SPEAKER_00: okay we have an awesome show for you today i have the acquired boys joining me again ben and david are with us we're going to talk about ruloff taking the reins at sequoia from doug leone and we'll talk about the fast.co implosion who's responsible who's most responsible for that train route and my pal lon harris is with me again this week no solo dolu today i brought in reinforcements since molly's still on vacation now she'll be back on monday brought in lon harris to do the final episode episode eight of the dropout and what this means will there be a second season and who deserves more jail time balwani or elizabeth holmes we're

SPEAKER_01: going to answer all those today on this week in startups stick with us it's going to be a great

SPEAKER_02: show this week in startups is brought to you by fiverr get access to millions of freelancers

SPEAKER_03: around the globe to help turn nothing into something today go to fiverr.com and use code jason for 10 off that's fiverr.com and use code jason our crowd our crowd helps you invest early in pre-ipo companies alongside professional vcs if you're interested in investing you can join our crowd for free at o u r c r o w d dot com slash twist and notion notion is one place for notes docs projects and everyday work that goes way beyond a wiki go to notion.so and use promo code twist to get 250 off an annual team plan for those of you don't know ben gilbert is gilbert on the twitter yes

SPEAKER_06: he's been around for a while he's got a solo name uh there and he is the managing director at psl pioneer square labs now there's another pioneer labs that popped up subsequent to yours right yes daniel grosses is it daniel grosses his name yep yeah now wait wait how many years after you did pioneer square labs did he do pioneer labs i don't actually know i think pioneer app pioneer i think

SPEAKER_11: his might just be pioneer i actually don't know a ton about it we started pioneer and the website is pioneer.app got it yeah we started what september 2015 so he may have been around then too

SPEAKER_17: interesting you know i have this problem with launch everybody's like oh launch fund and i'm like

SPEAKER_19: no that's me they're like launch festival launch conference i'm like also me like got those

SPEAKER_20: trademarked could you pick something just a little launchpad conference i'm like too close

SPEAKER_21: and wasn't there like a launch there was something oh there was launch.com which my friend

SPEAKER_23: dave goldberg rest in peace did which was a music it was the original like spotify and uh that is now owned by yahoo but uh yahoo had bought it so they actually own the domain name launch.com and so i've been talking to them about the domain for the better part of 10 years for no other reason than it's kind of like a moby dick kind of situation for me like you know like inside.com was a moby dick for me i was like i really want that domain name in the 90s

SPEAKER_26: i was like i got a really good idea it could be like about.com but you go inside so it's like deeper

SPEAKER_27: and there's there's something in your soul that feels good when you get the the short domain it may not be worth like our friends at tiny just got tiny.com and that has to feel real good

SPEAKER_28: absolutely when you have a dictionary name or an at handle like jason you have this wonderful

SPEAKER_23: moment in time where everybody covets your home it's like having the best home in the neighborhood and everybody's like if you ever sell it you're like never selling it they're like but if you do sell it you're like never selling it my daughters my grandkids are going to live in it they're like but if you did i'm like never selling it so literally like very famous jasons have come to me hey uh big fan i'm like not selling the name

SPEAKER_34: it's like wow you know you ever want to beat an action film i'm like oh wow the stakes

SPEAKER_23: are getting high here can i i will give you the name if i can defeat you as the super villain in the film where like literally i beat the out of you and you basically bend the knee and

SPEAKER_39: say you know i give up you were the new action hero no that's not gonna happen david sacks

SPEAKER_30: here but like there would be a lot of computer generated like a lot of you know if you were

SPEAKER_44: going to be the big muscular yeah getting there getting there all right and david rosenthal is here with us as well he's d wait wait are you dj rosenthal dj rosenthal this was my uh my college uh email address were you literally a dj in college or did you just use it the randomly

SPEAKER_47: assigned like you know string of eight characters that princeton gave me is your middle name with

SPEAKER_29: a j j james yeah so you literally are both of our middle name is james yeah is it really

SPEAKER_26: yeah look at you guys uh so you are dj you're literally a dj rosen i am a co-founder of

SPEAKER_20: kindergarten ventures which i am proud to say i got my beak wet i put a little i think we

SPEAKER_57: can say that i'm a minor i'm a little lp i'm i'm very very happy for you to say i'm thrilled

SPEAKER_23: oh yeah i just you know i like david i decided like i'm saying no to every venture firm but then like friends of the show or maybe like somebody i've known for over a decade like

SPEAKER_26: me and put a little taste in i mean listen i got the cheddar laying around but now i'm

SPEAKER_59: like 22 our profile just went like you know 100 listen i get invited to almost i wouldn't

SPEAKER_26: say all funds but i get invited to a lot of funds because people want to build that fabric or whatever and it just it's just too many i mean i'm over so over indexed in venture i mean you're you guys have probably experienced this and i'll let you sort of chime in on that but

SPEAKER_23: you need to have a strategy when you're a venture capitalist where you're 80 90 venture

SPEAKER_61: 10 20 other as opposed to like if you were a perfect uh portfolio manager you would say

SPEAKER_64: 10 venture if you're aggressive for you and us and uh you know not only is it our investments

SPEAKER_47: our portfolio is all in venture but like our operating business is highly indexed to startups and venture capital as well and with in terms of pods yeah yeah the pods well you know there

SPEAKER_23: is something about being all in so how do you both think about as you throw off capital and you're over indexed in venture are you comfortable being over indexed in venture because let's face it it's like uh you know it's the area of your excellence it's the most domain expertise you have so you can be more comfortable operating where else would you want to be right well you know that's that is the question do you ever get nervous you're over indexed especially in a time like we've seen from q4 into q1 and now going into the next year when everybody's predicting a recession this maybe isn't the best place to have been but it could be the best place to start so let's just start maybe ben give me your thoughts on your personal psychology right now because managing personal psychology in a downturn with a predicted recession is important yeah uh well so you're

SPEAKER_30: asking if i'm okay being in just very boring regular venture really heavy and not just everything in

SPEAKER_16: crypto that's that's the question are you thinking about going even more you know i'm going to take

SPEAKER_19: this tesla jacket off because i'm so hot but for people watching this it's a good looking jacket this is one of the original hundred roadster owners i'm going to go to austin right after this for the tesla rodeo um so i'll see everybody there tonight but this is the original tesla logo for people who don't know that's what the key of the roadster looks like it's that little

SPEAKER_83: i don't know that it's like a triangle um with the team they dropped the shield right so now it's just the yeah it's just the real state it's not the shield but it was like you still have it right

SPEAKER_19: i have it right here yeah it's actually somebody just the rally road team wanted me to put it on i don't know if you know rally road which does fractional ownership of assets sorry about the

SPEAKER_89: noise uh you're gonna hear my jacket coming off um yeah i think we were talking about putting it on

SPEAKER_23: for 250k it turns out those roadsters were worth 10 years ago people were selling them just to get them out of their garages the original uh roadsters which they were going for maybe 40 50 grand they

SPEAKER_61: originally cost 150 they had dropped down my goodness what an investment now 10 years later they hit classic they're starting to get towards classic car style you know uh age and obviously tesla's doing

SPEAKER_23: well and there's a small number of them on the road and when they get in accidents they get totaled because they're tiny little cars so there's a guy who buys all the used ones if a car gets totaled he buys them for 30 40k now you could buy a pristine one with under 50 000 miles for 30 40k

SPEAKER_26: 10 years ago you know or so because everybody when the model s came out now it's 250 um and then maybe for one that has some uniqueness to it like the first hundred it could be a little bit more so and then i have model s number one which i think is worth a million maybe um so those

SPEAKER_61: two cars kind of yeah uh but anyway then let's talk about so those are my personal my non-tech assets

SPEAKER_103: i guess that are you know one more real quick little sidebar i finally got a model 3 it is unbelievable

SPEAKER_61: model 3 is the greatest car ever made i think is even better but um the model 3 innards are now i

SPEAKER_26: think matching the model wise but what is your favorite part about the car may i ask

SPEAKER_64: ooh my favorite part about the car i didn't i was not into driving before i got i still wouldn't consider myself like i care about performance or anything but just like it's just the windshield

SPEAKER_47: and you are so there like the screen is kind of out of your field of vision so it's just i thought i would miss the instrument cluster i never want an instrument cluster again like you just see yeah out and it's amazing and it's so responsive it's instantaneous it's it's like i'm like like

SPEAKER_64: my body is like going down the road it's amazing it is david says he doesn't care about performance

SPEAKER_27: but we drove from san francisco a few weeks ago down to sand hill road and of course he's he's on the he's on the entrance ramps and he's like you want to see what this thing can do oh yeah i had a friend

SPEAKER_23: who liked to like he would this a friend of who's not me he would double the speed when he get off turns then he would go like two and a half the exit ramp three the exit ramp it's like dude it's a 50 mile per hour exit ramp you're taking a 45 the tires are starting to grip and squeal

SPEAKER_06: in your whatever car you're driving on let's hypothetically say a corvette or something uh but it is a pretty amazing car but you previously you drove like a honda you're like a honda

SPEAKER_120: accord kind of guy i take it i had a acura station wagon still have it's oh okay yeah they're a

SPEAKER_06: bunch totally totally on brand like a totally pragmatic this is a good car to have for 10 years ben you're a bmw guy obviously i am a 2008 honda crv guy oh that is that's a little bit of a sporty

SPEAKER_29: car the crv right uh maybe now it's not from 08 oh the crv is the suv i'm thinking of the other one

SPEAKER_27: there's another one with a three-letter name there's an hrv that's a tiny version there's a toyota like oh you know what i'm thinking of crx which is a no no i'm thinking of yes there is

SPEAKER_126: oh look at that whoa yeah oh you are a huge nerd bought it fully depreciated like this thing is

SPEAKER_125: this is like fully optimized you know what i thought you said nissan and i was just thinking you had a nissan gtr which are they nicknamed godzilla so this is what all the fast and furious kids drive like when you see people doing donuts in those showcases in san francisco whatever they call them where they go on the street and then make donuts and everybody goes around them and cheers and then somebody gets hit by the car and everybody cheers more those what do they call those there's a name for them here uh rally showcase rally show something anyway they do these things incredibly

SPEAKER_61: dangerous um and then the cops come and they're just like yeah whatever and it turns out they steal the cars or and do this or they steal the tires of your car put them on their car melt the tires

SPEAKER_64: then swap the tires back so just so dude did you know that jensen huang the uh incredible nvidia ceo one of the greatest greatest of all time uh what he's he's got a is it konigsberg i think the uh that crazy um oh yeah supercar thing but he used to have like literally a fast and the furious

SPEAKER_47: toyota supra and uh and used to like race that thing and yeah almost died crazy uh sam altman's into

SPEAKER_109: racing cars there's a bunch of people in the tech scene who are into like racing cars i'm into living

SPEAKER_125: a long productive life uh dhh likes that i'm into like surviving for a long time and enjoying the last

SPEAKER_61: 20 30 years of my life we all know how hard it is to build something out of nothing that's what the startup game is all about and it's easy to quit according to a study conducted by fiverr 25 percent of people surveyed revealed they had a business idea in the past 18 months but almost 60 percent of them never pursued it and the majority said it was due to a lack of resources so here is how fiverr can help you fiverr's talent marketplace has millions of freelancers across the globe and they're accessible in just a few clicks they have experts in design data marketing website building music video animation and so much more just search for the service you need and set a timeline and price then fiverr will provide a list of freelancers who meet your criteria you can browse their portfolio read the reviews and you know exactly what you're paying for before you pay we love fiverr we've used it for many research projects design projects they do a great job they uh can get somebody up and running almost immediately so here's your call to action every successful something was once nothing so head to fiverr.com and turn nothing into something today you're going to receive 10 off your first order by using my code jason what a great code at f-i-v-e-r-r.com that's fiverr.com and use the code jason two r's in fiber ben uh in all honestness let's talk about portfolio

SPEAKER_26: construction here as capital allocators obviously joe because yeah go deeper into crypto we get we can dunk on that in a minute but how do you think about it you are you just comfortable i'm assuming

SPEAKER_27: you're well over 50 of your net worth is tied to tech yes um i've thought a lot about this as you can

SPEAKER_30: imagine uh and personally i kind of look at it like i'm extremely comfortable with that and not just tech mostly early stage tech given the fact that i'm 32 like i i hope to spend money later i don't really have a lot of need to spend money right now and so i i'm comfortable with a large percentage of it being super high risk the other thing about being in venture is it's not like being a startup founder you are reasonably diversified like there's almost zero chance you're going to have a 20x fund if your fund is large enough but like you should feel pretty good about generating a return and hopefully generating a 3 4 5x return from your fund so i've sort of looked at it like i am way over indexed

SPEAKER_27: you know uh compared to what any financial advisor would tell you in what they used to call alternative assets uh or you know early stage tech venture um but i i don't know like that's where my passion is

SPEAKER_11: that's where my unique advantage is that's the stuff i understand i feel it's like if you were a great

SPEAKER_34: poker player you would not be playing gin or rummy or backgammon you would play more poker so i think

SPEAKER_06: that's a really great insight david what's your take on this or you had a question for that maybe

SPEAKER_64: well i got a question for both of you but more you jason like okay so i've been working in venture for one way or another for 12 13 years now i don't know that i've ever seen an individual fund to lose money uh like i think it's very hard for a venture fund even the worst venture funds to be negative in the long run have you i mean i'm sure it exists but like what's your experience you don't hear about

David Friedberg: it and i think those funds go away so if you let's say you put up numbers two funds and i think you

SPEAKER_23: probably get away with it for two funds and if you really sucked then maybe you don't get the third

SPEAKER_159: because you're raising the second you know in the j curve of the first so yes yes yes all all of that

SPEAKER_160: and like i don't mean bad also by the way relative performance you said you've been doing it for

David Friedberg: you've been doing it for 10 years too we've all been doing it since like for just over 10 years right

SPEAKER_47: yeah i think i'm probably i just mean like like like truly bad funds bad funds bad firms relative to

SPEAKER_39: everybody else they almost never below one x we all started in 2009 2010 after the great we've literally done a bull run for 13 years so it's kind of like it was high tide for us it was a massive

SPEAKER_23: dumping snowstorm we all look like you know we're great skiers great surfers but you know now that

SPEAKER_47: there's no madrona is a great firm so like that's they're in a great league but uh you know i joined

SPEAKER_64: their fund started in 1999 that 1999 fund went deep in the j-curve and pulled out and it came out really x fun how close did they hit come to hitting the ground or the water oh whoa shoot i mean the uh this is i don't mean this to be a knock on them at all like they're they're great and that they survived

SPEAKER_173: like but it was i think 99 to 2005 until they raised the next fund six years with basically like

SPEAKER_00: your plane is like one engine and you're flying like 2 000 feet above the pacific ocean and you're

SPEAKER_23: like somewhere between like hawaii and australia yeah and you're just like this thing's going down

SPEAKER_34: any minute but we got a little fuel we got one engine we're at 5 000 feet we can see the water

SPEAKER_00: let's see if we make it to new zealand maybe we find it to fiji maybe there's some

SPEAKER_11: you know polynesian island we can land this thing on sequoia is the same story from the dot-com fund right like what was doug saying that that they did during cigarettes in their arms before they you know lose money in it yeah cigarettes in our arms before we lose money i love that they

SPEAKER_27: forwent for went foregoed uh their management fees during the 99 2000 fund also right to try and make sure that they were returning capital i think it's going to get very real for people i

SPEAKER_06: think we're going to see a lot of vcs quit in the next two or three years i think what's going to

SPEAKER_26: happen is when people have to go to three or four board meetings and watch layoffs and watch valuations

SPEAKER_06: become so crushed and depressed that they look at their portfolio you know what this thing's not going to recover what you'll see is like if there was a five person team you might see two people go you

SPEAKER_26: know what i'm just going to join this company or i'm going to retire i think you're going to see that like changing of the guard uh in a car if we do have a crisis and i don't think that's guaranteed but certainly something's going on none of us are macro um here i don't think but let's pretend we are

SPEAKER_27: but the good news is like if you look at america's track record over the last 250 years you don't need to be a macro expert as long as you have a long investment period like no such a good insight like none of us need to i kind of look at it i think i've sold maybe like if i look at my stock portfolio right now i just don't turn it over i just have my like 20 to 30 companies i really like i keep adding to those positions i've i've sold like one to two percent of the value ever and i kind of look at it like i'm not trading i'm investing and so uh we probably will have some rough years somewhere in the next five i don't know what one or two or five but i don't know but if you own amazon or if you

SPEAKER_26: owned airbnb i don't know what names are in if you own disney the idea that disney airbnb uh google are not going to be relevant in 2030 or 2040 is kind of farcical like they would really have to

SPEAKER_23: to to destroy google or disney if you deliberately try to do everything wrong like literally said i'm going to make the worst decisions i can make every day when i come into work i don't think you could stop those juggernauts like you're not allowed to turn it off but you get to make terrible no one's

SPEAKER_27: done anything new at google in like 20 years anyway so i they just have the the most successful high margin business of all time and then literally they felt a monopoly this is a warren buffett quote the

SPEAKER_64: um i forget how he phrases it my my more crude phrasing is that uh you want to look for businesses that literally like everybody could go home and a monkey could run them yeah basically it's anti-fragile

Chamath Palihapitiya: businesses you know they do arguably better in chaos and google certainly is that like whatever

SPEAKER_06: happens in the world you shake the globe the snow globe there's no world in which people are not

SPEAKER_196: searching for information and clicking on ads that match the search term like they just built the

SPEAKER_27: perfect engine here here's a bear case for google because i've been thinking a lot about this uh not investment advice but i um i really like google as the stock oh and nick nick super producer nick just

SPEAKER_47: came through with the quote it's it's so much better than mine this is warren invest in a business any

SPEAKER_199: fool can run because someday a fool will wow that is a rare moment of perfect from warren clarity from a

SPEAKER_200: capital allocator who has actually literally watched somebody take one of their great businesses and try to

SPEAKER_23: drive it into a wall like that's that's he's talking about a person there i don't know which person what they did to him i don't know who heard him but somebody heard him and that's like a

SPEAKER_205: that's the subtweet of the year of the of the century who who hurt you warren

SPEAKER_19: it's definitely solomon brothers thank you for that definitely great job on the punch up today like i circle around the joke i circle around the joke and you could see me like forming the joke in my brain and then nick's like boom he just snipes it who hurt you warren it's time for another our

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SPEAKER_215: uh in a crazy time yeah or do you not even think about it generally all of the above generally my

SPEAKER_160: philosophy is much like ben uh and i think yours um but i actually have made a a change with all the

SPEAKER_64: recent stuff going on just a on the margin optimization um i have moved as much of my tech

SPEAKER_47: exposure into my retirement accounts oh as possible because i want to hold it forever and just like be as

SPEAKER_64: long term as possible so you're doing the roth ira thing doing yeah i have an old roth um and then and then making contributions every year to to new ones um uh so i've shifted i've used the market downturn as an opportunity to um tax loss harvest a little bit shift stuff into the retirement accounts and then in uh non-retirement stuff i'm actually mostly berkshire at this point um i view that as like i i actually think todd and ted the investment managers there are fantastic investors the berkshire

SPEAKER_47: apple investment is one of the greatest investments of all time period full stop when did they make

SPEAKER_225: that explain that to the audience what they did because between he really only owns he doesn't like tech stocks he likes snowflake and 2019 apple yeah but it's not it's not warren or charlie it's ted

SPEAKER_46: and todd at this point who are doing this um so wait when did they do the investment you said 2013 i think

SPEAKER_11: they initially started the position around 2015 15 16 yeah yeah anyway i'm very happy to get

SPEAKER_46: broad market exposure through a great investor for them in my non-retirement accounts still get some tech exposure and then for my active investing i do it try to do it mostly i've come to two i've come

SPEAKER_26: to two things one is keep investing early earlier in the life cycle as early as possible uh and then

SPEAKER_239: i'm trying to perfect the building of a position in the winners those are the two things i'm trying to do so vis-a-vis the whatsapp you know backing up the truck position i'm trying to do that but earlier

SPEAKER_06: so you know you get somebody and take more risk in getting people into the accelerator right there's only really three accelerators four accelerators that i think actually are worth going to um if you're a reasonably new good new founder i think we have one of them we've done it we're on our 25th class seven each class we've had i don't know five or six companies become worth over a hundred million dollars and already right it's a it's a nascent program and then we have a unicorn now grin uh became a unicorn out of it 12 over 12 positioning grin and so you know that when i started under one

SPEAKER_26: percent positions in the ubers and thumbtacks and robin hoods of the world with these 25 50k checks then two percent of superhuman five percent of calm 12 of grin you know you go along that sort of journey and all of a sudden you know having a fraction you can build a nine figure position by owning under one percent if you you know hit like if you split the arrow with an uber investment you can hit a hundred million dollar position if you have five percent of uh of just a you know two billion dollar company like say com and then you know if you have 12 you can hit a hundred million dollar position with it being but you know an eight nine hundred million dollar company so there's a i think that's just the the position i'm coming to now david you do small investments right now with kindergarten and you don't you don't care about pro rata or you do fight to get it which one yeah oh yeah everything

SPEAKER_64: i was talking about before i should caveat is just you know personal account you know trading of

SPEAKER_237: not not venture investing the vast vast vast majority of my investing in bens too is venture investing um

SPEAKER_43: but personal account teaches you things i i didn't used to trade individual stocks and in the last

SPEAKER_27: couple years i've been doing it a lot and uh i i i think it's really valuable for early stage private tech investors to to be forced to grapple with public market realities the altos guys talk about

SPEAKER_64: this all the time they made their the altos i think they talked about this on our episode the retirement plans uh for the for the firm there uh they all actively manage i mean i think i'm sure if you wanted you could like do an index fund or whatever but they decided like this is going to

SPEAKER_113: be part of our culture we're going to learn by doing that and then apply that and it's because that's

SPEAKER_26: what the lps and their funds might be the high net worth individuals and their funds are probably doing it for some part of a retirement play or for their kids and you know that's actually a very clever way to stay in the game but tell me how you are thinking about now that i'm an lp and i'm now on the elpac you and i both oh we're the elpac

SPEAKER_34: i didn't see that in the side letter david i'm looking at this investment in a cpg company uh you invested in a sports drink you when you pitched us you said you were going after sass and marketplace how did this investment happen take us through how you source when he pitched you didn't say he was

SPEAKER_256: going after oh they were college roommate oh how interesting you had the inside line on a sports

SPEAKER_242: beverage with your college no interest okay well played uh um i'm still figuring out we're still

SPEAKER_160: figuring out pro rata um it's such a different world now with angel list right like we my uh current operating assumption is we will not be doing follow-on and pro rata in investments that we

SPEAKER_64: make in a given fund out of that same fund we will probably do it in the next funds like just do it

SPEAKER_263: kind of a daisy chain as long as you tell people you that you're daisy chaining it's totally yeah

SPEAKER_64: i think we're gonna daisy chain rather than raise do a traditional venture style which i did you know forever of you know raise a 250 million dollar fund of which 100 is initial investments and 150 is reserved for perette i just like then you're trying to predict the future and i think make sure you

SPEAKER_26: fight fight for uh pro rata every deal and say i'm a valid you added investor i have a podcast i can help in other ways please give me make an exception in the side letter please give me pro rata i'm going to work for it and it's going to be such a de minimis amount it will really help me raise more funds and help more founders that's the script clip it here and just keep saying it over and over again do not uh fight fight fight for that pro rata you never know when you're going to hit something big and that pro rata can be worth something you come to uncle jason and say hey

SPEAKER_00: you got those lps sitting out there maybe we could do my pro rata and split the car and i'll be like

SPEAKER_268: yum yum let's go i knew there was a reason you of course there is and ben's like i'll do that too

SPEAKER_23: i'll do that too secure the bag startups need a central hub to store information and collaborate on

SPEAKER_269: work now more than ever that's because we're all living in this crazy remote world everybody wants to put all the information in one place and that one place is now notion documents projects all that stuff it kind of goes in the same place on what you could consider a wiki when we went fully remote in march of 2020 notion became our internal knowledge bank we even use it for external purposes you know like when we did this series on this week in startups called the startup checklist well we just put it at thisweekinstartups.com checklist and that is all hosted on notion on notion every team

SPEAKER_48: from engineering to sales can work together seamlessly and they have 500 integrated apps including things like google and slack collaborate in real time and tailor workflows to your needs hundreds of thousands of teams worldwide are already delighting their employees with notion notion is now a worldwide community of millions and they're creating templates and tutorials so the product is continually improving just go to notion.so and use the promo code twist and you will get 250 dollars off their annual team plan that could be a couple of months for free so it's pretty great for a growing startup like yours that's notion.so and use that promo code twist during checkout for

SPEAKER_06: 250 dollars off uh all right let's talk about sequoia since i have you here you guys did a great uh two-parter uh on sequoia and i just had doug leone on episode 1403 and i've been friends with

SPEAKER_26: ruloff who's on the board of inside.com previously mahalo been a friend of mine for a long time and he

SPEAKER_184: picked me to be the first scout for sequoia so uh thank you for getting my entire career in angel

SPEAKER_06: investing started in many ways is ruloff still on the inside board he is yeah i mean i we do quarterly board meetings he shows up he's never he's been late once um like literally something happened and he gave me a hundred dollar bill when he walked in five minutes late and i framed it and i have it

SPEAKER_239: on my wall in my office um i had him autograph and i put on my wall in my office and i'm going to start that at my firm late for a meeting hundred dollar bill um so what are we what does this mean i think uh in the industry to see this changing of the guard and ruloff taking the baton from doug who basically worked with michael moritz i think they had the baton together who took it from i guess valentine valentine so uh here we go third gen the third generation basically uh what does it

SPEAKER_242: mean to you david uh well first off i have to say your interview with doug i mean any interview with

SPEAKER_47: doug is is great you're starting you know on third base but like you did that that was so good it was

SPEAKER_64: like just uh um you know i could tell episode i think yeah oh yeah when when uh i i i could see when i was watching that interview like i was like oh doug's gonna doug's gonna retire like

SPEAKER_40: david texted me he's like this is the farewell tour you gotta listen to jason's episode this is the

SPEAKER_23: farewell yep yeah i got that sense of history when i was talking to him and i also got the sense you

SPEAKER_26: know like since we've known each other and he's mentored me to a bit to a certain extent um which

SPEAKER_239: people don't know about and i you know i i try not to talk about personal relationships all that much because i feel like it's you know up to the other person maybe if they want to talk about it but he he mentored me a lot in venture when i was raising my funds as did rule off um but doug took a particular interest and i think there was a level of trust in like the interview which when you're lucky enough to have a personal relationship with somebody like i had with tk when he did that seminal two-parter uh or sacca you know or tramath and some early interviews like yeah it really does help

SPEAKER_184: the person i don't know just be honest and candid you know it's like a super advantage but so what do you think it means that ruloff got the slot well it was um you know i mean from my

SPEAKER_64: perspective as a total outsider but having covered you know sequoia for a long time and known folks there um you know i think the last few years everybody was watching to see was was it going to be when when doug retired as everybody knew it was coming yeah was it going to be a rule offer was it going to be neil shen in in china who took the the senior steward position um and uh i mean

SPEAKER_47: obviously the last 12 months in both the us and china has i imagine changed a lot uh on that but um but that this was huge it's kind of like this is like the smoke coming out of the vatican moment you know when uh when you know ruloff was anointed to to be senior straight and then you know they'll all tell you like oh we're all and rule of even uses the animal farm quote right like we're all equal here some are just more equal than others you know blah blah blah but this this is this was really really

SPEAKER_184: big big deal what do you what do you think ben uh what are your thoughts on this moment in time is

SPEAKER_27: it a big deal uh or huge okay i think why uh well two reasons one uh the the sequoia fund which i want to come back to in a second um but two sequoia has been one of the only firms the only venture firms ever to do generational transfer incredibly well benchmark is another example where the second generation did as as good or better than the first generation and certainly better since venture just keeps getting bigger and bigger every subsequent generation does better on a dollars perspective but you know on a on a percentage or an irr perspective uh you know i think you have to look at did the second generation of uh sequoia do as as good as don or better i think probably better to to um to look at moritz and leone versus uh the the the og goat of don himself and i think sequoia this is you look at the the partnership that they have now they're just all stars i mean it it is it is an example of uh of generational transfer at a firm done right which most of the time doesn't happen like most of the time people who started the fund built the brand um you know had the initial relationship with lps but like they hold on for a long time and i i think um you know the the whole venture industry has a lot to learn from building a you know hopefully 100 year franchise i i imagine they're they're looking

SPEAKER_30: to be the subsequent generations after this that sequoia has built yes i think the generational

SPEAKER_46: transfer thing sequoia has done it well there have been very very few firms that have done it i think

SPEAKER_64: why this specifically and sequoia transfer specifically is so much bigger impact than even benchmark you know great venture firm on par with sequoia in the venture industry it's a they'll be the first to tell you they're a small craft boutique you know shoe by design yes by design they haven't added 20 different

SPEAKER_296: parallel projects or funds and then double down on the five winners like in treason or sequoia yes

SPEAKER_64: sequoia controls so much of the capital globally you know and influences so much of the capital globally like think about it you know they've got top three venture franchise venture and growth franchise in china top three venture and growth franchise in the u.s top three venture and growth franchise in india they've got hedge funds they've got heritage they've got the scouts program you know they've got they were part of y combinator like this the you know they are this is like a you know

SPEAKER_47: goldman sachs type uh generational transfer like this is this impacts so much around this is the global

SPEAKER_28: financial system the footprint has gotten so enormous and the previous footprint was so enormous but they

SPEAKER_01: let that power dissipate by allowing by doing distributions and saying here's your shares back

SPEAKER_00: lps when the lps were like okay now we're going to give them to some investment bank to manage or we're going to put them in account somewhere now rule of said hey we're going to just do this evergreen fund if we distribute square to you and now you have a billion dollars or let's just pick a more reasonable you have a hundred million in square i'm still on the board we're still involved with the company we're not getting off the board we're now going to stay with the company we're going to stay with google okay we're distributing a billion dollars to whatever you know endowment do you want to manage your google investment or would you like us to keep it here and then maybe take a little bit of it and put it into the next five funds you don't have to do a capital call well you can do a capital call and we can just leave it over here and once a year you take money out

SPEAKER_61: yeah we'll manage it for you since we're on the board and we were the first investors in the

SPEAKER_27: company such a high level on the sequoia fund to make a software analogy is that defaults matter they change the default from being you know a 10-year fund where you do a distribution to lps and then you go back to them for your next fund and say hey can we manage some of your capital again and they change the default to say hey endowment that slice of of your um your capital that we manage what if we just manage that forever and that is a part of the sequoia fund and you are just choosing to allocate a part of of the university endowment to us to manage indefinitely and we have lots of great funds that we can deploy that into we'll keep you posted we'll talk with you about the timelines on everything but it's changing the default to remain involved permanently rather than

SPEAKER_42: always get your capital back and re-up next time yeah it is just fascinating and it's absolutely selfishly fantastic for me because rolof is one of my great friends this is the best possible scenario

SPEAKER_306: for me how does it affect me gotta secure the bag how does it affect my power base my power base grows

SPEAKER_308: what's the the the secure the bag i love it like i never i never really heard it till you uh

SPEAKER_34: started using the bag where'd you pick it up yeah um secure the bag i think is a mobster gangster term

SPEAKER_26: that then became popularized in uh the hip-hop rap community um so like many things scarface uh godfather goodfellas gladiator a lot of these uh you know seminal works of machismo kind of made

SPEAKER_01: their way and were inspiring to hip-hop culture in the 90s in new york and so the idea that even in

SPEAKER_26: a brutal world uh whether it's the mafia or gladiators um you mean white combinator is that

SPEAKER_314: sorry yeah the mafia uh so there's a perfect segue that you could actually um have some honor um and

SPEAKER_01: that there was some discipline right that's the paradoxical nature of our thing you know what they would call the mafia and that's really what the point of this the point of the sopranos is our thing like the last generation was the last beautiful you know this thing of ours was kind of perfect

SPEAKER_26: and then it's the decline of what was beautiful about the mafia i know that's a that's the paradox that they're playing with is like there used to be honor you didn't rat on your friends you you did your time you wore a suit there were rules wives children were never murdered we never touched drugs no sweatpants no nonsense and you know then all of a sudden people started wearing hats in you know

SPEAKER_23: this is a great scene i was i was literally in my younger years in a restaurant with a group of guys and somebody walked in with a hat and it just freaked everybody out at my table i used to run with a little bit of a crew that maybe was you know uh and somebody got off from the table and told the

SPEAKER_26: person take the hat off the person did take that off and it literally that's a scene in the sopranos where tony walks up to a guy and says take the hat off in arty bucco's restaurant that's not a um that that that's based on real world events like you you you had to behave a certain way you know uh

SPEAKER_63: and back to sequoia that then rule of this is why this is so importantly generational transfer is when these yes shifts happen and you know roloff has laid out his blueprint with the sequoia fund but

SPEAKER_47: there's going to be a lot more like things are going to change now and we are going to see how

SPEAKER_26: it's all going to change um here's the great thing i think also not resting on not resting on your laurels is one of the things i take away from this and the other thing is experimentation and not following so i don't know if you saw but sequoia is launching their own accelerator um um y combinator just in europe is that right well just in europe i have no inside information they did not come to me and ask for advice you know no i mean foolishly foolishly yeah actually you know we're partners and they meet with all my accelerator companies it's not like they came to me and was like hey you know you know what do you think of this uh like they did with scouts so i'm just making it clear because people sometimes assume i have inside knowledge i don't so making it clear they did not

SPEAKER_23: in this case to float the idea they just did it and they're doing a million dollars into each company and they're going to do 15 companies and they don't say how much they're going to invest but they i think what's unique is they're not trying to do what y combinators doing they don't want to do 400 companies they could do that tomorrow they're saying we're going to do 15 companies and i think

SPEAKER_00: if they're putting a million in that means they're looking at putting a million in for five or ten percent so it's basically like they're taking a seed fund and adding they're adding a 12 whatever it is an eight-week program i think they're adding this eight-week program to a seed investment so i thought

SPEAKER_26: that was a very interesting concept that i might copy so it's almost like it's more like graduate school they're kind of like putting a big investment in um and they are not just trying to copy other people i think the sequoia fund i never heard of anybody doing the evergreen fund and venture like that is there somebody who did that before them there have been evergreen funds like

SPEAKER_173: sutter hills and evergreen fund but it's a very different design and proposition yeah um so what

SPEAKER_27: do you think of this well i the art so so at pioneer square labs we've started 31 companies now in our studio different model we're a big glorified co-founder we've got 22 people engineers designers

SPEAKER_06: all that and we start these companies which means you get some co-founder equity in each company 20 of each company or something just for founding it what's the ballpark more we're a true co-founder

SPEAKER_196: for okay so you get half of the equity uh does that up the cap table downstream with other investors where they get jealous and they're like why should you get 40 of the company the founders get 40 and

SPEAKER_27: we're only getting 20 for putting money in as with anything else there are some investors that have a problem with it there are lots of investors i think we have 90 funds that we've co-invested with at this point who are completely fine with it and understand the value people have a problem with

SPEAKER_196: it what is your response to them and then what is the profile of the people who have a problem

SPEAKER_06: with it i'm just curious because there's a little jealousy that goes on i notice i'll tell my stories

SPEAKER_348: after but well tell us how they shade you or guilt you or what's their response to you about this

SPEAKER_207: issue this the studio business is a tremendous amount of shoe leather i mean it's running an

SPEAKER_27: operating company the same way that running a startup is running an operating company and i think the people that don't like it don't realize that and they look at it like oh you're just running a fund and how come you have all this you know this like outsized economics for you know deploying tiny amounts of capital in your early stage i just think it's it's it's a misunderstanding of what's being done because no one's looking at the founding team and saying you have too much equity for doing all the pavement pounding you're doing at the beginning when you look at like what a founder has versus the second or third employee it's 10 or 100x less and so you can't out of one side of your mouth be saying gosh it's really about all the equity that's necessary for the next 10 years and then out of the other side of your mouth saying but the founder and ceo of the business

SPEAKER_30: should have 50x more than the first hire it's it's a little bit yeah it is the jealousy of lazy people

SPEAKER_27: this is what i experience everyone has their own perspective and and everybody gets way too gracious but everyone gets it shaped by a world view that was successful for them like the thing that i always have to remember is everyone's got a widget that works well for them and that shapes their perspective and like i have my own and people that don't like this business have their own and so i i think like you're never going to change the mind of someone who has who is extremely successful doing something a certain way and then tell them that that way is not the way anymore all you can do is say well my way is different and they can both be successful yeah it's incredibly magnanimous okay but the the point that i'd not to just like i would literally talk about psl way diplomatic i want to like the reason i brought it up is because i think sequoia had a very similar insight which is the deal for early stage investing totally changed from what early stage investing used to be where

SPEAKER_128: you'd put in a million or two and own you know a meaningful chunk of a company ten percent forty

SPEAKER_06: percent yeah yeah it's back in the day forty percent and then not too long ago when we started you put a million in at 10 million post or you put two million in at 12 million post you own 15 of the business 10 of business sometimes 20 for that first seed round and so when that changes and

SPEAKER_27: if founders are doing the thing where they open up a note at a very high valuation and just take a bunch of 100k checks or 500k checks and you know the the it becomes unattractive or the superior returns get arbitraged out of early stage investing what should you do you should play a different game you should find a way to be on the other side of the table you should move late stage you should you should find a way to be fluid based on the way that the landscape has currently changed to produce the best outcome for your investors and moving earlier than early stage is one way to

SPEAKER_06: do that fantastic uh we have actually done that we have something called founder university now which was a two-day free program we made it a 12-week program people pay 700 bucks to come for 12 weeks if they finish the 12 weeks we give them the 700 back 94 finished 85 asked for their money back i think 10 people were like keep it i don't care it was so awesome uh we had 100 people go through the first we have 200 in the second the 100 in the first cohort they were so good that when i met them i gave five of them 25k each for 2.5 percent of the business these are companies that

SPEAKER_26: aren't incorporated yet in a lot of cases like they i was like here's 25k to get incorporated for 2.5

SPEAKER_00: percent and people like you're crazy what are you doing like that's too early and i'm like is it i mean if i do 100 of these for 2.5 million is it if one hits you know you did a great um shoot i

SPEAKER_64: can't remember if it was on twist or on another pod a few years ago you talked about um startup investing as like the analogy of like you chip stack in poker yeah and like it's it's all like

SPEAKER_63: where are you in the hand and how much are you putting into that hand at what point and it's managing that right and like putting in 25k at that stage like to a large basket of startups startups

SPEAKER_109: like that's that's what we call in the business a feeler bet there are some people i've watched sophisticated players phil homie does it sometimes we're in a hand the flop comes out there's an ace

SPEAKER_61: and two other cards and he's in whatever second third person to act out of let's say he's second person to act out of five four and he just like there's 800 in the pot he puts 200 and you're like okay there's like three people to act after you or two people to act after you

SPEAKER_00: 200 is not meaningful and all of a sudden three people fall and he wins the pot or then that happens in the minority of times or i don't know two people fold now he's heads up against somebody and and now he's just got to figure out that one person's hand and that 200 as a feeler bet

SPEAKER_204: if it pays off one out of four times he's break even right if you did it 200 and you want 800

SPEAKER_196: if it works one out of four times it's a it's a it's a break even bet so it becomes super interesting as

SPEAKER_63: a feeler you give these people 25k it's a feeler but you see what they do with it right like some of those people are going to take 25k and they're going to do nothing with it some of those people are going to take 25k and they're going to go to town with it and you're going to be like all right

SPEAKER_06: and now you have more information and more information and earlier information is like my thesis right but it's just to your point ben it's so hard to do this work do you know how hard it is to

SPEAKER_204: run founder university have 200 people who are building their mvp ask you questions like they're literally asking the same hundred questions every week for 12 weeks how do i raise money how do i get product market fit how do i find a technical co-founder i mean you have to be willing to suffer through just hardship uh and and the hardship of starting a company which you do ben of of 10 ideas

SPEAKER_27: how many wind up getting funded of your 10 ideas so of the 10 ideas we start working on about two of them okay of one that we work on of 10 that you've worked on 10 that we work on one spins out into a company and every time we spend something out into a company it could it we have the ability to get

SPEAKER_30: it venture funded through you know relationships and pre-vetting and that sort of thing so it's like

SPEAKER_204: one out of five ideas make it there so you have to come up with five ideas to get one and then one out of ten that you build get funded so that one out of 50 ideas one out of 50 ideas gets funded yeah and then out of but our goal is ten ideas those ideas should get thrown away return it'll be 10

SPEAKER_61: so you go 500 ideas to 10 executed to one working i mean it's a lot and the operating business comes

SPEAKER_27: in really dialing in what you do at what stages so the goal would be to get from that 10 ideas to the two that we actually work on like do that in an hour and a half meeting so that you you just burn through the bad ones as fast as possible pick your you know most fertile potential ones to work on and then hopefully you're not writing code and doing heavy design stuff you know hopefully you're able to throw a lot of those out and kill them for customers don't want it or business model reasons or tam reasons or the goal is just like burn through all the bad ones in the most efficient way possible and that's the thing when you're really looking at like the p l of running a studio uh of

SPEAKER_30: figuring out if you're good at it is can you get through all that crap in a super efficient way

SPEAKER_00: that is fascinating and i i don't envy you running one of these beta works science like these companies are known for one hit every five but so are venture funds that's the funniest thing is like ever that's

SPEAKER_128: the like thing about studios oh well they did hymns and oh well they did dollar shave club which is funny that they're both they didn't really do dollar shave club they invested totally i don't

SPEAKER_27: think they and i think they've been very friendly or you know everyone's got this like one cute example of the studio but like sequoia is one of the few firms where like if you even if you back out the winner they've got another winner but like if you go to one of these super successful firms and you back out their deca corn it's like but that's the whole business that we're in yes exactly exactly so it is

SPEAKER_383: similar um all right listen we we there's uh their news there's a huge elephant in the room

SPEAKER_00: over the last two weeks something happened it is we all have to discuss it it was an act of abhorrent violence and drama and i need to get your takes on this everybody's talking about it on social media and of course i'm referring to fast.com shutting down i'm just trying to figure out if this

SPEAKER_386: was the tf to elon and twitter or is this or will smith smack that was the one i was kind of teasing

SPEAKER_205: but all right this is going to become the raw shock test of all raw shocks fast to shut down this week

SPEAKER_34: and we just have to go through the timeline here and this is i think going to be i mean i think the

SPEAKER_00: amount of information that's coming out about this train wreck has taken me on a journey of feeling sympathy for a founder i thought was just misguided and now i'm kind of learning might be a complete charlatan and horrible but i don't know where i sit in this drama yet so maybe you guys can help me

SPEAKER_01: figure this out the timeline is pretty simple fast raises 2.5 million dollar seed at an 11 million dollar valuation in 2019 2020 they raised 20 million at a 150 million dollar valuation by stripe

SPEAKER_204: which apparently is making a mafia bet according to ryan breslow to create a competitor to uh bolt september fast launches it's one click check out with select merchants quote unquote and does the infamous why come i'm sorry september 2020 they do that's doing a combination no i don't think so right i don't think so if they did they would have done 7 000 tweets about it and we would know yeah uh fast launch is one click checkout and does the infamous five dollar merch show where tens of thousands of people buy hoodies and have no idea i think that's probably there's the fast hoodie on nick it is i think

SPEAKER_399: those hoodies cost them 20 30 dollars i think they lost 25 dollars on each leader lost leader it's a

SPEAKER_61: lost leader costco hot dog like the costco hot dog it's the costco uh hot dog or the uh or it's the chicken at um who who did the roast chicken costco also has a five dollar roast chicken the five dollar roast chicken costco sold so many of those they bought the chicken farm from what i understand guys

SPEAKER_63: i went to ikea for the first time in a while oh you did the meatballs swedish i did the i did fro-yo

SPEAKER_47: for a dollar ten dollar for a dollar ten a dollar ten but then i figured i i did some research i found out the hot dogs the ikea hot dogs they have a policy or at least they used to have a policy that they had to have the cheapest hot dog within a 30 mile radius of the store that was like the stated

SPEAKER_408: policy on the pricing oh my god i have a great idea i'm gonna open a hot dog stand across from ikea for 50 cent hot dogs and then we're all gonna go in and buy 40 cent hot dogs from them

SPEAKER_204: take the hot dogs and go sell them for seven dollars so anyway i'm starting a new fashion

SPEAKER_61: label called jason's fast and i'm going to buy up all the fast uh hoodies on sale okay 20 and listen

SPEAKER_204: i don't mean to laugh about this story but it's so tragic and insane that i think there's a little bit of humor in it and that's how we process things 2021 fast raises series b at close to 600 million 84 million led by stripe again throughout 21 21 fast grows to 450 employees processes a meager 30 million in transactions to generate 600k in revenue about 1300 per employee which if they were driving for

SPEAKER_26: door dash would be a hundred door dashes a year and if you made 13 bucks per uh or something like

SPEAKER_06: that so if all the employees did one door dash every other day they would have made the same amount of money no it's even less but anyway at its peak fast was burning 10 million a month generating 50k

SPEAKER_26: um in other words if they had put that 10 million into a bond portfolio and gotten four percent tax-free

SPEAKER_339: it would have made eight times as much money okay i gotta jump in here there's lots to criticize

SPEAKER_27: here but i hate this thing about the 600k because what if they just were making no money then this wouldn't be the conversation at all the conversation they're building a really complex platform and they haven't launched it yet so of course there's no revenue okay do do you think there's any world in

SPEAKER_417: which the fast i'll take the other side of it is there any world in which building one click

SPEAKER_27: check out requires 450 people okay so that this is where you get into like the i don't understand how complicated it is to build a checkout solution and like interface with the payment rails and the payment gateways and and and of course like line up all the deals with the e-commerce providers i i it seems hard but i don't actually understand how engineering hard it is there's no world risk stuff

SPEAKER_422: is there i don't yeah but i mean you do not need 450 people these guys were playing the momentum game

SPEAKER_46: for as a comp friends of acquired modern treasury they have what maybe 100 employees maybe a little more at this point they are doing money reconciliation payment operations like

SPEAKER_64: money comparable fintech challenge just as hard i would imagine and 50 of those employees are very new

SPEAKER_46: yeah 50 of those employees are very new and they're moving close to three billion dollars a month at

SPEAKER_06: this point yeah so no these are very efficient businesses is another way of saying it you don't

SPEAKER_27: actually sort of so like uh sort of but like what what checkout i think checkout has super thin margins and so even if your payment volume is super high i think it's actually hard to build a big revenue

SPEAKER_01: business yeah i mean your point about turning on revenue um then changes everything because you start doing math so i always tell founders like if you're selling the promise of this do not bring up the performance yeah don't do math right because people you know if you go to a bunch of smart people and you're like yeah we make ten dollars per customer how many customers you have a thousand okay so you make ten thousand dollars like well how often do they spend ten dollars with you every day or every year

SPEAKER_196: it's like oh we sell them this meditation app once a year for 10 bucks that was literally comms business and then it became 10 bucks a month or six dollars a month and all of a sudden the whole economics change

SPEAKER_89: and how you view the business change and rightfully so but uh i guess to me what i find fascinating about

SPEAKER_377: this and i'm interested in your position on it is the founder ah okay yeah and so and just to wrap up

SPEAKER_196: things started going wrong in late uh q4 of 2021 they tried to raise 100 million at a billion dollar valuation right as the markets were repricing stocks um then they tried to do a down round at a 450 million dollar valuation um and told uh potential investors they planned on doing a layoff to cut its burn and then um in march they told investors they were looking to be acquired and then in april they shut down so literally you know this feels like to me malfeasance on the part of the board the investors and the founders and the management team to run a company at this level of

SPEAKER_204: speed with no brakes no guard rails no trans no alignment on the car are you suggesting they ran it fast they ran it very fast too fast in fact and and this is just malfeasance and i think this is that there's something wrong with the founder here because somebody did a tweet storm about his history

SPEAKER_432: and he's got a long story i think did you retweet it or you engaged with it i was like none of this could

SPEAKER_204: have come up in diligence and i don't know if any of it's true but uh oh we're showing right now the graph of like the employee account which you know employee account does core a lot of investors will look at the employee account chart on linkedin and use that as a proxy for how the business is going which is a fine way to find high growth companies but then you have to look under the hood and say is that growth line in any way related to the reality of the economics of the business um and in this case it was not adding more people to this business did not help the core business i think that's the cardinal sin here um but pull up the uh tweet storm if you can find it i retweeted and said something to the effect of like i'm sure none of this came up in diligence make that like

SPEAKER_145: three times bigger so people can read it um and then just throw it to me in the tweet um that's

SPEAKER_436: that's basically i'm sure none of this came up in diligence uh what happened here i think is maybe

SPEAKER_00: stripe was so uh wanted revenge on bolt so badly this is a theory that they saw this kid as a proxy

SPEAKER_01: for this kid dom holland who i had on the program who didn't seem super sharp to me and you know listen i want to make it personal but um i didn't even want to have him on the program but they kept begging to

SPEAKER_00: be on the program over and over again and i was like this person's too much when we're not on this show anyway listen i i would love to have dom back in the program but they were super aggressive about the marketing and it was always this like promotion and marketing and they named the people at the firm you know like when people get called googlers and like they self-assign themselves we're googlers

SPEAKER_01: we're amazonian whatever like they were kind of trying to create that mythology it was almost like an elizabeth holmes kind of derangement of like we're going to do all the accoutrement and theatrical stuff for a startup as opposed to what needed to be done which is product market fit but anyway he's got a background according to this where uh his background here is that he was involved in a towing business and

SPEAKER_145: other businesses where he was incredibly smarmy uh and confrontational and i guess accused of being a charlatan uh in previous businesses and i'll we'll put on the show notes link to this but what what

SPEAKER_01: is the takeaway here uh in terms of late stage venture capital why did i say late stage not as in

SPEAKER_269: the stage of investing but as oh i see like the ending of late stage capitalism and then in parentheses

SPEAKER_27: venture specifically all right what happened here i think there's plenty to criticize and i will i'm not going to be like let's start with the criticism diplomatic but like okay here was a thing that was going super well they built like an insane team in the first like year so like they knew how to meme their way into bringing very talented people on so so going back to my my earlier comment of like when something works well for someone they kind of keep doing that thing because it's the thing that they know works so you like keep you're trying to build an amazing and i actually do from all accounts of people i know uh who are hiring fast employees right now they're like the talent density is crazy high so like in some ways that can sort of explain the psychology around why do we need to build an enormous team so fast because it was the thing that was working now when we look at the stripe angle stripes a b2b company they have no consumer relationship and consumer relationships at scale are crazy valuable but of course like a lot of the um consumer touching businesses are really hard to build and also if you look at something like a checkout solution super thin margins so their revenues were going to grow really slow i think stripe kind of looked at this and was like huh opportunity for us to have a consumer relationship maybe this is like our option bet and if you were going to go about making an option bet on something that you think could be really important in the future but would be really hard to get sort of mass penetration on it you kind of think okay well then the founder or this business needs to have some unfair advantage where they actually will be able to will something into reality from a cold start like they need to get installed on all these e-commerce platforms all these merchants need to adopt them like something crazy has to happen in order to allow them to thread that needle one way i don't know if it's clearly it didn't work but one way you could do that is effectively memeing yourself into existence where you build the five-year aura of a successful company around your brand persona you attract all the best people and at some point if it's like you if you did actually have a strong brand and you do actually have all the best people and you do actually have stripe backing you three rounds in a row you could call it bad money after bad but you know backing you continuously a high value at some point like you could actually get the customers to show up and believe that this is great and if it actually was a great product which i don't know that's a plausible strategy didn't work at all went up in a ball of flames but like you can see the strategy

SPEAKER_01: david the uh one of the great things about entrepreneurs is they get good at something they do press their advantage and all executives bob eiger is a great deal maker he goes on the deal run of all deal runs somebody's a great operations person like frank sleutman at snowflake he just

SPEAKER_23: fires people who are average or good performers and replaces them with people who are good or great and you know he and everything's a war to him right so it's it's an operational machine he's not out

SPEAKER_200: there banging the drum and doing marketing he's just destroying people who work for him who you know are not good or who are good and he's like you're not great you're only good 8.5 out of 10 you're fired uh fast as a slow as we go um you know so what do you think of you know ben's defense

SPEAKER_339: uh it was founder it was more of a hypothetical defense okay hypothetical defense you want listen

SPEAKER_144: you want to take the other side ben you got to be a big boy and then david is gonna i took the other side now david's gonna referee go ahead david oh boy okay yeah i mean i i uh deciding vote david

SPEAKER_47: who's right this particular thing i think jason is right but i think ben you would probably admit that too like that this was the running of this company was a travesty you know probably you know is it there no scale probably not but like it's somewhere between a travesty and a theranos but the

SPEAKER_457: reality is on a scale of one to theranos where do you rate this in fraud god or malfeasance or

SPEAKER_461: incompetence oh theranos lives were at stake so there's no lives being a seven yeah uh madoff being

SPEAKER_47: an 11. i don't know this is pure speculation because i know none of the details but i'm guessing a

SPEAKER_466: four i don't know something like that but but the reality is like you know one modern treasury funds

SPEAKER_47: 10 fasts from a venture capital standpoint so like this is the thing these are like big flashy stories it's like watching a train wreck everybody gets excited but yeah they happen because like the economic incentive for capital is like sure let's fund a bunch of these and one of them's gonna work

SPEAKER_204: here's the things i don't like about this number one governance who's on the board of fast that allowed this person who had a sordid background to run amok and burn money at this rate who was in the meeting when they presented a two-year plan that made no sense and didn't put their foot down and say maybe we don't need 450 people where is the governance so that's my first question well that was part of the

SPEAKER_237: problem like you got stripe leading these rounds of stripes a great company i'm sure all the people they're great they're on the board they're operating company they're not a board member this is where

SPEAKER_61: strategics are so number two when we talk about strategics as investors and we're like ah you want to do a strategic round fox in the hen house distorts what the goals are term sheet probably like

SPEAKER_29: strategically messy have some non-pure financial incentive and that's exactly right so you put a

SPEAKER_204: strategic and you listen stripes among strategics i understand like a founder wanting to take their money but this is what happens when you lay down with a strategic they have a you're gonna you're

SPEAKER_01: gonna wake up and you might not be in the position you want to be in like this is a this is the absolute pinnacle of why strategics are kept out of high growth early stage companies is because they are going

SPEAKER_196: to have a distorting effect um three the scale of investment is completely unnecessary and we're breaking the milestone based system that makes our industry what it is so governance strategics and milestone all three of these things were thrown out the window and then finally diligence which i don't know how much of dom's past is being exaggerated there's two sides to every story yada yada some people are polarizing some people knock a lot of it over while they build the future i get it but that's what i want to know about that's the p side that's missing for me is governance strategic diligence and what was the fourth one i came up with oh milestones yes so let's talk about the

SPEAKER_204: milestone based system of silicon valley somebody comes up with an idea they go to an accelerator the accelerator accepts them okay you hit a milestone come out of the accelerator you beat the other

SPEAKER_196: people coming out of the miles or you you know meet a bunch of investors you pass market with a bunch of seed investors and dentists and seed funds and angels yeah you get product market fit you start scaling you get a venture firm yeah you get to true scale and predictability you build a management team

SPEAKER_236: you get to your series bcde you go public is there a major risk here ben that people have forgotten

SPEAKER_27: the milestone based system that got us where we are today yes and that is not just like fast is the most uh fiery example to talk about that but i over the last five years everyone shifted one click down the uh round system and what they were looking for we heard all the time series a is the new b

SPEAKER_339: probably two or three clicks right the invention i was thinking the same thing david maybe we have two clicks and in this case four precede was not an asset class that previously existed in fact

SPEAKER_27: even 10 years ago seed wasn't really an asset class that existed that was angels so we invented two brand new clicks in the whole thing and in doing that i think we got everyone so comfortable with the idea of moving their underwriting criteria two three four years earlier in the life of a business for that amount of capital that there is sort of the risk of the whole thing uh of people being so insensitive on price versus milestones that yes i think we are in a very uh high risk non-resilient system right now like everything kind of fast is a great example of this the the the playbook that they were executing assuming there was a sane strategy and they had a good discussion about it that was just not a resilient strategy if everything went right it maybe could have worked but they did need every single thing to go right everywhere along the way and there was no slack in the whole thing a lot of the people who choose to raise rounds like this that aren't hitting the traditional milestones are basically just reducing their resilience and requiring that everything go right in order to create some positive outcome and as the whole venture system shifts to that yes all these investments take on much more risk

SPEAKER_336: well and jason what you've been saying it goes hand in hand with governance right like milestones

SPEAKER_64: governance go hand in hand and i think you know actually if you read a lot of the stuff that that ruloff you know wrote i think probably even in his memo around the sequoia fund you know that's what he's all about and i think what they're trying to do with the sequoia fund is like if you set up incentives such that when you invest in a company you care about the long term you know economic

SPEAKER_47: outcome of the company then you care about milestones and actually building stuff and performance whereas so much of the venture industry and you know i'll raise my hand like myself included in the type of

SPEAKER_64: stuff that i do is instead baked on based on mark markups based on making the fun look good based on tvpi based on selling secondaries based on getting liquidity uh and and that's how you end up with

SPEAKER_482: stuff like this yeah it's really it's really crazy that people have forgotten what got us here i

SPEAKER_00: cannot i mean the number one reason the number one reason we've turned things down of late you know or in the past year was the valuation just didn't add up for us and we're like there if you're raising at a 50 million valuation and you have no revenue and you barely

SPEAKER_01: have product market fit well we could just focus on accelerator companies or do 500k into 10 seeds that have their first five customers and we don't have to worry about you going from zero to five customers we've already got 10 opportunities so it was like i love the founder i love the business i

SPEAKER_196: love the product mock-up but i have other options and if you have other options then why not focus

SPEAKER_01: on the other options i think is the case and so discipline is what's needed governance is what's needed governance is actually cool this company with proper governance would have had somebody pump

SPEAKER_196: the brakes and i'm not throwing shade at the board members you know from stripe or index or brian sugar is a friend of mine is an angel investor maybe he was on the board and who knows maybe dom negotiates

SPEAKER_01: some sort of board control but you know governance is important uh when you know and having a copilot if you look at if you think of governance as like a really good copilot when you're in the soup when you lose an engine like having a copilot reading that list for you okay now step one reset the engine step two check the oil gauge step three flip the you know circuit breaker step four do this step five you know check your altitude you know like one person's flying and one person's going down the checklist like this is why modern day aviation is so radically different read the book the checklist manifesto and you'll learn about this is why people survive surgery and plane uh problems you know

SPEAKER_196: aviation challenges and disasters get avoided it's because of good governance good checks and balances so that i think that to me is the big lesson give me a company as we wrap here that you're super excited about could be any company you've invested in but at this moment in time this week this month something

SPEAKER_236: happened that made you excited about that company something that made you excited about a company in

SPEAKER_64: your portfolio while ben's thinking you know what's top of mind for me right now is is in video we're in the

SPEAKER_47: middle of our uh nvidia series here and uh you know i don't have a particular view on the stock the

SPEAKER_64: valuation is incredibly high right now but um god what they've built like it's just it's such a story

SPEAKER_147: that i was thinking a company you invested in but okay we'll go with that one yeah

SPEAKER_486: your book and david's like i don't have any investment here but sure what do you got what do you got um

SPEAKER_204: let me go to ben and then i'll come back to you ben what do you got you got something queued up could be could be one of your studio companies that's getting tracking well it's funny i was

SPEAKER_27: gonna this is like a a psl acquired sandwich so we just had the founders of trova trip on our lp show

SPEAKER_30: and i think that episode's gonna come out maybe tomorrow but they've built it's a travel company uh that lets groups of people go on trips with creators that they already follow oh i know this stands up a trip on trova trip it's run by a third party operator from trova trips platform we looked

SPEAKER_204: at this actually i was very intrigued by trouble oh yeah yeah did you invest in it or is this a studio

SPEAKER_27: so full disclosure i'm actually on the board representing psl ventures and it was a female

SPEAKER_491: founder i believe is a female founder uh yep lauren and nick lauren and nick i remember meeting lauren yeah

SPEAKER_204: it's a really cool company so you as an influencer say i'm going to do this trip you get to go for free yep and you might make a 10 or 20 percent of whatever dollars come in yep and then your fans so we if you did an acquired fm goes to i don't know someone more exciting than sand hill road hopefully

SPEAKER_495: well i mean it could be something cool like yeah well you went to the rosewood on a thursday night

SPEAKER_27: what an adventure that is exciting oh yeah we could take everyone on like a backpacking trip

SPEAKER_433: in patagonia yes and it could be something epic they pay five thousand dollars once in a lifetime and they get to go with two people who they would love to be affiliated with you're selling a little

SPEAKER_204: bit of access we looked at this back in 2019 and i fell in love with it uh but i don't know why we didn't get there have to look at my notes but maybe i gotta make up for this mistake mine is going to be anyplace.com uh this is something we incubated and um they were originally started by um letting people do short-term rentals in two and three star hotels which um had so much availability and living in a hotel was great and for nomadic people it was great because you could but hotels didn't want to take the risk if people wind up domiciling there and

SPEAKER_26: they didn't know how to run like so think of it like as an airbnb um reaction hey the hotels

SPEAKER_01: you know are that are being impacted are not the five star hotels it's the two or three star hotels that are 200 300 a night that airbnb is uh beating but then living in a hotel is pretty dope because you and the hotel just says okay we'll change your sheets once a week you know as opposed to every

SPEAKER_196: day i've wanted something like this before this is great now what they did was they did an experiment where they set up a podcasting studio a widescreen monitor a standing desk and they made their own

SPEAKER_01: kind of curated spaces uh at anyplace.com which are designed around people who need to be on a green screen all day or you know whatever and so here you go you can do short-term rentals if you're a podcaster if you are in-house sales if you need to do whatever or you live a nomadic lifestyle so if you wanted to spend a month in miami or los angeles you can go to your boss and say hey can i rent this for a month and you know be in your backyard so if somebody working for me said hey i want to spend time with you every day and we're going to do a retreat we'll go for two weeks everybody gets a room with an office in it basically a home home office in it so it's a pretty cool idea i

SPEAKER_89: encourage everybody to go try anyplace.com free ad for them uh david do you want to um all your

SPEAKER_269: portfolio companies are like okay ben understood the assignment jason understood the assignment david did not understand the assignment but but here's your chance because i was talking about

SPEAKER_27: acquired so that's true somebody wants you to if only more people were curious about listening to podcast episodes about nvidia where would they turn where would they turn

SPEAKER_511: i'm just playing the game at a different level here there's the there's the nvidia uh

SPEAKER_515: i could shareholder talking about a portfolio company here or i could get three hours talking

SPEAKER_269: to people on my own portfolio company let's go your whole portfolio is on edge this year there's this portfolio company it's called nvidia they have this really interesting chip it's going

SPEAKER_517: to be big everybody it's going to be big encourage everybody to look for an nvidia chip in their

SPEAKER_157: next laptop i want to give a quick shout out to my kindergarten partner

SPEAKER_46: and portfolio company uh kettle you've had a you've had nat on the show they are really rocking

SPEAKER_64: and rolling they're building a reinsurance company they're literally building a new reinsurance company it's amazing for climate risk um and uh you've talked a lot about it on the show

SPEAKER_520: we've talked about it but like it's it's working they're building a reinsurance company so great got

SPEAKER_01: it there it is cattle our cattle.com i think is uh the one to take a look at so for all the venture capitalists trolling for investments on this podcast there's three for you to look at we're talking our

SPEAKER_196: own book everybody's favorite part of the program uh thanks again boys you always do a great job ben

SPEAKER_01: and david go check out acquired.fm search for it in your podcast player and uh look forward to uh guesting over at acquired at some point soon we got get find a third person and let's do like a little mini super team over there oh you know what i'll bring molly over that's what we're gonna do i'll bring molly over and we'll come over to your house and you guys can cook us dinner all out love

SPEAKER_61: it uh all out all out well thank you for having us it's super controversial now like there's a group of people like the overwhelming majority of people love that podcast and it you know hits it hit like

SPEAKER_204: 31. yeah thank you and people are copying it now like there's a uh some venture capitalists did one and they basically said we're just copying and we're just gonna take them there's like three of them now where they're just like we're just literally taking the exact format we're gonna make a joke we're gonna have a jcal we're gonna have a sax we're gonna have a chamath we're gonna have a nerd

SPEAKER_532: science there's only one jacal and yeah of course of course yeah but i mean listen it's fine people

SPEAKER_204: want to try to um but it's flattery but you know there's a group of people who maybe disagree with one or two people on the pod and are like upset at me or then they back channel to molly molly can you

SPEAKER_61: talk to jacal about what sac said and i'm just like even jacal can't talk to to sax about what

SPEAKER_422: he said well whatever i'm just giving one example it could be freeberg and another or chamath another but it's like who hates freeberg freebreak is the most wholesome what i mean when he said i mean i

SPEAKER_00: you know anyway i'm not throwing any of my besties under the bus but what i would like to encourage

SPEAKER_34: people to do is you can be friends with people that do not agree have your exact world view this was the strength of america you absolute morons be able to sit at a table with somebody who voted differently than you or likes films that are different than the films you're you like or they love golf and you love poker viva la difference what is wrong with you people that you can't even sit and talk about things

SPEAKER_00: that are important with people you disagree with it's a it's a road to disaster if you cannot maintain civil discourse or even uncivil discourse with a group of people who are different than you

SPEAKER_63: it's so insidious it's like such a it's everywhere in society but it's in silicon valley too and that's just so it's ridiculous because that's not what's like silicon valley is about differences they

SPEAKER_89: literally like there was like this overton window and like from one side the republicans were like here's a piece of plywood they put a piece of plywood and then the the left people were like on the inside and they're like oh you put plywood on the overton window they just put their plywood on the inside so now we got this like overton window that used to be super wide open we could talk about

SPEAKER_00: anything oh yeah what should we have affirmative action should we not like i don't know where i stand on affirmative action in a college should it just be merit-based like this is super complex it's

SPEAKER_89: going to the supreme court none of us know the answer to how admission should work equally does anybody know the answer to that question if we did we wouldn't be sitting here struggling with it so be able to discuss things with people who have a different opinion and then have the humility to be like i don't know how to deal with putin he's a sociopath no he's a dictator like does any of us know

SPEAKER_74: how to deal with putin what's that like if if i were like a if i had if i was very good at

SPEAKER_27: geopolitical strategy like i would i would be doing that but i'm that's not my job and i don't know that

SPEAKER_121: that is not my strength so yeah probably not perfect quick example about this i we were just

SPEAKER_64: visiting we have really good friends from business school who live in dallas and uh one of them is a

SPEAKER_63: uh oil and gas private equity investor and the last few years have just been brutal for him so many of his lps have just been you know their university endowments and they're like well our students you know our constituency banned us from investing in this anymore and uh and the whole time he's and now like

SPEAKER_47: with with russian puni's like yeah i mean it's a lot better our world runs on oil and gas still like yeah it'd be great if it was sustainable but but wouldn't you rather get the oil and gas from america than putin like it's so short-sighted what people have been doing yeah all right listen everybody follow

Chamath Palihapitiya: ben everybody all david great conversations let's have more of them on the more difficult subjects we'll

SPEAKER_01: see you over at the acquired fm feed with molly set it up uh nick let's go let's keep these conversations going all right boys i'll talk to you soon take care david take care ben all right everybody lon is here for this week and streaming molly is on vacation we got to start with the dropout

SPEAKER_294: let's talk the dropout yeah it's over this is the eighth episode it's over it's done that was done

SPEAKER_00: my perception was they took their time up to episode seven and then episode eight was just like so much happened in such a short compressed period of time whirlwind yeah it was a whirlwind on a storytelling basis was the whirlwind something that you liked about the eighth episode or do you feel like they should have opened it up to eight nine ten or do you feel third option like they compressed it and then if they i think they're doing season two they could go back and expand you know

SPEAKER_01: they're going to do season two did you hear i think she said amanda seyfried said she wanted to do season two there's no way they're not doing a season two because balwanis we have to hear the

SPEAKER_560: end of the ball i mean there's there's more story to tell they could keep going for sure i i like the

SPEAKER_561: finale i mean it does feel like once that you know this is where it all gets away from her and like right by the beginning of this episode the forces have sort of aligned against her and it's one thing after

SPEAKER_563: the other and they sort of have that moment where it seems like they get away you know the the story

SPEAKER_565: comes out the board agrees to stick with her and there's this kind of eye of the storm moment where it's like oh maybe we got out and then immediately after that medicare comes in and shuts down the lab

SPEAKER_561: and it's it's over for real uh and i i like that i felt like it it captured how it must have felt for her where one moment she's still interviews and top of the world and billionaire and genius elizabeth

SPEAKER_563: homes and then literally the next minute her own lawyer is like i'm leaving you can't afford to pay

SPEAKER_01: me anymore you know we were never such a good observation about the dropout and how they did the storytelling which is it might actually they may have made the editorial decision that frauds take a long

SPEAKER_00: time to be discovered and it's a long slow process investigative journalism and the fraud builds and you're covering up mistakes with more fraud but then when there is a tipping point the plane falls from

SPEAKER_01: the sky right and this was the plane like is soaring to all new heights and everybody's like there's

SPEAKER_00: something wrong with this plane there's something rattling it seems like it's off course or whatever and then boom the engine blows and it is in a descent and a free fall that it is not going to get after

SPEAKER_204: and the john carrie roo story yeah is that slow burn i felt like i could watch just the john carrie roo

SPEAKER_562: story for eight episodes it left me wanting more that right and i think that they did a narratively i

SPEAKER_561: don't know how realistic this is but narratively they they had this great moment of it's that one interview it's that tv interview she does where she can't really answer anything and she doesn't seem sorry and she just keeps repeating that she's devastated because that was the line that they gave her like oh you know really hit this in a humane way that you're devastated and that's the moment i think everybody sees that and re that's the moment where it sinks in for george joltz and for david boyser or boise or whoever like when he just like he's pieces out he just leaves yeah he's like oh it's

SPEAKER_565: over she can't she can't convince anybody like this is it it's all going to collapse around her and

SPEAKER_204: we're gone my favorite scene and then i'll get yours was the them coaching her on how to apologize and it's sort of like a pairing of her asperger's like qualities again i don't want to diagnose i don't know if she's been formally diagnosed but they were i mean all but saying it that this person has the inability to communicate like a normal human and she says i'm different that there were like two or three scenes where that came to play the one is she can't apologize and she keeps saying i was devastated i was just it was devastating right but she can't say i'm sorry and everybody around her is just like is it so difficult for you to just say you're sorry then there's another scene with balwani where she reveals oh yeah you you dated me when i was very young didn't you right and and he's like well i have all these emails and then she's like well i was barely 18. kind of insinuating you know this svengali um kind of how badly this could play for him

SPEAKER_561: like you know all of these scenes of like if you look at it from this perspective yes i can make you

SPEAKER_565: look very bad and and leave you sort of holding the bag for a lot of this yes the rashma moment and then

SPEAKER_00: there's the final moment where she's just like i got a dog and a boyfriend and she's under the cover

SPEAKER_01: and she's i think they're kind of insinuating maybe she's on molly and she's kind of like living her best childhood again which she gave up well she's going to burning man so those are my three scenes but

SPEAKER_508: you riff on those of what you loved about the last episode i was going to pick the bit with her and

SPEAKER_561: mikaela watkins early in the it was the the lawyer she was the head lawyer for theranos earlier in the

SPEAKER_563: episode they have this great moment with them where she goes you know you've really become a good friend and you can see i don't have friends right in mikaela watkins face you can see she doesn't

SPEAKER_561: think of this person as friend they've been spending all this time together because she's in devastating legal trouble not because they're hitting it off and getting along and uh interesting that this episode of we work which you may not get time to today also plays around with this idea of like these people don't really understand what friendship is it's always every relationship is transactional yes and there is no like real friendship there it's just what can this what can this person do for me or get me or reflect for me or give me so there's that early scene and then later when mikaela watkins doesn't even work there anymore and she's just saying a ruper murdoch sold

SPEAKER_565: all of his shares for a dollar you should get ready to go to bankruptcy court oh can you do that for

SPEAKER_561: me and she's like i don't work for you anymore this is my friend and like no this is somebody you

SPEAKER_565: screwed over this is an employee who is counting on you who's now out on their ass and like uh i thought that the the the i don't know if that really happened but the tension of that scene like the way that they personified everything that was going on in two people i thought was really

SPEAKER_563: good where she's literally chasing her out of the theranos office and into her her and it shows i love

SPEAKER_196: your point about the inability to form actual relationships and also sociopaths and narcissists do

SPEAKER_204: not care about the fallout around them and that is the tension of what's happening in uh the dropout is she actually does not care she got a dog she got a boyfriend she's on to the next thing right and

SPEAKER_61: the lawyer and this is a lawyer who's defending a sociopath so she's of moral questionable authority

SPEAKER_517: already yeah and even the lawyer who's defending a sociopath is like you hurt people like these are real people like what the is wrong with you this is an attorney who was trying to you know screw

SPEAKER_605: over the widow and the person who committed suicide over this that's how cutthroat she is and even she

SPEAKER_608: has been pushed to the breaking point i was waiting in george's bathroom to ambush his grandson i mean

SPEAKER_609: yes he was cutthroat yeah this is like darth vader being like dude that's dark yeah why would you do that

SPEAKER_561: i mean it really it's interesting too where it plays with the idea of what it means by the dropout because the whole the whole series you're thinking of well she dropped out of stanford to start this

SPEAKER_563: company but it's really the ability to just move on you know like i'm doing this this was the thing oh

SPEAKER_01: it's not working we try the next thing and the delusional speech she gives on the way out which is like they tried to stop us they're just not ready for true innovation it's like or you're a sociopath

SPEAKER_00: who surrounded yourselves with sociopaths and you could have done this completely differently uh absolute uh great storytelling yeah uh liz merriweather is the show's creator and she uh amanda seyfried is lobbying to do number two but the quote from liz i would love to work with her and all the

SPEAKER_01: people who worked on the show again but the story has gone as far as i want to go with it which means

SPEAKER_617: okay let's let another creator do it hand it off i mean we we've heard a lot of stuff like that often

SPEAKER_565: before and then so like white lotus when that was it was like this is a one-off thing we're not gonna

SPEAKER_563: and now they're coming back for season two they keep saying mayor of east town who knows maybe they'll do

SPEAKER_561: another one i wouldn't say that's the negotiation right it's a negotiation i wouldn't say definitely not i would say let's see you know show me the money more weeks and then let's see what happens with the case i mean does sonny balwani end up going to jail are there more developments what do you think

SPEAKER_294: just based on what we saw on the show let's assume the show is pretty close to reality

SPEAKER_00: right based on the show what is the proper sentence we are not judges we know nothing about the legal

SPEAKER_34: system yeah i don't know we did watch this series on a moral or ethical basis who is more culpable

SPEAKER_561: balwani or homes i mean it seems pretty similar to me right like it i know i was reading about his big argument i think they mentioned this show is that he didn't draw a salary like well i wasn't there was no profit i wasn't profiting so how could it be me doing a fraud and i think that honestly like as you know shifty and semantic and argument as that is i think there is something there it wasn't his company he was on a very core level helping this other person out yes and it was her thing and she was the one taking all of the accolades and i'm the ceo and i'm the founder and i'm the billionaire genius and the steve jobs so on that level she's setting herself up as the figurehead but they they're

SPEAKER_598: definitely both cold i don't think either of them should get away uh scot-free but you tilt if you would tilt a little bit more blame on the ceo makes sense yeah like the i mean it's just kind

SPEAKER_561: of a buck stops here sort of thing like she was in the position to when he's like hey maybe we should crack open these siemens machines and look inside yeah she said absolutely not we wouldn't know why

SPEAKER_565: would we do that we're amazing company we need to make our own technology you know like yes there was that moment when she could have done that and she did not yeah yes there were ample moments for her

SPEAKER_61: to stop the fraud and in fact the show shows her contemplating stopping the fraud right and i mean

SPEAKER_641: i think this goes even one look beyond just fraud i mean fraud is bad don't do fraud it's a criminal

SPEAKER_561: offense for a reason but i think this goes even beyond financial fraud because it's medical records i mean it's like as they said in the end people giving incorrect cancer diagnoses aids diagnoses uh misdiagnosing a miscarriage i mean these this is very serious this is people's health it's very serious and what

SPEAKER_236: a great show they have to have to have to do a second season the best thing i've seen on hulu

SPEAKER_645: since dope sick i don't know i like dope sick as well a lot of good stuff on hulu these days atlanta

SPEAKER_204: season three of atlanta on hulu right now you know i didn't watch season two which i heard was an artistic tour de force i love season one you know it's just very hard for me to keep up with this and we will be back with lon next week to go over uh with molly we crashed uh which is on episode five and we'll have episodes five and six if you want to catch up and then we're going to start severance

SPEAKER_01: the band stiller so we're going to keep doing this every thursday and we'll start severance i am on episode i'm just starting episode two so if you want to catch up with us i think maybe we'll do

SPEAKER_649: three episodes of severance uh well severance is ending tomorrow the finale so maybe we'll do two or

SPEAKER_651: three episodes so yeah i think as many as you can as many episodes seven episodes total in the first

SPEAKER_01: season all right so maybe we break it into three weeks so we'll do like three episodes three episodes two episodes that would be a good way to do it okay we'll see you all next time bye bye thanks lon

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