SPEAKER_00: all right everybody it's friday variety let's go people we got a big show for you what we got first

SPEAKER_01: molly first up we have news in what will not be the last segment like this we have two high-flying startups that are reportedly about to announce some layoffs possibly for very different reasons

SPEAKER_04: so we'll break that down yeah a lot of lessons here it's time to sharpen your pencils and get to work founders because as we're seeing with fast and go puff layoffs and raising rounds of capital is getting much harder in 2022 and then next up we have an amazing interview with bradley tusk he's back he was the venture capitalist who helped uh travis and uber navigate regulation and we do an amazing interview with him we hit a lot of topics uh molly what topics did you enjoy i mean

SPEAKER_01: i'm just so fascinated by his sort of central thesis as an investor and also a long time political

SPEAKER_08: political operative that startups cannot ignore regulation they have to play this game because

SPEAKER_09: governments can make or break markets so interesting gambling uh and even uh we get into psychedelics

SPEAKER_12: and ketamine therapies and bradley had some interesting experiences and thoughts on that

SPEAKER_04: and then we wrap up every friday with everybody's favorite segment okay boomer from rachel reporting

SPEAKER_14: our producer rachel reporting in the real world it's going to be a great show stick with us

SPEAKER_15: this week in startups is brought to you by our crowd helps you invest early in pre-ipo companies alongside professional vcs if you're interested in investing you can join our crowd for free at o-u-r-c-r-o-w-d dot com slash twist boast if you're a startup developing new software or rnd you may be owed up to 250 000 in cash back from the government boast helps you get that money quickly and easily the first 50 customers will get 10 off their first year by mentioning promo code twist at boast dot ai slash twist and coda is the all-in-one doc for teams if you've got a stack of niche workflow tools or if you're buried in docs and spreadsheets coda is the doc that brings it all together startups can get a one thousand dollar credit at coda dot io slash twist hey everybody it's friday variety hour we have

SPEAKER_17: a great interview today as you heard us say we've got a great okay boomer today but also just settle in pour yourself a glass of wine it's gonna be a thick boy show because there's also a bunch of interesting news out here lots what do you want from us it's just all so good yeah people say they want the news

SPEAKER_18: other people say they love the interviews and you know what we try to do is give you a little bit of

SPEAKER_04: both and you know six days a week to choose from and uh just put us at the top of your queue and then

SPEAKER_21: just listen there's so much important stuff for you to learn about and i think this first story is super important for founders um to really think about and it's it's pencil sharpening time so

SPEAKER_23: why don't you cue us up on the uh go puff story here yeah so you know that we had uh the go puff ceo

SPEAKER_06: on the show not that long ago and what was so interesting about that is the the conversation about how deliberately this company had grown how you know responsible it was being in terms of developing this business which is a tough business as we know go puff as a reminder is an instant delivery startup that delivers in an average of 15 minutes they have their own uh micro fulfillment centers they're evidently looking to raise something like a billion dollar round however the news this week is that go puff is planning to lay off three percent of its workforce to cut 40 million dollars in costs

SPEAKER_26: ahead potentially of an ipo and the ipo is of course where they hope to raise that billion dollars yeah and

SPEAKER_04: so we talked about this go puff is in the instant delivery startup space trying to get that 15 30 minute window if you're in a city maybe it's 30 to an hour you know in the uh suburbs and they have 15 000 employees they're laying off three percent about 450 according to this story uh and they raised 1.5 billion in a convertible note valued at 40 billion what we all know is that puts them in the growth uh category for tech high growth tech and high growth tech has been uh repriced so the real price of the company maybe 10 billion right now maybe 15 billion in other words they've got to rebuild their valuation because they're not worth as much as doordash or two-thirds of uh what uh uber is worth or i'm not sure lyft's evaluation now but i think it's 10 to 15 billion for a while so in the private markets people can get excited right molly and they can make a big bet they might have protections there so if the valuation goes down and they raise this 1.5 billion at 40 billion those people are going to get their money out first they'll they'll have a ratchet they'll get more shares they're protected

SPEAKER_21: so they got this you know sky high valuation which looks really great in the press but now that the market's corrected you know they're going to have to use this 1.5 billion dollars to get your profitability and the public markets want profitability and it was a very hard juxtaposition for

SPEAKER_30: and a pivot for airbnb lyft doordash postmates and uber to shift gears and say we're going to go from high growth to high growth plot high growth losing money to high growth breaking even and a path to

SPEAKER_21: profitability and look at the look at the work that uber has had to put into this for five years you know four or five years doordash for years and so you know this actually uh reeks of competence and maturity really for me it does because the market has changed in a very dramatic fashion so this is as if you're the pilot and you know you're just going really fast and you know uh flying low and now you're like hey we need to conserve some fuel here so let's go 55 miles an hour let's conserve fuel let's get to the destination and let's make the company look like what public companies are being rewarded in the public markets every time uber or doordash or airbnb start hitting into profitability dipping into profitability more people want to own the shares right and that is the story uh of high growth private to public and that transition so i think this is competence uh and probably unnecessary if you think about it right because it's only three percent so you're like do they really need to do this they're sending a message to internally they're sending a message to public market investors that we're going to be disciplined and even though three percent makes no sense like three percent you can't raise another whatever it is hundred million on top of the 1.5 and absorb these losses no we're just going to do what's right for the business that's what it says to me is they're trying to communicate

SPEAKER_01: to the market we are competent this is stone cold jason um stone cold because let's be let's you know remind everyone it's 450 humans who are getting canned here but uh the plan layoffs some more details

SPEAKER_06: about the layoffs the planned layoffs uh follow a hiring freeze earlier this month and and this is kind of interesting the resignations of several key executives the job cuts are part of a broader organizational restructure this is all according to the information um and are likely to focus on top earning managers outside go puffs core delivery operations the person briefed said now i have two questions for you one i can completely understand the argument that this shows some discipline that says we are keeping our costs under control as we head to the the public market given this company's focus and we'll hear you know just a throwback from ceo uh what was his last name rafael um in a minute talking about their their sort of ilishayev thank you rafael ilishayev um talking about the company's focus on discipline profitability you know like he was like we built this company so intentionally so deliberately we took a really long time to get where we are how do you have 450 top earning

SPEAKER_08: managers outside the core delivery business to to lay off like is there is that is it just a market

SPEAKER_01: change or were there some maybe missteps well what probably happened was the market was so hot

SPEAKER_04: money was so cheap that they were able to raise a lot of money and they might have had special projects going on think product extensions uh new products and services that would you know maybe drop a year from now or two years from now so you know if you took like um airbnb as an example they launched experiences at some point right and uber launched uber eats at some point and uber self-driving their self-driving unit and they also have um the trucking unit right so uh when the market contracts and people say hey listen we need you to be more profitable you're going to look at those second third fourth businesses that you're developing in the laboratory and say you know what let's take those off the table for now let's focus on the core business and let's make sure everybody understands that that business can in fact be profitable and what that looks like because people are going to give us no credit so if you're in an environment where people are giving you no credit and they want you to prove it to them before they buy the shares well you're kind of put into um you know a bad situation now there is also this concept of never waste a crisis it's quite possible the board sat down with the founder and said listen we don't know what's going to happen maybe the ipo window closes we're not able to ipo maybe you got to keep this thing private for another five years and then the ipo window opens up again it could be a recession next year that's what indications are showing we don't want to go public in a recession we want to use the recession as a chance to grow market share um and do it quietly without people understanding what we're doing so the ipo is maybe the ipo is off the table for this company right now maybe and if that's the case then they're battening down the hatches and if you think about any company getting rid of the bottom five percent of the company in terms of performers gives an opportunity for those other people to rise up take more responsibility if you get rid of the bad managers every company could uh universally get rid of three four five percent of their employees in a very disciplined fashion and perform higher that's just management theory you know and it's when you cut people it gives other people an opportunity the company functions better now there's a human side to all this and you brought that up it's very quick for all of us to be like oh what about the people losing their jobs in this case in tech it's almost universal that you get an obscene amount of severance when compared to the average american's severance and when you get cut at a fast food

SPEAKER_48: restaurant or working in a factory or any other job you might get a week or two weeks for every year

SPEAKER_39: of service if that yeah tech workers who don't need the money in almost all cases and have five other job offers and getting recruited like crazy in today's environment get three or six months to go to bali or go surfing or snowboarding or some so like when people are like oh but what about the people being laid off you don't have to worry about in that tech i worry about people being laid off in a factory that's shutting down permanently in detroit those people we need to

SPEAKER_52: very fair point and on the plus side they are getting laid off now before this recession that we're

SPEAKER_06: all manifesting into being actually occurs um so hopefully they'll be in a good position

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SPEAKER_06: to discuss with you okay hold on red flags i would like to discuss with you one yes gopuff has had as i

SPEAKER_23: mentioned these three high level executives resign recently including the svp of product and growth

SPEAKER_06: okay the vp of marketing solutions and the director of partnerships and of course this is all happening in the context of instacart having major pullbacks saying effectively we're not going to ipo and we're repricing ourselves uh you have other sort of food delivery you have zero grocery sort of abruptly going out of business it are there larger questions about the management possibly or just faith in this

SPEAKER_66: business because grocery delivery as we know going back so many years has never worked as a business

SPEAKER_04: we don't know if these resignations were voluntary or they were um you know you know walked up to the edge of the cliff you know holding hands and told to jump so uh in order to save face uh what uh an executive team will do is they'll say to you know people who are vice presidents or senior vice presidents like this hey listen it's not working out uh we both know that we're going to be eliminating your position and we're going to go in another direction if you'd like to resign we will give you your year of options and uh you'll get six months of pay if not we're going to fire you and you won't be getting those things and then here is your agreement and just remember you know non-disparagement and non-disclosure and private information so if you want to sign these and get the six months and have your options vested till the end of the year feel free if you don't uh you're fired as of today so this

SPEAKER_21: is typically how these things get framed so don't be surprised if it's not that there's like a legion

SPEAKER_04: of people walking out the door it might just be uh they could have been mutual and yeah framed as

SPEAKER_74: resignations to see cleaning up right exactly they're just cleaning up i mean it seems like

SPEAKER_06: most likely again given like remember and this is why i almost want to play this clip we were so amazed at raf and how deliberate he was and what how what a careful business builder he was and so it is most believable at least based on our right like if we bought the pitch in the room it's because this guy seems so freaking competent so it is most believable that they're cleaning up

SPEAKER_04: yeah competent people have to do layoffs common people have to fire people competent people have to do reorganizations all of this can be true um i think you know when the press gets their hands on something like this uh sometimes they will take the worst interpretation about it and the information they're getting is from the people leaving yeah so the people leaving are this is a mess you know what a disaster this company will never work you know and maybe they want to they feel rejected leaving the company or they weren't needed so you know you know this as a member of the press you will get all the bad stories yeah and the people who are staying there or the pr people are trying to spin it as like normal course of business truth probably somewhere in between they may have grown a little

SPEAKER_21: bit too fast and they could be highly competent and it's a hard business and it's a i think a first time or second time founder a young founder for sure so they're also getting their legs under them and learning how to do the job first time found all right found it in college so let's play let's

SPEAKER_01: play the cluster and find ourselves like i'm so glad we did this interview because he's you know they're turning into such a newsmaker story and it gives us that that extra context that is missing

SPEAKER_06: in these reports today let's play this interview of roth talking about profitability and different

SPEAKER_01: markets being a core value of gopuff 29 seconds great it's like we're not going to operate and

SPEAKER_89: lose money forever right this business was built on the tennis of really really strong unit economics and profitability so we're not going to go out and open up markets and lose money for years and years and years especially on a unit level and not produce a profit on the unit level so um we're examining all of that and kind of every market that we're entering into and kind of making strategic decisions along the way and what makes most sense both for our customers first and foremost and then to how unit

SPEAKER_01: economics play out uh and then he also when we asked him producer justin reminded me when we asked him

SPEAKER_06: what he was worried about like what keeps you up at night about your business he said he was worried about making sure the right people were there with the same scrappy mentality that made them successful

SPEAKER_04: and that may be what he that may be part of the layoff process here it could be multiple things at the same time hey the market is slowing down we're going to have more scrutiny in the ipo people are not suspending disbelief a lot of these spacks were so outlandish in their projections and optimism that the sec is getting involved you know all these incredibly strong companies are being repriced and we're in a space where uber lift doordash are you know being put in a holding pattern until they hit profitability okay we need to prove it to the market and he might have just said you know what the the logical thing for me to do here is to get rid of the people i may have hired too fast who are not scrappy enough and who want to just spend money like you know drunken sailors to hit their goals and i just need to go back to the core of scrappy people and proving it to the market so it reeks of competence to me but that's only because when i was a journalist i probably would have been like mismanagement and then once you see companies doing this kind of stuff and you're part of the planning of it and you're seeing it up close and personal it's typically incredibly thoughtful in how it's done there are exceptions like that guy and this crazy trend where they lay people off on mass on a zoom

SPEAKER_06: and stupid stuff like better.com right i mean i think it's always valuable to take note of layoffs like this i suspect you're 100 right and the reason you know we're in a very lucky position to be able to make a somewhat informed guest around that because we have talked to him one-on-one yep two-on-one and came away profoundly impressed with the thoughtfulness and care and intentionality of the ceo so it is a hundred percent likely 99 likely that this is pure competence and also it's the freaking grocery delivery business where there are so many bodies littered that we cannot help but

SPEAKER_04: wonder it's a graveyard it's a graveyard startups from web van to cosmo uh it's clear consumers really like to get cheap goods quickly yep and it's clear that founders keep finding innovative ways to delight them what's not clear is the margin and that is always going to be the challenge is making enough money to provide the service and there might be a moment where there's diminishing returns i suspect like if you need emergency deodorant or soap or a six-pack like does 15 minutes or

SPEAKER_21: 45 minutes actually make a difference does five dollars for delivery or twelve dollars for delivery if you're living in a major city in a three thousand dollar a month apartment does it actually

SPEAKER_12: make a difference probably not and so that might this might be one of the rare cases molly where entrepreneurs have built products that over service the customer to a level that the customers

SPEAKER_01: doesn't need yeah yeah could be i'm trying to think of when i've ever needed 15 minute delivery and i think the example i gave once was tampons and one time i had postmates bring me a plunger

SPEAKER_108: and when you need a plunger you yes something you get a plumbing problem the plumber cannot come fast

SPEAKER_23: enough yes right and you got a little kid in the house and you can't leave but i mean like those are

SPEAKER_108: vanishingly rare for snacks you're okay yeah i mean it is the use case for delivery has become

SPEAKER_04: you can tell that we've reached a moment of diminishing returns when people are making the decision on when they get their packages based upon how many packages get sent and consolidating them into one so you don't waste the environment or you don't have to open more than one box right like we've all made that decision where amazon tells us three boxes on monday tuesday wednesday or one box on wednesday and you're like i don't want to open three boxes yeah i don't want to go downstairs and get the three boxes just give it to me all on wednesday one box easy breezy right

SPEAKER_01: you've done that i'm sure a hundred percent and it's almost like a mat it's almost like a massive um experiment it's like a huge test about what consumers really want and i suspect that amazon's

Jason Calacanis: got the data that shows that people actually don't need next day delivery as much as they think they do

SPEAKER_21: yeah there's there are problems that people have that are acute that are you know the the i've got

SPEAKER_118: a broken pipe in my house problems and then there are yeah wow pop tarts are delicious you know like

SPEAKER_01: these are two different classes of problems kleenex and i am ordering it from amazon because i don't have time to go to the store but do i really need kleenex tomorrow like no no i mean the window can

SPEAKER_29: be dirty for till saturday and when i go to costco and get it for half the price and get twice as many ounces of all right um the window you cleaning your windows with kleenex but you say kleenex i thought you

SPEAKER_12: were um talking about windex sorry oh yeah yeah totally uh kleenex windex all this stuff right

SPEAKER_127: i mean if you're just gonna get a little you can use toilet paper i don't i don't know i don't even know the difference yeah how much does it ask me how much a gallon of milk costs how much a gallon milk costs i don't know 15 20 bucks you tell me gallon of milk i think it's about 20 gallon of milk's

SPEAKER_133: like 27 dollars i think yeah uh no idea well you will know that i started this live stream being

SPEAKER_138: like how does anyone do it can someone come to my house and help me make my life work is it is that a thing can you have that i need that yeah i mean uh get a family assistant i guess

SPEAKER_12: is the title you're looking is that a title that's a thing yeah yeah i mean there's a state manager that's when you have three or four homes they manage it you know making sure all the houses are in good condition you can outsource that i actually want to start a startup around that i had this idea of outsourced estate manager so imagine like whatever your house costs you pay one percent of that a year to just have somebody manage everything for you so when you have to replace filters or find a new gardener or change your tesla charge or whatever it is that's broken or needs to be maintained you know you just outsource it to somebody so that i've been really wanting to work on this i'm trying to find an estate manager who operated at a high level who would want to be like the president of this organization or the general manager because i'd like to run it as a test

SPEAKER_22: i think it would be incredible i think there's like even mid-market homes who would want this right

SPEAKER_01: well i was gonna say i don't think it even has to be like a multiple home situation i mean in a way that's what i'm talking about but just for like life yeah so like all of those things state manager

SPEAKER_03: state managers are 150 000 or house assistant it could be you know what you could have tears you

SPEAKER_74: could have a state manager yeah and that's your money maker but you could also have fractional home

SPEAKER_06: assistant i mean literally for 20 years i've been talking to my friends about like could three of us families just share a home assistant a home assistant i just didn't know it was called that

SPEAKER_155: and now i know what to call it um it was a little sexist but i think they called it like a friday girl was like the old term for it uh really super maybe it was like called a house it was somebody who

David Friedberg: would come to your business or a home and do your bookkeeping on fridays and open your mail and oh you know just like a somebody to help out one day a week so with my concept for the estate manager

SPEAKER_04: would be fractional estate manager so if you have one house and it's 3 000 square feet and it has like

SPEAKER_30: one kitchen and you know three bathrooms that's like one level of state management now you got a house that's 10 000 square feet with you know two or three kitchen like areas wet bars and all this

SPEAKER_21: stuff and then you have a second home now and you have an office or whatever now you're starting to need somebody to just rotate between them and there's always going to be maintenance going on so if you could fractionalize that but have one phone number to call that would be incredible because almost universally everybody in your neighborhood is trying to figure out who is the best pool person

SPEAKER_03: the best gardening person the best plumber right and if you if you represented say 25 homes in oakland and

SPEAKER_04: 25 firms in berkeley and 25 in the wider bay area now you get 75 homes in an area you know the four best plumbers you know their pricing and you're not redoing that because you're like okay molly needs to have her you know sink redone jason's already had his sink redone they both use this polyform so we got the person who does that we know the replacement cost and so they can't screw you on the bell right

SPEAKER_01: right and so it's sort of like it's the level in between thumbtack and you

SPEAKER_95: like i went and found them and booked them and showed them was there when they showed up and check

SPEAKER_04: the work check the bell paid it for you and i've worked with them on seven other projects like getting your wi-fi set up properly in your home is like uh you know it's a day's job and you know but

SPEAKER_12: not for the person who's done it a hundred times it's a two-hour job for them totally yeah so anyway

SPEAKER_04: that's my idea if anybody wants let's leave this in the show if anybody wants to work on the estate

SPEAKER_21: manager startup i want to incubate i'm just looking for somebody in the bay area who's done estate management already and wants to work in a startup where we would service like maybe

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SPEAKER_21: fast we talked about this earlier in the week this is of course the one click checkout startup uh we covered it a number of times and dom from the company has been on the podcast before as well they're now according to reports considering layoffs and trying to find a buyer after failing to raise at two different valuations over the past few months this is yet another story molly of the market changes quickly and founders must react to it and this is a great bookend to the previous story with go puff maybe go puff is acting proactively and maybe fast is

SPEAKER_01: acting reactively uh retrospectively so why don't you or maybe fast i mean yes so i'll cue us up here before we dive into analyzing fast of course is part of the reason we're all so fascinated by the story

SPEAKER_06: is that fast is the company that sprung up as a direct competitor to bolt and according to ryan breslow's initial attention getting tweet storm was uh created potentially a little bit by stripe and the yc mafia this is his accusation uh to compete directly with bolt now either way one click checkout software for online merchants is not a terrible idea seems like a good money maker it also seems like fast grew incredibly quickly uh raised about 120 million dollars from investors including stripe and index ventures but its main product generated just 600 000 last year according to the information by the way shout out to malik morris at the information who is a fast scoop machine just is like producing story after story after story about this company um but you know this is one of those this is a very much like a feels like a fomo vc story where people were just they were seeing maybe bolt success they were seeing stripe print money stripe itself was like cool how can we extend you know this success into other areas of payments and fintech payments are a big deal where do we think this all went wrong so uh you know if it was in

SPEAKER_04: fact like a revenge startup uh as ryan breslow is kind of it's like framing it as that's never a great way to build a company which is as a reaction to another company or it's rarely a good way to build a company i should say sometimes you know steve jobs will make ibm into the enemy and but the truth is steve jobs and and was were just very focused on early computer users and delighting them they weren't really trying to kill ibm that became like a meme uh and a bit of a marketing well every company

SPEAKER_190: needs competition right competition makes you want to fight harder so of course right so it's great

SPEAKER_08: motivation to talk about who's your competition it's maybe not good to spin up a company whole cloth yes to come after your competition right if you now if you say there must be a better way and i

SPEAKER_21: have a better idea instead of renting time you know off of some giant mainframe computer i want to put a computer on your desk and it won't be as powerful as that one but it'll be on your desk and it's yours you know okay great let's let's start that competition that paradigm shift but here um it could just be poor execution it could be a wildly competitive space and it could also be overfunding and the overfunding uh that makes this company look like a failure now if this company had raised 10 million and it had 600 million in revenue and it had 60 employees uh we would be looking at some six i'm sorry i've had 600 000 in revenue with 60 employees and you're making 10 000 per employee and they had put 10 million to work they would be trading at you know and it was a 50 million company okay they would be trading at a more reasonable valuation 50 times 100 times their revenue and their revenue employee wouldn't feel as modest and they'd feel more efficient so this is where over funding again this is going to be a continuing theme in 2022 what looked reasonable last year looks completely insane this year so by this year's standards well why did this company need so much money why do they have 500 employees is that actually a distraction because if they've only got you know 600 000 in revenue and 30 million dollars they don't need that many employees and obviously

SPEAKER_198: it's not an efficient way to deploy capital yeah if stripe was worth 100 billion or 200 billion in the

SPEAKER_04: private market for them to make a hundred million dollar bet is you know like literally uh you know whatever it is a fraction of one percent of the value of their company and so it's worth taking a shot so weird behaviors happen in hot markets and then eventually reality sets in you cannot defy gravity you can put on a cape you can pretend you're flying but gravity is gravity you know and

SPEAKER_21: now we're seeing what happens when you don't hit your numbers and what are they going to do here lay off 400 people go to 100 people and have the money last longer i don't know apparently last week

SPEAKER_01: the company's ceo told potential investors that fast could slash its 500 person staff by 50 to reduce

SPEAKER_202: cash okay so yeah so i just said so specifically exactly what you said yes it's in fact i think that

SPEAKER_159: would be again back to the mature thing to do the market changes be mature you got to you have to do it

SPEAKER_00: react to the reality here so you know i it's it's very easy for people to dunk on dom um who i had

SPEAKER_30: on the program and people were asking me today like what did you think of him now and reflection you know i thought the same thing and i said it then he was too too much sales pitching too much marketing you know a lot of sizzle not a lot of steak a lot of hat not what are they what do they say

SPEAKER_205: like cattle yeah all hat no cattle um now that's not a dig to him he's early in his career

SPEAKER_04: uh and now this is his crucible moment so if i'm dom or i'm dom's mentor or i'm on his board i'm sitting him down and saying listen everybody thinks you're a everybody thinks you don't know what you're doing is that who you are or not because now is your chance this is your crucible

SPEAKER_111: moment as ruloff would say at sequoia okay so are you going to be mature are you going to make the layoffs are you going to double revenue with half as many people because that's what the world needs to see they need to see you triple revenue year over year double revenue quadruple revenue year

SPEAKER_04: over year with half as many people and they need you to stop with the tweet storms and you know giving yourselves high fives and you know all this nonsense you know you got no business giving out

SPEAKER_111: startup advice and so there's too much start when i started there wasn't enough startup advice nobody knew molly how to read a term sheet nobody knew who the angels were in the world it was all very clandestine and if you asked another founder hey can i can i see your term sheet that the vc gave no no i'm not allowed to show it to you um well can you introduce me to somebody that i don't know let me ask like it was all very very clandestine and an insider kind of approach now all the information is out there well one of the problems with all the information out there is you know people like dom might be giving startup advice and people might be taking it because he raised 100 million and he might not have any idea what he's doing yeah right and so be careful who you take your startup advice from you might be taking startup advice from somebody who is literally racing off a cliff and doesn't know it and then you're like i'm gonna follow that guy and all of a sudden you've raced off the cliff velman louise style and you were chasing them to a destination that does not actually exist

SPEAKER_52: it's really interesting it's sort of like uh how it's like instagram or like someone else's happy

Jason Calacanis: marriage like you see a startup that's raised 120 million dollars and they're in hyper growth and you're like oh my god like their house looks so great and their marriage seems so awesome you have

SPEAKER_127: no idea what's happening nope inside exactly no idea like yeah you wake up one day and like the story

SPEAKER_05: comes out of like how horrible their marriage was and totally functional insane and you're like

SPEAKER_19: oh my god you're like oh god everything seems so great because of your 120 million dollars i mean

SPEAKER_04: fake it till you make it we talked about that on yesterday's show on thursday with this week in streaming and lon you know you are perpetually trying to sell a vision to raise money and that's great until your life becomes more selling the vision than you know creating the reality and

SPEAKER_39: your skill set i see this with a lot of founders they become so skillful at telling the story so skillful at raising the next round that they start to do what is most enjoyable and what's most

SPEAKER_111: enjoyable is to raise that next round at a higher evaluation because it makes you feel good it's like

SPEAKER_04: oh look at the scoreboard but the real scoreboard is your customers and are they renewing or are they churning and are you delighting them or not and the scoreboard is do you have great employees who come to work every day and crush it or not and that that's basically what it comes down to here is we've we've lived in a crazy you know 24-hour rave known as you know the the the boom and now the lights came on

SPEAKER_01: and the music stopped and yeah some people are still dancing saying when the tide goes out you find out who's not wearing pants exactly so pick your analogy this will not be the last time we have a story like this on this week in startups i would imagine over the next couple years and what's going to be so

SPEAKER_06: interesting is just to your exact point jason like to see who rises to this moment to see what great leaders are going to do it right now do it show show what you're made of or you know or quit you

SPEAKER_04: know that's what's going to happen you're going to see a bunch of founders who are like this isn't worth it i'm going to quit and then you see other founders just buck up buck up and get the job done

SPEAKER_21: uh you know frank sleutman is a wartime ceo you know what they said frank sleutman was like talking to somebody i heard this conversation and uh he's like you know you're a great wartime uh ceo he says business is always war and business is always war so dom uh should have been acting as if this was a war the whole time and you know now he's gonna really he's behind the eight ball so step it up yeah step it up he should get out there on sales calls himself he should be talking to his customers you know even if it's a small number of customers you should be talking to him saying how can i delight you more uh and he should just get everybody focused on the customers full stop efficiency is one of the

SPEAKER_56: main components in startup success everybody knows this you got to be efficient that's what coda is all about coda is the all-in-one doc for teams your text and tables live together in the same document and this helps any team collaborate more efficiently especially remote ones they've got thousands of templates to work with at coda or you can repurpose templates published by some of the best innovators out there for yourself coda works out of the box and it's completely customizable so you can create a wiki or a knowledge hub for your team you can onboard new hires quickly and adapt fast to any major or minor changes in your business here's how we use it at this week in startups my guy presh

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SPEAKER_06: off twitter tweeting more operating speaking of operators next up we have an incredible conversation oh with long time political strategist and investor bradley tusk of tusk ventures author of the fixer about i mean all things at the intersection of regulation and startups it's so freaking interesting we talk about uber's taxes taxi strategy in new york city sports betting regulation writ large as a market maker and breaker and ketamine and ketamine i mean it literally has everything if you want to take a deep dive into

SPEAKER_21: uh ketamine and other uh the regulation of psychedelics we touch on that as well and uh bradley had some

SPEAKER_12: first-hand experiences that he actually shared with us so stick with us it's a great you've got it all hey everybody welcome to another episode of this week in startups uh bradley tusk is with us good to

SPEAKER_198: see you bradley uh he was on episode 1327 back in november of 2021 and uh bradley's a bit of a fixer uh he knows how to work in regulated environments and he's also an investor was early uh in the uber experience and i guess i have to start with uh two questions bradley one are you watching the show and any quick thoughts there and then number two what do you think of the taxis quite ironically or paradoxically

SPEAKER_240: including themselves in uber after we're watching a tv show from 11 years ago uh basically showing us the

SPEAKER_198: taxi lobby doing everything they can to kill lift and yeah yeah so a few things so one is uh i'm not

SPEAKER_242: watching it because my view is it's just going to make me really upset so it didn't seem seem worthwhile you know i i continue to be friends with travis i'm invested in cloud kitchen and work on it and so um didn't really feel like watching him just be totally smeared um and in terms of that look it's interesting because you could look at it as sort of a failure on both sides right which is for taxi yes you know wildly hypocritical to be calling us every possible name and accusing us everything you know imaginable for so many years and then being on the platform on the flip side for uber though you

SPEAKER_245: know while it was a smart move and the stock went up as a result of it it's also sort of an acknowledgement that the original uber vision didn't quite work or at least wasn't quite executed

SPEAKER_242: properly right in the sense of if uber was able to deliver the value proposition that initially envisioned it wouldn't need to put taxi on there right that now effectively by equating everything what it says in a way is yeah we may not be that better after all so and look i have a probably somewhat controversial view which was when the board replaced travis they should have replaced him

SPEAKER_245: with someone equally aggressive and visionary and i think by putting dara in there from my perspective good manager seems like a nice man but the underlying vision that would have made uber a multi-hundred

SPEAKER_242: billion dollar company um took someone different to pursue he hasn't pursued that and i think as a result

SPEAKER_06: you know it's kind of middle that's so interesting we've been having sort of an ongoing conversation uh with about founder control and because partly because we're watching all these shows and we're all sort of reliving that but also we see mark zuckerberg with super voting shares you know taking down america left and right and there is this we've had this question about where the pendulum is going to swing next in terms of founders like is it going to be another situation like after the dotcom crash where you had to put a grown-up in charge of every company and it sounds like you're saying you can do

Jason Calacanis: that but what you might do is drain the life out of a really vibrant unicorn it cut yes exactly so on

SPEAKER_245: one hand look i don't know what you guys are saying but even in the last eight weeks i think not only

SPEAKER_242: are valuations starting to drop a little bit but some of the ability for founders to sort of set these terms that felt a little crazy to us even four or five months ago um they're not quite as bold to ask for those things right now so i think on one hand they're gonna have a little less control based on

SPEAKER_245: some recent changes in the market on the other hand yeah i mean that's look i know that a lot of times

SPEAKER_242: the thesis is put the kind of crazy visionary in at first and then replace them with a grown-up once the company goes public or you're trying to get to the next stage um oftentimes that can work but fundamentally if the company's whole success is dependent upon the original vision being executed you have to either leave the founder in there or replace them with someone who also has the same skill set and interest in doing that right when you replace them with the opposite personality and that they're basically told not to do anything like that the old guy did then by definition yeah

SPEAKER_253: you're shutting down the potential that you invested you know i i looked at the taxi thing slightly

SPEAKER_198: differently which was um if you're going to want to make peace with these cities um allowing one app to have everything in it and kind of not threatening their ultimate demise uh to ride sharing was kind of like an olive branch of hey sure we'll send some of our traffic your way we'll make a little bit on it now you've got this more complete app because travis did always think about maybe buses would be in there or some public transportation would be in there so i looked at it slightly differently which was hey if we're collecting this data sharing it with new york you know the administrations would understand it more and then well if there were people who didn't know about uber by now or you know were fans of taxes for whatever reason well now they have uber and they could hit uber eats and hey listen i would rather our guy be in there of course uh but they have gotten to this point where actually they're going to be throwing off cash flow so at least the company i think is default a lot years later but

SPEAKER_261: yeah i was just gonna say that i'm like wow so you know it's kind of hard no more losing a billion

SPEAKER_39: dollars a quarter because i kind of liked that what was great about it was you know if you if you look at the disparity in the number of cities uber's in versus lyft even to this day it's just extraordinary

SPEAKER_264: the footprints of the businesses or whatever it is and by the way i have let me quickly pitch it

SPEAKER_265: because i think it's really interesting a way that uber could actually literally drive lyft out

SPEAKER_242: of business completely and it would it's a little counterintuitive but if uber actually changed their position on the work classification issue and said we're going to make all of our drivers employees then by definition those drivers can't drive for uber and for lyft like they can with their independent contractors when that happens because the point you just made jason drivers are going to pick wherever the bigger market share is that's going to be uber basically absolutely everywhere once they start shifting over look the network effect can run in either direction right so it could work well but could also really fall apart and as more and more drivers shift over from lyft to uber because that's the better opportunity for them they no longer have the choice of doing both then customers say i'm not waiting 16 minutes for a lyft and they download uber too or switch to the other app and eventually over time i don't see how lyft stays in business because they don't really have that many other revenue streams um so it's fascinating to bring that up

SPEAKER_268: because i love this i said that on cnbc years ago and i almost got left out of the room and i was like

SPEAKER_198: well wait all of the things that users keep asking about which is like you know getting cars on the slow days and then is there any standards in the cars can the drivers have a standard you know uniform

SPEAKER_21: code of conduct cleanliness of car we we couldn't tell them you know uh you couldn't direct the work of an independent contractor once you start directing their work when they start and and you needed people early you needed people to start at 5 a.m to to get commuters and people going to the airport and that was hard to get drivers on the road at that time so setting the times uh you know maybe wearing and putting an uber logo on the side of the car putting advertising the car once you started dictating how they did work uh that is when you triggered the full-time thing so yeah it would be

SPEAKER_272: because it started to become shift work and that would stink for the for the independent

SPEAKER_21: contractors but i think the other thing that's happened correct me if i'm wrong when you look at the independent contractor versus uh full-time employment it seems like there's politicians and unions who really want to push people towards full-time shift work oh sure but the market actually has kind of spoken where people are like i i value my flexibility i please leave this on-demand economy alone yeah and now that the prices have raised you know and there's like all the floors are in with

SPEAKER_114: floors gig work seems acceptable to the overwhelming majority of people without a floor the third way

SPEAKER_278: right right ultimately you could take the third way a couple steps further right so by definition

SPEAKER_242: if you look at organized labor returning the sharing economy workers into full-time employees is

SPEAKER_253: their biggest opportunity for organizing in decades right the private sector labor unions have never recovered from the kind of demise of auto and everything else so for them this is a huge deal because once someone becomes a w2 if that place is represented by a union they start paying dues they become members it really works to the financial advantage of the unions itself the companies obviously have said look we want to be able to both have our own independence and give our drivers independence and that logic makes sense but there's really no reason why we have to stick with a system that was created in the 1930s right this is when fdr was present francis brookens was the

SPEAKER_242: labor secretary and that third way you know makes eminent sense right where you could for example we were at one point working on a company called handy um i don't know if you guys know that but i

SPEAKER_245: remember they the what they asked us to do was sort of so crazy anyway because they just said we would like to give health benefits and other benefits to the people on our platform but not if it

SPEAKER_283: then automatically turns us into a w2 employer can you get us permission to give people benefits

SPEAKER_245: and amazingly of course all the red states were like yeah no problem at all and all the blue states were like no which should be the opposite of what you would think right but the blue states were like oh if they can get benefits and maintain their independence why would they ever want to become

SPEAKER_242: a full-time employee why would they ever want to pay you new dues or anything like that so ironically the far left was blocking benefits for working people um simply because they were trying to push over the bigger opportunity for organized labor who are their political support right this is

SPEAKER_06: this is your specific genius bradley which is like you sit at this intersection between startups and policy and when you and i talked in 2018 you know one of the things you said is that you had found that startups would take their tech seriously their fundraising seriously but they look at government in politics as an afterthought which then you know at the time you said was a really risky thing to do i think it's born out that that was a very risky risky to do is there a difference now i mean i can't say

SPEAKER_242: that yeah it's it's getting a little better i'll give you a few things one is just by the fact that we're now investing out of our third fund um that we've been able to do this just shows that at least you know jordan and i had this thesis of you could try to focus specifically on it regulated startups and say hey we can solve your political regulatory problems and that clearly has worked well enough

SPEAKER_253: that we've you know been able to do three funds worth of of deals um but to me one of the biggest things is when i meet with a founder which like you guys i do well every day um i want to see that they know what they don't know especially when it comes to government politics media things like that

SPEAKER_242: and i would say the average kind of founder five six years ago was more on the lines of oh i went to stanford i was in white combinator john door is on my board and i'm so brilliant that when those regulators see how special i am they're gonna do whatever i want that particular mentality has

SPEAKER_253: changed enough that i don't hear that too much anymore once in a while when i do i'm like okay

SPEAKER_295: x we're out we're done with the call so the arrogance or entitlement just assumption because

SPEAKER_297: we've been given our flowers by silicon valley that the government will just bow down to our

SPEAKER_245: brilliance yeah that was the initial assumption and i think that because they've seen both you know

SPEAKER_253: uber and other startups comes to mind yeah and then the big tech companies kicked out of them and government in the press that mentality starting to shift which is unfortunate but ultimately molly helpful

SPEAKER_278: if you're me and you want to get people to start really taking regulation seriously yeah do tech

SPEAKER_198: workers need to be unionized what's the argument for and against because we hear all these kind of you know things tech companies are taking advantage of people and then you know that's the sort of worst interpretation over here and they they want to just grind people down and they hear on the and i mean actually even including it tech workers like people who work at google proper you

SPEAKER_272: know they've been talking about now i guess the fiber folks got unionized for the first time that and then there's obviously retail workers like amazon's retail workers and then on the other side you

SPEAKER_198: hear this you know all these unions only care about dues uh they're just trying to collect more dues

SPEAKER_155: they they don't care about the actual workers what's the truth in your reality so the truth is this and

SPEAKER_280: keep in mind i've dealt with labor for almost my entire career because you can't work in government

SPEAKER_244: and not endlessly negotiate with labor in one form or another private sector unions serve a very important

SPEAKER_242: purpose right when the people who work in a specific sector lack the ability to sort of advocate for themselves and they are more powerful doing it collectively then it absolutely makes sense to have private sector unions or think about like coal miners right like of course uh there should be someone looking out for them to make sure that they get better treatment than they get right now

SPEAKER_245: but if you're in a private sector company whether it's a sharing economy company or google or whatever else the conclusion you have to reach is i will make more money and have a better life if i'm in this union than if i'm not and i remember so you know i was my bloomberg's campaign manager and we always had this weird thing where we were seeking the support of labor like every single candidate does and they would say sometimes what was bloomberg lp unionized and the answer is no but the reason no is every time that the union would try to organize the the workers there are like why we get we make really good money we have amazing benefits we got all these snacks why do i need to pay you dues i'm happy the way i am so it really comes down to if you truly feel like where you're working that you're being taken advantage of and that could change if there were collective bargaining power then yeah a union makes total sense but i think in a lot of environments you know there's becomes ideological assumption that if you're that's what i was sort of getting at it feels like ideological you have to be pro labor but actually in the case of something like google you're probably gonna have less take-home

SPEAKER_315: pay if you do that well i mean the in the example of uh and i'll drop it to you molly after this but the example of the uh media companies unionizing it's exactly what i was gonna say oh is that what

SPEAKER_47: you're gonna go to we both found that perplexing because when i heard back channel from somebody

SPEAKER_21: got unionized i was like oh wow that must have been interesting he's like ah jcal greatest thing ever and i was like explain he's like well now when like reporters come to me and they want to raise i'm

SPEAKER_111: just like i'm sorry here's a schedule i could you're you're a level 2.5 and you'd have to get to

SPEAKER_21: 3.1 for me to give you six thousand dollars more a year 500 a month whereas previously somebody come in and be like listen i dropped two scoops i'm taylor lorenz i want to raise i'm on a1 twice this person's been a1 on the front page zero times i deserve to get paid as much as they do

SPEAKER_111: period under story but you lose that ability yeah when you join the union yeah that's true i mean i think

SPEAKER_74: it's it's become like what do you say though i mean i think it's become a marker of which industries

SPEAKER_06: are the most at this point right like because if the idea is if the idea is that media companies are unionizing in some ways to try to counter bad management like there's this sort of question between i think management and the reality of the business well in the reality of business exactly like it most likely unionizing isn't going to fix bad management but it seems like increasingly and i don't mean to derail us but it seems like increasingly what it can be is a sign of bad management when you see these outfits organizing it's because the the the maybe the entire business model for sure

SPEAKER_245: but the correlation between a company being unionized and that having resulting in better management um you know you don't see much of that either right it seems to me that in the media

SPEAKER_242: industry and look i i get it which is that if you're a reporter anywhere but fox news and a few other

SPEAKER_253: outlets you know the thing you're most afraid of is being thrown out of the you know the woke mafia or whatever it is so therefore you have to love unions and want to be unionized but what's interesting is the only media outlets that are really making money are the ones that have flipped

SPEAKER_245: the script completely whether it's on the left or the right like fox news or the new york times right where they say okay you know what we're not even going to pretend to be objective we're not even pretend to be balanced we are going to take the people who watch us or read us and make them feel

SPEAKER_242: better about themselves and better about their lives by validating their views and invalidating everyone else aside you know yeah and that's look it's horrible for democracy it's incredibly polarizing but it's very lucrative new york times is doing better than ever fox news does better than

SPEAKER_253: anyone else in media by far so that's actually the model by which media companies can make more money and then theory unionized reporters can make more money it's it's incredibly destructive for democracy it's sad that the new york times is now such a sort of poor institution but nonetheless

SPEAKER_339: that's where it's gone all right i think there's two ways we can go here we could go psychedelics

SPEAKER_47: or we can go crypto or we can go gambling well actually do you want to take some shrooms play some bets yeah in bitcoin that's what we could do right now if everybody's up for anything yeah

SPEAKER_346: did you get my email from two days ago i did i did yeah okay i was on the road but i'll i'll ping you offline yeah gambling is my that's my wheelhouse i i'm into all these things let's start with

SPEAKER_268: gambling uh well i mean i think to set the stage we did see the supreme court took some action on

SPEAKER_198: states being able to decide uh if they have gambling online or not pre-pahara had famously banned online poker it was a lot of uh gray area there so online poker and things are coming back but it's it's state

SPEAKER_47: by state so what's catch us up on when that when that uh judgment happened and then how quickly each state fell and what that process was like because i was getting all kinds of pitches like hey this

SPEAKER_00: thing happened in the supreme court and here we are and then it wasn't actually ready to go yet so

SPEAKER_351: where is what's the state of so so paspa was the name of the law that was overturned by the supreme court

SPEAKER_280: it effectively prevented states from making their own decisions around gaming state of new jersey sued

SPEAKER_242: and ultimately after going through the entire process they won so what it did was it certainly created the opportunity for every state to then make their own rules and set their own regulatory structure around gaming um and it it opened the floodgates but what i think people in the gaming world who kind of didn't know politics that well didn't understand is yes more states are going to allow sports betting i gaming esports betting everything else for sure but this stuff is not going to happen overnight right because number one politicians sort of they always think that if they do a pro gaming vote it's going to cost them their seat in reality nobody knows the individual vote that any politician especially a state senator or state rep makes nobody knows who their state senator is um but they all have to get over that initial fear i've dealt with it so many times the government so that's number one number two um gaming bills are tough because you have not just a fan duel which a house investor in or you know someone trying to you know mgm trying to bring more i-gaming or whatever it is

SPEAKER_253: you have all the existing casinos you have the race tracks you might have dog tracks you might have highlight poker rooms native american tribe and they're all weighing in on the process which means

SPEAKER_242: you can still get to the right place i think something like 29 states have now legalized sports betting but it's a multi-year process it's it's not an overnight process but the good news is every time that we get one sort of piece of digital done i think the other ones move faster so the first

SPEAKER_253: frontier with sports betting which also by the way is probably the worst business uh within uh

SPEAKER_245: digital gambling because ultimately because it's a really commoditized product

SPEAKER_242: you don't have any control over where and when it happens um and you just can't differentiate yourself so fanduel draft kings mgm caesars it's kind of a race to the bottom of who can give customers more incentives and free play um because otherwise haven't they really distinguished themselves whereas i gaming and ultimately esports gaming so you you want to bet an nfl game a lot has to happen right you need two teams a stadium referees uniforms the amount of friction is is significant right two dudes in solar plane madden and you're just betting if the next place a runner a pass it's infinite right so ultimately both for the sector and for the taxpayers to me the real money will come with i gaming and esports gaming uh and we're getting there so five states allow i gaming right now no

SPEAKER_253: one's even really you know thought about esports gaming yet because it's so new um but that's going to increase significantly uh over the next couple years in i gaming are you allowed to bet on yourself

SPEAKER_360: or is it people betting on just games they're watching um it could be either one but right now

SPEAKER_280: it's it's more but what you're actually doing on your own so you're playing poker or blackjack or

SPEAKER_297: whatever it is but you and i could play some video game for cash versus each other is the ultimate

SPEAKER_253: concept yeah i mean that's the ultimate or actually it goes step by step further the ultimate dream which we are working on um is third party esports betting so peer-to-peer is good but again take some

SPEAKER_242: friction you and i have to say text and say hey do you want to play fortnite and then we have to go do

SPEAKER_245: it right we know and keep i have a 13 year old son so i'm very familiar with the video game world at the moment um the amount of people just playing something at any given time is massive right so any game you

SPEAKER_242: could possibly want if you said i'm just going to go on twitch or youtube or wherever it is and watch people play and bet on it um that's the holy grail wow what is this oh good molly i'm

SPEAKER_343: sorry the gambling just got me like 50 questions popped in you i mean this is your jam you keep going

Jason Calacanis: i do i'm just sort of stunned by that concept and that opportunity like what would that even look

SPEAKER_370: like it is it do you have this company are you trying to cultivate it right now that's what i

SPEAKER_372: that's what i emailed jason about today yeah we're doing my weather beaks a little bit here

SPEAKER_74: would the gamers get paid and then i'm even just like i'm like wait if my what if my 15 year old

SPEAKER_06: son is streaming on youtube playing a game and other people are betting on him i find that kind of fundamentally creepy but also like is he getting a cut like yeah i mean it depends on how you're

SPEAKER_245: doing it so again this is all super new and i'm not sure how many people even thought through this

SPEAKER_242: but i would say in a tournament setting absolutely right that's where sort of the i think everyone's interests truly align where the gamers the fans everyone um and again your 15 year old son is not going to inadvertently be in it because he has to choose to enter the tournament or not so if he chose to he proactively chose to do so so we know for a fact that that system works i think molly the

SPEAKER_253: broader question of like okay your son is just playing his friend you know in league of legends and then i'm sitting there watching them and betting oh no i mean they're streaming all the time right

SPEAKER_06: they all know that they need to be streaming and so they're streaming to youtube and they're streaming to twitch i guess it's sort of the the filter i mean i think what you're saying is who would want

SPEAKER_01: to bet on a rando game between two kids that happens to be on twitch but a tournament yeah yeah

SPEAKER_245: the tour me for sure would i'm not sure the answer might be that people would bet on the rando game

SPEAKER_242: i'm not sure um but i do think one of the things you'd have to account for in the rando game and someone in the toby in the chat room just just mentioned this also which is you've got to figure out a regulatory system where your your son and his friend aren't saying okay let's throw the game you know i'll win and let's bet on me um so you've got to be able to work through that

SPEAKER_253: potential problem so in terms of individual non-tournament um there's got to be some sort of self-regulating mechanism that i've got ideas about how to do it but it hasn't emerged yet all

SPEAKER_198: right explain to me what's going on with playing live casino games like table games online people are streaming themselves or make capturing video of themselves playing blackjack with a live dealer basically over zoom in some apps this seems to be like a really compelling kind of thing to be able to just interact with a dealer take out your phone at a bar and i'm playing blackjack

SPEAKER_245: yeah for sure um and by the way it could be a real life dealer or it could be an ai deal right you could

SPEAKER_242: even expand the scope more and the better the tech tech gets you might not even know the difference so yeah i i think that's a massive opportunity because again we talked about the friction in sports betting there's no friction with this right you could be playing blackjack anytime day or night and quite frankly you know you might say that after a certain number of people it just doesn't make sense to have that a blackjack table but there are other games where it could probably be pretty

SPEAKER_253: infinite right if it's roulette like why couldn't 50 000 people all put a bet on the same same wheel if they wanted to right you can't do it in physical world but you could do it in the digital world so

SPEAKER_242: yeah that that is sort of the next step um you're seeing states start to get there it is a you know it's a process like everything with gaming but yeah if you fast forward three four five years i think every state that has gaming there are a few like utah that just are never going to right but

SPEAKER_253: for every state that has gaming in some form they're going to allow both i gaming and esports betting and then the next really interesting question to me at least is when web3 is fully here and whatever that means and we can spend an hour debating that but um that's next i i think the world of gaming changes

SPEAKER_245: even more because let's say like you're a state lottery now i have two options i'm in the matter i can

SPEAKER_242: either walk to a bodega and buy a scratch off ticket and with a quarter scratch something off

SPEAKER_245: or i could pop on my oculus or whatever the the system is and in a second i'm in the coolest casino monte carlo with the most glamorous people possible around me and i'm throwing dice who's buying a pick six who's buying a scratch off ticket right so a lot of gaming is going to have to evolve and for that matter i don't know that anyone's going to those riverboat casinos either i don't know how many of those you guys have been to but they're usually pretty crappy um now vegas macau the places that

SPEAKER_253: are destinations i think will be fine because they'll remain destinations but um i do think this

SPEAKER_198: will change do you think this is going to induce more gambling by normalizing it or do you think what the majority case will be is just moving gambling from the shadows uh and the gray market

SPEAKER_297: black market economy and then making a tax if you were to look yeah it's a little it's a little bit of

SPEAKER_399: both right so majority of one or the other majority i think the majority moving it out of the shadows

SPEAKER_198: that's what i think i think it's 70 80 percent just stuff that was occurring in back rooms and

Jason Calacanis: putting it friend center and frankly it's like only fans or tumblr getting rid of porn which you know

SPEAKER_242: push sex workers back into the dark ages of pimps anyway side note so but look whether it's drugs gambling we learned this lesson with alcohol and prohibition already there are things that people want to do you can tell them they can't do it it doesn't make them not do it it just creates a black market with crime and violence and everything else and you'd ultimately rather have whatever the activity is regulated and taxed than just happening totally out there in the wild with no ability to influence it at all so that's true for gaming it's eventually going to be true for drugs we're already you know we've seen it with cannabis we're going to see it next with psychedelics um but yeah to to me jason it's it's just taking it out of the shadows and bring it into the

Chamath Palihapitiya: but some percentage will be inducing more introducing and it will inducing some 20 or 30

SPEAKER_280: but but hold on the flip side let's say that lotteries don't survive this or riverboat casinos

SPEAKER_242: don't survive this or dog tracks don't survive this um you know people are going to fall off on that end they're going to start up on this end i think probably the worst societal effect would be younger people who may not have bet before are far more easily brought into the mix like then you know i think about my grandparents it's not going to be zero sum right they would buy lottery tickets every day my grandfather would go to belmont or aqueduct you know all the time yonkers when they were you know

SPEAKER_290: um otb was an entire oh i would go to see you know because we lived right by them at sheep said

SPEAKER_410: do you know what otb is molly what we're talking about otb no so there was something called in new

SPEAKER_47: york off-track betting they basically were storefronts oh yeah i know what that is yeah yeah yeah and so

SPEAKER_198: otb was the brand in new york and you would go by a storefront and there'd be 30 people packed into a tiny storefront buying tickets looking at tiny television sets smoking cigarettes and there were so many people in that that my dad started opening for lunch because we have to be four doors down for on fifth avenue in brooklyn in bear ridge and when he opened for lunch it was just

SPEAKER_411: otb people going and getting a hamburger and then going back and back and forth and they smoke like

SPEAKER_74: chimneys but i mean our producers are saying in the chat you know and they're younger than we are

SPEAKER_06: that they put the two of their ages together among their cohorts that this is definitely happening that they feel like these are these are like the jewel of gambling right that it's targeting younger people it's bringing more of them in like i think there's no question that it is and so i would say

Jason Calacanis: that when you consider when you consider expanding these i mean you wouldn't let's be honest like you wouldn't be investing if you didn't think it was gonna grow rather than be a zero sum so then the

SPEAKER_06: question is what will the eventual backlash be because there always is one you know yeah look i think

SPEAKER_253: ultimately the esports one may have a greater backlash because parents will say oh i know my kids playing i don't want them gambling um and if you're a politician it's a good sunday press conference

SPEAKER_242: to have right that i'm gonna protect the children yeah however i also think uh that the opportunity is so significant government always needs more money and yes there will have to be a lot around age

SPEAKER_253: verification but there's absolutely nothing wrong with people at the age of 18 betting uh on video games or blackjack or poker or sports or anything else and so the onus is between the industry to really get age verification rights where i think the jewel comparison sort of both works and doesn't work is um if the industry does what jewel did and they basically build a product that is completely

SPEAKER_242: targeted to people under the age of 18 and they just lie about it you ultimately don't survive right and jewel has taken a lot of hits for it deservedly so i mean when one of they came to us about an investment we said look we're not interested you know i have two teenage kids like i'm not interested in making it easier for them to get flavored you know uh vein a lot of it right but if you told me all you want to do is sell to adults and how do we change our business model to do that like okay that's an interesting conversation to have so i think where the gaming companies are going to have to be smart and step up as yes is there a world of of business pride from 14 to 18 that they could have if they didn't follow the rules absolutely but if they pursue that i think they'd run the

SPEAKER_422: risk of being shut down completely i take such an opposite stance on this which is the sooner your

SPEAKER_198: kids can learn the math uh and the control and the executive functioning of gambling the more prepared they're going to be for real life because real life is just one giant set of decisions and if presented as here's the decision making framework in a game of skill chess sports you know poker forget about just randomly betting on sports but it would be important to understand how those odds are laid so actually teaching them how to be a bookmaker and how to lay the odds and the mechanics of it the more prepared they're going to be for the real world so this putting kids in a box and like you know we used to buy we used to play the um sheets you know you get the sunday sheet and it would just be

SPEAKER_272: you know you pick which uh and you would pay a dollar to three dollars when we're kids in high school we were doing it uh and it was like kind of controlled so i like the idea of a controlled one if they built into fortnite think about this molly if you're a teenager decided like hey mom can i be

SPEAKER_198: in this tournament it's a 10-week tournament it's ten dollars a week we play and this is the payout

SPEAKER_272: schedule for the winners it's a hundred dollars for a 10-week tournament uh can i play in it i mean

Jason Calacanis: he's already he's already trying to do that like he qualified for some cs go tournament and there's

SPEAKER_06: a you know monetary god help me like buy i mean he you know look i i said on the show recently that he has a fidelity account where he can do fractional investing and frankly it's not that far off but i'm just right all while i'm pointing out and i'm not even trying to make the the moral argument one way or the other it's just sort of like you as a person who sits in between startups and regulators know that there will the humans love a backlash and love to overcorrect and there will be a company that markets to kids and it will be a problem for the whole industry at some point yeah or you have

SPEAKER_242: to anticipate this stuff and figure out how you're going to create a narrative and position yourself before the bad thing happens or that when it does it doesn't splash back on you yeah yeah yeah as

SPEAKER_06: a startup of course yeah well i was gonna say this gets the whole idea another conversation we've been having on an ongoing basis about regulatory certainty and like you know we have you're we're talking about gambling now and we're in a state where 29 states have legalized gambling but not every state has and the rules are really confusing that's sort of the same universe that's happening in crypto which is that you you know the sec has yet to sort of get it together and even fdic has yet to get it together in terms of like what's security what isn't a security what's allowed what isn't like what's your thinking on not only navigating regulation but ways in which regulation

SPEAKER_08: needs to get it together to be a market maker or at least to set the rules that could help companies

SPEAKER_242: thrive yeah i i split it into two buckets right so the first bucket kind of uber or airbnb are kind of really good or fanduel good examples where you know take uber and jason knows because he was there like travis as brilliant as he is didn't invent the idea of paying people to take you from point a to point b

SPEAKER_245: that's been around for thousands of years he figured out a much better way to do it um but it was still

SPEAKER_242: a tweak on an existing system whether it's hotels or taxis or casinos or whatever it is in those situations the regulatory fight is really a market share fight between the incumbents and the startups um and the incumbents are trying to use regulation to prevent the startups from gaining traction but then the then the other half and this is the stuff that um to me is more interesting actually are the white spaces so that could be crypto or ai or machine learning or drones or autonomous cars or however many other things where climate yeah there is no incumbent you know that you're fighting against and there is no existing regulatory framework and you're creating it so like i'll give you a good example we're investors we call dibs it's a fractionalized sports car trading company um you know on blockchain we um had one of the most interesting discussions of my career about a year ago where it was we know we're going to be regulated eventually because dibs takes physical custody of the of the card right so eventually they'll figure this out and regulate us we can wait

SPEAKER_245: and just kind of play out the string and see what happens or we could pick our regulator right so we decided after a whole process we was the state of wyoming the state of new york and the sec who after a whole analytical process landed for a bunch of reasons on the state of new york um and we went to them they were kind of shocked we're like we'd like to be regulated which is not usually the call that they get every day but fundamentally if you're in these white spaces you know you got to figure out they're going to be regulated eventually so what do you want what would benefit your company the most how do you build a regulatory mode to box out the competition um and

SPEAKER_242: so i think the way that you think about white spaces has to be really different than the way that you

SPEAKER_280: think about existing industries that are really just tweaks so for fractional ownership like

SPEAKER_297: masterpiece.io does this people are doing it in real estate you're saying hey it feels like it

SPEAKER_00: well i guess some people could argue it's a security other people could argue it's like an llc

SPEAKER_198: sharing ownership like an spv like we do for investing and so just proactively pick which modality you want to embrace and embrace it fully and then just build the infrastructure of the company and the cost structure of the company as capable of doing that a place where that hasn't happened nfts right and we uh just did an interview with fish fry i guess gary v's nft they're making a restaurant they raised over 14 million dollars and nfts to build a restaurant and then i was like well how long does a restaurant exist for and they're like yeah it's gonna be a great restaurant and i'm like and then what happens if molly was like well what happens if you kick somebody out because you know they're they go full will smith at the place uh you know like what are you what do we do here you know uh and he's like yeah we'll figure that out so it's like oh okay so more things than not they're kind of on the fly figuring this out what do you think of this you know forget about fly

SPEAKER_442: fish club as a concept but just nfts as a concept yeah i i have a maybe unpopular view on nfts which

SPEAKER_242: is um and by the way you know we're in dibs like we're certainly involved in the space however it seems

SPEAKER_280: to me people who really care about crypto and like crypto don't want to convert their money to fiat they want to spend it in the form of crypto and right now there's only two things you can do with it

SPEAKER_242: you can go on tour and buy like a grenade launcher um or mdma or whatever it is or you could buy nfts right those are the two things that you can clearly buy right now cryptocurrency as a result you have this boom of people you know who have crypto two trillion dollar registry right now

SPEAKER_245: and they've nothing to spend the money on so to me nfts have this way artificially high valuation or just value on each thing simply because of supply and demand but when the metaverse comes that's when in my view crypto shifts from being an asset class to a currency once that happens and

SPEAKER_253: you can buy basically anything with ethereum or solana or whatever it is i don't know that nfts really sort of holds up after that now that might not be for another five seven years um but i think the reason why nfts are doing well is simply because they're the only game that's interesting

SPEAKER_272: and then and then we're sort of like saying paper here like yeah you can make a lot of different things with a piece of paper you put a contract on it you can write a poem you can make toilet paper

SPEAKER_198: this is it's not like it's uh it's really open for interpretation people are using them as membership clubs in some cases then some cases are creating dow's yep it's a fancy term for something we've had for a long time in the uk and here in the united states like an llc a limited liability corporation and so whenever anybody pitches me on it i'm like well that's illegal according to the law here in the united states and then they say well just create a dow raise all this money and then you distribute it and then people vote i'm like what's the corporate entity and they're like what do you mean i'm like when you take money don't you have to make a corporate like no you just put it in a wallet and so walk me through like the sort of blissful naivete of like the dow crowd that they can just collect money from people and deploy it and not even know who they are right i think when they do this stuff yeah explain what's going on here why one group of people

SPEAKER_48: thinks they can do anything and another group of people is like uh i don't want to go to jail

SPEAKER_245: right so there's a few things so one is look crypto by definition is a sovereignless currency

SPEAKER_280: right it it's not supposed to apply to the rules of central banks in any given country and if you take a step even further back to me and this i find this actually kind of beautiful what crypto really is is it's the manifestation of the loss of trust in our institutions right so since the vietnam war which take this country trust in government wall street media the church higher ed has plummeted and then that trust has to go somewhere right it creates a vacuum and i think one of the geniuses of crypto is

SPEAKER_242: it gave some people a place to say okay you know what i don't trust the fed reserve i don't trust washington dc i would rather throw my lot in with similarly minded people even if i'll never know who they are but i still think that's a better community for me than participating in this corrupt system right so if you truly believe that then the kind of dow example that you gave jason makes sense because it's like oh we're not part of any sovereign rules and governance structure we're existing kind of on the outside of it all together um and it's a nice theory but the problem is whether it's you know dow is doing things that aren't legal or generally speaking crypto facing sec regulation the reality of government and politics are still going to come into play with all of this and i think the greatest existential threat to cryptocurrency is not technology it's it's not even belief in the system anymore it's regulation right right because you know biden issued an executive order a couple

SPEAKER_253: of weeks ago around crypto and i think the industry misinterpreted it right people were pretty excited about it and happy about it and probably you know everything rose that day what did you see

SPEAKER_265: i see it as more of a problem like i felt like there was some stuff in there

SPEAKER_253: that was fine we all agree with yes uh we should figure out ways to help the unbanked yes we want crypto jobs in this country you know yes we should have consumer protection kumbaya stuff yeah nobody

SPEAKER_242: but what it really did to me was it said the sec and the u.s government have the power to do whatever

SPEAKER_245: they want to regulate crypto something like if they see anything as a threat to our financial system or economy or anything else they could do whatever they want to me the eo was really an affirmation of okay

SPEAKER_242: gary gensler go for it do whatever you want um it's if the regulators are super pro crypto that's a different story but it not only didn't tie their hands it affirmed their power and their authority and so it seems to me that until the crypto world gets into the game and becomes political um they're going to really be at the mercy of regulators and a lot of and a lot of risk and fundamentally the only thing

SPEAKER_280: that politicians care about in my experience to keep in mind i've worked in city government state

SPEAKER_242: government federal government executive branch legislative branch from campaigns i've really seen this from pretty much every conceivable angle is they just want to stay in office right um all they care about is can they win the next primary because the gerrymandering the primary is usually all that really matters and so what they're really thinking about is can whatever entity that i'm saying yes or no to impact my next primary right now nobody thinks that crypto can impact their next primary

SPEAKER_280: for as long as that's the case no one's going to care what they think about regulations or anything else but if you became pharma if you became truly political then if gary gansler war starting to do

SPEAKER_242: things he didn't like and joe biden the team of the white house is like oh you know 2024 this industry is going to really come out against me guess what someone from the white house calls gansler and says knock it off um but you're never going to have that kind of protection until you start

Jason Calacanis: taking politics seriously yeah it's funny because that the day that ea eo came out we talked about this on the show remember i was like i don't think it's a coincidence that this is the day that

SPEAKER_06: mastercard and visa announced they're raising merchant fees they were like oh we're good

Chamath Palihapitiya: we're good well i mean i think people were living under a delusion that the government didn't have

SPEAKER_198: the ability to stop something and you need only look at what happened with napster and what happened with victorrent and other services the government can simply use this tool called the law and enforcement

SPEAKER_47: and these two things combined yeah will put you in jail and sure you can do illegal things and get

SPEAKER_198: away with it for a time but you know you can stop things um maybe not on a technological basis people could still fire up crypto and send it but you just make it really uncomfortable if you get caught doing it and xrp is the perfect example you have ripple which was acting like a security had a fixed number of tokens they controlled the supply people were buying them to speculate they were manipulating

SPEAKER_21: the market in all kinds of ways according to the sec complaint and now they're in embroiled in a case right now that who knows it seems like it's a coin toss to me but have you been following that xrp case

SPEAKER_245: and what are your thoughts on a little bit um yeah i don't sort of know which way it's going to go

SPEAKER_242: either look i'm rooting for them one i i like chris and brad the team over there and we've done some

SPEAKER_280: work with them but again fundamentally even the courts are not immune to politics right they are not immune to public pressure to the zeitgeist everything else and you have to create an environment that makes the

SPEAKER_242: judges think okay if i rule in this way i'm going to be publicly supported by because if they think that they're going to get beat up for it it's they're still human beings right as smart as our judges might be they still want to be liked like everybody else wants to be liked and nobody likes being criticized and again you have to create a climate and a culture that gives them the permission structure to rule in your favor right so for example the crypto world could be a tremendous grassroots advocacy force in u.s politics right because so many people do it and i know that your average sort

SPEAKER_253: of you know bitcoin maxis is not probably thinking that much about like who their city council member is or whatever else but when you can organize people just from their phone which they're already on 24 hours a day already and you can start to then use that to impact public opinion uh you know polling

SPEAKER_242: everything else that's what changes politicians and then ultimately we talked about this on the last podcast jason mobile voting so i've been funding and running the campaign nationally to make it possible people to vote on uh their phones over the blockchain and the reason why is right now we live

SPEAKER_280: in a world where every district is gerrymandered the only election that really matters are the primaries primary turnout is 10 to 20 percent they tend to be the most ideological or the special interests and as a result nothing gets done if turnout were 50 it would change dramatically to use a tech example and if you guys remember when amazon tried to set up their second headquarters in queens in new york

SPEAKER_242: and everyone thought it you know they would get parades and roses and instead they got run out of town the reason they got run out of town was that they misread the politics completely which is

SPEAKER_280: yes their polling was right the majority of the city wanted it even the majority of the district of long island city wanted but that eight percent who bothered to show up in the state senate

SPEAKER_242: primary they're as far left as you get and they hate amazon city council members state you know state center all those people actually behave very logically politically by killing it which is these are the people that are going to vote in my next election this is how they feel i'm going to do what they want because i want to keep my job every policy output is the result of a political

SPEAKER_01: i mean and this is like this is the whole ball right it's like the law and governments can make

SPEAKER_06: your market or break your market and so you better understand how to play that game okay your entire investment thesis let's um i'm certain that we could talk to you the entire day but i want to turn to the metaverse briefly you wrote a long piece about regulating the mega metaverse yeah sort of trying to create a framework right a place to start from in terms of having the conversation about regulating the metaverse it's long but can you sum it up for us

SPEAKER_475: yeah so it's 20 pages it's 6 000 words um it's a pamphlet it's a booklet really so it's funny how

SPEAKER_245: the whole thing came about which was so you know like you guys are like thinking about this stuff right so it was over christmas break my we were down in austin see my wife's family and i was like

SPEAKER_242: you know i don't always participate in every single activity right so in one of the non-participatory

SPEAKER_245: moments kind of had me like okay you know the metaverse like all right if you were the regulator bradley what would you do so i started making a list like this is relevant that's relevant

SPEAKER_242: and then when the break was over i came back and said to the team here what would you guys do and i have a dozens of people here who are political experts and so they all gave their opinions by the time we were done it was this 6 000 word 20 page memo um but the fundamental point is this the metaverse um is coming it's not like a yes it's conceptual right now but it's gonna be here and it's gonna

SPEAKER_245: be everything good about the internet and everything bad about the internet times right and so whatever

SPEAKER_242: problems you see right now uh are only going to be magnified and all kinds of new problems or opportunities are going to emerge you can't think that that we don't have today so like if you look at

SPEAKER_253: you know uh the eu just put in something called the digital markets act uh like last week i think it was um which really started to change uh some of the rules around competition and antitrust and really force google and amazon and facebook and others to to be more inclusive in the way that they do things all of the problems we have today so section 230 of the telecommunications decency act which gives uh prevents any liability for the platform for the content posted by the users which meant then means facebook and twitter only have the incentive to want things to be toxic and because that's what drives eyeballs and that's what drives clips that drives revenue if they were legally liable for some of it that would change and then they would start to actually moderate the content um privacy so europe

SPEAKER_242: has something called gdpr that gives people a lot more control over their data um data portability interoperability especially in the metaverse can be incredibly important because we're going to recreate your avatar every time you go into a different metaverse that would be nuts yeah so your ability to monetize your data other people's blood monitor data all that has to get addressed and third is antitrust um and we really don't have laws in this country at this point that envision kind of what these tech platforms would become like um and have ways to keep them in line so you know if the fdc has to sue every single time that's a long process and facebook isn't as rich as the us government but they're not far off right so all of these companies can spend an equal amount of money on lawyers that the justice department can so you've got to change the underlying laws itself so these are all things that should be happening today anyway i think once you reach the metaverse all these problems are significantly magnified so if you want to protect

SPEAKER_280: kids if you want to try to keep it from just being even more toxic than ever if you don't want a handful of companies to control everything which as an early stage investor i hate because i don't know about you guys like i can't invest in anyone that's going to try to compete with google or microsoft or amazon or anything else because right now they will crush them and the market and the laws allow them to do so right so i think if you want more innovation and you want more consumer protection um you need to act on these issues right now anyway and then when the metaverse comes

SPEAKER_481: it just magnifies it exponentially all right there you have it bradley tusk almost an hour bradley uh

SPEAKER_297: we'll have you back on in six 12 months and and check in on the regulatory environment we didn't even

SPEAKER_155: get to psychedelics uh but uh everybody listening will be getting a uh if you go under your seat there's a big bag of psilocybin for you to figure it out yeah but i mean briefly we we're getting

SPEAKER_485: pitched on a lot of stuff and it seems like that's another one where the will of the people

SPEAKER_198: yeah is uh driving it as we start with cannabis and it seems like there's you know so yeah yes

SPEAKER_245: plant drugs are gonna flip next so i am a big supporter of it i actually just went through a

SPEAKER_253: whole ketamine uh therapy process myself i thought it was a fantastic experience really good i really lozenges or an iv or what lozenges uh mind bloom is the startup that does it i know i've heard about

SPEAKER_280: this mind bloom is racing through the fantastic experience however i have not made any psychedelic

SPEAKER_242: investments yet simply because as much as i like them and believe in them personally i've yet to see an actual technology company that can have a tech multiple and scale uh what i see are like things that would be really good for society and people but they're retail or they're you know they're just not i haven't seen the business yet that as a venture capitalist makes me want to invest in it but i think

SPEAKER_253: you're absolutely right it's coming i don't know if it's seven years or 12 years but in the same way that cannabis is basically legal everywhere almost everywhere today psychedelics will be the same thing and so

SPEAKER_198: this mind bloom company does an online consultation you're suffering from anxiety depression whatever you're not sleeping at night you get lozenges that have ketamine and you put them under your tongue you feel a tingly sensation and then you feel less depressed less you know here describe the process

SPEAKER_490: of getting it and then the process of taking it so it it the point of the ketamine is that and i'm not

SPEAKER_242: obviously a scientist not giving science here but it increases the neuroplasticity of your brain and what that means is especially when you're mom 48 right so like my mind is far more closed than when i was young um i there were things for example that like in therapy i understood intellectually right but i just couldn't accept it emotionally even though i wanted to and it would make my life a lot better if i could the ketamine by increasing the neuroplasticity made me open to these concepts that otherwise i wouldn't be but i will say you got to put in work right you have to go into it with this i knew what i wanted to achieve um i i was very specific about it going in every time i finished it i kind of wrote down not just what my thoughts were during the the ketamine session itself but kind of what this all means for my life i ended up producing about a 20 page document that i read multiple times a day now it's kind of my

SPEAKER_368: practice um so i think it can be incredibly helpful but you have to put a lot of work into it and you

SPEAKER_242: have to go in with a very specific goal if it's just like hey i want to do ketamine six times and have a good time like you can do that but quite frankly it's it's expensive and labor intensive to do it this

Jason Calacanis: way um and probably doesn't make sense yeah it's the uh i see a lot of not tripping balls but i do know a lot of people who have used it in that therapeutic setting and have found it to be

SPEAKER_297: like game changing okay they're not giving you the lozenges for friday and saturday night they're taking a lozenge you're talking to a therapist and whatever it is about your childhood your trauma

SPEAKER_198: your anxiety about the future whatever you know twitter addiction i don't know just comes to mind uh you know you'd be like i want to talk about my addiction to whatever or the issues i have with a therapist so it's not they're not dealing uh street ketamine which by the way i mean with this fentanyl being imported from china and yeah how dangerous it is i think we have to look at the harm being done with illicit drugs in a different way because we now tipped over into a super drug it's

SPEAKER_30: like some sort of science fiction where you know the highest you could go would be heroin and yeah that would be like rolling the dice you know every couple of hundred times maybe you od and then fentanyl it's like yeah you're gonna od basically yeah look it sounds crazy but as a parent sometimes

SPEAKER_244: i wonder if you know if you're you know your kids are smoking weed you feel like let me just get it for you from the dispensary because if you're buying on the black market and the chance it's laced with

SPEAKER_253: fentanyl you know that's truly dangerous yeah yeah on one hand i don't want to be like the supplier for my kids by any means but i you know it is a real world concern that you know i worry about all the time

SPEAKER_06: i also i mean it's clearly we just want to talk to you all day but i talked to a startup that's using ibogaine there's a drug called ibogaine that it can evidently be used for to end addiction speaking of which right like just basically interrupt the receptors in your brain that make you addicted to opioids and it's this company where they have to set up clinics in mexico and south america because the drug itself is not federally legal here but they can off you know they're based here and they offer all this the therapeutic services around it but then you have to go to another country to get this treatment and it's just like catch up catch up yeah it's i think it's kind of like ayahuasca or

SPEAKER_514: something it's a disassociative so you can kind of lose your ego and then accept things maybe within

Jason Calacanis: more open like you're saying i say more open-minded but neurology right it's not woo woo it's like the brain is part of the body interrupt the receptors like change the grooves like it's pretty it's pretty

SPEAKER_272: fascinating i think that's what they're figuring out and when you see psychiatrists and therapists who have had you know two modalities basically pharmacological therapy pharmacological therapy now they see this and it's like wait a second rewrite the operating system refrag the hard drive reformat everything and then put the data back on nice and clean yeah maybe that's worth checking out now of course these things do come with a lot of risks so

SPEAKER_514: yeah yeah um you've got to really do your if you're if you're going down this rabbit hole so to speak you really want to give it a lot of thought talk to a lot of different uh providers

SPEAKER_504: yeah i mean like just right to reinforce that i didn't do the ketamine thing until i talked to my

SPEAKER_253: doctor and had a very thorough conversation about it when she said yeah i'm comfortable with this

SPEAKER_272: then i said okay go ahead totally being studied right now at stanford my friend's wife is a psychiatrist there and they're literally studying it and she told me nothing short of a miracle like people who had severe there's another way to do it not the lozenges but like an iv drip of ketamine that is also supervised and they say they give this to people who are or they're studying giving this to people who have like depression that is absolutely uh prior to this been you know at that

SPEAKER_198: sentence of depression you know you're not getting out of this to a number of people are getting out of it and so these poor people who are addicted to fentanyl the the irony may be they're

SPEAKER_272: buying fentanyl on turk street but they need to go to berkeley and trip out and reset their brains and and get off of the the opioid addiction which is just pernicious and terrible all right man

SPEAKER_524: listen all right hey thanks for having me guys thanks for coming again bradley appreciate it we'll talk to you soon cheers and i'll follow up with you on email sounds good see you guys

SPEAKER_06: all right bye take care all right we've given you news we've given you an incredible interview with bradley tusk and now there's more there's more thick boy friday i saw somebody tweeting about how they watch every uh okay boomer segment which i love to see so producer rachel is back with another okay boomer segment this time it's akash raju the co-founder of glimpse and glimpse uh announced

SPEAKER_154: they've raised 6.2 million in seed funding on the day of our interview and just so you know a

SPEAKER_12: little bit about what's to come brands pay glimpse a subscription fee for their products to be featured in short term rentals what a clever idea so smart so if you're in an airbnb for example and they have

SPEAKER_06: a purple mattress and you're like oh my god i love this mattress which literally happens to me all the time in airbnbs you'd be able to buy it directly from a qr code next to the bed are they raising maybe

SPEAKER_54: we should talk i don't know it's product placement in the real world it's not product placement in a movie it's in your life what a brilliant idea crushing it all right okay boomer okay boomer i understood

SPEAKER_542: the assignment hello everybody and welcome to another in real life recording of okay boomer today i have glimpse co-founder on akash we're actually at shop talk we met here at shop talk this is a really cool convention highly recommend checking it out but i don't want to focus too much on the convention i want to focus on glimpse because today they just announced that they raised a six and a half million dollar seed round which is really incredible and i'd love to learn a little

SPEAKER_544: bit more about glimpse cool yeah so with glimpse what we do is we work with a lot of brands and services and we place their products into short term rentals and resorts as a way to drive like trial and conversion so as like an end consumer it's essentially like you go you stay in like an airbnb and the mattress there instead of just being like a random mattress could be like a casper mattress or a purple mattress and we provide like a conversion funnel tied to that so we're essentially providing the distribution network for their brands and um all of like the kind of like conversion and stuff tied to that and we have a network of 8 000 properties that we work with wow that's so sick so

SPEAKER_542: how long can people stay at those rental properties yeah so it's um whatever they would normally stay

SPEAKER_544: at so typically we work with high turnover properties so stays like under a week um anywhere from like a

SPEAKER_542: day or two to like three to four days and are you guys actually managing these rental properties yourselves or are you guys going to like airbnb verbo and then like kind of collabing them with

SPEAKER_544: those brands so we collab with the hosts of the properties directly okay it's like these 8 000 properties represents around like a thousand individual users and they are users of glimpse for

SPEAKER_542: their properties how do you find like these people that own the properties yes it's very like

SPEAKER_544: community and word of mouth driven so i think like the way our model works it's really nice for the host they get like a free product if they're selected to work with the brand and stuff so whenever someone has that aha moment they refer a lot of other hosts so it's very like word of mouth driven community driven um especially since it's around like improving that guest experience so like these hosts rally around to try to like learn how to be a better host get better ratings and work with flims to get better products for their properties so the first brand that comes to mind

SPEAKER_542: that i would love to see in like an airbnb or a short-term rental would be anchor products we love anchor at this weekend startups this isn't sponsored or anything we just really like anchor um they're like tech

SPEAKER_554: products but it would be cool to have like a spare charger or something like that there do any like

SPEAKER_544: food brands like collaborate with you guys yeah so we have done like food and snacks in the past um but we actually launched with more focus on like durable products because um you place one product you don't need to replenish it or anything and it just drives like sales and stuff back to the brand so um but we have worked with brands like liquid death if you've heard of them yeah and like yeah dang chips and stuff um we've been more focused on these durable products and are like launching cpgs in the

SPEAKER_542: next few quarters very very cool what's your favorite brand that you guys have featured in the

SPEAKER_544: rental properties so far well i love all the rents okay for sure but so i actually stayed in one of our properties um in uh park city oh it's so sick yeah and then i went on a hike i didn't bring hiking shoes or anything i fell like a hundred times yeah and i actually fell in love with like the weighted blanket and the massage gun that were in the property theragon or whatever those yeah so we're working with a brand called lyric that's like a really cool massager that's like a new innovative take on massage gun so that type of product and um like a weighted blanket brand like that combination was incredible where i had to buy it for myself as soon as i got home very cool think about it i was in pain like the whole left side of my body from my hike and then you have those two things right there like you just fall in love with it in that moment it's really that can't really happen anywhere else

SPEAKER_542: right right weighted blankets are awesome so that's a very cool thing to have there so we graduated college the same year 2020 you graduated from purdue um which like penn state is in the middle of nowhere yeah how did you decide that you wanted to become a founder and then how did also did you decide that you want to do rental properties basically like when i was at purdue i was really involved

SPEAKER_544: in building the student entrepreneurial community like purdue is a very like engineering heavy school so there were a few like startups coming out of purdue but it wasn't like a ton relative to like what i saw at other schools so i was really focused on that i met my two co-founders and eugen kashal who joined one of the clubs i started and we actually just started working on startup concepts together just for fun like a good way to like get to know each other um and that's kind of like when i realized that i love doing just like zero to one like just building things like totally building something that provides value to users and one of the concepts we actually had tied to the fact that purdue's kind of like yeah like not necessarily like an urban area was bringing brands to campus to engage with the students so it helped being in a rural area yeah okay the reason we saw this was i think hbr max or something was promoting having their services in the dorms and they brought like a fake iron throne oh that's cool yeah and it had like a four hour line on campus that's when i realized yeah like there's these students here like yeah they are the right target consumer they're just not in like new york or chicago or whatever so the way we tested this concept was actually posting a pop-up with a small brand in the u-haul truck that we parked in the middle of campus okay and um the maker she drove more sales than she did in her shopify over a two-week period interesting which is when we were like okay like there's something here where we can bring brands to consumers where they are still provide that touch and feel and drive like better conversion um the pop-ups was our initial take on this but then um as we were like i was i was approaching graduation and stuff like that i was like how does this become like a venture scale like large business and we started talking to like different types of spaces where consumers are high turnover but intimate enough where you can trial it and saw like huge pull from the short-term market industry because was that like before the pandemic happened or is this during the pandemic right before like like literally like like january 2020 is when we were thinking about like okay maybe not pop-ups like let's do short-term mentals whatever before short-term mentals like really blew up yeah i'd say about like there was a really strong community but anyway it wasn't necessarily as mainstream as it is today but it was still like like there was like these strong communities like we posted like a wait list online and had like 150 hosts sign up in like 24 hours that's insane all focused on yeah like elevating their guest experience and it was so cool to see this segment of users that just cared about how do we make the people staying in our properties as

SPEAKER_542: happy as possible and so for i'm still i guess trying to figure out a little bit more about glimpse on the user standpoint so if i wanted to like stay at something that like glimpse had glimpse like products in it i would still go to like airbnb right like i wouldn't necessarily go through

SPEAKER_549: glimpse to find these hosts it would still be like on that platform yeah so today like glimpse is

SPEAKER_544: primarily like a b2b platform between the brands and the properties okay and then the point of discovery is in the property itself where yeah it's like you just sometimes you like wouldn't know if you're yeah okay okay there that's so crazy yeah and then like i mean part of the long-term vision is to build that consumer layer where like glimpse is like equal to discovery it's like when you think about like glimpse it's like okay there's products around me that i can discover but today we're building our wedge by like being the distribution layer providing brands with the opportunity to get into these amazing short-term rentals um and then the guest staying in there can really engage

SPEAKER_542: with the brands fall in love with it etc so how do you know like a brand's up for sale is there like a qr code next to like the weighted blanket or something that they can scan so it's really focused

SPEAKER_544: on like discovery and learning more so there's a qr code with the product that just like lets you learn more about like like yeah like the massage gun or the mattress or whatever and then when you scan it we actually integrate with like the brand's e-commerce system and their email marketing tools where it's like a direct conversion funnel where if you really loved it like you can just scan it and like purchase it directly we use like unique discount codes and like email captures to attribute it or you can like leave your email and then like the brand will probably like engage with you again like after your stay okay but what we've seen is that when someone scans the qr code they're like truly at a point of really high consideration because they love the product so much that they

SPEAKER_549: did want to learn more okay that makes sense and do the airbnb people or the hosts have to pay to

SPEAKER_544: use glimpse no so today it's actually like an application basis so they like apply to join the glimpse platform and once they're there whenever we work with the brand we launch the offer to a specific set of properties that fit the criteria and then if they opt in then the brand has final say so it's like a double opt-in relationship okay we're like in exchange for the host like hosting the product and really like elevating it for their guests and stuff they're getting the product for

David Sacks: free but the brand's also getting complete control over where they want to be and who wouldn't want

SPEAKER_542: like a free purple mattress like an airbnb that totally makes sense it's really cool so i guess now going back to your story sorry i keep like popping all over the place but back to your story um how difficult was it to convince um brands to like sign on to this be like yeah you should let strangers basically like test your product um in airbnbs because i feel like that's like a very difficult

SPEAKER_544: i don't know way to like trust people yeah you know yeah so i think like like for brands um i guess the timing which we started was really critical but brands have been really focused on new ways to get customer like to drive customer acquisition experimental marketing yeah and like big yeah and like we were providing like an experiential channel that's driven by touch and feel so there's a segment of brands where like if you can actually use the product like that is a competitive advantage like if it's truly like a better brand or a better product you can't really learn that unless you touch and feel it so true and we were basically providing a scalable way to do that like instead of taking the risk to open up your own store in like a high foot traffic area um you can open thousands of showrooms essentially by using the glimpse platform that

SPEAKER_542: is so cool i love that idea i've actually been really interested in the whole um getting like touch and feel products before i buy it because i love amazon i'm not gonna lie guys before our interview i actually had to instacart a tripod that my phone's sitting on right now because i did forgot to bring a tripod because i actually didn't know we were going to be recording so i forgot to try how to instacart it so i've been doing online shopping to the max i love instacart amazon things like that but it does come down to the point where there's some products that i really do want to have that experience with it before i shell out the money yeah um show fields kills it new york city and miami it's a showroom where you can go in experiment touch all the stuff um pop-up grocer which is a pop-up grocery store i saw them in miami i think they're also new york around the states and then there's one based in soho right now blanking on the name but it does um sustainability and things like that that's another pop-up i believe that's showing only like home goods for uh like the ultra sustainable people like everything is beige and it looks really aesthetic and i i really like those kind of things especially like with um since the pandemic where i've really like felt like i've missed out on that in-person shopping i hate shopping malls yeah but there still needs to be a way where you can like experiments you know the stuff exactly yeah i know

SPEAKER_544: definitely like huge fans of all those models um i think the same thesis that like i think for me it's like in 10 years i still think that people will be drawn to things in person and that authentic relationship will still live in person and like i think like we're trying to pioneer one of the ways to do that got you and how can people find glimpse yeah so um all social media so we have a website tryglimpse.com um on linkedin we're like glimpse.inc i think okay on twitter we're try underscore glimpse cool um but try glimpse is kind of like the main name and i'm sure if you search up like glimpse product placements or something like that you'll find us awesome but yeah and then our instagram is really cool we showcase a lot of the products that are in properties yeah so okay you can actually see

SPEAKER_591: what the experience looks like that's really really cool and then where can people find you if they

SPEAKER_544: want to reach out yeah so best would be like linkedin or twitter um and then my email is just my

SPEAKER_598: first name at tryglimpse.com awesome well thank you so much for talking this is a really cool quick interview yeah thank you so much let me know how i did guys like i said this is like my third ever in-person interview this is very last minute i think it was great i think it went really well again thank you so much for being on yeah yeah thank you yeah thanks hey everyone producer nick here

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