SPEAKER_00: a portion of it is the regime change in washington and a portion of it is there's a lot of buyers when there's a lot of buyers they set a new top they drive prices up and so if you're like tiger and you offer you know you compete to beat the entire venture community to put money into a sas company before it goes public let's say it was asana or hubspot i think those were public already but that was the kind of businesses they were interested in the zendesk sas kind of companies if they were pursuing that and they wanted to beat everybody at the table those people have to

SPEAKER_04: deploy capital as well so they keep top-ticking the market they keep pushing it up their bid is going to be higher than everybody else's because they want to win they want to deploy the capital remember they're getting one and a half percent two and a half percent who knows what their fees are on 12

SPEAKER_08: billion dollars that's so much a quarter billion dollars a year in fees i mean if it was one percent it would be 125 million dollars a year a year this week in startups is brought to you by

SPEAKER_13: open phone create business phone numbers for you and your team that work through an app on your smartphone or desktop twist listeners can get an extra 20 off any plan for your first six months at openphone.com twist vanta compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business vanta makes it easy for companies to get a sock to report fast twist listeners can get a thousand dollars off for a limited time at vanta dot com slash twist and cla innovation takes balance cla's cpas consultants and wealth advisors can help you get from startup to where you want to end up get started now at cla connect dot com slash tech hey everybody welcome to this

SPEAKER_04: week in startups i'm your host jason calacanis with my co-host alex wilhelm we've got a packed show for you today tons of news and a great guest what's on the program today alex so today on the show we have

SPEAKER_18: tiger global getting defanged and all the data that's behind that we're going to talk to the

SPEAKER_20: founder and ceo of a company called flight that we're very excited about then we're going to add phoenix to the twist 500 then gm kind of gives up on his robo taxi dreams and if we have time if jason and i don't yap too much along the way the new head of the ftc and what he promised trump so it's gonna

SPEAKER_22: be an absolutely packed show all right uh let's get to our first story alex yeah so we're going to talk

SPEAKER_20: about a name that has not shown up on this show in a while but used to be something we couldn't get away from tiger global jason one of the best parts of pension funds attached to you know states like california is that they will often disclose data on how their investments are performing they have to legally right required or not we get the data and what that means is you and i can see inside of funds that we might not otherwise get data from so the latest is that cal stirs which is the california state teachers retirement system um has data on tiger global's 2021 era 12.7 billion dollar fund

SPEAKER_04: and a few other funds that are for a second a 12.7 billion dollar venture fund 12.7 billion dollar

SPEAKER_00: venture fund the the perfect size of a venture fund was like 400 million remember yep and that was

SPEAKER_02: considered the ideal size fred wilson talked about it the first round team talked about it that's 300

SPEAKER_34: or 400 of these 400 or 500 million 250 million dollar funds and they deployed it really quickly so

SPEAKER_20: you know we think a lot about venture capital funds having i don't know a 10 or 11 year time frame jason what would be the average length of investing you would do for a fund like three years there is um

SPEAKER_37: you deploy capital typically over three to four years for a fund yep then that's when you kind of

SPEAKER_00: plant the seeds and then you harvest in the second two-thirds of the fund so let's say you spent three or four years planting and then you're going to spend another you know call it eight years uh these funds typically last 12 to 15 years at 15 they kind of close out they buy out the final positions for a dollar and everybody writes it off and you're done they're timed as 10 they typically have extensions but yeah tiger because there was so much money flowing into funds and there were so many great deals and founders were raising so much money and founders were being offered so much money and the market was ripping and free money was everywhere tiger decided to do an experiment which was to deploy capital as quickly as possible and basically just take the entire cohort that had reached series b or c in 2020 2021 2022 time frame and we saw a lot of our portfolio companies get offers to raise 50 million 100 million from not just tiger but koto and a number of other firms sure that decided

SPEAKER_44: to write 50 million dollar 100 million dollar checks not dissimilar to what masayoshi san did with his um

SPEAKER_18: fund as well yes so how did that all work out well we have some data now now jason there is the j curve

SPEAKER_20: that does come into play here so sure you never expect a private investment pool to have very positive returns at the beginning you're talking about fees some things are going to go sideways immediately and so on the back half of the fund's time frame it tends to get better that said when we compare tiger global's pip 15 it's 2021 fund it's not doing well so recently calsters marked its investment from 93 to 65 million it's a net irr of negative 15 which i believe makes it a bottom decile fund uh four years in jason is enough time i think to say that if your irr is poor compared to your peers something's wrong and we're not looking too soon the data is my read this data is very early

SPEAKER_50: so in fairness to them um you know looking at it they are literally in where the j curve begins if they deployed this in 2021 is that what they're saying with this fund yeah is that it was you know deployed in 2021 we're sitting here it's about to be 2025 so it's a three or four year fund in other words they just finished that deployment cycle or how it would typically run but they did 315 startups in 2021 alone so that's a pretty consolidated moment in time and what you want because of time dispersion is when you invest is if you were investing over say i don't know 36 or uh 32 or 48 months right four years you

SPEAKER_04: might peak in you know the market might peak in month 24 then come down and be you know the valuations

SPEAKER_44: might be half that for the next 24 months yes so blended you know you might have been slightly up paying above market by 25 but not 100 or 50 if you catch my drift it's effectively dollar cost averaging

SPEAKER_00: for literally dollar cost averaging for venture capital yes and so and then also it increases your chances of hitting an outlier because there are a certain number of outliers created every year which means every year a certain number of them get product market fit every year certain ones get what we would call market pull in the industry market pull is when people are just uh calling up saying do you have this product can i get this product throwing money at you signing up without you doing any marketing uh facebook uber teslas you know any great product airbnb had this viral word of mouth people just sought out the product without them having to do it and that's market pull hopefully they were looking at companies with market pull i think the criticism was how thoughtful can you

SPEAKER_57: be if you're investing in a company a day including on the weekends you know and how much diligence can

SPEAKER_04: you do and how big does your team need to be we are a team here of i think 12 investment executives we do 100 investments a year and we've run programs like founder university launch accelerator which are

SPEAKER_60: like y combinator tech stars and then even a pre-accelerator uh a startup school if you will so you know

SPEAKER_00: we are an at-scale investor but i think they had the same number of people or less doing three times the

SPEAKER_04: number of deals in a year and these are more complicated deals but what they said was hey if you're at 10 20 30 40 50 million in arr we'll just give you credit for a valuation that will be coming in two years and deploy the capital and i guess that's the challenge everybody saw in this approach we all saw it there but i will tell you it only takes one so if one of these turns out to be hubspot or one of these turns out to be a tesla or an uber or an airbnb and they invested in you know the one to ten billion dollar range you know there could be a hundred bagger in there there could be a

SPEAKER_64: 20 bagger in there and you know maybe that makes up for a lot of mistakes we'll see it's true i do

SPEAKER_66: want to go back to episode um 1207 from twist because you were talking to um founder funds ever

SPEAKER_20: randall at the time and you spent a lot of time talking about tiger but the quote from the show that really stuck with me was if there's no adult in the room what happens when things go wrong

SPEAKER_66: and i wonder what fraction of tigers investments from this fund from the 2021 period when it deployed it that don't need help because you talked about staff says i doubt their staff to help even a third

SPEAKER_68: of those companies and if here's what i heard a lot of people who are at peak zurp funds have left

SPEAKER_00: now why would you leave well your track record for that fund that you'll have to live with forever

SPEAKER_04: would be based upon those investments and if those investments were all at five times the proper valuation yeah and you knew there were a lot of duds and you know you would be fighting tooth and nail for the next eight years to finish that fund and your reward for doing so would be you would return 1x you would just get everybody their money back or you would return 1.5x well you know then you got

SPEAKER_00: the carry is only that small amount right it's not a 3x fund a 4x fund so a lot of people who felt their funds were underwater especially if you were like a rank and file person it's kind of like being on a basketball team and like you lose your all-star you know like their knee blows out and then like somebody else retires whatever and you can't win you're like you know what i'm not resigning with this team i'm gonna get traded i'm gonna go work for somebody else and so a lot of people i think and

SPEAKER_04: i don't know specifically with tiger if this happened but i think what i did hear was a lot of people

SPEAKER_74: were like yeah you know not my problem now i'm out founders know that every missed call is a missed opportunity customers don't want to wait they will call someone else if you don't pick up but if you use open phone you're never going to miss another customer call and guess what it's super affordable and easy to use people used to spend tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of dollars putting in a corporate phone system and now for just 15 a month open phone will give you a business phone line and complete control of your destiny want to know who's answering customer calls and how they were handled open phone can do incredible things like sync with hubspot and give you ai powered call summaries automated responses to ensure you don't miss a single ring well that's all built into open phone and if you've got an existing phone number they will let you port it over at no extra charge get 20 off your first six months what an amazing offer at openphone.com twist that's o p e n p h o n e dot com slash twist for 20 off for six months if you are the founder of that company as you point

SPEAKER_00: out what do you do well people need to say like oh my god you you lost your consigliere you lost your priest you lost your rabbi at this organization so then who do you talk to now there's somebody else there who's a custodian of this and they didn't do the initial investment hike you went on through the headlands in san francisco for three hours and you hung out at burning man or in ibiza and you went crazy and had a great time and now you built all that fabric yeah and it's gone and so now you have to start over and this happens when your company gets acquired as well you know you could lose the person at aol or microsoft who bought your company some mid-level manager comes in it's not their project uh like cruise uh which we'll talk about in a moment yeah and they're saying you know what this isn't my problem i'm going to cut this thing there's no way for me to win i'm not going to

SPEAKER_82: clean up somebody else's mistake i've been in a board meeting when there was an investor who was

SPEAKER_20: a custodian and they always dialed in and then they always did not listen and they would get called on occasionally and you have to back up and explain to them why so i i think if you lose your praise if you lose your consigliere you really are adrift and that's not what you want when you are in trouble now how did this happen well i just and i think that there's some data that shows off just kind of what's going on and you and i were talking about this chart and so this shows uh the wisdom tree cloud computing index what's that it's just the bessemer cloud index in index fund form and it tracks software companies more or less than public we also have a nasdaq here and i put a little time box around the period in which we had the absolute peak of enthusiasm towards late 2021 and then how rapidly within 69 months everything changed and so i guess what tiger ended up doing here was really effectively and efficiently and aggressively buying the top and that will happen to everybody if you have a period of time but it just looks so painful in retrospect i mean they they graded the

SPEAKER_91: top you know um it's in a way what's happening with bitcoin right now if you go all in on a space and

SPEAKER_00: we were talking about mr uh mstr micro strategies michael sailor there's another company or what it's

SPEAKER_02: called lava mama camera mara mara they now are buying i don't know if it's billions or hundreds of millions in bitcoin they're i think responsible for this top in bitcoin a portion of it is the

SPEAKER_00: regime change in washington and a portion of it is there's a lot of buyers when there's a lot of buyers they set a new top they drive prices up and so if you're like tiger and you offer you know you compete to beat the entire venture community to put money into a sas company before it goes public let's say it was asana or hubspot i think those were public already but you know that that was the kind of businesses they were interested in the zendesk sas kind of company salesforce you know next salesforce next hubspot next asana whatever if they were pursuing that and they wanted to beat

SPEAKER_04: everybody at the table those people have to deploy capital as well so they keep top ticking the market they keep pushing it up their bid is going to be higher than everybody else's because they want to win they want to deploy the capital remember they're getting one and a half percent two and a half percent who knows what their fees are on 12 billion dollars that's so much a quarter billion dollars a

SPEAKER_08: year in fees i mean if it was one percent it would be 125 million dollars a year a year and i'm assuming

SPEAKER_04: it was two but let's say it was one and a half two i mean you're talking about a lot of fees 10 of that fund 20 of that fund will go to fees over 10 years depending on how their fee structure and people could have negotiated that but at the top of the market people don't sweat the small stuff

SPEAKER_99: right so now for founders who took that money is the question and i had to mentor a lot of founders

SPEAKER_00: and i said listen if you're going to go with best price least rights just know when this all blows up

SPEAKER_50: we're going to have to clean it all up so make sure you have a lot of runway you know what we had a

SPEAKER_00: lot of firms take the best price highest price per shares at the lowest rights board observer seat one board seat not two that kind of thing and so now i've been spending the last two or three years with

SPEAKER_04: those companies that let's just come up with a number they're priced at a billion and raised 100

SPEAKER_50: million and then the market and headwinds started and people started laying people off your number of people who have seats for your sas product goes down so you're working really hard you cut half your staff and you bust your ass at let's say acme sas company sure and this year's revenues 10 less than last year's then next year you're at the same level as last year but still 10 less than two years ago so your best day when you made 50 million was two years ago or let's say 25 million two years ago then you went down to making you know 21 million then you went down to 18 now you're at 18 again you got to build back up so it can be a little uh depressing not only to be an lp in these funds but you're diversified it can be super depressing to be a gp in this fund because you don't know if you're ever going to get a return and then if you're a founder of one of these companies you gotta run a company that's sideways for four freaking years yeah to get back to growth because you were going for it they told you to hire another 50 sales people to hire another 100 developers to go international and then maybe the market wasn't there your product wasn't tight enough you went too fast car flips out and then we go we have to basically pull you back down to a reasonable amount of spending to try to figure this all out i am on the board of companies and i've been involved in meeting with companies in the same position you know what happens next the founder leaves and then there's like really i've already fully invested yeah what we should talk about founder

SPEAKER_20: investing at some point and people that want to change it to avoid having early founder exits leave a lot of dead cap table at seed stage companies but that's for another day the the thing that i took away from this is no one and i'm glad you brought up masayoshi earlier no one has cracked a foolproof method for deploying essentially infinite capital in the private markets at scale quickly and not losing their shirt at the later stages i do think accelerators tend to do pretty well but i just don't think series c or d plus you can do it and and make money and i guess now we're just watching tigers lps sit and kind of cry quietly in the corner until all this shakes out but i bet you they'll go back to at

SPEAKER_00: least one x by the end yeah i mean that's this is why people like venture as a cohort if you hit something you know you could get back in the black again you could you know get lucky you know hit some huge pot and you're back in the game right so a way to look at this is if you were allocating to venture you know 15 of your portfolio 20 of your portfolio 10 of your portfolio as a major lp you know that over time you know you've got let's say 20 venture let's say 10 venture funds you work with and they come back to you every two or three years with a new fund so you know over 10 years you're in 40 funds maybe they got a little frisky there were 50 funds each fund represents two percent of your return so you could have 10 funds not return you know but half you know and then the top

SPEAKER_04: quartile return 5x and you you blend out to beating the market you know and tripling your money

SPEAKER_64: over 10 years hopefully as opposed to just doubling your money as you might in the stock market in the same period of time we got a question from the chat uh linkedin from linkedin we go live on linkedin uh arzen lee yes what's your expectation guys on valuation decline from 2021 to 2025 some of these cohort will try to make ipr mna next year so i wonder how much equity will be destroyed in the upcoming year your thoughts any thoughts on that yeah well the equity is already destroyed so if

SPEAKER_20: you go public at a lower price that's not the equity being destroyed in that moment that's just realizing what it has been worth so i wouldn't blame the exit point as the the equity or value destruction um i don't want to get ahead of my skis but there has been in the last month or two an appreciation in public revenue multiples for software companies it's not huge it's very encouraging if that keeps up jason even another 1x i think we could see a lot of liquidity in a lot because that's going to make a lot of things easier to do yeah i'm just not confident in how the economy is going to play

SPEAKER_44: out next year to make a real projection you i'm super confident that the trump administration and the group of people around them want to see m a come back and be vibrant and they want to see regulations

SPEAKER_00: go down and they're putting people in there who are pro business pro m a pro vibrant markets and so yeah we need more companies going public and we need more m a so let the games begin i think literally next year is going to be like a starters pistol for m a teams at all these giant companies who are going to be able to call somebody in washington uh who they might know or you know they've been at

SPEAKER_02: mar-a-lago the last month or two and they've been hanging out there i saw a report mark and recently spent half his time in mar-a-lago the last month did you see that report yeah this is why

SPEAKER_74: i call it the musk a16z administration founders do you want to sell to bigger customers i know you do you got to get that acv trending up and you want to push your churn down right sounds good but to sell to those big buyers you need to clear all of these compliance checks you know that that means you got to have things like sock 2 sorted out what's sock 2 it's a standard and ensures that companies keep their customer data safe and if you aren't sock 2 compliant you can kiss those big deals goodbye you're not going to land the lighthouse customers you're not going to be able to operate at the highest end of the market but vanta makes it really easy for you to get and renew your sock 2 compliance on average vanta customers are compliant in just two to four weeks can take months without vanta and they automate compliance for gdpr hipaa and more so you can sell to bigger customers in whatever markup your startup is going after vanta is going to save you hundreds of hours of work and up to 85 percent on compliance costs stop slowing your sales team down and use vanta get a thousand dollars off at vanta.com twist that's vanta.com twist for one thousand dollars off your sock

SPEAKER_126: too well i mean it's everybody administration then because keith for boy jacob his husband his

SPEAKER_50: partner you know they're everybody's down there even the people like aaron levy who you know was a vocal kamala surrogate supporter whatever he was uh donator and pincus who you know legendary democratic fundraiser for obama hillary and even uh biden they've all flipped now and they're like you know what uh we're gonna split this team to go super pro m a so i expect the market and i expect m a ipos to rip in the next four years doesn't mean we won't have tariffs or inflation or other issues but i don't think m a is going to be the issue anymore and so all this backlog if you didn't die if you if you made it you just have to what i was telling people is make it to 25 alive which i heard was like the slogan in hollywood as well make it to 25 alive and a lot of options are going to options are going to open up and the option is going to be if you have a 10 to a 250 million dollar software business you're going to have mark benioff hello you're going to have salesforce coming hubspot anybody with a hundred billion plus market cap is going to come knocking and that's going to include uber airbnb looking to expand their businesses you're that expedio rumor previously doordash amazon they're all going to be and andy jassy is going to be like hello anybody home oh whole foods yeah we'll buy that remember when they bought whole foods for 10 billion a lot of these 10 billion dollar little pickups so it's going to be great for business so uh the next ftc leadership

SPEAKER_20: class is coming into view big news andrew ferguson will be the next chairman he's a current commissioner on the ftc and trump said over on truth social that ferguson has and i quote a proven record of standing up to big tech censorship and protecting freedom of speech in our great country in terms of how i think about people this guy's going to be very pro business um he voted against banning non-competes recently and he voted against the bill that made it easier started the bill the ftc action that made it easier to cancel subscriptions so if you're a comcast great that's going to be lovely but we also got our

SPEAKER_132: hands on his pitch to trump about what he will do as chairman of the ftc where did this come from it got leaked or they released it or well leaked or released is an interesting question that i don't think i'm qualified to answer but well we've seen that many times journal in my journalism days where you get a

SPEAKER_44: leak from like inside of motorola somebody would give us information about their next phone it was a leak

SPEAKER_20: yes i don't know if this was a leak or a leak but punch bowl got it and everyone's been taking a look at it so there's a couple things here that i think you're going to absolutely love um he mentions here how he wants to end lina khan's war on m a fantastic that's exactly what you're talking about also ending the ftc's attempt to become an ai regulator that struck me as pretty interesting but then this is why i get a little uh curious about what big tech means because you said you know anyone over 100 billion dollars next year is going to be on the phone looking at incremental revenue talking acquisitions absolutely but here he says that he wants to focus antitrust enforcement against big tech monopolies especially those companies engaged in quote unlawful censorship so what what does big

SPEAKER_60: tech mean i don't know if anyone knows i mean what he's referring to there is facebook and youtube

SPEAKER_00: specifically and twitter back in the day canceling trump's accounts i'll just translate it for you this is a document for trump right this is a pitch to trump for his services what does trump remember

SPEAKER_44: after january 6th that horrible day in american history trump had his accounts suspended on facebook youtube twitter and i don't know if anywhere else i don't know what else was like a major platform at

SPEAKER_50: the time four years ago he was basically ghosted like milo yiannopoulos or you know pick a person alex jones they just gone which is a private company's right to do the republicans have twisted this a bit where they're like you have the right to do it except if you do it so putting the hypocrisy aside that you know a tiny business making cakes in you know whatever state in the south you know doesn't have has the right to turn down gay customers do you think that's abhorrent do you think that's a civil rights penalty or do you think that's respecting a business owner's right to do to work with the customers they want we could have this debate all day long sure what people have come to

SPEAKER_147: this is their justification in their minds okay because you're probably saying hey is this hypocrisy

SPEAKER_00: their justification is at a certain scale these sites are so powerful that to be removed from them you are essentially being removed from the public square so they want facebook youtube and people at scale let's say over a billion users over 500 million users whatever it is you have to justify or be transparent about why somebody is removed and have a process for them to be put back on platforms appeal etc which you remember alex zuckerberg who was pretty cowardice in this he's like yeah we're banning trump then he's like i regretted trump's a badass and then in between he hired a group of like academics to create a board of people who would make these decisions for facebook and then

SPEAKER_152: they think they disbanded it or they just ignored it a lot i remember they'd be like you shouldn't do this

SPEAKER_20: and facebook was like eh we want to um by the way on the whole aaron levy and um zuckerberg changing their tune they're just afraid of retribution right like this is this is political fear to a large

SPEAKER_00: degree i mean okay um that would be a cynical take sure you we could have that take i think the other take is which would be mine uh my personal belief is if your candidate doesn't win you should support the

SPEAKER_60: other candidate and push them towards their better angels and what they can do that you believe is in the best interest of americans that's the approach i'm taking which is the same approach i took last

SPEAKER_00: time so i think zuckerberg you know some people might say he's really scared that he's going to get broken up and therefore because of what he did to trump there's an argument there uh the jd vances of

SPEAKER_02: the world have been pretty hardcore that these things need to be broken up they have too much power and they determine an election and so you know they do think he's probably nervous about that aaron levy running a sas company i don't think he's nervous about that i think he probably thinks it's cool that smart silicon valley people and a former venture capitalists are venture you know

SPEAKER_64: the vice president and that they're going to have some influence here as opposed to career politicians

SPEAKER_20: i guess i do have a cynical take because yeah um i've been watching things i think is the way i put it uh but i think you raise some good points and i want to add a little bit more from what

SPEAKER_167: ferguson said in this document by the way i would think you're right just to make that summary you're

SPEAKER_50: probably right zuckerberg is scared and then i think the rest of the people mark pincus who now is saying hey listen i support this and this or me i support these two or three things i may not be like a a trump guy or a mega guy i'm a moderate but i do like these two or three proposals so that's what's happening now thank you guys myself or you know someone like aaron levy you'll see us cherry picking these are the things that i think trump could do in the trump administration and jd could do that

SPEAKER_170: that would be positive for business the world humanity the market is pricing in some cynicism

SPEAKER_66: like uh shout out to tesla but i don't think every percent of appreciation since the election is

SPEAKER_20: predicated on uh changes to its business fundamentals versus lack of regulation is going to be is the big

SPEAKER_02: you know the the people who are in highly regulated businesses self-driving finance you mentioned before

SPEAKER_175: subscriptions if you're in one of those businesses especially finance you know it's going to be

SPEAKER_00: gangbusters now like yeah you know although trump has he does he vacillates between the populist comments and the things so there's you know as people have said and i'm not the first to point this out there's something for everyone when he describes his position and i'll give an example of it he's he has publicly come out and said things about like predatory credit card prices and that they shouldn't be allowed and then he's saying we're gonna have less regulation we get rid of all regulation finance companies gonna be able to do great so somewhere between these two is going to

SPEAKER_184: be the reality all right everybody welcome back to the program steven estes is with us again he's a

SPEAKER_186: principal at cla they're a professional services provider they specialize in cpa tax consulting and wealth advisory his areas of expertise lie in vc-backed startups vc funds high-growth startups with complex tax issues in multi-state and international filings welcome back to the program steven hey

SPEAKER_184: thanks jason appreciate it when you look at these growth periods right when startups start rapidly

SPEAKER_189: growing how do they screw it up first and foremost the sales tax there was a big shake up in that about four years ago it kind of opened the floodgates the states really being able to force small companies to collect and remit sales tax in a lot of different states when we had the pandemic hit and the rise of remote work that really intensified that as having employees in various states creates the requirement to collect and remit to sales and customers in that state so that was huge and then secondly like really just like how to handle the issuance of equity key employees it amazes me that founders don't know more about various restricted stock awards and stock option plans that are out there safes have been a godsend when it comes to keeping 409 a values low for early stage companies but a lot of founders don't have a clue when it comes to how like a price round can negatively impact your ability to bring on those critical hires because it really massively increases the tax liabilities that come with the receipt of equity in those companies all right you need a trusted

SPEAKER_186: advisor taxes accounting you don't want to play games with this stuff get it right get a great partner like cla go to cla connect dot com slash tech and let them know your boy jake al sent you

SPEAKER_00: once again cla connect dot com slash tech we're going to deport 15 million people you're xenophobic you want everybody dragged out of the country he'll say that have one rally and then i'll say you know hey and jd will come out and say you know we're going to start with a hundred thousand five hundred thousand known felon criminals who've attacked somebody in the united states we're going to find them and get rid of them probably somewhere between the two right so you can pick where you

SPEAKER_193: want to interpret the bombastic colorful things he says and then we'll see what he actually does i think

SPEAKER_20: that's a very illustrative set of examples because in one you have things that are diametrically opposed for example capping credit card rates at ten percent and on the other hand go wild to the fintech or in the financial sector on the immigration point both of those options are pointing in the same direction so i think there it's much easier to say yeah somewhere in the middle when it comes to things that are diametrically opposed i'm i'm just curious now um we'll find out so ferguson back to him he said in his pitch to trump that he wants to quote pursue structural and behavioral legal remedies under the antitrust laws and the ftc act to make sure large platforms treat all americans fairly and to prevent them from using their market power to box out new entrants and stymie innovation how do you do that with the ftc does regulation like i mean i i i struggled like this document that i read jason just goes back and forth on so many things he said he wants to end lina khan's politically motivated investigations right under the bullet point that said investigate and prosecute collusion on dei i

SPEAKER_206: mean it's a job it's a job application so how can you not care about your own intellectual like like i don't know are we talking about politicians here or we're talking about ethics

SPEAKER_207: professors i think we're talking about i'm talking about being a human if i said to you jason we're

SPEAKER_209: gonna you have a very high moral ethical bar alex i know this and you are a man of logic what you have to learn is politicians number one jobs and people who work in politics the number one job is to stay

SPEAKER_00: in power and the way you stay in power is being flexible intellectually and being able to say both

SPEAKER_37: things at the same time and hold space yes i'm being precocious here you have to hold space for as you

SPEAKER_209: called it diametrically opposed things or things you know the the the level of cognitive dissonance

SPEAKER_00: a person like yourself who is logical who loves numbers and facts and truth the challenge you'll have trying to understand what politicians are doing is they're not looking at the facts or the logic or looking for hypocrisy or things that are you know uh would they don't have cognitive dissonance they just say everything and then they figure out what they're going to do later and i think that's what it is after you get the job he's going to figure out what his what the positions are it's going to be choose

SPEAKER_209: your own adventure next year then okay choose your own adventure bending towards much less regulation

SPEAKER_00: smaller government less taxes so if that what if you're in that group of people and i it's important

SPEAKER_02: to kind of distance yourself from the personalities involved because i feel like it's there's a lot of baggage and for good reason scar tissue baggage whatever you want to call it i like to divorce

SPEAKER_44: myself from and just say if any presidential candidate were doing this it was bill clinton and he said we're gonna have less government we're going to lower regulations and we're going to

SPEAKER_50: lower your taxes i'd be like high five thank you voting for you yeah i just i i can't do away with

SPEAKER_20: things like you know the attempts to end birthright citizenship which might have impacted my mom's citizenship satisfied if i think about my family tree and so to me like i i cannot look at my family's income statement and think to myself you know what for three percent more net income per year for my family i'm gonna give up x y and z and this is a personal thing i'm not gonna make a moral point

SPEAKER_66: but i'm perplexed occasionally by what people are willing to let go for a little bit less friction but

SPEAKER_225: sorry i've i've lost off i think it's actually no no it's i think it's within our mandate you know

SPEAKER_44: sure with immigration there is a really important case to be made i did ask the president about this uh about green cards for people who get degrees he gets that issue people around him get that issue so i think what we're going to see is when yeah when all the fireworks stop and the bombs stop going

SPEAKER_00: off you're going to see it immigration settle into less people crossing the border illegally we all want that people being deported who are just known felons like you just beat up a cop you're going home

SPEAKER_44: that's it we're not you know one strike you're out kind of situation um no leniency no like probation just out of the country now i don't know the legality of all that i'll be totally honest of

SPEAKER_00: how that would occur sure um but and if there's going to be like due process do people who've come here illegally get due process how much due process do they get do they get due process once they're back in their home country who knows and then you're going to see talent get exceptions and people who invest get exceptions trump loves a good deal i for me it's very simple you come here with a degree we need and a service we need you get a couple of extra points you invest money here you get a couple extra points and we just sweep the most talented entrepreneurial technical talented rich people

SPEAKER_44: from around the world and get them here and then yeah just a little less people at the border sounds like a pretty good idea 0.6 population growth which is whatever it is 3 million i think it was like it looks like 2 million people a year across the border or came here uh which was like roughly

SPEAKER_00: double what it normally is so we're kind of in spitting distance of what everybody considered

SPEAKER_232: normal before yeah well things change but also like you know going back to the the point you made about

SPEAKER_20: trying to figure out what the hell trump's going to do the high school immigration point that he made to you on on all in you and i've talked about a couple times but like whenever i go back to the record from his first administration um they made high school immigration harder to do so maybe this

SPEAKER_84: time it'll be entirely different but i think stephen miller's still gonna run anyways one thing i do

SPEAKER_44: know jason right so i think that's what's in play right now yeah who gets to decide who does trump listen to you know and once he's listened to everybody does he go with the trump 1.0 administration or the trump 2.0 administration does he go you know with people who are the business people who are the

SPEAKER_00: billionaire crowd who are the successful entrepreneurs who have created millions collectively jobs tens of thousands of jobs each or does he go with the career politicians who got him in the first

SPEAKER_20: time i gotta i gotta i gotta ask jason would you on the business folks yeah yeah but like i mean talking about market injuries and talking about your friends you know he's also not by the way running

SPEAKER_238: again keep that in mind he's not running again this is a legacy moment for him i know but like how many

SPEAKER_66: people in silicon valley do you think would be okay with deleting democracy and putting the six richest people from tech in charge because that that kind of feels like well i mean you know trump's in charge

SPEAKER_147: and he makes his own decisions as we've seen you know he he's he he fired two-thirds of the people in the first administration so he's pretty clearly in charge i'll be honest i think and i think when you see him in office he's going to make his own decisions uh absolutely he's going to make his own

SPEAKER_248: decisions and i think everybody around him kind of knows that i hope so but one decision he made

SPEAKER_18: the other part of our ftc story is that mark meter in the ador is being added as well to the ftc giving

SPEAKER_20: the republicans a majority one data point here on him is that while he worked for senator lee he drafted a bill that would have forced the breakup of google's ad tech business i think that was back in 2022 so anyways a mixed bag when it comes to the ftc certainly a change from lena con we'll see the

SPEAKER_165: details when they come out it's going to be 10 times better than lena con for startups and

SPEAKER_18: entrepreneurship perfect segue my question jason was very simple startups that might um let's say

SPEAKER_20: not see a path to an ipo if you wanted to get your company ready for this starter gun m and a moment

SPEAKER_147: what do you recommend oh what a good question um i always tell people partnerships lead to purchases

SPEAKER_99: partnerships lead to purchases great companies are bought not sold if you go and you say i want to go meet everybody do m and a you know the chance of getting bought are five percent or less if you're

SPEAKER_00: i don't know whole foods or your instacart and you're working with walmart or amazon and you've got some you know deal where you could order certain items from whole foods on uh amazon let's say like say their house brands were made available okay yeah now we made a deal somebody in the organization who wanted certain hopeful brands on you know made a deal with somebody who is responsible for that and then the ceos find out about it and i thought that's interesting and then they see each other at sun valley at the allen company conference or they see themselves at the all-in summit or they see themselves at some you know davos and they're like oh yeah i know yeah john and susie are working on that yeah that's great um it has that business coffee high margin yeah i was wondering maybe have you thought about like us maybe helping you like maybe put more skews on we could run a test like maybe in austin or have your home bases and then all of a sudden the purchase happens right yeah and so you see that over and over and over again it happened to be the weblogs inc aol wanted to invest bezos and indresen were going to be the two investors they each offered 250k uh at a 5 million dollar valuation we were going to sell 10 percent of the company for 500 000 it was going to be mark and dresen for 250 and bezos for 250. i met with both of them they both committed and then aol came in and said we want to buy the company uh we want to invest in the company can we put a million in next to them and we'll take 20 and i was like well i don't know if i want to dilute that much like hey we want to buy 49 and we want to use your software you know and it just the conversation eventually was like ted leones has called me my greek brother uh we're going to buy your company you're going to become very rich for a 30 year old man and uh you're going to learn a lot here and then you go off to do even better companies after this will take care of your brands boom and

SPEAKER_44: then 30 million sale happens and so that's it it's just partnerships investment collaborations lead to getting to know each other lead to the acquisition yeah every single time it happens that way this this

SPEAKER_20: reminds me a little bit and i'm going to try to make this uh pc but like essentially if you're out and about in in society you're in a run club spend time at a cafe go to live events the chance of meeting someone to date goes up dramatically if you're at home by yourself so go out there and make some connections and then hopefully we can talk about your m a deal founders on the show in 2025. awesome all right now jason news we added a really killer company to the twist 500 today i'm very excited about this it's called phoenix phoenix helps businesses accept payments by giving them tools to build their own payment systems directly into their apps and services and i think this company is one of note for the next five or ten years because the digital payment space is both so large and still growing so quickly so statista estimates that the total value transaction value of digital payments is going to be about 17 18 trillion this year and grow about 16 per year through 2029 so that's an enormous tan can't do much better than that and critically there are a lot of great companies in the digital payment space we talk about stripe on the show at what at least once a week and stripe did grow its payment processing volume to about a trillion dollars last year up about 25 but the market is so big fragmented with so many different needs that i don't think any single company is going to actually win the whole thing so phoenix and the reason why i like it is that it started life as a kind of a payments infra company versus a payment processor so i wanted to go into your company help you build payments into your own software stack keep your costs low and essentially be in the background but the company as of 2023 also became a payments provider so now it does kind of both sides of the equation growth has been fantastic up i think 4x in the last year as of october and they raised 75 million dollars more i just can't say enough cool things about this company i think it's really really whip smart well positioned and uh it's growing really fast i love it

SPEAKER_132: so if you want to have payments but not use stripe you would use phoenix yeah and phoenix lets

SPEAKER_00: you have your own payments inside of you so you can accept credit cards you can accept uh paypal whatever it is buy now pay later instead of using stripe or these other models you would not have to do

SPEAKER_274: that but you'd still have to pay fees to the credit card companies i assume yes so what's the advantage

SPEAKER_66: of this why not just use stripe oh my god stripe works it's lovely it's so big because it's good well

SPEAKER_20: phoenix makes the pitch this way do you want to send your customers to a stripe interface to do a transaction do you want to share any of your brand with them probably not you want it in house and also they think they argue that stripes model which is very very simple 2.9 plus 30 cents per transaction is a bit expensive and so they charge uh they make you pay the interchange fees of course at cost there's a sas fee and then i think it's a variable rate but the idea is own your own infra have it in house keep your brand and pay less and frankly that's not a non-compelling pitch for

SPEAKER_02: business customers i don't think okay uh well welcome to the trust 500 and any notable investors

SPEAKER_18: there listed i'm curious yeah so way back in the day homebrew so shout out hunter walk and sato over

SPEAKER_20: there um amex and visa have also put money in unspricing uh bain lightspeed and then accrue capital which actually i don't know that well led their last 75 million dollar round got it okay so they're

SPEAKER_64: cooking with oil and uh more competition always great for customers of those products you'll keep stripe on their toes and good for them to have a competitor i guess yeah all right awesome what else is in the

SPEAKER_44: news as we get ready for our guest who will be coming up next yes uh let's do gm and cruise i am

SPEAKER_66: you ever read a headline and just want to cry a little bit yeah so that was me that was me okay so

SPEAKER_20: if you don't know everybody gm which owns cruise most of it is backing off its dreams of building a robo taxi fleet and is instead going to take cruise this entity that has gone through a hellacious there and back after an accident and some controversy and they're going to fold it into their existing uh driver assistance program inside of gm they're not going to build a waymo competitor instead they're just going to make their trucks self-drive better and they're going to cut their spend on self-driving i'm just disappointed it feels like such a a failure to understand the

SPEAKER_02: innovators dilemma well and uh there's another shoe that's going to drop here i'm almost certain of

SPEAKER_00: it um this sounds like there is going to be some sort of a partnership that's going to occur or some divestiture of crews perhaps i i don't know i don't have any inside information but usually when somebody shuts something down like this it's probably because they have some other better deal and some other better option presented itself so i think we've seen half the story here and the third act is still going to happen first act was trying to do it and then they had that terrible accident where they didn't hit somebody but somebody got hit by a human power car they ricocheted into a cruise car which then dragged the person unknowingly and then cruise of course famously selectively edited the video when they submitted it did something which most people i believe felt was um dishonest as me charitable and and that led to them being shut down in san francisco and then the program being canceled altogether waymo of course is doing great in san francisco and other locations and they've got partnerships with a couple different companies including uber cruise was obviously an uber partner yeah it stinks that they are giving up but i do think we're going to see something happen after this and so i wouldn't be surprised if gm announces that this asset and this technology is going to be co-branded with another person uh i don't know if it'd be uber or lyft or another automaker who doesn't have a solution a toyota nissan whatever or one of the third parties we've had on the program who are working

SPEAKER_02: on the prog problem and you have zooks of course owned by amazon working on this so you know how many

SPEAKER_00: self-driving technology companies how many ride sharing companies do there need to be it's probably there's 20 people working on self-driving now and we'll go down to seven

SPEAKER_44: and this is part of the process is people saying you know what i fold i don't feel i can keep up

SPEAKER_246: with waymo uber lyft zooks yep um what was the other one wave wave wave thank you uh there's so

SPEAKER_286: aurora doing trucks i mean there's so many out there is evidence of what you're talking about plus

SPEAKER_02: five or six people by do byd everybody doing any china so this has got to go from 25 people down to 15 down to five basically and then they'll just it'll consolidate down to five players and i think

SPEAKER_20: cruz is not going to be one of them apparently dead on but i just think cruz should be one of them so uh gm in their call about this they had a call last night and i read the transcript this morning and it's going to save them about a billion dollars a year by my understanding which is not chump change but if you pull their q3 earnings they expect their full year ebit to be 14 to 15 billion dollars so it's

SPEAKER_132: not even that much savings and they could have de-risked their entire future sounds like an

Chamath Palihapitiya: announcement's coming okay all right all right well so they get the they decide that they're not going

SPEAKER_00: to do this but they're still going to make their cars powered by i don't know waves technology aurora's technology tesla's technology i mean it sounds crazy that tesla would do it right now they've given no indication they would yeah that i know of but or let's just take superchargers as an example sure

SPEAKER_147: can other people use superchargers right now yes yes could people use superchargers five years ago

SPEAKER_44: i don't know the answer to that no yeah they cannot no it was not it was not like it was open to other people now it's open so you know sometimes people change their mind and uh let's say if tesla did have the best or waymo did have the best self-driving technology in the world yeah or wave or zoops let's say those four people or aurora those five people have incredible like they're 80 90 of the

SPEAKER_50: way to solving it uh-huh i think we all agree they're 80 of the way they're 85 of the way there i do um so if they're 85 of the way there if you were one of the would one of the four of them

SPEAKER_261: consider licensing it to gm to be in all their cars i mean sure but that's not too much yeah but

SPEAKER_20: that's not the thing that i'm that i'm that i'm thinking about because to me waymo and the promise of zook's style self-driving cars and you know tesla talking about building a fleet that you can rent and just use means that personal car ownership is going to eventually become such a dated concept that we're not going to understand it and gm just looked ahead and said you know what we need to do right now is pay more in dividends make more money from large trucks and just go for the most

SPEAKER_82: mealy mill mouth option of working on our l3 technology in the meantime so sure maybe but i

SPEAKER_297: mean oh my gosh there was a future that they could have shot for and they shot for the most tiny thing

SPEAKER_00: what if waymo decides they don't want to make cars but they do want to make the greatest driver in the world and they say you can put it into all your gm cars and then you can sell those to any ride

SPEAKER_66: sharing network door dish anybody you want cool but i mean if that's the case then every single car

SPEAKER_44: company in the world can do it cruise was unique well way but waymo doesn't make cars right they

SPEAKER_20: adapt jaguars i think currently yeah yeah but they're moving away if they're moving away from that thanks to the move deal that we mentioned i i i guess yeah sure maybe jim can find a way to license but to me they they were investing like they wanted to be a critical technology leader in a

David Friedberg: growing industry and now they've gone yeah it's really three different businesses you got the

SPEAKER_00: ride sharing business uber and lyft you got the self-driving technology business uh zooks tesla etc

SPEAKER_64: uh waymo and then you have the car manufacturing business tesla is going to have all three uber is

SPEAKER_00: going to have two out of three the car manufacturers will have one or two out of three and i think that's the way this is going to go down and then if you're placing your bet you're placing your bet on do people want to own cars or not i think young people probably do not want to own cars if there

SPEAKER_34: are cars available all the time they're just going to go with cars available all the time and not own

SPEAKER_66: one i mean you brought it up last uh last time on the show so i don't think i'm breaking any personal

SPEAKER_297: boundaries here but your oldest is getting closer to driving age sure i'm kind of curious what do you

SPEAKER_298: hear from her friends what do they want i mean we live in austin where you kind of need a car and if

SPEAKER_00: you live outside the circle in austin you know for 10 10 miles or whatever it's a little hard to get a an uber or a lyft way out there now you know in the future that might change but i do think

SPEAKER_02: the people in her school and people her age do have cars and they learn how to drive right about now and i'm going to teach her on the ranch how to drive the rtv and the and the the tractor and

SPEAKER_132: the lawnmower and yeah she'll know how to drive a car right after that nice no i mean i couldn't wait

SPEAKER_66: to get a car and get my license so i could get the hell away from my parents and uh the fact that kids don't drive these days means that their parents are too nice is my view you should be mean enough

SPEAKER_18: to your child that they want to drive that's it all right our guest today is severe wadwa he's the

SPEAKER_20: founder and ceo of a company called flight jason that's f-l-i-t-e dot city this is a company that i'm personally excited about because when i first heard about it i was not sold on the idea of working in the events business but after digging a little bit deeper i'm kind of obsessed the way that i think of it is that it's vertical sass for event hosts severe welcome to the program good afternoon

SPEAKER_147: guys thank you thank you for having me nice to see you severe uh we are investors in your company tell us uh in the audience maybe share with us what you do what's the mission of the company uh and how

SPEAKER_311: it's going so far of course yeah so um i'm building flight flight is the operating system for event

SPEAKER_312: organizers it stems from a problem i faced myself as somebody that would put up events you know all around the country at different nightclubs what we realized that was um you know artists tick tock djs and creators that have a massive following couldn't monetize on their audience or even connect with them just because they were really good at sort of like creating an experience for them but they didn't know how to take care of what happens in the back end of an event so operations taxes finances hiring payroll and then finding synergies between these different tools and you know building product on top of that so we released flight to sort of simplify the operations so you as a creator can do what you're best at you know performing for your audience or you know connecting with them started this in school when i went to nyu just graduated in may um was in launch this february and yeah it's been an exciting last nine months i'm happy to share demo as well yeah well yeah show us the product

SPEAKER_00: here and we'll ask you questions while you get it queued up i guess the first question i have is

SPEAKER_04: who is the customer and what is the business model here so currently our business model is the fee on

SPEAKER_312: top of tickets sold through our marketplace we charge a dollar plus 12 on tickets sold our customer is an event organizer that puts up about one to two events a month sells about 600 tickets for those events at an average price of 28 how do they sell tickets currently because this

SPEAKER_00: is the long tail of events this isn't a ticket master taylor swift event you're going after this is on average a 500 person event uh or something in that range right yeah 500 to a

SPEAKER_321: thousand um the way we sell tickets or the way these creators sell tickets is by sort of advertising

SPEAKER_312: it on instagram or youtube but what we do is more than just the ticketing right um i think events have so many different revenue streams in terms of you know drink sales at bars or you know just everything related to the ecosystem and we come in there and sort of help you monetize and grow your

SPEAKER_04: revenue in those streams as well and uh a portion of this is obviously the promoters who are involved i remember when you first pitched me yeah you're explaining how this uh entire space works somebody

SPEAKER_00: who's a dj who's throwing the new year's eve party or i don't know some you know uh party in the summer whatever they're in ibiza or you know new york whatever it is there are promoters who have mailing lists who bring people to see a dj they get cut into the revenue so there is a bunch of accounting that

SPEAKER_58: goes on here it's a lot more complex than than people knew yeah yeah yeah of course um and these

SPEAKER_312: promoters you know you nailed it they struggle to get their payments in a city like new york city every promoter spoken has taken three to four weeks to get paid out maybe 200 to 300 bucks from an event and that's absolutely you know horrible so we hope you streamline that and then take care of the accounting and sort of retargeting with these promoters as well and you know it's funny that you mentioned jason taylor swift right ticket master massive concerts theater stores in the news recently think about an artist a couple levels below taylor yeah she probably has the exact same level of talent and the exact same you know a pretty strong audience but she probably doesn't have the team or operational sort of resources to put up concerts at scale so with something like flight she can hop on do what she's best at performing but take care of everything that taylor has a team for

SPEAKER_66: just through technology on flight i wanted to ask about that because to me concerts are an enormous driver of my personal nightlife so they're the thing that i care about the most

SPEAKER_20: have any bands actually used flight thus far to do more than a one-off concert severe we haven't had a

SPEAKER_312: band but we've had a lot of tick-tock djs um tick-tock djs i see yes so they travel around the country um whether it's you know in the west coast or new york city these guys yeah they put up performances but all their operations and team and sort of finances is all managed through flight can i ask one more question

SPEAKER_20: about that so on the finance side you guys in your faq talk about how you have um same day payouts which is awesome as a feature people love to get paid but one thing we also think about are chargebacks and you know people disputing payments and so forth does the company hold any risk by making it so easy to pay out event hosts are you all holding any kind of the bag financially there um not really though

SPEAKER_312: because what we do is we firstly vet these customers really well before they hop on the platform and then secondly we've integrated a lot of apis to sort of like reduce payout amounts i mean you can cash out instantly but there's still certain restrictions we place to manage chargebacks and it's great that i'm you know presenting my screen we've built a lot of custom apis around the whole dispute sort of you know section to manage chargeback so everything's automated and taken

SPEAKER_100: care of through the platform and so if somebody wasn't using flight in this business if they're a

SPEAKER_335: tick-tock dj they would i don't know put something on eventbrite but not have all these additional features and ways to manage the events yeah absolutely yeah they'd use eventbrite

SPEAKER_312: and then take care of you know their marketing on mailchimp twilio they do their finances on quick book they you know run ads through meta directly on snapchat uh and we have flight ai as well which

SPEAKER_309: i'm super excited to talk about in a bit oh any announcements here you want to make or what is

SPEAKER_312: it going to do uh we learned that with flight we bring a lot of operations into one platform and so we make it very easy for you but on top of that i mean these djs are performing right they're on the road all the time and what they've done at times is text me while i'm out with my girlfriend being like hey can you change this ticket for me so what we've done with flight ai is literally everything you can do on flight is happening through a conversation now so instead of texting the founders at 4 00 a.m in the morning you know the ai does it for you ah so instead of uh going

SPEAKER_335: into an interface on your desktop you just go into a chat room and say hey raise the prices of this

SPEAKER_340: ticket or this offering this table or whatever it happens to be um yeah question for you about software

SPEAKER_00: development as we wrap here we are entering this age of efficiency and a lot of founders are using ai inside their organizations to drive efficiency maybe you could tell us a little bit of how ai has changed running a startup if at all uh and specifically your startup yeah um it has been you know massive

SPEAKER_321: for me i think while being in school and building a product like this balancing classes back then and

SPEAKER_312: then you know being able to write tons of code uh gpd especially when it just came out really really made it easier for me i mean i didn't know how to code in javascript or react or any of what flight is built with and i've built most of the product myself so uh come a long way using using ai tools and then now our team we haven't you know we have a international team that codes for us they take care of all of our development and we've given them access to almost every ai resource they need from github copilot to sort of different subscriptions so they can be more efficient and what have they asked

SPEAKER_193: for well i'm curious what besides uh you know uh github or you know chat gpt is there any other

SPEAKER_315: specific products that they say hey we really need this uh not not not at the moment but i keep looking

SPEAKER_318: for more products i think i can find more solutions to make their life easier we're gonna grow faster

SPEAKER_82: and you know more efficiently as well oh i just want to pick up on the growth part because i was going through your linkedin and you said as of a couple weeks ago that you guys are growing 70 percent month

SPEAKER_20: every month and you've grown to over a hundred thousand users so i'm just kind of curious that's

SPEAKER_66: tickets sold to people not event hosts themselves yes that's the consumer that has bought tickets on

SPEAKER_312: flight we have about 60 active event organizers on the platform that you know run events every twice a month that's why i say active okay yeah a hundred thousand consumers in the platform so that's exciting

SPEAKER_66: just a question about getting getting out there i know you were just in college you were nyu you and i were talking before the show about how busy new york city is as a place to be but does

SPEAKER_20: flight scale to other markets that are smaller and i know i live in a smaller city so i'm thinking about providence but i'm just curious how far down market you can go and still have a flight friendly

SPEAKER_310: event i mean our biggest market is connecticut um funny that you mentioned so yeah um massive in

SPEAKER_321: connecticut um philadelphia um washington dc and i think the around 33 cities around the country

SPEAKER_312: reviews flight we just started in dubai in london and now india as well this winter oh my gosh all

SPEAKER_00: right cool it does seem like these younger generations alex um because they're online so much i think that they're starting to get to the point where maybe they're online too much and they're like i need to get out and hit the club i need to do something with people in the real world yeah so every time things go you know the pendulum swings too far one way i think you get a

SPEAKER_45: reaction and live events people just keep asking me when's the next live event when's the next live event when can we see people in person is that a trend that you're building off of yeah absolutely

SPEAKER_312: and it's also it's also nice that you mentioned i think ticketing is a very big space but you know there's tons of players building ticketing platforms i think the way flight stands out is you know targeting these consumers and bringing say you're in your bedroom using technology scrolling through your you know feed you want to organize an event you can hop on something like flight and through an ad scale event as well if you need so we normally get these kids off their chairs to

SPEAKER_318: attend these events we also start to get them to throw these events which is massive it's going to

SPEAKER_50: be a big part of i think uh the future people talk alex about like oh my god job destruction you used to always be able to get a retail job yeah then that went away as a safety net we were talking just yesterday or the day before hey you know used to be able to get a job uh as a uber driver a doordash driver maybe over time that goes away yeah and so what's left you know people become podcasts creators content creators poets uh musicians and live events there's actually i think as we get rid of some of these jobs humans are going to be looking for something to do and one of the things they might want to do is throw a party or throw a concert and go and attend it and that's a beautiful thing enabling people to do that it's in a way flight is kind of like airbnb in that it kind of helps people build this platform and you do help aggregate some people to attend events yet or is it

SPEAKER_340: still more like mailchimp where you know you bring your mailing list we're not here to grow your mailing list but eventually substack when they competed with mailing mailchimp their focus or

SPEAKER_00: beehive even better because they came from the um the morning brew team they had that cool feature of like uh affiliates built into it so they they said you know hey there's tons of mailing list products we're going to help you grow you have the affiliates that's the tool for your growth so i'm wondering if you're um not just ag aggregating uh supply but and being a tool for the supply but

SPEAKER_312: are you aggregating demand yet yeah um to start we've built a lot of product for you to reach your audiences and mails um you know notifications text but we focus a lot on our consumer app a lot of these kids you know discovery is very important for them to sort of find events so we've nailed down an app where they can easily find events explore and that helps bring the demand in for them but what we've realized is helping them sell an extra six seven tickets is amazing but helping them sort of make back-end operations efficient will help them sell 50 60 tickets in the future and build a brand which we always want to focus on the b2b operational side of things can i just slip in one last question

SPEAKER_20: jason because i just remembered this so when i was going through flight before the show just prepping going through the service signing up looking at different events i noticed that they do have a great mobile app for ios but not for android and so severe i'm really curious about the choice to go ios only at this stage and i guess when does it become necessary or beneficial for you to invest in building an android app and i say this as an ios user be clear yeah yeah uh the android app is important

SPEAKER_321: i mean i have a swift background and you know we had to pick our battles and what we want to build

SPEAKER_312: what product is more important and dedicate resources to so we thought we'd get the ios app first um a lot of our customers use iphones as well but yeah we're gonna scale our team after our

SPEAKER_361: fundraise and expand to android as well okay well if you're gonna go to india android you know absolutely

SPEAKER_00: yeah yeah okay you'll get there um well listen continued success it's great to be on the journey

SPEAKER_04: with you i think you're on to something you know i do see all these tiktok djs as i'm scrolling it's amazing how many people are listening sometimes it's become like um a modern day radio station where the live feature has a little bit of monetization built into it but it's not a lot and then i noticed a

SPEAKER_50: lot of singers and then i noticed the singers you know who have two three four five hundred people watching them they're all announcing their events so it's kind of becoming alex like stand-up comedians remember tony hingcliffe would have like these shorts the shorts for tiktok and for youtube came from

SPEAKER_00: you know the small event he would do here kill tony and then all of a sudden he's on tour across the country or podcasts helped them do it i think there's going to be something there with tiktok djs you know you you get into a certain dj a certain vibe a certain community and then you go out and see them when they tour it's really a fascinating way to monetize the celebrity people get on tiktok

SPEAKER_53: specifically absolutely yeah well severe thank you so much for dropping by we will keep track of

SPEAKER_232: how things are going and when you cross the next major arr milestone you let us know we'll talk to

SPEAKER_32: you again thank you for having me all right well done well done all right another amazing episode it's

SPEAKER_00: wednesday wednesday here on december 11th we'll be back on friday december 13th with another news program for you he's alex i'm jason turn on your youtube and you can see us live monday wednesday

SPEAKER_44: friday's 12 o'clock texas one o'clock right coast 10 a.m left coast ish ish we start right around that

SPEAKER_45: time all right everybody bye bye bye