SPEAKER_00: I have never seen a hired CEO and a founder go at it like this in history. Yeah. This is a one-of-one situation.

SPEAKER_04: I mean, if the CNBC article that came out, if the reporting there is right, this is crazy. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Embroker's Startup Insurance Program helps startups secure the most important types of insurance at a lower cost and with less hassle. Save up to 20% off of traditional insurance today at Embroker.com slash twist. While you're there, get an extra 10% off using offer code twist. With Mercury Raise, startup founders no longer have to navigate roadblocks alone. Visit Mercury.com slash raise to get access to a network, connections, and advice. And NetSuite. Once your business gets to a certain size, the cracks start to emerge. Things you used to do in a day take a week. You deserve a customized solution and that's NetSuite. Learn more when you download NetSuite's popular KPI checklist absolutely free at NetSuite.com slash twist.

SPEAKER_06: Hey, everybody. Welcome to This Week in Startups. We're going to do a news show because you guys love when I do the news and there's a lot of news with us, Producer Nick. Everybody loves Producer Nick. You've heard him on the All In Podcast. He is the man behind the scenes producing five, six episodes a week for you.

SPEAKER_09: Absolutely grateful audience members. You had a great summer. You did a All-Star Summer. Congratulations, Nick. You got a lot of big guests.

SPEAKER_11: Yeah. Now it's time to, uh, ramp it back up for All-Star winner.

SPEAKER_00: Well, we, we, we had a great run and I think there's a bunch of people who couldn't make it over the summer, so yeah, we take a second shot at them for the winter and we're going

SPEAKER_15: to be four days a week in the winter. Is that correct? We're on the four-day-a-week schedule right now.

SPEAKER_18: From here on out, we are four days a week for the rest of the year. There will be some special, um, little episodes dropping on our days off from the great folks at Crews, uh, Financial. We're doing a startup financial basics, so that'll be dropping on some days off. But yeah, generally speaking, we'll be four days a week.

SPEAKER_00: Which is a choice by me, just so the audience knows, because, uh, listen, doing six days a week twist and all in seven days a week, it was taking over my life and there's no opportunity for me to get sick or to have time off. If I take time off, I literally have to do six episodes the week before, which means 12 episodes in a week, like four times this summer. And that was nuts. So I'm trying to get some of my time back. So we'll be doing four days a week plus all in. So you're going to get me five days a week, more than enough for y'all, but you know, the news is backed up and I wanted to go deep dive, uh, into this anthropic thing. So why don't you queue it up for us, Nick?

SPEAKER_18: Yeah, it was a really big week at anthropic. A couple of things came out. So just so everybody knows, they're the startup, um, they're sort of like the fourth or fifth player in AI, right? So you have open AI, you have Google, you have Microsoft, anthropic, and I would say inflection to Reed Hoffman's company. They're sort of the next two up there. Yep. Um, in terms of the major players, anthropic is led by Dario M. O'Day, uh, he previously led research teams at Google brain and open AI. Um, they have a chat GPT competitor. It's called Claude and it's a chat bot based on anthropics model Claude two. Which launched in July Claude two is known for its massive context window. It can intake a hundred thousand tokens. That's the largest that I've seen, or I can find right now. It's about four times larger than what, than the largest offering chat GPT has. And to explain that in English. Yeah. So if you, the context window is the amount of text that you can input for a, an AI chat bot to intake. Right? So for instance, when I really like using Claude, because what we do at this week in startups is we find people's interviews. We transcribe them. Then I take that entire transcription. I turn it into a TXT file. I upload it onto Claude. Claude can actually intake that like an hour or two hours worth of, uh, conversation and

SPEAKER_03: then spit back out to me, you know, the 10 to 15 most interesting bullet points in like two seconds. It's absolutely incredible.

SPEAKER_09: So if I was going to interview somebody on the program, you could find a previous interview, say, Hey, what are the highlights from when they were on Tim Ferriss two years ago, or they were on the speaking startups five years ago. And you can just paste right into it.

SPEAKER_00: Literally copy and paste. Literally copy and paste. Or you can do an attachment, right? You can attach, uh, an item now.

SPEAKER_31: Yeah, attach a TXT file is what it turns into.

SPEAKER_00: But can you do a URL? Can I put a URL of an MP3 and say, transcribe this end? No. Can you tell me the five biggest? Okay. So that's, that would take another step out of the process. And I think that's coming, right? Because we were talking about multimodal. Like it transcribes it for you.

SPEAKER_33: Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00: Or multimodal. Here's an audio file. Here's a video file. And then we just have to process it. First, right? That might take a little time, but it really is a great product.

SPEAKER_35: Claude.ai is the Claude is the product. And it's really great.

SPEAKER_37: Yeah. I've, I've, I use it more than chat GPT just again, because of that context window.

SPEAKER_18: I think they, the barometer they use for it is they say you can, it can intake, um, it can intake the entire novel of great Gatsby and give you like, uh, spark notes basically, which is pretty amazing.

SPEAKER_39: Wow.

SPEAKER_40: Uh, spark notes for those of you who are gen X is also known as cliff notes, but in Nick's millennial generation, they were called spark notes, uh, just programming note there.

SPEAKER_42: Okay. So what was Anthropix big news? The makers of Claude. Yeah.

SPEAKER_12: Yeah.

SPEAKER_18: Earlier this year, they raised a bunch of money, $400 million from Google in February. And as part of that deal, they had this like pack to use Google cloud,

SPEAKER_04: which will come up in a second. And then they had another deal a month later where they raised $300 million from spark capital at a $4.4 billion post.

SPEAKER_18: This was pre revenue, I believe. So just last week, Anthropix announced this new deal with Amazon and here are the terms.

SPEAKER_04: Amazon would invest an initial $1.25 billion into Anthropix and then either party Anthropix or Amazon. And Jason, I want to hear if this is like a standard deal could trigger an additional $2.75 billion investment from Amazon, bringing the total to 4 billion, both parties declined to disclose evaluation. As part of the deal, Amazon would start offering early access to Anthropix models to its AWS customers on this new platform that's called Amazon Bedrock, which is inside of AWS.

SPEAKER_18: It's based, think of it as like a generative AI playground inside AWS, where they offer a bunch of different models.

SPEAKER_46: Why are they calling it Bedrock? They should call it Amazon AI.

SPEAKER_18: Yeah. Terrible branding. A couple of months ago, they announced that they wanted to be like the Switzerland of AI and allow all models. It's pretty interesting. LexisNexis and Ray Dalio's Bridgewater Associates are already using Claude through AWS.

SPEAKER_03: Oh, okay. So they did a little beta test. Okay, great. And Claude is by the way, available now on AWS. You can go use it Claude too.

SPEAKER_40: LexisNexis, for those who don't know, is a legal system where lawyers, and they've been

SPEAKER_53: using it for decades. It was around in the nineties when I was installing local area networks for lawyers.

SPEAKER_55: You could search case law. So all those case law, you know, is up there. So any time anybody filed something or whatever, it goes up into LexisNexis. So this would be incredible to put on top of LexisNexis, one of these language models.

SPEAKER_18: Yeah. I think libraries use it for citations too. I remember learning how to use LexisNexis when I was like 10.

SPEAKER_37: And their competitor is Westlaw. And via Reuters, Anthropic, as part of the deal committed to rely primarily on Amazon's cloud

SPEAKER_04: services, including training its future AI models on large quantities of proprietary chips that it would buy from Amazon. Hold on. So my question to you is, does this sound familiar? Yeah.

SPEAKER_61: Wait a second. Didn't Amazon do a deal with Nvidia and Nvidia, does Amazon make chips?

SPEAKER_12: Apparently they're, they're developing a proprietary AI chip. The first I'm hearing about this. So that's fascinating.

SPEAKER_64: All right. Listen, we work with super early stage companies at my investment firm. It's called launch. I'm talking pre series a, right? We're talking seed stage, friends and family. And you know what, at that stage, maybe they don't have insurance yet. In fact, just recently, we have an amazing startup. They didn't have D and O insurance. If you don't know what D and O means, that basically protects your directors and officers, directors, board of directors, officers, the people who run the company, your management team. So what do we do? We send them right over to Embroker. Embroker is business insurance built specifically for startups. Embroker single application helps startups get four quotes for four lines of coverage in 15 minutes. They connect you with one of their expert brokers for unmatched service. And that goes beyond your policy. Okay. We use this at all of our companies. It's easy peasy, lemon squeezy. And if you're not getting insurance, you know, at some point, you're going to have to get it. So let's make that point today. Right now, this weekend, tonight, just go to Embroker today with the code twist, and you'll get 10% off their startup package. How do you get the startup package in broker.com slash twist? That's E M B R O K E R.com slash twist.

SPEAKER_66: Make sure you use that code twist for 10% off that also more importantly than getting the 10% off. That shows them that you're listening to this weekend startup. So we love and broker. They've been amazing in terms of supporting our founders for years. And of course, this very podcast. Great job and broker.

SPEAKER_00: Okay, so there's two very unique things in this story. Let's start with the first. I love this. Uh, either party can trigger another investment. So let's say anthropic does terrible and everything's a total mass and their product falls way behind other products in the market. They can demand 2.75 billion from Amazon for a failed product. According to Reuters. Yes, that is true.

SPEAKER_06: Or if things are going smashingly and they don't need money and they're just printing money hand over fist things go great for anthropic.

SPEAKER_00: Amazon could put a gun to anthropic said and say, we're buying. Let's say this is at a $10 billion evaluation. We're buying another 27% of the company. I would say that my guess is they can do that at a $10 billion evaluation or it could be stepped maybe, but I've never heard of a, of a deal like that. It would normally be one sided.

SPEAKER_09: Amazon has the right. This would be called super pro rata pro rata. You get to keep your percentage ownership super pro rata. You get to increase it. And so the, my thought here would be the valuation would be enough that this would

SPEAKER_55: increase their ownership. If they're investing 1.25. Um, at, uh, you know, whatever evaluation this is, uh, do we know what evaluation this round occurred at? It doesn't seem like it's public.

SPEAKER_80: So here's the latest news on Tuesday, just a couple of days ago, the information

SPEAKER_18: reported that anthropic is in talks to raise another $2 billion this time at a tar that this is, uh, reporting, um, they're targeting evaluation between 20 to $30 billion. Um, according to the article and they, they saw some fundraising materials. Anthropic is currently generating revenue at a hundred million dollar annualized pace. Okay.

SPEAKER_09: So that would be a hundred million out of the gate is pretty significant. And there was a report chat GPT for, uh, and open eyes. We're getting a bill. Is that a billion dollars? So these things are being priced at a hundred times. If the secondary at 90 billion is true, let's call it a hundred X revenue ballpark. So if they're making a hundred million, a hundred times, that would be obviously, uh,

SPEAKER_06: 10 billion. And this sounds like a $10 billion, five to $10 billion valuation to me.

SPEAKER_00: Um, this people are ahead of their skis here. Obviously these valuations make no sense, but in a hot market, you know, you give people a lot of

SPEAKER_55: credit as publicly traded companies, they might as SAS companies be getting,

SPEAKER_09: you know, 10 to 20 times top line revenue. If they were high growth, high growth being they're doubling every year.

SPEAKER_55: And these things do seem to be doubling every year or at least 50% every year. So congratulations to everybody all around. I think these, uh, early language models are doing fantastic because they have two swings at bat. You can make money from consumers. You know, everybody in our company pays 20 bucks a month for chat GPT for,

SPEAKER_92: uh, and you can make money because APIs are hitting these. And people are building them into their product.

SPEAKER_09: So it's a wonderful business. It's a software business. It's a high margin business with the only exception being the amount of

SPEAKER_93: hardware you need to run these language models, which I think will go down over time. Yeah.

SPEAKER_18: So I've read about Anthropic. Most of their revenue comes from, uh, pay as you go, API usage, and they have a small

SPEAKER_04: pilot program where they're testing like an enterprise version with select customers, sort of like chat GPT enterprise.

SPEAKER_09: Um, but you think it's the enterprise is the big win, by the way. Enterprise is the huge win for all of this.

SPEAKER_55: The fact that I can't see as the CEO of launch or inside everybody's chat GPT stuff, and it's all in one place and it's learning from everybody on the team. So if you asked a question about this week in startups, I asked a question, somebody asked a question about something else that should all be going into the knowledge base.

SPEAKER_93: And we should all be having discussions with our verticalized AI, but go ahead. You had a question.

SPEAKER_18: Yeah. So, uh, the reported valuation that they're raising at is between 20 to 30 billion. And they say by the end of 2023, they'll be on like a $200 million annualized revenue pace. So at, at the best case, the cheapest price would be about a hundred times revenue. And the worst case would be 300 times revenue. Yeah. Compared to open AI, they were just, yeah, they're about 80 to 90 times revenue based on their Wall Street Journal report last week. So do you think that, um, that, that sort of makes sense to you, that number?

SPEAKER_100: Cause these are the, the top of the class in AI and they're really the only game in town right now.

SPEAKER_55: Um, it's ridiculous. I don't think there's any logic to it.

SPEAKER_09: Um, it would take you, if these things double every year, it's gonna take you a couple of doublings to, to get towards reality. So you're probably giving them credit for three years of undone work, four years of undone work

SPEAKER_06: with a lot of risk and a lot of competition coming. Mm hmm. So I think these are strategic investors, not financial investors, strategic investors

SPEAKER_00: for Amazon to, uh, be able to sell their proprietary chips to a major player, uh, and get them to use them. They don't need to make any money on this investment. If they break even or lose half their money, uh, they got somebody major to use their chips

SPEAKER_40: and to give them product feedback on it. So again, they don't need to make money on this.

SPEAKER_18: What if Amazon chips underperform NVIDIA's and it's a strategic disadvantage for Anthropoc to use them? Isn't that a major risk?

SPEAKER_105: That would be, that would be the major risk Anthropoc stake. And that's a really good insight. Yeah.

SPEAKER_09: I think that is a major risk if their chips suck. And then I wonder if in the contract, they have to say their chips have to be performant within X percent of the NVIDIA ones. So anytime you do strategic deals, things can get weird. This is an example of that. That's why in venture capital, we see strategics come along and want to invest in our startups that we're on the cap table of. It's a major red flag.

SPEAKER_00: Great.

SPEAKER_09: Good.

SPEAKER_00: They have different motivations. Yeah.

SPEAKER_55: It's that simple. Um, now listen, the press reports are probably, I would just say any press report that's based on rumors. You should, as a, and I'm not picking on the information here, any press, New York times information, Washington post, I would assume that in 50% of cases, they have wrong information.

SPEAKER_40: And in the 50% of the, yes, when they have right information, they only have partial information about that, right? They might not have the full context and that's how the press works.

SPEAKER_55: That's how it has always worked. Um, so I'm not saying it's gotten worse necessarily. And, you know, these publications do the best they can, but being on the inside. Now I can tell you how little information they actually have. If they got a leak deck, that deck could be old. It could be a draft. It could have changed three times in the last three months. Cause decks change. It could be somebody with an agenda, giving them wrong information specifically. It could be faked information.

SPEAKER_09: I've seen every single one of these things happen from both sides of the fences. Remember I was a journalist for a long time running a publication, whether it was Engadget or this week in startups or Silicon Valley reporter.

SPEAKER_00: And I was on the other side, uh, you know, as an investor and being on the board of companies, I would say 90% of the time, the information is incorrect in some way. 50% is, you know, directionally correct. And 50% it's wrong.

SPEAKER_53: So anytime you're reading a newspaper or an information source, just understand that.

SPEAKER_18: And I think they understand that and they would agree. Do you think this is a good strategic move by Amazon to sort of get early access for Anthropics? Fantastic move.

SPEAKER_09: Yeah. Cost them nothing. They'll make it all back on people using AI products.

SPEAKER_00: It's a no-brainer for them. Yeah. I think, cause if you've used Claude, it's that good. And if they're competitive out of the gate with chat GPT four, they're not going to fall behind. So here we are. And I think you can assume there'll be 10 competitors in the space, uh, making serious progress. I just got the pictures, uh, added to my chat GPT for the multi-mobile today. Yeah. Uh, and I, well, I used it today for the first time. And I have, I had like a piece of electronics that I need a special plug for. I took a picture of it. I said, what plug do I need? It nailed it. It's like, you have a model that you need this. And I was like, okay, go buy it for me on Amazon. Give me the link. And it says, I can't do that, but just go to Amazon and search for this name, power charger, and you should be able to find it. So it was like, well, that's pretty scary.

SPEAKER_03: Um, it's funny you say that too. Cause I, I noticed.

SPEAKER_18: So when we were on the show with Sonny the other day, he was actually using code interpreter, which is now called data analysis, I think on chat GPT to, uh, review the image

SPEAKER_04: of the, uh, the guy wearing the trousers and the nice white jacket. And remember you said the thing about the tortoise shell glasses. It didn't pick up on that. So I got access to it yesterday and I just, I sent the same image. I gave it the same prompt to like, tell me about all the accessories and stuff in this outfit. And it actually saw the, it said there are also tortoise shell glasses in his, uh, pocket.

SPEAKER_03: Pocket. So I wonder if it's a different, like more advanced. No, no, no.

SPEAKER_00: It's just listening across the web to every conversation occurring. It downloaded this week at startups and it fixed its own error. I was like, wow. I mean, eventually it will be doing that. Right. Eventually it'd be listening and it'd be like, oh, it's talking

SPEAKER_06: about me. I could have done a better job. Maybe you know, I think it's every time it does its analysis. I think it's doing it for the first time.

SPEAKER_55: And so if you, if 10 people upload the same picture and ask for, you know, feedback, it's going to give you different answers. And in fact, I have taken it, I've uploaded a picture and three different times,

SPEAKER_123: asked the question three different ways and gotten three different answers. Yeah.

SPEAKER_37: Well, and then every followup question you give it is, is part of the reinforcement learning. Right?

SPEAKER_27: So if you follow up and you say, what about the, did you miss the tortoise shell glasses? It will understand. Yeah, I guess I did a bad job. Oh, sorry.

SPEAKER_125: Sorry.

SPEAKER_55: Bad robot. Crazy. Yeah. Poor bad robot. Uh, all right. Listen, uh, congratulations. Great job for both parties. Uh, I think it's a big win.

SPEAKER_06: And, uh, just another check box that these are going to be commodities very soon. Now they, they may be revenue generating commodities, you know, like gold or diamonds

SPEAKER_00: are, or wheat or oil. You know, I'm not saying commodities in a, um, derogatory way. I'm saying commodities in that you can get storage on the internet from a thousand different sellers. You will be able to get a language model. I believe from hundreds of sellers next year and thousands in five years.

SPEAKER_09: This will be. You know, something that many people offer at increasing lower prices with different levels of offerings.

SPEAKER_55: And so this is great for humanity. Everybody's gonna be trying different ones. Different ones will have different specialities or progress and let the games begin. Great. Great for everybody.

SPEAKER_132: Question about strategic investors, by the way, too, just in case in Anthropics case.

SPEAKER_04: So now they have these two major, uh, strategics, Google, who was the earliest investor and now Amazon, who's coming in with potentially up to $4 billion. How did those two investors talk to each other? If at all?

SPEAKER_00: Well, it depends on if they have board seats. Um, and in this case, uh, you said it was 400 million from Google.

SPEAKER_136: And it was another 2 billion that's coming from Google.

SPEAKER_06: Yeah. So the question is, are they on the board or not? And did they negotiate board seats and didn't, was Anthropic in a position to tell Google they didn't have a board seat. So now let's say Google was on the board. And this, uh, Amazon deal comes up.

SPEAKER_00: That means Google would be in the conversation about this. Should we take the money or not? Or they would have to say, Hey, Google, you cannot be involved in this. We're going to have, cause you're conflicted. You can listen to it, but you can't vote or we're gonna have to do this around your back. You can see how awkward that gets. Now let's say Google doesn't have this and Amazon did negotiate a board seat. Now you have the opposite. Let's say they both have board seats and now you got warring factions on your board. You can see how complicated this is gonna get. The same thing happened when, uh, Eric Schmidt was on the board of Apple and then Apple bought Android. And then there's a famous photo. You can look it up online of, look up Eric Schmidt, Steve jobs, uh, together. Uh, there's a famous picture of them at the Stanford mall. Um, and I think this was at the time this was going on. Yeah. Um, and he felt super betrayed. And so, you know, there's literally a picture of him being like, and he, Steve jobs is doing the WTF pose. He's like, what the, uh, there it is from Gizmodo. Um, and so I think that this was taken around that time. And then Eric Schmidt eventually went off the board and he obviously Google wasn't a strategic investor in Apple, but they had a pretty close relationship.

SPEAKER_36: And obviously they had that very important search relationship, which has become at the center of the Google antitrust.

SPEAKER_18: So just research on anthropic, uh, Google from earlier in the year and, uh, the information estimates they own about 10% of the company. That's.

SPEAKER_143: Which would get you a board seat. Yeah.

SPEAKER_18: Uh, and here's just a paragraph from the, um, information article from a couple of days ago.

SPEAKER_04: Investors would also be buying into a company with an unusual corporate structure.

SPEAKER_144: Oh, non-profit.

SPEAKER_04: Anthropic founded in 2021 has an independent body of five individuals with no financial stake in the company who can elect and remove a number of anthropics board members.

SPEAKER_50: Anthropic said this group aims to align anthropics goals with the interests of the general public.

SPEAKER_40: That's like a B corporation. Um, so there's a weird hippy dippy thing called a B corporation, a benefit corporation.

SPEAKER_55: The way corporations, uh, like a C corporation, uh, like a Delaware C, Delaware C has to do what's

SPEAKER_40: in the best interest of shareholders. A B corporation, a benefit corporation is another designation that's done by a third party. Um, and they're in the interest of the stated mission.

SPEAKER_06: So the stated mission was, Hey, we're here, um, to help, uh, you know, people get smarter. And we want to, we want to help, uh, elementary school kids, um, be better at math. Let's say brilliant.org came up with that. Our goal is we're a benefit corporation, brilliant.org, which were investors in brilliant company, by the way, our goal is to make the world better at math.

SPEAKER_00: Well, then as a B corporation, they would have to take that into account that stated mission, whatever it is that the company states and, uh, the best interest of shareholders equally, as opposed to just shareholder interest. So if it wasn't a benefit corp, and then they said, Hey, we want to get into, you know, uh, we want to stop doing math. We want to start doing English, or we want to put 90% of resources into literacy. Well, then you'd have to say, wait a second. I thought we're a B corp. We had this, we have to change our, our stated mission. So this is kind of taking the benefit corporation, uh, and putting something

SPEAKER_53: weird into it.

SPEAKER_18: So I think, uh, anthropic, when they started to that, they, there was a big marketing push they had around, like, um, you know, uh, what do they call it? Constitutional AI. I think they were the constitutional AI company where they were saying we're building like a better set of ways to, uh, make AI more fair or whatever.

SPEAKER_153: Whatever. I mean, listen, all this, uh, hand wringing, you can tell these people are completely

SPEAKER_55: insincere if they're selling their secondary shares at 90 billion. Nobody cares about anything. Then do re me.

SPEAKER_156: Show me the do re me the money. People want the dough. That's all that matters. Do re me.

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SPEAKER_34: That's mercury.com slash rays. All right. You want to talk about Flexport and our guy.

SPEAKER_160: Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_161: And by the way, we invited Ryan on the pod. He, uh, he might come on the pod. I was just leaving at that. Okay.

SPEAKER_00: But yeah, catch the audience up on this because I have never seen seen a hired CEO, uh, and a founder go at it like this in history. Yeah. This is a one of one situation.

SPEAKER_03: I mean, if the CNBC article that came out, the reporting there is right. This is crazy. And we're gonna get, again, as I said, 50% is probably right.

SPEAKER_09: Yeah. Or directionally correct. Yeah. And you can be sure there's a lot of agendas that sharing information with them on both sides and everybody in between. Keep going.

SPEAKER_00: Now let's tee it up for the audience. Flexport we know is the logistics and freight forwarding startup. Yes. Uh, that's done incredibly well. And, uh, I am friendly.

SPEAKER_93: I don't wanna say I'm like close friends, but I'm friendly with. Peterson. Yeah. He's been on the podcast. Uh, this.

SPEAKER_167: Yeah. Acquaint is his pals. Pals is good. Yeah.

SPEAKER_18: Pals. Um, yeah. Yeah. Flexport, obviously logistics, freight forwarding startup. They've raised over $2 billion from founders funds, soft bank, Andreessen, a bunch of others, uh, last value to $8 billion. The company and Ryan Peterson gained a lot of notoriety during the pandemic because of their insights on the global, global supply chain shortages. So, uh, I think even Ryan came on all in at one point.

SPEAKER_169: Uh, to explain all those. To explain what was going on at the, at the port of LA, I think.

SPEAKER_42: Yeah. Yeah. And then they were explaining how everything was backed up and then those shipping containers became super expensive. And that was when.

SPEAKER_04: Which was great for their business because they charge percentage fees on the cost of shipping containers. Right. So that was. No flat fees, percentage.

SPEAKER_09: That's why you go percentage. Yeah. Not flat fees. Because you never know. And all of a sudden things, ticket prices can go up five X. Yeah.

SPEAKER_46: And all of a sudden you're the beneficiary. Yeah. No flat rate pricing people.

SPEAKER_18: So in June, 2022, Peterson announced that he was going to step down as CEO and transition into executive chair at Flexport. Flexport then hired Dave Clark, who's a former Amazon executive, and he's most known for scaling Amazon's logistics business.

SPEAKER_04: Right. So kind of legend in that space. Clark and Peterson worked together as co-CEOs. For the first six months of Clark's tenure, and then Peterson officially transitioned to executive chair in March. In the first half of 2023, this is according to the information, Flexport's revenue dropped 70% year over year to $700 million. And that was mostly because the cost of a shipping container went from like the peak, peak high of all time. And then it crashed down. Yeah. Like 10,000 to 2,000. Exactly. Exactly. Which basically tracked with their revenue drop. In July. So this is when it got a little bit interesting for me because I remember this whole thing.

SPEAKER_18: Peterson announced that he was joining Founders Fund as a partner in July. Right. And you kind of thought, oh, wow, this is someone who's very notable in tech.

SPEAKER_04: He's clearly starting the next phase of his career. He's still involved as an exec chair, but this is clearly his next thing that he's going to do. On September 6th, a couple of months later, Peterson announced that he was returning as

SPEAKER_18: Flexport's CEO and Dave Clark resigned on that same day. Hmm. Peterson notably also rescinded 75 job offers due to what he called like over hiring issues at Flexport and he needed to get the runway tight and he needed to get things back on board. Ryan Peterson then started posting on X about sort of what he would do differently than Dave Clark. And it sort of seemed like, uh, you got the impression that Peterson thought Clark was running the business the wrong way. At least that's what I gathered. Some of those posts have since been deleted, which the CNBC article also noted. And now here's where it gets kind of weird. So it was reported that Peterson and the board basically told Dave Clark either on a zoom call, either you can resign tomorrow, or we're going to announce that you're fired, which maybe you can

SPEAKER_04: say that's like a gentleman's layoff or something like that. Again, this is just reported. It's a gentleman's firing. The gentleman's firing. Yeah. Um, Clark resigned.

SPEAKER_52: And the next day, five of his key execs that he hired were also fired. Is that standard when a hired gun CEO leaves?

SPEAKER_177: Yeah, listen, if you, it's kind of like when you take out a captain, when you take out the boss,

SPEAKER_00: are the captain, who are the captain's going to be loyal to? You better take out the whole crew. Yeah.

SPEAKER_34: It's, you know, right. Silvio's going if Tony's going. Yeah. You can't have your conciliary. He's not going to make the jump in all likelihood. Makes sense. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: You remember when junior got pinched, Bobby Bacala was like the last man standing. Right. And then remember there was that famous scene, uh, at the pork store where he just told him like, hey, listen, junior can still be the, the boss in name and he can keep the following, but I get everything else. Yeah. And then Bacala famously says to the victor goes his boy,

SPEAKER_184: and then he kicks him out of here.

SPEAKER_03: It was a great scene. So, uh, one major problem that led to Clark, Dave Clark's being ousted again,

SPEAKER_18: according to CNBC was financial present projections to the board. So Dave Clark thought that flex port was being way too overly optimistic. Peterson and his team was kind of reluctant to pair back their projections. Clark eventually won, but it seemed to have, again, this is according to CNBC, pissed off Peterson in the process and some of the board members. Any, uh, response to that, Jason, is that typical? So, okay.

David Friedberg: The existing board members are gonna be loyal to the founder always, right? You heard about founder friendly culture here.

SPEAKER_06: So, you know, they're gonna, they, you bring in an Amazon exec as a CEO for one reason and one reason

SPEAKER_55: only you want an operational machine who's gonna aggressively hit targets. And typically you're gonna bring somebody like that in because you think, Hey, the creative founder, maybe they're tired.

SPEAKER_00: They've they're exhausted. Or maybe they're not an operations person who's gonna sit there and just grind. Mm-hmm. And he was brought in there to grind and you're not there to grind it sideways. You're there to make it grow. Mm-hmm. And so if this person started sandbagging, maybe their comp was based on, you know, and their equity and their targets, uh, correlated with the management team's bonus structure. Now, if the board gives them says, Hey, this is the board, including the founder says, Hey, here's what we need you to hit.

SPEAKER_06: Then that's gonna be aggressive. Yeah. And then the person like, you know what? I wanna sandbag this. I can't hit that. There's no way I can hit that. I can hit half that. And then they wanna do is they wanna double it. So they get into the bonus. Cuz anytime you do these bonus structures, let's say the goal was to hit 2 billion, right?

SPEAKER_86: You said they were at 700 million this year, but let's say the goal had been 2 billion. You know, he negotiates it down to a billion. They hit 2 billion.

SPEAKER_06: They're probably gonna get some massive bonus for anything above a billion in revenue. Mm-hmm. Um, and I would you look up Dara, uh, Kashversahi, uh, from Uber. He had some crazy target of if he hit a hundred billion dollar valuation, he got some sick bonus and I don't think he ever got there. He came really close. So, you know, you, you, you want to incentivize and it's a bummer if they don't hit it. It's fantastic. If they do, you get the idea. Yeah. So I, I think that's probably what was going on here. Now, big picture.

SPEAKER_00: If the thing was growing and he was hitting targets and it wasn't for these, uh, the recession looming

SPEAKER_55: consumers that the, um, what do they call the backlog? The, the supply chain, uh, indigestion. There was a term for it. We were talking about supply chain, backup, whatever. Yeah. During COVID all that.

SPEAKER_06: Yeah.

SPEAKER_138: The kind of 900 ships waiting outside the port to. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06: All that, um, nonsense getting worked out was not good for the new CEO.

SPEAKER_55: So I, I would attribute a lot of this, not to either party being incompetent. I would say this feels to me like the majority of this has to do with market conditions. Hmm. And big picture.

SPEAKER_06: What I've seen in business is everything's up and to the right. Champagne corks. Everybody's great. High fives. Winning forgives everything. You could be a jerk. We could have gotten in a fight. I could have punched you in practice. It doesn't matter. You know, Draymond punches, whatever that kid's name is in practice and they win the title. Everybody's great. Hey, you know what? We went through the fire together. You lose. Okay. Somebody's got to go. This is not working out. Right. And so winning forgives everything and listen, they were losing. It's gotta be brutal to have your, if it's in fact true.

SPEAKER_55: And again, you heard my disclaimer, 50% of stuff you read in the newspaper or you read online is not true. And the other 50% is partially true.

SPEAKER_09: So, you know, who knows what the truth is here, but the undeniable truth is the market changed dramatically.

SPEAKER_18: Yeah.

SPEAKER_09: So that's what we do know to be true.

SPEAKER_18: You know, wrong place, wrong time for a hired gun CEO to come in.

SPEAKER_161: Yeah. I mean, it's like, this is like when Marissa took over, uh, yahoo, you know, it was like,

SPEAKER_12: good luck, you know, like, was that, was that at the great, great financial crisis time?

SPEAKER_00: Uh, no, it was after that, but it just was, you know, yahoo was in super decline. Yeah. You know, there's always this thing where like women get the CEO slot, you know, when things are in a turnaround, not when things are going up, they've said that about Linda at Twitter slash X, like the only time women, and I don't think this is necessarily true, but when it's a turnaround situation, when it's hard, that's a tough thing to come into. Now, I don't know exactly when Dave Clark joined, but, uh, I don't know if they were on the upswing then, or if it was clear that things were going to be challenged,

SPEAKER_205: uh, you know, coming out of COVID, et cetera, but, you know, listen, 2022 that he joined.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah. So they knew, they knew. I mean, he knew well that they were in recession territory. Things were brutal. He took the job. Um, but maybe it was more brutal. Um, so also this stuff like

SPEAKER_55: Peterson, I don't know if we're ready to transition here, but Peterson came in like, uh, a raging bull here.

SPEAKER_78: Well, Clark, you mean Clark? No, not Clark. When Peterson took back over, didn't he come in like raging?

SPEAKER_37: Yeah, he was sending job offers. He said, get ready for layoffs. He basically came in and was like, we need to cut, you know, I think Dave Clark was sort of, um, growing it like a company that was

SPEAKER_18: maybe in 2021-ish era or 2019 and Peterson came in and was like, runway is tight. Here are the layoffs that were expect layoffs. We're sending these job offers. I'm so sorry. And he actually did, um, he did some sort of- He did a bunch of tweets about it. Yeah. He was posting about her on X. Something for, he said, you know, obviously he feels terrible about rescinding the job offers, but I put together some program to help the people out that were getting affected.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah. But I want to just bring one thing from the CNBC story, um, that I thought was really interesting. So according to the CNBC article, um, which we'll link in the notes on September 13th, this was a week after Clark resigned. He resigned on the 6th, I think. Mm-hmm. Flexport's chief legal, uh, counsel contacted Clark and told him that his resignation actually was not accepted by the board and that the board had fired him for cause. Okay.

SPEAKER_12: Can you just explain what for cause means?

SPEAKER_92: Okay. Yes. Um, for cause and not for cause. Not for cause would be, hey, we're reorganizing. You didn't do anything wrong. For cause is you didn't do the job. Uh, or, and in like a CEO position in that contract, it is very detailed of what cause is

SPEAKER_06: defined as, and cause can be defined as like really dark stuff, like sexual harassment, fraud, stealing, uh, mundane stuff, like not showing up for work, not doing the job. And so for cause is

SPEAKER_00: extremely, extremely detailed. Why is it extremely detailed? Because of situations like this, when you do get fired for cause, it means that we don't want to pay you severance. Mm-hmm. Uh, and that we don't want to pay you your bonus or vest you your shares. Now in the vesting of shares, this, these shares could be single trigger or double trigger. There's a bunch of nomenclature here. Um, but just to explain it in layman's terms, if you were in the calendar year, uh, and you get fired, uh, if you get fired for cause, no more vesting of your options. Now let's say his options were vesting on a yearly basis or a quarterly basis or a monthly

SPEAKER_86: basis. Let's just say he was in, was he at year one or year two? Uh, calendar wise, probably right

SPEAKER_215: in between those two. Starting year two, I think. Okay. So we don't know if he was, he's probably,

SPEAKER_55: he probably had a one year cliff. He's probably vesting monthly then, but let's say it happened before the one year vest. You fire somebody in that 11th month for cause or for any reason, you let them go. Cause you don't like them. They don't get that 12 month. They get zero shares in the company. That's why there's a one year cliff. Let's say more likely he's on a monthly thing. And let's say he, he gets fired, not for cause board, just change your mind. Hey, it's not a fit.

SPEAKER_06: They don't have a reason to fire you. He may have one year of salary, maybe two, probably two in his case. And he might have two years of vesting, which means he gets, let's say they offered him 5% of the company, you know, and he had a five and he, you know, he gets 1.25 of that every year. He might be forward vested for one to two years. So he might have the 1.25. He got originally one fourth of 5%. And they probably don't want to give him another 2.5%. And it's not that they can't afford to give him the 2.5%. It's that they're really mad right now. Yeah. And that's an anger and it's a personal thing. If he had done a great job and it wasn't his fault, they probably would have just given

SPEAKER_00: him the 1.25 or the 2.5 that he's supposed to get. I'm picking numbers out of the air, right? Usually hired CEOs get about five points at a company this size, I would guess. If it was a mega

SPEAKER_93: company like Google or Uber, maybe they get 1% of the company over time, right? All right, listen,

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SPEAKER_04: checklist. So then, on that call, he's offered Flexport's legal counsel tells him he's been fired for cause. And then he's offered a package of 2 million Flexport shares, which are we don't know the price per share, but that's millions and millions of dollars. If and only if he signs an NDA and a non-disparagement clause. Standard. Clark declines the offer.

SPEAKER_226: Wow. He says no, right? I was like, oh, I was reading the article. I felt like I was reading Great Expectations or something. I was like, oh. That's crazy.

SPEAKER_04: Then, so this is September 13th. If CNBC is to be believed, later that same day, Clark takes the stage at a supply chain conference where Peterson had spoken earlier in the day. We don't know if Peterson was still there and the audience didn't say, but Peterson had spoken earlier in the day and actually said, he said nice things about Dave Clark. And Dave Clark was in the audience for his talk. Yes, he was. He was in the audience. He was like first row. Clark goes on stage and this is what he said, and I quote from CNBC, the only thing I really regret from the past year was I sort of picked the wrong founder. Basically, it was a place of extending my reputational halo to a group that, in my opinion, did not deserve it, largely because about half the team was let go last week on Friday, the most brutal non-severance packages I've ever seen in my life. It was about as disrespectful a way as humanly possible. How much money does this guy have that he can just turn it down? Or I guess

SPEAKER_00: he has the money to fund a lawsuit or maybe he's got some goods. Well, if he was one of an Amazon

SPEAKER_230: executives. Yeah, maybe he's got a billion dollars from Amazon. They had a huge run up from 2000.

SPEAKER_55: Maybe he thinks the $2 million, the 2 million Flexport shares are not going to be worth anything, but this is as bitter and dark and crazy. I have never seen anything like this. And now again, there are some things we know as facts here that he said, she said, these guys are fighting, they're saying nasty things about each other in public. Okay, that's all facts. And then we also know um, that the shipping, um, industry was challenged. The other thing we know of, I'll be honest here is, you know, Ryan is a great founder, super smart. And, uh, he's coming in and he's gonna save the company. So I would say, you know, I think Peterson's got a really good shot at saving the company. Um, bummer for founders fund. They, they got a great partner in there. Um, I guess

SPEAKER_40: bummer for Peterson, but better to save the company than lose his fortune because I don't know how much he sold in secondary, if any, I don't know if Peterson's cleared money. I would think he's

SPEAKER_100: sold 50 or a hundred million. Maybe in that soft bank round, the soft bank put in like 2 billion or 4 billion, right? You would think that he took some off. I would think he, I would think he peeled

SPEAKER_36: off a hundy. That's my guess. If, if, if 2 billion was coming in, I could see him peeling off a hundy.

SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, uh, Masa, as I said, the Masa PO. Um, and so if he peeled off a hundy, great for him, but I think he's got a lot of pride, obviously. And he's come back and he's become super vocal. And, uh, you know, this happened with, um, Travis getting kicked out of Uber. I hope someday Travis gets to, I'm not saying Dara is not doing a great job. I think he's doing a great job. Um, but someday Dara will, you know, want to do his next thing I'm sure. And

SPEAKER_55: I would love to see Travis come back like Steve jobs did. And then, uh, you know, this has happened

SPEAKER_40: a number of times in our industry and I, I think he'll do a killer job here. Uh, and this is his Steve jobs moment. So make the most of it, Ryan. Yeah. Just wrapping up on the stuff from

SPEAKER_18: the article, uh, Clark sent, had his lawyer sent a cease and desist letter to Flexport, basically asking the company to preserve and retain all communications involving his departure. Um, yeah, he's just gonna sue. That's a preserve documents move.

SPEAKER_09: That's sort of what it was getting at. Yeah. It's called, it's preserving documents. It basically

SPEAKER_55: means the lawsuit's coming. So we told you to preserve documents. If you suddenly change your document retention policy, which you're allowed to do as a company, after we sent you that letter, not a good look, I don't know if it's actionable or not. Um, but you know, listen, uh, this is Rashomon. There's always different views of who's wrong,

SPEAKER_40: who's right. It didn't work out. That happens. And they got ugly and it shouldn't get ugly.

SPEAKER_53: They should have had controls in place to not make this get ugly. Apparently they did not.

SPEAKER_18: Um, yeah, so I think founders one is okay too, because they're, I think they were the early, earliest investor in Flexport. Trey Stevens is on the board. Um, you know, and they,

SPEAKER_245: they have a, a big position in the country. Shout out Trey Stevens, amateur boxer. Um,

SPEAKER_247: yeah. Uh, I'm staying out of that one. Sharing your boxing videos on the internet. It's a little

SPEAKER_03: thirsty. Uh, let's keep going. I don't know, man. I, I, I have no qualms with anyone who, I love those Zuck videos of him. I think if you can fight and you could throw a good punch. All right, fine. I'm going to start doing mine. I'm going to start releasing mine.

SPEAKER_257: I'm going to be in the over 50 category of, uh, if I could dunk a basketball, there'd be a video of me dunking every day. That's fair enough. I did share my martial arts

SPEAKER_40: videos from my thirties on, on my Insta. So, and if I had videos of them, then we shared the videos for sure. Uh, but yeah, now that I'm fit, yeah, maybe I'll start sharing. I might take my new videos.

SPEAKER_18: So last story of the day, Jason, um, I guess you could call this a little big detail. Maybe,

SPEAKER_04: um, DoorDash is tasked as testing a really interesting new feature that they haven't actually publicly announced yet. They're just testing in some small markets, but they're testing it in San Francisco. And obviously a bunch of people that are like venture capitalists and stuff have been screenshotting it and sharing it on, on, uh, X it's called dine out. Um, and it's basically a rewards program that offers DoorDash users with cash credit for dining out at local restaurants. John, if you could throw up the image here. Oh, it's like a check-in. So this

SPEAKER_42: is, there used to be, uh, two apps. One was called GoWala and one was called four-step. These

SPEAKER_105: became a big craze after South by Southwest. One year we were investors minor. I think I put 10k

SPEAKER_93: when I was first starting my angel career into GoWala, which was bought eventually by, um,

SPEAKER_40: Um, Facebook and there was a mobile local social mo low. So mo low. So was like an acronym that we

SPEAKER_06: used 15 years ago and you would check in and it would automatically then tweet or Facebook. Hey, you just checked in. And so I used to do this all the time when I was in LA, I would just check in everywhere and it was like gamified. You get points for that. Then people started showing up with the places I was checking in. So then I started checking in when I was leaving, but it was fun to kind of bookmark these places. But here, this isn't just bookmarking, is it? No, you're getting,

SPEAKER_04: you're getting cash credit in DoorDash credit, right? So, you know, if you go and you eat out at this, like right here, um, you see Pacific catch on Chestnut Street in San Francisco, you get a $20 credit. That's basically an entree, you know? Yeah, that's an entree. It's an entree level. DoorDash credit to then use in the app. And these screenshots were posted on X by Olivia Moore, who is a consumer investor at A16C. My question to

SPEAKER_37: you, Jason, is why would DoorDash do this? What is the reason? Oh, it's very simple.

SPEAKER_06: This is to lock in, um, restaurants. DoorDash has a number of restaurants and I think Uber Eats does as well, that are exclusive to their platform. It's not a lot, but they do try to become the

SPEAKER_55: preferred, if not exclusive provider. And if you've ever gone to a restaurant or, you know, somebody works in one, they'll have five terminals up and running. Yep. And you see them working them and then there's startups that consolidate the five terminals into one. It's a mess. Now, what people

SPEAKER_06: will do is sometimes they'll simplify. Let's say you have too many orders. You're just like, I'll just use one or the other platforms. What this does is it creates a deeper relationship with those famous restaurants. And so, um, that $20 is probably being shared that economics in some

SPEAKER_00: way. So let's say it's a $20 credit. I bet you, um, the restaurant picks that up because they probably make on average $20 from somebody ordering online. Uh huh. So that just incentivizes people to try doing, uh, and become more loyal to a restaurant. So it's a no brainer. And I, I, you actually nailed it when you said, oh, that's an entree. What that means is when people do it, Is that what I sound like? And they're like, yeah, oh, that's an entree, you know, like, whoa, you know, like, but that was just that like the way you framed it is perfect because for somebody who is like thinking about the cost audience. Yeah. Yeah. You're thinking about the cost of food. You got a family, you got a budget and you're like, Hey, whoa, that's the cost of an entree. That's, that's significant. They put it at a dollar amount. That's significant is my point. I think that's being covered in some way by the

SPEAKER_09: restaurant and maybe a little bit on door dish, maybe door dish waves their fee for that order or something like that. Right. Now they got a deeper relationship. They have information on what when

SPEAKER_55: you're checking in and then eventually maybe door dash will have a loyalty program. And maybe when you sign into restaurants, it'll work the other way. So if you've ordered online, you get a $5 credit to go to the restaurant or you get a free drink in the restaurant. All this does is is meant as a loyalty to increase consumption. What is Lena Khan claiming with Amazon is that they created the Amazon

SPEAKER_92: program, uh, prime in order to make people more loyal. Wow. Congratulations. You're a genius. You just discovered airline miles and Costco. Like if you're a Costco member, it's you shop at Costco more. If you have Amazon prime, you shop there more. If you have door dash rewards, you're going to, you're going to use door dash more often. So it's just a way to increase loyalty for everybody.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah. I think it's brilliant if they're trying to recruit certain restaurants to be door dash

SPEAKER_04: exclusive and then they can say to the restaurant, not only does being a door dash partner or whatever

SPEAKER_18: they call it, increase delivery. It, we also now have a feature that increases your dine in rates by 50% or 30% or 80% or whatever. I think this is, it's a very powerful message. I love this feature.

SPEAKER_55: I love this when I saw this, it's a great feature because it matches real world. And, um, and this is something I, you know, I think I've been telling Uber with their Uber one, like they're going to really keep pushing that. And I don't know if they're public with how many people are using Uber one, but it's not insignificant. And I think Uber one saves you a lot of money and you get a lot of cool upgrades and they should keep following that string because we saw where Amazon prime went with it. If you're an Uber one user, are you ever going to use lift? No. And I love two airlines,

SPEAKER_06: United and jet blue mint, uh, which is like actually a class. It's like their business class or

SPEAKER_92: first best comment. And so anywhere I go, I try to do those two. And when I do those two,

SPEAKER_55: I love the service for both of them, but I love the rewards too. Cause I, the United, um, you know, uh, lounges are pretty good and United. Goes to a lot of destinations from the Bay area and I build up my miles. And so all my credit cards are United and I use Bonvoy, which is Marriott, which owns a bunch of brands, but they bought SPG, which was what I used previously, which I think was the W hotels, et cetera. So when I was coming up, I just always stayed at W hotels cause those were hip and affordable. And so I would always have a million Bonvoy miles, a million, uh, United miles. So, you know, if I was short on cash, I could just

SPEAKER_93: use my miles up and get free trips. Yeah. Uh, which I, you know, and so I think these gamification

SPEAKER_40: things, these loyalty things, they work on humans. You know, if you play, if you've ever played a game

SPEAKER_09: like Farmville or any game with gamification in it, it works, we all know that, right? So this is gamification. It's brilliant. Congratulations on the door dash team. Very creative idea.

SPEAKER_00: And you know what? Sometimes the best ideas are sitting in the, um, the graveyard of startups. And that's why startups kind of build on each other. This check in apps. If you go back to the four square days and people thought four square and go Lala were going to be multi billion dollar companies. I thought it was the future. It was going to change everything and it didn't, but here it is again, pretty cool. And then ultimately what does Yelp do now? I see. And they already have the discovery

SPEAKER_03: built in part. They have the discovery part of it. They have the restaurants ingested. That's why

SPEAKER_04: it's, I love it so much. And this is a broader societal point, but I just think life is better when restaurants are packed and people are moving and shaking and there's nothing sadder than a Friday

SPEAKER_18: night, 7 30 PM and like half the restaurants on the street are closed down, which, uh, shout out San Francisco. Great job doing that to your city. Cause I remember it was so depressing. All of my favorite places were empty all the time and it sucks. And I feel so bad for the, for those people. And I hope

SPEAKER_55: that this gets some asses back in the seats. It's going to, and I was in New York to your point. And when I was in New York, I had one night where I had like a meeting and then I was free and I left it open. I couldn't, you know, I got a lot of people to catch up with, you know, family, friends, business colleagues, founders, LPs. And I just had, I knew I had this one night late, you know,

SPEAKER_92: after like a late meeting or something that I had online. And I walked up to Soho and I had like the

SPEAKER_06: three best restaurants that I had re written, uh, I had read an eater. So I go to the first one, I look and it's empty. I don't want to be alone in there. And then I went to my second choice,

SPEAKER_55: which I wanted to go to Balthazar and have the steak called poiv, which I love. I go there, it's packed. And there's a couple of seats at the bar, which is where I like to eat when I'm alone, I eat that steak called poiv. I share it on my Twitter. So I agree with you. We need these restaurants to be hopping and it's absolutely fantastic if they can get that going. So just

SPEAKER_40: great job to those, uh, team over there. I think it's a great idea. And, you know, I, this is, um, yeah, I don't know if you saw there was a report that Uber was going to launch a task rabbit type

SPEAKER_55: service. I don't have any information. I think that's going to be a big one. So if I could click on

SPEAKER_06: Uber or you're with child right now, you know, you have your babysitter, uh, cancel last minute. Uh, what would you pay for a last minute babysitter? I pay 50% premium, but I mean, you'll see when you have, you need a babysitter and you don't have anybody to come, you'll pay a

SPEAKER_55: little extra. Um, and so I think that that like, you know, uh, there's many different places for Uber and DoorDash, uh, and Airbnb to go. Um, you know, and I think this is where Elon saying he wants X to be the everything app. Uh, I think you'll see DoorDash and Uber and Airbnb, you know, thinking about travel, transportation, and food, and you'll see X doing, I don't have any inside information here, but just publicly they've talked about having payments. Uber actually did a payment thing. There's a thing called Uber cash inside of Uber. I don't think it's become a thing yet because Apple pay is so great and so ubiquitous that why would you need to open? Why would you need to keep cash inside of Uber? Uh, but they did seed it a little bit. I don't know how it's going. Uber cash. I don't know if that one took off, but Uber is doing, I think trains and some other things. You can do taxis in it. Um, obviously you can rent bikes, uh, through the Lime network and so all that stuff. And then if they had, you know, like, um, you know, uh, manual labor or they started

SPEAKER_306: flight working yet Uber. Cause I saw, you know, I did see that said something about like,

SPEAKER_18: Oh, book your full book, the entire itinerary on Uber or something like that. Yeah. They're doing

SPEAKER_55: something. It's, um, well, they were doing, um, they were doing blade built into the app.

SPEAKER_40: Yes. But yes, I think they were doing some flights, um, in, um, they were doing some flights in Europe. So I think that starts in Europe and I think trains in Europe is a big deal. So I think you'll be able

SPEAKER_55: to book your trains and stuff like that. There's no reason you shouldn't be able to do everything. I should be able to take out my Uber app and take the New York city subway.

SPEAKER_116: I was on the New York city subway and I saw people using their phones.

SPEAKER_03: Oh, it's the best thing ever. Yeah. That, that came in, that came in a couple of years ago. Yeah. You just, if you have Apple pay, you just put it right up to the thing and go boop, boop. There's no more waiting online for cash or get the Metro card.

David Friedberg: I'm such an idiot. I just literally, I saw it and I just like, let me buy a Metro card to be faster.

SPEAKER_316: Oh, boomer. Oh my God. You look like such an old man.

SPEAKER_116: It had some weird logo. It didn't have an Apple pay logo. It had some like weird third party name. And I was like, I gotta sign up for this and get the app for that.

SPEAKER_318: Yeah. But that's, that's bomb.

SPEAKER_04: Oh, I mean, it's, it's the best thing ever. And then the worst part, I used to live in Hoboken, the path train doesn't have the Apple pay.

SPEAKER_03: So on the, to get the path back to Hoboken, you got to fill back up the Metro card. Like I'm in, you know, 1999. That was brutal. Anyway. Mm.

SPEAKER_123: Well, this has been a fantastic episode and we'll be back tomorrow with an all ask Jason episode. So we're gonna do some ask Jason tomorrow.

SPEAKER_321: Jason unplugged is what we're calling it.

SPEAKER_55: Jason unplugged. Absolutely. Casually chill vibes. I like it. Just takes. Yeah. Just takes. Okay. Hot takes. Just vibes and takes.

SPEAKER_161: Vibes and takes. Like the kids say, we'll see y'all next time. Bye bye. Bye bye.