SPEAKER_00: Hey everybody, we got a big news show for you today. It is Wednesday. We're at the top of the

SPEAKER_01: mountain. It's windy up here. Molly, a lot going on. It's windy and there's an avalanche of news. So a little thing that went by the other day that we didn't even get around to covering was

SPEAKER_04: the fact that the head of Amazon's consumer retail division, Dave Clark, left. But then today come to find out he is going to be the new CEO of Flexport, meaning that founder, Ryan Peterson, is stepping back to be executive chairman. So lots to unpack there. Amazing. Great, great job.

SPEAKER_06: That's a, that's a serious get. And, uh, the scooter app bird is laying off almost a quarter of its team. We're going to talk about these layoffs in context and how you can learn from them as a capital allocator or a founder or somebody who's working in the startup industry. Yeah. Speaking

SPEAKER_04: of birds, uh, I believe I've heard a little bird whispering about a possible feature that Twitter might do. Looks like Twitter's doing it. Bring your own algorithm. Hmm. Yeah, this is going to be

SPEAKER_06: great. BYOA. Uh, if you don't like the algorithm, they're, uh, providing you. Hey, maybe pick one written by an independent open source provider. This could change everything in social media, including the toxicity. Maybe the people who are the loudest and the most annoying, uh, will get less prominence in your feed. Yeah. Or maybe you can make your feed total chaos. Uh, we have an incredible

SPEAKER_15: startup of the day today. It's called Mote Diverse, uh, which thankfully is unrelated to the

SPEAKER_06: metaverse or Dr. Strange. Instead, they're building a pipeline of apprenticeships as a college

SPEAKER_16: alternative. I love apprenticeships as a career path. Love that. Love it. And then, uh, we're

SPEAKER_01: going to wrap with a quick hit on Citadel getting into crypto. And speaking of institutional investors,

SPEAKER_04: Gary Gensler in the SEC hinting that there might be some overhauls in the payment for order flow

SPEAKER_21: space coming for Robinhood. It's going to be a great show. Stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by Coda. Coda is the all-in-one doc for teams. If you've got a stack of niche

SPEAKER_23: workflow tools, or if you're buried in docs and spreadsheets, Coda is the doc that brings it all together. Startups can get a $1,000 credit at Coda.io slash twist. Odoo. Odoo is a fully customizable and fully integrated suite of business apps that lets you build and scale your stack as you build and scale your business. Your first app is free forever. And right now, Odoo is offering $1,000 off your first implementation pack at odoo.com slash twist. That's O-D-O-O dot com slash twist. And ActiveCampaign. The hardest thing in business is turning a lead into a customer into a repeat customer. Simplify the process and start creating repeat customers with 10% off your ActiveCampaign subscription today at ActiveCampaign.com slash promo slash twist. All right. First up today,

SPEAKER_25: Flexport founder and all-in, Bessie Guestie, a friend of the pod here at This Week in Startups, Ryan Peterson announced that he recruited Amazon's consumer CEO, Dave Clark, to join Flexport and

SPEAKER_27: eventually replace him as CEO. This is huge news. Tee it up for us. This is huge news. So,

SPEAKER_04: Dave Clark built that Amazon consumer division. He had been at Amazon for ages and recently left and it was surprising and raised a lot of questions. And as it turns out, he is joining logistics startup Flexport as co-CEO. In case you're not familiar with Flexport, it's a company that helps companies move products around the globe, what is known in the logistics industry as a freight forwarder. And listen, Ryan Peterson is a beast. Yeah. As a founder, Flexport was evidently the seventh largest buyer of cargo between Asia and North America, as Forbes reported in February. It was founded in 2013, generated $3.3 billion in revenue in 2021 and is forecasting almost $5 billion for 2022. It's not pure software margins, but Flexport was profitable in Q1 and valued at $8 billion by lead investors, A16Z, before they went all crypto all the time and MSD Capital, which is Michael Dell's family office.

SPEAKER_31: Yeah, it looks like Dave is going to start working September 1st. So he gets his summer. There'll be

SPEAKER_06: co-CEOs for six months and then Ryan's going to move to the executive chairman role. For those of you don't know that role, executive chairman, chairman means you run the board of directors, executive means you're still working at the company. So those are the two words in that title. Clark became the CEO of the Amazon global consumer retail business. I think that means the stuff we buy, like the stuff we buy. The stuff we buy. In 2021, after eight years as an SVP, senior vice president of worldwide operations, spent his entire 23 years at Amazon deep in their logistics business and was promoted to run the Northeast fulfillment centers in 2003. Last week, he resigned from Amazon and there's his tweet from Dave Barr. I've had an incredible time at Amazon, but it's time for me to build again.

SPEAKER_34: It's what drives me to all I've had the honor of working with. Oh my gosh, turning into an Oscar

SPEAKER_37: speech here. Can you start playing that mute? Play me off. This tweet's too long. Thank you for making it so much. Fun to come to work to work every day for 23 years. Invert, invent cool,

SPEAKER_38: amazing bags for customers. Just trying to like make up some Oscar music on the fly. Yeah, it's just a little much. Yeah. I mean, so there's like a million different

SPEAKER_04: things to unpack here, including, wow, he was only CEO of the consumer retail division since 2021, going to do this interesting opportunity after 23 years, right? So build again, I have a question. However, the other big question that this raises, why is Ryan bringing in an outside CEO? And here's what he wrote on Twitter. And I think this is fascinating. He says, why am I transitioning to executive chairman when things are going so well? It's simple. The more we learn about our markets and learning about the world economy is the best part of working at Flexport, the more we realize the opportunity in front of us is enormous. I'm now to the point where the only fear I have left for Flexport is that we're not living up to our potential. And he said he wanted to get the most entrepreneurial leader he could find to build this thing into the like infinite growth beast that he wants it to be. You know, these things

SPEAKER_44: get so big, you know, at a certain point that you're just going to need help. And some of the

SPEAKER_47: some of the best ways to do that as a founder is to give somebody the CEO slot, who has much more experience than you. And in this case, you know, somebody who has worked in Amazon for 23 years, Amazon basically changed the face of the supply chain really two companies who changed supply chains. Apple and Amazon, right? Yeah. So if you could get either of those type of executives who've been there for 20 years plus, you think about the knowledge that this person has having watched, you know, Amazon launch basics, Amazon Prime, Amazon in other countries, there's knowledge that would take Ryan 20 years. Totally. So basically, this person shows up with 20 years of knowledge Ryan doesn't have to acquire and the price for that is like you give him the CEO slot and they get to use all that energy to be a leader. And then you get that pent up. This is what I like about it is, you know, somebody six man of the year on like some team, or they're the number three on the team, and then

SPEAKER_06: they get to be the number one, you think like KD, Russell Westbrook, and James Harden when they were on that Oklahoma Thunder team, right? So three crazy all sorts who changed the league, and they break up, they get their own teams, all of a sudden, I think all three of them have been MVP. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong. Yeah, they can't all be the MVP of the league or the finals or you know, or the conference. If they're on the same team, it's just not possible. It's not enough balls in the game.

SPEAKER_04: And it I it is so interesting, because it's a very mature, I think, and smart move by Ryan Peterson, that also takes advantage of some disruption. Yeah, at Amazon, right? We have seen since Andy Jassy came over in fact, best tea in the noted game pointed this out Jassy's cleaning house with Amazon's executive ranks, Liz Coddington just left to take over the CEO CFO position at Peloton, she was Amazon CFO. We have seen in recent earnings reports that Amazon's retail business is somewhat break even relative to the other parts of the business. It's very clear that like Jassy and Amazon is all in on the cloud business, less interested potentially in the retail business, which yikes for all of us who live and breathe Amazon all day every day. But it it gives Ryan Peterson, I think this great moment to pounce and to get somebody with I mean, the fulfillment network that Amazon has built, the

SPEAKER_51: warehouses, the lockers, press the pickup, the drop off, the returns like our own planes, they launch

SPEAKER_52: their own fleet of planes, they essentially bought their own from my understanding, I don't know if they

SPEAKER_47: technically bought their own factories, the way it was explained to me is they bought like the next 50 year rights to these factories, you know, and they work with the families who own them in various regions, but they essentially have bought them out. And you know, this Flexport is kind of the most important private company right now along with Stripe, very similar situation to Airbnb and Uber when they were private companies before they went public. So this will be, you know, these two are going to be what we'll be talking about over the coming years when we see the next wave, we had this

SPEAKER_06: Google wave and then Facebook and Twitter going public, then you have the Uber Airbnb, uh, you know, cohort, and the next cohort is going to be Flexport and Stripe. And when we see those go out, that's when you know, the market is going to be through the other side of the cycle, right? So if you want to know when the recession is over, it's when those two go public and people are losing their minds over them. Antonio Gracias, friend of mine, who was the original investor in SpaceX and Tesla, or one of the original investors, he was just at the oil and summit did a q&a with us and he said his biggest regret as an investor was not leading a Flexport round that SoftBank led and meme account praying for exits, which has been on the show anonymously. It's like one of two people who were ever anonymous on the show, uh, said, you know, he could be on the cap table of any private company would be Flexport.

SPEAKER_53: Yeah. And, uh, yeah. So congratulations to the team over there. Congratulations. And a lot of,

SPEAKER_04: I mean, again, a lot of maturity and wisdom by Ryan Peterson to say, let's bring in this fricking rockstar and turn this thing into Amazon of global logistics. Huge.

SPEAKER_57: If you're a startup, you know, you have to save where you can. I'm talking about time and money

SPEAKER_47: and your bandwidth. That's why we love Coda. Coda is one doc to rule them all. And here's a quick example. My guy press just made a beautiful template for investor updates. Yes. If you're a founder and you have investors, you want to update them, especially in these uncertain times so that they can support you. Maybe invest a little more. How do you write an investor update? Well, we got you covered. Go to this week in startups.com slash investor updates and use my template. Coda has tons of templates waiting there for you for almost anything you want to do.

SPEAKER_61: Coda works right out of the box. It's totally customizable and your text and your tables can live together in the same document. This means all your valuable data, your objectives, and your strategies are all in one place and your team is literally on the same page. You can onboard new hires quickly from anywhere because they get to see all the best practices and you're going to react quickly to all the changes that will happen in your business. Join the productivity revolution and sign up for Coda today. Head to Coda.io slash twist and you'll sign up and get $1,000 in credits. I kid you not. Coda.io slash twist for $1,000 off. I mean, and if you look at it, the last couple

SPEAKER_06: of cycles, most of the big companies were consumer. So Google, Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, all consumer. Interestingly, Stripe is like a developer finance tool. I guess people would argue and um, Flexport is clearly a business to business SaaS slash logistics company. So, um, what's happening is, uh, tech is moving from just being a consumer experience into infecting every sector of society. Yeah. So it's not a coincidence that we're seeing, you know, other hundred, you know,

SPEAKER_66: potentially $100 billion, $50 billion companies, which is what I would say these companies will go public at, at some point. Um, yeah, and then we'll actually even have, uh, a weapons company

SPEAKER_04: too coming out of Silicon Valley with Andrew. Yeah. I also look forward to the next five to 10 years to climate tech companies increasingly being among those, those cohorts, because that's just give it 10 years. Yeah. I mean, you know, John Doerr just gave that billion dollars to Stanford to start a school, uh, around climate tech saying this is the next computer science. You know, I was

Chamath Palihapitiya: speaking at David Freeberg's, uh, production board LP meeting just yesterday, and they asked me about

SPEAKER_06: climate and I said, you know, it's really interesting. It is really being driven, I think, and Chamath agreed with me, uh, by consumers. Um, and that's where we're going to see that first wave of winds, I think. And I was like, look at, you know, you've got companies that are, you know, doing coral or, you know, allowing merchants to, to help people, um, you know, make donations to charity. You know, you have people working on packaging of consumer goods. It's really almost every one

SPEAKER_25: of the stories. I don't know if you're seeing this. It seems to have most stories seem to have some compelling consumer, uh, angle to it. Now sale plan, a company we invested in is B2B. So there'll be B2B ones, but man, the consumer, the consumer in that space is relentless young people, not buying clothes. It's just such an amazing trend to me. Young people always have loved buying new clothes. They have young people who are like, I don't want to buy new clothes. My daughter was like, I don't know if I want to buy new clothes. Can we go to a vintage store? I'm like,

SPEAKER_27: why she's like, well, there's more clothes than we need on the planet. And those clothes are perfectly fine. And I want to go buy those and they're cooler anyway. So there's like, really?

SPEAKER_04: Wow. It's really a huge shift. I mean, granted on the other hand, you're seeing shine, right? Like dominate the fricking planet with the fastest fashion on earth. God help us. It's like an ecological nightmare, but you see an equal and opposite reaction. And the reason I'm making all these faces, if you're watching it on video is because I completely agree. And I've had investors literally mock me for saying, I think that there is a massive consumer opportunity here, not even just opportunity, but like responsibility. Like, yes, is it the fault of the fossil fuel industry and their disinformation campaigns and corporations who pollute and get away with it? Sure. But when consumers all do something at the same time, like say, I don't want high fructose corn syrup in my food

SPEAKER_49: anymore. Yeah, it changes. And if we're the ones who give them something to buy. Yeah,

SPEAKER_06: they're gonna buy it. You know, I'm a pragmatist. Like if consumers were rejecting this, and they're like, I don't want to pay extra for solar panels, that's too much work. Like, why do I want to have

SPEAKER_52: these people ripping up my roof? I'd be like, Okay, let's find another solution. Like put the solar panels somewhere else. People don't want them on their roofs. People want them on their roofs. Yeah, they want to look at them every day. They want to open their solar app and see and they want to geek out to that just like I want to geek out to you know, never going to a gas station that was like,

SPEAKER_47: that was my big conversation with people for 10 years after I got the roadster. They're like,

SPEAKER_25: what's it like? I'm like, I haven't been to a gas station in six months. I have not pulled into a gas

SPEAKER_52: station. In like two years, I had to pull in because I want to get a cup of coffee when I was driving up and down the, you know, five going on a long road trip. And I was like, I guess I have to pull into a

SPEAKER_82: gas station where I put my car. Like, are there spots here? I'm not getting gas. So you know,

SPEAKER_04: it's a value add. And now increasingly because of people like you and me, and I believe it is actually the responsibility and duty of well, middle to upper middle class consumers to adopt these technologies, because that's what makes them affordable for everybody else. And now solar and wind are the cheapest energy out there full stop in every state like it's now it's the best economic

SPEAKER_06: decision to Yeah, I mean, this is the thing is, if just like I had a blind spot for Airbnb, um, I didn't have the opportunity to invest in Airbnb. But you know, I thought it was really dumb idea, like a niche, I would say dumb, I thought it was a very niche idea. I was like, couch surfing, like, I don't want to get stabbed. I don't want to like stay in a serial killer's house. I don't want to, you know, serial killers to be hosting people like this is the craziest idea. And yet, it's become super normalized. And there are it's there's no serial killer phenomenon associated

SPEAKER_89: with right. So Airbnb, like, if you're a serial killer, like craigslist is scarier than Airbnb.

SPEAKER_52: Well, I mean, again, if you want to be a serial killer, do you really want to have to like, you know, work people and meet them there and leave them a gift basket and get them remind them to leave a five star review? It's not exactly Jeffrey Dahmer behavior.

SPEAKER_92: Can you like Hannibal Lecter's call on your phone? Oh, Clarice, Clarice, can you leave a five star review for me? Clarice, the Wi Fi password Clarice.

SPEAKER_94: Clarice puts the lotion in the basket.

SPEAKER_92: Chianti. Chianti is the Wi Fi password Clarice. Clarice, have the neighbors stop crying?

SPEAKER_99: Okay. All right. Now you're freaking me out. Okay. I'm literally like I'm getting a little I'm getting the wiggles over here. Okay. But speaking of

SPEAKER_102: Molly, who is this man you see? What does he covet Molly? Who is this man you see?

SPEAKER_104: My brother and I was like, it puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again.

SPEAKER_105: It puts the lotion in the basket. It puts the lotion in the basket.

SPEAKER_104: I'm all in on Hannibal Lecter. I know, you're full Hannibal. Which isn't as fitting actually, that's appropriate. Clarice, have the lab stop crying. If you're going to be the bad guy,

SPEAKER_01: be the baddest guy. Be the baddest guy. Exactly. All right. Speaking of consumer facing companies, however, that do in fact have a strong climate positive argument. And as Flexport positions itself for expansion, the massive layoff wave continues.

SPEAKER_04: This one, the latest to be hit is the micro mobility company bird. Yeah, which is planning to lay off 23% of its staff accounting for 138 workers. Over the past month, their stock has sunk 42.5%. And this is by the way, I think the latest numbers I saw this were at something like 17,000 tech workers total being laid off. Although in this case, I have to say, I feel like there were already existing questions about bird and this business.

SPEAKER_06: Yeah, I mean, listen, this is like a part of the narrative when, you know, you really start to feel terrible about this because, um, you know, if you look at bird, uh, what they're doing is, um, important in the world, right? Uh, it's important to have this micro mobility. Consumers love it, but we always knew that this on a unit economics would be one of the, um, hardest businesses to actually make work. And I'm trying to find the, is it bird global? The name of the, is the name of the, the actual company. So they went out on a SPAC at $10, right? Like the SPACs do. And now they're

SPEAKER_04: trading at 71 cents. And also had to lay off 30% of its employees at the beginning of the pandemic.

SPEAKER_119: They let off like 400 people then. Cause it was already, there was already, you know, big trouble.

SPEAKER_66: It sucks. I mean, it sucks. They're there. It really sucks. Uh, and so I, I think the,

SPEAKER_06: this might be one of these businesses. I, and I, again, I don't want to be dunking here and say, I told you so, because I know this is like, people are suffering. A lot of my friends are investors in this business. Uh, Saks was a big investor. Rula from Sequoia was investor. Antonio Gracious was investor. So my friends are all in this. And the Travis, the person who was running this is awesome. And the team is awesome. And the product is awesome. And it's important. So all of that is true. Yeah. I think when we look at this and what the lesson is,

SPEAKER_25: is unit economics are super important. And Mark Suster was actually my good friend, Mark Suster, uh, from upfront ventures was the original investor. And so I've had four friends who were on,

SPEAKER_06: I think all of them on the board and this company was a high flyer. Yeah. Um, and it had the

SPEAKER_27: opportunity probably to sell for multiple billions of dollars to lift Uber, you know, and other folks. And they didn't, uh, and now they're worth 200 million, maybe right now. Um, that company has

SPEAKER_25: had hundreds of millions invested in it and they're worth only 200 million right now. The problem is unit economics. And we all saw the writing on the wall with this, which was, they were saying this was the Uber killer. And I looked at it and I talked to like,

SPEAKER_06: you know, the bill girlies of the world. And, you know, obviously Travis from Uber, not Travis from bird. And, you know, we had like really long discussions about this and thinking about it from first principles. It was like, okay, these things can only operate in certain cities. There is a very finite window where scooters were Santa Monica, Venice, you know,

SPEAKER_123: maybe some parts of San Francisco or Oakland, but maybe not other parts of Oakland. Right. And

SPEAKER_27: certainly doesn't work in the suburbs. It's for one mile rides. It's urban micro my built mobility,

SPEAKER_29: the places that it's like, it's not cost effective to take an Uber. So you just take this thing a mile because it's too far to walk. That's as a tam goes as a bottom up tam exercise. Yes. It's just not

SPEAKER_123: that many. So you really have to do a bottom up tam here. So I always like to include a lesson here in what we can learn from these things. So this is a great part of a bigger company. It's a great part of a transportation company just like bikes are too. But if we go bottom up tam not how many rides are there that are under a mile or two miles. That's what people were telling me, hey, this is why this business can be awesome. Under two mile rides equal this percentage of the rides and it was some incredible number like 50% of rides are under two miles and lifts and Ubers and whatever and taxis. Okay,

SPEAKER_47: now you drill down. Okay, who wants to get on this thing and risk, you know, put a helmet on risk breaking the risk. Okay, so two thirds of users are not interested in physical activity like this, they want to sit in a car and use their phone or make a phone call. They don't want to do a physical activity like this. Then you say which cities will allow it tam gets smaller. Then you say under what weather conditions is possible. It's not working in the freezing cold, it's not working in the snow or the rain. So in Arizona, okay, maybe in Phoenix, you know, or like the dense part of the city, but not in the server part city. So it was a very small market. It was one part of the mix, but they did make their own hardware, which was very good. And they solved so many problems.

SPEAKER_06: So, you know, it's tragic in a way, a lot of effort went into this. And it's just tragic to see this hardware is hard, folks. And then you add hardware to operating in the real world. And it's really difficult. I think the business here, which they had, as part of the business was allowing people to run franchises, and they would power the franchise. So if you wanted to run this in your

SPEAKER_123: town, Molly and create a business, you could rent scooters for, you know, 50 bucks a day, or maybe 25

SPEAKER_06: bucks a day, people use it for the whole day or whatever, it kind of works in that in that way, or for municipalities to do it or for campuses to do it, but it may not work as, you know, a straight up Lyft Uber competitor. And I think that's why Uber and Lyft never really, they, I think Uber had bought jump at one point. And I don't even know if they're operating that, I don't even know if

SPEAKER_01: they're operating that business. Maybe they still have the bikes, but I'm not sure. I mean,

SPEAKER_04: because the other thing that happened is everything you just said, plus pandemic, people stopped taking any rides, let alone one to two mile rides. And so then you had this sort of like, quintuple rent whammy. And yes, I mean, we don't want to belabor the layoff story. It's heartbreaking to see it sounds like bird was actually a really great place to work. And they handled the layoffs really well. But I think we're now what we're going to start to see in addition to all of the you know, the layoff trackers have been busy, we're now looking at a rising tide of potential ruin. We've talked about a couple of companies that have so little cash in the bank at this point that yeah, it's, it's more dire, but possibly and I we don't know that that is the

SPEAKER_32: case with bird, but it's getting pretty good. Yeah, I mean, it's not looking good.

SPEAKER_27: Here's the thing. Peloton bird, you know, we talked about Buzzfeed, when things correct this violently this quickly, and capital markets turn off, if you haven't cashed up and had a huge amount of cash in the bank, and you're losing money. Oh, my Lord, you got a problem. And this is why I was

SPEAKER_06: always again, you know, this isn't like Uber's got its own challenges, obviously. But the thing I always appreciate about what Uber was doing is they always kept a massive cash reserve, like a massive,

SPEAKER_123: unbelievably, some people said obscene amount of cash on. And yeah, like in a situation like this,

SPEAKER_27: an obscene amount of cash comes in handy. And so I think when you look at Peloton, when you look at Buzzfeed, and you look at what's happening with bird, the cash shortfall is gonna be the problem, they're not gonna have the time in some cases, we'll see to figure this out. And I think they get bought. I think they'll just be part of a bigger thing. So I think so too.

SPEAKER_04: Now, you know, they really should. Actually, I was just thinking about how those jerks at Apple are just going to win all over again, they're going to win and win and win because everything is gonna

SPEAKER_69: get so cheap. And they're sitting on $200 billion of cash. And they're just going to be scooping

SPEAKER_06: stuff up left. Yeah. Well, I mean, if we think about Peloton, I wonder if there's an existing gym company that actually has a lot of seriously. Yeah, like there might be like another company that like

SPEAKER_13: an orange theory or, you know, what's the one that's super expensive that all the stars of the sea,

SPEAKER_47: Mary's boot camp. Oh, you're talking about not cybex equipment. There's a ton of these. But I'm thinking there might be like a Nike or something that looks at this, you know, some global brand

SPEAKER_123: and says, you know, Nike should own Peloton. Oh, my God, you can buy Peloton equinox. I was

SPEAKER_04: thinking of equinox. Yeah, you know, what should buy Peloton actually is like Bonvoy,

SPEAKER_157: like a hotel chain. Absolutely put that in every hotel. Yeah, if you stay in the hotel, you get your

SPEAKER_47: year's membership paid for free, right? It comes for free with it. Yeah. So these things that can't be standalone businesses, that'll be another trend. We'll see Molly is things that can't stand on their own, will be absorbed and become a feature of other products. And that's, that's what we're seeing here. I think BuzzFeed, you know, at this point, bus Vox should just buy BuzzFeed, right? Instead of Vox going public, maybe they just, you know, in a way do a hostile takeover of BuzzFeed and now they're

SPEAKER_06: public. And that would be a way for them to backdoor into going public and have the shell of it. And, you know, just start, I mean, it's only worth 300 million. If they just started buying

SPEAKER_156: shares on the open market, Marriott, not buying. Yeah. Bonvoy is what they own. Marriott has a 56 billion dollar market cap. Sure. Nick is checking on the cash reserves. What does Peloton have then?

Jason Calacanis: Yeah. It was a good idea. He's looking, he's looking, right? Because I was actually one of the hotels, uh, I stayed in one of the hotels I stayed in, in Miami had a, had one Peloton. Yeah. And I

SPEAKER_04: told our producer, Justin, who is a Peloton fiend. I was like, dude, you should come to this hotel. They've got a Peloton, but I was thinking like, man, if they had Peloton and every like fancy hotel situation, I was in, um, Peloton market cap is 4.1 billion. So if Marriott has the cash reserves

SPEAKER_06: or Weston, totally do it. You know, here's the thing. I, um, I was at, uh, the proper hotel. Uh, sometimes I stay there when I'm in Austin, uh, and the proper hotel had a tonal machine. I have a tonal

SPEAKER_47: machine. Oh yeah. You open up the total machine. It says open your app and scan this. So I guess they put it in hotel mode and there's a little QR code. I scan it. The machine's welcome, Jason.

SPEAKER_52: Here's all your information. And then when I stopped working out, it's like logging you out in 90 seconds, click here to not log out. And so it automatically logs you out. So you don't have to

SPEAKER_137: worry about somebody, you know, using your account. See, that's what I'm talking about. That would be

SPEAKER_174: amazing. Yeah. So there's some ideas for you. Anyway, there you go. Listen right now, capital

SPEAKER_61: efficiency and extending your runway is more important than ever. So how are you going to do that? Well, one easy way is to cut costs and run all of your SaaS apps on one platform. And for that, you need to check out Odoo's amazing suite of business apps. It's going to save you so much time and so much money. Using Odoo means you won't have a bunch of different SaaS subscriptions to manage and all that money. Your credit card bill comes every month. You're in shock. Everything you need is already on Odoo. And all you have to do is turn it on when you're ready. And Odoo will only charge you for the apps that you actually use. Odoo has over 40 main apps and over 16,000 in their open source community. I'm talking sales, accounting, marketing, automation, HR, website builders, and so much more. And this will streamline your business perfectly, AKA no more transferring data back and forth from all these disparate products and services that you use. And you'll have one customer support contact across all of your apps, not 20. And the best part? Well, first app is free forever. They're gonna give you $1,000 right now off your first implementation pack. That's right, you're gonna go to odoo.com slash twist and get $1,000 off. What a generous offer. That's odoo.com slash twist.

SPEAKER_178: All right. Speaking of ideas that apparently are being picked up by the market, like in real time,

SPEAKER_156: Jane Wong from who's a tech writer followed by protocol breaks a lot of stories about Twitter

SPEAKER_183: has reported on Twitter, that Twitter is working on what she does is she is she looks at all the code Molly. And when she finds things in the code, she reports on things in Twitter's code or the API that

SPEAKER_06: could be indicative of future hardware products or future product releases, just like people will look at iOS for indications of what's to come, you know, like little Easter eggs. So she does that,

SPEAKER_47: but I'm not sure who she works for. I think she's independent. Yeah, seems to be. But she has a history of breaking everything like she finds all the nuggets. So what did you find this? Well, she has see, she

SPEAKER_29: seems to have found a nugget that suggests that Twitter is a need working on custom timelines driven

SPEAKER_04: by custom algorithms that are viewable to the users possibly opening up I'm reading from the tweet, the timeline curation, aka the algorithm to third party developers. So in theory, this would be like maybe Twitter creates at first a bunch of custom timelines. Do you want only politics? Do you want no politics? Do you want celebrity news? Do you want all depth heard all the time? That kind of thing. But in the future, maybe you could be like, I only want to get the Peloton feed or the venture capital

SPEAKER_49: feed as curated by J Cal or whatever it is, or the climate tech feed. You know, you could also do really

SPEAKER_06: interesting. Well, here's an interesting idea for a feed. I want feeds that I want to feed of the most

SPEAKER_47: interesting political discussions by people using the least charged language. Right? Right. So I'm trying to get to intellectually interesting. So I want the political discussions. And news discussions. I want news

SPEAKER_52: discussions, global news discussions by people who have the highest reading level, I'm sorry, the highest

SPEAKER_47: verbal ability. So instead of people writing fragments of sentences, and using an eighth grade level or a

SPEAKER_00: fifth grade level, I want to be we're writing on a 12th grade level, and who are writing intelligent things. And you know, I'm not saying that algorithm works. But if you have but it's an algorithm, it's a

Jason Calacanis: It's a start 100% somebody's gonna figure it out their linguistics professors who can like literally

SPEAKER_04: create a heat index of the the the emotional temperature behind a tweet so that even if the vocabulary level is high, there might still be a lot of heat in the tweet. Like I'm thinking Glenn Greenwald, for example, very, very smart. Hella heated. Sometimes maybe you want that? Yeah, most maybe you want that? Or maybe you don't? Maybe you literally have a heat index for your tweets? Like I would like to filter my news by low heat.

SPEAKER_06: I want the most passionate and highest reading level, you know, highest verbal ability, you know, I want the most concise. Yeah, I want the ones by people who are followed by I want the political

SPEAKER_27: discussion of people followed by politicians. Okay, that's interesting. I want ones of people not followed by politics. I don't know, there's there's some vector here, you know, I would like to see what all the people on the right, right? Like I would love to have a feed that was like, here's like the David Sachs, Glenn Greenwald, you know, right side feed. So before I do all in,

SPEAKER_47: I can see what they're seeing, right? I can see what they're geeking out to what is their world look

SPEAKER_06: like, right? I want the Ben Shapiro, you know, David Sachs, Glenn Greenwald, you know, daily wire feed. And I want to just consume that and see what it's about. This is what I did during the whole Trump era. I would listen to a little bit of Ben Shapiro, a little bit of Rachel Maddow, and I listened to him back to back, and they would be covering the same topic. And it was just like, really? Is there this much between the two? And then I would listen to the economist or, you know, at the Times, the New

SPEAKER_66: York Times wasn't as far left. But I would just try to find things in between the two, you know, Lawfare is a good podcast, you know, and I just try to find some things in the middle. So but

SPEAKER_67: everybody's got a different media diet they want. So this is going to be awesome. Could solve a lot

SPEAKER_04: of problems for people. Honestly, that's what I'm sort of waiting to see is I wonder if it'll solve a lot of problems for people. I'm curious to see if that will be the case. I hope so.

SPEAKER_123: Well, it's certainly going to educate people as to the algorithm and give them agency. Right now,

SPEAKER_47: we have zero agency when it comes to the algorithm. There is no choice but to accept the algorithm from tick tock as is Facebook, tick tock, Instagram, I think Facebook and Twitter,

SPEAKER_04: you're allowed to at least do you can change it to logical chronological, which actually is a pretty remarkable experiment. And what I think? Yeah, for sure. What we'll find is an interesting, like real time social experiment and what people actually want versus what they think they want. Because a lot of times they turn on the chronological and they're like, actually, I just want you to give me the most

SPEAKER_32: interesting tweets. And then companies are like, we did all the research. And it turns out that you think is interesting is really bad for you. But yeah, it's interesting.

SPEAKER_209: Here's the thing, what I would like to do, I've thought about a slider for my feed. Yeah,

SPEAKER_06: I would like to have a slider that says make it 50% reverse chronological and 50% best of. And when it's best of put it in a light orange background, some, you know, an orange, you know, rule around it, that's like a bin line, put a little orange line around it. So I know that's like, is, you know, orange to red is how hot the tweet is, but it's from the last 24 hours, or since I was last online. And then the 50% is, you know, reverse chronological. So when I'm scrolling through,

SPEAKER_67: I'm getting the most recent combined with, you know, the most trending, that's the feed I'm

SPEAKER_75: looking for. Yeah, it's like, but I want to, I want to control. I love a slider too. So because I

SPEAKER_01: want to, I want to alter it in real time, right? I want to be like, Twitter is really making me mad today. It'll lower the heat. Just like, give me Star Wars. I don't want to hear the heat one,

SPEAKER_212: right? Yeah, anger. Yeah. Or percentage politics, right? Or percentage politics. Exactly. Like I

SPEAKER_04: might, I might actually, there might be days where I take news down. Yes, no more news. It's just,

SPEAKER_29: I'm just like, I can't, right? I'm too upset, whatever it is. Yeah. You know, one of the things

SPEAKER_06: I'm doing is trying to find some content, like masterclass, or I got my masterclass going again,

SPEAKER_66: and I'm going to do some of those 30 day, like courses there. And I do my MIT course where I'm

SPEAKER_27: trying to find things like that, that are, you know, just build my knowledge base, and make me feel enriched. So I'm looking for if people have suggestions from email producers out or just at Jason me on social, I'm looking for things like a playlist of things that will make me smarter, or, you know, like entertainment, educational, edu, edutainment, I'm looking for entertainment, what we use entertainment, I'll get smarter, but it's presented in a way that like this podcast,

SPEAKER_06: hopefully is entertaining in some way. So that's what I'm looking for more because the doom scrolling is not working for me. Like I, the, I realized with this gun stuff and the school shooting, like, I just like, I might be kind of broke my brain. And I was just like, I got to stay off this

SPEAKER_146: news. It's just too, making me too, I don't want to say it, but it's making me depressed.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, I Yes. And almost by design. And it's just not I know, I like, this is so embarrassing. But I'm so grateful that one, I'm so busy here, that I like literally yesterday, I had no time for Twitter, like somebody told me something that was happening on Twitter, that was everybody was talking about. And I was like, Yeah, I don't, I don't know what you're talking about. Thank God. And then second, I installed Candy Crush. Because during those rando 20 minutes, when I might be tempted to look at Twitter, I'm now setting a timer. Yeah. And I'm

SPEAKER_221: playing Candy Crush. Well, I mean, if you like an old brain is like, you're a boomer, you're

SPEAKER_13: officially turning into like, you're like turning into Auntie Molly. It's fine. Auntie, when it gets

SPEAKER_09: too hard, I uninstall it. And then I put a new impression. So, you know, I play threes or, you

SPEAKER_06: know, I like to play Age of Empires or these kind of like, real time strategy, I like strategy games.

SPEAKER_47: They're good for letting your brain get into a flow state, but without all the, you know, emotional baggage that comes from the game of doom scrolling, which is pretty gross. Listen, one of the hardest things in business is turning a lead into a customer, right? You get that lead, but now you got to close that customer and keeping that customer around for the long term, right? It's a funnel. Do people even know who you are? Did you get that lead? Did you turn them into a customer? And did they stick with you? Well, one of the best ways to do that is by having a seamless customer experience. So you'll save time and provide a tailored experience at scale. Active Campaign helps you automate email marketing, sales pipelines, reporting, follow-up scheduling, notifications, and more. The whole process is dialed in, and it's going to cut out all those tedious manual tasks like moving information around, cutting and pasting, checking for customer replies, and sending emails. You want to have a great process. You want to refine that process and you need a great tool. And that great tool is ActiveCampaign. So start creating personalized

SPEAKER_61: customer experiences and get 10% off your ActiveCampaign subscription today at ActiveCampaign.com slash promo slash twist. That's ActiveCampaign.com slash promo slash twist for 10% off. And most importantly, to let them know that you're a fan of this weekend startups. In our startup of the day

SPEAKER_06: segment, Molly, we all know companies like Microsoft City and Verizon, you know, are always trying to get talented people. But not everybody wants to go to college. And so there should be some new career

SPEAKER_27: pathways. And one of those is apprenticeships. And I've always we invested in one apprenticeship company. I've looked at a lot of them. People are resistant to apprenticeships, they kind of put

SPEAKER_06: them into, like maybe predatory, I'll say like, if they're, if you're paying for an apprenticeship, should you be paying to do work? People look at them as like unpaid internships, that's triggering for people they feel there's an inequity. They're not equitable, I guess is what some people argue could understand that argument, I guess. Although I'm more in the camp of like free will, people should be able to do what they want to do. But I get the counter arguments. But it does seem to me that an apprenticeship is a quick way, or if you call it an unpaid internship, but one with more training involved in it, if there is actual training, and it's not just going to get lattes for people

SPEAKER_66: is a really cool way to, you know, get a career path. So tell us about multiverse.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I mean, I think it also, it's all wonderful. I'm surprised to hear there's that backlash. But I guess I just hadn't paid that much attention. multiverse, however, is a company that's just raised a $220 million Series D at a $1.7 billion valuation to offer tuition free programs in areas like software engineering, digital marketing and data analysis. These are apprenticeships that last 12 to 15 months, they blend on the job training with online education and community, and they're paid. So they're paid apprenticeships at these companies like City, Verizon, Microsoft, and KPMG, according to an unlike something like a massively, you know, what is a massively the online courses, the online courses, move. Yes. Yeah. Unlike some of those, which can have a lower completion rate, because you know, you're sort of doing that on your own time, and you're not doing it as part of a real job. According to multiverse, the software engineering apprenticeship has an 85% completion rate. Wow. And the companies are hoping to develop a pipeline of talent for these in demand digital skills, because it's hard to hire people into these jobs, and also find underrepresented talent that isn't surfaced in the typical university path, you may have people who aren't getting into college, or just don't test well, or all of the things that might or can't afford it, right, all the things that might keep somebody out of university. But you might still have a really

SPEAKER_15: great engineer on your hands. Yeah, it's, you know, if they're paying people to come to the apprenticeship. Well, then it's, yeah, how could you complain about that, even if they were paying the

SPEAKER_47: minimum wage, you're at least getting paid for your time, and they're teaching you. So that is kind

SPEAKER_25: of the holy grail. Now, of course, I wonder the devils in the details here, I wonder what you need to have in order to get one of these apprenticeships, it does seem to me, you're going to have to have some

SPEAKER_47: aptitude. I don't know that if you're not, you know, a top flight, you know, high school student with great math, you're getting into developer apprenticeship. If you don't have great English and verbal ability, I doubt you're getting that marketing one, digital marketing, if you are not great with logic, physics, math, science, I don't know, you're getting the data analysis one. So,

SPEAKER_244: you know, this there, there could be, I would assume it's not yet, it's not for people

SPEAKER_04: starting at zero, right? It's like, maybe you had a great high school experience, but you don't want to go to college, or you can't afford it, or, you know, who knows what all the reasons are that that might not work out. And you could, you know, young and bankrupt, and our noted gang is like, college doesn't pay you and charges $200,000 for the piece of paper. Maybe you could just do this

SPEAKER_49: instead. I mean, this is great. Like, we've been talking about this at the government level forever.

SPEAKER_27: Yes. Here's the thing, there are careers that pay incredibly well. And those careers, should be ones that were willing to give loans or companies should defer. And then there's our, there are degrees which seem like luxurious pursuits, that maybe have no career opportunity

SPEAKER_06: directly associated with them. And I think that's where, again, a very nuanced discussion about loans

SPEAKER_00: and about fairness, equity, yada, yada, all this stuff. Let's just take a very pragmatic look at this. Does the degree get you a job? How much does the degree cost? How much does the job pay?

SPEAKER_27: That's like the beginning and the end of this. Anything beyond, you know, a four year pursue, two year degree, four year degree, six year degree, whatever you wind up doing, if it doesn't actually result in a job, you better have your antennae up when you look at that cost. Yep. Or else you are going to get buried with loans that you have no hope of paying, being, you know, a retail worker, or, you know, whatever it is, and you have to do some hard pivot.

SPEAKER_04: And I love this focus on this is about outcomes. Yeah, like, get paid to learn the thing that you want to do, has always been sort of the, the holy grail and the opposite of college, whatever you want to say about the college experience at some high level in terms of your like life experience and your

SPEAKER_261: blah, blah, blah. Producers gave us the for the digital marketing job. It says you have to have

SPEAKER_06: the right to work in the US undertake any other work to not undertake any other work or schooling during the apprenticeship, you got to be focused. Okay, you have to demonstrate interest in coding through personal academic or professional projects. Okay, there you go. So you have to have shown some aptitude here. Yeah. Like demonstrated interest, I think being for the software engineering one. Yeah, the software engineering one, I think you have to have written code yourself. So right,

SPEAKER_66: you probably have to go spend six months on your own exploring, you know, YouTube videos, whatever.

SPEAKER_01: And or maybe it took some coding in high school, which a lot of them. Correct. So they have it

SPEAKER_06: folks pretty cool. The on the issue of internships, just to fill you in. Unpaid internships are considered

SPEAKER_27: very polarizing because and I did see this experience and I and to be honest, I was on the other end of it. I needed to make money in the summer. Because I had to pay for my college for the past year, I was in arrears, I was I owed for to money, I was in debt and had to work that whole summer,

SPEAKER_06: 6070 hours a week, three different jobs, no vacation, zero days off zero spending to just pay off last year's tuition. So that I could get the bursar to let me sign up for new classes in September or late August. And so when you've got rich parents, you can take a free internship at Condé Nast, it actually pissed me off. I was jealous, I felt the world was unfair, put a fire in my belly, you know, and you know, I took it out on, you know, everybody by just, you

SPEAKER_67: know, becoming really good at my job, and then dunking on these weak, privileged kids, and then starting my own magazine and hiring him to come work for me and then torturing them. You know, on the regular.

SPEAKER_04: It's like, you know, it's a long game. He's playing people as a long, vicious game here.

SPEAKER_271: But that was how I basically, you know, took it out on people. But you know,

SPEAKER_27: so now there's been a movement that no unpaid internships, but now there's also, you know,

SPEAKER_00: having been an employer, I don't want to do internships, because internships are a drain on everybody's productivity, you have to pay somebody to learn, you know, somebody important, you know, like, if I had an intern here, and they had to work with you, they're going to screw up your

SPEAKER_27: life, Molly, like, you're gonna be like, Why do I have to do this? Because like, and the only time I do it, I you know, sorry, sorry, slash not sorry, I do it as a favor, man. I do it for friends of mine's kids. Is the world not fair? Am I doing a favor bank? Heck, yes, I am. I got three daughters, but I'd be able to call those favors in. So I will literally tell my friends if your kid needs an internship, let me know, I'll give them a 10 week internship, and I pay them. And it's such a net loss for me in the short term, because it's going to take somebody else's time up, you know, on my team. And I have to pay because if you don't pay, even though these kids don't need it, it creates a weird dynamic that they're doing free work, and you can get sued. So they, they're basically becoming illegal to do these free internships. So now internships are kind of going away.

SPEAKER_04: I would rather say apprenticeships than internships. I think that, you know, it makes a lot of sense in a company of the size where you can actually afford the resources, because like, listen, for a small company, yes, it is a resource trained to have an intern. It just is. I was thinking the other day, I was like, I need to find an assistant. Like, maybe I can get an assistant who wants to like, learn about something that I've done and did it. And then they'll also help me with just like the house, you know, I was like, brainstorming ways to, yeah. And then I was just like, I can't know, I'm gonna have to teach this idiot stuff. Like, I don't have time for that.

SPEAKER_278: Well, I mean, like, it seems so great to, you know, like, well, I could be a mentor to someone.

SPEAKER_162: Now there's no time. They used to call it there was a sexist term for it in business. Uh, it used to be called like a Friday girl or a girl Friday.

SPEAKER_47: Basically, you would if you had a small business, like a little construction company,

SPEAKER_06: you know, you have a plumber, you would have some lady come up for Friday and be an office manager. And it was like a specific type of, but I remember it was like a Friday, a girl Friday or something. And it was just like somebody to come once a week, just to clean up the mess. Girl Friday, was that it? Yeah. Um, and so that's like a personal assistant or an office manager, but for one or two days a week. And, uh, that typically worked, you know, in the, in the mix of women going back into the workforce, but not being wanting to work full time. So this is like a, a remnant of the fifties, sixties and seventies, uh, totally Friday. I need that.

SPEAKER_09: I need a girl Friday. I need a 1950s girl Friday. You need a non

SPEAKER_287: We'll smoke cigarettes and drink martinis together. You need a Friday person. Exactly.

SPEAKER_288: Yeah. Speaking of ladies, I have chosen. I love, I actually want to combine these next two stories

SPEAKER_04: into a little quick hit because you know what a freaking finance nerd I am. Yeah. And I think these are both big trends. So two headlines that are related. One, according to CoinDesk sources,

SPEAKER_01: Citadel securities, which has been the target of like the retail investor, uh, meme apes. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: And GameStop and AMC investors, um, is now building, right? That's Ken, that's Ken Griffin. Exactly.

SPEAKER_119: Like he's like enemy number one for the, of the redditors. He bought the constitution just to like,

SPEAKER_27: do, he puts the plus one dollar just to screw with the Dow. Exactly. He likes to poke the tiger.

SPEAKER_293: That guy. Yeah. I love that. They're now starting a crypto village trading marketplace. What?

SPEAKER_297: What? Yup. Yeah. Wow. This is the guy, Ken Griffin, crypto skeptic, so much so that at one point he said that crypto was a quote, jihadist call against the US dollar. I love it. He is of course also

SPEAKER_04: the one who outbid the constitution Dow for that copy of the constitution. He said, uh, let's see the,

SPEAKER_01: and then CoinDesk is reporting quote, the current crypto market structure is deficient and inhibits wider adoption from a lot of investors, which is what Citadel securities trading consortium

SPEAKER_04: is addressing. Earlier this year, Sequoia and crypto VC firm Paradigm invested 1.15 billion

Jason Calacanis: dollars in Citadel. Got it. Both of them also invested in the institutional focused crypto exchange FTX. So this represents an institutional takeover of this, of the crypto exchange part of this,

SPEAKER_04: which is something that we keep talking about, right? Like everything, all the money in crypto seems to be in exchanges and not products and value creation on product. And then on the other hand, so that's as one example of institutions coming for upstarts. And then the other potentially is SEC chair, Gary Gensler, hinting that there might be some big overhauls coming to retail investing specifically around this idea of payment for order flow, which of course, as we know, is the business model that has enabled Robin hood. And then every copycat sends up to it, including like Schwab to offer free trades. Yep. And so the SEC is making some noises about the idea that that may, that payment for order flow may present a number of conflicts of interest and that there may need to be more transparency for retail investors. He does note, and this is important right now, there is not a level playing field among different parts of the market wholesalers, dark pools and lit exchanges. That's true. But it also feels like some of the I would imagine that in there in corners of Wall Street bets right now, this is being interpreted as a crackdown on retail investing, which has been disruptive to the broader market.

SPEAKER_06: Okay. So let's do the first one first. Yeah. Getting into crypto in 2022. As it's crashing, I mean,

SPEAKER_00: is buying into the ultimate by the dip? It's either the ultimate by the dip or like,

SPEAKER_52: I'm going to catch all the knives. Like, yeah, really is isn't Coinbase, like, got serious challenges right now. And so Citadel wants to literally stand under like, you know, when like you unload a dump truck and all the stuff comes flying out of the back. Like Ken Griffith is like literally somebody put all their knives in there. They opened up the dump truck and he's standing there at the back, like, I'll catch every knife. It's like, I don't, I don't know, you can catch all these knives,

SPEAKER_199: can like, or, or I mean, yes, yes, or he wants to deliver the death blow. Like he wants to bring

SPEAKER_01: the machete to Coinbase. Yeah, maybe I don't, right? Like, I don't know. I mean, Citadel,

SPEAKER_104: like the guy who would buy the constitution for a dollar more than the Dow just to be like double

SPEAKER_317: barrel finance. He's like, he's like, he's literally like Heath Ledger's Joker. Like he really,

Jason Calacanis: I could imagine him taking that $1 billion and just being like, I'm putting Coinbase down.

SPEAKER_227: I'm putting that dog down. If you're good at something, Molly, never do it for free. Never do it. If I'm going to cause chaos in the crypto market,

SPEAKER_98: you damn sure I'm going to get paid. He's like, you know what? I broke the global economy once and I'll do it again. Nick, by the way, producer Nick, unironically loves Ken Griffin. This is exactly

SPEAKER_06: the kind of energy that producer Nick is here for. Yeah. So, you know, if here's the thing about crypto right now, um, as we're, we were just talking about bird, we talked yesterday, uh, about, uh, Buzzfeed, uh, and we talked two weeks ago about Peloton, right? We're having this ongoing discussion about what is a viable concern going forward. Well, when these shakeouts occur, you quickly learn what's not working. Like these things are seriously broken and some of them will have the risk of ruin or there'll be features or there'll be, you know, business lines of bigger

SPEAKER_47: companies. And, but if you, if you don't die during a downturn, then by definition, you deserve to exist. So if you survive, you know, like this crazy nuclear winter, you're going to be so strong. You're going to be like a shark or a crocodile or a cockroach, you know, the animals that make it through

SPEAKER_06: to the other side. When we have these cataclysmic events, like sharks have been here for a long time, alligators, you know, uh, cockroaches, these things have, have, have made their way across many different cycles. If you make it to the other side, you know, you're, you're, you're good, uh, by definition. So what is going to make it through this long, cold, you know, winter when all the food goes away and there's no free money, there's, you know, there's no fruit and leaves on the trees. And, you know, there'll be, there'll be some things in crypto that actually make it to the other side, right? And for sure, maybe that's his thesis, or maybe you had this thesis underway.

SPEAKER_47: Yeah, that's what it is. They had this thesis underway in the upmarket and they're still executing.

SPEAKER_66: So he didn't just pop this idea out when they raised that money from Sequoia and Paradigm, um, that billion dollars, this, that was the plan. So when they did that earlier this year, that means they were probably doing it six months before that. So yeah, that's what's going on here.

SPEAKER_114: Uh, I, I got all excited while you're talking, thinking about how, if you want to survive a siege, you want to be in a literal citadel, like a big,

David Friedberg: What's the difference between a citadel and a keep? Is that the same thing? I don't know. A castle, a citadel, a keep, you know, you know,

SPEAKER_331: between a citadel. Lord of the ring nerds. Get, get, get in here, Lord of the ring nerds.

SPEAKER_333: I know there is a nodey nerd here who can tell us what is going on. There definitely is. Oh my God.

SPEAKER_49: Come on nerdies. I just came across a, like a writing forum that's like, I'm working on a fantasy

SPEAKER_01: novel set in a non-terran world. And I need to know the right language. Do I want castle,

SPEAKER_335: keep, citadel or fortress? Okay. Okay. I'm off the rails. I'm off the rails. No, I, uh,

SPEAKER_212: what about the sec? Oh yeah. Yeah. Okay. Anyway. Uh, so then going on to pay for order flow. Yes.

SPEAKER_04: SEC, uh, actually trying to create a fair playing field spurred by Robin hood and trades like that, or are they trying to like shut down this pesky retail trading situation? So it does seem to me

SPEAKER_337: that, um, more disclosure here would be better. Always more. I'm always in favor of more disclosure.

SPEAKER_47: So if you, uh, chose to, I'll, I'll leave out the name of the companies that do this since I own shares in one of them, Robin hood. So to just make this like more generically, should people be able

SPEAKER_27: to do payment for order flow? In other words, should people be able to have this data front run the market? Should consumers be able to trade the fact that they're buying shares to get free trades? Seems to me consumers should be able to make that decision for themselves. If they want,

SPEAKER_47: if they're, if you're holding the stock forever and you're paying a fraction of a penny difference in a share, or somebody is looking for data to make big trends based on the retail market, you're making independent decisions. Does it matter to you? It probably doesn't.

SPEAKER_06: Right. But you should, does it, but you should know, right. And so how do you let people know this?

SPEAKER_47: Um, and I think it's just, you know, listen, people, you know, we are selling your data to other firms. So they know your trades. They know everybody's trades. Uh, and that's why it's free. And here is the opportunity to pay $29 a month to get 10 trades a month. And then after that, it's $3 a trade. So you just have a choice, which is what I've always felt about Facebook as well. I feel consumers should have the right to use Facebook, not use Facebook, but if they do choose to use Facebook, the higher order, uh, you know, offering should be, would you like to pay $7.99 a month for Facebook with no ads and no tracking? Or would you like to have it free? And we're going to sell your information down to the articles you read, you know, and the web pages you go to and your time on site and who your friends are to advertisers in aggregate so they can target ads to you, you pick, right? Right. So it's, it should be a, you should know.

SPEAKER_04: I think you should know. Yes. Right. Like you can only pick if you know, what is also interesting is that Gensler and the SEC aren't necessarily calling for an actual ban. They're talking about this kind of interesting, uh, middle ground, possibly creating an order by order auction mechanism to help retail traders get the best price possible. So to mitigate the potential conflict of interest built into the arrangement, which I like, this is like one of those times where I feel like the SEC might be working toward a good solution to, um, to what is a real issue,

SPEAKER_06: the transparency specifically. I mean, this all has to do with high frequency trading. Um, what was that book flash boys or flash trades, whatever it was the Michael, um,

SPEAKER_124: I think it's flash boys. Yeah. About Brad Katsuyama. I've talked to him by the way. Great interview.

SPEAKER_04: So smart. No, no, no. Brad Katsuyama is the guy who's building IEX, which is the

SPEAKER_32: exchange that was supposed to mitigate for the high frequency trading. Yeah. It's a speed bump. It's got a speed bump built into every trade. So, you know, I always felt the high frequency

SPEAKER_261: trading thing was flash boys. Yeah. I felt that that felt to me like unfair, um, that because

SPEAKER_06: somebody put their server closer to the other server, paid for a fiber line, upgraded their fiber line. Like it just felt icky. Um, it feels to me like the stuff should be more transparent and people shouldn't be able to get that edge. It would be like there, I'm trying to think of the analogy

SPEAKER_47: in gambling or sports. Like, I don't think somebody should get like a little edge in a basketball game that they know who you're running the play for, you know, or, you know, whatever it is. Like, so it just

SPEAKER_06: felt like icky to me. I like the idea of there being like auctions and tracking, just like with shorting of stocks. My understanding of the shorting is nobody has to disclose who's shorting, the big positions, whatever. But you know, if you if you own stock in a company, you have a certain percentage of it, you do need to, you know, if you're an employee, say, if you're selling or not, like that kind of stuff. Yeah, I feel like shorts over a certain percentage should need to be listed. So should

SPEAKER_29: have to this but that makes a ton of sense. Because shorting can be shorting can be a great check and balance in the market where others do not exist, but it should be more transparent. And the reason

SPEAKER_47: should be everything. Well, if you're if you're shorting, and you've got a big position, and nobody knows it's you, and then you're doing like gnarly memes or bot armies, like,

SPEAKER_27: you should own you should own your short, like, it'd be good to know, if Bill Gates does have a billion dollar short on Tesla, I kind of want to know that. So when I see him on TV, and he's talking bull, like, exactly, what is his position here? Now, if he had a million dollar short, like,

SPEAKER_123: does it matter? Or $100,000 short, maybe under $1 million shorts don't matter, right? But over 10 million or over a million, you know, or over 10 million or over x percentage of the stock, or or the top 100 shorts, whatever it is, come up with something because how is that not manipulation?

SPEAKER_66: It is, it should be disclosed. And that's why some people who take these short positions as like,

SPEAKER_06: you know, is the is the reason that like the reason they're running their companies, they come out and say, we're shorting Herbalife. Here's our slide deck of why we think this whole thing is a scam. We went we did the training. It's a multi level marketing thing. None of this stuff exists. We went to like, when that guy shorted Herbalife, and I think he got barbecued on it. Yeah, he like,

SPEAKER_27: they I don't know if you ever saw that deck in the presentation, like, he was finding like Herbalife in the back of like, this deli was the address for the Herbalife thing. And they were running it out of the back of the deli. But there was nobody ever there. And it was like, they did this with like,

SPEAKER_06: 20 of them, they couldn't find all the affiliates. So people were the affiliates were doing all kinds of weird stuff. But they were still had good sales. It might have been sloppy or even, you know, smarmy, but it was still working. Alright, as we wrap here, little media meta media meditation. Yeah, I guess we have two things we can talk about my hit on Megan Kelly, or your tweet storm

SPEAKER_124: about ownership. Why don't we start with yours? Yeah, sure. And we can do it. That's up to you.

SPEAKER_360: We're right here. We're right here. This is the end of the show, folks,

SPEAKER_04: we're gonna get through these two things. Yeah, we are. Let's talk about Megan Kelly. Let's go there. Because I feel like what I feel like you had an interesting, I mean, for one thing, you had a really interesting hit, but also you had a like, front row seat to this thing that we've been talking about, which is the incentives and media that are making people get

SPEAKER_364: potentially more and more extreme as they go independent. Yeah, so you got ambushed a little

SPEAKER_00: bit. I don't feel like I got ambushed. I went in knowing Megan Kelly was

SPEAKER_47: I didn't know she was like full. And I don't I still don't know if she's full like alt right or whatever. But she seems to be like, I guess down that in that Tucker zone, which is, I would say, far right for entertainment persons bar entertainment. Yeah, absolutely. But I know that she was doing like, YouTube. And so I was like, Okay, Sax is doing it. I recognize the name. I know she had this huge contract, I think with NBC at some point. So to be honest, I didn't think it through. Um, Sax was doing it. He asked me to do it. I was like, Okay, fine. It should be an interesting adventure. Um, yeah, somebody here and saying in the comments and prophecy Megan is like Tucker light. Okay, fine. Right. So maybe she's just that's fair. That's fair, probably. So I didn't go in with a lot of expectations. But at some point, we get to and it was on the eve of the Chesa Boudin recall, which I was not a supporter financially. And I didn't start the recall

SPEAKER_06: movement. I did a random act of journalism where I hired a journalist, uh, where I did a GoFundMe. I put in $500. The rest of the community in San Francisco put in $60,000 or so we gave it to a woman named Susan Reynolds who covers crime. And I said, this is exclusively to do feature stories on victims. Will you agree to that? She agreed to that. We gave her the money. I didn't make any money off it. I just passed it through got some insurance. And that was it. I thought this would be an interesting experiment for me. So I'm associated with it. And I don't live in San Francisco anymore. I live in the wider Bay Area, but I do have a property there. Um, and so I do have some sort of vested interest in the future of the city. So we talked about that. And for those of you don't know, Justin Putin got recalled. Um, San Francisco is 6% Republican, but somehow those Republicans figured out how to get like 65% of the recall votes. So this massive Republican GOP wave, or maybe they did 10 votes each. I don't know what these GOP right fingers are doing in San Francisco, but somehow

SPEAKER_38: they figured out the, I think there was like four Republican billionaires in San Francisco and I'm friends with two of them. Something like that. And they all went for this campaign big time.

SPEAKER_06: Well, I mean, it's a, you know, they were doing it maybe for, you know, more sinister dunking reasons, but the people of San Francisco had enough of the experiment of not, um, prosecuting

SPEAKER_66: violent crime. And that's basically what it comes down to. People had enough of it. Um, it was a little too far, even for the, the thing. So we talked about that. It was fine.

SPEAKER_67: Um, oh my God, Megan had a $69 million contract from NBC. Oh my God. Ooh, if that's true. Really?

SPEAKER_29: So, um, at some point. Great. Super complimentary to you. I understand. I did not. What's that only I, it started out great. It sounds like it was, she was super complimentary.

SPEAKER_271: It was fine. Yes. Cause I think she saw me as an ally, uh, for dunking on the left,

SPEAKER_123: but most people think I'm on the left. So here I am in my no man's land. I'm just like, I have no home.

SPEAKER_27: I am literally a Ronin with no political party. I got my own wacky views of the world, you know, and people are claiming me for one party or putting me in the other, depending on their party.

SPEAKER_123: So then she gets into this gun control thing and she's like, and by the way, the left is using this gun thing to show, blah, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, they're even miss taking the, you know,

SPEAKER_27: what is a mass shooting? And I was like, well, that's interesting. Like, what is a mass shooting? Just like, you know, so I thought that was like a pretty, cause you know how I am about

SPEAKER_123: these topics. I like to problem solve. I'm the problem solver in the relationship. So I immediately go to problem solving. I'm like, okay, if the problem is the definition of mass shootings, let's all get consensus on that. So I'm looking online. I see the FBI USA Today,

SPEAKER_27: victim rights group. Everybody says four is the number for mass. And she, so I asked her like, what I think is a very straightforward question, you know, um, Megan, how many people have to be

SPEAKER_52: killed or shot in order for you to consider a mass shooting? And this like trigger warning, she lose, starts to lose her cool. And I was like, oh, I've seen this before. When I had the Palmer Luckey interview, I asked them three times, how, why were you fired from Facebook? So here we are again, this person is like, and she asked this like bizarrely convoluted

SPEAKER_04: question. Um, that really wasn't seem to be saying that Democrats were calling all shootings, mass shootings unfairly so that they could justify taking away guns and avoid their record on crime,

SPEAKER_29: which was the, that's the shortest possible version. Exactly. And then Jason's like, whoa, whoa, whoa. How many people need to be shot for it to be considered a mass shooting? And then we got

SPEAKER_199: to the all caps, all caps. I'm the interviewer. You are not. And then bad words. Yeah. She called me a prick. And then she was like, how about you answer my questions? And like,

SPEAKER_47: yeah, yeah. Uh, I was talking to somebody else who was on our show and they're like, oh, that's what she does. She like warms you up. And then she attacks you like, that's her,

SPEAKER_393: that's her shtick. So I was like, oh my God, this is entertaining. So I'm like smiling and I'm like, oh my God, she's losing her mind. Jake how's loving it. I'm loving it. I was like,

SPEAKER_52: I was also like, wait a second. Is this person a professional? Like, she's like, you don't even know me and you may be number 26 in the rankings. And I'm like, oh my Lord. So you know what some, it was like a cat, she's a Karen. She went full Republican Karen. So she loses her minds in Starbucks. She starts knocking everything off the counter. She goes full Karen. I step back. I'm like, I don't need to be part of this. I'm like, so everybody starts taking out their phones and

SPEAKER_98: taping Meg and Karen. Um, and, uh, and so of course, full disclosure, I'm like, I can't believe you want to show. And then, you know, like, I'm like, I had the same thought. I'm like,

SPEAKER_01: here I am. I spent the whole morning yesterday from 7am to 10, like making our show better. And he's out here making sure that there are people who are not going to want to come on our show anymore. And I'm like, what is happening here? But I think it's like such an interesting, but then it's this whole question about who you engage with. Yes. Who you, who you quote unquote platform. Why? Like who's acting in good faith out here to bring us information. And this is like one of those cases where I'm like, sorry, but no, she's not, you are. Yes. But does it matter

SPEAKER_199: if you go on this show where the whole show is not in good faith? Okay. Well,

SPEAKER_399: here's the reaction on Twitter. These are me like, I was like, Oh, it's actually like,

SPEAKER_402: I love it. It actually looks like Emperor Palpatine. This is mid Jason, do you want me to upload the clip and I'll play the curb? Oh my God. No,

SPEAKER_406: we'll play the curb clip. No, no, this is funny. Watch this thing. Hold on. No, no, not the whole thing. It's like a 45 seconds. I'll leave it. We'll put it in the show notes.

SPEAKER_06: You guys listen to this, but this is Nick's Nick did this as like a goof to our group chat. Oh, nice. Okay. Yeah. I mean, Sax does look like I like

SPEAKER_52: Palpatine. If somebody could Photoshop Sax with the Palpatine hood and you know, like he looks like Palpatine and I'm like, Oh, I'm like, I'm like, hello there. I'm like, Obi-Wan in this picture. I'm like, Oh,

SPEAKER_209: hello there. So anyway, the, um, there was a big, uh, I kind of, this thing went viral yesterday.

SPEAKER_06: There was a lot of support for me. Uh, and I got a lot of DMS who were like, wow, this is the best moment you've ever had in media. Uh, you know, and it wasn't like a dunking thing. It was, I think

SPEAKER_27: what people saw in that moment was the complete insincerity of her argument. Yes. And some people

SPEAKER_00: thought I was a little rough on her because she demanded that I respond. She said, well, answer

SPEAKER_27: my question and I said, well, I said to her, was there a question? Can you, can you tell me the question? Right. She says, well, I gave you a framework or whatever. I want your reaction to what I said. I said, okay, I'll give you the reaction to what I said. And the first thing that came to my mind was, um, you've just come, uh, you've just, and I can say this, I think on all in or here and there'll be no problem. I think you've conflated a bunch of issues, uh, in a partisan way.

SPEAKER_412: And I probably didn't need to add this last part, but I was in full candid J Cal mode and I said for

SPEAKER_199: ratings. Yeah. And I think all so true that it triggered a volcano. Whoa, that was the game over.

SPEAKER_393: Volcano. And I said, I think you've conflated a lot of, you know, important issues here in a partisan

SPEAKER_52: way. That was like trigger number one. Yeah. Oh yeah. And then I was like, because you're a Karen. And it was because you want ratings. Cause I, that's sincerely what I thought she was doing. That's what I sincerely thought she was doing. Now, was that rude of me as the guest to say that? I don't know. I, if somebody said it to me, I would be able to, in a calm fashion, say, no, it's not for me. Let me, let me, what part did you think was partisan? And if it's convoluted and it's three or four issues, let's take one issue at a time. I'll, I'll put aside the ratings thing.

SPEAKER_27: But if you think it's convoluted, I'll break it down into three parts. Number one, you know, gang shootings of one person is not a mass shooting and handguns are not weapons. And why are we including these statistics in this argument? As you know, this person did,

SPEAKER_123: right? And so if you want to make that argument, we can have that argument, right? And I, I think that's the nuance argument that would have been better, right? I think she's programmed to be

SPEAKER_27: partisan. I think she's programmed to do cliffhangers. And she's still in that, like MSN, whatever, I don't know what network she was on, Fox, NBC, but she's in that network opinion news thing, right? We're at the end of the clip, you know, you're trying to make these hangers so that you can stay tuned through the, you know, whatever, Omaha Steaks commercial, and then we get you back after it. Yeah, which was like,

SPEAKER_428: T's in the biz, the T's, yeah, like the super teases. Yeah. And so I don't think she's actually

SPEAKER_27: got her. And I think she's smart. I mean, I don't know how smart she is, or, but I think she's so in

SPEAKER_123: a certain, like a format. Right? I think the format she uses is completely different than what we do here. Completely different than all in which is similar to what we do here is honest discussion

SPEAKER_06: based on that. Yeah, and completely different than a highly produced NPR piece, where you do a lot of research and you edit it and you you know, you tell a story kind of thing, and it takes two days to produce it. She's doing something completely different. And she's not going to have a nuanced

SPEAKER_52: point by point debate because that doesn't serve her audience. And she picked one side of the audience that side of the audience wants to have a partisan dung fest. And I'm not there for a partisan dung fest. I don't know what site says what I want to have a detailed nuance discussion.

Jason Calacanis: And so I feel like, as much as I was like, I can't believe you went on that show. Why are you trying to ruin my life all the time? Explain to people why this ruins your life,

SPEAKER_98: Cinderella. Because then I get a thing that's like, I can't believe you work for this guy. You got to quit. You got to come work for me. You're like causing harm in the world. Like,

SPEAKER_49: it's like my job to clean it up like Cinderella. Yes. I'm like, hey, I'm not on that other show.

SPEAKER_436: It's Beauty and the Beast would be a better one. They're like, Beauty and the Beast is an excellent one. Exactly. Who goes out and is like, rawr. And if you could just do better, you could turn him

SPEAKER_126: into a normal man instead of a beast. Right? Yes. Yes. Be beating the beast, by the way,

SPEAKER_49: the single most damaging fairy tale that has ever come along for women. So that was the thought I was having. And then you see what happens when because you do have all of these bad faith actors and media on every on you know, and there are extremes on both sides, although the far right

SPEAKER_04: is the most extreme right now. But it is about incentives. It's about staying relevant. It's about engaging and having like a it's really I keep saying like, of course, everybody wants to trigger the libs. It's fun. Libs are the worst. Sometimes I literally feel like in the room, like

SPEAKER_09: the mom, like being a buzzkill about like, well, actually, it's really true, though, that people do get discriminated against in the real world. Right? So what happened really, though,

SPEAKER_49: is that what she's in is a bubble of constant positive reinforcement for everything that she says. And you went in and punctured the bubble. Yeah. Here's what it was actually fascinating to watch.

SPEAKER_66: Yeah, and I did. And to be totally honest, honest, I did not go in there try to dunk on here. I did what

SPEAKER_27: I always do just want to have like a reasonable discussion. Let's, let's get into the facts. Let's problem solve. And that's not what's happened. That's not what happens. That's what's happening there. So it became like a Jon Stewart moment. I don't remember when Jon Stewart, I think was I think there was one where he talked to Jim Cramer, and he became sort of

SPEAKER_06: serious about stuff. Or there was another one where you know, like, you're just kind of being

SPEAKER_27: serious, right? Actually, lo and behold, I became the serious person here who was like, well, how many? So I asked her three times. Yeah. So how many people do you want to play it? Do you

SPEAKER_448: want? Okay, so here, what's the funny one? This is just a funny clip. All right. Now we can just

SPEAKER_449: enjoy. We can enjoy the aftermath before we have to go back to work. How many people do need to die

SPEAKER_450: in a mass shooting for it to be? Why don't you answer my question? Since you're here as the guest?

SPEAKER_453: What was the question? Was there a question? Yeah, I thought we're here to have a dialogue.

SPEAKER_451: Yeah, I'm shooting the point at you. And I'm asking for your reaction. Okay.

SPEAKER_66: Um, I think you're conflating a lot of different issues in a very partisan way to get ratings. That's bull. Don't question my motives. That's this is where you turn.

SPEAKER_455: You asked me what I think. That's what I said. That's what I think. I think you're

SPEAKER_460: complaining a lot of issues here. I think we need to have a realistic discussion about gun control in this country. No, no, no, let me just stop. I'm giving you my honest analysis. And for you to say that I

SPEAKER_465: am misleading the audience for ratings is a prick thing to say. You don't know me. All right. I've made my name. I've made my business based on honest journalism. I realize you may be number 26 worldwide, but you've never done real journalism at the level I have in your life. So I don't need

SPEAKER_459: a lecture from you about ratings. I'm here to deliver honest information to my audience. That's

SPEAKER_468: what I'm doing. Oh, my God. Well played. Well played. Nick. It's too funny. Oh, God. You know

SPEAKER_154: that there's that new like that new emoji. That's like this. That's oh, yeah. When you look at your

SPEAKER_474: fingers, your eyes like yeah, it's like a horror movie. That was too good. Sacks. I'm crying.

SPEAKER_477: Sacks reaction was just so great. Sacks reaction. He's like, yes. I feel like at first he's like

SPEAKER_98: watching it happen like, oh, no, Megan's going down. Oh, my Lord. And then pretty soon he's like,

SPEAKER_479: we are 26 in the world. Boom. Well, I mean, well, and you know, she asked us about, hey,

SPEAKER_47: the pod's done so amazing. I was like, yeah, no, it's crazy. It's like a phenomenon. I can't believe it hit number 26 the other week. So then that was very revealing. You know, when people lose their cool Molly, it becomes very revealing what they say. She that whole time she was interviewing me was thinking how the are these guys 26 and I'm 2600. I'm stuck on Sirius. I am on Sirius channel 273. Yeah, I have 49,000 Twitter followers. J. Cal's got 500,000. I am a professional journalist. This guy's a hack. Yeah. You see how she tried to dismiss me. Yeah, 100%. You have never done

SPEAKER_137: journalism at my level. I've never done. You know me. I ran a magazine. I sold the company for 30 million dollars. I created the number one blog in the world for a period of time. Engadget was the number one blog for like two years. I mean, pretty much changed digital journalism full stop.

SPEAKER_271: Yeah. Come on, man. I'm not trying to get a Pulitzer over here, but you don't have to like

SPEAKER_487: attack me and they show you may be 26, but I blah blah blah. And I was like, okay, somebody needs to

SPEAKER_392: talk to their therapist about this because like, come on, like, really? You're that angry at me?

SPEAKER_489: And maybe listen, maybe it's always like Bill Simmons is number one. And he's just talking about the Celtics game. And why should Bill Simmons be number one? You know, Bill Simmons to be number one. I love

SPEAKER_199: his podcast. You're her. You're her Scott Galloway. Speaking of Scott Galloway. And maybe look,

SPEAKER_01: maybe the show's like that all the time. I don't know. But to me, it seemed like what happened is you got accidentally inside the bubble. I did. You made a good, you made a like a reason you were

SPEAKER_04: like, let's have a real conversation about this. And you had a good one liner that was somewhat

SPEAKER_29: devastating in its, uh, unvarnished truth and bubble burst. Bubble bursting. Uh, all right.

SPEAKER_31: And Kara Swisher is leaving her role as a columnist. And also Kara Swisher is leaving her role as a columnist. And a podcaster at New York Times after, I don't know how long she was there for like a year doing Sway, which was great. Great, great, uh, interview show. Maybe longer. And was an opinion

SPEAKER_49: contributor. I don't know if she still will be doing that, but yeah, is going back to Vox.

SPEAKER_66: Going back to Vox, uh, which walk code, uh, Pivot's been a great success. Uh, she's been doing that with Scott Galloway, professor Colt takes for about four years. Swisher said she became very interested

SPEAKER_25: in owning intellectual property and sharing the benefits of building a business alongside a

SPEAKER_06: partner. So what I would take from that is she has ownership in pivot now. It's not just a paid gig. And they did a conference in the code conference. I think they're going to do one more year of that and end it. So maybe it'll just be like the pivot conference. We'll take that. And she, you know,

SPEAKER_66: she's 60 now, she said, and, um, she looks right for 60, by the way, and great energy.

SPEAKER_47: Uh, you know, when you're 60, Molly, you probably have one more good pushing you to build a brand. And she probably wants to create a legacy here and she wants to own that legacy.

SPEAKER_401: So this is about the New York times, but also, yes. Okay. Yeah. So explain that because you were

SPEAKER_01: there. Totally. Yeah. I mean, I think what's so interesting is that what we're seeing is that legacy

SPEAKER_04: media, uh, such as the New York times, she's leaving for almost all the same reasons that Taylor Lorenz left, which is that the New York times is only interested in having one star in the house. And that star is the New York times. Got it. That they're not interested. And, and, you know, full disclosure, neither is American public media, the parent company and marketplace interested in having their talent own. Right. Even a part, let alone all of the products that they create. Yes. In house. And so what Kara sweat said is not only, uh, is she very interested in owning intellectual property and sharing in the benefits of building a business alongside a partner. She said, these organizations need to start thinking about talent. Yeah. And I, I think

SPEAKER_47: it's just a really, it's a big change. You created, I mean, you've created a number of brands. And when I say created, I'm not saying you, um, co-hosted like I created this week in startups, you co-hosted somebody created marketplace, you co-hosted, but people don't know is make me smarter and correct me if I'm wrong here. Make me smarter. I know for a fact how we survive. You came up with those names and those concepts executed on them. And now the company owns it, which is how it works. If you work for a company,

SPEAKER_06: you, they own your IP, they pay you a salary. You take no risk. They take the risk. Boom. But you did

SPEAKER_04: create the resources and all of that, but I created those two brands. I'm not misspeak. I created, Tom and I created Buzz Out Loud for CNET, which was the first successful, you know, commercially successful podcast. I created the buzz report. I created always on, I even wrote a business plan for it. So what you're seeing in media, like this is the way of work, but in media, like creativity, increasingly I'm realizing that creativity is a product that creates value. And so you're having these legacy media operations have a brain drain because it's because they're disincentivizing us to bring our best ideas to work. At some point after I had argued with the last place enough times about ownership and ID and equity or even freaking bonuses around products, I created inside my own brain and inspired others to execute. Yeah. You get to the point where you're like, okay, I'm not going to bring you my good ideas anymore. I'm going to start my own thing and own them on the side. And I think it's just very interesting in the media landscape that that's what Taylor and Kara and, and all of the creators who have chosen to remain Joe Rogan, right? Like you see people saying, I'm not participating in this thing where I give you my creativity for free because it's a really valuable

SPEAKER_66: product. Yeah. And I think this is kind of a hybrid. So there really is like three models here. You're Joe Rogan, or this week in startups or whatever. You're a solo person, you take all the

SPEAKER_06: risks, you pay the staff, you you own it. And then there's I work for somebody full time, they own my IP, I get, you know, all these, I take no risk, I the if they hire staff, I don't have to pay them and worry about their staff, I don't have to get a second mortgage on my house or whatever, to pay for this endeavor, you know, not knowing if it's going to work or not. But there is something in the middle, there's something increasingly the thing in the middle, you know, could take a couple of different forms here, I'm just taking a guess, I don't have inside information, but bank off did by

SPEAKER_66: Weblogs Inc, which was like kind of the precursor to Vox, you know, um, the verge was based on a gadget, you know, and their video game was based on joystick. And he's giving me credit for that. So

SPEAKER_47: I don't need to belabor it. But um, you know, they are clearly going to give Kara Swisher ownership in this new brand. Mm hmm. And they're going to put up the money to make it. So maybe it's a 5050 partnership, maybe she owns the majority of it. And they aren't or maybe she said to them, Oh, I own it. You get to monetize it for 10 years. And I'm doing a licensing deal with you, which is the deal that Joe Rogan did with Spotify. Joe Rogan still owns all his IP. He just gave exclusive rights to it for

SPEAKER_06: a time period to Spotify. So there's different flavors of this. And people need to realize that

SPEAKER_01: right. And they do, I think legacy media needs to realize that because they've got a big brain drain problem. And they have people choosing to be YouTube creators and Instagram creators and be on

SPEAKER_04: Spotify. And they have every opportunity to make their own podcast and platforms still matter. Like people call you back a lot faster when you're at the New York times than when you're not. Yeah. Um, but I just, I think it's like a big, you're starting to see a big power shift and it's, I think it's great to see, you know, when Taylor does it, she went to the Washington post. So it's going to be all the same issues respectfully as it was in some ways. But when Kara stands up and is like,

SPEAKER_29: no, right? Like I, I have given you my product for free this whole time.

SPEAKER_210: No, not for free. Not for free. You got ownership. I was a paid servant. I was a paid, right. Yes. And maybe, you know, you have to try to benefit in outside ways by like

SPEAKER_114: getting speaking gigs that the New York times never lets you take and all of these other things. And

SPEAKER_52: it's just like exhausting. So good for her. Yeah. I mean, there's, you can make the choice as a content creator. It really is. How much risk do you want to dial up? If you want to take the risk,

SPEAKER_06: you get the reward. If you want to just show up for work for 40 hours a week or whatever number and, you know, just rest, you can take that option too. And then there's everything in between, you know? Yeah. And, uh, so, uh, congratulations, uh, Kara Swisher's making money moves. Great.

SPEAKER_527: Good for her. Making money moves.

SPEAKER_01: Moves. All right. Speaking of which we are supposed to podcast in the morning, they invest in the afternoon and we are well into the afternoon. God, this is a long show, everybody. All right.

SPEAKER_158: Tomorrow we have a little notice. Give a thumbs up. Uh,

SPEAKER_261: if you're watching on YouTube, youtube.com says this weekend. This weekend. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: And then tomorrow to those notice, we'll be back at 9am Pacific with a special guest.

SPEAKER_532: Oh, special guest. Oh, oh, oh, oh. So just, oh, I know you prepared early. You're doing the show without me tomorrow.

SPEAKER_337: Yes, I am. But with a fan favorite guest.

SPEAKER_156: Special guest, empty chair. Just kidding. Fan favorite. Fan favorite.

SPEAKER_535: Fan favorite. Is it a lady boss? It is a lady boss. We got a lady boss. Here we go.

SPEAKER_536: It's going to be a good show. All right. It's going to be a great show. We'll see you all tomorrow. See you then. Bye.

SPEAKER_541: If you are a founder of a pre-Series A company, you haven't raised that Series A yet,

SPEAKER_25: which is really hard. Well, we wanted to invite you to Founder University. This is a two-day intensive course. It takes place on June 13th and 14th. It's remote. It's free. We limit the number of people who can come. We asked you to apply. And this virtual workshop is free for founders and

SPEAKER_27: helps you understand how to fundraise and pitch, how to hire great people, how to build a world-class product, how to execute on your sales and marketing and some growth techniques as well. The launch team and I have been doing this for a long time. It has been amazing for us to get to know founders. And that's why we do it. Of course, we want to help folks as many as possible. That's part of our mandate. But really, our mandate at launch here at This Week in Startups and the Syndicate, which is where we meet and invest in companies, is we want to back builders. And so we use these events as a way to get to know you. And if you're building something and we see you're incredibly building something interesting in the world, well, then we want to invest in you. So truth be told, every time we do Founder University, a half dozen of those people we wind up funding in the next year or so. So it's a great way for us to spend time with entrepreneurs. We're going to be joined by a lot of experts. My friend Becky DeGraw, who's my attorney from Wilson Sincini, will be speaking at the event. Fitbots co-founder Jesse will be speaking. Marlowe's CEO Mary Fox will be speaking. So we get a bunch of our portfolio companies who have been crushing it and who have learned a lot. And we've seen that they are qualified builders. We have them come speak at the event. So you see how we do things here at This Week in Startups and launch and the syndicate. We like to create a flywheel. We invest in people who come out of Founder University, some number of them really crush it and become world class companies. And it's not guaranteed, you have to do the work folks, the ones who do, then we have them speak at a later Founder University. So a lot of the great companies we've met came to a Founder University, they got to know us, they learned something that was worth their time. And that's really what we do with the agenda. We try to make it worth your time to take two days off work. Essentially, now it's remote. So you consider it your weekend, even though it's taking place around the week. You consider it professional development. And if you learn one or two important things about running a company, fundraising, growth, hiring, well, those one or two things will pay for those two days, I am absolutely certain of it. Now you have to apply again. So you can register at Founder University. Yes, it's a great domain. So go to Founder University and sign up. We also have a course called Angel University if you want to invest in the companies and you think the philosophy I've explained here about how I invest in companies and I've invested in over 300 of them. If you think this is an interesting way to meet startups early help them and invest in them. Well, you can read my deal memos as we invest in new companies and you can join us on that adventure. And I do this through a course called Angel University that has raised close to $200,000 for charity and you can sign up for Angel University at angel.university. We do it four times a year. Great program. And it's just me and my partner Mike Savino talking about how we pick companies, how we evaluate them, how we diligence them, how we source them, like Founder University is a source of investment and deal flow for us. And that three or four hour course actually, I think it's more like four or five hours is well worth your time. All the proceeds from Angel University go to charity. And again, over 175,000, I think at this point it's gone to charity. We're very proud of that work. And Founder University is free. But you do have to apply and we do pick people who have built a little bit of something. So we're looking for you to have some skin in the game. We have a Founder University 12 week program, which you can also see at Founder.University. We'll be starting our third cohort shortly. And you can apply for that program. If you have not started building or you're very early stages, haven't incorporated yet, you're nowhere near the Series A, you're kind of in the solo or

SPEAKER_150: co-founder situation and you're just starting to build, maybe, maybe you've incorporated, maybe you have it. And that's a 12 week course. And that's another great one that we do. So please join us, Founder.University. And if you want to invest in these great companies, Angel.University.