SPEAKER_00: okay we've got an amazing show for you today and i don't mean that like i did the other thousand times i said it today is actually the best show ever i'm going to talk with bolt ceo ryan breslow he sells some one-click checkout software but he made some news a couple of weeks ago when he announced that bolt would implement a four-day work week might that interest you sounds pretty interesting to me when we talk about his unique ideas about culture raising money for startups and this four-day work week and how it's going do they get fridays off if it's a holiday week lots of questions do people get a 20 pay cut i had a ton of questions he had a ton of answers but first let's chop up the news sequoia announced a groundbreaking innovative new fund structure that's going to change silicon valley forever and i'll break down how uh that is working it's kind of technical but kind of important so you're going to want to hear that one and then we'll talk about robin hood and twitter and their q3 earnings and some of the products and trends that are impacting uh those

SPEAKER_04: earnings stick with us it's going to be a great show this week in startups is brought to you by in brokers startup insurance program helps startups secure the most important types of insurance at a lower cost and with less hassle save up to 20 percent off traditional insurance today at embroker.com twist while you're there get an extra 10 off using offer code twist belay get back to doing what only you can do growing your organization and leave the rest to belay learn how by texting twist to 55123 or visit belaysolutions.com twist and novo free business banking if your bank charges outrageous fees you need a bank account that's built for small business get your free business banking account in just 10 minutes at banknovo.com twist okay sequoia announced a new fund structure

SPEAKER_00: today it's called the sequoia fund and this is going to be like their mega you know main fund and uh rulof both a good friend of mine published a blog post on sequoia's medium page this morning it's titled the sequoia fund patient capital for building enduring companies and that's always what they've been i've had rule off on the board of inside.com for over 10 years he's got bigger fish to fry but

SPEAKER_08: he still comes to every board meeting what a guy uh really one of the greatest venture capitalists of

SPEAKER_00: all time and you know he's like me still young and in the game or relatively young in the game so let me give you a background of how a venture fund typically works and why people say hey maybe it's too short of a time period lps rich people endowments non-profits and the like will give large amounts of money to a venture capitalist in a fund they typically name the fund launch fund one

SPEAKER_08: two and three someday who knows maybe i'll launch launch one four i'm not allowed to talk about that

SPEAKER_00: because of sec regulations um but these funds tend to be sequential so there's a sequoia 10 11 12 13 and then you might do vertical specific funds you might do one just for early stage one for just late stage one for just crypto and all of those funds have a 10-year horizon that's the standard but what we've seen is some companies stay private longer than 10 years airbnb and uber the two notable examples as well the value of those shares when they do go public they tend to do even better when they go public and so according to uh pitch book sequoia has over 60 funds since 1981 that seems directly directionally correct to me you know china india growth seed the classic venture funds but the problem is uh that when they distribute the shares to their lps so uber goes public they distribute the shares whatsapp gets bought by facebook they distribute facebook shares and full disclosure i'm in business with sequoia they're lps in my fund and i was the first sequoia scout uh but i haven't talked to him about this uh yet so i thought i would just explain it to all of you folks as best i can imagine if when uh you know instagram youtube google apple and all of these great companies that sequoia invested in and they might own 10 20 even upwards of 30 instead of sending those shares at you know the very low valuation of when the company first goes public versus waiting 10 years or just leaving it in the fund and then those funds allocating fees i'm sorry allocating money to the sub funds so these sub funds will still exist in other words their seed fund or their you know sequentially numbered fund will still exist those folks will determine when they want to distribute the shares okay square which is a famous example you know they went public at a very low uh valuation and now they're a magnitude higher in fact ruloff is still on the board of the company and that was his uh example here is like listen square has returned billions of dollars post tens of billions of dollars post being public we should keep it not sell those shares and sequoia knows the company best so those lps don't have the experience working with these companies they want sequoia or in my case with the launch fund or in david sax's case with craft or chamath social capital or with friedberg the production board those lps who give us money they trust our judgment and they are giving us carry they're paying us a portion of the returns in order that we make the best decision possible on their behalf and that's why it's a really i take it very seriously the job because you have to make some serious decisions when do you sell the shares when you distribute them etc and if you were to distribute your amazon shares or apple shares when they went public as opposed to holding them my lord that could be a big difference in fact my crack research team talked a little bit about that uh and we don't know if this is actually correct but if apple went public in 1980 at like a 1.8 billion dollar value valuation we found that number online and now they're worth 2.5 trillion that's over a thousand x not percent x you know one dollar equals over a thousand it's actually 1377 according to our back of the envelope here and this is all back of the envelope and according to our research sequoia sold their stake in apple in 1979 for 6 million 18 months after investing if they had held that till today it would be worth over 8 billion dollars easily maybe more who knows uh what stock splits and other devices occurred at that time so what this will do is it's going to flip the model around where sequoia can just manage this the sequoia fund while still doing venture capital so all those public interests will be in there and uh here's some quotes from his blog post moving forward our lps will invest into the sequoia fund an open-ended liquid portfolio made up of public positions in a selection of our enduring companies in other words we're going to keep the shares so you invest in that fund then the sequoia fund quote will in turn allocate capital to a series of closed end sub funds for venture investing investments at every stage from inception to ipo right so if you're an lp instead of going into specific funds you go into this big fund and then that fund then you know hands the money off to each of these sub funds here we go this is the important part proceeds from these venture investments will flow back into the sequoia fund in a continuous feedback loop investments will no longer have expiration dates our sole focus will be to grow value for our companies and limited partners over the long run this new structure removes all artificial time horizons on how long we can partner with companies it enables us to participate on their boards and help them realize their potential over the course of decades because if you distribute the shares now you own you know less than 20 or less than 10 do you really get to keep a board seat no that's why vcs roll off of these boards typically unless the founder wants to keep them so this is just an incredibly disruptive thing to do uh for obvious reasons it also in quote from ruloff's post it also lets us hold public shares long after the ipo and seek the best long-term returns for our limited partners in other words uh we will decide when to sell those if at all so they can make a decision if they have a bunch of shares do they want to sell them do they not want to sell them we want to sell 10 of them etc so let's just do a thought exercise here imagine if they had held apple google and whatsapp which got bought by facebook and then resulted in facebook shares this would probably be close to a 200 billion dollar public fund so we covered the apple one right and what that could have been worth you know 10 billion bucks then you look at the google investment well sequoia co-led the google google's 25 million dollar series a sequoia had something like 22 million shares at 85 a share at google's 20 2004 ipo at that time was worth 1.9 billion approximately then google uh which ipo did a 23 billion dollar evaluation we know is now worth almost 2 trillion so it's 1.86 trillion at the taping of this so that's 80x since the ipo now sequoia's investment in google today would be worth around 150 billion dollars with a b and my understanding is many of the partners at sequoia never sold their google shares they just hold them i mean is there something better to hold than google is there something better to hold than apple not to the best of my knowledge like why would you ever sell those shares uh the whatsapp investment uh sequoia reportedly owned you know the

SPEAKER_08: you don't really know all the exact details here 20 on whatsapp uh after doing the seed series a and series b rounds that was a another groundbreaking innovation from sequoia which was they just made that same firm that was growing like a weed whatsapp they just offered them each round of funding and you don't have to go out and even tell anybody what you're doing share your deck we'll just give you the money um some people would consider that bad hygiene and it really is based on the outcome so if you saw andreason horowitz did three investments in like 18 months in clubhouse one at 100 million one at like a billion and then one at 4 billion that would be bad hygiene because the result was bad you know if clubhouse turns out to be worth 100 billion they're gonna look like geniuses that's basically how the industry works if you're right it was the right bet if you're wrong it was the wrong bet you should not have gone all in uh so what what's

SPEAKER_00: app sold to facebook in 2014 for 16 billion about 4 billion in cash 12 billion in stock and uh so if you look at that sequoia probably turned 60 million into 3 billion in four years well at the time of the acquisition facebook was at 55 dollars it's gone up almost 6x since then so the investment would be worth close to 20 billion for sequoia so this is just a brilliant way to have a bigger impact in the space they'll have more influence this wasn't mentioned but if sequoia if the sequoia fund now owns like fidelity or goldman or other funds owns a significant portion of a public company hey you you have direct access to the founders you have direct access to the management

SPEAKER_08: team not that they don't already have that their sequoia but you do have more influence um because

SPEAKER_00: you've been more helpful so now uh they did talk about would this be publicly tradable it's not going to be publicly tradable so i'll be private so it will scale forever uh and they'll be my understanding is there's going to be a redemption period every year so every year if you're in the fund and your patient capital which is think you know the ford foundation or harvard or mit one of those great

SPEAKER_10: endowments or non-profits that's i think 90 of the money in sequoia's funds i'm taking a guess here

SPEAKER_00: then uh you are not trying to day trade you trust sequoia brilliant every year you make a decision if you want to get some of that money out if you need it and if not well you got the best in the business watching your investment and uh they're going to know what decisions to make and if you don't like their decisions well of course you have it's your money and your returns you can sell out brilliant idea i do think um a number of people will copy sequoia this seems like it will also be better for taxes because when you distribute your shares you don't have a tax event so lps get the shares but then those lps then sometimes decide to sell their shares pay taxes and then put those share put that money to work in another venture firm here they can just leave them in there let them grow it's not like these endowments are looking to liquidate it's not like i think you know harvard's at 50 billion now it's not like they need 20 billion dollars tomorrow to buy a small you know series of islands in the pacific they're not making big purchases they're just using the interest on those

SPEAKER_08: endowments to run uh those universities or for a foundation to run their you know really virtuous programs in the world so congratulations to sequoia great leadership uh and i think everybody who's got multiple funds will work towards this and will quickly become the standard if you don't have business

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SPEAKER_08: it but they're not like the ideal customer profiles the assets under custody is 95 billion that's up over

SPEAKER_00: 115 year over year down slightly from q2 which was 102 billion this is a very significant statistic as well this means how much do all the accounts have in them combined and so super revealing that this is a you know a lot of money to be the custodian of uh vlad noted uh that this quarter uh was focused on developing new features and this is critical because uh when a company grows this fast let's face it the wheels can come off uh things can break to have customer support problems which we saw coinbase you know had national news cnbc talking about people having their accounts hacked and there's no phone number and obviously coinbase um did make some changes and got some phone numbers going for

SPEAKER_08: account resets so these companies really grew faster than anybody ever anticipated you know getting to 20 million users my god 20 million accounts is crazy unprecedented so a little retreat and a little bit of like maybe cleaning up uh shop and building some infrastructure here is a really good move for startups that are growing too fast we saw uber do at airbnb many people have gone through this where things were moving really fast and you said you know what we need to sure things up and make

SPEAKER_07: sure this is built to last and i believe robin hood airbnb uber these are all belt to last companies

SPEAKER_00: it feels like that to me one of the big efforts they're going to have is this crypto wallet and so robin hood announced that uh in late september vlad announced that the waitlist was already over a million users and this is critically important when you have a huge base of users you can launch products that are adjacent to yours and that will then you don't have to acquire a customer for that service you just shows up in your app so when i use wealthfront at some point they put margin loans in or 529s i had andy radcliffe andy radcliffe on here many times on the show and he talked about that strategy we just want to keep releasing new features this is similar to google releasing chrome gmail buying youtube android have all these google search users google docs gets put in your interface even google plus got put in your interface and been removed because it was so terrible it actually was a great product but it should have had its own domain name that's another that's a story for another time uh so robin hood introduced crypto trading in 2018 uh and in q3 crypto trading accounted for 51 million of transaction based revenue about 14 of total revenue so robin hood clearly wants to boost its crypto presence and that's why they're making this crypto wallet uh robin hood offers no fee crypto trading which they can use to market against coinbase which is staggeringly expensive i think is what i hear from most people who trade crypto 1.5 fee on all transactions uh using a bank account so i don't know that's staggering but i think for crypto folks they feel it's high coinbase has 68 million verified accounts so that's verified that's not necessarily

SPEAKER_36: monthly so you could have many verified accounts and then maybe you know people are hodling

SPEAKER_00: and not using them every month so they're reporting on two different numbers there but clearly coinbase

SPEAKER_08: has done an extraordinary job uh they're also vlad noted they're going to do live 24 7 phone support and that's going to be a big game changer doing 24 hour seven days a week is coming over the top and basically providing more than you know a lot of other services do where you have to call during business hours uh they announced in a press release that robin hood would be offering retirement

SPEAKER_00: accounts in the future this means they're going to go up against betterment uh wealth front which we have a position in and so you'll start to see all of these different financial services you know kind of race towards a singularity a banking account a checking account an atm card a visa card all of these things are going to be offered in all of these services it's just so clear to me it's just a

SPEAKER_08: matter of the prioritization and how good they are how much they delight users one really cool thing they did was they were using uh say technologies which is uh was acquired in august of 2021 and they took a handful of questions from retail investors which uh typically only the banks ask questions during these

SPEAKER_00: calls uh so they're really still on that mission to democratize uh so if as a robin hood shareholder i believe this company will be worth 10x in 10 years that's why i'm holding my shares great management team loyal customer base incredible product design it's not an accident when somebody gets to 10 or 20 million accounts it's not an accident when somebody builds a wall world changing beautiful app so when i see that whether it's uber airbnb tesla you don't bet against great product and founders still at the company running those companies making those great products and so robin hood airbnb uber you know all have world-class products uber doesn't have the founder there anymore so that would be a little mini red flag um so take that for what it's worth but i think they've got a pretty good ceo uh who's

SPEAKER_08: been doing a pretty good job of getting them focused on what matters and i think their earnings will be in november they're a little bit behind everybody else this is the big week for earnings

SPEAKER_00: okay let's go to our next story twitter has also reported their q3 earnings and noted their revenue was less impacted by ios ios privacy changes than they anticipated that's interesting news uh twitter stock is up about four percent after hours uh 63 dollars a share q3 revenue 1.28 billion that's 37 percent year over year we talked about this on the program if you're above 20 30 percent you're in that high growth category uh ad revenue totaled 1.14 billion that's up 41 year over year uh and ad engagements which is like when you click on an ad you open it up you reply you retweet you like or you bookmark those were up six percent year over year cost per engagement increased 33 percent year over year

SPEAKER_08: they really love that cost per engagement metric i don't know if that's important you know everybody hits the like button uh who knows if that's actually important

SPEAKER_00: but they report it so we'll we'll pass it on uh the operating loss was 743 million operating margin of negative 58 this includes a one-time litigation charge of 766 million dollars the original lawsuit was filed in 2016 and alleged dorsey among others in facts about the slowing user growth while selling their personal stock holdings according to the verge we i don't think the terms of that settlement are detailed usually those things are paid for and then everybody moves on so you can take out profitability for this year i'm sorry for this quarter and you can just strike it from the year because listen the company is worth a lot of money and so uh it's uh that's a speed it's an expensive speeding ticket but a speeding ticket nonetheless q3 net loss 537 million due to the fine that twitter paid uh for the user counts uh to settle that and so that's an interesting sort of rub here is that twitter feels like it's growing their product and doing interesting things but and the revenue is growing but it does feel like there should be more going on here i think there could be some acquisitions that occur that would be really great if they could buy some things that maybe grew it but twitter is a very unique product in the world it's super influential among a certain cohort of people they've never been able to get everybody on the platform everybody doesn't like it you have to be kind of chatty and addicted to twitter to really get into it you have

SPEAKER_08: to be kind of an influencer or you're really passionate about things it's kind of different than the family-friendly facebook stuff or the salacious you know dancing meme stuff on tick tock it

SPEAKER_00: kind of falls into like this intellectual influencer business influencer journalist vortex which might be interesting to look at the fact that they gave the blue check marks to all the journalists early and all the ceos and all the athletes i think that actually defined the service that it was a service for influential people and so when you don't have a blue check mark you kind of feel like a second-class citizen i know when i go back to my old account and i don't have the blue check mark

SPEAKER_08: i think my tweets don't get taken as seriously um and uh just interesting uh those early product

SPEAKER_00: decisions the biggest right here i think is that the apple ios 14.5 app tracking transparency features which launched in may those are supposed to call cause all these kind of headwinds and they didn't um so that is a good sign twitter announced new features in q3 communities this allows users to interact with members of a group like facebook um i haven't been invited to join one yet tipping i have seen tipping uh like cash app and i see people starting to have that in their bios just a a couple of people have it i applied to get it i didn't get it a super follows which means you can subscribe only to content again i've only seen one or two people with it i asked them to give it to us i would like to test it and there's a safety mode which temporary blocks accounts for weeks that use

SPEAKER_36: harmful language or send repetitive replies mentions so it does feel like twitter is you know getting

SPEAKER_08: safer uh they've done a good job with dealing with trending topics even in the face of the chaos around covid and the january 6 insurrection or if you're far on the right party uh protest

SPEAKER_07: kind of feels like an insurrection when you talk to the police who are dragged out but let's keep the show not political for now uh and so great job to the twitter team uh the product velocity has been great

SPEAKER_00: and of course twitter space is doing great they didn't mention it in the call i don't believe uh but i do believe the velocity of products at twitter is moving faster i've been obsessed with review which is their email product kind of a a company that came i think before substack to do paid newsletters and what i found was if you go to twitter.com jason or twitter.com twi startups or slash launch or you know a bunch of our accounts we have mailing lists and i'm paying like 1400 bucks a month for a mailchimp and then it's free on review and it's connected to our twitter so i took like three or four of our email accounts where i had my team do it i don't do any work uh and they moved them over and now we're collecting a dozen 50 whatever emails a week on those accounts so we're getting email signups and then our bill for a mailchimp i think went from 1400 down to a thousand so i'm starting to think i don't even need mailchimp anymore because review is giving it to us for free it's kind of a big hack isn't it now there are some features mailchimp has around templates and around um cross-referencing lists and making you know new segments that you know power users are not

SPEAKER_08: going to um give up easily and so they'll stick with mailchimp in fact we will stick with mailchimp

SPEAKER_56: for some of those reasons but we've already started to deprecate our our mailchimp account

SPEAKER_08: to just try to get that payment from you know what is 18 000 a year now or something and get it down to you know 10 maybe because it's expensive uh we use it a lot but if we can save money i'm gonna do it right since it's the nature of business okay next up my conversation with bolt ceo ryan

SPEAKER_58: breslow for so many leaders there's a moment in your personal and professional life where you realize you're in your own way yes you're the blocker you know you need help and that's exactly where belay comes in but delegating your bookkeeping to someone can be intimidating it's scary imagine though how your business would transform if you didn't have to worry about producing reports and balance sheets if you had more time energy and focus to work on things that only you can do like your product or hiring you could achieve bigger goals because you have the freedom to focus on what matters belay the incredible organization revolutionizing productivity with their virtual assistant service for growing organizations can help you that's why they're giving our listeners a free download of the cost of not doing your bookkeeping your finances are not the place to be experimenting holding your breath fingers crossed and hoping for the best so if you're ready to wave the white flag on handling your red and black margins let one of belay's experienced remote bookkeepers help get back to doing what only you can do growing your organization and leave the bookkeeping to belay just text twist to 55123 or visit belay solutions.com twist for your free download of the cost of not

SPEAKER_62: doing your bookkeeping today okay next up on the program is ryan breslow he is the ceo and founder of

SPEAKER_56: bolt it's his first appearance here on the show bolt.com is a payment company that was founded in 2015 he's raised over 600 million dollars for the company he went to stanford for computer science from 2012 to 2014. company's now got a six billion dollar valuation and uh i first became aware of uh ryan i think when i heard naval talk uh quite positively about you ryan on tim ferris's podcast uh when naval said my favorite founders are actually the ones who i learned from that's high praise uh quote he asked me for references he also did his own back channel he was very quick he was very transparent and then he actually compiled the feedback he had gotten on me and gave it to me as if he had done a peer review of me and he thought i should have the data uh and uh the reason uh i wanted to have ryan on the program

SPEAKER_14: was because he just uh did something uh really interesting at bolt here's a quote from his tweet

SPEAKER_56: one month into bolts four day work week experiment and the results are overwhelming uh this is a recent tweet 83 of the team believes they are more productive at work 86 of the team believes their work life balance has improved 95 of the team is in favor of continuing the four day work week is something that's been experimented with and talked about for i don't know a couple of decades the only other person i know who did it was ryan from treehouse uh so welcome to the program ryan how are you

SPEAKER_65: i'm great it's uh it's a pleasure to be here uh so tell me uh how did you uh come up with the idea for

SPEAKER_56: the four day work week was there like a specific thing that happened at your company people were burnt out you were burnt out or you just realized this could be an amazing way to um attract talent who might

SPEAKER_57: think wow uh i would like to have a four day week and take a three day ski weekend every week

SPEAKER_66: yeah i'd say over the last year we really started doubling down on wellness at work

SPEAKER_68: so we saw that there's a big risk with with working from your home and not having any degree of separation from work and in home life that people were working too much not too little which was our first concern right and so we had done a lot of training and development and different kind of features within our company around promoting employee wellness um and you know we had to coach people to like take time off and then one day we kind of asked the question well instead of coaching why don't we just institutionalize more time off and you know that led us to this the concept of the four day work week and um and they were like wow this this could be pretty incredible i i i saw it and i was

SPEAKER_14: like you know what i think that this is uh particularly important because of covid and working at home so that's great that you're confirming that because i too have seen in my own uh work and then other

SPEAKER_56: people who work with me that people just wake up obviously they don't need to take a shower they don't need to commute so maybe they hit the slack room at eight or nine as opposed to nine or ten they don't get that half hour hour on the way to the office to kind of prepare for work um and they just they start going all in on work and then i see the same people on slack at eight or nine pm and they're just responding because they can't go out because they're in quarantine and maybe they've watched everything on netflix and um yeah people are arguably working too much uh and it does cause mental health problems but this could also be solved by going back to offices so i'm curious what you

SPEAKER_00: think about the power of being in an office with other people as a possible solution here as well

SPEAKER_68: uh we're reopening offices i think you know we reject the notion that you need an office to be productive at work obviously the world has shown us otherwise so for us really offices are just more of a social benefit right they're for building deeper social bonds with your peers and with your team and so that's really what we're designing the offices for we're remote first which means we're always going to act as if we're remote but you come into the office for camaraderie um for maybe some brainstorming have a lunch and meet some new people uh on your team and and that kind of stuff

SPEAKER_78: yeah i'm thinking exactly the same way uh and there's no way to put the genie back in the bottle

SPEAKER_56: because so many of our team members have moved and so it would be impossible to ask them to start commuting so you'd basically have to throw the gauntlet down and say okay move back to the bay area within you know a 45 minute commute of the office and you know get on bart or get on caltrain and it's just not realistic uh to then lose some of your best team members who decided they would move to buy a home somewhere where it's affordable so i think that's the only way to go forward is to to do retreats maybe are you thinking about bringing people in you know like flying them in quarterly

SPEAKER_68: monthly do you have you thought about that cadence we are thinking about you know we think retreats and offsites are a big opportunity you put a lot of intention into doing it well they can be extremely rewarding and you know having a really rewarding few days with your team where you're super intentional about the time that you spend with them versus just being with them every single day in the office you know we think that that that's the way to go and so in addition to the offices we put a lot of effort into experimenting with different off-site programs hopefully we'll open source uh and uh and you know i think the broader point here is that we're rejecting this notion that you know any of the input metrics in terms of the work you do matter more than the output we don't care where you work how you work how much you work as long as you're getting great outcomes for the business and lifting up others around you and doing so then that's all that counts which day of the week are you

SPEAKER_79: officially off we're officially off on fridays i i had a feeling that would be the most logical now

SPEAKER_14: um how do you handle because you uh for people who don't know bolt does one click checkout uh it's

SPEAKER_56: obviously you're quite successful at that this is a customer support driven business you must have five day or seven day a week customer support obviously have servers up and running you can't let everybody take off friday because friday is a very busy day in the economy and if your servers went down or somebody needed customer support you can't so what groups did you have to adjust and say okay we're gonna have half the group or 20 of the group actually work fridays and how did you handle that

SPEAKER_64: mechanically yeah i mean doing a four day work week is not easy um and you know what i tell their

SPEAKER_68: founders is i'm not going to say that systematizing this is easy like there's you know you have to do hard work thinking about all these different edge cases and so we have you know four days like our support teams or service teams are on call you know they're working four days those weeks but you know we're we're shifting you know some will work fridays um but maybe they'll get their mondays

SPEAKER_64: off and so there's some mechanics uh to operationalizing this but you know we have a lot of smart people and we're able to figure it out uh when you yeah and that seems like an obvious one you

SPEAKER_78: know you just have to do you do full-time support on the weekends too do you have weekend customer

SPEAKER_64: support or does your business just say call us monday yeah we have weekend uh priority one level customer support so you know we do have to do some weekend rotations as well perfect yeah and and

SPEAKER_89: anybody who has a business does that and it's it's fairly easy to make those schedules and people just

SPEAKER_78: pick a couple weekends a year that they uh will will come in and make that sacrifice and then take

SPEAKER_56: them totally pretty pretty easy to do so i guess the next piece mechanically that i wanted to talk about was does that mean uh you gave you took everybody's uh vacation days holidays and pulled those back 20 so that the number of days off is not massively more than the work week we left all those in

SPEAKER_68: untouched um but we get some natural discounting because they're a bunch of fridays off anyway right and so you know you get some natural discounting there and then i believe the way we did it was if there's a monday off for a holiday in that week then it's still a four-day week you know we still just do fridays so it's not like we're taking you know 52 weeks in the year it's not like we're taking 52 or sorry 52 days um out of our team it's more like 30. um that's not the exact number but so it's definitely a big reduction but it's not a full 52. got it because that's what i was wondering i

SPEAKER_56: was like how many days a week are these folks actually working if you give people on average two or three weeks of vacation which i'm assuming your company does two or three weeks we do that's uh 10

SPEAKER_89: or 15 days let's put it at 12. people typically get 10 holidays uh so then you're at 22 days off and then if you were to do 50 fridays you would be at 72 and if you gave people five sick and personal days you would be at 77 days off out of five times 52 which is 260. so then people would be only working like 190 days per year or something like that so you've actually looked at that and tried to figure out a way so that the idea is there'll be no week that you'll work five days but the vacation days do

SPEAKER_78: count as part of that so that makes a lot of logical sense for me or if july 4th was on a monday you know then we'll work tuesday to friday yeah that's exactly right if your bank charges outrageous

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SPEAKER_68: based culture to pull this off like we are very fortunate to have built a team of folks that are ridiculously passionate and who believe in high performance um and so we've we have built a culture that i would categorize as a performance culture we hold people to really high standards fair standards but high standards and so this is a given a get right we're saying hey you know we're going to give everybody really the time and opportunity to rest and restore but we expect that you're all in when you're here and in the office right naval has a great quote on twitter which is you know you want to work like lions not like cows cows graze all day doing the same repetitive things over and over again and you don't want that in your organization right i'd rather have people come into the office with full velocity for two days a week then five days of grazing and so

SPEAKER_64: if i can get four days of people coming in and giving it their all then i'm coming out very much ahead

SPEAKER_89: um does this mean uh people on those four days are putting in on average 10 12 hour days or are they just hitting seven eight hours a day and packing it up once again we don't really talk

SPEAKER_64: about time right we talk about impact so what we measure people on is what are they delivering to the

SPEAKER_68: company right not what what are they putting in and so we have a value which is live on our site conscious.org which is our conscious culture playbook one of our core operating values is founder mentality every single person at the company is a founder every single person at the company is a leader and so no matter who you are a manager or an ic everyone has core deliverables that they agree at the beginning of the month or the quarter that they will deliver to the company to push the company forward and so no matter who you are you have those deliverables and that's ultimately what we care about

SPEAKER_89: so they come up with their hey this is what i'm going to get done this quarter and then they circle back around and we see if they got it done if they didn't

SPEAKER_78: they can uh explain why what the blockers were and then they can reset what they're going to do the next

SPEAKER_64: quarter or you can fire them and say listen you didn't get it done that's exactly right and so with the performance culture you know you have to you have to hold people to high standards and what that

SPEAKER_68: means is if they don't adhere to those standards you know if you if you miss on occasion that's okay but if you miss regularly then there's something wrong and so you have to address that um and either come up with a solution or resolution or you know they have to move on um so we do hold people to really high standards and i think that's the biggest misconception of four-day work week i mean we've grown the company 18x in valuation in 18 months so one of the fastest growing companies like in the world and so we execute very hard and very aggressively um did your revenue grow 18x in that time period um not quite uh but uh what did grow that size in that time period is our shopper network and so our business is focused on building the biggest shopper network of one click accounts and that even means reducing pricing we've changed a business model to actually price merchants less to favor growth of the shopper network because we know once we have you know all the shoppers um we will be a you know be able to do a lot of good for our network and so we're prioritizing that above all us and

SPEAKER_78: that has grown about 18x in the last 18 months as well i mean it's been pretty crazy in terms of valuations uh in the market the last 18 months so that's why i ask it um you uh actually have strong

SPEAKER_89: feelings and i think you wrote a book on raising money what do you think the key um to uh raising

SPEAKER_68: money from great investors is momentum um explain that's a key concept so i write in my book fundraising which is now on amazon that um you know you have to create momentum in a fundraising process and you can't just go and tell everybody that you're fundraising right and so momentum comes in a number of different ways one is you know building warming your network and relationships and getting people excited ahead of a fundraise so that you know the momentum is in your favor when you finally tell people that you're fundraising right um so i outline that that process there and then the other side is obviously business momentum where you know you should be hitting key milestones and key goals that you may have even seeded in investors mind six months ago you may have said hey you know we if we achieve this or this or this it'd be enormous you know we're not sure if we're gonna hit it or we may hit it in 12 months and if you can come back in six months and have done

SPEAKER_64: those things that were supposed to take 12 um then you're in a pretty good spot to go raise a bunch

SPEAKER_14: of money yeah i like the way you phrase that because you're basically um incepting in the investor's mind what's important in the business and then you're coming back to them which shows that you have credibility that you set goals that you achieve goals and that you follow up with

SPEAKER_78: people and i always tell young founders that we're investing in or come to our accelerator it's a credibility exercise and people need to know you're going to be relentless and people need to

SPEAKER_14: know um that uh you're going to do what you say you're going to do because let's face it like a lot of people can talk a good game and there's been so much uh focus on the performative nature of raising money and what i like about your position is listen it is not about the performance uh as in acting it's about the performance as in the business metrics right performance is it's the same word for acting as

SPEAKER_89: results but it really is two very different things uh you know in my mind and a chart that's going up and

SPEAKER_14: to the right i always tell people if you have that chart and you email it to an investor 100 of

SPEAKER_56: investors are taking the meeting so what's better begging for meetings emailing lobbying using contacts to try to get meetings to try to get in the room to try and convince people that you're going to do something or redeploying that same amount of time and energy just actually making the chart go up and to the right even just 10 a month means you're doubling every 7.2 months you might as well just make your metrics go up and to the right and then email them the goddamn chart and it's so frustrating for me when i deal with some founders who will not take this very basic advice yeah i mean spot on you

SPEAKER_68: know i i do believe in doing a very good fundraising process and so focusing on doing that well but that's just for short sprints right the rest of the time you should be relentless about execution like throw everything else out the window and you should be talking to your team daily about what you're going to be delivering um and so that's something i think there's just a lot of confusion in the workplace with founders with teammates um and so we've tried to your simplification has been a big lesson for me as a leader which is like you're telling you know someone's telling you they're doing all these things it's like but i only care about this thing right this number or this thing getting done it's like i don't want to talk about those things unless this thing is getting done and then we could talk about all those other things right and so you know kind of standing your ground as a leader and defining what matters to the organization being crystal clear about that unleashes all of this amazing intelligence you have in your team around that but if they're confused and you're not clear about what's important then no matter how smart they are they may be deploying that intelligence against you know objectives that they've made up that aren't actually that important yeah i mean it really is the

SPEAKER_89: job of management to set the mission and to be very clear about what uh success and what success looks like and defining it you know if you're an investor i mean basically you have to invest in great

SPEAKER_56: companies and you have to do it consistently pretty straightforward are we investing in 10 great

SPEAKER_89: companies a month or not you know yeah exactly are we helping those company raise follow-on rounds you don't really have to be you know a genius to figure out what matters so um is this your first

SPEAKER_68: company i'm curious it's my first venture-backed company i'd always been doing like different side projects i ran a bunch of different internet businesses that were never you know super successful but in high school early college um i ran a web development agency that was trying to do add to cart custom built websites where you describe what you want and watch it get built for you it's called sites by hand and uh you know sold hundreds of customers and you know that was really tough

SPEAKER_64: to scale nights and weekends in my stanford dorm room and so i winded it down i'm like i'm like gonna die if i keep doing this customers are really challenging and it does not scale but one of the

SPEAKER_56: great i mean i've met so many founders who started in service-based businesses because they had no money they start a service-based business you get a customer in the first 10 days because everybody needs something built everybody needs help building their business and then all of a sudden you have five of

SPEAKER_78: these customers and then they want you to do more and they want you to do more and then you charge

SPEAKER_89: them more and then you have to hire more people and then people leave and then your entire life is based on two numbers how much you can charge your customers and how much you can increase that amount

SPEAKER_56: which pisses them off and then how little you can pay your staff and you live in that little window you scrape by whatever that margin is 10 30 and just the people who work for you want more money and are getting better job offers and want to work less or it's just a really hard job and then the

SPEAKER_113: customers want to pay less and get more and do want you to do free work it's just brutal i hated the

SPEAKER_64: service business oh yeah i mean it is brutal but i would i think it's a great way to cut your teeth for sure oh my god because it's a it's such a grind it's so hard you learn how to deal with customers

SPEAKER_68: you learn i mean a lot of as you said a lot of the great founders that i know started off this way

SPEAKER_64: yeah um you know andy bromberg who i um you know who the ceo of eco which i helped found um who's my co-founder there him and i met at stanford because we were both doing

SPEAKER_68: this web development work and seo work and so he bonded over that he's one of the founders i you know have the most amount of respect for but a lot a lot of great founders started off this way

SPEAKER_89: yeah in in terms of cutting your teeth if you learn each of those blocking and tackling skills my lord when you actually start a company that's a software company a sas company a fintech company a marketplace a consumer subscription whatever it is a business that scales in other words that you

SPEAKER_78: can grow and it's got some kind of fixed cost but unlimited upside you know you sell you have a million people using your software or you have you know 10 000 it's probably going to cost the same or pretty close to the same amount to service that you know putting aside customer support which does

SPEAKER_113: need to scale yeah yeah yeah yeah man exactly you just become dangerous you just become dangerous

SPEAKER_68: because it's like this thing is just scaling well it's so relevant for me and bolt because i knew everything about e-commerce and how the customers think right i was working with them all day and so even when i came to silicon valley and i go pitch investors i'm like i think checkout is a problem that we need to solve and they would all be like well you know can't possibly be a problem right now we all understand check out's a problem we've like we've all just basically created a new category of checkout but back in the day when i'd go around telling folks to be like this can't be a thing between all these different major companies there's no way this is an opportunity but i was just like you know i work with these customers all day and i know they really struggle with checkout

SPEAKER_64: and i know you can build a network if you connected checkouts and so i'm just going to go build it

SPEAKER_68: and sell it to these customers that i already know how to deal with um and so it ended up working

SPEAKER_89: out very well for for myself and that's even who do you wind up um competing against is it like the shopify's of the world or brain trees or paypal who who's your competition in this like quick checkout

SPEAKER_115: space the beautiful thing is it's really nobody because we're a new layer so basically what bolt does

SPEAKER_68: is we connect to the entire ecosystem we connect to the tax folks the shipping and fulfillment coupons discounts gift cards payment processors alternative payment methods we pull the cart from your shopping car we pass it to your order management system so we're integrated with about 30 to 40 different services during the time of checkout so we integrate with carno we integrate stripe integrated braintree

SPEAKER_64: chase payment tech apple pay after pay you know shipper hq you know netsuite erp

SPEAKER_68: you name it and so this layer might be handled by shopify but for most of the world they're building all these integrations themselves and so we're really just competing with an in-house code base it's like this orchestration layer this management layer over their transactional stack that uh has never existed as an independent platform how do you make money then how do you how do you charge for

SPEAKER_66: your service so we used to charge for the software we say hey we're we're doing all this hard

SPEAKER_68: development work for you you know as a platform replacing your code we're going to charge you for that but now the other part of our business so we have checkout os which is a software and then we have the one click network so if any shopper goes and checks out at one bolt merchant they not only have an account the merchant they have a global bolt account so we see them at the next it's a one-click experience right so we have the promise of clarity right like you just you show

SPEAKER_78: up at a website you're already logged in so it feels like you're taking the amazon prime experience but all these niche folks then have it i don't have to put my credit card in i don't have to put my

SPEAKER_68: login and my address in yeah yeah and and the difference between bolt and an alternative payment method like a clarna is we're the core checkout so we're not an alternative we're not check out with bolt checkout with carna checkout apple pay or after pay we have built all the infrastructure

SPEAKER_66: you know the thousands of features integrations millions of permutations of checkout to just be the

SPEAKER_68: checkout button and so we're the only company in the world that does that um and it's such a it's such a hard technical mission i mean i've been building this business for seven and a half years and we've just been writing integrations all day great domain name that's a million dollar

SPEAKER_89: domain name how did you get bolt.com there was you know there was a newsletter that dan pelson did

SPEAKER_78: called bolt.com so he owned it at some point i believe and it was about extreme sports i believe

SPEAKER_68: did you know that i knew it was like a youtube competitor back in the day yeah um but you know we another company had owned it and i was like this is a perfect name you know it's lightning fast bolt lock secure you can use as a verb right to bolt me uh bolt each other and so like i gotta get this name and i came up with a really creative idea because it wasn't for sale there's instagram bolt there's a facebook facebook was trying to buy bolt.com um and so we were competing with some like major major

SPEAKER_64: players for the domain and first up was i became friends with the owners they're a big company but i

SPEAKER_141: got to the top and i found the owner which company was it somebody must have bought bolt.com yeah yeah it

SPEAKER_68: was a big um wholesale wholesaler um like one of the top um just you know sellers power sellers on ebay amazon

SPEAKER_64: etc their company in nebraska it's actually a very cool company and um you know we got close and then i

SPEAKER_68: said listen your domain's going up in value by the freaking second yeah and so we'll just lease it from you wow um and there's this big sum that will pay you at the end of this lease and we'll give you a little equity too um to buy it outright which is more than any of the other offers and if we're around to pay you that amount you know you're going to get more and the equity is going to be worth an astronomical amount because we're around and we can afford that and you know if we're not around you get the name back and it's worth even more money

SPEAKER_72: and so we out compete facebook for both dot com so smart and so they'll wind up making seven eight

Chamath Palihapitiya: figures off of it they'll make eight figures yeah yeah i think it's a very smart move i'll be honest

SPEAKER_89: that you know like i invested in com.com because of the domain name and people think.com doesn't matter anymore yada yada but it does it basically means the chief executive officer was able to figure out how

SPEAKER_78: to get a domain name that is hard to get again back to the credibility exercise right i saw com.com and i was like wow you know alex is super credible i'm going to invest in this company just based on that i mean it was other stuff too he was also a brilliant product person but yeah a friend of mine

SPEAKER_89: dan palsson when i was a journalist i'm looking at his wikipedia page you didn't know this but he served as the chief creative officer of concrete media i remember that an internet service business from 1998 to 2003 in 1996 under concrete media he and jane mount co-founded bolt.com an early social networking site for teens wow that is a crazy history lesson there and word.com was a very famous literary site um back in the day and it was uh all out of the new york silicon alley ecosystem where i had silicon i reporter magazine and i remember covering dan palsin in the you know 90s but uh great to see that domain name is back in use uh all right listen great to have you on the program congrats on the four day work week i know you're hiring like crazy if people want to join a high performance team

SPEAKER_14: with a stock that went 18x in the last 18 months and that we assume is going to keep accelerating and

SPEAKER_89: they want to have three day weekends every week but be held accountable where can they find your job

SPEAKER_64: listings and what are you hiring for what's your most acuity yeah bolt.com go to our jobs page we're hiring like every role imaginable sales bd you know engineering product managers um so follow us at bolt on twitter at ryan brezzo on on twitter as well and um if you if you want to give it your all but also you know be treated consciously and learn to work consciously we would love to talk to you and

SPEAKER_89: it's bolt.com careers for uh since the ceo doesn't even know where his careers page is you got to have that off the top of your head just this is a message to every founder every single website just put slash careers slash jobs and have them redirect you have a beautiful landing page for careers but everybody go

SPEAKER_155: and apply for a job it seems like uh this is a great place to go if you're high performing you seem

SPEAKER_156: to have been inspired a little bit by um the amazon uh writing culture yes very much so our coo led all

SPEAKER_68: global logistics and worldwide fulfillment at amazon was one hop away from bezos so we got a lot of the good of amazon execution culture and then we provided our conscious culture layering but yeah

SPEAKER_56: i'm a big student say you think that they're too hardcore and they work people too hard well amazon's

SPEAKER_68: designed to cycle people out right it's like you know you're there for three four years and you grind and so for us it's like can we get the most out of everybody but keep them around for 10 years right that's our objective and so it's just a different mindset um but a lot of respect for amazon for for

SPEAKER_159: the execution side of the house i listen uh yeah i mean i'm literally listening to the book i forgot the

SPEAKER_78: name of it but we're doing in book club next week about the writing culture and it really is

SPEAKER_56: as a writer myself like writing is clarity of thought and if people are forced to write they will just be concise just take out all the fat and people just get to the point and like slide decks they're all just like what template should i do and like who gives a about what template you're using who cares what image you're putting you're wasting time just what is the business goal what is the strategy what is the tactic what are you struggling with and let's just get you know to work here the name

SPEAKER_159: of the book is working backwards and uh have you read that one i just listened to it yeah um basically your guy you know lived it so yeah yeah yeah you know it's kind of a dry book but it does explain

SPEAKER_89: the like write the press release yeah so that you answer all the consumer questions of what the product would be and then you can have a more informed working backwards inside stories and secrets from

SPEAKER_68: inside amazon pretty good book yeah a lot to learn from them you know we we've had a writing culture since early days and a shout out to matt mochari with the mochari method he first introduced me to that and so we have this thing called issues which is an asana board every team you have a weekly meeting you drop in issues and so unless there's something super pressing if you want to bring up an issue you go write it down and so before this people would cycle with gossip like oh why are we doing this shouldn't we be doing this so then it goes we go why haven't you written that up as an issue and by the way every issue has got to have a proposed solution or at least some ideas and potential next steps and so what you find is 90 of people they start writing and they're like oh wow this is actually more complicated than i thought i'll you know i'm not gonna gossip or complain about

SPEAKER_64: that anymore right and then 10 actually have a constructive solution that you can resolve i've seen issues get resolved in 30 seconds so everyone's like yeah that sounds good that's great that would normally take

SPEAKER_107: like three hours so yeah uh we had mochari on the pod i'm trying to remember what episode but cool cat

SPEAKER_64: he's awesome is he your coach he was my coach back in the early days um he been intensive like two months

SPEAKER_68: with me i don't think he really does that with founders i was like his first intensive and maybe only intensive and so we went super deep i actually made him ceo of the company for one day a week um for two months he was just like instead of me teaching you it's going to take two years just watch me and so i watched him and learned so much and then carried the torch and we really made it made it our own but i'm definitely standing on the shoulders of giants uh after reading a writing

SPEAKER_89: please write on this doc a one-line reaction to that writing examples i agree with this we'll

SPEAKER_88: implement i am skeptical of this but we'll experiment i totally disagree with this it's stupid wow i'm like

SPEAKER_174: yeah that's a that's a good uh a good way to respond to something that people are writing i like it i'm gonna i'm gonna investigate it a little more all right uh thanks for coming on the program

SPEAKER_78: continued success and uh we'll see you all next time on this week in starters bye bye