SPEAKER_00: hey everybody big news this week the wall street journal is reporting molly that meta the facebook corporation is going to be laying off thousands many thousands of people this week my lord it's getting intense out here in silicon valley it's real i mean we had said last week SPEAKER_01: that if google and facebook if meta and alphabet started doing this it was real so it is real we SPEAKER_03: have a ton of charts though to show the the evolution of meta over the past few years we're going to go real deep on meta's evolution hiring stock market drop and jason's plan buybacks stock SPEAKER_05: buybacks and then there may or may not be a shocking j trade shocking j trade and then pursuant to our SPEAKER_12: discussion last week about brian chesky making all the right moves and throwing off billions in free cash flow he's at the top of his game on a product basis as well big product news coming out of SPEAKER_13: airbnb yeah crushing it and speaking of somebody we are rooting hard for to crush it apparently we are SPEAKER_15: former peloton ceo john foley is back and jason is shopping for a new rug at his new startup dc startup called ernesta we're gonna break that down too it's gonna be a great show it's gonna be a great SPEAKER_17: show stick this week in startups is brought to you by notion is one place for notes docs projects and everyday work that goes way beyond a wiki get started for free at notion.com twist and linkedin marketing to redeem a free 100 linkedin ad credit and launch your first campaign go to linkedin.com SPEAKER_21: slash this week in startups hey it's monday molly how are you it's monday i had a nice restful weekend SPEAKER_03: with family i didn't look at any social media it was amazing yeah ran a little 5k training for the turkey trot yeah how about 5k i did well i mean slowly so that's 3.1 miles i'm gonna guess your time SPEAKER_30: uh three miles times maybe just a nice jog 11 minutes 34 minutes we don't have to talk about my time SPEAKER_15: the i live in one of those neighborhoods where you either go straight up or straight down oh oh that's different yeah walking run down and i hike it back up so it's fine i'm worried but you know SPEAKER_05: what that means that when i finally get to the turkey trot my time's gonna be amazing because all i ever do is walk uphill quickly the turkey trot 5k or 10k it's 5k my mom sent me all my marathon pictures this SPEAKER_38: weekend that was quite nice of her because the marathon was great yeah and i started getting SPEAKER_29: motivated because you know i've actually um the weight loss kicked in again a little bit so i been getting a little fit and i actually was on the treadmill and i just started running and i was like oh what's going on here my uphill walking turned into running so it is possible that you Jason Calacanis: could oh yeah i mean it builds strength and then you run down and then you you know whatever i mean it just listen it feels great it's just feels it's like sometimes you need a little extra endorphins SPEAKER_47: yes exercise critically important like you know mom being in town or whatever or whatever is going on SPEAKER_49: or whatever is going on in the world yes i i yes i'm glad you have one of us had a restful weekend SPEAKER_29: yeah i highly i highly recommend it uh okay so i disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer uh i'm not going to be the ceo of twitter at the end um and i'm not going to talk about uh any of the details of twitter you know there's plenty of places on twitter you can you can read about that so it's kind of odd to that to be the top tech story we're not talking about here but obviously my friend bought the company and uh yeah i was an advisor to it uh but people are making a lot out of it that they probably SPEAKER_00: shouldn't uh it's my involvement has been greatly exaggerated of course if that if i say my uh SPEAKER_09: involvement has been greatly exaggerated people like well you're flexing there's no winning there's SPEAKER_36: no winning in the situation there's no winning i will say i find it both difficult and a giant relief to not talk about it like it's sort of both of those things at once it's like you know what at least yeah whatever happens as the storyline plays out like i didn't have to say a word i wanted to but i also didn't want to so like you know what i recognize it put you in an odd spot i SPEAKER_09: appreciate you uh having my pack to the you know extent you can hear on the pod but you know listen if you want to hear a bunch of people randomly talking about it without a lot of actual information SPEAKER_61: it's plenty of podcasts you can do that you have twitter for that right or every other plenty of SPEAKER_29: or twitter or any number of places you can you can get involved in rampant speculation which i would say is that about 14 accuracy right now but let's get into the number one story that's happening let's SPEAKER_63: do it the other one the other one let's do it well i mean this is the big trend i think this is actually SPEAKER_03: been talking about this for a while serious stuff it's a meta story and i didn't mean that as a pun yeah i really didn't but according to the wall street journal meta the company is planning quote large-scale layoffs this week that could impact thousands of employees as of september 30th meta had over 87 000 employees which was up 28 year over year over q3 2021 so massive hiring boom has happened at meta on all in friday you and the gang talked about large-scale layoffs looming at big tech companies and we said on this show last week that once we saw big layoffs start to happen at alphabet or meta google or facebook that that would mean we'd really hit an inflection point and it seems like we're there so uh these meta layoffs uh like we said are expected wednesday i think they are expected to be huge like way way more than twitter or any of the other big layoffs that we heard about last week when obviously there were the twitter layoffs open door stripe cut a thousand employees lift cut 700 employees like it's it's getting to the point where i don't think we can safely say SPEAKER_47: there's going to be a soft landing for everybody who has laid off from tech clearly because also they're not all engineers right it's sales and marketing people and brand people and it's i think this is the this is the official sign that we are headed into some tough times in the industry well i don't even know if it's a broad-based us recession but it's a tech recession yeah i mean in SPEAKER_29: tech this is uh a crash let's be honest this is crash like behaviors beyond a recession recession negative growth for two quarters we kind of had that then we had as we talked about the positive gdp growth but in tech with these you know 60 70 80 90 stock prices off from their peak SPEAKER_09: and with these significant cuts we're going to be looking at i think what will feel like a recession for tech and this is really the result of the free money that was available and tech hiring being SPEAKER_74: leadership was thinking we're going to hire for two years out or at least a year and i think there's a lack of discipline around making money and profits free cash flow uh employee stock options comp you know people are typically giving four percent of the company's stock away every year and when the market is going up and the stock price goes up nobody questions any of these things but now on the table at every company is should we be diluting the shareholders forget about the employees and the management because that was the focus for the last 10 years yeah now people are saying the shareholders now why molly would people be focusing on the shareholders well because the shareholders are selling their shares and they don't want to buy them exactly like the free money SPEAKER_03: is over on every level as is yes and and not every easy narrative is true but one of the easy narratives about tech that keeps coming around and being kind of true is growth over revenue like we just keep seeing that in every tech boom which is like oh growth over profits hyperscale and then we'll make SPEAKER_36: money eventually but eventually always comes around and sometimes it comes sooner than you expect and SPEAKER_12: you haven't made the money yet i think as bill gurley said like uh you know the the boom is like going up an escalator and when it when it goes bust it's like going down an elevator you know like we slowly SPEAKER_09: consistently go up and then boom right down the elevator fast to the bottom floor management is starting to realize we gave we're diluting the shareholders too much we're spending too much money people are getting paid too much money the entitlement is too high the benefits are too high and i'm not talking about health benefits here i'm talking about like you know kind bars massages those those SPEAKER_29: tick tock videos like here's a day in the life of a google employee in new york and then they're like i you know i want to get a massage i want to get a facial i did this all that stuff we should say SPEAKER_05: because i don't want to disrespect these employees who got all those benefits and act like they're but SPEAKER_36: because that is what companies did because hiring was so competitive they made that choice right it SPEAKER_03: wasn't about like spoiling these big divas it was just about like how can we get you here because SPEAKER_29: yes it was an insanely everybody was over hiring thank you for uh correcting me or making sure that my point was clear a hundred percent that was the choice of management yep to create an entitlement culture SPEAKER_09: from the boardroom where people had no accountability and were getting tons of stock options all the way down to the rank and file management and boards made these decisions employees were along for the ride yeah and they also had no discipline in hiring people they just said well let's just you know if it's gonna if we have to raise every salary 20 and we got to do this to be competitive with each other they created a an unsustainable bid for high-tech employees i mean the opening SPEAKER_63: salaries in some companies 250k 150k like for positions that if we were talking about it five or ten years ago would have been much lower yeah so when all that discipline went out and we saw it in SPEAKER_26: their salaries market were like pretty standard million dollar packages standard it was getting SPEAKER_84: out of control you know out of control out of control and now um what people are realizing is SPEAKER_74: now that the top line's not going up then the uh hedge funds or you know the the retirement funds people who mutual funds who want to own stocks that grow are saying you know what these stocks are not going to grow they don't have discipline they're not throwing off dividends they're not throwing off profits they're not buying back the shares there are other options for us so we went from the number one option the safe option buy tech to a safe option i'm gonna buy some energy i'm gonna buy some dividend stocks i'm gonna buy you know whatever it is and so now the tech industry is going to have SPEAKER_63: to prove it to wall street that their stocks are worth buying if you're a startup you need to sign up SPEAKER_12: for notion notion is my favorite product of the last year why do i love notion well i had to make a a new system to track all the companies we meet with here at launch launch is my investment company we meet 60 to 70 new companies per week we put them into a database i looked at all the sas software out there there were people who wanted to charge me i kid you not 50 100 250 000 a year so i said you know what i'll just make my own software i'll hire a developer okay what's the number 150 250 a year even if i went outsourced and i used another country and it would take me a year to make the product that i want but we were using notion and notion has databases and they have these beautiful documents and they have tables and all the things i needed so we made the database of all the companies we meet with and what we found was we could with a no code solution like notion and using some other software that connects it by api to the other programs we use we could make chef's kiss the perfect customized system for ourselves and we did it within six weeks i had the system up and running and in the six weeks after that we perfected it i think this product's taking over the world SPEAKER_63: i'll be totally honest and i i'm like reading an ad for it right now but consider this a testimonial not all work collaboration tools are created equal some they're going to help you organize your company's information's other well maybe they'll help you manage some projects notion does both it's one tool for your whole team and it's so beautifully designed everyone will want to use it stop having 50 tabs open your browser just sign up for notion today learn more and get started for free right now at notion.com they have the.com and so when i saw this happen molly i said to myself i we had a con you and i on this podcast had a conversation i don't know if you remember this one but i said would not the logical thing for meta to do in a situation where nobody SPEAKER_74: believes you cut some staff buy back your stock cut the r d spending a bit and then watch the stock go back up because you're buying it on the cheap and i had owned facebook shares from i was an lp in a fund SPEAKER_09: that had one of their companies get acquired by facebook i sat on a nice chunk of that facebook SPEAKER_29: shares i wrote it from 70 60 or 70 bucks when i got the distribution from this venture fund all the way to 115 and i sold it the reason i sold it molly was because i just didn't like zuck and his impact SPEAKER_101: then i became a j trader and i said i want to learn about public equity investment you came on that journey with me and watched me lose 15 of my money in three months i'm just trying to warn you about SPEAKER_15: stitch fix like other than that i was on board well i i am trying to it's biggest loser in the SPEAKER_78: portfolio thank you yeah go to jtrading.com to see just the blood the bloodbath which is my first SPEAKER_75: quarter always ask me where my friends were before you make your jade anyway anyway what i've learned SPEAKER_09: is that making trades with your heart as a public market investor is a bad idea gotta be a little bit SPEAKER_29: ruthless so i was out on the weekend okay and i see this news break in our group chat right nick says SPEAKER_63: hey look i immediately open up robin hood and i put in a trade j trade and i bought meta i cannot believe SPEAKER_35: this i it's i was just like happening you're just fully this is your transition to super villain just SPEAKER_63: basically oh my god i bought 500 shares of it well this is my standard slug i'm buying 50k slugs SPEAKER_74: typically because i'm trying to build like a million two million dollar portfolio of active trading over the next 10 years with the stated goal of you know just beating venture capital returns i just want to see if my vc returns from this period versus my i'm taking like a 10-year challenge to myself can my public market buys it either match or compete with my venture buys now venture funds i've been involved in are currently marked at whatever four or five six x uh you know depending on where you SPEAKER_09: trust the marks um and so i've been elite in that regard i'm not counting scouts where i did phenomenal and SPEAKER_29: it was off the charts but just looking at this i'm saying this founder is going to take the medicine i believe zuck has so much pride and wants to win so badly that this this moment in time going from 360 a share to 90 a share looking like a fool having everybody in the world criticize you everybody in the world give up on you i think that is going to make suck not break suck and i think the first piece of medicine is doing what he's never had to do which is to say i was wrong i was wrong you know who said i was wrong jack said he was wrong for hiring so many people at twitter this weekend SPEAKER_09: i don't know if you saw that tweet storm yeah uh he said it's my fault i doubled the number of employees whatever i i shouldn't have done that brian chesky made that huge riff now he's throwing a free cash flow uh dara at uber made that giant one so at some point mature leaders say i was wrong and they make the cuts and you know you look at lift stripe open door these cuts are happening i think SPEAKER_29: this is like is this lifts third riff i think it's their second it's definitely their second but i SPEAKER_124: think it might be their third i do i want to go back for a second and say that on your robin hood SPEAKER_03: screenshot of the thing where you just joined the evil empire and bought a bunch of facebook it said SPEAKER_126: time and force good for day you were on the right side of the force for one day he starts doing these SPEAKER_09: riffs i'm kind of going ashoka i'm gonna go this is a deep day this is a deep pull for star wars fans but SPEAKER_29: i'm going ashoka now i'm not part of the jedi i'm not part of the dark side i'm like a ronin my like perhaps my favorite character in star wars right now sure that's an excellent that is an SPEAKER_03: excellent um pull for sure i will believe everything you have said as soon as i hear zuck say as soon as one i hear where these riffs are because i guarantee because if they are not accompanied with a reduction metaverse bending there's no universe in which he will convince convince me that what he's saying here is i was wrong that's like the that so far is the unproven part of your thesis right SPEAKER_29: so there's this my thing was a four-part plan a significant riff which this one seems to be we'll talk about how significant and what significant means here reduce the metaverse event expense juice the profits which happens from those first two things and there's other ways to juice profits and then use extra money to buy back stock essentially one and three are done the significant riff is going to juice profits now we don't know if two and four have been done yet but if i can get two three uh two or three of these i'm going to double my money in the next three years is my problem if i get four of these this is going to be a 10 bagger i think he yeah SPEAKER_84: maybe a five a five beggar it'll be a five bagger if he does all four i i could see any but he's also SPEAKER_101: stock comp i should add a fifth one here is a reasonable stock comp so keep stock compensation SPEAKER_84: at one percent instead of four or whatever they were burning through so that you know should we do SPEAKER_47: the charts i interrupted you before we got to no no no it's sort of fun those charts that would SPEAKER_31: actually show how deep this can also just how this can be accomplished right so set this up for the SPEAKER_03: listeners so uh we have some charts nick made some charts about meta's uh sort of situation uh current events and then what we think might be future events if all of the boxes on your checklist there turn green okay here's meta stock price since its ipo in may 2012 you can see it hit almost 400 a share wow i had forgotten about those times representing uh one trillion dollar market cap in just like one Jason Calacanis: year ago late 2021 and then now it's trading where you bought it at like 95 95 50. when's the last time SPEAKER_147: it looks like it was at 95. if you go backwards i mean maybe 2016 yeah okay so we're and that's about SPEAKER_03: the time that they were on an incline but also getting hammered by congress remember yeah because that was election interference stuff there was a lot of testifying there was like oh what's gonna happen SPEAKER_150: and it shot straight up and it just pretty much shot straight up so no one cares nothing you can swing SPEAKER_152: an election with facebook yeah bye bye bye i mean that was a cynical look no one cares that nothing SPEAKER_153: matters yay now let's layer full-time employees over time on top and we have this red line and you can SPEAKER_03: see that that number has only ever grown there's not even been like a dip it is now at 87 000 employees up 28 year over year in 2021 it like doubled in three years so yeah staffing staffing staffing that's SPEAKER_09: a real telling chart i mean it literally and this is what boards and management did they said the stock SPEAKER_29: price is going up let's just keep hiring because talent makes product product delights customers delighted customers equal revenue revenue equals stock price goes up stock price goes up and just you get into this flywheel of you correlate the employee account with the stock price and you keep it out you keep SPEAKER_05: employees out of your competitors hands like we shouldn't forget this sort of catch and kill aspect of this did you bring this up on this show that like sometimes companies all the time it's a blocking strategy it was blocking strategy exactly and they'll hire employees and just sit them there with an SPEAKER_03: insane salary package correct just to keep them from the other guy so that was happening probably too okay now we're going to add meta's quarterly net net income over time represented by a green line you see that peak at over 10 billion dollars per quarter in 2021 oh my god yeah look at that per SPEAKER_161: quarter before what a chart this is look at that just to show people we have now this is beautiful total SPEAKER_29: employee account in red the net income in green and the stock price is the black line we've now layered SPEAKER_03: three charts amazing yep and the net income is almost in lockstep with the share price of course you know SPEAKER_31: massive drop right as profits go down shareholders sell pretty straightforward but the only line that SPEAKER_03: hasn't gone down is employee hiring correct at all like hasn't even hasn't even started to flatten they are not even flattening that curve that is just a rocket ship straight to space okay and then finally we have a blue line added to our chart and that represents meta's average diluted shares outstanding which sit at 2.7 billion shares roughly as of last quarter and they've been giving SPEAKER_09: tons of share what's very confusing about this blue number and we'll do another episode or segment on this we have to break it down it'll be another double click but the amount of shares being given to employees SPEAKER_74: during this period was extraordinary i believe you know like i think the average as i said is like you know three or four percent so they're giving money they're giving shares to employees molly and that SPEAKER_84: includes the board uh in all likelihood although i'm not sure about their board because their board is all rich people i'm not sure how much comp they got but all the management team are getting massive SPEAKER_63: comp in the form of stock options the developer you referenced before this million dollar package SPEAKER_74: they're buying off employees and talent with massive amounts of stock the shareholders are being diluted every year by those stock grants right mm-hmm that stock is not free that comes at the expense of the people who bought their shares in the company that didn't have them gifted as employees but who bought SPEAKER_84: it in other words your retirement uh you know or your endowment or some mutual fund at the same time SPEAKER_29: you're diluting those folks you're buying back shares so facebook did buy back shares and i don't SPEAKER_09: have the buybacks here but if we could put the diluted shares outstanding with the align with how many shares they gave away and how many they bought back i've ever heard people say that this feels like SPEAKER_101: a scam you're giving massive amounts of shares to employees and management buying back the shares which inflates the price those employees are selling into that right okay so you can goose your share price by buying back shares but you're also at the same time just throwing shares out of a cannon like at the warriors game where they do the t-shirts like a money cannon yeah now is that fraud or is it SPEAKER_78: sketchy is it unethical well if the price of the shares are going up nobody cares right but when you SPEAKER_101: see a plummet like this now everybody's going to start questioning that so they did these shares SPEAKER_63: backs remember they announced them in 2016 they did in 2017 and i don't know how many how much they SPEAKER_03: spent on it but it was a lot it was a lot yeah i mean they started in the single digit billions with these buyback programs and by 2021 had announced had increased the buyback program by 50 billion dollars so massive numbers of shares being bought side by the way side note i also eventually want to see this when we talk more in depth about buybacks i want to see this chart for apple because same same massive SPEAKER_183: buyback program massive now if management is keeping you know the net income the profits of the business SPEAKER_101: mm-hmm growing well then maybe you'd look at stock buybacks in a different way and you know the relationship between stock buybacks and employee management grants molly because you'd be looking at it saying okay the employees are getting something but they're making good decisions in management to keep those employees and to keep our profits high right and we're benefiting from it as external shareholders who are buying a vote in this management so i trust apple i trust tim cook i trust the board over there they're gonna give some shares to employees to motivate them they're gonna buy back some shares which is good for all shareholders but we're not the bag holders as the public buyers right what feels like is happening at facebook because the price is going down is zuck is choosing to burn all the money have no profits or run the profits down i should say there's still some SPEAKER_29: profits obviously and the person who is really punished here is the people who bought those shares at 300 which is why jim kramer was like i don't know if you saw that viral clip of him SPEAKER_84: in tears he was crying he wasn't crying he was just feeling really frustrated yeah and we'll play a clip of it right now yeah okay you guys just saw the clip yeah yeah i mean it's interesting to SPEAKER_03: hear anybody talk that sort of fervently about this idea of like i believed them i had this trust but it's true that it is very unusual it's very unusual to look at the kind of chart we're looking at and realize that these precipitous drops right this absolute tanking of net income and share price came not as a result of externalities such as covid but as a result of internalities such as pivoting the whole company to a totally unproven virtual reality strategy and spending 15 billion dollars on it and so you could see where if you're jim kramer you end up going well okay the buybacks were one part of this scheme that maybe didn't feel great and then were the bag holders but SPEAKER_36: were the bag holders because like so far tim cook has not lit any money on fire at apple no like he's doing the same thing but with shareholder price firmly in mind like in no universe do we are do we expect to see tim cook be like you know what i'm sacrificing all the iphone margins on something completely SPEAKER_29: brand new and unproven it's not happening there is an underlying thing here uh that we should talk about as well the headwinds of apple making their changes to tracking uh mobile phones and the headwind of tick tock becoming an advertising juggernaut true also externalities and internalities that's true SPEAKER_101: i think i made that which they give you even less faith it gives you even less but the majority one you nailed it's the the spending yeah but it just shows you like management is internally screwing up SPEAKER_63: and externally screwing up or getting their ass handed to them so you're getting your ass handed to them and then you make bad decisions yep and they're not reacting that is a really bad situation it's a bad SPEAKER_31: situation so it's a good thing you drop 50 grand on their stock i'm just saying well here well here's my SPEAKER_29: thinking all right okay and our next chart well yeah this is the one that's going to be painful and i i do want to put a disclaimer here because we do we are talking about humans and you brought that up early uh thank you your empathy is always high and sometimes i'm thinking with my brain not my heart love mom well no i'm trying to think i'm trying to also channel my heart uh you know uh namaste as well as my logical thinking here these are people you know when these layoffs we look at them we talk SPEAKER_101: about them in the abstract here on the program you know these are people who you know uh sometimes SPEAKER_09: have given years of their life to a company they have their friends there they love the company and then the manager has to lay people off or the ceo told everybody like believe in me believe in the mission and then they have to say like we're saying goodbye to 20 of you 50 of you 15 of you 15 of you three times this is so hard and painful for individuals on one hand and then SPEAKER_84: you must also counterbalance this so that's that's this breaks my heart i mean i i have done these kind of layoffs molly i had people cry and like to this day i i feel tortured by it because when i talked to the two or three people who were crying when i had to lay it like a lot of people off at mahalo back in the day because the search engine algorithm just took away 90 of our revenue overnight i said you know it's going to be okay you're so smart i'm going to help you get another job you're SPEAKER_00: going to get a job instantly you know like and they said no it's nothing to do with money the job i just love working here so much yeah you know and you just you feel that dagger in your heart sorry to SPEAKER_09: say that for uh to my producers you have to take it out now man it is hard it is really hard to say goodbye to friends and say goodbye to the mission now going back to my head from my heart on a logic SPEAKER_12: basis these are tech workers they are so desirable on a global basis i would just be yes 98 out of 100 SPEAKER_36: because what do you mean when you say tech workers some of them are sales some of them are brand you know like okay the assumption that somehow they're all super skilled high-tech workers because we know that the people who get laid off first are the ones in customer support it's often sales it's often SPEAKER_03: marketing those are crowded fields like i just want to caution i just want to be mom again caution against the idea that this is like they're all just going to get immediately snapped up by SPEAKER_47: some tech company because they all know how to code that's not true yes so there is a SPEAKER_29: 100 correct if you're an engineer and you get laid off you have four office tomorrow if you're a sales executive you get laid off or a marketing executive you get laid off it could be quite different it SPEAKER_09: could be well they kept some of the marketing and sales people and they didn't keep you therefore you're the bottom half you're the bottom third you were the easy cut and then you have this scarlet letter situation if i'm using that term correctly you know you're you've been pinned as maybe the weakest SPEAKER_29: of the herd it's completely unfair because it's probably not true who knows how the decisions are made sometimes it's the first people in sometimes it's the most tenured people because they're the most SPEAKER_09: expensive and you say oh these young people who are coming in in year two of their careers are doing i could have two or three of them do the job for this you know overpriced person or what the management thinks is overpriced so you do have a lot of that variability you're 100 correct it's SPEAKER_48: a very nuanced issue it's a very good point of yours it's just that being said it's just hard SPEAKER_03: it's hard it's however exactly when you're looking at charts yeah it just it it it does require a pause SPEAKER_101: here because we're going to be on people on cnbc people in the news new york times us here we're going to talk about these things in relation to oh making the stock price go up and you know making the turning these companies around making them sustainable there's pain and suffering however that pain and suffering is not comparable to the the true pain and suffering in the world of people living in authoritarian regimes people who are living in dictatorships people who are oppressed so you SPEAKER_84: have to be able to maintain many thoughts in your head at the same time to contextualize this and so anyway i think it's gonna be pleasant just unpack that yeah so here we go okay before we go to the people chart if they execute my strategy here's what i believe will happen now this chart and you can watch all these youtube.com slash this weekend or if you watch us on spotify or listen on spotify you can press a button or you turn your phone sideways or something and it shows a video but these charts are great we'll do a series of these charts uh in a tweet storm on twitter.com twi startups black line stock price it's going to go up into the right green line net income it's going SPEAKER_74: to go up into the right those two things are correlated if the market sees income profits go up they're going to make the stock price go up how is that going to happen the total number of employees the red line is going to have to go down i believe to 2019 or 2020 levels that will be what's SPEAKER_84: taken seriously now that's going to be super painful we'll get to that in a moment molly SPEAKER_74: and then the diluted shares uh that are outstanding perhaps those could go down a little bit with a buyback so two things are going up two things are going down that equals the stock going 5x SPEAKER_09: you know going to three or four hundred dollars a share again it could do that right now it's trading SPEAKER_29: i think seven eight nine x price to earnings ratio it's it's it's been clobbered and people are bad people were betting last week this wouldn't happen but this is the plan i think it's the plan SPEAKER_225: hey tom eschbacher is here with us again he's a senior sales manager at linkedin marketing solutions and we're talking about their amazing report today in startup marketing as well as how to use linkedin to grow your startup what are some tactical things not big picture strategy i'm SPEAKER_223: talking tactics that founders can do today to figure out product market fit one of the big Chamath Palihapitiya: tactics we see here is amplifying organic posting with paid advertising you consider a startup that raises a seed round they post the news on their linkedin page and see a bunch of likes clicks and follows come in they follow that then with some updates about product and they see continued traction with for instance hr benefit managers at tech companies that have fewer than 500 employees that's a signal and it becomes important to then get a larger sample and to increase confidence we've made it super easy to identify which audiences are engaging with your organic content your linkedin company page your website and then extend reach into those segments with our best-in-class b2b ad targeting so for early stage startups who amplify organic with paid we see a 13x lift in unique reach and those are meaningful insights to help inform product and go-to-market strategies such a great strategy head SPEAKER_225: to linkedin.com this week and startups and get the report now so you have an edge on your competitors and as a little pot sweetener hundred dollars off your first marketing campaign thanks to com and the team at linkedin go get that report and get the hundy there was an interesting counterpoint from my SPEAKER_47: favorite twitter account which is a parody account buco capital capital our favorite i love buco capital SPEAKER_118: look he's got parody lest anybody think that arty buco is alive and tweeting no obviously he's alive SPEAKER_09: and tweeting spoiler alert he didn't die in the sopranos if anybody thinks arty buco got whacked SPEAKER_55: he's alive and well he does not participate in social media for obvious reasons he's busy cooking SPEAKER_212: if you're on the line you're making man of god you're making the vongole you can't be tweeting come on this is like my favorite account and i will rain hell if it is just so odd brand would start a SPEAKER_03: hedge fund it's amazing uh tweeted a bit of a counterpoint to this not a complete SPEAKER_36: counterpoint but just an interesting like if you're a facebook employee i think that the the first point in this tweet was the one that i think is interesting because it's it's like you see facebook SPEAKER_03: meta trying to execute this big turnaround and if you are an employee at facebook right the blue the original product and you're frustrated with all the metaverse stuff this is probably not going to help there's going to be a real morale issue and then he also makes a point in his third bullet point that SPEAKER_47: it's going to be rough out there once big tech normalizes big layoffs which is kind of going on and on and on it is a great time to be hiring so to all of our founders out there if you are trying to hire a benefit yeah you're going to benefit but he also makes the point that tech companies are getting their finances buttoned up for 23 guidance and that actually to what we just talked about SPEAKER_03: there have been people sort of celebrating these big layoffs as though you know and i think it's really good that we're getting that out of the way that that that although companies gave them entitlements that doesn't mean they were entitled there's still people losing jobs and that even though like i i have been known to out and out cheer for zuck to fail i don't want that to come at the expense of the people who work there because they don't deserve that yeah and on the uh SPEAKER_50: yeah great tweet a shout out arty bucco heart arty bucco i have such a crush on that parody account SPEAKER_44: pretty good i can't wait to find out who it is thoroughly an insider he understands the uh he SPEAKER_90: understands the industry pretty well on the morale issue if you make one riff and you're you know it SPEAKER_29: it tends to go well after about two weeks in my experience because i've been involved in this so many times with my own companies and companies i've invested in because what happens is people see SPEAKER_09: their friends get jobs and become happy and that that's a two three four week process they also see them go on vacation for three to six months if i'm being candid in the tech industry people tend to get you know whatever two three four five six months which is nowhere near what a bus driver or a chef or whatever gets like you get a kick in the pants and you get like a week's salary two weeks hours you're lucky so we have this incredible um you know uh graceful landings for very highly paid people and they tend to take a nice you know respite and then they land on their feet that's what i've seen traditionally now maybe this recession will be different but i don't i suspect everybody starts landing on their feet and maybe their comp isn't as good as their peak comp SPEAKER_29: but it's going to be within 80 or something and they survive then what happens is the company SPEAKER_101: they're at everybody goes wait a second things are going well and that's what the airbnb employees are airbnb morale has never been higher they are throwing off massive cash flow right we talked about this last week in the earnings just if you're an employee at airbnb right now the what is it four SPEAKER_09: or five thousand employees and not the two or three thousand that got laid off remember that super riff actually you remember perfectly well because you were impacted by it yeah the people who stayed SPEAKER_101: are stoked their stock price is surged and the people who left i'm gonna guess all did pretty well yeah you know if you want to hire an employee an airbnb employee is pretty coveted in this town SPEAKER_03: absolutely i mean there's no it's an a-list thing to have on your resume and so it it ultimately works SPEAKER_36: out and even for the people who left who were vested their stock price went up so yes i mean i think it being part of this industry and leaving having this happen like you know it just like you said there SPEAKER_03: are a lot of things happening all at the same time a lot of truths happening simultaneously it is tough SPEAKER_31: to lose your job abruptly in most of these cases these people are going to be fine but the short-term pain is real i mean if you look at this chart is this the people one yeah and i hate to be a downer SPEAKER_29: here oh wow yeah but if we were just to go back three years to the number of employees meta had right and then we drew some black lines here on the alphabet and meta just to give you an idea in 2019 SPEAKER_12: you know they had uh probably 40 000 or so employees there and they're now at 87 yeah like almost 60 rift to get to where they were in 2019 to get to where they were in 2020 it'd be similar SPEAKER_78: like a 50 rift then to get to where they were but in 2021 you know you're talking about letting go of 27 000 people a third of your staff that's insane i i'm gonna put their riff at 10 where did all this SPEAKER_47: hiring go i mean so 10 and 10 is still 8 700 ish employees i mean if they let go of 8 700 employees SPEAKER_270: yeah let it sink in how many people that is now in terms of the overall economy not a lot in terms of SPEAKER_183: in terms of the tech industry number of humans yeah just to process that many people being laid SPEAKER_12: off is going to take months i mean holy cow so what i i think maybe this might be a significant SPEAKER_276: number but a smaller percentage yeah maybe between i don't think i don't think he's going to do 10 i SPEAKER_47: think he's going to do five to seven i mean we yeah we have no idea to be clear the wall street journal didn't give a number it did say that they thought it would be many thousands of people SPEAKER_31: but that could be five percent i mean i think it's four thousand people which would be five percent SPEAKER_29: i'm going to put it at five percent so it will feel like a large number of people and it is it would be more people than all the companies combined last week that you know the open door twitter all that combined will be less than the meta riff this week well not at four thousand but SPEAKER_31: yeah well or close right so if it's five thousand it would be the same right like alone could do roughly the same or similar as every other company maybe five thousand people would be the same yeah SPEAKER_84: so i think there were five thousand people laid off at those five companies let's be able to open SPEAKER_29: door lyft twitter etc so anyway yeah for this to have an impact it's got to be five percent at least for it to have a dramatic impact would be ten so somewhere between five and ten percent would be it's in some way hit the bottom line which is i think what his goal is if it's less than five percent if it's less than five thousand employees this is a token and i made a bad j trade SPEAKER_09: to be a complete free market monster yeah if it's over five thousand people i made a killer SPEAKER_84: j trade because he's taking expense seriously yeah and this is where i have a really hard time with SPEAKER_78: public market investing because i'm literally betting the more people he cuts the better it would be for my j trade if he says i know 20 000 people what is so terrible about public market SPEAKER_03: investing right is that good news is always bad news or bad news is always good news and it's just like i know totally i'm excited about my three month cds at four and a half brian chesky is SPEAKER_26: shaping up to being one of the great ceos of our time i believe he's paying attention he's listening SPEAKER_03: to our i think he's listening to our show i think he might be listening to me specifically he even said he even talked about stripping the beds in one of his tweets i was like oh my god that's me SPEAKER_08: that's you all right go let's break it down uh let's break down all the right moves exactly SPEAKER_15: all the right moves chesky like he really is honestly exactly what we talked about on friday SPEAKER_03: so as a follow-up to earnings uh chesky revealed that airbnb was working on the the transparency around pricing to roll all of the fees in to and to be fair he had already tweeted that they were working on this but he has now rolled it out now when you search on airbnb we were talking uh last week about these hidden fees that people are are annoyed about and here's a video that chesky tweeted early on monday morning today as we're taping he said basically what you're seeing here is that cleaning fees will become more apparent earlier on so when you're searching for accommodations right now you only see nightly rates and no other fees and that those fees could be cleaning it could be tax it's whatever it is now uh you will have to hit a toggle switch to see the breakdown the total cost with nightly rates and fees so that you can more accurately search for locations in your price ranges you basically won't get this price surprise where you look at something and it's you know 300 bucks a night you think and then once all the fees are in you know and you can see that there might be taxes there might be cleaning yes you'll just see the total price breakdown part which is great SPEAKER_09: of this story is fees is just concisely uh being transparent about the fees brilliant and he did it exactly how we were talking about just a toggle switch and what's the default yeah and i'm assuming the default is to not have it turned on and then you turn it on but it's so prominently display for people not watching it literally has a toggle switch at the top as if your settings were open it's literally at the top and it says display total price bulletproof it doesn't matter if it's defaulted SPEAKER_29: on or off in my mind since it's so prominent yeah totally what you would look at and this is why you SPEAKER_63: listen to this week in startups molly is the detail here is what is the default in other words what is it start as on or off that tells you a lot is it defaulted on or off it looks like it's defaulted off and then you have to turn it on okay fine fair enough that's a product decision yeah now here's like an even more subtle one when you turn it on does it stay on for your next search or not SPEAKER_74: these are nuanced product discussions that really impact revenue and consumer behavior SPEAKER_63: is the default on or is the default off and does it remember your setting from the last usage SPEAKER_47: so just keep that in mind when you're designing a product and think about how careful airbnb and SPEAKER_03: chess you know and and everybody has always said about brian chesky and airbnb that fundamentally that although it was a real innovation in terms of business model that it was doesn't much like uber design first and so that the reason you know that that airbnb has talked about as far back as may of 2021 airbnb has talked about addressing the concern about the fees and said we're going to work on it SPEAKER_36: according to the wall street journal the reason it took so long was because they wanted to design it perfectly they wanted to make it as seamless and appealing and useful as possible without creating more SPEAKER_03: off-putting kind of friction distortion friction thank you that's already that's exactly the word SPEAKER_29: industry yes uh so yeah this is i mean it's interesting right like going from being a journalist to being inside the industry like all of a sudden you it's like the matrix like when i was a journalist i like had this amount of like knowledge of what's going on and then you're behind the scenes and you start having the real discussions okay what is the default setting okay does it remember your default SPEAKER_101: setting okay what's the friction here why are we doing it and in product design what you see is you know a product like uber this exact same thing happened with tipping and i had very passionate SPEAKER_29: discussions with travis about this back in the day i'm not speaking out of school we both have SPEAKER_101: talked about it publicly during interviews we've done i'm from brooklyn i tip everybody i tip people SPEAKER_143: who don't expect to tip remember i told you the story of the time i tried to tip a flight attendant SPEAKER_179: yep back in the 80s we called them stewardesses so back in like 84 like we don't have to go back SPEAKER_321: but yeah i was like a 15 year old i thought i was in goodfellas and i was like hey sweetie this is SPEAKER_327: for you i gave the flight attendant three dollars for a coca-cola and she literally took it and dropped it in my lap and said we we don't get if you don't take tips you're like oh i was like oh what do you mean you don't take a tip i keep the hertz guy already buco already buco i tipped the SPEAKER_331: hertz guy who brought my car around he was like why are you tipping me oh my lord i mean i tipped SPEAKER_333: the security guard when i you know when i went to idea i do remember that i do remember that actually SPEAKER_03: with uh with uber and trying to figure out how to integrate tipping in a way that wouldn't feel invasive like it wouldn't stress you out but it would let you make it easier and then the drivers you'd know where it was going like all of this is all of these are fundamentally designed questions so then the other thing other changes so there's this big design change to make the fees more obvious slash invisible the default is off i'm reading here invisible in the right way though i think it's interesting that the default is off but i guess maybe it's like then you can really see the breakdown SPEAKER_05: a little bit better i don't know sounds to me like a discussion that occurred SPEAKER_78: and there was a little bit of a split discussion internally i would love to know and they said let's SPEAKER_74: start by exposing it and let people turn it on yeah so this feels to me like a bunch of respected SPEAKER_63: people had a difference of opinion and they said let's start with the test with it off and see how many people turn it on so we get data which is not a bad decision by the way it's a considered decision let's turn it off and let's see if people turn it on it's a fine decision yeah it's interesting SPEAKER_03: like yeah it's sort of a jobsian question right like shouldn't do you are you the kind of company who collects the data and does a little bit of a real-time a b test and takes the flack or do you just say this is what you want as a customer i'm gonna give i'm just gonna make that call and they SPEAKER_29: could have gone either way and i don't hate it yeah it's another per that's another perennial that's why you listen to this we can start up from the inside i can tell you that's another perennial management decision do great products get made by god kings and queens who give the edict okay we're having a difference of opinion here congratulations everybody on the debate this was a vibrant SPEAKER_09: debate as the uh ceo i'm going with default off or i'm going with default on and that's where we're going i appreciate the dissenters uh the dissenting opinion but i'm just going to pick this one and if i'm wrong i will own it right so if i'm taking out the headphone jack and our sales plummet or i don't want buttons all over this and i don't want remember the blackberry had tons of buttons you remember like the smartphones had 18 buttons he's like let's have one button at the bottom yeah steve jobs and they're like are you crazy and he's like well the buttons could be on the screen it's the right decision i mean does anybody want an iphone with four buttons on the bottom SPEAKER_29: no it's great you want you want dynamic buttons you don't have to remember what the little circle SPEAKER_01: arrow back button means like come on have you ever been to that fifth avenue store in new york where there are no buttons in the elevator there are no buttons that freaks me out i've been to a lot of David Friedberg: those yeah with that with a person asking what floor you're going to and yeah i do not like that SPEAKER_36: anyway okay and in addition to and so in addition to this choice so the toggle's off by default fine but chesky also announced that they'll be prioritizing searches by total price SPEAKER_03: so that you're certain the highest quality homes with the best total prices whether you have that toggle off SPEAKER_36: or on exactly will rank higher in search results so they're prioritizing value and then regardless and i think this is such a clever mix and match so you have the toggle off by SPEAKER_03: default but the algorithm is going to prioritize the best total price which i think is genius and he's saying you know we started as an affordable alternative to hotels that's totally true and affordability is especially important today wants to help hosts who offer the best so in a way and i don't he's not trying to out the hosts here but it's an incentive the fact that the fee structure is very very obvious yes i think the hosts get to decide the cleaning fee yep they do is a very clever SPEAKER_00: threading of the pressure needle here he just took the buttons out molly he took the buttons out he did it he pulled the jobs brian all the right moves chesky that's his new nickname when you see him if there's airbnb employees listening i want you to come up to him just give him a little pound on the chest give him like you know a little fist bump and i just want you to call him all the right moves SPEAKER_63: he's doing all the right moves yes he understands his customers uh he understands his shareholders he understands his team and i was going to ask this question is airbnb about value or experience and what brian is saying people come to us for value we know that we're not pretending we're the amand hotel we know you want to save a little bit of money we know that matters to you that's part of your decision making process you want bang for your buck right and that's what i think of when i when i rent an airbnb i think okay i'm going here and i would have to buy four hotel rooms when i travel SPEAKER_74: it's four hotel rooms the parents the kids probably two rooms now with three kids and the nannies if i'm with a nanny or if i'm bringing my parents or whatever it's typically three four rooms right and i'm like okay three four rooms four or five hundred bucks a night i'm in for two three grand a night with because there's so much taxes in hotels and then i think airbnb it's typically like fifteen hundred a night or a thousand i get five or six bedrooms i can i can invite an extra person and they have a game room for the kids and they got a kitchen and now i can cook food which we like SPEAKER_05: so much better when you have a family you don't have to have a kid in a hotel room alone like you don't have to be freaked out about all of that adjoining rooms nonsense so it is it's a better value for families and it's just it's great but i oh what i really like about this the more i think SPEAKER_03: about the toggle being off comparing with the search results prioritizing total price he's preventing SPEAKER_36: the pharmacy benefit manager problem if the the middleman that sits in the middle of drug pricing SPEAKER_03: so like if they had just turned this toggle on by default and all you ever saw was the total price you wouldn't know the difference between the hosts who are charging an absorbitant cleaning fee and the SPEAKER_36: ones who aren't that's the game that's the game is to say you customer get to see this and you don't SPEAKER_03: get to be shocked by the fee but you host you don't get to just charge a bunch and hide it and SPEAKER_00: it's they play games with that well done they play games with the fee too from what i understand i'm not like i use airbnb like maybe twice once or twice a year and i think a lot of those hosts play games SPEAKER_78: with that fee they're like oh if you do all these things on the list which is super annoying like i i SPEAKER_101: i didn't come here to clean your house mm-hmm came here to have a vacation i don't you ever have this experience the last day of your airbnb and you're like oh you know the last time i vacation when i'm exhausted and i gotta go home and face reality i gotta spend two hours making sure like SPEAKER_369: the sheets are off the bed totally i gotta the garage door has to be locked with the code and i'm SPEAKER_236: just like i feel like i'm launching a rocket with the list of things i've got to do i just gave you money so i don't have to do these things that's what i said last week because i was like i stayed SPEAKER_15: at this airbnb and i had to strip the bed and we had to take the trash out to the outside trash SPEAKER_36: cans do all of this cleaning and i was like okay come on i just want to be in a hotel and then i saw this tweet from brian chesky that was like you shouldn't have to do unreasonable checkout tasks SPEAKER_03: such as stripping the beds doing the lot and i was like oh he's listening to the pod hey brian SPEAKER_377: what's up what's up all the right moves all the right moves all right come on the show SPEAKER_109: no he did he's gonna come on i just talked to him um vacuuming what do the laundry and the vacuuming apparently that's a bad bonkers oh can you put the sheets in the washer for me SPEAKER_08: i've stayed in places where they asked you to put the sheets in the washer oh so they come in and just have to the dryer i understand i understand the goal of the host SPEAKER_63: in doing that stuff it's just not cool and then they charge you an extra like 100 200 bucks if you SPEAKER_74: don't do it right that's the that's the the threat i guess nobody wants this nonsense just SPEAKER_47: make it or they leave you a bad review or whatever right it's just like no it's too oh yeah right SPEAKER_29: they review you too i love the idea that they sort by value i love that sort by value so if you want to play games you want to you want to f around and then you find out you want to f around with your SPEAKER_101: cleaning bill uh your cleaning face then you find out your search results yeah if i do an airbnb SPEAKER_312: i'm gonna have a new thing no cleaning fee no cleaning unless you stay in something or whatever SPEAKER_36: but just well i was gonna say like if you want to be if you want to be a host who if you know this up front and again this is just all about transparency and design and not letting hosts hide SPEAKER_03: stuff and not letting you know guests take advantage so you could be the kind of airbnb that says hey there will be no cleaning fee whatsoever if you strip the beds and you put the the wash in the washer SPEAKER_36: cool some people might be willing to do that they just might you know like i get a little bit of my SPEAKER_03: grandma vibe and i want to clean up a place like if that's what you're into and as a result you have no extra fee that is then all of a sudden you have some pricing control as a host you have a SPEAKER_390: differentiation opportunity you know i do that too when i leave a hotel room i tidy up i totally do and SPEAKER_391: i leave a tip and i leave a huge tip and i still clean up and usually i still clean up a little bit SPEAKER_101: because i don't want to be it's more like my own personal pride of not being a slob exactly maybe it's my irish upbringing but like i'm like oh my god i left like if i leave the coffee set up a mess i'm like oh no i literally if it's like stained i go get a towel and moist it and i just wipe the thing down because i don't want to be a coffee stain and be an animal so even though i complained about stripping SPEAKER_03: stripping the beds was for some reason that was a bridge too far for me that really irritated me i was just like that is not because it's just like it was combined with 50 million other rules and whatever SPEAKER_36: but the truth is i would nine times out of ten book an airbnb that didn't charge me a cleaning fee if i agreed to do that because then it would be a trade and i'd be like yeah fine cool i saved some Jason Calacanis: money but considering that i paid a cleaning fee and was asked to strip the beds i lost my mind full SPEAKER_63: karen i asked on the twitter yeah what's the best rug now why did i ask this question i don't want SPEAKER_74: to get into my personal life here but uh my spouse who you know is delightful beautiful stunning has an incredible sense of design charming and charming all the things i'm not uh that's why the marriage works and she really is wonderful um you you know like that couple where they invite the couple and they're like she's so great i guess the price we pay is that guy oh come on but we'll still invite SPEAKER_369: them that's what i've already heard by him but i started getting the second invites uh to dinner parties before that i was one and done like wait a minute it's like wait a second huh she takes the SPEAKER_09: edge off but anyway uh part part of the problem is uh you know we have the two dogs three children and um the rugs get destroyed this makes me go manic and i did a tweet one of the producers can go find it by doing a fan search on the twitter where i was talking about this and i oh my god look it's already SPEAKER_12: there like come on look at my producers so proud like they didn't already have that ready so i said SPEAKER_78: this anyone have a lead this by the way this is dated september 16th i just got a light and a quote SPEAKER_327: i'm getting a quote retreat lol well done that's a first for the show wow producers are on did we get SPEAKER_101: any adderall prescriptions for our producers they're on tonight wow strong monday so i put this out SPEAKER_12: there because i'm losing my mind i grew up poor we didn't have we had like one rug and like we didn't get rugs because these things get destroyed and it will make you as a cheap person like i am who has SPEAKER_63: cheap dna lose your mind like i love my kids i love my dogs but when they stain the rugs and i have to SPEAKER_369: go into dad mode and i'm like bad dogs or like daughters i told you no ice cream while we're watching superhero movies and they're like but i love ice cream like watching superhero movies with you why can't we have both things and i'm like i find out both things but they ruin these goddamn rugs molly SPEAKER_31: me and everybody on twitter was like esailrugs.com the end there's only no look scroll down SPEAKER_212: everybody said to me oh that's right ruggable ruggable everybody said ruggable and so what i did too SPEAKER_416: actually but now i'm all about esail but anyway ruggable anyway ruggable went crazy now here's the thing SPEAKER_36: ruggable you have one yeah you have two okay it comes with a little base level mat and you velcro it onto this mat and the reason that that's important is because you can unveil crow it and SPEAKER_147: you can put that sucker in the washing machine washing machine i pay five six hundred bucks for i got a big house i got five or six of these rugs five rugs these guys come they lift all the SPEAKER_101: furniture they take the rugs we do this every year um that's five hundred and six hundred that's five SPEAKER_08: or six hundred bucks per run per rug yeah because they come back they come back perfect god love them SPEAKER_101: they do a great job it's three grand every time i do this and i just watched three thousand dollars in my mind on fire sorry god damn it on fire and i kid you not like this is my the level of privilege i'm living under now these things get stained two weeks later the dog takes a leak a dog pukes on it a kid drops an ice cream and now i'm back in ocd land i just paid three grand and i told my wife SPEAKER_212: let's do this she's like i don't like those rugs why don't you guys just buy abyssal i'm no i have now you you you're trying to trigger me this is my trauma you can rent abyssal at the grocery store SPEAKER_255: i have abyssal it doesn't work oh it none of it works they whatever they do on the commercial with the bissel what are they it doesn't work or maybe i got the wrong bissel SPEAKER_143: bissel.com twist get 20 off your next bissel if the bissel worked i'd do an ad read for it but this SPEAKER_197: not this doesn't work for me are we or are we not freaking parents up in here right now like i'm literally turning into my mom and then my rug does this and then i need a bissel you just SPEAKER_05: got to leave i'm so passionate about rugs in the montclair okay okay so now let's explain what's SPEAKER_36: happening yes okay the reason that we're talking about rugs for so long is one it's fun as hell and two the peloton co-founder and former ceo john foley is back love it with a d2c company love it because why not and in this case it's a rug business d2c custom rug retailer hoping to enter the market quote in between home decor retailers and high-end custom rug sellers let's go ernest i don't SPEAKER_195: know what that means in terms of pricing oh eight to forty dollars per square foot SPEAKER_183: so definitely not the rug ten by ten crowd is a hundred a hundred times eight is eight hundred so for a large rug you got a large living room or a hundred times forty four thousand Jason Calacanis: oh hey oh yeah so this is some this is meaty this is mid to high end but these are custom now hold on SPEAKER_12: a second custom is different they're cutting it to your specs i like this we had a company called benchmade modern uh that i really believed in a great founder um and they it wanted i think we SPEAKER_29: got our money back it was like one of these sales where i was like ah i wish they i almost wish it was a zero instead of getting my money back i would wish they got me either a hundred or whatever but they did couches by the inch you could literally they would send you a draft a piece of paper that SPEAKER_101: you would unroll and you would unfurl it put it on your floor and it would say 48 inches 49 inches 50 inches 51 inches you tape it to your floor molly and then you go sit on the floor in front of your tv and you're like you know what i was gonna buy a 48 inch i could fit a 52 in it you put your side tables on the piece of paper next to it benchmade modern you can look at the video you look them up SPEAKER_446: that's pretty cool modern uh and they yeah i think they still exist by the way i just yeah SPEAKER_03: i mean i think it's not unusual i bought 50 year old handmade turkish carpets in assemble SPEAKER_450: and i paid you know 3 000 i think or something like that how much is like 6 000 total yeah i mean Jason Calacanis: huge right there they're seven by nine they're 50 year old they're handmade turkish carpets like it's a whole people you will spend money on yes and you'll be able to resell them probably for half SPEAKER_29: of what you bought it for a third of what you bought it for maybe yeah maybe the same depending SPEAKER_03: on what the market's doing but i will say this is not a ruggable you're this isn't you're not going abyssal this you're going to have to send this out for cleaning however uh it looks like foley learned his lesson on d2c we should note before we uh have to wrap here he's he was quoted as SPEAKER_36: saying i want to show discipline i want to show profitability oh and i want to have a real focus SPEAKER_453: on unit economics i love it ernesto will not attempt to vertically integrate its supply chain yeah SPEAKER_09: will we say this you want to bet on a founder after they get their ass kicked i just made that bet SPEAKER_101: on zuck yeah i i i i was about to say i hate zuck trying to speak for my heart not my mind i wish only SPEAKER_12: the best for zuck in his evolution my mind not my heart my mind hates what he's done but with my heart SPEAKER_90: i wish zuck a great evolution and parmer lucky why why did i do that why did i do that SPEAKER_460: it never ends it never ends but anyway i wish him the best i would like him to come on the program SPEAKER_63: i'm a huge fan of uh peloton i love it i hope that john foley this is my hope i hope john foley makes this a freaking huge success and then goes to a private equity firm and says look i'm selling rugs i'm a rug salesman i'm a rug salesman now i've learned my lesson uh-huh i i'm doing my penance i'm selling rugs amazing and i have learned like the rug salesman for thousands of years to do this profitably i'm a new man you can trust me now give me four billion dollars and i SPEAKER_369: want to buy the peloton asset back yes and i want to make my own umbrella company of ddc brands and i'm going to buy quip and casper and a couple of other ones oh let it be i went to morocco and i worked in the bazaar and i haggled and i focused on union economics he learned those skills right SPEAKER_212: he's like uh yeah you know like in the bazaar yeah he went to the mountaintop he that's him he went on his pillow love this let it be i want this to happen i wish john foley an epic return SPEAKER_12: i hope he dunks on all his naysayers and i hope he comes back and buys peloton oh my god that would be sweet sweet revenge make this thing a money printing machine save up all those profits john SPEAKER_212: and then go buy peloton the return of the king i love it i'm here for it i'm here for it it's a SPEAKER_471: redemption show is what we have on monday all right everybody thank you i was just gonna i'm so glad SPEAKER_469: you burst into such a great i didn't have to i know totally i was like such a great song man when SPEAKER_275: i put on that bar morally man i put that album on i just for me that's it we got a huge week coming up SPEAKER_36: next unicorns is back on wednesday we have our crypto roundtable on thursday we're going to talk about SPEAKER_03: this whole ft tftx alameda research binance selling out of all its coins and who's propping up who and the whatnot it's going to be amazing and we need those two to help us understand it and then of course we'll have more lon harris and ok boomer on friday lon harris and rachel reporting are just bringing the SPEAKER_90: heat every week really really great it's a great friday combo too great supporting cast here great supporting cast i wonder if rachel's going to find an interesting product and break in one day SPEAKER_00: rachel reporting oh yeah totally you know i'm not this ok boomer she's locked for fridays but you know i'm hoping maybe tuesday wednesday thursday she breaks in well that's a great interesting product maybe she did the uh last week she did that cool uh yeah mood boards freaking awesome yeah she's good SPEAKER_469: also if you're not i know i know you got like a side hustle or a side quest the kids call it a side quest i know you're on a side quest but you have to watch the peripheral i watched one and i just watched SPEAKER_63: the last two episodes of andor without my wife yeah and they were so freaking good that this is the slow burn of all slow burns there have been no lightsabers or blasters in this and it is the most heightened tense just incredible storytelling in the star wars universe outside of like you know two or three of the best films it is incredible and or is a revelation the money they spent on this the actors in it the guy who played gollum mm-hmm i forgot the guy's name that guy they pigeonholed andy circus with circus SPEAKER_212: circus circus s-i-r-k-i-s this guy andy circus deserves an emmy for this performance oh he is SPEAKER_96: an extraordinary actor and they pigeon told him as like the monster like gollum like he always plays SPEAKER_369: a cgi character this guy's a thespian he can act i want to see him in more films i love him and uh you Jason Calacanis: know he's in uh the iron man once he's in the marvel the avengers one once he's like he's the he's SPEAKER_03: the like kind of south african guy who's like you can't scare me because you're not a cuttlefish oh anyway okay so that's all coming up i will i will get caught up on andor you should get caught SPEAKER_36: up on the peripheral it's gonna be a great week stick with us see you tomorrow bye bye bye