SPEAKER_00: Hey, everybody, it's Friday, Friday, and we're going to do our variety show. We're going to do Five for Friday, but then, boop, boop. Breaking news, Molly, we got a leak.

SPEAKER_01: We break down some leaks. Jason got his hand. Jason just can't stop with that investigative reporter bug.

SPEAKER_05: Got his hand on some Twitter leaks.

SPEAKER_07: Molly, explain to us what the leaks were for.

SPEAKER_05: The leaks were for Twitter's new crowdsource moderation tool called Birdwatch. It includes screenshots, so you are going to want to find the video version of this podcast.

SPEAKER_08: YouTube.com slash this week in.

SPEAKER_10: And then we have another great OK Boomer from producer Rachel. As always, it's going to be a great show. Stick with us. Stick with us.

SPEAKER_14: Why not? This Week in Startups is brought to you by Notion. Notion is one place for notes, docs, projects, and everyday work that goes way beyond a wiki. Go to Notion.so and use promo code TWIST to get $250 off an annual team plan. OurCrowd. OurCrowd helps you invest early in pre-IPO companies alongside professional VCs. If you're interested in investing, you can join OurCrowd for free at O-U-R-C-R-O-W-D dot com slash twist. And Intercom. If you're an early stage, high growth startup, you can get access to Intercom's Early Stage Academy today at a 95% discount. Join the program today at intercom dot com slash early dash stage or email them at startups at intercom dot IO.

SPEAKER_17: We're live, Molly, with breaking, breaking news. Hey, everybody. Welcome to Friday. It's five for Friday. Is that what we call this?

SPEAKER_19: Five for Friday? Five for Friday. Yeah, I like that.

SPEAKER_20: Five for Friday. Because we can't promise the second five, so we're just calling it five for Friday.

SPEAKER_23: It might wind up being four, but this is where we do five topics in five minutes each. But this first topic, breaking news, alarm sounding, must credit this week in startups.

SPEAKER_24: We have received the bird watch screenshots from an insider.

SPEAKER_27: We, we, we, we, we boop.

SPEAKER_28: Boop.

SPEAKER_34: So we cannot talk about how we got these screenshots. That being said, we have the screenshots of bird watch. You're asking me what's bird watch. I am.

SPEAKER_37: I mean, I'm not, but someone is.

SPEAKER_36: you know how wikipedia has mods yeah the best thing about it yeah and you know they try to

SPEAKER_34: keep the community on track you know how twitter has uh you know a harassment truth misleading information all this you know fake news issue molly you don't have that yeah i believe

SPEAKER_43: i've heard a little bit about that here and there okay right a lot of things going on there all

SPEAKER_34: right so twitter has a great idea uh we'll see you know if it works or not and we're gonna have an open discussion here i am open-minded to this um they're going to have a community driven approach

SPEAKER_24: to tackling misleading information in other words instead of twitter saying hey ivermectin or this post or this meme is fake news they want all of us to do it now how this is executed uh the devil's in

SPEAKER_41: the details right like all things so and we should start by here that they announced this feature back

Jason Calacanis: in january so what we or january 2021 they were like we're gonna do this birdwatch thing and everybody

SPEAKER_49: was like i'll believe it when i see it well now you're gonna see now we're gonna see it exactly

SPEAKER_34: all right so here's the first screenshot i have like i think i have six screenshots to go through here okay so this is what you'll see in your app see it says bird watch there and you're in the you have basically a bird watch in your menu now they're going to show you tweets and they're going to ask you is this note helpful now this is um a note that somebody else made on somebody else's tweet in other words this is community on community checking so somebody said okay on somebody else's tweet i believe it to be a joke so there's a rating and then this other member of the bird watch is being asked is this note helpful in other words molly you're in bird watch you said i think this person is joking in their tweet because they asked you to review a controversial tweet right and then i say do i think molly has been helpful so this is the star chamber checking the star chamber right and um i say it's somewhat helpful i think you've been somewhat helpful here molly so for those of you listening i click not yes not no is it helpful i click somewhat and then it actually asks you what was helpful about it and i'll just read you some of the choices here sites high quality sources easy to understand directly addresses the tweets claim provides important context neutral or unbiased

SPEAKER_24: language other so they're asking me to pick one of these choices about molly's commentary on a tweet that would be let's say a charge we will get into that yeah then they ask another question what was unhelpful about molly's note so i'm policing the police the most cynical view of this would be like stasi like spying on each other we're like some underground but if all this stuff was transparent right and you could see the ratings as a user well maybe it's helpful i don't know so let's see was

SPEAKER_23: what was unhelpful about it why don't you read these ones molly and tell us what you think of

SPEAKER_05: these so then you can say uh and this is what i like about the asking these questions what's helpful and unhelpful is it's uh creating a critical thinking muscle so what was unhelpful sources

Jason Calacanis: are not included or they're unreliable sources do not support note incorrect information opinion or speculation typos or unclear language misses key points or irrelevant or argumentative or biased

SPEAKER_53: language oh the old framing of something i like the old framing of stuff so i have wait i want to

SPEAKER_05: i have a level set question before we dig deeper into this so and then there's one more there i think

Jason Calacanis: that last one's kind of interesting uh note not needed on this tweet so what this is saying is there's going to be notes under tweets right that was my question so it seems like birdwatch has two is a two-factor situation you can put a note on a tweet that you believe to be problematic right and then someone can read the note good or bad yeah and then someone can rate the note so it's like a

SPEAKER_60: double rating system sort of i i think that's what they're doing here so who knows who gets invited into

SPEAKER_34: this but of course now the devil's in the detail you as you know somebody on the right might think well msnbc is not reliable ben shapiro and fox news are reliable you know if you're a joy reed and you know uh who else is on the left uh who's the media guy from cnn who's very polarizing for the right people

SPEAKER_63: are always dunking on him anybody watching right well brian stelter is reliable thank you is that

SPEAKER_64: reliable sources yeah that's reliable sources got it okay so brian stelter is like you know the right thinks he's like apologists for cnn yada yada it's interesting because all the women in media think

SPEAKER_06: he's the original catch and kill guy but okay all right yeah so so many letters here sometimes the

SPEAKER_70: whisper network comes out on the show and it's very fun uh he yeah you know i understand what you're saying because the promo stuff right yes um anyway so uh okay so then so what we're so our

SPEAKER_05: question here is one it sounds like you may some people may be able to attach notes to tweets other people's tweets other people's tweets but but they may that we think is going to be by invite like it won't be like well right now you apply to be in birdwatch i don't know if they're

SPEAKER_23: going to go to birdwatch and say we'll have 50 we'll have 35 people a third of people who are on the left 30 people who identify on the right 30 people who rep are independent or they're going to say we're going to go to librarians you know and people with degrees in library science which was yeah what a wikipedia's original a lot of people who are into this degree of library science and impact when i did mahalo i i tried to hire those folks um they're they're a really interesting group of people they would love to work for free if you try to pay them it'll be really bedlam okay

Jason Calacanis: right next screenshot okay so we have so we have the note thing and then we have the the moderating of the the rating of the note situation and then let's keep going through the

SPEAKER_24: features okay so now here we see a tweet from elon and this is an actual tweet and this is an actual birdwatch in effect you see elon's tweet there it says ultimately the downfall of the freemasons was giving away their stone cutting services for nothing which is a joke i believe like i don't think the freemasons actually did their work for free and it says help rate notes submitted by birdwatch contributors so this person is being asked to look at other people in birdwatch and uh rate their

SPEAKER_23: notes and it says only visible to birdwatch contributors so this is like this is like how the sausage is getting made behind the scenes uh and actually a reply from joe uh the co-founder of airbnb is there

SPEAKER_24: uh this couldn't compete with the discount masons some revenue is better than none so anyway there you see how it exists in the wild um let's see another one but it is notable to me that the note

Jason Calacanis: is only visible to birdwatch contributors and again we don't know if that's the case now with the bit

SPEAKER_08: well then what's the difference between a note what's the difference between a note and a reply

SPEAKER_60: okay so the idea would be replies everybody's doing already there's a sea of them yeah notes would appear

SPEAKER_43: right under the tweet ostensibly and would be by this group of people who are trusted in some way

SPEAKER_34: so it might be if you write a note and 25 other bird washers say great note accurate yada yada then it appears but if your note is not deemed to have consensus around it i'm taking a guess here it wouldn't right okay so just like if somebody made a good argument as a wikipedia person editing a page there's like a discussion page and they said listen this person is not notable here's the reasons i don't think they're notable another person replies hey they are notable they're on this top 100 list here's a link to them being quoted in the wall street journal five times and then people kind of can vote on that and and you get some sort of consensus going startups need a central hub to store

SPEAKER_94: information and collaborate on work now more than ever that's because we're all living in this crazy remote world everybody wants to put all the information in one place and that one place is now notion documents projects all that stuff it kind of goes in the same place on what you can consider a wiki when we went fully remote in march of 2020 notion became our internal knowledge bank we even use it for external purposes you know like when we did this series on this week in startups called the startup checklist well we just put it at thisweekinstartups.com checklist and that is all hosted on notion on notion every team from engineering to sales can work together seamlessly and they have 500 integrated apps including things like google and slack collaborate in real time and tailor workflows to your needs hundreds of thousands of teams worldwide are already delighting their employees with notion notion is now a worldwide community of millions and they're creating templates and tutorials so the product is continually improving just go to notion.so and use the promo code twist and you will get 250 off their annual team plan that could be a couple of months for free so it's pretty great for a growing startup like yours that's notion.so and use that promo code twist

SPEAKER_05: during checkout for 250 off okay so here are the kind of closer even to reddit than wikipedia where you can because you upvote responses yeah so in a reddit thread what you'll end up seeing is the

SPEAKER_77: responses that have been deemed the most useful or helpful but again this is struck more structured

SPEAKER_23: yeah data here so they're structuring it by giving you like that i don't know what you said but like turn your brain on kind of situation what was the word you use when it gives you the mental model of here are all your choices how to think about that um you use some term of like hey this is engaging your brain um and so here we go we're looking at this and so this isn't a place to make other jokes or be publicly replying this is a place only to do this structured kind of data so here it says uh this thing needs more rating so here are the comments people put on elon's tweet in there don't go too fast here go back up please i'll tell you when to move down um got to admit here's the note got to admit their third baseman was killer though um don't know what that's yeah i guess so

Jason Calacanis: right let's keep going uh so this is where someone is abusing their note privilege to put a funny

SPEAKER_23: comment on the tweets there are many conspiracy theories about the freemasons and this is a joke about those theories the etymology of free is disputed but it doesn't mean they refuse payment

SPEAKER_24: for their work oh my god this is so useful this is showing it being super useful yeah there somebody's literally explaining to people who don't understand elon's sense of humor the joke like all all people how much do you understand when i a lot of times when i make a joke and listen i'm i'm a funny guy who makes good jokes hilarious that are very understandable when i make jokes sometimes i will put the laughing face in other words i laugh at my own joke right at the end i put the smiley face just so i don't get a flood of replies where people take the joke seriously yep um and then when people when people refuse to understand it's a joke because there's four hilarious rolling on the floor laughing emojis i will reply with the absolutely perfect animated gif of superman looking around like this and he's flying and then somebody put the the the word the joke yeah and the joke moves around but superman can't find it that's showing even superman can miss a joke so anyway this is a perfect example if somebody unpacks this for somebody next let's scroll down another uh little bit here so we would have clicked yes that's um helpful see anything you'd like to improve there's nothing to improve here this person nailed it it's amazing amazing and so great here is a bird watch screen we're gonna go i think this is the third screen we're on here and bird watch says we need your

SPEAKER_34: help rate these notes chosen for you okay so let's pause for a second here if you're not watching the video you can go to youtube.com this weekend you would search for the may 6th episode go to the videos and you can just sort them by date go to the may 6th episode fast forward a couple of minutes in and you'll see these actual screenshots or if you're on spotify uh we're part of the video thing where you can just if you turn your phone sideways i think it turns the video on uh and then if you're on apple podcast you have to search for this week in startups video we have two feeds one's audio and a video okay now rate these notes chosen for you notes on these tweets need a more diverse range of feedback and

Chamath Palihapitiya: your point of view could help decide if they're helpful this list refreshes regularly so this is

SPEAKER_120: notable no pun intended sorry notable thank you thank you for no i didn't do that i also laughed at my

SPEAKER_41: own joke because no one else was gonna yeah yeah no absolutely uh the puns are heavy today so anyway

SPEAKER_34: what's notable about this note about making writing notes is that they were chosen for you right so i think the algorithm here right is going to say hey you seem to understand elon's sense of humor

SPEAKER_23: covid politics the supreme court whatever it is whatever your jam is we'll show you more notes like

Jason Calacanis: that so let's scroll down here and take a look and in this case we're assuming you are one of the birdwatch mods so to speak and that's why you're saying and it's telling you that's why you're seeing

SPEAKER_05: okay so it's not like everybody will show up on twitter and be like hey check out these notes like

SPEAKER_23: god help us no yeah the the 0.001 deemed worthy of being a birdwatch and trust trustworthy will be in here yeah and uh okay you're gonna say well who watches the watchers yeah yeah you really are of course

SPEAKER_24: but it what we saw at wikipedia was you know it's winds up trending towards incredibly helpful unless you're a bio of a living person because if you're a pile of a living person yeah the anonymity there means anybody who's your enemy you're ever fired or you ever beat in competition or has got an

SPEAKER_23: axe to grind with you is going to shape your wikipedia page to be 90 your failures and 10 your

SPEAKER_24: victories but yeah totally so here ian miles chang or chang chang chang um he um is a polarizing citizen journalist muckraker if i had to describe him i don't know exactly what his deal is but i think he's known for covering the antifa folks and getting beat up by them on a number of occasions um somebody

SPEAKER_23: fact check me if that's not correct but he's like a uh pretty full you know like when people go to like portland or wherever those you know sit-ins and riots and stuff were happening he kind of goes there with a camera and live streams and he's like one of those dudes okay oh no that's not him what is

SPEAKER_80: is ian miles part of the alt-right i'm thinking of andy no or go but i think they're both part of the

SPEAKER_05: right i'm assuming that he's right i'm assuming this guy is right wing because he is appears to in this case be retweeting a meme that is full-on putin disinformation and propaganda about ukrainians

SPEAKER_34: ukrainian battalions being made up of neo-nazis ah okay so chiang uh has made a name for himself in right-wing circles by frequently weighing in on us politics i guess is one description on the internet okay so you're describing a meme it's that um line drawing which is like um a trolling drawing so this is kind of like a 4chan hn kind of vibe we in azov battalion are neo-nazis i don't understand this

SPEAKER_05: joke actually there was this there was this sort of disinformation campaign about how there was an

SPEAKER_142: entire uh regiment of ukrainian fighters who were neo-nazis to try to bolster the claim that putin invaded because he's trying to purge nazism from ukraine got it and they're there this is like one of

Jason Calacanis: those situations this battalion might be i don't know but this was definitely part of this whole right like this was one unquestionably a whole part of this big like look everyone they're nazis and it

SPEAKER_147: i think it's i think they are like in this i mean it's just a very it's messy in fact but it may

SPEAKER_149: not be a perfect one for birdwatch to check in on because we're relatively well informed people and

SPEAKER_34: i've have questions about is this reality or not i have questions i have i mean it's kind of you listen if you're dealing with disinformation and it's putin and it's a the fog of war i mean this is the

SPEAKER_05: ultimate use case here and if you're the guy throwing this in here and your whole history is

Jason Calacanis: that you are as one twitter user described it a right wing uh or an alt right gamer gate ding dong

SPEAKER_06: then one assumes that you're which by the way bravo bravo bravo mani mani gandhi for that one

SPEAKER_159: all right here we go next one okay so let's look at the notes let's scroll down a little right so this

SPEAKER_05: gets posted and then presumably the notes are everything we just said like well that battalion

SPEAKER_34: is actually neo-nazi yeah oh there we go yeah and then the second half of the meme is that is russian propaganda putin is the real neo-nazi okay and then it says here help rate one note on this tweet so somebody put a note and you can rate it is that the end of the screenshot i think so so then okay so let's go to the next screenshot so you can see where this would be helpful like

SPEAKER_10: um and then here are bird watch in in the in this bird watch tab which only the oversight committee

SPEAKER_161: the the ministry of truth the true birds the note holders the bird watchers the the keepers of the

SPEAKER_23: notes the keepers of the notes would have access to this tab not us and it says bird watches newest notes hot off the presses these are the most recently written notes contributors can rate these notes to determine their health list so again the bird watchers uh oh god here we go a marco ruby

SPEAKER_164: this is terrible this sounds like a unique form of purgatory yeah this is literally like a black

SPEAKER_168: mirror episode hey um here are the most loathsome people in the world how would you like to rate their tweets i mean right like this is saw nine this is the this is what the what's the what's the evil guy

SPEAKER_170: in saw i don't know the guy who's like the little puppet oh i don't watch that stuff no i'm a big chicken jigsaw jigsaw so in the horror film saw there's like a little jigsaw puppet and he comes up with all kinds of contraptions to torture you and maim you this is kind of that this is it's jaw saw nine

SPEAKER_174: this is gonna be the premise of it if we have your jigsaw pregnant people do we have to can you

SPEAKER_05: let's say there's like a particularly inflammatory tweet from one marco rubio related to abortion

SPEAKER_49: then you get some notes submitted by birdwatch contributors i just think okay you don't want to read this straight from marco rubio it's amazing because i'm just going to go into like the fog of war speaking of which full tilt i don't want to tilt oh i'll read it if we have quote pregnant people

SPEAKER_05: then how says marco rubio in i'm sure completely good faith yes can row be about a woman's right to choose ah because now that we've perverted the concept of womanhood yes with the existence of trans people then the question of abortion is utterly specious okay i don't let's not even go there saying

SPEAKER_185: what the is a note gonna do for this well oh good there's a note on it well it's not the worst thing

SPEAKER_102: i've ever read it might explain it or might explain his history or like he's referring to trans people

Jason Calacanis: here well i mean people might not get it at first a popular republican trope that as long as women don't actually exist neither can abortion perfect i think actually might be do for anybody well i think

SPEAKER_34: there might be people who when they read the tweet don't understand it at face value i guess that's the idea putting more context in it or you know maybe you could link to you know other tweets by him

SPEAKER_142: anyway let's keep going here you're like in case you're wondering how loathsome this tweet really is

SPEAKER_34: let me help you understand okay here we go and then here's a new york post pansexual florida teacher can for discussing orientation with students okay so i guess that's the don't say gay slash parents rights

SPEAKER_23: kind of post to be i mean there's one where i feel like you tricked me today but i'm not trying to

SPEAKER_192: trigger you this was not i'm not trolling you i promise these are the ones leaked to me it's a

SPEAKER_60: obviously i think what this is showing is like that birdwatch at least can identify

SPEAKER_54: anybody can identify these you could already report them anyway okay so let's okay but i think

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SPEAKER_34: the goals what are they okay why don't you read this one and just describe what we're seeing here on the screen for the people listening so this is the third tab on the bird watch tab

SPEAKER_05: in which right so then you uh bird watcher are also asked to review notes that have been rated helpful

Jason Calacanis: by contributors bird watch relies on contributors to rate each other's notes notes shown on these tweets have been rated helpful by contributors of multiple perspectives ah that's a key graph at the end there

SPEAKER_34: so they're saying multiple people wait hold on go back to that contributors of multiple perspectives so they're not using political leaning here oh we don't know well well they're not right and

SPEAKER_05: this could be like when this could be like when facebook was like we're gonna surface all news sources and they were like and it includes breitbart and alex jones and daily wire exactly feelings on

SPEAKER_10: roe v way right just can't wait for those um by contributors of multiple perspectives so they made

SPEAKER_23: the language they're using is specifically to uncharge it right they're trying to keep this like cool and calm here contributors of multiple perspectives i i salute them for writing good copy i think it's good copy okay so the example given here let's scroll down i wish i had more examples of the notes to be honest uh i know we have a lot of just scroll down here let's take a look at

SPEAKER_70: this tweets here's a governor scroll down um okay so here's some uh do we see the rest of this

SPEAKER_218: screenshot yeah but it says stit claims all four million oklahomans so they're basically uh taking a

SPEAKER_05: claim by a uh right so he says in this case the tweet by the governor in oklahoma says i represent

Jason Calacanis: all four million oklahomans who overwhelmingly want to protect the unborn one assumes the note here then

SPEAKER_05: goes on to say all four million oklahomans have been polled and in fact uh this is not accurate

SPEAKER_06: right yeah okay yeah so great that's a but again that would be in the replies so i don't totally understand how the well proximity and featuring matters yeah so if it's in the replies people

SPEAKER_56: are like you're saying that because you're a west coast east coast coastal elite or you're saying that

SPEAKER_64: because you're a hillbilly you know from appalachia here it's like there was some sort of process

SPEAKER_34: the community of bird watchers who are thoughtful and monitored in some way voted this note as the best note so i have a feeling that the notes will be ranked by how helpful they were and that what they hope is if you're good at voting them and you're not using bias or trying to spin that the best note will make it to the top so they're probably trying to find thoughtful people with a sense of purpose now you say hey you know that's never going to work well it's kind of working over at wikipedia um more often than not i think most of the stuff on the wikipedia is surprisingly accurate for the majority of large pages long tail pages no they're not edited they're not looked at and if you have

SPEAKER_139: your profile on there it's just going to be your haters anything it can happen yeah although if somebody

SPEAKER_190: would update my photo that'd be amazing it's like 15 years old i look 11. um uh that's a bad thing

SPEAKER_227: it's right if you just want to can somebody put a thin jason photo on there not a bad jason

SPEAKER_05: because i like can't edit my own i uh am definitely not of the opinion that this could never work my initial response is yeah let's go let's get there yeah my initial response is that this is overly complicated when in fact it's it's a wikim it's a wikipedia model when they could just start with a reddit model like i actually think if you could upvote and downvote that they do that in

SPEAKER_56: replies now i think they do show the replies based on the likes i know that was like an experiment they

SPEAKER_165: were doing i don't know if they broadly did it right but then it becomes a popularity contest molly

David Friedberg: where it's you know the top one is going to be maybe the joke the top one's going to be i mean yes

Jason Calacanis: the most honestly i read a lot of reddit so my two i actually think that my two trusted most trusted news sources in a weird way are wikipedia and reddit because i believe that the bulk of that audience on reddit depending on which community you're in let's be clear but even still like this is a community that's actually devoted to a really smart discourse and i don't see things get voted up or voted down just because it's like oh this conforms with my worldview it's more like wow this contains a lot of really interesting information and it's very useful and if that was the message around upvoting downvoting and you had managed to get rid of spam and bots then i think it's not so much about because right now surfacing replies based on likes is a popularity contest but including down votes allows for moderating influences on either side i just think there's a simpler way

SPEAKER_05: to improve this than like a sort of like anonymous layer of hand-picked elite you know twitter roddy who are empowered to deal with this if i know who they all are maybe there's that but it just i don't

SPEAKER_19: know it feels a little like here's the thing if you know who they are then you can start lobbying

SPEAKER_245: them right then you just come for them yeah so then it's just them and you yeah so then it's an

Jason Calacanis: unelected board of mysterious elites who get to decide i mean they're they're policing each other but

SPEAKER_56: i don't know it's just like it's complicated that would be the most it's overly complex it's the most

SPEAKER_34: that's the most uh cynical slash concerning world view of it right that's the if this is executed horribly that would be the possibility i'll take the other side yeah um if they pick thoughtful people and you have enough thoughtful people there even if there is bias in aggregate people are going to pick the most sensible note to put up there and it's only a note uh for explanation and clarity it's not the final answer so if it is framed as here's a note on this tweet from the community and the people who uh read tweets if you want to see these and you don't have to see them you could turn them off maybe would be an option don't show me these but if you do choose to see them this is what a group of thoughtful community members um voted as the most important uh context for you to know so it's just context and it's context from the community mods i think if it's framed as here's some context from community mods not the definitive answer it could be very helpful and so context matters i think that's why i like it being right under the tweet and if even if it wasn't opened if it just said community notes uh or community manager notes that's kind of what that you know had this term called list moms it wasn't gender specific it was just the mothering concept of you know being nurturing there were there was a concept of a list mom for list serves list serves were like the original group message boards

SPEAKER_23: for people who don't know and you would just sign up for an email list and then you would get flooded with 300 emails in a day people talking about star wars uh or lord of the rings i mean moderation is

Jason Calacanis: great yeah like wikipedia works a moderate you know we have moderators in our chat like it is really it has traditionally been a very valuable concept in terms of keeping online communities

SPEAKER_34: when does it work molly when does moderation work in your experience you know in decades of experience on the internet and yeah for you and before that online services when have you seen it work well what do you think makes it work i think it all mentioned our youtube uh chat room so right i think

SPEAKER_05: it always works well i think like always when you have impassionate when you have passionate empowered people as part of communities who are in charge of taking care of those communities and keeping them

Jason Calacanis: safe it works until there's a certain amount of scale or lack of empowerment or overwhelming by bots and brigades that makes it impossible so the question is whether this can be accomplished at twitter at scale and whether people will trust this moderation layer it look every effort in this

SPEAKER_49: direction by twitter is a good one let me be clear yeah like i like that's a good one

SPEAKER_05: so i give it a thumbs up for the experiment you like yes actually i will say thumbs up to experimentation implementation to me seems complicated but i think just because we haven't seen it in the wild

Jason Calacanis: and we're bouncing back and forth between the mod view and the public view and the this and that and you know so but yes bravo for trying everything to make this thing better you might not realize it

SPEAKER_17: but you've probably used intercom before you know when you visit a website and that little chat bubble pops up

SPEAKER_196: and they help you with any question you have well that's intercom i literally used it this weekend it's the best way to connect with your customers intercom's platform helps you engage and support your users through personalized chat like experiences and over 25 000 companies use it every single day i kid you not because they want to foster their relationship with customers they want to covet those customers and those customers have great things to say in fact here's a testimonial from twitter it's almost like all websites i visit with that intercom chat button i instantly associate them with great customer service just like intercom intended so if you're an early stage high growth startup you can get access to intercom's early stage academy today at a 95 discount join the program today at intercom dot com slash early dash stage or email them that's how cool they are at intercom they'll just you just email them startups at intercom.io how easy is that by the way you can register for intercom's next custom experience for growth webinar on may 18th by clicking on the link in our youtube description or the episode

SPEAKER_34: page great job intercom i would say you kind of nailed it in there uh to make it even more succinct the communities um that really have great moderation is when you select people who truly care about that community and have great intent so it really is in who you select it is and so how did we select the mods for our youtube chat which have the ability to ban somebody time somebody out that you know they have like god powers in our chat yeah we can't sit there when we're on air and do it but you know i'm a ch i'm a mod for nyx fan tv how did i get that privilege they saw me there every night and they heard me dial in and they saw my contributions and they said jacal really cares about the knicks he's been here for 20 nights he's commented on 20 games yeah um let's make him a mod we saw a beard script we saw zen profit we saw folks yeah who showed up every day for youtube.com slash this weekend we said yeah it's obvious we should be a mod and if they did a bad job we would take them out so you kind of lightly met you pick people in the community who truly care as you pointed out and you empower them and i guess you gotta yeah you gotta monitor them make sure they don't go rogue um and there could be some going rogue but i think this is an interesting idea some people might say just no thumbs on the scale just let people interpret for themselves yeah i don't think that's helpful other people might you know see here's the problem if you hire a bunch of fact checkers there's a certain group of people out there who are just unbelievable liars and another group and they don't care about their lies like they're like lying is trolling to them so it's kind

SPEAKER_273: of fun and there's one side who uses lying kind of as a sport like a blood sport and there's another group that uses framing and words as their sport i don't want to tell you which side it is but if you watch politics there's one group who uses framing and emotion and then there's another group that just

SPEAKER_275: uses straight up lies and trolling to great effect fire hose of lies yeah and fact checking we know

SPEAKER_05: what's interesting what's valuable about the mod concept and again i keep going back to wikipedia and reddit which i think are like remarkably well accurate and managed and well executed because they are because they have communities who care about them in charge of making sure that they're okay places or horrible places but whatever um what works about that is that it is not top down and we also know that fact checking as a concept like sadly in many cases doesn't work it reinforces the lie like it

SPEAKER_49: just restates it and it also because of the way our brains literally work in terms of the grooves

SPEAKER_139: hardens positions yeah weird that is a that is a very weird thing that we will have to overcome especially when the leaders of a certain group are like just keep going in harder and harder on the lies

SPEAKER_34: i mean i'm yeah i mean let me just be clear i'm talking about the election lie conspiracy that the election was rigged yeah and you lose like 61 cases or whatever number of cases they did and i i think trump has every right and his group to take every single court case that they want to spend money on that's how the justice system works but when you lose 30 40 50 60 whatever the number wound up being i think it was in the 60s that they lost at some point we and they don't have like a single piece of evidence that like it was rigged at a certain point you're like you lost 60 times like do you need

SPEAKER_273: to lose 120 or 70 what's the number of court cases you need to lose for us to deem you a loser like the justice system makes mistakes i doubt it gets it wrong 62 times in 62 two different venues i hate to be political here but was it not obvious to everybody and to your point for people who believe it the

SPEAKER_102: groove had been you know so carved in their brains that they can't get out of the groove that it was stolen and what 60 court cases does is it sows doubt because on the other side you're like why would

Jason Calacanis: there be 60 court cases about this if it wasn't if there wasn't something to it so you just you keep repeating and repeating and repeating the lie and it doesn't matter how many times someone says that's a lie some portion of the population is going to be like yeah but it keeps coming up and where there's

SPEAKER_23: smoke there's this issue with saxophone it's like there was no russian collusion and then i give the facts and i'm like yeah but yeah what about this and what about this meeting and what about you know this person getting a fine this person going to jail and then these people getting pardoned like all of this was because of russian interference and like yeah but trump wasn't ever proven to be a puppet for putin but you just said the whole russian collusion thing was false right there was all these examples of russian collusion did you not read them the mule report they didn't get a smoking gun of trump you know getting a bag of cash and he you know but you did have all these people around him meeting with the russians and you had him asking for them to hack hillary's email so like what about that

SPEAKER_287: and they're like oh yeah well that's different then all of a sudden their argument breaks down

SPEAKER_288: and they don't want to talk about it anymore very disciplined sax is very disciplined oh god he's so

SPEAKER_289: just messaging let's just put it that's very uh and we're still friends yep there you go there we're

SPEAKER_291: still friends that's that's it for one for friday one for friday which is throughout the five because this is such big news producing on the fly we're moderating it's too big news this is a

SPEAKER_24: this week it's startups exclusive if you have an exclusive uh we don't pay for scoops here uh so don't i'm not sending you a bottle of um don julio but the person who gave me these leaked screenshots uh i'm sending you a bottle of don julio thank you yeah yeah thanks for the screenshots uh this is an exclusive if you are going to rewrite this verge fox business insider muscling

SPEAKER_295: to muscling muscling to mollywood and jaco thank you that's right have a great weekend everybody

SPEAKER_298: we'll see you next time muscling okay bye all right everybody it's friday it's friday here and

SPEAKER_300: everybody loves at the end of the friday episode rachel braun rachel reporting here with her okay boomer segment tell us rachel who do you have on okay boomer this week this week i got to talk to patrick

SPEAKER_303: mcdonnell he is the co-founder of flapjack flapjack's a really cool startup that uses data

SPEAKER_05: to optimize the layout of restaurant menus flapjack is also one of my favorite fake swear words from when i was trying not to corrupt my child um how big a business is this like what does patrick have to say about flapjack and and why why that specifically restaurant menus so we did talk a lot about how he got

SPEAKER_309: into the restaurant industry um he found out this was a pretty big problem when he started making air filters for people during the pandemic people that were buying the air filters were restaurants you know because they wanted people to come in and start eating inside again um from doing that he found out that a lot of these companies had issues with their uh with their restaurant design um even the grammar in some of the menus kind of sucked and he found out that if he just kind of tweaked the menus um people were able to save a ton of money and i thought that was

SPEAKER_312: kind of a cool cool way he found it interesting so this is ai or it's a consulting service so they

SPEAKER_34: look at the menu and they consult with you and tell you hey listen your caesar salad would do better if you had shrimp and you could say plus seven dollars for shrimp and you had a flank steak plus six dollars or eight dollars for flank steak that's a layup for you why don't you have you know add chicken add shrimp add flying steak to the bottom of any salad yeah is it that kind of like advice that you would think every restaurateur would know but maybe it's not obvious so exactly they use food cost data

SPEAKER_317: sales data and online reviews to design the most profitable menu um he also said that there is like

SPEAKER_309: an eight to ten increase in gross profit after people use flapjack and eight to ten x or percent

SPEAKER_321: percent percent percent yeah yeah so i said not possible to be eight to ten x but not in restaurants

SPEAKER_34: percent makes sense because if you could lower it you could certainly lower your food cost by five percent you could certainly increase orders by five percent i mean all that optimization is there do they did he talk about taking into account i know we're totally like we're interested we're interested the feedback that you give on uber or doordash because they ask you to thumbs up and down stuff on an individual item basis and if you thumbs it down they might ask you why hey it came cold whatever and because you know it's let's face it some things don't travel well maybe the restaurant tour thinks it does in optimal conditions but in reality you know if you order ramen you know sometimes it comes in a big globule brick of ramen and you're like this is terrible and then some places seem to have figured out how to deliver ramen without making it turn into a brick of you got

SPEAKER_327: to separate the broth who's not doing that he did not mention it being used for uber eats or anything

SPEAKER_317: but i think that'd be a great use case he's in a uh in a incubator type of thing a residency program called hf zero uh down in miami so i'm sure he's he's building out there i like it so and you know

SPEAKER_329: it's really interesting what's going on did you get an allocation i think it'd be really you may need an

SPEAKER_05: allocation i think and then the funny part so okay let's we'll call him up but the funny thing is that actually despite our interest in the business it's like the least interesting thing about this kid who worked on the flamethrower project at the boring company who negotiated from a spoon to a bmw like

SPEAKER_332: this sounds like a really fascinating founder yeah he is crazy cool so he was the first and only i

SPEAKER_317: believe full-time employee at the boring com the boring companies not a flamethrower project which was really cool and then he was a project a product manager at dropbox um okay so the job is starting

SPEAKER_309: to start about to the jump to creating a uh startup i thought was kind of interesting going from like

SPEAKER_334: two kind of pretty big companies excited to hear your interviews everybody yeah stick with us nicely done

SPEAKER_343: good catch good get okay boomer i understood the assignment so thank you so much patrick for coming on the segment of okay boomer so to give everybody a little bit of backstory i met patrick because i

SPEAKER_317: showed up hf zero which is a hacker fellowship in miami i heard there was a bunch of cool people there and i quite literally just went to your guys's little compound to see what was up you were sitting outside eating and we talked for a little bit and i realized your startup would be something that jason would be really interested in and you were really funny so i thought you'd be a great person to have on the segment you are the co-founder of flapjack right yeah that's correct awesome so can you give

SPEAKER_348: us a rundown of what flapjack is yeah so we optimize restaurant menus at least as a starting point so we like leverage sales data online review data food costing eye tracking studies to optimize

SPEAKER_350: like a piece of paper um so it's effectively like conversion optimization or like funnel optimization

SPEAKER_348: except we do it on like a printed out item so we can generally lift restaurant gross profits like eight to ten percent which is pretty meaningful for restaurants that's like another 70k for like

SPEAKER_353: our average customer that's awesome and so are you guys only doing physical paper menus right now or

SPEAKER_348: do you ever do online menus we're starting out with paper just because like the competition the space is

SPEAKER_350: less restaurants already understand it we're seeing a lot of restaurants switch back from qr codes to paper menus but it's like a really good wedge like it enables us to like get access to a lot of like restaurant data we get their um live order data their inventory data their food costing data like their food delivery profiles so like i think we can kind of position this almost as like maybe like

SPEAKER_348: a main street to restaurants where we just like continually find you know 5 10 20k just kind of

SPEAKER_353: like lying around their business that's awesome i love this idea because i do not like qr code menus

SPEAKER_317: i don't hate them in the beginning i kind of understood like why we had to do them especially when we were like slowly getting back to like the restaurant world but at this point i hate the fact that sometimes it takes a long time to like open up the actual qr codes somebody always has a problem with it if you're with a big group and also like once you're on your phone in the beginning of like a meal i feel like it's a little bit difficult to get off so super excited to see flapjack come into play and can you also explain what hf0 is the area that we met i assume you're are you still there

SPEAKER_358: right now oh yeah i'm still with the palm trees i can tell i'm still uh in our hotel uh yeah it stands

SPEAKER_350: for hacker fellowship zero the idea is it's like a 12-week kind of like residency out here in miami

SPEAKER_348: so in person kind of all like housing food like laundry room turning kind of everything's done with the idea that you can just like singularity kind of like focus um so it's been like really refreshing it's been nice to have like been able to just like fully work on one problem for this kind of period of time um yeah it's been really fantastic very cool awesome and how did you find out about it was this

SPEAKER_362: like some application process or do people find you ah they're a little under the radar maybe a little

SPEAKER_348: bit on purpose uh we got connected with the man who he was like i have a background in mechanical

SPEAKER_350: engineering and he was working on some hardware stuff so just like curious uh he like knew that

SPEAKER_348: we were about ready to like start fundraising uh and he's like hey you should like look at these people

SPEAKER_364: instead um and then kind of got talked into coming out here so here we are very cool so it's a really

SPEAKER_353: really cool area that you guys um are living at like you kind of mentioned it's like a hotel to me

SPEAKER_317: they almost felt like i was in like a college dorm area like a really tropical college dorm with like a bar fairly close by so how has it been having to focus on flapjack like solely literally nothing else like you guys aren't cooking like you said there's there's meals that are provided for you everything's really done up just make sure you can focus has this like intense period you think helped

SPEAKER_366: flapjack or do you feel just incredibly burnt out from it um i think it's like something that you can

SPEAKER_348: do for like a short period of time like i don't think burnt out is quite the right word but i definitely think you can like have to keep this up intensity for like a period of time get the business where it needs to be like closed we're like raising kind of like a pre-c to c route we'll like have that close pretty soon um uh and like i think that's important and then like i think i might

SPEAKER_364: need to take like a little bit of a vacation after this for you know three four days and maybe get slightly more on like a a little bit of a more normal work schedule and like maybe take like a day off on the

SPEAKER_317: weekends oh my gosh a day off don't say that yeah i i want to i know right i want to flashback because you have a really interesting background and i know that because you kind of mentioned it when we were talking but then because you you were so happy to come on the show thank you so much i was able to stalk you a ton on the internet and i found a lot of cool stuff about you um one thing i do want to read out loud from your linkedin you're a 2019 grad from usc you did mechanical engineering this

SPEAKER_353: activity stood out a lot to me personal bartering starting with a spoon gradually traded up to a bmw

SPEAKER_378: 320 ai on craigslist is that true yeah uh it was like on craigslist and based marketplace and like

SPEAKER_350: back when offer up and let go were a little bit more of a thing uh i don't know it was fun it was like i read the story about the guy who went from the paperclip to the house um and i'd like uh i just like sold a lot of stuff on craigslist and ebay as a child uh for better or for worse uh so like i kind of wanted to see if i could do it so like i went from like a spoon to like a piece of antique uh film equipment the antique film equipment to like a bicycle trailer that you like haul your kids in behind a bicycle from that to like a garbage disposal garbage disposal to a security camera system a security camera system to like a set of rims and tires that to a moped moped to this kind of like beater acura done this beater accurate to this like bmw and then i sold i graduated college uh but it was great it was like it was yeah you'd be amazed like it's just all about kind of like relative values like how do you find somebody who like isn't willing to put in the work to sell something but like wants the item you have um i want to do it again there's like some

SPEAKER_359: people who popped off on tiktok with it recently i saw i saw i thought this was i was like dang like was this part of a challenge or something but uh because you graduated in 2019 i guess you

SPEAKER_317: weren't able to even put this up on tiktok or musically i guess would be back then right

SPEAKER_358: yeah yeah yeah i'm jealous they've uh there's people who picked up some really good size audiences

SPEAKER_317: doing it capitalized on that i also found out that you were the only full-time employee on elon musk's not a flamethrower project that was really cool how did you get from doing things like trading a spoon on craigslist to um working on this flamethrower at the boring company being a pm at dropbox which is the only thing that i that you told me about when i uh met up with you at hf zero to founding um

SPEAKER_366: flapjack what what is this timeline and how did you find yourself doing a bunch of really cool things

SPEAKER_348: let's see so i i studied mechanical engineering in college somewhere around like junior year i like worked a couple internships and i'm like i like this just isn't like the right like path for me

SPEAKER_350: like there's people are way too excited about this then like i thought i'd really love it but it's like a great place to be from and i'm really glad but um so i'm like okay now what so uh i was like okay i like have like a mechanical engineering portfolio like things that i built but i don't really have like a business portfolio or like anything else like i have a lot of things that i've like welded or like designed but like i'm like okay i'll try the spoon project like i'd done it once before back in like high school i went from like an xbox controller to like a dirt bike um so i'm like i'll try that that's like i don't know like a good story i can like get that on kind of a portfolio and then like the stars kind of aligned i don't know some combination like hard work and meets opportunity meets like some dumb luck and like the boring company had sold flamethrowers uh and they're kind of like looking for somebody i don't want to say run the project but like i was a student in college um but just kind of like take on just like the day-to-day work of it so like i i cold emailed elon's chief of staff who kind of passed the message down to the boring company kind of like the background worked out they want somebody with a hardware background they like appreciated the hacky projects uh i i was like a student at the time so i could just kind of like hop out of school and like you know was willing to like work pretty hard hours so really thankful them it was like a really fantastic opportunity like i owe him a lot for it um that's awesome and then like i'm like okay like i'm kind of doing product work here like i don't know everything from like instructions to

SPEAKER_348: assembly to pick up events to like customer support like if you emailed flamethrowersaboringcompany.com

SPEAKER_350: i responded um and i'm like well there's like kind of product work like maybe i can get like a pm job in tech and they're like kind of notoriously like challenging to get like a lot of people applying um dropbox like valued people with like interesting backgrounds like i had kind of like a weird story a little bit of uh um just like your non-traditional uh like pm and tech job uh and like the hiring manager and kind of person running the program really appreciated that um so yeah i don't know some combination like things compounding some kind of like dumb luck some like uh i don't know i i don't

SPEAKER_371: quite yeah this is a great answer but no that is a really really good answer because it sounds like

SPEAKER_353: you said before that you hacked a bunch of projects together and i wish that was something that more people were told in college to do because i actually think projects matter 10 times worse than like anything you actually end up doing in the classroom um what kind of projects were you hacking together

SPEAKER_317: that you ended up showing the boring company and dropbox yeah let's see for boring the like trading

SPEAKER_348: up to a spoon to a car was like a big one um i had like some hardware projects around like i had

SPEAKER_350: worked for like a drone company an underwater robotics company uh and that was important just to show some

SPEAKER_348: like technical proficiency because it's like a hardware project and like most of the engineering work was done but um there's like a little bit of kind of like hold over um uh and then like going into dropbox like i had some kind of specific almost like case studies that i could like compartmentalize out of flamethrowers um that like showed like understanding your customers like how to think about production schedules and like um like how to interpret data and like that was really important

SPEAKER_353: how did you find yourself then going seems like you had a pretty heavy hardware background you really liked hardware it sounds like you were doing a bunch of projects in it um but then going to flapjack this doesn't sound like there's any hardware in it right now do you ever think that you're gonna like want that hardware experience again or do you think you found like a love here in that product space um

SPEAKER_348: doing software yeah i guess like i ended up with flapjack because i had prior small business producing like air filters for restaurants during the pandemic which was like pre-vaccine how did you find out that was like a thing how did you get into this this was a project with like a good friend it was it was like hey we were frustrated because like during cover there's been like a lot of focus

SPEAKER_350: on like hand sanitizer right which is great yeah but like you get code from like respiratory droplets like things floating in the air so like there should just be air filters everywhere right so we found this like vice article that was if you take like a box fan and you strap like a merv 13 filter on the back it's like a really effective air filter uh and i'm like i understand hardware like i can put a nice little sheet metal housing around this and we like produce this to scale so like produced a couple hundred of them and like installed around the bay area like air filtration is is not a fantastic business for a variety of reasons um uh but started to like get to know restaurant owners and like the conversation just kept kind of being like hey thanks for the air filter but like can you help me stay in business next month instead uh yeah so kind of just started like walking through their business of like where are the opportunities is it in like spoilage or inventory or like labor or whatever it might be and then like stumbled upon kind of menus and like it's kind of this field called like menu engineering or menu optimization like new from time at dropbox of like you know you can run

SPEAKER_348: experiments and like kind of nudge users to do things like have really big lifts to pay on like how you design your product and then started to look at these menus i'm like these aren't like professionally designed not because like a restaurant doesn't value it but just because they have a lot going on so like did some menus at places as like experiments for free and like

SPEAKER_350: started to get data back it's like wow like these people are going to make another like fifty thousand dollars off of this um and then they started to like email me right weekly to make updates to the

SPEAKER_348: menus oh my gosh okay i'm like not only is like a consulting business like where where they'll be like paying up front fee but like i think there's a need for kind of like an ongoing menu management system that like enables them to edit their menus because they have you know like six seven menus but then can also just like drive additional value out and continually optimize it for time were you

SPEAKER_371: doing this while you were working at dropbox or did you realize somewhere during the time that you know consulting is obviously a pretty time consuming consuming thing to do like how long were

SPEAKER_348: you at dropbox i was at dropbox for a year and a half um i mean like in in all honesty like i was actually laid off from dropbox um around ah geez like a year ago um so like had a decision of it's like okay i can like go back into tech like i'm thankful that like dropbox name like experience like carry some weight and like felt like i could get a job somewhere doing like something that i would love um and dropbox brought like a good amount of resources to like just help with that transition um uh but also thought like there might kind of be maybe something that was a little bit kind of

SPEAKER_350: greener feel it's something that like i can maybe find a little more more meaning in um and i really enjoyed working with like small businesses at dropbox and i really enjoyed restaurants and like thought that like they could just get like a little more kind of like wind in their sail which would be like a little more data savvy if you just kind of like talk to them and approach them the right right way and just like really understood um them so kind of just took like a flyer on it

SPEAKER_353: um wow that's so crazy so do you think you would have um taken the jump to become a full-time entrepreneur if it wasn't for getting laid off or do you think you would have done it and it just

SPEAKER_348: would have taken a little bit more time i don't know it's hard to say um i definitely think i like

SPEAKER_350: always had side hustles and i've always had projects um uh just like always going on like those are just my hobbies right it was like trading on craigslist but like there's always

SPEAKER_348: a little bit of a difference between those and you know something that's like a company or something that can have venture returns uh i think it's like easy to like lie to yourself of like oh i'll get

SPEAKER_350: it done you know in six months or a year and i think i've like watched a lot of people i know kind

SPEAKER_348: of do that um i mean hindsight will tell in 2020 we're still pretty early over here with flapjack

SPEAKER_389: of like if this was the right decision um uh but but regardless it's like been like a fun adventure

SPEAKER_353: how has going to a a hacker fellowship benefited flapjack or just you as a founder yeah i was a

SPEAKER_350: little skeptical at first not gonna lie i think i had like gotten some bad advice from uh people that like incubators and accelerators are like a waste of time there's like really expensive in

SPEAKER_348: terms like equity i think there's some truth to that i think it's more of like your odds of success as like an entrepreneur entrepreneur and as like a startup are just like unfortunately pretty low at

SPEAKER_350: least like having these like crazy venture returns right like you know you being becoming a unicorn is like 10 but probably lower i don't even know it like it's not super high so like i think it's like a first time like founder especially like you know it's been time in tech like didn't have a deep enough network to like raise a funding round off of or at least didn't think so like i think there's just like a lot of just like good housekeeping that you kind of pick up that i think like would have taken us a lot longer to figure out uh just like you know we're under charging for a long time so like increasing prices and like being honest of like okay like we should hit these prices because like if we don't like then like the margins on like this being like a venture scalable company which like isn't there so we're like backing the product into this and like it ends up working out and like we're in a good place but i think it would have taken us another like three months um or even to think about like how like growth metrics and like you know how much to grow monthly and like how to think about that and how to back into hiring um uh like i think maybe like incubators and accelerators are maybe like attacks on kind of first-time entrepreneurs like that's okay

SPEAKER_397: and like maybe you can get around it um uh but like overall like i think like i'm pretty happy that

SPEAKER_353: we're here and it was the right decision in hindsight that is a great analogy like attacks on first-time founders because i like how at least i guess i haven't seen that many accelerators and incubators operate but you know jason obviously has um founder you and things like that that happens um and it's

SPEAKER_366: really interesting hearing some of the stuff they cover because it's it comes down where it's just like the almost like the basics and i feel like if you don't have like a good foundation as a founder with those basics it is so easy to mess up along the way and it's almost worth like having to shell out that portion of your company like you kind of mentioned in equity to have a really really stable

SPEAKER_346: foundation as you like as time goes on your company grows um where yeah yeah i i i don't mean a

SPEAKER_348: taxes like a negative form i think it's like uh like you have a lot of shots and like doing entrepreneurial things you can do multiple times like i think you can do it on your own you can

SPEAKER_364: definitely do without i just think it's maybe a little bit of like a harder journey oh yeah

SPEAKER_353: and now that you know it i feel like now you know it so do you think that you would go in for example like if you start another startup do you think that you'd ever like go back into

SPEAKER_348: another like accelerator or incubator um maybe i think it depends on like the company in your stage and your success um i think like our goal coming out of this was to like get the underlying business metrics working out making sure we like had happy customers but then also like uh the process of fundraising is just like very opaque like very much designed to be opaque and it felt like we just like needed just might have like read up a lot on it just like needed some like clarity on like how to run a process how to like get intros how to think about it how much to raise or what cap um so i i think it depends on like whether your business is venture scalable whether it's not whether it's like super out there and you kind of like need these champions like pushing on the bleeding edge or like maybe it just like makes sense kind of on the surface and like you can just

SPEAKER_364: raise around on your own or like maybe you have enough success too so i i don't know hard to say

SPEAKER_353: who do you think would be like the best contender like what types of startups and what stage

SPEAKER_348: to do something like a hacker fellowship yeah um i mean it depends on your risk profile at least to us it was important that we had kind of like prove this out to ourselves um i definitely think you can take a different approach and just kind of like go in and be like we'll figure something out but um i think it was important that we felt like we had customers we had some data behind it we like knew that this generally worked especially because like what we're pitching is maybe like a little bit of kind of like a strange concept to like people who aren't super familiar with restaurants

SPEAKER_364: like we optimize pieces of paper at least to start um uh i don't remember the question now i'm just off

SPEAKER_413: on a tangent but no you're good so perfectly fine because i don't know if i could go back to it anyway

SPEAKER_353: so um but you said optimizing pieces of paper and this is just where you guys are starting you said that

SPEAKER_366: multiple times so obviously this sounds like what you're doing is like you're collecting data what is your guys's long-term goal with flapjack yeah i think we can kind of be like like the main

SPEAKER_348: street almost of restaurants where like we just kind of help them find money in their business without that much work so like menus act as like a really good vehicle where like we're able to get access to like a lot of data within the restaurant we're able to understand how it operates um and we're able to like build a lot of goodwill with that customer um and they like understand it through the context like we get good data back from it and we're like it's like a little magical they're like we're going to make an extra 50 000 a year and like that's really meaningful to most of our customers but then it's also easy to kind of like see opportunities in their business where like we can just kind of make small tweaks and just like find them another you know 5 10 20k like their credit card processing rate can be you know dropped a tenth of a percent or something or like um the way they order inventory like one company is charging them more than another or like their utilities can be negotiated down or like some of the like vendors and sas products they pay for can be negotiated down um and like we get access to all this information like through the menu process and like we just have more data on restaurants and pretty much any other vendor uh so like i think that's kind of like the long term like i really like the idea of kind of being like the friend to like all restaurants where you're just like every month you're finding them another you know 5 10 20 000 in their business and like hopefully you have a really good relationship with them through

SPEAKER_353: that that's awesome and is it difficult to be selling to restaurants like selling software like this

SPEAKER_366: because this is a notoriously difficult group of people to adopt new technology or do you find that they're pretty okay with it i used to work at a fellowship that did like supply chain mobility and whenever we dealt with like people in trucking it was like pulling teeth to get them to adopt something new you know um so what is what is it like trying to sell to people that are restaurant owners yeah i

SPEAKER_348: think people a little bit get it wrong and people say that it's really challenging and like i think selling to all customers is challenging or like has its challenges i think no you know anytime any who's gonna pay you four or five thousand dollars like there's challenges with it um uh i think like what people get wrong is like restaurants only really pay for two different types of things like they pay for things that they have to have like a point of sale system inventory labor rent you know utilities or they pay for things that like directly make them more money like food delivery and like it is attributable to ubereats that this order came in and like they can go in the order eats dashboard and be like we're gonna make an extra 2k this month even if that like cannibalizes other channels um so like i think as long as we always stay in this kind of like vein of like we will impact your bottom line we'll do it in like a trackable way in a way that like you understand and like can um kind of like pull back to us like i think we'll be in an okay spot got you and i kind

SPEAKER_353: of want to make a little bit of a 180 but what was really interesting too when i was talking to you and uh indoor co-founder while we were eating dinner that one day was that you guys said you were from sf and you were in miami and you were planning on going back to sf and i i do meet a

SPEAKER_366: lot of people from sf that made their way down to miami but most of them are pretty gung-ho about staying around there what is the difference between being like a founder in this space in in miami which i feel like is like the new hot place to be in tech especially if you're young versus sf which is like

SPEAKER_348: such a legacy city yeah i mean so like i guess i'm not entirely sure where we'll be in all honesty because we we keep having picking up customers out here but we also have customers in the bay area so like i think we'll be somewhere between the two um uh i guess like i grew up in the bay area in the east bay uh so like i have like a good amount of just like friends and family and just kind of like

SPEAKER_350: roots there uh i i also just like haven't really left this kind of like hfo bubble over here like

SPEAKER_358: i've literally just kind of like been at this hotel for a couple months and like you need to explain

SPEAKER_371: like what this place looks like i took an uber out to this place i've actually went to it once

SPEAKER_353: without knowing during miami hack week i didn't know that it was hf sears thing um but explain to

SPEAKER_358: everybody what this place looks like because this is so interesting to me yeah uh uh you guys should have have dave on the podcast i don't i don't know i don't know if i should yeah i'm meant to be like the uh uh the spokesperson for this uh um it's like it's a cool compound it's like it's at this hotel

SPEAKER_350: and it's like three historic buildings like hundred year old buildings built by shipbuilders

SPEAKER_348: uh and then kind of like a couple like apartment rows on it with kind of this like big courtyard it's kind of like a hotel meets a hostel meets like i don't know it also has like a bar on the side

SPEAKER_350: that honestly i've never been to but like it's like kind of tries to be a nightclub it's actually a little bit of a noisy neighbor um uh it is like kind of on the edge of like a little havana and brickle and like it feels like kind of like they found like a miami hack house here um yeah

SPEAKER_371: definitely i definitely think that's a good description of it and what are the age ranges

SPEAKER_353: um between the people that you are currently working like working around because i was talking to the wonderful founders of paella and they were saying that in their cohort there was somebody i

SPEAKER_366: believe as young as like 14 or something in theirs and i thought that was very incredible

SPEAKER_358: so what is the age range for you guys uh i think here it's like 23 to honest like 50 something it's

SPEAKER_348: pretty broad uh definitely no 14 year olds i think it generally gears towards like mid to late 20s uh i definitely think like yeah people there's like this notion of like the college dropout starting stuff like maybe that's true but i also feel like the majority of people at least like i hang out with their c or like have like been through a couple jobs in tech and like have noticed a problem and are now

SPEAKER_371: working on that yeah do you find it to be like beneficial than having that experience at the

SPEAKER_353: boring company and at dropbox as a founder like i feel like a ton of my friends have jumped i mean myself included like i haven't worked a corporate besides an internship i've never worked in big tech or a very corporate job for that matter like do you think having that experience has benefited you

SPEAKER_366: as a founder or do you think that's a step that like gen z founders as a whole could skip

SPEAKER_348: um i think like every job can teach you something i think there's always questions of like how long you should spend there and like when does the learning stop at least for me like the learnings from dropbox were like how you can like systematically like build products use user data research talk to customers like what's the role of like an engineering manager or like a researcher just like how does a company that historically has like had good success iterating on features like getting growth like function um and like the boring company was like almost the exact opposite it's like how do you

SPEAKER_350: take a bunch of people who've like never dug a tunnel before and like dig a tunnel as fast as possible yeah um uh yeah just like wildly different cultures wildly different goals like yeah just complete opposites uh and like they both have their pros and cons and like at least i was fortunate enough to

SPEAKER_348: kind of see both i think like the lessons for boring were like you can just have a lot of people move like really freaking fast doing something really amazing and the lessons from dropbox where like

SPEAKER_411: you can be really methodical about like what you build and like very intentional and have good

SPEAKER_353: results out of it um so yeah i like that i think that's really interesting i hear a lot about people doing the whole like moving fast and breaking things and it's i always wonder i'm like is this the best is this really the best way to like start your career off as a young person um breaking breaking things but um obviously like you said there's pros and cons to both i guess i'm probably in the realm of the breaking things part of part of what we do i guess attack like our whole team moves incredibly fast all the time i would not consider us to like dig very very deeply in on like one thing ever and i've definitely learned how to move faster than i ever thought i possibly could and it's benefited me a lot i i've never had to work slow so i'm not sure how that would benefit me but it's definitely been an interesting uh role here for sure so thank you so much for coming on um where can people find you and more importantly where can people find flapjack ah yeah um i guess uh i

SPEAKER_348: guess on my twitter which is at product patrick is that right that's a good hand that is a good

SPEAKER_411: handle i don't even know how long have you been on twitter not that long uh that's good the profile

SPEAKER_358: at product patrick yeah how did you get that name i just it was just open it was just like available like six months ago no way i'm googling this right now i'm a little bit of a lurker though maybe one day i should start posting uh that's really good and flapjack is available on flapjack.co

SPEAKER_353: um are people already using it companies already using flapjack you said you have some customers

SPEAKER_348: over in sf companies over in miami yeah one in australia or like a couple dozen uh locations using flapjack like menus and service at places um any in new york no not yet ah someone we've been talking

SPEAKER_358: to uh but they're they're a little larger um uh we'll we'll get there we'll get there okay you have

SPEAKER_353: to let us know because uh producer justin producer nick and myself are all based in new york so we'll have to check out one of the uh flapjack menus when we get the chance yeah yeah we'll uh we'll make our

SPEAKER_348: way there it's too much of like a restaurant capital that we just can't avoid it absolutely already

SPEAKER_353: thank you so much again for coming on uh patrick mcdonald of flapjack awesome thanks for having me