SPEAKER_00: all right everybody welcome to friday molly is on some well-earned vacation so producer rachel is filling in we're going to go over all the results from google amazon and apple yep there

SPEAKER_02: are some hot takes from jason and some things that jumped out especially from those big tech results and then molly interviews and another amazing launch accelerator founder and of course

SPEAKER_04: if it's friday we have an ok boomer uh segment this is an interview that rachel did with the founder

SPEAKER_07: of the tech conference and program slush it's going to be a great show stick with us this week in

SPEAKER_09: startups is brought to you by masterclass learn from the world's best minds anytime anywhere and at your own pace get 15 off an annual membership to masterclass at masterclass.com startups vanta compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business vanta makes it easy for companies to get a sock to report fast twist listeners can get one thousand dollars off for a limited time at vanta.com twist and fitbod tired of doing the same workouts at the gym fitbod will build you personalized workouts that help you progress with every set get 25 off your subscription or try out the app for free when you sign up now at fitbod dot me twist all right everybody it's friday mollywood

SPEAKER_13: is off yeah gets a three-day weekend well earned and with us is rachel reporting she's gonna queue up

SPEAKER_07: some important news for us god it's earning season so we gotta cover these important earnings reports google

SPEAKER_14: uh had their uh quarterly earnings so did apple and so did amazon so the big three yeah uh let's start

SPEAKER_16: with google how did google do so google shares are down three percent after missing on revenue and profit in its q4 earnings report and the big takeaway here so google missed on top line and bottom line as its ad business saw a substantial slowdown in q4 and revenue from search ads and youtube ads were down

SPEAKER_00: two percent and eight percent year respectively all right that's uh as i always say in a down market a recessionary market one of the things people cut first they're going to cut ad spend right so you're

SPEAKER_07: going to just look there and cut some ad spend they're also going to cut some cloud computing i'm sure we'll hear about that later people are going to look for places to cut that aren't human beings because it's emotional to cut a human it kind of sucks to lay people off management doesn't like to do that it's bad for morale but cutting some advertising if everybody cuts advertising 10 percent uh 20 percent in a down market sure you're going to see it but google uh has some of the best

SPEAKER_14: ad tools out there search is qualified and it is some of the most targeted advertising in the world along with amazon's new ad business google's is some of the highest performing in the world now youtube that's brand advertising right so you're not as much direct response you're not getting people close to a sale it's a little bit further away from the sale so it makes sense that it's off eight percent only two percent for search so actually i think these results are not that bad and i would

SPEAKER_02: expect google to be able to come back from these and have you ever bought anything like off of a youtube ad

SPEAKER_27: before i myself have youtube pro which used to be called like youtube red since it came out so i

SPEAKER_07: haven't seen ads on youtube with the exception of like accidentally getting logged out you know if i use an old laptop or something so i don't see any and therefore i don't click on them and i'm also not a very directed advertising influence consumer i'm a research-based consumer so when i do click on ads it's going to be on amazon ads the google ads i do click on are google flights or google local or google shopping so when i do a search and i'm doing research because i'm a research heavy person not like a a video ad kind of person that's kind of when i i think click on a lot of ads and amazon

SPEAKER_14: now you'll see the editor's choice you know or the amazon choice whatever they call it frequently they also

SPEAKER_07: buy ads so you'll see it in the organic results and you'll see it as an ad and sometimes i'll click on

SPEAKER_14: it even if it's an ad and a lot of the search services on google flights shopping hotels those are all cost per click people don't realize their cost per click but people are getting paid a whole google's getting paid a whole lot of money do you buy stuff off of youtube ads have you ever bought

SPEAKER_31: off a tick tock ad or a youtube well i also have youtube premium and the only time i can think about if

SPEAKER_16: i if i would have bought something it's probably off of like a sponsored reddit post if i was going to pick something off of like a social media because i read it has like again i'm also i guess pretty research-based if i'm looking up for a product and it comes up as sponsored and reddit i can see myself

SPEAKER_00: clicking on it but not yet from youtube yeah and it looks like uh youtube ad revenue 7.96 billion so

SPEAKER_07: eight times four 32 billion dollars a year it's incredible business uh but they um fell shy of estimates

SPEAKER_32: the good news is i think the shorts business maybe you can tell us a little bit about that rachel

SPEAKER_38: yeah the shorts business is really interesting to me so obviously tick tock has been um a big

SPEAKER_16: competitor of youtube especially when we saw it you know kind of pop during the pandemic but since i believe february 1st youtube has started really monetizing creators with uh their version of tech talks which is uh youtube reels so that's an exciting thing that we're going to be seeing

SPEAKER_40: although i or youtube no it's called youtube shorts youtube shorts yeah instagram is reels yeah yeah

SPEAKER_16: and i don't i don't know i don't really like youtube shorts so i'm interested to see how this goes

SPEAKER_00: i i think they're getting a ton of uh views for it i i saw 50 billion daily views for shorts which

SPEAKER_07: makes sense because they're really pushing them hard we do them here on this week in startups we get to use for them as well um but this is going to i think become a real business for youtube advertisers haven't particularly embraced making shorts yet so when a new content format comes out creators exploit it first and then marketers slowly try to figure it out so i don't think advertisers have

SPEAKER_14: figured out shorts yet some on tick tock you do see some ads on there um i've been seeing some ads for movies and stuff like that so i think we'll see the entertainment companies kind of figure out shorts first and uh some product companies are are also doing that but it's going to be a big business for them and i i don't see any ads on youtube shorts i haven't seen any ads ever uh but maybe that's because i have the ad-free version so i guess i'll never see shorts ads have do are they selling

SPEAKER_48: ads here yet so i guess they haven't turned it on yet i am not sure if they turn the money on because

SPEAKER_16: i also use premium and honestly when it's like the first thing you see when you open the app though and yesterday uh ceo sundar kachai said that shorts actually surpassed 50 billion daily views so like obviously somebody's looking at them people are liking them obviously at least that's because it's

SPEAKER_19: the first thing that you see when you open um that youtube app um and 50 billion daily views that's up from 30 billion daily views uh back in april 2022 oh okay so it's growing significantly it's almost

SPEAKER_00: doubled uh all right well i mean this chart i think so it tells you everything you need to know about youtube youtube has peaked essentially at this seven eight billion dollars a quarter in revenues google's

SPEAKER_16: cloud still growing i think google cloud is still growing uh their q4 google cloud revenue that was 7.3 billion year over year that's up 32 percent and uh quarter over quarter that's up 6.5 so cloud

SPEAKER_21: was really one of those bright spots for google and google cloud revenue actually beat estimates and showed

SPEAKER_41: pretty strong signs of growth yeah uh obviously google got in on the layoffs 12 000 employees last month

SPEAKER_14: pretty uh charged as we talked about on the program people were kind of upset about it they didn't understand who was getting laid off and why but that's not going to hit the books until maybe q3 because they gave such generous severance packages so we won't see it uh i guess we have the

SPEAKER_07: sankey chart uh which gives you a pretty good overview of uh how the revenue works on their search advertising obviously the bulk of their revenue uh they do make some from cloud and they do make some from their google play store uh getting 30 percent of apps uh adsense google ad manager uh their their ad tools also make some money but yeah still wildly profitable still throwing billions of dollars net profit 13.6 billion so a money printing machine and uh flat is the new up so if they're slightly down if they miss the revenue they miss a little uh earnings while they regroup during a down market it's an advertising based business that's their revenue is advertising so it's just gonna um they're gonna have to fight it out quarter to quarter uh but i still think it's a strong company and i think chat gtp chat gtp and that whole headwind i think might be a little um overblown i don't think people are going to stop using youtube or stop using google search just because chat gpt is available i don't think it's going to take any time away it's not going to take any revenue away from google search the answers on chat gpt are not reliable yet so we'll see if chat gpt 4 puts a dent in it but i think we're a couple of years away from chat gpt taking away meaningful revenue from google search franchise or youtubes i don't think that it's going to take revenue away from either of those services or users it's going to take a while for that to happen yeah and we're already seeing like google really

SPEAKER_31: branch into that ai space so it's going to be interesting to see like when their competitor

SPEAKER_16: like officially comes out earlier this morning even google brian you might have to pull this up there uh google invested in a really interesting uh ai product that i saw that helped uh really detect when people put hateful prompts in ai so i feel like in the next two quarters this could be something

SPEAKER_61: to watch uh in google's other category um which includes like their their ai projects that really

SPEAKER_63: haven't been announced yet yeah it's definitely um we're going to see a flurry of products come out

SPEAKER_00: from google with their chat assistant and api natural language models or learning mod uh models for developers to play with but again it's not going to have any impact on the youtube franchise

SPEAKER_07: the android franchise the cloud computing franchise and certainly not the search franchise it's going to take years for that to even put a dent in it so it's uh it's fun to talk about but i don't think

David Sacks: it's going to have a meaningful impact on their revenue they listen a lot more when you lose and so be smart about your delivery and what you're what you're saying but it can be an extremely important

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SPEAKER_16: revenue but providing weak guidance for quarter one uh so amazon's ad business as opposed to google's is absolutely crushing it and if you if you listened to the last all in um you guys already gave kind of like a sneak peek on why that could be um their q4 advertising revenue was 11.6 billion and that was up 19 year over year up 21 quarter over quarter uh but before let's just get into the results and we can explain that i guess in a minute their q4 total revenue was 149.2 billion dollars and that was up 8.5 year over year 17 quarter over quarter and remember with those quarter uh over quarter results that is like a holiday bump so sure just be super mindful the holiday season happened last quarter and with this revenue breakdown by segment um especially with online store revenue you can see that holiday bump um online store revenue was 64.5 billion that was down two percent year over year up 21 percent quarter over quarter aws revenue was 21.4 billion up 20 year over year up

SPEAKER_76: uh four percent quarter quarter so that's slowing amazon revenue is amazon web services revenue is

SPEAKER_00: slowing it was in the high 30 it was in 30 year over year now it's down to 20 as startups and big corporations say hey let's take a look at our cloud spend you know like let's have some austerity there right people are looking at their bills they look at marketing and then they look at cloud and they just

SPEAKER_07: try to cut them so we we see a slowing amazon uh web services exactly so they're like tightening their belt

SPEAKER_16: there with their subscription revenue and that includes things like prime um audiobooks music that was 9.2 billion dollars uh for their revenue which was up 13 year over year and up three percent quarter over quarter and then finally this is the really interesting part the ad revenue which i'd love to hear you talk more about um 11.6 billion dollars up 19 year over year up 21 quarter over quarter so amazon's ad business is just absolutely destroying it they're doing crazy well yeah so this is um really

SPEAKER_07: interesting the advertising businesses at uber and the advertising businesses at amazon these are new entrants into advertising and when you look at them what do they have in common well you're very close to the transaction and so when you do a search for i don't know some product you need a ski helmet uh if i go do a search for a ski helmet you can be sure that people who make ski helmets are going to

SPEAKER_14: want to intercept me uh at the moment uh i'm i'm really considering buying that now what are the two

SPEAKER_07: places where i'm definitely considering buying it one is amazon and one is google search right and if i do uh a search result the first one the first three results are well actually it's the first four results right now i'm looking at amazon i did i yeah actually it's five so it's the the first row has findway some ski helmet uh provider and then the first results first four are sponsored and the first organic one is in fact the fifth interestingly one of the advertisers is the amazon choice so they're the

SPEAKER_00: amazon choice uh this outdoor schema master uh has an amazon choice logo on it in the sponsored one so in order to become uh to get a lot of reviews that ranks you higher so now you're forced just like on google search if you don't buy google ads you're not going to get good seo so you have search engine marketing sem leads to seo search engine optimization that's what's happening now on amazon it's the same exact playbook if you buy ads you get more people to purchase it if more people purchase it you get more rankings you move up in the organic results so to be number one in organic you're probably going to have to spend money on the ads so it's kind of confusing like if you're number one

SPEAKER_14: in organic why would you buy ads well you're one of the first five and you're the the sixth or the fifth or the sixth after the ad so which is what you see people will buy their own names and they'll be in the first three results on google so it's kind of uh impossible to have a vibrant business if

SPEAKER_07: you don't buy those ads and it's a hundred percent paid for already so what do i mean by that if you

SPEAKER_14: rachel look at amazon service they've already built their service the ad business is just all profits i mean with the exception of maybe some de minimis amount of technology to serve them some developers to build the software and a sales team although much of this is probably self-serve this is going to be an extraordinarily high margin business the same is true for uber which we'll report next week uber when they put ads in there and you probably have seen them you're you're in a taxi you're in you're in an uber or you're ordering food and you have this nfl ad there telling you about the game tonight it's kind of you can't miss it you have to look at it because you have to see your taxi coming your captured audience and think about the data amazon has on you or the data uber has on you if you're a commerce business the amount of data you have is extraordinary at the same time that apple is taking away the data that facebook would have so these businesses these ad businesses for

SPEAKER_07: commerce companies are truly significant and for the first time i was buying some t-shirts and i used

SPEAKER_14: amazon's checkout have you used that yet rachel where you use your amazon credentials oh yeah put your address in and payment on a clothing retailer or something like that the quicker the checkout

SPEAKER_74: the better it is in my opinion and i like it better than paypal's option for quick checkup because

SPEAKER_16: what paypal can do um is it kind of has a delay so like you i know i've heard from other people's experiences that they've checked out before and accidentally not transferred enough money or something right into their account um they can still check out the project um excuse me they can still check out the product but you can still get a um like non-sufficient fund fee if you use paypal because you uh they have that like one day delay when they actually charge you whereas amazon will charge you right away so it really doesn't have um any space for error there so i love it i'm a huge amazon fan especially living in the city uh sending my stuff right to whole foods to pick it up is pretty

SPEAKER_00: big and what's really nice is you know i have my if i go to my amazon account i can see my amazon orders

SPEAKER_07: and you know if you say if you go to when you're on the amazon interface if you go to your account list you can see your orders when you click on orders one of the tabs is amazon pay and i can see in one place all of my uh spend so this is really nice to see it consolidated in one place uh and i don't i can buy direct from the merchant so i think that business is going to be um huge as well and it's super

SPEAKER_14: competitive uh advertising just extraordinary for um amazon now they don't consider it a pillar so

SPEAKER_07: the three pillars e-commerce aws and subscriptions are the three pillars i think the fourth one which isn't going to show up in their revenue yet it's going to be healthcare because they announced they're doing uh their drug uh prescriptions and they bought one medical so i think that we're going to see uh some really great uh future revenue from that yeah i totally agree um if you guys want to check

SPEAKER_16: out the one medical uh founder come talk to us we can link that in the show notes because that was a really great conversation and you know even if we compare like amazon's ad revenue to other big tech companies like google's search revenue like i said that was down two percent youtube has revenue down eight percent meta's ad revenue down four percent um so amazon's ad is just seems way more resilient than uh google youtube and meta it's new yeah so that it's it's it's new so it's growing uh and

SPEAKER_00: advertisers are going to probably move some amount of spend from meta aka facebook yeah and some spend

SPEAKER_07: from google to uh amazon but they're going to have to learn the interface learn the creative so it's a process and then some folks uh are not natural uh advertisers on the amazon ad network so if you're advertising a tv show i don't know that you're putting that on amazon but if you're uh obviously doing e-commerce it's more natural but yeah this is going to be a huge business for them uh and i think

SPEAKER_101: on all in friedberg talked about it uh we have a 30 second clip of that so amazon's ad business is booming right as jama pointed out earlier but so much more of consumer behavior is shifting where people are going direct to e-commerce sites and then the ads that are getting the highest click through and where advertisers are spending more and more money is on e-commerce sites i know this from experience on a couple boards i'm at where companies stopped spending on facebook and google and just started spending exclusively on amazon and that's where you get consumers that are much more likely to purchase the purchasing proclivity is higher the click-through rate is higher so the return on ad

SPEAKER_00: spend is much higher yeah and as i said you have no choice if you don't spend on it your competitors and a lot of these products are commodities like a pair of ski socks again back to skiing on my mind but you know i buy ski socks on a pretty regular basis you know if you're if you're not buying the edge you're not going to get seen and a lot of times i see on the ads like this is a four and a

SPEAKER_07: half star with three thousand reviews i really want to check out those socks it's proven to me that they have a large number of people who have purchased them so uh amazon is going to do fantastic and um yeah but yeah not a lot of profit there so that's something they're going to have to make a decision on is do they want to start showing a profit or do they just want to keep growing that top line and taking all that e-commerce share they obviously have headwinds with azure doing really well for microsoft and that's growing faster than aws is so aws uh could be a little bit challenged here and you could see azure catching up and certainly chat gpt and that being available as part of azure that's headwinds i'm also seeing in startups microsoft startup program uh which advertises here on the program they give a hundred fifty thousand dollars in azure credits and aws i don't see doing similar startup promotions and so i think azure is being really aggressive microsoft is being super aggressive and trying to win cloud business if you're a sas or services company that stores customer

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SPEAKER_07: your sock two app oh by the way i think jeff bezos is coming back i know it sounds crazy but i think amazon is going to have some significant headwinds and challenges and so i could very much see jeff bezos coming back and maybe running the health group and just making sure that that works but i think bezos is going to just be like bob eiger going to do a couple years off the grid and get bored and he's going to want to come back so that's my prediction you heard it here first oh can't wait to clip this later

SPEAKER_113: so um i'll see if i'm right about this one it'll be it'll be on tick tock if you are this is going

SPEAKER_00: viral what a great business you know like i mean how many weeks can you do skiing on your yacht at the grammys whatever bezos is up to you know working on rocket ships on vacation you know someone like him is just gonna he's he's so engaged in life that i think after a couple years

SPEAKER_119: decompressing um he's gonna come back let's hope yeah so um we can move forward now i guess with with apple like you were saying so apple just like google um they also missed on the top line and bottom line

SPEAKER_16: but its stock is actually up three percent today um iphone sales really missed revenue estimates by around 2.5 billion dollars and mac sales missed by around 2 billion dollars um holiday buyers obviously tighten their belts a lot and they were just not as active as apple anticipated and also i'd like to note that the iphone um kind of came out around that time like the holiday season like it always does in my opinion it just wasn't as impressive and i wonder if that's like 14.

SPEAKER_00: yeah yeah the new one yeah i have 13. i went to the apple store recently i just um i my daughters were getting boba and i was giving uh my daughter was out with one of her friends so i gave them a little

SPEAKER_07: privacy to get their boba while they were getting their boba and going to sephora i just walked the apple store and i picked up the 14 and i looked at my 13 and i was like i i'm not a price sensitive shopper i always like to get the latest thing and for the first time i felt not compelled to take out

SPEAKER_00: my credit card i was like this 13 is enough i don't want to have to unbox the phone i don't want to have to set it up and literally not maybe a little bit in the back of my mind austerity measures is a down market i i do think about austerity uh frequently but it was more just like the act of unboxing it having to return it and going through a half hour with the sales clerk that was the friction for me that i was like there's not enough here for me to go through that 30 minutes i just want the 30 minutes of my life so that is i think to your point rachel it's not that compelling and then i walked around i looked at the ipad mini and i was like maybe i got an ipad mini i always like this nothing was super compelling to me i look at the ipad i looked at the new macbook air which is amazing and extraordinary and beautiful machine i was like nope my m my m1 yeah macbook is just fine i got the big monitor on it i'm happy and so this is austerity now i did i do have to say i j traded uh last week so on february

SPEAKER_14: 1st what is today today so there's two days ago i bought 500 more shares of amazon 500 more shares of apple 500 more shares of disney the amazon trade is down a little bit i guess i bought at 107 a share

SPEAKER_07: it's at 105 i bought apple at 145 uh and it's at 154 so i'm up on that one and i bought disney at 110 and it's at 111 so i'm up modestly on that one as well but i just feel all three of those companies amazon apple disney are just gonna do extraordinary and i'm not too worried about this pullback the economy is obviously um in a some type of recession or we're in some sort of down market even though it's not clear exactly it's a definition of a recession but people are spending less and uh they're gonna let their phones last another year they're gonna let their cars last another two years and just austerity across the boards is i think the theme for 2023 definitely if you're choosing

SPEAKER_16: between like that new macbook that came out or the ipad um that m2 chip doesn't really for like the average person make that big of a difference between uh the m1 chip and the ipads now even though the lenovo keyboards are kind of crappy um i feel like in fact i know because as a consumer i went to the the apple store i was going to buy a second uh computer when i bought an ipad and just stuck one of those lenovo keyboards over it the ipad sales actually increased almost 30 percent um from

SPEAKER_119: 7.2 billion dollars to 9.4 billion dollars and that was the only one out of those three categories to go up and i don't think that's super surprising because if people are tightening their belt and they are having to go buy a new macbook um and the new macbook that they that offers just isn't that big of a difference from the last one you might as well just get an ipad um with with how

SPEAKER_00: much it can do now which is kind of cool yeah this 10th generation ipad which they just call ipad comes in

SPEAKER_07: a bunch of colors it's an incredible deal it's not expensive i just upgraded when this one came out the 10th generation it's quite a deal it starts at like 450 bucks and uh i i bought my twins uh yeah

SPEAKER_00: uh new ipads because they're all ones were so broken and janky and it's got the flat bezels on the side like the iphone you know design that everybody loves so much and it's just a great bargain so i could

SPEAKER_07: totally see people saying instead of getting a two thousand dollar laptop i'll get a six or seven eight hundred dollar ipad which kind of does everything you need right google drive like all

SPEAKER_135: you need just as long as you got a google doc in there for college unless like you're doing some

SPEAKER_16: heavier i i did like a some coding classes in college and besides those i basically just use google

SPEAKER_119: drive for everything so as long as your ipad can get that um that could be your device to bring to class i'm interested yeah to see how that is uh see if macbooks go up especially um they have

SPEAKER_14: also in the software level made it really nice to have two windows up at a time so you can have a browser on the left with your document and on the right you can have a browser up with the wikipedia or grammarly or something so this ability to have two different apps open or one takes up two thirds of screen one third it's starting to feel more like a desktop right uh and so and the keyboards are

SPEAKER_92: so good yeah i could see people buying them in lieu of buying more expensive laptops it makes sense to me

SPEAKER_07: the services business has been also doing fantastic and they're still printing a ton of money net profits

SPEAKER_92: of 30 billion dollars i mean the profit of this business is still extraordinary yeah and this how

SPEAKER_16: did the services business do so the services revenue was 20.8 billion dollars and that's up six percent year over year up 8.3 quarter over quarter and that really that was a bright spot i mean it beat estimates by like 300 million dollars um and remember services that includes all those subscriptions um that they have plus apple's app store fees so like you said the speed estimates

SPEAKER_07: like it really it really did do well well if you think about the services business that's almost 21 billion dollars and uh if you look at like the macbook seven billion dollars ipad nine billion dollars the watch and airpods 13 billion dollars services is bigger than those three categories and services is a third of the iphone revenue so even if iphone uh sales slow a little bit people are going to buy

SPEAKER_00: you know apple music apple tv yeah they're going to pay their app store 30 tax you're going to need extra storage because now with photos there's no way to store all of your photos in year 5 10 15 of having a mobile phone uh you know on your phone so you're going to have to pay for extra cloud

SPEAKER_07: and then like news is actually a pretty good service uh i find myself using uh google news a whole bunch and then my kids use the i'm sorry apple news and then my kids use apple uh arcade uh so when you have this family plan whatever i'm paying for it this apple one or whatever it's called their version of prime uh i mean i spend a i spend a lot of money on it and i get a lot of value from it and i'll never get rid of it so yeah uh this is a really bright spot for apple so it seems like each company apple had the bright spot of services and ipad uh google um their cloud

SPEAKER_00: is doing pretty well and then amazon their ad business is doing well so you know even though

SPEAKER_14: they got headwinds they they are doing really innovative product things and i think when you're looking at these companies you have to ask yourself are they throwing off cash and are they continuing

SPEAKER_07: to make innovative products that delight customers i think in all three cases they're still uh throwing off some amount of cash depending on the unit and they're still delighting customers with great products

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SPEAKER_10: slash twist that's fitbod.me slash twist for 25 off awesome i'm excited to see what happens next quarter

SPEAKER_16: especially um you kind of mentioned this last time we did earnings reports i believe this was on the time when we had sunny and vinion which was cool because i think molly was also out last time um this isn't in the notes by the way but you mentioned how you thought we were basically i think last quarter halfway through um the kind of recession that maybe we had two or three more quarters i'd

SPEAKER_119: love to hear your thoughts on how much more time you think we have now um moving forward in this in

SPEAKER_00: this kind of like downturn yeah so we had the second quarter the third quarter uh were down markets and

SPEAKER_07: then the fourth quarter right and so now here we are in the first quarter i've said these recession type things typically are six quarters so three quarters uh you know second third and fourth and now we're in the first so we could be four of six or seven quarters away from a normal environment of course the stock market popped the fed uh was talking about how you know they were having a disinflation uh they said that like a dozen times on the call they were very dovish and they did a 25 rate hike not a 50 i'm sorry a 25 bip rate hike not a 50 bip and they're going to do another 25 probably next month so i think the market is starting to think soft landing and then we had the jobs report come out today and the jobs report was supposed to be like 150 or so and it was 500 new jobs were added so now

SPEAKER_14: we have a 50 year and in some states like utah or some cities like salt lake city we have record low unemployment since we started recording unemployment yeah so the fact is i think young people of which you are one uh and maybe you could tell me this anecdotally true a lot of folks who had maybe some savings maybe some stimulus maybe they had some great consulting gigs they spent all that money and now they have to get back to work they got to pay bills there's not as much saving left they may have bought some nfts they're worthless or they flipped some nfts previously that kept them afloat whatever the the confluence of events were during the pandemic when we didn't go out and spend pandemic ended everybody spent yolo now we're sitting here in 2023 it's maybe time to get back to work and so some normal relationship is going to occur and people have to take jobs whether they're a waiter or a copy editor or a developer or whatever you're going to have to go back to work at some point is that

SPEAKER_74: what you're seeing anecdotally or i'm seeing a lot more of my friends that did get laid off um

SPEAKER_16: especially from big tech i had a ton of friends in big tech um and if they got laid off i actually don't see them going back to traditional nine to five jobs but i don't see them going to bali like i think like or lisbon like they're not taking those crazy vacations um and not coming back to the states for like six weeks on end like i thought they were that they were doing about a year ago um instead i see a lot of them doing things like consulting for other startups um trying to

SPEAKER_119: start things their their own like this definitely isn't like that vacation mindset i think um like

SPEAKER_16: it was this time last year and the january jobs report according to cn cnbc um it showed that non-farm payrolls increased by 517 000 and that's insane that's insane that's way higher than the 187 000 um that the market actually estimated like that's that's crazy the chart it's almost like it's a

SPEAKER_07: mistake so i'll i'll give you the chart here to pull up uh brian if you don't mind if you look at this new york times chart um from january 22 you almost feel as if take a look at this rachel that some sort of mistake has been made in the chart because um you had last month or for the last i don't know

SPEAKER_00: it looks like one two three four five months we've had between about 250 maybe 300 000 jobs and it was going down for like four months in a row five months in a row and then all of a sudden we

SPEAKER_07: have double the number of jobs as last month 250 last month and now 517 in january what happened exactly was it that people were taking off for the holidays and then everybody decided hey new year

SPEAKER_14: new me i gotta get a job and they just because there's two jobs out there for every unemployed

SPEAKER_07: american and we're now at 3.4 it is the lowest unemployment since 1969. there are many factors

SPEAKER_14: at work here people retired early we've talked about them here people died of covet sadly um some

SPEAKER_07: people because of covet said you know what i'm just gonna retire early um it's not worth the pressure and then obviously we're not letting people immigrate into the country over the last two administrations biden and trump both anti-immigration and we were anti-immigrant during covid obviously because we were concerned about people spreading the virus i i don't know how this gets resolved and this is um this could cause more inflation if people have more money to spend could they start spending it i mean people who have jobs spend money labor force participation uh which has not changed all that much um you know is at 62.4 the peak yeah when i was in my 30s i think was 69 so we're still off 10

SPEAKER_162: from the peak participation um i'm interested to see too like if people will continue to spend money um

SPEAKER_16: like they have been just because like even going grocery shopping it is actually insane like it is nuts and i think like small changes like that even though like some things around me haven't changed like i haven't seen as many although there are some like restaurant prices for example um it was restaurants restaurant week in new york city i didn't notice restaurant week being any more expensive than any of the other ones in the past however just because i'm starting to see like those day-to-day

SPEAKER_00: prices like gas groceries for restaurant week now because when i was a kid they made it the year so in 1999

SPEAKER_167: it was 19.99 to go in for lunch during restaurant week and you got three courses for 1999 what is it

SPEAKER_02: now so at the i went to um the red hook uh lobster i believe it's called like the lobster pound or the red hook uh i think it's a red hook lobster pound mike sabino actually has been to it before too which

SPEAKER_16: is kind of cool um their um price was around 30 and it was for lunch um and that was for two courses it was great wonderful highly recommend um it seems like 30 dollars is pretty much the standard dinner

SPEAKER_40: though is like 60. um which again if in new york city that's pretty that's pretty freaking good for

SPEAKER_07: a three-course dinner yeah i'm looking at it right now two-course lunch three-course dinner 30 45 or 60 new york restaurant week um and this was like a great thing to get people out and to try all these new restaurants and man it was amazing how packed places got um it's not it was also like a fun vibe too right do they give you a prefix menu though it's like a shortened menu like pick yep

SPEAKER_177: from these three appetizers exactly it's a lot of young people are there too because it's normally like

SPEAKER_16: people that can't afford the restaurant um it's normally you have to get a reservation to go places for example um i don't think valentine's day uh is covered i think if valentine's day is right after but when i was booking like reservations for example for valentine's day i actually had to book it january 14th at like 9 00 am right when they opened because stuff for like the whole month is just

SPEAKER_167: completely booked oh wow look at this it's a four-week program so week one week two week three week four and they can participate in any number of those weeks exactly so they don't have to participate

SPEAKER_05: all of them which kind of saves the restaurants a little bit i think um because if you do all four

SPEAKER_167: weeks i'm sure that's a little bit that's a little bit taxing that's a little bit taxing but i'm looking at them and the first two restaurants i picked up on the website um are in fact uh doing all four

SPEAKER_07: weeks they're participating in all four weeks so very cool uh if you're in new york city go see

SPEAKER_167: those great restaurants awesome all right well done rachel uh great job any more questions for me as we

SPEAKER_177: wrap here on these three big names i think i will have to message you later with any more questions i'm sure i have a ton um this is the first time i guess in 2008 i was 10 years old

SPEAKER_181: so i have not really been through uh a recession like this before so i'm sure some are going to pop

SPEAKER_07: up but not really too short to ask about yet i mean it's basically uh this one is pretty shocking i have to say because in the previous ones we never had these high watermark of uh entitlement and how

SPEAKER_00: easy business was it was really easy to raise money this last couple years really easy to get revenue or to get people to try your sas product everything was easy uh the only thing that was hard was raised was uh hiring people now the opposite it's easy to hire people at least in tech because we have so many people available so and because you have a global workforce and people have figured out remote so

SPEAKER_14: it's really easy to hire people now and i think we're going to start to see salaries normalize across the globe and so that's going to be particularly hard for maybe some people who

SPEAKER_00: got google jobs non-technical google jobs and maybe as we saw in some of those reports were getting paid twice as much as somebody doing the same non-technical job at amazon or microsoft and at google they're getting paid twice as much maybe you have some friends in that sort of bucket and they were doing a pr or marketing job or pm job and they were getting paid some crazy amount they may

SPEAKER_191: never get that salary again or it might take 20 years to get that salary again or they might need to re-educate and get more technical to get somewhere near that salary so i think that's the

SPEAKER_07: just like we had some valuations that are peak were peak valuations we might have had peak employment compensation for certain jobs for developers maybe not honestly now that you say that

SPEAKER_01: i actually haven't had any friends um really be impacted to be honest with you except for my

SPEAKER_16: friends in tech none of my friends in at the banks have really been impacted um none of my friends that work in healthcare in fact i have a ton of friends um because the pandemic happening in 2022 and it being 2023 that two-year mark if they did extend and do um a further two-year program to go into the medical field um after seeing what happened in 2020 i have a lot of friends just joining the healthcare industry and that seems to be hiring phenomenally well um so really cool to see that and i know that it also talks about in that job support that it added like 58 000 jobs in healthcare and you can really see that

SPEAKER_191: healthcare we're going to be behind the eight ball because we have an aging population people live longer

SPEAKER_07: and uh yeah that's not gonna that trend will not correct you we're going to be short staff so yeah i think you're gonna the tech people are the ones impacted any other industry services like healthcare they're not going to uh that's not going to change in our lifetime all right we have a great interview molly did with one of our accelerator companies uh perrin davidson from eater club is going to be on the program next and then after that of course you're doing one of your okay boomers so next up

SPEAKER_86: la 26 interview uh launch accelerator our 26th class all right everybody i am back interviewing

SPEAKER_199: founders from the launch accelerators 26th cohort and today we have perrin the founder of eater club

SPEAKER_202: welcome to twist thank you excited to be here i know me too there's been a lot of excitement about eater club i feel like you there's a lot of buzz a lot of buzz around eater club i appreciate it it tell us uh i guess in your own words slash pictures what what you do yeah so let me just

SPEAKER_201: play a little bit of a demo that we have and excited to share what we're doing but ultimately we are a next-gen distributor disrupting the food service industry by creating a new kind of curated

SPEAKER_204: approach to helping the next-gen restaurant operator yeah so eater club was born out of our editorial

SPEAKER_206: approach with la eats and it really was actually trying to solve a true pain point so we've been

SPEAKER_208: in over 800 kitchens interviewed hundreds and hundreds of chefs from amazing pop-ups to michelin stars you name it and in that process we really learned a lot about what's working for them and what's not and in that world we realized that there's a giant industry issue of really the world's you know best brands really can't find these great restaurants and restaurants have a hard time sourcing amazing brands and for a lot of people to understand 70 of the million plus restaurants in the united states are all single unit operators so it's the person you imagine down the street that you might know who's wearing many many hats so they don't have a lot of free time they're trying to hire they're trying to stock their restaurants they're trying to get customers so really we wanted to bring our background and ability in terms of storytelling and curation and bring that to a wholesale food service club really in a way that makes it super easy for them to order where the old way was a lot of triplicate carbon copy legacy kind of approach there's a lack of transparency and pricing and really we're all about trying to make it as easy as possible for them and in the process if we're doing that we're helping these amazing vendors find great brands in the process so it's supposed to be a really holistic approach if we're doing it right it means we're putting great products into great restaurants it means we're helping sell them and i'd love to get into a little bit how we support them after the sale and ultimately that means the vendor is working and then it works for us so one of the things that's unique about our approach well let me yeah

SPEAKER_202: let me back you up a minute and just make sure i understand so basically you have all these restaurants and these restaurants are standalone so they're not part of a chain and they they just

SPEAKER_211: literally have a hard time finding high quality or affordable like food and drink for the

SPEAKER_212: restaurants yeah anything it could be great sustainable packaging and also the larger

SPEAKER_208: distributors let's just say the smaller you are the less of a priority you are as it might make sense in a new world where operators are used to shopping on amazon and that traditional digital commerce experience it's really great how do we actually bring that to those food service operators to have a similar experience and not have to have a salesperson show up and really can shop on your time but what we do that's even more important is we're trying to cut out the middleman so for us it's about creating story as the new salesperson and really connecting these brands directly to restaurants with nobody in between so we produce fully original business and consumer content for all of the curated vendors that we bring on the platform everyone's invited specifically to join and that's a really important part we know that ultimately if we can be that gatekeeper we're helping

SPEAKER_206: not only the great restaurants find great products but also the customers who are the ultimate judge

SPEAKER_202: and jury are going to love them too and this is why this is why it's club it's like curated you're invited into on both sides of the marketplace the restaurant side and the vendor side yes and

SPEAKER_208: right now restaurants are only invite only as well too so we can make sure that we have a really great

Jason Calacanis: experience for both sides of the marketplace gotcha okay great so you have this club you are a vendor

SPEAKER_202: you are a restaurant you're connected there you can kind of shop online and then and then i think you were getting to this part where you support after yeah that's one of the things we think is really

SPEAKER_208: important which is it's great to get accounts it's great to drop off wonderful products but in a world where they're so busy how do you actually help these restaurants or sell them so for us it's about creating original content for the consumer as well so everyone whether it's a 30 second founder story 15 second or about the specific products we want to catch the customer in the moment before they come into the restaurant when they're hungry and they're looking for where to eat or where they're checking out another brand so it's our job to help these restaurants meet the customers where they are 90 of customers will experience a restaurant in some capacity online before ever dining there so our goal is to give them great content to help them meet those people where they are and also grow their audience everyone's looking to grow their online channels and for us it's about those 10 real customers that become regulars how do we get them to be excited about some new sustainable type of coffee we got to help them understand what it is if they want to help reduce that carbon emission or if they want to have something with a lower water impact or if they're just looking for something that's a little bit more transparent without artificial flavors we we cover organic natural sustainable emerging brands everything and anything that might be more interesting and also that's a little bit more premium it requires a little bit more storytelling and ultimately that's what's really important is that these products are exciting they are interesting but to get into them want to have that founder story as part of it so that they can understand where this journey started it didn't just start in this great bottle or great product but it started with someone's idea so part of it is bringing those people into the process and returning that value by cutting out the sales person so that we can get better prices to the restaurants

Jason Calacanis: so would you say that you are a wholesale marketplace and a studio

SPEAKER_221: i love that that's very much we want we keep trying to how we want to define ourselves that's

SPEAKER_208: why we kind of said next-gen distributors supporting next-gen restaurants but yeah we see ourselves as a wholesale food service company a media company whether that's a studio or a network there's so many ways of looking at it but our experience in producing content for the last few years has really positioned us well we know exactly what makes sense what's scalable ultimately creating first-class content is not cheap or easy but we've come up with really original processes to make it a lot faster and cheaper and ultimately it's that editorial approach that's so important for us so it's worked at la eats it's the same approach we're bringing in terms of curation and that's what we think so important as we continue to want to grow it's about finding new restaurants that we can cover in that process it makes us more valuable to the vendors because we've grown our audience and in that process we're actually growing our consumer audience along the way so it's a flywheel that we're looking to keep pushing but it has to do with authenticity and integrity and really standing behind the products and the restaurants and that's something that can help separate us and we're excited the world's so crazy everyone's bombarded with content advertising marketing in every way so how can we just make it a little easier for the restaurants and a little easier for the customers yep talk to me about the la eats

SPEAKER_202: origin story what what is that it was literally uh my sister and i wanted to start it a few years ago

SPEAKER_208: it was really just a casual thing and the whole idea was in a world where things are super busy how can we share things that we stand behind that we would say are 8 out of 10 or better in the food category and we're 20 or less initially which was most things eventually after we got to 500 curated reviews we removed the 20 cap because maybe you want to have a great 50 or 100 steak whatever it is we always say it's not that everyone has to have it every night it's just everyone has a special moment there's always a right time in the right place so we decided to have a little bit broader spectrum but at the same time still just doing things that are 8 out of 10 or better or that we can stand by and that's what's really important so in a world where plenty of people share bad reviews or other stuff we figured hey people just want to know where to eat not where not to eat so that's the whole idea of of our approach and we have an emoji based review format that we've been using for the last several years really just trying to have a quick takeaway again a world's super crowded how can we give you a quick food score service score ambiance we have an eats fact with everything we share the location the item price just that top level information that kind of is the most important um but ultimately everything on our feed and everything we've done is something we can stand behind we can say go try not everything's a 10 but that's okay right and this is la eats

SPEAKER_202: official on instagram yes right is that okay like almost 100 000 followers um and then the content that you're creating for the restaurants and vendors who are part of the marketplace does it go on that instagram it's for their own social channels like what does the distribution look like great

SPEAKER_205: question so for us it's kind of three parts one is there's the business content which lives on our

SPEAKER_208: platform and then we do some internal promotions like interstitial things like that that will be on la eats and some of our other channels the consumer content is actually meant to live on all of our buyers platform so they may have two three thousand followers whatever it is any number is good because those are real people real customers real fans if we can get a few of them excited about it that's going to translate into trying great products so that's really important for us but at the end of the day we do bring our audience which has some of the world's best chefs restaurateurs operators so we leverage all the different channels in different ways depending on what makes sense and at a different time but we want to make sure that the restaurants are actually leaning into putting it on their platforms and their channels to get those core audience excited amazing all right and then

SPEAKER_202: the accelerator style questions are next how um tell us how you make money we have an interesting

SPEAKER_208: approach so we've taken a hybrid model compared to a traditional distributor we have a membership fee for our vendors again we're trying to return value there's a setup fee of fourteen hundred ninety nine dollars to join and a fee between eighty nine and two hundred ninety nine dollars a month depending on what services they get with us we actually handle fulfillment we can do cold chain storage so we have a whole variety depending on what's needed um and then we have a fifteen percent take rate and that's what we're doing with the vendors so we can keep our cost down in terms of what the final price point is so we can ultimately keep these more premium products priced a little more aggressively so we're trying to pass that on restaurants will pay a small monthly fee probably in late 2024

SPEAKER_215: when we're ready to turn that on but right now we're just inviting restaurants that we are excited about to join and and really just having them kind of leverage some of the the products we're offering

SPEAKER_202: and then does that how talk a little bit about that pricing model and how it helps maybe lower prices

SPEAKER_205: throughout the chain yeah so for us a traditional distributor has a much higher margin which if you start to tack it on if we had a higher margin that means there's a higher final price point to

SPEAKER_208: deliver those goods to the restaurant which means by the time they're marking it up to their appropriate margin the price could be on an average drink maybe 50 cents more than what it would be with our lower margin because we're able to keep it at a more aggressive price wholesale price point to them we also bake everything in we make it super easy we make the shipping is all baked in everything is next day that we can deliver so the goal is to try to simplify everything possible so these restaurants can try products or you know fulfill and kind of pivot from something they're already offering so they may want to bring in a new skew we want to make it as easy as possible to turn

SPEAKER_202: that cost into a profit for them and then talk to me about scale what does the path look like to 10 million and 100 million dollars and how hard is this to scale if you're doing fulfillment

SPEAKER_208: in addition to connecting absolutely so we're really excited to be working with 3pl partners that allow us to kind of scale nationally and so where the demand is we can kind of scale up third-party logistics third-party logistics yes on the wholesale side which maybe people aren't as familiar with it's very common more on the d2c side but we're trying to leverage that same kind of warehouse capacity to help us scale and that starts with us back to that editorial flywheel so as we grow through california we'll be expanding our coverage into northern california then as we grow east we'll be expanding our coverage into certain warehouses in texas chicago florida new york so we'll be targeting those main markets initially and kind of continuing to grow it's all about really building the relationships and having great coverage and in that process continuing just to grow our audience and then we just make ourselves more valuable to the vendors we're also looking internationally to source vendors exclusively for eater club as well so we're trying to look across the globe across the country for great products and in the process kind of help launch some of these emerging brands many of the companies we have are their first time in southern california definitely their first time in food service in southern california if not so we're trying to help them just really build that brand awareness and we're comfortable working with organizations have a great mission great

SPEAKER_204: founders but maybe zero brand awareness and we're not turned off by that at all what just out of

SPEAKER_202: curiosity is the kind of ideal customer profile like what's the the restaurant in the sweet spot for you

SPEAKER_208: the ideal customer profile is like a popular like a deli or a cafe or a restaurant kind of the the place that might be in your town or on the main street that's that's a little bit more interesting and at the end of the day they're catering and serving an audience that's a bit more excited to try new products that are a little bit more open-minded that's the ideal customer and the complement is also with the ghost kitchens and virtual concepts and hospitality groups so when we're not servicing the independent restaurateur our digital front of the house is really important for hospitality groups to be able to market and also for ghost kitchens that have no front of the house whatsoever so we're trying to provide value to all of those sectors and let the chains kind of be the chains and in a world where the independent operator needs to stand out how can we give them products that get customers excited to ultimately come in the door so we want to say hey we're the first to carry this or we're we've now changed over to a new sustainable product whatever it might be but if we tell the story right that's what we believe is going to lead to the foot traffic of people coming in if you pick curated products we know they're ultimately going to love it which is really important so we're trying to really think through all the way to the customer even though we are a b2b we consider ourselves b2b to c in a way even though we don't sell to the customers

SPEAKER_202: right i'm trying to put this into like a framework that people would understand in terms of restaurants so not like not like a cat's delicatessen where you're going to go because you know you're going to get kind of roughly the same thing all the time but more like an indie dean and deluca

SPEAKER_208: if dean and deluca was more of like a food a restaurant instead of like a grocery absolutely exactly so i guess another answer for those that love the irwan is like the equivalent of the irwan restaurant or place like that even though i would say they're a bit more boutique we're trying to be a little bit more accessible and the other thing that we're trying to do is that these are the first tier of restaurants so we want to take it to but ultimately we believe everyone should have better products that are cleaner and better for people so how do we actually get them into the places that people are the most excited about now but ultimately help them bring the price down so it becomes accessible to that next set of restaurants that would say hey i can't afford that i might like it how can we help get the price down to make those products more accessible because we want to grow the market we don't want to just go after what's there we want to help people understand that there's an opportunity to increase what that market share is but it's up to us and that's why we're so excited to do that selling and not leave it to the vendor or the restaurant amazing eaterclub.app

SPEAKER_202: is where you can find it parin thanks so much and congrats on what you've built so far

SPEAKER_191: thank you so much this was great all right next up uh great job molly on eater club uh is an okay

SPEAKER_02: boomer who did you have on okay boomer this time so this time i had a guest um that has been long awaited for me um erica solven leinen um sorry if i butchered that last name erica is the ceo at

SPEAKER_16: slush which is a student-led not-for-profit based uh kind of like tech program based in helsinki and

SPEAKER_143: they have a giant event that i went to really cool and it's like oh you went to slush by accident i visited helsinki i wanted to go to my first solo female travel trip and i messaged the city of helsinki i was like hey this is what i'm interested in this is what i do for work this is what i do for pleasure this is i gave them a list i give them i was like city of helsinki you don't have any female solo traveling stuff what do i know to do they took me um on a tour of like an egg alternative egg factory because i told them i was a pescatarian um i went to slush with a bunch of other people around my age helsinki is wonderful it city of helsinki when did you do that via fabs uh i took a vacation right before thanksgiving this is a while ago i wanted to get erica on but being the ceo last year you did it just this year yeah oh they invited me they've been lobbying me to come to

SPEAKER_00: slush all these years you totally gotta go it is insane the keynoted every year and i'm uh the problem is you know it's like there's so many speaking gigs i get offered yeah but i really wanted to go to slush and finland is amazing so that's awesome you had a great time wonderful um the

SPEAKER_02: cool i think she's the prime minister who is she's controversial for a little bit because she

SPEAKER_143: she had that one partying photo she spoke at it and that was really cool yeah that was awesome

SPEAKER_250: leave the prime minister alone yeah i'm a fan of her i think she's cool and marin uh unfortunately

SPEAKER_143: there's one person i wanted to see speak there but she was unable i think she was sick or something it

SPEAKER_40: was sophia amaruso and i saw she just recently raised um sophia yeah from girl boss yes

SPEAKER_86: uh nasa young robos i just became an lp in her fund and oh amazing yeah i believe it's called

SPEAKER_07: trust fund correct yeah trust fund doesn't have trust but also like trust fund but she's not a trust fund baby she's an actual hardcore entrepreneur and a friend of the pod all right actually we should

SPEAKER_40: book her to be on the pod we should totally should she's she's really interesting yeah good friend of mine erica and i talked about slush's ecosystem and her role the origins of slush but um hopefully next

SPEAKER_119: year i'll be able to go again and we'll actually get to hear here uh girl bosses talk congratulations

SPEAKER_267: and uh enjoy the interview everybody okay erica thank you so much for joining me on this segment of okay boomer erica savalainen is the ceo at slush which is an amazing student-led startup event based

SPEAKER_269: in helsinki finland that i had the honor of attending this past year again erica thank you thanks for

SPEAKER_267: having me so slush isn't just a tech event it feels like to call it a tech event is a little bit of a

SPEAKER_275: disservice can you please explain to everybody what slush is yes um so slush is a movement led by students and recent graduates uh our mission is to help and create founders to change the world

SPEAKER_278: and yes you're right our main tool for that uh is a tech event so 13 000 people in helsinki uh every november um however uh actually when you look at our team our team members don't really feel like they're event organizers we rather see see ourselves as uh young people uh learning as much much as they

SPEAKER_275: can about startups and entrepreneurship while they're at slush and then once a team member has

SPEAKER_279: spent a few years in the team we hope uh that everyone will kind of go to their next adventure and maybe build a company as a founder operator or join a vc do you know what percentage of the students

SPEAKER_269: that are helping create slush actually become founders themselves i don't have an exact number

SPEAKER_278: because of course there's some lag like not everyone funds a company directly after yeah um however i would say that majority of our team members end up in the ecosystem wow okay and also also the number of companies about it but founded by our alumni is growing year by year i think there's at least

SPEAKER_289: three companies cooking like under the radar at the moment uh by previous team members so very cool so

SPEAKER_267: before i went to finland and finland was my first solo trip i ever did and slush was a big part of it so

SPEAKER_269: thank you um before i went to finland i only really knew two startups that came out of helsinki or finland in general one of them i think was or ring and the other one was angry birds what startups have

SPEAKER_294: come out of slush members or operators yeah i think the uh most famous one would be vault which is a food

SPEAKER_275: delivery startup uh recently acquired by nordash actually uh and uh vault was founded by uh mickey

SPEAKER_278: guzi uh the first student ceo uh of slush um and actually the early team was fully comprised of

SPEAKER_296: slushers and uh many slushers joined uh after so i guess that is the kind of most exciting road story we've had uh this far but many younger companies kind of going to the same direction yeah that's awesome

SPEAKER_267: yeah i saw that vault got acquired that's really really cool and i know slush has been around for a while i believe it started in 2008 although online there are a ton of different like origin stories what's the origin story that you think is true because i saw two and i'm interested to see

SPEAKER_278: yeah i actually do know that this one is true um so so slush was uh correctly uh founded uh in 2008 and back then it was an initiative of five finnish entrepreneurs uh and they were worried about finland in general uh like the lacking attitude of entrepreneurship uh the lacking networks of people wanting to build companies and also the lack of venture capital available in in finland and for finnish founders um and they decided to to organize a small event uh to tackle that so a few hundred people uh in in one room um however these people were busy founders um so they didn't really have time to commit for this side side project uh so luckily uh peter westerbakka who is one of the core team members in uh rovio uh the creator of angry birds that you just mentioned met this young guy called mickey kuusi and uh mickey was back then uh a president of a student society called aalto is and uh he was extremely eager to have an impact and change the world um and uh this group of uh finnish entrepreneurs ended up handing slush the small event to the hands of this student association uh the student association didn't really like uh the kind of small scale so so they started growing uh the event heavily uh and a few years after uh it was 10 000 people then 15 000 people then 20 000 people uh and

SPEAKER_296: now it is an extremely strong movement uh for over 10 years but the first one was already 10 000 people

SPEAKER_278: um not really so it was like increasing with thousands of people here yeah okay okay i would say

SPEAKER_267: wow that's a really big one um i was in a student-run venture capital club in college and we had like

SPEAKER_269: a pitch event and i can't imagine putting on the level of professionalism you guys do during the slush event and i know there are other locations of slush that happen i saw one was in tokyo and there was one i think in shanghai um are these still run by students and do you guys have to do them

SPEAKER_267: remotely or are these done by people actually based in this country oh it's a great question um so

SPEAKER_278: yeah we've had many uh global editions of slush events uh and our way of doing things has always been kind of believing the believing in a local team and uh like if you want to create impact it has to start from the grassroots uh so our global events have always been run by local local teams um at the

SPEAKER_279: moment we don't have any large-scale global events we're instead focusing on relevance over scaling in

SPEAKER_269: helsinki uh but yeah okay that's awesome i feel like when i was at the event there was a lot of

SPEAKER_278: other people that were yeah um so nothing's set in stone so it might change the base based on situation but but uh the idea is that we would rotate ceo every every two years and uh it is fair fairly uh or the reason is basically to give opportunities always for the for the next generation so this is no one's

SPEAKER_279: life work uh rather than a launchpad um and uh maybe my answer to to how the ceo is selected is a bit

SPEAKER_278: boring so uh the board will nominate ceo as uh as as in many companies however um it is often chosen from the team among people who worked uh for the community for for several years and kind of learned a

SPEAKER_304: lot while doing that and also kind of developed love towards the towards the work that we do okay so will this be your second year or yeah so i'll be on board uh still this year and then let's see i i

SPEAKER_296: am sure that my uh successor will be amazing even though i'm not uh certain who it will be yet

SPEAKER_267: yeah that's super exciting and it's really cool how you do it um by the board and is the board comprised also of all students or is it like former slush members as well um yes our board consists of

SPEAKER_275: former slushers uh so so many of former slash ceos and also a few kind of more experienced members of

SPEAKER_296: the finnish startup ecosystem so it really is like uh uh by the community for the community movement

SPEAKER_320: yeah and as ceo what does that actually entail like what are you doing uh for slash yeah um so

SPEAKER_307: so slash it it actually is like quite a complex product so putting together a uh 12 000 people

SPEAKER_278: uh event uh we have 10 million in revenue we have a full-time team of 50 people and all that so um it is a lot of like a leadership uh and management uh making sure that we have clear goals uh we understand

SPEAKER_296: how how to get to those goals uh and we understand uh kind of um how each and every team members work contributes in in achieving what we want to achieve after this position do you think that you want to

SPEAKER_278: be ceo of your own company um yes i think the more time you spend in an environment like slush um the harder it becomes to imagine anything else than ultimately building your own own company so definitely i will want to find a company in the future uh whether it will happen directly after this uh who knows uh but it will definitely be my end game and you're a student during all of this

SPEAKER_267: right is this that does the do the universities of helsinki like cut you any slack or anything because

SPEAKER_307: they know that you're doing this um the university system in finland is actually fairly flexible um

SPEAKER_278: so it is fairly easy to start a job like take a job uh alongside your studies um what happens to many slush team members is of course that they kind of uh when they get on board uh they see that there's a lot more learning uh in actually working for slush than than studying so uh the university might not always be that happy uh for that decision uh but then um at the same time i do feel that the kind of atmosphere in the universities here here in helsinki is very supportive for students taking on

SPEAKER_304: different kind of initiatives and kind of learning also outside of the lecture halls and what's your major uh i major in finance oh that's awesome how old are you right now uh i'm 27 so i actually am

SPEAKER_278: like an older slusher and uh i did kind of um stop studying full-time a few years back because i got caught by by slush uh i think our average age in the team might be somewhere around 24. wow that's still

SPEAKER_267: that's absolutely incredible being a ceo of such a large organization and how many people um make up slush

SPEAKER_307: um so as said um we see our team as a place to learn a lot about building companies and i think uh

SPEAKER_278: our kind of how our team functions also emulates a growth company uh to some extent uh so we start each year with around 20 people uh and scale up to 50 full-time employees uh closer to the event in the fall and finally uh for the event 1500 volunteers uh will join the ranks okay so at that point it is a

SPEAKER_267: rather big big operation yeah yeah of course and so when you're doing this you're also a student

SPEAKER_269: um is this something where you guys can like give yourself a salary or is this something that you have

SPEAKER_278: to do to fully volunteer in this position yeah um we do have a full-time team uh that is paid um so yes uh there is a salary um however i think it is important to recognize that any community of this size wouldn't live without people volunteering and wanting to give back um so so i guess that the

SPEAKER_296: salary isn't why anyone's joining rather than actually learning and uh being part of the community

SPEAKER_267: but it gives i like that you guys at least are given a chance to i feel like if you had to also focus on another chance like okay how do i afford to like live and now being able now to at least get

SPEAKER_320: a paycheck lets you be all in at slush 100 definitely of course like uh if you needed to

SPEAKER_278: think of like uh maintaining your your life uh without salary then of course you wouldn't be able

SPEAKER_267: to focus on what matters at your work so it's necessary very cool and i guess my last question question and this is kind of a big one so you could take a while if you want what problems are most likely to occur at student-led ventures like slush so if other students are listening to this and they want to become like a ceo of their own like student-led organization what should they be looking

SPEAKER_275: out for that is a great question there is one clear problem but at the same time i also do think that it it is a problem that necessarily don't need to get fully resolved um that is the fact that when

SPEAKER_278: your organization is run by students and recent graduates uh the rotation is is rather high like you will have new team members joining and uh more experienced team members uh leaving and that's part of

SPEAKER_279: the game that's part of part of the uh deal uh in a way of course uh with that rotation uh there's

SPEAKER_278: something we we might call uh organizational alzheimer at slush so so you do lose some some human capital with that um and there are many things to do to tackle that to ensure that there is this kind of learning over different generations uh so that we actually end up improving and not reinventing the wheel uh year after year um after after uh at the same time i wouldn't be too scared of this challenge because as said uh if the team wouldn't rotate new people wouldn't get the learning opportunity uh and uh what's the point of all this uh if that that wouldn't happen yeah yeah that's

SPEAKER_267: awesome well super duper excited to see the next slash this last one that i went to was really awesome

SPEAKER_269: i loved that i was able to meet other people in the tech community around my age especially when traveling that's always fun and i look forward to hopefully making my way back to helsinki someday

SPEAKER_346: yeah we'd love to have you so make sure to be there this year right thank you so much erica yes

SPEAKER_14: thanks rachel all right everybody that's a wrap what a great week rachel thanks for stepping in you

SPEAKER_61: did great thanks for having me i'm super excited for molly to be back she is just gone for today

SPEAKER_351: don't worry she'll be back on monday all right we'll see you all have a great weekend and we'll see you all on monday bye