SPEAKER_01: All right, everybody. It is Friday of All In Summit week. We made it. We were on a boat yesterday. We were on a boat yesterday. We were on a boat. No big. But we're here for you today in the feed. And that's what really matters. You recently may have seen the news that Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has co-founded a new space company, space related company. And we got the CEO on to talk to us.

SPEAKER_05: That's right. Alex Fielding joins us today to talk about cleaning up all the junk in space. Obviously, getting to space, thanks to Elon and SpaceX and a number of other players, but mainly Elon, they've got them really cheap. It turns out when you reuse the rockets, you can get a lot more stuff up there and bigger payloads. And now there's a lot of stuff out there. There'll be more stuff out there. That means things can collide and colliding at 18,000 miles per hour. It's not a fun experience, it turns out. And the Russians happen to be blowing stuff up in space because they can.

SPEAKER_07: Uh, so it's getting a little bit sloppy, I think, a little scary out there, a little scary.

Jason Calacanis: Yeah. And it's time to do a little cleanup work. So Alex explains that.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah. He's a total pro at you're really going to love this interview. There's just a lot of like geeky space talk. The nodies loved it when we recorded it. It's just super fascinating about what that low earth orbit ecosystem is starting to look like.

SPEAKER_05: Yeah, there's going to be a lot of great stuff out there. Everybody's going to have internet around the planet. And they're going to have it at a really affordable cost. Thanks to Amazon's constellation, SpaceX's Starling constellation. There's a third one coming out.

SPEAKER_12: And we also talk.

SPEAKER_13: They all blow each other up.

SPEAKER_05: Well, we, and we actually talk about weapons in space and the history of that. I thought that was an interesting, uh, diversion. If you remember in the conversation that we got into, so this is going to be a great interview for you, but first we're going to answer a quick ask Jason and Molly. We have to add the add Molly to it. Uh, about downturns. It'd be a great episode.

SPEAKER_18: Yeah. Yeah. Stick with us.

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SPEAKER_07: All right, everybody. It's time for an ass Jason, sorry. Ask JMO. We have to rebrand this. Molly's here to help out as well. Um, and, and here is the question. What do you remember about the tech industry during the dot-com crash and the great recession? Two different moments in time. Any specific things that you did?

SPEAKER_23: Does that stand out to you? What a great question. Yeah. So I was in the dot-com era. I was 30 years old. I had my magazine. Uh, in, in 2008, I was 38. I was born in 1970. It's really easy to do the math. Um,

SPEAKER_05: And so the first one was particularly brutal on me because I had a magazine, Silicon Alley reporter, about a hundred employees. And I had to go down to six. And, uh, that was hard to lay off 80 people who you loved working with. And we were doing over, I think we did $11.6 million in revenue in 2000. And then we went down to 600,000 in revenue 2001.

SPEAKER_04: It was perhaps one of the most beautiful, brutal years of my life. Uh, and I got through it and kind of made me the entrepreneur I am today. Molly, where were you in 1999 to 2001?

SPEAKER_01: I was at CNET and it was CNET was not like the most high flying, um, dot com. So it's not like we lost all our foosball tables or anything like that. But there's one memory that sort of sticks with me always. And that memory is of all of us. Like in our kind of pod working, realizing there had been some big market move, right? There was like a big crash. And everybody was like, huh? I wonder what's going on here. And then all of a sudden a hawk hit the window at CNET. Like, okay.

SPEAKER_31: So in downtown San Francisco, it was down by fishermen. Not too many hawks. Yeah. Not a lot of hawks. No.

SPEAKER_01: Drashed into the window, like almost like an earthquake. Like it was the most intense. And then it was so upsetting. And then this hawk is like laying on the ground outside and everybody went over to the window. And it was just this like really weird. I know that there should be a larger lesson here, but sometimes life is just a metaphor. And that happened and all of us stood there and we were like, whoa, this feels like kind of a bad sign. And then like two days later, September 11th happened.

David Friedberg: Yeah. I mean, that's, people forget that one, two punch. It all happened all at once. Yeah.

SPEAKER_23: We were, we were already on the ropes and then nine 11 happened and you kind of got the sense that the world was a very dark place that you were unsafe.

SPEAKER_05: Um, and that the, uh, age of innocence, the innocence was over for our generation. We had just lived this life where the internet happened when we were in our twenties, everything was going up into the right and young people were coveted, believed in, they were looked to for the future.

SPEAKER_07: And then kind of everybody thought.com is a scam, much like people look at crypto as a scam today. And then nine 11 happened and you thought, well, this is the first time, um, we are going into a war. Um, when we had this obscure concept of war with drones in the Middle East during the Gulf War.

SPEAKER_05: Um, but again, with a volunteer army, uh, it didn't really impact everybody. And it wasn't on our shores. It was in the, you know, in, in people's minds, like there's a desert very far away from here. And we have some interest in the oil and some number of thousands of us are going there and lots of them are dying, but we're not, you know, the, the ones on the short end to stick. We have this crazy dominance. So it was very weird. Like the, the Gulf war was this CNN, you know, uh, almost like a movie, you know, if it was in a, uh, a mirage that you were watching, like, is this real or not? Like with the bombs going off in Baghdad. Um, whereas nine 11, you knew people who died, you saw people jumping out of the buildings, you saw the buildings collapse.

SPEAKER_43: It was incredibly traumatizing having a lift third. I had PT. I literally had PTSD from it.

SPEAKER_01: I can't even imagine having been in New York and then our version of it, which is kind of absurd to think about now. And I'm not trying to throw anybody under the bus, but because those two things were happening in conjunction, we laid people off that day. Yes. Like we were on the West cause we had a New York office, but it was like, it was happening at the same time as the crash. Yep. Nobody really totally understood the magnitude of, I think how it was going to unfold, how bad it was. I don't know, but I know that those two things, like literally we sort of were at home. Nobody went into work that day, but also we had layoffs. And to me that it's that to me, those two things are really inextricable. They can't be separated. And then the other big memories is having dinner with some friends, all of whom worked in the tech industry and having, you know, our one really plain spoken friend be like, you know, clearly things are going to get bad. A lot's happening here. And she goes, but we're going to be okay. She's like, let's not, let's not kid ourselves about who's not going to be okay in this economy and who is.

SPEAKER_07: Yeah. And it was a pretty harsh, you know, it was a harsh lesson and we see it over and over like, yeah, I think who winds up getting screwed in these things and the definition of like, you know, what is truly screwed? Like, you know, people, people died in 911. Yes. Horrific. And then, you know, our economy slowly recovered. And it was just a shocking, it was shocking for people. And I think as you get older and you live through these things, you start to realize these things pass.

SPEAKER_05: It is the human condition. There have been wars, there will continue to be wars in our lifetimes, there are booming bus cycles in the economy. And, you know, you can prepare for them doesn't mean they won't be shocking when they do happen. But in the generally things will, will pass and things will be okay. And I think that leads up to 2008, which was, you know, the, the great recession for people who don't remember that. Um, I was running, uh, I guess Mahalo at the time, which is now inside venture backed. Uh, and, uh, I just started, uh, was just about to start angel investing and, um, the market collapsed.

SPEAKER_07: I didn't have a lot of equities. I had moved all of my, uh, money in the markets into revenue box back community bonds, 18 months before the market crashed.

SPEAKER_54: No. So, uh, I just had a sense that everything was overheated.

SPEAKER_55: It didn't make sense to me. And I moved a hundred percent of my money into revenue backed muni bonds, uh, which are ones that have like, um, uh, a bridge behind them, you know?

SPEAKER_05: So the bridge tolls go to the bondholders first. So even in the rare case where a muni bond would go under, which is very rare, like a town has to go bankrupt because they get sued or something. Um, the municipal ones of the bonds are the, uh, my understanding was that those were the most, um, valuable. And it turns out they weren't in fashion. So the core value of the bonds went up like 10 or 20%. And I was making four or 5% tax free. So I wound up playing the economy perfectly. And then I went into investing mode. So I was a little older, 37 years old, 38 years old. And it was clear to me that the Warren Buffett quote, having lived through the dot com era was in effect. And I immediately, uh, said time to invest. Uh, what a great time to be investing in companies. What a great time to be buying stocks. And, uh, so as Warren Buffett said, be greedy when investors are fearful and be fearful when investors are greedy. Um, everybody was scared. I became greedy and right. You know, the last couple of years, people have been greedy and I've been really scared. Talking on this podcast, Bill Gurley has been very clear about this, Fred Wilson, anybody who's been through these things, a couple of super cycles. And so as I, uh, said on the all in that came out today, and I've been saying on this podcast, you know, now's the time to be an angel investor. Uh, and a lot of the big wins I had, you know, came to fruition in the last five years. And now I'm back to investing in companies. Uh, I mean, never stopped, but you know, I think this is the year, uh, the next two years are going to be the best time to be investing in startups. The, the valuations will be reasonable. Uh, competition for employees will not be as intense. It's always competition for great team members, but it won't be like they'll have six or seven offers and three of them will be from big tech companies that now have hiring freezes.

SPEAKER_07: Um, so you're not competing with Uber and Facebook.

SPEAKER_05: Cause, uh, and you know, Apple, cause they're probably, uh, either have freezes or are maybe even going to be laying people off. So, uh, and Twitter has a freeze I guess on now and is laying some people up.

SPEAKER_07: Sometimes people don't even realize the stress they're under. They get physical symptoms like headaches. Maybe they're grinding their teeth. I used to do that. Even digestive issues, right? You get that pit in your stomach. Well, those are all indicators of stress. And let's not forget about doom scrolling. Like I do. Oh my God. And not getting enough sleep. When you're a founder or capital allocator, the weight of the world is on your shoulders and it's stressful. And listen, it's been a stressful couple of years with the pandemic and the swings in the stock market. So here's your reminder to take care of yourself and maybe try some therapy. Better help is customized online therapy that offers you video phone and even live chat sessions with your therapist. There is no shame in the game of getting therapy. Go do therapy, get some stuff off your chest, have somebody listen to you and just have a place where you can spend an hour, a half hour, whatever it is. And just let it be about you and solving your problems and releasing a little bit of that anxiety. It's much more affordable than in-person therapy and you can do it on your time and you can do it at your space, right? So give it a try. I twist listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com slash twist. That's B E T T E R H E L P.com slash twist. But where were you in 2008? And how did your career change?

SPEAKER_01: I tend to think of it all as a little bit of a lost decade. Like we were certainly investing in different types of content. That was, I mean, because there was sort of less pressure, CBS came in and bought CNET. So we had a lot more flexibility then to sort of experiment with things like digital video. And we had already sort of done some of the pivot to video. So I actually, I sort of credit that time as being a weirdly useful, creative time. Like we got to play with every single format because everybody was trying to figure out the next way to make money in media in particular. And so without that, I think I wouldn't necessarily have had the exposure into every single version. Every single version of my every single version of journalism at that time, right? Like I did TV and I was doing digital video and all of that.

SPEAKER_61: Um, well, well, I'll just say it's a really great point.

SPEAKER_07: When the market is down, people get very experimental, try to try a lot of different things. And when the market is up, you know, maybe people are chasing something or whatever. It's very nice for artists, uh, and, um, for founders and creatives generally in that down market, because, you know, the expectations low. You can start doing a little experimenting, you try. So this new thing called podcasting, because what do you got to lose? You know? Yeah. The business is kind of grinding.

SPEAKER_01: Like we were sort of streaming TV was starting to be a bigger deal. We had a little show for TiVo TiVo. I mean, at that, that is the point where I wrote scene at a business plan. I was like, Hey, let me do a half hour broadcast caliber, uh, online video show. We got a deal with Xbox out of it. Like I went all over the world shooting the show because we were looking for the next big thing. It is like a useful time, but I will say like in terms of awareness, certainly in 2001 too, I was so young.

SPEAKER_00: Did they do layoffs in that 2008 period or just hiring freeze or?

SPEAKER_64: Some, I think we did some layoffs and a hiring freeze.

Jason Calacanis: I mean, honestly, it felt like that whole period was a little bit of a sideways freeze, you know, it was just a little bit sideways.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah. A little bit sideways. Yeah. Um, and we did fine as a company, but it was all like a little bit stuck, but there's also the stuff you're not aware of until later. It wasn't until later that I went back and took stock and was like, Oh, like we bought a house in 2006, like a bunch of dum-dums. And, you know, like there's, there's, there are differing levels of awareness, I think, depending on what stage you're in your life. So I'm like, I feel very, to your point, ready for a downturn. Now I'm like, let's go work whereby I call my financial advisor. I'm like big sale at the stock store. We shop in like what? Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_05: Well, I mean, I, uh, if we did this nice little exercise, um, recently on the pod where we just said, what's the market cap of the market cap of the company minus out the cash. What's the enterprise value? Now, as long as that company is not going to have the risk of ruin going to zero and they have customers and product, you know, that there should be some value that would be created after that point. So, you know, whether it's Coinbase, which had a little bit of a pop after, you know, we had this like panic selling last week. Um, or, uh, you know, Robin Hood had a little bit of a pop. I am a shareholder. Uh, Uber had a little bit of a pop. You'll start to see this bouncing along the bottom. Um, you know, I don't like to give financial advice, but my advice to you, Molly, uh, just not to anybody else is if you were did love a product, you know, like you did love Peloton, uh, or you did love Robin Hood or you did love Coinbase or you did love Uber or DoorDash. Uh, you could dollar cost average into those companies, uh, which basically is a fancy way of saying, find a little bit of time, taking nibbles. And then, you know, if the price goes down, you buy a little more. So if you said, listen, I love this company, uh, I'm going to buy it at $10 a share. Oh, it went down to seven. I bought some at seven. Oh, it went down to five. I bought some at five. Oh, it went back up to seven. I bought some at seven. Oh, it went up to 10. I bought a little more at 10. So if you were going to buy $6,000 worth and you bought it $1,000 on the first of the month each month, well, then your average price might be 7,000. If you were going to buy it anyway. Yeah. You know, most people would say, if you're going to hold it for 10 years, it doesn't matter. You know, if you bought it all at 10 or five and everything in between, because you're buying it with the hopes that it's going to go five X. So if you want to optimize some people like that dollar cost averaging approach. I like that. Other people like, uh, to just make the bet and set it and forget it. I'm a set it and forget it. I love the company bought the shares at a penny or 50 cents goes up to 60. It goes down to seven, which is what happened to my Robin and shares. I'm, I'm in it. I think it'll go back up to 60 in 10 years.

SPEAKER_07: And I'll just sit here and I'll wait. And you know, Uber will go to, I'm convinced Uber will be a trillion dollar company. People might think I'm crazy because it's been a 50 billion to, you know, $80 billion company as a public company. But I, I see a, you know, 10 to 20 X there. And that's why I'm holding. You have to make your own decision as to why you're holding. And I look at the product and every time I use it, I'm delighted. And if it wasn't there, I would be freaked out, uh, if I couldn't use it. So great question.

SPEAKER_80: It's a good metric. And a great question. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01: Great question. All right. On a, we're just taking a complete turn in topic from downturn to we're going to the moon. Actually, we're going to low earth orbit, uh, with Alex fielding.

Jason Calacanis: We're going to find all the junk flying around.

SPEAKER_01: Exactly.

Jason Calacanis: CEO of private tier Alex fielding coming up next. Enjoy. Hey everybody.

SPEAKER_01: Welcome to this week in startups interview edition. We know you've been getting interviews all week long while we are off on our adventures in Miami today. We're very, I definitely, and hopefully Jason are very excited about this. We have Alex fielding, the CEO and executive chairman at private tier space. A company built in specifically to create technology, to clean up the space debris problem. Alex co-founded, co-founded private tier with Steve Wozniak, who's the president and Dr. Maura Bajah, who's chief scientist. And Alex, I cannot wait to hear more about what you're building there. Welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_89: Welcome to the show. Alex, are you a sanitation engineer by trade? Uh, or, uh, engineer by, uh, I like this.

SPEAKER_93: It's going to be a new job. Uh, sanitation engineer to the stars. Literally.

SPEAKER_100: That's, that's, that's where this all started. 20, 20 years ago, Woz and I were building a company called wheels of Zeus. We were building apple tags like 20 years too early. I remember. And that was a bizarre time because you know, there was no system on a chip for GPS 20 years ago. You had to do it all yourself. You had to calculate ephemers. You had to do the hardware. You had to do the power management. You had to do the software. And Woz and I were pretty appalled 20 years ago. That shows how old I am. That half of the stuff we had on orbit was trash. So off our roughly 2000 then satellites about a thousand or 1100 were dead. And we used to joke about this. Like, would we be the world's first space sanitation engineers riding on the back of the trash truck in space and tossing them in the compactor. But, uh, you know, this is the definition of the tragedy of the commons. Nobody did anything. And 20 years later, we're tracking roughly 33,000 things that are bigger than the size of a softball. They're bigger than 10 centimeters and 75% of that's trash, which is, uh, unbelievable.

SPEAKER_105: Yeah.

SPEAKER_107: When you say trash, um, this is debris from satellites and other space excursions we've had, correct?

SPEAKER_100: That's right. So what you're looking at here at privateer.com is, uh, is an app we call wayfinder and all of the orange dots are active satellites. All the teal dots are dead satellites and everything that's pink or purple or gray. Uh, and, and if you close that window out, you can, you can zoom out. And, um, what you'll see when you zoom out, keep zooming, keep going back. And this is the giant ball of trash we've made in space. So most of what you can see here is some form of debris, rocket bodies, um, you know, fuel paint chips, nuts, bolts, screws, and what you're looking at here is stuff. That's bigger than those paint chips, nuts, bolts, and screws. You're looking largely at pieces of trash that are, you know, like I said, bigger than a softball. So it's kind of terrifying. I mean, imagine somebody throwing you a softball, but it's doing 18,000 miles an hour. Uh, that's, that's a little, little tough to deal with.

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SPEAKER_115: That easy folks.

SPEAKER_01: Remind us for those who are not familiar with the kind of dangers of space trash.

SPEAKER_63: Why all the ways that this can kill us?

SPEAKER_100: Well, you know, mv squared is still mv squared, right? So the problem is, if you think about getting hit by a bullet, and that bullet's doing a kilometer a second, just imagine that bullet doing 17 times or 18 times that speed. And that's what you're looking at, you know, here. So it's really a huge challenge. And it's even worse because it's kind of like that movie, you know, Alien, right? It's like Jaws in space. You don't ever see the monster until it's on you. And unfortunately, you know, it's the things that you can't see that can really mess things up in space. We have things crash into each other in space all the time. We have so many problems in low Earth orbit, especially that the gap between science fact and science fiction is just massive. I mean, we can't reliably dock in space. We can't reliably see the debris in space smaller than 10 centimeters. We can't reliably navigate between objects in space, partly because of both of these reasons. And, you know, this enables the next frontier in space. If we all agreed that we invested in a launch to get SpaceX to get this number down to like 5,000 bucks a kilo, I can put that Coke can in space for less than $5,000. Then all the infrastructure, it's like we built the highways to the stars, but now we have to build the restrooms, the Mickey D's and everything else that goes to service it. So that means tug toe operators, people doing station keeping people trying to refuel satellites, people try to grab the dead ones and Delta V them out.

SPEAKER_117: All of that stuff needs this enabling underlying technology to be able to do it. It's missing.

SPEAKER_107: So nobody's ever been killed by space trash falling from space is my understanding with some light web research.

SPEAKER_118: And the ISIS has had the International Space Station has had to move a dozen times or so their protocol is when they're one in 10,000 chance of running into debris, they'll just reposition.

SPEAKER_107: So I guess, is this a problem today? Or are we really anticipating?

SPEAKER_118: Now that low Earth orbit satellites are being put in, in a massive constellation by at least three companies, Amazon, SpaceX, Starlink, and then there's a third one, I can't remember the name of it. One of my producers will help me.

SPEAKER_107: Is this a forward looking problem, you think?

SPEAKER_118: Because we haven't, I think, ever had any kind of fatal instance in space or on the ground because of space trash.

SPEAKER_100: It's, it's rough, right? There's, there's a couple of observations that are really painful, just from a humanistic standpoint. Like if you look at our launch sites and those inclinations that are convenient from those launch locations, and you look at where things are on orbit, mostly from those sites. And, you know, keep in mind, many of these sites like Kennedy, they were planned in the 60s, or, you know, and they've been operational for some time. And the way that re-entry for objects in space, natural orbital decay, with re-entry that doesn't happen over water was planned, and it was planned, was that this stuff would ultimately burn up and the bigger chunks of it would land in places that the United States didn't care about at the time. So we're talking sub-Saharan Africa, you know, the Congo, you're far more likely on those re-entry statistics to land in a place that is not Manhattan. Okay. Manhattan was set to be the lowest risk place to be hit by space trash. Yeah. So the stuff does re-enter, and it does re-enter fairly frequently. And we've just been lucky that most of the time it lands in a sandy place or in the ocean and doesn't land in your backyard or on a school. But I do agree with you, not having an on-orbit casualty, which is a great thing, is something that traditionally we didn't worry about a ton. We worried about it a little bit. Now we worry about it a ton, because like you said, we move the space station fairly frequently. I mean, we move it, you know, four or five times a year minimum over the last couple of years to avoid debris. And that debris is generally something that we can sense, detect from ground-based phase array and from some sensors in space. And then we can kind of move the station as needed. And we have some tricks to how we do that. But look at what happened in November, right? The Russians blew up Cosmos 1408 in an ASAT attack. And all the debris that resulted, that was an explosive payload from a missile hitting their own dead satellite and shooting debris the way an explosive charged us. It just went everywhere.

SPEAKER_128: Why did they do this? This was a test to see if they could blow up other people's satellites in an aggressive fashion?

SPEAKER_99: Well, it was over flying their own airspace. They didn't really make any qualms about doing that.

SPEAKER_100: So they, they certainly didn't ask anyone for permission. And they did it at the time. We all thought it was, I say, we all, but the bulk of the space community thought this was clear posturing and banging on the chest that if you overfly Ukraine, we will blow you up.

SPEAKER_129: Because they could, they proved the capability yet again. It was a, it was a, if you overfly a satellite.

SPEAKER_130: So if you want to take pictures of Ukraine, we're going to blow up your satellite. Right.

SPEAKER_100: Sure. Yeah. And I, I think, you know, for, for wrong or for wronger, because there was no right reason to do that. The problem was the, the propaganda machine in Russia did a fantastic job saying, everything is good. Situation is green. It's all usual up here in space. What was the truth? We had seven astronauts and cosmonauts on board that we told to go to sleep in their escape vehicles and Soyuz and Crew Dragon. Lock the door and wait. Why did we do that rather than move the space station or just tell them, come home, right? It's dangerous. It's an unknown situation. We can't see the small debris. It's just as dangerous to them. The space station's covered in a skin that we call the Whipple shield. Okay. It's like Kevlar and aluminum with a gap. And then there's some Kevlar and aluminum. And the idea is to kind of, you know, have the, whatever hits it, break up to smaller particles so that that bigger mass doesn't hit the hole. And kill everybody. We didn't know where to move them because everything around the space station, like you said, Jason, one in 10,000 is the criteria, right? If you're going to get hit, if the likelihood is one in 10,000, you move. But what if everything around you is one in 10,000, then what do you do?

SPEAKER_135: Yeah.

SPEAKER_100: And our resolution sucks. So if you have not very good resolution, and I can't tell you, this is the safer place to go. And what do you tell them to do? And it's heartbreaking because that debris is going by them just like George Clooney and gravity every hour and a half, but they don't just get to jump in the escape vehicles. Right. They got to put their suits on. They got to go slide in. They got to close the doors. So this is like, uh, this is going to be PTSD for this generation of astronauts, um, for a long time. And here we're seeing the Whipple shield.

SPEAKER_138: That's what it looks like. You got it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_139: Yeah.

SPEAKER_118: So it's kind of like a crumple zone. It just slows down the impact of these things. Yeah.

SPEAKER_38: Right. One hopes.

SPEAKER_142: And it gets hit all the time. Right. In May, right.

SPEAKER_01: It was May, 2021 astronauts on the ISS discovered a hole, a five millimeter wide hole in a robotic arm that was attached to one of the modules that they think was likely. So there's this, because you guys are thinking on space scale and planetary scale, there's sort of the, there's the danger now, which is acute. And we're to the point where we can't necessarily move the space station because the risk is almost equal everywhere. And then there's this sort of farther out danger. The, the Kessler effect, the idea that as these items collide with each other, they break up and create even more debris to the point where we might just trap ourselves on this planet, because there will be such a cloud of debris around us that we can't get off. Like, how much do you actually think about that?

SPEAKER_143: It's theoretical.

SPEAKER_100: I mean, the, the thing is that we are part of the things that we don't know in space. Right. And I could write a, that would be actually a really boring book. The things we don't know in space, they're all terrifying, but there's a whole lot of them that are very close to near earth space. So we don't know orbital carrying capacity, which is kind of the, the way in space terminology of talking about how congested is the highway. And there are certain orbits now that are already so congested. Your launch window will be very, very small. There's certain sun synchronous orbits, polar orbits where the FAA will only let you go maybe two hours a day. Why? The rest of the time we have to space objects at a certain rate. Everybody wants to be there. It's a popular neighborhood. Um, and we don't have the resolution to know how to properly space or how to more closely space the objects. So we've got this significant gap between objects because our space tracking is so bad. We then don't know, um, things like real astrodynamics. We treat all these objects in space like bowling balls, like they're spheres. So, and that's clearly not true. Like these satellites no longer look like Sputnik, right? So when you have a refrigerator with wings or a Coke can with wings, you know, it's material properties, it's drag, uh, profile and it's mass. If they're unknown, how in the world would you calculate where that thing's going to be on the next orbit? Especially if you treat it like, like a bowling ball, there's, there's hundreds of these bizarre problems that need to be solved. And the technology is being missing because Leo was not the focus of the old world of space. Leo's low earth orbit.

SPEAKER_112: In 2022 digital ads are not what they used to be. Costs are increasing.

SPEAKER_07: Attribution is less effective and targeting is failing. It's, it's a bit of a mess out there, isn't it? So marketers need to diversify their media mix. We all know that. And they can do that with OOH. What is OOH you're asking? That's out of home advertising. You remember murals, bench ads, maybe those posters that they put up on the side of, uh, like construction sites. All of that stuff falls into the bucket of OOH. These kinds of ads offer great reach, higher brand recall, and the lowest CPMs of any traditional ad type. But buying OOH is a terrible experience. You don't want to get on the phones with thousands of different vendors. Well, AdQuick is here to change that. It's a super easy way to plan, buy and measure every kind of outdoor advertising from static billboards to painted murals. So I want you to go to adquick.com.twist and mention twist to get $1,000 off your first campaign. And listen to this. If you plan to send more than $10,000 a month, email VIP at adquick.com for a VIP consultation. They added that for our audience to make it super special.

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SPEAKER_118: So I guess now the question is, uh, in your solution, how do we get these things out of the air? Because my understanding is, well, they're moving at incredible velocity. You're saying they may not move perfectly.

SPEAKER_107: Uh, I could just be a chunk off of this thing. So who knows what trajectory it's on. And so you gotta find it. You gotta somehow match its speed, get close to it, and then do something with it. How on earth are you going to clean up tens of thousands of little pieces out there?

SPEAKER_118: Is this seem as impossible to do as it seems to my brain?

SPEAKER_107: Uh, or is it actually something that's within our ability today?

SPEAKER_100: It's, uh, there, there's a scale. So there, there are fantastic companies out there like, uh, Astroscale and ClearSpace are two great examples of companies that are working on docking with dead satellites and Delta Ving them into the atmosphere.

SPEAKER_117: So they burn up or moving things. There's companies that are now. What was the term you use?

SPEAKER_158: Delta Ving? Delta V. Delta V. So Delta velocity, push it, push it into the atmosphere.

SPEAKER_100: Got it. Um, this is, this approach, you know, tends to work pretty well. I mean, we haven't tested Astroscale and ClearSpace have not, you know, tested on large, uh, you know, real satellites yet, but they're very close. They've flown quite a bit. They're, they're getting better at things like, um, active rendezvous, which is really just docking. Hmm. But, you know, to do that, you have to know a whole host of things that are missing in space. So privateer is working on building the platform that connects all of these capabilities, the sensing and detecting the tracking to observation capability to developers everywhere so that they don't have to fly stuff in space. Cause the other part of the challenge is everybody who wants to fly something now that it's really cheap to fly. You know, SpaceX has got it to 5,000 bucks a kilo. If you want to put something in space, if you want to put that Coke can in space, you could do it for 5,000 bucks a kilo. Well, as a result, everyone is putting something up and no one shares anything that's on orbit. At least not very well. So privateer is working on breaking open that layer of things that are already in space with our own space assets to encourage developers to utilize those and share those through consumption based API.

SPEAKER_117: Similar to what Amazon has done on the ground with infrastructure as a service with their data centers in AWS.

SPEAKER_118: Does that mean you want to just log where it is incredibly accurately and give that information to other folks to go clean it up? Is that what I'm reading? Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_100: I mean, we're not running a fleet of cleanup satellites. Our Pono class satellites, Pono is kind of Hawaiian karma or, you know, the word for kind of doing the right thing in Hawaiian and we're headquartered in Kihei in Maui, Hawaii. The whole goal of these is to be able to sense and detect all the small stuff we can't see from the ground because we can only see about 10 centimeters from the ground. And then also provide developers capability looking down to see things with cameras, radio decks, with radiation sensors because space weather is a big issue.

SPEAKER_167: And then you want to put up satellites to help people find all the junk.

SPEAKER_100: Find all the junk and continue to do great things on Earth that require space to do them. I mean, John Doerr just just did this billion one donation to Stanford right for the climate center. And his whole thesis was that climate is the next computer science that we will we will hack the Earth. We will hack the environment and there'll be a new generation of people to do it if that's true. And I mean, I can't help but think a good part of that's true. We're going to do it from space. I mean, we you know, we screwed up the land. We screwed up the ocean. We screwed up the atmosphere. Now we're screwing up space if we're going to fix this. And I think we can because I'm a crazy optimist.

SPEAKER_169: We have to do it one step at a time the way we screwed it up one step at a time.

SPEAKER_170: So you're saying step one is you can't, as John Doerr himself might put it, you can't manage what you don't measure.

Jason Calacanis: That's right.

SPEAKER_170: Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: And so it sounds like you're describing obviously a technological solution, which is the sensing and the satellites and the mapping of this kind of growing debris field, but also a little bit of a movement.

SPEAKER_100: Absolutely, because we were big believers that, you know, if you look at the situation over Kyiv right now, how many satellites with cameras looking down or over flying Kyiv? It's quite quite a number. Why? If you have one camera in one particular resolution, why couldn't we share that to get the same image? Why would we have to task all the satellite assets to do that? Um, and this problem is becoming more and more pervasive. You know, universities put up cube sets quite often. You know, it's not rocket science for kids to put satellites in space. There are 10 centimeter cubes, and that's our minimum tracking resolution from ground based phase rays. So guess what happens when the 10 meter 10 centimeter cube is spinning? We can't see it anymore.

SPEAKER_175: Invisible. Yeah.

SPEAKER_107: So we've become so privileged with our access to space. We've done such a great job of getting stuff up there that we now have to worry about putting too much stuff up there.

SPEAKER_178: Mm hmm.

SPEAKER_107: The number one controversy has been low Earth orbit satellites, I believe. Uh, these are going to be absolutely amazing for humanity and spreading internet to all the places in the world where it doesn't exist.

SPEAKER_118: We're going to get another billion people online. So they're absolutely fantastic.

SPEAKER_107: Uh, in terms of what they'll do for humanity. Um, and my understanding is these are modern satellites. These companies know how to, um, maneuver them in space. They're not junk and they have an exact plan for deprecating them, uh, over periods of time. So should we worry about lower Earth habits, low Earth orbiting satellites like star links and Amazon's and everybody else's, or are they being done in a way that they'll just clean themselves up in there? It's, it's not the same issue.

SPEAKER_100: I look, I mean, I, I think the, these big satellite constellation operators are trying very, very hard. To be mindful of not screwing up Leo, uh, quite candidly because they have to operate there. Yeah. It's so it's actually in their own self-interest to make sure that we don't run out of orbital carrying capacity or so that we can see the stuff so that they don't crash into it. And they, they don't create their own mini Kessler effect of things, hitting, uh, things and those things, hitting things. The, the interesting thing about this is that if you look at those capabilities that are proliferating Leo, a lot of it's focused on global communication to the planet. Some of it is now starting to look sideways. It's communication to space. And, and then there's all of the things on the ground that connect to these things. There's a lot of science going on in space and there's a lot of one off. I want to put my telescope in space, or I want to put my set of, you know, various sensors in space. That is more tricky, um, in a bizarre way, because now you, as a small satellite operator putting up one thing, have to be really mindful of all of the other things. It's like crossing a highway by foot, right? Like you have to, you have to watch out for all the things that are already on the road and the larger operators are still missing the underlying technology to do autonomous collision avoidance. So there's great companies like Kayhan working on this, uh, to make sure that we don't hit each other in space. There's also the challenge of conjunctioning. And there's a bunch of companies out there that are behaving like extortionists, basically selling conjunction services to constellation operators, taking people, state vectors and telemetry data and trying to determine when are you at risk of crashing into each other? When are you going to bump into somebody else's thing? And then of course the intelligence, well, who's obligated to move? And where should we move? Where's the lowest risk position? That stuff is coming. But privateer is releasing our own service. We call RELSIC, which is Kessler spelled backwards. And we're not charging for that 24 hours ahead. We're just asking space operators, please provide your telemetry and state vector. We'll provide the service for free because it improves the whole space community. We shouldn't, it shouldn't be optional to crash in space, right? This shouldn't be a market.

SPEAKER_184: This should be a technology that helps humankind.

SPEAKER_156: So that'll be open source in a way like an open data project where everybody self reports where they're located.

SPEAKER_107: You also have the trash located. So essentially you're making like open maps, the open mapping project on planet Earth that a bunch of people can contribute to.

SPEAKER_156: That's right.

SPEAKER_100: And if the byproduct of that is, you know, Molly's in a dorm room and she's decided she's going to do the next app to track dark fishing, illegal commercial fishing in the ocean. And she needs a camera looking down for those boats and she needs an image classifier and she needs a radio antenna. We can provide her that capability through an API so she doesn't have to launch a satellite and she can use that for a tenth of the cost of what it would cost her to do anything in space. And then the number of operators that are being mindful and thinking about how to not pollute space anymore can manage that infrastructure without adding additional risks and challenges to the bucket.

SPEAKER_01: Right. I feel like we should note here that one of the things that sounds like you're arguing for is a little less redundancy in space that not every company needs its own set of satellites. Not every researcher needs its own satellite, which would rely on the companies that already have satellites.

SPEAKER_38: They're sharing that data. Is that that's that's right.

SPEAKER_100: I mean, oh, 80% of the stuff that goes into space, it really is the long tail, right? 80% of the capabilities, the same capability, but we all have been putting it up because we couldn't figure out how to share it. The 20% are the bespoke sensors and the, you know, instruments that science wants to put up there to do something very unique and they need to test it. It's all super relevant, but it's not 80% of what people using space assets want to do with them. So we're helping kind of bridge that gap to get the 80% of those resources to be available and shareable by everyone, not just on our own satellites. But if you have a capability and it's in a place where people want it, please work with us to provide that to the capability to developers through APIs that they can, you know, call those resources from that way. We don't have to put up more.

SPEAKER_118: And to your point, we need to share the services up there. So if there was a service level in space for cameras, you know, and other services, this could be eventually like Amazon Web Services in space.

SPEAKER_156: And that's what you plan on building.

SPEAKER_165: Yeah, that's that's right.

SPEAKER_100: And, you know, Amazon and Microsoft and Palantir and others are already on that heading that direction. But if you go to privateer.com, just like stuff in space, you'll see all of the catalog info on all of the things on orbit, all of the things circling Earth. But there's a little party piece. We didn't announce it. If you go and look at any asset that you click on, that's an orange dot that's active where we have more than one source of tracking data. You can also see the deviation, which is another reason we exist. The average deviation in the lower space catalog, all the assets and all the people tracking them where we think they are. The average deviation is 200 kilometers. How do you dock with something? How do you get a trash truck to a trash can if you don't agree on where the can is?

SPEAKER_38: It might be 200 kilometers away from where you think it's going to be.

SPEAKER_100: So this is this is actually a good. If you click on, you were just on a Planet Labs flock a second ago and you can always do this. What is a flock? So so Planet Labs has cameras that look at Earth and image the entire Earth every day. Right. And if you look at any of these, you know, satellites like if you click the show filters at the top left. Now you see on the screen, you can see that there's a number just moving slowly across your screen that says two.

SPEAKER_197: Yeah. In the middle of the planet.

SPEAKER_100: Yeah. If you go into the middle of the planet and just zoom in where that number two is. Keep zooming. Oh, there you go. Now, if you know, you'll notice that there's a gap between one and two. And it's a pretty big gap. It's like, you know, 70 ish kilometers. What that gap is demonstrating is the data that's up on the right hand side of your screen. Number one is the high resolution United States Space Command tracking data. So that's some of the best tracking data we have in government. Number two is the onboard transponder that Planet Labs has on their flock satellite, which is a camera looking at Earth. And if you look at that data on the right hand side of the screen, you can see, you know, orbital speed, mean motion and period. If you scroll down on the right in that little box, you'll see the same data.

SPEAKER_99: So you'll see like ninety six point six minutes or seven point six kilometers a second.

SPEAKER_200: So the one and two represent the same data set. Yep.

SPEAKER_01: In theory, two different data sets for the same device. For the same device. That are off by about 70 kilometers. Okay. Yep. I got it.

SPEAKER_100: I'm guessing that the gap just from what we're seeing on the screen, I'm not actually doing that math in a spreadsheet. But part of the reason that that gap exists, as you can see here, we're point six degrees off on argument of perigee. So Planet Lab says one forty four nine oh one three. And above it in the space command catalog, we can see one forty four, three, two, four, seven. So we don't agree at this particular moment where the heck this thing is. So how would you rendezvous with it? How would you connect with it? We also don't know things like spin rate or tumble rate. So we don't know how fast. Let's say that the object was uncooperative. It wasn't sending us data. How would we know how fast it was spinning or tumbling? Would we know if we could reliably dock with it? So all of these questions require on orbit capability as well as ground based capability.

SPEAKER_99: But you can you can get all of this data from as many sources as will provide it to us for free in this free version of wayfinder at private tier dot com. And then we've got wayfinder pro coming very soon here that has private sources of tracking.

SPEAKER_100: So other companies like, you know, like XO and American others that, you know, can work with us to try to find a way to to provide that tracking data to developers. You know, they still earn a profit space gets safer and we don't put as much stuff up. Yeah.

SPEAKER_204: Pretty amazing. I mean, I just in this this drop down menu you have a private tier.

SPEAKER_107: If you go to the second one and you pick the constellation of Starlink Molly, you can just see like how many there are. So you just showed the data sources all and then you go to second one Starlink and it's like, oh my Lord, they have a lot out there. And a lot of them are, I guess, you know, because they're flying in orbit, you know, you'd see many of them are over the ocean for large periods of time.

SPEAKER_208: So you would think that that's wasted time when they're over the ocean unless they're servicing boats, I guess.

SPEAKER_01: So if I'm looking at that and that's all Starlink, I am asking, I think the question that you're asking, which is why does anybody else need any up there at that point? So like to what extent? I mean, sure. Right. Yes. Bandwidth. But what I wonder is to what extent our company is going to have to cooperate with each other to make space for their own safe for their own operations and our, you know, future ability to travel to space.

SPEAKER_100: It just depends on what you want to do with them. Right. I mean, the obvious killer app right now is Starlink. It's communications facing planet Earth. Yeah, but there's a whole lot of non obvious applications. I mean, we still have we don't really think about our GPS assets very often because they just work. But if we end up with a cloud of debris that's kind of like a virtual denial of service attack in space or if we lose certain capabilities over certain areas because those particular things have become damaged or were attacked intentionally, it's really dangerous. And there's also things that we want, like we have a lot of sensors looking at Earth for climate science. I mean, we're doing oceanographic research, atmospheric research, all that's coming from space. I mean, when Al Gore gets on stage and talks a lot about the inconvenient truth and where we are with climate climate studies. You know, one of the things that's generally left out is how much of that work, how much of that science we do from space. So spaces. I'm not going to be super clear.

SPEAKER_01: I'm not arguing against Starlink or the ability of us to launch these satellites.

SPEAKER_38: I'm just saying is part of privateers mission to say there may be times when you company should collaborate instead of instead of be redundant. Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. Like share instead of launch.

SPEAKER_100: Share instead of launch is definitely model one. Right. And we want to take advantage of it, too. I mean, we're everybody's customer that we can be to use that data.

SPEAKER_117: Yeah. And we're not trying to be hypocrites.

SPEAKER_118: Let's talk about the militarization of space, because there's a lot of actors who, you know, maybe aren't the most trustworthy or haven't been as upfront with us. There was this 1967 outer space treaty that we agree. We wouldn't put WMDs, weapons of mass destruction, nukes in space. Um, but of course, military satellites are everywhere, but therefore monitoring stuff. Are, are people putting weapons in space today? And what, what is the, what is the community think when you guys are talking to each other? Not like publicly, but you know, you're at some conference, people have a couple of drinks in them. The Russians, the Chinese, they got weapons in space.

SPEAKER_224: Do we have weapons in space? What do you think?

SPEAKER_100: I mean, we, we know that there are, uh, and the, the DIA, um, the defense intelligence agency published a report, not even a month. Oh, it wasn't a month ago, maybe a month ago. But, uh, it goes over the various types of weapons that certain countries, especially, you know, those countries that there's a lot of concern about, you know, uh, China, Russia in particular. Um, I mean, I would say, you know, India potentially having more capability there than, than people would feel comfortable with how many different types of weapons there are that are already in space. We also have an app on privateer that we're, it'll, it'll be launched here in 60 days called comply, which just tells you how many satellites that are on orbit or in or out of compliance with the international space act and treaties. You know, we're not doing enforcement, but unfortunately for us, nobody's doing enforcement. So that the lie in the outer space act and the treaties is that everybody is required to sign up that goes to space. So we all sign the same thing saying we will not put weapons in space. We will not do certain things in space, but it sure seems like some people kind of have their fingers crossed behind their backs when they did it. Because we have, we, as the space community worldwide have done some really horrible things in space. And there's also a number of assets that have violated the space act and treaties just out of greed, right? Because intent is really hard to prove, but Hey, if your satellite has 5% of the fuel left, do you want to move it to a graveyard orbit with dead things? Or do you want to leave it in place and just pray you can use it until it goes out of fuel? Cause that's money for big companies.

SPEAKER_226: Yeah.

SPEAKER_118: I mean, if we look at, um, ICBMs, intercontinental misses, like these things can get anywhere on the planet in an hour or two and blow stuff up, uh, at least according to pop culture and war games. But if you put nukes in satellites and they just gotta go down, they don't have to go back up. Right. And going up to a lot of fuel. Um, and then I guess the Russians blew this thing up. So they blew it up with a missile or did they just send a kamikaze style satellite at it?

SPEAKER_107: Was there actually explosives in it when they blew that satellite up or do you not need explosive? You just go really fast and you just crash a big mass into another big mass and that's enough. You don't need a bomb.

SPEAKER_100: Well, this is, this is actually kind of the, the, one of the worst parts of this is that, you know, we do have pretty good, um, intelligence around things that happen in space. But when this happened, the Russians knew that there's no enforcement body. I mean, a lot of us will chastise them and say, this is a horrible, horrible thing that you've just done for all of us. It's a really dangerous and stupid thing. Right. It's even dangerous and stupid when you have your own cosmonauts on the space station, which is now at risk because of what you've done. I can't imagine being one of those cosmonauts on board and having your other crew members and comrades go, what the hell? And I'm sure that they didn't know. I'm sure that the Russian government didn't give Roscosmos a quick heads up before they decided what they wanted to do. Uh, but this, the, the, the missile that they launched was off of a boat. They sent it up and they also, the, the crazy thing is what do we know? And what did we not know? We, it wasn't even on our scope of tracking. It was over Russian airspace when it happened. So what did we see on our ground-based phase ray? We saw many, many dots where we once saw one because the explosive charge resulted in chunks of things. Right. So we didn't even see the explosion. It's not like we have a playback video or a forensic capability in that part of Russian airspace. So we couldn't unwind it and say, oh, wow, a missile went up and blew it up. How did we know that the Russians actually did it? Hmm. Well, they actually listed and, uh, they did the responsible thing in their own airspace. And they issued a notam, a notice to airmen for pilots in the area that there was going to be a missile leaving a boat there that, that morning. And to just not fly in the airspace. Cause you know, Hey, if you're in a plane, you could get hit. Wow.

SPEAKER_99: So they actually publicly notified their own community that they were going to do this. They didn't say, we're going to go blow up a satellite. They just said, we're launching a missile. Hmm.

SPEAKER_118: It's fascinating. The, the Russians actually worked on a system called a fobs bombardment system. And it's a warhead system that uses low earth orbit. Uh, and, um, just before reaching its target, it D orbits through a retrograde engine burn. We first developed the system as a nuclear weapons delivery system. I'm reading from the Wikipedia in the 1960s. One of the first Soviet efforts to use space to deliver nuclear weapons. Uh, in August of 2021, the People's Republic of China tested a weapon that combined a fobs with a hypersonic glide vehicle. Um, like a kinetic bombardment system, but with nuclear weapons fobs had several attractive qualities. It had no range limit. It's flight path would not reveal the target location and warheads could be directed to North America over the South Pole evading detection by Norad's north facing early warning system. It's crazy.

SPEAKER_100: Um, and this is, if you, if you look at what you're looking at here in this, um, so, so this is, this is the document I was talking about from DIA. This is, this is only, I don't know, I think they published it in March. So these things are not speculative. These things are actually cataloged. And in this report, you'll also see the volume. How many of these things have been launched recently? Where are they on orbit? And it's terrifying, right? Yeah. And it should be because this is, this is part of, and I am not a, you know, privateer is not a, a company working on these types of things. Weaponizing space and so on. I mean, this is, this is totally opposite of what we, what we like to see happen. But this, this challenge is if we knew what, where these assets were, right, then what do we know about their capabilities? You know, how many of these types of capabilities to grab an object and throw it somewhere or to blow an object up with an energy weapon from space? These are no longer speculative things that just happened in weird science fiction. They're things that are now being worked on and developed in science fact. That's pretty terrifying. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: Well, let's, yeah. I mean, let's tie this to your business. I mean, I would imagine that for you in terms of launching that pro product, which I assume is paid, that's the business plan here, that governments must be clients. Like who, how, how will you make money? And I would imagine that must be part of it, right?

SPEAKER_99: Well, we're focused on commercial space first.

SPEAKER_100: So we're, we're working with constellation operators like SpaceX, like Amazon, like others who have their own things in space that are, that have the same challenges. Now their customers could totally be governments. And don't get me wrong. We're not turning away business from friendly governments, trying to learn things about space environmentalism and sustainability and how to traverse space more safely. They could certainly use the data to improve their own capability. But, you know, this is a, this is an area where we're being very, very mindful of how you pick who you provide services to. You know, we're not trying to be the gatekeeper or say that there are bad people or good people, but this becomes one of those things of, you know, what do you sell to Russia in this moment, right? Or whoever is doing something that you really believe is wrong in the world in the moment. The flip side of it is, would we turn down Russian data, right? I mean, that's a, that's a really hard consequentialist kind of argument. I mean, right now, even in the privateer platform, you'll find data from Vimple from the Russians. That's important data tracking space trash. Would we turn it away? No, we wouldn't turn it away. Would we be, would we be their customer? No. Wouldn't be their customer. But hey, anything that keeps the space environment more, more sustainable.

SPEAKER_169: Definitely want to make sure that we do that. Amazing.

SPEAKER_242: Well, continued success with it.

SPEAKER_204: And thank you for doing this important work of keeping the skies clean. Yeah. This is fascinating. Thanks for sharing with us all of a sudden.

SPEAKER_01: Consequential. Thank you so much. Come, please come back and tell us how it's going. Tell us as soon as somebody invents the big fishing net. Scoop it all up.

SPEAKER_247: We want to.

SPEAKER_249: Yeah, that's.

SPEAKER_01: It feels like we're going to get to the point.

SPEAKER_249: You'll know first. So you tell us.

SPEAKER_224: It feels like they get to the point where there'll be drones just zipping around space,

SPEAKER_118: find the stuff just while we're sleeping. Just pushing it into the atmosphere. Yeah. Like just, it'll be like a little Wally picking up like a nut, a ball tier.

SPEAKER_138: You know, like a.

SPEAKER_251: Coming soon. Coming soon. You know, like a whole bottle of.

SPEAKER_01: By the way, I have to say you could find Alex on Twitter at 2345678.

SPEAKER_38: I don't know how early you had to be to get that username.

SPEAKER_254: But. Well, it turns out at Jason was taken. So. Yeah.

SPEAKER_138: That's. Yeah. That was all that was left. That's all that was left. Exactly. I had at Alex. I considered changing my name, but then I got at Jason.

SPEAKER_264: I traded it.

SPEAKER_01: That's. All right. Continuous success. We have a very special. I wish we had some music and like. They didn't even tell me about this. A very special. Okay.

SPEAKER_266: Boomer for you.

SPEAKER_61: This is like very self reflective, but I did listen to half of it. When they started talking about you.

SPEAKER_23: I guess the boomer group is Rachel coming on to talk about this. I didn't approve this or know about this, but I like it. I like taking the initiative.

SPEAKER_05: This week's okay. Boomer. Oh, okay. All right. It was a high risk maneuver, but I came out. Well, so well played. I like you taking a little bit of risk. Um, so, so tell us what was your concept for today's episode?

SPEAKER_271: So on today's episode of okay. Boomer, I got to speak to fresh your chief of staff. And I also got to talk to producer Nick and producer Justin. We talked about everybody's path into how they got their jobs, their favorite parts about working at twist and at launch. We even got to talk about how it was when Molly joined. So that was a really cool episode.

SPEAKER_274: I thought it was a good episode to have air the week. We were all going to be in Miami. See each other.

SPEAKER_277: We're all hanging out together.

SPEAKER_61: It's lovely. Professional development. What a good idea. I listened to the Molly part. Molly, what did you think? I don't know if you listened to it yet. It was so awkward.

SPEAKER_01: I mean, it was like when you pass someone a note in class and then they read it right in front of you. Like it was, you know, it was very, I just try to think of myself in the third person for a minute. And then I was like, I need to step it up in this master class in producing thing. You'll hear it. You'll hear it all.

Jason Calacanis: But it was very lovely. All right.

SPEAKER_14: So it's like baseball, but I think it does. It does. It's a people on the current.

SPEAKER_05: But I think there might be some nuggets there of for people who, you know, are running companies. I think investing in young people in the early part of their careers. And I think young people investing in their own careers and taking it seriously is a really great way to run a business, a fun way to run a business. And it just requires both parties to buy in. And what I really liked about it was it was great for me to hear. Because I don't do reviews and I don't like to talk to you all about like compensation

SPEAKER_43: all that stuff. I have people for that.

SPEAKER_176: But it was nice to hear that you all love it and you all love the challenge.

SPEAKER_05: And like you like taking years out of your career path, which is what I tell people. If you come work for me, you're probably gonna take five years, 10 years out of your career path. After you've worked for me for two or three years, people are going to start trying to hire you because, you know, they're going to look at you as like, oh, J. Cal is good at spotting talent, probably my superpower and good at mentoring talent or demanding excellence.

SPEAKER_280: And, you know, giving you a little push there to do more than you maybe think you're capable of. And so pretty good. I had dinner with pressure last night, in fact, who just started a special project for me when he was 19. You know, marketing, building videos and doing, you know, simple marketing tasks. And now it's my chief of staff. And I had a good conversation about that.

SPEAKER_07: And then there's a way to keep folks, which is keep them challenged. Number one, people don't quit jobs. They quit bosses. And so keep that in mind. It's not the job or the company that people quit. Typically, it's typically the boss.

SPEAKER_280: They quit. They just fall out of love with the boss and they don't feel inspired.

SPEAKER_05: Or maybe they don't feel respected or maybe they don't feel supported. All of those things. And I think it's pretty reasonable. And so you need to be challenged, but you also need to step up and you have to want it. And both parties then are in a pretty good relationship. And then I also figured out how to keep you guys here for a long time.

SPEAKER_43: You guys know what that is?

SPEAKER_282: Yeah. What is it, Kerry? Is it Kerry? What is it?

SPEAKER_176: You haven't experienced yet. But freshie poo got a little tasty poo, as did Nick. Freshie poo.

SPEAKER_05: Because we sold. We had an opportunity to sell some shares early in one of our breakout winners. We took the opportunity to do that. And the way it works in venture just to tip cards. And this isn't, I don't think in the episode, but you know, if you have carry, which in a media job that doesn't exist, you know, at NPR or, you know, CNET or, you know, the ringer. Or maybe they get stock in, I guess, some modest stock in Spotify.

SPEAKER_196: Yeah, I mean, people get various, you know, types of equity or whatever.

SPEAKER_05: Maybe. A bonus might be more aligned. But it's not like unlimited upside of owning equity in high growth startups. And so, you know, pressure was able to, you know, get a little taste of one of those unicorns. And then, but we only sold 20% and you invested over four years. So he probably got a percent like 25% of 20%. So then that means he had 25% of 20% would be 5%. So he has 20 times that amount back loaded. And then I said, and he was like, yeah, there's a lot of money waiting for me as I invested. And then I was like, and that's about one company. What if you wind up having three of those? Now it's three times. Now it's 60 times what you've already got. Now, what if those companies 10x from here, which is a possibility. Now it's 600 times what you have. And he had never thought about it that way. But that's really what you have to think about. You know, these companies can 10x.

SPEAKER_280: I think it also go down to zero. Well, that's generally don't go down to zero, but they could also lose 80%. That's not happening. Zero sometimes happens. But anyway, I think that's the long term. Well, it also keeps you around.

SPEAKER_07: And one of the great balancing things I think is employment in this country is what they call at will, but it's at will for both parties.

SPEAKER_05: You know, if you think it sucks to work here, you can walk at any time. And if I think you're not pulling your weight, we can fire you at any time. And that's one of the great things about the American economy is that we have kind of taken. What's best about America? The freedom, dare I say? I hope I canceled for that. And we actually codified it in employment, which is you're free to do. You can free to walk out the door anytime you want. And you could get cut anytime as well.

SPEAKER_07: So it just I wish health care worked that way, Molly, where the health care wasn't tied to employment. That would be the big win, because because health care is tied to employment, all the entrepreneurship, all of it would allow people to move more freely.

SPEAKER_05: You know, a lot of people you don't experience with young people, but you and I experience this Molly with children and families. You know, if you the first thing you have to think about when you're changing jobs is health care. Yeah, what's my health care situation going to be? How do I get that work that out?

SPEAKER_280: Oh, what was my health care before? And it's like, should we really be making people think about that in 2022? Like, there should just be a base safety net.

SPEAKER_05: If this is really, and you know, who agrees with this paradoxically? Everyone. Ironically. No, David Sacks. Yeah.

SPEAKER_23: You know, my, my, my best friend, one of my best friends in the world for a long time. And, you know, people are like, oh, he's crazy right wing, whatever. And it's like, he's believes in, uh, you know, uh, universal healthcare.

SPEAKER_01: Well, it's funny because people don't know. I know we're like a little off the rails right now and what is happening, but my financial advisor, we were having this conversation about like, he's pretty conservative. And we were having this conversation about healthcare and he's like, well, they have that. It's Medicare. I was like, no, like he literally thought. Yeah. Sincerely believed that Medicare exists. He thought we had a universal layer of healthcare available to anyone. We have it for some people, not for everybody. We have it for the elderly and for people who are extremely disabled. Like it was such a weird, but I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. You, cause he was complaining about Obama and the, you know, the affordable care act and whatever. And I was like, honestly, we'd be better off if he had gone all the way and made that. You think that the thing that they were trying to accomplish already exists, which is why you're not. And then he was like, oh yeah, no, that should totally exist.

SPEAKER_308: I'm like, Medicaid is designed for people with limited income.

SPEAKER_01: Medicaid is designed for people with limited income, but very limited. I mean, it's not like, he was like, oh, I just thought everybody had a base layer no matter what. Like backup.

Jason Calacanis: And I was like, yeah, no. Anyway.

SPEAKER_23: The income limit for Medicare's income limit is $1,200. I mean, that's 14,000 a year folks. For those who are playing along.

SPEAKER_43: Yeah. For a married company, it's 1,700. Yep. The last I checked.

SPEAKER_01: Exactly. Like we can afford to have a base level of health insurance available to everyone.

SPEAKER_262: And we should, and it's such a weird, but what's amazing is like when people are just like, oh, I thought we already had that because it seems so obvious.

SPEAKER_05: Well, you know, and I think we have to negotiate better. You know, um, there, there, there are countries like Canada where, you know, I was talking to somebody in the pharmaceutical business and they're like, yeah, we just, we're, we're in a standoff with Canada. Cause they won't pay us for our drug. You know, whatever it is, a hundred thousand dollars for treatment. Now this is a really important drug for a small number of people. And Canada is like, yeah, a hundred thousand dollars. Sorry. Can't do it. They're just some hardcore negotiators. Like it will do it for 40. You know? And it's like a big gap between the two numbers are like, well, America's paying 120. And so we can't pay you for it. And they're like, okay, well, I guess we just won't use your medicine. Yeah. Somebody in Canada is actually watching the store. And that's where like having a customer would be so important. You either need to have some crazy negotiator or you need to have a customer, you know, if people, you know, this were co-paying and having people having all the pricing on websites. Like, you know, when you go to a SAS company, they don't tell you the price. Like every doctor should be required on their website to have slash pricing. And it should be, here's our pricing. And then all that pricing should be in a database. So if you say, Hey, I got to get knee surgery and people do this for elective surgery. If you wanted to get, you know, what do they call a nose job?

SPEAKER_07: Or rhinoplasty. If you wanted to get a nose job or, you know, liposuction, those people are, you know, because it's elective, people shop for that. And people go to Korea for it. They'll go to Mexico for it.

SPEAKER_280: You know, I don't know if I recommend Mexico, but Korea is, you know, a little sketchy.

SPEAKER_14: Watch it.

SPEAKER_23: I'm just saying, I know there are situations where like, it may not be the most robust solution.

SPEAKER_280: Whereas Korea has like the best plastic surgeons in the world, according to what I've read. Not that I'm considering anything here. You know, I'm not considering. You know, you, you could people, basically what I'm saying is people shop where it's like, does anybody shop for knee surgery? I didn't. And then I found out my knee surgery was like, whatever it was 50 or 60 grand to just get my, you know, meniscus. I mean, I didn't pay for it. So I was like, I'm not the customer here. It's my insurance company's a customer, you know, screw them.

SPEAKER_326: So it's, it's just dysfunctional. Okay. So, uh, let's go to okay. Boom.

SPEAKER_332: Thanks guys. Okay. Boomer.

SPEAKER_330: I understood the assignment.

SPEAKER_332: All right. Thank you guys for joining. This is a very special segment of okay. Boomer. For those of you who don't know, fresh is Jason's Jason's chief of staff.

SPEAKER_333: Justin and Nick are the other producers on the show with me.

SPEAKER_338: Thanks for having us.

SPEAKER_333: Can you guys introduce yourselves a little bit? I want to hear like a fun fact.

SPEAKER_338: Um, all right, Justin, go ahead. Oh man.

SPEAKER_333: Throwing them under the bus.

SPEAKER_339: Uh, I'm Justin. I'm the producer that publishes this show most days and I help find a lot of guests. And a fun fact about me is I Peloton every day. Oh my gosh. Yeah. That's a fun fact. And I could probably, I haven't met another person that could beat me, but I know there's plenty.

SPEAKER_343: Fresh. Fresh.

SPEAKER_345: How do you feel about that? Terrible at, at Peloton. Okay. But, um, yeah, no, that's, that's great.

SPEAKER_347: Um, I can, I can go next. Um, I'm fresh. Jason's. Yeah. I got it. Jason's chief of staff. Um, more recently. Um, previously was working on, well, I started at launch, working on marketing stuff, then transitioned onto the investment team. Um, more focused on the accelerator. So like looking for early stage companies. Um, and then now chief of staff, which is like, I'm still figuring out. I don't really know what the role is. Um,

SPEAKER_351: the guy.

SPEAKER_347: Sort of. Yeah. Um, but it's, it's a ton of fun. Just like managing different projects that Jason's working on and he's an idea machine. So, you know, there's always something fun. Um, very cool. Yeah. That's me. Oh, fun fact. Um, oh, I, um, I don't know. This is fun fact. This is just top of mind. I have like really bad posture. And so I just started seeing a chiropractor and, um, I have to go in like two days a week now. This is like monthly, like, or weekly, um, uh, adjustment thing. And so I get, let me know if you think it's a scam or not.

SPEAKER_355: Yeah. I've watched so many chiropractor videos on YouTube. Yeah.

SPEAKER_357: I'm not hearing chiropractor tick tock. Oh, is that a thing?

SPEAKER_355: Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_359: You hear the, do you, are you one of those people though that gets skeeved out by hearing people's like backs crack? No, no, no.

SPEAKER_360: I love it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_362: Me too. It's like, it's like dopamine hits my brain every time I see one of those videos, but I'm with Justin.

SPEAKER_364: If this weekend startups switched to a chiropractic YouTube channel, we could probably two, two X within the next two months. Easy.

SPEAKER_333: Pitch that to Jason. Next idea he has be like, listen, listen, listen. All right. Last one over here. Nick.

SPEAKER_368: Um, Hey everybody. I'm Nick. Uh, I work on this weekend startups with Rachel and Justin and Jason and Molly. Um, I'm having trouble thinking of a fun fact. I'll be totally honest with you. I don't know that there's anything. Um, I mean, I'm sure there's something, but. Oh, come on. You had us do that.

SPEAKER_354: Fun fact is the job has totally taken over his life every three hour. Fun fact is now thinking about producing content.

SPEAKER_368: No, I like, uh, I enjoy my weekends and I try to have all of you enjoy your weekends as well. I try to not bother anyone at all over the weekend. Cause I know that you guys are going, I don't know, 12 hour days during the week. So I'm like, at least let them have some Saturday. Yeah.

SPEAKER_375: You guys, what time do you guys go to bed?

SPEAKER_379: Go to bed. Um, I normally end at like 10, nine.

SPEAKER_375: Okay.

SPEAKER_379: I see like group chat messages. Oh, those are crazy.

SPEAKER_382: I'm in Pacific time. So it's like 10, 11 PM sometimes. And you guys are still like chatting it up in the group.

SPEAKER_384: Justin and I have like a weekend, have a weekend talk too. Justin and I have, have a nice weekend chats, but once the all in summit's over,

SPEAKER_333: hopefully that the sleep schedule will get up back onto it.

SPEAKER_386: Yeah.

SPEAKER_368: It's always interesting with events. Cause there's just like a new job on top of your job already. And then you just have to fit it in somewhere. Yeah. Either on your weekends or during the week gets it. Yeah. The, the, the last couple of weeks leading up to an event is always insane.

SPEAKER_389: Um, and that's where we are right now for the people listening. Yeah.

SPEAKER_358: And you, and so this will go out the week of the all in summit. We, we've all met each other before, which was crazy.

SPEAKER_362: Awesome. I think I've met Nick and Justin maybe one or two times, maybe three. Fresh definitely only once, but it was amazing nonetheless. So really excited to see you guys again. This we're recording this, um, on Wednesday, May 11th. Fresh is already in Miami. Uh, Jason just left to Miami and the rest of us will be heading out on Saturday. What are you guys like most excited for, um, for either the all in summit or our little team retreat happening afterwards? Fresh, I'll let you pioneer that. Okay.

SPEAKER_392: Yeah.

SPEAKER_347: Um, most excited. Uh, so this is, we, we talked about this kind of a bit earlier with Nick. Um, this is like the first conference we've done where, I mean, it's, it's no secret. Like we were selling tickets for $7,500 and most of the audience is like, um, fund managers of capital allocators. Um, and then outside of the scholarships and stuff, um, which were discounted. So, I mean, the conference has made a lot more money than we typically do, um, for conferences. And so we're just able to do way more bougie things. Um, so like parties are probably going to be crazy. Um, like I've never been at launch where we've done, um, just like insane stuff. Um, like the themes of the parties, the fir, the first nights. Um,

SPEAKER_333: And how long have you been like working at launch? Cause I think, have you been working here longer than Nick has?

SPEAKER_395: Um, slightly, um, Like a year longer, right? Yeah. I think a year, but me and, uh, we should, we should talk about my next like interaction.

SPEAKER_397: Um, Yeah. We have intertwined, uh, origin stories. Ooh.

SPEAKER_394: Okay. So how long have you guys been working here total then?

SPEAKER_381: Um, me, I started, uh, October, 2017. We got to pivot the conversation.

SPEAKER_359: Cause you actually got your job in a really cool way. Right? Yeah, sort of.

SPEAKER_381: Um, um, basically.

SPEAKER_347: Yeah. Yeah. So I, um, I had listened to this week in startups. Um, just was interested in tech from a young age. And so found the podcast and then I was in university at the time. Um, but after my first year, I was just like, uh, this like, isn't for me. And I was like failing most of my classes. And so I knew I couldn't go back. Um, or else I just would have delayed the whole college process. Um, and so after first year, I was just like, all right, let me, um, just send a bunch of emails to people that I admire. Um, or that I'm like interested in learning more from. Um, and so send like hundreds of emails that summer. Um, one of the person or people was, uh, was Jason. Um, because I'd.

SPEAKER_400: Wait, say who the other, say who one of the other notable people was. Oh, um, was it Gary? Is that the one?

SPEAKER_405: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I saw. Yeah.

SPEAKER_406: I actually. Wow. Going to garage sales and ripping off old people, flip flipping cards.

SPEAKER_410: VaynerMedia. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_409: I love that.

SPEAKER_410: That was, um, I was really trying to actually, I was more interested in that than working for Jason. Obviously.

SPEAKER_413: Do that. My other job offer was at Sasha, which is like VaynerMedia is like. Yeah, no way. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_381: Same thing. It's so funny. That's hilarious. Yeah. So I had, I actually got an interview there. Um, but it wasn't like interviewing with Gary.

SPEAKER_347: It was like one of his team members. Um, and I guess, I remember I took this like iconic photo of his like sitting in Gary's office, um, and post it on my Instagram and it felt nice. Um, but didn't get, didn't get an internship there. Um, but anyways, yeah, I sent, sent a whole bunch of emails out. Um, and then, you know, Jason was like one of the, and he's like, he's like known for this. Like he's so good at email. Um, so I just sent him an email and like within three minutes he responded. Um, I sent him a huge thing like pitching an internship and, and then he responded like two things. Um, he said, uh, what are your skills and what do you hope to accomplish in life? Um, and then I sent him this huge email and hindsight was terrible cause he didn't read it. Um, but then he had this tweet, um, like a week later or something. Um, and this was around the time that his book angel came out. And so he tweeted out, uh, tweet a selfie of you and my book, and maybe we'll pick you to come watch, um, Blade Runner 2049, um, in San Francisco. And so he, uh, he, he made that tweet and obviously I'm like trying to do anything that can to get in front of him. And so I do that. I tweet up the photo, um, me in the book. And then a couple of minutes later, he puts me in a thread with his assistant just at the time. And she's like, um, cool. Do you want to come out this Thursday? Um, and it was like a Sunday night there. And I mean, I was in Toronto. I'm from Toronto. Um, and so I like booked my flight ticket that night. Um, and it was like my first time to San Francisco. And it was literally like a two day visit. I was staying in like a hostel USA shout out USA hostels. Um, Grimiest place. New sponsor.

SPEAKER_417: New sponsor of the show.

SPEAKER_419: I've got to interject here. And if you're liking this, this story from fresh, you have to go into YouTube after this. Yeah. Type, type in going to San Francisco, question mark. Whoa. Hashtag number one. And you're going to find one of the best blogs of all time. It's fresh. Documenting this exact experience, the full sequence. I watched it before joining. And it was, I was like, should I take this job? Um, cause I was at a consulting company before. And I was like, I w I want to learn everything about it. And pressure actually is the, the leading content about making and choosing a job at launch. So I'll let you continue. You did the USA hostel thing. And now you're actually going to the meeting and SF right pressure.

SPEAKER_392: Yep. Yep. That's, that's amazing. Justin, they watch that.

SPEAKER_347: Um, but yeah, so staying at the sting at the hostel, um, the movies on a Thursday night, I go out, there's like 30 people there. Um, that, and we met up by the cafe X machine at the AMC and the matrion in, in San Francisco. Um, so I was like super excited. It's like my first time in San Francisco.

SPEAKER_381: I'm like, yeah, this is so cool. I'm seeing cafe X. I'm seeing cafe X. I just read about this robot machine.

SPEAKER_423: Robots making coffee. Whoa. Like living in the future. Future bro. Yeah.

SPEAKER_410: Uh, although I was so dripped out when I got to SF. I was like, yo, what? This place is so trippy.

SPEAKER_381: Uh, cause I was like in like a terrible area. I probably was in like tenderline area or something just cause that's where all the cheapest like

SPEAKER_347: hotels are. Um, and so, uh, anyways, get, get to the movies theater. Um, there's like 30 people there. Um, I'm like super introverted. So I'm not like going up to people and like talk to them, but I do see a familiar face. Um, and I, because of the podcast and, uh, but basically I see, um, the founder of superhuman there and I, I only knew his face because I had met his brother doing like an onboarding call at the time. Um, when they're doing these, the personal onboarding and the team was like 10 people. And so I was like, Hey, I know your brother. Um, uh, and like, uh, I love the product. And so we got, we got chatting there. And so that was cool. That was like my first like interaction was like a Silicon Valley founder. Um, and, uh, so I met Rahul there. Uh, and then Jason comes in meet Jason. I shake his hand and like said, Hey Jason, like great to meet you. Um, I'm like the guy who flew from Toronto just to like make sure he remembered who I was. Um, and he's like, Oh, cool. We talked for like 30 seconds. Um, but didn't really like talk about job or anything like that. Um, and then, you know, other people wanted to talk to him and stuff. And then we went and watched a movie and then that was the end of that interaction. Um, but what came of that, uh, after that movie, he sent me an email. Um, he was like, we have this conference next week called launch scale. Um, if you want to come and help out for that, um, you know, we can figure out what you, what you do the, during the conference. And then, uh, after it may be, uh, give you a project to work on remote. And then if you're good, we can hire you kind of thing. So, uh, ended up doing that, flew back out to launch scale. Um, met Jackie. She was the first person at launch that I met, um, Jackie incredible. Um, and then just helped out, did whatever, mainly did like social media at the, at the conference. Um, and then, uh, yeah, after the conference ended up meeting with Jason and he was like, all right, well, I'm going to give you this project to work on. Um, it's, uh, to organize 30 is so specific. That's Jason, you know, as Jason's ideas are, it was, uh, I want you to organize 30 dim sum meetups across the U S for my book. Um, I was like, awesome. Cool. Um, I had no idea what to do, but I was like, he literally made me do this.

SPEAKER_413: He literally made me do the same thing, not with dim sum. And he was like, make, make a hundred meetups this year across, across the, across the world. Right.

SPEAKER_333: When I got here, that was the, this guy's a playbook. It's almost like he knows what he's doing or something. That's so funny.

SPEAKER_381: Um, but you, so here's the funny part, you actually started doing that and you actually did it.

SPEAKER_347: I didn't even get to do it. He was like, he gave me the project and then I flew back home and then he calls me. And I was like, one, I didn't even know how he got my number. Um, but he calls me on the phone. I'm like freaking out. I pick up and he's like, Hey, it's Jason. Um, I'm like, Hey, what's up? And then he's basically is like, uh, Hey, my, um, my head of marketing or head of growth at the time. Um, he just handed in this two weeks. Um, so I'm looking to hire for like a marketing role. Um, and so if you want it, it's yours. Uh, you can work remotely and we'll figure out a way to like, get you to SF. Um, cause at this point in time, he was like no remote. Um, and everyone was like in the office. Um, so yeah, uh, he, I had to, I just skipped out the whole process of setting up these dim some meetups, um, and, uh, and got the job, but I started working as a contractor. Um, cause I was Canadian and, um, then, you know, long story short, we ended up setting up like a Canadian office and, um, hired a couple of Canadian folks and, um,

SPEAKER_433: All because of you.

SPEAKER_347: Well, I mean, it conveniently worked out. Um, and I got my visa. It was, it was like, I mean, it was incredible. Cause I got my visa through that process. Yeah. Um, so yeah, um, that, that's kind of the story of how I did it and there's more, but I don't want to keep talking. No.

SPEAKER_394: How did, uh, so Nick, you guys said that your, your path's connected. Your, your path's kind of intertwined. What what's the story with that then?

SPEAKER_368: Um, so I, I joined launch in January, 2019. So two years after you, a year and a half, I guess. Yeah. After presh. Um, and I had been working for launch. That's when I joined full time. I'd been working, uh, on a freelance basis for a year before that, uh, working with presh every night. Uh, well, night, my time, I guess it was night, his time too. Um, cause he was in Toronto at that point, but I worked at major league baseball, um, at MLB network. Um, I was an editor and Jason reached out to me in like 2017, uh, right after I graduated from college. And he was like, Hey, um, you know, can you edit clips for us? We need, you know, we, we only have one person working on this and they need to do the show. They can't do clips, you know? Um, you know, and I was like, yeah, no problem. And I think I was getting paid to start like 15 or $20 an hour. Um, and I, I worked nights. So, uh, at the network, you know, baseball's on at night and on the weekends. So I worked like, I think I had off like Mondays and Tuesdays or sometimes Mondays and Thursdays. And I would work like, it was the worst schedule ever, but, um, you know, that's what you got to do when you start. But, uh, yeah, it was like 6.30 to 2.30 AM. I worked and I would get home at like three and then from like three to five, I would knock out clips.

SPEAKER_441: So my first interaction with Presh was sending him clips at like 4.30 in the morning and him replying to me like, Hey man, uh, why are you up so late? Are you guys? Or he was like, you mentioned something like, are you, is this like your morning or are

SPEAKER_368: you still late from yesterday? Um, and then that's because I would send my clips to Presh. So that was, uh, that was my first interaction with him. And then a couple months later, um, if I'm remembering correctly, I think somebody left launch the person that was there. Um, I don't, I guess we shouldn't say names, but whatever they, they, uh, they resigned. And, uh, Jason was like, Hey, do you want to come on full time? Um, and I was, I was living in Hoboken at this point. Uh, and, and he was like, I want you to move to San Francisco. And, uh, yeah, I, we, I did. And I, I came on January 28, 2018.

SPEAKER_443: Yeah.

SPEAKER_368: No, 2019. Sorry. January, 2019. Um, and then I've been here since. That's crazy. And it was, yeah. I moved out to San Francisco a couple months later and, uh, then Presh moved out.

SPEAKER_441: And then we were in the office together for like a year. Uh, just boys and out.

SPEAKER_332: Is it like how different it is? Is it, excuse me, working in office with our team versus remote?

SPEAKER_362: Cause like we're fully remote right now. For those people who don't know, uh, Justin, Nick, and I are all out of New York, which actually works well. We wake up before obviously Jason and Malling, we can write the news and stuff pressures out, um, over in the Bay area. What do you, what, what like differences do you guys see the most?

SPEAKER_368: As a media organization, uh, we operate much, much more efficiently remote. Um, candidly being able to have people on different coasts, waking up at different times. Um, and, and sort of making the best content that they can in their own, um, for, you know, in the way that they're most efficient doing it. Right. Cause not everyone is most efficient moving up. And it also just, it lets us hire way more talented people and have just this way broader range. Um, on the investment side, I can't, I can't really speak to it too, too much, but I know at least like, you know, if, if we were restricted to hiring only in San Francisco, uh, you're not getting Charlie Cuddy. Right. Who is the director of education, Nebraska with his family. He's unbelievable. And there's no chance we hire him if we were only into, I mean, um, I can say no chance, but I don't think that he would have moved to, uh, San Francisco from, you know, his nice, um, comfortable house in Nebraska with his family. I don't think that he would help route his family to do that. So, um, yeah, as, as a media organization, it's, it's, it's more efficient remote for sure.

SPEAKER_452: Um, is it any, we actually, yeah, like trash.

SPEAKER_362: So I guess your role has changed a lot now since you were working, cause you went from marketing to chief of staff. That's kind of a big jump, which is really cool. Has your job changed a lot since you guys, um, since everybody, I guess, left SF cause it seems like a lot of people aren't based in SF anymore.

SPEAKER_452: And whereas like the whole whole team was like, you're probably, your life's probably changed like dramatically.

SPEAKER_392: Um, yeah, as soon as it was basically, as soon as I got to SF and then, you know, we had a couple months in office and then pandemic and then everyone remote.

SPEAKER_347: And then a lot of people left SF. And you're like, wait a minute.

SPEAKER_456: Yeah.

SPEAKER_347: Why didn't you like move back to Toronto though?

SPEAKER_456: Why did you stay in SF?

SPEAKER_347: Um, yeah, it's a good question. Um, I just liked, I just honestly liked, um, SF and the outdoors and that part of it. Um, but it honestly, at this point didn't, didn't really matter. Um, well, I guess, I guess now as, as, as, uh, as chief of staff, it makes more sense that I'm kind of where Jason is, but, um, prior really didn't, I could have done whatever I was doing remotely anyways. And most of my time at launch was technically remote because I started off remote and then our Toronto team was still remote. Yeah. Um, and then, so I only really had like in person, um, with the team end of like 2019. Um, but I would say same thing to just, you know, mimic what Nick said. Um, just what like feels way more efficient. Um, in the office I would, you know, I mean, Nick too, would just like stay super late. Um, Nick either was like editing or, you know, doing producing or whatever it was on, on the twisted media side. Um, and I would just say late, just like either had meetings during the day. Um, and then just actually getting work done after hours. Um, so most of the day would just like be at the office, um, versus now it's just like way more flexible, obviously. Um, with, you know, working from home, you can go to a coffee shop if you want, or go for a run or yeah. Do, do anything like split your day, however you like.

SPEAKER_462: Or do your Peloton. Or do your Peloton like Justin.

SPEAKER_347: Yeah.

SPEAKER_345: Justin, you've joined a couple of meetings, like on the Peloton, I swear.

SPEAKER_419: Or a couple, I've, I've switched to writing the morning ticker on the Peloton, which is, you can get like a laptop mount, which is actually pretty good. Cause I'm doing like lower intensity training, but, uh, yeah, I don't, you can't really do that in the office unless you have like, instead of head training.

SPEAKER_466: Exactly.

SPEAKER_362: Exactly.

SPEAKER_468: Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_362: Our schedule is a little bit different. We're not going to, I try to do coffee shops like in the morning during the day, but I feel like when we're on recording. I have to have like 5 million screens, like my, like 5 bajillion tabs open. Um, sorry. I feel like we're, we're probably a little bit more strapped down to the, the location of like our homes and wherever our big monitors are. Yeah.

SPEAKER_441: Yeah.

SPEAKER_368: I think, um, you know, just to give a, uh, tie the story together and where Justin comes into all this. Um, I started working and we were at, I think two days a week and very occasionally we do it episode with a week with three shows. Um, and it was just interviews at that point, right? It was just founder interviews. We, we would re occasionally do a news round table, like once every two weeks or once every month. Um, and then Jason wanted to ramp up to three and then we ramped up to four. And then eventually I think right around when we were at four days a week, I was like, we need to bring on another producer. Um, which is what Justin and we brought Justin on. And that was what 20, the end of 2020 middle.

SPEAKER_471: Yeah.

SPEAKER_472: I actually started started 2021 early. I think the job posting probably went out on January 30th or so.

SPEAKER_475: And yeah, at that time it was like three to four days. Most days. I think even when I joined, it was three to four, but then that quickly got sold out and the ramp happened pretty quick. I think after I joined to consistent four and then consistent five and then consistent six.

SPEAKER_466: And that's what led us to hiring Rachel.

SPEAKER_368: Yeah. And, uh, trying to, you know, all of this stuff that gets done on this week in startups is in, we're trying to build a media organization or a very lean, very efficient media organization from the ground up and kind of figure out what processes work best and which don't as we go. And the way that we've done it is we've scaled revenue and we've scaled output before we've scaled team. So a lot of ways that this works is, you know, um, a, an organization will create itself. They'll raise money. Then they'll deploy that money by hiring people and then they'll scale up content. But the problem with that is there's not always the demand for the content, right? Like the athletic, for example, which is a paid subscription for sports. Um, they just, I think had a massive, I don't think had layoffs or, uh, as part of their SPAC presentation, it came out that they're, or like losing a lot of customers or whatever, but, um, it's not going great over there. I don't, I don't think, uh, we did it the exact opposite way. We scaled up everything, made sure that there was demand. We sell out shows fast, we sell out shows first. And then on the back end, we, we figure out how to make sure that everything's awesome and then we can do everything. Yeah. So we're operating almost, uh, the exact opposite way that, uh, an organization that would raise money first would work. Um, and it would hire people first.

SPEAKER_484: Okay.

SPEAKER_362: How do you guys feel about that? Um, that workload, like doubling down and increasing before, um, you have like almost enough man, obviously like we have enough manpower cause we can make it work. But I think it's made very evident on the call that the time, like everyone's using their time, like very, very wisely on this team because like you have to, and even then you're working kind of late. Um, and then once it gets to a point where like you hit your breaking point, then you hire another person. How do you feel about that as a culture before you hit your breaking point?

SPEAKER_487: Yeah.

SPEAKER_362: Hopefully. Hopefully.

SPEAKER_364: I know that the base camp folks, uh, Jason Freed and DHH and their book, they, they like, they say don't hire until it hurts, which is a pretty.

SPEAKER_419: Okay. It's a pretty similar philosophy. I mean, they're, they're all about like bootstrapping. I mean, not, but yeah, just kind of, they decry the VC model, which I think it makes a lot of sense for media businesses. There's some things where we're sprinting ahead definitely makes sense. But, uh, I mean, at times it sure it'd be, it'd be fun to have loads of extra resources to just deploy at will. I think pressure was talking about how fun it is to plan the all in conference when you're just, uh, you, you have a lot of resources. Yeah. Um, and I think we still give our, our partners a great deal and some of them have been with us for a long time, which is awesome. Uh, but I, it's definitely shown if, if you're interested in just like any entrepreneurship, not just startups, it's been a really good lesson on, on how to actually survive. Cause there's other companies out there that are our peers and some of them that are doing some awesome things like on deck, but they just had a lot of layoffs. And I, I really don't, the only way you're getting laid off at launch is, um, is if like you, you personally are having difficulty getting the work done. I think given at least the health of the business. So it, it depends on what type of company you want to work in. Uh, but it's, it's been really good to, to learn how to, how to run effectively. And there are definitely trade-offs you make, but, um, it's been really cool to watch and learn. I totally agree.

SPEAKER_362: I feel like learning to do like a bunch of different stuff too. Um, like having a lot on your plate and having to learn it all at the same time has taught me, like, not only at like things that are basic, like this is my first job out of college. So it's taught me to do things like time management, but it's also taught me how like to be like a way more effective worker. I think like in previous roles, even at like internships and things like that, like I had a lot of wasted time. And by being able to have like a bunch, it's a, it's a daily show. Like you have to get all this stuff done like that day. It's not like it can wait till tomorrow and having that kind of like deadline imposed upon you. I feel like has made me like 10 times better of a worker overall. Yeah.

SPEAKER_497: Jason describes it as, um, or he likes to describe it as, you know, working here as a young person.

SPEAKER_368: Will his goal is to increase your, uh, trajectory of your career, like skip 10 or 20 years. That's what he wants to do. And I think that we've done a good job kind of curating working. Um, I'm sure on the investment side as well, but on twist specifically, um, I mean, you're given agency almost immediately. Like Rachel, I think for you, it was almost like week two. You've got that, uh, meetups project. Um, and again, you know, you say first job out of college or, um, yeah, we, we really, really try. And I almost want there to be no bureaucracy in this job for, for anyone that works on this week in startups. Because I've worked places before where there's a ton of bureaucracy and like awesome, really cool, interesting things get stifled. And then have to go through this, um, processing machine where when they come out the other side, it's this just like totally mid like, eh, kind of thing for what it used to be at the ideation stage. Right. So, um, I think twist works best when there's a little bit of like, uh, creative chaos. And it's just like, is something interesting? Yes. Boom, go run with it, do it. Um, which I think is that the, is the stage that we're at now. And I think for young people working in that kind of environment, which I'm sure exists on the investment side too, but I can't speak to it as well. Um, it's different than a lot of first job or second or third job out of colleges would be. And we like it that way. Yeah.

SPEAKER_362: Jason does a really good job at hiring a bunch of young people. I think it could help people grow within the company as well. Like Prash, you have been here for quite a bit. Um, so it's really cool to see everybody is like path throughout the company. Justin, I guess we skipped over you completely though. With how did you find the job? You didn't find it through like cold emailing.

SPEAKER_333: Jason, did you? Uh, I replied to a tweet.

SPEAKER_364: That's what I did too. That was the impetus.

SPEAKER_419: I was an occasional this week in startups listener, probably listened to a lot of the great episodes, uh, maybe four to 10 a year for since 2018. And then I was listened to basically every all in and then Jason had, uh, tweeted about it at the time. I honestly thought he was looking for somebody to help out in a part time capacity. I wasn't really, um, fully aware of the ambition of the, the podcast to scale to more days a week, because I think at that time I was still like, oh, they do two interviews a week. Maybe they just need help booking guests or something like that. Um, I'd love to do that on the side. I was working a consulting job at the time.

SPEAKER_475: And, uh, once I started down the process, I realized that it was definitely not part time and it was definitely full time.

SPEAKER_419: So, uh, I kind of viewed it as, as going to business school of sorts, because just the, the breadth and, uh, the companies we cover, then the types of content. Like we, we've did series in the last year, scaling your startup and, uh, startup legal basics. Um, and some of those other ones that are very on the educational side, uh, the, the VC elements. So that, that's why I ended up, um, joining up, but yeah, I'm just following Jason from the podcast over the years.

SPEAKER_475: That's awesome.

SPEAKER_362: I, I also found the job through a tweet, but somebody else mentioned to me, obviously like I knew who, who Jason was and like what this weekend startups was again. Also wasn't like a daily listener, like our, our beloved noted gang, shout out you guys. Um, and since you've been on, we haven't even mentioned Molly would joined our team. She's the newest of the hosts, AKA the only other host, um, with Jason. And it's definitely made our, for my role with producing. I feel like I do most of the stuff with Molly, which is really, really fun getting to work with her podcast, hall of famer, Molly Wood. Um, and it's really, really cool seeing her and Jason's discussion, especially as a recent, like, how do you guys feel about producing a show now having two hosts?

SPEAKER_452: I think it's made life easier in my opinion.

SPEAKER_368: Yeah. For Molly. I mean, she's been incredible. After joining just for, and if, if people are using as this as like a little peek inside the curtain, um, before Molly got here, we have zero. No, not Justin, not me, not Jason have any history in like actual real. Real, uh, like podcast media, nothing zero. We're just like, I think that this is how you do things. Making it up as we go. Yeah, exactly. And we're like, yeah, this works. It seems like it working. So whatever. Um, but, and I mean that in terms of like actual output and then also like your, our input, like for, for staffing and hiring and what, how we should be allocating our time here, here and here. And when Molly came on board, I mean, it was just like, immediately, she's like, okay, here are like, um, three things that are really easy that we can do. And by the way, she wasn't like, you guys are doing everything wrong. It was like, she, she came in and she was, I think I was like, can please help us? Like, is this right? And she was like, yeah, this is, you guys are doing great. But like this thing, this thing, this thing. Um, and one of the things specifically that she said to do was each host should have their own producer. So Rachel essentially became Molly's producer. Now Rachel does everything for this week in climate startups. She does all the booking 100%. Um, where if I didn't know that I might have just done that, or one of the three of us might have just done it as they came in. But now that Rachel's dedicated to it, you're almost getting like a masterclass every day from Molly on, I would assume how to be a better interviewer and host. Um, how to do everything on the back end and then everything else in between. Is that fair? Oh, totally.

SPEAKER_362: And I definitely think it's so interesting working under Jason first and then getting to work under, I work under both of them. I mean, but, um, specifically getting going from like having the, just Jason as the host to then helping Molly out with that, like that climate segment. It is so interesting seeing how differently they operate in the podcasting space. Like how Jason really is. Like you can tell Jason's like a business guy and Molly would is like a podcasting pro. Not that Jason isn't like a phenomenal podcaster. Obviously he wouldn't like the numbers wouldn't be so good if he wasn't phenomenal at this. And not that Molly isn't like absolutely not like Molly wasn't like doing stuff with market watch forever, but you totally see where they shine different differently. Like for example, when we write for Jason, it totally differs for when I write for Molly Jason. Like we have a, we're going deep in with the, uh, deep in with the facts. There's like math right now here where we're doing, we're doing behind the envelope bath. Um, it's like pretty intense and intense note scene, uh, for like from 11 to, to what is that? Like 11 to one every day we're out, we're writing pretty deep. Whereas Molly it's like bullet points a lot lighter. I feel like she wants to like interject with her own opinion without me, like kind of putting my own voice in it as much as possible, which is really, really cool.

SPEAKER_368: Yeah. Um, Justin, I'm, I'm curious what, how you think the, uh, the dynamic has gone so far.

SPEAKER_523: Yeah. Pressure and I had actually went on a run back in December when, when we happened to be in the same place, like our, our second meetup ever.

SPEAKER_419: And on there, I joked about joining twist at like a series B, which is kind of ridiculous because twist is, um, like a very small company, but, and it's been profitable basically the whole time. So it's, it's not really a startup, but I think that comparison is kind of right because I joined after the business model or like product market fit had kind of been established looking to add some additional. Streams and new elements to the show. Like we still do at least two interviews a week, but now we're adding much more content for a daily listener. And, uh, one thing that you definitely see a lot of series B companies start to do, which we just did is you hire like experienced execs. Like the startup team originally might just be a bunch of scrappy, uh, young people or people who are like the disruptors, but there, there's definitely always something you can learn from the traditional incumbent industries. That's why you see like, uh, uh, uh, an Uber, like maybe poach, like, uh, Amazon and Amazon people to Costco people, et cetera. And Molly really comes in and brings that professional background, uh, from radio. Um, and just helps us add more structure to this because, uh, I think it is when you're a small team, especially when you're a small team with a lot of, um, trust, maybe from working in the same place, uh, you can get kind of lazy about what, how you actually systematize things. And, which is great for experimentation, but as you try to add more people to mitigate problems, it definitely gets pretty chaotic if you don't have the right structure in place. So I think that that's been, it's been great to start to add structure and, and more dedicated responsibilities.

SPEAKER_475: So people can actually, we can make sure we're making the most of our team and, um, instead of like duplicating work or, um, just working on things that, that actually aren't going to push the show forward. So, uh, I, I really enjoyed that. I agree.

SPEAKER_362: That's awesome. What are your guys's? So what do you guys hope to, when you got this job, were you like ever thinking like, oh, this is like going to help me. Um, like, I want to go over to the investment side. I want to go work at a startup. Like what was your guys's like main goal, I guess, of taking this job or were you guys mostly just focused like on the here and now living in the present? Press you can go. Cause you've been, you've been on mute for a bit.

SPEAKER_380: Um, yeah, main the really like, so when I first wanted the role.

SPEAKER_347: It was like, do whatever, um, just to make an opportunity because I knew I wasn't going back to school. So whatever that was, I was like down for. Um, and then after, you know, working a year, it was more so like, um, like, I guess I started thinking about more career wise, what I wanted. Um, and I guess I like discovered, well, the one thing that's great about launches, like, it's like a Silicon Valley bootcamp. Um, so you'll, and this was like one of the things, Troy, who was, um, the marketing guy that had, had quit at the time, which is how I got the role. Um, he had told me, um, cause we had like a week or two together onboarding. Um, he was like, it's like one of the best places to, um, just get, you know, get your hands, get, basically get in the trenches and, and learn the world of Silicon Valley, uh, and startups. And so that was super exciting to me. Um, and with that, obviously you get that experience, you know, on day one, essentially working with Jason. Um, but I would say like the thing that most excited me, um, was just having a breath of, um, education in those, in this world of startups. Um, and I was like fortunate enough to get that with the different roles that I've had over the years and everyone at launch really gets that. Like everyone has some involvement in each part of the business, um, cause they all overlap one way or another. Um, so I think that's cool. And then the other thing, which is cool, which is how Jason like started his career as well, which was like doing everything part of the business. Um, and so he, he had mentioned like, you know, he would, he, you know, learned how to take photos and stuff for like the magazine when he was producing, um, Silicon Valley reporter and just basically added a whole bunch of skills throughout that process of building that business. And I feel like he's giving that opportunity for all of us, um, just to keep adding new skills, um, getting to like 70%. We don't have to be perfect. Um, like it was mentioned, you know, we can still hire experts, but, um, everyone. On our team is like super scrappy and you can get to like 70, 80%, whatever the role is, um, which I think is, is awesome. And, um, something that I just want to keep, you know, going on for the rest of my career. Um, but yeah, nothing too specific, like still like it being broad, still like being scrappy, um, more of like a generalist type role is for me what I like.

SPEAKER_395: Um, yeah.

SPEAKER_456: That's awesome.

SPEAKER_362: I, it's funny. Cause Justin literally said like, this is like basically in place of business school. So the education thing, I think rolls, I, I was definitely, um, I actually just talked to Mike Savino with our 2021. Like you're in, in a review cause I, a hundred percent on that same path where it's like, I just want to learn as much as freaking possible. And like, who better to learn from at the time of getting the job? Um, it's like, who's, who's better to learn from them than Jason. Besides now Molly Wood, it's like, if I, if you want to do something in media, if you want to do something in business, like really, like these are the subject matter experts, which is like an incredibly cool experience. But I'm still on the, on like, when I was coming into this role, I was like, I don't know if I want to do stuff in messing. I don't know if I want to do stuff in startups, like go work at a startup, or I don't know if I want to try to like pursue podcasting myself. Cause at the time I did have like my own podcast, which is since like, kind of like taking the back burner. But, um, really, really cool to be kind of like an inch deep and a mile wide at an organization that I feel like has so many different arms to it. And one of the best things about being at like a small organizations with so much going on is like, you can kind of like hinted at this, like the amount of responsibility that's given to you is insane. Like the other day, Jason was like, yeah, you should probably like tweet more from the twist account. And I was like, okay, like, let's go. Like, okay, I can do it. Like, we'll figure it out. Um, or it's like planned meetups and it's like, I've never even planned like a sorority event before, much less like a gathering in Japan with people I do not know in a Slack group that I just joined at a company that I'm very, very like unknowledgeable in. And the, the amount of like responsibility that's given to you at a fairly quick pace is more than I think what a business degree could give you. Plus getting to learn like all the vocabulary, like during the show and hearing Jason and Mike and Molly and all the awesome people on the investment side, like talk about, um, the actual process in which like that goes is, you know, it gives you some like practical knowledge.

SPEAKER_531: You want to wrap it up, Nick? I think it's a good time to wrap it up.

SPEAKER_368: Um, yeah. The original question was like, what, uh, do you want to get, uh, out of this?

SPEAKER_359: Yeah. Or what were you, what were you thinking that you wanted to like learn? Like, why did you take the job in terms of like, did you have, like, were you interested in like making it over to the investment side or were you interested in like becoming like the best producer possible?

SPEAKER_368: Yeah. It's an interesting question. I, uh, I didn't really think about that when I joined. I just, I wanted to, uh, it sounds super shallow, but this industry pays a little bit better than the industry that I was in and, uh, I like money. So that's why I, uh, originally took the job and I was like, all right, if I don't like this stuff, I could always go back to sports. But I have found the challenge of learning and becoming, or trying to become an expert on things that you know nothing about before coming or very little about before coming here. Uh, I found it really fun and, uh, it's rewarding. Um, it's, uh, there are times where, you know, you, you have to do something you've never done before, like go through an S1, um, or a quarterly earnings report and break everything down, uh, into a really simple, understandable, easily readable way that makes Jason or Molly look super smart when they say it. Yeah. Um, and if it's your first time doing that, you get graded, like it's your 50th time doing that. Yeah. And that makes you elevate your game, um, quickly. And that goes for a bunch of different things all across the organization. That's the kind of place that it is to work. And I found that to be something that I, even though it could be hard in the moment when you kind of look back on it and you're like, wow, I can't believe I've done all of this stuff. Um, it's great.

SPEAKER_538: That's true too.

SPEAKER_359: Um, in terms of like, I always say this and I like, well, this is probably being a dead horse.

SPEAKER_362: Cause I'm sure I've said this on like other okay boomer episodes, but like, I think such a strong indicator of somebody being super intelligent or at least knowing what they do at a really deep level is like the ability to explain things in the simplest way possible. Um, and by sitting down and having to write things, um, every single day, not only is it like forcing us to understand what's happening in the tech community, like we don't have a choice, but to know what's happening, happening in the tech community, in the market, um, in the world of, you know, Silicon Valley, but we have to be able to explain it in a way that like a fifth grader could understand it. Cause when you're writing show notes, like these aren't something that like, this isn't like a teleprompter out here that somebody is necessarily reading word for word all the time. This is something that they were kind of like glancing out, reading, you know, creating like their own opinions on, on the fly. It's not like we're, we're out here like writing Jason's opinion and Molly's opinion, you know, they are obviously really smart people. So being able to write things in completely, again, like a way that isn't going to sway them one way or the other. So it's understood by like a mass amount of people is I think internally, definitely making me smarter and understand what is happening a lot better.

SPEAKER_368: And I think if you can't explain it in the simplest terms, like if you can't explain something to an eight year old, then you shouldn't really be writing notes for people to pontificate it about it to a really intelligent audience. And that's the standard that we hold ourselves to. That being said, I do think that Jason and Molly, when they, when we have a topic that is like, not only do we not understand it, like experts are like, yeah, I don't really know what's going on here. Jason and Molly will say, listen, we don't really understand this. We're trying to figure it out in real time. Here's what we know. Here are the facts. Here's what we think. And then, you know, if you have any comments, like Jason always says, hey, tweet at us. If you know better than us, please let us know. And then we'll kind of incorporate that into our knowledge going forward.

SPEAKER_362: Yeah.

SPEAKER_389: If it's a reputable source, which I think is a good point.

SPEAKER_362: I totally agree. And it's nice having like two, it's nice seeing them like work out things together, like understand things together and like fill out the pieces. That's probably one of the big benefits without having two hosts now. But yeah, thank you guys so much for joining. I know this is probably like a really interesting episode for most people. Didn't have on a Gen Z founder on this time, but I thought it would be cool for you guys to see behind the scenes a little bit, especially with the All in Summit happening this week and with our retreat happening this week. Again, getting to meet Presh for a second time. Going to be pretty wild.

SPEAKER_545: Pumped.

SPEAKER_362: Awesome.

SPEAKER_456: So where can everybody find you guys on the internet besides at producers or besides producers at this weekend startups.com?

SPEAKER_546: You don't want to, you don't want to follow me.

SPEAKER_456: You don't want to find, don't want to follow Nick.

SPEAKER_547: Nick is an anon.

SPEAKER_546: Wildly uninteresting.

SPEAKER_547: Yeah. Nick is.

SPEAKER_370: I'll plug mine, I guess. Justin P Fortier.

SPEAKER_549: F-O-R-T-I-E-R. Nice. Twitter. Very cool. Very cool. You can find that on, on all platforms.

SPEAKER_456: Cool. And then Prash.

SPEAKER_554: LinkedIn, Twitter, whatever.

SPEAKER_456: Are you going to drop your like YouTube channel as well?

SPEAKER_554: Nice. Um, I don't, yeah, I guess you can search my name, Prash Dinesh Kumar on YouTube. If you wanted to watch the vlog. Yeah, exactly. Watch that whole woe series, actually.

SPEAKER_419: But seriously, I hope if you've made it this far on the podcast, and this is kind of a long rambling one, you clearly like the show and you're clearly interested in, uh, launch and this weekend startups and all the stuff we're putting out. And it's definitely growing slowly, uh, or in a, in a sustainable manner. We, we've really, I think probably two X the entire audience size since I've been here, which is kind of crazy to think about it since it's, since it's big, but the, the team is growing. So if, if you're really passionate about startups and tech news and, um, have made it this far, you should, um, keep in touch. Make sure to follow Jason, uh, follow our, our LinkedIn postings, um, from both launch. And I think launch is typically where we post them on LinkedIn and, uh, yeah, I would plug that intensely because he definitely is always looking to, to help mentor great people. Yeah. And, uh, as long as you, uh, have a will to work, this is trying to fix our bedtimes.

SPEAKER_563: No, no, we'll find new things to do. I'm kidding. Bed, bedtimes is a moving target.

SPEAKER_413: So, awesome.

SPEAKER_362: Thank you guys so much for coming on. This is a really cool segment of okay. Boomer.

SPEAKER_337: Maybe I'll get to talk to you guys like one-on-one in different episodes and dive deeper, even into some of your guys' stories and excited to see where everybody goes.

SPEAKER_568: Thanks Rachel.

SPEAKER_337: All right. Bye guys.

SPEAKER_568: See ya.