SPEAKER_00: there was some sec notes about mean coins and the howey test yes there it is the securities and exchange commission with a doge dog on it okay here we are folks we went from too cold SPEAKER_02: right in the goldilocks zone with gensler and i guess we're now going into the too hot under trump SPEAKER_06: maybe i don't know so essentially what they're saying is you could launch jason dollar sign jason okay you could pump it you could lobby to get coinbase to list it you could hold 80 of it yourself and you SPEAKER_07: could dump your bags on the community that bought your token and that is all entirely copacetic SPEAKER_06: legal and safe and to me that is not the case everybody can have their own opinion on this and SPEAKER_09: what makes a great democracy is that we debate stuff this feels like to me i'll just say it in no uncertain terms that this was written and designed to get the trump coin and the melania coin SPEAKER_12: out of hot water yes this week in startups is brought to you by paddle self-serve software is global by default but selling to every country is complicated paddle's merchant of record manages payments sales tax chargebacks and refunds so you don't have to wherever you want to take your business go there with paddle go to paddle.com twist to get started with your exclusive listener fee-free period linkedin ads to redeem a 100 linkedin ad credit and launch your first campaign go to linkedin.com this week in startups and hubspot for startups smart founders aren't piecing together random tools hubspot is the customer platform that thousands of startups use to scale efficiently get 75 off plus three months of perplexity ai for free go to hubspot.com startups all right SPEAKER_14: everybody welcome back to this week in startups it's friday we're here three days a week with me of course alex wilhelm how was your little fake hey brother you have a good time you play a little SPEAKER_17: poker you had baby with baguette it looks like you had a good time i had a great time we love going SPEAKER_18: to the parades in new orleans if you don't know mardi gras is not one day it's lots of parades across SPEAKER_19: the city so it's just it's an amazing time to be there and i did get to go play some one three jason you know what it's a lot more fun to play poker when you can afford a couple of buy-ins versus me when i was like 20 and i always had one bullet whenever i went to go play you know SPEAKER_21: yeah that's not good you get a bad beat you know you get into a 65 35 situation which you always want SPEAKER_09: to be in you'll take that all day but oh yeah the villain hits the one out of three chance and SPEAKER_24: there you are now you're out of the game which is why you need to play a smaller game well i mean when i was 20 i was making like eight dollars there wasn't a small enough game for me at that age i guess that's why tournaments are nice because without the ability to rebuy you know you get to SPEAKER_25: maybe last a little bit longer and it's all good well it is a great friday here but i do want to SPEAKER_09: address the palmer lucky feud you know the palmer lucky feud is going to keep happening so here we are okay so i said some spicy things about palmer lucky on this podcast years ago you can just type in palmer lucky jason calcanison you'll find it essentially he got fired from facebook by zuckerberg and cheryl sandberg and i think the reason they fired him he's admitted was he funded something that was you know he covertly funded something at the time is the allegation uh that was like an anti-hilary campaign putting it aside i said on the program you know i think it's dumb to do that because if you're a leader it's gonna blow up in your face i did say it a little bit spicier than i'm saying it now which i maybe i didn't need to be as spicy as i was was at the time and i guess i could have put a caveat on it if the guardian story if the verge story is true right because now nobody trusts media so everybody assumes anything the media says is false but the truth is at that time he was fired SPEAKER_16: and i guess you know maybe in trump 2.0 era he wouldn't have been fired he would have been lauded right uh so times change but i think my advice to founders stays the same and the advice i gave to SPEAKER_09: founders at the time was pretty simple don't do anything covertly because it winds up blowing up in your lap okay putting that aside i did say it a little spicy and i guess you know somebody told me amongst our mutuals um and i got a lot of mutuals with palmer he sees me as the avatar of that very you know painful time in his life so he's gonna unload on me every chance he gets well it's friday the epstein files were supposed to be dumped as i've explained a gazillion times when i was in new york in the 90s and when i was going to the ted conference in the early 2000s i met epstein probably have met epstein a half dozen times he would be at these uh billionaires dinners he would be at ted and he would be there giving marvin minsky and i don't know like all these mit professors he was there giving them donations to charity to to their research probably have spoken to him for 30 minutes SPEAKER_16: total in my life obviously not his type and never flew on the plains never went to his island but i am in his uh black book like hundreds and thousands of other people who are notable in new york city finance or tech so what does palmer lucky do today he insinuates that i'm in the logs because i guess they were supposed to release all this stuff but it's the same thing it's his black book so i'll say it again i was never involved with epstein i was never on his island i was not involved in all those alleged shenanigans and there are thousands of other people in his black book i'm not going to mention the 50 people who palmer lucky and i have friends with who are also in his black book who were also at the ted conference with him during that period of time so the feud continues palmer's gonna dunk on me and his partner posted like oh my god i'm gonna have a terrible weekend i guess insinuating like oh my god uh you know something terrible do i look like i'm worried this has been going on for like literally 10 or 20 years now anybody who met jeffrey epstein or ran into him donald trump woody allen bill gates reid hoffman okay i mean the list goes on and on i think none of these people were involved in the alleged shenanigans it's probably 0.01 of the 10 000 people who jeffrey epstein knew or was you know at conferences with or in his black book were involved in this but here we are in the conspiracy age i'll have to deal with this forever i will make it clear forever SPEAKER_18: it seems like an unnecessary amount of pick on his part peak on his part i don't know palmer at SPEAKER_19: all to be clear and uh i saw this and put it i was like haven't we already gone over this and so i i talked to lon and lon was like we've gone over this because i think we've gone over it together on the show it's been a while but i mean it's not it's not it's not new and i think there's a lot of SPEAKER_42: trump supporters uh throwing stones from glass houses when it comes to certain people that may SPEAKER_16: or may not be in the logs the real ones and i'll be honest i don't think even though trump knew him and there's like this famous video of him you know at a party with him at mar-a-lago i don't think trump's involved in any shenanigans with him i think he probably knew him they probably you know SPEAKER_09: these guys are 30 years older than me at that period of time in new york i was in my 20s running my magazine i was kind of notable you know not like super notable but i had a magazine and you know i think he was this is my very i think that scene was like a cia musad kgb agent and i think he SPEAKER_16: was trying to get compromise on people like trump gates you know anybody who was powerful i know i SPEAKER_00: sound like a conspiracy theorist there but that's what i heard from many people who were in the circles was that he was probably some sort of a spy of some type but anyway here we are year 15 or 20 SPEAKER_16: of this for me i'll explain it every year i'm an open book i've never been questioned by any cia fbi SPEAKER_34: i guess i'm not important enough to compromise i'm a peripheral figure here at best man let me tell you SPEAKER_42: that jason i'm so glad that i'm peripheral to your peripheral because yeah you'll get dragged into SPEAKER_19: this no no i know that whatever but like i i just i see i i've been close enough to people of note in various types of note that i i know that spame just seems miserable or being of note seems miserable SPEAKER_16: i guess i mean i'll be totally honest my life is so great i've got a great family i've done better than SPEAKER_17: i've ever expected i get to pick what i do i have the greatest friends in the world i get to ski SPEAKER_16: you know i ski 24 years this year i'll probably get another 10 15 days and i mean everything in my life is so great the only thing i'm ever worried about is you know how my dad's a little bit sick or whatever you know things i have to do as a parent you know that's what i'm focused on so i i actually don't care and i didn't get palmer lucky fire to be clear i think people some people think like i said something on this niche podcast about startups that got him fired yeah no the end you know i i'm not in the epstein fly logs uh i didn't get palmer lucky fired like let's try to get back to reality folks palmer lucky got fired by cheryl sandberg and zuckerberg because it was really untenable to be at a silicon valley company in that trump 1.0 era and be a trump supporter it's not like today SPEAKER_09: where you can be a trump supporter and not get fired at that time if you were like a high profile person and you were supporting trump it was you know kind of cataclysmic here in the valley you can say what you want about it but that's the truth i just commented on it i commented in a spicy way you SPEAKER_66: can look it up anyway let's move on there's other things to talk about i wanted to start with a chart SPEAKER_19: because this i think really boils down a lot of stuff we've been talking about about startup growth how quickly startups are expected to grow in the ai era so take a look at this and for those on the SPEAKER_07: audio version this is a chart that shows how long it takes the median company to reach 5 million dollars worth of annualized revenue comparing the top 100 sas companies on stripe back in 2018 and then the top 100 ai companies that use stripe in 2024 the median time amongst these top 100 SPEAKER_19: companies to reach 5 million arrow jason fell from 37 to 24 months did you know you're required to pay SPEAKER_70: digital sales tax wherever your customers are well no one likes dealing with this type of administration whether it's taxes or accounting especially when you're in a busy startup and that's why paddle has stepped in to put your billing and your taxes on autopilot whether you're launching a sas product or maybe you've got an app perhaps a game you now can reach billions of people globally that's the magic of the internet it's the magic of the app store and it's awesome and it's one of the things hey as an investor we love too but this scaling brings tons of challenges like taking payments and local currencies and navigating all those regional tax laws they're complicated plus you got to manage fraud you got to manage refunds right and that's different in every market and that's a massive headache that's going to slow you down from doing you know important work with product market fit hiring and raising money so let me tell you a messy payment stack is going to eat up all your time all of your energy and money these are big company problems that you're going to face even as a small company and they compound every time you enter a new market well paddle was built to handle this for you hey listen maybe this is unsexy but this is what building and scaling a startup is all about sometimes you got to do your chores and you need a partner paddle's going to be your merchant of record your mor and they're going to handle payment localization fraud prevention tax compliance customer billing support so that you can grow faster hey man if you need to launch in a new country you're done you want to add a payment method easy and you want to set local pricing and you want to do it intelligently one click so here's your call to action wherever you want to take your business go there with paddle paddle.com twist to get started with your exclusive fee free period that's paddle.com twist to unlock your no fee startup period this is great that stripes releasing this SPEAKER_77: you know we have this problem with data we get from different sources data from stripe is you know SPEAKER_09: pretty great data because it's the actual money flowing and um this is what we're seeing inside of our organization the startups we invest in smaller number of people ramping revenue quicker if they get product market fit so this is predicated on getting product market fit if you don't have product market fit you can't have your revenue ramp so just as founders understand that you got to get product market fit first what does product market fit mean it means like you're actually really solving a problem that people are willing to give you money for and if you do what this shows is you're going to go a third faster or so to hit those incredible numbers so congratulations to those companies and thank you to stripe for releasing it this is really good for the american economy as well what this means is the productivity caused by ai is seen in ai companies in the most pronounced way that makes sense because the people who are running ai companies are the first to use ai yeah so what you can take from this is a non-ai company will see similar gains maybe not as pronounced it might not be a third but it might be ten percent so overall great for the american economy great for innovation SPEAKER_00: and we're not seeing a job implosion yet we probably will see that in self-driving maybe retail or factory work but i gotta be honest like until i see us alex lose jobs yeah because of ai and those people not SPEAKER_02: find work i think i'm gonna stick with there'll be job displacement and we'll be able to absorb those SPEAKER_09: people or new people and net net we'll be able to navigate this here in the united states i think SPEAKER_87: that's probably right there i think economies that are very service-based uh if you think about like the SPEAKER_06: indian i.t sector for example that could be a bloodbath challenging and what i think we're seeing instead of job destruction is instead just capped team size and i know we talked about this all last year with our static team size theme but i just want to pull from salesforce's most recent earnings call mark benioff dropped earnings earlier this week jason we won't go through all the numbers but he said we're not going to hire any new engineers this year we're seeing 30 productivity increase on engineering and we're going to really continue to ride that up so to me i think what this means is engineers are just not expected to be a lot more productive on a per person basis and so companies are going to delay hiring they would have done this year probably five years out and that could you know change the labor dynamics depress the prices for engineering skills and speaking super crassly for SPEAKER_19: startups that's great because think about how much money they had to compete with when fang was going SPEAKER_06: crazy yeah now fang doesn't want as many people so that means there's more brilliant folks out there for startups to hire so to me that i can see a positive lining there i've brought that up as well SPEAKER_00: it's a really interesting point if you don't have five job offers from the mac 7 plus coinbase uber etc SPEAKER_09: yeah you're going to be more likely to take a startup job which might mean less revenue yes in the short term more revenue in the long term because you get to take a chance uh there was SPEAKER_48: some sec notes about mean coins and the howey test i think we should explain uh yes there it is the SPEAKER_00: securities and exchange commission with a doge dog on it okay here we are folks uh we went from SPEAKER_02: too cold right in the goldilocks zone with gensler and i guess we were we're now going into the too hot SPEAKER_48: under trump maybe i don't know i saw this brief note from the sec it feels like they're crafting the SPEAKER_02: law around the trump meme coin uh if i'm being candid it feels like oops trump did something yep let's make the law fit it now also myself do believe we should re redo regulations and people should be able to invest in anything they want through an accredited test but just for intellectual curiosity SPEAKER_16: here let's look at the how we test okay and what the sec said and just try to make sense of this SPEAKER_96: okay so we we put together a little graphic for everybody to break down kind of like the how we SPEAKER_06: test to define what is the security and if you don't know how he was an old supreme court case and it set forth kind of policy for what is a security and what isn't so what matters jason is that a security for howie is an investment of money into some sort of common enterprise something that people are working on or taking part in a startup would be an example for sure yeah with the expectation of a profit which is why the startup investing point makes sense you don't put money into a series SPEAKER_07: b hoping that you have less money in the end you want to make money and a security is something that SPEAKER_06: you expect other people to generate value for that you can accrue to yourself so if we were to put SPEAKER_09: bitcoin against this you do invest money in bitcoin is it a common enterprise with a central group of people no it's by definition distributed and decentralized right there's no one person who can make the decisions for what happens to bitcoin right it's it's literally was designed in the famous white paper to be decentralized people do have the expectation of profit when they buy it nobody's buying bitcoin just to own some ones and zeros and it's to be delivered from the efforts of others okay now that one's kind of on the bitcoin a jump ball right like you have michael sailor out there pumping it so it does feel at times like a common enterprise but the truth is you have no control over him he could one SPEAKER_48: day wake up and say no i think bitcoin's a scam i'm selling all my bitcoin right yeah i'm gonna buy SPEAKER_108: solana eth whatever so it doesn't feel like bitcoin passes this test i don't know bitcoin does wait SPEAKER_96: bitcoin does test well it depends on how it passes positive or negative right how he tests indicates that bitcoin is not a security the only way i should see bitcoin as a security let's say it that SPEAKER_06: way so we don't confuse people all right yes we're trying to be very clear here and the reason why i SPEAKER_07: agree with you is that mining of bitcoin is insufficiently centralized to me to warrant the idea of a common SPEAKER_96: enterprise if there was one miner maybe that's a little bit different but it's not the case okay SPEAKER_09: so the howey test would say bitcoin is not a security the howey test if you did xrp as an example and they centrally control it it's a company that company has venture investors that would say it is a security and i think the sec did believe xrp is a security now that's a controversial one but you can say xrp is very very different perhaps they're trying to put the genie back in the bottle in the xrp example okay continue let's see if we can thread this needle here okay so that is the howey test SPEAKER_118: and that is why we think bitcoin is a commodity versus a security now what about meme coins meme SPEAKER_22: coins are something that we've talked about on the show both through the trump and melania token launches and then also recently through melee in argentina and the libra oh that's right i forgot SPEAKER_126: about the hot tour coin i mean there's like literally 10 000 coins released a day so that that that's in favor of like uh you know this ruling but okay let's go through it here so the sec SPEAKER_19: comes out with some new guidance and this really matters because the sec has been dropping cases SPEAKER_07: it's been giving kind of you know free range to a lot of um i would say crypto companies and activities that had previously been under the thumb of the sec so the sec says what is a meme coin it defines a meme coin as a type of crypto asset inspired by internet means characters current events or trends for which the promoter seeks to attract an enthusiastic online community to purchase the meme coin and engage in its trading and frankly jason i think that's right but but i want SPEAKER_09: to hear from you is that mac your understanding of meme coins okay so there is some centralization of a meme coin because there's a website there's a person who writes the copy on that website the terms of service and they own 80 of it and then they distribute them hey founders i want to share with you an Chamath Palihapitiya: experience i love it's when i get an ad that is relevant and not some nonsense like the other day i got an ad for a fund management platform and it was like a new one i'd never heard of i clicked on the ad because well i manage four venture capital firms we scheduled to call with them and it was amazing how did this happen well i was on linkedin because i'd like to share links from the podcast this week in startups right on linkedin in fact we live streamed to linkedin three days a week and we get a great audience over there and i happened to be presented with this fund management platform and it was a direct hit like i mean talk about hitting the bullseye if you're in business and you're making a product or service it's really hard to find customers in the business to business space and doing b2b SPEAKER_16: advertising is hard but linkedin makes it so easy because you know their tools let you target people by job title industry company size and more so this fund management platform obviously was looking for people in venture capital who had a fund size and a number of people maybe 10 people maybe 50 people and they found me they got me they split the arrow boom right on target and there's two things you really need to know about linkedin going into 2025 first they broke a billion members and 130 million of those billion are decision makers and 10 million of the billion are c-level executives like myself where can you get to those people it's really hard and the second thing you need to know linkedin makes an impact b2b markers report two to five times higher return on ad spend or roas return on the ad spend you should know that acronym compared to other social platforms 79 of b2b markers say linkedin is the best Chamath Palihapitiya: platform for paid media linkedin is going to let you build the right relationships it's going to drive results and you're going to reach your customers in a super respectful business environment it's not a place where people are dancing around saying inappropriate things or debating politics nope linkedin equals business business equals linkedin start converting your b2b audience into high quality leads today we'll even give you a hundy 100 credit on your next campaign go to linkedin.com slash this week in startups to claim your credit that's linkedin.com slash this week in startups terms and SPEAKER_09: conditions do apply okay so if we pull up the howey test again i'm just going to run through it from my perspective with the howey test i'm going to be as intellectually rigorous as i can here okay it's an investment of money check you're giving money two it's a common enterprise well if the people who released the mean coin own a large percentage of it that means they have something in common with you SPEAKER_16: and you're working on this together and the people who are buying it certainly have an expectation of profit because they're sharing charts and drawing on the charts where they expect it to go and they're SPEAKER_09: using a ticker symbol and it's traded on a platform like coinbase or robinhood right next to other securities and is it to be derived from the efforts of others well ah i do that's where we get interesting because if melee was tweeting it right melee tweeted it so that sounds like you're relying on him to tweet it to get the pump going so i'm going to use melee here because i don't want people to weaponize this against my friends who are in the administration they'll be like oh jacal says this you know i'm going to use melee invested money people are collaborating on it people expect a profit and you expect that other people will keep pumping it and people are disappointed when the pumping stops like when hawk tua stops pumping it and gets called out on it or melee gets called out and they stop pumping it SPEAKER_126: people are disappointed so for me meme coins do scream securities i know so wait so how does the sec SPEAKER_48: get around that well okay yeah please explain it to me because i i just went through the test and SPEAKER_16: melee coin and hawk tua i'm gonna leave trump and milani out of it so we have don't have the political issues both of those are clearly securities to me what do you think do they do you think those melee David Friedberg: is a security or not the libra token yes yes but i personally have a wider umbrella view of what SPEAKER_06: constitutes a security but let's just narrow down to what the sec says because their logic here is something that we can just vet against you know reality okay so one thing they say is any expectation SPEAKER_07: of profits that meme coin purchases have is not derived i'm quoting here from the efforts of others skipping ahead a couple of lines the value of meme coins is derived from speculative trading and the collective sentiment of the market like a collectible my issue with this is is that if my expectation of profit is not derived from the efforts of others and the value is derived from speculative trading aren't i depending on other people to make me money ergo it's a common enterprise with the expectation of profit thanks to the work of others that to me does not obviate the howey test and so to me the sec's logic here while popular with folks who like meme coins and want to keep doing this isn't exactly airtight and there is an enormous i would say loophole built into SPEAKER_06: this so you said jason that when hawk to a girl stopped pumping her token people were a little bit SPEAKER_19: mad but also people were concerned that by hyping your own token you were perhaps making it into SPEAKER_07: security or committing some sort of illegal act well there is a footnote footnote nine at the bottom of this sec note and it says for example i'm quoting if the promoter's efforts are limited primarily to hyping the meme coin on social media and online forums and getting the coin listed on crypto trading platforms then there are not likely to be sufficient indic it's a latin word indication to establish SPEAKER_06: that purchasers had a reasonable expectation of profits so essentially what they're saying is you could launch jason dollar sign jason okay you could pump it okay lobby to get coinbase to list it you SPEAKER_07: could hold 80 of it yourself and you could dump your bags on the community that bought your token and that is all entirely copacetic legal and safe and to me that is not the case so there is an exception here designed i think to give trump a legal out and i think this is not regulation based on a plain text SPEAKER_19: reading of the law which is how i would like to go about things but instead a carve out for what i would say is the melee token not the other two well anyway you can say whatever you want i'm i'm trying to be SPEAKER_09: judicious here everybody can have their own opinion on this and what makes a great democracy is that we debate stuff this feels like to me i'll just say it in no uncertain terms that this was written and SPEAKER_10: designed to get the trump coin and the melania coin out of hot water yes that doesn't mean i don't think SPEAKER_159: regulation changing is a good thing so two things can be true at the same time i do think we need to open SPEAKER_119: up regulation i do think americans should be able to buy meme coins i do think they should be able to gamble i wouldn't bet on the jets that's a disaster you know sorry jet fans everywhere but i bet on the SPEAKER_00: knicks almost every game and i love it and and i play poker and you play poker so we're i am very libertarian people should be able to do what they want to do i do think when powerful people with platforms like myself hawk tua malay trump melania you do need to think about that because the people who might get hurt are your fans and you can only do it so many times just on a practical basis but also SPEAKER_09: there is a massive amount of confusion here if things have a ticker symbol if there are charts and if they're trading alongside things on platforms like coinbase and robinhood which and other ones and i'm obviously a a shareholder in robinhood and i just had vlad on the program SPEAKER_161: wednesday great episode with uh raul and vlad row from superhuman go check it out you know i i kind SPEAKER_14: of think it quacks like a duck walks like a duck has feathers like a duck people are going to be SPEAKER_09: confused here's what the regulations for meme coins if it trades on a platform like coinbis then there should be an incorporation it should be a security and those non things should maybe trade on a different platform or there should be a massive disclaimer when you try to trade them i traded i bought a thousand dollars in trump coins i lost i think half my money and i did it just to make a SPEAKER_48: point so i could bring it up that i lost half my money on it as a joke with my friends and tweet it but here's the thing those uh coins i believe will go to zero full stop i think trump will be worth SPEAKER_00: zero i think when you buy them on a platform like that it should say this is not a security this is a collectible do you agree you're not buying a security even though it has a ticker symbol whatever you know because there is some freedom of speech here but this is a bad precedent i think to set i don't think it's a good use of i think the sec should really maybe examine what they're doing here because now we're going to have a bunch of other meme coins come out there's going to be i mean this means if this is the law now you can list every single meme coin on robin hood and coinbase SPEAKER_119: yes right i mean that that's the law now and so just a lot of people are going to get hurt i'll go back to what i've always said have an accreditation test yep if you're accredited and people explain SPEAKER_09: hey meme coins are a new device nfts are a new device utility tokens are a new device bitcoin is you know this distributed network is decentralized and like literally people have to take a test to show they understand what decentralized versus centralized is they have to take a test so they understand the how test like how is that a bad thing so why are we focusing on this carving this stuff out when we could be focused on a sophisticated investor test so i think the sec is doing this to SPEAKER_119: cover up for what happened with the trump coin that's obvious to everybody come on oh yeah are we SPEAKER_48: gonna call balls and strikes here are we gonna lie this is a cover up to make a carve out around that coin SPEAKER_09: okay so here we are i wonder if this is going to get challenged i don't know how when the sec puts a notice like this out can people sue our attorney general is going to sue on behalf of people who lost SPEAKER_19: for hot to a coin i bet you the answer is no okay because i think if you think about like the broader american left if you will i i think that this is probably pretty far down their agenda of things SPEAKER_06: they're concerned about at the moment so i think it's going to go ahead and pass and also i'll just say it's popular with folks who have a stake in the crypto economy so here is a post from katie bibber she's the chief legal officer over at paradigm which is a crypto vc firm and i thought she had a pretty reasonable response to this jason she said that it's quote refreshing to see the sec adopt a constrained view of its own power and that to me is more conservative of a position small c conservative than i would take regarding what the sec should do because i think that that securities exchange commission should be a little bit more aggressive than constrained just because people are always SPEAKER_19: trying to do fraud but then she follows up by saying quote fraud is and always has been illegal and i i think that's a good caveat to this but i don't see how allowing for the meme coin explosion to SPEAKER_51: keep exploding is is going to limit fraud yeah so that's a struggle all right everyone knows that crm Chamath Palihapitiya: isn't just software it's basically the heartbeat of your business but it can get ugly quick if your data isn't organized and you're dealing with a messy tech stack that's why i love hubspot for startups it's the all-in-one customer platform so you don't need a frankincite of fools no right now early stage companies are going to get 75 off and with this one system you're going to automate marketing that actually converts track your sales pipeline without spreadsheet chaos and you're going to manage your customers like the amman hotel six stars all the way you're going to get investor ready analytics that tell your story perfectly and man when you pull up hubspot and you got those metrics you got those analytics things are going to go really faster for you as a startup with potential investors plus you're plugged into an amazing community of founders who've already tackled what's ahead they've been around those sharp turns and they can tell you how to navigate them hubspot was built by scrappy founders i know them and they understand every dollar counts that's why hundreds thousands of startups trust hubspot to scale their businesses here's an amazing call to action so generous from my friends at hubspot 75 off that's right seven five not seven percent off not five percent off 75 off hubspot for startups you're gonna get three months of perplexity ai for free SPEAKER_09: that's a great pot sweetener head to hubspot.com startups so i guess two things can be true at the same time this is revisionist history probably not good for our democracy you're only going to get so many of these as trump and the administration i think these things will build up in the american people's minds so i think you do need to consider that when you're representing all americans while many people want to see crypto be legalized and have that great i'm in that group you're in that group i think most people are in that group regulate this figure it out create clear guidelines gary again so didn't do that but then i think if you're trump i think what trump needs to think about in his administration needs to think SPEAKER_48: about is you get so many of these kind of inside deals you know questionable moves january 6 the violent folks republicans didn't like it 80 of the country didn't like it i think this is going to be up there where like 80 of the country is not going to like this you can only queue up so many of those before you lose credibility as an administration and maybe the good stuff you're doing SPEAKER_16: like i believe the doge stuff is good i don't know if you saw joe jebbia uh from airbnb is working on this very interesting thing to help people retire within two days instead of taking eight months and make it paperless like that's the kind of stuff that we need to hear more about is the joe jebbia SPEAKER_126: stuff and so please let's try to minimize the number of these you know things that feel conflicted corrupt wrong let's just use the word wrong this feels wrong sure january 6 pardons for the people who were violent feel wrong i don't know about the other ones maybe you know in some of those cases those were overzealous prosecutions but we know that violent criminals should not get away with it so SPEAKER_48: that's for me that what i believe is that you get so many of these things and trump's using them up pretty SPEAKER_182: fast here uh i don't think a lame duck president who has an imperial perspective on his office is going to SPEAKER_24: slow down and then the lawsuits like last time will build up yeah so i don't then it's going to become SPEAKER_09: such a distraction that i i think he's going to just get then he loses the midterms right if people feel like you do too many of this then he loses the midterms then gridlock then lawsuits and we're back to the trump 1.0 presidency yeah let's go to the joe jebbia thing and then bring on our guest all right SPEAKER_06: uh so joe jebbia is the co-founder of airbnb friend of mine by the way for full disclosure oh well SPEAKER_184: okay when did you guys meet tell me that story real quick he came on the pod and uh i met him SPEAKER_09: i see you know in in circles he lives here uh in the same town as me in austin and uh yeah we've seen a basketball game together so we're friendly yeah we're friends we consider us friends yes that SPEAKER_194: is that is perfectly fine so here is i mean it's not like a full-on bromance i'll be honest i would SPEAKER_119: like it to be i think it's a cool dude i would like to maybe have a you know maybe extend it to a SPEAKER_06: bromance but it's not a bromance level yet all right well joe writes over on x.com everyone's yield favorite twitter i'm excited to share i'm bringing my designer brain and startup spirit into SPEAKER_07: the government my first project at doge is improving the slow and paper-based retirement process since leaving airbnb in 22 i've been looking for my next design challenge i'm paraphrasing and i think nothing's more important than improving our government if anyone else wants to help out let me know this is at the us office of personnel management or opm and i think this is exactly and precisely what i was hoping to see from doge okay i want the government to be more efficient less inefficient faster less slow and there's a lot of things that we can do and i do think that having a perspective that the way we have done things might be the wrong way is a good way to approach the inefficiencies in government SPEAKER_06: jason you and i are on slightly different sides of the cost-cutting approaches and how that's going SPEAKER_07: but no matter what we can all agree that taking a paper process that takes too long digitizing it and making it beautiful it's a great thing to do for our government and its workers so SPEAKER_199: i'm a huge fan of this and i'm really really proud of joe good friend yeah and more of this like so to SPEAKER_09: the doge team again i'm just going to call balls and strikes everybody knows some of these people are my friends and yada yada and associates and everybody knows that i'm a never trumper who is rooting always for the president to succeed i've been very clear about my my positions on all this i was a double hater this election not that i'm the main character here but i mean on the show i guess i am this is my show but i'm not the main character but just to put it all in perspective i understand how people can be absolutely like shocked by how aggressive doge is being i happen to agree with it SPEAKER_48: because i got to see it during the twitter reorg and i happen to believe in it but i do understand it's not everybody's cup of tea and you you might not understand how powerful it is to shut off every credit card and then watch all the sass subscriptions turn off and how good that is when you have fraud SPEAKER_34: waste and corruption okay but this is great this is great and doge needs to do more of this tell more stories like this and i think doge is getting the message i kind of know they're getting the message SPEAKER_16: believe it at that you did see them say they're going to give raises and promotions to people who are doing a great job in addition to the layoffs they're doing for people who can't even fill out SPEAKER_48: an email that says what did you do last week we do that every day here at our company every company SPEAKER_14: does a stand-up anyway uh we got a guest so let's uh welcome our guests to the program jason loves to SPEAKER_203: just to swing by his play and drop like eight grenades out that i want to just that i want to SPEAKER_204: swing at and then we could go all day we're gonna move on to our guys no you're fine you're fine you're SPEAKER_207: fine let's keep it moving so um sorry i mean we covered a lot already i know i just meme coins SPEAKER_210: epstein parmer lucky i mean we're cooking with oil now just just oh just don't let me start talking SPEAKER_06: about poker we'll never make progress all right brandon brown so he is the founder and incoming board SPEAKER_07: hey what's up brandon over at grin i know you guys have known each other for a while and brandon is transitioning away from his former role into being a board chair it's a great moment to talk about with different roles at startups why you might change up your role ceo 10 years brandon welcome SPEAKER_214: to the show man thanks yeah happy to be here been uh been fun watching backstage and be a good SPEAKER_09: conversation yeah for folks who don't know grin is a really special company went to our accelerator we i'm on the board we invested in uh i think we invested in the company three or four times which is not normal usually we will do an accelerator investment then maybe a seed investment and then we're kind of done because there are series a investors b investors who are better at that but we've been uh lucky enough to invest along the way the company's done spectacular gotten to a figures in revenue they do a great job managing social media campaigns at scale and the big question when i met SPEAKER_217: brandon uh was is social media going to become a channel now let's talk about that you had this SPEAKER_09: thesis that social media would become a marketing channel and an important one how many years ago SPEAKER_213: and i would describe it social as a channel but also is like the new publishers are going to be people and not companies and so brands need to understand that and harness it and that was i met you in 2017 we started the company in 2014 and this is a pivot for us first thing that we did for the first three years didn't work yeah and then met you and pivoted here and you joined the board and we've been kind of on the ride ever since and it's been yeah it's been fun just walk us through that i SPEAKER_223: guess we have some examples of influencers and then maybe just for background we'll talk about how the SPEAKER_09: product works then we'll talk about you transitioning out of the ceo slot which is a big controversial moment in any company uh an intense moment and we'll we'll get all those great founder stories after we just sort of queue up what the product is and why it's important yeah so a big way that consumer SPEAKER_213: brands go to market these days is they work with creators on social so they're doing uh ads they're doing seo they're creating a lot of content but a huge channel is they're sending product to instagramers people on tiktok youtube you can imagine that process once you start doing it at scale is just incredibly complex how do you find the people how do you recruit them how do you contract with them how do you report on all of that and brands are typically in spreadsheets using a bunch of different tools they've got a cobbled together team that's doing it and so we built sas kind of like how a account executive in a inside sales team would use something like salesforce but they use these marketing managers at brands use grin to manage influencer marketing and manage these these creators at scale yeah so it's software product makes that easy and it's pretty crazy because this is it's kind of like a common thing in the zeitgeist and it's known now but 10 years ago this was an emerging thing and had a bunch of problems around it and so we were one of the first to go solve those SPEAKER_19: problems so i'm curious how long it took grin to go from starting this to being ready to help uber for example build its global tiktok presence because that was the case study that i was most excited by that you guys have out there seems like a big project big brand lots of different touch points and controversial in some markets due to regulations so what was the process like building the first product and then getting it to the point at which you were ready to help uber go from zero to 60 SPEAKER_213: on tiktok yeah so i mean the company stories it's been you know like all all startups i think from the outside looking in like you see the tech crunch headlines and you see the the fundraising announcements and it looks like it's a linear up into the right trajectory but we all know it's never the case from we started the company in 2014 we were working on a different product for for a while realized it wasn't going to work pivoted in 2017 actually brandon pausing you there what was the SPEAKER_19: moment you realized that the first product wasn't going to work and then you had to let it go because i'm sure some founders out there right now are thinking am i on the right path should i pivot so SPEAKER_218: how did you decide make that decision well for me so the first product we had built and again it's a long time ago but it was called jumpstart and it was big youtuber promote small youtuber SPEAKER_213: in exchange for money so it was like a collaboration marketplace and this was this actually before i i'd met jason and grin as as you know it today existed and what i started to realize was that the only creators who were trying to like pay for growth in this paid collaboration way uh typically were like trying to hack growth and they didn't actually they shouldn't be paying for growth they needed to be improving their content because the core thing that was actually making them not grow is that their content wasn't great and so like i had this realization i was like oh wow like this product that we're building has a bad customer these are kind of hobby solopreneurs they're not really investing into the right things so we just didn't feel like it was going to be big and so we changed everything in in 2017 and looked at you know my background our core competency as a team like what where can we pivot and how can we go build something meaningful and then transitioned into uh this software for brands to collaborate with creators which is a pretty big SPEAKER_203: departure at the time and you've built what is effectively as far as i can tell kind of a two-sided marketplace you have clients come in and you also work with a lot of different influencers SPEAKER_06: how has been the the social media changes we've seen in the last couple years and how has that impacted grin's business because to me search has lost its primacy people don't blog as much as they used to people don't read the news as much as they used to it seems that social media has become SPEAKER_19: ever more important even if it gets a little straining at times over on x but i mean has that SPEAKER_218: been a major accelerant to the grin business yeah the way the way we think about it is so i think a lot of it comes down to like what do you think the atomic unit is and if if you think the atomic unit is SPEAKER_213: the creator so the person on the other side of the phone or the camera who's creating the content and then the platforms are responsible for distribution and you could argue this especially on tick tock and with for you like the way that the algorithms changed but as long as brands need to organize around creators then like there's going to be a need for a product that simplifies that and and products that simplify that and so that's how i think about the changes like i think platforms will come and go like you know we've we've seen kind of the wild ride with tick tock we've we saw clubhouse had their moment a few years ago and so i think as long as brands have a need to stay organized around managing creators at scale like there's going to be a need for for products like grin okay i have a SPEAKER_19: question about that because to me and i know this is me being an outdated essentially boomer but when i think about product placement and i think about influencers i really had this like 2014 instagram vibe in my head and i presume that that's really not the case so brandon is it still as effective today in a more commodified social media era to go out and reach out to people that have followings and give them stuff to promote because to me the juice has been squeezed from that lemon slightly but it sounds like i'm actually behind and things are getting bigger than they were before well i think SPEAKER_218: it needs to be part of like multi-channel right so like like i still think paid is it is extremely SPEAKER_213: important organic owned social for brands is extremely important but then organic social from creators and influencers and and using that as a way to reach the consumer in a really honest and authentic way and then repurpose that content across paid and other channels like that's not going anywhere like that's extremely important in in today's world and i think like this this product in this company is that like the it's at the bleeding edge of marketing right and so i'm a marketer i've been a marketer my whole life i sell a marketing product to marketers at grin for for a long time and i think at the at the bleeding edge of marketing there's always going to be these like unproven experimental channels that if you can unlock them early there's like an arbitrage on the reach and distribution and you know i would say arguably influencer and creator maybe has reached a saturation point there but still is a really important part of the overall mix okay so the SPEAKER_227: brandon eight figures of revenue companies growing pivot successful important market bleeding edge SPEAKER_06: and you're stepping back so to me it feels like you finally reached you know the the plateau of joy in the startup game like you've kind of built something that's robust and is going to last and so i guess first of all you're going from ceo to board share so tell us why that's the right move for you and then also the timing here just to me seems ab not in a bad way abnormal but surprising SPEAKER_233: in terms of what i tend to hear from ceos in your position yeah it's a good question you know i think SPEAKER_213: like from so the this here's a crazy stat and jason you were along for this ride like me and you were in constant communication about this but we went from basically zero to a billion valuation in four years so from 2017 to 2021 we went from zero to 480 employees that that was an incredible ride like met like especially from the early pivot uh finding product market fit scaling really fast uh and then 2022 we started to hit real headwinds as a business and i think it was macro you know i think there was some execution missteps but at the same time like you know we really started to see softness in the economy the brand started to pull back and then when brands pull back like where they pull back like they go and they look at marketing variable and then they look at experimental marketing variable and so i think our category was was was affected and so from 2022 to 2024 i led the company through three layoffs three riffs so so like a trip triple riff uh and it's pretty wild to have gone from like that explosive growth to then retooling and then realizing like oh shit hopefully i can pass on here yeah yeah we didn't go deep enough we got to go deeper and so through that process got the company to break even with a bunch of cash still in the bank and i started thinking about succession right it's been a decade uh co-founder had left and moved on like we've built a a category and an enduring business but as i looked at what the company really needs like in the ceo operator seat you got to be going 150 miles an hour like if if you want to build something really big and meaningful and so i started to feel like the best thing for the company is to think about how we can get someone with this renewed energy vigor someone who can really lead the company over the next three to five years to to create the outcome that we're looking for found that in the new ceo i mean he's extremely talented and so but it's bittersweet you know like it's you you build something it's it's so close to you for so long it's like in a lot of ways it's your family and and uh but for me it's about like what's best for the business and then also just being honest about a decade-long journey there's that quote from from elon around you know building a company is like staring into the abyss and eating glass like yeah actually that comes from bill lee SPEAKER_09: our friend uh west coast bill on twitter and good mutual friend of ours you know just from a board perspective since brandon's being so uh honest here i would say you know every startup year is like dog years put seven years on your on your life so you know if if seven of his years were those dog years that's 50 years at the helm or for any other employee right for the ceo the founder whoever's in that pilot seat you're putting on that much mileage and then you look at during a down market or headwinds like we saw with the silicon valley bank collapse and the correction and peaks are going to peak it's the end of the world that was a great swing and you know i have to say some founders are able to assess SPEAKER_00: reality and there was this guy uh warren bennis who was on the program that a friend of mine had put me in touch with so many years ago and he said to me um you know i said what's the nature of leadership and he said defining reality and i think he had been in world war ii or korean war or something he'd been of service and um other people had said this and you know what you did really well brandon was SPEAKER_09: you know in our conversations and your conversations with the team is you accepted the reality and the reality was you're not gonna like beat that valuation that we got and the valuation was incredibly rich when we became a billion dollar company and that the only thing we could do was not say hey there's another round coming that's gonna one-up that we can look at the amount of cash in the bank wow that's a lot of money we can look at the revenue okay there are people who are customers who are cutting back they're cutting back the number of seats they spend on salesforce because their sales team went from 50 sales people to 25 and so the whole industry was watching this sas contraction and then of course if you're looking at marketing and this is an experimental new product line okay what's gonna go first well there's a retreat to what you know and what's the most effective SPEAKER_16: the experimental stuff you're figuring out you're figuring out do i give kim kardashian a million dollars or do i give 20 influencers 50 or do i give 200 influencers five or do i give a thousand influencers a thousand or ten thousand a hundred to market my watch my glasses my my sneakers all that was being figured out and of course in a down market that gets constricted constricted we saw that in the venture space the number of venture firms went down a third i had to look at reality and say okay SPEAKER_00: is every venture fund going to be easy to raise and double the last one or quadruple the last one this is what great leaders do and i think you did a great job brandon you were always very sober about SPEAKER_09: things even when things got overheated and uh you know i hope as a board member you know me having a couple of years experience on you and maybe one i basically saw probably one extra cycle than you did SPEAKER_219: uh from the dot-com era and the great recession you were how old were you in 1999 2000 well i was born in 85 so what 15 years old yeah so i was 30 right i watched it up close and personal and uh during the SPEAKER_09: great recession in 2008 you were uh 23 you're in college right so i had actually experienced those as an adult in the workforce and so when you did things like oh we have a little bit of venture debt and oh people really want to push us to take more venture debt to spend their venture debt i just said you know i remember pulling you aside at one point i was like things don't grow to the moon SPEAKER_00: sometimes things can get bad like we should not be using this for runway we had like a really thoughtful discussion of it i could tell you some founders who i was working with alex at the time brandon SPEAKER_16: they were just like whatever jay cow old guy i'm i'm maxing out the venture debt and i'm spending the venture debt that is what will take you out for sure and here's the truth yeah it did take out two or SPEAKER_00: three of your contemporaries from that time period and man i was just like why don't these people listen like brandon did yeah and you had a little bit of venture debt but you didn't go spend it on an office or some cockamamie third product before the first one actually had product market fit it's a great SPEAKER_09: thing to do to say you know what somebody else has more energy i put 10 years into this i mentored them i'll move up to the chairman position reed hoffman did it many other folks have done it and what you'll see is the company will do better and you'll come back even stronger i want David Friedberg: to ask what the venture debt thinks a lot of founders are watching this brandon you said that SPEAKER_19: found venture that will take you out can you just explain to people why it's so risky for SPEAKER_261: the founders out there i mean well you have to pay it back so that's i know that's obviously on on SPEAKER_213: app blush but it's like all of a sudden you have a correction and revenue isn't just flat but reverses your tripping covenants and then you don't have the cash to pay it back they have a daca so they control your operating accounts and then they sweep the account wake up one day you have no cash and your company's gone another person on the board was i liked this comment he would use every now and then and it wasn't you jason but it was one of the other directors is that's how you lose the keys to the kingdom so there are certain things you can do that if you're not careful will wipe you out and too much too much venture debt uh especially the other thing too i would say is like the equity investors so the venture investors and your equity partners like they have a vested interest in seeing the company succeed their shareholders their owners debt maybe they have some warrants but it's small amount and so they're they're not typically not working with you maybe some of the like the venture debt providers are but especially the banks the banks are extremely conservative and they're they're they're wiping the accounts uh if if push comes to shove and the SPEAKER_19: covenants part of this as far as i understand venture debt terms is that you can borrow money when you raise money you saw silicon value bank would loan you another five if you raise 30 and as long as your arr was growing at some percentage they wouldn't take the money back and demand the money back immediately is that a fair explanation of covenants yeah and so it's um there's something SPEAKER_213: like ebitda covenants growth rate hurdles like mrr to certain kpis in the business and it's fine when you're growing but then i think in certain situations where you where if you flatline or if you decline yeah it can be risky the other thing too i want to comment on jason i agree with you about just the pattern matching in cycles like i think you know i i heard a mentor told me this quote i just love it is in any 10-year business period you have six good years two great years and two terrible years that could put you out of business yeah and so you need you need to prepare and so and i think it's right it's like don't get too high in the good times don't get too low in the bad times but know that these 10-year cycles repeat i think for me it's like man it's so valuable having just gone through that you know i wasn't a part of the dot-com or the 08 that as we described and i think as i go into the next 10-year cycle because i'm an antsy person you know i'm helping at the board level but i'm going to be doing new stuff yeah i'm just grateful for the experience because i think the pattern matching is real but you have to live through it like you no matter how much someone tells you you know you SPEAKER_09: have to experience it i mean i agree with that you in order to really take the lessons in you have to experience it that's part of alex like playing cards like we talked about if you see your pocket aces SPEAKER_48: lose you know or you see your set you know lose to a bigger set or a set lose to quads or a set lose to a you know i don't know a runner runner flush or straight this is in park analogies here because SPEAKER_09: you can feel invincible at one point in time and you and then you know you get wiped out but SPEAKER_48: statistically when somebody like nate on 538 said nate silver said oh listen this person has a one in free chance of winning the election people thought well that's not possible for them to win the SPEAKER_16: election and then the poker players were like okay so it's like you know you have you know uh an over pair and somebody has you know a lower pair like or you have a flush draw and it and it was just obvious SPEAKER_00: to people but you do have to have reps you do have to see it yourself to really understand it but it's also good to have mentors who can tell you because you will learn the lesson faster and you can learn SPEAKER_09: these lessons faster more efficiently and be aware of them and take them in if you do a little bit of research brandon great job bringing the company thank you for your efforts and look forward to being the first check in your next company you told me you promised me and you'll promise me here SPEAKER_184: again on the air that i am your first call when you have your next idea and i get to put the first SPEAKER_274: check in you agree that arm a little more you agree yeah but yeah 100 i get the first no no no no no SPEAKER_278: no no no no look at everybody hey i didn't commit to that everybody you have to commit that i'm in the the first investor in your next i mean but what what a time like even as an operator an SPEAKER_213: entrepreneur what a time to just go experiment like you know i think just the pace that things are changing it's it's innovation and opportunities everywhere and i saw the growth rate graph you guys put up earlier in the show i think the the pace at which these companies are getting to like 10 20 SPEAKER_00: 50 million arr is just crazy yeah you don't get there by accident i can tell you because 99 of SPEAKER_217: startups that are funded do not get past 10 million and uh the one that does like you did with grand and other people have done it really does take tremendous amount of discipline effort a little bit of luck on the margins but generally i think you know building a great team being obsessed with your customers and then refining that product incessantly is a pretty good playbook team product customer SPEAKER_282: brandon great job thanks guys appreciate it appreciate you talk to you soon just a great SPEAKER_09: founder you know there's some people when you meet them alex i tell people there's like a neon sign above their head i see it it just flashes winner winner and so when i meet people i am always astounded when i see that neon sign and uh with brandon i saw it so it was great we have pulled the clip from the i think episode twist 219 you're kidding me this is now when i know we're doing great on our uh SPEAKER_288: production ability yeah this is good stuff the first primary task of a leader is to define reality to find reality yeah that means being very clear-headed about what we're up to face now actually if you really feel this isn't that you've been ordered let's say you've been ordered by the regimental i'm by the company commander i'm a platoon leader and it's a platoon leader who leads two platoons that lead the charge and you've been ordered you're in the army and this is not like in a corporation maybe it can be a little more time so you can't say well i don't know if i agree you know it's not a time for a debate dissent at that moment later on you can talk and you know complain about it but so uh you've got to you've got to say guys this is going to be a rough one and we're going to do our best and we've got a good battle plan and here are the here are the issues you know you're going to have these are snipers over in a church steeple you got to define this is true of any institution you're leading now it doesn't mean you sound hopeless because i remember when i was so i SPEAKER_19: think that's a useful point i like the military analogies jason i want to rewind here and point out SPEAKER_96: since when is there alex 1.0 another bald white dude who's who's that that's tyler crowley tyler SPEAKER_00: crowley was uh co-hosting and lon harris was the newsreader and that was the trio in the early days that's in our i don't what do we know what episode this was i believe this is 219. so if you want to go SPEAKER_217: look this is probably year three or four uh and uh you can see i got 10 more pounds of fat on me uh and uh yeah we did that in santa monica and this is the early days of podcasting that was probably in SPEAKER_270: 20 i don't know 14 15 or something who knows but that's tyler crowley um who was kind of my chief of SPEAKER_00: staff and but was the original engineer producer of the show lon harris who's now our editorial director here he was the uh original newsreader and worked with me at mahalom and so that was the old school SPEAKER_09: crew uh back in the early days of podcasting i wanted to do a founder lesson today i think we can SPEAKER_119: get one in and then any other lightning you want to try to get to here as we wrap up the week okay so SPEAKER_300: um two options here one from our dear friend fresh formerly of the launch team and one from uh matt SPEAKER_204: turk about where you should build a company jason pick a direction for us i mean you can't go SPEAKER_06: wrong with presh all right so here is a tweet from presh and i think it does explain a very important concept so fresh writes over on twitter take every one star rating personally don't take every five star rating personally and then austin petersmith someone that i've known on twitter for SPEAKER_204: ages uh summarized this and says negative feedback straight to the heart positive feedback straight to SPEAKER_183: the team perfect uh this is just great leadership these are two people i've worked with for a long time SPEAKER_09: presh came to work with me he dropped out of college to work for me here at launch and austin worked with me on inside and i'm an investor in his new company yeah just two great entrepreneurs out there SPEAKER_00: getting it done negative feedback very important the detractors in nps world are people who give you SPEAKER_09: a six or less on the question how likely are you to recommend this product or service to one of your friends and uh what we're speaking to here is the value of detractors haters the haters usually have now there are drive by haters and there are drive by people praising you and that's what they're sort of getting to here i think the lesson at the end of the day is you have to not get too high on your own supply as brendan just said in our previous segment you know and not over index on the lows but SPEAKER_48: inside of hater comments will be you know uh you're fat you're ugly um you know you could um uh do a better job on x y and z uh reminder you're a fat bastard and you have to be able to parse SPEAKER_09: through that feedback and find the actual kernel of truth the haters will make you greater is what i always tell folks and then in terms of praise yeah i like um austin's feedback which is hey just send it to the team team uses praise and somebody told me you know the job of leadership is to repeat the same things over and over again and make people feel 12 feet tall and so that's an actual you know David Friedberg: it's impossible to be 12 feet tall but you want to make them feel that way no no i think it's i think SPEAKER_19: it's well said because i mean there's various little little acorns or cohen's or you know nuggets of wisdom that we talk about my favorite is the job of the ceo is to make the secretary rich and i know SPEAKER_06: that's a slightly dated bit of phrasing but i've always held onto it but i i really do like the idea of parsing out positive negative feedback and and portioning into the right things because the least effective leader takes praise for the team gives it to themselves takes criticism of the the team and gives that to other people or as i put it you know criticism should roll up and praise SPEAKER_204: should roll down basically yeah i mean i think it's pretty good advice i want to point out that this SPEAKER_06: this discussion of haters brings me to my favorite meme on the internet so i'm just going to bring SPEAKER_204: it up because i i can't help myself okay this is an old historic tweet and it reads the haters said i couldn't do it and they were correct honestly a great call from the haters that's so great i mean SPEAKER_59: there is something to it you know so i mean yeah sometimes the haters are right sure or as i call them the jaders shout out to my guy i'm like oh sorry stray bullets everywhere you brought that back all right so SPEAKER_19: just really quick things everybody um waymo announced that they are now at 200 000 paid rides SPEAKER_22: per week up fantastic keep in mind that uber did 33 million a day in its last quarter so waymo is growing but remains an absolute it's 200 a week right so that would be a week yeah so you divide that by SPEAKER_119: seven it'd be 30 000 a day to 33 million it's yeah one thousandth as many here's the thing it's gonna SPEAKER_00: take time everybody um wants to talk to me about this because i'm the you know the early uber investor which is totally fine because i bring it on um and i'm not talking my book here but i'll SPEAKER_09: tell folks once again uh you know if you just build a model and you can ask gem and i to build a model we SPEAKER_324: did that here one time with their deep research product it's a billion rides a day in the united SPEAKER_09: states around the world it's a much larger number obviously the united states is but five percent of the global population it's going to take a long time to get to 10 or 20 autonomous rides i think in the next 10 years we could see 20 of rides be autonomous and at the same time i think people will take more rides because it'll get cheaper you'll be able to drink when you ride yep you'll be able to sleep when you ride so the idea like flight you know airplane rides used to be for the rich and you know you you they were a bit dangerous in the early days and then eventually it became safe and cheap and ubiquitous and routes were everywhere and so just common folk anybody could afford you know a 49 to 149 anytime fare on southwest or jet blue and it became more common so imagine that and cars used to be something only for the rich and the elite and then you can buy a car now for a couple of grand SPEAKER_00: uh so we're gonna see number of rides go up and we're gonna see four or five players because the number of cars that will be necessary when we did the calculation is you know somewhere in the range of SPEAKER_177: tens of millions of cars per percentage point give you an idea you know as big as uber is and the ride sharing business is and to the delivery businesses it's less than one percent of rides SPEAKER_16: ride sharing is less than one percent of rides it might be like you know 0.8 1.2 depends on the country obviously and the density so the pie is getting bigger the percentage is tiny there it's going to take i think just in the united states millions of cars being produced every year to just get in just SPEAKER_09: to get that to two percent let's say so what will the cars cost i think elon's been pretty clear it's going to cost them 30 40 000 per car yeah maybe they get it down to 25 they did 1.8 million cars two years ago 1.75 i think last year so let's give them the benefit of the doubt they do 2 million cars and i don't know 10 of them go to the self-driving effort it's a quarter million thousand quarter SPEAKER_24: million it's a lot of money and well that's the other thing people are you got to really think about SPEAKER_09: that so let's take 1 million cars and how many rides they could do they could do 20 rides a day you know 20 million rides a day okay that's incredible okay that's what waymo's doing right now with their 200 000 cars oh no i don't know how many cars they have but that's what they're doing their 200 000 long story short if you put a million cars on the road which tesla's capable of doing and byd is capable of doing toyota's capable of doing that's 30 billion dollars SPEAKER_34: it's 30 billion dollars for 1 million cars we're going to need like a hundred million cars this is trillions of dollars worth of cars folks and batteries so i think one of the other issues is SPEAKER_48: you know travis brought this up the founder of uber co-founder um like garrick camp he pointed out SPEAKER_00: like there might not be enough electricity in california right now to charge all the cars to do all the rides so we got to upgrade that and how many batteries can be produced this is not to SPEAKER_16: say it's not going to happen oh yeah no no it's going to happen but it's going to take 10 years to get to 20 percent ride sharing and that means the market grows 20x and i think there's three or four players just like in e-commerce or commerce generally it's not a winner-take-all market because it's the real world folks it's not one airline it's not a network effect digital business it's a network effect real world business yes that's a very distinctly different xy matrix and if we were to make a four quadrant is it a network effect business yes or no clearly ride sharing is a SPEAKER_00: network business is it atoms or bits it's atoms and you can just look at that to understand the real SPEAKER_19: world yes and i agree with all of that but i'm more optimistic on the timeline because we're seeing other companies advance so quickly so uh tesla which you mentioned just two quick little news items SPEAKER_06: um they're doing some fsd in china we're still figuring out exactly what that is but seeing that pop up for the first time and also tesla is working to launch a free self-driving taxi business David Friedberg: in california which is the step you do before you start charging for it so i think that's the big win SPEAKER_09: i think immediately tesla should partner with lyft and uber and put teslas with safety drivers in them for a year or two in each market with their hands off the steering wheel and prove like waymo did nothing to worry about folks and then you just can record for people hey look we did a thousand rides today and we had two interventions per thousand so it's like you know 500 rides before we have an intervention and of course they have some of these statistics for me driving my car but i'm not a safety driver safety drivers are clearly the first step now he did say elon that in june there would be people in cyber taxis without drivers so i think they're gonna have this is a prediction i don't have SPEAKER_00: inside information i think they're gonna have a constrained route like they did for the cyber taxi launch in a constrained area like they said they picked downtown you know area of austin they could very well make that work very easily so if they pick like a two mile by two mile area and they just really nail that yeah maybe they don't need to have the in-car safety driver they could do that with remote drivers and just have one person watching it like people say waymo has one what do they call SPEAKER_270: them that's not remote drivers they had another word for them operators or something they had some SPEAKER_87: i think it's i think it was operator but i'd want to go back and fact check that but someone who's David Friedberg: overseen they need to have an over i would that's what i would if i was running the program um i would SPEAKER_09: have 10 cars with 10 operators remote in in austin maybe in a small area and then i would have a thousand uber drivers and just give them the model y with the 4.0 package and i think actually my feedback on fsd is now outdated because i have the hardware 3 package and elon said the hardware 3 package is probably going to have to be replaced yep and he's kind of been warming up the the shareholders to that so my prediction right now is uber waymo number one tesla number two in the short term then maybe tied and then maybe tesla wins you know the number one spot because of their production SPEAKER_19: ability all i care about is that they're going to be competing and me alex as a consumer does well and one last note on this we ride is expanding which is the public chinese self-driving company that SPEAKER_06: listed here in the states they're expanding a bit in europe and china so to me we're seeing competition internationally definitely here in the u.s it feels like it's accelerating and so the waymo SPEAKER_07: milestone of you know new number of paid rides per week is just indicative that i think they're trying to stay ahead of tesla which is great we want them on their toes we want everyone fighting april 23rd new york city you and mike savino are heading down for angel university this is a great course SPEAKER_02: we do i think we'll have 200 seats we're going to do it at a dim sum place or peking duck place we teach people how to angel invest we do some live pitches and all the money goes to charity SPEAKER_270: or i should say any of the proceeds go to charity because you know uh we do a little marketing on this and we uh spend a little bit on the uh dim sum but uh we have donated a large amount to charity i'm very proud of this and uh we do our workshop we try to teach people how to invest in private companies more intelligently we put you into a private slack community we give you some models and you can question us and and you know tell us you know what you've learned in terms of the areas you come to it you meet another 200 people who are accredited investors angel dot university to sign up i think we're SPEAKER_217: charging a thousand bucks and it includes lunch and we'll probably have like a little after party but a fun thing to come to if you're independently wealthy accredited investor and want to hang out SPEAKER_324: with me and mike in new york it's a lot of fun we do it once a year join us if you want to learn from SPEAKER_07: each other and us we also have the founder fridays city competition coming up all right we're going to SPEAKER_02: do a city competition we did this in the early days of the show basically if you're part of founder SPEAKER_16: fridays go to founderfridays.tech which is meetups for founders we're going to have each city do their own little competition so you do a pitch competition between your 8 to 16 members in your community you tell us which one won your community so san diego will battle seoul will battle SPEAKER_00: sydney will battle san paulo will battle saugones new york the end and uh we'll make a lot of fun about it it'll be here on the program so your city will get some promotion and that startup will get some promotion go to founder fridays.tech to start your own chapter we do this just to help founders like everything we do it's just to support founders and inspire innovation it's not a complicated formula here thank you so much alex it's great to have you back thank you producer maddie port and chris and SPEAKER_270: the sales team matt hannah and jamie and uh of course our co-host here alex wilhelm we'll see you all next time