SPEAKER_00: hey everybody welcome to tuesday first up we have some rapid fire news zoom reported their earnings for q3 not too pretty and amazon is reportedly on pace to lose 10 billion on its alexa devices and their streaming service in 2022 we're going to break that down and for our startup of the day we have samara this is a a adu you know like a nanny unit in your backyard founded by one of the airbnb co-founders joe and they're creating factory produced studio and one bedroom units that are absolutely gorgeous then our guy sunny madra comes on the show to break down some of the contagion that's happening in crypto since the ftx collapse it's going to be a great show so stick with

SPEAKER_02: us this week in startups is brought to you by and brokers startup insurance program help startups secure the most important types of insurance at a lower cost and with less hassle save up to 20 off of traditional insurance today add in broker.com twist while you're there get an extra 10 off using offer code twist squarespace turn your idea into a new website go to squarespace.com twist for a free trial when you're ready to launch use offer code twist to save 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain and mixpanel helps startups find product market fit faster by offering powerful self-serve product analytics apply today to join mixpanel startup program and get fifty thousand dollars in

David Friedberg: credits at mixpanel.com startups it's still earning seasons right we're on the tail end of earning season

SPEAKER_06: it is uh i'm just laughing because it's like another news that's not as interesting as ftxt

SPEAKER_07: but still pretty good it's pretty well i would like to get back to startups and tech companies and i'm just tired of talking about crypto because i told you this thing was a grift 99 of the time

SPEAKER_10: now i'm right and there's no like joy in being right about this because i didn't make any of the

SPEAKER_11: money i found no bag holders i didn't flip anything so i made no money yeah and all the people

SPEAKER_14: who were wrong made out like bandits it seems i know this is the cruel nature of being a trader is that you could be right that it's a grift but you didn't by being right that it's a great

SPEAKER_17: you didn't get anything from it if you identify a grift the whole point is to grift i'm an idiot i was early on this grift and i didn't take advantage of it no nfts no j coin nothing no trades no

SPEAKER_10: soul yeah that's my hot take i mean it's incredibly infuriating and you can't short this stuff i could

SPEAKER_22: have been a multi i mean you know you know i just every day i live with the imaginary 20 million

SPEAKER_24: dollars that's just gone yeah yeah i'm just gone anyway grift grift grift let's get back to

SPEAKER_10: so let's talk about tech where i can lose more money yeah some j trading if you want to i mean you know buy more disney i'm gonna buy more disney i haven't but i'm going to let's we should talk more

SPEAKER_27: about disney we should really because i've been listening to more like they they got a bunch of

SPEAKER_29: debt it's still it's gonna be fun it's gonna be fun i think it's a long-term buy i i know they have

SPEAKER_32: debt i know they've got problems they got a little mini pop from the news the return of the king yeah which is great yeah but i don't think that that's why you trade it i don't think you traded on

SPEAKER_11: the return of the king i think you traded on what he does in the execution of the king

SPEAKER_27: there's gonna be an awesome acquisition like it's gonna be we were speculating in the group chat yesterday that it might be spotify like i feel like something exciting bob i saw that bob one slash three is gonna do something exciting but yes it is still earning season uh remember pandemic

SPEAKER_35: darling zoom yes remember when zoom was the most unstoppable company on earth a hundred billion

SPEAKER_27: dollar company at one point yeah yeah yep and is frankly like still doing pretty well although not as well as everybody was hoping shares dropped seven percent after zoom released its q3 earnings report revenue hit 1.1 billion dollars that was up five percent year over year free cash flow was

SPEAKER_35: 295 million dollars that was down 25 percent year over year net income topped out at 48.3 million down 86 percent year over year might be one of those things that people are starting to cancel because

SPEAKER_38: they've got enough folks in the office that they don't need the paid version anymore zoom also for

SPEAKER_41: i have another theory there okay um why don't you finish up and that'll give you my theory what's

SPEAKER_27: okay yeah perfect zoom also reported 3 286 customers paying more than a hundred thousand dollars a year that number was actually up 31 percent year over year and cash and marketable securities on hand 5.2

SPEAKER_44: billion dollars okay great company great product we're actually using it right now there's only one

SPEAKER_11: feature that matters in this product it's the de-aging feature you and i look like we're 38. we look amazing we look amazing we don't need makeup artists uh this stock is going to crash once somebody figures out how to do the same video filters and make people look young in slack google hangouts etc honestly this touch up my appearance is the key feature that doesn't exist in other products

SPEAKER_48: if slack adds touch up my appearance or other people uh add that i think it's going to be game

SPEAKER_35: over i'm being a little facetious here oh here's the issue kind of honestly this makes me think that snap should start doing video conferencing immediately because they got the filter thing dialed why are they

SPEAKER_51: not going for business enterprise here's the thing yeah i want those eyelashes like snap can give me it's

SPEAKER_54: like the greatest well i'd like to have somebody they should there should be a filter store where

SPEAKER_10: like it's independent of any particular product like i would love to have zooms lighting features and all that stuff as a system tray startup where it does it in the system tray no matter what software i use zoom google hangout slack huddles microsoft teams i can control my video settings independent of those now i know that's a little bit hard to do but that would be a very cool thing to do apis but here's what's happening everybody's going to question every sas bill everybody's looking for duplications

SPEAKER_11: in the sas stack zoom yes and zoom you were right again zoom was an add-on feature uh that other products didn't have i have done more and more huddles in slack recently and they do video and you can pop them out and the thread is kept there now when i use zoom and i have a chat that chat is gone it doesn't exist anymore it's lost like tears in the rain and when i use slack the history is there and the fidelity of huddles in slack has made me think i want to find out what our zoom spend is and i want to go down to two zoom accounts and the whole company of 22 nobody should be paying for zoom everybody go back to the free version we'll have two versions for webinars or whatever we need so i want to trim that spend because it's duplicated here and then additionally we have notion and at some point i believe notion will add chat slack added zoom zoom's going to add slack and slack is adding documents right they did that announcement recently so they have a document associated with each chat room so now it's the race for who can unify chat video conferencing and documents

SPEAKER_10: right now who's simultaneous editing yeah all of that put together that's going to be the holy grail i think it's a three horse race right now between notion slack and zoom and well that's funny because

SPEAKER_27: that is all true and all three of those combined represent like the teeny tiniest fraction

SPEAKER_35: of the actual like google and microsoft market suites right like everyone is still we have this

SPEAKER_27: idea that all of these people are using these products and the fact is most most big enterprises are still just paying for google like the the whatever they call it the inner the office suite or microsoft yeah and so it's not it's not just a race it's like a race to the death so i had i am going to take like i had my single most successful tweet thread ever about oh really so oh yes like far and away the only thing that ever came close was one time when i tweeted about bts is that you know they get you they get they were they were happy i was like yeah you're a thread vc now is that i'm

SPEAKER_35: a thread vc yeah totally i'm a freaking thought leader bees i do no i didn't know about sass software because like i do this is exactly what i think is happening inside companies is that they're going wait a second they're doing exactly what i'm doing as a consumer and what made me think this is that i just went through this thing where i was like jesus christ i paid for a lot of things i'm gonna cut this is just like this why do i have this i'm done paying for storage in three different places yep and i was like ooh companies are gonna start to do this too and as we flood the zone with sass products they're gonna be like no if you're a new one god help you and if you're an existing one and you're like zoom just count zoom is pulling a peloton here i'm gonna call it like they are acting as though the pandemic's never gonna end and they don't have to innovate or they got completely overwhelmed just trying to keep the service alive during the pandemic which i think did happen but have not added on to it and so what's gonna happen is we like i i can't believe i'm gonna say this oh god

SPEAKER_70: i'm really sorry to my co-workers like i want to go to an office now i want to twice like two times

SPEAKER_85: a week i want to no everybody does it was it's every time we've gotten together it's fun we should

SPEAKER_11: do like a 48 hour sprint what we'll do is everybody comes to work and then we go to miller and lux we get the steak and then uh if we want to come in the next day but i think we're going to do wednesdays maybe we just do wednesdays it'll be like opt-in but if you opt-in you get to hang out with the king and the queen and uh you get to have a steak i mean seriously and so like

SPEAKER_51: zoom has sat there and just been like oh we'll be indispensable forever that's what peloton thought

SPEAKER_32: no you won't they're gonna have to build these new features yeah i've got to add features fast uh into the sass point i had sass frustration yesterday i mean these sass companies have got to get their

SPEAKER_10: ish together i love i tell all my founders do year-long contracts totally cool offer that make that the primary way you sell but also i have like i wanted to my sales teams over at inside i want to use like one of these uh sales coaching software like gong is the leader and then there's like 10 other ones and um it turns out if you scroll down here you'll see mark benioff responded to me he's like oh use sales forces but here's the problem oh i didn't know a month i want to pay month to month i want just this one piece of software so i'm going to check out if mark benioff is telling me they have like a gong competitor i'm going to check it out what these things do is they record the sales calls and then they look for trends and they tell you if you're talking too much if you've got empathy what your tone is and you can coach your sales people to be better sales people it's kind of cool and i was actually thinking about it for our founder calls now this is a little controversial it's a little creepy it's got all kinds of issues but the truth is like people become better in conversation with coaching and so this records them and then gives you like coaching tips it's actually seems to work and none of these companies were like the first three or four

SPEAKER_11: companies would not give me monthly pricing because i'm like i don't want to sign you know these things

SPEAKER_99: cost a thousand dollars a hundred dollars a month per sales person we have 10 sales people at inside i'm like i don't want to spend twelve thousand dollars on this for two years they all pushing me

SPEAKER_11: really hard but it turns out anybody can build this software apparently like gong is not difficult software to build and there's 10 different companies doing it maybe 20 now and sure enough in my replies one of the companies is like oh hey jake out we actually charge monthly we know that this is like an issue and i'm just like the whole point of sas was to give me the ability to sample software that was one of the strengths of it so now you're gonna bind me to a contract no i'm out okay so what's

SPEAKER_27: funny about that is that the whole point of sas from the investor perspective was to have companies that came and said we have completely predictable recurring revenue and we would probably advise them i would think as investors to lock people into a contract because i don't want your revenue to be fluctuating wildly because you only charge month to month right like fundamentally this is the issue

SPEAKER_35: with subscriptions the thing people like whether you're business running a business or you're a consumer like i loved when you know it was like i could try youtube tv i could try sling i could try playstation whatever their thing was and it was like try it for a month and if i don't like it i'm out unlike xfinity and dah dah dah but then playstation went out of business and sling i think got bought and whatever because you can't make enough money you can't make recurring revenue you

SPEAKER_11: can make monthly without contracts well monthly works for super products and most sas like google uh i don't know about salesforce but like google will offer you a discount for a year but you can still do month to month yeah so what i think is happening this to me is a negative signal that these companies are in a panic yeah that they need to lord it over people who want to try their products i think it's a bad precedent it's to to say i am so unsure of my product's value that you might quit after three months and try another one but that's what i love about like the competition for ideas uh i just shared another tweet link there if you pull it up this guy's got meat record i'm just gonna give him a shout out and he's like oh you know we're doing it self-service free and affordable plans yada yada and so this is like what you have to understand at sas if you are gonna be like over i'm not gonna say which companies were over the top but all of them they're pricing and like trying to harangue us and then my sales team really wants to use one of these so i'm just telling my sales team use this one uh shout out to uh meet record hq hall so now yeah scene hall i'm sorry if i'm mispronouncing your name but shout out yeah and i'm just gonna give his product a shot because he wants to do monthly now he may not have the best product but he's gonna get my support and i'm gonna go with the person who's confident enough to win my business back every month you know if if spotify sucks and it's month to month i can quit and go try apple music or vice versa i happen to pay

SPEAKER_44: for both by the way because i have the apple bundle and i'm like whatever i like having the two

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SPEAKER_35: love imbroker imbroker.com twist the apple bundle speaking of this entire trend right you're seeing all kinds you're seeing companies respond to i think what is a i'm going to just call it a broad scale

SPEAKER_27: subscription killing there's a calling happening in subscriptions whether it's enterprise or consumer and some so you're seeing companies have to raise prices because they can't afford to subsidize anymore apple just raised the price of that bundle like almost four dollars i think from well three thirty from basically 30 to 33 bucks a month which caused me to go in because i'm turning into such a cheap bastard go in and turn off all the things i don't actually use such as apple music because i only want to pay for one and then simultaneously my friend who's like a big media exec was like oh yeah i just told our entire division give me a list of the stuff that you

SPEAKER_35: like here's a list of all the things we pay for you have one week to tell me if you use it or not and if not we're killing it like massive budget cutting so you're seeing differentiation right like and this is getting all the way back to zoom or snehal and his hustle yeah he's going to differentiate

SPEAKER_38: that company with month-to-month pricing yeah zoom is not differentiating with new features like it's if you want to survive now yep oh boy are you going to have to work harder i'm surprised like there

SPEAKER_11: hasn't been an independent zoom competitor that has like more affordable pricing i don't think zoom's

SPEAKER_124: particularly expensive necessarily but but zoom is in beta for like mail and calendars and stuff like

SPEAKER_93: that so you know i think better move faster guys it's been three years it's been a little too slow

SPEAKER_11: i'm a little too long it is rock solid i mean i will say that about zoom it is the best of that's why i still use that i think it's still best in class yep but and i mean look at this below yeah that's the thing touch up my appearance to whoever mark benioff on slack touch up my appearance mark we're both i mean mark might be over 60 i'm over 50. you're still holding on to the 40s i'm still

SPEAKER_99: holding on baby hold on i mean when the five comes it's kind of freeing because you're like well i'll be dead soon so who cares yola i know um it does that's gonna be great but i'm not there yet i'm still

Chamath Palihapitiya: working hard hold on hold on and just enjoy 40. you can say i'm in my 40s i mean whatever number of

Jason Calacanis: months you have left in your 40s yeah years i have years left in my 40s okay okay okay years

SPEAKER_138: 23 months whatever you want to consider years it's good it's greater than 12 months is years

SPEAKER_140: 12 months in one day okay anyway just stop counting you stop counting over 50 you're just like i'm counting down it just enjoy every day enjoy every sandwich i just want to give the shout

SPEAKER_10: out to the slack team huddles are awesome huddles are awesome huddles are awesome and keep making huddles better people don't even understand like huddles exist but the integration of the of the threaded

SPEAKER_11: chat with the huddle and i would like to i don't know if it lets you save huddles or not but that would be cool too if you save the huddle and it was still there in your feed i don't know i

SPEAKER_142: wonder if you could that would be cool if you could record huddles that should happen that should

SPEAKER_143: happen but it would be good if it jumped just dumped it into the feed uh can you save slack

SPEAKER_101: huddles it's not possible to record huddles and huddles transcriptions are not sorted by slack

SPEAKER_149: or amazon website or hmm see yeah see that's a mistake filters and saving come on mark we'll

SPEAKER_101: tweet them we'll tweet them after that we need it we need those uh huddles so anyway i i wish zoom the best i'm not a shareholder at this point um but i think they do need to move faster

SPEAKER_113: i invited the founder on this pod a couple times it doesn't come on the um okay we gotta talk about

SPEAKER_35: this amazon situation okay with a lot of i'm in the room i'm in the room with one so i gotta i gotta just say lexa lex with lexa right that must be what they do on commercials like lex lex friedman by the

SPEAKER_11: way i am a fan of alexa because they uh you don't know this but they created a product extension it's

SPEAKER_99: called lex friedman so that's the 2.0 of alexa's lex friedman it's a it's an automated ai that asks questions to celebrities it's just a joke i'm not saying you're a robotic but you're kind of robotic

SPEAKER_161: is a little robotic i'm just saying it's a remarkably consistent cadence today on the i'm gonna i'm

SPEAKER_163: gonna work on my lex freeman today on the program my dear friend kanye west artist anti-semite fashion designer i'm jewish kanye i'm jewish do you hate me we're friends i'm part of the jewish media isn't

SPEAKER_135: that redundant i'm like it's a funny joke but it's not cool dude oh boy and he's trying to make a joke

SPEAKER_138: to a jewish guy about the jewish community i'm like kanye no and then i'm like i'm sorry why are you

SPEAKER_165: platforming him exactly i'm like mentally ill like oh oh you had a scorpion on your podcast and your scorpion's done you i can't believe it okay so interesting i'm having mental people in a mental

SPEAKER_14: i'm just public service announcement if somebody is having a mental health episode and or if somebody is

SPEAKER_99: a racist anti-semite exactly anti-semite piece of sugar in either case you don't have them on the

SPEAKER_10: pod yeah either case yep and or case i know i know what i know what lex was trying to do he was trying to use his friendship to capture like somebody standing up kanye it's like standing up to a

SPEAKER_174: person who's having a mental episode it doesn't matter the words just go straight through them and

SPEAKER_27: now i'm just gonna okay a fight but the amount of ego that is involved in thinking like that you it's like some beauty and the beast syndrome or something like well i'll be the one that will get through to him and it's like the ego involved in that like no and also i'm not even sure that really it's a beauty and the beast thing like you just want the you just want the clicks like come on

SPEAKER_44: i think that's like i mean i hate to be sorry but i think a lot of people are like as i get to have kanye west you know top 10 celebrity in the world on my pod it's going to be a ratings bonanza

SPEAKER_183: so but i i think lex said his word that he thought he could get through to them i agree with your point about it's like an ego trip like i'm going to be the one who gets through a person yeah like

SPEAKER_184: like no you're not bro spoiler alert you're not okay so alexa so i think this story is freaking

SPEAKER_27: fascinating so business insider is reporting uh that amazon's worldwide digital unit which includes hardware devices like alexa and the prime video streaming service is on pace to have an operating loss of 10 billion dollars this year and that most of those losses are tied to hardware devices and that those losses were actually two times greater than the losses from the brick and mortar store locations and grocery business so primarily this is about echo and marco and prime video streaming so you have

SPEAKER_140: to include some of that yeah you have to include the lord of the rings billion dollar debacle sorry about

SPEAKER_193: that was not a debacle that was an awesome show i'm just talking about on a financial basis all right

SPEAKER_11: so there's 10 billion in losses across three distinct businesses that they bundle together so that

SPEAKER_195: other people investors slash competitors don't know exactly how they're spending their money that's

SPEAKER_31: what these big companies sometimes do so prime video is part of this 10 billion but most of the losses they specify are from this hardware business the

SPEAKER_32: and it could yeah and it could include probably their camera business too and ring because who knows

SPEAKER_117: if those things are losing money or not but i'm sure those are in there too okay but let's say it's

SPEAKER_44: five billion of it that's a lot it sort of goes into you're kind of dipping into i guess zuckerberg territory is what we're gonna sort of the punchline here we think well it kind of feels that way maybe

SPEAKER_27: that the story focuses really heavily on alexa and the uh investment and the bezos his personal obsession with yes so you know it's like he was so into it that he was reviewing the emails personally

SPEAKER_44: that obviously there was never marketing email so he wanted to make sure the copy right that's part of their philosophy with that book what was the book we read working backwards working backwards yeah

SPEAKER_10: there's a great book about amazon's philosophy where they would write the marketing copy first this way you kind of would understand the value prop as explained the press release so the value prop as explained to the press and the value prop would be the faq or the marketing copy the landing page

SPEAKER_124: basically for the public so that you understand the spec so that makes sense that he was involved in

SPEAKER_27: that i guess it does that's not that unusual it's it's clear this piece makes it clear that this was a bezos baby and that you know and it's interesting because it what they did was sort of flood the zone with heart with money losing hardware hoping that there would be this uptake in usage of these voice assistants that would eventually make money and and you know they had they tried all these integrations like oh it's gonna be in the microwave it's gonna be an uber it's you're gonna order dominoes you're gonna there's you know something something disney there for five minutes there was like a food network thing that would be show up on my little you know screen and and give me recipes none of that happened people just used it to set timers and ask the weather yeah and so so

SPEAKER_70: it's 10 years i mean i just find it so fascinating i think because there's so much social awareness

SPEAKER_27: of this feature and this product that it turns out they're calling it like a staggering failure

SPEAKER_207: all right there's a little bit of cynicism here this has been a moderate success and when i say moderate

SPEAKER_10: tens of millions of people do use it the challenge here this is where like for startups listening you spend all this money you get product market fit modest product market for consumers so i do use siri to set my alarm so if i'm falling asleep i'll just say eerie set an alarm for 8 30 and that works great or i'll say in the car you know play the war on drugs on spotify you know or pay play this song so playing a song setting an alarm all these things work well what hasn't worked is commerce yeah and

SPEAKER_11: this is where bezos i think um you know thought and and this could still work so this is where you have to make hard decisions as a as a business owner people never said uh lex friedman order me more coffee beans because they like to see the coffee beans they they don't trust it enough to just say that

Jason Calacanis: that's and it wasn't good enough right it would be like ordering you a maserati and you'd be like

SPEAKER_11: whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa yes so and i think it probably is good enough uh now lex lex is probably good enough right now to order my coffee beans knowing what i previously offered and i do now i don't know if you do this but i don't look at my amazon shipping page anymore i used to look at it am i going to bundle everything now i just i do one click ordering i don't look at all the stuff i'm like you know what i'm not going to even i'll just whatever they default shipping is i'm going to go for unless i really need it like it's a specific screwdriver i need for tomorrow so i think consumers might at some point really like to do commerce here but ordering an uber ordering coffee beans it didn't work there's no business model here and there's no subscription model here and

SPEAKER_38: it's been commoditized by google and apple and they're winning they have pulled ahead i mean as market share goes they are much yeah slightly now much bigger i think or have slightly more users slightly

SPEAKER_89: also i think there's a couple right there's a couple you use any of these by the way what do you

SPEAKER_27: use it for uh i use all of them i don't really use the google assistant i briefly had one of the little pucks and we would use it to play this fun like music trivia game okay um oh wow you did something

SPEAKER_44: outside of like setting an alarm and playing music that was it though literally i found out about

SPEAKER_27: this one music trivia game and now they have it on lex so once in a great while to entertain my child i will do that i use them for timers i use them for the weather i use siri constantly my my life revolves around uh reminders on my phone remind me in two hours to send that one email or remind me when i get

SPEAKER_35: home to blah blah blah blah blah like i do that with voice constantly but that's pretty much it and so i think that that there are two lessons one flooding the market with zero revenue with the heart money losing hardware and hoping to find a business plan later is something that only amazon can afford to do and then write off and then have it be a nice hedge against their monopoly profits so good for them but two or b you can lead a consumer to behavior change but you cannot make them change like no this to me is a lesson that that zuckerberg should internalize which is yeah you try to get people to fundamentally change the way they interact with devices the internet world and commerce and the world yeah and if they wouldn't do it by changing their input to voice they're not going to do it by changing their input to their face and standing in a room like

SPEAKER_10: i think that's a cautionary tale yeah and what the way i look at this i think it's a very good point it has to be much much easier to change behavior like two or three times easier so it is to set a reminder to set a timer when you're cooking is 10 times easier than picking up your phone because your hands are dirty you're cooking you don't want to get the schmutz on your phone uh doing a reminder it works so well again playing music it works so well it works three times it's 10 times faster to just play a certain song or album or artist than to go hunt and pack and type the sentence but other things don't and so that's where you start to have this problem is people have probably and we're we're the tip of the spear right we're part of the avant-garde we're part of the early adopters we've added one you know category of behavior every year or two of this thing's existence

SPEAKER_113: so over 10 years we use it for a half dozen things or less maybe three or four

SPEAKER_85: right i'm gonna say probably three i'm probably four maybe so anyway so if you use it for things it's not essential no and then if it went away i wouldn't care experience is getting ruined if it

SPEAKER_165: went away it would irritate me a lot less than today's recording and it's getting more and more

SPEAKER_35: annoying because every time i try to set a timer it's like by the way did you also know that i can dance the moringa you know like i'm like oh it tells you alexa it's oh it's trying constantly to like tell you about new things that it can do and it's like i don't want to do new things listen

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SPEAKER_11: thing they're trying to get you to a six or seven this is a great paradox i don't know if i would shut

SPEAKER_32: it down here's what i think they should do alexa should say this is so important for humanity

SPEAKER_11: we're going to open source this and make it part of aws and we're going to open source the code smart and anybody can build any alexa into any device because they already allow you to partner with it but i would even take that further we're going to dump the data you know the the abstracted data obviously not people's actual recordings yeah we're going to make this the greatest open source prod project of all time that's and we'll take the 10 000 they said 10 000 employees might be working on

SPEAKER_241: this is that correct oh no they're laying off 10 000 employees as we talked about last

SPEAKER_101: oh okay so some number of those might be some number of those have been that yeah so maybe

SPEAKER_27: they're likely to be well they said it was yeah i think they are they said it was going to be devices is that where the those layoffs would start devices retail and human resources

SPEAKER_32: yeah time to get focused i mean this is we're moving into the age of austerity and efficiency yeah because we lived in the speculative asset bubble so the price to pay for the speculative

SPEAKER_11: asset bubble you all had a good time buying crypto and you know yoloing meme stocks now you all pay

SPEAKER_44: the price taking those cheap ubers you're all going to pay and everything yeah getting your like dory dash at a discount guess what here's the price everybody gonna have to come back to work yeah and

SPEAKER_113: salaries are going down it's gonna be hard you got to come back to the office and yada yada yada

SPEAKER_165: it's now the ajos is coming speaking for a friend you got to cut your doordash budgeting

SPEAKER_248: yeah you gotta doordash i mean you gotta my kids about to move out i was like we got a budget now we

SPEAKER_10: got a cap on doordash i think that's reasonable i mean i i had there's been some serious marital strife in the uh calacanis household over the uh you know and i listen i'm a very uh you know doting father but when i see the uh door that the uh uber eats rather of uh boba that's the marginal that's

SPEAKER_11: the line in the sand like no you can order dinner but hell no on the second and ordering seven i mean when you put in all the delivery costs and everything we're at ten dollars per boba i got three daughters there's a lot of boba and the wife and me i don't order the boba i just go i'm like the vacuum cleaner there you know there's always like 20 left in each boba yeah and that's

SPEAKER_99: my that's my boba experience i'm the cleanup crew i take each daughter's backwash i get that's what i

SPEAKER_255: get that i'm like ew that's that's what i get you know like because i don't want to spend i don't

SPEAKER_27: want the fifth ten dollar boba in there that's why you got that bulletproof immense immune system by the way like the more kids you have i think there's something to this the more kids you have the more bulletproof your immune system is because you're just ingesting all the germs let's do the uh

SPEAKER_143: startup of the day let's do it this is a fun one yeah i mean i'm friends with joe and uh i traded

SPEAKER_35: some text messages with him over this yeah okay cool so you should come on the show and talk about

SPEAKER_27: this samara samara i'm going to call it uh is the new joint by airbnb co-founder joe gabia and former flex chief executive mike mcnamara uh and it creates it's actually a housing startup housing

SPEAKER_35: designs adus creates factory produced studios and one bedroom units this actually started as an internal innovation team within airbnb in 2016 as sort of this clever like how could we create more stock probably um and then earlier this year so it was effectively incubated in airbnb and then broke away to become an independent startup airbnb retains a minority stake in the company and it's made up

SPEAKER_151: entirely of airbnb alumni what do you know about it tell me more uh well you know joe's a great designer

SPEAKER_11: um and this is gorgeous design i have a little bit of a background in this we incubated a company called

SPEAKER_44: blockable which started by making blocks like this you know six seven years ago and then they realized this is an okay business uh but not a great business it's a low margin business it's very bespoke people want to customize stuff uh but the the concept of building in a factory is a very powerful uh concept and i'll explain why in a moment blockable eventually said you know what we're

SPEAKER_10: going to do multi-family dwellings and so they did uh one for people coming out of recovery slash homelessness which sometimes addiction and homelessness as we know tragically gets combined and uh you can build in half the amount of time a third of the amount of time and for less money although the money isn't really in the savings of the materials or anything it's the savings of time so when you try to build an adu in your backyard you got to get an architect you get permits all this stuff and then you got to build and when you build you have to use materials and the materials get delivered you know and if it rains one day everything's covered and you know you got people with exacto knives and saws and you know they're cutting things in the field doesn't lead to the greatest precision and it means you're limited in the materials you can use because you can only cut certain things in the field now what blockable did was they had power water cutters precision water cutters and they could use new materials molly that last 100 or 200 years uh or that are sustainable or that are better for the hvac and for energy consumption and then when you cut them

SPEAKER_11: perfectly with a water cutter with a cad computer attached to it it's perfect and then when you snap them on you go four rivets and it's on now in the field you know they're doing you know uh sheetrock and they're plastering and all this stuff and it will be far from precise which means there's going to be a lot of gaps the heat and the cooling is not going to be perfect um and you can't work 24

SPEAKER_32: hours a day so there was this moment at blockable where we were talking about plumbing and there was

SPEAKER_11: like hey we don't have uh there's a shortage of plumbers in the country it turns out americans

SPEAKER_259: don't want to do jobs yeah uh-huh thank you uh dad joke um they don't want to do these jobs uh and so like the average age of a plumber is like 60 years old or something anyway we got this plumber

SPEAKER_11: shortage and we're going to do the plumbing on site and it was like wait a second why don't we just hire a plumber full-time buy out their business put them in the factory and then all of the construction workers who normally would be sent into the field and have to leave their families for 30 days 20 days

SPEAKER_10: and you have four of them living in a rv somewhere or in a cheap hotel and a or an airbnb share with four or five of them they can go to work every day in a factory yeah they can leave that or you can and you can run two shifts in a factory or three yeah uh and there's no rain and it's controlled and it's a better life for the workers and it's more efficient and then you just drive these things to the field so that's the genius of samara uh and joe's a great designer and these things will be lightly customizable i predict and um they have a specific concept here which is to have these be for renting them out for airbnbs and uh yeah that's a great business the better business that blockable

SPEAKER_14: chose was to not do these but to do stackable ones i do think that it'll be interesting to see

SPEAKER_27: what is the ultimate tam for the backyard unit right adus have been very very popular in california they we've gotten a lot more permissive about them there's this idea that this is what creates now yep sure but then you have divided your total addressable market not only by people who want to rent uh in somebody's backyard but want to rent a studio or a one bedroom right like i i think there's this as an airbnb play great the question for homeowners is going to be like is this really worth it to spend let's say they start at 289 000 a one bedroom unit starts at 329 000 to put this in the

SPEAKER_70: backyard to rent it out it's you know as opposed to there's an adu boom because of the laws the laws

SPEAKER_44: have changed you can't stop an adu um you used to be able to stop these now actually did i tell you the

SPEAKER_108: story about like the ucolic town i live in i won't say the name of it here but i don't want to box

SPEAKER_11: myself but uh in the towns up and down uh the bay area yeah adus count as affordable housing yes and so there's a little cynical game going on if you commit to building an adu uh and a neighborhood gets x number of adus on the board they don't have to build affordable housing and then if you were to

Chamath Palihapitiya: build the adu and then you know you used it as your kid's art room but you said you were going to

SPEAKER_11: rent it out maybe you could kick the can down the road and stop building low-income housing or

SPEAKER_10: multi-family housing in your community for another five or ten years and filibuster your way through this so adus are going to fly off the shelves for that reason and and otherwise people working from

SPEAKER_119: home the work from home thing is making adus into offices so how often are you like i wish i was because you use your garage correct me if i'm wrong i do for your studio so and built a studio up there

SPEAKER_165: i mean it was like oh i need this you know yeah yeah yeah so that's that's that's the future of this

SPEAKER_10: but you know joe's the perfect person to run this this will be a billion multi-billion dollar company because he's a design head they'll make these in factories it's going to be really great also in um people building communities for this so tony shea rest in peace built an airstream park you know inspired by burning man yeah when you go to burning man you're like you know what living

SPEAKER_11: in an rv kind of nice it's contained it's affordable you know like the small house living concept

SPEAKER_27: yeah totally quite delightful i have a whole collection of women friends that just want to start a like a ladies commune because i'm sorry to say it like this but like the men die first and so we have this like we want to create kind of our old folks community and um that's entirely

SPEAKER_199: the concept is like tiny houses organized around a big lodge where you can come together i mean like

SPEAKER_11: it'll be like summer forever but anyway these that's what that's what i predict will be the big win somebody in austin is going to get you know 20 acres just outside of austin and put uh 40 of these a half acre each and a bunch of young people are going to be like you know what this is going to cost me 100 grand for this home and i get to hang out and there's a central lodge where every night there's dinner and i just pay 10 bucks for dinner on my you know little you know uh community card right this is going to be good for society people need to start living

SPEAKER_191: like this this is good um good for society this will this could also solve the housing problem

SPEAKER_10: and affordability now in some places like california people can be protectionists as i previously described of course but then the places where they're not will have these so you don't need everybody to agree to these you just need some places to agree to these just like houston and austin and some in new york city manhattan allowed for a lot of building and that you know led to a lot of people wanting to live in those places because they were more affordable if you put more units in then just because of supply demand the the worst units will have a lower price eventually so this is where like the nimby's screw up they don't want high-end housing because they're like oh it's you know but there are a bunch of developers living in the mission in what was formerly the low-end housing and they're like there and those people would move to a place with a pool yes or a gym and then those places would be available for firefighters cops teachers we uh have a little we'd have to do a

SPEAKER_27: little bit because this is our last show until sunday we're gonna bring on our emergency buddy sunny madra to talk about the latest in the ftx contagion just to tide you all over so that hopefully

SPEAKER_199: you can ignore it over the thanksgiving break but coming up right now here's sunny mandra two things

SPEAKER_00: we always want to talk about on this show number one how to build the best product possible and number two how to find product market fit faster these things usually go hand in hand but relying on your gut is not good enough many vcs aren't willing to wait around for you to figure it out based on your instincts no investors are looking for founders that can use data-driven solutions to find product market fit more efficiently so you have to check out mixpanel right now and they'll give you 50 000 dollars in credits when you join their startup program mixpanel helps startups find product market fit faster by offering powerful self-serve product analytics you can get insights in real time with the help of mixpanel's pre-built templates and this is critically important startups i've invested in they've been trying to figure out what their customers are actually doing in the product well if you don't have mixpanel set up you don't have cohort data you don't have the features designed to see hey you know maybe you spent a hundred hours on a feature and ten percent of your users actually use that feature how do you know well you have to have the right analytics stack and that is mixpanel apply today to claim your fifty thousand dollars in credits at mixpanel.com startups of course they want to grow with you that's why they're giving you 50 dimes that's m-i-x-p-a-n-e-l dot com slash startups

SPEAKER_11: and that's startups with an s okay plural all right it's tuesday november 22nd 2022 now molly we know it's a thanksgiving week which means journalists you know whatever stories they have hey you bank them

SPEAKER_285: yeah for monday tuesday you start banking your stories but in the age your feature pieces you're like

SPEAKER_248: your feel good stuff yeah yes you bank it you sell into thanksgiving wednesday you know you don't

SPEAKER_00: want to be like publishing a story late tuesday or tuesday god forbid wednesday and then having that

SPEAKER_26: roll over into your thanksgiving but you know what you know who don't care about any of that who doesn't

SPEAKER_289: care sbf don't care sbf does not care citizen journalists citizen journalists citizen journalists

SPEAKER_292: journalists will learn let's take a couple years trust me in another three years of this yeah in

SPEAKER_293: another three years like a bunch of like coin report or you know crypto apology all these folks

SPEAKER_11: are going to be like you know what yeah i'm going to shut it down december 20th 21st and have a holiday

SPEAKER_293: with us sunny sandeep madra because this is so much crypto news and uh we want to get you to check in here i don't know where to start but i guess contagion is the word people are using now molly

SPEAKER_35: i think that's where we got to start right thank you sunny for joining us on the holiday week we are as a programming note this show is off wednesday through sunday which is why we have to do an emergency all our emergency coverage has to happen yesterday and today so tuesday and sunny was kind enough to come on from his travels during this holiday week to talk about the contagion so we there's like there's all the stuff that's just non-stop with ftx and we will get to some of the just the t because at this point it's just ongoing bananas crap but it seems like the real salient question is how bad is this going to get now because it seems like a lot of firms are getting caught up

SPEAKER_299: in the crossfire yeah it definitely and you know we saw last week you know the block five filing for bankruptcy and the big one right now that everyone is really staring at is genesis and so genesis is

SPEAKER_301: essentially a prime broker trading uh arm of dcg and they uh got caught in the ftx um meltdown uh lots

SPEAKER_300: of money i believe 175 million they had stored there and i think um what everyone is really waiting on right now is you know do they file for bankruptcy and then what is the subsequent impacts of that if we were to try to summarize it into the most salient things that i think maybe both you and jcal would be most effective by is the um the bits the grayscale bitcoin trust and so that's another asset of dcg and what everyone is sort of wondering now is if genesis goes down what happens to dcg in trying to save

SPEAKER_301: genesis and then dcg is the digital currency group correct okay what is that yeah thank you

SPEAKER_155: yeah ftx dcg i mean i didn't know there were this many players but there is this grayscale bitcoin

SPEAKER_310: trust correct now that so what's dcg it's the parent of both of those dcg is the parent of both

SPEAKER_301: of those of the so what is it so think of dcg as a holding company with a bunch of entities in it right and we'll the two we'll focus on right now and i and i you know i don't want to speak on it too much i don't know all the entities they hold but the two that are in question right now are the grayscale trust and the grayscale trust is interesting because that's the first publicly listed vehicle where people were able to buy um you know bitcoin through their traditional you know brokerages and what's become in question and yesterday you know there's some more details came out which are positive is that what was becoming in question was are the assets that are held by the trust actually there as well because we've seen all this stuff happen with with the rest of the ecosystem so coinbase came out yesterday they're the custodian for the grayscale trust and basically verified that the holdings do exist about 640 000 bitcoin i believe they they came out and confirmed are actually there so that's a that's a really good news for the ecosystem because we don't have a situation where the assets are gone the challenge is that is a income producing asset for dcg and in trying to save uh genesis which you know it's an important part of the ecosystem because it's a prime brokerage for like a lot of crypto do they end up unwinding that and does that end up pushing out those 600 000 bitcoin into the ecosystem and further impact the price of bitcoin that's one thing that and there's other assets in there too there's ethereum and other things in there but the biggest asset in there i believe is is the bitcoin and so that's the real question everyone is um kind of wondering right now

SPEAKER_315: what ends up happening with this asset okay so just to put a a little mini recap here you got dcg this is another one of these holding companies nobody can have one company anymore gotta have like a bunch of companies there's nothing sus about that necessarily dcg uh invested in a lot of different crypto companies they've got like a portfolio of crypto companies one of those is genesis and then one of those is this grayscale uh bitcoin trust now you can buy grayscale there's a ticker symbol associated with it so i could buy it if i was on my robin hood app or e-trade correct now it also has 635 or 640 000 bitcoin but instead of holding them themselves they use the most trusted name in exchanges which seems to be the last exchange standing coinbase correct coinbase a grayscale did not come out and say hey we have the goods they did not but coinbase which does a custodian service and a custodian services they charge you a percentage of your holdings to make sure that your coins

SPEAKER_183: are your tokens are secure that's what a custodian service does that's the function and there's two functions at coinbase we've had brian on here talking about it one is retail and one is a custodian

SPEAKER_315: service for like enterprises so if somebody like when tesla bought a bunch of bitcoin they might have used i don't know if this is correct coinbase to be their custodian so for treasuries or whatever that wanted to be in on that and there is a uh letter from coinbase's cfo in a tweet here's the letter

SPEAKER_183: and this comes from genesis i guess all digital assets that underlie grayscale's digital assets

SPEAKER_323: products are stored under the custodian of coinbase custody trust company llc okay and then in that

SPEAKER_199: letter coinbase is like no problem we have it it's good it's right here we can go put hands on we got

SPEAKER_325: the goods but okay if that had to get liquidated to cover am i correct genesis's or dcg's collapse

SPEAKER_330: genesis genesis owns grayscale grayscale is a genesis product gen i think grayscale is a dcg product

SPEAKER_35: correct genesis and grayscale in theory shouldn't have anything to do with each other but you could imagine a scenario in which maybe dcg would be like genesis is out here saying they need a billion dollars in cash we know that that is currently in custody at coinbase we could go get it

SPEAKER_300: um no it was that on the table it wouldn't be to borrow from it but it would be to unwind this truck because there's this trust generates revenues i believe it was about 200 million dollars

SPEAKER_301: a year there's a there's like a fee associated with running this trust something like two percent so if the assets in there are like you know 200 million dollars sorry 10 billion dollars then you get you know a serious amount of fee revenue associated with it so that could be associated with liquidating

SPEAKER_340: this this asset gbtc by the way gbtc is the ticker correct and then one other question to clarify about

SPEAKER_35: dcg it sounded like the way that you described that entity that it could be among the entities that increased exposure in institutionals like in what we think of as traditional financial services like

SPEAKER_345: made this more accessible is that a fair uh genesis not not genesis yeah genesis was acting as you know

SPEAKER_301: sort of a prime broker so they they were basically facilitating trades between institutions that are you know trying to you know transact in the crypto ecosystem which is important for the crypto ecosystem

SPEAKER_35: to grow definitely but does increase the risk that then if genesis does fail the contagion spreads if grayscale has to be unwound that all of a sudden the exposure is beyond just it's not as contained

SPEAKER_301: shall we say to the crypto that's exactly yeah exactly and that's the risk and i think coinbase coming out and talking about that yesterday was really good for the ecosystem and now we can just hope that this liquidity crunch that genesis is in um given some of their funds were locked up inside ftx and then given that you know there was a run on them and they've stopped withdrawals that they're able to plug that liquidity crunch and without having to go under that's what would be great for the ecosystem

SPEAKER_354: genesis is going down i mean it's a billion dollars i was gonna thank you like yeah i'm just

SPEAKER_356: gonna say it like there i don't think anybody wants to catch a knife anymore the knife catcher

SPEAKER_00: is trying to find somebody to catch his knife sam bankman freed sbf from what i understand is in the bahamas on working the phones doesn't have an ftx email anymore he's he's kicked out of the company but he's still trying to work the phones over the thanksgiving weekend to get three billion dollars to save ftx i mean what maniac is going to give him three billion yeah that that's a difficult one right

SPEAKER_300: now i think given everything that's happening yeah although i think you know with with dcg genesis these are entities that aren't caught up in you know i think bundling to putting them together is a

SPEAKER_301: little bit not fair to those folks like these folks have been operating legitimate businesses they've been operating with you know in a business to business fashion and so then why did they get

SPEAKER_300: caught right why are there their skis why are you so uh because they had 175 million in deposits at ftx

SPEAKER_365: got it right so their deposits are gone but how does that lead to a billion dollar liquidity crunch

SPEAKER_300: well there's a lot of leverage in these things right so there it is but you know they put it on

SPEAKER_368: the next because they put the 175 million on the next they didn't cover the spread you know i was

SPEAKER_372: having this conversation with someone over text yesterday and there's a lot of there's a lot of

SPEAKER_301: yeah and uh there's a lot of noise around leverage in the in the crypto ecosystem which you know obviously it's it's it's been kind of really bad and i think there needs to be some regulation around it but our lives are surrounded by by leverage right our credit cards are leveraged our student loans are leveraged our houses are leveraged right you know our bank deposits go in and they

SPEAKER_376: get leveraged this is not something that's you know only just in the crypto ecosystem it's just that

SPEAKER_378: there's so what's the difference well i think crypto leverage and my regulation right so if i were

SPEAKER_380: to magnitude well yeah so i mean that's it but if i were to simplify it right there is up to you know

SPEAKER_301: so banks in the us operate with fractional reserves but the the fdic you know backs it to 250 000 so there's some safety there for the depositors even though the banks are operating in a fractional reserve model then there are these stress tests that you know came in after the 0809 financial crisis which uh are you know forced the banks to basically you know publish what their leverage ratios are and undergo tests as well to make sure that you know they don't blow up in the case of um you know certain situations that occur lastly this bank runs you know if that were to occur in the regular financial system we'd see the same thing happen and it's just happening much more frequently now in this ecosystem but you know regulate we've talked about this many times but it comes down to regulation

SPEAKER_316: right without that that's where you know this stuff got really really i think people got over their

SPEAKER_315: skis using your term jco well and also let's be honest if we were to compare it to a home molly correctly points out order of magnitude people were trading five to ten times their assets in some of these offshore um casinos aka mark uh exchanges and like who gives five to ten x leverage like the mob like you really don't give five to ten x leverage to anybody but then there is the underlying value which causes revenue generation of an asset so the intrinsic value is uh you know a home can be rented and maybe cover part of the mortgage or all the mortgage or it can be sold and cover part or all of the loan but the intrinsic value as we've seen of some coins is 0.0 dollars and sometimes they go there whereas a home you know it's possible for a home to go to zero i guess in detroit like there's no value to it but it's not common no intrinsic value for an asset i think no leverage if it's not a revenue generating thing and the magnitude of this i think molly is is the key if you wanted to borrow against

SPEAKER_140: your stark stock portfolio what do they let you borrow 25 40 sunny before you get called uh and they

SPEAKER_299: ask you to cover 20 30 40 percent yeah i mean you can even go up to 100 a lot of cases on the stocks

SPEAKER_301: right it depends on the stocks exactly right you know i think if you're taking a blue chip they'll let you borrow 100 against it right because they know it has some intrinsic value yeah yeah i mean

SPEAKER_27: i think you know this is well this is again like this is a thing we keep repeating which is that the

SPEAKER_35: parallel to the financial industry the traditional financial industry as we think of it is one-to-one right like every time that we've taken away guard rails or or had an oversight with respect to some rules someone has come along and found a way to exploit those rules and make a ton of money that has happened all throughout history with traditional banking it's price it's there is somewhere there's an asset bubble being built up that nobody's thought about in traditional banking and crypto and the financialization of crypto just open the floodgates of opportunity to basically use the exact same tools leverage you know using customer assets under collateralizing like it's all the same i mean i think what's so kind of mundane about it is that it's all the same shenanigans

Jason Calacanis: that it ever is yeah it's just like slightly technically more complicated it's also has no

SPEAKER_402: friction right sunny there's no friction in this there's no controls definitely right it's it's harder

SPEAKER_299: in the regular you know trad fi system to go and borrow money right you have to sign a lot more

SPEAKER_403: i love that you crypto people that stands for traditional finance that's their dig trad fi

SPEAKER_409: you you have to go and sign papers you may have to sign a doctor sign you might have to sign docu

SPEAKER_100: signs now you know a docu sign really yeah you might have to get it notarized if you're transacting millions of dollars on leverage you might actually have to shake the person's hand and say congratulations

SPEAKER_412: on your new home wow incredible innovation there's a key wait are they going to inspect the home next

SPEAKER_413: are they going to check that you actually have the house the deed foundation i know i was going to say

SPEAKER_417: not in california but yeah but they did do they had those no income loans right no that was sent

SPEAKER_35: did they did i mean i remember in 2006 going you know having a conversation with a mortgage broker who basically was like oh yeah you can get a loan this big and i was like that is our entire monthly like income yeah like that is so unbelievably irresponsible practically it was almost gross but it would be like more than our take home right at the time when i was married and it was just like and thank god i had you know was previously married to a really nice eagle scout who was like yeah that's not no that's not a good idea is the thing about that you should not actually borrow more than you

Jason Calacanis: could ever hope to pay back but like no but there are very many people in this world who cannot really resist the allure of borrowing more than they could ever hope to pay back yeah and just hoping it's

SPEAKER_424: going to be fine credit cards well yeah buy now pay later buy now pay later three trillion dollars

SPEAKER_35: in credit card debt that americans have like it's we are actually the whole nation is kind of a financial

SPEAKER_427: it's an all-time high right now right i think that's what it keeps spending that's this is what's

SPEAKER_315: going to get the economy this is what's going to kill inflation you say no i mean if this is i think the feds concept here is like hey listen um spend yolo get in debt and then go back to work and get a job and be productive in society pay your taxes and then stop spending money on stuff they literally want

SPEAKER_151: people i'm convinced they don't care if you get a job and pay it back they really don't because actually the fed yeah they don't give a about that the fed sorry banks make a ton of money when you

SPEAKER_100: don't pay no yeah and i'm just saying i'm just talking about the fed is like if you they want to crack consumers and the consumers refuse to be cracked like when are the consumers going to stop

SPEAKER_00: spending money it's no austerity it seems like there's no austerity measures it's really crazy

SPEAKER_437: when does it stop i mean have you seen airline tickets i just bought one but i used miles because

SPEAKER_35: it was so scary bananas bananas i said uh i was thinking about like popping to london for during christmas and new year's to like see phantom of the opera or something and it's like i just set a price alert for it and every time it pops up i laugh out loud i'm like you gotta be kidding me with this

SPEAKER_441: what is it what is like coach to uk is like two grand is two grand that should be a business class

SPEAKER_315: ticket or at least economy plus that's crazy i had to spend 90 000 miles on a one-way business class

SPEAKER_183: to texas and i was just like i just it was such an offensive price one way i was like it i got so many miles i'll just start using miles at this point because the cash has more value cash today

SPEAKER_100: i just want to say there's one person that the consumer should look to when evaluating what to do

SPEAKER_446: in a situation like this let's bring up the goat if i told you i know how it all ends right once you know how it all ends that the only use of time is how do i buy more bitcoin but take all your money buy bitcoin then take all your time figure out how to borrow more money to buy more bitcoin then take all your time and figure out what you can sell to buy bitcoin and if you absolutely love the thing that you're that you don't want to sell it go mortgage your house and buy bitcoin with it and if you've got a business that you love because your family works for the business that's in your family for 37 years and you can't bear to sell it mortgage it finance it and convert the proceeds into the hardest money on earth which is bitcoin so what i would say is use all your time to acquire bitcoin finance entities and weaker currencies to buy bitcoin or educate yourself on why this makes sense if you're not sure and then educate everybody around you you know if you're working for a company that's got a hundred million dollars in the treasury you ought to convince the ceo and the board of directors to convert the treasury to bitcoin that's the most creative thing you can do that'd be worth billions to them it's like if you were to say to me mike it's the year 2000 you're in argentina what's the best use of your time the best use of my time is figuring out how to get all of my money converted into dollars and get it out of argentina because i'm going to lose 99.5 percent of the money if i don't nothing else matters all right folks well they're sure i don't know the date of that exactly

SPEAKER_454: i think it was a year ago i think bitcoin was at like 60 000. do not listen march 2021 listen yeah

SPEAKER_35: it has since lost two-thirds of its value bitcoin's under 16 000 i'm just saying that my 1300 portfolio is in danger of going to zero it's now like at 350 dollars it's become like a sick fascination like i'm like wow but i will say i saw saint laurent cnbc the other day and he and binny has been saying this too like plenty of people are like actually bitcoin seems really resilient and he sounded relatively speaking pretty sane he was like you know those of us in bitcoin are in an unhealthy relationship with cryptocurrency and we want out like they just have messed this all up and bitcoin remains the only pure you know thing and and i was like okay how have we reached a point where he

SPEAKER_144: sounds like our rational crypto uncle it speaks to the broader are you still long are you still

SPEAKER_100: long your bitcoin yeah i am you're still long okay now you got in bitcoin at what dollar amounts

SPEAKER_315: sub 100. okay now could have sold at 50 60 70 be honest do you think you should have paired your

SPEAKER_466: position or are you still long and they will return to that here's my thesis on on bitcoin it's been

SPEAKER_299: correlated kind of to molly's point all this stuff is happening i think it's just a replacement for a store of value that's much easier than you know gold or anything that's been there it's been around it's never been hacked it's been super solid through all this stuff that's happened and i think you know

SPEAKER_300: the next generation of folks that come out there when they look for a place in terms of a store of value you know i i think it's going to be something that'll be there and i think it'll increase in value over time i i just continue to believe that with respect to bitcoin i think every asset's gone through speculation but well even even gold has right you look at gold in the early 80s right it hit

SPEAKER_301: you know huge highs and came back down and so i kind of just feel like it's it's i don't really think about it as a cryptocurrency i don't think about it as you know all the stuff that happened in this ecosystem right now i just think of it as a store of value asset for myself that's easier than other

SPEAKER_372: stores of value for now and my portfolio allocation that's how it's allocated as a store of value

SPEAKER_183: got it right now yeah i was going to show you the debt since you guys brought up the debt chart i think this is from the fred website sumer loans credit cards and other revolving plans you know we had a little dippy poo there uh during the um pandemic people stopped spending so it went way down you get a little stimmy check maybe you pay down uh and you're not going out but then it just sort of picked right up the line seems to be a straight line from 2010 um and obviously accelerated from the 2000s but we got a lot of debt in this country it's three thousand dollars for each of the

SPEAKER_402: 330 million americans now that includes 70 million kids i think in that number but every american now is

SPEAKER_44: three thousand dollars fifteen dollars an hour average you know entry level wage uh 200 hours so the house of cards you guys it's a house 200 hours of work to burn this off everybody's got to do 10 percent more work this year to pay down their debt if they or if you were actually an uber driver 36

SPEAKER_183: it's actually a hundred dollars per person if you got kids you got to do if you got two kids you got to do 300 hours of uber driving to pay down the country's debt it's possible but it's not healthy

SPEAKER_144: yeah but it's 70 percent of gdp so we're not getting off that crack as a country i know i'm

SPEAKER_473: just trying to get uber drivers for dara just trying to get we have a driver shortage so if you have debt may i suggest 36 an hour average wage at uber shout out to my god to talk about your advice

SPEAKER_35: no it's life advice okay now can we talk about the crazy stuff can we just like dish for a minute on the ftx story let's do it tea time let's go okay insane quotes coming out just by minute by minute by minute the latest is uh that according to the wall street journal ftx's sbf cashed out 300 million dollars during the funding period of ftx's growth when ftx raised 420 million dollars this is a quote from the wall street journal from an array of big-name investors in october last year the cryptocurrency exchange said the money would help grow the business improve user experience and allow it to engage more with regulators left unmentioned was that nearly three quarters of the money 300 million dollars went instead directly to sam bankman freed who sold some of his personal stake in the company according to ftx financial records reviewed by the wall street journal and people familiar with the transaction and then apparently he just bought a bunch of nice houses for himself his compatriots and his two stanford ethic professor parents i'm sorry did you say ethics i believe that they are in fact ethics professors can't make this i need to verify that but yeah i i'm pretty sure they are like what and so the tweets today were like okay now we can blame the parents too because

SPEAKER_380: no one asked this whole secondary thing i'd like to push it back to jcal i'd love to because you know i think it's come up in several conversations but where do you stand on a secondary of that size

SPEAKER_315: i have always had the same position a secondary that's enough for a founder to buy a home in their

SPEAKER_100: city buy it outright have a million or two bucks in their bank account takes the edge off and lets them go long okay i speak from firsthand experience uh having watched founders who got more than that start thinking about the plane the second home and all the distracting things that happen from wealth creation but taking off the edge buying yourself a three bedroom loft for two million bucks and having two million bucks in savings in a bank account now you don't have to worry you did the added insurance so if you had a 50 million dollar position in your company let's say it was worth 200 million you were two co-founders you each got 50 million you sold five or 10 million i'm okay with you selling 10 20 if it doesn't exceed your home plus two milli let's make a number here so depending on where you live you know if you live in salt lake that's you know could be two million plus another million for the home plus a million or two million in taxes you know four or five million you live in the bay it might be ten when you see it go above those numbers founder distraction becomes a real thing and i think the people who are providing the secondary just need to pause and think do we want our founder super distracted if the company's going public you know and it's been

SPEAKER_11: year 10 or 11 or 12 well the founder has been post money for a long time sunny post money sunny and when you become post money it can take the edge off not everybody is like you post money sunny who you still have the blade and you wanted to start a company but if i'm being honest you know

SPEAKER_256: sunny and i have uh have recreated we've recreated we've we've had a couple ski days here and there

SPEAKER_10: and uh you know talked about uh the finer things in life and so it can take the edge off that's all you got to decide if you want to take the edge off and there there's a little bit of a trow right like productivity crazy crazy crazy then you get the money and all of a sudden you get lazy and then you're kind of hanging out down here and you're like well this is boring af molly and then you're like i gotta get back and go win again so you just have to be careful when you insert that trow

SPEAKER_144: of uh hedonism and wealth in my mind quick correction both parents are law professors not ethics

SPEAKER_35: professors but they are law professors and the father is focused on tax law and then second yeah there that was one of the chapters i particularly that's actually in j cal's book in angel and that question of the secondary sales and specifically of the governance around them and not letting your founder get to the point where they're taking out effort money and i think we can all agree that

SPEAKER_351: that actually that sbf was like way beyond effort money like f all morals money this is what we're

SPEAKER_468: talking about at some point it's like a nice double dip because he got the cash himself it seems like

SPEAKER_300: and then he used the company proceeds to buy real estate so he kind of did the opposite of what you

SPEAKER_35: guys were talking about and it's kind of sounding like that money might just be gone like that it might have just been kind of disappeared in a way that creditors are not going to be able to get access to

SPEAKER_315: it that you know but go ahead you go i was just going to say the uh i am seeing a lot of people talk about their parents maybe not being ethics professors as such uh they're legal professors but they have

SPEAKER_183: done some uh teaching and or writing around ethics so i think that's yeah that's definitely come up

SPEAKER_49: philosophy of personal responsibility um and that kind of stuff well there's personal responsibility and

SPEAKER_502: then there's a luxury beachfront home what do you want they're only human i mean i mean is it possible

SPEAKER_315: that he lied to his parents about the state of the business and so he just you know thought hey my business is worth 50 billion or whatever 20 30 billion at the peak and hey mom and dad i sold 10 of my business i got my 3 billion in secondary and i just wanted you to have these homes like i mean it seems like he could reasonably have lied to them and it would not have seemed out of market if you see coinbase as a public company i remember the coinbase investors like were popping champagne on twitter you know hey we're the greatest investors of all time look at our returns what was the peak coinbase

SPEAKER_00: valuation and then i guess that's what we should that's one thing you know i'm a fan of brian armstrong's is he the last exchange standing here now sunny and what do you think is there going to be

SPEAKER_300: is there going to be a run on bitcoin of uh acquaintance i don't think so i i think um you know look one of the things that brian has done and you guys have had him on here and all in and other places is you know he is now showing stability in the ecosystem which you know in in a weird way like everyone was

SPEAKER_301: looking at sam but it's like it's really brian right and he's speaking from many standpoints whether it's like sort of the work life balance stuff uh you know he spoke about that to you know the regulatory ecosystem you know i think when he had you guys had him on the all-in pod he's wearing like a suit and tie or at least a shirt and ties so he's kind of picking up the mantle there i actually think it's really good for coinbase right there and you know them coming out and what they did what we just talked about earlier with the the grayscale trust right coming out and their cfo

SPEAKER_515: putting a letter out and doing that these are really really good things for the ecosystem yeah

SPEAKER_35: and i think they're important as long as it is all true and we have no reason to believe that it's not right but at this point it really does feel like coinbase is sort of the last that's interesting

SPEAKER_10: molly you're assuming you're assuming i think or maybe i don't want to put words in your mouth but i think it's an interesting test to assume fraud in crypto and work backwards to prove to me it's not i'm not saying that coinbase says anything like that but i would assume now maybe there is fraud

SPEAKER_35: exactly like shenanigans malfeasance problems assume problems assume problems assume problems assume that at least some of because the thing is like even coinbase i would assume and i'm conjecturing here but even coinbase i would assume has to rely on like a bank who takes deposits and makes loans and and places trades or whatever has to rely on the collective faith and credit of the other banks in

SPEAKER_199: its system and so i guess where i feel that coinbase could still be vulnerable is too contagion to the full faith and credit of the other players in its system sunny i think it's i think it's a it's a fair

SPEAKER_380: assumption i i do i think like they because they're you know listed in the public markets i just think

SPEAKER_300: that the they haven't done sort of what some of the other uh um players in the ecosystem were doing like if we think back even through you know using your analogy there for a second molly look at what happened in the banking crisis right it was you know it was a few banks that are really kind of over

SPEAKER_301: stretched themselves in that in that time frame and yeah and i it feels like again with coinbase's transparency that they're not one of the folks that have overstretched themselves and so i feel like they they should remain solid through the through this and the real thing for them is

SPEAKER_300: innovation can they continue to innovate in this ecosystem because one of the the challenges that i see for them is given that they have to play this role like innovation usually requires going and taking some risks and doing some some new things for people and you know we're not seeing them do that

SPEAKER_515: right now and that that's that really sucks because we need more of that in the ecosystem as well and

SPEAKER_35: is that the distraction factor largely right it's just like keep everything together trusted stable and

SPEAKER_293: that yeah definitely right right i'm wondering uh you know in terms of the health of businesses a lot

SPEAKER_183: of people will look at the debt to equity ratio of businesses how much debt do they have to their equity how much cash they have on hand coinbase's debt to equity is now 60 60 i guess if i'm reading this debt to equity ratio chart so they must have a couple billion in debt and they're worth 9 billion or something now they've gotten clobbered they were worth at the peak 76 billion dollars and then what

SPEAKER_140: is the revenue going to be like to your point are people going to be trading crypto or just trading out

SPEAKER_300: and giving up or do you think about retail like i mean i think trading volumes are definitely down right there's been a lot of stuff published and you know you see that not so much with bitcoin but with the other assets right now and you see when that those prices fall like if you try to go to

SPEAKER_301: some fundamental analysis as the use of blockchains fall then they're you know the associated tokens whether it's ethereum you know eth for ethereum or you know soul for solana as those things start to fall the value falls right there's less happening on those blockchains and that you you can kind of just see that from the broader ecosystem right now and they have a they have a cloud that they're launching you know for folks that are building in the crypto ecosystem so they you know they have

SPEAKER_530: started to put some real kind of good products they want to be even coinbase wants to be aws ask and be infrastructure as well as trading and definitely definitely mark and they're doing it

SPEAKER_301: for themselves it's very amazon like as well like they need it for themselves so they're just making

SPEAKER_183: it available to others which i think is a smart play so that's it that might be a that might be a signal to buy coinbase then if they're going to build the rails for people to build on whether

SPEAKER_10: it's nfts or tokens or trading systems and they have to build it for themselves yeah why not do that so you know a lot of people go to this website coin market cap i don't know who runs it i don't know if the data is correct because the amount of trading it showed was bonkers i never bought that that was the actual volume but coin market cap do you trust their data because they said the entire market cap of everything all coins they could identify was like almost three trillion at some

SPEAKER_183: point now it's down at the peak and now we're down at like whatever it is 800 800 yeah yeah that feels

SPEAKER_300: do you trust those numbers the beauty of the blockchain and i can speak to this with with some some level of authority because of your company give a shout out what we do yeah um yeah i mean most of these folks are uh pulling this stuff from the blockchain right so transactions prices so these

SPEAKER_301: things are being pulled from um records and so yeah i i i would you know i don't particularly like we don't use these guys as a data source but um you know the numbers just what you're saying there seem to line up with what's happening in the ecosystem give a plug for your company and what

SPEAKER_402: you're doing in terms of trying to understand all this and then what yeah what inside information or

SPEAKER_300: insights you have from what you do yeah i mean like uh just you know across the board like one we've been really focused on the growth of this ecosystem so what what's happened is speculation and

SPEAKER_301: what we've been really trying to bring products towards is taking the actual data and helping them grow and so whether it's finding lookalike customers with um you know some of our algorithms that we have using blockchain data for that or basically finding projects that other projects that collaborate with based on you know holdings that exist between projects we do that type of stuff and now as a lot of you know big companies are entering the ecosystem uh you're seeing a lot of brands come in the nft space right now and they want to understand uh you know who they should interact with how the royalties are being generated we do a lot of royalty dashboards for companies that are generating royalties for these nfts have been created and you know we've talked about that before and royalties that are not being paid as well and so um yeah so we're basically acting as a like a de facto source a trusted

SPEAKER_515: source within the ecosystem within the crypto ecosystem how can people learn more about that

SPEAKER_183: definitive.io definitive.io that's it definitive.io we can pull it up on the screen here and you know if you come to the show i think uh given your amazing insights pulling up a chart or two always uh you know fair game i think here since we're paying you such a huge amount of money to for your appearances feel free to pull up uh well there's the website but yeah that's your goal is to try to

SPEAKER_11: make sense of all this with all the on-chain data yeah and one of the things that we really also focus

SPEAKER_300: on and just last plug here is that we allow people to pull in off-chain data and i think it's

SPEAKER_301: important to look at those two sources data that's like just regular data data that lives in your private databases and mash that up against the stuff that exists on chain because not everything you know if you're building a product today even if it's a web3 product not every transaction is happening off chain and so a classic example something you may want to do and this is where you spend a lot some of your time now jaykel is if you're an nft project and you want to understand

SPEAKER_300: how many of your holders have gone and made their twitter pfp picture the verified nft you know they have that functionality so we we basically pull that information from twitter we we look at that

SPEAKER_301: and you can see is that a net benefit for your ecosystem is that cohort is that cohort a better cohort a different cohort do they spend more are they more active and then you can understand if you should support that from with inside your project and say yeah convince your holders to go and make their twitter pfp that and maybe give them something for doing it because it it drives more

SPEAKER_548: you know usage of your nft depending on whatever you're trying to do in your you know your particular

SPEAKER_324: project did you just reveal jacal's secret nft project what no one called me i i am not doing it

SPEAKER_160: i mean that would be amazing to launch an nft in the trow of like chaos and just being out there and

SPEAKER_100: be like get your nfts everybody yeah i mean you really this now means this whole collapse i think means if you have a product if you're raising for a crypto project what are the chances of getting funded

SPEAKER_183: today and what do you think you need to have to clear market with venture capitalists because you've been doing raising money is it still like vcs have tons of crypto funds laying around so

SPEAKER_300: there's a lot of crypto um you know there's a lot of funds available i think what you're going to see

SPEAKER_301: now is a lot more diligence and really really deep diligence and you know sort of we're gone are the days of the seven days turnaround to less you know from meeting to funding to it could be a 30 60 day process which is a lot more natural than what we've seen in the past i think people are going to be a lot more do have a lot more scrutiny to your business plan i think coming out of this people are going to be definitely want to understand what your governance models are you know board seats uh you know things associated to that and so and i think that's all good for the ecosystem because you know when things were flying high funding was happening quickly diligence was low governance was really poor and then bad things happen right so what's the saying we can't have nice things we

SPEAKER_554: can't have those good times again but it's probably for the better this time around that's for the

SPEAKER_293: better yeah all right there you have it i hope you're right i hope you're right have a great restful weekend and uh hopefully we'll see you and vinnie again yes he is of course spending all his crypto

SPEAKER_11: money at some music festival what's left of his crypto fortune he is yoloing at some rave slash i

SPEAKER_00: mean the the life of vinnie lingam i mean i follow that instagram and i am like he figured it out what am i doing i'm here five days a week six days a week with molly grinding out podcasts working second

SPEAKER_17: jobs nightmare i'm just like working three jobs over here i'm on side quests i'm trying to find like golden hammers you've got an unpaid job too jcal i mean i'm trying to get some stuff done here and

SPEAKER_256: like uh he's out there music festivals this guy's got he i think he's got costumers on the payroll

SPEAKER_573: every time i see you you follow vinnie lingam molly no but i'm about to i mean you follow vinnie lingam it's like i think he's got i'm just saying that's how you hardcore that's all i'm saying is this guy's

SPEAKER_256: got cosplay this guy's got more cosplay and costume designers on his payroll really

SPEAKER_80: doing everything okay okay no flies out no flies out anyway sunny happy thanksgiving okay great to

SPEAKER_581: see you guys too great to see you thanks great conversation i love it look at thanks