SPEAKER_00: all right it's a big news day cryptocurrency continues to struggle now it's not just china doing the saber rattling here in the united states our government is looking into big transactions in crypto and making their own cryptocurrency to compete with bitcoin and is this the beginning of the end of bitcoin and the crypto movement or is this the start or the end of the beginning we're going to get into that also robin hood is going to give retail investors access to ipos on the first day at the ipo price an amazing announcement and more the founder of magic spoon is with us which

SPEAKER_01: is an amazing protein cereal which i love and i buy and he started with crickets in bars and that failed but he still loved protein just not from insects he tells that whole story on the back end

SPEAKER_02: and i got a special message tree at the end of the pod in the button stick with us this week in

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SPEAKER_08: first story it's been a rough week for crypto and it keeps getting worse the u.s treasury department has cracked down on crypto um or their saber rattling and the fed has announced they will explore a

SPEAKER_00: centralized digital currency just like china has announced a digital one and they're going to start exploring it this summer so this uh leads to a lot of people doom and gloom is this the end of bitcoin is at the end of crypto i think if we look at the arc of history this might be looked at as the starting line or the be the end of the beginning is how i would describe this this isn't the end or the beginning of the end it's the end of the beginning the beginning will be looked at as the 10 years of the early days of bitcoin and the 10 years before that of e-currencies virtual currencies in-game currencies etc so uh we covered bitcoin obviously on wednesday after china uh banned their banks from servicing crypto related transactions and now the u.s is getting into the mix so this is a lot of news but not a lot of facts right and uh we were looking at you know when i was talking on wednesday i made the point that a lot of the bitcoin maximalists have lost their minds they're so

SPEAKER_01: into this currency that they have no objectivity which i can understand if you bought something at a hundred dollars and it went to sixty thousand dollars all your objectivity gets lost trust me i've been

SPEAKER_08: there robin hood uber com i love these brands you're not going to convince me that they're not the greatest brands in the world my children are the smartest in the world your children are the smartest and most beautiful in the world in your case the children might be bitcoin in mine they might be some of these companies it's talking your book i get it but i told you and i've been saying for years if china

SPEAKER_00: wants to stop something they stop it they wanted to stop the uyghurs they put millions of them in jail they wanted to stop booksellers they tortured them and re-educated them they wanted to stop tiananmen square they ran tanks over their own people and they wanted hong kong back and they didn't want protests and they just took those people to the mainland and reinstated or instated their own mainland government in hong kong so we i think we can all agree that if china doesn't want bitcoin to exist just like they don't want the new york times or facebook to exist they're capable of doing if they can stop the new york times twitter facebook and vpns and certain books to be sold in china they can stop bitcoin in china it's a very simple thing to do you execute people you torture people you re-educate them and everybody stops doing that behavior or it goes so underground that the cost of being a bitcoin miner or running bitcoin servers or having thumb drives with bitcoin on them becomes so great that like vpns and other things in china you would just stop doing it so let's put china

SPEAKER_01: aside how would you stop bitcoin in a democracy where people get to vote and you have representatives and you have a legal system well here's my quote and i've been talking about this for a while if we feel the us dollar is suffering compared to cryptocurrencies our government has a very easy way to fix that a 10 tax every time you buy or sell a cryptocurrency on top of whatever taxes you're already paying a

SPEAKER_00: crypto currency premium if you will this is something that is a very real possibility here in the united states and once you put a barrier like a tax in front of a behavior the behavior goes down and when you remove barriers the behavior goes up i think that's obvious to all of us we all watch what happened with cigarettes they ban the ability for you to smoke in a restaurant and they did it slowly and on airplanes and you're like okay we gave up airplanes or we had a smoking section in restaurants and on

SPEAKER_08: airplanes then they banned it completely then they put a tax on it and then the tax became ten dollars a pack and then consumption went down in the reverse you stop penalizing people or you stop uh criminalizing or um you stop people from let's say uh putting people in jail for selling i don't know fentanyl on

SPEAKER_00: turk street what happens the price of fentanyl goes down because in the price of fentanyl on turk street in

SPEAKER_01: san francisco in that cost is the cost of getting your drug dealers in and out of jail and how many days off they have so if you want the cheapest and the best drugs possible the best fentanyl the best meth

SPEAKER_00: you go to san francisco which is why every junkie junkie a term in the dictionary for somebody who's addicted to heroin and opioids if you're a junkie in the united states you go to get your junk in san francisco why the least policing the lowest price the highest quality so if you uh if you discount something people will consume more and if you tax it they'll consume less this would be the headwinds

SPEAKER_01: of all headwinds on cryptocurrency just like if you lower capital gains people get more involved in the stock market invest more startups that's why there's this big debate should we increase capital gain

SPEAKER_00: should we keep capital gains you know i can tell you since i'm on the front lines of this one of the big reasons people love to invest in startups and in the stock market is because of capital gains treatment if not they would just leave their money in other assets like boats airplanes and second and third homes you lower capital gains tax trading goes up if robin hood makes trading free uh and they do it with payment for order flow people trade more so on thursday the u.s treasury called for stricter cryptocurrency compliance with the irs saying crypto poses massive tax evasion risk uh i added the word massive u.s treasury department announced they will require any crypto transfer worth 10 000 or more to be reported to the irs as part of biden's tax plan that's a no-brainer we knew that was coming um and investors have seen the value of their bitcoin slide 25 of last month um and everybody's kind of realizing this is like maybe a capitulation moment uh and the end of the overheated movement so there's probably two things going on here stimmy checks and and people having excess capital at home because they're not going out they're not going on vacation because of the pandemic with the reopening people are going to buy less bitcoin and they might even sell bitcoin to do things in the real world like go to an electronic music festival according to cnbc a growing number of wall street analysts have recently been sounding the alarm that regulators at the treasury and the sec could soon take a more active role in crypto regulation quotes from the treasury department release cryptocurrency already poses a significant detection problem by facilitating illegal activity broadly including tax evasion so can you stop bitcoin and people trading it on usb drives well there was somebody doing that in vegas with poker folks they were cashing in chips for bitcoin and all the details

SPEAKER_01: of the story you can do a google search for it but they pinched that guy and you get in big trouble um remember al capone they got him on taxes not the booze story number two this summer the fed will take another step towards developing a crypto currency the federal reserve will release a research paper sound familiar this summer that explores a move to a central bank digital currency for cbdc so cbdc is how i'm gonna pronounce it cbd like the miracle drug in cannabis with a c at the end cbdc um and this is what most countries will do this does not mean they would eliminate the dollar they would keep the dollar

SPEAKER_08: they would add this and they would test it and make it one or two percent of uh you know money in the united states so we probably have two currencies going on concurrently it would be a digital uh dollar

SPEAKER_00: basically and um the fed has been studying payment systems for several years and plans to release an

SPEAKER_01: instant payment service called fed now in 2023 jerome powell quotes the effective functioning of our

SPEAKER_00: economy requires that people have faith and confidence not only in the dollar but also in the payment networks banks and other payment service providers that allow money to flow on a daily basis technological advances will offer new possibilities to central banks including the fed while various structures and technologies might be used as cbdc could be designed for use by the general public the moves of multiple countries mainly china and the central bank digital currency space has sped up

SPEAKER_08: the fed's timeline according to sources so uh in sub nation in summation if we wrap this all up the treasury department's cracking down on large crypto the fed is gearing up to learn its own version

SPEAKER_01: that sounds actually very pro crypto it means crypto is here to say if they want to track it

SPEAKER_00: and make sure taxes are paid they obviously want it to exist and if they're making their own this means crypto technology is becoming a fabric of life so it's a win for crypto now is that a win for bitcoin maybe not maybe it could mean that bitcoin becomes the precursor to the cbdc and that bitcoin is looked at as the aol of the space i know that i'm going to get a lot of people being upset but it could be that if the cbdc is more powerful more accepted and easier to use and your bank already has it and bank of america and wells fargo you know can put your money into that you might just start using

SPEAKER_08: it you might have massive adoption and so um how big is this risk for the two trillion dollar crypto market it's massive um in the short term is it headline risk yeah it feels like headline risk in the long term it's increasing legitimacy for sure 100 the crypto tax i think is clearly coming now let's just talk about bitcoin um you know it hit in 2017 and i spoke at a conference when it was hitting this like you know twenty thousand dollar kind of mark i think you know nineteen thousand plus and i told people listen this is a great time for you to sell if you bought at ten dollars one dollar five dollars sell half your position a third of your position buy your home buy your second home pay down your debt whatever it is buy some amazon or uber or airbnb stock and it went down massively and it stayed down for a

SPEAKER_01: long time and then we had this huge valley uh from nineteen thousand down to three thousand which is an eighty percent correction bitcoin steadily dropped uh for a full year to its first bottom of three

SPEAKER_00: thousand um and that was particularly painful and you saw me doing 360 dunks on twitter you know also telling people like don't be surprised if bitcoin goes to zero this is a possibility um and then we had

SPEAKER_01: another peak in july of 2019 we saw it race from three thousand up to twelve thousand four x and people were really excited about that um and then the steady bull you know run went to 12 000 and of course we had another valley after that 12 000 down to 6.5k a 50 correction and so bitcoin drops again it bottoms out it loses 50 but it was two times higher than the previous bottom right remember we talked about that 3k bottom now the bottom 6.5k and i'm no chartologist i don't believe in chartology or any of that stuff but it is interesting to look at this process the third mini peak happened in february of 2020 started the pandemic six and i think it was pandemic driven we have this huge rally and it goes 6.5 to 10k up 50 percent uh 53 in fact and of course a third major valley after that from 10k back down

SPEAKER_08: to 4.9k down 50 again and following the rest of the financial markets into that abyss of uncertainty and the end of the world in march of the pandemic coveted fears it bottomed out of 4900 lower than the 6500 previous bottom but between the 3000 and 6500 bottoms and we have this fourth major peak 4.9 up to 63k that's what has made people lose their mind in the last year 13x in 13 months certainly something to be excited about and here we are in the valley 63k down to 40k i think even today we were down in the 38k range uh which is down a third and so people who bought really really had a little bit of a whirlwind here to put that into context it's we've i just pointed out the the 2017 peak the 2019 peak the 2020 brief peak and then this april 2021 peak all of these peaks um resulted in valleys that were 30 50 80 but the valleys um went down less so you had this 80 drop 50 drop and then a 30 drop we're experiencing now i think the 30 drop winds up at 50 so 63 in half is 31.5 i think we could hit the 30k uh level um and maybe even 20 we'll see um so um my friend zach coleus a friend of the pod who does ask jason and zach with me on this pod a friend of yours as well he says this will be the end game for crypto as a mass market thing the fed and the chinese will launch a centralized digital currency stealing all the innovation then they will ban the decentralized currency so he's kind of just going there i think that these things will be regulated they'll become underground they'll probably over time become secondary to the ones that the sovereign nations deem acceptable and i know that this is going to tweak a lot of you but this bitcoin maximalists you know in the market today they're not the developers who've developed the technology those developers i think have been selling their positions through all these peaks and valleys in fact i think the valleys the the smart early bitcoin holders i'll call them the you know the the single digit crowd or the two digit crowd you know people who bought it from 10 cents to 100 i think they've been selling this whole time and buying amazon stock and other things and i think this has become religious i think it's become a mania uh and i think the people who were you know seeing on twitter from uh accounts that are anonymous or pseudo-anonymous a lot of these could just be uh accounts created by people who have large positions who are pumping pumping pumping and trying to clear positions before this whole ponzi scheme bottoms out and gets replaced and the technology gets basically co-opted by governments that would be the most cynical take on all of this i think it could be a long slow decline for bitcoin or maybe bitcoin keeps going who knows um i the majority chance i think is that um bitcoin will see 25 000 before it sees a hundred thousand that would be my bet um i think it's pretty easy bet to make

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SPEAKER_00: episode in other news robin hood which i'm an angel investor in uh just for clarity and to do a little

SPEAKER_01: mini flex announced ipo access they're basically going to allow retail investors to buy ipo shares before the company officially lists in a blog post on thursday robin hood titled robin hood is democratizing ipos robin hood announced they were rolling out ipo access to retail investors with no account minimum this is super important and amazing because obviously ipos pop on the average of 36 in 2020 according to deal logic and retail investors usually don't get involved in that so there's a little more democratization here um some notable one day pops snowflake 104 lemonade 139 big commerce 201 airbnb 100 door dash 85 jfrock 62 and palantir 38 all on their first day of trading so how's it going to work well robin hood users will search the upcoming ipos from a list of participating companies

SPEAKER_08: that plan to distribute their shares to robin hood so robin hood is going to go to each of these uh issuers and say hey can we get an allocation uh just like a bank would and i think that they will become the preeminent uh bank for this and you probably didn't see this coming obviously i did see this coming because um i've i've heard about it from the grapevine as an angel investor that they might continue their path towards democratization if this is their path boy uh robin hood as a clearinghouse for ipos sounds pretty compelling if they have tens of millions of members that would cement even more people using the services if you could get in there and get that first day buy or pre-order as it were a reservation so you request to buy your shares at the initial listing price when the final price is set you can review edit or cancel before the shares are allocated uh so watch and wait ipo shares can be very limited but all robin hood customers will get an equal shot at the shares regardless of order size or account value so that's the key here robin hood you know despite some of the uh stumbles and and trips and falls they may have had during these peak outages or peak moments of trading or unprecedented you know short selling battles uh versus the longs robin hood has always stood for trying to democratize and make the financial system more equitable and here is a perfect example of it uh so how are they going to do it robin hood will not be an underwriter but they will get an allocation of shares by partnering with investment banks i wouldn't be surprised if robin hood bought an investment bank i have no inside information on that but why not um they i mean the reason why not would be they would be competitive and it would limit their ability to get other underwriters but it's possible um that they could uh buy an underwriter um are they the first movers nope sofi made a similar announcement in march but they will act as an underwriter require three thousand dollar account minimums and the old guard has offered ipo investing with a much higher barrier to entry you may know about that if you have a morgan stanley or a goldman account with seven eight nine figures in it but you would not know about that if you didn't you would be getting those offers by email or on the phone from your money manager who you pay a vig to so um if you look at robin hood and sofi and you compare them to the old guard and the barriers to ipo access robin hood no minimums sofi 3k account minimum fidelity 500k account minimum td ameritrade 250k account minimum charles schwab's 100k and um ameritrade and schwab got sued by goldman in 2018 over ipo stock sharing after goldman attempted to end uh the contract with the brokers goldman wanted to sell more shares to its own clients rather than lending them to td and schwab to sell to investors so this is um pretty amazing news and just a quick hit um i got to listen to antonio garcia martinez on kara swisher's twitter space um you know he he talked a little bit he kind of agreed with me that slack is uh the trojan horse that went into every company and it basically i loved his metaphor i

SPEAKER_00: always said you know slack is just not the place or any electronic communications for political discussion

SPEAKER_08: religious discussion any charge topics just like you shouldn't discuss your relationship or your finances or religion or any politics over sms messages or on message boards because it eventually

SPEAKER_00: devolves into somebody calling somebody hitler goodwin's law if you want to look that up and so

SPEAKER_08: he has the same exact feeling that a lot of the coinbase and base camp issues and in fact his issues at apple are part of this you have employees who have a venue inside of a company to debate they didn't used to have that unless maybe at a friday meeting or you know in all hands or during a lunch but when you put it on electronic communication that's the big thing that's causing this chaos obviously trump being president for four years made a lot of people lose their minds as well uh understandably and you know kara has a very good point in all of this uh and i give her a plus one for this which is apple and google coddled employees uh for decades and you know she's she's pretty objective about this saying listen you know don't be afraid to yell at the ceo or tell us what you think and they gave everybody kombucha and snacks and bring your whole self to work and all this uh stuff but it turns out that might have been a really bad strategy and or disingenuous um because you give employees all this

SPEAKER_07: empowerment um and then all of a sudden they have power in the slack room or on a message board and your

SPEAKER_08: company hit scale man it could blow up in your faces and you know all these non-essential you know perks and keeping people you know like kids we're going to take care of your gym we're going to take care of your dry cleaning we're going to clean your clothes we're going to drive you to work on a school bus you know and and you're going to be in an open office plan like kindergarten we're going to have time on the rug to tell stories like all this nonsense that you know people did and to hodl employees and keep them you know nurtured and in this cocoon or womb at the apple or google headquarters or facebook headquarters i think we're starting to realize like work is work your life is your life and maybe it's good that you have your own life after work and so finally you know antonio makes a you know good point and he was basically talking about his own mental health and how he lost his mind just over the last couple years on twitter uh because he's a full contact uh person i don't know if he's being satirical he tends to be a little satirical um but he his quote from um that twitter space i think twitter trump in a year and a half of lockdown has made everybody crazy and nobody knows how to fix it i know how to fix it i'm going to go see the knicks for two games in new york next week and i hope to see you there okay uh next up is the founder of magic spoon a great cereal a great story he started with crickets and he ended up with

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SPEAKER_30: and a great founder on the program a founder who failed at his last startup building cricket protein bars yes cricket protein bars i kid you not i got pitched on a lot of cricket startups a great source of protein um but his second company uh after the protein uh bars made of crickets is one that i am absolutely delighted by and if you try this cereal i guarantee you you're going to love it too it's quite addicting and from what i understand if you're into keto or maybe not spiking your blood sugar magic spoon is magical and that founder is gabby lewis welcome to the program thanks for having me

Chamath Palihapitiya: good to be here uh so as i uh rib uh uh ribbed you a little bit there in the opening you started with

David Friedberg: crickets i did how did you even find out about cricket protein and uh i i was going to ask you why that failed but i think it's pretty obvious people don't want to eat bugs is it did you did you figure that out it was too too tall of a mountain to climb it took us five years eventually it sunk in

SPEAKER_39: you know that that was actually half of it and we can we can get it really so part of it was the

SPEAKER_42: demand side obviously hard to sell people to eat something they think is not only weird but downright gross so yeah a bit of a marketing hurdle there but the harder part actually was the supply chain so when we started that business and just to sort of get into why we started it the idea was the insect protein in general crickets in particular extremely sustainable protein source compared to pretty much anything we conventionally eat for protein and we thought it would be an interesting idea if we could convince people to move some of their diets away from traditional animal protein towards sustainable proteins like crickets and our idea for convincing people to sort of make that leap was to develop a line of protein bars that turned the cricket protein into a flower that had no taste and sort of create this trojan horse of sorts and the trojan horse was a little bit harder to get in we thought it might be yeah and then like i said even the harder part was creating a supply chain from scratch with insects that you have to optimize the feed and the temperature and the water and i

SPEAKER_23: go i would just imagine like you're it must be like a hundred crickets in each bar and chasing around the forest trying to find a hundred crickets per bar must have taken forever you know they they

SPEAKER_46: they weren't wild caught or they were all these free red trickets you know i'm not interested i know

SPEAKER_39: farm raised but that the upside of farm raised whether it's fish or cattle or crickets is you

SPEAKER_42: can control the feeds you can optimize the omega-3 profile and so very healthy crickets despite not

SPEAKER_23: being free range yeah i mean it it was a really great idea as a founder when you think about it

SPEAKER_01: everybody wants sustainable protein we know how horrible you know factory farming is in terms of cruelty sustainability bacteria and you know anti but i mean this is a long list of why that's not a sustainable protein source and it seemed like a really good idea and we were pitched on many different companies doing it and the sourcing of crickets was always a problem and of course getting people to

SPEAKER_30: not be grossed out buying it it was like a really unique set of people who wanted to buy into this but uh you sold it to aspire foods and then you started magic spoon uh back in uh i think the beginning of 2018 and uh raised a little bit of money for that what was the initial concept there and

SPEAKER_01: then tell us what you learned from the protein bars that you carried over into magic spoon and and the formulation of this next company and idea yes i think first learning is sell something that

SPEAKER_42: people actually want which sounds flippant but i think a lot of founders don't quite appreciate product market fit i think especially in the food world there's this idea that you can take a cutting-edge ingredient whether it's moringa or kombucha or you know an obscure mushroom with amazing benefits and if it makes logical sense and you're a smart capable founder you can brand it nicely and convince people to buy it and that was sort of what we were trying to do with exoprotein the idea made sense logically we thought with some clever marketing we could just make cricket protein mainstream overnight or at least in a couple of years turns out it was a little bit harder than we thought and so this time around for our next business we wanted to do something a little bit less niche than crickets and what could be less niche than cereal it is the only food group basically where you wander into the grocery store there's an entire aisle dedicated to it yes and from kids to

SPEAKER_59: adults everybody loves a bowl of cereal it's like a go-to food but cereal is the worst thing you could possibly eat historically sugary cereals are flour and sugar and do what to your blood and do what to

SPEAKER_42: your chemistry yeah 100 so it's this whole aisle just stuck in this old paradigm of sugar and carbs and grains but it's a product that everybody loves everybody's got amazing childhood associations with being carefree watching cartoons having a delicious bowl of sugary cereal but most people including myself when they grow up they stop eating as often maybe it goes from every morning to a couple of times a week or a guilty lit nice snack and what we wanted to do or at least see if it was possible to do was recreate that same taste and texture we all love from the classic cereals but doing a way that it's guilt-free grown-up ingredients optimize macronutrients meaning high protein low carb zero sugar

SPEAKER_24: and that was really the idea for magic spoon and how does one as a food entrepreneur actually formulate something that i think you know really didn't exist before you did it there there

SPEAKER_30: were very few people in this space um how does one go about making a product i i'm curious like is there like a laboratory you go to resellers how do you do it yeah it's very different for different

SPEAKER_42: types of foods so for most products you see in the grocery store the way somebody would start to formulate it is they would start in their own home kitchen so let's say it's a protein bar like our last business you start in your own home kitchen you'd order maybe not butters dried fruits get a vitamix blend together form by hand next stage is you rent space in a small commercial kitchen rent it by the hour they got some larger scale machinery maybe you can make a few thousand protein bars there for example then you find a small co-packer contract manufacturer outsource partner they've got bigger machinery maybe they make 10 000 bars and you scale up from there cereal though

SPEAKER_69: there's no version of making it at home you can't just yeah you can't puff the um i mean what you

SPEAKER_01: described was how rx bar grew correct like they it was like dates and eggs and whatever they literally handcrafted them and then made small batches and then 100 yeah and you can do that with most

SPEAKER_42: products you see in the grocery store if it's a beverage a snack product our product cereal it's an extruded product so basically you take a flower or in our case a protein powder and you put it through an extremely expensive large-scale piece of machinery and so there's no small scale way to test it out so we had to go around the country and visit all these different cereal manufacturers and convince them basically to run trials for us and help us develop that initial formulation so we went through probably every protein source you can think of except for crickets actually but everything else from pea protein to whey protein college and everything in between we tried every natural sweetener you can think of in various uh permutations and after about six months of testing endless formulas came up with a texture that mimicked the texture of classic cereals and then we moved on to the flavoring and worked with a bunch of different flavor companies testing for example dozens of different cocoa flavors with slightly different lighter dark or vanilla notes and eventually we sort of

SPEAKER_08: dialed in the various formulations i have to say you know the the magic spoon flavors are absolutely uh delicious and uh there's a peanut butter one which i think is my favorite right now i i we got the variety pack at some point um and i tried them all uh there's a fruit loops type one like a fruity one

SPEAKER_30: and there is a frosted one and a cocoa one but they're all kind of look like cheerios that size

SPEAKER_39: um yeah they're all around o's right yeah they're all the same shape they're all round we have five

SPEAKER_42: or six of evergreen flavors and then we launch limited edition flavors every six weeks i didn't

SPEAKER_01: know about that and yeah that's incredible and when you look at it the major difference i noticed is there's almost no protein in like your frosted flakes like one gram per serving somehow you figured out how to get like i think it's 15 14 or 15 grams yeah in a serving so it's literally 10 times 14 times

SPEAKER_82: the amount it is and it's funny one of those large cereal companies i won't name they came up with a quote unquote high protein version a few years ago and they increased the one gram to three grams

SPEAKER_42: so they literally tripled it but you did 14. so that that was the sort of level of innovation is it really expensive to put protein in it is that the issue i think it's number of things protein powder is massively more expensive than wheat flour or sugar that other brands are using and i mean it's funny to look at cereal as a category traditional cereal it's sort of a microcosm of everything that's wrong with the food system right it's industrially processed subsidized grains and sugar it's sort of the if you could try and create a tasty but it's cheapest possible food just to like quickly satisfy people and give them a quick energy bump that's going to crash later that's cereal just in a box and then marketed to children so um very cheap ingredients very cheap formulations protein is is more expensive and then there's also some formulation hurdles so once you generally get the base formula to be around 40 protein and we're much higher than that it comes out quite hard and so it takes many months of formulations for us to figure out how you get the light airy texture as well so that's like

SPEAKER_24: you have to blow some air into it or something i mean some aeration occurs yeah something like that

SPEAKER_42: and then i mean the other piece as well is the these large cereal companies whenever they've tried to make healthier versions has backfired so lucky charms famously removed artificial uh flavorings from their cereal a few years ago and the sales plummeted and so they were like oh maybe we shouldn't try and make this thing healthier really what happened is that everybody that didn't care about nutrition they didn't care that there were no artificial flavors in there anymore just it just tasted a little bit worse to them so they lost those customers and people that do care about nutrition

SPEAKER_89: it's still terrible for you so they didn't get anybody new either yeah it's like if somebody's

SPEAKER_01: walking into mcdonald's no offense to mcdonald's they're not thinking about their nutrition so making a big mac healthier means nothing to the mcdonald's customer you know all respect intended like maybe adding a salary bring in extra customers but it actually makes total sense if you know and and making a coca co making a diet coke yeah maybe that's like a different it's a different product line right and i think that's probably the mistake what they should have done is just said hey we own

SPEAKER_24: you know frosted flakes we're gonna make a different brand like magic spoon look you probably keep hearing about sock 2 compliance and you might think is this relevant for me

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Chamath Palihapitiya: slash offer slash twist okay secure frame dot com slash offer slash twist for two thousand dollars off nicely done secure frame okay let's get back to this amazing episode you guys charge i think nine or

SPEAKER_24: ten dollars for a box of cereal the equivalent for frosted flakes would be like three bucks so you charge

SPEAKER_64: three times as much a bowl of cereal goes from you know 50 cents to a buck 50 something in that range

SPEAKER_30: um how do you overcome that with customers or are there just is it just that frosted flakes are just too goddamn cheap and uh it doesn't matter to people most of the latter i mean there's a lot of categories

SPEAKER_42: where we've seen this happen right whether it's personal care or beverages there's like the cheap coca-cola and then there's the kombucha or the healthier beverages that are massively more expensive or even just to look at juice right you've got the tropicana orange juice and then cold pressed juice comes in several years later and it's much much more expensive and so time and time again we've seen that people will pay for a higher quality product what we tend to do to get people over the initial shock is explain and this is right when we say it what we're selling is not really cereal i mean it's literally not cereal there's no cereal grains in our product in terms of a strict initial definition what we're selling is protein powder in the shape of cereal and so when you compare it to a protein bar per gram of protein we're cheaper than a protein bar and nutritionally we're the

SPEAKER_97: same you're 10 cents a gram of protein 12 cents a gram of protein yeah and so once you frame it like

SPEAKER_42: that and you compare it to an rx bar a quest bar a protein shake whatever it's a much cheaper breakfast

SPEAKER_98: option that makes complete and total sense do you only sell direct to consumer we do we actually just

SPEAKER_78: launched on amazon about a month ago but whoa whoa whoa yeah yeah you did like three years of direct to consumer and then you go on amazon do you go on amazon because they reach out to you so we're two

SPEAKER_102: years into the business we yeah all day to see we decided to go on amazon for for a couple of reasons

SPEAKER_42: one there's just a lot of people that only shop on amazon and we were losing them to copycats that are

SPEAKER_106: that are popping up so okay you had a gun to your head basically yeah i mean we didn't have to do it

SPEAKER_42: right plenty of brands have copycats on amazon and they decided it's still not worth them doing for you know i think if you're an apparel or fashion brand there's good brand association reasons potentially not to go there for food i don't think that matters at all um but for us we just saw the monthly search volume for magic spoon cereal and we saw these other brands that were just copying what

SPEAKER_107: we're doing taking that and so we figured we might as well just just take that share there as well

SPEAKER_08: and so i see i'm looking at it right now 44 bucks for uh subscribe and save when you do it on your sites 36 bucks so there's a super incentive to go direct and is is that part of the idea in managing the you know when a brand is going to manage amazon as opposed to having amazon manage them you're you're going to just charge you're going to give a discount for coming to your site and it's

SPEAKER_01: just a little more expensive so for me if i did subscribe and save we're talking about an eight

SPEAKER_08: dollar swing if i'm going through this monthly i'm going to get a hundred dollars a year you know it's quite significant it's like two free months if i go direct yeah part of it is the subscription program

SPEAKER_102: we have on our site part of it is also we have the core flavors on amazon but the limited edition

SPEAKER_66: flavors that we launch every six weeks only on our website and so last month we launched maple waffle and cookies and cream they sold out in a couple of days next week we're launching two new

SPEAKER_79: flavors yeah like i didn't know about this this is making me like get hungry just thinking about it

SPEAKER_64: so can i subscribe just to the new flavors or do i have to come to the site and like it's like a drop

SPEAKER_94: and it's like i gotta be there on the right time it's the latter i mean we'll email you we'll

SPEAKER_42: make we'll make you aware um but because they they don't occur with sort of like a definitive

SPEAKER_63: frequency there's no subscription just to those but i think it's a terrible idea respectfully gabby

SPEAKER_64: i think it's a terrible idea i think what you should do is there should be a vip program and you uh if you subscribe for the year i give you all my money for the year for five boxes a month or whatever if you know what would that be yeah i buy 40 boxes a year you guarantee me i get every special edition can we make a deal like a vip product because 40 a year is 400 bucks i give you 400 at the beginning of the year yeah whatever it is buying up front yeah you just get all that

SPEAKER_122: cash up front yeah no cancellation boom you get guaranteed for cash flow too love it uh when you

SPEAKER_64: brought this idea to venture capitalists did they think you were nuts how do you get a venture capital

SPEAKER_124: firm to agree to this cereal yeah yeah it does seem a bit crazy no you've raised three rounds of funding

SPEAKER_123: i think so you've raised no well over 10 million right yeah but we're you know we were used to

SPEAKER_39: pitching crickets so all right so a little easier than that once you've been trained on that it

SPEAKER_42: anything's easier it was funny actually when we spoke to traditional food vcs there was this conventional wisdom that cereal as a category was dead we actually spoke to one investor who said to us i think it's an amazing idea but don't call it cereal call it puffs or bites or something else because people were looking at the category of cereal and they were seeing a decline year over year and it was but it's declining from 12 billion to you know something slightly smaller than 12 billion still an enormous category but for whatever reason people just saw that and they thought we don't want to get into this declining category traditional food investors i'm talking about now um and then there was also concerns i think as there is often with other food companies that are innovating that this is a category that's dominated by in our case three companies so males post and kellogg's control about 80 85 percent of the market and dominate shelf space so that that was another worry but i think all of that was sort of alleviated by the fact that still enormous category a product that people absolutely love and really the first true innovation in this aisle in i mean since granola maybe if you walk the cereal aisle 30 years ago it looked the same as it did two years ago and so really it's just been dying for something new and a lot of the investors personally what we were doing really resonated with them like when we described to them how we wanted to bring back cereal in a way that was packed with good stuff and that none of the bad stuff i made sense on a personal level as well and then we also um raised most of our funding from investors that actually backed our last business and so even though most of them didn't get the outcome they wanted in the last business they had a lot of trust in us from the five years we'd worked together and so most of them actually backed us again in

Chamath Palihapitiya: the initial runs from magic spoon so you proved that you were a good steward of capital you're going to make

SPEAKER_131: a good run at it so you had built up that trust for the second company now as a d to c company you got to have marketing channels i've seen you guys i think on the insta and i think i've heard you on podcasts what what works for d to c and especially in today's market where my understanding is when the

SPEAKER_30: economy is really hot the facebook ads get too expensive for d to c products only work for software products really and so i don't know the margin of your business but it's it's pretty healthy i'm assuming but obviously you can't be as healthy as you know com.com selling software or some video game

SPEAKER_131: that has people paying 100 bucks a month in virtual currency so so how do you build a d to c business and has that changed now with the facebook uh algorithm mobile changes yeah i'll answer that last

SPEAKER_42: piece first okay not much has changed for us we we have a very mass product right so we haven't typically relied on straight narrow targeting we've typically done like broad audiences and and that's been i think when you asked earlier about our learnings in the last business one of the biggest learnings now is we want to make sure we're building a product with mass appeal and so some people like our product because it does work for the keto diet it doesn't spike blood sugar but this works just as well for a mother or father of five they want to give their kids a quick healthy breakfast in the morning and so we've been very careful not to target just specific niches um in terms of other channels beyond facebook and instagram ads that every d to c company is playing in we do do a lot on podcasts like you mentioned both larger ones like you know tim ferris pod save america and a bunch of smaller ones as well we do a lot of influencer marketing and that ranges from tiny influencers that we're just seeding product to all the way up to major celebrities who became investors in our business and then a sort of bunch of things in between that that are cash and rev share

SPEAKER_98: and any number of different relationships so when you look at podcasts i'm just curious um

SPEAKER_08: your if your average lifetime value is whatever four or five months two hundred dollars something like that who knows what the real lifetime value is because you're only two years into the business but

Chamath Palihapitiya: you know these podcast ads on tim ferris or other at scale podcasts might be whatever 20 30 40 000

SPEAKER_01: an ad and you're selling 40 worth of cereal in a four pack is that even possible for you to be profitable from the get or are you looking at it as like half branding half roi how do you think about

SPEAKER_93: that well the flip side of what you're describing is that we have much less consideration a much higher

SPEAKER_42: conversion than these other companies right so yes like someone might be selling a thousand dollar mattress the higher margin on that purchase higher average order value we're five percent of that average order value but i bet our conversion rate is you know 20x their conversion rate so people you know people buy this quickly when someone sees or hears an ad from us it's not then a month of us retargeting them in six different places and then making sure you're trying to sell eight sleeps

SPEAKER_78: fifteen hundred dollar bed which i'm an investor in it's well worth it you've you've narrowed the audience down to people who really care about sleep and who can afford to spend time yeah exactly yeah

SPEAKER_30: and you have to convince them it's a considered purchase and all that stuff um uh and then in terms of agent in terms of influencers what works there because i've heard that nano and micro influencers are super effective and that like the big huge ones people with tens of millions are not effective and that it's really this sort of mid-market is that true directionally or is it you know you have a massive pill product or are you just doing like the the people who work out and who are in great

SPEAKER_93: shape and you know into diet yeah with all this stuff is trade-offs right so if you're looking at pure

SPEAKER_63: efficiency i'd say generally the smaller the better in terms of just return on ad spend but you can't

SPEAKER_42: scale that quickly so you're not going to build a big d2c business only working with influencers with 5 000 followers and so if you want to grow quickly you need to be playing in sort of the next stage so let's call it a hundred thousand to two million followers and so that's usually where we're focusing that's the right blend of efficiency and scale once you get beyond that and there's like four different managers involved and much longer contracts it gets a little bit harder and also that becomes more of a brand awareness place so we're in that middle area we do it mostly on instagram stories and youtube actually and starting to explore tick tock as well got it your tick tock makes total

SPEAKER_08: sense when the grocery stores must have come calling the walmart's or the you know whatever costco's when they start calling how do you think about them as a business are you going to take the same

SPEAKER_134: approach and or is there just not enough margin for you to run a robust business how do you think about

SPEAKER_149: them yeah plenty of margin first of all you know we built this business assuming we're going to go

SPEAKER_63: to break and mortar eventually so actually when we started a couple years ago i didn't think we'd

SPEAKER_42: be purely d2c two years in honestly i didn't think we'd be able to build a business this big this quickly only d2c just because it hasn't really been done in food very much so we've been developing relationships with the large retailers since our last business so we we know them all we talk to them and eventually we we will be uh everywhere that cereals purchased basically we need to be

SPEAKER_78: uh and then you have one form factor of cereal um which is these o's and this puffiness

SPEAKER_08: um they're very light uh crispy they they do well under uh milk duress uh i find they don't get soggy which is pretty nice but have you started to think about like maybe some other types or is it uh gonna just be changing the flavors and have you thought about other brand extensions or do you think it's best to just stay focused on cereal and own that we've thought about it but really

SPEAKER_42: there's no need for us to think beyond cereal in any detail right now it's an enormous category i think that was actually maybe one of the one of the differences when we're talking to food investors versus tech investors early on you know every tech investors first question was what's the platform where do you go beyond cereal yeah um but when you look at the food industry very few food brands are able to really move beyond a hero product so whether you're talking about quest bars and like yes they have chips and pizzas and all these things but bars are still the core business or vega for

SPEAKER_63: example let's get endless different bars and shakes and powders but really there's like one powder that's core business usually there's a hero product and that's the main focus and for us because cereal is such an enormous category there's not really a need to start playing in bars or yogurt or any other

SPEAKER_134: smaller category that's really just distracting yeah that makes total sense so what's next for the

SPEAKER_30: business what are the challenges now that you've gotten to i'm assuming you know millions or if not tens of millions of dollars in revenue uh you're a virtual company it's a small company i think you you're trying to keep it lightweight but um what's next for the business just more of the same and scaling or do you have to do is there something different that occurs when you get to you know

SPEAKER_102: really true true scale yeah it's it's a boring answer but it's really just more of the same most things are most things are working right now and so we're we're 22 people right now currently

SPEAKER_42: remote but we'll be transitioning back to being in the office in new york so hiring for all of our

SPEAKER_157: teams and when are you going to do that and then how are you going to manage that people want to

SPEAKER_39: come back or do people want to stay remote yeah uh it's a great question that we're navigating currently i think all the employees are listening get your asses back to the office you can't negotiate

SPEAKER_66: here's the official announcement yeah no i i think most people have been craving the the sort of

SPEAKER_42: interaction we're such a small company and everyone is in new york so we've been seeing each other for sort of outdoor meals the past couple of months like gradually reintegrating everybody and people are just like really excited actually we're finding so it'll be a process over the next several months

SPEAKER_168: start off you know a couple of days a week probably and we'll play it by ear yeah i i think most of the

Chamath Palihapitiya: companies here in the valley are starting with the three day a week thing uh and you pick which three days um yeah you know i'm talking about the big at scale companies the google's i think announced they're going to be three days a week um and then you know other places are just saying listen if

SPEAKER_08: we love saving 10 on 20 on our costs and you save the two hours of commuting so it feels like maybe people work a little bit more since they're not commuting because they get to the desks earlier and they leave later and i feel like the grand bargain here is if you work at home you have to be a high performer and because you know if you're not a high performer you find out immediately because yeah the person is not getting a ton done it's just you have to look at the actual work as opposed

SPEAKER_131: to looking at the culture what did you learn during remote work did you did you figure some things out

SPEAKER_42: as a manager and as a founder yeah well i actually think your your point about figuring out whether somebody is good faster in a remote world actually applied to hiring for us so we found we were forced to become a lot better at hiring meaning we relied a lot more on projects on case studies we i think were less prone to any bias from somebody walking into a coffee shop or our office and just being

SPEAKER_82: charming in person and yeah smarter than they are perhaps so i think we've got we got much better at

SPEAKER_47: hiring um well it does take out the theatrics and performative nature of interviews which are you

SPEAKER_08: know you have to put on your best face you get a haircut you shine your shoes you come in and if you're extroverted you know and confident you get the job and if you're introverted but

SPEAKER_102: you know an assassin maybe you don't yeah and it's easy to sort of fall for that and not realize until

SPEAKER_42: it's too late i think to the prior question just around when it's what kind of companies it's right

SPEAKER_63: to to be remoter in person for i think the smaller your company is and the faster things are moving the more important it is to be in one place so because we're only two years old because we're only 20 people because there's only a couple of people in each function that know what's going on so we only have a couple of operations people a couple of growth marketers it's so much easier if they're all in one place and can just overhear each other's conversations i can see the much larger company

SPEAKER_42: once we're in the hundreds of people it matters a little bit less because things aren't changing as fast but for us given how quickly everything's changing i think more important probably than for

SPEAKER_98: larger companies to eventually be more in person stupid question the boxes in cereal is that like a

SPEAKER_01: standard thing the size and everything and you're tied to that no because i was looking at and i was like why don't people send me these especially since they're coming in mal why aren't they sent in some

SPEAKER_30: other type of bag because i get uh who's your competitor um uh keto crunch i've got the name of it there's another one that's really good too um what's the name of it you know hitler there's a few yeah there's kathleen a crunch is catalina crunch so i think that there's like you and i don't know who came you i don't know who came first or if it matters but um i would say their cereal is like really

SPEAKER_01: hard yours is very soft so i actually and this one break your heart i kind of have both in the house

SPEAKER_186: and i alternate between my mic and walk away right absolutely but i will say like i i do think like

SPEAKER_64: they they complement each other nicely theirs is more in a flaky kind of way and yours is more in

SPEAKER_78: the cereal kind of way i find yours is lighter theirs a little heavier so it's kind of nice to

SPEAKER_188: switch them back and forth um but you're i guess yes it's the box thing and the size thing because

SPEAKER_123: they're coming in these little pouches you're coming in the big classic box how do you think about

SPEAKER_42: that i think from a purely practical function perspective boxes are not the optimal choice we we chose a box mostly for branding reasons yeah we we want to convey this sense of nostalgia we want to make people feel like the routine classic box of cereal and all the slight frustrations of ripping it accidentally as you open it that come with that sense of nostalgia um you know another thing just more practically eventually when you're thinking about retail and the standout pouches are typically for granola and so when you talk to a retailer if you're selling cereal in a standout pouch it's very confusing as confusing as if you're selling granola in a box they don't quite know what

SPEAKER_182: to do with that but all right i've got a very important cereal question all right what flavor

SPEAKER_24: is classic captain crunch that was always my and i'm not talking about peanut butter captain crunch because that's peanut butter version of captain crunch but the original captain crunch the golden one that's made out of crunch berries which are a fictional item what flavor is captain crunch

SPEAKER_102: that that's a fantastic question that as somebody born in scotland who grew up there i don't i don't

SPEAKER_39: really have the childhood memories of eating it so i can't literally yellow it's like a yellow orange

SPEAKER_198: it's sweet it's delicious but nobody knows what is captain crunch actually what is that flavor actually

SPEAKER_79: closest to when you think about it it's sweet it's savory it's crunchy but that's about it you can't

SPEAKER_204: really figure out what the flavor is is it is it slightly corny perhaps would you describe it as

SPEAKER_198: i'm not sure it doesn't know corn flakes are corny frosted flakes are sugary corny

SPEAKER_39: this is not that flavor and i don't know okay i'll give you another question uh your classic

SPEAKER_24: favorite fruity cereal do you know what flavor that actually is that's interesting so uh frosted flakes

SPEAKER_01: comes to mind or fruity pebbles now i'm sorry um fruity pebbles or fruit loops now fruit loops are similar to yours they're like cheerios are in the circle and then fruity pebbles are just tiny little

SPEAKER_79: flakes and they don't taste like any one particular flavor i'm feeling the crunch in my mouth

SPEAKER_210: yeah they're not citrus they don't taste like apple are they lemony orangey no i don't know

SPEAKER_39: what flavor are yeah close your eyes next time they're they're mostly lemony if you close your eyes are they mostly lemon yeah very citrusy it's kind of strange you realize that yeah

SPEAKER_207: because the milk is countering the citrusy but is there actually citrus in like a fruity pebbles type

SPEAKER_42: thing or is it just a water fish flavor i i couldn't speak to exactly what they're using but if you close your eyes it tastes surprisingly citrusy wow that's interesting huh all right listen continued

SPEAKER_08: success with the business congratulations on raising 10 million uh last year or just late last year um that's going to take you for a while i assume who'd you do the 10 million with was that an inside

SPEAKER_217: round or yeah mostly an inside round yep very nice so things are going well it was a pre-emptive inside round they offered you uh before you went to market that's how it went down taking advantage of

SPEAKER_42: of the momentum yeah and working with people we know and trust so you didn't have to go out to

SPEAKER_131: market when you're a founder tell me about that decision to not go out and try to optimize maybe for price and go on the roadshow and instead do an inside round for me it's a no-brainer i mean when i

SPEAKER_82: think about my life running a company you know whether the valuation is up or down a few percent that doesn't matter and ultimately if there's a successful outcome it's not going to matter to me whether i own a slight amount more or less what is going to matter is whether i know and trust my

SPEAKER_42: investors whether we get on well day to day and so to continue working with people i've known for

SPEAKER_01: several years just yeah it's sort of you have jeremy lu from lightspeed uh which is a perfect investor for you because he was super overweight and chubby and then he went on a keto diet and he's diesel now yeah he's an amazing guy and a fantastic you found uh you found investor product fit there we go there we go no it's a serious thing i mean i know jeremy and he literally struggled with weight he was very public about it and then like he went on like a crazy uh diet and worked out and he and he's diesel now so he understands keto that's you don't have to really convince him that this should exist in the world because he's your target market pretty great yep exactly all right listen continued success

Chamath Palihapitiya: everybody go try magic uh spoon it's pretty great i will tell you oh sorry uh bleep that out uh pretty freaking great um uh and my my kids love it and good for kids too right like yeah yeah good for kids

SPEAKER_232: to not have many many of them don't even realize it's healthy which is they don't they do not i tell

Chamath Palihapitiya: you they do not at all and uh if you want to just go j cow style get the vanilla and the peanut butter

SPEAKER_08: and you go 50 50. that's what i do is it vanilla or is it frosted i guess it's frosted yeah it's

SPEAKER_42: frosted i actually go chocolate and peanut butter is my yeah you know what that's just too much

Chamath Palihapitiya: that's obscene i mean you're that's like so hedonistic i mean that's just over the top

SPEAKER_08: what i used to do was when i was a kid i would have frosted flakes and then i would take i loved honey for some reason and i would drizzle honey on my frosted flakes that was truly degenerate wow that's just way too much sugar listen continued success congratulations and yeah we'll see you

SPEAKER_01: all next time on this thanks for having me bye bye all right just a little button here at the end of the pod i'm doing an event a reverse demo day called meet our fund it's taking place in june online virtual go to meetourfund.com you'll have 25 different venture firms pitch you and those firms uh we'll take 20 minutes to pitch you founders on why you should take their money and then we'll have 10 minutes of q a it's going to be a great event you can come for free just make sure you apply right

SPEAKER_08: now because uh it's gonna basically fill up meetourfund.com