SPEAKER_00: Hey, everybody. It is Tuesday. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. It's a fun one.

SPEAKER_01: A big day for your boy, JCal. Uber reported Q2 earnings, and it was a monster.

SPEAKER_02: Doubled revenue and cash flow positive. Yum, yum.

SPEAKER_05: I know. So we're just in a great mood here at This Week in Startups. Also in a great mood, Pinterest's C-suite. We're talking about the Pinterest Q2 report, which wasn't amazing on the surface, but the stock is up big. There's new leadership,

Jason Calacanis: new activist investors, and JCal comes up with a great merger idea for this company.

SPEAKER_07: I got the M&A of the century for that. But while we were talking, I made a JTrade. I'm

SPEAKER_09: very excited about a certain hedge fund manager who owned this particular name,

SPEAKER_10: and I just decided to whip out my Robinhood and place a 50k JTrade in the middle of the show.

Jason Calacanis: No lie, guys. That happened live. Really did.

SPEAKER_12: It did happen live. And then... It's not investment advice. No, absolutely not. It's literally just an impulse buy for this guy up in here.

SPEAKER_14: Yeah. I mean, if you would like to follow a maniac who buys a stock based on another person buying the stock and they like a certain...

SPEAKER_17: Then CNBC has a show for you.

SPEAKER_19: Yes. It's called JTrading with Jason Calacanis. Oh my God, I should have a CNBC show. Okay, keep going. I mean, you really should actually.

SPEAKER_20: And then we wrap with a great interview with the CEO of the Lambie, a healthcare concierge service

SPEAKER_05: that's totally focused on the idea of healthcare as a customer service experience. What a freaking concept. So great. We love it.

SPEAKER_24: Absolutely. So it's going to be a great show. Stick with us.

SPEAKER_26: This Week in Startups is brought to you by Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC 2 report fast. Twist listeners can get $1,000 off at vanta.com slash twist. Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website. Go to squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. And Embroker's Startup Insurance Program helps startups secure the most important types of insurance at a lower cost and with less hassle. Save up to 20% off of traditional insurance today at Embroker.com slash twist. And while you're there, get an extra 10% off using offer code twist.

SPEAKER_29: All right, everybody. It's a great day for Uber and me.

SPEAKER_31: I knew this day was coming. I've talked about it for many years.

SPEAKER_33: I should rub balloons. You know what? I feel rude. I should have really...

SPEAKER_09: It's a big day for me because I have been saying for years, years. And in fact, yesterday we talked about managing growth versus profitability. And I said, listen, much like Google can turn a dial

SPEAKER_37: and they can pick how many ads they show you. And they can pick the minimum cost per click. The cost per click, I think, originally was like a penny on Google. And then they made the minimum five cents. Over time, they went from, I think, two to five cents. Uber can turn a dial and pick how

SPEAKER_10: much they charge for a ride, right? It's pretty straightforward. And I've said for years, if you just take the number of rides and you divide it by the losses, it was averaging, at the time I had done a couple of years ago, I think 55 cents. Total rides, total loss, 55 cents, right? So when they lost a

SPEAKER_37: billion dollars, they had two billion rides, 50 cents a ride. You get the idea, Molly. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_38: Back of the envelope math like we like to do here. Long story short, DK, Dara, my guy at Uber, my second guy, has turned the dial. And today was the day when Uber just took the dial and they dialed it

SPEAKER_41: up. And then they just took wheel barrels of cash and dump them off the back of the car and just

SPEAKER_37: wheel barrels of cash dumped into the conference rooms at Uber. Mm hmm. Piles of cash in the conference rooms. Uber generated 382 million in free cash flow while doubling revenue year over

SPEAKER_44: year. Okay, this is both dials earnings and revenue. Yum, yum. Let's go. Yeah. We told

SPEAKER_47: everybody this would happen. Literally and specifically what Dara said he was going to do

SPEAKER_05: not one quarter ago. Mm hmm. And then lo and behold, he did. And now the magic has been achieved

SPEAKER_51: free cash flow three little words, the most powerful three words in the English language free cash flow. Everybody loves it. Everybody loves it. Yeah. Yeah. Should we get into the nitty

Jason Calacanis: gritty? The stock is soaring. It's up over 17% this morning. Gross bookings. I just got it. I mean, honestly, I bought a little bit on the open market and even I am stoked. Yum, yum. Here we go. About that. Yes. Gross bookings, $29.1 billion. That was up 33% year over year. So we're seeing a couple things happen. One, the dial and also the fact that people are back out in the world. So yay for that revenue up 105% year over year to $8.1 billion. That was a beat on estimates. Uber is on pace for $30 billion in revenue in 2022 net loss $2.6 billion. But this included this $1.7 billion headwind of mostly unrealized losses from investments and $470 million in stock based comps. So the free cash flow ended up

SPEAKER_12: up $780 million year over year to the total of 382. Because they lost last because they lost in that

SPEAKER_09: same quarter, right? Right, right, right. Yeah, they take out the capital expenditure. So there's still a little fun with numbers going on in fairness here. And you always take out Uber is a very unique situation. They when they couldn't get the gold medal in China or another location, Russia, whatever it was, they would get, I don't know, 10 to 30% of the incumbent joint forces with them. And that was Travis's brilliant plan. That Bill Gurley, I believe, collaborated on like, we get the silver medal or the

SPEAKER_10: bronze medal, let's collaborate with the winner. Because all of this does, of course, all of these wins compound to the number one player. That's how network effects work. And they've got tons of cash and

SPEAKER_09: tons of assets. Stock is up. It's great. I think the lesson here for everybody is something I'm trying to do here live on the program, Molly, and it's been great to have you here because you worked at marketplace. And I really want to just really become an expert on public market companies, in addition to private market companies. Now, I never thought I was like, clueless about public

SPEAKER_76: market companies. But I want to be an expert, you know, I want to be in the top 10% of investors there, because I'm already in the top 1% of investors on the private side. And I think what you have to understand is, when you're evaluating a company, and you look at pricing power, and you look at their cost basis, if you or their costs, not cost basis, but the you know, their expenses, if you can trim expenses, and raise costs, that's a very powerful business. And you couldn't do that when you had seven competitors to Uber or

SPEAKER_78: DoorDash. But when you're down to the final two players in a space, three players, you know, which is really, there's only

SPEAKER_79: two players in maybe two, three players in the food business, arguably to make up the majority. And then really, there's really two players and rides. And internationally, you know, there's many other

SPEAKER_23: smaller players. So the point is, you got to look at this stuff and say, if they did raise prices, what

SPEAKER_82: would happen? Would they lose more users than they gained in the revenue coming in? And if they cut costs, what would earnings look like? And this is what we're seeing across the board in big tech, hiring freezes, salary freezes, stock compensation being rethought, and then even layoffs or forcing people to come to the office as a de facto layoff, knowing that 10% won't come back. So that's what we're going to see. And the stock market, this is the way out, right? We wonder how does the stock market reset, right? And the way it resets is people look at businesses and go, Hey, that's a business. I could see myself owning. And I look at Disney and I saw the Andor trailer. Did you see the Andor trailer?

SPEAKER_86: Yeah, we should definitely that maybe should be our show with Lon, huh? Yeah, we should definitely come back to us on Twitter. And I was like, Oh, yeah, good.

SPEAKER_91: It looks so good. It looks beautiful and amazing. And awesome. Awesome. So I'm like, okay. And then

SPEAKER_88: I saw their Disney plans with Professor X and the X-Men and Secret Wars. I'm like, maybe I need more

SPEAKER_82: Disney shares, because their their strategic plan is pretty great. And so this is how the stock market

SPEAKER_14: resets, you lower all the expenses, you reevaluate every business you go from first principles, you know, is this a really good product or service that people want? Are they willing to pay money for it? And are we spending the right amount of money? And I think for Airbnb, Lyft, DoorDash, everybody,

SPEAKER_09: they weren't charging the right price. And they were spending too much money. And all of those things got dialed in in the last three years. And here we are, Airbnb, and Uber, and DoorDash, I think are going to be companies 10 years from now, this is not investment advice that will be worth for me,

SPEAKER_76: I think they're going to be worth five, 10 times what they're worth. Now, that's my estimate for

Jason Calacanis: those companies, Airbnb does report earnings this week, tomorrow, maybe? I think Airbnb also reports. Yeah, Uber's a lot of things are coming together in exactly the right way for Uber right now. And it does include the fact that airport bookings are back to pre pandemic levels, which meant that this quarter, mobility, you know, most of Uber's revenue in the pandemic has been coming from delivery. So bravo to Uber for having the foresight to see that delivery was going to be a big business, no matter what. Yeah, it kept this company alive during the pandemic, without a doubt. And so then

SPEAKER_15: now mobility is 126% year over year and up 41% quarter over quarter, mostly airport bookings, which is it was airport alone was 15% of total gross book. I mean, people are on the move,

SPEAKER_09: they want to enjoy their vacation, maybe you go out, you have a couple cocktails, you don't want to get dinged with a DUI or murder somebody like that. This is the promise of Uber is that you get more flexibility and it's expensive to rent cars. It's expensive to drive. And so you know, in some cases, it's cheaper in other cases, it's more convenient. And so great job to the team over there. The other thing to look at is, you know, the trips, the number of trips and the customers they were up in a nice way 24% year over year and 21% 24% for trips and 21%. So how do you double revenue? Well, that's where the take rate comes in take rate is a fancy word for the percentage you get. Mobility was always supposed to be 25%. But they did variable things with spiff's little promotions for the drivers, etc. And discounting to get people on the road on both sides of the marketplace. But the take rate for mobility 26.6%. In other words, if you spend $100 on Uber, Uber gets $26.60. That's up 8% year over year. And the delivery take rate, which again, they were in a massive discounting where you remember, that's up to 19.4%. So if you bought $100 worth of dinner for you know, you're six people or something. Yeah, $19.40 is what Uber eventually made on right and that's up 4.2% year over year, again, back to efficiency turning these dials, when you have a really great business, there are some dials you can change and the dials, you know, for Uber are becoming predictable, the dials for

SPEAKER_37: Amazon, for Google, for Apple, they're very predictable, Apple can pick, you know, how much they want to charge for a phone. So they know their earnings. And they can actually send their

SPEAKER_105: margins, it's just blow them out. Yeah, yes, what? So that requires though, Molly, extreme product

SPEAKER_71: market fit. Sorry, that was my final thought that I forgot to say, you know, if you have these dials,

SPEAKER_108: but it's on a not a great business, in other words, a business that doesn't have huge product

SPEAKER_01: market fit, then you can't play with the dials because you're just trying to keep the plane in

SPEAKER_110: the air. But if you have absurd product market fit, you can just do do do do do move your dials

SPEAKER_09: around and pick how much money you want to make this is chef's kiss for businesses like Uber, and I think Airbnb, I would put in this category of now they are becoming similar to Amazon and Google

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SPEAKER_33: twist for $1,000 off your sock to that's what I was going to ask actually so Airbnb I looked it up

Jason Calacanis: reports today. So does PayPal, AMD, EA. But what are the dials for Airbnb? So the dials for Airbnb, like how do you on the same number, it seems to me that there's their future revenue improvements are going to rely on growth.

SPEAKER_37: Okay, they could change at any point in time, what they charge to hosts, and what they charge to

SPEAKER_23: customers. So that percentage they could change. Now I don't think they've often changed it. But they

SPEAKER_12: could, because it's a delicate relationship, like you do not want to piss off your hosts, you know, because they, of course not, can potentially go elsewhere.

SPEAKER_10: I think the hosts, what are the hosts like, they give 5%. Let's just say the number is 5%. They take from both sides. So they get 10% total, I believe that's what it was last time I checked. So if you're, if you're a host, and you're renting your place for 500 bucks a night, average booking is four nights,

SPEAKER_123: let's say $2,000. I'm just making up numbers here $2,000. And you're paying 5% to 100 bucks. So let's say you made it 7%. Now you're paying 140. Are you going to cancel? I don't think so.

Jason Calacanis: Yeah, I don't know. I'll be curious to see what those earnings look like over time. That seems less obvious to me what Airbnb can do to increase revenue without increasing users. And that means having hosts and that means having inventory.

SPEAKER_123: Yeah, but where are you going to go? If you're a host, and you take yourself off Airbnb, you

SPEAKER_86: literally lose 90% of your bookings. If you rent your house out because rents are at an all time high,

SPEAKER_33: you could lose inventory. So this is the delicate balance. And so one might argue they are have less pricing power, right? And that's what I'm saying is, I think they have a little less, they have fewer

Jason Calacanis: dials, right revenue, like Uber can raise prices, and I'm still gonna do it. Airbnb, it might be a little trickier. And I'm, you know, if I'm evaluating these two things as a 10 year stock, I'm not sure

SPEAKER_79: that they have so many obvious paths to increase revenue. Most guests pay 14.2% of the booking subtotal nightly rate cleaning fee, additional guest fee, if applicable, excluding Airbnb fees and taxes.

SPEAKER_139: And for a split fee, which I think is both sides pay the host is charged 3%. So I kind of feel like,

SPEAKER_10: I guess it's a debate going on with the producers. Is Airbnb essential? Do you feel it's essential or

SPEAKER_32: not Molly? Because you're an Airbnb user. I am an Airbnb user. I'm about to stay in one in Mexico

SPEAKER_143: City, but I don't think it's essential. You're going to like push comes to shut up. I'm so jelly.

SPEAKER_146: I know you should come down. I know I really want to go to Mexico City. I've never been kind of a

SPEAKER_148: hipster locale right here. I heard the food, the art, everything's amazing. Yeah. Come on down. We're

SPEAKER_149: gonna be partying in Mexico City. But I don't. I actually really- Oh, take the This Big Startup's

SPEAKER_151: Jet. Perfect. There you go. But I'll come solo. I'll just come for the night.

SPEAKER_154: No, just come for the day. Just like fly down in the morning, fly back in the afternoon. It's great.

SPEAKER_158: Exactly. Private chat. Boom. I think it's essential. I do not think it's essential. I think that you can

SPEAKER_05: always default to a hotel. There will always be there's other platforms for renting houses, and frankly, a hotel will cook and clean for you. Okay, I take it back. It's not essential.

SPEAKER_123: It's not essential. I always think it's essential because with a family, I like to have the kitchen and everything. But now that I'm thinking it through, the last couple of times I did travel, we got two hotel rooms with adjoining rooms, and we went to the restaurant or room servers and the girls like that more. Yeah. And the pool. Right. It's great for what it is, but it's not essential.

SPEAKER_05: And I think you just see on Twitter, and I'm not trying to bash Airbnb. It's like-

Jason Calacanis: No, no, no, no. Right? This is all, I'm just sort of, as I think about which stock would I want to own or what are the, like Airbnb has made attempts to diversify. And I will tell you,

SPEAKER_12: the other thing we did in Mexico City is book several of their experiences because those are great. Oh, you did? Yeah. You used Airbnb experiences? I have never used them. Really?

Jason Calacanis: And like, sometimes you'll look up a tour on a website and find the same one on Airbnb for like

SPEAKER_09: cheaper and easier to book. All right. Anyway, I just want to say congratulations to the team at Uber, past, present, future, everybody. Great job. And that's why I'm still holding a very large position in Uber. And I'm not J trading. I have too much of it. I was thinking of putting a J trade on a couple of weeks ago, because I was like, it feels like after he went to New York and talked to all those hedge funds, it'd be a good J trade to put on. But I didn't want to put a J trade on because

SPEAKER_170: I already have a huge position. But I am thinking about Warner Brothers as well for a J trade.

SPEAKER_09: Really? Well, it turns out Warner Brothers Discovery has been spun out. It's its own holding

SPEAKER_01: company. And there's this guy Michael Burry. Do you know this guy who is the guy from the big short? All right, he deletes all his tweets. I'm not up on any of this Warner.

SPEAKER_44: He deletes each tweet. I think it's Burry. Okay. And he's a really smart cat. And he's got a hedge

SPEAKER_01: fund and his positions are public. And so I use Zapier to create a Twitter room on our Slack. So Zapier to Slack with a Twitter room where Michael J Burry's tweets, you know, he deletes each tweet.

SPEAKER_181: Mm hmm. I'm learning along Michael J Burry, I can just pull it up for everything. There's a whole

SPEAKER_25: story about it in seeking alpha. So he deletes his tweets in real time. I have his tweets come into a

SPEAKER_185: Slack room with Zapier because it makes me happier because he deletes his tweets. I can't keep up with it. Zapier.com. But I like his tweets. And he says like really provocative things. But he deletes them

SPEAKER_14: within like, I don't know if it's six hours or 12 hours. So like he tweeted at 904 AM today. And it's Michael J Burry. So you click on that tweet, it's now at the taping of this 1046. It's gone. And so you have to like, be on alerts with him or something to see his tweets. I don't know, he I think he got in trouble with the SEC. But his portfolio is available online. And as I become

SPEAKER_82: a J trader, so there you see what I did, right? Everybody can see I created that thing. So if you were to do a search on Twitter, I'm sorry, if you do a search on Google on the Google, you can find

SPEAKER_09: his portfolio online. So I guess scion asset management is his hedge fund, or his investment

SPEAKER_136: company. They have $165 million in portfolio value. This is for q1 2022. And it looks like WBD

SPEAKER_37: Warner Brothers Discovery is his at the time was his third largest holding. Yeah. And it's gotten crushed. It's but this is who owns HBO Max and discovery and Zaslav, who I talked to when I was doing a reality TV show. Back in the day, he's running it. And he's really smart. And he's a

SPEAKER_82: CEO of merchant. This guy is a hardcore guy. So I'm at like a special conference you're not supposed to talk about give a talk and he is baller. So anyway, I am now really looking at WBD. This is going to be possibly my next J trade. And this is not Molly investment advice. No. Just we're just talking

Jason Calacanis: here. Just a couple of friends hanging out in Mexico City having a chat about stocks. That's it.

SPEAKER_203: And I'm not saying I'm going to put a trade on right now. But, but if you were watching on video,

SPEAKER_137: you might have seen the telltale head drop that says I'm looking at my phone now. I would never

SPEAKER_20: I would never just pop into my phone. I like Uber Bonanza day. It's got fun energy. It's a fun energy day.

SPEAKER_206: Daddy's feeling good today. Let me tell you that. It's a fun day. Now. Hold on. Let me take a look.

SPEAKER_210: Warner Brothers. Yeah. So the Seeking Alpha. Hold on. I'll put my grandpa glasses on here.

SPEAKER_182: While Jason looks at his phone for no reason at all. That's 5% today. Note that on July 25,

Jason Calacanis: Seeking Alpha wrote about this Burry holding and said the combination of Warner Media and Discovery created a true media giant, arguably at par with Disney and Netflix. The stock has been off, but that could be good news if you felt like you like a big sale at the stock store.

SPEAKER_05: Well, usually these mergers are a red flag, right? Like you saw like the Turner one fall apart.

Jason Calacanis: So it's kind of interesting that this is one of the few that at least according to this article are saying, you know, the combination of the assets creates this huge content library, 200,000 hours of video content. The assets are complimentary because Discovery has a lot of nonfiction. Yes. And Warner Media has a lot of fiction. And then of course, continuing the quote, the deal will support a focus streaming platform that may compete with Amazon Prime, Netflix and Disney Plus. And this is one where like,

SPEAKER_05: it's really hard to compete. Are we done? Are we ready? Are we done? Can I stop camp dancing?

SPEAKER_214: Yes. Thank you.

SPEAKER_29: The J trade is on. Oh, what do you know? Not investment advice. But when you see the grandpa glasses go on, I don't listen, I'm not saying Vlad that you're using a font size that only a 30 year old can read.

SPEAKER_219: But like I've got my font size ratcheted up on my iPhone 13 Max grandpa settings over at fidelity, where the grandpa's trade, I think you can make that font as big as you want. Oh, there it is WBD

SPEAKER_123: orders in I've just bought 3000 shares at $16.26 48 grand on WBD. I've been waiting to make this trade. And this is not investment advice. But I just made a big J trade. And we got to put this in Prometheus, by the way, we are going to have three sponsors for J trades. They're not going to be

SPEAKER_09: like ads in the show. But I'm going to like have like, maybe a charting company, a trading company, a community. And when I do the J trades, we'll mention those folks. So we'll be able to monetize the J trades if we will. But I really believe Warner Brothers has I was thinking of who's going to be number one and who's going to be number two.

SPEAKER_141: Mm hmm. I believe these are the number one and the number two in streaming. I believe streaming is beat up right now. These being Disney and Warner Brothers, Disney and is that

SPEAKER_33: what you mean? One and two? Yes, because here, yeah, Disney, Hulu, ESPN. That's pretty good

SPEAKER_14: trifecta, is it not? Mm hmm. Then I go Warner Brothers, DC Comics, Discovery Channel, and HBO Max.

SPEAKER_76: Yeah. Come on, who's going to get to a billion subs? If you edit then in Amazon and Netflix,

SPEAKER_36: and that's your foursome? Um, you know, I think I know who's coming in first and second. And I believe

SPEAKER_09: there will be a 1 billion subscription service very soon. In our lifetimes is what I mean by very soon.

SPEAKER_123: And if it is, what would that even look like? Just think about the amount of money that would print.

SPEAKER_37: If it was but $4 or $5 a month, because you have internationals much cheaper, obviously.

SPEAKER_76: Let's just say it was a $5 average globally. $60 billion a year?

SPEAKER_237: Yeah, that's great. In revenue? Subscription?

SPEAKER_41: What could you do with that? Like, the entire NBA, all the teams in the NBA are worth $60 billion. You know, like, it's an NBA ownership of the NBA every year, probably. Yeah, you could afford to buy

SPEAKER_37: anything or build anything. Yeah, it's bonkers. It's bonkers. And DC, by the way, it's completely mismanaged. And so Zaslav is going to get in there. I've seen this guy up close. I've been in a business

SPEAKER_82: meeting with Zaslav. He's no joke. And I've seen him speak. This guy's like a hardcore guy. He's like a sleutman of the entertainment industry. So interesting. Yeah, yeah, he's like a general, like, this is the guy you would want, like, if there's a zombie apocalypse. Yeah. You know, like,

SPEAKER_01: yeah, like, this is the guy you'd want to be in his town, right? He'd run it fair, but he'd have a strong hand like, you know, you'd be safe from the zombies and the other other tribes. So I like it for

SPEAKER_23: that reason. I think he's gonna come in and the DC team is all fired. You guys, this is what he's gonna come in. He's gonna give the speech, Molly. What made Marvel so successful? And they're gonna go around the table. And everybody's gonna talk about the five things Marvel did right. And he's

SPEAKER_82: gonna go, well, why are we not doing that? And it's gonna be crickets. And then he's gonna say,

SPEAKER_23: all five of you. Thank you for your service. Your desks have been cleaned. There are cars waiting for you downstairs with your boxes in the back. You're fired. I don't want to ever see you.

SPEAKER_82: You're a disgrace. And your services are no longer needed by Warner Brothers Discovery.

SPEAKER_76: Everybody's fired. En masse. Start over. That's what he's gonna do. Yeah, when he does. Oh my Lord.

SPEAKER_82: Okay, sorry. I'm excited. No, I'm into wartime CEOs watching what happened with Uber. Yeah, I'm just

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Jason Calacanis: All right. Let's talk about Pinterest. Let's. This is such an interesting story. Pinterest also up almost 20% in after hours trading after it did not tank. Like, I mean, we're not going to sit here and say these were, you know, booming earnings. It was not like a giant banger of a report, but it didn't tank. And that was good enough for everybody. Also, what I think is super interesting about these earnings is that, you know, first of all, it was like barely a miss. Revenue was up 9% to $666 million, which we'll assume is not some sort

SPEAKER_05: of a curse, but it was revealed in a release separate from Pinterest earning report. Because you remember like a month ago and we sort of noted it in passing, if at all, Pinterest founder,

Jason Calacanis: Ben Silberman, left as CEO and became executive chairman, which was sort of a kind of moment. And then in this report, this release that was put out separate from the earnings report, Elliott management confirmed Elliott management, of course, the activist investor group that most recently tried to push out Jack Dorsey at Twitter confirmed that it is now Pinterest's largest investor and said it has quote conviction in the company and its new CEO who recently was Google's former president of commerce payment and next billion users bill ready. So he knows a little something about making money. And I listen, like there's no evidence that Ben left because of Elliott management, but one assumes that some conversations were had.

SPEAKER_09: This is the great part about the public equity market. And this is why I want to really learn how it works. I think the reason Bill Gurley became the goat was because he was a public market investor that went private. I think it's better to be a private market investor. I think it's more fun. So I don't want to not be that. But I think he understood it when he was a public market analyst. You know, I think famously, he covered, I think it worked with Mary Meeker and all those folks, and he covered Amazon in the early days, which is why Bezos was like, yeah, it's one of the smartest cats I know. And I think people like Elliott management, I know they have a bad name. And people are like, you know, they're sharks, whatever. But when you go public, you now have this, you know, backstop of if the company is being truly mismanaged, and it doesn't have like a super voting structure, like New York Times and Facebook does, these folks can come in and they can activate activism,

SPEAKER_23: and you know, be a little sand in the oyster that perhaps could make a pearl. I don't think that always happens. But one of the things in the private markets that we've gotten wrong,

SPEAKER_82: is making people god kings, you know, I would say god queens as well. But just there's no example of a god queen female CEO being given what the New York Times, Facebook, I think there's one other company

SPEAKER_81: that has the superstructure. I guess Google has it too, still. Shopify has it now. Shopify does have

SPEAKER_23: it? Yeah. So anyway, there's like a half dozen god kings who have given themselves this power. It's

SPEAKER_82: dysfunctional. It's brilliant if the if the founder is truly extraordinary, but it is quickly dysfunctional if they're not. And I think it's something that I hate to say this, because I am a free market monster. But now that I'm studying the public markets, I'm joking, I'm not a free market monster. I don't know if these things should exist. Yeah. I'm wondering. Now, you do have the option to buy the company or not. Right? You don't have to own Facebook. But I'm also wondering, like, maybe we shouldn't allow this forever. Maybe there should be some greater controls of public entities. So if you want to take the public's money, should you be able to say I have 100 votes to your one? I don't know. I don't want to flip flop here. Because in the past, I've said, you know, it's, you know, you have the option to not buy that. While that's true. These companies also do seem to get awfully power.

Jason Calacanis: And their governance is important. Exactly. They're included in indices, they're included in pension packages, they're included in 401k is like, there is broad public exposure to these companies. And so governance really does, does matter like that is in theory, what the SEC is supposed to exist for is to protect investors. And if you're giving a CEO ultimate power at a publicly traded company,

SPEAKER_86: there is going to always eventually emerge some tension there.

SPEAKER_07: Yeah, I guess those, I like your argument as well that all these like pensions own it as well. Now,

SPEAKER_09: they have the option of not owning it. But the indexes are the indexes. And sometimes they index the top 100 by market cap revenue, whatever. So they kind of get dumped in there. I don't know, I, I have to think this one through now that I'm becoming a public market investor, I really have to think so because I have always been for founder control, especially in private companies or founders having, you know, strong controls in place, because I do think the previous model, you know, where Tony Perkins and other folks would replace the CEO as the general course of was the accepted best practice in Silicon Valley, you know, up until the 90s, when it started to change. And that was actually the

SPEAKER_79: founding story of founders fund and the whole Sean Parker versus Michael Moritz story, you do want

SPEAKER_76: to have control so the founders don't lose their companies early, because that will, that would generally be bad. But for public companies, had a certain size. Hmm, I'm starting to wonder,

SPEAKER_12: I like this mindset. I like this lifelong learner mindset here. Because I don't have a hard and fast

Jason Calacanis: opinion on it either. But it does feel like it doesn't I mean, there's just something that fundamentally doesn't feel right about it, right? It's like somebody will what did Nick just put in the chat, Warren Buffett said, buy some by companies that are so great, an idiot can run them because one day

SPEAKER_37: an idiot will. It's so true, right? And so, yeah, I am wondering, maybe there's like, you can have it

SPEAKER_09: for the first 10 years as a public company, or it maybe it decays 10% a year. So you can have the super voting shares for the founder for 10 years when they go public, or, you know, whatever, plus 20 years, but it goes down 5% a year. So eventually, the company becomes, you know, more vested in the public, I might like something like that. Yeah. Where because I understand if I took my company public, I'm like, Listen, I want you to be able to buy shares in it. And I wanted to freely trade. But I want to make the decisions here. I don't want to have, you know, activists come in here and, you know, steal it from me. But then maybe you should just stay private. So maybe there's a third way

SPEAKER_115: is what I'm getting at. Maybe there's a third way.

SPEAKER_05: I wonder if this is what that air what Eric Greece was trying for with the long term

Jason Calacanis: stock exchange, like if that was that was sort of founder friendly, founder control oriented, but maybe in a slightly different

SPEAKER_09: It was more for as he explained it to me holding your shares. For a certain period of time. So if I agree, I'm going to buy Pinterest,

SPEAKER_82: or Uber at whatever share traded spent, I promise I'm going to keep it for a year, or two, or five. And if I buy it, they will sell the company will sell me those shares at a 20% discount if I agree to hold it for five years. Right? So it's, again, a third way. So interesting innovation. But you know, Pinterest is now making was 666 was their exact revenue.

SPEAKER_296: I mean, I should have stopped at 665. That's not a good sign to No, dude, that's punk rock. That's like biting a head off a bat in your earnings record. That's rockstar. Yeah, that's sick.

SPEAKER_300: All right. So Pinterest has the sign of the devil for their earnings. Ronnie James deal. Here we go. Iron Maiden. So rock on. Ben Silverman just destroyed a hotel room last night. Yeah, he literally just. Guitar through the window.

SPEAKER_309: He definitely did. Well, in fairness, they did sacrifice a lamb on the top of the Pinterest building on Bryan Street last quarter. Which is how they, you know. They hit 666. They all got pentagram tattoos.

SPEAKER_314: Yeah, there's a pentagram spray painted on the Pinterest headquarters right now on Bryan Street.

SPEAKER_222: I really think that we are like one nanosecond away from creating a new conspiracy theory that Pinterest is actually like satanic. And that's where all the, like the QAnon people are going to get a hold of this and be like, I knew it.

SPEAKER_316: I, I told you my daughter asked me if the Illuminati was real.

SPEAKER_31: And if I was in it, because she was talking to her friends and I looked at her and it was, I gave her the totally, totally, totally surprising.

SPEAKER_42: The Illuminati is an urban legend and it's an insult to entrepreneurs and people who have worked

SPEAKER_176: very hard their whole lives to help make this country better. Or Illuminati is, and I don't want to talk about it again.

SPEAKER_321: The Illuminati is not real. It's a stereotype and it's insulting to entrepreneurs.

SPEAKER_323: It's like what I told her. And she was like, no, really. Are you in the Illuminati? Yeah, but for real though, are you in the Illuminati?

SPEAKER_325: I was talking to my friends. And you were all, kinda. And I was like, fine Illuminati.

SPEAKER_136: I'm going to quickly explain one of the crucial types of insurance that every founder of every

SPEAKER_37: startup needs to understand. It's called cyber insurance. It's a, you know, it's a little cyberpunk name. What it basically means is hacks. You got to be covered in case you

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SPEAKER_123: 666 million. Yeah, up 9% year over year. Yeah, it's slow growth. Yeah, they're losing a little bit

SPEAKER_37: of money 43 million. It's not a big deal. But look at the monthly active users. That's impressive.

SPEAKER_182: 433 million bigger than Twitter. It was down 5 million year over year, but it did beat estimates.

SPEAKER_334: I gotta know how many of their multi active users are search driven. That would be very interesting

SPEAKER_15: to know. Like how many of them come from Google. Because you do end up with a lot of search results

Jason Calacanis: that send you to Pinterest. That happens to me all the time. And then I get super irritated, because if you click on it in a just regular old browser, then it's like, do you want to open the

SPEAKER_337: app? Or do you want to log in? Or do you want to view the result? Like, it's super? They're trying

Chamath Palihapitiya: to do? It's like I am a Pinterest user, LinkedIn and Pinterest do the same thing, which is

SPEAKER_09: they think if we get you into the app, we can reduce our dependency on Google search, and we get more people to download the app. And we take your data. And we get your data.

SPEAKER_37: Well, it's more about just owning the user like Amazon does like getting people to come directly. And so it does work. I would do the same thing. And if I'm being honest,

SPEAKER_09: yeah, but it is annoying at times when you just want to look at the profile in your browser window, and it launches the app. So what I do is I write the way to get around this, I believe is right mouse click open in a new tab, or I have my middle mouse, which is a scroll wheel that you can press. I set up my scroll wheel to do that. So try that next time if on an image for Pinterest, and see if it opens it up without launching an app.

Jason Calacanis: Mostly I just move on now. Although I do use Pinterest, I actually got like a super good crafting idea from Pinterest over the weekend. Like I did it. I crafted. Pinterest. Craft it's kind of cool. I'm a woman of varied interest. Oh my god, I made the cutest little my inherited my grandmother's collection of tiny travel spoons, which I was like, Oh God,

SPEAKER_152: I'm gonna put these on eBay. Oh, I like those actually. I think those are dope. Then I made them into these beautiful modern shadow boxes. And I like spray painted one of her holders. I like a good shadow box. Boho chic. I'm really freaking proud of my crafting situation.

SPEAKER_108: Rachel's obsessed with this situation. I think you and Rachel should do like this week and crafting

SPEAKER_15: we'll do like we're like mother and daughter. We're like into all the same stuff, which means I'm too old.

David Friedberg: I think you're like Rachel. You're like Rachel's wacky aunt from Berkeley. I think that's actually

SPEAKER_357: what you are. I want to be like, you're like your auntie, auntie Mo.

SPEAKER_359: Oh, wacky aunt wacky aunt. It's like, you know what, I got in trouble at Coachella. I can't talk to my mom. I'm Molly tell me. I got invited to Coachella, but that's awesome.

SPEAKER_37: All right, but they got 2.6 billion in cash. This is a kind of a big number.

SPEAKER_123: Yes, this is a big number. So they're in good shape. It's an advertising based business, right? There's nothing but advertising space. They have not come up with a subscription business. There is no such thing as

SPEAKER_21: Pinterest Pro, right? I do not believe that is the case. Correct.

SPEAKER_123: And I think they make ecommerce revenue is a big part of it, too. So that was the big thing when I remember the early days of Pinterest that was being pitched to me was Pinterest is going to be the next

SPEAKER_282: Google Shopping or Amazon. That actually has not happened.

SPEAKER_372: Yeah, no, not at all. I Yes, which is why this new guy is in here. This Bill, Bill ready is here

SPEAKER_126: because he's ready to take create an Amazon competitor. Hey, oh, because yeah, they just

SPEAKER_05: have sort of under emphasize the shopping part. And now I have definitely noticed that when you go to Pinterest, there's like shop or explore and you default to shop.

SPEAKER_14: But when you shop, are they delivering it? Or are they? And you put it in a like a shopping cart?

SPEAKER_82: Or are they just getting paid for click to dump you to a Shopify site or an Amazon site?

SPEAKER_374: I think they're just getting paid to dump you basically just a bunch of ads, like Google

Jason Calacanis: shopping ads. Like I think it's like a Shopify situation. Yeah, see, they need to buy Etsy.

SPEAKER_10: What's Etsy market cap? They should use this cash to buy Etsy.

SPEAKER_86: Or they should just compete with Etsy. Because I love Etsy. I shop there all the time.

SPEAKER_37: Pinterest needs to buy, I'm sorry, Etsy. Now they're similar sized companies.

SPEAKER_01: So they should be a merger. This would be the greatest merger ever. This is you don't have to change anything about it ever, ever. Etsy just carries on. But when your Etsy merchandise is on Pinterest, you can add to shopping cart. And you get free delivery. If you come from Pinterest, or something. And then they should use Pinterest when somebody posts

SPEAKER_37: something on Pinterest say, Did you make this? And would you like it to be on Etsy?

SPEAKER_09: It would be the easiest thing in the world to link up. Oh my god. Yeah, in the back channel. I'm seeing pictures of these goddamn spoons. That is so amazing. Wait, are those all yours?

SPEAKER_389: Oh, this is like a third of her collection.

Jason Calacanis: I used a glue gun. I used a glue gun. I glued these like spoons onto it. I bought white backing for the shadow boxes. I spray painted one of her old ugly wooden holders and like put new hooks on it.

SPEAKER_141: Can we show the one with the blue shield? I love this one. Like the Captain America shield one? Yeah, like Captain America shield. This one is great. Isn't that so pretty? It looks distressed. Did you make that?

SPEAKER_182: I distressed it. I spray painted it. And then I used a sander and some mat, and I distressed it. Like who am I even? I love it. I'm a crafter.

SPEAKER_82: Listen, this is what I like about this one is, are the spoons now removable so you can take one

SPEAKER_406: down? Oh yeah, I can swap them out. And pass it around. Look at what Molly's doing here.

SPEAKER_82: Look at that. I think now each of those spoons is worth what? Like five, ten bucks or three bucks if you're buying them? Yeah, something like that. I mean,

Jason Calacanis: I probably could have eBayed the whole collection for a couple hundred dollars. Okay. But it's like a lifetime of my grandmother's travels, you know, like I couldn't bring myself to do it. So awesome.

SPEAKER_09: My mom bought these things from the World's Fair. And she has a collection of from the World's Fair. And she's been buying them off of eBay for years. I think she probably lost money net net on buying them. But I want to do something similar for my mom with her collection. This would be amazing.

SPEAKER_01: What I like about the boxes, you know, it frames them, but I like your hanging one much better. Because you could actually touch them and take them down and stir your coffee with them and put it back.

Jason Calacanis: Yeah. Well, I kept a whole bunch of there's just some little ones that I'm like, I need to develop a caviar habit because they're just cute spoons, you know, absolutely. Yeah. Should we talk about our

SPEAKER_126: health? I am obsessed with healthcare now. And not enough to be like, all in on it. I'm saying I'm like,

SPEAKER_01: super curious in the way I was curious about like, calm.com. And I, you know, or in this collaboration

SPEAKER_09: with you, Molly, and the climate syndicate, the syndicate.com slash climate, I'm like climate. There's like, it's like a moment. We're seeing.

SPEAKER_186: I'm curious. Yes. I'm sure I'm climate curious. I was mindfulness curious, and I am now healthcare curious.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, which is to say, I am, you know, investigating what's going on here, because something is changing. And I know quantified self was a piece of that model, you know, it was very

SPEAKER_09: and watching what people did with calm. And then I got fit bod and watching how well that's gone. And then I use the tonal and the peloton. There's something happening here where people are taking

Jason Calacanis: control of their health. Yeah, because they have to write when you have anything time you have a system that's so broken, you can sense that disruption is coming. And we're like, right at

SPEAKER_76: that hump. I think I like that as a playbook actually to look for companies possibly is like, people are frustrated, and they're not going to take it anymore. Right? What do you want to roll

SPEAKER_282: their own solution? Like, what do you hate? Right? It's always been a great one. What's broken? Like, which company do you hate the most? Oh, I hate taxis. Oh, I hate hotels. You know,

Jason Calacanis: I hate cell phone service. Anthony Levandowski, who we got to follow up back up with is working on a

SPEAKER_09: fixed cell phone service. I'm like, hallelujah. Here we go. Perfect. Yeah. So Tandis Urban spoke at the all in summit. And I became friendly with her a couple years ago. She was telling me about this thing she was building. Well, they actually launched something called the Land B in New York. It's a private club, essentially, where you pay 3000 a year, which I think is half of what it should cost. So put that aside. And we talked to the CEO, Chloe about this. And then you get a doctor,

SPEAKER_01: a wellness kind of person coordinator and a concierge. And you get this like a little pod

SPEAKER_07: that works. You got 230 people have done this. And people will not shut up about how great it is.

SPEAKER_09: And there's a large number of people who could afford 3000 a year for their health. Because if you have a gym membership in New York, that's like 200 bucks a month. Yeah. So this does not seem outrageous

SPEAKER_33: in terms of pricing. And I think it could change everything. So we did a little interview with the CEO of the Land B. Chloe Harouche. Here she comes.

SPEAKER_09: Hey, Molly, I've been obsessed with concierge doctors and this one medical acquisition by Amazon that we talked about, it does seem like people want a better healthcare experience. And

SPEAKER_76: a friend of mine, Tandis Urban, who presented at the all in summit, is the co founder of a company called the Land B. And I found out about this company is quite taken by it. Kind of like a private

SPEAKER_09: club slash healthcare provider. And they offer a concierge service to members for an annual fee that I think is probably half of what it should be if I'm being honest $3,000 a year, which is a lot of money, you know, for some people and maybe too little for others. They're incorporated in August of 2019. But they actually have built this now. And they build this like really interesting concept, Molly, where you have a team, physician wellness advisor, and basically a concierge who manages your benefits. And they'll help you navigate your insurance, they'll do referrals to specialists, you can chat with them, they have community events. It's kind of like Soho house meets doctor's office, if I were

SPEAKER_76: to describe it. And I thought I would have the CEO on the program. Her name is Chloe Harouche,

SPEAKER_435: and she is the CEO and co founder of the Land B. Welcome, Chloe. Thank you. Super excited to be here.

SPEAKER_436: Awesome. Chloe, meet Molly Wood. Molly, meet Chloe. Great to meet you. You too.

Jason Calacanis: I was obsessed with every second of Tandis's talk at All In. And I love the kind of fundamental concept you have at the Land B, which is like that you're approaching this as a customer service issue, which I think is such a powerful insight that I would love for you to

SPEAKER_12: break down a little more.

SPEAKER_441: Yeah, I mean, I think that it's sort of the root cause of what we're trying to get to, which is how do we actually solve the problem of prevention? And the only way to really do that is by creating buy-in from the consumer. And today, the consumer is not really the patient. And so how do we ultimately change that in order for the consumer to be more focused on their health, to be more engaged and more motivated? And so the way that we do that is we shift the perception in people's minds of how do we actually interact with the healthcare system from, I need to go to the doctor because I feel sick because I have to go to, I want to go to the doctor because this is a time for me to be intellectually curious, for me to take ownership and control over my health and actually do something a little bit differently, but really enjoy the process along the way. And so ultimately,

SPEAKER_442: by putting that control back into the hands of the consumer, we can be more effective at solving prevention.

SPEAKER_61: Where are you at today? I know that you've fired up this space in Manhattan. You got 230 members,

SPEAKER_09: some number of them pay $2,000 to $3,000 a year for the service. Again, I think it's super low. I don't know how you came up with that number given the service you're providing and how this can be profitable. But how long have you had this, I guess, pod of, you know, the concierge and the wellness and the doctor? And so how many months have you been doing it? And

SPEAKER_448: and what are your members saying about it?

SPEAKER_441: So we launched in September of 2021. We launched with about 180 founding members, those members are paying $2,000 a year. And actually, a lot of them ended up investing in the company because they were so excited and passionate about what we were building. And really, what that meant for us is that we were the first ones to build a practice for patients by patients. And so so much of what we do is really redefining and redesigning the experience of going to the doctor from the perspective of the patient. And so that ultimately is our differentiator. It's really thinking through what does a patient need in order to get from point A to point B. And that's what we've done. And so every sort of aspect of the experience is very much thought through that lens. And that's ultimately why when you think about how our members responding to this, it's sort of this aha moment, this relief in their minds of like, wow, this is the first time that someone really gets it really gets what I need, and isn't just creating fluff around the experience, but actually focusing their attention on what I need in order for me to actually solve this issue

SPEAKER_442: or just be more proactive.

SPEAKER_449: What does that look like? Can you give us some specifics? Like walk me through, I just signed up.

SPEAKER_137: I'm gonna what happens next? Is there an app? Do I make an appointment? What does my team seem like? Like, give us a sense of how that actually translates into the experience.

SPEAKER_441: Yeah, so the app is coming. But essentially, the way that it works today is when you join, you get access to our patient portal, which allows you to schedule your first visit. Once that visit is scheduled, we send you our comprehensive intake form. And that usually takes members about 25 to 30 minutes to complete. And it's a very extensive rundown of your previous medical history, where you currently stand, what your lifestyle looks like, what you've tried in the past, what you hope to achieve in the future, etc. So very, very comprehensive. And ultimately, our care team, which is the first step to sort of doing something differently, we actually review that intake form. We spend time as a team, sitting through that doing research, asking questions, collaborating on what types of questions we want to then ask the patient when they come in. So then the patient comes in, it's an hour long visit, it's broken up into three parts, the first 20 minutes is a meeting with your entire care team. So as Jason mentioned, it's your doctor, it's your wellness advisor, and your concierge manager, all sitting around the table with you, talking about what we learned from your intake form, and what questions we have, then we sort of help, you know, frame the conversation of where we want to focus our attention. Obviously, this is an annual membership. So we hope to achieve all of these things over the course of the year, not just in one visit. But we really want to focus on what is sort of the most urgent need to ultimately what is the long term goal. At that point, we also ask the patients to share a little bit more around why they joined the Lambie, what do they hope to get out of this? What's sort of plaguing them more than anything? The second third of the visit is just with the physician and that's to go through your vitals, do a comprehensive physical exam and do an initial set of baseline labs. So we do more than your typical doctor's office. For example, we test vitamin D, we do a robust hormone thyroid check. So we look at things that most doctors don't look at. But we do also create this sort of standardized approach to your baseline labs because it's sort of the first look. It allows us to get a better glimpse of what should we sort of focus on in the next round. The third piece of it is a wellness assessment. So after you meet with the doctor, you trans transition over into the wellness consult room. And that's a meeting with just the wellness advisor. And again, that's to sort of dive deeper into what have you tried in the past? What's working?

SPEAKER_442: What's not working? Have you tried different diets? Have you tried different exercise regimen? What does your sleep hygiene look like? What are the challenges that are stopping you from actually improving your health on a day-to-day? How can we work on your habits to really improve

SPEAKER_441: your overall health outcomes? And so from all of that information that we gather over that that one hour meeting, we're able to create a personalized care plan for you. And again, that crosses every function across health and wellness. So we'll talk about specialists that we want you to see, supplements that we recommend that you take, future blood works that we want you to dive into, and then obviously wellness goals. And all of that has their own set of timelines, their own milestones that we want you to hit. And that's sort of the roadmap that we want to follow throughout the course of the year. After that, again, it's an unlimited model, but we check in with you proactively at least once a quarter to see how things are progressing. And that's sort of the first also iteration where a lot of our members want to feel like there's someone behind the scenes checking in on them, that they don't have to be the ones worried about their health. There's someone that's sort of making sure that they're following the right steps, that they're doing the right things, that something that they should have done is actually happening. But then obviously there's the opportunity

SPEAKER_442: for that patient to also reach out to us if they have a new symptom, if they are interested in a new

SPEAKER_441: wellness modality and want to learn more about it. And then on top of that, we have this sort of thriving community that we've been growing. And that's sort of with the idea of creating more opportunities for our members to feel empowered and motivated to learn about the latest research, the latest trends in health and wellness, and actually speak directly with those thought leaders

SPEAKER_442: so that they can feel that they have a real seat at the table. And that's completely unique in healthcare, where again, as you pointed out, consumers today are not the patient, but how can we actually take that control and put it into the hands of the patient by giving them that information directly, and then giving them the opportunity to discuss it with their care team as equals?

SPEAKER_79: I did notice on the Instagram, which is the land being just search for it, or it's the dot land

SPEAKER_09: be, I didn't know you could do dots in Instagram, that you're sharing information and having events. And then I noticed you guys were having like live events and bringing people together for talks. And that's what you do at a private club, I was only ever a member of the battery. But when I lived in LA, the soul house had me come out and speak to the membership. And you know, it's like very intimate, you know, you get 50 people show up out of the whatever thousands of members. So that stuff like, you know, really just proactively sounds like worth the price of admission. I always like to do a little math on businesses $3,000, 230 people, about 700 grand, 690,000 to be exact. And then I just divided the number 6000 because you have three people 2000 hours a year each, you get about 26 hours. So it seems like everybody's getting 26 hours

SPEAKER_37: with their doctor a year if on average, which would be a lot if you're texting and stuff like that, that only takes 15 minutes, and you can multitask there. So tell me about the economics of the

SPEAKER_23: business. Is it as I was sort of thinking priced too low to start because my understanding when we

SPEAKER_14: had talked or maybe I was talking to Tandis that you sold out immediately and you have almost no

SPEAKER_455: churn. And it's early, obviously, people can move or whatever come up. Yeah, here hasn't come up. But

SPEAKER_82: did you price this way too cheap? And then how does that affect both sides of the equation in this, you know, a deal? Because, you know, can you get great doctors and great folks on a 700 K budget?

SPEAKER_441: Or does it really need to be five or six things? Yeah, no, totally fair point. So obviously, our mission in building the Lambie was to ultimately democratize this level of comprehensive high touch access that people really crave and need in order to get better, right? So we didn't want to just create another concierge practice where people have, you know, 50 patients under their their care, and they charge about $50,000 a year, and they give them their cell phone number and you can talk to them whenever that's that's not what we wanted to create, we really wanted to build a solution that would allow us to scale this level of, you know, high touch comprehensive care. And so that's why we very much rethought how to be as efficient as possible from an operational perspective, from a tech perspective, from a care team structure, so that ultimately, the masses can benefit from this type of solution. And so part of that is, you know, sort of the emphasis on, you know, shifting towards asynchronous chat, right? So we do offer unlimited visits, but 90% of the engagement that we see with our members today is done asynchronously, so via text or email. And so what that means for us is obviously, we're addressing a lot of the questions that our patients have very quickly and effectively. But also, it means that we're able to then handle much more patients at any given time. And so that allows us to, you know, bring down the price point, because so much of what we're doing is being managed and triaged by the concierge manager, which obviously is not the same level as a physician. And so we're reserving the physician's time for those more complex questions. And really just, again, being smart about how we sort of structure that physician's day, ultimately, how we bring in the wellness advisor to focus on a lot of the preventive measures that we want our members to be paying attention to. And ultimately, as we bring in tech, which again, we've just started to do, but we hope to really accelerate over the next year, is we're really going to lean into that ongoing asynchronous proactive outreach where our members feel that support from their care team without the care team really lifting a finger. And so there's this ability for us to really sort of scale that personalization and really bring to life this care plan that we're already, as I mentioned, building for all of our existing members into a much more interactive experience. So sort of think about gamifying preventive medicine. And so to your point, yes, we could charge way more because we're doing so much. But the reason that we're charging less is because our mission was never to sort of create a service that would alienate the masses. Like our goal is to be just a bit smarter than the average doctor's office, which is typically built by a doctor who is not savvy in business, and also doesn't have sort of any sort of systems engineering mindset tackling the issues that are plaguing the healthcare system. It's very much an infrastructure problem. And so yeah, right. So it sounds like you're saying there's a couple of

SPEAKER_449: high touch expensive portions here like that initial meeting, like of course, onboarding physicians,

Jason Calacanis: and then when you have encounters with a doctor in person, that's a very high touch experience. But the rest of it is sort of like an automated calendar that's like, hey, remember when we talked about how you need to get your skin checked because of the sun situation, like now's the time to come in. Yeah. And that's like a free, that's a SAS margin type interaction.

SPEAKER_441: Exactly, exactly. And that's ultimately the goal. And that's why, you know, prevention is so cost effective for everyone involved. And that's why it makes so much sense. Just even thinking about the broader healthcare system, the way that we save healthcare is not by creating more one medicals, which again is sort of feeding into the same system of reactionary medicine, but rather creating a system around prevention, which ultimately minimizes our dependency on the broader healthcare system on insurance, which is very backwards, very outdated, very red tapey, and ultimately just create this

SPEAKER_442: sort of comprehensive approach that gets at what patients really want today.

SPEAKER_461: So what does it really need to cost per year? Because I get pitched on these.

SPEAKER_09: Jason's like, I'm not letting this go. No, I mean, that's why people listen to the show is because I force people to answer the question. No, I got pitched by one medical. I'm not one medical, private medical. A lot of my friends have it. It's like 100 grand a year for a family. That's a little too crazy expensive for me, I could afford it. But I thought it was like, probably not optimal, because we already pay whatever it is, $50,000 a year for health insurance, you put 150 together, I was thinking like, from 1.5 million over 10

SPEAKER_01: years, you could just put that money into a pool and get rid of your insurance that you'd probably be covered with catastrophic. So between 3000, you know, and what would arguably be like 30,

SPEAKER_09: 40,000 a person, there's a 10x difference. What do you need to make this business profitable and really work? Because this obviously can't work for everybody. It's a noble mission to do that. But this is kind of like, you know, an Uber black type of service, if we were to put it somewhere, it's a four star hotel, it can't really be a two star hotel experience, it just wouldn't work economically, correct? So what should it cost? Like, what do you think your proper price will be

SPEAKER_441: after this, you know, first cohort is test? Yeah. So what's amazing about this first cohort is that these are motivated individuals. And the reason is because these are people who have a chronic condition, or they describe themselves as optimizers. And obviously, there's overlap between those two people. Because clearly, when you've been faced with a health crisis, you're that much more inclined to, you know, dig into your health, understand your data, try to do whatever you can to be proactive.

SPEAKER_470: So if you want to fight self, people, would you say like, correct, would be like, you know,

SPEAKER_441: whether you call them a biohacker, an optimizer? Yes. Or use Peloton, because they like to know where

SPEAKER_09: they're at, they're getting their blood work done every year. And they understand more than that.

SPEAKER_472: Yeah, every quarter. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you should blood done quarterly. You should. Yeah,

SPEAKER_442: you should. You're actually making significant changes to your health, like taking a supplement,

SPEAKER_441: for example. You don't want to just wait a year before you recheck that you want to be checking it on a quarterly basis to see to what extent you're actually absorbing what you're taking, if it's effective. And also, if you're you're changing other lifestyle factors. Anyway, okay, so beyond the blood work piece. So anyway, these are the types of patients who are motivated, and they're willing to pay a higher price point in order to really see that that comprehensive approach that high touch care. So these are the people that

SPEAKER_442: ultimately are our beta users, there are founding members, and they are the ones that are helping us learn on the go. That's why you discounted them. So what should it be? Right? No, no, no. So so

SPEAKER_441: actually, these are the people that are paying the $3,000 a year. So ultimately, as we continue to

SPEAKER_442: develop the programs and the resources and the infrastructure, and the tech, to support what these most demanding patients need, we then will be able to cater to the masses of people who don't

SPEAKER_427: necessarily understand that you'll get easier to do over time you so so actually the answer to your

SPEAKER_441: question becomes it's actually could be much lower than what we're charging today. Really? Yes.

SPEAKER_09: What what do what are what are doctors make these days? And why would a doctor choose to work at the land be or one of these, you know, services versus or one medical versus working in a hospital, like a doctor in a major city like San Francisco, LA or New York? Mm hmm. So in a hospital, what's really

SPEAKER_441: tough for physicians is is one of two things. One is that their compensation is driven by volume. So the more patients they see, the more procedures that they they conduct, the greater their bonus. And so whether it's by the hospital itself, and the way that the hospital gets reimbursed by the payer, etc, they ultimately are motivated to increase the number of patients that they see every day. And so that's part of the reason why they're incredibly burned out, because they know that the more patients they see, the more they churn them as quickly as possible, which is why the national average today is eight minutes per visit, is because that's sort of the way that the fee for service model has, you know, played itself out. The other side of it is that within a hospital setting, and even within many private practices, doctors are doing a lot of the admin work. Insurance reimbursements require doctors to do a lot of inputting today, I think about 40% of their time is spent just on admin. And obviously, you can imagine how these doctors must be 15 years of schooling and residency and internships where they're making like under 50 grand a year. And then they have to spend 40% of their time doing grant work like that's just not what they signed up. These doctors are pissed, they're looking for an alternative solution. And in primary care, they're making about $200,000 a year. Sometimes when they go sort of the private route, they can make a lot more private medical obviously pays their doctors really, really well. But not every one can afford private medical. So yeah, that's just sort of a bit of context there.

SPEAKER_449: So you pay the doctor salaries directly? How does insurance play in here, if at all?

SPEAKER_441: Yeah, so right now, insurance is not playing a role. And that's partly because we're new, we don't have much data to support our hypothesis. And so payers are not that interested in what we have to say. But the reality is that payers are moving into value based care models, there's already been significant data to show that value based care models improve health outcomes over time, which means that payers save money. And that's what they want.

SPEAKER_449: So then sorry, and then just to clarify, so then as a result, if somebody has a procedure

Jason Calacanis: through you, that's also revenue for you, like the $3,000 a year is not the only revenue that comes in?

SPEAKER_442: No, so we don't do procedures. Primary care is not very procedure based. So when procedures need to be had, we either refer to a specialist or to a hospital or to an

SPEAKER_441: imaging center, depending on what that procedure actually is. So the $3,000 a year covers all the visits at the Lambie, all the chat at the Lambie, the blood draws that we do, we actually bill through insurance because we draw them on site, but we send them out to a lab for processing, all the specialist referral coordination and that access to the network that we've built, all the community events that we've done, all the member perks, all that stuff. But and once you leave sort of the four walls, virtual four walls of the Lambie, that's when you start to leverage your insurance. And that's where in many ways, we actually do support members in navigating insurance, which is a beast in and of itself.

SPEAKER_488: Yeah, for real. Okay, got it.

SPEAKER_441: But but sort of the long term play is, you know, how do we sort of stay aligned with payers? Because ultimately, payers do want to partner with a solution like ours, where we're actually keeping their costs low, because we're keeping patients outside of the hospital, which is when so much of the money ends up draining their resources. So, so they do have, there is sort of a partnership down the road. It's just a matter of when not, not if.

SPEAKER_224: Mm hmm. See, I'm really long on your business, because I was, you know, as somebody who had like

SPEAKER_09: regular insurance, then went to the concierge doctor and was paying 30,000 a year or something for this like extra level of service. And it was great, you know, you could text your doctor, you know, you don't have to wait for an appointment, they do a really nice job, beautiful space. And then I looked at one medical is $199 a year. And I'm like, well, that seems like too cheap. And then $100,000 a year seems too expensive. It feels like there needs to be like this sort of middle ground and 3000 a person if you had a family of five would be 15. So you have the quantified self people, tell me about families, and how you think about families at the

SPEAKER_136: land.

SPEAKER_441: So we definitely want to incentivize families to join together. Because when a household is equally bought in to change, that's when change really happens, right? Like if your mom is cooking you a meal, that's super healthy, and you don't care about being healthy, you're going to just throw the broccoli out. But if you have this sort of shared appreciation for improving your health and being focused on prevention, then you're much more likely to actually do it. So we have a spousal rate, and that ends up being about $2,800 a year for the second person who joins. But we're willing to, you know, give that to any sort of family member that joins as long as they're considered an adult, so over 16, because we don't do pediatrics. And that can extend to, you know, a sister if, you know, sisters are joining together, because again, there's that accountability, that camaraderie, that really does accelerate change.

Jason Calacanis: What about scaling? What does that look like? And how do you maintain that, like bring on enough physicians and maintain that kind of very personal touch up front?

SPEAKER_499: So are, you know, there's there's two sides to it, right? So we want to be able to widen our funnel

SPEAKER_441: of primary care physicians who fit our model, because it's an integrative approach, it's collaborative, a doctor is working side by side with a wellness advisor, which is never something that they've done before. And then at the same time, you know, we want to make sure that we're standardizing all of the resources and programs that we're building, so that it becomes much more plug and play. And it's easier for physicians to deliver this type of medicine without reinventing the wheel. And so that's why we're in the process of developing, ultimately, our own sort of boot camp for integrative medicine, which will be sort of an abbreviated version of a traditional integrative training program, which typically takes about two years, which is time most physicians don't have, which is why they don't do it. And so that will allow us to attract more primary care physicians who are eager to implement this type of care into their practice, but don't have the time, the bandwidth, or the money to invest in it on their own. And at the same time, standardize our approach to care, so that it becomes easier. We're ultimately empowering these physicians to deliver this type of care, standardize it from the perspective of scaling the quality and the consistency of our product, while still creating enough autonomy for physicians to get creative and be able to sort of implement their own unique approach and style when it comes to care delivery, because that is something that I think a lot of physicians appreciate when it comes to medicine.

SPEAKER_09: So it seems to me that the price of certain procedures varies wildly here in the United States. This is why people go for dental work and cosmetic surgery in Korea or, you know, Mexico or other places, Latin America. And it seems like you have a unique position where if I'm paying you and you're my advocate, you could be telling me, hey, listen, here is the matrix of,

SPEAKER_01: you know, how good the care is, and then what it costs, because none of this stuff is on the websites. This is what makes me crazy. Like, you talked before about like, who's the customer? It doesn't feel like I'm a customer when I go to places and I don't see the menu and what the prices are. When we go to a restaurant, if we see a steak, and it's a New York strip steak, and we're like,

SPEAKER_76: this is $300 for a New York strip steak at this, you know, guy who salt bay who throws salt on it. And then I'm like, Well, I buy a New York strip. And it's the same one for $40 at Whole Foods, or you know, from even a specialty good eggs. And when I go out to a nice restaurant, it's 70. So why is it 300 there? So this guy can run salt on his arm? Gross. Anyway, putting that aside,

SPEAKER_14: do you help people navigate this issue? And which is mind boggling in America that the same procedure when I got my meniscus done on my right knee, somebody fell on it at the Chelsea Piers playing basketball. It was like one place was $20,000. Another place $100,000. Why is there such a spread in the cost? And do you help people navigate that? Or is that the insurance company's

SPEAKER_489: job? I'm just always wondering about that. It's really an unregulated market. And it's what the

SPEAKER_441: government has been trying to tackle for some time, but it really stems down to what are physicians

SPEAKER_442: incentivized by. And so let's put cost aside because we're ultimately not able to know what the prices are going to be until the hospital decides to charge you with that price. But taking

SPEAKER_441: a step back is how do you trust the recommendation of that physician in the hospital, right? So these physicians and obviously some do this more than others, but because they're motivated to recommend a procedure that will ultimately generate more revenue for them and the hospital, how do you trust whether this recommendation or this prescription or this treatment protocol is the best one for you? So we do facilitate and help patients navigate getting second opinions so that they have as many perspectives around the table as possible, and then help decipher between all of those different recommendations to choose what is the best approach for you. And that's, I think, where primary care should really stand when it comes to quarterbacking your health. Because today, when it comes to a diagnosis, patients are very much left on their own to determine what they should

SPEAKER_442: do next, right? So they're getting input from one doctor who's telling them to do this treatment

SPEAKER_441: approach, and then they're getting an input from another doctor that's completely conflicting with what they just heard from another doctor. So who do they trust and how do they make the decision?

SPEAKER_123: And that doesn't take into account price, like, it doesn't take into account price. Why is it every

SPEAKER_37: time I talk to a healthcare person, they never take into account price? Like, when we buy everything else, you'd say like, Well, should I buy that steak? Is it worth the price? Should I stay at that hotel? Is it worth the price? Should I buy a Prius or a Tesla or a Jeep? Like, is it worth the price, the value?

SPEAKER_23: Right, there's, it's always like, well, I'm not paying for it. Therefore, I should just go with the best. Is that a major problem with what's wrong in healthcare in the United States is that we don't

SPEAKER_01: actually think about the cost and value first? And we just or, you know, equally?

SPEAKER_441: Well, I think the problem is that we know that the payer is being the insurer is paying for that, you know, procedure. And so that's why so many of these hospitals are willing or able to charge ridiculous amounts of money for procedures that really should be much less. And that's also part of

SPEAKER_442: the reason where when you say I'm actually paying out of pocket as an individual patient, as opposed to my insurance is paying, the cost changes dramatically. I don't know if you've ever had that happen to you. But typically, your your bill decreases significantly when you're paying as patient. So it's a very tricky thing to navigate. But we are able to help people just be a little bit

SPEAKER_441: smarter about it, decide when you should be, you know, saying that you're paying out of pocket

SPEAKER_442: versus not. And this even happens with blood work, where if you're paying out of pocket, you know, you can get a 60 70% coupon. So you save on that versus if you have a very high deductible. So technically, you do have insurance. So then your bill ends up being much higher. So there are different nuances like that, where we can definitely help you navigate those things. But when it comes to hospitals, it's sort of a big black box where every hospital can charge their own prices, and no one can say anything about it. So it's really like, okay, you know, the price, is it really worth it for you to do this? And and it's not really like, oh, you have cancer, should you have the surgery to take the cancer out? No, it's more like, you know, you have a bad

SPEAKER_441: meniscus tear, do you do surgery? Do you try physical therapy? Like what are what are sort of the options at your disposal? And then how do you, you know, factor price into that?

SPEAKER_76: Final question for me. And I think Molly might have one too. My final question is,

SPEAKER_09: do you see this trend of people self insuring where or company self insuring where they're like, you know what, insurance doesn't make any sense, especially for people who are younger and healthy, instead of paying for this, whatever 25,000 50,000 a year, or whatever for a family,

SPEAKER_61: I'll just get catastrophic or whatever. But I'll put that money towards a plan for myself.

SPEAKER_09: Are rich people doing that? Because I know companies do that, right? And is that going to become a trend since this is so bizarre, our health care in the United States?

SPEAKER_441: Yeah, no, I definitely think that that's already a trend. So many of our members are on high deductible health plans where they're spending significantly less on premiums, meaning on a monthly basis, they spend less, but their deductible is higher, but they recognize that, for the most part, the doctors that they go see are out of network, or the prescriptions that they get are, you know, can go towards their deductible, but still, they're spending less overall. And so where a land be membership really comes into play is that we're sort of complementary to a high deductible health plan, where so much of your health, actually 80% of your health needs can be addressed with primary care alone. So ultimately, you don't need to rely on insurance so much, because the only time that you're going through insurance is if you have a major issue. And so, you know, we not only see the trend, but we're very, very supportive of the trend.

Jason Calacanis: Molly, anything more from you? No, I love it. Chloe Harouche is CEO of the Land B, and possibly the future of medicine. Thanks so much for the time.

SPEAKER_518: I am really excited about your business. When are you coming to the Bay Area,

SPEAKER_441: Bay Area in LA? Like, what's the story? Yeah.

SPEAKER_521: Yeah, yeah, soon. Bay Area in LA? You coming?

SPEAKER_441: Soon. Well, we're licensed in California. We do have members in California. But typically, what we do is just require that they come in person for the baseline visit, and then everything else can be virtual. Oh, really? Yeah.

SPEAKER_527: Oh, so I could be a member from here? So we could just fly to where? New York?

SPEAKER_441: Yeah, come to New York just for your first visit, and then we'll do everything else virtual.

SPEAKER_532: Love it. Okay. That's fantastic. See you soon. All right. Good luck with everything. Thanks a lot. See you soon. Thanks. Take care.

SPEAKER_29: Okay, everybody. Thanks for listening. I am doing episode four of The Blueprint tomorrow.

SPEAKER_37: And I am loving doing The Blueprint, Molly. It's like the VC segment we do together,

SPEAKER_01: VC Sunday Schools. The Blueprint is like a new version of that. And my topic tomorrow is having a bias for action. I cannot wait. I literally am like stocking

Jason Calacanis: the Blueprint episodes. I'm like a fangirl. Yeah, well, that's a moment. I cannot wait to hear it. Plus, if you would like all of these insights in real time, follow us on Twitter, at Jason, at Molly Wood, at TWI Startups, and leave a review on your favorite

SPEAKER_00: podcast app if you don't mind. And of course, join us on YouTube live every day. Back 10 A. YouTube.com slash this weekend.

SPEAKER_09: Oh, it's so great. 200,000 subscribers. Thanks, everybody, for subscribing. And we'll see you all tomorrow, Wednesday. Stick with us. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

SPEAKER_110: Gonna be a great week.