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SPEAKER_02: Today's episode of This Week in Startups is brought to you by GoToMeeting. Sign up for GoToMeeting using promo code START to begin your free trial. And MailChimp. Manage a list with up to 2,000 subscribers and send 12,000 emails per month for free with MailChimp.

SPEAKER_05: Hello, everybody. Hello, everybody. Welcome to This Week in Startups. It's our news roundtable edition. Thomas McNerney is with us.

SPEAKER_07: He is a famous angel investor extraordinaire and Michael Robertson of mp3.com fame and of now dar.fm fame. Really outspoken, hyper-intelligent guy, serial entrepreneur.

SPEAKER_05: Tyler Crowley promises me an insight or at least an NPR voice impersonation. And the Sassy. Karen Caglia is with us to read the news. Sassy is with us.

SPEAKER_10: Let's do it. Come on.

SPEAKER_14: It's what it's all about, man. They said, money is the root of all evil.

SPEAKER_15: What? Funny how it feeds my people. Yeah. We ain't gonna live like equals until we get the money, spend the money, and defeat you. Yeah. Money is the root of all evil. What? Funny how it feeds my people. Yeah. We ain't gonna live like equals until we get the money, spend the money, and defeat you.

SPEAKER_04: Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. Welcome to This Week in Startups, the program where we

SPEAKER_05: talk about making things that change the world, being entrepreneurs, and I'm really working. I think I'm gonna start my religion. You know, I saw the movie The Master, which wasn't that great. Weren't you raving about it on Twitter, no?

SPEAKER_22: I was raving about wanting to see it because I'm an L. Ron Hubbard, like absolutely fascinated with L. Ron Hubbard. I sort of feel like that's my third act.

SPEAKER_26: And everybody's nervously laughing right now because it seems so believable.

SPEAKER_28: But yeah, I think I want to start a religion based on entrepreneurship and being responsible

SPEAKER_07: and actually making the world a better place and not being so goddamn handicapped.

SPEAKER_29: The startups are not that entirely different from religions, are they? Apple is a good example.

SPEAKER_32: They're not. And the idea of wanting to create and the fact of creation and changing and making

SPEAKER_22: things better for our fellow humans, I think it's a pretty high order calling. And with me, Michael Robertson, speaking of high order calling, he's a guy who believes in individual responsibility. We have a lot of great tweets back and forth. Michael, welcome back to the program. How are you?

SPEAKER_41: Thanks, Jason. And absolutely, you should start your own religion, if for nothing else, for the better tax treatment.

SPEAKER_28: That's a very good point, actually. I think I could beat Mitt Romney. Mitt Romney's paying, what, negative 13% tax? I'd like to get to negative 26%. I think the

SPEAKER_05: ultra-wealthy should just be given 10. This would be a part of my pitch. The ultra-wealthy should get 10% back from the poor for creating the jobs. It'd be like 110% tax rate. Michael's behind me.

SPEAKER_07: And, of course, you're working on dar.fm. And then you made that really cool interface. What was that

SPEAKER_46: interface where you can just type in your email address and get the audio file? Because that worked really well for me.

SPEAKER_48: Right. Well, we just launched UberTalk.

SPEAKER_49: Right. And that's a cloud radio guide of every show that you can listen to on radio right now.

SPEAKER_51: And this worked really well for me. Check this out. You go in here and you're like, oh, I like fresh air.

SPEAKER_07: You click, you want to record fresh air. And then all you have to do is type in your email. So I type in, like, steep decline at gmail.

SPEAKER_53: Really nice interface, by the way, Robert. And this is, like, so much better than the dar.fm interface because it's so simple.

SPEAKER_55: So now you'll get an email. I just emailed it to you. Now you're going to get an email with fresh air.

SPEAKER_57: Tyler Crowley's favorite program. Yes. And today on NPR, Tyler Crowley with us, talking about humane tea leaf curation.

SPEAKER_59: Welcome back to the program.

SPEAKER_61: Thank you, Jason. Today we're drinking Adagio's famous Sencha green tea.

SPEAKER_32: Now, no tea plants were actually harmed. These are cruelty-free harvesting of the tea leaves. Yes, they are. And so explain that process of how you can cut the tea leaves without the tea tree and bush crying.

SPEAKER_61: Right. Well, it's with a special pair of scissors. Right. Right. And these are certified cruelty-free. Certified cruelty-free scissors. Of course. Yeah. It's a very intricate process. The gloves themselves are organic cotton. Free trade. Yes, free trade cotton. Right. Yes. And the denim that the workers wear is also...

SPEAKER_30: And every pair of denim they're wearing, one goat receives also denim pants. A pair of pants, correct? A pair of pants. That's right. And the Republicans are trying to stop you.

SPEAKER_67: Mitt Romney said he wanted to kill all the goats and give all moms cancer. I think that's what I read last.

SPEAKER_68: Anyway, that's all right.

SPEAKER_28: Anyway, very cool. I like this UberTalk. Everybody check out ubertalk.com. It's really tight, and it worked for me.

SPEAKER_05: And what's really interesting, Michael, is you can get an RSS feed of what you subscribe to

SPEAKER_70: and then put that into your iTunes, and that's the ultimate hack, because then your phone is constantly syncing that, right?

SPEAKER_35: That's right. That's right. But, hey, I have a different site for you, because you're on the political vein. I want you to go to taxballoon.com.

SPEAKER_38: This is also one of my little inventions, taxballoon.com.

SPEAKER_74: Taxballoon.com. That's a good name. Wait, wait. Like a balloon of tax? There you go.

SPEAKER_77: Okay. So T-A-X-B-A-L-O-N?

SPEAKER_78: Double L.

SPEAKER_77: Double L, double L. Oh, right. Double L, double L. Okay, I got it. I got you. Entry zip code. How much would tax come up in 2013? All right. 9-0-2-3-2. Very good. Very good. I think we know where you are. Oh, adjusted gross income. This is Tyler Crowley.

SPEAKER_22: He's going to make $42,000 next year. I know that. And he's a renter. Wow. Look at that. It actually calculates how much your tax is going to go up. Interesting. Oh, the Obamac tax is in there, too. Obamacare. Sure. And the increase for California is crazy. Wow, that's very interesting. Everybody check our tax balloon. Thomas MacNerny is with us. How are you, Thomas?

SPEAKER_80: Good, good.

SPEAKER_22: Serial angel investor. Of course, clout was the angel investment that everybody made fun of you for for the first year. And now for the last year, everybody is trying to buy your shares off you in the secondary market.

SPEAKER_83: Better lucky than good.

SPEAKER_22: It's been pretty amazing, isn't it, the clout run?

SPEAKER_83: Yeah, it's been fun.

SPEAKER_28: From zero to hero. It's unbelievable. They just got this Microsoft deal we were talking about the other week. Yeah. And now they're going to be informing Microsoft search results. Right. And Google, where's Google in all of this? How come Google is just ignoring clout? And how come Twitter is ignoring clout? And then Microsoft's embracing them?

SPEAKER_86: Well, I think it's early for Google. I think Microsoft, in fairness, is being pretty aggressive with Bing because they have some catching up to do. Yeah. But they are doing it. And they're there.

SPEAKER_88: And it's clever. And I think they're thinking a lot about how social and search come together. Yeah. That's cool.

SPEAKER_07: Which is why Google launched Google Plus, right? They want to get those social signals into the search engine. So we'll talk about that a little bit more in the program. But congratulations on... I mean, that one angel investment pays for all the previous angel investments you've ever done, correct? At this point? Probably, yeah. By two or three? We'll see. If you were to exit, I'm saying, based on what we know about the valuation today, if you were to exit today, it would pay for all of your angel investments to date times two or three?

SPEAKER_92: I think so, yeah.

SPEAKER_53: You'd know so, and you're smiling, so it's probably a 5X. Hey, Kieran Calley is with us, the sexy, sultry voice of Kieran Calley. What happened? Now I'm suddenly getting a following on Twitter. I'm bringing it just for you, Jason.

SPEAKER_97: Just for you and all those fabulous listeners out there.

SPEAKER_100: And somebody is hitting on Twitter.

SPEAKER_54: Wow. Yeah, the sassy. There are a lot of people that listen by audio only, like a huge percentage of the audience.

SPEAKER_05: That's why we're working so much for making the audio quality perfect and buying these expensive microphones.

SPEAKER_29: To the degree that I get recognized by my voice at parties.

SPEAKER_28: Yeah, people are like, oh, have an insight for us? I was actually at Disneyland, and my mom said, oh, you know, this is like having a Disneyland app.

SPEAKER_102: You know, it's like having a wheelchair at Disneyland, like Tyler says.

SPEAKER_67: I said, yes, that is an insight from Tyler. Hey, here's an insight for you. Get MailChimp.

SPEAKER_70: We just used the MailChimp API for the launch ticker, correct? That is correct. It's amazing. And now, instead of you having to cut and paste all the...

SPEAKER_106: Oh, man, don't even talk to me about how horrible that process was. Right.

SPEAKER_107: So we used to have to cut and paste all the news stories in the launch ticker, put them into

SPEAKER_28: MailChimp, and that would take five, ten, fifteen minutes. Yep. Even longer. Okay, let's say twenty minutes. And now, so that's pretty fast, actually, to create an email campaign. But when you have to do it five, six times a day to 4,000 people, we said, hey, we should

SPEAKER_108: probably automate this. So we had Jonas, who's our super developer, super developer Jonas, work with the API.

SPEAKER_70: And now, we click, like, three or four buttons, and it just gets sent. We don't even have to log into MailChimp, right?

SPEAKER_109: Well, we do, just to choose the audience and, you know, just to... Oh, if you want to choose who you're going to send it to.

SPEAKER_112: Right, and just to make sure that every fine little thing is in place.

SPEAKER_05: Right. But technically, we wouldn't have to. We could just shoot it out, I think, with the API.

SPEAKER_07: But ninety-nine percent of the effort is done, and we went from a twenty-minute process down to... Less than five. Less than five. And that's the kind of automation and speed that the MailChimp API can give you if you're building one of these more sophisticated programs. It's very easy to tap into that API. The documentation is there, and it took Jonas, what, three, four, five days to build the soup

SPEAKER_114: to nuts? Yeah, I was amazed how fast he did.

SPEAKER_115: I thought it was going to be a longer project. I thought that was going to be forever. It was like 48 hours later, it's like, yeah, it's working.

SPEAKER_28: And I was like, wait a second, that saves like three hours of Karen's time a day.

SPEAKER_07: Yeah.

SPEAKER_116: That's pretty awesome.

SPEAKER_07: Hey, thank you, MailChimp, for making a great product, and thank you for providing 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month for free. MailChimp is constantly releasing new and awesome features like we talked about just now. And also, these mobile-friendly email templates are amazing. So when we send a template, it just works if you're going to use it on your iPhone or Android.

SPEAKER_108: They just keep solving these problems and making it part of the existing package, and they keep lowering their costs. It's one of those great things. When a business gets successful like MailChimp, they keep adding features but not raising the price. And that's the ultimate efficiency that's coming to the market today. And that's why we see it becoming easier and easier to create a startup company or to take a small to medium-sized business, make a small one a medium, make a medium one large, and even scale a large to an extraordinarily large one. Because of great tools like the ones provided by MailChimp, drag-and-drop file uploading, and the free plan is always free.

SPEAKER_123: Eee eee eee eee eee eee eee eee eee eee eee eee eee eee eee eee eee eee eee eee eee eee eee MailChimp. Pat Thomas.

SPEAKER_124: Don't make me spit on my teeth.

SPEAKER_125: First story, Karen, go.

SPEAKER_127: All right, our first story. This is something I know is interesting to Jason.

SPEAKER_128: There's quite a heat up going on in same day delivery services.

SPEAKER_129: Cosmo.com is back.

SPEAKER_128: It looks like Cosmo.com is back. A little different this time. We have Walmart now entering the arena. It's going to be doing it just in select cities right now. They're testing it. The interesting thing about Walmart is that they're doing the delivery from their own stores. They're going to be using UPS in every city except San Francisco, San Jose, where they will have their own fleet. The cost is $10 flat for an unlimited number of items and there's no minimum purchase. Now, Amazon is already in a few markets and their deal basically starts at $10.99 for each additional item. Though if you're a Prime member, it's basically just $4 an item. Then on top of that, we have eBay doing eBay now and that's in San Francisco only. So you have to do it through the app and you can get merchandise from Macy's, Target, Toys R Us, Walgreens, a bunch of places. And interestingly, all the reports didn't say how much it was going to cost, but if you look at the screenshots of the app, it says $5. All right. This is getting ridiculous. But then there's also UK-based Shuttle, which raised a bunch of money this week, $3.2 million. UPS is one of their investors.

SPEAKER_134: And the whole idea is that you'll be able to get a purchase delivered from an online purchase within minutes.

SPEAKER_07: And I'm launching a new service, I'm going to announce it today, where you basically take out your iPhone and you say what you want. And then you can just drive and run anywhere and the person chases you down and then they try to catch you.

SPEAKER_136: It's sort of like a game. It's like you're running down the street and they're chasing after you with your Hershey bar. Like, here's your Hershey bar. What's your question?

SPEAKER_138: So I guess the question is who has the advantage here and why?

SPEAKER_07: Well, obviously, Amazon has a huge advantage. What's refreshing about this time around is that you need to mute your Ustream on your computer. Is my Ustream muted now? I did mute it.

SPEAKER_139: I don't have Ustream. Oh, there it is. I'll just turn Ustream off. Sorry about that, guys. Ustream is off.

SPEAKER_07: What's great about it this time around is you remember back in the Silicon Hour reporter days, we would do this joke where we would have Urban Fetch and Cosmo bring us, like, one pack of M&Ms. And, literally, a messenger would come with one king-size pack of M&Ms. They would charge you 99 cents for a king pack of M&Ms. And somebody would be sitting there like some, you know, beat writer. And the, you know, Urban Fetch guy would come in, they raise their hand, they put the package in their hand, and they would eat their M&Ms. I was like, wow, you just cost Urban Fetch $12. And then we would do it all day long to see if we could keep them coming. It was like just us being non-cruelty free. But this time, obviously, people are charging, so it's sustainable, so people learn their lesson. But, Michael, you remember those days of Pink Dot, Urban Fetch, Cosmo.

SPEAKER_140: Why is it going to work the second time around?

SPEAKER_35: Well, I think the only one that's really interesting to me is Amazon, because you need to have a massive inventory. You know, I'm not going to call 20 different services for 20 different little subsets of products.

SPEAKER_38: So I think Amazon has got a shot, because they're already so good at logistics, that I think that one I feel positive about, less so about the newcomer shuttle, who I don't see how they get off the ground, because it's such a monumental task.

SPEAKER_05: Yeah, those guys are toast. This idea, and no offense to the shuttle founders, maybe they got some secret plan, but just being a messenger service, I don't understand why a venture capital firm is hiring a messenger service, or investing in a messenger service, because, as you can see, Amazon and Walmart are baking this into their services as a competitive edge, as a blocking strategy, as a moat strategy, as Google does with their products. They're not making any profit. In fact, they're losing a couple of dollars doing these deliveries. So they're doing it to kill off whatever retail is left. Walmart's doing it to fight themselves from becoming extinct. What room is there for somebody to come in and provide a $4, $8 delivery service, when that's what they have to pay the messenger anyway? There's no profit in there.

SPEAKER_108: I don't know, Thomas, are you long these businesses? And what impact do you think this has on society, and specifically, retail?

SPEAKER_86: Yeah, I mean, I think it's going to be tough for retail, especially for commodity kinds of things, that you know what you're getting, you don't need to go and try it out in the store. I think Walmart may surprise you in terms of, you know, they have a huge footprint. So the reality is Amazon is used to kind of having more centralized distribution, whereas Walmart is quite distributed as it stands, so it might actually do well in this kind of...

SPEAKER_151: That footprint, which was a disadvantage, now becomes an advantage.

SPEAKER_88: I think so, I think so. But look, these are scale businesses. So I think Amazon, Walmart, unless you, as you point out,

SPEAKER_86: unless you have some real specific kind of differentiation, or you're going after some kind of vertical, I just don't see how you do it.

SPEAKER_05: Yeah, and it is pretty interesting. When I was in San Francisco the last time, two or three times during one trip, people were using either TaskRabbit to get coffee. I was at a poker game where, like, somebody takes out TaskRabbit,

SPEAKER_07: and they're like, okay, 20 bucks, you know, get all these, you know, people, you know, $6 lattes or whatever delivered to us by somebody on TaskRabbit, right? Then another time, they were using... What's the other service where you can order, like, any food that everybody uses in San Francisco? Grubhub or something? Somebody's Grubhubbing it, you know? Oh, they're on Grubhub. Boom, boom, boom, boom. And so San Francisco is becoming the future. Like, it's amazing. It's different than any other city. You know, and Uber started this. This all points back to Uber, but now it's becoming like, what services can we make instant?

SPEAKER_108: Every possible service, speed is being taken out of the cost, and you look, I think this is the end, this is the beginning of the end of retail, or the end of the end of retail, perhaps. Right. You know, Walmart, you know, Amazon was sort of the first, Amazon Prime, and now this. You look at the people selling direct, Everlane, Warby...

SPEAKER_160: Warby Parker.

SPEAKER_108: Parker, whoever these knuckleheads are selling glasses for nothing. $99. $99 glasses. We're basically wiping out every retail job will be gone, and so will every retail location.

SPEAKER_46: I don't know what retail locations survive other than showrooms at this point.

SPEAKER_114: Exactly. That's what, I mean, that's the other thing. Best Buy, you know, just yesterday said that they're gonna match their prices to what's online, and they know that people are just coming in and using it as a showroom. I mean, they know that.

SPEAKER_05: But then is there any margin left? And I don't know. I mean, I think this is part of the end of employment.

SPEAKER_07: The end of retail is part of this end of low-end employment, and I think it's gonna be something we're gonna have to get used to as a society.

SPEAKER_46: Michael, are we gonna be faced with double-digit unemployment as we get rid of the bottom 10% of jobs in our society through this kind of efficiency?

SPEAKER_38: No, come on. Technology always makes more jobs, Jason. Come on, an ATM isn't ruining jobs. I know you and Obama think that. But no, here's what happens. Best Buy is eventually gonna wake up from their slumber, and they're gonna turn into a quasi-membership. Here's what I mean. You're gonna have to pay $10 to get in the store, but they'll apply it towards buying something. Kind of like those bars do, you know, where you go to the bar, and they charge you $10, and they go, but you get two drinks. That's what's gonna happen with Best Buy. How else are you going to take advantage and charge people for that showroom that you're becoming?

SPEAKER_05: Yeah, the showroom experience, and there was also this rumor I heard about people that Amazon was gonna launch select showrooms that would be in line with the Apple Store.

SPEAKER_07: In other words, here's the highest end items, the best sellers. So let's have a table here. It's only the four highest rated espresso machines. Here are the four highest rated toaster ovens. Here are the four highest rated TVs. And you go there, you play with them, you have a genius bar type experience. You order it, you leave, it's either delivered to you, but you never have to actually carry, this concept of carrying something to your car will go away. And that makes sense when you're talking about Walmart having to build these local stores, right?

SPEAKER_86: My feeling is it moves and becomes more artisanal, and exactly your point. I mean, I think retail's gonna have to up the bar. You know, I go to a Circuit City or Best Buy, I mean, it's a lousy experience. You can't get a salesperson. It says people are terrible. Terrible. You don't, you know, you're not getting any advantage of being there. Whereas if you go to the Apple Store, I mean, they have the actually relatively smart, trained people. They have the genius bar, the experience is a good one. I think the commodity kinds of products go away. But if I go down to Abbot Kinney here in L.A., in Venice, I don't want a retail, I don't want a Ralph Lauren store.

SPEAKER_07: Right. So it's the return to artisanal, in a way. And that will be the differentiator. Because if you can't compete with Amazon on, you know, a car charger or something, or whoever on a flat panel TV, you can on some artisanal food or some handcrafted artwork or something like that. That will be the differentiator. I kind of agree with that. I think it's a good insight.

SPEAKER_75: Hey, Tom. P.S. Hey, Tom. P.S. Circuit City's been bankrupt for like five years. Just saying.

SPEAKER_05: We just, we like to like, remember the days of going to Circuit City. God, I remember the Wiz in New York. I'm old school. Yeah, yeah. The Wiz. Or Crazy Eddie's. My God. This whole, like, just like these, I think that our kids, just like they will never know a time before smartphones or iPads or email or the internet. Like, they're going to have this, like, very confusing concept of retail. Like, you went to a store? Like, what do we do with all these malls? I think they're all going to be converted into housing or something like that as people move to the cities. They're already, like, some people reclaiming the parking lots and making farms out of them.

SPEAKER_07: I don't buy what Michael was saying. I think Michael was being a little bit facetious, but I really don't think a lot of these jobs are, you know, as we make these things more efficient, you know, you have ten people can make Instagram, which entertains a hundred million.

SPEAKER_05: Like, the amount of people it takes to entertain a lot of people when you have a global frictionless environment.

SPEAKER_07: Gangnam Style is one video that has, you know, delighted and wasted the time of a half billion people now. You just think about that scale. Like, you know, one item, 500 million people. If you look at some TV show on CBS, they've got, you know, a lot more people working on it. Maybe 100, 200, 300 times as many people working on it to get only 2, 3, 4 percent of the audience. Kind of interesting. Next story.

SPEAKER_28: All right, so...

SPEAKER_38: Jason, I can assure you they said the same thing about the tractor when it first came out.

SPEAKER_49: Oh, my God. All those farming jobs lost because of this tractor. So, I got to disagree with you on that one.

SPEAKER_05: But what about the fact that it's becoming so much harder, the jobs that are becoming available because of technology.

SPEAKER_07: Can people get those jobs? You know, people who are 40 or 50 years old, do you realistically think they can be retrained to become HTML5 programmers?

SPEAKER_199: No, I don't. Okay. So then those people...

SPEAKER_38: But you're looking at one... Individually, it creates a lot of harm, right? If you're that obsolete 50-year-old who had a job that is no longer necessary thanks to automation, yeah, that's bad for you. But as a society as a whole, no question, it's positive.

SPEAKER_07: Right, and then, so as a society, how do we deal with those pockets of pain if there's no way for them to reboot their career? What do we do with somebody for the last, whatever, 20 years of gainful employment? Test. Test rabbit. That's it. You know, like, it's literally... This is going to be the sadness. It's like, you know, my dad, at a certain point after he had his businesses, you know, he had a couple of jobs as managers, but then who's going to hire... You know, it was kind of a sad conversation I had with my dad at a certain point, which was like, he told me, like, nobody wants to hire a 60-year-old bartender. He's got 10 years of work he wants to do, but do you want to go to a bar and, you know, hang out with a 60-year-old guy, or do you want to go to a bar and hang out with a 30-year-old girl, or whatever it is, you know?

SPEAKER_05: It's just, society just doesn't need those people, but they have so much more life and so much left to give.

SPEAKER_29: That's the interesting thing is people live a lot longer than when the, you know, the age of retirement at 55, now seems crazy when people are living to be 55.

SPEAKER_208: Unless you're in Greece. Next story.

SPEAKER_138: Okay, so we can move on to the iPad Mini. There were a couple of interesting details that came out this week.

SPEAKER_128: We did hear that it's going to be sold only with Wi-Fi, not with wonderful LTE or anything else. That's got to be wrong. Or even 3G. Now, we did see some interesting photos. You could see the iPad Mini on top of an existing iPad. You could see the lightning connector. Those look pretty convincing. And then, you know, people, of course, are still speculating about the price. We don't know anything about that yet. Now, All Things D did have a story this morning saying that it's looking like there's going to be an event invitation only on October 23rd. They're not going to do a big blowout event like they did in September for the new iPhone 5. So I guess, will the Mini sell better than the iPad 3, which was $3 million in three days? Will its price matter to consumers who are looking at the Kindle Fire and the Nexus 7 at about $200?

SPEAKER_213: What do you think, Thomas?

SPEAKER_86: I mean, you know, Apple is sort of in the great position of being a company that people will buy their products sort of regardless of feature comparison and then a price comparison. Specs are over. Specs are, yeah, for them, right? And so they have to be somewhat relevant, but I think less relevant than other brands. So I think it will do well. I think it's interesting to me to see Apple's product pipeline and sort of how that evolves and are they going to make any sort of game-changing innovations in the next couple of years without Steve.

SPEAKER_179: Yeah, because it seems like now the iPhone 5 seems, okay, we've solved 85% of the smartphone problem.

SPEAKER_07: Yeah. Like it's going to get incrementally better. And this might be an admission that after three versions of the iPad, really the biggest thing we can do innovative-wise is make it a 30% smaller so you can hold it in one hand. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05: We're sort of getting towards the end of the road with the iPad even. But I do think this will be a tremendous success and a lower price point is absolutely necessary. There's absolutely no way. If they do launch a Wi-Fi only, which they do with the original iPad, it's only to get suckers like me to buy it.

SPEAKER_07: Because they've got to have it for the first hundred days and then a hundred days later come out with the LTE one. But you know what? I'm not going to do it this time. I'm going to wait. If it comes out Wi-Fi only, I will wait. Jason Kalkanis is saying that.

SPEAKER_46: No way, man. Not a chance. You're going to have Mahalo buy it, so it's not on your name. I'll probably have to go buy it, but this is going to be much more successful than the iPad.

SPEAKER_07: The iPad is way too expensive for the average consumer who has an iPhone already. If you've already bought an iPhone for, you know, what is the equivalent of $600 or $700 when you unwrap it from the plan, which you are paying for. You have to do the math. You know, an iPad at $600, $700 and to get one at $250, that's a big difference.

SPEAKER_224: Kids don't own iPads unless they own their parents. Rich kids, you know, own their parents' old ones. But even, like I'm not buying my daughter an iPad 3 for $600. I'm giving her the iPad 2 or iPad 1, actually she has.

SPEAKER_07: So, I don't know. What do you think, Michael? iPad 2, iPad Mini, big success?

SPEAKER_227: Well, I think not as big as maybe you're suggesting, because for the first time they've got real competition.

SPEAKER_38: You know, there's no real competition for the iPad. The size, all the features it has, it's stand-alone. But as you get smaller, you know, that Nexus 7, that's a capable product. The Kindle, the variations of Kindle, those are some capable products. So, I think they're going to find a lot more resistance, a lot more competition at the smaller size.

SPEAKER_229: Yeah. You know what? I have to agree with you on that.

SPEAKER_07: I do think it will be a tremendous success, but the Nexus 7, to say it's a capable product is even an understatement. It's $199. It comes with $25 worth of credits in the store, so it makes it essentially a $175 product. And it is buttery and delicious. I don't know why it doesn't have LTE in it or, you know, other stuff. I guess they rushed it out. But it feels solid. And the 7, I prefer the 7-inch to the bigger one. I just don't like the app selection of Android yet. But I think they'll get there, because they're probably 80% of the way there. And actually, their movie selection and their book selection is really nice. Their store is running excellently now. I think their store is getting more innovative than the Apple store in terms of interface. Did you notice in the app store on Google, the Google Play store, it's personalizing?

SPEAKER_05: Your friends like these other apps?

SPEAKER_54: So, like, I'll see Evernote if I don't have Evernote. That's the weird thing about the Apple store, isn't it? That it's not social.

SPEAKER_107: Yeah. I mean, I think if you're going to do app discovery, movie discovery, all that stuff needs to be social.

SPEAKER_07: And that's where Google actually seems to have an advantage over Apple. Apple needs to get their social act together. And I think getting rid of, we talked about it before, getting rid of paying might have been a mistake, because unless they're going to come up with something else.

SPEAKER_237: I think they should buy Path. I think those guys get social, that would be a great fit.

SPEAKER_07: I don't think Dave's selling. Unless they made Dave, like, chief software officer or something, I don't see him selling. He's having too much fun. And I was having a private conversation with him on text just the other day. And the growth is good. And I think he's really happy with where he's at and where the product is. And also, he made a ton of money. A guy probably made, I'm going to guess, he came close to nine figures or more on the Facebook sale, even at a half price discount haircut. So why would he sell? To get another $100 million or $50 million from Apple doesn't change his life. But making Path into something that's better than Facebook, I think that does change his life, because he's playing for ego and legacy. And playing for legacy is a lot more powerful than playing for a short dollar.

SPEAKER_75: Hey, Jason, I think one of the most interesting aspects is the Lightning connector.

SPEAKER_38: From what I read, there's actually an encryption chip in there. Yeah. You know, why did they go to Lightning? It seems to me that it was for one reason and one reason only, and that is to basically take control of the third party peripheral connector market. Yeah. Because they literally put a chip in there that people are trying to reverse engineer. But if you don't reverse engineer that chip, you can't make Lightning compatible connectors, adapters, decks, etc. I heard it. I think that's a fascinating move by Apple to try to make more money from the add-on market.

SPEAKER_07: Yeah, that does mean if they did, if that, you know, they are doing that and somebody says they've hacked it already. Yeah, I heard it. But I don't know if it's actually hacked or not. So I don't know if I buy it. But somebody said the Lightning connector has been hacked. We'll see, you know. I think that's correct. And that shows at their end of the life cycle. If they're looking to the peripherals as being the place where they make their money,

SPEAKER_05: that could also signal like, hmmm. Which means they have to get the Apple TV. They have to make a TV. And glasses.

SPEAKER_224: Or glasses or wearables or something. It has to be some transformative product or not. I mean, maybe they just keep lowering the price of the iPhone, have more options on the iPhone and they just build a bigger and bigger base. Either way, I'm very low on Apple stock.

SPEAKER_07: If they don't ever release another product, literally if they don't release another product and they just make their laptops, desktops, iPhones and tablets, they're going to continue to grow as a company. Because they only have a small fraction of market share. Very small fraction of market share. Even now. The tablet, they have a large percentage on a small base. On the phone, they have a moderate percentage on a huge and growing base. So there's so much more left. But they will have downward price pressure. Hey, let me tell you about GoToMeeting. That's how we're getting Michael on the line in that beautiful HD faces. Citrix GoToMeeting. This is a product. I literally logged into it just yesterday and I saw all the meetings that have lined up. I got like 10 meetings lined up. It keeps your whole schedule in GoToMeeting. So it's like, oh wow, look, there's the other meetings I saw on my schedule that people are booking. I use it day in and day out. Why? Because it works. And I was doing this call with somebody who was showing me this product. What's it called? Vocus. There's a product called Vocus that I saw. My PR people were like, hey, this Vocus thing is pretty cool. Check out Vocus. So I said, ah, check that out. But I don't want to take a meeting with people from Vocus, right? I'm too important for that. I want to know somebody who's their client, right? So I said, hey, anybody use Vocus? Somebody ping me.

SPEAKER_05: I use Vocus. I said, how long have you been using it for? He said, over a year. I said, great. Will you show it to me? He said, yeah. Boom. We set up GoToMeeting. And then I just handed him the presentation. I said, log in and show me how you use it. Show me how you work. And for like half an hour, he walked me through how they've used the products, all the hacks. This was one of the most productive conversations I've had in a couple of months. He just gave me his whole PR playbook, how they find the journals, how to do it, all through GoToMeeting. And if I hadn't been able to just flip, hand over the thing, then I logged in myself and showed him what I was working on.

SPEAKER_108: And we were doing this like dueling banjos, handing back and forth control of the meeting. GoToMeeting works flawlessly. And it works on Mac, PC, iPad. And these are all free apps. I use it all the time.

SPEAKER_07: You want to go to GoToMeeting and use the promo code START. The promo code START. Let me tell you something. Meeting is believing. If you use it for a meeting, you will believe like I do. You will be a believer in the power of Citrix GoToMeeting. Thank you to my friends at Citrix and I concur. Meeting is believing. Hit the try it free button and use the promo code START. S-T-A-R-T. Very important that you do that. And if you've already signed up and you want to be a mensch and you want to just show them some love, go ahead to Twitter and just say thank you at GoToMeeting for making independent media like this week in Startups possible. Next story.

SPEAKER_114: All right. So Eric Schmidt was on stage the other night with Eric Swisher and Walt Mossberg. 92nd Street Y.

SPEAKER_258: Yes.

SPEAKER_114: Okay. He had a very interesting conversation and one of the things that came out, of course, was that he said he would be interested in, you know, getting Twitter in their search results again. They would talk to Yahoo about a search deal. Other tidbits, they won't give Motorola advantage over Samsung in terms of hardware. And they're talking to car manufacturers about putting the driverless technology in them.

SPEAKER_134: And, you know, given the choice between being CEO of either Amazon, Facebook or Apple, he would choose Apple because, frankly, it had the most cash.

SPEAKER_262: Did he laugh when he said that? Was that a joke?

SPEAKER_110: You know, I was listening to the stream and I think, you know, he didn't really want to answer the question, but it was Cara who posed it to him and she pushed it a little more. And he did come out and say, well, you know, I've always respected Apple and, you know, knowing Steve and that sort of thing.

SPEAKER_115: I think that's the worst thing a former CEO can say. Yeah. He gave a big F you to your past team and he's still the chairman of Google. Well, Google wasn't one of his choices in that. Listen to me.

SPEAKER_268: Oh, I see.

SPEAKER_115: Right.

SPEAKER_137: He was given the choice between Facebook, Amazon and Apple. Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_269: That's different. That's different. So, you know, you have to say, see, when you get that question, you have to refuse to answer. You got to be like a filibustering president.

SPEAKER_07: You're like, listen, I respect all those companies, but there's no company I want to, you know, be in charge of other than Google.

SPEAKER_108: They're not even close to the opportunity Google has. They say, no, no, seriously, but putting Google aside, if Google didn't exist, which one? You say, listen, I can't answer that because I know all the stuff that's going on at Google that I can't talk about. And it's so amazing that really what Apple and Facebook are pursuing is nice, but it's nowhere near the level of what Google has in terms of opportunity. That's how you answer that question. That was a big F you, unintentionally, obviously, to his team and to Larry Page. And he probably had to go back and, you know, tell everybody, like, listen, I didn't, I shouldn't have answered that question. I should have answered it like Jason said.

SPEAKER_273: You never say something like that. You never say something like that. That's like, that would be the equivalent of like, hey, if you weren't married to your wife, of these three, of your wife's three best friends, which one would you rather be married to?

SPEAKER_05: If your wife ever asked you that question, you just can't answer it. I'm not interested in any of those women. Your three friends, your three sisters, your three cousins, whatever they, you know, three supermodels, no, not interested. No, I can't answer the question. I'm sorry. I just, I can't think of anybody but you, baby. You don't answer that question.

SPEAKER_128: All right, Jason. So the CEO question aside, is Yahoo or Twitter search deal more likely, do you think? And is Larry a better CEO than Eric was?

SPEAKER_279: That's a great question for Michael Robertson. Go ahead, Michael. What do you think? Larry or Eric?

SPEAKER_49: Michael Jordan or Oscar Robertson. Come on. That's a silly conversation to have. You know, they're very different. They're both extraordinarily capable. So, I mean, talk to me in five years. You know, we'll see about Larry in five years.

SPEAKER_05: Yeah. I mean, I think that's right. And also, who is the right CEO at the right time? That's the right player. There you go. And that's really how, you know, when you look at this, they needed Eric Schmidt early on because in that day, back in 2000, Thomas, you were around during these times, Wall Street didn't take product people seriously. If you had a product person in charge of a company, they immediately thought of Apple. Pre-Facebook. Well, no. Pre-Apple's comeback. Yeah. They thought if you put a product person, it was like putting Steve Jobs in charge instead of Steve Ballmer, instead of, you know, a business person, instead of Bill Gates.

SPEAKER_07: So they didn't look at Bill Gates as a product person, they looked at him as a business person. Because Bill Gates' success was based on a couple of key deals. Not really technological innovation. He cribbed most of the technology they did from basic to Windows to everything. But when Steve Jobs became Steve Jobs 2.0 and he actually could produce killer products that then drove the market as opposed to killer deals that drove the market, that's when, you know, Larry's the right guy now. Eric was the right guy then. Larry was the wrong guy then. Eric's the wrong guy now. Because people want to make the analogy between Steve Jobs 2.0 and everybody else's in the market. And that's why you see this founder product bias. If you can't speak about the product. And that's why Marissa got the job at Yahoo, not, you know, other people who would have, you know, Scott Thompson, who was in charge. Terrible choice because she's a business wonky guy. Nobody respected his product jobs. Everybody, whether it's true or not, or, you know, and I guess some people will debate it, they look at Marissa as a great product person. Somebody who makes great product. I happen to know she does make great product and she cares and she understands product.

SPEAKER_77: So, yeah. Anyway, what do you think, Thomas? How's the world changed? I mean, this is, it's really a big, it's a different world, isn't it?

SPEAKER_86: Yeah, I think you're right that at the time, Eric had the maturity and experience and, you know, to run a company that ended up being a public company. I think those guys were able to, you know, both Larry and Sergey were able to play the right roles. I think Larry's going to be a great CEO. I think Google is the most, one of the most interesting companies around. They're super innovative. I think they got a lot of room. Last time I was on the show, you mentioned the value of YouTube. That's sort of, you know, kind of hidden. I mean, I think they have a lot of great technology and assets that are, you know, kind of under the water that people don't necessarily think about.

SPEAKER_286: Yeah, people just don't get how, what a juggernaut YouTube. If you, if you told me right now I could own either asset, YouTube or Facebook, I would take YouTube.

SPEAKER_287: Sure, sure, I get it.

SPEAKER_05: I think it's a bigger play.

SPEAKER_86: And I think, you know, they need credit for catching up on Android. I mean, you know, Apple, when the iPhone came out, I played with it for a minute and went online and bought Apple stock. I mean, to me, it was such a game changer in the fact that Google could come back and that Android is a...

SPEAKER_07: Yeah, and take the majority of market share with Android, whether they don't really control it the way Apple does, they don't control the ecosystem, but they do have number one in market share.

SPEAKER_293: That's incredible. From a zero, from a cold start. Yeah. That's pretty impressive.

SPEAKER_295: Well, Jason, just one point. I know back in the old days, it was fairly common for a founder to kind of get pushed out at a certain point for, you know, a mature, you know, wise business person who actually would run a business while, you know, a young founder just wanted to go build something.

SPEAKER_297: And so he could go off and do that again. Or she. Or she.

SPEAKER_229: Yeah.

SPEAKER_07: I think they, that was the model previously, you know, push out the founder, make them chief product officer and put in a, you know, a more seasoned CEO who could scale the business. But now what people are realizing is like, you can buy people who can scale a business, but you can't buy product visionary.

SPEAKER_05: That's like one in a million. Well, one in about 10,000. Scale people? God, every year, Harvard graduates and Stanford graduates. How many MBAs who understand scale? There's so many of them. They're just like, scale's a dime a dozen.

SPEAKER_07: Whereas, you know, product dog race, you know, if you have to go up against Dave Morin on a path, or Ev Williams with medium, you know, and his track record, or Jack Dorsey with Square.

SPEAKER_53: I mean, you just look across the product landscape. I mean, the people who make product today are just so good at it. I mean, so focused.

SPEAKER_86: The best tech companies are founder-led, right? Apple, Google, Microsoft, Oracle. Facebook. Facebook. All of those companies are founder-led. Yeah.

SPEAKER_304: Yahoo?

SPEAKER_86: Not so much. Well.

SPEAKER_139: AOL? Not so much. Yeah. You know, those things are suffering. Next story.

SPEAKER_128: Okay. So we were just talking about Jack. Well, we all know Jack has officially stepped back from Twitter. That came out in a New York Times profile of Dick Costolo, in fact. And then Jack felt the need to correct the record, if you will, and say that this is actually something that had been planned all along. And he gave his direct reports back in January already.

SPEAKER_114: And he's only at Twitter on Tuesdays and focusing on Square now. So, you know, Sarah Lacey, she quickly accused him of revising history, pointing out he had told Fortune this was a long-term plan. She also had her own sources. And she just kind of had a more general attitude that you can't do two companies at the same time. So can an entrepreneur ever run two companies at the same time? And do you think Square suffered while Jack was away?

SPEAKER_07: Well, an entrepreneur can run two companies if they have a great team. So Steve did it with Pixar and Apple. Jack did it with Square and Twitter. Elon Musk is doing it.

SPEAKER_310: You can do it. Not sustainable, though. That's...

SPEAKER_07: Yeah. I mean, I think there's an expiration date on... And it depends. You know, if you're... Launch, as an example, launch, like I've contained that. I'm not trying to make that into SpaceX. I'm trying to make it something boutique-y while, you know, mahalo slash inside.com is the big thing. And so, I mean, yeah. But I think Sarah probably has... It's probably more right than anybody in this situation that there's some revisionist history. And if things had gone really well, probably Jack would still be doing it. But maybe there was some tension over, hey, this person's not here that often. It's all different. Everybody could have a different view of the same situation. And that's what typically happens here. And it's a delicate situation because they need Jack involved because he is the face of Twitter and the creator of it. But, you know, you can't have somebody there part-time and splitting time. So it's a very delicate situation. And a lot of the stuff they're doing is probably more Dick Costolo is doing and less Jack-esque, if I can use a word. So, like, the cutting off the developers and moving towards, you know, this sort of hardcore approach Twitter-staking. I bet you Jack doesn't buy into, you know, heart and soul. So there's probably a little bit of tension over that.

SPEAKER_224: And these guys have done a good job of just smoothing it over and controlling the press. And Sarah is probably stirring the pot a little bit with good information.

SPEAKER_110: Oh, yeah, no, she had a very public back and forth with Jack Dorsey over Twitter.

SPEAKER_114: And I actually put that in the ticker. You can just read it for yourself. I mean, you know, he was definitely, you know, not giving in on what she said.

SPEAKER_297: And she said, you know, I can go dig up the sources right now. I mean, everything's out. You know, you can't pretend we don't know.

SPEAKER_313: What do you think, Michael? You run two companies concurrently. You've done it before.

SPEAKER_38: Yeah, and it wasn't a good experience. So my inclination is that, you know, two companies. I mean, it's hard enough to run one, you know. So I'm with you on this one.

SPEAKER_315: Yeah, yeah. What do you think, Michael?

SPEAKER_173: It's just incredibly hard. I mean, maybe for a time, you think about Steve and Pixar and Apple.

SPEAKER_86: And, you know, you could argue with Pixar, maybe you want a little bit of Steve. Too much Steve is too much Steve. So maybe that's the other time.

SPEAKER_313: Yeah, yeah. Too much Steve in a creative place like Pixar could just make everybody creative leave and cry. Right.

SPEAKER_224: Which they did have to throttle, I think, Steve at Pixar to make sure he wasn't crushing the soul of the creatives. Yeah.

SPEAKER_86: So maybe a little piece of, you know, the magic of Jack and certain product stuff was good.

SPEAKER_321: But yeah, to sustainably, to run it is just too hard.

SPEAKER_224: Also, they're both becoming rocket ships.

SPEAKER_77: So, you know, it's like, you have to, it's one thing if they're, you know, one's a boutique thing and, you know, it's not meant to be huge. You know, if you own a cafe and you're running, you know, an internet company, that's one thing. You know, like your cafe is your side project and your company is your company. But this is a case of, not only that, it's a product person. So then if, it's almost like, well, if he comes up with a great product idea, which company gets it, you know?

SPEAKER_325: Yeah.

SPEAKER_77: And that's why, I mean, Elon Musk was talking about making a holding company for Elon Musk

SPEAKER_108: companies. So he's becoming such a brand now that SolarCity has filed for IPO. That's right.

SPEAKER_07: You could take just Elon's personal stake in SolarCity, Tesla, and SpaceX and put it in Elon, Inc. And he's also thinking about doing this other project of high-speed tubes, kind of, to shuttle people at, you know, twice the speed of a Concord on the ground, 600-mile-per-hour trains that would get you from New York to San Francisco in half an hour, whatever, 1,000-mile-per-hour. He's like, okay, where does that project go? And I think he's actually got two different, well, he's got two different teams battling it out from two different companies. So who, you know, how does that work? You know, what is his next idea originates?

SPEAKER_05: And a lot of the stuff in manufacturing and SpaceX, I know, informed his decisions about how to manufacture a Tesla. So you have this sort of duality. And I experienced it, too.

SPEAKER_07: A lot of the things I've learned from being the host of this show inform what I'm doing at mahalo-slash-inside.com, if we do wind up using that name, and the launch conference as well. So these things, you're just constantly torn, like, who gets which idea out of my brain?

SPEAKER_86: I mean, Elon is so exceptional. I mean, he's literally, you know, I think the greatest entrepreneur alive, probably.

SPEAKER_224: He's the great, I think, pound-for-pound greatest living entrepreneur. What do you think, Michael? Who's your pound-for-pound best living entrepreneur today?

SPEAKER_227: I'm going to go with that guy who bought Sirius and DirecTV. What's that guy's name?

SPEAKER_38: The old guy? Mel Karmazin? Nah. He's the guy who just took over Sirius.

SPEAKER_330: We loaned him $500 million and got 40% of the company back when they were struggling. What's that guy's name?

SPEAKER_334: Oh, from Charter? Yeah, that's the guy. Older guy.

SPEAKER_49: It'll come to me in a second, and I'm going to cramp. Somebody get on Google.

SPEAKER_46: Yeah, I'm trying to find some, I know who you're talking about, that guy who bought. He's with Liberty.

Chamath Palihapitiya: He owns Liberty Media. Who's the guy in charge of Liberty Media? John Malone. John Malone. There you go. That's my guy. Really? Why?

SPEAKER_339: Just gangster or dealmaker?

SPEAKER_340: Well, I think he's moved between industries.

SPEAKER_38: He's a master of spotting untapped opportunity. Listen, he's way different than Elon. Elon takes nothing to make something, so that's a different core expertise. But with John Malone, that guy makes these huge transactions, huge bets. He bets on stuff that's out of style, and then when it comes back, guy ends up with a few billion in the bank. It's phenomenal to me. I mean, it's a very different style than Elon, and huge respect for Elon, but John Malone's somebody I've watched closely.

SPEAKER_343: Nicknamed Darth Vader by Al Gore because of his ability to do deals according to the Wikipedia, a promising new site out of Boca Raton, Florida.

SPEAKER_344: Next story. All right. You should check it out. You should check it out.

SPEAKER_110: We were talking about Larry earlier. He did top the Fortune 40 under 40 list this year. He knocked Zuck out of the top spot.

SPEAKER_136: Of course. You're comparing Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg is like comparing Michael Jordan and like

SPEAKER_345: Scotty Pippen. You know, like they're both in the same game, but one person wins the game and the other person is sort of in the game.

SPEAKER_128: Okay. Well, the Larry profile, of course, focused on buying Motorola, their dominance in mobile ads, and Android success. It didn't actually even talk about the driverless cars or the Google Glass or the other stuff

SPEAKER_297: that's going on.

SPEAKER_345: Well, how about talking about $50 billion in revenue a year?

SPEAKER_297: Right. Right.

SPEAKER_345: How about talking about a stock that's over 700 and it's at the highest point ever and

SPEAKER_115: Zuck's stock is cut in half and people are fleeing it like rats from a burning ship? Right. So, I mean, it was actually a very tech-heavy list.

SPEAKER_114: Yeah, of course. And Marissa was in third place. Jack and Sergey actually tied for fourth. Farther down the list, you had Brian Chesky of Airbnb. He was 17th. Ben Silverman of Pinterest and Kevin Systrom were tied for 18th. So, you had, well, actually not just tech people, but as you would point out, product people. Yeah. So, I guess, you know, clearly you think Larry deserved the top spot, but are there other...

SPEAKER_108: Under 40, I guess. Yeah. The 40 is just such a, well, these lists, I mean, having built these lists together, you know that it's just like a bunch of journalists sitting around a table just going, how can we tweak people, how can we get the most out of like the press that we're going to get off this list? Sure. So, it's all gamesmanship and pomp and circumstance. It's meaningless.

SPEAKER_77: You know, what really matters is, is that, you know, what is the quality of the products being made by these individuals ultimately? And then what's the, you know, success of their businesses?

SPEAKER_114: Okay. So, which young startup founder do you think is underrated who doesn't get nearly the attention maybe he or she should?

SPEAKER_224: Dave. Dave from Path. Okay. I think he's just like crushing it on a product basis. Actually, you know who's most underrated? It would be your boy Joe from Cloud.

SPEAKER_86: I agree.

SPEAKER_83: I mean, I think it's really, he's so understated. He listens more than he talks. He's an awesome guy.

SPEAKER_55: I had him on the program. The guy is like, he's got no media, he's not a natural like, he's not a natural speaker. Yeah. So, he needs to go to like media training, which in a way was exactly the sucks thing. Yeah.

SPEAKER_07: So, you can tell when you talk to Joe from Cloud, he is, the wheels are moving, but he hasn't yet been able to present the idea with, you know, the panache. That jobs could, right?

SPEAKER_358: Oh, God. Yeah.

SPEAKER_07: So, there's so much upside.

SPEAKER_05: He just, you've got to send that kid to media training and just let him shine, but he'll get there.

SPEAKER_86: I saw him on TechCrunch TV the other day. Yeah. He's much better. Good. So, that's a measure of a CEO, too, is how quickly they improve, but yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_269: And it's much, I mean, listen, if you, anybody can add the polish, you know, being a great

SPEAKER_224: salesperson, you can't add the other product thing. That comes just from a certain innate place and instinct, I think. You're right. Anyway, list, who cares?

SPEAKER_109: Does Michael have that?

SPEAKER_224: Oh, Michael, any thoughts on this list?

SPEAKER_49: Well, I was on the list once, and my advice to all those guys is frame that sumbitch.

SPEAKER_38: Guaranteed, you're going off the list. Guaranteed. I'm 45. I'm off the list. So, financially or age-wise, it will catch up to you. But my vote would be Angela Sotera, CEO of DeviantArt. Ah. Very quietly has built the top, what, 40, 30 web property. They're profitable in L.A. Doesn't get much attention because they're not in Silicon Valley. But he's a young cat that I think is definitely someone to watch. When I did mp3.com, he flew to the first conference. He was so young, kid was 14, had to come with his mother, no joke. But that's how long he's been doing this stuff, and it's really showing. He's building a nice little property there with DeviantArt.

SPEAKER_345: Yeah, and I don't think people even understand what DeviantArt is, but it's a bunch of artists

SPEAKER_07: sharing their work, but it becomes a fascinating place to spend a little bit of time, because if you were looking for, say, like, you were a fan of Iron Man, and you go search DeviantArt,

SPEAKER_199: like, you will find all this fan art of Iron Man that is just like, this is the greatest stuff I've ever seen. Like, there are people making art all around the world. This kid over here, who is this kid who just made this gorgeous Loki versus Iron Man artwork, and this thing has become a juggernaut. Look at this gorgeous artwork being made around the world, and they've just figured out a way to consolidate, and then you go find the artist, and you jump, you know, this kid, Andy Park

SPEAKER_46: Art. Where is he from? He's from the United States. Who knows? But this guy's got a quarter million pages on here. He's been on the site for five years, and he has got a lot of artwork on here, and you can watch his career drawing Marvel comics grow, like there's his Tomb Raider from back when.

SPEAKER_77: It's just a really inspiring site, and very, like, you can waste a long time there.

SPEAKER_82: That's a good call. It's a great L.A. company. Great L.A. company, yeah.

SPEAKER_77: Let's get it. Book him for the show.

SPEAKER_369: I was just going to say. Book him for the show. All right.

SPEAKER_370: Yeah, yeah. See? Book him for the show.

SPEAKER_128: Oh, yeah, me and Michael were talking about this. Yes, this happened actually in August, and it was the California Public Utilities Commission sent it to them for operating without a proper license. It was calling them a, I think the term was a charter party carrier. Now, they all insist they're legal. They're just upsetting the status quo. They are continuing to operate their businesses while they're talking to the CPUC, and it's interesting to point out, of course, that Uber had some issues with this same regulatory commission a couple years ago, and also continued operating while they sorted that out. So, what kind of regulation in this space makes sense, if any?

SPEAKER_229: What do you think, Michael? I mean, for these people who are doing these ride-sharing, tip-your-driver apps, should there

SPEAKER_07: be any regulation, or should anybody be able to pick you up and drive you anywhere?

SPEAKER_49: Well, I'm a libertarian, so you know where I would come down on that.

SPEAKER_38: But more fascinating to me, that I think people should take note of, is that the government in certain industries is not just a referee. They're actually a player. And hotels, the government's a player because they have a special tax called a hotel occupancy tax that gives the government money. So, this is why you've seen friction on Airbnb from government officials. It's not because they don't like competition. It's because cities are actually in the hotel business. And it's the same with car transportation. They're in the car transportation business because they charge fees for licenses or cab tickets or whatever, however they frame it. But they're in that business. So, when somebody comes along, whether it's an Uber or a sidecar or whatever, the government is going to fight for their revenue. And they'll always frame it as a safety issue, of course, because who can argue with safety? We all want to live in a safe world. But really, it comes down to one thing, money. And it will be interesting. It will be fascinating to see how successful these cabbies are in the cab cartels, what I call them, in fighting not just sidecar, but Uber in five different cities is having a real knockdown drag out with these guys.

SPEAKER_376: Yeah, it's fascinating.

SPEAKER_07: Obviously, I'm an interested party myself with an angel investment in Uber. And I, too, have been described as libertarian. So, I sort of feel like, what business does the government have in me tipping somebody who drives me to the airport? So, if I asked Karen Haig, can you drive me to the airport? And this happened, I remember this in my youth. Like, I would ask somebody, I'm like, I'm going to drive to the airport. I'm taking a cab to the airport. It's 40 bucks. And I remember people saying, can I drive you for 20 when I was a kid and when I was in college and stuff like that. And people would do that. They would drive their friends and say, give me half of what you would give them because

SPEAKER_108: I could use the 20 bucks. Sure. So, and that's how sidecar works. Sidecar works that you call a car, the car comes, and you just, when you get out, it tells you this is a $120 price. When you get out, you pick how much you want to tip. The guy told me one out of five people doesn't tip them. Zero. But then he can put feedback. I got zero tip from that person. That person can then be considered a bad tipper in the system when they ask for a ride next time. So, it's kind of genius in that way. I will say, the guy who picked me up was in a 10 plus year old car.

SPEAKER_269: The seat was like, you know when people put the seat back in, they're laying back. He's driving like this. He's driving like this down the, you know, 280 and he's talking to me the whole time. So, he's leaning over like this, hey, yeah, no, it's been great.

SPEAKER_108: And he's, you know, some people might say that I like to drive fast or, you know, on the faster end of things.

SPEAKER_382: This is the man who floored the Tesla out here in Kohler City.

SPEAKER_384: Yet, you are the biggest wuss of a passenger I have ever been in a car.

SPEAKER_386: Oh, absolutely. I'm like holding the thing like, bah!

SPEAKER_210: Any airport we land at, we get in the cab, guaranteed, he's like, can you please drive a little more slowly, a little more steady on the road?

SPEAKER_387: I'm getting seasick back here. Hold on, we might have to pull, there were times when we all had to pull over. That's because I get car sick. Car sick? Yes.

SPEAKER_30: But you drive like a maniac. But I don't drive like a maniac. Let's not get down on tape here in case I ever get in a blowout accident.

SPEAKER_390: You don't drive, actually, I'll take you back. I'm going to be in front of some judge.

SPEAKER_210: You'll be like, I know your friends say you drive crazy. No, it's not that you drive like a maniac. You drive very fast.

SPEAKER_391: I have driven fast before my daughter was born.

SPEAKER_21: Right. I stopped since then. True. Well, on occasion, when I'm in the car.

SPEAKER_05: There's a difference between going from zero to the speed limit and accelerating quickly in an electric car than exceeding the speed limit. I agree. I don't do the latter, I do do the former.

SPEAKER_07: But here's the thing. This was a dangerous ride. The guy was totally not qualified. But I got the ride for $45 and Uber would have been $100 and a regular black car would have been $200 or whatever. So I wouldn't do it again because I can afford the Uber price and I wouldn't want the danger.

SPEAKER_05: But I understand that the market needs this. And so I think that Michael makes the right point that they're just over-regulating because they have an interest.

SPEAKER_110: And the CEO of Sidecar did reach out to you and say, you know. Oh, yeah. They tried to get me home.

SPEAKER_345: And I was like, listen, I don't want to fire the guy.

SPEAKER_05: I've only taken one ride. And they're like, who was the driver? I was like, I've taken one ride in the service. You haven't. You know who the driver is. But I just wrote them back. I was like, please do not fire the driver. Please do not penalize the driver. I'm not. I wasn't. You know, I'm just trying to give feedback as a journalist and as a writer, not get somebody fired. I don't want somebody to lose their job. They need their job or whatever.

SPEAKER_86: But reviews can make that better, right? And so you can review. And then over time, you'll be able to see. And you can just say, only show me drivers. They're four-star or better. But I've had cab drivers in San Francisco fall asleep at red lights.

SPEAKER_178: Of course. Because they're so overworked. Yeah. That's the BS of it all. I don't know.

SPEAKER_398: They're trying to regulate these guys. Yeah, I don't think they're any safer. Meanwhile, they're doing a terrible job regulating the people they've been regulating for decades.

SPEAKER_400: Yeah, they're not regulated. They're protected.

SPEAKER_108: Yeah, exactly right. And Michael's right. And that's where I think Uber, watching them, they've been successful in every one of these situations with these lawsuits. And the way they win is they take the populist approach that you're stopping competition and you're keeping prices artificially high. And they win every time. They won D.C. They won New York. They won Boston. They won Chicago. And I believe in all four of those cities. I don't speak for the company, obviously. But just from what I've read, all four of those cities, I think they had some level of resistance. And I think they crushed it each time. Karen, am I right?

SPEAKER_164: Yeah, they haven't been defeated yet. Right.

SPEAKER_05: So, I mean, I don't think you can defeat it. And people have the right. Like, who's the government to say, I can't take a ride with somebody and then tip the driver? Like, really? It's like government's role in my life. And if we have all these people who are out of work and there's more competition, there's more availability, fine. You know?

SPEAKER_402: These people need jobs. Creates efficiency, basically. It will drive more. Helps the environment like crazy.

SPEAKER_05: Well, here's the thing, though. If you have lower-priced options, more people will take it. So there are people who do not specifically go out on a Friday night because they say, oh, a cab's going to be this amount. And then they say, oh, well, I'm not going to drink at night because, so I'm not going to have the bottle of wine at dinner because I can't afford a cab home and I'm going to be driving. So, you know what? Screw it. I'm going to drink a bottle of wine at home. So now if they can get a $10 cab ride instead of a $30, they can bring their own bottle of wine.

SPEAKER_108: They can get the wine delivered through, you know, same day through Amazon, whatever it is. It's like, well, these things are going to lead to more consumption.

SPEAKER_29: Yeah. One other nuance to add on this is Uber is actually incredibly self-regulated internally

SPEAKER_54: in who they allow to drive. Of course. More regulated than any. Astonishingly so.

SPEAKER_269: I mean, if the Taxi Commission were to try to fire people based on these things, it would take like 20 different letters and, you know.

SPEAKER_29: I mean, because the general manager for Uber LA, the dear friend of mine, we go and ride together because he doesn't have to pay and I tag along, right? Sure. So he's testing the service. Sure. And the nuance, the degree to which the standard that they insist out of those drivers, if the guy isn't incredibly friendly, like he's let go, like immediately.

SPEAKER_108: I gave a bad review and, you know, I don't know if they fired the person or not, but I had a guy basically lie to me on Uber. And I never told the story publicly, but I requested the driver and I saw he had accepted the job. Then I looked back at the map and he wasn't moving.

SPEAKER_05: So I called him. He said, yeah, yeah, don't worry, don't worry. I'm, I'm up to, I'm on the 405. I said, the map shows you just north of the 10, two exits over from the 405. I need to get to the airport. If you are delayed or you're, you know, getting gas or something like that, I just need to know because I'm going to drive myself. No, no, I'm on the 405 wheelchair exit. I'm like, but the map doesn't show you there. He goes, yeah, the map on Uber always breaks. And I'm like, really, you're telling an Uber investor who's used Uber a hundred times that the map breaks. And I was like, this is straight up lying. And right as I told him that, and I laid it on the, I see him start moving as I'm on the phone with him and getting off the phone. He starts moving. And so then I called him. I said, okay, where are you now?

SPEAKER_151: He's like, I'm at, you know, I call him like five minutes later. He's like, I'm at Wilshire and I'm at Montana exit. This is like 10 minutes later.

SPEAKER_05: I'm like, okay, I'm showing you at the 405, getting on the 405 entrance. You're stuck in traffic, I know that entrance ramp, it's really, you know, he basically

SPEAKER_07: lied to me. So I basically wrote back that this was the first time I'd ever been lied to by a driver

SPEAKER_05: about ETA, and this is a serious problem you need to talk to him. This was in LA. He started texting me back because he had my text, because I had been texting with him. How dare you, you know, give me one star? And he started yelling at me.

SPEAKER_55: So then I told Uber, like, by the way, not only did the guy lie, he was belligerent when I gave him a poor rating. Well, guaranteed he was late.

SPEAKER_46: And I'm like, in that case, I had to side with Uber. Like, I don't want somebody else to have that experience.

SPEAKER_418: So the driver can see what rating you give him? Yes. I didn't know that. Yes. Oh, yeah. They're laid off on a one star. But you can't see what rating they give you.

SPEAKER_269: Yeah, I think they can't. Maybe they called him and said that he got, that may have been what happened. I don't know if he sees my review, or they called him immediately and said, what happened?

SPEAKER_224: Because I know that my account is marked VIP. Like, I think they have, like, VIP markers on certain people. Yeah.

SPEAKER_295: But doesn't that make you want to give a good review, even if it wasn't amazing, just because you don't want that person to lose their job?

SPEAKER_108: I don't want the person to lose their job, but I also don't want people to have a bad experience with Uber, which I'm an investor in, or I don't want other customers to suffer. So it's sort of like a Yelp review, where if you have a bad experience at a restaurant, don't you, I don't know how you guys feel. But when I have a bad, a really bad experience in a restaurant, I feel more loyalty to the Yelp users than I do to the owner of that business. And I feel like I have to warn the other Yelp users. What do you think, Michael?

SPEAKER_38: Well, I think Uber's going to win all of their political battles, and here's why they have a secret weapon. You know who a huge constituency of theirs is? Politicians. Politicians flying back and from to D.C. or Sacramento. They're not leaving their car for two weeks at the airport. They're one of the big Uber passengers. So Travis is very smart. He knows this, and when he finds friction in Chicago, in D.C. or whatever, that boy looks up politicians, and as it turns out, people like Pelosi are huge Uber fans and come to his rescue. So he's a smart guy, Travis, the CEO at Uber, and I like his chances to beat back the cab cartel. So I'm not so sure about the little sidecar guys, which are much more informal and don't have a clean argument on the safety issues and things like that.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah. They do have. One of them got back to me and said they have a million dollar insurance bond or whatever, which I would... Yeah, that was Lyft. That was Lyft.

SPEAKER_07: And like, we have a million dollars. But I saw Alexia TechCrunch uses Lyft every day, she said, because she can drive to, she can

SPEAKER_05: get to work for five or six bucks. She doesn't want to spend 25 or 20 in an Uber, so she wants the $5 Lyft and the same person

SPEAKER_422: picks her up. And she doesn't want to slum it in the subway.

SPEAKER_428: And she doesn't want to slum it in the subway. And she doesn't want to slum it in San Francisco, my God, the place is night of a living dead. I mean, she moved to New York.

SPEAKER_30: There are so many homeless people in San Francisco.

SPEAKER_108: I mean, and I'm from west side of LA, where there's a lot of homeless. We're like the second capital. The difference is here, it's like they're all mellow up there. They're all very aggressive and tweaked out on crystal meth or whatever it is. And they are like, they will come right up in your face. And I'm with my daughter walking to the park, you know, at the Metreon or whatever. And I'm like, dude, you cannot get that close to my daughter to beg for money. It's out of control. I think San Francisco has lost their minds. Somebody needs to make an app to like report on aggressive homeless people.

SPEAKER_429: Oh, wait. That's a zombie driver. That's suspicious behavior.

SPEAKER_30: No, but I remember that night we were driving.

SPEAKER_108: Tyler and I were driving one night.

SPEAKER_55: And we go through the Tenderloin or whatever the areas are over there where it's really dicey. And literally like driving down the street, I looked and I thought I was in a Romero film. There's like, ah, like all across the street.

SPEAKER_276: There's a hundred people on the sidewalk, right? And there's 30 people in the street just meandering, walking, just looking up, dragging bags. It looked like none of the living dead. And I'm driving the car like, eh, eh, around the zombies.

SPEAKER_432: And they're like putting their hands on the car, ah, brains, you know? I'm like, this is insane.

SPEAKER_276: How do people live like this? And it's all these liberal, you know, San Francisco people are also, you know.

SPEAKER_07: That's the color of the city. And cops, they have no ability to like maintain order there.

SPEAKER_05: They must, they're so neutered and they're so, such a small force that they can't keep control of what's going on, I guess. And if you give a ticket to somebody for jaywalking there, they probably consider it a human rights violation that somebody was reprimanded.

SPEAKER_368: But God forbid you park illegally. They're on you. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_83: They're on it for that next story.

SPEAKER_295: All right, Jason. Well, I don't think we can close the show without talking just briefly, no rants, please, about the new Bravo Silicon Valley reality show.

SPEAKER_128: Oh, jeez. Jesus Christ. I just, I just, just, just indulge me just, but don't, don't rant, please. So we know that the preview came out this week. It shows a lot more partying than product building. Some people have pointed out that you don't see anybody who's Indian or, uh, it's called the station.

SPEAKER_445: Let the trailer speak for itself. Or I can just work.

SPEAKER_447: People have been intimidated because this package generally doesn't come with a brain. People follow me because I say my thing. Wow, Sarah Austin. I don't hold back.

SPEAKER_450: Well, that's just, I can just stop for one second.

SPEAKER_108: It's not something you do. By the way, I just saw two people with bikini tops on. I have been in the technology business for 20 years. Those are the first two bikini tops I've seen in the context of technology.

SPEAKER_405: You're saying, you're saying well-casted then.

SPEAKER_108: Well, I mean, we're, we're, I think we're about 10 seconds into it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_339: And those are the first two bikini shots I've seen in the, have you seen anybody in a bikini in the industry? Oh, there are loads of hot babes. What are you talking about? No. In a bikini in a business setting? I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Right, exactly.

SPEAKER_108: I'm like, no, there are, I'm not saying there are not beautiful women in the industry either. Don't start emailing me. And I'm not, I said, I'm not making any judgment. I'm doing a judgment on the fact that I saw two bikini tops in seven seconds, and I've seen none in 17 years.

SPEAKER_54: Are you saying they're pandering to the audience? Here we go. Keep going. Let's keep going. Kill yourself. Bravo.

SPEAKER_465: If you don't want to roll the dice, so if you're not aiming for something a billion dollars or larger, why waste your time?

SPEAKER_468: God, kill yourself.

SPEAKER_470: That looks terrible. I mean, it's so douchey, like.

SPEAKER_472: Vote my entire life to technology. I know Sarah. She was, she was the Rockaboon girl, right?

SPEAKER_55: Daydream. My company. Sarah is the Rocket, wasn't she on Rockaboon for a while? Sarah Austin?

SPEAKER_475: I'm here now and I'm going to make an impact. I don't know if Sarah did Rockaboon for a while. She lost a lot of weight. She really got himself together.

SPEAKER_479: Yeah, I mean, she, they cleaned her up for the show. Daydream. My company. Who is that douchey guy?

SPEAKER_481: This is the only way we have to up our game even more than ever.

SPEAKER_480: The future of the world is in our hands. We're not sitting back and letting it pass as well.

SPEAKER_26: The future of the world is in our hands. Woo! Really, yeah, you and Elon Musk are fighting to save humanity by getting us to Mars and

SPEAKER_276: by getting another round of mojitos. Congratulations.

SPEAKER_470: What a disaster this is. What a complete, utter disaster.

SPEAKER_487: I can be really taken aback by how opinionated I am.

SPEAKER_22: Yes, we're all taken aback by how intimidated you are with your track record of nothing. While you talk to the other girl in the bikini who has zero track record. We're so intimidated.

SPEAKER_489: The bloggers, the engineers, and then...

SPEAKER_21: All right, just surprisingly, uh, Caucasian casting there.

SPEAKER_405: Well, that's one of the...

SPEAKER_108: I mean, Silicon Valley is surprising. Yeah, hold on a second, Tyler. You're on to something. Let me check this out here. This looks like the cast from, uh, the Glee? Yeah, it could be Connecticut Housewives Kids. This is, they look like they're all a bunch of, like, it's a good-looking group.

SPEAKER_106: Yeah, this is Darien, Connecticut. Well, Hermione's an immigrant, right? She's not American. Is she? I don't know.

SPEAKER_23: Yeah, England. That's, uh, yeah. Technically, I'm saying Caucasian. I think that makes you Anglo, yeah.

SPEAKER_371: Yeah, but they did have an immigrant, just pointing out. It's... Yeah, you know, if they're from Ireland, if they're from Dublin, they're still white, by the way.

SPEAKER_424: I don't know if that really counts.

SPEAKER_97: Well, when they came to this country in the 19th century, Irish were considered black.

SPEAKER_07: Six white people, three men, three women. I don't know any of them, except for Sarah Austin, and she's very nice. And Hermione. But she's a podcaster. Do I know Hermione?

SPEAKER_495: She does the video for The Next Web. She's done a lot of stuff. I mean, she's doing...

SPEAKER_05: So basically, of the women, two of the three women are podcasters. Like, they're hosts. That really doesn't mean that they're in the technology industry.

SPEAKER_371: Well, she and her brother were building something, and I actually put that in the ticker not too long ago, and they were making this scale.

SPEAKER_295: Her brother is the technical one, and she was...

SPEAKER_345: Oh, this is the scale, yeah, where you balance yourself and do your weight.

SPEAKER_128: Right, and you can just put any smartphone in it, and it's basically just a very sophisticated piece of plastic, and so that's why they can make it that cheap, and they want it to be able to be like a weave.

SPEAKER_136: Yeah, I have a weaving scale already, and then there's the Fitbit makes a scale. Not everyone's going to buy a weaving scale. No, I know.

SPEAKER_294: Those scales are getting down in price to like 25 bucks, so really, that's the best they can come up with, is they came up with the scale that I put my iPhone in. And that you can do exercise on and weigh yourself on.

SPEAKER_128: It wasn't just like a scale. Anyway, so they...

SPEAKER_297: They did that on the show. I don't know what the other products are on the show. That's the one that's been revealed so far.

SPEAKER_151: This will be... I guarantee cancel one season. If that lasts more than one season, not a chance.

SPEAKER_134: So, you know also that Kara Swisher had a profile of Randy Zuckerberg that came out in Harper's Bazaar this week. I did see that.

SPEAKER_114: I like Randy. I mean, Randy is hoping also that this show gives her a little bit more cred in Hollywood, not just as a technical Silicon Valley person.

SPEAKER_295: So, I mean, is this show as bad as everyone thinks it is? Is there anything that's going to be redeeming about it?

SPEAKER_136: That's stupid. I mean, clearly it's dumb. And clearly it has absolutely nothing to do with Silicon Valley. And it's by Bravo. I mean, Bravo is just like stupid.

SPEAKER_05: I mean, if it was done by Discovery or it was done by ABC, you know, like you might expect it's going to have some redeeming quality. Like ABC does Home Makeover, Fox does, Gordon Ramsay. You have some level of expertise, right? But I can tell you as somebody in the industry, these are not experts. These are not successful people. So, what they've made is, I guess, like the Jersey Shore version of Silicon Valley, of the technology industry. More than an expert driven shark tank where Mark Cuban's got some credibility. So, if they had Michael evaluating ideas, or Thomas, if they had Michael, Thomas, and I evaluating internet ideas, working with entrepreneurs, it would be too boring. What is it like, Tyler?

SPEAKER_504: It's like a velvet painting of the Last Supper.

SPEAKER_108: It's like a velvet painting of the Last Supper, which is to say, the Last Supper is a masterpiece. Okay, I think when you say a velvet painting of the Last Supper, the Last Supper is an incredibly important piece of artwork.

SPEAKER_05: But when you make it out of velvet, you're basically making it out of like, what you would make the dogs playing poker painting, which is the least valuable piece of artwork.

SPEAKER_55: So, if you applied the least value to the highest value thing, and you looked at it through that lens, that's how bad this looks.

SPEAKER_29: It's going to distort people's perception and perspective of what is really, perhaps, the most important thing going on in the world today, which is what's happening all around Silicon Valley, and every sitting around the world is trying to duplicate.

SPEAKER_345: It's certainly making a huge impact on what's going on.

SPEAKER_514: Huge impact. It's changing. It's amongst the industries making the difference. It's what our grandkids are going to look back at. What do you think, Thomas? Did they ask you to be on it? Or did you have too much substance?

SPEAKER_517: No, no. You would have been great on this. Oh, man. Come on. I mean, look.

SPEAKER_463: They're taking huge artistic liberty, obviously. They're trying to take a business that, frankly, is not that sexy, and it's a lot about hard work and detail and, you know, grinding it out. Try to make it about bikini parties. Yeah, and try and make it interesting for a broader audience in America. I get that.

SPEAKER_82: But, you know, it's not a reality show, put it that way.

SPEAKER_269: Right. It's very far from reality. Michael, when they approached you, you turned it down. Why?

SPEAKER_272: Is it true or not true that you were considering getting surgery to make yourself look better in the bikini shots?

SPEAKER_520: True or not true? This reminds me of that movie. Do you remember the movie Startup.com from 10 years ago?

SPEAKER_38: Sure. Yeah, Call Al. It was awful. It was terrible. Did you think that was terrible?

SPEAKER_514: Yeah, I wasn't a fan of the film. Right.

SPEAKER_38: I mean, this is going to be the same thing. Yeah. It's just going to be awful. No space on the DVR for that because it's all full of Honey Boo Boo. You guys watch Honey Boo Boo?

SPEAKER_470: Yeah. Honey Boo Boo Child. It's the child abuse channel, right?

SPEAKER_522: This TLC. That is fantastic television right there.

SPEAKER_345: Yeah. The Lashing Children channel, TLC. The Lashing. We've got to make a new acronym for TLC. Something Children. Television Lashing Children. Or something. Something about abusing children. I don't get it. They're the child abuse channel. You haven't seen Honey Boo Boo? No. You don't know what we're talking about?

SPEAKER_07: No. Oh, God. So anyway, just to catch you up. Honey Boo Boo. They had a show called... I'm very up to speed on pop culture. There is a six-year-old beauty queen named Honey Boo Boo. She was on a show called Todd Liz and Tiara. She drinks. She's got a mom who is a thousand pounds overweight. Wow.

SPEAKER_108: And who feeds her own daughter a combination of Red Bull and Mountain Dew and other energy drinks before she goes on stage. Wow.

SPEAKER_53: And then the girl talks about being like a doll that makes me holler or something. Here she is.

SPEAKER_528: I'm six and I'm a beauty queen. The other girls must be crazy if they think they're going to be me Honey Boo Boo Boo

SPEAKER_530: Chow.

SPEAKER_531: I'm super solid because I do paddocks.

SPEAKER_336: That's Honey Boo Boo Chow. But then, the best part is... Here she is. Look at this. Look at this. So that's her drinking her green juice.

SPEAKER_534: My special juice is going to help me well.

SPEAKER_535: My juice is going to help me well. My juice is going to help me well. Look at her. She is so boring.

SPEAKER_100: I don't worry. That girl is so high right now. This is what the judge is like. This is what the judge is like. Grabbing her belly.

SPEAKER_538: My juice is kicking in right now.

SPEAKER_05: Her juice is kicking in right now. So this girl... I mean like literally with my daughter, like my wife and I are having conversations over like what type of food she should eat, like the nutritional profile. I mean, we're like Reggio, Montessori.

SPEAKER_276: And then I just think about humanity. Like I'm putting all this effort into my...

SPEAKER_05: Trying to, you know, make my daughter a great global citizen. And this is going to be her effing roommate at Yale. You know? Or like she's going to like get a roommate when she moves to New York and leaves. And like this is going to be her roommate, right? And then all my parenting is going to go down the drain when this knucklehead child is...

SPEAKER_55: You know, my daughter meets this knucklehead child when we're at the Four Seasons in Maui.

SPEAKER_541: Probably not Yale or the Four Seasons, right? No, she's going to be rich. She's obviously going to be richer than me by doing this.

SPEAKER_345: And then this is her mom, who is just absolutely the worst mother in the planet.

SPEAKER_46: Not because she's phenomenally overweight and disgusting and like... But just like she lets her children do anything. Like they just eat...

SPEAKER_336: Oh God, it's the worst thing ever. They did a great... Did you see the movie Idiocracy? No, literally...

SPEAKER_548: It's literally Idiocracy.

SPEAKER_55: This is what makes guys like Michael Robertson like crazy. It's because we're trying... Like we have this whole like John Galt thing going, right Michael? Absolutely. Personal responsibility. How does this make you feel?

SPEAKER_108: Because you're a personal responsibility guy. You're a self-made guy. Your mom, you told me on the show. You didn't grow up wealthy or affluent. You made your own way in the world. When you see this kind of horrificness being celebrated on television, what do you think?

SPEAKER_49: I'm thinking it's going to be real tough for her to learn HTML5.

SPEAKER_05: Yeah. This person is not going to be employable. I mean, I don't wish anything bad on anybody. I guarantee you that this is like Dana Plato level abuse.

SPEAKER_07: Remember Dana Plato from... Different Strokes. Different Strokes. She wound up... Was she the one who wound up sticking up her own dry cleaner when she was high?

SPEAKER_05: And then she OD'd. I think that's the one. I think she OD'd. She tried to rob her own dry cleaner. She went to the dry cleaner like, hi, and was like, give me all your money.

SPEAKER_108: And they're like, Dana, your clothes are right here. We know who you are. She's like, give me all the money, you know. They're like, Dana, we're friends.

SPEAKER_26: We've been cleaning your clothes for 20 years. We only keep like $18 in the store. Here, take it, you know.

SPEAKER_463: I feel like this show has devolved a little bit though. Like the Bravo show we were making fun of initially. Well, I mean, listen, we have to always...

SPEAKER_07: At the end, everybody knows my technique now. At the end of the show, there's a little bit of candy for people who stick around. We'll stick around. We do have a little light stuff. Hey, last story.

SPEAKER_134: Last story, like really quick. Okay. And I just want to point out that Techstars did a reality show last year on Bloomberg that

SPEAKER_297: was not very well received either. A lot of people said that, you know, of course, selective editing and things like that. And it certainly wasn't trying to be anything like what Bravo is doing.

SPEAKER_136: I am in contract negotiations right now.

SPEAKER_108: There's a big announcement. Press the announcement button. Special announcement button. We had a special announcement. Can you find that on the TriCaster? When you have it, just play it. We had a special announcement.

SPEAKER_565: Da-da-da-da. Da-da-da-da. Da-da-da-da-da-da-da. You guys can't find it. Back in the day.

SPEAKER_05: Yeah. Anyway, make sure that we find that special announcement. Anyway, special announcement. I'm not making anything up.

SPEAKER_67: This is the truth.

SPEAKER_567: I've known you too long to know what that smile means.

SPEAKER_136: Go ahead. It smells way too big. I swear to God, this is the truth. I have an agent at CIA.

SPEAKER_568: That part's true.

SPEAKER_199: And, you know that, for television. Mm-hmm. And I've been approached nine times, this is the ninth time, in three or four years. And the show has gotten so big that somebody has asked for me to sign a no-shop deal to pursue a reality television show.

SPEAKER_07: This is not on a major network, but we will talk to major networks, but on one of the smaller networks.

SPEAKER_05: But not, small, but like, not network, but not like, you would, put it this way, you've all watched this channel in the last 30 days.

SPEAKER_575: To pursue a reality TV show.

SPEAKER_576: Starring me.

SPEAKER_578: Now, would you actually do this? That's the question. Oh, there's a show there. I wouldn't sign the contract if I didn't actually.

SPEAKER_179: There's a show there. I would not sign the contract. And I had very specific, uh, things going into it, and that's why it's taken nine people.

SPEAKER_108: And I've been doing it in my spare time, but now it looks like the deal's done.

SPEAKER_581: I'm going to sign the deal next week, and we'll see. So, so...

SPEAKER_424: It would be a short, like, ten seasons, a ten episode thing. So it wouldn't take that much time. I wouldn't have to quit any of my jobs. I would not quit this show. But I might have to take a two-week break to do the tapings.

SPEAKER_134: Okay, so is, what were the restrictions that people were having a hard time meeting?

SPEAKER_108: Uh, control. Editorial control. Oh, because I don't want to be, I'm not going to let myself be made into something I'm not.

SPEAKER_342: So I basically wanted to do it a certain way, if people want to do it that way. Oh, you got it? Here, play my special announcement. Here we go. Da-da-da! They got it, and they pressed the play button. Special announcement. Alright, you got it, but you can't press it. No, that's not it at all.

SPEAKER_590: That's a not-so-special announcement. That's like a puzzling.

SPEAKER_595: It's huge. There was a special announcement graphic and the word special announcement. Oh, boy.

SPEAKER_38: Jason, I just want to let you know that I just registered, here comes Jason Boo Boo. Here comes Jason Boo Boo.

SPEAKER_75: So if you need it, just let me know.

SPEAKER_108: Listen, and here's my honest assessment of my reality television career. It's not going to happen. I am 95% certain it's not going to happen.

SPEAKER_05: I think there's a one... I would... And if you asked me six months ago, I would have said 99.59. I think there's a 5% chance this might happen. Because the success of Shark Tank since Mark Cuban has been on it, specifically, and since a number of people have approached Mark about doing something,

SPEAKER_07: and he, Mark Cuban, said to the person, I cannot do it, you need Jason. That's how this whole thing started. So, if it does happen, it's because of Mark Cuban, because he didn't want to do this other opportunity,

SPEAKER_108: and he literally told them, you need Jason. And what he said was, he's like Dr. Phil with a little bit of Oprah and Gordon Ramsay. He really played me up. He was like, you didn't need to do that. Thank you, Mark.

SPEAKER_601: I think you stand up to that.

SPEAKER_108: If it does happen, it's going to be like that. But it would be along the lines of a Gordon Ramsay type situation. And I would only do it if Gordon Ramsay has control. I don't want to have people... I want to have final edit, basically, is what it comes down to.

SPEAKER_143: Muzzletough, man. I don't think it's going to happen, so let's all get back to work and not get crazy.

SPEAKER_128: Well, then let's do one serious story to end the show. Interesting little development this week. A company called Twice, which is selling secondhand clothing, is doing one million... Isn't that like Threadflip? Sort of. They're doing a $1 million restart fund. Basically, they're willing to acquire a startup that came through YC, Techstars, 500 Startups. What's the name of this? Twice? Twice. They're ex-Googlers. They have $4 million from SV Angel, Crunch Fund, Felicis, Lehrer. They've got serious investors. They're putting up a million dollars. They're offering cash and equity to a startup that hasn't gotten any traction. Now, the teams must have at least three engineers and designers. They have to pass a challenge that they give them and reference checks, that kind of thing. They're accepting applications right now. The offer expires either when they acquire somebody or by the end of the year. It's kind of weird. If they don't find somebody by the end of 2012, then I guess the deal is off.

SPEAKER_513: Sounds like a marketing...

SPEAKER_128: Is this a trend or a ploy for attention? What is actually the best way to free trapped talent in a startup that's going nowhere?

SPEAKER_345: What do you think of this, Michael?

SPEAKER_07: Is this a smart idea, restartfund.com, restartfund? Or is this just a brilliant marketing ploy?

Chamath Palihapitiya: Well, maybe I'm not understanding it correctly, but are they looking to hire engineers

SPEAKER_608: and this is a cheap way to get a team of engineers without paying an HR placement firm? Is that what I'm hearing?

SPEAKER_512: I think they're sort of saying there's a lot of Y Combinator companies that are not working.

SPEAKER_199: Their business is working, so they'll give a million dollars in cash and equity to that team to join their team.

SPEAKER_128: Exactly. After they, the team has to apply, they have to pass some tests, and there has to be at least three engineers slash designers. So it could be more.

SPEAKER_269: So basically what they're saying is we'll give you $500,000 in equity in our company and we'll give you each a hundred. Maybe they're saying we'll give you $700,000 in equity and a $100,000 bonus each for joining. That's how bad the...

SPEAKER_35: Listen, a recruiter is going to charge you 20%, right? That's going to charge you 20% of the salary.

SPEAKER_38: So as long as they're hiring less than five people or more than five people, it's a wash and they get a ton of publicity. So probably a good idea, clever.

SPEAKER_179: I think it's a great marketing idea. I don't think they have any intention of following through on it.

SPEAKER_615: You don't think anybody will actually apply or you don't think... I don't think anybody's going to apply, no. No.

SPEAKER_05: Maybe they shake... I'll tell you what could happen. And I do know this, being an angel investor now and looking at a lot of the... I get a lot of the companies that were like really hot and had a lot of...

SPEAKER_07: Launched at a conference and whatever, and they're now, what, Thomas, 18, 24 months out. And then what happens?

SPEAKER_617: Yeah, I mean, they're running out of money. They don't get the traction. Can't raise nay.

SPEAKER_83: Yeah. And then what happens?

SPEAKER_86: I mean, then it's, you know, the team... I mean, the challenge here is keeping the... The reality is if the company is having trouble, the team splits pretty fast, typically, right? Right. So it's hard to keep good guys.

SPEAKER_88: They can smell it and then they split.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah. So in this case, it would be like, oh, we don't... It's not that we have bad, bad situation.

SPEAKER_269: We have like a moderate situation and we think that whatever twice is... But listen, I didn't know what twice was. Exactly. So now I know what twice is.

SPEAKER_108: Yeah. And people have been... I mean, I said on the program, whatever, when Marissa took over, the first thing I would look at all the Y Combinator and Techstars companies that, you know, graduated three years ago and worked backwards as to who didn't raise an A. No A, make an offer.

SPEAKER_86: And you're going up against credible buyers like Facebook and Twitter and other companies that are actually, you know...

SPEAKER_394: The accurate thing is bumming you out, though, as an angel investor, isn't it? No, no, no.

SPEAKER_86: Because I have zeros that end up as a wash that, you know, keep my batting out.

SPEAKER_83: You know, it's like Moneyball. I'll take singles. It's fine, you know? And a single is, I got my money back. Singles, yeah. Actually, a single is sort of better than that, but it's a non-zero.

SPEAKER_05: It's like getting on first base by getting hit by the bull.

SPEAKER_83: Yeah, it's like a walk or something. It's a walk. Yeah.

SPEAKER_621: But I'll take it.

SPEAKER_05: Yeah. I'll take it, too, actually. Now that I think... Now you put it like that, I mean, versus losing the money, you get a second chance to invest it. Yeah. So it's better... It's actually... It is nice that there's a bunch of AccuHires out there, but you do wonder, if people held their ground and didn't AccuHire, would they be able to get better prices, you know, for their companies? Right. And I think that's the thing that we're not seeing, is that the entrepreneurs, the buyers know.

SPEAKER_07: Facebook knows. And I had somebody tell me, Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg himself, said to the founders of one company, screw your investors. Our big law firm is going to wipe them out. They're going to get washed. They get nothing. I'm going to give you all great employment contracts or make more of the Facebook stock.

SPEAKER_224: And literally, this is a very, very reputable person who's been on the program, who everybody

SPEAKER_139: knows, said to me in private, Mark Zuckerberg himself told the founders to F their investors.

SPEAKER_108: Yeah. It's a challenge. I mean, the buyer... What does that do to an ecosystem when Mark Zuckerberg is telling founders to F their

SPEAKER_224: angel investors?

SPEAKER_88: Yeah. Well, then you see what the founders are made of, because the good ones will say, look, I'm not going to do that.

SPEAKER_224: Yeah. They walked, in this case. They walked and they wound up selling for a much higher price than somebody else. Right.

SPEAKER_114: But there's still this question of how do you free the talent, right? If somebody's working on something that really isn't going to go anywhere, I mean, I've heard that argument before, you have a limited number of people who are really, really good. Why not give it, make it easier for them to go on to something else instead of continue with this thing that's going nowhere?

SPEAKER_626: Yeah. There's no reason to keep banging your head against the wall unless you think it's going to break out.

SPEAKER_88: Yeah. There's no commitment though. And you know, I write a check for someone or you do, you know, the idea is starting a

SPEAKER_86: company is really effing hard. And so you get that going into it as like a marriage or something. And so, you know, raising kids, you don't expect it to be a cakewalk. And so yeah, there are going to be times when it's extremely hard, extremely dark. And I've talked to founders, I'm like, look, this is all part of the part of it. It's part of the journey. So you don't want them to just fold up their tent too easily either.

SPEAKER_345: Right. And it's like, it's almost like the tightrope walk now has a net and the net is Facebook. Right. You know, Yahoo, Airbnb, whoever, AccuHire.

SPEAKER_269: I mean, the AccuHire is like the safety net, which we never, Michael, you never had a safety net. If you go out, if you blow out, you run out of cash, you're done. Yep.

SPEAKER_608: That's right. Hey, the more interesting thing here is that even if TWICE does do the hire, they're still in the business of selling secondhand clothes. Are you kidding me? That's no business there. You know, of course, you're talking to a guy who's wearing $14 Walmart jeans too. So, you know.

SPEAKER_55: That's just because that you have a... I love Michael. You have an admitted, Michael, OCD complex about your own wealth and spending money. You're cheap.

SPEAKER_636: Fair enough. Very cheap. I pay for your ticker.

SPEAKER_108: You do pay for the ticker. That's true. That's value though. That's value. Let me ask you this. Tell the car story, Michael. Hold on.

SPEAKER_491: Hold on. Don't forget about the cars. I want to know. When you have to fly, do you fly first business or coach? Or private? Coach. Amen, Michael. If you're flying from LA to New York, coach or business?

SPEAKER_269: JetBlue. Coach. Okay. Now, if you're flying from here to Paris.

SPEAKER_166: If I'm taking the family, we'll go first. If it's by myself, I'm going the cheapest way possible. Right.

SPEAKER_491: See, this is interesting. He could afford to fly first all the time. I love this guy.

SPEAKER_55: He actually could afford to charter. He doesn't. Right? He's got that little thing in his head like, money has value. I can't spend it. That's what I have in the back of my head all the time. Money has value. Don't spend it. It never goes away. You always have your grandmother. I have my Irish grandmother in my head like, don't waste the food. Don't waste it. There was like, any food on anybody's plate. Like, we could not leave the restaurant. Even going to a restaurant with my grandmother, like, it was painful because she would just look at the prices and the first thing, oh my, $32?

SPEAKER_30: How is it $32? I bought that in ANS, ANS has it for this. I'm like, Grandma, you can't compare the price at the restaurant of the piece of salmon

SPEAKER_07: to the piece you paid at the supermarket. That's cute.

SPEAKER_650: She didn't get it.

SPEAKER_286: Yeah. I think she would steal all the rolls. God bless her soul. Literally, my Irish grandmother, we would go to the diner.

SPEAKER_387: Should we talk about Virgin America? That's true, actually. Now you know where I get it. We go on Virgin America. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Let me tell the story of my grandma first.

SPEAKER_26: Go ahead.

SPEAKER_07: So my grandmother, we would go to the diner or whatever. In the old days, she had, like, you know, God bless her. She started to have, like, dementia and all this stuff, Alzheimer's. One day, she would be like, she would know who I was. She would know, you know, my favorite TV show and my favorite dish. And another day, she just thought I was her son. She called me by one of her son's names. It was one of those kind of, like, tenure, you know, ends. But we go to the diner and the bread would come. The first thing she'd do, she'd take the bread.

SPEAKER_654: Slide it, slide it. Like, nobody's seeing the bread go up the table. Look over that way, look over that way.

SPEAKER_07: She'd take all the buns and put them in her purse. Then the butter trays, like, six butter patties.

SPEAKER_657: Look over there.

SPEAKER_07: And she dumped the butter patties in her thing. And I'd say, Grandma, you don't have to steal the buns.

SPEAKER_476: I'll buy you whatever bread you want. No, don't worry about it.

SPEAKER_69: Then the guy would come. She'd say, can we have some more bread? The kids love the bread. The bread would come back. Look at that way. Look the other way.

SPEAKER_276: Don't look. Don't look.

SPEAKER_07: Bread comes off the table. And, like, we're doing it. And then I would say to the guy, like, I'm really sorry my grandmother's stealing the bag. He goes, don't worry about it. We have it all the time. I give like a huge tip. Literally, I give him like a $20 tip on top of what I had to give.

SPEAKER_05: Just to make up for the fact that my grandmother, like an insane person, is stealing all the bread.

SPEAKER_664: When was she born?

SPEAKER_286: Do you know? She died last year. She was 92 when she died. So, 19.

SPEAKER_665: Yeah, before the Depression. Before the Depression.

SPEAKER_07: Lived through the Depression. Worked in a candy factory from the age of like 14 or 15 in downtown Brooklyn. For nothing every day.

SPEAKER_162: Wrapping candy like Lucille Ball did.

SPEAKER_151: Whenever she saw that Lucille Ball episode with wrapping the candy, she would tell me that's what she did. On the conveyor belt rafting taffy.

SPEAKER_88: That was her job. They would ration in the US and stuff. They would ration chocolate, sugar. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_374: And then she always loved candy because of that. But anyway, you tell your story.

SPEAKER_29: I had a grandmother. My Irish grandmother also had Alzheimer's. And I have a very funny story where we went to a diner. Uh-huh. And she had the butter and she started eating it like ice cream and was like... We looked over and she was like, this is great ice cream. Wow. Wow. No, but Virgin. Yeah. So on Virgin America. Right. We'd get the... What is like the first class? Select. Yeah.

SPEAKER_94: Business Select. Economy Plus is the third row because it has a table. You can pull the table. Yeah. You have the most leg. The main cap and select. Main cap and select.

SPEAKER_674: Yeah. It has a table that comes out from the front. And your first class business doesn't have it. It doesn't have it. It comes out from the side. It's kind of awkward. I love it.

SPEAKER_678: For working, it's the best.

SPEAKER_07: If you're doing your laptop. If I'm getting flown out on a speaking gig and they're paying, I still would want row three, not the first.

SPEAKER_29: Yeah. So there's one other interesting perk, which is unlimited food. Yeah. Off the menu that you order.

SPEAKER_156: Unlimited movies and food in that row as well.

SPEAKER_29: Right. So LA to San Francisco, for people who've never taken it, that's a 50 minute flight.

SPEAKER_680: 40, 50 minute flight.

SPEAKER_210: Right. You're barely off the ground. Yeah. He gets on the flight. The plane hasn't moved yet. He's ordering three of everything on the flight. Three jolly beans. Yeah. Three chocolate chip cookies. And he's elbowing me like, hey, order some of these cookies. And I'm telling him which ones to order.

SPEAKER_684: I make them order three. Yeah. Or two or three.

SPEAKER_210: And I'm like trying to sleep on the flight as I always do. Don't bug me. Yeah. The flight attendant.

SPEAKER_29: Yeah. And the flight attendant knows what's up too. Yeah.

SPEAKER_685: And she hands it to me and I just have to sit there like, God, I'm being such a cheap person.

SPEAKER_339: And she comes and she's like, three jelly beans. I'm like, yeah, that's me. Yeah. And you're giving them to me.

SPEAKER_689: Three chocolate chip cookies. You got any room in your bag here? Put these in your bag.

SPEAKER_269: Three.

SPEAKER_108: And then I'm like, well, you know these, these, these, these illy espresso chocolate cappuccinos. Those are like three dollars each. So I order three of those and I put them in my bag. Yeah. And she's watching me. I'm like, my kid loves them.

SPEAKER_694: I get it from my kid.

SPEAKER_695: But it is my grandmother in my house. I know. She's telling me like, you paid for those seats. Get that value.

SPEAKER_463: Yeah. I know guys at Charter though that'll clean out the bar too. Oh, I've been on that too. I've been on that too. It's just crazy.

SPEAKER_549: That's so funny. That makes sense.

SPEAKER_199: You're on a charter flight. It's like a $30,000 charter, $40,000 charter. And you clean out all the drinks.

SPEAKER_55: And there are little mini bottles. Yep. There's 30 mini bottles. Yep. And they're taking the mini bottles and putting them in their pockets. The mini bottles cost a dollar each.

SPEAKER_700: They're putting $30 worth of mini bottles in their pockets. I've been there.

SPEAKER_229: Listen, this has been an amazing show. Everybody follow MP3 Michael, Michael Robertson, great serial entrepreneur, lots of great opinions. And check out dar.fm.

SPEAKER_29: I just got my email, by the way, that the one you signed me up for just finished. Oh, did it really? Yeah. Good. Everybody check that out. No, no, no. The NPR recording you signed me up for, Michael.

SPEAKER_705: Yeah. Now you got it.

SPEAKER_07: What's that called again? UberTalk. UberTalk. Everybody check out UberTalk. Michael, thanks for being on the program. Thanks, guys. And Thomas, thanks for being on the program. Everybody follow at TGM, TGM, TGM, TGM. And Superfan. What's your name, Superfan?

SPEAKER_707: Kurt Kumar.

SPEAKER_07: Kurt Kumar. Next time we have to have at least a camera on the Superfan. We'll give him a microphone so I can interrogate him. You're a Superfan for how long? How long have you been listening to the program?

SPEAKER_710: A month.

SPEAKER_07: Seven months.

SPEAKER_229: You watch a lot of episodes? I do.

SPEAKER_710: You got a favorite? Yeah. Well done. Well done. A lot of ideas.

SPEAKER_712: Yeah. Yeah, it was a great episode, Chris Saka.

SPEAKER_140: Very eye-opening. And if you want to join the Superfan list and come in and watch the show, just email team at thisweekend.com. We let people come watch the show if they want to, as long as they're not crazy. In this case, I'm not sure.

SPEAKER_55: Thanks. It could be crazy. I don't know if you're crazy or not. Listen. Thanks at MailChimp. I use the API.

SPEAKER_199: The API worked brilliantly. I was able to save literally five hours a week. You saved me five hours a week. Yeah, which means you're saving me.

SPEAKER_99: You don't touch this stuff.

SPEAKER_718: Let's be clear. I know, but that's five hours of saving for me.

SPEAKER_108: I've got to get my sassy in. You're just sassy in. But listen, that's five hours I get to reallocate of Kieran's time, which I like, sassy Kieran. That's 250 hours they saved me with their amazing API. So thank you for saving me 250 hours of KK time. And thank you so much to GoToMeeting by Citrix. Meeting is, in fact, believing. They wanted me to say meeting is believing.

SPEAKER_722: They do want you to say meeting is believing.

SPEAKER_108: I love saying meeting is believing because I do believe meeting is believing. How many meetings have you been in, Thomas, where meeting is believing?

SPEAKER_723: Not enough. Really?

SPEAKER_54: Angel investing is a little rough right now, isn't it? Can we, before we split, Tom has a new thing going on. What? Well, I want to hear... What's the latest investment, Tom? Well, no, no, not new investment. I mean his...

SPEAKER_86: Fund? Yes. Do you have a fund? Yeah, I work with a partner whose family started at Televisa and Univision. Oh, yes, I remember. Yeah, it's called Nala, N-A-L-A Investments.

SPEAKER_88: And we're having fun and we think about how tech and traditional media come together.

SPEAKER_727: Oh, wow. That's sort of my wheelhouse, too. Yeah, yeah. Let's talk after the program.

SPEAKER_88: Man, I didn't know that. Thanks.

SPEAKER_463: How big is this fund? Tens of millions?

SPEAKER_727: Or millions? Or tens of millions?

SPEAKER_463: It's kind of evergreen, but call it tens of millions.

SPEAKER_229: Yeah, I like it. All right, there we go. I have a podcasting network I want to tell you about.

SPEAKER_67: The show has almost hit 300 episodes and it's doing very well.

SPEAKER_730: So, I think we're at... 296. This is 296.

SPEAKER_229: 296. Yeah, there we go. Yeah, episode 300. I'm going to interview Tyler.

SPEAKER_674: Listen. And we'll see you all next time on This Week in Startups.

SPEAKER_732: Bye.