David Friedberg: okay everybody we have a jam-packed friday show for you first up i'm going to kick it off with a couple of great ass chasing questions then molly is going to sit down with two not one two amazing launch portfolio founders and she's going to find out why we invested in those companies

Chamath Palihapitiya: and then we're going to wrap with another edition of ok boomer it's going to be a great show so

SPEAKER_02: stick with us this week in startups is brought to you by i trust capital did you know that you can invest in crypto through your retirement account and still get the same tax advantages as a traditional ira visit itrust.capital twist to start investing today grammarly is an all-in-one writing tool that helps you churn out clear and concise communication fast go to grammarly.com slash twist to sign up for a free account and get 20 off when you sign up for premium that's g-r-a-m-m-a r-l-y dot com slash twist and neotax don't leave money on the table claim your research and development tax credits with neotax and get 500 off any service fees related to neotax products learn more at neo dot tax slash twist all right we have a couple of ask jasons that have uh been

David Friedberg: backed up here i wanted to get them we had a great question from gabe long story short says gabe got my first taste of the startup world as an early employee at a small b2b sas company a business to

Chamath Palihapitiya: business software company uh here in my local town i left and want to join another startup do you have any advice or questions to ask to make sure i don't join a company that won't be around in one to two years okay great question if you want a company that you think is going to be around in one to two years you're going to look for a company that has uh raised let's say over 10 million dollars over 20 million dollars and that has over 50 or over 100 employees now why did i pick those numbers well venture capitalists are not going to put 20 million 50 million dollars into a company that they don't think is going to be around in two years and that should give them enough runway to be around the later you join a startup the later in the startup's life cycle the less responsibility

David Friedberg: you'll probably get because they have so many people they might have five people doing one job or two people doing one job as opposed to one person doing five jobs right that's the benefit of

Chamath Palihapitiya: going to a startup that's in an accelerator or just seed funded and has under 10 employees

David Friedberg: and the other benefit of this late stage company is you are probably have a greater chance of your

SPEAKER_12: options being worth something but you're going to get much less of them so when a startup's worth 10 million and they give you they might give you as an employee a quarter point 10 basis points a tenth

Chamath Palihapitiya: of one percent okay one percent of a ten million dollar company is uh going to be a hundred thousand dollars in shares so if you got 50 basis points or 25 basis points a quarter point or a half point you'll get 25 to 50k in shares okay that's kind of interesting but it's not a lot of money right if your salary was 75k and you got 50 000 in stock options it's nice but what you're actually betting is that 10 million dollar company will become worth a hundred and then a billion right you want to see

David Friedberg: it go a hundred x so what you want to see ideally is that 50k become worth 500 and then five million that would be a great startup journey for you now if you join the company when it's worth a hundred

Chamath Palihapitiya: million are they going to give you 50 basis points 500 000 in equity no they're still going to give you 50 000 in equity which means instead of you right getting a half a point right one two hundredth of the company you're going to get one two thousandth of the company the same amount to make it worth

David Friedberg: 50 000 they're still going to give you 50 000 in equity so you're going to have a much lower percentage and you're going to be betting that your 50 000 will 10x to 500 000 and yeah maybe if they've gotten to a hundred million dollar valuation there is a chance they could become worth five billion or ten billion so you're lowering your risk you're lowering your percentage ownership the chances

Chamath Palihapitiya: of the actual equity being worth something go up uh dramatically the later you join but your percentage ownership goes down and your chances of having like a true home run go down there are some exceptions here which we call the rocket ship exception if you know something's a rocket ship and it becomes pretty obvious you kind of knew uber you kind of knew airbnb you knew facebook and google long before they were worth billions of dollars it was pretty clear to anybody in the industry that these were rocket ships you got a chance to get on a rocket ship you take the chance you get the seat if you're looking to be a startup employee and so that's really what you should be doing if i was you i would look at which companies have raised money from a quality vc could be david sacks at craft could be chamath could be bill gurley could be rule off at sequoia one of those great legendary firms i would try to find a legendary venture capital firm's investment portfolio and go to one of those companies because then your signal is going to be really high uh that the equity could be worth something right those companies tend to perform two or three times better than ones that are backed by no-name vcs and that's not a dig to the no-name vcs but the top vcs get better deal flow therefore their companies on average are much better and so that's my best advice to you but you're doing it right by going to work in the business-to-business sector and working at startups and really thinking about the risk level you want to take some people might want to take more risk and get more responsibility i would rather you go take go to a company earlier when there's 10 employees so

David Friedberg: you can get more get more learnings and who cares if it goes out of business nobody's going to hold that against you and you learn a lot when it goes out of business so i would rather see you learn more but if you find a rocket ship can't blame you for getting on a rocket ship you're going to you're going to have a greater chance of getting rich okay great question from robert coming in we have an enterprise customer in pilot who really likes a feature on our platform equipment inspection says robert uh it is used multiple times per day by multiple users six days per week okay interesting should i try to sell this to other enterprise customers or continue building out with this one customer currently in disagree with my co-founder on this okay so let me explain what's going on here when

Chamath Palihapitiya: you're starting a company and you're trying to figure out product market fit you will have sometimes a customer asks you to build what's called custom software software just for them a feature that they need and sometimes these features are a complete and utter waste of time because they take you off of building a piece of software for everybody so you have a list of all the different features you can build and then you also have to maintain and evolve those features so technical debt does build up in this case it's equipment inspections and so let's come up with an even better example let's say somebody is using slack and they say you know what uh for slack i would really like to have slack do a um chat room where everybody has to answer polls and we ask people a series of questions and we're a polling company and we poll people uh we're pew research and we want to have polling built in and you're like well there's all this other polling software over here why don't you use the polling so we want it built into slack okay so now you're competing with not only chat

David Friedberg: and communication software now you're competing with polling software and there's like survey monkey out there and other polling software like why do we have to build this is the question you're going to come to and you're now splitting your resources between two different things only one customer wants this that's a big problem and so that's the second point that robert makes it well hey listen this is being used by multiple users six days a week so maybe this polling software for pure research using slack gets used all the time okay that's an interesting piece of data but they asked you to build it so obviously they're going to use it should i try to sell this to other enterprise customers

Chamath Palihapitiya: or continue building out with one customer so this is really um you're answering your own question here if you're going to be putting time into this is it worth it to put it in to your product make a franken product where you're bolting stuff on for only one customer why would you do that

SPEAKER_12: well you would do it if you thought the other you know if you had 100 people using this product you thought i don't know 25 of them or 50 of them would do it and it's really easy you can make a little video and send it to your other users and say we're trialing a feature would you be interested in this

Chamath Palihapitiya: yes no maybe and just force them to answer the question yes no maybe then you would get a pretty good idea and this is like the product discovery uh process there's a whole art to this product discovery talking to customers teasing out of them what they want there's listening labs there's surveys there's interviews there's all different ways to do product discovery and you can look that up online the whole product discovery listening lab concept to figure out what people want and you can study

David Friedberg: people and say hey how do you currently do this and that's how great products are made now if you're in disagreement with your co-founder on it one thing that you might find is that there's two businesses here there might be two businesses so if you're in your co-founder find two businesses what you could do is you could spin one off into a new company and you could no longer be co-founders i'm just saying if it really was a serious disagreement and that has happened historically where one founder will stay with justin tv and another group will go to twitch and they just you know one specializes in video games one specializes in life casting right i think was the situation there and so you see

Chamath Palihapitiya: that all the time when founders disagree if you really feel strongly about it well you got to pull the string and see where it leads you and if it leads you to hey there's two companies inside of one we're going to pursue those two different opportunities yeah by all means you know spin out or maybe you pivot and so this is one of the great things uh that comes from listening to your customers the thing that would become problematic is if this customer is paying you fifty thousand dollars for this

David Friedberg: equipment inspection software and you can't charge them anymore they won't pay you a hundred and you're spending two hundred thousand dollars you know investing and building this then you're going to make the money back maybe in if they get to their fifth year so you have to do a little bit of roi calculation if the equipment inspections took you a week to build and it's going to take a week to maintain it and you put every week of developer time and product manager time at let's say five thousand a week for two or three people to work on it okay it's going to question ten thousand dollars year one five thousand dollars each year they're paying fifty thousand dollars for it's profitable

SPEAKER_20: and they're a lighthouse customer so you can use them to do other customers sometimes doing a little custom software is not the end of the world but if you do that make sure you do it with an api

SPEAKER_12: so that the next time you have to do a custom another custom piece of software you can build an app store and let somebody else build it with an api into your software and then you can get on zapier

SPEAKER_03: and have your api available for other people to do creative things with great question from robert

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David Friedberg: okay we got a question from a professional author trying to transition into venture capital in your opinion what do you think is the best path for me to get my foot in the door in vc which furthering my education be the best way to do it what about various venture capital strategy courses that are

Chamath Palihapitiya: available on the web there's no downside to taking some courses i teach angel dot university we give the money to charity we've given almost 200 000 to charity now it's really a cool course and that's a five-hour course uh venture deals does an online course people seem to love that one as well

David Friedberg: and it's a great book as well so you know there there are courses out there that you can go take there's nothing wrong with taking them if i saw them i would be like okay that's a that's a minor

Chamath Palihapitiya: checkbox to me what i think would be a more meaningful checkbox is investing in 10 companies even if you found those companies on uh seed invest or republic and you put but 500 into them and you have a portfolio worth 5 000 or you did the syndicate and angel list and other places for accredited investors and you got you know 10 investments of two thousand dollars each and then you go to work for those founders you help them find uh employees you give them product feedback and you take them

David Friedberg: out to dinner or coffee and you'd be generally supportive if you came to me and said hey listen i've done a portfolio of 10 companies i now want to break into vc here's what i did as an angel

Chamath Palihapitiya: investor boom that's a quick path in because what you're trying to do is take yourself out of the

SPEAKER_12: bucket of talkers and put yourself in the bucket of people who are doing it and are unstoppable you know

David Friedberg: this as an athlete so if you say hey if you give me a contract i'll become a great basketball player and they're like well there's a basketball court right over there why don't you show me what you can do and why don't you get out there every day for five hours a day and you know perfect whatever skill you

Chamath Palihapitiya: think you are going to specialize in the nba at yeah you know maybe you know think of it like an open tryout any venture capitalist you can get to you can email 100 venture capitalists today what are you going to email them trust me i'm going to be good at this no you want to email them and say hey jason

David Friedberg: hey ruloff uh i'm a professional athlete i am looking to break into vc i've made seven angel investments over the past two years here's what i've learned uh from them here's a document and here's a testimonial from each one of them i'm looking to break in as an associate at a venture

Chamath Palihapitiya: firm and uh here are my seven references seven ceos of companies and here's what they said about me and here's their emails if you want to check in on me like that would be a bold move and if i saw that and i'd be like audacious bold this person is doing the job with or without me and then i would maybe

David Friedberg: write blog posts about what you're doing and be active on social that's a great way to build a brand as we've seen many vcs you don't need to have a podcast to be a venture capitalist i know that i may have started a bit of a trend here where every venture capitalist thinks they need to have a podcast and now they about startups and investing and now they need to have a podcast with three of their friends and do a roundtable you don't have to just copy what i've done uh podcasts are not the only vehicle i used to do a blog that got me on the map too social media can get you on the map

Chamath Palihapitiya: hosting small events just anything to show that you're in the bucket of people who are doers not talkers you need to put numbers on the board you need to show people that you really want it through

David Friedberg: your actions not through your talking all right great question i wish you the best all right got a couple questions i got a couple questions on twitter recently question from marin could an uber like business have grown in the current environment of higher interest rates potential recession and how would it have impacted how they strategically approach growth great question in fact uber was started right after the financial crisis and people looked at uber as a way to save money

Chamath Palihapitiya: so yes absolutely they could have uh they could have and not only could they have they did it was a

David Friedberg: really bummer of a time from 2008 to 2012 and people were not throwing tons of money and the tons of money came in that 2012 to 2022 period maybe 2015 is uh to 2020 is when it was kind of peaking so

Chamath Palihapitiya: uh you absolutely could do it and um people don't remember that even green desk to the precursor to we work another company you would say hey how could this company ever work in a higher interest rate environment etc or in a capital constrained environment well you bootstrapped and uber was

David Friedberg: a very bootstrapped company what people don't realize is it was only uber black and the uber black

Chamath Palihapitiya: service was highly profitable taking 25 percent of a 50 or 100 ride from the airport is a pretty great way to print money as opposed to doing uber pool for four dollars or uber x for twelve dollars those eight dollar ubers were the ones where they were maybe uh losing two dollars a ride the black cars they were making ten dollars per ride and that is why they got so well funded just like we work and green

David Friedberg: desk the precursor to it did really well because they bought ugly office spaces they made them hipster with the lowest cost stuff they were super cheap they had high margins and they took you know 12 square foot space or 25 let's say 25 a square foot per year space two dollars a month if you live in a city where they do it monthly versus yearly in new york they always did it yearly out in california they do it monthly they're probably paying 30 bucks a square foot but they were charging the equivalent

Chamath Palihapitiya: of 125 a square foot and they had that huge margin people only remember when they went into hyper growth and they were losing money uh now when you look at those businesses yes they did lose money but when if i say the word to you get a uh cab ride you say uber and i say get a desk share you say we work i say ride you say uber i say desk you know shared office you say we work the amount of money that was put into these brands uh has paid off massively and it will continue to pay off i believe that we work will continue to be like the gold standard in office sharing and i bet you all the money put in will be taken out at some point uh and uber clearly is there already they've already started to

David Friedberg: hit free cash flow and so yum yum for jacal question from joe how would the company be different today if travis had stayed on as ceo starting about uber man that is a great alt alternate alternative uh fiction story you know i i think there would have still been a lot of uh heat on the company right because it had become a target and uh you know people were unhappy with uh certain aspects of how the company was run but i think the company would be worth 25 more today of travis zone because i

Chamath Palihapitiya: think he would have continued to evolve as a ceo and he was getting better and better every day every week every month every year and i think he probably would have been rewarded by the markets for being audacious but some people might say that the public markets wouldn't have wanted the company to go public so they might have had to hold the ipo and that could have been a really dangerous thing to do so we'll never know um i think at some point it would be absolutely fantastic when dar is done doing his great work and dar has been doing a great job if at some point dar wanted to move on for uber

SPEAKER_11: and cloud kitchens to merge and for the king to return the return of the king and i would be there for it uh that would be an absolutely glorious moment if it became uber cloud kitchens and travis was ceo again in a couple years uh that would be absolutely fantastic as an outcome uh he's just a great world-class ceo leader visionary and he's unstoppable and people don't know what's going on at cloud kitchens

David Friedberg: i know a lot i say nothing i say nothing travis is keeping everything uh on the dl and he's just got his head down working and you know when he's ready he will come on this pod and he will do an

SPEAKER_11: interview i talked to him about it uh you will hear him first here on this week in startups for sure when he's ready to talk about it but he's my friend i don't put any pressure on him to talk about

David Friedberg: it when he's ready to talk about the incredible work they're doing at cloud kitchens they'll be ready but for now he's in the lab he's doing the work grinding that's his that's his superpower that

SPEAKER_20: kid's a grinder he gets it done all right great questions everybody being a concise communicator is

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David Friedberg: seth brown he is the ceo and founder of a startup called gifting seth went through our full launch cycle

SPEAKER_12: he started with founder university our 12-week program we don't even need uh to have been incorporated then he got into our accelerator we put a hundred thousand dollars into his business and you're going to hear all about his journey right now stick with us so our launch accelerator

SPEAKER_49: just finished its 25th cohort and as you probably know by now i've been sitting down with some of the founders over the next few weeks to dig into their businesses i've talked to spring eats legal q suede and chatter this cohort just keeps on giving we're more than halfway done and today i have seth brown the founder and ceo of gifting with a ph seth welcome and congrats congrats on completing the

SPEAKER_51: accelerator thank you um tell us what you're building yeah we're uh we're building an on-demand gift

SPEAKER_54: giving marketplace uh we want to change the way gift giving is done for both on the buyer side and on the seller side as well so how does that work uh what we're doing is we're pulling inventory from our retail partners both on a national level and the local level uh pairing that with a curated list of items taking into consideration people's interests uh based off of their geographical location price point uh what the occasion is and we're able to deliver those gifts in as little as two hours

SPEAKER_49: two hours um what is the tell me a little more about the specific problem that you're solving is it the speed is it the inability to pick out a gift like what are we how is this how is this going to make

SPEAKER_54: everyone so much more considerate and loved a combination of the two i am guilty of forgetting my own anniversary which is where the concept came from so first and foremost it is saving people like me that are either last minute shoppers which majority of the population are uh to be able to go ahead and provide a gift also not knowing what to get we've created a machine learning platform to take into consideration real interest real-time interest constantly being updated constantly being trained and then there's also an even bigger piece of this which is on the b2b side for retailers uh one in four gifts are returned annually uh and retailers are eating about 60 of those costs as it relates to liquidations processing discounting fees and we've created a virtual gift exchange within the platform to essentially eliminate the return ultimately saving on their major losses so you could re-gift you mean um you as the gift receiver have the ability to exchange the gift out and say you want a different gift prior to it being delivered all within that two-hour window love that and that's a good that's

SPEAKER_49: actually there's a good um climate uh impact there because returns have a really big climate impact a huge

SPEAKER_54: impact there six six billion pounds of waste annually and uh 16 metric tons of co2 released annually because

SPEAKER_49: of gift returns yeah remarkable um tell walk me through how this would work is it local retailers do you also have the benefit of bringing them online and allowing them to be part of this ecosystem so uh we

SPEAKER_54: started with national retailers wanting to bring on to allow us to scale but we view this as a huge benefit to local retailers it's their way of having instant real-time delivery we want to give back to the community we want to find those local favorites whether it be uh you know music your favorite music shop or bookstore uh whatever the case may be we want to be able to partner with local retailers to be able

SPEAKER_76: to allow them to see what it's like to have that speed and that on-demand uh environment and then how

SPEAKER_54: do you handle the delivery so uh we're currently using white label delivery providers um we have one national deal in place currently and we've also agreed to terms with uh delivery aggregator which will allow us to open up uh with a bunch more providers uh starting in the near future and how do you get paid two different ways on the b2c side uh we get paid from personalizations that we create within our app each gift can be accompanied by a 30-second video message uh that arrives prior to the gift going to the gift gift uh gift recipient uh we also allow for we also receive as it relates to the delivery itself and then on the b2b side we are receiving commission based off of every order that's being purchased and we also have a really unique marketing and partnership opportunity where uh different retailers can control different categories or different items during a first specific point in time and different

SPEAKER_49: period of time so consumers can pay a little extra to personalize the gift giving and then presumably they pay some kind of a delivery fee exactly okay and then retailers of course pay you a commission for the sales but tell me a little bit more about this customization kind of option you're talking

SPEAKER_54: about on the retail side on the retail side so the retailers they have the ability we can work with the retailer to say okay you sell this product we can ensure that you're getting the sale over the course of the next 10 days two weeks whatever the case may be and it also benefits them because their competitors aren't uh during that period of time so we have the ability to choose where the item is

SPEAKER_49: coming from within a geographical location oh i see so you can so if a consumer goes on and just says i want this gift you're saying you retailer can pay me a little extra to make sure that that gift comes from your store instead of the neighbor's store exactly i see clever all right and then in our classic uh accelerator style so let's talk about your traction which is looking great 7200 downloads 85 orders a 300 increase in website traffic since launching just last month yes we launched towards the end of

SPEAKER_54: last month so we're about three four weeks uh into it right now in our pilot market of south florida and we're seeing great traction uh great growth uh we're seeing tons of engagement as it relates to people using all the other features within the app as well such as our wish list our calendar reminders so that others like me don't forget their anniversary or special occasion um and you know each day we're getting more and more uh growth and traction which is a really exciting time for us

Jason Calacanis: that's fantastic and is it all organic like it's word of mouth growth for the most part so prior to

SPEAKER_54: launching we built a community of over 22 000 people we really wanted to make sure that we had that solid foundation and so we've been working on onboarding uh that community that signed up and joined our waitlist as well as a few different marketing initiatives primarily uh using search

SPEAKER_76: and some influencers and social media gotcha and then what is your path to 10 million and 100 million

SPEAKER_54: dollars yeah so in terms of 10 million uh we're looking at approximately 30 uh thousand uh deliveries per month uh looking at about 350 deliveries annually and uh path to 100 million is roughly 350 000 deliveries per month um which we look to do as we go ahead and we scale the uniqueness about our platform and gift giving is that even though we're only in our pilot market right now anybody can go ahead within the country can go ahead and can actually order a gift for somebody in in our pilot market which is a lot different than a lot of other on-demand platforms where we really have this two two-to-one impression engagement that's taking place because there's always a gift giver and a gift

SPEAKER_76: receiver um so we're actually able to use and leverage the gift giver as a way to bring on board

SPEAKER_49: a gift recipient network effects you gotta love it yeah seth brown is the founder and ceo of gifting

SPEAKER_93: at giphting.com seth thanks so much and congrats again thank you very much right now it's so important for

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David Friedberg: next molly sits down with carlene halet she is the ceo and founder of enriched hq they're a marketplace

SPEAKER_43: with a really interesting business model it's an amazing conversation about her startup so stick with

Jason Calacanis: us all right so the launch accelerator just completed its 25th cohort i have been talking to all of the founders over the past few weeks and the next few weeks to dig into their businesses you've already heard me talk to almost all of them next up carlene halet ceo and founder of enriched hq carlene welcome and

SPEAKER_99: tell us what tell us what you're building yeah hi molly big fan so thanks for having me um enriched hq

SPEAKER_101: is a central hub a marketplace of skills building and life skills enrichment activities for kids grades

SPEAKER_102: four and up we work with large corporations to bring this to working families parents

SPEAKER_99: to support their kids give me some more details how does it how do you do this is it an app

SPEAKER_93: how do they yeah pay for it what does it help them do are we talking laundry here i hope we're talking

SPEAKER_101: laundry here laundry right my kid needs to get his acting gear yeah exactly i'm i'm desperately trying to get my kid to put his dishes in the dishwasher so um probably not that though yeah this this comes

SPEAKER_102: really from my own experience as a single mother um wanting and needing to engage my son in enrichment activities that just weren't being addressed in school so life skills building things and as a technologist really knew that um this could be solved with technology so after 10 years of dealing with this problem i finally got to the point where i said enough um and so we built a marketplace that aggregates together best-in-class content from leading organizations around programs that extend learnings beyond what kids are learning in school so think you know maybe master class but for juniors and so corporate organizations contract with us to bring this to their working families and parents have access to this and discounts and free and exclusive content through the platform but we handle all of the logistics of building a complete program for the parents because quite frankly as a parent i know it's a nightmare to go out into the internet and to find multiple vendors and times and schedules and all of those things so we bring it together in one place and companies pay us to do that

Jason Calacanis: yeah i mean i cannot tell you how many threads i have been on with fellow parents of like what are you doing for summer camp does anybody have a good tutor does anyone know where we can take a skateboarding class what are um i'm so interested in this idea that you could partner with businesses and have it be something that's offered through work tell me about that insight because that feels like a big

SPEAKER_118: unlock for you as a business and then also your your parent customers yeah well like i said um

SPEAKER_102: um this is something that i've been dealing with for 10 years so i don't have a nuclear family here around me in boston so it's always been this crazy labyrinth of care that i've had to piece together um and it's a nightmare and so um what i've decided to do with the company is go out into the world and and find the best in class providers for things that families have told me that they want their kids to learn things like you know budgeting skills or investing or language or things that are um really um beneficial when they're can be beneficial when they're delivered in a virtual capacity and so we go out and we find these companies we partner with them we make them available on the marketplace and then our platform handles all of the transactional elements of building a comprehensive program for the parents across you know different vendors multiple kids multiple schedules multiple price points we just you know our goal is we again i live this nightmare every day and so how do i make this easier for parents to better balance managing their professional career as well as their home life tell me about the

Jason Calacanis: revenue streams um because it sounds like there are three major ones yeah multiple tell me how you get

SPEAKER_102: paid yeah um so first and foremost is our engagement with corporations and they enter into an annual contract and we i have sold to enterprise fortune 1000 companies for 15 plus years and the more simple it is the easier it is to get a deal done so it's an unlimited um uh contract for a flat fee um and they re it um renews annually and so that's the corporate piece um our activity providers uh we are an exclusive ecosystem so only companies that provide content where we invite them to join our ecosystem they pay us a monthly subscription fee to get access to promotions to our captive audience through our clients and then the third piece is is we take uh take rate on every activity that's booked so it's essentially

SPEAKER_115: a revenue share with the partners right so you get paid on both sides of your marketplace and on

Jason Calacanis: the transactions nice um how and it looks like it's working in marketplace bookings are growing 36 percent month over month you're available to over 200 000 employees what's the the feedback that

SPEAKER_128: you've gotten from the partners so far it's awesome i mean i think a sigh of relief from the parents

SPEAKER_102: right um is a big one um we work really heavily with um diversity and inclusion executives so we have direct access to a lot of groups within these organizations that support working families particularly mothers a lot of um high profile programs around elevating women in leadership and then of course there's the retention uh aspect of it and employees who would have chosen to leave because they're sick and tired of paying ridiculous amount of money for extracurricular activities for what feels like the right to have a job are staying with their companies which is eliminating attrition costs for the organization so

Jason Calacanis: it's really almost like an extra benefit if you're two of your big employee or customers adobe or american express you're saying are parents also getting a break on price then are you saying like listen we're

SPEAKER_131: gonna have these summer programs that you know are available to you and at a discount yeah and a lot of

SPEAKER_102: them are offered for free to the employees so you know every corporate account essentially buys differently and they want a different thing so we start with the baseline and then we say okay do you want to subsidize the rest of the cost for the employee some of them have said yes so all activities are free some of them have buckets of money that they're pulling from learning and development that was um only available to employees to upscale they're now making those funds available for programs like ours to support the children of their employees um some of them we do because we're a an ecosystem of um exclusive providers we do free um curated activities for particular client like i'll give you an example we've done uh hosted a global hackathon for one of our clients where each region had a team of kids and they all competed for the global champion hacker you know thing which was really cool for the kids and so yeah and that was we offered that for free

SPEAKER_73: it lets you it lets your employees and us the parents stay at work knowing that our kids are not just like

Jason Calacanis: at home latchkey kids in some you know unvetted program yeah gamer videos which is what goes down in my house same our classic of course accelerated question is what is your path to 10 million and then

SPEAKER_99: 100 million dollars in revenue yeah um we've been really really successful with some really great

SPEAKER_102: flagship customers out of the gate and so we anticipate we're on track um for just shy of 500 grand in revenue this year um and um by securing three to five additional corporate clients and um the activity rate conservatively uh we've estimated out that by um uh 2020 through the end of 2023 will be at two to three million which will take if that with the current clients will get us to about 87 million by 2025.

SPEAKER_116: so if our rate of 36 percent month over month continues to increase will well exceed that by 2025.

Jason Calacanis: carlene haylett of enriched hq i am rooting for you thank you so much for the time take care have a

SPEAKER_109: great weekend single moms taking care of each other damn it that's right we gotta stick together okay

SPEAKER_43: next up producer rachel is gonna wrap the show with another awesome edition of okay boomer this week she's talking to andrew young by day andrew young is a strategy and ops leader at meta you may have heard

SPEAKER_12: of that company but by night now on the weekends he writes about leadership growth and mindfulness he hosts events parties and dinners in new york seems like a really cool cat enjoy the interview

SPEAKER_147: okay boomer i understood the assignment today i'm speaking to andrew young on another great segment of okay boomer he's a strategy and ops lead at facebook but that's actually not what we're going to be talking about today i've mentioned him before on the podcast so if you listen to other okay boomers you might have heard me talk about andrew so when i first like moved to the city i went to a bunch of free tech events and that's really how i made all my first friends other than the friends that i already knew here that went to college with me but i would just show up to these tech events a lot of times alone and they were really awesome and were a huge pivotal reason why i ended up loving new york city even though i moved in january which kind of is not a super fun time to move in the city and the big question that i got back from people after mentioning these events that i've previously spoken about are how am i even finding these tech events and that is where andrew comes in and by the way if you have any questions fee if you have any questions please feel free to send them along to producers at this weekend startups.com with the subject line okay boomer and now back to these tech events so there are a few people operating in this space but none of them are as organized professional and consistent as andrew if you follow his newsletter musings and perspectives or his twitter account you totally know what i mean thank you so much for coming on today andrew and i know i just spoke for quite a while but do you have like a little elevator

SPEAKER_153: pitch uh like how do you describe yourself yeah i mean i i give and thanks for such a nice intro i guess i have two intros and one's like you know what i do for work which you know we don't have to talk about today it's not terribly exciting but i'd say what i do on the side is just get you know what i what i sort of call the best which is like the most open-minded the kindest sort of people in tech business media creative all these people together at really cool venues around the city um and so normally it's been like you know like a rooftop um like we did something at vr world we do like bars and lounges around the city we do dinners that kind of thing and it's just getting people together to chat in a business um a friendship any anything um related sort of you know why you would want to go in the first place and meet other people in new york city i think my first like big

SPEAKER_147: question is how did you even get into events because it doesn't seem like that's a very natural

SPEAKER_153: progression from working at facebook yeah for sure so i think like so i moved here august 2020 so again like not a great time to move to new york city um i think like everything was was closed and i'd moved here for a reason i moved to new york for the same reason that everyone else does it's to meet people it's to sort of accelerate my career my life and um just take part in that intensity and the energy that we all call new york city and you know i moved here in 2020 and i realized like all the restaurants and bars and all that kind of stuff was closed there weren't any events you know when i used to visit there used to be you know a bunch of stuff around the city and so what i did was you know reach out to people on all these online sort of networks so you know the first ones i used were like reddit actually i was a very sort of late joiner to twitter where i had an account but i didn't really learn how to use it until like much later down the line uh but like reddit and like fishbowl and like linkedin and i would just sort of message people and be like hey moved here um we've like chatted online before do you want to like meet up grab a drink grab dinner and i did that at scale i did a lot of those one-on-ones uh eventually started meeting a ton of like cool people and i'm and i was like and i got to connect these people so i started doing smaller dinners like six to eight people and that's really the sweet spot for like good conversation and that kind of thing um and it you know continued to sort of scale so after that it was like bars or like sections of bars like like 40 to 60 people and then started doing like you know entire sort of bars and lounges and now we're at sort of like you know rooftops um with like over over 600 people and so it really started small a lot of one-on-ones and as i start to met meet really cool people start to connect them together through like dinners and and those start to scale through like word of mouth and through my through my newsletter awesome

SPEAKER_147: so a huge thing that i've noticed that people have issues with when trying to host events is actually trying to find that event space so you mentioned like you started off small now um i've even attended some of your rooftop events which are in no way small how are you securing these events like are you are you finding sponsors are restaurants now like asking you to come at this

SPEAKER_151: point and just bring in people yeah initially i would just sort of build a relationship with the

SPEAKER_153: you know with some of the owners of the venues that i really liked so the hotel you know the williamsburg hotel i've done like four four events they're now going to do another one in september i love that venue i love their pool their rooftop you know their hotel and so started going there a lot and building a relationship with the people that work there and once they started to find out about um you know what i do it was just like a natural next step to sort of work together and put on events but there are a bunch of bars around the city uh bars and restaurants that sort of they they they rent their their spaces out for free and like some of them even have like no minimum wow so those are great spots they tend to be like on the on the so on the smaller side like under under 200 um and then the larger ones you know the reason i do my events on like a monday to wednesday is because like the thursday friday saturday just their minimums are too high and you know most of the time if you've sort of proven that you can bring people to their venue and make people spend they don't even charge you a minimum at some point so at this point i sort of have just like people at the different venues around the city that um you know sort of have have an open conversation an open

SPEAKER_147: thread with them and you know they're very open-minded gotcha and why do you think it's important for

SPEAKER_168: people to attend events even people maybe that are native to new york and have lived here for a while

SPEAKER_170: yeah i think the incredible thing about new york is that you know when i moved here i met so many

SPEAKER_153: people who had very established friend groups and they've lived here their whole lives you know yet they're still going out there putting themselves out there and meeting new people which i think is is really amazing so i think you know to answer your question go on events you know you always you hear all the time when people talk about sort of like networking and i don't really like that word as much but people are always like i gotta go in coffee chats like i gotta i gotta go up to at least one networking event a month and i i sort of hate that that concept of like i have to do this and so one of the ideas behind um at least my events is like i want to make it more fun um either through like the people or the venue or some kind of some kind of context within the event but i think you know by by my meeting people and like really exponentially branching out and building out your network that's going to give you what's going to make you happier you're going to have more friends um and it's it's also going to just help you accelerate your career yeah i totally agree

SPEAKER_147: with you i've kind of had a experience similar to the one that you're talking about where when i first moved to the city i was really thankful to have some college friends that were here but i went to a massive university i went to penn state so absolutely loved it but it is kind of hard to to branch out honestly from that small group that felt like my penn state friends or my college friends and by going to different events even if it was showing up to some alone which felt a little scary at the time but now uh now that i've been to yours i know that's pretty pretty common it has definitely made the city feel a lot more accessible which is awesome and i guess on the other end to that question why do you think people should be hosting events because i don't want to say that you were like the catalyst for people hosting events but i do think that there was a huge shift in people having dinners where people just had little sat down uh situations to these full-blown like walking around talking to other people and maybe free-flowing conversations that you really specialize in like why should we or people be hosting those yeah it makes me really happy when i see other people

SPEAKER_153: hosting especially like um you know i think a few of the community builders in new york have like really creative and special events um like mike mccomby he does really cool events like new york field day that kind of thing like rachel canter so i think everyone sort of has i mean everyone's network is is is different and i think everyone has the ability to sort of curate the people that they think would get along based on their goals you know their vibe their energy that sort of thing and so i think it's important for everyone to sort of have a point of view on who do you think should sort of get together um and as a result you get sort of very very diverse events uh very creative events um that spans sort of all the industries in all types of roles and that kind of

SPEAKER_176: thing yeah it's funny you mentioned rachel cantor so she actually came on the podcast before episode

SPEAKER_147: 1436 rachel is awesome is definitely another incredible community builder um another person you introduced to me that i have to give a shout out to is i think david goes by the brunch guy uh on on twitter but another just absolutely phenomenal really cool community builder um and i feel like like so now you have this it almost feels like the more i see content on your page the more i actually am exposed to other community builders so you've literally built a community of community builders what advice do you have to people who want to break into the event space or maybe host an event of

SPEAKER_153: their own yeah that's that's a really good question so i think when you when you think about events right um you need a couple things so you need you need a venue um you need sort of what i call distribution or you need a community or people that would actually attend the event um sometimes you need a partner but i think in in you know if you do event from monday to wednesday you could probably get by without spending much um and then you need some sort of context or like an anchor in terms of like why people would go to the event um so i think i've seen some cases when people were like oh i really want to host the event i love the idea of bringing people together um but they're missing like one of these elements and these are really like the four sort of building blocks you need to throw like a decent event so for anyone who wants to host an event just keep those four things in mind the first one you host you're like going to be nervous and i've talked to a few folks who first event very nervous and you know it's hard for them to have a good time because they're so tense and they're coordinating and and they're it's like in the moment sort of thing but after you do i'd say like three to four it's going to feel um it's going to feel more natural and you'll get to a point where you actually have a lot of fun at these events and there's not much planning coordination required uh so my tips just to sum up keep those four things in mind and it really just takes repetition for you to get comfortable enough to have fun and and to make it sort of like a um you know make it more automatic for you gotcha i do have a question was that a uh

SPEAKER_147: a article or a written piece in your newsletter the four pillars here no not yet maybe i should write something about that i was about to say that honestly that sounds like really good tangible advice that people should have down have down in writing um i think that's super super great and do you have any advice maybe so say i want to do like an okay boomer event i want to try to find everybody that i listen to i think i've mentioned this before on the pod but i think it's really difficult to kind of see like my podcasting community like one time um when nate o'brien was on the podcast who is one of my favorite podcast guests to have on um i said like hey if anybody's listening like shoot me a message on twitter and i got so many people messaging me that it it absolutely made my day um but besides that one time it's kind of difficult to know um who's listening so if i wanted to do an okay boomer event but i did not know like i don't know how many people listen to this segment

SPEAKER_180: what are the first steps that i would do as somebody that's never planned an event before

SPEAKER_153: yeah yeah i would i mean you can like sort of like um what's it called you can sort of like test test like the demand you have um and so sometimes or a lot of the times what i'll do is i'll like post a tweet and i'll be like who's like interested right if you're interested like comment and i don't i think a lot of people think i do that for like engagement sort of hacking um but the fact is like i have this tool which i can share i can share with you after which like automates like twitter dms to anyone who commented and so if anyone if anyone like dms me that's actually more work for me to like go in that dm in my inbox and reply and post a link and so if it's like i think the first time i did that i had like um maybe like 150 comments and i just automated all that stuff in

SPEAKER_183: like two days a lot easier how did you do that that's so sick it's a tool called it's called

SPEAKER_153: twift dot xyz it's a really cool tool okay that's so awesome yeah super super efficient and i'll send it to you after i know the uh the guy that that created it and he's you know he's sort of um he built some really cool products but i would say you know sort of test your demand a little bit whether that's through a newsletter or survey or like twitter um and then from there you can sort of gauge what kind of venue size you need and i would say you know like if i have like a thousand rsvps i'm like 40 to 50 percent will show up if it's a free event yeah so use that as

SPEAKER_186: sort of your rule of thumb yeah i think that's really awesome that you're able to use a plugin

SPEAKER_147: like that to help i think that's one of the most difficult things i've seen in the event space is the rsvp versus like the show up because especially in new york and i'm sure this goes for other cities but the actual venue itself like the cap on the amount of people you can have if you have like 60 people in event space you meant to have 200 it is very evident and then vice versa it is not comfortable so maybe new york more than most cities due to the nature of there not just being very much space um i feel like knowing the number of your audience is something that's super important at least to somebody that attends events uh it's something i definitely notice are there any other things that you find that are like super important besides the amount of people just show up like the fact that there's food there the fact that there's like i don't know a bar like is there any key aspect in an event that you think people should really be paying attention to yeah so i used to think

SPEAKER_153: you know we need an open bar and i was like we have to do the open bar thing but fact is like on a wednesday nobody really wants open bar on a wednesday it's super it's like probably like 120 bucks per person per head yeah and no one's no one's gonna drink that amount of money or eat that amount of food so i don't really do the open bar thing um i i did an event with nick gray a while back for like sahil bloom and sam par and nick is like the master of like events and i think he's mostly done sort of like uh smaller curated events and he does like icebreakers and he wrote a book on how to like throw a party um like a two-hour cocktail party he wrote a book on events and what is it called let me let me pull it up right now so i think it's yeah i think it's two-hour cocktail

SPEAKER_186: party something like that i love that yeah i saw that unfortunately i was out of town for the event

SPEAKER_147: but that sam par uh show out seemed to be really cool so that absolutely blasted all over social media and i actually got to speak with danny miranda who is another wonderful podcast host speak with um par

SPEAKER_196: i believe around the same time so i got a lot of a lot of his content like all in one swift weekend

SPEAKER_151: which was really awesome yeah it was a really cool event and you know what nick did there was he introduced the idea of volunteers and he had about so let's say we had about i think like 500

SPEAKER_153: people came out to that event um he had about 30 volunteers come out wear yellow hats and their job was to go around and do a couple of things like one if anyone came alone just like talk to them make them feel comfortable um and second of all to sort of connect different groups and different pockets with each other so people were sort of like mingling with each other not just the people that came up with and i did that at the rooftop event i threw last wednesday we had about 70 volunteers come out and i i thought it was a success story because i got some dms after and people were like i love this volunteer they're awesome introduced me to someone who was exactly who i wanted to meet and so that you know the icebreakers is something like i i never used to think about and i think most people don't um definitely definitely a good idea to try out very awesome that's awesome i feel like i keep saying

SPEAKER_147: awesome but it's like there's no other word to put this and unless you've been to like one of andrew's events like it's really difficult to put in words and especially as somebody who's moved around a lot so i'm an army brat for people who don't know so i've moved like for for high school for example i actually had four schools in four years so being able to go to events like this i feel like i wish had um more of an impact on me even younger in like my high school career do you have any tangible

SPEAKER_202: advice i guess for people maybe that want to start doing events even before they get in this corporate

SPEAKER_153: setting like when they're in college yeah i think um you know that's another good question and like the the act of like not only the coordination of events but like the facilitation of the conversation and like how you run the the programming during the event i think that's a muscle that most people can start working on and it's like if you're in like college you can like throw like smaller parties like dinners you know happy hours you can still do a lot of that stuff and find creative ways to connect people you know that i think the the sort of the baseline thing you do is you find a venue and you put people in it and if you want to take that one notch up you know you start to do icebreakers and then even what like one level higher than that it's like um how do you pre-program things into the event so that people will like definitely sort of meet others and you facilitate sort of the idea of serendipitous connections and that kind of thing so definitely a lot of things you can do in college

SPEAKER_180: awesome my last question what has been your favorite event that you have put up so far that's that's a

SPEAKER_153: really tough one i i love the hotel i really love the hotel so any sort of any of the rooftop events i've done there have been really cool i'd say the last one with the volunteers you know that one i thought went really well and it didn't rain so it was it was perfect um but i'd say that while i do love the really massive events uh i also do this sort of under the radar happy hour every month it's about 16 to 20 people those are really fun because those are a lot more curated the conversation is a lot more intentional and i i actually get to talk to everyone who goes and i think everyone sort of gets to talk with everyone so those are ones i'm going to start sort of sharing on twitter a little bit

SPEAKER_147: more uh those are probably my favorite ones awesome it's so funny actually i've never seen you at one of your own events i've never seen you yeah i've never seen you except for the one where it's kind of like a happy hour where we all went out uh for dim sum one time i've actually never seen you at one of your events so next time i'll have to hunt you down yeah i was thinking about that i was like you know what i don't think i've talked with you at one of those well thank you so much for taking the time to come on if i ever do a okay boomer uh meetup of sorts i'm gonna have to contact you again and have you show up because you're you seem to be rallying the troops over here absolutely but happy to

SPEAKER_148: help thank you so much andrew yeah thanks for having me and where can people find you my twitter so my

SPEAKER_153: twitter is andrew young andrew a-n-d-r-u-y-e-u-n-g stellar awesome thanks okay everybody thanks for tuning

SPEAKER_20: in what a great week monday through friday so much news so much content for you as a founder or a capital allocator we're going to be back on sunday with another edition of vc sunday school and this week in climate startups we'll see you sunday enjoy the long weekend everybody