SPEAKER_00: they didn't want to listen to the point that other people were being impacted by this. And so, it felt like a criticism of capitalism or of the venture capital model. But I think it was more

SPEAKER_01: like a cry of like, oh my gosh, there were these people who were doing this thing and now they are being whole cloth uprooted and their life savings are being torn apart. And so, that's why the pirate analogy I think is actually good because pirates don't apologize. This Week in Startups is brought

SPEAKER_02: to you by NetSuite. Once your business gets to a certain size, the cracks start to emerge. Things you used to do in a day take a week. You deserve a customized solution and that's NetSuite. Learn more when you download NetSuite's popular KPI checklist absolutely free at netsuite.com slash twist. Miro helps take ideas from in your head to out there in the world with its ability to democratize collaboration and input. Sign up for free at Miro.com slash startups. And Arising Ventures is a holding company that acquires tech startups facing setbacks. Arising Ventures knows what founders care about because they aren't bankers, they're tech founders themselves. Go to ArisingVentures.com slash twist today to learn more and connect with the team.

SPEAKER_07: Welcome to This Week in Startups, everybody. Alex Wilhelm is with us again from TechCrunch, and previously that, CrunchBase, and before that, TechCrunch.

SPEAKER_08: Yes. That was at the Boomerang, essentially?

SPEAKER_10: Pretty much, yeah. There was one more stop in there the year I went to rehab, but yeah, that's more or less the trajectory. So, back at the mothership and oddly enough, coming up on four years back at TechCrunch, time flies.

SPEAKER_11: Wow. Yeah. But I didn't even know you went to rehab,

SPEAKER_12: but you, like me, like to partake in a beverage once in a while. Well, I like to partake in beverages all the time, and that's why they're like,

SPEAKER_16: you know, the old Amy Winehouse chorus there. They tried to make me go to rehab, and I said, yeah, okay, fair enough, good idea.

SPEAKER_18: Fair enough, yeah. Good call, good call.

SPEAKER_19: Listen, I'm with you. I like to keep it straight and narrow. No drinking for me. It makes me too tired. That's too tired.

SPEAKER_10: That's the thing. Like, in my life right now, because, you know, our kid's now 10 and a half months old and very active. Like, if I was hungover, I would get, like, life would just steamroll me. Like, I have to wake up and go.

SPEAKER_07: Having to take care of a child, just all of a sudden, everything changes. And I can tell you, I have been hungover and had to take care of kids and not like, or like, you think you have help, and then the nanny gets sick and, but you were out till 3am playing poker and then it's 6.30am

SPEAKER_27: and the baby's screaming and your head is like nothing in the world. It's just literal torture.

SPEAKER_29: Well, this week our, our beautiful daughter got, uh, her second illness. And so one night this week,

SPEAKER_10: we were up like, you know, every half an hour, all night long. And I went to work the next day and I was like, oh yeah, this is what it felt like every single day when she was two months old. Right?

SPEAKER_07: Yes. Right. It gets easier. It gets easier. Yeah. It does get easier. It is the, uh, the sick kid is something you have to get used to. It is as a father. I found when my daughters were sick, it was just this, uh, incredible feeling of like, I have to do

SPEAKER_27: something to protect them and take care of them. And sometimes they, they have food poisoning and they're just going to puke every half hour. And all you can do is rub their back and sit with them with a plastic bag. I just literally had this last week. And I said, you ate something that disagree with your stomach. We're going to do this for about three hours and then it's, it's going to stink.

SPEAKER_35: And, but I'll get you some warm ginger ale and yeah, you know, we'll make the best of it. We'll watch a movie and watch some star wars. So yeah, it's good for us, but I will say new experiences,

SPEAKER_24: like for example, sitting with that plastic bag, oh God, you didn't do that 20 years ago. You know,

SPEAKER_40: it's no, no, no, no. You were just, you know, uh, over the side of a fence at a random neighbor's yard on the way home going, oh my God, never again. So we got a lot to get to here.

SPEAKER_27: Tech earnings with Alex Wilhelm. I love when Alex comes in the program because, uh, you know, we, we, we have a very similar career path, uh, both of us journalists, both of us, uh, business journalists, and you're just so good at, uh, the finance side of this, Alex. So there's just nobody better to, to go over the earnings really. It's a great week for me. I have been an investor in a taxi cab company for a long time. And what I have noticed. Yeah. It's, um, uh, I was like maybe the third or fourth investor in this company and still friends, uh, with Travis got to spend some time with him, uh, recently. Uh, and he's doing great with the new company, but he doesn't really like to talk about it all that much. He's heads down, but his last company, uh, which they said would never get profitable has now turned into a money printing machine. So Alex, take it away. Uh, w w w what do you take out of this Uber quarter and the last, I guess three of the last four, I think they were profitable and now they're set up for this S and P

SPEAKER_57: 500 situation. Yeah. So it took a while to the detractors credit to get here. I think Dara's done a great job as Uber CEO to take a company with a lot of potential and a lot of good bones

SPEAKER_00: and turn it into a cashflow generating machine. So to me, the question mark over Uber's viability has been answered very clearly in the last year. You can pick the starting point when you want to say it's been decided, but certainly now in Q3, we're looking at numbers. And the funny thing about this quarter is it was good, but it was boring because it was another quarter of solid growth, good cashflow generation. Um, you know, the net income number feels very solid for the company is.

SPEAKER_01: And so I almost read it and was like, nothing here is blowing my mind because the company is just healthy. Now there's no longer like a, Ooh, what's going to happen. It's just, yes, there it goes.

SPEAKER_00: And I'm not surprised because whenever I use Uber eats, I somehow managed to pay an extra $9 in associated fees on top of delivery and then tip. And I know that that is why Uber is making so much money. So you are welcome, Jason, for all of my custom. And, uh, I'm just really happy to see the amount of implied consumer demand here implies a healthy American consumer,

SPEAKER_61: healthy global consumer. So not a lot of negatives, frankly, just feels pretty good.

SPEAKER_63: Yeah. Uh, gross bookings, $35 billion. Uh, they obviously get a percentage of that. That's

SPEAKER_64: called the take rate, uh, take rates been very healthy and, um, that revenue, uh, which, you know, is the percentage of the gross bookings that they actually get over 9 billion, 9.3. And, uh,

SPEAKER_27: that's broken up nicely between mobility delivery and freight, although freight's having a tough time. We saw that in the market with, I guess, convoy going out of business. That seemed to be a mismanaged nightmare. Uh, and then, uh, obviously flex sport,

SPEAKER_48: speaking original founders come back and they've also had to deal with an absolute collapse in

SPEAKER_57: revenue. Yeah. That's so tough on the Uber front though, that the chart that really made me pretty happy to look at was their adjusted EBITDA over time. And also they're essentially adjusted EBITDA

SPEAKER_10: take rate. So if you look at, um, their adjusted EBITDA margin as a fraction of gross bookings back to

SPEAKER_00: that point, um, it was just under 1.1 billion in Q3. And that was 3.1% of gross bookings. It was 2.7 in Q2. It was 2.4 in Q1, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. So, um, not only is the number going up, the fraction is going up. So the company is just getting more and more profitable. And I don't think that everyone thought it was going to work out this way. Now the true believers, let's search yourself. We're right all along, but it, uh, it did it. Congrats. Well done.

SPEAKER_07: Well, I mean, this is an important lesson. I think for journalists, you and I coming at it from the business angle, there are journalists who come at, uh, stories from a culture angle as well. Sure. From a culture angle, you would think a cutthroat company that was dealing with regulations and maybe had a bit of a pirate mentality, which some people consider a feature. Other people consider a bug, you know, here in Silicon Valley, when we have a group of pirates and they want to go, you know, uh, win and we're like, let's go. Here's a couple of boats. Here's some provisions. Here's ammunition. We, that's what we bet on pirates. Um, and so if you were,

SPEAKER_47: is that true? Because I think people don't want to say it in today's politically correct era,

SPEAKER_77: but I would say no, Jason, I don't actually agree with you. And I love the pirate analogy

SPEAKER_10: because actually, if you go back to the history of tech runs, Michael Arrington, uh, about how, you know, they were the kind of the pirates that people wanted to track. But now when I look at

SPEAKER_00: venture capital is talking about metrics that look for startups are looking for, it seems that like the early stage startup game has become so metricized that there's actually not that much room left for pirates. It seems to be like venture has gotten risk averse because SaaS is so predictable. And so now no one wants to take a flyer on something ridiculous.

SPEAKER_07: I think it's a very good point you're making. People always try to take venture capital in early stage investing and they try to money ball it. This, I get pitched on money ball for startups all the time. I made my own money ball system. I don't share it too much publicly, but I have a database of the 20,000 applicants that come in and we rank them on 13 criteria of why we should invest forwards. And then we have 25 reasons why we shouldn't invest. So I took over the last 10 years, my betting strategy, and I just made some heuristics out of look for this. And then these are either pink or red flags. And that's the totality of my money ball system. But I think in SaaS, it was very predictable. So people like David Sachs, you know, who are quants in, you know, and come at it with that, you could find in their minds, hey, how much money did you deploy? How much money did you make? And then what's the leverage there, right? It took you $10 of invested capital to make a dollar, it took you five to make $2. Okay, that that latter company is better, it would be the the person's general thought. However, if you go to the Reid Hoffman blitzscaling, if you go to the Peter Thiel, you know, monopoly, or Sequoia Capital, like we're going to invest in the top top companies, and it's winner take most, we are still looking for pirates. And there was a very famous moment

SPEAKER_35: in the history of Sequoia, where Don Valentine said to a young partner, agreeableness, like

SPEAKER_07: how easy is somebody to get along with? And then how like exceptional are they at their job? How competent are they and make a four quarter box? I said, Where do you know, which founders do you think we make the most money from? And it was extremely competent, obviously, and then difficult to get along with. I was gonna say yes, and then not agreeable. Yeah, not agreeable. And you know that I think that's where the pirate thing comes from. But you're right, people try to moneyball it. I

SPEAKER_27: don't try to moneyball it in my career. I just try to look for as many of the important variables,

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SPEAKER_27: when you look at the press at that moment in time, what do you think they got right or wrong

SPEAKER_07: in terms of objectivity? Because obviously, there was a lot of social issues going around at that time. And Silicon Valley was getting very powerful. And then the antagonism between the tech press and the founders kind of peaked a bit during that time period, you had some bad behavior like

SPEAKER_27: Theranos, you had the pirate behavior like Uber and Travis, and you had everything in between and just a lot of wealth getting created. So it got a little weird there. But what did they miss

SPEAKER_47: in terms of this story specifically? Well, I don't think it's going to be

SPEAKER_96: a single answer to that question. Okay. If you had two or three things they missed.

SPEAKER_10: If I had two or three things, well, I almost wonder if Uber was overcapitalized, and therefore that led to it just burning through more cash than it needed to. Because if you go back to how Dara has trimmed expenses and headcount and so forth, it seemed they could have done a bit more with a bit less. And so I think that the questions on their financials could have been answered earlier by the company itself. So while I do think that the press was in the middle era of Uber a little bit too negative, I think the company also wasn't operating at its kind of peak efficiency. So I think that that kind of falls on both sides of the fence. That's a great point. I think that's a real,

SPEAKER_07: I didn't even think of that one, but you're right. And that does trigger people because they look at it and they see people shooting money out of a money cannon, and you're losing $3 per ride or $4 per ride, and ride shouldn't be this cheap. This doesn't make logical sense. What are you doing here? And Amazon did a similar thing like Amazon Prime when we first all got it did not make logical sense. We were all like, wait a second, I give you $60 a year and you give me unlimited two day delivery. Okay, you sure? You sure? Because I'm going to use that five times a week.

SPEAKER_57: We're trying to cut back on our Amazon Prime usage just for the sake of limiting the edges

SPEAKER_10: of our carbon footprint. And it's so hard to get off of Amazon. That company has me by the neck.

SPEAKER_07: Sadly, I mean, and when you have a kid, it's even more pernicious. Yeah, what I started doing was

SPEAKER_27: because I too have this concern when I see all the boxes in my garage looks like a UPS. Yep.

SPEAKER_07: Uh, like depot. And I have just, I can wait till Friday. Friday's my Amazon day. And I just put everything on Friday. And I've just said, you know, like on a stoic basis, I'm not like a super weirdo, like stoic, like gonna make TikTok videos about it. But I'm just like, I can wait for my anchor charger station for Friday. Yes, it doesn't have to come Tuesday at 9pm at night in like a little box, you know, with my little battery in a box with a gazillion puffed up that you know, it's just gone. And it's also the annoyance of opening six boxes versus opening one. So I think it's good for it. Okay, so I like that. That did distract people. So that's a good reason.

SPEAKER_10: The other thing on the Uber front is pirates don't pay as much attention to collateral damage as people who are supposed to look at the broader economy. And so when we're talking about Uber going

SPEAKER_00: into the markets and shaking things up, you call that a taxi cab company tongue in cheek earlier, but who was its competitor competition at the time it was taxis. And just to be clear, I was living in San Francisco at the time. Taxis were terrible. I went to the Uber launch party in Chicago when I was in college. Like, so I was around very early when it was only black cars and clearly it was a superior service, but the company was able to raise money and subsidize rides and go after a business that was often run and managed and held onto by a small business owners. And so I think a lot of the complaints about people who are annoyed at the coverage of Uber was that they didn't want to listen to the point that other people were being impacted by this. And so it felt like a criticism of, of, of capitalism or of the venture capital model. But I think it was more like a cry of like, oh my gosh, there were these people who were doing this thing and now they are being whole cloth uprooted and their life savings are being torn apart. And so that's why the pirate analogy I think is actually good because pirates don't apologize. And maybe in an economy and in a country with hundreds of millions of people and a very complex economic fabric and social fabric, maybe if you rip it, you're going to get some, some blow back now. Yeah. Uber is great. You know, when my parents visit, I send them an Uber from the airport to bring them to the house, et cetera. So I'm not a hater by any means, but I think that some people think that any criticism is somehow a, an attempt to say, you can't do this versus someone saying, Hey, maybe we should have thought this through a little bit differently. Um, but at this point though, you know, we're looking at the rear view mirror, Uber's revenue of 9.3 billion last quarter, I think shows where the world went.

SPEAKER_07: Yeah. Uh, the other observation I'll have there is, um, every time Uber had any kind of a crisis, there was like an internal, I dunno, kind of wink and a nod. Um, anytime there was a bit of a controversy and the press kind of fell for it. And there were a hundred, uh, news stories. Do you know what

SPEAKER_09: happened? Inside the company? Just Uber itself. Oh, I mean, probably with things went up, right?

SPEAKER_07: Yeah. Downloads spiked. Yep. So as we've seen with, let's say Twitter and X, something happens with Elon, X traffic goes up, more people go check out X. And so that, that was another new kind of wrinkle in the fabric of PR, which is if there's a controversy, as long as it's not so horrible that it turns into a boycott, which it did for a moment in time. And that was NG, not good. When there was a moment in time where it was like, screw these guys, I'm deleting Uber and the delete Uber movement happened and lift that actually did have an impact in, especially in places like San Francisco, like

SPEAKER_69: maybe 10 or 20% of people switch. That was a not good moment. Uh, and that was like the,

SPEAKER_27: the backstop against this press strategy. If it was a strategy, it really wasn't like an explicit strategy, but it was, uh, something that was notable. The thing I always looked at, uh, and, um, I always try to think from first principles, uh, is, you know, especially as an investor, you have to be

SPEAKER_69: dispassionate about these things. I just looked at the total number of rides and the total number of losses. And I watched like, okay, we did a hundred million rides. We lost 300 million. Okay. It's $3 per ride. Okay. And then it was like, oh, we did a billion rides. We lost 2 billion. It's $2 per ride. And then it was like, okay, all of a sudden it was like, we're losing 50 cents, right? 25 cents a ride. I was like, well, why don't we just flip that by 50 cents and be profitable? And it was like, yeah, we're doing that, but we don't want to impact that top line growth. And I was like, does that really impact the top line growth? 50 cents? Like, oh yeah, it could like change it 2%. And I was like, why don't we just flip that dial? And I was like, well, Uber was able to raise, I think over $20 billion as a private company. And so the question now is,

SPEAKER_117: as they make this money, when does that paid in return capital go back to shareholders? And then it's all profit from there, which is called the J curve, as you know, um, where you're have all the money that's been paid into the company and then slowly you pay it back and then it's free cash flow. And all that money is just going to shareholders. Uh, that happened with Tesla

SPEAKER_69: recently. Um, and it happened with Amazon in the second decade, and here we are, it will happen

SPEAKER_10: with Uber as well. So on that point though, just pull the numbers up. If you look at, um, Uber is positive operating cashflow, uh, quarters one through three of last year,

SPEAKER_00: 886 million. Uber's Q3 operating cashflow in Q3 of this year alone was, uh, 966 million. So the pace of cash generation by Uber has accelerated it dramatically. And it's to the point now when I'm kind of sitting around going like, okay, so are they going to start announcing buybacks? Like how, how is this going to be returned to investors? Because clearly the company has an excess cash compared to its investing needs. And I think that that's kind of a, that's when I really feels like a company has hit its maturity point when it just is so cash generative that it's kind of like, oh crap, what are we going to do with this? But I will say today cash has a 5% yield that makes you look brilliant. So holding onto that cash, I mean, doesn't hurt at all.

SPEAKER_57: It's super efficient. You're right. I want to go back though to the, the Uber's trajectory, press media and who got it right and wrong. Here's a question I have. If Dara had taken over

SPEAKER_00: three or four years earlier and the company could have avoided some of the Travis related headlines,

SPEAKER_10: let's just say that. Yeah. Yeah. Do you think the company would be healthier or less healthy today?

SPEAKER_07: It's a great question. Um, I think if you didn't have the pirate there, when there were battles to be fought, like, are we going to be allowed to exist in London? Are we going to be right? Are we going to be a standalone company for the first time in China that doesn't have a local partner? And are we going to try to compete for China? Like those kinds of decisions would just never have happened under, let's just say, quote unquote, professional management. It would have been like, that makes no logical sense. There's no way we can compete in China. Now Travis went into China and was like, we're going to win. We're here to win. And the Chinese government and the, you know, people were like, okay. And of course, when I talked to him, I was like, are we going to actually

SPEAKER_27: win? He's like, we're going for the gold, but the silver we get when we own 25% of DD, that's a pretty good silver medal. So we're going for gold. We'll accept silver. We're not taking bronze.

SPEAKER_07: We're out of here if we have to get bronze. Um, and that's the kind of thing that, you know, I think a professional CEO, a Tim cook, Sundar, whoever Satya, like they're just not going to think in that pirate mentality. They're going to think is the juice worth the squeeze. Do I want to get fired? Because I went with such an audacious strategy. Only founder authority can do audacious

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SPEAKER_131: So sign up for free. Okay. Well, I agree with you on Sundar for sure, but I want to, I want to

SPEAKER_57: disagree on the Satya point. I think it takes big founder energy to drop 10 billion into open AI and

SPEAKER_29: essentially cement their position to top the AI market for the foreseeable future. Like that's,

SPEAKER_136: I don't know. It's a rare moment of big founder energy. I agree. That's BFE.

SPEAKER_29: Yeah. Well, you know, if you don't get that joke, you're not online enough, but I think it's possible.

SPEAKER_00: I just think it takes a leader that has so much built in trust inside the organization that people will trust them to lead them close to the edge. And Satya, I think just given his cloud background could pull it off. Most people couldn't, but I will say they went into China, Uber did they spent a lot of money. They ended up with a stake in DD that then later got whacked by its own government. And so I

SPEAKER_23: wonder if that was actually a net positive. It did wind up being positive. Yeah. At the end of the day,

SPEAKER_07: I think they made a couple of billion. Um, and so I think of the 20 billion that was poured into the

SPEAKER_139: company, something close to 10 billion came back in their ownership and other entities. Yes. Yes.

SPEAKER_140: So ATG and so forth. Yeah. So that was, it was, it was super creative, but, uh, if, if you're right,

SPEAKER_10: though, that, that Dara couldn't have joined the company a couple of years earlier as CEO,

SPEAKER_16: because it was still fighting the pirate battles, then I think that the media coverage at the time that I was skeptical was actually relatively reasonable because the company was still a

SPEAKER_27: question. Yeah. I would say it was reasonable. Yeah. I think they went a little bit too far. Not always. Yes. Yeah. It got personal, which, you know, it can get personal. It was a,

SPEAKER_07: it's a certain climate, but you know, our job as I think financial journalists, uh, is to kind of get

SPEAKER_69: to the truth of the matter and understanding that there is a playbook that in a Zerp environment, you will be allowed to leverage. Oh yeah. Whether it's Amazon, Tesla, or Uber, where you're going to be allowed to do a decade of losses in order to own a very important market is, uh, it's allowed sometimes. And I think just getting good at identifying who gets permission to do that. Like, it is maybe open AI has permission to do that right now, right? They've been just given ungodly resources, um, a $90 billion valuation with a billion dollars in revenue. I don't,

SPEAKER_27: you know, it's 90 times top line revenue. It's a little bit rich, right? Um, and they've been given 10, $20 billion in cash. I don't know what the number is now with that, what they're up to in terms of investment, but yeah, I mean, it feels like if you were going to give somebody a lot of rope,

SPEAKER_146: it would be Sam. So why not? Oh yeah, no, for sure. I mean, I mean, I've only met him

SPEAKER_10: once or twice. It seems like a perfectly lovely guy. Um, but what I think he is,

SPEAKER_00: is a big old nerd and you know what Satya is a big old nerd and nerds love to nerd it up. And that's why you saw Satya at their developer day. He didn't have to go there. They were fine

SPEAKER_147: without him. He probably wanted to be there. He probably wanted to be associated with it.

SPEAKER_07: Yeah. He asked. Yeah. I mean, he wants that nerd cred. You're a hundred percent correct. Uh, just quickly looking at lift gross bookings, 3.6 billion revenue, 1.2 billion net loss,

SPEAKER_64: 12 million actor writers, 22.4. They got a billion seven in cash.

SPEAKER_147: Uh, guess what? What happens here now? Guess what? Guess what it's worth? 6 million 4.1. According to Google finance. Ooh. Yeah. It was more than a hundy and less worth four.

SPEAKER_00: So here's the thing about, you know, about founders and doing crazy things. Lyft does one thing in one country. Uber does many things in many countries and unsurprisingly

SPEAKER_10: they're doing better now because they're more diversified on their product and geographic sense.

SPEAKER_00: And they got permission via Zerp and capital and so forth. But I mean, Lyft also raised a lot of money for a long time. Lyft was not a poor company and they were able to

SPEAKER_29: lose money for a long time too. And they've ended up silver in a market, you know, ah,

SPEAKER_67: I think they got a participation trophy. If we're being honest, um, they participated in this,

SPEAKER_64: this chart is incredibly telling. I mean, if you look at the revenue chart between Uber and Lyft, and I'm guessing that this is going to be a case study at Harvard and Stanford at some point is just

SPEAKER_158: the divergence of the revenue. Yeah. Pretty spectacular. Look at how, if you're looking

SPEAKER_10: at watching the video of this, look at how long it took Lyft to recover to its pre COVID revenue number. And then look at the, the different curve you see with Uber and then the acceleration points.

SPEAKER_00: So Uber definitely also got dinged. I mean, we all stopped taking, I mean, I think I actually deleted the Uber rides app from my phone because I didn't need it for two years. Yeah. Uh, but then if you, if you look at the continuing performance, once people went back

SPEAKER_29: outside, I mean, it's night and day does not seem like an unfair way to put this.

SPEAKER_07: There was a lobby of people saying, don't do eats. It's a low margin business only do ride hailing be just be good at one thing, right? Have excellence in one vertical is a lot of times the typical

SPEAKER_69: advice, but then it turned out, you know, if you have the resources, you know, sometimes having a counterbalance where if Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, I'm staying home and okay, I'm going to cook Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, but I'm going out the other three nights of the week. Well, Uber has something for you each night. You could order Uber Eats or you could order groceries now. And if you forgot your lemons or whatever, cause you're making, you know, soul or something, you need some capers and lemons. You can get that too. So you could literally use it seven days a week. You're going to run out of money real quick. Uh, it's a pretty expensive habit, but yeah, that, that was, I think a master stroke of genius. And I gotta, I think there's another third. I don't think by the way, the, um, I mean, all due respect to Lior and shipping, I think shipping's great. I think that I think there's going to be a third leg to this stool or it could be a four leg stool, but they are, uh, experimenting with, uh, like a task rabbit like service. There was a new story about it. And I think that this could be the ultimate Uber one, which is you open your app up and you say, I need an assistant. I need a $35 an hour or a $50 an hour person to help me with stuff, domestic office, whatever it is. And maybe there could be two or three categories. So you say,

SPEAKER_117: I need hourly help for four hours. And it says, what do you need it for? And it's like, I need somebody who can work the register. I need somebody who can come to my business and be receptionist or do some research, or I need somebody to help domestically. So maybe it's like executive domestic retail. Sure. And you pick one of those three and it just gives you an hourly rate. And an Uber person comes for 50 bucks an hour and saves your ass, you know, in a city because

SPEAKER_69: somebody missed their shift. I think that's going to come. And I think that could be the third layer

SPEAKER_00: of the stool. Um, I'm excited about that, but I think we don't talk about any more is, uh, labor

SPEAKER_10: availability. And there's an interesting tension between a tight labor market and consumers having enough cash to spend on Uber eats and the markups and stuff that it comes with and the economy

SPEAKER_00: being relatively weak and having lots of possibility on the supply side for labor. So right now I can afford to use your reads every day if I would like, like, yeah, that's fine. Um, but I'm cheap and sometimes I get peevish and I stopped my orders. I'm like, I'm not paying $37. That's going to bring me a burrito right now. I will, I will get off my butt and walk. And I wonder as the, the consumer around the world gets stressed and we've seen the rising debt levels at household and so forth. I wonder if there's a point in which the prices have to come back down and the margins compressed a little bit for, for Uber across its, its different products. I'm not sure. It's just

SPEAKER_10: something that I'm thinking about as we watch the GDP numbers and overall health of, uh, of us.

SPEAKER_07: I put this into the category of Starbucks, which is I thought for a long time, people would stop getting Starbucks because it makes no logical sense to pay $4.50 for a cup of coffee with milk and that they would just austerity measures would kick in. Like I make a pot of coffee every day

SPEAKER_139: cost me $1.52 to use high quality grounds and we make it every day. And sometimes the housekeeper says, oh, you know, it's like, we're wasting half a pot. I'm like, nope, four people get to have coffee and we didn't go to Starbucks. Everybody, we saved about 15 bucks a day. So don't worry about pouring out the last third of the pot. Um, and I always thought people would, you know, get a, a nice contigo or something and make their coffee at home. And it's like, nope, this is a luxury I want. Uh, like I'll

SPEAKER_69: call it the avocado toast theory. And I think if something like ordering your burrito brings you extra joy, you get to work a little bit longer. I think, yeah, maybe on the margins, people will, you know, the, the, the people who are stretching for that will take stuff out. But I think for people

SPEAKER_139: who are busy executives, middle-class and above, it's just a luxury they don't want to deal, but not deal with. And I, you know, listen, I see it. Sometimes my housekeeper was showing up with a Starbucks. And I just told her, you know, don't, don't order Starbucks for 450. Like you

SPEAKER_117: can have drink the coffee. It's like, it's a higher thing. And then I showed her how to use the espresso machine. And I was like, froth the milk, pour this in. This is better coffee than Starbucks coffee. I'm paying for blue bottle beans or, you know, red cat. These are, these are better beans

SPEAKER_69: than that. And now she drinks our coffee and I'm like, great. I feel so much better than her spending a hundred bucks a month on Starbucks. How often does your housekeeper come?

SPEAKER_181: Uh, it's full time. We have full-time housekeeper. Yeah. Yeah. Full-time housekeeper. None. Yeah.

SPEAKER_182: I mean, it's, it's like the, as a, as a kid from Brooklyn who we had chores and we had to do

SPEAKER_69: everything. That's like the ultimate luxury to have a full-time housekeeper and nanny. So, but those are two different people, right? Same. We have a full, she can do a little bit of nanny

SPEAKER_181: stuff. We have a big house. So you have to, there's no way to have the size of house I have right now and not have a full-time housekeeper. If you're listening to the next one minute of conversation

SPEAKER_00: and you're like, these guys are assholes. It's true. Um, we have a full-time nanny and we have a, our housekeeper comes once a week. Our nanny is amazing. She does, she tidies, she sweeps, but like, you know, Myra comes over and blasted the house and I'm not gonna lie. I will on my deathbed. I will give that up because I also, I grew up with a family of four kids, one income. Like it was, you're scrubbing

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SPEAKER_90: ventures.com slash twist. Arisingventures.com slash twist. If you go to other countries,

SPEAKER_27: it's pretty astounding. Um, I spent some time in the middle east and the immigration policies are very

SPEAKER_69: loose in other countries. So, you know, for example, if you're in Dubai, you know, in the UAE, there's a ton of Indians, Filipinos, et cetera, and people get paid a different salary scale.

SPEAKER_139: They're happy to have the work. Um, and people have drivers, housekeepers, chefs, whatever. There's just a lot more labor available as opposed to the United States,

SPEAKER_69: because we have this housing problem and we've got this dysfunctional immigration system. The reason why Americans are doing so good and can afford Uber Eats and can afford Amazon and all this stuff and DoorDash is because we've, because we've locked down immigration so tightly, even though people would have you believe the border is like insane. And sure, I'm like, I'm sure it is insane, but we have the record low unemployment right now, like 3.5% or whatever. Like this is the lowest of our lifetime in 50 years. It has not been this low. That's why wages are going up. And Uber is in a dogfight with nannies, housekeepers, uh, Apple, Starbucks, pick the retail, Walmart, Target, they're all in a dogfight to who, for who can pay five times minimum wage, federal minimum wage,

SPEAKER_191: which is admittedly like seven or something. Yeah. So seven and change. Yeah. Yeah. So

SPEAKER_69: admittedly it's insane, but you know, even in the city is $15 an hour, it's two or three times that, you know, is, is the going rate for, for, you know, blue collar work. And so we, we've really driven up, I think salaries in this country. And so people are really upset about the Biden administration or cause he's old or whatever, not to make this political. But if you just look at the

SPEAKER_197: state of Americans, record, low unemployment salary is going up and people aren't able to

SPEAKER_117: hire in this country. So I don't understand why immigration is such an issue. We just need to

SPEAKER_197: maybe make it fair, you know, like, dare I say, build a wall and control it, but let people come in fairly and in an orderly fashion, but we need more people in this country.

SPEAKER_10: Absolutely. I mean, not to bring up, uh, Matthew Iglesias by accident, but his book when billion Americans actually got me thinking about this point. If you like, okay, you fly a lot. Uh, sure. My favorite thing to do is whenever I get stuck in a window seat, because I'm too cheap to pay more for a better seat, because I grew up lower middle class. Um, I look out the window and there's nothing. America is empty.

SPEAKER_01: There's nothing. No one.

David Friedberg: If you just fly over for a reason. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: Yes. And so like, let's, let's, let's get another a hundred million Americans. Like people who are like worried about China's government and hate immigration in the US. I'm like, look, you need to get your head out of your nether regions, but let's let some folks in. And I think, well, I have a lot of thoughts about this and I don't want to get too far away from earnings, but I think that, uh, you know, just, and if we sit down with a piece of paper in 30 minutes, we could hash out an immigration plan. That would be much better than what we have. The problem is I think certain people in politics have painted themselves into an ideological corner

SPEAKER_07: about immigration. And so they can't step back from the extremes. And it's very simple. If you look at any country that's doing really well, they have a point based system. And now even me saying point based system will have some group of people say you're racist or you're whatever. And it's like, no, it's logic. If somebody is a PhD who speaks English perfectly, and we need that PhD in whatever chemistry, they should go to the front of the list. And then if somebody has a master's and they're a

SPEAKER_27: nurse and we need nurses, they should be next up. And then if somebody doesn't speak the language and you know, they've got a criminal record, maybe we should have them come in less or not at all.

SPEAKER_69: And we could have a thoughtful process. And so I've been saying on all in and everywhere people listen to me point based system, then a certain amount of compassionate from people who actually

SPEAKER_117: come from a place where they will be murdered if they go back like Afghanistan, like refugee status of an acute mess, not faking it because people know how to fake it. Now at the border, they've been watching YouTube videos of like, just say these things. And then you qualify for this, you know,

SPEAKER_69: and then you have the lottery, you know, hey, I want to come, I'm not super qualified. Can I get in

SPEAKER_206: line, take a number? Yeah. And that would be just totally fair. What do you think of this?

SPEAKER_57: So I think what I think that's very reasonable. What about temporary worker permits for people who work on farms and such? Because there's a lot of that labor. And of course, of course. Okay,

SPEAKER_69: so basically, Republicans were in favor of an open Southern border during the Reagan to Bush era, and the NAFTA era, and people forget this, but David actually pulled up the story from the Wall Street Journal during that time period. People were in favor of this, Alex, because they said, Hey, what's the difference if people from Mexico, come work in California, and then go back for Christmas, it's no big deal. We need somebody to pick the strawberries. Americans don't want to pick strawberries, hard labor. So you know, migrant workers come in, they pick the strawberries, they go home, everybody wins. So why even have a Southern border, just let them come and go let them have a driver's license, let them have a decent quality of life, pay the minimum wage, or you know, Hey, we're Republicans, maybe we'll pay them cash and pay them half a minimum wage. That was kind of what people were doing. And my dad had a business in the 80s. And the entire economy was driven by being able to pay a Mexican dishwasher or shorter or cook half of what an American got paid, they got paid five bucks an hour when everybody else was getting paid 750 or something like that. And that's kind of how the economy worked in the, you know, the off the books economy. So well, it's a good thing

SPEAKER_213: we no longer have an off the books economy and everything's above board in this country.

SPEAKER_69: Yeah. Well, I mean, it's interesting you say that because now with gambling, and legalizing gambling, uh, and using, you know, DraftKings or whatever, that's actually happened. And so if you, uh, and then if you have cannabis be legal, that was a big part of the underground economy. And then if you let migrant workers get driver's license and then get W2 or whatever, 1099, then they become part of it. So there's actually something to getting things out of the gray market, which helps the economy.

SPEAKER_16: The bigger, your unofficial economy is less efficient. Your state is like in general,

SPEAKER_00: like if you go to, if you go look at, um, I'm going to be very gentle on how I say this countries in Latin America that have less high functioning economies, you tend to see greater concentrations

SPEAKER_10: of gray market activity, things that are off the books and so forth. And that is not the best way to run an economy. No, um, blasting on this on labor. And then we'll talk about Clavio, but I

SPEAKER_00: keep hearing people talk about AI is going to replace labor. We're not going to work or there won't be any jobs or robots will rule us. I was thinking about concerns. I think people ask me like, okay, Alex, you write for a living. Are you worried? Not really? Uh, unemployment is currently three and a half percent, 3.6, whatever it is. And we are like, what, how many technological revolutions deep since the industrial revolution and we're still using every single person? Nothing

SPEAKER_10: has changed. So that's my broad take on, on labor in general. I think we're going to stay low unemployment for a really long time. I'm not worried about it. I have to agree. And that would mean

SPEAKER_64: immigration is a good idea. I don't know if you saw this, a bunch of tech executives, uh, in Silicon Valley have a project called California forever. It's like a utopia project, uh, about 70 minutes

SPEAKER_222: outside of San Francisco, Solana County exists, S O L A N O. If you want to look it up,

SPEAKER_64: on your Google maps, it's before you get to, uh, Sacramento, uh, which is like the ride to Tahoe, there's just, like you said, just huge swaths of land. They bought, you know, like hundreds of

SPEAKER_139: thousands of acres there and they want to build a new town there. And then east of San Francisco and Oakland, uh, in the East Bay, you have all these planned communities that are starting to happen.

SPEAKER_69: So there is a distinct lack of creativity in this country for building new cities. I think the greatest pitch for a president and I dare, I don't want to say this because I think Trump will probably pick it up because he's so savvy. If, and when I run for president, I'm going to say 10 new cities in my administration, we're building 10 new cities and these 10 new cities are being built from the bottom up and will be the greatest place you could ever live. And here's what they're going to be like. Housing is going to be amazing. Commuting is going to be amazing. Bike paths everywhere. And your kids are going to be able to live near you. There'll be community pools. You'll be able to go to a pool or a rec center. Everything is going to be like cul-de-sac or any other plant community in

SPEAKER_117: Austin. They have the dominion. I think, yeah, we're going to build 10 million new homes, a million

SPEAKER_99: in each of these 10 cities and high density housing. I presume given that you're talking about the

SPEAKER_117: highest of density with, you know, it'll be high density in the center. And then you bike out for, you know, the five miles outside of it and it's a townhomes and then it becomes homes. So apartments, townhomes, and then homes. And you can pick what you want. You want the backyard, you know, it's half hour commute to the city. You want the townhomes, 15 minute commute. And if you want to live right there, you come downstairs. It's a five second commute to be in

SPEAKER_228: the middle of the city. We're America. We can't build a city. Give me a break. Elon's landing two rockets at the same time. Why the can't we build a city? In the ocean.

SPEAKER_229: It's easier to, I'm kidding. I know. I mean, that's literally, it's a great point, Alex.

SPEAKER_197: This country is so dysfunctional. Yes. That people have to think that the best way to build a city is in the middle of the Pacific ocean. Have you not watched any disaster film? It's going to get flipped over. By a large. Poseidon adventure. By a wave. A lizard wave. It could be any of that.

SPEAKER_117: A nuclear lizard. It's going to be. It's going to flip over at some point. Everything's going to be hanging upside down. People are going to die. There's the middle of America. There's a

SPEAKER_197: between California and San Francisco. The middle of California is completely empty and it's coastline.

SPEAKER_240: Build a city. Or a few. A bunch of bleeps in there, please. No, you're fine. No, I mean, or not. I mean, people aren't children, but I'm a big believer in this country, in the United

SPEAKER_10: States for all of our warts and flaws, for all of our starts and stops. We've been consistently making more opportunity available to more folks over time. And I love that. And I stand behind the project. The thing that actually gets me worried isn't current federal deficits or, you know, infighting them in Congress or whatever. It's whenever I see a headline that's like,

SPEAKER_01: New York city is going to build 1.2 miles of subway. It's going to cost $37 billion. Like

SPEAKER_00: why can't we build things? And I I've seen this in microcosm in Providence where I live and they want to build, um, I think it's a five story building down the street from me a little bit, just to keep my location slightly generic and the neighborhoods up in arms, like, ah, density. And I was like, oh my God, I saw this in San Francisco. I know this story, build it. You guys

SPEAKER_01: always complained that people graduate from Brown university and RISD and all these other colleges and leave. And then you won't build cheaper housing. Yeah. It's, it's like, I'm talking like,

SPEAKER_77: these are smart people who care, but they're there's one argument you can get them on. Hit me.

SPEAKER_139: This is the argument I use. All right. Do you want your children and your nannies or teachers

SPEAKER_69: and the firefighters and the ambulance drivers to live near you? Or do you want them to commute an hour and a half in and hate you? And for some rich people, they will actually, that argument will

SPEAKER_139: get into their brains. Now you saw Mark Andreessen and his wife write this NIMBY letter in Atherton. I don't know if you saw that letter. Oh, I saw it. Oh my God. And they're just like, and they were building like a three story, you know, in the place of one parking garage, they were going to have like eight people living there. And I know this makes a billionaire and his wife who owned 20 homes probably have to write a letter. This is what compels them to write a letter. Here's an idea, write a letter. Why, why isn't El Camino Real, the North and South Boulevard, you know, in the Bay area, the artery before they had the highways, the 101 and the 280. Why don't we just say, on that artery, you can build six stories up and down the entire peninsula. Six? How about 60? Let's go. I mean, I'm just, yeah, okay, sure. I'm just trying to make it so these NIMBY people don't write letters. Like six stories, the whole way, the whole corridor.

SPEAKER_117: Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you let people do that, then you'd have this incredible corridor where people could get on and off of it and go into their apartment complex and then your nanny

SPEAKER_197: or your teacher would not hate you because they have to drive three hours a day and commute. And then you can't get teachers for your school or a nanny to take care of your kids.

SPEAKER_201: Yes, absolutely. In fact, you know what we need? We need someone with a lot of clout in the local

SPEAKER_01: economy, someone with a lot of capital and someone who has a proven extra amount of time to write long manifestos in public to push this forward. And there's no one better than Mark Andreessen himself.

SPEAKER_254: Exactly. Get a shovel and a cement mixer and get to work. He says, let's build. Yes. Well, then why don't we build?

SPEAKER_228: Yes. This is what Mark Andreessen should be. If he wants to stand on the high horse and say, it's time to build. How about saying it's time to build dot, dot, dot on El Camino Real?

SPEAKER_192: Oh, no, I'm sorry. It's time to build dot, dot, dot on the blockchain. Yeah. I mean, really seriously. All right. Listen, I want to skip Klaviyo for a second. I love Klaviyo,

SPEAKER_117: but we have to go to next door because it's a great segue. I love this app next door.

SPEAKER_197: Okay. I looked at what's going on with this stock. They got 540 million in cash. They lost 40 million or so. They're making 56 million a quarter. And the enterprise value of the

SPEAKER_258: company is 500 million. So if you take out the cash, this company is worth $0, I think,

SPEAKER_00: as best as I can tell. Let me double check. I'm no genius at math. Mark Caps 560 and then balance sheet. Um, I had this all pulled up and now I can't find anything.

SPEAKER_266: This is the problem with prepping for the show. Yeah. Um, but I mean, if you're, it's zero.

SPEAKER_10: Yeah. It's, it's, it's worth like a dozen million dollars on an enterprise basis. Okay. So you and I should get some money and just go buy it.

SPEAKER_268: No, I think it's actually, well, okay. Here's the thing. Okay. Walk me through this. Yeah.

SPEAKER_10: Love the idea of communities. Love the idea of a social app to help people connect with their

SPEAKER_00: neighbors. I recall the SPAC. I recall the company when it went out and I recall the excellent, um, best of next door Twitter account. So, you know, I'm on board with this. The problem is, uh, in Q3 of

SPEAKER_10: last year, it had $54 million in revenue this year. This year's Q3, it had 56. That's no change at all. Um, it's usership on a weekly basis is up a little bit year over year, but not by much. And it's not making any more revenue off of people. It's net losses are sticky as hell. And

SPEAKER_00: even on an adjusted basis, it is making no progress. Now the company did announce a 25% reduction in staff, uh, in this earnings report, but you cannot cut your way to greatness. And I wonder if next door simply doesn't scale as people thought, and therefore it is just not going to be the business

SPEAKER_272: people hoped it would be, even though I love the idea, the product and the results.

SPEAKER_64: Okay. They have 800 employees. Now they're going to 600, 600 employees to make 200 million in revenue. Ugh, it's tough.

SPEAKER_139: Yeah. I, it feels like, you know, they should be able to do that. How many people work at TechCrunch?

SPEAKER_222: A hundred? No, 65, probably. 65. It probably does 30 million in revenue. Uh, if I guess with the events and everything,

SPEAKER_276: if I had to take a guess, having run these businesses before, uh, I'd say it's about 30 million, probably 10 million in advertising and 10, 20 million from the events business. Uh, so if you

SPEAKER_278: put it all together, about 30 million, probably. Um, and so I'd have some insight information on that, not recent, but historical. Yeah.

SPEAKER_139: So anyway, uh, you know, you, this thing should be able to run pretty easily with 400 people. You should be able to run this with 400 people. So half the number of people. And then there is an advertising headwind right now. And this business only has one revenue stream

SPEAKER_64: from what I can gather, which is advertising. So while they can't cut themselves to greatness,

SPEAKER_139: they could make the business, um, run more efficiently by probably getting rid of some underperformers. Cause clearly this company hasn't, does not have a cutthroat culture in

SPEAKER_69: the way Facebook does, right? Like Facebook's growing, Google's growing through all this. So this is a social network. If Facebook owned this, it would be a different story. So it's not cutthroat enough. They probably need to have a change in management, probably need to have a change in the employees there and shake the place up. I would, if they put me in charge of this, I'd immediately go to 400 people. Um, and then I would build a subscription business into it of some type. And I would say, if you want to be a vendor in the system, if you're, if you live in the community, it's free. If you want to be any kind of a vendor, it's $99 a month to have an account on the system. And then I would try to get a million vendors, nannies, whatever, to be in the system, plumbers, et cetera. I come up with some way to charge them for being in the directory that wasn't free. Um, and then just try to get a base of a hundred million, 200 million in

SPEAKER_117: subscription revenue as quick as possible. Like the New York times did that when you have the headwinds of advertising, the business doesn't look completely F your thoughts.

SPEAKER_10: So, well, I've been thinking a lot about ads in general, because one of the most interesting things about big tech companies in the last couple of years, uh, putting meta to the side for this, cause we all know they sell ads. Uh, but it's amazing how big of an ads business we're seeing at like Amazon and Microsoft. And so to me, there's, there's this, uh,

SPEAKER_29: thing that happens with scale and essentially just consumer reach, which is suddenly you can

SPEAKER_00: turn on this advertising tab and make boatloads of money. And I don't think it always yields the best consumer results or in terms of consumer surplus in certain products, but it does happen. And we're seeing those companies do well. Like if you look at Amazon's business, even

SPEAKER_01: Instacart's ads business is crushing it right now. Then you look at like one or two tiers down in scale, and they are struggling. So looking at next door here, I I I'm, I'm almost thinking to myself,

SPEAKER_00: you know, okay, Amazon's crushing it on ads. Everyone else is doing fine at the big tech side. Why can't this little company do better? And I think there's, there's a threshold you hit

SPEAKER_254: when you matter enough to get the dollars. And so maybe the question here matters is,

SPEAKER_67: is exactly correct. In advertising scale matters. Either you have an endemic advertising base like crunch base does, uh, or, uh, Oh, I'm sorry. A tech crunch has when you, same thing when you,

SPEAKER_117: when you have, uh, except not when you have an endemic advertising base, like in gadget, when we ran in gadget, like sure, where is Samsung going to advertise their new phone? It's going to be in gadget. Where is like Silicon Valley bank or co America going to advertise their stuff this week in startups or tech crunch, right? It's going to be like, there's endemic advertising.

SPEAKER_139: And you know, you're exactly correct. Other people have built advertising businesses, but the people who've had success are close to the transaction or have true scale. Yes. Uber eats and DoorDash and Instacart. They're close to the checkout. Therefore it's coveted. Then you look at Amazon, it's close to the checkout and it has scale. So that's why it's such a

SPEAKER_69: juggernaut now in tens of billions. Right. And so next door is going to have a hard time because are they near the checkout? No, there's next door is not a checkout product, but that's what I'm saying. Anybody who's in there, who's not living in, you know, Boise, Idaho or Brooklyn or Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, specifically. If you want access to that community, you got to have the $99 a month vendor account. Okay. And that gives you a profile page. And if you don't, you don't get a profile page. And I would just convert everybody neighborhood by neighborhood to $99 a month, $1,200 a year. If you get, but one customer pays for itself.

SPEAKER_117: And if you can't afford that, you can't be in the community.

SPEAKER_16: Annoying people is the Tim cook approach. What's the pirate approach? The pirate approach is to say,

SPEAKER_268: we need to 10 X our weekly active users. Sure. So that's another approach. That's what I would, that's what I would do because if you do what you say,

SPEAKER_10: you can probably build a more sustainable business and a little bit easier on the revenue side,

SPEAKER_117: but it's going to be worth 1.2, 1.4. Yeah. Fuck that. You know, like I'm just trying to build a base. So I would say it's a one, two strategy. I would take your strategy as the long-term strategy. And I take my strategy as the foundational strategy. So let's get a, let's put one team, a hundred people on just building this base of subscription revenue that keeps the lights on. And then, Hey, advertising comes ebbs and flows. Yeah. Let's go 10 exit and give people money to build content, to build local news. Like I think it could be a really good local news, like patch. I feel like that's way open. And there's so many journalists. I don't know if you saw Jezebel shut down yesterday at the same time, vice laid people off at the same time next door is laying people off. What is a, what does a local journalist get paid?

SPEAKER_197: Uh, I think the median is like 40, 50, 40 or $50,000 a year, less than a nanny.

SPEAKER_139: So literally if you are journalist, you get paid less than the nanny. It's, it's literally like being a priest. It's a vocation. You're it's just, well, teachers get paid 50% more.

SPEAKER_29: Why are we in business journalism? Because it pays exactly the last bastion of, of economic

SPEAKER_287: viability. Um, so I, I, I love all of that and I want next door to succeed because what I like about

SPEAKER_00: it is, it is, is fundamentally people power. The, the people in the community are, um, at the forefront more. So I would say than in other social networks that are a bit more seemingly

SPEAKER_57: algorithmically driven. And let's be honest, we do have an issue with loneliness in this country.

SPEAKER_01: Yes. And so I think things that could in theory, bring us closer together and make us have a slightly

SPEAKER_00: tighter knit local area are good. I love the fact that when I walk across the street, I know the family there, I walk around the corner, there's a store. I know the owner of that store. When I walk into the cafes in my neighborhood, they're like, Oh God, here he is again, two large Americanos.

SPEAKER_147: And you know, that is worth gold to me. And I think we mostly don't have it due to commuting and so forth. So I wanted to succeed. My glasses are going on. You know what that means?

SPEAKER_19: J trade alert. It's time for a J trade. I'm opening up Robin hood. Now 20,000 shares of kind is $28,000. It's too small of a bet. Let's make a bigger bet. Let's go 30,000 shares, $43,000. I'm going to review it, swipe up, order received, cha-ching. We got a J trade. I just bought $43,000 worth of next door. I'm going to probably regret this, but I'm doing it. I convinced myself

SPEAKER_27: that there's an asset here. That's worth it. We laid out our plan. Now the plans in the world and

SPEAKER_69: yeah, whatever I'm giving you, you convinced me, I'm giving you 20% carry on this.

SPEAKER_318: Uh, I think that breaks ethics. I think that breaks journalistic ethics.

SPEAKER_104: I'm going to donate 20% of whatever I gained to your charity of your choice.

SPEAKER_287: So you, I just want your favorite charity. You could have, you could have, you could have hired

SPEAKER_117: the second nanny instead of making a J trade. I'm sorry. I've been sitting on the sidelines. I've been wanting to buy a company that is just totally getting demolished and it makes no sense.

SPEAKER_69: I think this is the company. I think this is an easy purchase. If I'm, if I'm Elon, I would buy this in a heartbeat since he's got a good team, like running Twitter now X,

SPEAKER_117: and he's got like a good product team. If I'm Elon, I'd buy this in a heartbeat, get all that local stuff together. Nah, just, you can log in with your X account, but he wants to build a super app. So maybe like it knows your location. And then in Twitter, you could have a, a scream, like the feed from next door goes into Twitter. I don't know.

SPEAKER_00: Some what's the biggest, um, like a handy person marketplace out there.

SPEAKER_276: Thumbtack and Angie's list. And they are struggling. Uh, Angie's list is struggling

SPEAKER_139: as a public company. You know, right now the market is brutal to anybody, not profitable. We know that. And then they're rewarding people who are profitable. So the question is to our first story, Uber, how quickly can next door start to look like Uber? I think you need to have 300 employees.

SPEAKER_328: Sorry. I think the cuts, you got to cut 50%. 25% now reduce level. Yeah. Yes. So cut 25% now and

SPEAKER_69: then tell everybody we get to profitability, uh, within a year, or if we don't, we're going to cut another 200 people. And so, and the other thing is a lot of the people who were hired, I hate to say this so brutally, but this is what I hear from folks when they hired people 2019 to 2021,

Chamath Palihapitiya: those same people would command half the comp. Then now that you know how to manage remote workers, those same remote workers in Canada, you know, south of the border, uh, you know, Latin America,

SPEAKER_69: Manila, they go for much less. And I get to see this Alex, because I work with startups and startups

SPEAKER_276: have limited capital right now. Sure. Somebody was telling me they have a VP of operations in Portugal. This person, they would value at a hundred thousand dollars, like a VP of ops. Guess what the Portugal salary is for this person? Oh, it's a European country. European, but Europe's poorer than you

SPEAKER_207: think. Europe's poorer than Americans think. I'm going to go, uh, 57. 35.

SPEAKER_69: What? 35. They replaced a hundred thousand person with a $35,000 person in Portugal. Now,

SPEAKER_276: guess how much an SDR, sales development rep, in the United States, these get paid 75k,

SPEAKER_69: fully baked, maybe 40, 50k base with 25k. Think of it like the Yelp person who's calling on people, restaurants, like that in-house salesperson, or they work as an SDR at a SaaS company. They give leads,

SPEAKER_117: they warm up leads, they nurture them, they hand them off to the sales people selling Salesforce. I love SDRs. Yeah. Yeah. SDRs, which are also known as research people. Guess what a researcher gets

SPEAKER_69: paid per month in Latin America or Manila or India, who has been doing it for three years and has an English language proficiency and IQ that's higher than the average American. Wait, per month or per year?

SPEAKER_344: Just go per month, per month, total comp per month. So 75, 12, six, carry the one divided by seven.

SPEAKER_287: Don't make me do math on the show on my day off. Um, I'm going to go, uh, uh, 200 hours a month of

SPEAKER_103: work, 50 hours a week. Okay. Let's go with 2k. Just throw it around. Remember 1k. Ah, 1k. And I,

SPEAKER_139: I know where to hire them now. So because my, I literally, this is the great thing with working with young founders and we invest in 150 companies a year. Yeah. They just explained to me how they're doing it. I'm like, wait a second, you have 12 people and you're burning 30,000 a month. Everybody's getting paid this amount. I'm like, oh, developers in Latin America are getting 2k a month and the ops and salespeople are getting 1k a month. I'm like, how is that possible? Like, do you know the cost of living in these countries? I'm like, it's much lower. Unbelievable. And these are great jobs. And these people do not quit the jobs. And then I said, for the people you have in Manila, can I ask a question? Are they working the overnight? They're like, they prefer to work the overnight. If you work the overnight, you get $7 an hour.

SPEAKER_276: If you work during the day, you get four. So everybody, the overnight shifts in Manila and Philippines and those places is like, you almost get paid double for doing that. And they just

SPEAKER_139: sit in your Slack room. So you know how to manage remote people, right? Everything went remote, right? Yeah. Is there any difference in managing a remote person who lives in

SPEAKER_276: Canada, Portugal, or Hawaii? I mean, I have colleagues around the world, so I'm actually very

SPEAKER_10: accustomed to doing the time zone dance. And I look, I'm a long-term believer in remote work and remote teams. And I know that there is many viewpoints in that conversation, but my best argument in favor of this is I couldn't work with the great people I do if I demanded they all live next to me. And so to me, it's like, if you want access to global talent, you go global. Um, you can do it very well at those prices though. Oh my gosh, that's maybe, maybe unemployment is

SPEAKER_192: going to go up here in the U S that's what I'm thinking. And you know, what I did was just as an

SPEAKER_276: experiment, I'm hiring four, um, operations, you know, admin type people and I'm giving them to four

SPEAKER_139: different departments. And I said, we're going to do an experiment for the next six months. You're going to have this admin person in this Slack room. Anybody in this eight person group can use them for anything they want. Just say what you want in the group. Think of it. Like it's like Amazon webs. It's like, we have a mechanical Turk in the company, go to the room, make a request. They do it for you. Boom. So if it was you, you could say, Hey, I want some charts made, or I want you to make

SPEAKER_365: me a table of this. And then you have to ask yourself, can chat GPT do it? Or does the person in Manila using chat GPT do it? Oh, cause you're going to give them the chat GPT account.

SPEAKER_10: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. But then apply that with GitHub co-pilot to the developer question. And then suddenly the people you're hiring around the world that are lower price point can do more.

SPEAKER_69: I mean, this is where it becomes super mind blowing. So if you think about what you just said, you're a 2k a month developer in Latin America or India, that's what they get paid two or 3k a month.

SPEAKER_276: So 25, 40k great job, but that's for an average developer. Now imagine your average developer has co-pilot. So if we were going to rank them on a scale of one to 10, they would be a maybe a five or six developer. Sure. They start using co-pilot. They immediately become a seven or eight. Now you're the CEO of a company and you can hire three developers in Latin America or India for the price of the US one, the US ones at eight out of the gate, but maybe they want some quality of life. Maybe they

SPEAKER_69: want, you know, more free time work-life balance as Europeans and Americans have now become accustomed. And then you got three grinders, you know, and they're both your interaction with them is on zoom and slack. So what I think happened was people like you as a manager or myself as a manager or CEOs, once you learn to manage a remote person, then the idea of hiring somebody overseas who speaks another net language natively and is a part of a different culture and gets paid a different pay

SPEAKER_117: scale or is not scary anymore. I'm not scared of having remote workers anymore. That's all I have.

SPEAKER_379: That's all people want to do is remote work. So fine. I give up. Yeah, I give up. Also, if I give up, I should also get the benefit of being able to hire globally. Yeah. The most important thing you learn

SPEAKER_29: when you travel is that everywhere you go, it's folks. They debit to food changes, clothing changes,

SPEAKER_00: religion changes, but everyone wants the same thing. Everyone's lovely. Everyone around the world's fantastic. And the thing about this is, uh, you're right in many cases that these are very well-paying jobs. And what happens is in economies where you do see work like this, uh, eventually the labor price goes up, uh, for the local community and makes people a lot richer. So I'm totally in favor of this. I love the democratization of opportunity around the world. Thanks to the internet. It's taken longer than I would have thought, but I think, I think we'll know things have really changed when

SPEAKER_254: developer salaries in the U S peak. All right. On an inflation adjusted basis. Yes. We got to do this.

SPEAKER_276: Uh, you were on the show, uh, when the, we work s one came out, you and Molly episode nine, six, nine, let's go to Alex at the top of his game with Molly at the

SPEAKER_273: top of her game. Three, two, one. We'll play a 40 second second clip. See on the side.

SPEAKER_382: I'm glad I'm not alone in the we were chaos. Cause I was concerned that I was too stupid to figure it out. I was missing something very important, but it doesn't sound like it. So

SPEAKER_383: what, what to you is the worst part of all of this, the business model. Yeah. The personal red flags that keeps throwing up or something else. The fact that I cannot with complete

SPEAKER_382: confidence tell you their gap gross margin. And I I'm talking about that. That is a fundamental basic way to understand the quality of revenue in a business that helps you understand their burn rate. Are they burning money to build a recurring, strong revenue base? Or are they burning money to build a revenue base that may have 5% gross margins? And if they are doing that, they are throwing tons of good money to get bad revenue. And then it's ridiculous, but because they set up the S one in such a way that they don't actually break that out. My hands are off. I'm not even a

SPEAKER_69: thousand miles. Okay. There it is. You were talking about the gross, the eventual gross margin of the business. I think you nailed it. Here we are. We were going bankrupt and I think you get your victory

SPEAKER_276: lap here. You were exactly correct. There weren't the gross margins business were flipped and broken.

SPEAKER_10: Yeah. So that's what I discovered when I went back to the numbers, uh, with, when they did file, I went back through the SPAC deck, the original S ones, and then the recent earnings and the company's

SPEAKER_16: gross margins were always somewhere around zero, as best as I could tell through all the, all the smoking mirrors. Um, it was just never a good business. People like to say, you know,

SPEAKER_57: gap is not fair because share-based comp shouldn't be blah, blah, blah. You know, the nice thing about gap is there's no hiding. No. And so that's why I really do appreciate having at least some rigorous numbers to go against. And we work never had good revenue.

SPEAKER_10: They spend too much money. And then they got several successive shocks from the economy, remote work being one COVID being another. And I think that was just, you know, a couple of extra

SPEAKER_276: nails right through the heart. Yeah. I think we really have to look at everybody playing, uh, community EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA. I think it might be time for us to stop with allowing accounting, mashugana, massaging. If you want to talk about that on your own time, fine. But if you're talking about it in relation to S ones, 10 Q's earnings calls, there's an argument to maybe not let people do that. So I'm for a free country, but I just feel like they're the accounting shenanigans.

SPEAKER_27: Why do we have gap? Why do we have principles and rules if we allow people to ignore them and then

SPEAKER_358: focus on a different one? It's a really good point. And here's what I'll say. I was prepping for this show about half an hour before we got on. I just want to go back through the numbers,

SPEAKER_10: make sure I recall things. And I was going to point up, um, the slide decks from each of these

SPEAKER_57: companies, earnings reports, and they were not called investor presentations. They were called earnings supplements, which I think is actually a change in how they're being described.

SPEAKER_00: I think the sec is saying you need to point out that this is not your earnings. This is something in addition to your earnings. You need to be clear about that. And I agree with

SPEAKER_57: you. And the reason why I think, uh, especially adjusted EBITDA is, is something that we should not trust as much as many people want us to is that they strip out share-based comp. And then later on, they have to buy all that stock back with cash. And so all they're doing is moving essentially a cost to the future, which they then bury in their, um, I think that would be an investing cashflow. And so to me, it's a little bit of a shell game to make the numbers look better in the meantime, and to not show how much your employee base actually costs. Yes. For startups. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_276: Don't care. Uh, yeah. For big companies. Yeah. See, I think maybe the, the rule here should be kind of like when you get your credit card statements or you have a banking account, they're required to show you your interest rate. Yes. On the top level. There's some level of regulation here to protect consumers. And the regulation I think is, and I, you know, I'm not

SPEAKER_69: up on this, but this happened during Dodd-Frank or something where they just felt like the banks were not being upfront. They said, okay, you guys obviously can't police yourselves on the top level of a bank statement above the fold in newspaper terms. You gotta have your interest rate and how

SPEAKER_276: much interest you paid this year. Yes. And I, even I, when I go into like my Morgan Stanley account, when I look at my margin loan account, it has how much I'm paying and my margin loan is

SPEAKER_69: variable. It was like 1% and now it's six or 7%. And, but I can see it right there. Right. Uh, and it says, how much did you pay? And so I can make the decision. Do I sell shares in Uber or

SPEAKER_276: other things or, but it's growing and is it growing faster than 7%. Okay, great. If I need some quick cash, I can take the margin loan, spend the money and pay it back or sell shares to pay it down. Right. This is how, uh, affluent people never pay taxes as you probably heard from Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. You just take loans out against your equity holdings. And hopefully if your equity holdings keep going up, you eventually can push the tax burden way down the road.

SPEAKER_183: Yes. And then put it into a trust and then give it to your kids. And then maybe, yeah,

SPEAKER_404: that could work too. Yeah. If you, but I don't want to leave them with too much of a burden. Um,

SPEAKER_276: I want to just leave them with the investment company and having a share in that. And either you work there and you get a nice share or you don't work there and you get a smaller

SPEAKER_29: share. Now that I, I just want my daughters to work with me. Yeah. No, not now that I have, now that I have kid one and we're thinking about kid two, I'm thinking a lot more about like how to teach them about money. And oh God, it's going to be so hard.

SPEAKER_276: The best thing to do is to have, um, put a certain amount of money into their Robinhood account or Wealthfront, whatever easy to use platform you have. Yeah. And I would just give them when they're of age, the app, I'm going to do this with my 13 year old with a thousand dollars in it and say, you have the S and P you have a thousand dollars in, you know, Q, Q, Q, Q, the NASDAQ or some Vanguard fund, or I put 500 in each. And if you want to sell it and move it to other things, you can go have fun with it. And we'll both look at it and talk about it. If you want to, if you think you can outperform the indexes, go for it. If you don't, just leave it there.

SPEAKER_00: Do you know, when I discovered that I thought business was really interesting, elementary school stock club joined on a whim. We got million dollars in fake money. We got to play that.

SPEAKER_24: I, I, I, this was, you know, back in the night, I tanked it. I was so bad, but I loved it so much. What did you buy? Who the hell knows? I was in the computer lab at elementary school in rural Oregon.

SPEAKER_10: Like it was not high tech. Um, but I remember I, the first day before I did any trades, I, my money went up because I earned some interest on it. And I was like, Oh, this is the best thing in the world. And it had me hooked line and sinker and therefore the rest of my life. Um, so I, I agree with that,

SPEAKER_29: but more like my children are going to have more money than I had and instilling work ethic is, you know, I think something you, you think about, and I don't know, I just might, I, now I stay up at

SPEAKER_84: night thinking about this now versus like sports, you know? Uh, I think the right thing to do with

SPEAKER_276: your kids is understand that chat GPT and AI is going to take away a lot of the jobs that we thought were the great jobs, being a writer, a developer, a designer, and those jobs are going to have

SPEAKER_117: compression in how much money they make. And they will go to the median average of, they'll go to the average of an international person with chat GPT four. And so while you could thumb your nose and be on your high horse about a logo designed in India or Manila or Latin America 10 years ago. Now, if I were to show you a logo made in one of those countries versus an American, you would not be able to pick the difference and using Adobe and Canva and their new AI suites, you would be like, wow, the average logo built for 50 bucks is better than the average logo built 5,000 bucks 20 years ago. And when you started a company 20 years ago, one of the things you did with your first million and a half dollars was you gave five to 25 K to an agency to build your logo. Wow. Now in the days of Engadget and TechCrunch, when we were building those brands, Peter Rojas's fiance at the time, and then wife today, she made the Engadget logo. I think we paid her 500 bucks, 350. And that was a lot for a logo, you know, 20 years ago. Now founders make their logos using Dolly or some AI looks great. Yeah. And I'm like, how did you do that? How much did it cost? And they said,

SPEAKER_276: 17 minutes. And I said, Okay, cautious 17 minutes. Got it. That's the price. 17 minutes. Okay, well, if you're a founder, and you've got unlimited time, you're working 16 hours a day, seven days a week, okay, 17 minutes is free. So logos now free. Okay, question though, you're,

SPEAKER_10: I think you're slightly more pessimistic than I am about certain jobs and their viability long term, but that's nuance. What are the safe jobs? Do you think in a world of AI? If you're 18 right now,

SPEAKER_117: listening to this, clearly physical anything physical in the world, that's like a trade skill.

SPEAKER_276: Yeah, it's gonna be crazy. Like, you know, try getting a plumber electrician, any of those jobs. So if you have the propensity, it's going to be a six figure job. And I would say it's safer than the equivalent six figure job you might get after 20 years of being a journalist, right to hit six figures as a teacher or journalist is a 10 to 20 year journey, I'd say. And your job as a plumber, electrician, carpenter, pick the trade will be higher. Yeah, but I do think the skills of leadership, building product, building a team, and being able to manage teams to build products. That's always gonna be there. Because you correctly pointed out at the top of the episode, that we always find work for people to do. Well, the work is, what's a problem in the world, where I can save people time, save the money, or delight them and make them laugh. Those three things will always be here. Can I entertain somebody make them laugh, cry, otherwise feel emotion, you know, inform them whatever it is, and then save the money, save them time. Those things are always going to be going to be there. So go ahead and teach your kids how to build a product or service in the world, and how to build a team to work together, to collaborate to build products and services in the world. That's what

SPEAKER_379: I'm teaching my daughters. And if they can do that, they're going to have a job forever.

SPEAKER_433: Yeah, or learn to weld. It's really funny, because, you know, for a really long time,

SPEAKER_10: people looked down their nose at people who worked with their hands, and those jobs were viewed as lesser. And even the whole blue collar white collar divide was, was not just class in the United States, but it was also, you know, kind of like a cultural cache that they were valued jobs didn't have. If we think about the power of digital technologies in a realm of generative AI, taking away the white collar premium. And oddly enough, pushing that back onto the blue car drops, there's a full circle element to this that I that I that I appreciate and find ironic that the

SPEAKER_147: computer guys got so smart, they took away their own jobs, almost to a degree. Yes, who would have

SPEAKER_10: thought unpack that? Well, okay, so we worked really hard on on getting big data to work. And then we talked a lot about how to do machine learning. And then we learned about transformers, then learned

SPEAKER_00: about LLMs. And then we built generous of AI applications, and then they learned how to code. And suddenly the snake began to eat its own tail. And so now the people who made all this great stuff,

SPEAKER_10: almost like a not Sisyphus, who's the dude who flew to the sun and got burned and Icarus, Icarus, thank you kind of an Icarian journey of flying too close to building something that's as smart as you are, and then it takes away your work. I think you're right about anyone being able to evoke emotions,

SPEAKER_29: which is why I hope that my writing is sufficiently humorous, even though I'm a journalist to keep me

SPEAKER_64: employed. We'll see. I had a thing with writers, you know, in our organization, when we needed to write copy myself, Jackie, or maybe one other person where the copywriters out of 20 people at the investment firm. And so people would come to us with their, you know, you know, raw copy, we polish

Chamath Palihapitiya: it. Now they come to us and I say, highlight everything in notion, or Coda, or Google Docs, or Grammarly, and then say make better. Or if you really want to get good at it, take it from Grammarly, then put it in notion, then have notion, improve it and do two layers of improving your writing. And literally, there is something where you can, I think it's in notion

SPEAKER_276: where you highlight it, or it might be superhuman, and you just say make better. It's not even like,

SPEAKER_139: make it more definitive, make it more concise, make it more appealing to a business user. It's just better. Yes. And my Lord, it takes people from where you and I are at as writers, like we're elite

SPEAKER_276: writers who can get paid very well for our service. I think if we were if we're 100 out of 100, or 99, we're 98, 99 out of 100 in terms of getting paid as writers. Yeah, it brings somebody who's a 20, I think to an 80. Oh, behind us. Okay, yeah, I think they're like, it's good enough to hit the

SPEAKER_139: publish button. In other words, remember, like writers should be like, this person doesn't get the publish button on TechCrunch or Engadget. Somebody got to read your shit and make sure it's tight. Now that person, that person, you could actually let them publish. All right, I got to play you this.

SPEAKER_69: Did you see the South Park episode about I have not seen it yet? Okay, I'm gonna play you one clip,

SPEAKER_348: please. And then I want your reaction. Here we go.

SPEAKER_449: Excuse me, you're a handyman, right? Can I get you to come look at my oven door? I can trade you services. I have geology skills. Could you come fix my door? And I'll give you some

SPEAKER_450: geology? Hey, why don't you guys get out of here? You're making the Home Depot look all shitty.

SPEAKER_12: So apparently, I was just quoting South Park and didn't even know it. The joke here is all the intellectuals with PhDs, lawyers, accountants can't find handymen. So they

Chamath Palihapitiya: say go to Home Depot and just hire the people outside. Yes. So many of them go to Home Depot that they now become the Home Depot. Yes. And the handyman's right by to get their, you know, sheetrock.

SPEAKER_454: And they look at them and say, you guys are making this place look really shitty. Get the hell out of

SPEAKER_455: here. It's a bunch of attorneys and lawyers. So I mean, I really do think a lot of professions,

SPEAKER_10: entry level work is currently done by hand that could be done by digital services in the future. And I think we're seeing, we're seeing startups attack every bit of the insurance stack and so forth, just to pick a random example. And it's going to get a lot better and faster. So the cool thing for me is given my, my thesis, that no matter what, we're going to have employment between three and 5% long-term throughout the history of mankind is what are folks going to do

SPEAKER_00: once they get their stuff taken away? And what does that unlock? And that's a question I don't

Chamath Palihapitiya: know the answer to, but I'm very curious. Yeah, I think each you're going to have to have a level of resiliency that I think a generation or two didn't have to have. Gen X,

SPEAKER_139: there was always going to be a job for us. You know, we may or may not like it, but we could be, you know, moody when we took it, then Gen Z, you know, millennials, like, yeah, they were like paralyzed. Like, Oh my God, I have to go to the office. Like this. I don't know if you saw that

SPEAKER_276: the tick tock of the woman who was like, I leave my house at 830. I don't get home until 615.

SPEAKER_467: And my life is, I have, there's no life left for me. We don't have time to have that argument, but it was two hours each way. That's insane. Back to your point about people commuting too far.

SPEAKER_69: Yes. Yes. That was insane. Yeah. She, she wanted to live with her parents and I was like, Oh, here's the hack. Get a roommate who has the same problem in Manhattan. And then you, one of you sleeps in the living room. The other one sleeps in the bedroom and you turn a one bedroom into a two

SPEAKER_471: bedroom more than just one. I mean, fine. You have three of you put a bunk bed in like,

SPEAKER_69: and then just live by your house and you'll be cool. And just, you gotta just get into dorm life. Anyway, this has been a great episode. It's going to be a crazy future. You need to be resilient and self-reliant. So if you have kids build self-reliance and resiliency at your kids,

SPEAKER_139: you can do that by taking them on long hikes or camping or anything that takes grit, skiing, boating, hikes, camping in the wilderness, make them build a fire or make them build a, a tent for themselves. Let them feel like they could survive in tough conditions. And then when they face

SPEAKER_276: a world without jobs or jobs that are hard, they're like, Oh, well, being a welder's not that difficult or a construction person. If I got to paint a house, it's not the end of the world.

SPEAKER_475: Well, they'll all be podcasters anyway. Let me tell you, I, uh, I've done welding

SPEAKER_29: poorly and, uh, it's terrifying. So shout out to all the welders out there because that is,

SPEAKER_10: that is a legit skill. And I'm, I'm always in awe when I see some really good welding out in the wild. Jason though, I do hope that in the future there are jobs for podcasters because I find it amazing

SPEAKER_131: that people still like, I don't know, listen to us. Thanks everybody. Yeah. Thanks everybody for

SPEAKER_479: listening. I love doing this. Um, I hope I get to do it until I'm dead, you know?

SPEAKER_192: Absolutely. Uh, all right. Listen, everybody follow at Alex first name club. Yeah.

SPEAKER_365: Oh yeah. On the Twitter still. Uh, so everybody follow Alex. He's just extraordinary and a great

SPEAKER_379: guest to have during earning season. You can follow me. I'm at Jason and you can just tweet to us. Hey, enjoy the pod at Alex at Jason. Uh, and we get to flex on our gen X first name club status.

SPEAKER_482: I'm a millennial. I'll have, you know, uh, you're kind of more gen X than millennial. You don't

SPEAKER_479: whine all that much. Are you moody? And do you want, uh, only to my spouse? And then she tells

SPEAKER_483: me that I'm, I need to get it together. Exactly. You, you feel more gen X to me because you're,

SPEAKER_57: yeah, you're more passionate about weird verticals. I forgot what I, I forgot how old I was. That that's how I know that I'm getting older. Cause I was like, am I 33 or 34? And my wife was like,

SPEAKER_240: you're 34. I'm like, really? So I put in the bowl from alpha and I'm like, oh yeah, she's right now.

SPEAKER_483: You're a mature 34. You feel like 44 to me. You're like perfect to be a dad. You'll be walking around. You got the dad vibes going now. I'll text you about the stroller. But it's going to blow your

SPEAKER_482: mind. Oh, absolutely. All right. We'll see you all next time on this week in startups. Bye bye.