience um building social apps in the past and i'm really excited to see other community managers kind of jump on this app because i i think this has been my favorite one that i've used for an event so far

SPEAKER_04: i cannot wait to see this and i'm so excited to see this idea come back around because jacal i'm certain that you remember the south by southwest yeah there was like one infamous year of south by southwest where was it foursquare there was some app that was doing foursquare broke out there there

David Friedberg: was another one called submarine or something uh but there was a bunch of different ones location and everybody was like oh it was foursquare people were ding then it was twitter and then there was like a

SPEAKER_00: periscope one or something not periscope the video but there was another one and it's basically all the same concept you you have your location you chat you see it on a map and uh you know you can then triangulate and find people and it's kind of fun like um and i think people should uh bring these back there was one called twist actually twist.com uh that my friend billy had backed that was really cool if the three of us were going to go to a music festival we would all load twist and or if we were all going to a destination so you know how ways you can send somebody or a thing yeah imagine if

SPEAKER_92: ways allowed you on a group trip to just say hey leave this on for the next 48 hours 72 hours and

SPEAKER_128: this has been built into imessage now i think you can share your location to the end of the day and

SPEAKER_397: that's what this is right saturday same thing it shares i believe for the duration that you're in the group chat and you're allowed to turn on and off your location yeah so i live in new york

SPEAKER_394: city so i don't really want people knowing you know what i'm up to and where i'm staying and where i'm living and i'm not going to too much stuff for tech week but it's really cool i kind of want to use it for like a pickup soccer league is like what i want to try to do because we've seen these apps just die out time and time again with the pickup sports because they're really really difficult

SPEAKER_408: to scale so i'm like you know what a group chat like this might be a little bit of a better use

SPEAKER_04: case in the city um it's a good idea and people could post where they're having a pickup soccer game exactly and then you could just navigate right to it you know this would be great

SPEAKER_00: yeah it'd be good for a pro it's good for a bar crawl you know like if you're going out with

SPEAKER_393: your friends you got a bar crawl you trust all 10 people it was used for the lower east side bar crawl that i missed out on i was gone the weekend but they it's exactly one of the use cases that

SPEAKER_394: actually a different okay boomer guest andrew young used the app for so it's already started in the

SPEAKER_14: league yeah we're gonna go out we're gonna get some nachos whatever right everybody enjoy this

SPEAKER_394: awesome thanks guys okay boomer i understood the assignment thank you so much cliff learner for joining today on okay boomer if you guys don't know and aren't in new york city right now the app saturdays is totally popping off for tech week and cliff is one of the co-founders awesome thanks i'm super

SPEAKER_423: excited to be here and share the story we've been up to lately yeah so you're a little bit different

SPEAKER_394: than people i normally have on this segment is called okay boomer so i normally have people around my age that just graduated college or are even younger still in college um that are founders or vcs you have a really awesome history in the social space and a ton of people my age are hopping on the bandwagon of using saturday so i was like okay i i still really really have to have you on because you've absolutely just like i said taken over um new york's really big event circuit in tech this year

SPEAKER_428: thank you are you saying the gray in my beard is showing my age i i sometimes like to fancy that

SPEAKER_394: i'm still in college not not at all i uh i i think it's really really cool how you obviously have had a pretty long history with creating different platforms that people are using and i think you need to explain your background i'm just very very impressed you are not a one-hit wonder um you've created like several different platforms that have really taken off and this one is in my opinion going to stick around for a while and i'm excited to see where it's going to go but for the audience

SPEAKER_398: why don't you give everybody just who are you and what was your background i guess before coming and

SPEAKER_432: creating saturdays uh thank you you're too kind with those words and you know you're not wrong i'm not gen z which has kind of made this really interesting to build a lot of pros and cons but my

SPEAKER_437: background is after college i worked on wall street realized i did not um do well taking instruction from other people needed to do my own thing and i thought life's short let's have fun let's build a product that i would use all my friends were using in a space i thought would grow really quickly so i started a dating app many years ago and it was doing okay and i read this article about facebook launching a platform facebook wasn't facebook yet they were launching their apis no one knew what this was and you could tap into what is now known as a social graph in the real world people met through their friends on in dating online back then if your friends knew you were using a dating site you were an outcast no one would talk to you and i like weird ideas and my product view is as an entrepreneur look for something people are doing the real world and see if you can use technology to make it faster better and cheaper so i thought this is interesting let's build an app on facebook a dating app where basically you can go through your friends find out who likes you this was so taboo and we put it out there and at first it didn't work uh and we quickly iterate i'm very data driven and i looked back in history what product really would make the experience super fun super easy super quick and what you now see today as what's known as tinder and bumble used to actually be hot or not that was actually really the first true viral product and we introduced the hot or not experience browsing one photo at a time and we introduced what's called the double blind match and it would be hey rachel some of your friends like you but you have to invite friends to figure out who and we woke up with a hundred thousand users the next day a million by the end of the week 10 million by the month long story short that grew to 100 million users we were actually the first one to do swiping tinder and bubble get the credit today and ran that for many years and during covid really started to get the itch again to build social you know everyone was kind of bored not much to do during early covid and i started to notice a lot of the social dynamics breaking down and how people were connecting and i always had this itch on location nobody had cracked the location problem in social and i called up my brother who was my co-founder on the first company uh daryl learner and he agreed we're both getting older and connecting with our friends and lose connections just becomes harder so we kind of had a shared vision and said you know what let's do this and we started building two years ago it's all kind of uh come to a head in the last few weeks around

SPEAKER_441: new york tech week and taking a life of its own wow so this has been in the works for a while yeah

SPEAKER_437: it's a problem i've been thinking about for a long time i like to sit on a problem for a long time and think and analyze and i literally studied every social product every location-based product in the last 20 years you know the most famous some people might remember and you know my age uh it will come out here's four square go walla bright kite looped was uh sam altman and there have been a ton of course since um and they all fell out for various reasons and i studied them all asked a lot of questions from users who use those products and it became pretty clear to me where the pitfalls were where the problems with the products were and they weren't solving the right problems so we kind of went with a blank slate and and so let's give this a shot that's super interesting and i've

SPEAKER_394: noticed like the maps um sector has gotten pretty big not over the past two years i guess i'm not that tuned in but over the past probably year especially since the pandemic has hit and a lot of my friends work from home sharing your location with somebody especially on maybe find my friends uh almost feels like a form of social currency and obviously snapchat has the snap map and things like that but find your friends is something that is super duper accurate whereas the snapchat map wasn't crazy accurate i think it only refreshed like when you opened the app and with saturdays it gives you an extremely extremely specific location and how the app works like when you

SPEAKER_398: open it is basically that location is shared with other people in the group chat correct we've changed

SPEAKER_437: things very rapidly i actually from building many social products uh i've probably built four or five social apps over the years mostly dating that grew to millions of users and wanted to build a social product and one thing i've learned is the female experience is everything guys don't need specific features and nuances around uh safety and privacy as much as women do so my advice anyone building anything in consumer and social make sure especially if you're a guy you're focusing on that female experience it's very different you got to get it right so we actually interviewed over 100 females wow asking them yep yep focus sessions mostly in college what do you like not like about whether it was nearby friends on facebook snap maps life 360 you name it the responses we got were fascinating something we never would have imagined and it really started to paint the picture why none of them have solved the problem and and let me just take a step back to me the problem is the day you leave college you need to recreate your social circle and we frame the problem as who do i know that's around and who should i know we want to engineer serendipity all the time you're saying i want to grab a beer go to an event find people i know and this is similar to you look on instagram when you travel you share a post what you're really saying is i'm in london i kind of want to brag about it but i also want to see who i know is here but i don't want to feel obligated to hang out with you right that's what people are saying it's the post i'm traveling to san francisco who's around who should i meet i'm moving to new york city who should i know all of these we kind of think about as who do i know that's around and who should i know and what we discovered actually is we built at first our product like you described like all these other location products around this concept of precise location and we spoke to actually probably 200 females and 90 percent of them were in what's called ghost mode on snapchat and what's fascinating is we kept asking why i'm a big believe in the five why's because you really have to keep asking why to truly understand what their pain point is and the there were two things that came out women go into ghost mode one because if they're not in ghost mode it would be interpreted as kind of a beacon you can message me and they would get all these text messages and it would be overwhelming it's just creepy for people to know where you're sleeping at night it's just creepy and there's no need to know most of the time which starbucks you're at and what we did is we said that's really interesting every single location-based product has put you on a map exactly where you are and a lot of them have actually forced you to tell us where you are all the time and i'm a big believer in building consumer social products you really have to focus on the user experience at all costs and i can get into this you have a lot of entrepreneurs now from the younger generation who are obsessed with growth hacks and there's no product in history that started with a growth hack all of the products that you read about that had these quote unquote growth hacks first had an absolutely incredible user experience that was supported by data that people loved and then the quote-unquote growth hack presented itself so we really focused on what is the great experience and for us to engineer serendipity and us meaning me and you rachel right it would be weird we met a month ago through uh you know the amazing andrew young which we'll talk about and it would be weird if i texted you what's the context is he trying to deem me this is too formal i don't know him that well but if we both happen to be in the same area clearly active on a product then it wouldn't be weird say oh what are you doing in the neighborhood so the long story short is i think a lot of these products have just gone it wrong people don't want to share the precise location a lot of the time so we really actually changed the experience which made the app take off about two months ago where we put you in a neighborhood it's not creepy for me to know you're in the west village or andrew is in williamsburg at all and people want to share that now we can engineer some serendipity and magic so that was one of the kind of killer learning experiences over the last two years it took us two years to get

SPEAKER_397: there but it's been a game changer for us yeah i am definitely one of those people that's in ghost

SPEAKER_394: mode and that was one of my issues when i first actually used the app be real was i don't mind um having my i think my location on twitter says manhattan right um so if i tweet i don't i don't mind people knowing that i love living in new york city i think it's pretty evident i talk about living in new york city i talk about living in manhattan in particular quite often so i don't mind that and then over on twitter but would be real whenever i posted um even though it's only to a handful of people granted you were able to get that really specific location and i'm somebody who lives around a bunch of bars and restaurants right so you could see the locations of any of those bars and

SPEAKER_397: restaurants that they would think like that i was at and i was like you know what that's just way too

SPEAKER_394: particular so i like the idea of having like a vague idea or maybe say like uh somebody like lives in i don't know like soho or in grammar c park like i think that would be really really helpful just the same way like when you're in college and at penn state where i went we have like east halls is where all the freshmen live south halls are where all the sorority floors were so you kind of knew where people live like in that way and like that almost like your little community and i think this app in particular is amazing for cities like new york where everything is fairly accessible but things are really spread out so you can get anywhere but it would be really convenient if you could see who's in the area because i definitely have had issues even like very recent where there's this girl and i met her when we were um out at a party and we had a lot of things in common she's like i just moved like i'm having a really hard time meeting other girl friends it's really easy to meet guys because dating apps but girls are hard um and we found out she lives an hour away really deep into brooklyn and she's like i really wish i could meet more people in my area of brooklyn because they come into manhattan we're all um like the area that we were out in she's like i see all these young people and i know there must be people like in my area of brooklyn but because it's more suburban um and there aren't as many places to go out she's just like not meeting them is there like a certain demographic of people that like saturday is is specifically targeting right and it's it's

SPEAKER_437: interesting you describe that and wouldn't it be a magical experience if an app just sent you a push notification or you opened it and it said look that person you met a few weeks ago is actually in the same neighborhood and you know one of our big learnings we actually tested on colleges and that's where we learned a lot and it didn't work well at first you think about social apps you think you need to target your best friends and we started to try to get all your besties on here and it took us a year to learn this people have perfect information about their best friends they know where they are they know what they're doing the app wasn't working and what we realized is there was a core set of users who were hooked on the app and they didn't have many friends and i started calling them up gotta really always ask your your users why why why and they said i don't know this person too well i haven't spoken to them in six months but i feel connected knowing what city they're in and what we realized is especially during covid you know normal social constructs brought broke down during covid and just by knowing the location of these loose connections kept you connected so we shifted the product to focus on these groups we realized the magic in your life happens and what's what's i'll call friends 10 through a thousand these are the loose connections and there's no good way to contact them you meet them you add them on linkedin you add them on snapchat you end them on twitter you get their phone number none of them are right the only way to actually connect with them in real life is through location information and that's where we completely shifted our mindset and said okay if we can get most users willing to share us share with us their passive location general neighborhood vicinity we can create magic all the time and if you think right now let's say you want to grab lunch right there's probably 50 or more people you've met over the last few years whether it's from penn state or just uh through podcasts that are within a mile that would grab lunch with you but how do you reach out to them there's no good way and that's what i think we're trying to solve and you know it came together new york tech week uh andrew young who i think is the most influential gen z community builder actually a fun little story i i went to an event at the williamsburg hotel and the energy was just incredible everyone was so nice genuine and i said this was a couple months ago i need to meet the person who put on this event so i've been to a lot of events it was different and andrew is sort of like um kaiser sosa nobody knows who he is but everyone talks about him and i couldn't find him at the event and i kept cold emailing him and then finally one day he gets back and said cliff i checked out saturday this is the app i've been waiting for i moved here a couple years ago couldn't meet people let's partner and we've partnered for new york tech week there's seven eight hundred people in the chat room now and it's the feedback has been incredible and what i'm most excited about when new york tech week is over and everyone starts spreading out going back to their cities they're going to open the app and instantly be able to have what i hope will be a magical aha experience say oh there's actually 15 people from new york tech week that are within a few miles from me i know have a way to stay connected to them and anytime you go to an event and even when you graduate college you're always asking how do i stay in touch with the people i've met over the years and as time goes by people move away and how do i know when they're nearby and that's really what we've been trying to solve um and it's uh it's been pretty cool the last month through new york tech week and working with andrew things have taken a life of its own the feedback has been incredible

SPEAKER_397: um and we'll see where it goes from here andrew was able to join us on the podcast previously on

SPEAKER_394: episode uh 1551 for a segment of ok boomer which was awesome and i think this ties really well with andrew because as somebody that works completely remote and for the company that i work for um it's me nick we have two editors and uh our host jason and molly and there's the launch team but basically those are the people that i'm interacting with um on a day-to-day basis online and only nick is based remotely close to me and he's not that close he lives kind of you know lives he doesn't live in manhattan um so i don't really have co-workers that i'm meeting in person so when i moved to new york meeting people and going to events like ones that andrew put on were awesome because it really like especially in the age of uh remote work going to events like that and putting yourself out there even if you're not the most social person that's just how you're going to meet people in the city like we're not going into an office anymore and unless you're somebody that's really good about walking up to people on like a we work or or somebody that you know it's going to a bar a lot i'm able to keep up making those relationships at bars and texting people like you said that follow up i think events really are the main way i've been able to meet like a new group of people um but you're totally right i default the most awkward thing too is going to an event especially the ones that andrew puts on where it's a wide variety of people which is lovely but you go to one group and they're like oh add me on instagram you go to another group and they're like

SPEAKER_397: oh uh let's connect on twitter you go to another group and they're like what the heck like why aren't we just like texting like that's really weird you know another group and it's like oh like that this is a professional setting like i'll give you my email so saturdays i found is not only nice

SPEAKER_394: because of the map location but it kind of gives like every person no matter their background at his events like a singular place to go we need that like that that is definitely something that i think andrew he's been trying really hard to use um his presence on twitter and on instagram and through his newsletter but having saturdays keeping everybody in one place that is definitely something that i hope

SPEAKER_451: more community managers get on the bandwagon of right and going to event is still very intimidating

SPEAKER_437: for a lot of people there's five to ten percent of people have no problem walking up to a stranger but if you don't know people going and i'm actually an introvert you don't love going to events because you've got to talk to strangers and everyone's trying to size everyone up when we launched this on colleges as i mentioned i did 200 interviews college students kept saying it would be amazing if i knew where the freshmen were where the seniors were if you're a senior which bar was hopping where people were watching the game which library the engineers were studying at and we actually built those features similar to a dating site where you can add tags so for you it would be maybe we put startups and we would let people filter the map and it was a massive fail right imagine there was the map right now and you filtered it for startups and you saw me what do we actually have in common what we realized is what people truly want to connect around is trusted connections so we recreated a product around groups and introduced friends of friends so imagine the next time you're thinking about doing something whether you're bored whether you're going to events and you can in the room instantly see oh there's 14 people who are connected to rachel let me now message them or at least i have a reason to talk to them that's not weird and creepy and and there's a trusted connection so one of our big game changers about a month ago is we launched friends of friends on the map and this specifically goes to our vision of answering the questions who do i know that's around who should i know who's in san francisco people don't want to meet strangers are not good at that they want to meet through trusted connections you know similar a lot of clues from the dating uh days hinged back in the day really now did with friends of friends so you know that's been very powerful and everyone who's connected to someone like you someone like an andrew you know it's a trusted connection they're

SPEAKER_479: going to be genuine they're going to be kind you want to meet them and the relationship just builds

SPEAKER_481: very quickly the right way yeah well i'm super excited to see um where saturdays goes especially

SPEAKER_394: after new york tech week i like i said if anybody is a community manager or is hosting an event or honestly just as a friend group that is new it's not that close i recommend i think this would also be cool throwing this out there i recommend saturdays but i i also think it would be cool if maybe somebody wanted to start like a pickup like soccer league or basketball league i see a lot of apps that fail with this because they can't tell like who lives in the area i think it would be nice if a uh of the pickup sports league i don't know maybe maybe joined this because this might be kind of cool

SPEAKER_423: um and a few of us met including people

SPEAKER_482: we met on saturday and we played pickup basketball that's funny dang it i thought i was coming up with

SPEAKER_477: something new well thank you so much for joining us on this segment of okay boomer where can people

SPEAKER_394: find you and where can people find saturdays awesome yeah you can find in the app store on

SPEAKER_437: just saturday but it's really much better when you onboard through a group so i'd say follow me on twitter cliff learner c-l-i-f-f-l-e-r-n-e-r and uh give me a dm and we're kind of testing a bunch of groups sort of under the radar to avoid the stranger danger and i'll invite you to some groups and you know instantly you'll have a few hundred uh new best friends awesome thank you so much

SPEAKER_85: thanks all right everybody uh that is it for variety show happy hour friday we're just putting

SPEAKER_04: the drinks down and going to bed but we have an awesome show coming up on sunday we're not done

SPEAKER_74: this week is not done mayday mayday sorry he's just topping up he's just topping up keep talking

SPEAKER_04: molly i'm um yeah i got you i got you i got you boo we have bc sunday school coming up on sunday like always and we're using we're doing our new thing where we use a thing in the news

SPEAKER_74: news to kick off a conversation yeah exactly the kids call about a news peg in the industry we talk

SPEAKER_04: about the wing which announced that it was shutting down for good in august and have a conversation about when you might want to intervene as a bc if you see a founder going off the rails when a project is about a founder more than it's about a business um and what are what are some of the moments that we can step in to keep you from driving your convertible off the pch i mean just guidance

SPEAKER_00: you know during times of trouble is a great role for a board of directors in fact it's why they're there and you have to wonder with the wing yeah what went wrong here because this was such an amazing um

SPEAKER_14: product i think and i don't know if you saw molly there was a little breaking news uh which came out after we taped the segment we taped the sunday school we don't actually get up on sunday's dude

SPEAKER_496: the founder being sued for like a million aid or something for background she signed a personal

SPEAKER_12: guarantee when you sign leases i mean another piece of advice you could never let the founder sign a personal guarantee because in the case this happens this founder is going to go bankrupt personally

SPEAKER_04: you're going to lose everything this is a hundred percent a thing that we would have intervened on

SPEAKER_34: 100 as board members yeah and then who do you have for your um who do you have for the founder ceo

SPEAKER_04: uh discussion on sunday yeah for this week in climate startups i talked to alan chang the founder and ceo of a company called tesseract energy this is super interesting the goal is to generate affordable renewable power and solve climate change no big deal by financing and building the creation of tons and tons and tons of renewable energy via token sales okay interestingly enough this is like my second token conversation that i didn't hate but also they're selling where in markets where they're allowed they're selling energy direct to consumer at a huge huge discount which you can imagine in the european market where they operate kind of a big deal right now all right it's going to be a

SPEAKER_16: great show so we'll see you on sunday have a restful saturday everybody bye bye bye