SPEAKER_00: Okay, big show today, everybody. And we have five full This Week in Startups coming to you this week. I'm going to start off with Peloton. Are they undervalued? They have lost 75% or so of

SPEAKER_01: their market cap. But their numbers are looking really good. I think, I think Peloton might be a buy and I'm going to go into the numbers and tell you how I assess that. Looking at their subscribers

SPEAKER_00: and the value of their company and the lifetime value of their customers, we do a little bit of back of the envelope math. So you understand how investors think about these businesses. Then we have an amazing interview with the founder and CEO of rad power bikes. I love ebikes I bought to this company is like really doing crazy stuff. And we talked about the founding story, and why ebikes are this new magical experience that everybody should try. And I by the way, I paid for those bikes. And then I invited them to show. So you know, I never accept anything free, which is nothing free. It's always somebody wants to have lunch or wants a favor and introduction. So I never accept

SPEAKER_02: anything free, nor does anybody on the staff, there's no way to get on this program. If you send a PR note here and try to get somebody on the program, it automatically puts your person in the penalty box for like a year or two, we won't even consider them. So don't send PR requests for this weekend startups are all in please. I mean, unless it's like Bill Gates, or like a top 100 person, we understand them like, yes, you can call us if they have a new book coming out. We're going to have the

SPEAKER_06: founder of snowflake on the show on Wednesday. And I'm reading his book right now. It's fantastic. And so

SPEAKER_08: yes, for that level of person, maybe at the end of the pod, I put this at the end, spoiler alert,

SPEAKER_03: I'm going to talk about the ending of secession producer Nick is going to pitch me on me being in season four, he's got a story arc idea. We'll see how that is. We'll put it up the flagpole see if anybody salutes. And I'm going to recap the season and what I think of this extraordinary piece of art that they created called secession. So if you haven't seen the final episode, just at the end, know that I'm gonna talk about and there'll be some spoilers. And at the end of the end of the end, Nick and I had an open end discussion about all in podcast and just in the last 10 episodes, it's gone to the top 50 episodes in the world top 100 pockets in the world. Something's happened.

SPEAKER_02: And we get into how we produce the show. And some inside baseball about the last couple of episodes and Nick strategies around that. And I actually talked about cafe acts one of my investments, which came up during the show. So some inside baseball at the end that you're going to really enjoy trying to do a little bit more about my life and take you inside the program in detail with some of the producers and principals on the show. Stick with us.

SPEAKER_12: This Week in Startups is brought to you by Micro Acquire, the startup acquisition marketplace. Start the right acquisition conversations at your own pace. Get free and instant access to over 100,000 trusted buyers with total anonymity. Say goodbye to brokers and meet your ideal buyer today. Go to trymicroacquire.com slash twist. Stripe. Join thousands of successful founders who choose Stripe as their payments platform. Whether you're an online or in-person retailer, software platform, marketplace, or subscription business, visit stripe.com to learn more about how Stripe can support your business today. And Calm for Business can help your employees be their best selves at work.

SPEAKER_14: HR and benefit leaders can get a free year of Calm for Business at calm.com slash twist.

SPEAKER_00: All right. First up in the news, I've been watching Peloton because I absolutely love this company. And at some point CNBC asked me, hey, J-Cal, what do you think of Peloton? It was really expensive.

SPEAKER_17: They were worth, I think, 30 billion or 40 billion at the time. And I was like, gosh,

SPEAKER_13: at $30 billion, if they have a million of these connected units or whatever, it's 30,000 per unit.

SPEAKER_00: Per customer, that makes no sense, because the lifetime value of the customer is nowhere near $30,000. Even if it was, it still wouldn't make sense. And so I've been watching it like a hawk. And during this recent stock market correction, of course, the stock market, if you zoom out a year, still at all-time highs, basically bouncing along the ceiling, as we say, if you imagine a balloon, if people think there's kind of a ceiling, kind of was bouncing the ceiling. And there were some stocks that became meme stocks. Meme stocks where people were explicitly trying to pump and dump or run them up or run amok with them. And the meme stocks were AMC and GameStop. Those have compressed and come back down to earth. And then there were some stocks that were stocks that were considered pandemic stocks. They were going to just have a huge boom. People got excited about those. You had a little bit of memeness to them, a little bit of pandemic thesis. And then you also had more people participating in the stock market, thanks to apps like Robin Hood. So Peloton was one of those that kind of hit on all three, right? It's a consumer product. So retail investors love it. It also is a, you know, an absolutely great product. So if you're actually looking at it in a great business, I think, because they get 40 bucks a month in subscription, which is $500 a year, in pure profit from the software subscription, put aside the hardware, which if they broke even on it, you know, having millions of people pay you $500 a year is pretty great business, isn't it? Anyway, they peaked at a $47

SPEAKER_17: billion market cap, the price has compressed since then. And we'll show you a couple charts here. If you're watching the YouTube channel, if you're listening, the chart is just showing the

SPEAKER_00: peak. Alright, so Peloton on December 24 2020 Christmas makes sense. Everybody was buying Pelotons for folks hit an all time market cap. I think the peak stock price of 162 bucks a share pretty amazing. Since that time, they've lost a massive amount of value. They're down at 13 now. So they're roughly a third, right? Or a quarter, right? Four times 13 would be 26 times 252. So they're trading about 25% of where they were. And just last week, there was this crazy moment, sex in the city. And this will just be a mini spoiler alert has a sequel. So if you really care

SPEAKER_17: about sex in the city, fast forward 90 seconds, I'll be done talking about it on the show. Just like

SPEAKER_00: that, which is the sequel to sex in the city, Mr. Big, Chris Knoth, famous for being on Law and Order, great actor, at least when he was on Law and Order, dies after has a heart attack after using his Peloton and the stock dropped like 10% the next day, which makes no sense. My gosh, it's fiction. And

SPEAKER_17: it's like nobody even watches the show. I think it's like very minor show. And I watched it was kind of terrible. I'll be honest. I was never a huge fan of that show. I might not be the demographic. So

SPEAKER_00: this week, Peloton came back with their own ad to counter this. So just in, you know, sort of news around Peloton, we'll get back to I want to get back to the numbers and answer the question is it undervalued now is Peloton was clearly overvalued now is it undervalued? And we'll have a little discussion about that based on some numbers. But here's a 37 second comeback ad that Peloton did

SPEAKER_17: really quick with Chris Knoth, basically saying he's not dead. I'll see you on the other side of 37

SPEAKER_31: seconds to new beginnings. You look great. I feel great. Should we take another ride? Life's too

SPEAKER_37: short not to. And just like that, the world was reminded that regular cycling stimulates and improves your heart, lungs and circulation, reducing your risk of cardiovascular diseases. Cycling strengthens your heart muscles, lowers resting pulse and reduces blood fat levels. He's alive.

SPEAKER_41: Is that Ryan Reynolds, the voiceover? I think it is. Anyway, during this time, overall revenue has

SPEAKER_00: increased 6%. But it's connected fitness subscriptions have nearly doubled from 1.3 to 2.5 million. So in other words, when you look at the chart of their actual business, pretty amazing. Just in the in q2 of 2020, they had 712 connected fitness subscriptions. They now than a year later, they had 1.6. So they're more than two and a half times. And now they have 2.492. So almost 2.5. We'll give them the round up there. So this is a really great looking chart. If you look at their quarterly revenue, it's come down. This is I think, because of supply chain issues, because a part of their revenue is buying of the bicycles and the tread. And then part of it is the software subscription that you have now in order to really use a Peloton, you have to have a software subscription, you can theoretically use it, but you can't take the classes, it doesn't record your data. So they basically put a gun to your head, I think it's kind of lame, actually. But whatever, it's such a great product, that most people are not comparing this to a piece of gym equipment, they're comparing it to a gym membership. And for 40 bucks a month, each of these spin classes, I think, are my understanding is 25 to 40 bucks, depending on what city you're in is what a spin class costs. So if you go to about one class a month, maybe the two, you're in the block already. And the software is amazing, and it's super convenient. So it is much better for you. So if you look at the mix, of revenue, that's the key here. I don't like the hardware revenue, obviously, we like the software revenue, because the subscription revenue, I think is 100% profit. In the same quarter last year 2020, they had 757 million in revenue, 600 million of that came from the bikes 156 million from subscriptions. So obviously overwhelming majority was selling the bikes and the treads, the tread is their fancy word for a treadmill. In their most recent quarter, they earned 304 million from subscriptions. So they doubled subscriptions a year later, and they made 500 million, a little bit less selling hardware, I think that it might not be it might be they have some supply issues, they were having a hard time keeping them in stock. So what we really want to look at here is Peloton's ratio, because when you're buying a company or stock, whether I'm doing it at an early stage, or you're doing it as a public investor, you try to value the business in relation to their sales, their customers lifetime value, some other metric. So if you look at their ratios, they were at $35,000 per subscriber at the peak. In other words, if you took the value of the company 47 billion, the number of subscribers was like $35,000. And that has plummeted now. And that was last December. Now this December, they're at $5,000 per subscriber. Well, what's the lifetime value of a of a Peloton subscriber I just described before, it's $500 per year to have this offer of 40 bucks a month, so 480. So we'll just run that up to 500 for back of the envelope math time. So if somebody stays with the product for 10 years, that's pretty amazing, right? Micro Acquire is a startup acquisition marketplace

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SPEAKER_49: these deals is like $1,000 a person you ever go to a closing dinner, that part of the whole thing is, you know, the closing dinner, you spend $1,000 on wine per person, you have this crazy $10,000 dinner to celebrate. This is $290. It's like the cost of the appetizers. Okay, folks, if you're a

SPEAKER_03: buyer, you're being negligent not being on this platform. Micro Acquire helps startups find buyers, it's as simple as that. And they'll help you start conversations that can lead to an acquisition in just 30 days for free at try.microacquire.com. And that subscriber ratio we just did only doesn't count their digital only subscribers,

SPEAKER_00: because they do have people who just pay for their digital only subscription. And that digital only subscription doesn't include their hardware. That's for people who want to use their own bike. So if you go on Amazon, you can see people selling bikes with iPads. If you have your own bike, you can have a Peloton subscription and just use your own bike. So they don't want people who already had bikes to get left out. But it doesn't do things like change the speed of the bike or, you know, it's just not as integrated, right? They don't have the data from the bike getting pumped

SPEAKER_44: into their system. And Peloton lists its annual retention at 92%, which is extraordinary,

SPEAKER_00: which is 8% churn. So if you just do some back of the envelope math here, this is a chart we made internally. So, you know, there could be errors in it and obviously make your own investment decisions. But I like to just make some quick charts. So if you were to look at their subs, connected fitness and digital subscribers, at their current market cap, they're worth $12,000. If you blended those two together in the second column, we're looking at annual subscription costs, 468 connected digital only 228. If you take their lifetime value, based on the projected average subscribers lifetime, then you would be looking at if you just think that they will stick with the product for 10 years, you know, the 10 year lifetime value is something like $13,000. So that's like one times or so or one and a half times if you think they stick around for six years, one and a half one to one and a half times the value of the company. In other words, the company, if you take how much money they're gonna make just from the current subscribers is worth what it's what those subscribers are worth. So I haven't made a move here, I don't buy individual stocks, but I'm going to keep my eye on Peloton because it looks like they are suffering through just some real negativity. I do think it's a takeout target, Apple should buy this, I've been saying that for years, it feels always has felt like the Apple of this space. And Apple doesn't like to buy things. So who knows if they'll ever come out with their own connected fitness. But there are other brands like Nike, or other companies that might want to own this and Amazon, I could see wanting to own this, because it would play well into your Amazon Prime subscription. Imagine you bought your Peloton equipment. And if you had Amazon Prime, the subscription was just included. And my Lord, it could be a great business. So I love the business, I thought this would be an interesting way to look at it. So when things compress, and you have these valuation compressions, maybe sometimes some companies will get valued at less, I don't know how much cash they have, you can take the cash out of their valuation and then do this, you could give them some value for the equity of their brand, a lot of different ways to look at these things. But I thought I would take a moment and say, Hmm, is Peloton a buy right now? Like, I kind of don't like to buy equities, I just put my stuff into new companies. But I might make a bet here. I'm thinking about making a bet. You tell me and reply to me with your best use case, or your best case for or against Peloton on Twitter, I'm at Jason. So just reply to me and just tell me if you think my math is off or whatever. And we'll do a little

SPEAKER_04: tweet storm on the TWI one. But I believe in the company, I think they could have three or four more products. I think they should buy Hydro. I have a Hydro rowing machine barely use it. But I think

SPEAKER_00: the Hydro is a great product. And they basically copied the entire Peloton UI anyway. So that would integrate seamlessly. And then there's Mira and there's Tonal. All these things should be one subscription. And then you can use them at other locations. That's kind of the best part of the Tonal is when I was at the proper hotel in Austin, I took a picture, like a QR code on the Tonal and it just let me write in. And I could have all my account of workouts there and I can track my workout and then it times out after five minutes and log you out and the next person can use it or you just hit log out.

SPEAKER_25: Pretty cool experience, I have to say. All right. I'm really excited about our next guest on the

SPEAKER_08: program, who decided he would go into one of the most difficult categories any entrepreneur can take on. Yes, he's building electric bikes. And you say to me, hey, would you ever invest in an electric bike company? Hardware is hard and you're up against China and the race to the bottom. Well, the only way to win in hardware is to make a product that is so transcendent, amazing, detailed and made with such a level of obsession that it can't be copied and the brand actually becomes worth something to consumers. Well, Mike Radenbaugh is the founder and CEO of a company you've heard me talk about on social media. It's called Rad Power Bikes and they make kick ass electric bikes that are like nothing you've ever tried. You can go visit them at radpowerbikes.com. How do I know this? Well, I tweeted after having driven e-bikes when I was in Italy and in Miami and over the past couple of years,

SPEAKER_25: hacked together e-bikes on the playa at Burning Man. Electric bikes are a different experience. You will take an electric bicycle on missions that you would never take a regular bicycle and I would say my Rad Power Bike missions tend to be the ones I would use my car. In other words, I am not wearing a bunch of sports clothes. I'm wearing regular civilian clothes and I want to get a little bit of exercise, but I also want to have the optionality to go a little bit faster without sweating

SPEAKER_08: and to get to my destination quicker and easier and to get up and down the giant crazy hills that we face in the Bay Area. Welcome to the program, Mike. Jason, thanks. That was a radical intro. It's pretty rad. You and I met online because I tweeted, what's the best electric bike

SPEAKER_25: to get? And I got flooded with responses, but the one that came over and over again was people who were absolutely obsessed with the Rad Power Bike. I bought the best one and then I bought the Rad Wagon. I don't know what the name of the first one I bought was. What's the top of the line Rad Bike? I think you had the Rad Rover first or the Rad Runner. Rad Runner. Yeah, with the big flat seat on the back that you can have another person sit on with the pegs. And so the bikes on an inspirational level, they don't look like touring bikes. They don't look like mountain bikes. They have big chunky tires. What is the aesthetic of this bike called? Is there a name for this category

SPEAKER_73: uh bike that you've uh perfected? The the e-bikes that Rad popularized was first the direct consumer

SPEAKER_75: model. Okay. So that's a really big part of our our history. The second part was this e-bikes that are

SPEAKER_76: and we say built for everything and priced for everyone. And that built for everything, what what we take that internally to mean is that they're built to replace car trips. They're built to replace your getting from point A to point B. So they don't look like a bicycle with an electric motor put onto them. They look like something quite a bit different. So the bike that you got the Rad Runner as an example, that's what we call a a utility bike. And so you can carry groceries on it. You can take your kids to school. You can head out on date night. You can commute to work on it. And it's got

SPEAKER_78: tons of accessories that allow you to store stuff on it and big locks and big tires and puncture resistant

SPEAKER_81: attires. What's the point of the giant chunky tires that feel more like a motorcycle or a moped? You know, cause these aesthetically will look more like a moped kind of, which we don't have really here in the

SPEAKER_83: United States, but you do see in Europe quite often. What's the point of those big chunky tires on a

SPEAKER_73: utilitarian basis? Well, all along fat tires are breakthrough for the e-bike category because

SPEAKER_76: they make people look at the category differently. It feels more like a piece of transportation because it can go over train tracks and rough roads and it can travel in inclement weather and it's super comfortable. Doesn't get flat tires as easily. And, um, and it just looks freaking cool. So, so I think it catches a lot of people's attention and like brings them into the category the way that a regular, you know, bike by appearance maybe wouldn't. Does that fat tire make it easier to

SPEAKER_81: ride and more stable because it has more surface area on the street? Is that a part of this?

SPEAKER_67: The most of our bikes have suspension forks as well. So they have the actual pneumatic suspension,

SPEAKER_76: but then, uh, the tires help with all the smaller bumps in the road. And so then you just have what's like a really cushy ride when you've got that combination of suspension forks plus big tires. So that's really the double whammy. And then it just makes them more versatile. You can take them on more types of, uh, paths. And the reason we did fat tires originally was that that just didn't exist. That was something we pioneered and we did it because

SPEAKER_75: bike infrastructure was not very good. And we wanted to overcome that through product design.

SPEAKER_89: And if you drive them over grass, like I do, or I have gravel in a driveway,

SPEAKER_17: you know, it just eats that just go right through it. Boom. Uh, and that is a nice part of it does

SPEAKER_48: make it feel more stable. If you're a startup founder, you know, early decisions can be the difference between success and failure. And one decision that thousands of successful founders have made is choosing Stripe as their payments platform. We all know Stripe CEO Patrick Paulson was on episode 723 back in April of 2017. Over the past decade, Stripe has made processing payments simple and borderless. That's what you need to know. Simple borderless because the world is complex and there are many regions for you to do work in and you want to make it simple. That's why you make the foundational decision in your startup to use Stripe. They've enabled businesses like Shopify, Postmates and Kickstarter. You may have heard of those three incredibly successful companies while they empowered them to grow revenue and expand to new markets quickly. Kickstarter is the perfect example because they accept payments from 195 countries. Thanks to Stripe and Postmates scaled their revenue to over 70 million after increasing payment authorization rates. Stripe has engineered the world's most powerful and easy to use API. So you can get up and running in minutes, not days. And you can free up your employees to focus on other parts of your business, like acquiring new customers or hiring more people. If you're looking for a no-code solution, well, I got good news here. Stripe recently launched the brilliant payment links. This generates a link that you can share with your customers to get paid fast. There's no coding required because we're moving to a no-code world. We all know that people are building all these great businesses with all these SaaS tools. Well, Stripe is getting in the game now. They got payment links. You got to check it out. I want you to visit Stripe.com to learn more about how Stripe can support your business and it supports all the businesses in my portfolio and people love it. Whether you're an online or in-person retailer, SaaS platform or a marketplace, head to Stripe.com to get started today. Now, in terms of the

SPEAKER_81: ride, this is what people don't understand about the ride. You can ride it essentially in two different ways. There is a literal throttle on the right hand and you can twist it and power will be sent to the tires and you will zip along at up to about 24 miles an hour, depending on if you unlock. You can do a little unlock trick I read online and I think you cap it at 20 miles per hour on the bikes

SPEAKER_96: and then you can unlock it if you choose to and get up to 24. Am I ballpark correct?

SPEAKER_73: Yeah, the federal limit's 20 miles an hour. So everything's 20 miles an hour at Rad and we have

SPEAKER_75: 750 watts of power. So that's another thing we've popularized. Throttles, like you're talking about. Throttles didn't exist before Rad in a big way and so that was something we popularized and the other thing was 750 watts of power, which is the federal legal limit in the United States and

SPEAKER_76: that amount of power empowers you to go places you just normally wouldn't. You were talking about climbing hills before we jumped on today with the bikes and it's the great equalizer.

SPEAKER_94: It flattens hills, even steep ones. Yeah, when I drive up hills, I find like even the steepest of

SPEAKER_81: hills, it can eat the hill at eight or nine miles an hour at a pretty hard vertical and these way more because they've got the battery, they've got the chunky tires or if you'd like to you can pedal and if you pedal it has gear shifters like a regular bike might and depending on the gear shifter it's easier or harder and then there's a second setting one through five which is how much energy gets put

SPEAKER_25: into each pedal so when you're on one you feel like you're riding a normal bicycle but with a just a little bit of assist when you're on five you know you do one rotation and it's gonna push you an extra I would say five miles an hour or something so if you're going five you're gonna go ten if you're

SPEAKER_94: going ten you can go fifteen am I about ballpark right about how the pedal assist works? You got it

SPEAKER_75: exactly right and so our bikes are designed to be throttle assisted when you want to just go from point a to point b and don't break a sweat and maybe you don't even want to pedal that day you just want to cruise yeah and then there's also the pedal assist side and that's one of the reasons why our product

SPEAKER_76: regularly gets compared to sort of an iphone moment where it's this it's this device that people don't really expect but it all of a sudden it covers all these different applications in your life and it becomes this like necessary daily tool not for just for not just for transportation like for you take your kids to school take them to the ice cream store and do it without having to get in a six thousand pound vehicle for uh you have to go pick up one ice cream cone and uh yeah some of my

SPEAKER_81: favorite accessories the one I have that is just absolutely amazing is it's a cage that goes on the back the back can either have a flat seat which could arguably fit two kids but you know my 11 year old will go on those there's nice pegs so she can put her feet on the pegs and feel nice and safe you have put plastic over the tire so there's no chance of a person's you know jeans getting caught in there it's very well thought through so you can sit on the back great but this one has a cage the cage has double bars on each side so there's two bars on each side if you sit in there you can also use the pegs you could put a five-year-old in there six-year-old seven-year-old my 11 year old figured out a way to turn sideways and actually get in there then they hold the bars on the inside and then there's an outside bar which is like this very rigid cage that i'm assuming is for safety if the bike were to fall over kids wearing helmets if they were holding the inside bars and we have to talk about safety

SPEAKER_107: when we're talking about bikes those would hit the ground first is that made for safety is that the goal of that cage what do you call that cage that kid cage yeah we call that the caboose we gave it

SPEAKER_75: a fun friendly name and uh yeah and so within there you can put child seats like you said or you can put

SPEAKER_76: sort of seats for for younger younger uh sort of uh you know younger children and we just released a new accessory which we got to get you jason and i was going to say it's a good accessory for uh seattle winter or san francisco summers and it's a cover that goes over that cage for the winter so it completely encloses the uh you know the child passengers from rain and rain and snow and so we've seen customers in north dakota using it in the uh you know in tough winters there and we also just launched some bar mitts that go over the handlebars and keep your hands nice and toasty in the winter

SPEAKER_81: looking at it right here it's called the conestoga conestoga cover yeah kind of soga cover wow that is brilliant so you get a little wind protection etc um while you have

SPEAKER_08: that caboose but the caboose is for safety yeah like if uh kids are on this that's a natural concern of parents in some way that would act as a safety mechanism yeah you got it right yeah and then the

SPEAKER_75: the child seat itself encloses the kid and then we also sell you know helmets across the website there

SPEAKER_76: and like i said all of our bikes go 20 miles an hour they're they fit within the federal definition of a bicycle and an e-bike and so they're very safe to operate and like these big tires and big brakes everything's designed to welcome people that would not traditionally cycle into the this e-bike movement that's happening so you should think of our products a lot more like a piece of consumer

SPEAKER_94: electronics than you would a bicycle it is a as you're saying this iphone kind of moment when you

SPEAKER_81: ride an e-bike for the first time whether it's rad or any of them the sense of joy is very much because i used to ride a vespa you know like a scooter when i lived in manhattan and i loved that experience when every time i go to europe uh i will rent a vespa i love the 30 miles an hour zipping around it's the right speed without having the windshield and everything around you can just enjoy a city or the countryside and this feels very similar i have to say which is it's kind of like a nice speed

SPEAKER_25: to go 20 miles an hour if you're going downhill maybe hit 25 i've hit 30 on it i slow it down at that but these are capable of going much faster not your bike but e-bikes are capable going much faster i've looked online there are people who have ones that go 30 40 and 50 miles an hour let's talk about the regulatory framework of where these sit and then the different classes of bikes and then where we think they're going to go because people seem to be trying to figure out how to adopt to a world where some bicyclists are going 10 miles an hour and some are electric i see some bike paths say no electric other ones don't seem to care i don't know why you would care if it was electric or not but let's talk about the regular regulatory environment in the united states now of how these things are classified

SPEAKER_73: well it's really not that complicated now after passing some great model legislation the last few

SPEAKER_76: years so there's a three-class system for e-bikes now that's federal in the federal uh you know law in a bunch of states as well and so it's e-bikes that are limited to 20 miles an hour and 750 watts of power like a rad power bike can be used in almost all normal bike lane you know bike you know sort of inner urban trails systems and it's it can be it can vary a little bit by it from city to city and um but no generally e-bikes are now federally classified and it's it's a lot less confusing i think what you might be referring to is also just scooter and bike share which is not what rad power bikes does we we sell and service we offer a solution to the to consumers right want to own the bike and accessorize it the same way you you've kind of described you've done it for you and your family so i think a lot more of the legislation challenges and the headwinds are on the share industry where they've had a rocky five years so to speak i mean the bike sharing has transformed cities

SPEAKER_94: they're absolutely amazing however uh people are adjusting to more bikes being around americans are used

SPEAKER_81: to walking or cars and we just have to reset everybody's expectation here to be uh like the

SPEAKER_94: nordics germany and china where when you pull up to a red light there's more bikes than cars waiting

SPEAKER_73: for the light change correct yes and hey it's happening fast here electric bikes outsold electric

SPEAKER_76: cars in the united states last year two to one that makes so sure so it's it's coming fast and and um and luckily the legislation's already really cemented and in support of what we think is the the right speed the right power the right sort of use and application of course there's more we want to do to make e-bikes part of everyday life and and in legislation and that's what our government affairs team

SPEAKER_94: works on primarily so there are e-bike classes one two and three 20 miles per hour for the first two 25 for the second e-bike class one is pedal assist number two means you can have a throttle and then three is a throttle and going up to 25 miles per hour correct right three is up to 28 miles per hour in

SPEAKER_76: class three but you don't have a throttle and there's no throttle in class three and so we really believe that the throttle is a huge unlock for application because like you said sometimes you want that vespa experience um you know like a weird application but sometimes i like load my panniers up and i still have a bag uh coming from the grocery store and i can put it between my knees and then throttle home

SPEAKER_25: so so you have a big meal and you're full and you're like i don't want to puke here and i need a little

SPEAKER_134: bit of electrical i'll just i'll just glide yeah absolutely yeah it's great for uh after thanksgiving

SPEAKER_96: uh dinner that's for sure for sure and then of course there's mopeds and those come in a b and c

SPEAKER_94: classes 20 30 40 miles per hour they look at the ccs instead of the watts i think it's 49 cc and then you need a driver's license for the first two categories once you get up to 40 miles per hour on a vesper or more you're going to need that motorcycle license business leaders know that

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SPEAKER_25: so there is an overlap occurring here that you don't participate in yet which i'll call e-bike class four they operate like mopeds right they are require driver's license and they go over 30 miles an hour

SPEAKER_140: you don't participate in that yet and are you planning on it no we really we really believe

SPEAKER_73: that 20 mile an hour top speed is sufficient for the masses and you know today rad's customers are

SPEAKER_76: about one-third rural about one-third urban and about one-third suburban and so it's already something that's resonating really broadly geographically lots of socioeconomic sort of spread in that to people from sort of all walks of life or buying and using our products so we think we're there we think it's the right sort of speed the right amount of power so you know these these higher power applications um there's just a smaller grouping of app of needs so for example 70 of trips in the united states are under 10 miles 60 are under six miles so most people aren't traveling that far for their for their average sort of daily applications so so like super high top speeds we don't think it's

SPEAKER_142: responsible or makes a lot of sense and uh i mean going on a vespa which has a similar tire structure

SPEAKER_25: uh and it's just a slightly different type of helmet right you have to wear a motorcycle helmet but those going 35 miles per hour allow you to be in traffic that's going 35 miles per hour so that's the justification i think for rad making this class of vehicle because there might be people who are doing that 10 miles but they have 35 mile roads the roads i'm on are typically 15 to 25 miles per hour so when you're riding a rad bike you can ride like a car in the middle of the lane and the person behind you can stf you uh shut the frack up if they don't like it because you're going the speed

SPEAKER_117: limit but the only problem i have is sometimes i will go onto a street that starts to hit that 35 it would be nice to go 35 sometimes i can get my rad power bike up to 30. but you know you know jason i kind

SPEAKER_75: of compared to this like like a gaming pc versus a regular pc it's like yeah there's there's there's

SPEAKER_76: a small group that could really benefit from that but we're focused on e-bikes for the masses um and and i think you're right at 20 miles an hour you you spend a lot less time interacting with cars

SPEAKER_75: because you're traveling more like the speed of traffic so that's that's what we found to really

SPEAKER_96: be the sweet spot yeah there's a 40 mile bike uh vintage cycle has a 36 mile one and there's some other people making them a nice uh super 73 which makes uh i guess they're the closest competitor to you they i think are making some that are bigger but i see some um cops now have

SPEAKER_149: ones that go 50 60 miles an hour i think that's super interesting a cop like 50 or 60. watch out

SPEAKER_25: well i mean if you think about it you know if you're trying to evade a cop on foot uh or on a bicycle and their bike can go 50 that's that's pretty dope okay so um most people you decided to go direct to consumer i think that's brilliant um when you get the bike it comes in a nice box uh you have to put it together it's not that hard to put together my assistant put one together she's never put a bicycle together so she was literally able to do it uh she's not not technical but she's not a bicycle mechanic uh but a lot of people like to go to a dealer and try things out so talk to me on a business level about this decision to go direct versus having a dealer network and then also support because one of the pieces i got for one of my bikes was broken i call customer support you guys are super busy we were able to eventually get it worked out and you had i guess a street team in the bay area that will come help you so talk about that challenge because you're dealing with physical real world product they can get damaged like what happened to me one one of the bikes got damaged in shipping uh which you know it's gonna happen at some point to somebody um but the decision to not go

SPEAKER_154: through the retail channel and go direct and getting these things serviced which is super important

SPEAKER_73: no great questions jason well we think of you as almost like an early adopter so you joined when

SPEAKER_76: we probably only had 50 000 or 100 000 customers we're now over 350 000 customers wow we'll add more than a hundred thousand in just the second half of 2021 alone we're you know we'll end the year at over 700 employees in the company and um you know we have five retail stores now we'll more than double that next year we have you have your own retail stores of course yeah so you're taking like a tesla approach to it having a showroom kind of thing yeah we have we have a you know our showrooms are doing really well at welcoming what cities did you pick the start uh san diego seattle vancouver we just opened a brand new location in berkeley california right down the road from you oh that's fantastic that's probably who helped me out yeah yeah it could be yeah and then we have a we have a retail store in utrecht in the netherlands as well and so we'll be expanding all over the east coast you know all you know more stores along the west coast more stores and in the rockies all along there so so rad customers have the ability to buy online and ship directly to doorstep or they can buy online and pick our rad mobile service which will bring the bike to their house white glove delivery and all spick and span or they can come to our rad retail stores and have directly charge a little extra for the

SPEAKER_94: the vip service to build it what does it cost to have them come and put it together for your 100

SPEAKER_76: bucks 200 bucks yeah right between there yeah depending on location wow so yeah and so so we find those customers love that value-added service to have one of our mechanics do the final assembly process however you know before we had all these stores and mobile service operations we had hundreds of thousands of customers that buy the bike ship direct doorstep and assemble it themselves and we we find that it's a fun process for people you put the front wheel on you put the pedals on uh a few you know a few more little pieces and away you go after kind of a quick safety check on the bike so yeah this was this was something we faced right away out of the gate was okay we want to make e-bikes accessible how do we do it and a big part of that's pricing and so our bikes are priced between just under a thousand dollars to to nineteen hundred dollars and um and those bikes are of a quality like you've experienced that compares to bikes in the six seven eight nine thousand dollar range because you're going direct from rad and we have a lot more that was

SPEAKER_94: the thing i was delighted by because i you know i said i'm price insensitive at this point in my

SPEAKER_25: career but um i did look at and i was like wait a second this these clowns want four or five thousand dollars for an electric bike it doesn't have any of the accessories and your bike matches it on specs or or bested on specs and yours are fifteen hundred to two thousand i bought that top end obviously well how do you do that is it because you don't because you go direct and you don't have to sell it to a bike store which then is looking to mark it up a hundred percent is that the savings is the

SPEAKER_173: bike stores are marking these things up fifty a hundred percent yeah there's a lot of layers in

SPEAKER_76: there when you buy a traditional e-bike yeah but maybe more importantly is we've just designed our whole business vertically and so we own we own last mile through our retail stores and mobile service operations are vertically integrating into manufacturing so when when you buy from rad we have designed and engineered everything and we own all the tooling for it and we produce it in six countries now six different countries we produce our products so it's just a very different experience that's let you know i think it's more onesie twosie with the traditional bike companies and i would think of rad frankly we just we that 700 people or so at rad we look a lot more like a consumer electronics brand a lot more like some of your favorite consumer brands and just the way we've built the company and so that shows up in the pricing it shows up in the quality and it shows up in the sort

SPEAKER_75: of revolutionary nature of the products like we don't we don't want to launch anything that's not going to create a dinner table conversation with you and your friends so people are i mean everywhere

SPEAKER_25: i take the bike it reminds me when i had the you know 16 tesla roads are ever made i mean it's just

SPEAKER_94: literally i'll park it at a restaurant i take my two daughters off we go eat greek food and five people walk around the bike and they ask questions what is it how does it work that i'm like it's got the name on the side you could google it folks but i am asking uh answering a lot of questions we charge 100 200 to have the install done the white glove service that's break even or you lose money on that at best right like you're not even i mean you got to send somebody out that takes two hours person's

SPEAKER_172: got to get paid well it's hard to find people today their mechanics well because we we we push a lot

SPEAKER_76: of volume through our system and so we have positive contribution margin in a lot of these sort of white glove channels for rad like our stores and you know i'd say like no there's some there's when you when you can drive volume and you can deliver value to the customer when you have those kind of two things happening then sales happen at rad a lot by word of mouth and so we save a lot on marketing costs and so no rad has been sort of a largely break-even business as we reinvest into growth and

SPEAKER_25: scale and just so everybody knows i i never accept any free products so when you said you had to send me something out that's incredibly gracious of you i will buy it myself i bought both bikes and you did help me with the customer support i appreciate that um and uh when you the the control panel on it there's a little control panel on there like a little lcd kind of thing where you do the settings that i think you buy from somebody else currently that's somebody else's uh display because

SPEAKER_75: i've seen it on other bikes i think yeah as an early adopter you had some products where there was

SPEAKER_76: a mix of off-the-shelf parts and rad engineered parts and so every new iteration that we come out with for example today we're on the rad rover version 6 that just launched about three months ago and so that's a completely new display and user interface and so that one's all engineered in-house and

SPEAKER_75: tooled in-house so so you'll start to see let us go to go to 100 on everything and yeah i'd say the

SPEAKER_102: one you have now on the old ones is kind of janky it's like not user friendly i mean it takes a

SPEAKER_25: little it's not difficult to use but i'm always like what's where's the information and uh i was wondering about that and then i was also wondering i see one of the main um selling points of some other bikes is there's a built-in gps and a built-in lock from your smartphone you do have a key on yours that locks it but you don't have gps and i think you can you can take it and uh ride it even if it is locked or does when i lock it on mine does it is it incapable of being ridden yeah it's turned off

SPEAKER_26: when you when you power is off but people can still ride it like a pedal bike but as long as

SPEAKER_76: you have the bike locked up then you're going to be just fine and no your comment about the display on your current model your prior year model year a lot of feedback we got from our customers was that the display buttons were a little too small to be used with bigger hands especially when you have gloves on and and so the new displays have your glove friendly sort of you know larger button display units that's great yeah so we're always listening to the customer and always sort of implementing

SPEAKER_00: change as we uh roll out new revolutions of rad okay so now what about the gps thing and then making it so because i thought this would be a really easy thing for you to do i think when i'm on my control panel or i should have an app i should be able to connect to the bike and lock the bike remotely and when i lock it remotely you can't use the wheels you know the the screen gets locked and i have gps because listen bike theft sadly is something we all have to live with why no gps i mean i'm

SPEAKER_25: putting like air tags on my bike hiding them under the seat kind of situation but seems to me like putting gps on this would cost 100 bucks and then you could get a whisper net or a gps drippy service for like whatever it is 25 bucks a year i think is what they would do two bucks a month three bucks a month and you could just charge us you know 150 bucks on top of the bike to have that feature where

SPEAKER_75: you at with that i i you spend a lot of time with folks in startups and scale ups and companies doing hyper growth and um rad's been growing like crazy and as you can imagine it's all about prioritization and so early on it's what is the customers like what's the highest and best value for the customer so we apply a value innovation lens and so that's why we don't have connectivity today if we if rad

SPEAKER_76: does connectivity in the future maybe i could be on in a future episode to talk about that i'll promote

SPEAKER_149: that too it's going to be something you're definitely going to add connectivity i mean people want to know where their bike is right i mean that's like if we do that it's going to be something

SPEAKER_76: that we've spent years on and and it's not just an app for the sake of an app it's not just connectivity for connectivity's sake it's something that's really driven by our first mover insights is driven by that 350 plus thousand customers we have today and you know user studies and um so that that's why we wanted to focus on a really great super scalable fundamental product and and then fold

SPEAKER_75: in new features and accessories we launched 40 accessories this year right for our products so like the

David Friedberg: you know the engine is turning or sorry the one i really like that i'm not sure if i'm gonna get

SPEAKER_00: is my rad power bikes have a nice pass through for your legs in other words you don't have to lift your

SPEAKER_83: leg over to get on the bike like a vespa you pick your foot a couple of inches maybe it's 12 inches off the ground or 14 inches and your leg just slides across and you're on the bike however you make a beautiful black plastic case that can slide into that space and become a giant cavernous

SPEAKER_25: storage space that looks like you can hold some groceries your jacket your laptop whatever and it locks nice so kind of kills one part of functionality but it adds another what's that thing called and what are your most popular accessories today that that accessory is called the center console

SPEAKER_73: okay makes sense and what we we have people putting 12 packs in there of soda of course

SPEAKER_75: and yes of course small small dogs like they put will park their small dog in there and kind of take it close it leave it open with a small dog in there yeah so it's got an open top that you can leave

SPEAKER_208: open so your dog's head you can take the top off and leave it open and let your puppy be in there

SPEAKER_96: absolutely oh i wonder if my new 30 pound bulldog could fit in there that way he would love it i don't

SPEAKER_72: know if we can fit a 30 pound dog we have a whole other set of rad uh pet carrying accessories and so

SPEAKER_76: the categories that we love and we focus a lot of attention on our accessory lineups one is pet carrying and so we have pet carriers that are all engineered and designed in-house uh now there's family family biking accessories the others are commuting like you know commuting to work applications and then just general utility like running to the grocery store gonna haul in five bags of groceries back home and uh or for commercial applications right we have heated uh or insulated insulated pizza uh delivery food bags for we have thousands of commercial customers that use these in business applications so a lot of our accessories are in that vein as well what's nice about the accessories

SPEAKER_25: is on the bike are pegs screws i don't know what you call them uh mounts where all these accessories you make them like you make running boards which are really cool so my rad wagon has running boards not pegs so then when my two daughters run they both can put their feet on essentially like a running board that would be on the side of an suv um that is the secret right it's like really easy to zip zip

SPEAKER_75: these on absolutely yeah that's another thing we pioneered is this universal accessory mounting

SPEAKER_76: system so almost every spot where you can mount an accessory with on a rad power bike has a multitude of things that can go into the slots and we kind of think those like expansion slots on a pc and uh depending whatever the user needs so we have front rack mounting points on every single one of our bikes so you can mount these big durable front racking systems so you can have gear on the front gear on the back and gear in the center console like you just described and the sides you can put saddle bags but that

SPEAKER_25: obviously makes it harder to have a passenger but the front one is pretty cool on the front you can

SPEAKER_213: put a small basket a giant basket i don't know what else but you put big baskets up there absolutely

SPEAKER_178: yeah pizza carrying the devices you can put uh stereos and boom boxes you know you name it

David Friedberg: yeah that's the thing i was thinking about but i don't know if i want to be that guy

SPEAKER_25: uh mike you know like the guy who has like you know dire straits or whatever blasting while they're riding their bike and then everybody has to hear it kind of cool in a way if you were going for a ride with a couple of friends uh but you got to buy these things in pairs folks because as much fun as it is to have an electric bike you got to buy two because somebody's going to come over and they're going to go for riding the bike you're going to go for riding the bike again this is a crazy thing you're like you got to buy them two at a time because you got to go out with friends on these

SPEAKER_75: bikes they're so much fun oh i think my job's here is done jason i'll uh talk to you later thank you i

David Friedberg: hate to be such a super fan but i do think how many people who order a bike order a second one i mean

SPEAKER_25: that you've got to have because that was the first thing i did i bought the bike i'm taking one daughter at a time and then it's like ah we want to go too i got three daughters i got one wife okay two bikes one can hold two one can hold one so now we got the whole family on these things yeah

SPEAKER_72: that's what we find is just you know get get ready for a life of uh being an e-biker and what comes

SPEAKER_76: with that is a multitude of bikes and a garage full of them at some point because you you end up having different bikes for different applications different members of the family uh you might trade in and trade up your rad model over time as well as you kind of find your life might change and your needs might change for your bike and so yeah we see that that's another great part of our business is like we have so much word of mouth but we also have so many returning customers because once you're an e-biker you're bit by that sort of rad grin or the e-bike smile like you said and you feel like kid again and you get to places faster than you do in a car and it really is the multitude of benefits

SPEAKER_75: is just you know keeps yeah keeps people locked into that lifestyle it's it's uh i know it does for me

SPEAKER_222: the key to the whole thing is that missions that would be too far to go on a bike like if you got

SPEAKER_00: a bike and you're going to dinner you're like ah i don't know if i want to exercise right now i just want to get dinner or i'm just taking the girls for ice cream you mentioned ice cream as a mission

SPEAKER_25: you know the quick lunch the ice cream going to the store what i find now is some of the missions where i would have used uber eats or you know postmates or whatever i'm just like you know what i feel like getting some fresh air i'll go get this ice cream and i'll bring it back so i'll just zip down and get the boba or get the ice cream bring it back for my daughter it's quicker than waiting on uber eats and i get a little bit of you know i still use uber it's don't get crazy people but i you know it's nice to just ride it out there um hard to raise money for this i say you

SPEAKER_83: raised a lot of money now but i mean investors must have been like are you kidding me you want to create an electric bike company and go up against china's like race to the bottom and everybody

SPEAKER_25: out i mean it's a doggedly expensive place uh to exist and the margins are obviously going to be challenged over time so what was the in the investment community's reaction when you came

SPEAKER_173: out with this crazy idea that you were going to make an american electric bike company i started this

SPEAKER_76: company as you know when i was 15 years old and um this job you know as i think of it today like it it picked me and this is my life's mission so this it is it has required a lot of grit and and a lot of hard work by a lot of people on team rad but all these customers that you know as we call them rad riders um they have propelled us in a myriad of ways one is all the great product and user feedback two is just coming back to buy again and so that data has been instrumental in helping us secure some of the best investors in the world rad's the first e-bike company on the planet to have kind of institutional investor list behind it and um i think it's a testament to the sort of core economics of the business and then the long-term trends that rad is positioned better than anybody on earth around it so maybe like just walking through a few of those the the largest contributor of greenhouse gases in the united states is transportation yeah and like i said before 70 of trips are under 10 miles an electric car only takes a little dent out of carbon because they're more energy efficient than an internal combustion engine but they're still 4 000 6 000 8 000 pound vehicles and electric bikes on the other hand gets 1600 miles per gallon energy equivalent or so yeah i mean

SPEAKER_94: the truth is now if you buy i have electric car i have electric bike the the times i use gas are

SPEAKER_25: limited to like but one car we have which is kind of like our getaway car in case the world goes to hell and i mean you know you i got like a backup old car just in case you just need a solar panel and uh yeah yeah you know i'm just i'm thinking like walking dead type scenario i want to have both options available but uh the po the people who did your series a at 1.5 million dollar pre it was hard to raise money back then they're sitting pretty right now your series d at 1.5 billion they're on a thousand extra right now congratulations to the people we don't publicize our valuation and

SPEAKER_72: that's not that no absolutely so yeah okay yeah so but no but but but i but i i do think that the

SPEAKER_75: story is quite an extraordinary one a hardware company i want an e-bike business we get the

SPEAKER_107: information from we get the information from pitch book which tends to be directionally accurate but

SPEAKER_75: well yeah well um but but i can't speak to that but but i think you're right on the trends here that this is an incredible story in a car centric world and and it's a people-led movement right so you have

SPEAKER_76: the the investor our investor group um there are their users of our products and i mean that's the thing i mean they see the transformational nature of these things i immediately reached out to you

SPEAKER_96: i was like i gotta find out if there's an opportunity to invest here but the trainer left the station let's talk a little bit about uh the government support that's coming we uh are seeing more and more cities obviously have bike sharing great that's a that's a great vote of confidence for what you're doing eventually they might want to use your bikes i assume uh they must have contacted you already you're too busy uh being sold out uh tell me what you think of these bike sharing programs and eventually maybe partnering with the city we've seen a lot of success with

SPEAKER_76: commercial fleet operators using the bikes to deliver food and beverage and groceries and parcels but we've also seen a lot of success doing sort of community bike lending programs so there's one that's being stood up now in oakland that we're really excited to be a partner of and these are groups that almost act like a e-bike library so you can rent out a model for a week and use it and so that's where we're focused is letting consumers spend time on our products and we see bike share and the sort of scooter share industry frankly the that side of micromobility where people will use it to go from you know do the last mile trip in an urban environment when they're you know visiting a new city or here and there between lunch meetings we see those as as really people coming in the door of micromobility and as they sure as they fall back in love with wow that feeling of being on electric micromobility it's silent it's swift it's super fun it's economical they want to buy their own e-bike and they want to tune it to their life and so that's

SPEAKER_162: that's where we see ourselves so you're not running any of those programs but if people want to buy the

SPEAKER_75: bikes and run it themselves mazel tov go for it yeah we yeah we we focus mostly on rental fleet operators that are in vacation you know communities what do they rent them for a week you said that people

SPEAKER_94: are now doing co-ops and renting them what's the what's the average price to rent these things a

SPEAKER_75: week a day these are the most this is the most beautiful story some of these things are non-profits

SPEAKER_76: and they offer the bikes to people for free and especially people without the economic means otherwise and we just and that these are the kind of programs we love to support because it's right

SPEAKER_94: towards the mission of our business that's absolutely fantastic we're seeing in the build back better

SPEAKER_25: plan a lot of infrastructure items related to electric obviously they want to increase the incentive to people to buy electric cars we've always had a one to five thousand dollar tax credit for cars i think that's going to go up to five thousand if your tesla is seventy five hundred if you're a legacy person because tesla pays people more money but doesn't have a union and the people with the union i think get a better deal because biden's in the pocket of the unions putting that aside there's an e-buy credit of 4.1 billion dollars in the bill better act uh what impact might that have

SPEAKER_253: because i think it's something in the lines of like i don't know 500 or a thousand dollars is that right

SPEAKER_76: yeah it is jason it's an amazing moment for e-bikes in a national sense because this is the first time that e-bikes have been provided with an incentive an incentive like this so it validates e-bikes as a primary form of transportation for so many people you know more than two-thirds of our customers primary reason for buying bikes from us is to replace car miles and and so these are the kind of conversations we've been having at their federal level uh and and um and it's great to see the e-bike tax credit included here so you said that sort of total amount of money allocated to this program but it's just a 30 tax credit uh for folks that fit within the sort of uh income tax brackets and so is it this starts to phase out at 75 000 of modified adjusted gross income okay so if

SPEAKER_81: you're really middle class you're you don't get this tax credit if you're under 75k a year you're a

SPEAKER_94: civilian you whatever it is you get a major discount we're talking about 900 the bike has to cost less than four thousand and you get a tax credit of 900 in other words you get your money back that's right pay taxes you get that 900 back now on a bike like yours that cost you know i think the

SPEAKER_96: max you can spend is close to like two if you get some accessories maybe 2500 but let's just pick a

SPEAKER_256: number 2000 would that mean the bike would go down to 1100 as you know this bill or something like that

SPEAKER_75: it'd be a 30 tax credit okay so 600 yep so so it's a 30 tax credit and no we think it really moves the

SPEAKER_76: needle and it makes it takes a product like ours that's already resonating with people like i said from all walks of life our bikes start at less than a thousand dollars but it just takes it to making it that much more accessible people spend a lot more than that on their cell phones you know they spend

SPEAKER_72: a heck of a lot more than that on their laptops and yeah cell phones 1200 laptops 1500 2000 i mean

SPEAKER_25: if you think about 4.1 billion divide that by 300 you're talking about putting 14 14 15 million possibly thousand dollar e-bikes on the road that'd be amazing how many e-bikes are there in america now

SPEAKER_173: you said you sold 350 or something already yeah yeah so rads are 20 25 market share in the united

SPEAKER_76: states and climbing um you know next year we're gonna you know like i always think about rad as like a business it's historically more than doubled sort of triple digit growth every single year and um and we've got a lot of supply we're in stock of 90 of our bikes now and um and that'll move to 100 towards the end of the year and moving into january so we're going to be in stock on all of our our rad models going into the new year and and hope to be so all next year that's been the biggest constraint to growth over the last few years for our business we always been inventory constrained pre-pandemic post-pandemic mid-pandemic like we are now and so when the business is in stock and able to you know keep up with customer demand then i think we're gonna tap out that tax credit faster than the years that it's going to be made available because that ends at 2025 and we're gonna need to re-up on that because e-bikes are going to be flying off the shelves

SPEAKER_94: it is a bright new future i am so excited that you're doing this you've chosen to make it your

SPEAKER_83: life's worth because the joy it brings to people who ride them and what it's going to do for the environment and congestion in cities is absolutely stunning this is one of the uh you know i'm not a big fan of government interference in markets however a little incentive to make the air cleaner and to get rid of congestion i think we can all agree that's something pretty good to spend a

SPEAKER_96: little bit of taxpayer money on it's an amazing product sincerely uh i met you after being just a huge fan of the product so if you're listening to me and you want to have a thrill and have a great time riding a bicycle i give it five stars two thumbs up my highest rating rad power bikes are absolutely delightful i love them uh and it's just added a lot of joy to my life so sincerely my biggest endorsement it is just an amazing amazing product and i look forward to buying many more in the future as you keep creating better and better products wow thank you jason thanks for the support of the

SPEAKER_73: the e-bike revolution so i'll see you out there on the roads it does feel it does actually feel like

SPEAKER_17: a revolution and you can you can see it too because when you pass by somebody because i've

SPEAKER_25: passed by people with rad power bikes or even other ones the super 73 whatever that move there's so many great players in the space uh that you're doggedly competing against but you're all really

SPEAKER_83: part of a revolution to just get some more cars off the road and for the love of god if you're running a city and you've you know you just have to go i'm sure you've been to the nordics but you've been to denmark and you've you've driven a bike there i'm assuming yeah we have an office in

SPEAKER_72: the netherlands so yeah we we shipped to yeah 28 countries there so yeah absolutely describe for

SPEAKER_83: people what it's like to drive a bicycle in the nordic countries i mean it is completely different

SPEAKER_72: than america yeah you come back and you start to not have car blindness anymore so in the u.s you just

SPEAKER_76: get so used to seeing cars everywhere and you when you come back from the nordic countries you realize that there's clearly been a better way all along they literally when you're in denmark along the

SPEAKER_83: water they don't put cars they put a beautiful wide promenade and they give half of it to pedestrians and half of it to bicyclists and you can get from point a to b in most cases with never interfacing with a car and that's really what we have to look at when you're looking at a modern city whether it's brooklyn or new york manhattan uh miami we should be looking for areas uh whether it's you know on the beach or you know taking streets that are normally for cars and just no cars on that street zero cars and a hundred percent bicycles that's the way to make this revolution happen is to just make it just the one concern people have in the united states is a very valid concern is having to share the road with insane cars that are giant with people who are you know doing their makeup eating a slice of pizza or texting it's crazy that we do not have protected bike lanes everywhere but who's doing the best job

SPEAKER_85: as a city in the united states with protective bike lanes you know e-bikes have been growing really

SPEAKER_76: fast every year like i said pre-pandemic post all that or mid-pandemic here but infrastructure bike infrastructure really got a huge acceleration through the pandemic yeah because streets started getting taken back again by people and and and local governments were doing it because of health mandates and and and so turning in like you have there you have something called safe streets or slow streets in san francisco and you know in paris they shut down a ton of ton of infrastructure we saw sales grow multi-hundred percent uh just over a few months there as they started shutting down

SPEAKER_83: more streets there to car traffic that's fantastic so so it has been a huge accelerant and bike lanes induce purchase of the product makes total sense and for cities they just have to have the chutzpah to realize if you build it uh they will come that's what happens it is a specific concern the first thing my wife said is safety safety safety that's it you can have the kids on this are you riding on roads with cars yes i'm right that there are only roads with cars in america and road car you know bike lanes only but i know the bike lanes and we just have to take this like to

SPEAKER_96: another level just like shutting down certain streets to make outdoor dining it's delightful

SPEAKER_256: just do that in every possible city we if you're voting and or you're in office this is a quick way to stay in office and get more votes everybody loves a good bike lane it's fantastic it really

SPEAKER_73: is isn't it i mean it is it's totally non-controversial the the local businesses along this promenade

SPEAKER_75: they do better they do better so it's just it's as simple as that i mean we've been giving all this space away to cars for free all these years you can fit i think you park 16 bikes in the same place you can park an suv and and so you know just like our our city streets have been taken over like

SPEAKER_76: this but one thing that's always been really surprising to folks is how many of our customers are in the suburbs and in rural areas because yeah the sub the city you might have a subway you could jump on right you could maybe walk to your destination but in the suburbs they've just been designed with sprawl and disconnection and so that's where an e-bike is we've seen some of the biggest growth for our businesses in the in the burbs and in rural areas where they don't have bus

SPEAKER_83: systems where things are designed disconnected all right everybody can follow mike on twitter m-i-k-e-r-a-d-e-n-b-a-u-g-h

SPEAKER_96: he's active on the twitter ratpowerbikes.com and uh just go buy one trust me just go buy one great

SPEAKER_02: all right it's the end of the show uh both this episode of this podcast and of season three of secession everybody's been watching it great show um really my my goal for 2022 is to get cast in

SPEAKER_00: secession as a late stage like koto tpg whatever masa yoshi-san softbank i want to be like a late stage vc working on a project with kendall and then just absolutely be like the worst example of a

SPEAKER_02: late stage investor in the world it just totally caused chaos with kendall on some transformative investment but let's talk about the season finale uh because i think it's absolutely fantastic i think this has been an absolutely fantastic season um and uh i'm very very excited to play

SPEAKER_193: uh a vci next season we should start that just as a rumor so uh our producer nick has mapped out a storyline producer nick and i'll i'll you tell me your storyline for season four with me written in

SPEAKER_02: and then i will um i will give my recap of the final episode but okay pitch me on this all right so

SPEAKER_286: let me just back it up for a second the reason i think this would work is because there there may be no other person in the world that understands um like peak apex do she vc than jason does because he deals with founders early early stage founders raising money seven of them um constantly all

SPEAKER_287: year long and he hears the best and and in fairness a lot of the stories are great a lot of venture capitalists are really really nice people over the time majority yeah but he also hears all of the horror stories all of them you all you know them all right um so and you um you've dealt with it

SPEAKER_289: yourself right you tell the story about being in a meeting and someone's on their phone you stop and

SPEAKER_06: you're like hey yeah guy was on his blackberry during a meeting for mahalo.com and i just stopped the presentation because he was under the table using his blackberry and i was like well this is lame i flew up here and can't even get through a 10 minute presentation crazy yeah so in a weird way

SPEAKER_297: this was kind of the role that you were born to play oh yes well yes i deal with this all the time

SPEAKER_298: yes so all right here's how i think it should go right so season four starts okay and i'm not caught up on season three yet but i i know generally what happens so so there might be some things that don't

SPEAKER_286: make sense here but whatever so early in the season kendall hears about all the money that's being poured into venture capital over the last couple years right it went from the low billions to now hundreds and hundreds of billions approaching trillion dollars over the last decade

SPEAKER_298: right he's now severed ties from logan he needs to do his own thing he wants to make his own name and he's like i gotta get in on this this is crazy yeah um and he's considering should i go or should i try and raise an early stage fund should i try and go late stage what should i do so he calls his friend from business school got it enter jason enter jason yes the apex predator of vc douches is how this character is described in the right room the apex vc douches um jason you so kendall calls you and he's like hey thinking about uh starting a firm i don't know early stage early stage and you're

SPEAKER_287: like dude early stages for the birds late stage is easy money everybody does the diligence for you you make all the nerds that work for you check off the diligence boxes you just throw in 25 million

SPEAKER_306: and then two years later you flip it and you dump it on some stupid retail investors he's like it's the easiest job in the world easy money easy money easy money why would you put 10 years of

SPEAKER_309: effort into this like you could just put 10 months who cares who wants to work with early stage

SPEAKER_289: companies anyway that's just a waste of time yeah yeah there's so many of them with a hundred

SPEAKER_309: customers when you can work with somebody with 10 million right he's like 2x easy 2x flip it no

SPEAKER_298: problem easy 8x whatever whatever they're going for um so your character convinces him that right now

SPEAKER_287: the way the market works paying 550 to 100x revenue or more for a sas company is going to print money right that's the state of the market right now that's what we're paying dude who cares you see tiger global whatever that's what we pay then you take a meeting together and the meeting scene is like you are legitimately the worst person on the planet and everyone is like oh you're interrupting

SPEAKER_289: the founder you're just like you're on your phone you're not even paying attention you're like showing him memes you're like dude you see what happened you see zion he gained all this weight oh my god

SPEAKER_316: i'm an idiot yeah so the founder is sweating for the product oh why don't you why don't you raise

SPEAKER_03: the prices why don't you fire your bottom 10 of customers yeah you do this with half the number

SPEAKER_289: of employees have you yeah it's like a sas enterprise software company like have you thought about

SPEAKER_287: integrating web3 to this at all or no are you guys are you guys not thinking about that yeah just the worst right just yeah terrible suggestions so that's like early-ish on in the season then in the middle somewhere in the middle of the season um something's happening right kendall something

SPEAKER_286: happens to kendall where you know he's trying to show this off against his dad right he's trying to prove to his dad hey look i started this thing on my own i did i you know look at this deal we're up five right right right right our deal already got marked up we made more money than waystar

SPEAKER_309: made this month in one month i made more money with one investment than waystar or a what is it acn

SPEAKER_03: avn we saw rico no what's their fox they call it avn or something yeah something like that yeah

SPEAKER_286: right right right we're up right and look how low margin money on paper than avn made this month right i own 10 of the software company 90 margins your margins are what on your on your

SPEAKER_298: nothing yeah you're a loser dad um this is how the new this is how new money's made something like

SPEAKER_289: that right yeah and then a few episodes later if you turn out uh the company's getting pro by the doj

SPEAKER_287: for lying to investors and then the market starts correcting and then all their public comparable kind of like what's happened over the last four weeks all the public comparables start going the zoom level compression yeah yeah yeah and you and he already did the deal so he paid you know whatever let's call it 75x uh top line sales but i sold all my secondary so they have to do a down

SPEAKER_289: round now kendall and they're asking kendall for intros to raise the down round they're like we got to cut the valuation in half and then the the somehow the company would have to be somehow tied into like ad sales or some kind of platform like that waystar royco acquires the company for like

SPEAKER_226: 10 cents on a dollar logan always invested in i've never seen logan roy not win i've never seen

SPEAKER_193: that's how it ties up but the even better part i'll punch it up is this late stage vc clears his position kendall marking it up so when kendall marks it up he sells his piece to code to in an llc and he says listen you know i just always like to take some chips off the table donate

SPEAKER_56: the player hit the game exactly this is all fair and he's like well yeah i locked in my win i sold 80 i kept 20 as i did insurance so i'm good yeah and it turns out that the guy oh and it'd be great

SPEAKER_287: too if kendall didn't know but it turns out the guy also has an early stage fund he like led the a while he was telling kendall that like early stages for morons right or he took his money and he bought

SPEAKER_309: options in roystar yeah knowing that you know he's like yeah and i took the money and then i just bought

SPEAKER_342: options i know your dad hates you and he wants to spite you and then yeah i knew i was gonna yeah i just i

SPEAKER_309: flipped my investment in this dog into royco because yeah your dad's a killer he's always that doesn't

SPEAKER_02: lose i think it's great all right good job uh somebody can clip this and send it to them adam mckay that is adam mckay and see if i can get him okay you have my number walk on you have the number he's he'd be in the writer's room uh also so for people who didn't see um there just i have a couple of notes

SPEAKER_00: about the the ending uh this was basically a mirror uh for those of you who don't know of

SPEAKER_347: rupert murdoch and what did rupert murdoch do uh with his kids um uh and uh james murdoch being a really smart son who is now who was possibly going to be the heir apparent but i think murdoch just

SPEAKER_00: decided to sell everything to disney this was kind of the same moment where uh logan roy was like listen

SPEAKER_01: i could give this to my kids but there are people like disney who really know what they're

SPEAKER_00: doing and are playing at the top of the game that is in the best uh the best interest of the shareholders so when all these kids will basically prove that they don't know what they're doing like each one this season you know kendall went for the throne and he didn't kill the king shiv tried to uh get a board seat at the board meet at the annual meeting she failed and then roman tried to do this deal with

SPEAKER_01: the merger and be his dad's right hand man and he fell and then all three of these failure dips kids then decide that they're going to collectively use their total incompetence to try to take on logan roy who is a self-made man who built this from nothing and he's got jerry and frank and all of these people around him who've been through the war with him and they're all like oh but you should do this

SPEAKER_49: because we can now vote you and he's like yeah no i talked to your mom and tom uh is loyal to me not his wife shiv who's not loyal to him and all of a sudden they are totally neutered and all they get

SPEAKER_03: is their whatever two billion dollars each and logan gets his five six billion and he wins again and it's

SPEAKER_193: the perfect time to sell and logan wins again it's like the perfect arc you they actually thought

SPEAKER_49: each of these deranged kids uh thought that they had because of their silver spoon and because of their inheritance because of what was gifted to them some amazing ability to take over this company and run it when in fact what they should do is just take the bag and run with that and go do whatever they want in life and the other observation i had about this is they're so miserable that no matter

SPEAKER_01: how epic their lives is and this show does an amazing job of accurately showing the life of the ultra ultra ultra ultra ultra ultra wealthy where they do not care about their 50 million dollar apartments or their jets or their helicopters they're on huge lakes they're in tuscany they don't care they're miserable while being in the greatest locations that all of us watching this would be like if i could go on that vacation once in my life i'd talk about it for the next 20 years you

SPEAKER_00: guys hear me talk about the time i stayed at the amman hotel in tokyo you hear me talk about you know

SPEAKER_02: times i've gotten to you know i went to tuscany this summer and i was able to borrow chamats beach house or whatever it was a rental whatever but he let me uh use this place when in the beach in italy we've been

SPEAKER_01: public but that was very nice and i like for me i'm just pinching myself this is incredible i can't believe a kid from brooklyn got to have these people are not having that experience at all they're

SPEAKER_00: miserable they don't care uh and what amazing performances i think across the just entire uh spectrum those four kids being miserable and then getting nothing my prediction for next year

SPEAKER_02: is that uh this deal somehow comes off the rails the deal that they closed with uh the gojo joe deal something happens and the gojo deal unwinds uh or the gojo ceo yeah like maybe

SPEAKER_193: the gojo ceo was cooking the books maybe he gets arrested he dies in a helicopter accident something happens and somehow logan roy gets control of the company again and then everything's back in play or maybe the kids splinter and they go start buying assets and they get their money and they start building things but this has got to be no more than a five season show i think the way this has been

SPEAKER_00: going the stakes get higher every year and it's it's gotta unravel i hope they don't do this for 10

SPEAKER_02: years i think they just have to absolutely um end the show in five seasons or less like that's what i think and that final scene where logan roy is explaining to them that they're just pedestrians is absolutely fantastic and then there's this other scene when he's with that scars guard character who played the clown from it you know what incredible where he they both kind of respect each other because they are just marauding marauding uh capitalists just those two on screen together

SPEAKER_00: and he just realizes this is my best this is in the best interest of all shareholders especially me

SPEAKER_17: to cash in my chips and uh that they are just really just total morons it's absolutely amazing and shout out uh to uh comfrey and greg and some of the other supporting cast who just were amazing as well i'm a big fan of the red scare podcast and dasha did a great job uh and that kid greg is just awesome but tom's tom uh is uh the goat i thought tom was absolutely amazing and i also love the guy from um ferris bueller's day off uh he had a great great scene uh in this final episode where it's so important for him to have been the firstborn son uh and then obviously um yeah connor just amazing he

SPEAKER_02: got finally got his flowers in this episode where they gave him a great scene because he's just been great in the show but they never really focused on him enough he got a really great scene uh and jeremy strong after that new york new yorker profile where he's just like some crazy method actor and they kind of were sort of signaling that nobody likes to work with him because he's too intense

SPEAKER_00: and insane and he thinks this is a shakespearean drama and not a comedy or a dramedy um and that he's

SPEAKER_02: kind of like clueless or whatever i don't know what's true of that or what's not or why that story dropped at this time but jeremy strong gives the amazing performance when he breaks down and just confesses that he's a murderer and he could have saved that kid or maybe he couldn't have and then roman comes in and starts making jokes now i know why i couldn't get a gin and tonic and shiv's just like you ruined my wedding he's like they don't care about the person who died trying to score drugs uh for this degenerate billionaire heir uh and what a great show um i know it's unrealistic i know you know whatever it's a bunch of white people acting insanely privileged or whatever but it's i think

SPEAKER_00: it's like a great late stage capitalism moment and the end of media as uh it's really it speaks to the death of the american entrepreneur in the media space it speaks to the death of um uh secession and

SPEAKER_01: inherited wealth that really is a theme here is that the concept of being born on third base and

SPEAKER_00: getting this incredible inheritance and these businesses they just can't survive not the media business and not the next generation so this whole idea that the next generation gets to do nope there are disruptors there are entrepreneurs out there who are going to build better businesses like the goju guy you know or any other entrepreneurs they show on the show or capitalists it the the strongest survive in entrepreneurship so i just love it as an entrepreneurial show the acting is top-notch the writing is top-notch i know it's unrealistic at times the scenarios are unreal but they do seem to

SPEAKER_01: get a lot of nuances right uh about you know where they're going how they're traveling the clothes

SPEAKER_00: they're wearing what matters to them you know the whole scene with the bunny rabbit and feeding them a bagel like that is like crazy rich people with you know sending their concierge doctor to take care of a rabbit like that's just perfectly on brand and amazing what a great show congratulations to everybody

SPEAKER_02: involved if you haven't watched it i'm sorry for spoiling it but it's sort of like any of these great shows like the sopranos or breaking bad where i think it's just like some great wine you've had before some great restaurant you got the chicken parm or you know you got the ribeye there before and you could go back 10 times and get that same peaking duck and be just as happy as the first nine times great job and uh what do you think what do you think of it at mention me on twitter or instagram what was your favorite part of it and if you by the way in this day and age i'm giving you 48 hours on the spoilers i'll tell you on the show if i'm going to talk spoilers i'll put it at the end

SPEAKER_00: but just on twitter and everything else you got for you got 24 hours 48 hours and then everything's out stay off twitter when i want to watch a next game i don't open twitter i have scores off if you

SPEAKER_359: don't want to get spoiled with these big season finales whether it's billions or this or curb just

SPEAKER_363: stay off social media okay the end did you read the the whole entire profile on uh jeremy strong

SPEAKER_00: i didn't read the whole profile okay i read like half i was actually listening to it autumn which was a company i wanted to invest in audm got bought by the new york times i think they have

Chamath Palihapitiya: professional people read whatever the big features wow and so at the top of the new yorker page they had that where you could play it so i started listening to it while i was working it was so i thought the

SPEAKER_286: the writer did an amazing job amazing balancing it where it was it was very like it took jeremy

SPEAKER_287: strong very seriously and he's like he you know he's almost daniel day lewis incarnate right like

SPEAKER_370: you read this did you read the part about he studied all those actors yes and he was like wrote him a

SPEAKER_287: letter there's like dustin hoffman yeah and daniel day lewis like he would stay outside of his um he you know he became his assistant on one shoot for he got on the sets of those people yeah and he would

SPEAKER_286: just he was outside of his trailer all day all night whatever you need daniel i'll do it for you right away and daniel day lewis wrote him this amazing note like you're the future whatever and he wouldn't talk about it because obviously daniel is a very private person but then they also he also like there were these little hints all throughout the article where and someone had a quote like you don't know you can't it's impossible to tell if jeremy strong is like the next daniel day lewis person that that is like he's just about that life like he's acting as his life or he's gonna be a

SPEAKER_193: method actor do not do not let anybody else on the cast see me until we do the scene yeah that's how intense they are like if i happen to walk by somebody you you the whole thing you me and i

SPEAKER_379: can't do my performance yeah so but the the writer kind of uh also like there's these little nuggets

SPEAKER_286: where he like he kind of might be insinuating that he's sort of faking it and he's actually what he really is is like the best networker of all time because then later in the article the the guy mentions he's or the person who wrote it mentions that um jeremy strong gave him like a list of names to contact yeah and was just like oh and it's all and then he's like and the writer's like yeah and two days after i started the profile matt i got a text from matthew mcconaughey saying oh my god jeremy strong hardest worker ever best guy ever and he's like that never happened like that's weird so he kind of like i don't know i thought he told the line really well where he's like

SPEAKER_287: he is this like crazy obsessed method actor but he also like really knows how to play relationships

SPEAKER_367: he wants to be known as the crazy like so he's like pring himself which by the way

SPEAKER_00: kendall in this last episode spoiler alert it's not a major spoiler he said you know he's like yeah

SPEAKER_02: i think i'm just going to document dump all this stuff onto my instant and vanity fair is working on a story with me and then confrey comes and he's like and she's like well it's kind of more like the pr person kind of like well it's more kind of like we're kind of floating ideas with vanity fair they're not really reaching out to us and it's like oh yeah these guys are so desperate to be

SPEAKER_387: relevant for their inheritance that they're actually calling vanity fair and trying to stir stuff up and

SPEAKER_287: like yeah and i thought you made a good point too like you're i think succession is at the point where

SPEAKER_286: um and and very few shows hit this level where you don't even care what the plot is anymore you just want to see everyone hanging out yes right like the sopranos hit that note right you don't

SPEAKER_367: even care what happens you just want to see paulie and sylvia if they're at the bang if they're at

SPEAKER_298: the poker game it's going to be great like it doesn't matter it does not it can be about anything and i feel like you know there are shows where the plot map like game of thrones never really hit

SPEAKER_286: the point where you want the characters hanging out right it was kind of all about the plot but

SPEAKER_287: succession is like it doesn't even matter what the plot is it could be anything you're just like yeah

SPEAKER_309: i'm in i just want to see everybody hanging out no no like there's like we're going to a wedding to tuscany it's like awesome i can't wait i mean well you know and then it's also like they're in the back

SPEAKER_01: of a limo they're in they're on the jet in three different cabins and different things for that was

SPEAKER_00: also like a very cool note um when you're i've been on a lot of private jets obviously and like when people are super baller what's up like there are there are ones that have one cabin right you have four seats in the front you got the shared table and you got a bathroom right okay starter jet 12 seats whatever then you got one that's got like the four seats in the front and the you know captain's chairs you got the table and the couch for like eating a meal and then you got a cabin in the back with a door that closes and that's like typically a bed then you got the ones that have three so

SPEAKER_193: there's like one seating room then there's like another seating room and then there's a bedroom and then there's the ones that have four and one's for the crew one's for security the assistants the nanny whoever then there's like the passengers and then there's the principal and so you know when logan roy

SPEAKER_49: is traveling he's like you guys go up there we're gonna be in this cabin security and my assistants in the first cabin and they're walking between like that little nuance there's somebody who is part who is this life who's telling them it needs to be four cabins yeah logan roy is not on a two or three cabin he's on a global he's on you know this level of plane it's got to have four cabins because

SPEAKER_193: the discussion of the kids is happening in one logan and his you know business partner or whatever is in one and then the assistants and the nanny that's incredible it's pretty like that level of detail is just extraordinary that they get right or like when they went out to the hamptons house this

SPEAKER_00: season amagasket or whatever like amagansett amagansett whatever like and they're going out to this house and they gotta go there like that's actually a real house that was sold for like 75 million that's got like

SPEAKER_01: whatever amount of beachfront and they're going on a hike and then some chef has set up a lobster bake like i've been to a i mean i've been to nantucket and cape cod like a lobster bake takes you know like 24 hours of planning it takes 10 people they're setting up and they're like oh yeah we gotta and then just like stumble upon this table like it's nothing it's like they spent ten thousand dollars setting up a lobster bake at the end of a two mile hike yeah they stop there they don't even eat anything they just have like a glass of wine they barely touch it and they just like all gets thrown away and you're like i had the poor person in me or my poor you know thinking is always like oh my god they just wasted ten thousand dollars on a clam big lobster there's like five star michelin chef all these people had to carry tables out there and set all this up and they don't give a they just yeah just throw it away who cares not my not my problem it's like it's a rounding error it'd be like

SPEAKER_49: you throwing away a chicken sandwich like you ate you were like yeah i don't feel like the chicken sandwich like i can't throw away a chicken sandwich i still like i'm like you gotta save that right yeah those are the notes that the show absolutely absolutely nails yeah of conspicuous consumption i think it's also kind of like the end of the white guy white family media company like there is

SPEAKER_340: something connecticut whatever uh great neck long island it's like the east egg west egg i think that's

SPEAKER_193: been a criticism of it like oh my god it's all these white people it's like yeah and then they have

SPEAKER_00: like the new york times was going to merge with them in that second season and they were like a bunch of white people but they were like super liberal and they're like the fox and it's sort of like the schulzburgers and the murdochs considering a merger and it's like it's like all these decrepit old white you know rich you know heiresses and heirs and you know they all just got handed this like

SPEAKER_02: dying empire and they're just like totally circling the drain with it absolutely great season and uh shout out to the i don't know if you watch this podcast but there's a podcast called the watch um and they did a great job this season of just every night doing a show where the show runner and this other uh guy who is just a pop culture genius uh the two of them um so you know folks are always asking me uh for a recommendation but uh chris ryan and andy greenwald and greenwald yeah andy greenwald is like uh actually makes tv so he actually can talk about uh and if you listen to it a lot of my observations are gonna be crib from them but also stuff that like you know i've been reading all the i got so into the show i was like reading all the recaps and you know people talking about it on twitter um but uh they do a great job this kid chris ryan is like he's kind of like the version of me as a moderator chris ryan is unbelievable i think like chris ryan i would like to meet

SPEAKER_193: chris ryan at some point because he's been doing pods for a long time and i kind of feel like the two of us have a similar podcasting style where he's really good at getting the most out of andy greenwald and then he adds his you know piece to it but they and lots of impressions too he does impressions yeah yeah he does i just like you know like i have to say like bill simmons and his like internal squad for the ringer they really have perfected the hot take two-man game pick and roll you know uh and i didn't even know they had one about tv um but i i watched i watched the i listened to the watch after like some of the um the mandalorian and they did succession well and then shout out to my friend

SPEAKER_01: kara swisher um she did the official podcast which was good but not as good as the watch because she had to do the official hbo one so i hope she secured the bag and they paid her a million bucks for it and she got access to some of the cast and whatever so that was good but the takes weren't as good because i think they can't be as critical because it's the official hbo one or you know yeah it needed she needed to be paired she's such a great interviewer she loves the show but she needed

SPEAKER_193: to be paired with an independent tv critic for the entirety of the arc so that was my criticism of that podcast um was they should have just paired her with like an andy greenwald or somebody who

SPEAKER_00: could independently kind of hit at it but that's the problem you know the person who makes the product and does the post show insecure has been doing this wind down after w-i-n-e like wind down but wind down and that's interesting it's like this whole trend but i like the independent people who do it i'd like to do that at some point with like the all-in crew or something like after something i don't know what we would do what would we do nick like after what could we all

SPEAKER_428: get congressional hearings maybe they're long that was a joke that was a joke okay

SPEAKER_00: professional hearing i wish there was something that was like the super bowl of what we do there is no oscars or super bowl of what we do i mean if steve jobs was doing a keynote that would be

SPEAKER_286: it yeah but there's not so yeah no and i i almost think that the part of the why all in's cool is that you guys don't care about you like there's no um i think that you all should think that you the show is the super bowl of your industry that's what it's becoming at least once a week when it comes out

SPEAKER_440: right yeah i mean we're 45 this is the peak i saw that's how i want you all to think i want you guys

SPEAKER_441: to think that this is the super bowl of our like every week i do i take it seriously i don't know if

SPEAKER_02: you saw the comment the top comment on the youtube was just that i did a great job moderating this week and i was like i think it's not that my moderation is getting better i think you get credit for your edits because i know you're editing to make things easier to hear when we all start talking at the same time so shout out to producer nick the fifth beetle on the all in pod um the thing i would say is i've

SPEAKER_00: been working with them offline and saying to sax like here's why i'm interrupting you you're going too

SPEAKER_364: long and it sounds like a monologue and if you if i let you go on a right wing tirade and i don't represent the other side of the opinion you're not being challenged so let me challenge you and it's

SPEAKER_01: not an interruption you're just doing six points you got to do one or two points so we have a reasonable chance and then chamath is now and freeburg are becoming the masters of saying

SPEAKER_193: um hey i want to build on something jacal said hey i want to build on something sax said i want to build on something i like chamath's point from two episodes ago in other words showing interest in the other besties insights yeah is when things get really good i think i don't know what you think

SPEAKER_286: yeah i think it's incredible i you know i love like last week for i and i told uh i told you all this but i thought that the better.com layoff segment was the best like if someone had to ask me what this what is this show i would just give them because it started funny like making fun of how poorly he did it yeah yeah terrible terrible job and then it got into um you know sort of like here's why this happened and friedberg was like i think we should really and he always does this he deconstructs things down to like what actually matters here and he's like what really happened they were yeah they were wildly overfunded and when you're overfunded and it's a hot market you're pushing all the chips in and when you when softbank gives you money a lot of what they're giving you is also growth targets and to meet those growth targets you have to really go all in and if if there's a pullback especially in a market like mortgages that you're cutting people and that's and so some of this is an incentive to grow is due to the incentive to grow as much as it was to you know any other normal market thing yeah and then saying you know he freeberg gave like this advice like hey as a founder your investors they don't especially if it's you know one of these not going to name them but firms that are throwing a million bets out in 2021 they don't care if you're if you're one of the nine that go bust they don't care they care if you're the one that doesn't go bust that that hits that you know 50 80x whatever that's all they care about your but your values are different you should care about your employees and what if you go out of business it doesn't matter to your investor but it matters to everyone that you employ right and then chamath gave all these amazing stories um from

SPEAKER_380: facebook and and that led to the yuri milner story and it was just the market was compressing and

SPEAKER_56: they needed to get money and then yuri came over the top and they had taken money from microsoft he was given that inside baseball of stuff people have never heard of never and it was just that

SPEAKER_286: but all of that information was in one segment about a stupid 900 person not and you know of course that's terrible for the 900 people but in the grand scheme of things like who cares

SPEAKER_452: yes it was like a layout story right it became right and bigger picture right and the whole reason

SPEAKER_286: the story got brought up because you were like let's talk about how ridiculous this is and then

SPEAKER_455: it just turned into this like magical incredible segment that you will not find you cannot find that anywhere you're not going to get that anywhere else i don't know if you saw my tweet but i said

SPEAKER_00: listen i think what's happening in mainstream media is they're addicted to making you scared and outraged just like the algorithm they want to make you scared they want to make you outraged why increases engagement and then if you think about what we're trying to do on the pod and we on all in pod we explained it the other week and we should leave this by the way this decompression of deconstruction of all and let's leave this into the episode please because i like it as a segment

SPEAKER_347: i like you being on the show a little more nick you're good on the show if you don't mind um thanks

SPEAKER_00: what um was very interesting was you know we were saying we're trying to teach you how to be an independent thinker and radically self-reliant is the word i use that's what i'm always trying to do i want to give people those insights and make them radically self-reliant they trust themselves

SPEAKER_01: and i think what's happening is this bifurcation of the com you know commercial media corporate media like whatever it's fox msnbc new york times it's all corporate media vox buzzfeed they all exist

SPEAKER_193: to make money for shareholders and the quickest path for them is to try to keep up with the algorithm to get more engagement so they're in an arms race with zuckerberg for outrage for engagement how do they get it it could be cancellations it could be woke it could be fear it could be covet world world coverage it could be you know if there's a riot whether it's a january 6 riot or looting in san francisco or a blm or rittenhouse they're going to get you anxious worked up outrage to get you to tune

SPEAKER_49: in tomorrow night to msnbc or fox or anything in between the two what we're trying to do is to say here's how to think for yourself here's how to be smarter and create things in the world and not be

SPEAKER_193: part of that silliness which it's becoming obvious to everybody what's happening you're being manipulated to make you outraged to get you to tune in again and i got absolutely pulled into it during covet and during the trump era because how could you not it was so crazy and scary i don't blame people for it

SPEAKER_49: but they're whipping it up and i you know with that rittenhouse thing i wonder in those situations if we didn't do wall to work coverage of people rioting uh and going crazy if rittenhouse would

SPEAKER_193: have left his house with the gun right i think people are saying i want to be part of that i want to or some subsection of people are so worked up they say i want to be part of january 6 i want

SPEAKER_49: to be part of whatever is happening when rittenhouse decided he had to go protect himself so the media is not causing january 6 but they're not not engage getting people to engage in it more if that

SPEAKER_458: makes sense i don't know how you feel about that nick yeah and it's my take on our success

SPEAKER_286: yeah i i try and and you could just see this like my it's a microcosm but if you look at the titles of the episodes i try and make them uh engaging without making them clickbait inflammatory right for like for instance last week right we talked about a giant tech stock pullback um or growth stock pullback if you want to call it that uh and i and and kind of what happens when you actually hit uh we didn't call it uh depression but you know i think we're going towards a recession in the stock market correction recession whatever yeah correction okay um and i i you know i i think i said op i think in the title it said operating in a downturn perfect i just wanted to make it like not you know i didn't want to say like hey sell like everything right now you know it's a crash right and i just yeah i i what i try and

SPEAKER_44: make it and i know i didn't notice that on 57 you said understanding omicron yeah i didn't want to

SPEAKER_386: make it like you didn't say like omicron oh yeah understanding it like i think that's actually

SPEAKER_01: uh a great way to do it tech stocks plummet was accurate um some people might say but vc's great

SPEAKER_140: resignation accurate check versus departure i mean we just put the facts out there and that's it

SPEAKER_286: it's enough yeah and i try and get most of the engaging topics in the title but if you look at earlier episodes i was a little bit more inflammatory because i i didn't really think about the impact that the show would have now right and i don't want people to look at our title and and like remember i think i tweeted this but like the all the shows that we were around in like the top 50 shows in

SPEAKER_287: america were like one of them was like american democracy is it changed forever i think one of them

SPEAKER_308: was like boobies something like yeah but that was funny everybody responded to comedy podcast though

SPEAKER_286: it's a comedy podcast called like yeah yeah whatever um but yeah there was there was like an npr podcast that was like is this the end of american democracy as we know it's like okay like what are we

SPEAKER_01: doing here npr like even npr's in on it i don't blame you as a producer in media the you're in an arms race for headlines so you want to do the best you can to get people to the show i think what we all have

SPEAKER_49: to do is like let's just calm the rhetoric down calm the fear-mongering i i kind of wrote a couple of tweets over the weekend i got a big response was like listen uh i don't know if you can pull those tweets up somebody but i basically was saying like listen we live in like the greatest time ever we're living twice as long the opportunity is amazing i'm just trying and i was very specific to say in the united states like stop complaining everybody please i can't take the incessant complaining

SPEAKER_44: and some of the hardship i'm listening to this hardcore history podcast that my friend

SPEAKER_02: turned me on to last week about um um it's called like road map to armageddon um and so i started

SPEAKER_49: listening to this over the last week like the nazis during world war ii were hopped up on methamphetamine they weren't sleeping they were deranged murder can you imagine like you're fighting the nazis and they're on zero hour sleep hopped up on meth like nazis are already crazy and like we're complaining about bitcoin 40 000 and like my nft is down and my dwarf dash is in here like up people like buck up

SPEAKER_02: our grandparents like went to war and we're already like saying democracy is over and complaining about

SPEAKER_286: like nonsense yeah i think bringing it back to all in how i would kind of phrase it i think that specifically our show has a major advantage and it's the ultimate advantage actually over every other publication on the planet in that we don't need to make money there's no financial incentive no and it's it's you all do it because you care about impact and we like to talk to each other and you

SPEAKER_380: like to talk to each other you do it because you like it and that was the original idea yeah right and

SPEAKER_287: that is the ultimate advantage in that you know they need to be inflammatory sometimes they need to

SPEAKER_286: drive people to their website so they can survive none of you are worried about that nor am i and it's just it's an advantage that they don't have it's kind of an unfair advantage right but yeah the

SPEAKER_00: advantage they have yes they have the unfair advantage of um like if you're a tech podcaster who runs events i'm not going to mention any specific names but if you're too hard on somebody they won't speak at your seven thousand dollar ticket conference so you have to toe this line of access journalism they call it where you're not too brutal to somebody so they don't show up but then you've also got this audience that hates tech and so you're hating on tech while trying to get tech people to spend seven thousand dollars on a ticket while trying to get the right person to come and sit down for an interview and so this access journalism becomes very challenging kara swisher is the best at it she's like literally was dunking on zuckerberg and she's like i like mark zuckerberg personally you pull up her article about mark zuckerberg from last week in the new york times her first sentence is how she personally likes zuckerberg but she needs zuckerberg to show up for code conference or to be on her podcast at some point and so it's she's just very good at managing that access or whatever but then there's other people who are just pandering right and i wouldn't put her in the

SPEAKER_193: pandering category but it does we're free i mean everybody knows we're capital allocators we we are obviously going to talk about books but we're going to explain it here's why i'm long uber here's why

SPEAKER_483: i'm long robin hood there's why i'm not selling my square like last week another great example another

SPEAKER_286: great example of so you were talking about friedberg was talking about low level um low wage manual kind of you know mcdonald's starbucks jobs starting to go away because the companies can't afford that price anymore and can't run it profitably if they have to pay people 20 an hour and nobody wants to work that job for that crappy wage anymore right and freeberg brought up how you know technology is going to change this and you say um oh you know not to pump anything but uh you know we have and you didn't even say the name of the startup and you said i have a startup that um we're talking about

SPEAKER_290: cafe access doing robotics or whatever i didn't want to pump them up i was just like they're doing right

SPEAKER_287: which and you didn't even mention the name but as you brought it up to make a good point and a good example that was fair and that was in line with the conversation you didn't bring it up out of nowhere everyone's like oh pump it dude pump it like joking right so it's this like you did it

SPEAKER_286: um to make a point and a good one and you got made fun of for it because that's how the show works and you guys are friends and that's another thing that really um you know it's it's it's like an all-star friends we wouldn't be able to break it's like a super band but everybody actually is really good friends with each other it's it's a perfect i don't know i i love doing it i i you know you know you say all the time like you give up your friday nights for it i don't care i i love

Chamath Palihapitiya: doing it i really do i know the audience appreciates you giving up your thursday and friday nights for it over the last year and you know just nobody else could do the edits you do plus i just rip it

SPEAKER_02: up on saturday so whatever yeah i'm super pleased with cafe x surviving the downturn i you know it was really hard uh i think for companies in the retail space and they just started if i just put the instagram up there somebody could pull up the cafe get cafe x i think is their instagram and we can leave all this in the show by the way because i like uh i like to give a little shout out um i like to sort of like uh show uh decompression or deconstruction check out uh the instagram somebody could pull it up and you'll see they've been selling these uh colette macaroons um at sfo's terminal three and um i always said like you know he told me the they were like why are you using the arm in the cafe app so can somebody pull up the instagram i just posted it in the um restream and the second image is a video

SPEAKER_367: you can play that image while i talk i always thought you know like people are like why why

SPEAKER_00: don't you just do this as like a closed system and there was like a company brigo and you can just do it all behind the scenes and the cup comes out like you know those old school coffee ones that you would see in a hospital that use powder milk or whatever and we were always like we want to use the arm because we want to be able to do anything with it and one of the things we always knew was food would be really great and taps would be really great so they have taps they have food uh and they have the espresso machine so you can really do a lot of interesting things like they will take from the tap you know some green tea or some kombucha and then they can put milk froth on it or oatmeal froth on it and make it like a starbucks thing but you can only do that if you have an arm working between multiple machines obviously there are other beverages that are super popular right now like boba so they could obviously do a boba if they wanted to they use a hot chocolate machine you can do anything with the arm but this is the thing that has been the game changer selling you know ten dollar packs of you know the best macaroons in the bay area or whatever the best ones will be in lax or austin's airport you can really put really interesting things in there and then that makes all the ticket sales go up and nobody wants these jobs so like if you're dunkin donuts or you're

SPEAKER_49: starbucks and you can't get people and the lines are getting i mean i don't know if you've seen the lines at an airport for a coffee place i mean it can be 30 people people just crazy you should just put one of these between every four gates in addition to having the starbucks if you want to go to that and then boom so they went to a they pivoted to an enterprise model they run these ones at sfo but if duncan or illy or dean and de luca or other people want to run chock full of nuts whoever any espresso brand any coffee brand wants to run these and put their name on the front they'll give you the machine and the software and they'll be like a hardware as a service provider so shout

SPEAKER_06: out to get cafe x um really really proud of the team now when they when they lease the machines our

SPEAKER_362: franchise the machines um do they do they still maintain the cafe x branding no the idea is um you

SPEAKER_367: know we had to put them out there ourselves and because you know who's going to do this crazy thing

Chamath Palihapitiya: over the last five years right it was like a really crazy idea five years ago now it's an obvious idea

SPEAKER_367: um so we had to come up with something but now you know to pick the locations operate the machines and build a coffee brand is a lot of work there are people who already know how to do that like dunkin donuts and you know starbucks and coffee bean and tea leaf everybody knows i'm just saying in terms

SPEAKER_441: of branding like i pulled this picture up imagine this with uh like the pink and orange dunkin donuts

SPEAKER_226: colors you know you don't have to imagine i've seen like in decks all of the different brands with

SPEAKER_02: mock-ups yeah all the different models you can imagine this could work also for you know if you had um a club in vegas or something or you had um always making mixed drinks obviously if you have taps you could have cider beers wines you could be making coffees with uh you know kalua in them so it's it's

SPEAKER_367: ultimately extensible and what i was looking for an investment was something that could do the whole job

SPEAKER_00: and i looked at the salad robots the pizza robots they always did 30 to 60 of the job which is fine i mean that's helpful but i wanted something that would do a hundred percent of the job and be a full

SPEAKER_02: stack so yes i do think at some point some coffee brand will put a thousand of these or two because you can have you could have a thousand of these you know in between your five thousand existing locations right and then the people at the existing location like let's say you were dunkin at logan airport and your coffee bean and tea leaf you know at lax and whatever in austin you know the austin you know whatever a coffee brand well you could have the people who are working in the live store

SPEAKER_00: have three other versions of these right between other gates like the gate that has nobody you had to walk a mile to you put those there the people then go fill up the coffee beans fill up the milk if it

SPEAKER_367: breaks they go clean it you know so that's the vision i think is filling in like you ever see a

SPEAKER_00: starbucks in the baggage claim area no but you go because you can't fit it but you could fit one of these in the baggage claim area so when people are waiting for their bags you could have one of these there the dunk in person from upstairs could come down and fill the beans at the end and there's there's

SPEAKER_286: a gps monitoring on the cafe x app right so if you're like close by a machine does it send you a

SPEAKER_00: notification like i think it would be so cool when we had them in we had four of them in san francisco um and they were just constantly vandalized it was a real problem literally tough city to reach out

SPEAKER_367: um no they it would give you an alert hey would you like us to order your mocha then it would

SPEAKER_02: remember your last drink you said yes and it's like counting you down as you go there um so it's very

SPEAKER_502: cool um so yeah like you get a push notification like hey we know your favorite drink is this totally you will have it ready in three minutes that's it that's the scale vision and you know if you just

SPEAKER_02: that would be so dope if anybody knows anybody who um is looking to build a cafe chain and they have uh the ability to buy the machine uh i think the machines go for 200k and then it's like i think it's 2k a month to maintain them or 1500 for the software so you know these things can do 500 000 a year so they pay off in just a year or two i think if you have a good location and then the next nine years is all profit basically um and coffee's high margin so you can really you know if you had a campus of some type or you own buildings i think you know you need to be able

SPEAKER_508: to sell yeah it sounds like college makes so much sense it's relatively safe areas for the most part

SPEAKER_367: 24 hours a day yeah and you only need to sell i think a lot of foot traffic yeah if the average ticket size is like six bucks you know between one and two drinks then if you have a hundred order two hundred to two hundred orders a day you start to hit six to twelve thousand dollars six nine or twelve thousand dollars 365 days a year 365 thousand dollars something in that range makes

SPEAKER_02: it highly profitable like super highly profitable i think a thousand dollars a day in orders you know 150 orders a day 100 to 200 orders a day you just are going to break even to be massively profitable

SPEAKER_287: with these i wonder who's on the buyer side too for universities like is the but like if you're

SPEAKER_226: they usually outsource the entire thing to one restaurant group because they don't want to

SPEAKER_362: deal with it so that's a challenge basically give the restaurant groups the budget like are you dealing with a public university or private university's budget because if that's the case then 250k up front

SPEAKER_00: wouldn't be that big of a deal right i think they put the entire concession out to in a place like a

SPEAKER_367: college campus or a campus like google they might put the entire thing out to a restaurant group like restaurant associates or something and they just do everything all the coffee stands all the ottawa juices the snack bars they'll just do everything for them so they don't have to worry about it but then if you have a big venue like an airport they want to create a marketplace or you have a mall you want to create a marketplace where people are competing against each other and paying the highest

SPEAKER_02: prices for rent right and so they wouldn't just give over the entire mall to somebody to do the food where they want to have a vibrant marketplace of competitors and so that's the idea