SPEAKER_00: hey everybody happy monday it's a big monday it's gonna be a huge news week what do we got molly god SPEAKER_01: it is is it it's never ending the news weeks this is thank god it's monday though because there were SPEAKER_04: tons of stories over the weekend we work we work we work yes we work it's monday tgi monday SPEAKER_06: happy dan julio on monday we work anyway we are opening the show today with an absolute banger of an interview such a sharp phenomenal reporter a conversation about one click checkout SPEAKER_01: the whole ecosystem uh with the scoop machine malik morris from the information we've done one of his stories like for the past three weeks yes and fast so we just went to the source well we want David Friedberg: to reward the journalists who originate these stories and have them on the pod and talk to them SPEAKER_11: firsthand and it's just great for you as the audience um i think as a proxy um to learn who are the reporters how they do their jobs and who are the ones doing the real work because there's so much re-aggregation that goes on and listen there's a lot of commentary and we're going to SPEAKER_12: just take it straight to the source so we go very deep into bolt and fast what went wrong at bolt that big abg forever 21 lawsuit uh and uh the the noti gang the people who have notifications turned on SPEAKER_01: on youtube loved our segment with malik he's so good and really you can tell the reporters who really know their beats he knows every single thing about it then we have a fun little update on the tweets that we were just trying to like ignore over the weekend something something web 3 going great a board ape drop and a massive gas fee surge and another salon outage and we just begrudgingly SPEAKER_19: break it down and then uh we wrap with uh we live in the future segment with gravity sketch it's our startup of the day slash we live in the future it's a vr tool for designers to collaborate and build stuff like footwear or cars or your uh new backyard uh collaboratively it's gonna be a great show SPEAKER_22: stick with us this week in startups is brought to you by our crowd our crowd helps you invest early in pre-ipo companies alongside professional vcs if you're interested in investing you can join our crowd for free at o-u-r-c-r-o-w-d dot com slash twist fiverr get access to millions of freelancers around the globe to help turn nothing into something today go to fiverr dot com and use code jason for 10 off that's f-i-v-e-r-r dot com and use code jason and first republic bank where everybody gets a personal banker who's reachable by phone email or text and through first republic's banking app learn more at first republic dot com startup member fdic equal housing lender hey everybody SPEAKER_28: happy monday molly's here monday monday it feels like the world is um a nightmare it feels like the SPEAKER_29: world's been at a very accelerating pace like i say with the world's biggest smile a nightmare a complete SPEAKER_30: ongoing it's just things are moving very fast we're moving fast we had like trump and like ukraine SPEAKER_34: and a pandemic and a stock market crash and a stock market boom he launched buying twitter and SPEAKER_26: apparently a stock market crash again it's just it's like hard to it feels like everything is happening in my it must be a simulation right it's just like things are moving at such a increasingly interesting pace uh that it feels like that so anyway it's monday which means there's a lot of news uh but we're very lucky to have a breaking news old school journalist on the program today like somebody who actually makes phone calls and spends more than four hours on a piece and that person's SPEAKER_36: name is uh malik morris and he works at the information which if you don't subscribe to go ahead and shoot the lock off your wallet and spend the 25 bucks welcome to the pod malik SPEAKER_38: thank you thank you for having me that's uh quite an entrance quite an intro i know sorry we're making SPEAKER_41: you blush we're making you blush wow you're making me nervous let me ask where did you work before the SPEAKER_42: information uh so uh i was in school before the information um okay so i have a i worked in retail SPEAKER_46: i'm in uh fashion retail for 10 years before starting at the information and then during that time i went to grad school for journalism um shout out to craig newmark school of journalism at cuny um and very cool information as a fellow and then halfway through the fellowship got hired um permanently um and i've been there since last january wow friend of the pod friend of the pod craig SPEAKER_01: newmark yeah great guy yeah boy you found your calling in grad school way to go okay i mean i know we're just making you blush now and we'll stop any minute and just talk about the work SPEAKER_57: but well but you're talking to a couple of former journalists and we're very impressed SPEAKER_12: that feels great thank you you took the right route because most journalists wind up trying to build a set SPEAKER_11: of clips yada yada and so they do huffington post or business inside or whatever it is that's like more content farming you don't have time to call people on the phone do long firm journalism i mean SPEAKER_26: some of those places do do it at times but it's not the norm usually they put you know the early reporters on like here just rewrite this press release or you know here's a tweet make a story out of it here's a tweet that mentions elon or you know biden or whatever but okay so you're at the SPEAKER_11: information and uh you started writing some really interesting stories about two uh specific companies that have been in the news and they kind of are having this really weird dance and uh you've broken SPEAKER_26: a lot of the news about it of of course i'm talking about this fast checkout space uh which there's two companies in fast.co which shut down um we've had dom on the program and then ryan breslau's uh vault which we also had ryan on the program um so how did you get on the speed i guess to start and SPEAKER_38: then i guess we'll jump into the stories and so my reporting journey with the one click checkout the SPEAKER_46: world of one click checkout um started last summer um last august i wrote a story about a couple of the checkout startups that were trying to give or working to give non-amazon merchants the ability to offer customers an amazon prime like checkout experience you know where shoppers can purchase goods without having to create a new account and then put their shipping and credit card information for each purchase they make right um that story profiled three companies a very small young startup called peach pay um the veteran in the space um bolt and then the ale faded fast which as you mentioned closed its doors last month um and it was interesting because as someone who worked in retail for a decade um before becoming a journalist and now covers retail um as a journalist commerce lives and dies by checkout so the fact that you would have companies trying to offer accelerated um purchase experiences for brands and retailers that don't want to sell their wares on amazon makes total sense to me um so and in that regard the story it passed the smell test in my um opinion um but after that story published last august um i started hearing rumblings from industry insiders about fast in particular not having a real business um and i thought that was interesting right and i've been hearing it from just various people over the course of a few months um and then when i went digging um what not having a real business amounted to was that fast had built a stable of very small merchants with very little in annual sales um and this was intentional um on the ceo dom holland's part um he was going the route of shopify and giving mom and pop retailers the tools to sell their goods online without having to work with amazon right um noble cause um but in fast case um these merchants already had a ton of well-known checkout buttons for customers to choose from that included of course paypal and in some instances um amazon pay uh most customers as we all know are more compelled to click on paypal and they are to select a button powered by a company they never heard of right so this meant that fast was taking a tiny slice of an already eaten through pie which led to the company generating less than a million in revenue um in 2021 now this is all so intricate SPEAKER_69: right it must be said that for checkout software firms who scale it needs to process hefty transaction volumes so think shopify right and shopify shop pay their checkout solution that earns billions a SPEAKER_46: year in revenue but that's because it powers checkout for millions of merchants um and that's because checkout firms only take a small percentage for each sale and then they have to pay interchange fees to their partners so it's a very complicated space um fast had a faulty merchant acquisition strategy which had tried to um course correct a little too late um while raising a bunch of money and then SPEAKER_42: spending a bunch of money um so that's that that was my foray and into into all of this um i wonder we SPEAKER_70: should almost back up too and say that the reason and this will sort of lead into my next question a SPEAKER_01: big part of the reason this got so heated so soon as amazon's patent on one click checkout expired and all of a sudden in 2017 right and so all of these companies then thought okay green fields galore to SPEAKER_73: capture all these transactions correct but all those big names were still in the space like why do you SPEAKER_75: think and it's interesting by the way molly that yeah remember that patent was a business process patent SPEAKER_77: a very controversial super controversial yeah type of patent that people didn't think would actually hold SPEAKER_79: up it's interesting that the industry didn't even try to go after them but right or they sort of did SPEAKER_01: but they failed because amazon had so much money so it was always like a really interesting setup to this really then ultra heated um space but i wonder like who thought i mean apparently a lot of investors right thought it will just give hundreds of millions of um dollars to companies SPEAKER_51: that are going to be competing still with paypal amazon and then even eventually shoppay SPEAKER_01: like walk us through that background and why anybody thought this was gonna work so SPEAKER_42: the the i mean i guess i'm gonna be a little more controversial here so yes paypal um has accelerated SPEAKER_46: checkout um you know stripe is is trying to do the same thing um you know the legacy payment processors right but they also have tons of other features right and so being like the idea of specialization is very important um and can also scale um i mean and what you're getting is actually the primary criticism of the one click checkout space that's often large large that companies like bolt and fast when it was around um that it's just a feature right but i'll argue that it isn't just a feature it's an ecosystem as i said commerce lives and dies by checkout and there are trillions of dollars being transacted each year around the world and fintech firms can build large and profitable businesses taking small cuts of those transactions it just takes time and this is all happening at a SPEAKER_42: at a moment especially during the pandemic when e-commerce was ramping up online shopping adoption was ramping up and the vc market was really really hot like hot like the sun molting and they were just SPEAKER_46: willing to throw cash right and so a lot of the criticism of this just being a feature that these companies were getting raising mega rounds at insane valuations but i i i will argue that what they were doing what they are trying to achieve um to me makes sense and is absolutely useful and can scale but it just is not going to happen in a time frame of this person raised at a 10 billion dollar valuation and now they should have revenue at like 200 million dollars within just three years of launching you know SPEAKER_88: it's time for another our crowd deal of the week right now you can join our crowds investment in sotero according to the deal memo sotero has developed a patented new approach to data protection this new technique eliminates the gaps of traditional methods by securing any data asset whether it's on premises or in the cloud and according to their deal memo sotera is trusted by one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies you can invest in sotero at ourcrowd.com twist today and all over the world companies like sotero are innovating and driving returns for investors our crowd analyzes many of these companies then they select the ones with the greatest growth potential and they bring them to you they invest from personalized medicine to robotics to cyber security where companies spend 150 billion dollars annually our crowd identifies innovators so you can invest when growth potential is greatest and that's early so if you're an accredited investor you can join our crowd for free at our crowd dot com twist to sign up for free i think yeah this is a good point for to explain SPEAKER_11: exactly why this feature is not just a feature it's a it's a bit of a network play because if you're a merchant a and you have a million customers um all of them get cookied you now have their address they're billing information everything um is you know locked into their browser when they go to the next site merchant b merchant b uh if that you happen to have bought something from forever 21 now you go to zara if they're both part of the network the zara person doesn't have to refill in their information right and then the next person does it and so everybody who joins these networks then gets to take out what does it take 90 seconds for somebody to fill in their address or shipping address their SPEAKER_19: credit card information even if you're using like the chrome extensions or last pass or one of these you know uh browser extensions you still have to put in your your cc number or something and then auto-populate it so they they do make things elegant um and they there is a network play there SPEAKER_77: but certainly overfunded and the personalities seemed just uniquely you have this like coke pepsi kind of situation where they're going at it and then both ceos seem to be crazy narcissistic uh millennials or gen z's maybe you could speak to like this crazy dom character versus the crazy paranoid ryan king character because that's i think what i have the story here is that SPEAKER_38: you have these two very colorful very attention grabbing yeah yeah yeah well i mean so i i think SPEAKER_46: that they're very different right um i think with dom first of all dom had a questionable business past um yes npr did a really great story about um a tow truck um startup he had back in australia that he ended up being incredibly litigious um with the australian government which is quite unheard of for our startup um and he was definitely flashy um as we pointed out um myself and my actually very SPEAKER_42: brilliant um colleague k clark at the information who really is the actual scoop machine uh that we worked on about just not only just the money that he was spending but the way extravagantly spending it you know nascar sponsoring nascar um drivers um having these flashy off sites um that's supposed to be SPEAKER_46: recruiting events but then like in in tampa but they're not actually recruiting anyone from tampa um so there's that i think with ryan breslow as a character um i i know the tweet there that you all are referring to um about you know stripe and uh and white combinator um which i read through a couple of times and thought was um i can imagine why it's controversial but looked at it and said this actually feels a little bit nuanced and you know this is this person's experience um and i also think that the age he's actually younger than me which is trippy um and the fact that he's helming this company that's raised so much money at huge valuations um i think on that surface feels and also you know he he um is a dancer and has a dance you know company and all that stuff so there's a lot of a mystique to the ryan breslow character um that i don't necessarily feel as super dubious but i can imagine it's super eccentric um whereas dom holland had a history of very very uncultured business practices that seem to follow him too fast as well yeah ryan's 27 i don't know how dom is but dom did SPEAKER_28: have that background i think when we all read older i think yeah yeah he's older um but he plays younger i think he plays he does yes he can play younger characters he's like one of those actors who doesn't SPEAKER_63: age quite on purpose still in high school but yeah i mean i think going into that mafias you know SPEAKER_11: thread we we went on we we broke it down here you're i think you're right it's a very nuanced take because it is true there is a technique listen i was a journalist and i spent the last 11 years investing and i was on team uber there was a there are very explicit technique there is a very SPEAKER_108: explicit playbook and technique of if you invest in company a you can invest in b you invest in coke you can't get pepsi you invest in uber you don't get lyft it just makes total sense people don't SPEAKER_19: want to have conflicts so since you vcs don't want to have conflicts in their portfolios it looks bad and it's hard to manage you can actually work that which is just people do it with me all the time like hey just put 25k in and i'm like 25 000 we're trying to put 500 or a million in and they're like yeah yeah and they just go and they try to get 25k checks from everybody 50k checks just to SPEAKER_11: block you from eventually putting a bigger check and so when you get that small check offer most vcs just they know like it's like oh you can't use a jedi mind trick on us like that's not gonna work right um and you just say thank you but we want to keep our options open to write a bigger check so we can actually have a play in the space uh right and so that part was true uh for sure but he was SPEAKER_26: totally successful independent of all this so uh you know interesting um and then that sort of gets us SPEAKER_01: to like your latest scoop in a way which so okay you have this market dynamic what uh producer nick is calling it's a it's a market pull approach right the assumption that if you're a business that can capture even a tiny percentage of the volume of transactions that's occurring you're going to make a lot of money obviously that's the investment thesis behind all of the tens and hundreds of millions of dollars going into these companies and the crazy valuation but then now it turns out that according to your uh most recent article both of them were terrible businesses both was too SPEAKER_46: okay so i just want to start by saying that both stories not the same as fast as that fast was a startup with a faulty merchant acquisition strategy and the leader with the questionable business path both on the other hand is a company with maybe more capital than it needs that has gone through some changes in the beginning of this year and it's confronting big competition and a cooling venture SPEAKER_42: capital market so i'll just start by by saying okay yeah okay the fundamentals are not the same the fundamentals not the same so i'll back up a little bit and kind of continue what i was saying about fast so obviously they were going up to a lot of really small merchants right so they're SPEAKER_46: capturing merchants who already have a bunch of checkout options and maybe the customer not going to click on the fast button on their their transaction page right um and so that means they're taking a tiny slice of a tiny slice of a tiny slice right so to course correct and to correct this course of action last spring fast told his sales people that they would focus on science signing on brands and retailers with around 10 million million or more in annual sales um that's actually counted to what dom told me last summer when he was like they're going after um companies with less than 10 million in sales but that's not they are there um the hope was to build a big enough stable of those types of merchants that fast would process transactions for and then generates tons of revenue that plan didn't work according to former employees because the big merchants didn't see the upsides of working with the company that had very small brands and very with very little customers um as we as you all pointed out brilliantly um these checkout options work best for merchants when they can cross pollinate customers right so it makes less sense for marquee brands to integrate a one-click checkout option that isn't going to bring them more customers now we can go over to bolt right their strategy was different from the outset first instead of being a button on the checkout page bolt is checkout as a software service so when customers click um checkout on one on one of both merchant merchant sites the experience from start to finish is powered by bolt that leaves them in a less precarious position because the company's not hoping a customer will recognize its name and click on this button when buying something online the customer then has no choice SPEAKER_69: because they are the checkout system where things get tricky for bolt is that it decided last year to change its revenue model the company used to charge its merchants a fee for its checkout software in addition to the fee it took to process transactions um both decided to stop charging SPEAKER_46: clients for its software and only take a one or two percent cut from the transactions that actually SPEAKER_69: process now here's where things get tricky um under the new revenue structure when a customer creates a bolt account with merchant a that merchant doesn't get charged a fee to process the transaction from this newly created customer when that same customer goes to merchant b's site and buys something in one click because it has a bolt account now then bolt will take a cut from merchant b's transaction SPEAKER_46: but this is predicated on a customer making a journey from one bolt merchant to another which is very precarious territory okay um so when i spoke to ryan breslow um founder and former ceo bolt um back in december he said this fee change was to incentivize big name merchants such as casper who they've signed and fanatics so they've also signed to sign up and bring their trovo customers with them the theory obviously is the bigger the network the easier it is to sign on big merchants and power the entire checkout system which will then ensure that bolt gets a cut of every transaction happening on an online store and revenue will grow exponentially from that but in the short term that pivot um which some former employers spoke to said was implemented around last fall it set bolts um revenue projections back a little bit and and ryan breslow told me this himself when we spoke in december you know before he stepped down as ceo um so what happened is bolt ended up having around 28 million um in revenue um and from the transactions it powered according to a document that we viewed um instead of the around 40 million i was projecting to have according to people who were familiar with those projections um when i asked at the time so it's a little it's it's it's i think it seems like a good strategy because SPEAKER_130: you ins you you take out the friction of a merchant having to decide i gotta pay another sas fee SPEAKER_26: so it's like well listen it's free and if you bring somebody to the network um you don't pay so if you brought them you know to the party we're not going to charge them SPEAKER_11: but the next person yeah we'll charge them yeah it's just they they probably should have just done those one-offs with specific targeted customers not a general one so if you want to join the network and you come in the front door yeah pay for the software pay for this but when they were going after those strategic ones maybe they should have done that but i've seen that in business before you know right if you were paying if you if the if the objection the sales team came to say listen the objection is this 50k sas charge we have said well what if we got rid of it it's like yeah we're going to lose 10 million this year but what the network will build and then we'll that'll be defensible because then each merchant gets easier and easier and easier and if it's easier to assign them then it's easier to assign the next one and then all of a sudden you would get this velocity SPEAKER_01: that would be very very hard we all know how hard it is to build something out of nothing i'm pretty sure that's what all of our founders here at launch are doing all day every day that's what the startup game is all about and it is really easy to give up turns out what you need is a little help according to a study conducted by fiverr 25 of people surveyed said they had a business idea in the past 18 months but almost 60 of them never pursued it and the majority said it's because they just didn't have the resources so here's how fiverr can help fiverr's talent marketplace has millions of freelancers across the globe and these freelancers are accessible in just a few clicks they have experts in design data marketing website building music video animation so much more all of the ingredients that you need to make that mvp just search for the service you need set the timeline and the price and then fiber will provide a list of freelancers who meet your criteria you can look through their portfolios read the reviews know the exact cost before you pay remember every successful something was once nothing so head to fiverr.com two r's and turn nothing into something today you'll get 10 off your first order by using the code jason SPEAKER_142: at f-i-v-e-r-r.com that's fiverr.com use the code jason right now is amazon in this space too now SPEAKER_11: where i heard that they're extending theirs to third-party sellers so if you're a third-party seller on amazon and this one seems like the really clever idea so amazon made this incredible decision at some point which really is amazing in terms of dealing with the government and antitrust we're like if you want to sell stuff on amazon you can uh we'll let third-party merchants on but now what they're SPEAKER_19: doing molly i think is the the third-party merchants can use amazon checkout on their websites SPEAKER_145: right buy with prime and so every time yeah i mean they have felt the pressure the competitive pressure SPEAKER_19: clear yeah but think about this like one of the big decisions of all these companies and i was an investor one like smarty pants vitamins i was an investor and it was always like ah do we put stuff on amazon and then we lose people going to our site and they take a big cut and now it's like oh but we SPEAKER_11: get this other benefit on our site because when you go to a site i'm like i always check is it on amazon because i want all my orders in one place oh if it's not on amazon not prime i trust that okay then i will order it off of their side and go through the couple of steps this is like i think yeah going to crush everybody because now you're a third-party merchant you have no choice if you're considering being a third-party merchant on amazon this makes it a no-brainer yes and no um so amazon is not SPEAKER_42: trustworthy right and a lot of us tell me more what do you mean when you say that i'll predicate this by saying that the big thing was this is logistics play ostensibly right because it basically means SPEAKER_46: that you with the buy with prime means that customers that merchants non amazon merchants can offer their customers same day delivery right two-day delivery the same benefits they get with their amazon prime account right but logistics and fulfillment is even trickier space in checkout because it's physical goods right so in order for this to work with amazon ostensibly these merchants have to put their goods in amazon's warehouse right um do i want my items on the SPEAKER_42: same shelf where amazon can see and then copy and then it's on amazon basic so yeah that because that that that customer who um like you is saying well is this on amazon right yeah so amazon's not trustworthy SPEAKER_51: and that makes a ton and in fact third party it's third party vendors have already been complaining SPEAKER_154: about that when they list on amazon exactly so if you're not on amazon there's a reason is what SPEAKER_42: you're saying right so if they're even going to feel compelled to to offer this knowing that they might lose their customer essentially because they might just want to go to amazon anyway and then also SPEAKER_46: if they if it is checkout because we're still not clear on what this is and how it's going to play out um beyond amazon's immediate network right now me as a as a merchant am i even going to get that customer data which as we know with apple's privacy changes it's very difficult to to target customers very SPEAKER_42: it's very difficult to get that first party data which means customer information that's that's coming through your own channels whether it's your online site or your app um and then be able to funnel that into intel to target advertising to also retain the customers you already have and if i complicate that with the checkup how by amazon that i might just be kissing customer data goodbye because amazon going to use that for itself you know yeah so it sounds like a really smart play it sounds like and actually um in some of the reporting that we've done um it it sounds like a shopify crusher it sounds if anything more so like really trying to just go at the shopify um but whether or not SPEAKER_46: it's going to succeed in doing just that for merchants that are not on amazon for a reason um remains to be seen so i get the impulse to be like oh this is going to crush everyone but i'm SPEAKER_12: like um but it might not you know fascinating it just does help i mean if you i did this the other day amazon was always like on the dl with basics like you do a search some basics come up they don't rank themselves first i think they knew how to play the game and then since i buy amazon basics on a pretty regular basis it was in my navigation bar now i don't know if they're showing amazon basics SPEAKER_11: in everybody's navigation bar but when you go to a one of the vendor pages there's a thing called new arrivals so i go to the anchor page because i'm obsessed with anchor chargers and all this stuff as you guys know and i look at the new page and then i basically look at the new offerings and i SPEAKER_108: buy stuff i'm like oh there's a triple charger i want that now i went to the amazon basics pages and i started scrolling down and i had no idea the breadth of products that they're doing but if you scroll down SPEAKER_138: this page you're like okay they're doing towels okay fine they're doing mouthwash okay they're doing dog toys they're doing tampons amazon's doing tampons okay and and dog toys and stools and you you just keep scrolling down and it's like they're going to be no lotion sorry they're doing kettles they're SPEAKER_108: doing everything they're doing fire pits and you're just like wait a second wow they're doing everything SPEAKER_138: and you know i had no idea but they're doing wrenches like hammers and it just never ends and i think SPEAKER_91: that they have blown the doors off this it's going to a totally different place now so this is SPEAKER_51: potentially where a bolt or a faster certainly a shop of well i guess not a fast a bolt or a shopify SPEAKER_01: could certainly be saying one we won't do this to you but also to consumers and one of the notice mentioned this that that the payment network itself should be privacy preserving by default and that could be a selling point for me saying not only don't i want to shop on amazon i don't want it to have my data right or anybody else but you right like i just want to click out this one time SPEAKER_154: that's it we're done yeah like cash yeah and again it complicates the whole thing now especially in the SPEAKER_42: light of apple's idfa um they're a the app tracking transparency which which allows iphone users to SPEAKER_46: opt out of being tracked across different apps um which was invaluable data for advertisers for merchants um it's all about loyalty right it's about you have to build a brand now like you have to be a reason for to be a shopping destination for a customer whether you're a brand selling you know goods or you're a retailer selling you know goods from a trove of different brands um and getting into bed with amazon seems counter to that you know so again i i am not bullish on on SPEAKER_42: buy with prime as as um as an overtaker of this payment space or even the logistic space for that SPEAKER_88: matter this week in startups is supported by first republic bank a seamless banking experience is something we all want but what does it really mean at first republic it means you have access to your own personal banker someone who knows your name and is there for you when you need them so whether you're browsing their full suite of services or just have questions about your bank statement you can reach out to your personal banker by phone or email and through the best in class banking app ashley a managing director on my team has worked with first republic on one of our fun accounts for almost four years and she loves their customer service and support see what a difference and always on seamless banking experience can make for you visit first republic.com today to learn more SPEAKER_12: that's first republic.com member fdic equal housing lender interesting what's this link.co that stripe SPEAKER_26: is doing now i guess they are going to have i i saw they are going to do their own kind of fast SPEAKER_12: checkout i guess are they going to compete against their investment um so mafia does so that i'm not SPEAKER_42: yeah super sure of i'd have to look into that myself um it it does seem like they accelerated checkout was kind of already in their pipeline it just wasn't super like promoted or merchant facing SPEAKER_46: um you know in the way that fast was and bolts is um but it makes sense but again like i said when you SPEAKER_42: have a company like stripe that has an assortment of features um and product offerings it's like how dedicated can they be to just the one click checkout solution you know if if if their bread and butter really is payment processing you know it's like that's that's where these startups are coming SPEAKER_46: in and are are trying to um make a space for themselves is saying that we specialize in these things SPEAKER_42: so you can always count even if you look at shopify's ecosystem it's it's it's really in itself an app SPEAKER_69: store with a bunch of independent vendors right and the reason why that works so well is because those each of those vendors specialize in that feature that that merchant needs you know in a way SPEAKER_42: that stripe maybe may not be able to when it comes to one click specifically so does that partly answer SPEAKER_01: the question of why stripe would fund fast instead of just building this is that what you're saying just keep it simpler by making it a different because that is still an open question right SPEAKER_184: clearly question that is that is a big part of the thing that i know i'm still trying to get answers SPEAKER_42: on and trying to investigate um i know ryan breslow will say that that's just because stripe wanted to come after just to be mean yeah mean and spiteful um i think it is a great question what we've seen with the saga that happened that fast that is that is not what we thought it was which was just a acquisition play which you invest in this company and then eventually you'll acquire it um and so you have those capabilities kind of you know built in whether that company operates independently or whether SPEAKER_46: it's an acquihire that obviously was not the case so their actual intentions to invest in fast remains SPEAKER_190: to be seen at least on my end uh we should talk about the lawsuit molly we talked about this last week SPEAKER_26: this is another crazy wrinkle forever 21's parent company owns five percent or has the option of SPEAKER_12: warrants to buy five percent then they launched a hundred million dollar option to own allegedly do that uh so what's going on with this lawsuit i have we had theories but i'm curious what you think SPEAKER_42: yeah disastrous implementation among other theories as well um my reporting has been focused on the the nuts and the bolts yeah um don't pardon the pun um of the company of bolts business um and not necessarily the lawsuit i mean my st i worked in the story literally a day after the um the bloomberg published a story about the lawsuit um here's the thing when you have SPEAKER_46: brands as big as forever 21 legacy retailer like forever 21 or brands have been around for a long time like lucky um brand and a lot of a lot of abg's portfolio and they're doing online commerce SPEAKER_42: their back-end system could be a mess and trying to integrate you know your checkout solution SPEAKER_46: into those um systems can take a very long time what i understand is from reading the the uh SPEAKER_42: the lawsuit myself um is what bolt was promising in terms of timeline of being able to integrate either just the checkout software itself or a certain feature like loyalty program um into abgs um portfolio companies um online sites and what the timeline that actually ended up happening were different i don't know that that warrants a lawsuit um because that just sounds like the world of startups i mean how many that just sound like just the world of commerce like how many brands are saying you know yeah we're gonna release this car and then it's taking it taking a year because the the software and the the integrations and the reality of bringing things into fruition takes a lot longer um um the epicenter of all this is that five percent ownership thing yeah and that state of play so SPEAKER_46: you're with us on this this is a negotiation yes that's that's where things get interesting to me i can't speak on this so alleged i don't know any of what's going on but it does seem like that five percent ownership stake um that warrant that abg may want to exercise right now SPEAKER_11: um maybe they've been diluted so maybe bolt raised money diluted down that five percent or they're arguing that five percent and there's some contentiousness about this you know 500 million dollar windfall i guess is what it would approximately be worth for this retailer that's like really big money for them and so maybe they're using maybe they said listen we want our 500 million get us out of this or we want to execute on that maybe bolt didn't want them to execute on it who knows uh but they knew they wanted to sell it to somebody so maybe stripe wants to buy that five percent or something you know and they want the option to buy those shares and then sell them and so then this chess game goes on we don't see the chess game we just see the result and the result is hey well you put us in your deck and this is where the securities fraud thing is going to be particularly damaging um this is my observation not i don't think this was in anybody's stories but when they SPEAKER_138: claimed that bolt was raising money based on brands in their deck that uh is it avg the name SPEAKER_42: of this company no abg maybe abg brands group yeah yeah famously bought barney's and then um closed SPEAKER_26: it so that's who did that yeah first dead moment for new york murderers so the observation i had was you know if you raise money on a bogus claim a claim that's not true now other investors can say okay you misrepresented and you know uh you know things don't go well they have this uh claim of securities fraud and they literally this sort of pants right they didn't claim it to be clear like SPEAKER_19: that was a they hinted strongly securities fraud they did say you put in the deck a brand that we didn't even own at the time yes so you made a misrepresentation and so then the interpretation was had SPEAKER_01: bolt raised money off of that yes untrue uh customer base that that could constitute securities fraud what's so interesting is how scorched earth it is so even if abg ends up with the five percent stake that's backdated at a lower valuation and they walk away with somewhere between 300 and 500 million dollars have they put bolt in the ground with this lawsuit just completely disparaging them SPEAKER_42: um yeah so to the point of um alleged securities fraud um i don't know a ton or have substantiating SPEAKER_46: evidence or even substantiated reporting to talk about that but if you're signing on a conglomerate right that owns quite a few brands quite a few companies um touting that partnership as potentially leading to a lot of revenue by being in the checkout solution for most if not all of those merchants in time to me makes sense from for from as a as a if i were fundraising right obviously it remains to be seen or maybe it's out there and i just haven't looked um whether or not they said we actually do have these brands live or can count them as merchants or we have some of them live and they have however many other brands that we also can negotiate to work with um just to show you how much money we can potentially make from just this one partnership right right the latter to me is innocuous the former obviously SPEAKER_01: is a little sketchier um yeah could be actionable well and it sounds like abg may not have cared right that's like because it's not unheard of to puff yourself up in a day a little peek and it's very possible that abg wouldn't have cared had there not been this other several hundred million dollar SPEAKER_77: situation at stake right yeah yeah this is like one of those divorces where like every horrible thing SPEAKER_31: that happened in the marriage is like and by the way there was this time you didn't hold the door for me and uh this happened and that you're like okay guys just get divorced and like let us all be done SPEAKER_01: with this drama yeah right so long term you mentioned you're not that bullish on amazon prime as or buy SPEAKER_51: with prime as competition to bolt bolt according to your story it seems like so far in 2022 the prospects for its revenue growth don't seem to have improved but where do you sit on the competitive SPEAKER_01: landscape in general like could bolt still emerge as a winner or is it all shopify all the time SPEAKER_42: well i mean the shopify pieces is really interesting because ostensibly bolt is you know competing with shopify but and here's how so when we when we did our reporting and we saw that um in the in the first three months of the year it looked like bolt's merchant base had um contracted a bit um and we did i did SPEAKER_46: reporting and realized that you know part of that was just some merchants were migrating to shopify from either big commerce or magenta or one of the e-commerce software platforms they were using before for their storefronts um if a merchant decides it wants to jump ship to shopify bo has a harder time integrating with that canadian giant because shopify doesn't want its clients to use any checkout system outside of shop pay because that's the company's bread and butter um and in some cases both merchants were migrating to shopify from big commerce and magento as i said and this meant that they often had to leave both behind but here's the thing shopify powers mostly small merchants that don't from reporting i've done that don't make a lot of money bulk of their revenue base actually comes from shopify plus for which they have the tens of thousands not millions of merchants right so they actually don't have a monopoly on that space um and bolt is intended on going for encoding merchants that have single digit millions to hundreds of millions of dollars to even billions of dollars in annual sales um so i think you can still compete again i think it's the timeline that it might be promising investors might be promising itself and employees it may be promising reporters the world of when it can scale to you know a huge SPEAKER_42: level to be to justify evaluation in the tens of billions of dollars um versus whether or not it can SPEAKER_46: succeed i think i think this company can succeed i just think that the time especially with the revenue model change the timeline might be a little longer um for it to hit the scale that it might be um hoping to SPEAKER_28: achieve all right this has been amazing great job covering the space uh let us know when you got the next uh when you got the next uh big scoop you ever have this uh you hey did you watch the we SPEAKER_243: crashed did you watch the request uh malik malik malik malik yes yes yes right yes yes yes yes yes yes SPEAKER_245: yes yes if you drink the don julio in 1942 malik you've had it no good stuff have you had the good SPEAKER_247: stuff no yeah i i liked i mean did you what did you all think i like we crashed i loved it so good SPEAKER_42: i'm biased i i think jared leto has one of the most interesting and scary faces but i can't stop staring he's so compelling and hathaway is like the love of my life so i was on board she's love of SPEAKER_254: your life i find her to be like the most annoying person i can't stop watching are you joking i'm SPEAKER_69: leaving this was like i should have i should i should have declined the invitation okay i i should have you should i should have declined the invitation this is blasphemy telling me she doesn't play SPEAKER_259: annoying girlfriend wife really good she she plays everything really good she's an amazing actor she's SPEAKER_42: everything oh my god but yeah i know she she also plays into the trope of of of her as an entity being annoying which she totally is not to me but she does play that up and she does it to SPEAKER_254: incredible effect so i mean i think those two if this was a movie version i would say they should SPEAKER_34: have gotten oscar noms but obviously they should both get amy and odds and i i fabulous performances win everything win everything all right we cannot stop we can't stop thanks for coming on the show a bottle of don julio 1942 should you be allowed to accept it uh he's gotten the way to your house SPEAKER_273: i don't know if you're over 21 or not i appreciate that comment i am thank goodness i was gonna ask SPEAKER_38: that too i'm like i am sitting on the front door of 30 so my birthday was actually this past weekend SPEAKER_42: i turned 29 i'm not 30 yet i had a birthday party with family they're like you're 30 this i'm like stop saying that okay we did not lose that many years to pandemic happy birthday thank you we'll discuss SPEAKER_277: when i was 29 in new york in 1999 man i owned that town i was i was i was running new york man i can SPEAKER_279: imagine i was on charlie rose new yorker feature cover of the new york times running my own magazine SPEAKER_77: man i that was just give malik six more months and he will be right there in new york SPEAKER_108: i think feel like new york's going through a renaissance young people having fun in dime square running around town it's a feels like when new york gets a little bit edgy it's a lot more fun SPEAKER_282: like in the 90s it was edgy it was edgy af as the kids say like i lived in a commercial loft SPEAKER_77: you know like illegally built my own bathroom people were just doing that we would go out to like robot save the robots at 4 a.m to listen to electronic music nobody cared it was like oh SPEAKER_108: you can't serve booze after four o'clock it was like it doesn't matter we're gonna dance until 12 SPEAKER_46: p.m like it was wild yeah stuff like that's still going on it's happening more so in brooklyn than manhattan but that's what i heard stuff like that's still going on when i grew up in brooklyn SPEAKER_254: if you had a brooklyn driver's license and you tried to go to the limelight or palladium SPEAKER_287: or roxy or whatever in manhattan if you gave them your brooklyn license plate they would your um driver's license to hand it back to you and say sorry no b and t SPEAKER_289: so they no bridge and tunnel yeah you weren't allowed so i had to get a fake i went to say mark's place and got a fake nyu thing and you just give your fake nyu student card and they would SPEAKER_12: let you in at that time like they were like we don't care if you're 18 21 whatever do you have 20 bucks you're from brooklyn they did care about that actually yeah they didn't know now you come to SPEAKER_293: brooklyn and you have a manhattan license and they'll turn you away the same thing gross SPEAKER_299: all right malik uh keep up the great work let us know when you got your next super please come back SPEAKER_303: and don julio on the way all right okay thanks for coming take good care it's good bye thanks for SPEAKER_132: coming so good so good enjoy that springtime spring energy in new york spring energy in new york man SPEAKER_305: wow does that guy know it was great i miss new york so much spring in new york is amazing i got this i'm having this like negotiation with my wife i'm like the kids are gone in 12 years 62 years old i SPEAKER_12: want to go back to new york i'm saying just get myself a sick townhouse in greenwich village or like SPEAKER_312: a sick like across some bandits my favorite townhouses in the city are in the village right across from bandits and the village tavern they're so awesome yeah that's what i want just give me one SPEAKER_02: of those and then i'll just be like an old i'll be like 62 and retired talking about past victories investing in people's i'm just saying so much better than austin you went to austin recently or no no i Jason Calacanis: just spent a lot of time in austin and it's great and if i was gonna choose somewhere to end up i would SPEAKER_309: choose brooklyn over by over austin i you know austin's got a really cool it's not brooklyn's great um awesome school but it's like awesome feels like the city of the future like they really do have SPEAKER_63: this we could build and do and it's like literally like a boom town it feels like a boom town like we're going to just build everywhere like everywhere you look trains and things being built and people SPEAKER_11: are like yeah you want to build something approved and they're like no no i i was just coming in here to use the bathroom they're like approved you're like no what do you want to build proof SPEAKER_161: put a condo you're like no i was just going to ask you for direct directions to is there a starbucks around you like approved you want to build a starbucks approved they prove everything i know SPEAKER_322: pretty great which is why it's going to be freaking unlivable and like fire no more livable molly look SPEAKER_286: what they did here when they said no more units and it's like everybody was at each other's throats SPEAKER_51: and then you just slowly kill it i'm just saying every boom bust but brooklyn like new york endures SPEAKER_26: new york endures yeah they they went on a little building um you know run in new york where they're just like in manhattan yeah buy all the rights around you so in manhattan like um if you own like SPEAKER_11: a two-story building you have air rights to 20 let's say and the air rights are pretty generous so then what happens is somebody's like i'm going to buy these five buildings or i'm going to buy the air rights from these four and i'm going to build an 80-story tower and i'll and then you know you're in new york like people are like i can't see the sun they're like go to central park go to the west side SPEAKER_309: highway you don't even see the sun and so it's just a city you want to see the sun that's what the hampsons are for go up to the catskills like you want to see the sun like really cares about the sun like there's plenty of places with sun on the west side highway you know like you watch the sun go SPEAKER_34: down oh my god cares about the sun is my favorite thing that is my favorite san francisco they're like people are trying to build like eight stories to you know and they're like you can build three and they're like why and they're like because you're blocking the sun and they're like where SPEAKER_11: and they're like on this nursery school you know these four kids go out to the backyard and they need sun for this two hours and you're you're reducing it to 90 minutes and like in new york they would be like take those kids to the west side highway and they can have sun or wherever you know like you don't you don't have a god-given right to have the sun everywhere you know like sorry there is SPEAKER_141: there's this concept of shade that's such a like out of context that is the most astonishing that's like a a line from like wally or something you don't have a god-given right to the sun yeah like SPEAKER_333: we just we just put a big-ass umbrella over your city boom you could look up and see the sun at some SPEAKER_334: hour right like you can go onto 14th street if you look straight up there's like 45 minute window SPEAKER_154: where the sun's over you other than that yeah you're not your name it's a goddamn city yeah i don't mean this to sound like an argument against density i'm pro density bring on the building for god's SPEAKER_132: sake all right in other news um i was really busy this weekend uh rescuing kittens i don't need a medal SPEAKER_12: but we we saved you know did you save them four of them didn't make it two of them did um but we it was a really hard decision molly because i'm reading i don't know i'm not a cat person in SPEAKER_31: fact i just i kind of don't like cats although these two kittens are winning my hearts everyone SPEAKER_161: always says that at first yeah exactly so that we hear these crying kittens like all day long SPEAKER_11: yesterday we kind of find them in the in the ivy in the backyard so i'm reading online it's like stay away the mom will be back in somewhere between like 2 and 12 hours and uh so we're like oh god did we scare the mom away what's going on here we're waiting we're waiting we're trying to figure it out i'm getting advice online long story short uh you're not supposed to screw with the kittens until it gets cold or they're in danger so it's getting a little cold it's overnight they're still yelping and that means they're in distress so you know 10 o'clock at night or so we we go start cutting SPEAKER_26: out cutting the um the ivy and my my daughter uh the 12 year old finds two of the six still alive uh four of them didn't make it sadly um which is crushing um but uh we saved the two thank god we were home if we had been in you know tahoe or away they would have just all six that would have died uh sadly but the mom obviously abandoned them for some reason we don't know or maybe the mom's in distress herself we got the two uh and overnight we fed them and they're thriving again they're moved they weren't moving when we took them out of there and they were trapped in the ivy when my my family took them out my wife and my daughter but they're alive and uh we're gonna have two cats up for adoption probably in six weeks or so we gotta nurse them back to health and they're eating and they're SPEAKER_00: moving around climbing but their eyes are shut so cute babies that is so darling and such a good deed and there's no situation there's no chance you're putting them up for adoption no 100 they're not saying because i'm getting another bulldog so i'm gonna have a pair of bulldogs here who will eat SPEAKER_01: them and then you're gonna have one of those really cute um instagram accounts where the kittens and the bulldog snuggle because if you get a puppy and then you have maybe kitties i'm allergic to cats i'm not gonna eat each other i'm allergic to cats but anyway my exposure will cure that SPEAKER_63: i'm trying to you know watch the warriors game take care of my kids so much birthday party i had a SPEAKER_286: boredom philosophy bomb call this weekend i got a lot on my plate you're very busy too SPEAKER_51: no i was like it was like i'm adding to it by lobbying philosophy bombs into the group chat like SPEAKER_26: it's not oh my god with the philosophy here we go oh my lord and like everybody's trying to figure out people's motivation anyway putting all this aside um my feed is like going crazy with the SPEAKER_12: board ape maker yugo labs you know being cancelled and the crypto people losing their minds and you know i just was like i can't figure this out because you know when something happens in crypto it's like it's so complicated if you're not it's like people who are watching like nba twitter or you're watching soccer twitter and you don't know the names the teams and everything going on and you're trying to back into it on twitter you ever try to do that mm-hmm and you're like can somebody just explain this to me it's like oh yeah it's too early to explain it but we need to explain this because this is a really um interesting story uh around web3 uh still trying to get the rails and the plumbing working maybe you could explain to people they've heard of the board ape yacht club that's the nft collective called yuga labs yep they decided to do another project and then something went wrong can SPEAKER_01: you explain to us what happened molly yes i can explain it in uh by paraphrasing the notie gangs uh james who says yuga labs shat the bed ah it was a shatting it was a shatting i think that it was SPEAKER_52: a shatting or medium shatting pretty pretty like a pretty grande like bigger than a poop bag shatting SPEAKER_01: um so they amber herded the bed got it keep going so yuga labs minted a land sale SPEAKER_141: i guess like basically had a huge drop right they sold these uh a huge drop a huge drop of of shat tens of thousands of plots of like i think land in the metaverse if i understand it but did it all SPEAKER_01: at once and so then everybody went crazy trying to buy it and then there was this 120x surge pricing for ethereum gas transactions because as everybody tried to jump on and buy these plots like yay we're getting we're gonna get it then it the network was overloaded as i understand it and so gas fees at some point yuga labs raised 285 million dollars by selling these 55 000 new nfts at 7 thousand thousand dollars each but the gas fees cost the buyers 176 million at some point i think gas fees were like up to six thousand dollars per transaction oh okay great which was bananas people SPEAKER_19: paid it anyway because they're so desperate to get anything that yugo labs does they were willing to pay a fee of 50 or up to 100 apparently in transaction charges right which is quite paradoxical SPEAKER_138: because the whole concept of cryptocurrency is that you are going to be eliminating fees and lowering fees and making the war and and fighting the power why can't the fees be less than visa like this is the great failing of crypto you all have to get your together right and stop grifting because this is SPEAKER_368: two levels of grift in my mind one the nfts themselves yuga sold plots of land worth nothing SPEAKER_309: virtual for hundreds of millions of dollars that have no purpose in the world i know that they will have some purpose someday maybe perhaps you put your vr headset and go in there where they're collectibles SPEAKER_96: but let's be honest they're selling vapor and then on top of selling the vapor people had to pay huge SPEAKER_141: fees to buy nothing because this is why people hate web3 i mean it really is because the fees themselves SPEAKER_01: are are variable right so they rise and fall according to capacity if again if i am understanding that correctly and this is a large if so that when there's limited capacity yeah so there's a supply and demand in what is basically taxes it's like i feel like ticket master looked at what happened over the SPEAKER_374: weekend and was like oh hot damn we're doing that yeah i mean right now i'm sorry is like and you guys SPEAKER_223: hate us right what totally this was the ultimate surge pricing that is the perfect metaphor for this that's exactly what happened and you know ticket master was like oh hell yeah we're doing this next time so then jason in our group chat today rolls in with the best shot in the group chat now okay that's fair game let's go molly classics they're not all 14 year old boy jokes either um and says hey why don't this is like i love it when it's the most obvious easy perfect question ever well why don't they just release their big drops over 24 or 48 hours to keep the gas fees down obvious SPEAKER_34: right we don't even know i demand and the network is surging right like what travis did was and i SPEAKER_11: collaborated with him on this and back in the day was he wrote a blog post about search pricing on new year's eve and how to avoid search pricing and he's like you know get to your party before eight o'clock or nine o'clock because everybody's going to the party at 10 o'clock 11 o'clock to get there right before the ball drops and then you know if you leave the party uh you know an hour later you know you know SPEAKER_26: at 1 a.m you're going to do better than leaving in 12 midnight to one am so if they just said listen we SPEAKER_12: have a thousand i don't know how many of these nfts they dropped but let's say it was a thousand well in 24 hour period right you know you just release whatever it is per hour 45 000 yeah yeah i mean SPEAKER_51: it must have it had to have been pure hubris one thinks so like producer justin because we don't SPEAKER_01: honestly know justin producer justin saying well one way other projects have managed this is with an off-chain reservation system again just like buying tickets right when like when you really want those hamilton tickets you could go online and get into a queue and then when it was your turn yes but i think that would just be too centralized of a system so in this case they let the market work it out and drop their 55 000 once and just you know because the centralized system would make more sense SPEAKER_384: they make it more efficient because it has to be centralized it has to yeah this is like if you SPEAKER_11: went to the you know you go to the deli and they give you pull the number now serving number 32 like that exists for a reason you know like and this would be like if you pulled that ticket and they're like now serving who's willing to pay four thousand dollars to get a bagel and you're like just like SPEAKER_389: let people queue it's not the end of the world i don't think it's the end of the world i don't SPEAKER_01: know yeah anyway it just apparently uh went bananas i can't honestly though even tell if the crypto SPEAKER_31: world is mad about this or if they just went ahead and paid people were on fire but so they sold 55 000 SPEAKER_154: nfts for hundreds of millions of dollars and 150 and 176 million of those dollars were taxes Jason Calacanis: basically were ticket fees or ticket master fees got it that varied according to demand okay it is what it is it is what it is like if you're i guess the crypto space didn't like this but 55 000 people bought or wallets 55 000 wallets bought these things so this is i am totally going just great SPEAKER_26: i am totally for variable pricing um and i just don't like this price gouging of fees so you know here's another idea they could have made this an auction uh and they could have said you know here we have 55 000 of these and just say what you're willing to pay and uh what's the max you're willing to pay for one and how many do you want and then just let the auction do it uh so you know there's that way to do it too you could do a drop you can do an auction if you want to maximize price i guess doing a drop is the most fair way to do it um but who knows i'm sure there's all kinds of developers who have ways to sniping you know these sales and sniper tools so it generally isn't fair the fairest way to do that is to let people sign up i guess with phone numbers emails reservations and do a reservation system check and then limit the number they can do or what they could do is just SPEAKER_11: not let people sell these for one year uh that's another possibility so you lose the flipping there's all kinds of ways to do this what the grateful dead we used to do was you would send the grateful dead um a an envelope with stamps on it and a money order and it was a little bit uh and you know they would i guess sort them alphabetize them whatever it was just harder to do this and if you were part of the collective uh that wanted dead tickets they did their own ticketing and they would SPEAKER_394: sell you the tickets directly um and then some of them would go to ticket master or whatever but they SPEAKER_19: wanted to make sure real fans could buy them and uh okay yeah so there you have it evidently solana went down at the same time because i'm you know i got a bunch of venture friends who invested in solana SPEAKER_394: or the funds that invested in solana um was that related well no it wasn't related except that web3 Chamath Palihapitiya: took two shots in the bed now it was a double deuce it was a double shouting and double deuce yeah it was a SPEAKER_334: bad weekend but solana going down is is related in that solana was supposed to be faster cheaper SPEAKER_26: transactions to compete against ethereum right ethereum i don't know what's going on here that SPEAKER_394: they can't keep solana up and running but they can't keep it this is like the second or third time SPEAKER_63: they've had a big outage which i guess could be expected you know the big picture here for me molly SPEAKER_26: is at what point are people going to ship something other than nfts and money store and this is uh i think right it's web3's do or die moment i think i think this is all going to collapse in the next year so you can bank this as a as a prediction so i hope i don't professor galloway this but i think that the free money in the economy uh you know and the pandemic ending and then people having other things to spend money on and inflation is going to make this asset class you know and any other speculative assets class it could be stonks you know like gamestop it could be crypto and it could also be SPEAKER_19: watches and other stuff i think this category of you know let's call it highly speculative highly speculative assets is going to move to well i have to live my life and i got bills to pay and so SPEAKER_11: maybe i have half as much money for this and if everybody has half as much money for this a third as much money for this well then people are going to be more discerning so you might not see it in SPEAKER_26: yugo labs properties you might not see it in bitcoin ethereum but you might see it in other projects where people's you know uh propensity to just buy the stuff yolo and speculate i think people are going to start going to vegas again and you know go into basketball games and just enjoying life so crypto really needs at this moment in time to really start providing value so if this yugo lab stuff is going to have a value in the world like video games that they're you know in these worlds are going to be actually have some thing other than collectability to them i would highly recommend to anybody who's a crypto founder to ship product that provides value in the world and enough with the selling of assets before you provide value in the world that's the fundamental problem i have with a lot of these things is they're selling like this project you know these plots of lands are going to be worth something these nfts are going to back into something you better provide something quick because SPEAKER_12: people can only spend so much money on this bull until they demand some value and i think we're SPEAKER_154: we're getting to that point i often think about the interview that we ran that i did with elise colleen who was a she was part of the first time fund manager angel series but what was so interesting SPEAKER_01: is that she you know has raised this fund it's almost like there's a serious side of the crypto world SPEAKER_51: and an unserious side of the crypto world and she was like we are laser focused on the bitcoin network the lightning network the value that bitcoin provides as potentially currency contracts and a fundamental technological underpinning that could be applied to almost every business she's like we're laser focused on figuring out where you build value on chain versus where you don't and we're SPEAKER_01: not around with any of that other crap that other crap is like how it's all going to get sorted or its reputation will be ruined but i think that is fundamentally the unserious side it's the gambling it's sort of like art for profit but what's so interesting is how much money is headed into the unserious side and i just sort of feel like at the end of the day elise is going to be standing there alone having ignored all of the sound creating actual value and i'm just super interested to like SPEAKER_394: stalk her through this whole development i want you to listen to that she was listening to a podcast um where uh wiesenthal uh was talking to levine uh what's the full joe wiesenthal from bloomberg has a SPEAKER_416: podcast that i'm actually going to go on and um talking to matt matt levine yeah he's so good SPEAKER_12: he's pretty funny cat and he was basically explaining how like yield farming works and it was SPEAKER_11: like yeah people put money into a box and get more money out and there's some tokens and it was like yeah he kind of literally described a ponzi scheme and he's like but you know the box at some point will provide value but for now the box it's the odd locks podcast shout out to the podcast which i think SPEAKER_26: i'm going to be on next week or this week or something sweet uh presh can let me know i i said yes i i don't have time to do all the pockets because you and i are doing this and if i have opinions i was injured here but i like to saw lots podcast um and uh yeah it was a pretty wild exchange where people are yield farming and i was talking to somebody who's a high stakes poker player i wouldn't say his name but he stopped playing poker because he's making so money off this yield farming stuff and i was like can you explain it to me he's like not really uh they need money for liquidity i give them money they give me more money than i gave them and so it's more profitable than paying high stakes poker and i'm like one of the world's greatest high stakes poker players you've made SPEAKER_394: uh well i want to say the number because you could reveal it but let's just say tens of millions of dollars playing high stakes poker around the world yeah and uh he's just at a better table right now but SPEAKER_28: he'll be back at your table soon enough he was at our table and we were having a good time but he's like yeah i'm just not playing as much poker because you know this is just too easy i was like SPEAKER_375: okay right when the poker players are like this is too easy you know the grinders who are playing SPEAKER_28: people in macau you know it's a little bit of a where's the old uh yeah sorry need to unravel this SPEAKER_425: oh yeah it's been totally i have to red flags folks i have flags flags are everywhere all right SPEAKER_426: what's else what else is in the news uh crypto people please provide value but it's good that they're stress testing it i will say that well yeah exactly we're gonna figure out if there's value SPEAKER_51: thanks to a bunch of dum-dums like well also like things go down and their money is not our problem SPEAKER_11: twitter i mean facebook was born out of the fact that they couldn't keep myspace and uh uh friendster SPEAKER_26: up and running and they're like oh yeah we use this new software we can keep it up and running and you know zuckerberg just stole their businesses out from under them because it was faster google search SPEAKER_11: speed was like their number one way to increase usage right gmail number one way to increase usage they made it faster than other email programs superhuman same thing make it faster make it better SPEAKER_26: and stress tested and twitter had the farewell for years right so solana having their own SPEAKER_36: farewell moment is fine it means that there's something at stake and they'll figure it out hopefully SPEAKER_01: i think the idea of like a currency that you can trade across borders the you know way to send remittances to people without banks taking you know giant gas fees so to speak like all of that or even this idea of the blockchain oracle like a ground truth of data that can live on chain and and not be faked like there's a lot of business value there that will eventually be created and and what i think is happening on the other side right now is like a lot of noise that i'm gonna i'm gonna SPEAKER_154: i'm gonna try to understand this deep and that and then move on okay it's my plan we live in the SPEAKER_01: future with today's startup of the day gravity sketch which makes a 3d design platform similar to how figma is a 2d design platform so apparently the big problem it's solving is the process of taking a sketch like oh i drew a sketch of how this building should look and then converting it into a digital file SPEAKER_34: in a team setting right so i use figma all the time now because the designers at inside.com that SPEAKER_26: are building our you know social news you know community and social network uh send me figma designs and i look at them and i make notes on them so it's a way to look at mock-ups of a website or an app give commentary iterate on them see different versions so this is doing this for SPEAKER_01: vr i guess yeah virtual spaces so you take a little sketch so let's say like i had some landscaping work done not that like a year ago or something right and you made this nice it was just like a crayon he sketch like and there's going to be a tree here and whatever but if you could put that sketch in and then i put on a virtual reality headset and then i walk through my awesome new landscape got it SPEAKER_141: virtually kitchen here's then i would just be like take my money i mean honestly this would sell projects SPEAKER_394: like crazy i bet yeah let's see the video yeah let's watch the video here and see what we're working with if you uh don't get the video version of the show spotify and uh has video now and apple pockets has always had video just search for this video and then you can go to youtube.com this weekend but SPEAKER_51: let's keep the video they have while we're waiting for the video uh a hundred thousand users including SPEAKER_01: the product design teams at adidas vw and reebok you could imagine doing pretty cool car design stuff here the software is available for oculus meta it's got a four and a half out of five star rating with 999 ratings so almost every customer has apparently just kidding um and then it's london based recently raised a 33 million dollar series a led by excel okay let's sports get this here is joey SPEAKER_444: uh who's a footwear designer at uh footwear designer for kanye and he's sketching a pair of SPEAKER_01: easies turning into a shoe yeah there you go these are always unrecognizable as shoes so that's why it's David Friedberg: a little hard to tell what this can turn into i wear my easies and they're completely nick bought me SPEAKER_26: a pair of easies they're completely ugly and i get so many compliments on them and i look at them and i'm like SPEAKER_01: why do you people like these these are every time i see somebody in like the world's weirdest looking shoe and i'm like what has happened then my son's like look those easies okay so now we're seeing also car sketch uh happening so it literally is just like it's a pencil sketch right and then boom it SPEAKER_394: turns into a concept car love it and then when it's a concept car are you using your i guess you're using uh the handles that you use with your quest if you're using the quest from oculus to then you know pull out the fenders make create flares you know like the corvette has uh you know we can kind of flare out some air intakes or you know move the car around and make it longer or shorter it's pretty SPEAKER_165: pretty interesting i mean i guess what this would do for businesses too is save them so much money in SPEAKER_01: autocad like there's no this takes out a whole entire uh art department for one thing yeah SPEAKER_19: well i think no no what it does is it i think it's different what it does is it takes the principles SPEAKER_11: who are involved in decisions and lets them collaborate in real time so remember when you would have somebody would bring out like write a word document print it out go to a meeting everybody's got their red pens they make a bunch of edits and then somebody puts those back in the document and then they're like hey you know what you could do is we could all edit a document real time and they're like wait what version do you have you're like no it's there is no more versions it's one living document and i can see you in the document and you know that's when like google docs real-time collaboration i guess zoho was one of the first to have that this is you know the designers usually making the this car but the person who's the driver of the car or the ceo or the chief product officer or the coo you know they don't get to go in there and edit unless they're over the shoulder SPEAKER_19: here everybody gets to edit i guess in real time or make notes on it or even see it develop in real SPEAKER_01: time so you so you cut out that long thing where it's like we worked really hard and we used autocad and we made this thing and then you present it to the ceo and they're like hate it yeah this i mean SPEAKER_26: this is what we do with you hate it earlier envision and figma are the two leading for web design where you can go in and watch the designer make the website they're making different versions of it and uh you know i'm always making notes about the copy or i make a note and i'm like hey this is three steps can you make it one step so all i'm doing now with the inside.com social network that i made is trying to figure out how to make every action one you know two ones you know if it's four steps make it two if it's two make it one and uh it just takes a whole you have to change everybody's thinking because everybody's like okay yeah step one this step two step three i'm like are you using the site like do you want to do three steps or can i just like SPEAKER_11: have a button so what i did was i said here's a list of our newsletters just click subscribe and they're like yeah put your email in and then click subscribe and then get a catch bomb like no you're already logged in just click subscribe and they're like okay well for events and then they show me this like seven step events i'm like why don't you put rsvp for events they click rsvp it sends them an email with the details of the event and then refreshes that little page and says add to your calendar or invite a friend and they're like oh wow that's genius i'm like is it isn't that modern apps work but it's not how old modern apps right everybody makes things three steps SPEAKER_467: yeah as we were talking about three steps so why change it or you try to do something SPEAKER_11: comprehensive and like so there could be legitimate like well what if i accidentally plus the rsvp button i'm like what if you did i'm like okay then just say you know on rsvp you know put that on the page or in the email say if you don't want to come click here but you know like let let let people run let SPEAKER_19: people click things you know and make it no steps and then i like did the same for moderation so for SPEAKER_11: moderation this is something i want to mock up for elon and for the twitter team like for bots when somebody replies with a bot it should just say if if the algorithm thinks it might be a bot right because they reply to elon or jack or me with cryptocurrency giveaway and it has cryptocurrency giveaway bitcoin giveaway free any of those words in it it should just have a thing that says uh is this a bot do you think this is a bot and you're like prob yes definitely probably don't know you just have three words now you're scrolling through it costs nothing for a human to click definitely SPEAKER_138: and you know you get three definitely's it goes to it gets turned off it goes to review it gets SPEAKER_26: paused whatever shadow banned whatever uh and or it collapses and says three people reported this as bots and you can unclick it or the person can say you know whatever appeal that they're not a bot it'd be a lot easier i didn't you know all the and then when you report something SPEAKER_12: i don't did you give up on reporting tweets on twitter ages ago i see i think that the twitter SPEAKER_19: team was like you know what would be good if you did all the work right and they're like well i'm not doing that report you know like click the hamburger the you know three dots click report who are you reporting for me somebody else who are you what is this how much is this do you want to block them it's just like do you want me to email you later and we can talk about this SPEAKER_475: it's eight steps to your house right like no it's eight steps eight steps too many you should be able SPEAKER_138: to report it and it should just say um report and block you hit report and block it's reported and SPEAKER_11: blocked and then it says would you like to give us more information so you can one click report and SPEAKER_12: block now you know just how many people reported and blocked it a hundred and then six of them you don't need everybody to put the details in but there's six maniacs to put the details in just like SPEAKER_11: wikipedia so they're just not thinking through the user experience of how to make things SPEAKER_26: simpler for users yeah so on my system when i'm building an insight is and i'm testing it with our internal people if you see somebody report something if you go to inside.com slash new you SPEAKER_11: can see this if it's self-promotional you just click report and it shows you five report types uh spam low quality source uh duplicate self-promotional and so when i'm on the site i'm just like beep self-promotional beep self-promotional we're not you're not supposed to submit your own stories kind of or you know like press releases or spam and so i'm just like boop self-promotion and then it puts SPEAKER_309: a flag on it self-promotional and now people can see on your profile that you submitted something SPEAKER_19: self-promotional um and then that makes you not do it again so imagine if on your profile name and SPEAKER_11: showed uh well consequences you know it's like so if it showed on your profile reported for harassment or suspended for harassment on this date you could click it and you could see here's why you were supported for harassment on twitter and here's your response to it and here's how many people reported you for harassment and for what tweet like that'd be pretty great like if people supported it reported me for SPEAKER_19: harassment for doing my uh you know um tweet with somebody sent me images of me and sacks and broke back mountain and i was like this is pretty hilarious uh if somebody's like oh my god sacks was like you harassed me for that i'd be like okay great you know like i was reporting you can actually see it SPEAKER_11: that's the problem and i i i did that did you do that shadow banning thing to see if you've been shadow banned the twitter website no so it turns out like my some of my replies have been shadow SPEAKER_19: thing oh well i follow a lot of people um so i think it's like if you replies to you no i replied SPEAKER_11: to your replies to them were shadow banned yeah so if i reply to people what are you saying they found examples of my replies not coming up in other people's threads which is like a light shadow ban it's like you can still see my stuff if you follow me but if i reply to some high profile person maybe people don't see this is the kind of weird thing that should be just you should all know about yeah SPEAKER_488: yeah it should just be transparent because all it's doing is creating this culture of like SPEAKER_19: you know oh they're banning the libs they're betting the right wing they're banning this group they're banning that group it's just like just make it transparent like just let people know and let SPEAKER_43: the person know that they've been banned or reported i think that's part of the i'm telling you i SPEAKER_01: think this is why reddit works and why wikipedia works like you have first of all with wikipedia you have an army of editors who care about you have transparency every edit is on the record you have an army of people who only care about the truth and on reddit you have upvoting and downvoting like you have community level moderation which is all you know at some point we just all want to be like this guy's an we'll get rid of him yeah let us do that yeah i i don't know assuming we know SPEAKER_389: it's a real person and not a bot and then once that's solved they have downvoting on i know they SPEAKER_43: were experimenting with downvoting on twitter i think the downvoting i think they decided it's SPEAKER_496: negative and that's just so hilarious i think youtube made like oh yeah there's nothing else SPEAKER_473: negative going on there like give me i like the downvotes on youtube it was like a great signal i SPEAKER_223: know that could be like and then use it as a signal to the algorithm and not bullying and like SPEAKER_19: it's i don't know yeah i know i like the downvoting on youtube i like to see on my videos which ones were downvoted i do like downvoting with um transparency so if you down maybe maybe the SPEAKER_12: solution is if you downvote you have to put your name on it yeah because that's kind of cool that could work okay i'm going to add that to i'm going to add that to inside where you downvote and your name's on it and you can see why yeah oh really so if you downvoted it you have the option to say SPEAKER_473: right i think it's a low quality news source or low quality news source right or yeah okay somebody make them take a memo remind me of that it's a good idea product we're doing a little product design SPEAKER_506: here at the end of the show in real time like you do we got a big week a lot of news uh so stick with us and we'll see you on the next episode tomorrow