SPEAKER_00: This Week in Startups is brought to you by RxBar. Turns out real food ingredients actually taste really good. For 25% off your first order, visit rxbar.com slash twist and enter promo code twist at checkout. And ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire. Twist listeners can try ZipRecruiter for free. Go to ziprecruiter.com slash twist.

SPEAKER_03: Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of This Week in Startups, the podcast we've been doing for almost a decade. Where we talk to founders, journalists, investors about the technology and startup industry. Today on the program, back for his probably 20th. I've been on a lot. You've been on a lot. Is my longtime collaborator, longtime friend, Peter Rojas. Of course, he's a partner at Betaworks now doing investing. But previously, he founded Gizmodo and Engadget. And he's going to announce today that he has bought the Gizmodo Media Group. Congratulations. Congratulations.

SPEAKER_07: Let's not get ahead of ourselves. I saw that tweet.

SPEAKER_08: I got a lot of interesting DMs from that. Let's put it that way. Let's do it. We're sliding in. Yeah. Woo. TPG slide into your DMs. So it's, I think it would be too expensive.

SPEAKER_14: What would it go for, Gizmodo? They paid $120 for the Gizmodo collection.

SPEAKER_16: I think it's $135 for the whole thing.

SPEAKER_14: $135.

SPEAKER_17: It's collapsed. Yeah. It's probably doing $20 or $30 million in revenue.

SPEAKER_18: The whole group or Gizmodo?

SPEAKER_20: It's just individually.

SPEAKER_17: The whole group. The whole group. Probably $30 or $40.

SPEAKER_20: I don't know. Somewhere in that low tens of millions. I would guess probably around there. What do you think it sells for? $50? $100? I don't know.

SPEAKER_23: I mean, it's a decaying brand. I mean, multiples are hard to, they can be opaque, but I think the acquisition of Quartz recently is, how much was that for? I think it was 2.5X. Yeah. That's incredible. Top line. Top line. So it was, I think it was sold for $1.15. Yeah. Someone's going to fact check me on this.

SPEAKER_28: A Japanese app company? A Japanese company bought it. It was for $1.15 and they had like $40.

SPEAKER_03: Way to go for Bradley over at Atlantic Group because that was like a spin out of the Atlantic Group. Yep. And he was losing so much money off the Atlantic and this little Hail Mary Quartz.

SPEAKER_23: It worked out really well. It's a great product. It is. And I think they found a good acquisition. I think that it starts to call into question the valuations of things like Vice and Vox and BuzzFeed.

SPEAKER_32: We'll get to that. Okay. Speaking of which, Teddy Schleifler is here for the first time. Schleifler. Correct. Got it. And he's a senior editor of finance and influence.

SPEAKER_03: What does that even mean? I don't even know.

SPEAKER_35: Sounds good though. Who cares?

SPEAKER_03: Okay. At Recode. And before that, he was a political reporter at CNN. Welcome to the show for the first time.

SPEAKER_37: Since we're talking about media, let's just get right into it there.

SPEAKER_39: Gawker got bought for $1.35 by the founder of Bustle, who is super hated, previously SB Nation. Yeah. Right.

SPEAKER_41: What is that about? Why did he buy it? Because they relentlessly tortured him, which, I mean, they relentlessly tortured everybody on that side. But, I mean, him in particular.

SPEAKER_42: Us, Hume, Hume.

SPEAKER_41: We got dragged a little bit.

SPEAKER_45: Yeah.

SPEAKER_43: But, why do you think you have any backchannel on your day?

SPEAKER_48: I don't have any backchannel. I mean, it's a bankrupt. I mean, it costs only a million bucks. So, right. I mean...

SPEAKER_43: A million three five. I mean, it's got a million uniques a month for her.

SPEAKER_48: It's like a spending, you know.

SPEAKER_49: No, it's not a ton of money. But he said he's not going to publish to it. So, what's the plan?

SPEAKER_15: I thought about it. I thought it would have gone for a little bit more. Two or three. Yeah.

SPEAKER_53: That's how I was saying two.

SPEAKER_54: I'm not sure what's going on there. I mean, you can certainly see that you could throw some Google AdWords on there and... Maybe. ...run, you know. Maybe.

SPEAKER_17: But I'm not sure you'd ever make... I had a simple plan. This is my simple plan.

SPEAKER_14: Let me run it up the flagpole, see if anybody salutes. You buy Gawker.

SPEAKER_55: And then you put a disclaimer when you come to the page that, you know, Gawker was a little bit enthusiastic about their coverage. And sometimes they stepped over certain lines. And you can now read the archives by just watching this interstitial.

SPEAKER_37: And if you want to take this page down, it's $10,000. And just anybody who is... Just ransomware. $10,000 per page. Wait, isn't that the... Just ransomware.

SPEAKER_57: Yeah, wasn't that the revenge porn strategy? Basically.

SPEAKER_58: It's like Gawker revenge porn. Revenge porn strategies. Literally. Because you'd have... If it was $1,000 per page, you'd have to think about it.

SPEAKER_14: If you were one of the people who they...

SPEAKER_41: You know, if you're Julia Allison and they did 18 stories on you, you might be like, you know what?

SPEAKER_61: I want to get that scrubbed.

SPEAKER_54: I think that the move is you create a law firm and then they run ads. You want your story off Gawker? $5,000. We'll get it off. Well, you said earlier...

SPEAKER_20: That's what the revenge porn sites would do. They would set up these like fake law firms. Fake law firms to...

SPEAKER_03: Wow, that's pretty brutal. Well, what do you think about that Quartz sale in relation to... We'll leave Vox out of it since we go to it's owned by Vox. But let's just talk about the two. Let's talk about the two that are just above Vox in terms of valuation. Insane valuation for Vice.

SPEAKER_69: I don't know where that peaked at. Four? Four or five. Four or five. That's insane.

SPEAKER_16: And that story that just came out... Was that in New York Magazine about how it's essential? I mean, look, I wrote for Vice.

SPEAKER_54: When it was a Canadian company in print. No, when it was mainly a magazine in 2002 or 2003. They never paid me. I did get published in the magazine a few times. But it was always a Ponzi scheme. At the time, they were like, our plan here is to find somebody dumb who will basically pay us money because they think we're cool.

SPEAKER_23: And then everybody just wants to find somebody dumber to pay our valuation.

SPEAKER_75: And in this case, the dumbest people were the media companies who invested the last time?

SPEAKER_48: I think the last round was TPG was the last round. But, I mean, I thought the exit there has always been speculated it would be Disney. Because I think Disney's an investor, if I recall correctly.

SPEAKER_78: And then with both Fox and BuzzFeed, the speculation has always been about NBC. Because that's an investor in those two. But, yeah, BuzzFeed was playing an IPO last year. But they didn't hit their numbers.

SPEAKER_76: I mean, I don't think they've even hired bankers yet.

SPEAKER_54: So, we're close. But, I mean, the idea that Vice is worth $5 billion.

SPEAKER_23: Look, Disney bought Lucasfilm for $4 billion. And the idea that Vice... Yeah.

SPEAKER_82: I think it was... What was it for Marvel? 304, too. Yeah. Star Wars. Yeah, it was all 304. Pixar. Yeah.

SPEAKER_83: It just... I mean, Vice's revenue is just not enough. No. Being able to justify that kind of valuation.

SPEAKER_55: Also, I thought it was kind of one trick. Like, they never got out of that, like, gonzo journalism.

SPEAKER_39: Like, we're going to go put ourselves in harm's way. Or drop a bunch of acid in a Russian nuclear underground missile silo. Like, you're like, okay, I get it.

SPEAKER_23: My favorite thing that came out of that story, that New York Magazine story, is that it turns out that in the surveys of... I think they served as 18s of what their coolest and least cool brands are.

SPEAKER_54: And Vice was ranked the least cool brand. Trying too hard. TTH. Yeah. They're thirsty. But it's also associated with people my age, right? Our age. Like, Gen Xers. It's like...

SPEAKER_91: We are so uncool now.

SPEAKER_54: Yeah. Well, I mean, we'll set that aside for another discussion. Yeah. But... To them. Yeah. To them.

SPEAKER_23: But, you know, I think that it's just something where it was a media... It was a brand that is associated with a certain period of time. Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_17: And we're past that time now. Yeah.

SPEAKER_55: It always is like that with those kind of brands. Like, Esquire, Spy, all these magazines kind of had their run.

SPEAKER_41: You get, like, a decade or two, you know? You get, like, this prime decade, and then you get, like, the decade... Half a decade before and after paper magazine, whatever it is. Yeah. And you have to time the sale perfectly.

SPEAKER_03: If you look at this last, the last cohort, Huffington Post and Business Insider both sold in the $300 million range with $30 million in revenue or whatever it was. So, 10X. Perfectly timed. Now, you look at Gawker. Yeah. Sold for $135 plus one.

SPEAKER_95: Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: Give half to... Give half of it to Hulk Hogan and Pure Teal. Yeah. So, Denton owns 60% and then probably less after he took that big $50 million venture on.

SPEAKER_99: Yeah, because that was... They were first in the stash.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah. So, the $50 million comes off the $70. So, there's probably $20 million left to the shareholders. So, I would guess Denton got $10? Between $10 and $15, probably. Yeah.

SPEAKER_101: If he had sold it the year before, he would have owned 70% and it would have gone for $300 million. He would have gotten $200 million. Yeah.

SPEAKER_103: Probably.

SPEAKER_104: And this is the lesson for founders. Like, when you get offered an outrageous prize, you have to seriously consider it. Yeah. But Henry Blodgett timed it better than anybody.

SPEAKER_107: Oh, absolutely.

SPEAKER_104: Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: All right. Let's talk about tech. Enough about this media nonsense. Magic Leap is raising money again and they did a deal with AT&T, an exclusive wireless distributor in the US and they invested an undisclosed amount and the CEO of AT&T is getting board observer rights and...

SPEAKER_113: Not even a board seat.

SPEAKER_03: Just observer rights. Yes.

SPEAKER_113: Well, they're not leaning around, right? It's the later stage. No, I know. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: They're not leaning around. It's the later stage. And here is the video. Can we play the video of the Magic Leap demo? And what did you think of this? Underwhelming? Or interesting?

SPEAKER_117: It looks like the HoloLens to me. Yeah. The thing that's hard to tell from these videos is the full field of view because they deliberately pick... Like, if you look at the way that they're tracking, they're not showing... They're keeping the object in the center.

SPEAKER_23: Yeah, exactly. And so they're not... It's not like VR where you have this full sort of 105, 110 degree field of view of the experience. Got it.

SPEAKER_20: I think the HoloLens is maybe like 23, 25 degrees. Got it. Magic Leap is probably going to be similar. So the field of view matters.

SPEAKER_117: Why? Why? Because it has to do with how much you have to move your head to kind of keep the objects within range. Ah.

SPEAKER_17: So it breaks reality. A little bit. Yeah. I had that experience with the HoloLens where like I would move too fast and I would lose everything and oh, everything pops back up.

SPEAKER_23: Well, it's... I mean, that tracking is a slightly different thing, but it just means about like, you know, how much of the virtual experience can you, you know, see?

SPEAKER_68: Got it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: So if you're playing the Walking Dead AR, zombies can only come directly at you.

SPEAKER_54: Well, they can be everywhere in the space, but it's just about what you can see.

SPEAKER_126: So it's a little bit like, if I could just see you... We're blinders on it. Yeah. It's a little bit like that. Yeah.

SPEAKER_37: Wider than blinders. Yeah. So is Magic Leap, Teddy, in your estimation, a complete and utter fraud in Theranos? Or is it, in your professional opinion, is it Theranos? Is it overvalued?

SPEAKER_128: Or is it too soon to tell? Well, it's probably too soon to tell. I mean, sadly. I mean, it's...

SPEAKER_78: I feel like with Theranos, there was an actual example of fraudulent behavior and there was a product that you could assess as a fraud, right? Here, it's just a pre-product company valued at billions of dollars, right? Yeah. So I think we can see, once there's actual output, whether the inputs were worth it. Right. But I don't think it's at Theranos level. I mean, that would have to be... Right. It would have to be a fuck up.

SPEAKER_129: And here's the reason I agree with you that it's not Theranos level. Real investors who have seen and used the product.

SPEAKER_39: Mm-hmm. So if you look at Theranos, and we just had John Kerry Ruh on, and I don't know if you guys have listened or read to Bad Blood. It's extraordinary. Amazing.

SPEAKER_134: It's so good. Did you read it yet? I have, yes.

SPEAKER_135: Okay, so all three of us read it. So this is going to be segment two. It's just talking about the derangement of that.

SPEAKER_55: And I want you to think about, it's going to be a little teaser after commercial break, like the most deranged moment in Bad Blood. But for now, let's talk about Magic Leap. Peter, do you think it's Theranos level fraud or overhyped and overvalued?

SPEAKER_138: And could it possibly be worth $3 billion? And should companies be worth $3 or $4 billion before they ever get a product to market?

SPEAKER_117: I mean, I am...

SPEAKER_138: As an investor, as a journalist.

SPEAKER_23: So I have some skepticism that they're going to... It's going to be hard to live up to the valuation, right? Right. Because if AT&T invested... What was the... Do we know the post? Was it $4 on the last or something? I don't know. They didn't announce any figures. But let's say it's $4. Yeah. Billion. AT&T isn't necessarily... They're not a venture investor, so they're not looking for a big multiple. It's strategic. But for companies that invested at the $2 million valuation, you still have to be able... I think Andreessen did it at $2. Yeah. I mean, you have to expect this is going to be like a... It's going to be a very binary outcome, right? Yeah. If this ends up being an Apple-level company... Right.

SPEAKER_152: It could be worth $20 billion, $30 billion, $40 billion. Or $200 billion, right? Yeah.

SPEAKER_23: But the thing I worry about with them is that what seemed like they were far ahead of the AR market four years ago, the market's catching up pretty quickly. I mean, if you see the stuff that people are building just for the phones right now, a lot of that is pretty good.

SPEAKER_156: Yeah, we saw it with people holding their phone up and doing the kind of... What was the game? Pokemon Go two years ago.

SPEAKER_117: And the new Pokemon Go stuff is coming out.

SPEAKER_23: The Harry Potter game is going to be coming out. So I think that that's the risk that Magically runs is that the market catches up to them and that they have a much harder time standing out. I actually think one of the biggest challenges they're going to have, and one reason why I think the AT&T deal is kind of funny, is that for a lot of people, a lot of consumers, whatever AR glasses or headset they buy is going to be an accessory to their phone. And people are going to have an Android phone or an iPhone. And that's why Google and that ecosystem or Apple have such an advantage. Because you want to actually use the phone to have the wireless connection and to have the processing power. The idea that people are going to buy, they're going to have their phone and then they're also going to buy this Magically device and that's also going to have a cellular connection which they also have. I mean, that's just... That's ridiculous. Well, it's just... History has proven that people usually don't want to have... Yeah, two subscriptions. Two subscriptions or multiple devices. I mean, the iPad stuff is a little different, but in reality, people are not necessarily going to... I think that Apple and Google have a big advantage here.

SPEAKER_162: On a product level, do you agree with Peter or Teddy that this is like the window could be closing on them and that these are two pretty formidable competitors?

SPEAKER_165: Yeah, I mean, sure. I mean, again, how do we even know what...

SPEAKER_78: I feel like the problem with Magically right now is we're talking about a hypothetical... We're comparing very real products to a hypothetical thing that could be a pony.

SPEAKER_76: It could be a big, shiny pony. And the thing is, Apple's headset, we're not going to see for a few years.

SPEAKER_140: Right. Apple's two years out. I think it's more than two years out, to be honest. So they're working on Apple Glasses. We all know that. They are working on it.

SPEAKER_23: Yeah. And I think that what will be interesting is if starting early next year, what do we start to see in the supply chain?

SPEAKER_54: Because all the things that they need to do in terms of the micro displays for the glasses and the batteries and all that stuff, they have to start building the infrastructure to support that at scale. Right. And so that's where all these leaks come from.

SPEAKER_23: And so the fact when, you know, there are people predicting last year that Apple was going to do glasses this year.

SPEAKER_140: And I said, look, the fact that we know we've not heard anything about it from the supply chain. There's no component supplier saying we just got a big order. Yep.

SPEAKER_172: And we're starting to see some of that kick in.

SPEAKER_23: And I think if we start, if it starts going to high gear early next year, that tells me that we're looking at 2021.

SPEAKER_175: All right, when we get back, we're going to talk about the most insane Elizabeth Holmes moment in, or just Tharnos moment from Bad Blood. So think about that.

SPEAKER_03: And Teddy is wondering what is next for Benchmark and my pal Bill Gurley after Uber when we get

SPEAKER_176: back on This Week in Startups.

SPEAKER_03: And let me take a moment to tell you about RxBar. I love RxBar. I've been eating RxBars for a long time because it's simple. My trainer told me to eat RxBars, and then they wound up being a partner here at This Week

SPEAKER_14: in Startups. So that is pretty cool. They use egg whites for protein, dates to bind it together, nuts for texture, and delicious ingredients like unsweetened chocolate, real fruit and spices like sea salt or cinnamon.

SPEAKER_03: And that is my favorite flavor. They have this like chocolate with sea salt on it. Unbelievable. You can see those chunks of sea salt on it. They have a coffee chocolate I like, a peanut butter chocolate I like, and a peanut butter. I'm a peanut butter chocolate and coffee guy. You guys ever have this RxBar?

SPEAKER_177: I have not, no.

SPEAKER_03: Oh, it's great. It's the one that has a beautiful topography on the front. You'll see it like at all great stores. But you can also buy it direct at their website by going to rxbar.com slash twist and enter the promo code twist at checkout. T-W-I-S-T. And you'll get 25% off your first order. That is a sick deal. rxbar.com slash twist. And enter the promo code twist at checkout and you'll get 25% off. It's great.

SPEAKER_14: I keep them in the car I use for breakfast and, you know, when you get that like slump and I keep a couple in my bag when I'm at an airport so I don't make a bad choice and eat a Cinnabon, which has about 17,000 calories. So that's what I do. Buy a couple boxes.

SPEAKER_39: If you're into chocolate, go that way. If you're into coconut, go that way. They also got the, you know, the whole blueberry berry kind of thing going on. But I like the peanut butter and the chocolate ones. Go that way. Gluten-free, soy-free, dairy-free for people like Peter who are super restricted in their diets. It's going to be good for you, Peter. No artificial colors, flavors, preservatives, or fillers or all that nonsense. Great for workouts, all that stuff. rxbar.com slash twist.

SPEAKER_03: You will love them. Buy a couple boxes and then just put them everywhere. Put them in draws and don't make a mistake and make a bad choice. All right, let's get back to the action with Teddy Schleifler, who you can follow on the Twitter, Teddy, T-E-D-D-Y, S-C-H-L-E-I-F-E-R, and of course, Peter Rojas, my pal, at Peter

SPEAKER_178: Rojas.

SPEAKER_17: You're at Peter Rojas. Yeah. Yeah, still. But you don't use Facebook. Don't have a Facebook page.

SPEAKER_03: No, I quit in 2010. I know you did. Wow, poor old school. I quit. I ghosted. Then I came back because I had to market stuff. And I don't really use it anymore, but I use it like as a publishing platform. I don't go there anymore.

SPEAKER_49: I just check the box on Instagram or I use Buffer. Do you guys spend any time on Facebook? No. There's nothing going on there.

SPEAKER_182: Not professionally.

SPEAKER_49: Just like see photographs of high school friends.

SPEAKER_39: If Facebook didn't buy Instagram and WhatsApp, how would we be talking about Facebook right now?

SPEAKER_23: We'd be worried.

SPEAKER_39: We'd be worried? I think so. Yeah.

SPEAKER_23: I think that also it's the counterfactual around how would Instagram have done on its own,

SPEAKER_54: but it's clear that Instagram... It would have been fine. It probably would have been fine and it probably would be the main rival to Facebook right now.

SPEAKER_20: Yeah. It would have passed it, I think.

SPEAKER_104: I think it's got the potential to pass it on a global basis even. It's just a better product. It feels more hopeful. All right. Let's talk about Theranos. We've all read the book.

SPEAKER_03: What moment stuck out to you as something you didn't know from the press coverage that you read it in the book, I have mine, you read it in the book and said, oh my God, I got to tell somebody about this moment. Or you just like stopped for a moment and thought about the insanity of that moment. What was it?

SPEAKER_190: Do you have it? I have a non-book. Well, no, this isn't in the book. Okay, go ahead. You look excited.

SPEAKER_78: I think the most insane moment was two months ago when you see investors in Theranos, Tim Draper most prominently, post-charges continuing to defend. I feel like the denialism and the willingness of investors to still, to this day.

SPEAKER_193: Well, there's only one.

SPEAKER_194: One who's on television.

SPEAKER_128: Yes. But it makes you wonder who's not on television. What is behind that, do you think? What is Tim Draper trying to prove?

SPEAKER_48: Kind of a natural inclination for someone to want to defend the investment they made.

SPEAKER_14: But you could also say nothing.

SPEAKER_48: Well.

SPEAKER_14: Or you could say, I'm disappointed in the outcome. Right. I don't think she got a fair shake. But I mean, he's out there panging the table, correct? It's a different level of support.

SPEAKER_23: I mean, if I were Tim, I would say, look, I invested early. You know, it was a friend of his daughter. Yeah. And sometimes that's how investments get done, unfortunately. Yeah, sure. In your network.

SPEAKER_83: And that works out really well. In Stanford. And I say, look, it was early. She, you know, is basically at the ideation stage.

SPEAKER_20: And she had done some initial work and blah, blah, blah. And like, it didn't work out. Yeah. Mistakes were made. Mistakes were made.

SPEAKER_17: Yeah. Move on.

SPEAKER_83: Yeah. I think it's easier for him to actually do that than some of the later stages.

SPEAKER_205: Did you listen to the book or read it? I read it. Yeah, I listened. You listened or read it? I read it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_207: Okay. Did listening change that? I mean, what did it? Did he read it to John Carrey? No.

SPEAKER_03: But they had one of those really great, like, because it's such an anticipated book, I think they probably spent 50 dimes on the narration or 25,000 bucks or whatever

SPEAKER_209: they pay those people. And what do they pay, those people, the good ones? Let's figure it out.

SPEAKER_14: It's got to be 25, 50. Anybody who knows, email jason at Calacanis.com. I'm curious what a top flight audio narration cost.

SPEAKER_104: My publisher wouldn't tell me. I tried to get it out of them, but they're like, we can't tell you that because they're brids.

SPEAKER_140: Right, Terry. What was your favorite moment, Peter? So my favorite moment was, and I don't know how to pronounce this guy's last name, maybe you do know from the audio book, the John Fouige? Yeah, yeah. How do you pronounce that?

SPEAKER_117: I don't know. So it was the guy who was the father of the, it was like the family friend. The family friend. Who decided to patent something.

SPEAKER_20: That would be on the roadmap of Theranos. On their roadmap. And then Theranos decided to sue him. Yes. Out of existence. And he lost millions of dollars. And I felt like that guy must be like, I'm living in crazy town. It's nuts.

SPEAKER_75: And they were like parking cars outside of his house and they had like, yeah. The moment from.

SPEAKER_117: Well, and the other one, sorry, it was when George Shultz turned on his grandson. Dark.

SPEAKER_20: That was.

SPEAKER_217: Dark. That is going to be the crazy scene in the trailer. To set it up, George Shultz's. His grandson worked there.

SPEAKER_220: Grandson worked there. He was like a biochemist. His grandson was given John Carreyrou information. They kind of caught him.

SPEAKER_03: He goes to see George Shultz.

SPEAKER_222: Who's on the board.

SPEAKER_03: Who's on the board. An investor. And they're all family friends. All intertwined in the sort of Palo Alto, Stanford area. And he's like asking his grandson if he actually did it or not. Gave the information to the Wall Street Journal. And then he's like, okay, well, you need to sign some paperwork. And they opened the door to his study.

SPEAKER_224: And there's two attorneys waiting for him. It's like Darth Vader and Lando Conrissing hand you over at Cloud City. And you're like, what? You have a guest at dinner? Yeah. And it's like, whoa.

SPEAKER_228: And then he invites Elizabeth to his birthday party and not the grandson.

SPEAKER_37: Crazy. My favorite part was early on they tried to oust Elizabeth Holmes from the board. The board decides they're going to oust her because she's incompetent. She goes into the board meeting and talks them out of it. In year four. Like six years before the whole thing imploded. And I just thought to myself. This opportunity. I mean, it's like a sliding door is kind of like you made it or you didn't. That moment in time cost hundreds of millions of dollars and potentially people's lives. But what an amazing book. If you haven't read it or listened to it.

SPEAKER_233: If you ask the CEO, then there probably wouldn't be a book. There wouldn't be a book. We've heard about it.

SPEAKER_49: And you know, John Kerry did not get a Pulitzer for this. I think this is the best tech journalism I've ever.

SPEAKER_235: These things are overshadowed by Trump right now. It's just like, oh, I mean, like the stories were coming out. Yeah. Campaign. Got it. And it's just like. That's a problem. I mean, I wonder all the time.

SPEAKER_220: What's a better tech story that an investigative journalist did? Can you think of a better one? I can't. I mean, there's been some good stuff on privacy in the journal that won a Pulitzer previously. I don't know if you know that series they did where they tracked down cookies, which is essentially what made the European Union do this whole thing. But with privacy, but I mean, it's just the best reporting I've ever seen.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah. And I mean, it's like Spotlight, you know, the movie about the Boston Globe group. Like that was like, I think it's on that level in the.

SPEAKER_54: Well, and I think what's so crazy is that, you know, you kind of take this like, what's the worst case scenario? Like they're actively perpetuating a fraud.

SPEAKER_245: Yeah. Like they're switching the blood and putting it in a different machine and then bringing the investors to another room.

SPEAKER_20: It sounds preposterous. And the fact that it all turned out to be true is mind blowing. It was mind blowing. And here's the thing. Elizabeth Holmes.

SPEAKER_37: Well, now I guess there's criminal charges, right? Yeah. Right. But prior to the criminal charges, the SEC gave her a $500,000 fine and banned her 10 years from being on the board of a company.

SPEAKER_83: Yeah. And then I think they then they restructured the stock so that.

SPEAKER_20: Yeah. She lost her fault. Anyway, slap on the wrist. Not even.

SPEAKER_14: And then like some kid gets caught with a pound of weed and they're in jail for 20 years. Like the justice system is so insane. If Elizabeth Holmes. What will happen to Elizabeth Holmes in a criminal trial?

SPEAKER_23: She's going to jail. Yeah. Okay, here we go. It's a big enough story. And I think they want to make an example.

SPEAKER_49: It's a pelt.

SPEAKER_138: Like this is like it's a scalp. I think.

SPEAKER_37: I mean, I think so too. Like this would be the skill. Is this a Silicon Valley scalp? Because you can't get Zuckerberg. You get her. Make an example of Silicon Valley.

SPEAKER_235: Well, if only it was that simple that there was like a day. I mean, right over here, there's. Like it's going to be.

SPEAKER_135: Well, Attorney General. Like you guys watch Billions, right? Sure. You watch Billions? I don't. Oh my God. It's the greatest.

SPEAKER_257: It's a great show.

SPEAKER_03: I mean, just the two lead act. The three. I mean, the three lead actors. And plus. I mean, anyway, we'll talk about that later. But. So, yeah. What? Five, ten years? Three or five years? It's hard to say. Yeah. Martha Stewart.

SPEAKER_259: Martha Stewart did what? One year?

SPEAKER_03: 18 months. Something. Yeah. But that was like she did. I mean, she changed like the price. She sold something in a spreadsheet and sold like a hundred thousand in shares.

SPEAKER_20: She didn't like do hundreds of millions of dollars in wire fraud as this claims. Yeah. This could be. No, she. I mean, given the scale of the.

SPEAKER_54: I mean, look, white collar crime tends to be punished less severely than, you know, like

SPEAKER_263: if you go and rob a bank for $10,000, you're going to go. Right. Right. You're going to go to jail for much longer than if you funnel $100 out of the bank.

SPEAKER_265: And it's just, yeah, it's a whole thing is so disturbing. And, you know, when you think that's interesting to me is because I was obviously publicly defending

SPEAKER_104: Travis and Uber very strongly because Travis, I have friends for a long time. And I thought about that in context of and I've also been defending Elon. I'm not shareholders. I'm sure I'll do an Uber. I might have shares of Tesla in a mutual fund somewhere on Wealthfront, but I don't actively trade public stocks at all. None anymore.

SPEAKER_37: But you look at, like, this cantankerous Tesla, like, shorts and the fake accounts.

SPEAKER_270: You were mixing it up the other day.

SPEAKER_37: God, it was insane. I mean, it's like, it really is. Twitter has turned into such a rage machine. But they started deleting the bots. Have you?

SPEAKER_273: I lost about 800 followers. I lost 8,000. You lose any followers? I lost, like, yeah, like a couple hundred. Thank God.

SPEAKER_14: Why didn't they do this two years ago, Peter? You know. Three years? It's so obvious that they should have deleted these bots from the beginning. Why did they allow bots?

SPEAKER_117: I would say that it's big. I think, look, I don't know. I don't have any insight into why they do or do not do anything like that.

SPEAKER_54: Cynical view?

SPEAKER_23: I would say, like, the. Charitable view. Well, I would say the charitable view is that, maybe they're the same view, is that they. No. I mean, the charitable view would be that they're. Incompetent? No, no.

SPEAKER_117: I think it's actually, I think it's that if they worry that if they tank their

SPEAKER_23: active user numbers. So greed. That it's that there are going to be investors on Wall Street that aren't, don't take a nuanced enough view about why this is actually a good thing. Right. They don't take the long view. Or not even the long view, but just to be like, look, like, fake users don't really result in revenue for the most part. I mean, some of them click fake, the bots click ads and things like that. But.

SPEAKER_279: Generally speaking, it's, you know, not generally speaking, it is not a positive for the service in any way to have fake ads. Exactly.

SPEAKER_23: And so, and I think that, you know, if you are, if you are a, you know, not a sophisticated or not, I mean, not a nuanced thinking investor, you might be like, oh, like.

SPEAKER_54: What do you think? It doesn't answer numbers.

SPEAKER_48: That's my cynical view. My cynical view is that they were just doing it to appease Wall Street. Pump up numbers. Yeah. Inflate numbers. My charitable, I mean, my charitable view is that they were incompetent.

SPEAKER_37: Yeah. See, I, that's, I mean, exactly in line with you. The charitable view is incompetence. Yeah. Which people have said that there were, because of the management shifts.

SPEAKER_287: Yeah.

SPEAKER_37: And yeah, okay. But the uncharitable, the cynical view is that they did it because they didn't want their numbers to go down. Here's the problem with the cynical view. Or here's the other shoe that will drop. I think they get themselves into a trap. Now, if you don't kill the bot accounts over some extended period of time, and then you do, now you've admitted.

SPEAKER_289: Right. That you didn't do it earlier.

SPEAKER_37: That you didn't do it earlier. And there is, there are a hundred messages a week between executives there, I'm sure on Discovery, that'll be talking about the bot problem for years.

SPEAKER_220: So they actively made a decision to not do this, which means class action lawsuits could now say that they said they had 30% more users, 20% more users. So if we all lost 8%, 5% or 6%, 7%, 8%, what if it's 20%?

SPEAKER_292: That would be material.

SPEAKER_220: Like single, low single digits, not material, but double digits. Is this material? Because it would result in like.

SPEAKER_08: Material in terms of. Class action lawsuits. From a shareholder. Yeah. If you knew that, you know, 10, 20% were fake accounts and you reported the number

SPEAKER_02: anyway, not good.

SPEAKER_68: Well, I mean, let's put it this way.

SPEAKER_54: If shareholders are going to sue over double digit percentages of fake users, every, I mean, every online publication I know has a large percentage of fake traffic now.

SPEAKER_299: What?

SPEAKER_17: Really? How so? They do it themselves? No. Well, they buy.

SPEAKER_20: It's ad networks. They buy cheap traffic. It's sketchy. Well, it's. Taboola.

SPEAKER_54: It's sketchy ad networks that will do like fake click.

SPEAKER_23: There's a lot of spider traffic and got it to raise pages up. Yeah. And I don't think the publishers are doing it themselves, but I think that it's just a

SPEAKER_263: side effect of a lot of. Got it.

SPEAKER_20: So they buy traffic, whatever, pop unders, things like that. I don't think. I don't think a lot of this is publisher driven. I think it's interesting. Oh, I see.

SPEAKER_23: There's a big issue, a big issue with, especially around video.

SPEAKER_41: I think I understand what you're saying now. Now, if I own Gizmodo and I have this ad network on my site, the ad network has an incentive to send traffic there to fire off the ad.

SPEAKER_37: The ad network. Yeah, because they get paid for the click. Because they get paid for the click. Yeah.

SPEAKER_313: So they start doing it. The publisher just put up the ad networks thing.

SPEAKER_54: Yeah, exactly. And what happens is that the ad network, they will do a lot to make it look like real traffic because they don't want it to be filtered out.

SPEAKER_175: All right. When we get back from this, we're going to talk about Bill Gurley, the most successful venture capitalist of the last cycle, I would say. Obviously, the investor at Uber and their firm did Snapchat and a couple of other big mega hits. And today's got the article. We'll be right back. Let me tell you, hiring right now is miserable. It is the most difficult thing you can do. I have 150 investments.

SPEAKER_03: That's number one challenge I get from my founders is hiring. And you know what I tell them? I say, go to ZipRecruiter because it will post to job sites and the platform brings the

SPEAKER_220: right candidates to you. It identifies people with the right experience and invites them to apply to your job. Not like posting to a job site and waiting and waiting. These invitations have revolutionized how you find your next hire. 80% of employers who post a job on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate to the site in just one day. And ZipRecruiter even spotlights the strongest applications you receive so you never miss a great match. What are you waiting for? You have like three or four positions to fill. I know it. If you're listening to the show, you got to fill those positions. Go over to ZipRecruiter.com slash twist. That's ZipRecruiter.com slash twist. And right now, my listeners can try ZipRecruiter for free. That's right. It's the smartest way to hire. The right candidates are out there.

SPEAKER_03: You just got to go find them and ZipRecruiter knows how to get them. So get over there. ZipRecruiter.com slash twist. It's hard right now. It's hard hiring out there.

SPEAKER_37: Okay. Teddy, you've been pursuing this story, I know, for a little while.

SPEAKER_51: I have. Well, I mean, it's been a story that's been Silicon Valley's been trying to answer for a year.

SPEAKER_37: And I preface this by saying Benchmark, most successful firm, or Bill Gurley, most successful VC of the last cycle. Would you agree with that? Top two or three? Yeah.

SPEAKER_235: Certainly one of the most successful Series A firms. Yeah. Yes. Right. I mean, if you're comparing them to other, I think they're certainly in the top three conversations. Yeah.

SPEAKER_101: Which is amazing for a six-partner firm with no support staff.

SPEAKER_235: Partnerships rise and fall, though, right? I mean, I don't know if people would have said that in 2005. Right. But people say it now. And people might have said Kleiner in 2005.

SPEAKER_128: They wouldn't say it now. Right. So firms rise and fall.

SPEAKER_175: Right. Yeah. So what is going on at Benchmark?

SPEAKER_03: I'm good friends with Bill Gurley, full disclosure, but I don't really know anything. I don't talk to them about this stuff. Sure. So, but I saw they hired somebody. They did.

SPEAKER_48: They announced somebody. They did. I mean, so look, I mean, I think the corollary to being so successful is there's always questions about, like, how much hustle do you have left? I mean, Benchmark has always had partners. I think, you know, they always had partners in their 30s and 40s. And in fact, Benchmark has had sort of a tradition that when partners hit 50, they begin, they stop doing new funds. So I think, you know, this is a classic, this is a question that's obviously in Wall Street as well, in corporate America. Like, you know, does the CEO have to retire at age 65?

SPEAKER_327: Logan's run. Sure. Right. Right.

SPEAKER_48: Or, you know, I think this is something that every Silicon Valley firm thinks about, about generational transfer, especially in VC.

SPEAKER_37: But it's happening right now at Benchmark is what you discovered. Yes. So what exactly is going down?

SPEAKER_14: Is it infighting or is it a debate? Are the partners at each other's throat or are they just trying to figure it out? And what's the story there?

SPEAKER_48: So, I mean, so Bill Gurley, our expectation is he's going to do another fund there. Yeah. Which is somewhat surprising. There has been speculation definitely furthered by rivals to Benchmark that, you know, he's stepping aside and that will be huge news. But we expect him to do another fund, Benchmark will raise in the next year. One person who we definitely think is going to be out is Mitch Lasky, who's 56. I believe 56, maybe 55. And, you know, I think it's a healthy transition as funds get older. You want to, I mean, a lot of the best VCs are in their 30s and 40s because they're closer in age than entrepreneurs, have, you know, a spidey sense about what's hot and what's falling. Maybe more hungry, too. Yeah, sure. I mean, it's pretty hard to go to work if you're a billionaire. That is something that is, you know, a casualty of being so successful. Yeah.

SPEAKER_330: You call it rich is what we call it.

SPEAKER_48: I mean, I don't think Benchmark's done that. I mean, like, they've done a good job at still hustling even though. Right. No, they're hungry. Even though, you know, with a 30% carry and, you know, some of the funds that have been so successful, these people don't need to ever work again. But they still want to win. They still want to win. I think it's competitive and it's natural. So.

SPEAKER_55: But the overarching trend is that the old guard is moving out.

SPEAKER_39: People have been talking about this on Twitter. You mentioned it. I've been talking about it a little bit in the seed space.

SPEAKER_334: Chris Freilich just left first round or is stepping back in the first round.

SPEAKER_336: He's going to be a board member or something.

SPEAKER_39: Howard Morgan before that. Yep. And Michael Moritz, I guess, went sort of halftime or something at Sequoia. Yeah. Stepped back a little bit. Yeah.

SPEAKER_339: But Sequoia tends to keep people for a long time. Those are lifers. Doug Leone's still at it, right? I mean, he's still.

SPEAKER_78: Yeah, but their leadership is, you know, people are a lot of late 30s, early 40s. So, I mean, they do a good job at it as well. I mean, this is a challenge that, you know, again, this is not just a Silicon Valley thing. The question about how do you keep your youngest, hungriest people in leadership is something that every venture firm has to deal with. And some firms have done it better than others. Like, you know, obviously there's been a lot of debate about what happened at Kleiner. Yeah.

SPEAKER_344: What happened at Kleiner?

SPEAKER_14: How do you assess that? Sure. John Doerr was checked out? He hired bad people?

SPEAKER_341: John Doerr is the chair now at Kleiner. Right.

SPEAKER_51: But I'm saying when Kleiner fell. Yeah. When they stumbled. Sure. I mean, well, I think they had a couple of things happen at the same time.

SPEAKER_78: One of which was the Allen Powell trial, then just your basic questions about generational transfer, plus, you know, there was the iFund. I mean, there were a couple of, I don't think there was one single misstep. Right. But, I mean, Kleiner, to its credit over the last two years, has pretty candidly admitted that they're rebuilding, which I think I appreciate as a journalist who wants kind of an actual You want to report the truth? Yeah. I think that's admirable because a lot of it. They grab Mamoun. Yeah. He's in charge. A lot of capital farmers wouldn't admit that they're rebuilding. Right. They would say everything's fine. Yeah. So Kleiner has actually admitted that, and I think they deserve kudos for it.

SPEAKER_55: Yeah, and there was a rumor earlier that was well-documented that Kleiner was trying to get to Chamath to combine the social capital partnership and have Chamath take over Kleiner

SPEAKER_336: and Chamath declined. And then they got Chamath's number two, Mamoun. What's the backstory there?

SPEAKER_48: Yeah, I mean, he's kind of now at least leading the venture practice. Yeah. So, I mean, he is in a leadership.

SPEAKER_78: He was not the leader of social capital, and now he is a leader of Kleiner and the firm of history, and Mamoun is now kind of recruiting other GPs, and I would expect them to add another GP in the next six months.

SPEAKER_39: Peter, what are your thoughts on this now that you moved into venture capital and investing, what, three years ago?

SPEAKER_263: Yeah, three years ago, starting, I think.

SPEAKER_39: Are you enjoying it?

SPEAKER_195: Do you think you'll stay in it, or do you get the itch that you want to build again?

SPEAKER_263: Yeah, occasionally.

SPEAKER_140: Me too. I get that little itch. That's why I have Inside.com. It scratches my itch. I sometimes will have ideas, and the funny thing is now, having been on the other side

SPEAKER_263: now, I actually think I'd be a much better CEO.

SPEAKER_37: 100%. In what way? What do you think the leaks in your game were that you now see, clearly, from being on the other side of the monthly update?

SPEAKER_23: I think, one, just having a much better understanding of how fundraising works. I mean, I raised money a few times, and still, there's so many dumb things I didn't do, or

SPEAKER_140: mistakes that I made, or the way I thought about it was wrong. How did you think about it back then? I think I...

SPEAKER_360: You took each one personally? I did. That was my mistake.

SPEAKER_117: No, it was not as much that. I think it's, I didn't think about it as much as, what do, about, what do the investors

SPEAKER_23: need to see at each stage to continue moving forward? And so, one of the pieces of advice I give to founders right now is, they'll say to me, in fact, this is a piece of advice I got from, we do seed, pre-seed and seed, and we had a seed investment, and they were getting ready to use of Series A. And the guy was having some trouble, and he said, I'm tearing my hair out. Like, what do I need to show? What do I need to do to raise a Series A? And I said, honestly, if you want to raise a Series A, you need to show those investors how you raise a Series B. Yeah. Yeah. What the path, what you need, what you're going to do. The downstream investors. Exactly. Because that's really our KPI, right? Obviously, our return is our true KPI, but in the interim, and before the 10 years of

SPEAKER_68: the exit comes, we look at, did you raise another round of financing? Right. And in fact, that's how people track it.

SPEAKER_279: Chamath is always tweeting that they have the highest percentage of Bs to As.

SPEAKER_368: That is where you can be super proud. Yeah. It means you're picked well. Yeah, exactly. Or you pick safely.

SPEAKER_369: Well, that's the other thing, though.

SPEAKER_368: Maybe you didn't take enough risk. Maybe, you know, Benchmark has more, has less Series A to Series B, but they have more

SPEAKER_03: binaries like Uber, more Snapchats, because Snapchat or Uber might not look like a Series B company, you know.

SPEAKER_142: And so, I mean, that's one thing that I've learned.

SPEAKER_23: And I think also, you know, having worked with now a lot of founders and seen teams that have succeeded and teams that have not succeeded or failed to thrive.

SPEAKER_54: I think having a better understanding of what you need to do to build a team for the long haul. Yeah. Not that I hadn't built big teams before.

SPEAKER_41: We were always underfunded. Yeah, exactly. We were always scrappy at that time. Like, back then, we were kind of like outsiders. Yes. Yeah. Not kind of. We kind of were the definition of outsider. I still feel like an outsider, but.

SPEAKER_03: I'm not now, but I try to stay as an outsider. And, you know, it's very difficult.

SPEAKER_37: Like, this story hits home with me because I was trying to be the number one angel investor in history and the number one active. And it was pretty obvious who the three or four people in front of me were.

SPEAKER_39: Paul Graham, retired for the last three years or somewhere in Europe, I guess. Chris Saka hung it up. And then Ron Conway hung it up. Those are the three people in front of me. I mean, who else has got a better track record than one unicorn every six, every 20 investments? There's no other angel investor.

SPEAKER_14: You know, if they were still in the game, then I would be whatever. Kevin Durant in the time of LeBron, Michael Jordan, whatever.

SPEAKER_55: You know, like LeBron retires. So, I've had to, like, say, like, geez, how do I not call in? How do I not hang it up, right? Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_336: So, I just had to set new goals and, you know, really do some self-examination of why am I doing it?

SPEAKER_23: Yeah, I mean, I think ultimately, you know, you have to want to do, you know, you basically want to do the work. And I think. It's a lot of work. It is a lot of work. See, I thought DC was no work. No, it's a lot of work. It's a lot of work. But I will say that it is easier. Well, I think that it's the most fortunate kind of work that you can have. Yes.

SPEAKER_387: That's a great way of putting it.

SPEAKER_23: And I think that of all the things that you could have to do in your life in terms of, like, the actual day-to-day work, this is about as great as it gets. And I tell people, you have to do three things. You have to essentially answer emails, take meetings, and make decisions. And if you are not interested in doing those three things well, you need to find something else to do. And I sometimes feel like, oh, it's the job. It's so much email. And I'm like, look, of all the people who have ever lived in this planet, in the history of this planet, having to answer a lot of email is literally as good as it gets in terms of work.

SPEAKER_03: It's amazing. Yes, you do not have to make 18 pairs of shoes an hour. You literally just have to look at an email and decide if you want to take the meeting or not.

SPEAKER_204: You're not picking strawberries. You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_37: It's always hilarious to me. Like, people, these venture capitalists who are like, why are you emailing me? Because I wrote a script, and you're a director, and I thought you might want to – you said you need a script. You're looking for a great script. I made a script. You don't have to read it, but you could read the first page.

SPEAKER_391: Yeah.

SPEAKER_23: I mean, it's why I try to be very open in terms of the filter. I mean, I actually started doing open office hours over Telegram. Genius. Which has been awesome. Genius. Because I can do eight people in two hours. Because the chats – I can do simultaneous chats. Right.

SPEAKER_394: What are you working on? How's it going?

SPEAKER_23: Yeah, and essentially, like, you get people – one, you get people who – Oh, my God. English is not necessarily their first language. So, for them, chatting is actually easier. The other thing that's nice is when you're not doing face-to-face or not doing a call, you can actually take a minute, like, take a beat to kind of think about what you want to say.

SPEAKER_399: Right. You don't have to respond instantly. It's so smart.

SPEAKER_23: And so – and also just makes you accessible to more people in a shorter period of time.

SPEAKER_03: Because my closest competitor now is Y Combinator because we have our incubator. We're doing – well, doing 50 to 70 investments a year. Next year, we'll do 100, and I was talking to some kids who were over there, and it has a program, good, whatever.

SPEAKER_39: I was like, oh, yeah, you know, what did you think of, like, I don't know, you know, whatever partner over there.

SPEAKER_14: Like, oh, I never met him. Never met him. Like, they just – they get so much money so quick that you don't even show up for work anymore. Yeah. Right? Like, without saying names of Pacific Venture Capitalists, like, you look at their Instagram feed and you're like, oh, you're in Tokyo again. Right.

SPEAKER_37: For the fourth time this year, and you're in Aspen for a month, and Italy and – like, so in terms of being the best job in the world, the way I explain it to people is you get to meet with the smartest, most ambitious people in the world, and they tell you how the world is going to change.

SPEAKER_138: And then you make your best guess as to which one will change the world the most and then sit back and collect bags of capital. How does that sound as a job?

SPEAKER_391: It sounds – it's a great job. But you do have to help, and you do have to work.

SPEAKER_23: No, you do have to help, yes.

SPEAKER_406: You have to pick people you like working with.

SPEAKER_23: Yeah, and I think that's why, you know, for me, you know, there's a sort of intellectual challenge to the job, which is you have to try to look out there and try to figure out where do you think the world is going to go. And like you said, you get to talk to really smart people, which is always a lot of fun. And then I think when people come to you with their problems, you have to try to help. And you're not responsible for executing in that sense. It's like I can't solve it for you, but I can help. You can have a dialogue. Yeah, and I can – You can listen. And maybe there's an introduction I can make or maybe there's an idea I can – you know, something I can help craft. And I really like that aspect to it. It's super weird.

SPEAKER_411: It's a super weird job that exists in the world.

SPEAKER_37: It is like the greatest job after being a founder. Like if you could change the world, it's pretty amazing that you made something and you changed the world. But that job comes with such a heavy cost. Like you look at Zuckerberg and Elon. This is the most difficult year of both of their careers. The year their companies are at peak valuations.

SPEAKER_03: Their personal net worth, peak valuations, and Zuckerberg is getting dragged into Congress and Parliament and being made to answer questions about throwing elections and Elon sleeping on the factory floor.

SPEAKER_39: It's like it's not a joke. I was over there. It's like literally got a sleeping bag and like he's like literally there 14 hours, 18 hours, 24 hours.

SPEAKER_37: Bonkers. Yeah. But you also have to decide where you want the world to go. So it's kind of interesting. This Juul is now a $15 billion company nobody's ever heard of.

SPEAKER_14: J-U-U-L. Most people in Silicon Valley haven't heard of it. They only have heard about it recently.

SPEAKER_418: Yeah. People who don't smoke.

SPEAKER_39: People who don't smoke because they're educated, smart. They're up on science. It's a healthier lifestyle here. Healthier lifestyle.

SPEAKER_235: People would judge them.

SPEAKER_51: Even if the – That's a big part of it too. Can you imagine like –

SPEAKER_235: If you saw some founder who smoked a cigarette, you think you wouldn't –

SPEAKER_37: This is a true story. Back when I was still invited to Y Combinator Demo Day, I'm coming out and these guys look at me. I know they recognize who I am. And they're around the corner by the dumpsters at the Computer History Museum and they're smoking.

SPEAKER_423: Yeah.

SPEAKER_37: And I said, how are you doing, guys? And they go, oh, hey, we love the podcast. I said, great. I said, where are you from? Oh, we're from whatever, Belgrade or whatever, somewhere Eastern Russian, like, I don't know, Croatia. I'm like, you want a pro tip? And I said, yeah. I said, if any investor sees you smoking cigarettes, they're going to think that you're stupid and that you're undisciplined and they'll never invest in you. They said, really? I said, I'm not kidding.

SPEAKER_426: They put the cigarettes out. They went back in.

SPEAKER_427: And that is the truth, isn't it?

SPEAKER_78: Yeah. I think obviously investors want to see founders they can empathize with and understand. And if investors start smoking – I mean, but it's a cultural thing too, obviously. In Europe, it's totally different. Yeah, so I'd be curious what European VCs would say, if they'd say the same thing, smoking cigarettes is part of the culture there.

SPEAKER_175: Yeah, still a little bit, yeah. So Juul is worth $15 billion.

SPEAKER_128: They're raising at $15, yeah.

SPEAKER_175: They're raising at $15. Yeah.

SPEAKER_37: But the thing that I don't understand about this is, is this a good thing for society because it gets people off of cigarettes and it's a bridge off of it?

SPEAKER_49: Or are they onboarding people to vaping and vaping is also bad because it puts bubbles in your lungs? Is that true?

SPEAKER_433: It's a nicotine. It's still nicotine. It's still nicotine. It's a vapor.

SPEAKER_266: But also it has, I think, like a tremendous amount of nicotine in each –

SPEAKER_434: Yeah, more.

SPEAKER_165: I mean, the truth is, I mean, this is a subject of legitimate scientific debate. Right. We don't know yet. Yeah. I mean, I'm not – I mean, sure. We'll find out in 20 years. Yeah, we'll see how people did smoke Juuls instead of cigarettes. But, right, that's the question.

SPEAKER_235: And I think a lot of VCs have, you know, the same way that scientists are split on kind of the wisdom of Juuls. You know, VCs, you know, on the one hand, lots of venture capital firms have rules. They're not allowed to invest in Vice, right, which is, you know, there's no people funding porn startups or, you know, heroin dealers or guns.

SPEAKER_78: So, does Juul – should that be part of that discussion? I mean, on the one hand, if it's similar to cigarettes, you know, you're not going to be funding a cigarette startup. No. But if it's similar to, you know, marijuana –

SPEAKER_03: And they started as the Plume, which was the original vaporizer. Right. And designed famously by Yves Bahar, a friend of mine. It was a beautiful design. They, I guess, realized, like, the cannabis was not as addicting as this. But, you know, I talked to Yves Bahar about it, and I think that's the way they looked at it. And I think he owned some shares because of his designs. But I think it is a – it's becoming a bit of a discussion here.

SPEAKER_37: Founders Fund is the original investor?

SPEAKER_48: In Juul? Yeah. No, Founders Fund is –

SPEAKER_442: Who are the original investors?

SPEAKER_48: It's not a lot of VCs.

SPEAKER_235: It's not a lot of VCs, yeah. I think Tiger, isn't it? I mean, it's spun out of this thing called PAX. PAX made that plume. Right, right. So, I mean, Founders Fund is interesting just because they are much more willing to do, suppose, what other firms would call vice deals. And they're always kind of a bit – Well, Peter's a contrarian, yeah. Yeah. They did space. They just do a bit more out there things, and I think it makes them really interesting to cover. But they've done a lot of marijuana deals also.

SPEAKER_240: Yeah. Oh, Founders Fund has? Yes, they have. Oh, that's interesting.

SPEAKER_235: So it makes them more –

SPEAKER_240: They're starting to go public in Canada.

SPEAKER_03: A lot of – because we have one investment, Kush Marketplace, which is a marketplace for growers, processors, packagers, and dispensaries. So there's a bunch of different players. Yeah. So you might have somebody who grows the flowers, somebody who processes them into raw materials, somebody who makes them into cookies or oils, tinctures, whatever, cigarettes. And then you have, obviously, the distributors, the dispensaries.

SPEAKER_39: But they don't deal with – they don't touch it themselves just in, you know, marketplace, like a B2B marketplace.

SPEAKER_235: These markets are pretty big. I mean, like, obviously, you know, the e-cigarettes are – you know, could be –

SPEAKER_48: What if in 30 years everyone is – instead of smoking a pack a day, they're smoking e-cigarettes? Yeah. And then we've – and then in this case, you know, investing in Juul would, A, be good for society. Yeah, virtuous. You'd make a lot of money off of it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_458: So I think there's, like, a legitimate debate that's happening.

SPEAKER_03: The thing that's not debatable is that these are getting in the hands of kids because they're doing marketing of, like, really cotton candy, pineapple, you know, coconut.

SPEAKER_104: Like, they're really going for the kid market with these flavors. It was kind of loathsome when I read about that.

SPEAKER_461: Didn't they just ban it in here in San Francisco? I think that was –

SPEAKER_48: Several cities have banned that. I know Milwaukee banned it or those – Banned what? The sales – The sales of Juuls, yeah.

SPEAKER_240: To kids? They're already banned from kids, right?

SPEAKER_48: Just to ban it totally. Theoretically, they're supposed to only be able to be people over 21, but obviously you can – Wait, are you saying Juuls are banned for all people? I believe in Juul.

SPEAKER_464: I believe in Milwaukee. I have to – Yeah. I don't want to speak at what I'm wrong. Yeah, I'm trying to remember. You know, we just – Tell me a watering producer. I'm looking up. Something got passed. Jaggi.

SPEAKER_305: Got a –

SPEAKER_175: Yeah. Yeah. I'm torn on that one.

SPEAKER_03: You don't want people smoking, but the other thing I've noticed, because it got very popular in casinos when I used to play poker, and like they had to stop them at casinos because they were getting too popular, and these guys in casinos and in home poker games had these

SPEAKER_37: like powerful units, and they had chargers with them, and they would be swapping batteries out and pouring oil in, and I was watching them pour the oil in, and like these contraptions like two or three years ago, I think there was like other ones other than Juul that were –

SPEAKER_14: and the plumes of smoke coming out, and the frequency at which they were doing it was every other breath.

SPEAKER_471: Yeah.

SPEAKER_14: I was like, how are you breathing? I think that they're so addicting and so effective at delivering the nicotine that

SPEAKER_03: the consumption has to be a magnitude more. Yeah. So you might not be getting the cancerous – Yeah, getting the tar and things like that. The tar and the chemicals and the burning. Yeah. But you might be getting five, ten times the amount of – Nicotine. Nicotine. It's a little scary.

SPEAKER_212: Yeah, it's not a – There we go. Yeah, teen vaping is out of control. I mean, that brings the – I mean, the link here is on the FDA.

SPEAKER_78: I mean, it brings the regulatory uncertainty, which usually scares away investors, right? Yeah. The idea about like, what if this is banned, you know? Yeah.

SPEAKER_279: And sometimes the FDA giving it some guardrails, like what we've wanted in crypto from the

SPEAKER_482: beginning, which is like, it's obviously a security, like people are buying it so it

SPEAKER_69: appreciates in value. You're selling it using FOMA tactics, like buy one, get one free, like, well, if it's

SPEAKER_486: not a security, it's a utility, why are you doing this like staged, you know, buy your

SPEAKER_03: tokens now? What do you guys take on crypto after the boom? December we peaked. It's been straight downhill.

SPEAKER_39: Now we're bouncing along some level of stability in Bitcoin, but everything else is just crapped out in the ICO phase.

SPEAKER_54: I mean, there was that study that was a 54% of ICOs had no product within four months after that like – You know, dark, gone. Gone. And I think the other ones still don't have product. I mean, the thing I always tell people is point to me, name a successful product that's come out of an ICO, like consumer product that's come out of an ICO. There's zero.

SPEAKER_03: Brave Browser is the one that I think is legit and I've been using and I'm fascinated with.

SPEAKER_493: Do you know about Brave Browser? Brave Browser, yeah. Yeah. You know about Brave Browser?

SPEAKER_220: I figure that out, yeah. So it's the guy who – he worked at Netscape. He was in charge of Mozilla. He was just on the podcast and he's creating an attention token. You use Brave, it takes out all ads.

SPEAKER_83: If you put the ads back on, you'll get tokens.

SPEAKER_41: You turn the ads back on, you get tokens. But at the end of the month, you can put in $5 a month, $10 a month. It will show what you spent your time on. And as you know, you spent some time on ICO, you spent some time on Engadget. We'll just chop up your money automatically every month.

SPEAKER_336: So the idea is to use cryptocurrency as a microtransaction like other people have tried to do with real money. Right.

SPEAKER_39: And they – oh, the punchline is they also are airdropping coins people. The guy is Brendan Eck.

David Friedberg: Yeah, my favorite thing is to check dapradar.com, which is analytics for crypto, like these decentralized apps.

SPEAKER_54: The numbers are so low that it's almost laughable.

SPEAKER_23: Especially you look at like CryptoKitties, which has lost like 99.5% of its users or something like that. Yeah. But a lot of these kind of – Right after taking –

SPEAKER_503: Right after they raised, you know, a ton of money, which was like $10 million or something like that. Yeah, I think it was an A round maybe. Maybe it would be. Yeah.

SPEAKER_505: It's crazy. You should check it out.

SPEAKER_43: Is anything going to come out of this? Oh, here we go. Dapradar.

SPEAKER_506: So go to –

SPEAKER_43: CryptoKitties had 281 users in the last 25 hours.

SPEAKER_506: Go to marketplaces. That's not possible.

SPEAKER_224: Wait a second. Wait. Yeah. 281 users in the last – Yeah. That's not possible.

SPEAKER_507: That's all they've had.

SPEAKER_505: 281.

SPEAKER_14: I can go out on Market Street and have 281 people give me a high five.

SPEAKER_16: So these are the – Oh, my God. So pathetic. So look at this. Some of these have zero users, so it means that their founders aren't even using them.

SPEAKER_135: They literally don't even have bots using them. That is hysterical. Bring it over from Twitter.

SPEAKER_16: And so – Wow. That is nuts. You know, it's –

SPEAKER_117: Look, maybe there's something that comes out of this, you know, the non-fungible token space, the collectibles.

SPEAKER_23: But for all the attention and all the money that's gone into this space, there's just not that much going on. That's the way I've felt about it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_513: And I've largely stayed away from it.

SPEAKER_512: Where's browsers in here? Where would browsers be? I'm wondering –

SPEAKER_515: Oh, it's not a distributed app. Yeah. You'd have to be a dap to be listed here. So a distributed – Define for people what a dap is.

SPEAKER_117: How much time do we have?

SPEAKER_515: Well, just like give me the two cents.

SPEAKER_117: It's the idea that it's – Serverless is a component of this?

SPEAKER_23: So it's experiences that – or stuff that – applications that are built on top of these decentralized protocols so that there isn't necessarily – you're going and, you know, downloading an app as much as you are – you know, you might download like a browser, which gives you then access to doing transactions or whatever.

SPEAKER_224: So if you had a distributed version of Twitter, there would be no company.

SPEAKER_117: Which exists, and some of them might be on that chart there. Yeah.

SPEAKER_224: What's that one called?

SPEAKER_117: There's – What's that one? Steemit. Steemit is like Reddit. That has users, for sure. That's probably the biggest one. But there are a handful of them.

SPEAKER_75: And the reason a distributed Reddit or a distributed Twitter – the reason people went crazy for that and it makes sense is why.

SPEAKER_505: Well, so there's a – Why is that unique?

SPEAKER_23: So Mastodon, for example, is a federated – distributed federated version of Twitter that is, in theory – Serverless. Well, it's not serverless.

SPEAKER_525: Oh, there's multiple servers not controlled by anybody.

SPEAKER_117: Anyone can set up an instance and then you just decide to – it's like email, right? Anybody can set up an email server and then you can send email. And then, you know, other email servers can be like, this is a spammer. We're going to block you.

SPEAKER_388: That's basically how Mastodon works. And Mastodon is not token-based. Right. You could – there are versions –

SPEAKER_55: So the way Twitter banned the bots, Mastodon is not – you could have bots. You could have – You could set up a – ISIS could set up an ISIS server.

SPEAKER_129: Exactly.

SPEAKER_117: You could set up a Mastodon instance and have it be all bots and – All ISIS, all other things.

SPEAKER_23: And all the other – Porn, whatever. All the other instances would say we're just not going to – Include that. We're not going to link to that. We're not going to accept traffic.

SPEAKER_39: But you can't be stopped, in other words.

SPEAKER_23: No.

SPEAKER_39: Which is like essentially the dark web and some of these other things.

SPEAKER_23: I mean, it could be stopped in the sense that somebody could go to your hosting provider and shut you off. So you'd have to go –

SPEAKER_55: Which did happen, right? We did have Cloudflare, I think, got pointed in this like –

SPEAKER_23: Well, Cloudflare is – yeah. I mean, Cloudflare is not a hosting provider. They're CDN, yeah. But there are – what you could do – I mean, a lot of this stuff does end up on the dark web because it's stuff that people don't want to have out there. Yeah. You know, because of –

SPEAKER_69: Well, let's wrap with this.

SPEAKER_533: The nefarious nature of it.

SPEAKER_69: Teddy, you worked in the Uncovered Politics. I did, in my old life. In your old life.

SPEAKER_175: Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_03: Looking at today, 12 indictments, Russians hacking into the DNC, people talking to Guccifer who were maybe in Congress or in political –

SPEAKER_539: Right. People close to the campaign.

SPEAKER_03: Campaigns. And then the day the president says, Russia, if you're listening, a series of attacks happened

SPEAKER_220: specifically on that day, and that's in this indictment. Did you know what you heard about that one, Peter?

SPEAKER_541: Yeah, they started to spearfish. They spearfished. The Clinton campaign.

SPEAKER_69: Yeah.

SPEAKER_541: It's just a coincidence, I'm sure.

SPEAKER_69: Peter, what is your intuition on what's happening right now in the Mueller investigation and

SPEAKER_220: in the cyber attacks? Do you think it's possible – what percentage of what's come out – what percentage of what eventually will come out has come out is, I guess, my way of saying it. So we saw this indictment today, and now we're up to whatever we're up to, and Paul Manafort's in jail, and all these other people, Papadopoulos, et cetera, and now we've got all this proof of hacking, and Trump is meeting with Putin on Monday or Tuesday?

SPEAKER_545: Right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_220: This all seems to be happening, and the day after the FBI guy gets caught up in his SMS texting – I mean, this is all technology enabled, Facebook, et cetera. What percentage of what's eventually going to come out has come out now, and what's

SPEAKER_546: your best guess at what the end game is? And when it comes down? I mean, I know it's impossible to – yeah, let's do some speculation here. Sure.

SPEAKER_48: We'll speculate. I mean, it's probably a minority.

SPEAKER_235: I mean, the problem is that Mueller's office has basically – they sort of speak through indictments, right?

SPEAKER_549: They're leak-proof.

SPEAKER_235: No leaks? That's what it says. I'm not on the insides. I don't know. I mean, look, I think the investigation for the last six months has sort of been a standstill, at least publicly, where the big holdup has been whether or not Trump's going to do an interview, which was basically – that was basically the debate in, like, December of last year. Yeah. This year. Same debate. There hasn't really been much – I feel like there has not been much movement, at least publicly, on the investigation between January and now. Right. There's still been the negotiation of whether Trump's going to do an interview, which is the same debate. I mean, the challenge for Mueller's has been reported is that the – now we're coming up on the midterm elections. The FBI, pre-Comey at least traditionally, did not try and announce any major political investigations in the 90, 120 days before the election. Which we're in. Which we're coming up on, yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I think the – whether there's going to be any new indictments that are issued will probably only come after the midterms. Right.

SPEAKER_37: But they did get – according to this indictment, is it true they had 500,000 voter rolls that they may have compromised? They actually knew who the voters were? So now this is starting to be like that crazy conspiracy theory that I had, like, two years ago, which was like, I think they stole the voter rolls and then matched them to Facebook IDs with Cambridge Analytica.

SPEAKER_03: Because I had heard that from an insider that – two years ago. And that seems to me what's going to –

SPEAKER_555: It's entirely plausible. Right.

SPEAKER_03: This seems to me to be what's the most plausible. They hacked in and found out who voted for Obama or who voted in certain regions that

SPEAKER_37: went to Obama. Right.

SPEAKER_558: Yeah, you can't do the – you can't do the – you can't do the – you wouldn't know the vote.

SPEAKER_37: But if you knew the vote count was 86 percent or above the standard deviation, you grab those

SPEAKER_03: people, you get those people, you correlate them to Cambridge Analytica data, then you micro-target them and get them to not turn out to vote. And you just thread the needle, you know, like 17 sniper shots. Bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. Right down the line.

SPEAKER_561: Is it plausible now, you think? It's starting to feel like this is very real.

SPEAKER_23: I mean, the idea that you could run a very targeted campaign via social media and Facebook using a mixture of, you know, promoted content and then bots and, you know, not necessarily even bots, a human, you know, created accounts posing as actual Americans and things like that.

SPEAKER_564: 500 people in a boiler room somewhere?

SPEAKER_23: Yeah, I mean, and which we know exists and which is – there's a lot of documented evidence of what –

SPEAKER_565: That was the last indictment of those other 14 Russians because it was like they were boiler rooming it.

SPEAKER_23: You know, it was – like it was a remarkably effective operation. And, I mean, we were talking earlier about the Russians would do things like they'd set up these dormant accounts like fake – like that were – looked like they were local news, like newspapers. And these are years old. And they would post legitimate – links to legitimate news stories for years. Sleeper cells.

SPEAKER_565: Sleeper social cells. Yeah. Sleeper social accounts.

SPEAKER_117: And I think that's actually – it actually ties back to some of the challenges that, like, Twitter and Facebook do face in trying to purge their platforms of this stuff is that, you know, a lot of times we were organized around the idea of people either trying to spam people. Yep. Or, you know, do some, like, basic – Get a click. Would be doing this with unlimited budget to achieve a non-economic end. I don't think any of us really factor that into how we thought about, like, you know, we built – like when we built the commenting system at Weblogs Inc., it never occurred to us that, like, we should be planning for anything except for harassment and for spam. Right. We don't want people to spam and try to do SEO stuff. But if, like, the Russians had decided to use our comments, you know –

SPEAKER_572: To steer a discussion. Yeah.

SPEAKER_117: Like, you know, it just would never have occurred to us.

SPEAKER_573: Wow. Huh.

SPEAKER_117: We didn't build these systems around those kinds of scenarios.

SPEAKER_105: So where do you think this ends up? What does your gut tell you? What do you believe in?

SPEAKER_235: I mean, there's been – you know, I think Mueller's certainly under more political pressure than ever to wrap it up.

SPEAKER_78: Yeah. I mean, like, you know, he's basically been – the FBI and the investigation have basically been taking two years of attacks and polls show it's worked, right? I mean, like, there's – Misinformation works. We're sapping confidence in the investigation from polls. That being said, like, there's probably not going to be any major news, new indictments between now and Election Day. The fall will be – you know, Paul Manafort's trial will begin in the fall and will lead up to Election Day, which will ensure it gets more media coverage. Wow. That dude is so dirty. But ultimately, you know, like –

SPEAKER_576: He's so dirty.

SPEAKER_48: You know, it's going to – I mean, the expectation is Mueller will issue some report. Right. And then it depends on how – whether or not he recommends an indictment – recommends impeachment. Right. And, you know, then there's kind of the constitutional question about whether or not the president can be indicted, which has never been tested before in court. Wow. So this is going to have – this is going to get messy. I mean, you know, that's if he recommends charges against Trump.

SPEAKER_78: Yeah. But, like, there's going to be, like, several debates within debates about, like, what is even possible. Right.

SPEAKER_37: There's what's legally possible. Yeah.

SPEAKER_41: And then there's, like – when he said if the Russians are listening, go do this, he can just say that was a joke. And if they did it, I –

SPEAKER_582: Seriously, not literally, right?

SPEAKER_41: Seriously, not literally, yeah.

David Friedberg: I would say from everything that we've seen from Mueller is that he understands that he doesn't just have to lay out the facts of the case.

SPEAKER_23: He has to do it in such a way that he's going to be able to put Republicans in Congress in a very difficult position. Now, whether he can accomplish that or not is an open question. But he at least seems to understand that it's not just about, you know, filing – creating the bones of an indictment. He actually has to present things in sort of an airtight way.

SPEAKER_584: Right.

SPEAKER_220: And he's not the kind of guy who's got an agenda. He's a Republican himself. So if he's going through this thoroughly as a career person, you know, who's pretty incredibly respected and he's doing it in this methodical way, that would lead me on a game theory basis to say there's something very serious here or he considers it very serious or he would have wrapped it up already. And if he's being very strategic about where he drops these indictments, like the Michael Cohen's in the New York attorney general's office, this one's in D.C. for Paul Manafort. They all seem to be – my understanding is he's spreading these out and making different –

SPEAKER_272: Well, Cohen's stuff is that Cohen broke state – yeah, he broke state law.

SPEAKER_03: Right. But my understanding is instead of Mueller's office doing it, this like sort of separates. If Mueller gets fired, these things still keep going, right? So he's kind of like – that was one theory that people had. But I'm starting to think that it's all true.

SPEAKER_23: I mean, you read the Jonathan Chait story in New York Magazine where he said, let's take the – again, talk about worst-case scenarios. Let's talk about worst-case scenarios that it turns out that, you know –

SPEAKER_589: P-tape exists.

SPEAKER_23: Or that Trump is somehow an agent of some kind, whether witting or unwitting. Yeah. And he kind of plays it out. It doesn't – let's put it this way. If you take Occam's razor to everything, there is a perfectly reasonable logical explanation for everything that's going on, and it is not one that looks very good for Trump.

SPEAKER_54: Trump. Yeah.

SPEAKER_220: I think what's going to happen is the number of apartments bought by Russians, and I think that they were just dirty top to bottom in real estate and those kind of transactions, and that's starting to come out.

SPEAKER_262: They would pay $200 million for golf courses that were worth $15 million.

SPEAKER_220: Yeah. I think when all that comes out, that's why he said that's the red line, I think. But I think that – so then the question is – yeah.

SPEAKER_110: Let's see how much hate mail I'm going to get after this.

SPEAKER_220: No, I'm just wondering, like – even putting aside, like, if you're a Republican, Democrat, or a Republican who hates Trump, which a lot seemed to do, like a lot of Republicans don't like – they like that they won. They like that he hit some agenda points, but they don't like him.

SPEAKER_03: How do we get back to reality and people believing the news again and people believing in the FBI again and people believing in the integrity of the voting system again? As quickly as this has fallen apart, can we crawl back?

SPEAKER_37: And if it took two years for this whole thing to collapse and maybe it's two more years, four years of collapsing, how many more years to build it back up in faith and institutions?

SPEAKER_135: I guess Watergate is the only corollary.

SPEAKER_545: Yeah. It's going to take a long time.

SPEAKER_578: I mean, yeah. The polls speak for themselves and, like, the confidence in the FBI is obviously problematic.

SPEAKER_23: And you've got to listen to the – sorry. I'm sorry. But you've got to listen to that Watergate podcast that Slate did. I know.

SPEAKER_313: Yeah, really good. No, it's like it was three years of reporting or something before –

SPEAKER_505: And they try to do a good job of making you realize what it was like to be in the middle of it when people didn't know how it was going to end.

SPEAKER_23: Right. Because at the time, the idea that the president was going to resign or be impeached just seemed incredibly impossible.

SPEAKER_39: What I'm saying, I guess, for journalism, Teddy, is the concept of leaking information, it's changed, hasn't it?

SPEAKER_03: Like, leaking has become virtuous, normal, kind of fun.

SPEAKER_37: Like, it seems like WikiLeaks and people have forgotten the – it feels to me like people have either forgotten the ramifications of leaking or the legality of it because WikiLeaks has been championed so much.

SPEAKER_03: And then you have Hillary's email, the Sony hack. I feel like a lot of this, like – a lot of these people around Trump, they probably didn't think that stealing information off computers and leaked data was criminal, espionage.

SPEAKER_78: I think there's a difference between, like, leaking and stealing. Sure. We were just talking before about Bad Blood, right, which is a story which, without leaks, you know, there may be there enough to still exist, right? And, like, we would think about Elizabeth Holmes as, you know, the next few jobs. Yes. The part of – you know, I think leaking is a pejorative phrase on, like –

SPEAKER_608: Whistleblowing.

SPEAKER_78: Yeah. I mean, that being, like, you know, lots of, you know, journalists' jobs are to obtain the truth and, like, companies' jobs are to make themselves look good. Right. Sometimes good companies – sometimes the truth is the company is good.

SPEAKER_610: Yeah, but then there's hacking and there's, like, this whole, like – Right, hacking is –

SPEAKER_78: There's a whole hacking culture. Illumely obtaining information. Right. You know, very – you know, in the national security world, some leaks are illegal. But in Silicon Valley, I mean, like, you know, mostly, you know, how many times do sources say, like, you know, I'm under –

SPEAKER_336: No, you can get sued, you know, by a company. If you have an NDA, you break it, right? That's happened.

SPEAKER_263: So having, you know, like Teddy been on the receiving side of leaks. Yeah. Major ones.

SPEAKER_23: When I was doing a gadget, that, you know, the threshold is usually that you cannot create an inducement for someone to break a nondisclosure agreement or transfer trade secrets to you. Right. If someone does that willingly or if you happen upon it –

SPEAKER_394: You get an nondis email, not your fault.

SPEAKER_54: Yeah, it's not your fault. I think – They supposedly tell people to hack Hillary's email? Yeah, and I think that's where the operative question is, right, is what was the – what did the Trump campaign do to coordinate or induce or facilitate, you know, the reception of stolen materials?

SPEAKER_23: And I think there was something during the 2000 campaign where – I don't know if it was the Gore campaign or the Bush campaign. One of them got the debate prep book from the Gore campaign. And they didn't look at it. They handed it back. They called the FBI and said – They thought it might be a sting maybe. Well, they thought it might be a setup. But also, they were like, we just – that's the right thing to do is we got this. We didn't ask for it. We didn't do anything to facilitate it.

SPEAKER_263: And we're giving it back. Totally.

SPEAKER_96: It's going to be so interesting to look back on this conversation in a year or two. Can you imagine, like, how the world might change in a year or two?

SPEAKER_37: I'm telling all my founders right now, if you can raise money now, raise money. If you can raise money from good investors at an okay, good, or great price, take it down now. Raise a major round. Because having lived through three down markets, if Trump gets impeached, the stock market could lose half its value or a third. It could create chaos.

SPEAKER_624: It'll be chaotic.

SPEAKER_37: It could be complete, utter chaos, especially given how the Republicans are, like, taking this as, like, a real war, right? And the liberal side is getting pretty, you know, charged up as well. And the division seems so strong. I think this could be like Operation Wall Street was, like, kind of like a, you know, like light chaos. Imagine if Operation Wall Street – was it Operation Wall Street? Was that the –

SPEAKER_03: Occupy Wall Street. Occupy Wall Street. Sorry. Remember Occupy Wall Street got a little crazy in Oakland. People were, like, breaking windows.

SPEAKER_78: So you think that political – do you think that the Trump situation could affect startups?

SPEAKER_37: I think it could cut the stock market in half. When the stock market gets cut in half, because I've lived through that three times, LPs do not want capital calls made.

SPEAKER_03: So LPs tell firms, no capital calls. Slow down.

SPEAKER_113: You don't think that falling stock market would drive people to, you know, invest not in – It will. It will take eight years.

SPEAKER_220: We're now in the second largest bull market.

SPEAKER_113: So they can see private markets.

SPEAKER_220: We're now in the largest bull market, I believe, since World War II. We're 112 months, 115 months, or something like that. It's literally been a bull market since 2008. There have been two corrections that are, like, 21%, 19%. So depending on how you count corrections. But I don't consider those major corrections given the velocity of everything. So people debate if it's been a long bull market or not with those corrections. But when that tanks, the VCs can't invest. Then rich people who are angel investors feel poor because they see half their net worth go away. And they've got to start covering bills if they've been spending a lot. So they, you know, sell their second home or they try to rent it out. They stop angel investing. So everything dries up.

SPEAKER_37: And anybody who's sitting there with three to nine months runway is toast. And the people with 18 to 24 months of runway are golden because they can deploy capital in a down market. Right. And that means if the ad market on Facebook goes from $3 a click to $1 a click, they can just take up all the customers. Yeah.

SPEAKER_39: So great companies are built during the down market. Uber, Airbnb, before that, Google, you know.

SPEAKER_37: It's the down market is when you can deploy capital efficiently. But the number of companies that would go out of business would be extraordinary. And I think it's – I give it a 30% chance. I think we're 70% chance it's going to be, like, up and down, 20%. But I give it a 30% chance of a 40%, 50%, 60% meltdown and chaos in the streets.

SPEAKER_491: I don't know if it's that high, but – It's hard to say.

SPEAKER_37: Do you ever see people go to an airport and shut it down because of the president's behavior?

SPEAKER_634: Yeah. No, I mean – I've never seen that in my lifetime. But, like, the late 60s were pretty crazy.

SPEAKER_17: I know. That was not our lifetime, Peter. No, I know. I was born in 70. You were born in 76?

SPEAKER_20: 75. Like, that's not our lifetime. No, I know. But it does happen in recent memory, though. Yes. Just not in the last 50 years. Yeah. Scary times.

SPEAKER_580: All right. Welcome to This Week in Dystopia. Thanks for everyone on the pod, Ted. Sure. Good job. Go check out Recode.

SPEAKER_03: And you do your own podcast, or you just sit on others?

SPEAKER_640: I sit on Kara's podcast occasionally. Yeah.

SPEAKER_426: Yeah. She does a good job. Mayor Kara Swisher, mayorjason.com. Five years. The debates are going to be great.

SPEAKER_03: And Peter Rojas is doing his office hours. Follow Peter Rojas on Twitter and Betaworks, where he's a partner.

SPEAKER_23: Yes, and I got to do a plug quickly. We're doing, taking applications for our next accelerator. Nice. Live camp. It's around live interactive experiences. Nice. Everything in between HQ Trivia and Fortnite and Twitch. Like, people building kind of in those areas. In the moment is your theme. Yeah, live, synchronous, interactive experiences.

SPEAKER_645: And last year was bots, and the year before was VR?

SPEAKER_23: Two years ago, this past winter we did augmented reality and computer vision. Last year we did voice computing.

SPEAKER_16: And then a couple years ago we did conversational software. Which is bots? Chat bots and messaging.

SPEAKER_138: You were too early on that. Bots are now happening. Do you have a fear that your themes are too early?

SPEAKER_117: So, it's actually not, we don't mind because we still continue to get tons of deal flow from those categories.

SPEAKER_23: So, we just did, I mean, we'll still invest in those areas. You should re-theme. Let's do it again. You should theme back. We might. We haven't come back around yet.

SPEAKER_14: Like, alumni theme. Does this take place as an event? Like, on a day?

SPEAKER_23: It's a three, it's an 11-week program in New York. We invest, we put a couple hundred thousand dollars in each company. Nice.

SPEAKER_33: All right. Applications, Betaworks.com slash LiveCamp.

SPEAKER_55: Betaworks.com slash LiveCamp. Thank you to RxBar and ZipRecur to make sure you're watching. You do the slash twist and use the twist code. Thank you, Emmy Award-winning producer Jackie and director Tony. Great job. We'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.