SPEAKER_00: today is mollywood's first show as a full-time co-host and we're going to cover a lot of news the web three wars have begun on twitter jack elon balaji chris dixon sacks everybody mixing it up overnight rivian stock has dropped 45 we talk about that from the peak and the future of electric deals plus we talk about what she's going to be doing here at launch as an investor and we're

SPEAKER_02: going to talk about uh how we run the show so welcome to mollywood and let's get started

SPEAKER_03: this week in startups is brought to you by vanta compliance and security shouldn't be a deal

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SPEAKER_06: is not just about technology it's about organizational transformation join more than 45 000 people worldwide who are driving results with data iq visit d-a-t-a-i-k-u dot com so molly is here and um

SPEAKER_08: should be co-host of the show so second decade new co-host here we go ta-da i mean i have to

SPEAKER_12: assume there is someone here who did not know that so like guess what guys guess what and so uh

SPEAKER_17: molly and i have been friends for i'm trying to remember when we first met it must have been

SPEAKER_18: like at cnet or something when i was definitely at cnet i mean it's been 15 years yeah maybe it was

SPEAKER_20: probably when i was running in gadget i could see that in gadget yes in fact i wrote a thing that

SPEAKER_25: annoyed you oh did i and gadget yes oh really i was full contact back then i know we first met in a

SPEAKER_27: very jcal way oh no no and then we put it all together this is literally the story of my life is

SPEAKER_31: people saying we've already met and i'm just like oh no you see my wife is standing next to me she's

SPEAKER_35: just like let's hear it oh i know you didn't give them credit for something or no i called them rumor

SPEAKER_18: blogs i wrote like this poem about apple and in a throwaway sentence i referred to rumor blogs

SPEAKER_08: and then jason was like not having it at that time uh we were like these super underdogs at and gadget just trying to survive and it was really hard because we would not get wrecked i'll tell you why we were so sensitive we would break news and we would go faster than anybody you remember this time

SPEAKER_42: when like stories had to sit for a couple of days get read by two editors fact checked all the stuff and peter rojas was like okay we got a tip from somebody inside of motorola they showed us this we know he works at motorola like they had these inside things and we're going with it you know and i was like great that's our advantage and then it you know then i don't know cnet or who else at the time new york times will street journal walt mossberg would cover the same story but it wouldn't link to

SPEAKER_08: us or worse they would say uh a gadget blog or a tech blog and they wouldn't even say our name and i was just a rumor blog a rumor blog and i was like give us the goddamn link if you were and i what it was was at the time i don't know if you remember this but seo was so precious that everybody knew journalists knew publishers knew and the publishers explicitly told the journalists do

SPEAKER_42: not link to them do not mention them if we have to give them credit we'll say in gadget but do never link to them because we don't want to take our page rank 9 or 10 from the new york times and give

SPEAKER_45: it to lowly and gadget because then they'll beat us in the search rankings but anyway that was a funny

SPEAKER_48: time yeah so you're here you and i have been friends for 15 years and colleagues and we were

SPEAKER_08: talking i don't know it was like two years ago and you said hey i'm thinking i would like to be a venture capitalist how does that work do you remember the conversation maybe we could just give the

SPEAKER_25: audience a little background on how this came to pass i do yeah i mean i started when i went to marketplace tech that was one of the first covered streams i launched which was like let's help people understand how venture capital works it's such a black box for people it's this sort of mysterious mechanism it's like the priesthood that controls all the money and makes all of this magical technology happen what is the deal and then the more what is the deal stories i did the more i was like oh i kind of like this it sort of feels like a little bit like what i do but more direct right boots on the ground with a chance to make an actual impact but it's similar skills it's curiosity it's evaluation it's you know healthy skepticism um but it's also because we came from that world of like products and product reviews and evaluation it's also fundamentally enthusiastic and it's very positive yeah it's a

SPEAKER_39: very good it's very positive you get to get excited about stuff which is you know a great thing anyway

SPEAKER_25: so yeah so then i came and had this conversation and jason was like well everybody comes into the office 50 hours a week in san francisco and i was like oh no that's not gonna work yeah and then

SPEAKER_58: where they went up to that i was so much and then and then you know covet came and fixed everything

SPEAKER_08: and here we are kind of true um yeah i was trying to you know my initial idea was i came to the parties thinking you know all the venture firms i'd seen the advantage was being in the room having this discussion about the startup having the founders come in and sitting around a table with them and

SPEAKER_42: you just couldn't close a deal unless you spent time with founders and what i was taught by the sequoias and you know george zachary from charles river and all my mentors bill gurley and people who came before me was you know it's the amount of time you spend with that founder and the attention you give them is your chances of getting the deal and then also subsequently after you have the deal the chances of success and boy did that go out the window because nobody would meet in person nobody would meet on zoom if you said let's do a go-to meeting venture capital should be like you're not serious

SPEAKER_08: so all that was like interesting but then when covet hit it's really interesting it's made it sort of like online dating where people now go on these like quick dates i hate to use the dating analogy in 2021 um but stick with it for a second like they're like they kind of whip through tinder or i understand

SPEAKER_42: kids go through you know these different apps they pick somebody who's appealing they do a quick chat with them sometimes they go out with them sometimes they might even do more and then they decide if they want to have a relationship so it's almost like this idea that you you know met somebody had a cup of coffee whatever it just seems to have flipped so now it's founders just get on a 20-minute call they're like here's my diligence here's a diligence room here's what we're doing how much are you in for yes or no and uh it's if you told them like let's have a let's go for a walk around you know

SPEAKER_48: the park south park they'd be like are you crazy south park's a park in san francisco for those folks who don't know and typically vcs would go for a walk around the park and then other vcs would look out the window be like i wonder who that person's walking around the park with so that's very

SPEAKER_42: true life has changed it makes it so founders can have three times four times as many meetings

SPEAKER_02: and spend zero dollars traveling and it makes it so venture firms could meet three times as many companies and find better you know founder firm fit and i'm sort of to be clear i am mostly that was

SPEAKER_25: certainly a consideration but what i mean to say is jason and i have been in conversation for a while about how to make this all work and then a whole bunch of things came together all at the same time not least of which is remote work but primarily it was just like this is the moment this is the opportunity and i'm super excited so thank you wow we're super excited thank you because to give you

SPEAKER_08: an idea of my life uh you know the show was this week in startups like singular then twice a week three times a week they keep selling out the ads and i said i wonder if it could be five days a week and now here we are going to january six days a week we're gonna have a sunday show and we sell the yeah

SPEAKER_71: exactly be careful what you signed up for whoa whoa whoa um and i've got bigger plans but i don't

SPEAKER_73: want to scare you on day negative this is basically day negative 10. i'm gonna go ahead and i'm gonna

SPEAKER_25: like sell everybody on this idea that jason like has all this faith in me and really believes and we're gonna have this fun like as yogesh is saying the new segment where jason coaches molly about investing that's all true but let's be honest he needs backup the man needs any backup i mean it's just a self

SPEAKER_08: preservation no it's literally we've been running since the summer under this um constant fear what if jason gets covid what if jason gets sick what if jason goes on a vacation and when i went on vacation to italy this summer i banked a bunch of episodes i decided to stay a couple of an extra week i had to do episodes remote right so uh but episodes are now easier you know people are more likely to be guests because they can do what we're doing right now which is remote so then you probably saw that

SPEAKER_79: was marketplace npr or american or it's marketplace its own company american it's american public media

SPEAKER_25: is the parent company of marketplace and it's a frenemy to npr but everybody thinks they're the same

SPEAKER_81: thing yeah everybody thinks they're the same thing yeah sock two compliance is critically important

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SPEAKER_42: exciting uh about you having an interest in doing this aside from it you know we we have good rapport on air that's like a prerequisite um i'm excited to learn from you and have a different voice on the podcast because you've done a different style of radio than i have a different style of broadcasting than i have i've done this as like let's face it a bit of a hack you know like i was a pioneer in podcasting but i never formally produced shows for public radio or anything like that so i'm really excited about you working with our three producers um and they're super excited to have your

SPEAKER_08: mentorship we're amazing pretty great um yeah we don't use words like amazing like we like to use

SPEAKER_91: words like up and coming or hard working yeah easy on the right got it got it yeah there's that you know

SPEAKER_42: what who i think are going to be fine yeah they're going to be fine yeah uh there's a great um moment

SPEAKER_48: in an anthony bourdain uh documentary rest in peace uh when speaking of broadcasters incredible uh and speaking of hack broadcasters incredible right and somebody told the story you know after they died when they were in this restaurant and they're like because i can't believe how good your

SPEAKER_100: crew is they set this up we're in the restaurant the lighting's perfect everything's great your your producers are on everything they got it was just perfect every step of the way and he goes yeah listening we we only pet the baby when it's sleeping don't give them compliments like we got to keep them on there like hungry and

SPEAKER_48: stuff on their shows tell that to our our team uh but we have a great team and now there's eight people working on the show i think let's see two hosts three producers uh two uh folks in sales that's seven and then our studio director eight so there's eight people we'll add more as we go

SPEAKER_08: but it's becoming quite a phenomenon and so people understand what we're going to do so there's there's

SPEAKER_17: the news program there's interviews and then there's molly learning how to be a venture capitalist

SPEAKER_08: so the way molly and i discussed her kind of day breaking up is hey am we do the show and pm we do investing right and sometimes there'll be things that are different but uh what do you think about interviews molly because i was thinking about this right before we went on air i was like wait a second should we i mean we each obviously know how to do interviews independently and we'll do that but is there some moment in time where we do a joint interview with somebody or does that ever work have you done it before did you and kai uh wrist all do that ever marketplace once a week on make

SPEAKER_18: me smart ah every tuesday we would do a joint interview yeah yeah it is very doable and and i

SPEAKER_25: would also say does not have to be the norm like you don't have to do it every time there are definitely times when you want to but i think there is flexibility and backup to just like see how the sausage is made there's also some backup and being able to split up those duties and you know each of us like bring an interview occasionally super useful and efficient but absolutely there are times when we can get somebody on here and interview them live in this exact time slot perfect uh so

SPEAKER_17: let's talk a little bit about how we read the news because i think most days we'll do the news together

SPEAKER_02: some days if you're not available i'm totally capable of doing solo news um i don't know if you ever

SPEAKER_107: done the news solo but you've done segments not on this week in startups not on this week in startups

SPEAKER_108: um so i think it's possible uh i have hosted you know marketplace national radio show yeah um but

SPEAKER_00: when you do that you do those the day before or is it the morning of like explain the process because it's slightly different than here where it's like people are like oh i've known j cal entrepreneur

SPEAKER_17: investor he's reading the news and then giving his um opinion on that you don't you don't get to give

SPEAKER_113: your opinion right you just have to or too much opinion on make me smart yes and then of course there

SPEAKER_25: were the six years of buzz out loud where that where it was essentially this exact format every single day yeah so yes i think um because as you said we're like t minus 10 days right now i'm not officially here everybody like don't get used to this january she's gonna enjoy her breaks is when this actually will start but um yes there's a beautiful script that right now is all j cal and we can totally i think we just split up the blocks i love that we're basically just planning by the way the show in real time and zen prophet just said molly needs to learn how to do ad reads i'm not even

SPEAKER_39: oh wow that's actually i'm sweating that did you ever do ad reads on any of the other programs i'm sure no and it was like religion right it was like the host does not do ad read because

SPEAKER_125: sure capital j journalism i know i'm totally like oh well i think this is why gonna be like

SPEAKER_00: i think this is why kara swisher stopped being putting herself into journalist and became a

SPEAKER_42: commentator fully and doesn't work full time at new york times i've actually talked to her about this is so she can just be full opinion but i don't know if the audience of the new york times perceives her as like something separate than a new york times journalist i don't think they have the sophistication to do that but she does read the ads i'm not sure if she reads them i think she reads them on sway and then obviously vox does very well and uh but you know you don't have to read the ads i'm fine reading the ads um i find it kind of fun and i i was thinking today it might be interesting if when we sell the ads they could actually check a box and say you know jason molly mix it up you know like almost like because i have a feeling there might be people who might prefer you to read the ads uh products yeah you should just work in like a little uh low premium yeah take

Jason Calacanis: this opportunity to be like if you want molly like you know she's coming off this whole journalism gig you're gonna but you're not opposed to it so that's good you need some convincing

SPEAKER_08: well no i mean i was actually gonna bring it up to you off air but i think talking about how the sausage made here with the with the fans and the super fans and the pod is kind of interesting uh so we'll

SPEAKER_42: have to figure that out and have to talk to the sales team about that ideally what would be great is if we told people they didn't have a choice um and just said you know the ads will be read by one of the

SPEAKER_48: two hosts yeah if you have a preference you can select a preference here we'll do our best to accommodate and then i guess in rare instances somebody we could have them do that but you know

SPEAKER_42: usually we get the ads the week our standard is to give us the ads the week before so i tend to do the ad reads the week before and i'm good at it and people like it and i'll be totally honest when people buy the ads on podcasts i don't know what your perception is i think half the reason they do it is for the implied endorsement or it's nice to hear the host read it whether it's joe rogan you

SPEAKER_146: know or kara swisher or anybody in between and then half of it is like the actual performance of

SPEAKER_97: the ads did they do something for their business yep yep i mean i remember way back when you and

SPEAKER_70: i were podcasting at the same i mean when buzz out loud was on the ads became and we didn't read

SPEAKER_25: them but we would have people on staff read them and the ads became a character on the show i mean there was like our one of our camera guys charlie read the earth link ads and people started calling him earth link guy and he became a character on the show which is like the most sort of free branding that you can ever get i do think people like the i don't think audiences are as fussy about things

SPEAKER_149: like ad reads as we tend to think they are they're not sitting there like oh that you know molly's

SPEAKER_42: that's what i mean she read that that's embarrassing the only way really time it does happen is when you

SPEAKER_17: look at something like the new york times and their coverage of say facebook and you look at facebook and their propensity to use money to try to create influence and i i think they're spending like 100 million on podcast was the whisper number and i gotta think at least 10 million of that is at the new york times wow so if you watch any podcast or you go to like vox or any of these places

SPEAKER_42: yeah they're simultaneously covering facebook from a very you know i would say advocacy journalism kind

SPEAKER_17: of perspective um while there's a facebook ad saying facebook is doing the best to keep the net evolving and you're like what is this this is very weird juxtaposition that's why i don't think cara

SPEAKER_48: reads facebook ads so i think if they asked her to she wouldn't read them i think that might be the

SPEAKER_42: only exception so there are like these little edge cases where you're like i'm not sure i want to read

SPEAKER_18: that this is just such a good this is going to be a great you know columbia journalism or pointer piece someday like this sort of evolving relationship because way back in the day i don't want to belabor

SPEAKER_25: this show it's going to be like nine hours long but i back in the day it used to be that like you couldn't run like at cnet you couldn't run a samsung ad on a samsung review that was just verboten like no way was samsung allowed to place an ad on the page that reviewed the samsung you know way back in whatever it was back in the day now like forget it samsung can just buy like i mean the whole sort of ecosystem has changed as audiences have gotten trained to be less sensitive to those things yeah and yet we would get emails all the time at marketplace with that cognitive dissonance we've got emails about underwriting it now it's public radio and so it might be because people donated but like there still are some i would be very curious to hear what your audience thinks about

SPEAKER_17: yeah i don't think they care all that much you know what we do in the ad reads is i'm very specific with our producers make sure that if there's any claim in it we say who's making the claim right so if i were to say hey this company is the greatest number one crm in the world according to whom you

SPEAKER_00: know according to themselves according to a gartner group so you know and then some there's like over aggressive marketers who do silly things like maybe clip the ad and then edit it and put it on their own social media and we're like no no the ads only exist here you're not buying an actual

SPEAKER_17: endorsement where jacal's like i eat you know this specific neurotropic every day this mattress is

SPEAKER_164: amazing yeah here i am in it all right i think we belabored at that point if you don't have business

SPEAKER_83: insurance you failed one of the first steps of being a great founder startups should look no further than in broker brokers technology saves you time and money prices are like up to 20 lower and they got better coverage than all these slow incumbents you can go from sign up to quote and purchase in just 10 minutes i kid you not and when you work with in broker instead of business insurance incumbents you're not dealing with large slow corporations the sign up takes days not weeks and the process is so transparent there's no opaque pricing there's no negotiation you just get it all done easy peasy lemon squeezy i'm going to

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SPEAKER_167: all right thanks for supporting the show on broker love you guys oh and kai ristoll uh followed me and

SPEAKER_172: dm'd me or i dm'd him i just want to let you know that's so nice oh well you don't know what he said to

SPEAKER_12: me oh yeah really good point um no i said to him after the show then because i want to know no no i i said to

SPEAKER_00: him he said uh i said hey new follower and he was like hey you know i'll i'll just tell you general

SPEAKER_48: terms but uh because i didn't clear with him to say but you know he was just happy for you or whatever and uh i just told him like listen it's a real bummer for me because i really like to listen to make me smarter and you guys had such a great rapport together so it was bittersweet you know that she's coming here but obviously i'm super happy and he was i think super happy that you have

SPEAKER_176: to be a venture capitalist too uh for people who are wondering one of the oh good yeah say something

SPEAKER_25: nice about kai right no i was just gonna say that's so nice maybe sometime we'll have a line

SPEAKER_146: talk about macroeconomics absolutely yes he's awesome and uh for fans of the show one of the

SPEAKER_17: segments we're gonna make is molly is gonna learn how to be an investor that's why she's here you know half time on media half time on investing which is basically what i do uh or pretty close to it so we'll do segments maybe you know on the show on some regular cadence i'll let molly produce it um and uh we'll just talk about what molly's learning about investing and then we'll have little debates about the best practices or how to do interviews so for those of you who are interested in venture

SPEAKER_25: as a career molly's gonna produce some segments on that it's gonna be great i'm so excited i have a super massive notes file of just like topics to discuss from from my early homework and my early reading i i mean honestly i think learning in public is always valuable for everybody and like i said this industry is so fascinating and confusing and complex and there are rules but sometimes there aren't rules it seems like and you have such a long experience that i just think this is going to be a blast

Chamath Palihapitiya: okay so when we do news i'm excited for it too um when we do news what is your philosophy of who

SPEAKER_17: reads it and then who comments on it in terms of if i have more commentary on it should you read it or should i read it go into my commentary take or take a question from you what do you think the best way

SPEAKER_12: to pass the ball there is i think that generally like if we're getting going to be in a situation

SPEAKER_25: and i suspect we are like today you brought two stories i brought two stories probably best if like i introduce your story and then you talk about it so it's not a big old monologue and then vice

SPEAKER_17: versa okay great so then that means with the uh can you read the web three one you don't have to do the

SPEAKER_12: yoda voice you tricked me yes i absolutely can i know totally had said indeed the web three wars have

SPEAKER_25: inevitably begun and they've happened so soon before most people even know what the hell you're talking about jack dorsey elon uh balaji and a16z were involved in some back and forth on twitter last night starting with this tweet from jack dorsey a like sub tweets to the industry at 11 pm eastern on monday just sitting there thinking and he tweets you don't own web3 the vcs and their lps do it will never escape their incentives it's ultimately a centralized entity with a different label know what you're getting

SPEAKER_17: into and jason thought oh wow fire shots fired for sure and uh this was just the start of it uh this started for people with the take yeah what do you think well with his take um he's he's correct um web3 is a term that uh existed actually 10 years ago and it was for the semantic web which was going to be a web that was designed as objects and you could pull a recipe and you know ingredients would be one object steps would be another and it would be like a programmable but more on a content and object basis um and that was i think tim berners lee suggested it as web3 now the concept of web3 means the cohort of technologies around um cryptocurrency what are those it's decentralized not one person is

SPEAKER_42: running it there's just a bunch of service i talk to each other but nobody owns it servers can come on off in the network but there's no microsoft or amazon servers or twitter running the server farm

SPEAKER_149: right and it seems like sort of crypto and blockchain underlie that but yeah so this is the shots fired

SPEAKER_25: tweet then this twitter user replied nice with the following so you know coming back at jack with the following wsj headline from a december 18th article saying jack dorsey and the unlikely revolutionaries who want to reboot the internet the subhead of that story said members of the tech elite are banding together to bring the web back to its idealist origins they call their vision web3 so then jack replied to that and said no no no i have nothing to do with web3 wall street journal

SPEAKER_18: and others need names and photos to generate clicks how about how he's fired on everybody i mean i don't

SPEAKER_13: know what neurotropics he did last night but he was he was hopped up i'm going to say indica indica

SPEAKER_00: really good point indica's in make sure inward sativa make sure more energy i think it's on a sativa

SPEAKER_25: i read a whole thing about how both of those are like a myth because there aren't any actual standards and so whatever they're labeled means nothing but either way whatever it was he was got that he's got that big jack energy he had big jack energy so then balaji writes back and says so now it's starting to become a blue check war balaji writes back i respect you and everything you built i also disagree here twitter started as a protocol the free speech wing of the free speech party then corporate and political incentives led to de-platforming and censorship web3 offers the possibility not guarantee of something better i thought this was totally fascinating because

SPEAKER_12: it's that was like grafting on your own issue to frankly a completely different conversation yeah

SPEAKER_17: balaji is very smart he's like the head of the debate club um and what he doesn't realize as the head of the debate club um and he's been on the spot and all in and we're friendly um he's debating on twitter with the guy who created twitter maybe not the best strategy to come at that guy and what

SPEAKER_42: he put in there is he started with a compliment which means you know the insult's coming oh yeah the compliment is like i respect and love you you're the greatest and then he's like but social media platforms are the reason for decentralization i don't know if you caught that subtle you know little stab he's talking about twitter itself as a centralized product and facebook obviously right

SPEAKER_31: um and of course uh elon jumps in has anyone seen web3 i can't find it and there's some backstory here

SPEAKER_25: but let's keep going there is wait i want to hear the backstory do we have to let's just get through the next two tweets and then i'll give you the backstory all right yeah so then now i like this new ping pong that we've just started this is great and so then jack replies to elon it's somewhere

SPEAKER_213: between a and z drop the mic oh he means a16z you guys the venture firm that she worked at

SPEAKER_215: let's raise like a bird jillion dollars to invest in crypto and elon musk replies m something something

SPEAKER_12: i'm not sure what that would actually mean that one i didn't get that one i was hoping that you did but i didn't so something something so then elon jumps in with something that suggests that maybe

SPEAKER_25: he didn't get the a16z reference oh i'm just saying that's a possibility then is when it gets heavy

SPEAKER_17: yes this is the chris dixon one chris dixon is the lead partner at andreessen horowitz who has invested i'm going to guess over a billion dollars into crypto projects and why don't you read that one for

SPEAKER_25: us yes uh so then chris dixon jumps in with a subtweet first they ignore you then they laugh at you

SPEAKER_12: then they fight you we are here then you win and then jack is like oh hell no you're a fun determined

SPEAKER_31: to be a media empire that can't be ignored not gandhi oh my lord these guys have no idea what post

SPEAKER_234: ceo of twitter jack is going to be like oh you're totally right that's exactly jack unleashed

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SPEAKER_17: after dark it is jack unleashed jack gone wild he has jumped the fence and uh he does not care and um he is taking no prisoners he believes in the early version of the web i can tell you from personal

SPEAKER_48: conversations with him uh we're not besties or anything like that but you know i know jack for

SPEAKER_17: a long time and um you know he's a fundamental open platform guy and he is uh the other backstory i believe is that andreason horowitz didn't invest in twitter or square i think it might have been square they got turned down i think and then also uh and this i don't think anybody's ever talked about publicly but there was talk when twitter was at its bottom of a twitter buyout and i know that

SPEAKER_48: andreason horowitz was trying to do a twitter buyout that's not public knowledge but i have a lot of

David Friedberg: non-public information that i share on this program somebody if some journalist wants to now it is now so good luck with that amazing so i'll give you the backstory here um somebody sent elon the video

SPEAKER_17: of me talking about i don't know if you saw that bill gates video where bill gates is trying to

SPEAKER_00: explain the internet to david letterman and then somebody who's a fan of this show made a tick tock out of it and then i and that tick tock went viral got like two or three million views on tick tock where i just basically explain like yeah explaining web 2 or explaining the internet like bill gates is trying to do there is how i feel when i try to explain web 3 to people it's just and that doesn't mean i endorse web 3 necessarily or i don't think they're scams and all kinds of problems but it's just the general feeling i have but this person clipped it almost as if i'm like the web 3 you

SPEAKER_17: know super proponent and it's okay it's a fan doing a super clip i get it that went viral somebody sent it to elon elon asked me if he could tweet it i was like originally no and then he wound up

SPEAKER_00: tweeting like a week later because i told him okay um so he tweeted that that went viral and that's when this whole web 3 thing started to get momentum because he did a follow-up tweet to that video he said just to be clear i am not saying i know what web 3 is i think web 3 sounds kind of like a marketing bs

SPEAKER_17: which let's face it it is marketing it's just marketing and if you look at at the core of this is you know jack's view that the so that's the video uh that people can watch later but if you look at uh elon's follow-up reply you'll see um that he's very clear like listen i'm not endorsing

SPEAKER_25: maybe you could uh read that one molly i'm not suggesting web 3 is real seems more marketing buzzword than reality right now just wondering what the future will be like in 10 20 or 30 years

SPEAKER_17: 2051 sounds crazy futuristic yeah so to be clear there's there's a multitude of issues here one of them is is what we're building actually truly an independent decentralized no middlemen no intermediary

SPEAKER_08: version of the internet which by the way is what the internet was in the beginning exactly so this

SPEAKER_12: idea i am so happy that you and i can age ourselves in this way because it's like oh were any of you

SPEAKER_25: peanuts around for the internet a set of decentralized protocols that could connect computers and

SPEAKER_17: information that nobody owned and nobody controlled and rss feeds and html like nobody owned these it's called open standards um and so this is just like a 10 that what they're defining web 3 is kind of like this little 10 on top of it which is technically the servers aren't owned or controlled

SPEAKER_00: by everybody which is a very nuanced point in other words the software on the servers is open source the internet itself is not controlled by everybody but yeah when somebody puts a database like imdb or twitter a database of tweets or flickr or whatever on the internet it can become a wall garden of you

SPEAKER_256: know they control those servers and the data on them and it all had to like if you sort of compare the

SPEAKER_25: internet if you assume that when people say web 3 and i think this is the case now they mean some version of crypto and more importantly blockchain right they mean this kind of like decentralized usage of information and tracking and public ledgers and the kind of open availability of the information about what happens on the blockchain that's what they're talking about and that is it seems the the potential that jack sees in terms of it being a revolutionary and disruptive force even though he himself is one of the people who created an organizing principle around what was a messy ugly hard to understand set of open protocols and decentralized information sharing that needed a user interface and an organization and inevitably drew people who went like huh i bet i could make some money on this and as we well know the like driving principle of all business is monopoly and so we had

SPEAKER_159: an internet that became the web that ended up controlled by a number of monopolies yeah google and jack

SPEAKER_200: is like even though i did that i hope that doesn't happen with the blockchain you know and in super fairness

SPEAKER_00: to him he started inside of twitter years ago a project to make a decentralized version of twitter and the ability for you which was his brilliant suggestion which i had never heard prior to him making it uh bring your own algorithm write your own algorithms and when you open up twitter if you want to have an algorithm that emphasizes kindness or you know fact-based organizations and i want to have one that you know is a free-for-all and then somebody else wants to have one that's like their closest friends plus timeliness or something we could all tweak our algorithms in real time and let the best algorithm win and maybe somebody would say i want an algorithm that removes trolling from the far left and far right and that would be called the troll free algorithm and when you log into twitter it's like here's like the app store of algorithms that was jack's idea i believe and i mean he was looking at twitter as a way to you know cross the chasm and and decentralize it and make it more

SPEAKER_17: customizable yeah um the second piece of this puzzle is it's a lot of money being made right now right and people don't want to talk about how that money is being made uh but the how the money is being made is in many cases illegal um and non-traditional uh would be the kind way to say it and so what i mean

SPEAKER_42: by that is there are security laws and crypto tokens which entries and horowitz which is at the core of this they are the ones who have a media company that is ramming down people's throat web 3.0 they're buying up all of these tokens and here is what cynical people or concerned people have been telling me on the back channel and i always like to talk about the back channel um to the point i can so i'm not gonna put anybody's names on this but andreason horowitz is got a really great footprint of people investing in crypto so good on them they're working hard they're they're deep embedded deeply embedded in crypto ecosystem and they've been making bets for a long time great that's what they're supposed

SPEAKER_08: to do they also get to buy the tokens in many cases before the public gets to buy the token

SPEAKER_00: they also get to buy them at discounted prices maybe with some extra rights plus they're investing in the company in other words they've created two cap tables one for the global economy of anonymous buyers of tokens and then they have like the actual cap table following delaware law they're

SPEAKER_42: participating in both of these things and what people have told me is like now they're buying these

SPEAKER_17: tokens and they control the companies or have a big not control but they have a big seat at the table in the companies like let's say a board seat uh or they own 25 of it or 15 of the company now if you were to take the most cynical approach uh non-accredited investors can't buy into that company let's call the company i don't know acme crypto you can't as a non-accredited uh investor just in the audience if you're making under 200 000 a year you can't buy equity in acme

SPEAKER_42: uh crypto but you could buy the tokens on you know any a number of exchanges and adres and horowitz bought those tokens at a lower price than you because they were there at inception now the tokens are going up and adres and horowitz won't shut up about the company and they have a media channel so what the sec if you were to swap out the word token for security and you are working at marketplace for a long time understand public markets and the rules molly yep how would the sec interpret

SPEAKER_08: an insider buying low pumping and security to a group of people who are non-accredited investors on a global basis who they don't even know and those people buying it and let's say we don't know this let's say andre's and horowitz was selling some of their tokens i don't know if that's true or not

SPEAKER_00: but if they were selling them uh or and pumping it or they weren't selling them and pumping it and they had this huge vested interest both in the cap table uh and the tokens on the token side that

SPEAKER_17: would be considered either some combination if the tokens were securities insider trading um or market manipulation now in a private company if i said when uber was private i love ubers everybody should

SPEAKER_42: try uber uber eats is dope uber blocks great i'm an investor in the company you know there's nothing there because you can't publicly trade the stock it's private the the equities are not available

SPEAKER_17: when the company goes public you start to have a higher authority of you know are you speaking for the company etc as a board member so well that's just the issue i wanted to highlight right like we

SPEAKER_25: should clarify that the first part of what you have described is exactly how venture capital works like the the vcs invest in the company i know i know because i've been reading the book yeah in the company they get a certain number of shares that are preferred by the way they're better than the shares that people will be able to buy when they get on the comp on the public market and therefore they have this like preferred position within the company some ownership and they promote the company because they want their shares to perform better over time the difference i think as you've described it is that they're not also out there on a private market for stock in that company buying all the other stock right and then trying to pump up the company and pretending that they don't own those other shares the tokens common bucket the tokens yeah tokens we should say at this point the sec is still wrestling why it still works and is a gray area and there's so much money to be made real real quick before the sec figures it out is because they have not figured out how to specifically uh categorize tokens they don't know yet if they're securities they have not determined them to officially be securities in every case so in the absence of those rules katie bar the door make all the money you want and it seems like you were suggesting on twitter that like that might be the part that chris dixon doesn't want to talk about i think that's probably the part chris

SPEAKER_48: dixon doesn't want to talk about or anybody who's deep in crypto is what are their rules what are their

SPEAKER_17: lockups how are they be able to liquidate their position in what order right so there are all these rules with chairs around who can sell their shares in what order concept of party pursue if we're going to sell 10 of the company every shareholder gets to sell 10 of their holdings not just one so that you know people can have some you know equality uh in the representation of their shares none of that exists here and everybody knows when you're buying a token is there anybody buying these

SPEAKER_00: tokens um who of a thousand people buying the token how many are buying them independent of the appreciation of the price in other words they don't care about that the only situation i could see that happening would be if people were buying tokens in some video game where the primary use

SPEAKER_17: is to play the video game right right but in these cases everybody's buying these with some anticipation of the price going up where they wouldn't have bought them yeah um and the apps wouldn't have charts and people drawing pictures on them like trying to predict where these things are going and so this is great uh this is a great debate for us to have and you really need to have the government the sec and these agencies just say listen if you want to sell tokens it's a security

SPEAKER_42: if people are buying them for them to appreciate and you and then if we get rid of the accreditation

SPEAKER_17: laws that levels the playing field yeah and i think that that's the easiest solution here because you know it's going to be the circular debate about oh you hate innovation like every time i bring this

SPEAKER_48: up that it's unfair that one group of people playing by the rules and the other group is just running amok people are like oh you hate innovation boomer and i'm like and i i own like seven figures worth of bitcoin but okay sure i'm a boomer right um like i think that is the issue is just leveling

SPEAKER_00: the playing field now if everybody was allowed to buy tokens or private company securities what's the issue which is why these things work overseas right i don't know if you know this but you can sell these tokens in europe you know in a lot of other countries a lot of countries in europe and a lot of countries

SPEAKER_240: around the world no problem because you're allowed to do with your money what you will in those i mean

SPEAKER_25: in some ways the the part that chris dixon is right about is that this is in fact the inevitable evolution of a brand new economic sea change and we're in the part of the evolution where the people who understand it are in the position to make a lot of money on off of it yeah there are idealists who want it to be and then and then frankly the question of centralized or decentralized is almost off to the side because the fact is everything is going to become everything becomes centralized the end right there is no like we're not using linux right now everything centralizes and frankly it has to because that's the only way you get adoption if you think about how difficult it is to

SPEAKER_17: use these services we have yet to have something like bit torrent you know or things before it become easy to use other decentralized protocols had to be kind of masked in something like kazaa or napster in order for it to be productized so that would be the big challenge of this is can somebody productize that it make nfts as easy as buying something on amazon right and trading them and maybe we'll get there all right i think we beat this horse uh pretty hard but there is uh some breaking news i had uh tweeted something about like you probably don't want to start a fight with uh you know the guy the guy who created twitter um but then uh sax jumped in and put like uh he made a joke about

SPEAKER_25: the warning uh molly why don't you read this yeah he's saying thousands de-platformed lab leak theory censored first amendment in jeopardy jack oh does something happen i've been in an ashram someone criticizes web 3 jack how dare you so suggesting here that jack has allowed the principles of free speech to be destroyed on his platform again i am fascinated i know these guys are your homies but i am fascinated by how this conversation in jack's mind about technology decentralization has become a way for them to come in and be like we're mad at you about uh you know monitoring speech on your platform which again when you centralize ps that's what happens society is censorship yeah yeah

SPEAKER_304: i mean somebody has to be responsible you have liability to be clear david sachs is my bestie but

SPEAKER_17: we have very different political beliefs um and we've been able to maintain our friendship uh through that barely um you do a great job on the show but he oh thank you he um is uh you know very much into free speech like many of us are and what he doesn't recognize here is that jack also is super free speech but jack i think had a hard time maintaining the service known as twitter in the age of trump which is the trolley car problem you know the unsolvable problem of no wind situation was it kobayashi maru in star trek orleans or the trolley problem yeah it's just an unwinnable game running

SPEAKER_00: twitter in the age of a savant like trump who knows exactly how to tweet like right along the line of the terms of service he's like somebody's pin the terms of service and like here's what you can tweet he's like okay great and he just he's like yeah you know i'm so proud of these people or those people and

SPEAKER_31: those people are tearing into the you know yeah the capitol building or something i mean those issues

SPEAKER_159: existed before on twitter and it was grappling with it and you know it was it was it's the question

SPEAKER_25: it is the question that monetization drives is are you going to let your product become an unusable cesspool where there's abuse where there's fraud where there's fakery where there are things that to put it bluntly advertisers don't want to be associated with and that is why like call it all your censorship is a tool of governments not private companies if private companies want to make money they're going to censor i've witnessed john cena walking back the geographically accurate statement that taiwan is a country so that he can keep selling movies yes china was the most apology i've

SPEAKER_31: seen in my life i was like do the chinese have like a shotgun off screen pointed at him or something yeah so sad yeah it was a billion dollars oh that was what it was the shotgun was filled with like a

SPEAKER_30: million dollars the shotgun is the chinese market for movies the nba did the same thing the olympic

SPEAKER_25: committee did the same thing i mean it's so it's it's just like anyway i yeah well i think jack there's so many conversations i've been so excited to have with you on this podcast and i don't want to have them all today because we have you know the rest of forever but like oh it's gonna be so

SPEAKER_72: great well i mean and i think sax is having fun sort of making fun of jack the fact is i think jack and so is wiladji saying the same thing yeah i think jack's done a great job and these guys are both

SPEAKER_00: right-wing guys who feel who are really agree that trump got thrown off and i can tell you sax

SPEAKER_17: is a complete baby about the january 6 insurrection which i brought on an episode of all in and then he refused to publish the discussion and was like let's not because we have an agreement on all in if

SPEAKER_00: anybody doesn't like a topic we can skip it after we've edited it after we've done the show and i brought

SPEAKER_08: it up and he lost the debate to me like just handily and he's like you know what the january 6 stuff is going to come out like three weeks we should take this out and i was like no i want to

SPEAKER_42: leave it in and he's like well the rule is you know anyone who wants to take it out and i was like okay so he is really upset about the january 6 thing being considered an insurrection and all that and trump being kicked off so that's where he's coming from and he's he's fighting for his team which is the republican right um but jack is a free speech guy to be clear sure yeah absolutely

SPEAKER_25: let's see the reply uh from katherine bronsky was wait wasn't he the one who criticized web3 though which is true yes jack is the one who said whatever we're calling web3 right now is being co-opted and is becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of essentially one bc firm uh but certainly he is saying these private interests like it was everybody and their personal issues right and whether your issue is free speech or your issue is i want everything to be centralized and decentralized in the future or your issue is i want to make a crap ton of money on the blockchain everybody's or it's reports trump

SPEAKER_17: being kicked off of twitter and free speech and how generally speaking twitter has leaned more left

SPEAKER_316: than bit because the other backstory here is last week uh we talked about this terrorist but okay okay

SPEAKER_342: sure yeah now we just got a bunch of trump fans of the youtube comments she's called trump a terrorist

SPEAKER_08: i mean what is somebody who inspires a revolution a revolution in insurrection i guess it depends on where you sit um but last week we're gonna get to rivian any minute by the way what's that i said we're

SPEAKER_00: gonna get to rivian any minute by the way any minute now um last week sax um got a label on his twitter saying some of these conversations are heated there's a human behind it so he was a little bit tweaked like i'm the only person getting this because i'm republican and i'm right-wing and the truth is a lot of other people got it i got it so i this was when i was yelling i was yelling at my

SPEAKER_25: headphones while i was walking the dogs listening to that episode because i got that warning when i tweeted

SPEAKER_15: about my climate change podcast yes so basically every day this morning here's the thing i just found out though because i was in a group chat uh which is basically where all these like i was in one of

SPEAKER_08: these back channels with people and in that back channel uh somebody had the label he's like oh i got labeled and we all clicked on it and it was like four of us didn't see the label and two of us did and i was like oh wait a second what's the thread there so it's not that they're labeling a person it's that they're labeling a person and the recipient of the tweet so this is a more sophisticated

SPEAKER_42: algorithm it might be that you know me looking at as a climate i'm not a climate down a climate denier looking at yours might see that but somebody who you know didn't have passion about climate might not i don't know or maybe blue checks don't see it so i would love it if someone on twitter could come

SPEAKER_250: on and explain how this works they've been great actually uh yeah we have them are usually very

SPEAKER_25: open exactly about how they're implementing these tools and i would love to hear it they're the

SPEAKER_296: opposite of uh yeah they're the opposite of the other one facebook yeah in this regard all right let's should we just go right over to rivian let's do it okay rivian had a negative earnings

SPEAKER_00: report last week and the stock is down 45 percent uh since the peak rivian uh hit 150 billion dollar

SPEAKER_17: market cap in november as you know and since then the stock has dropped from 172 a share to 96 dollars

SPEAKER_00: a share current market cap 86 billion dollars earnings report rivian disclosed it will be a few hundred cars short of its goal of 1200 vehicles built in 2021 they have only produced 652 as of

SPEAKER_17: december 15th and they've delivered 386 of those so what you're seeing here is the fun with numbers and companies that are behind like to do companies that are ahead like apple just say like we sold this many phones companies that are behind play games like we've produced 652 vehicles uh we only delivered 386 of them you know which means like are they actually done i would wonder um a few hundred is a big miss if your goal was only 1200 obviously um i saw one in the wild and i got very excited is how

SPEAKER_366: sure we've been in the wild that's fantastic i took a picture of it i heard it's a decent car uh people

SPEAKER_39: seem to like it yeah actually a lovely truck i mean i really was like that thing is hot they should make

SPEAKER_00: like a couple hundred more of those you know that's the thing is like making a prototype and making a

SPEAKER_17: hundred thousand cars two very different things yeah last month on episode 1324 we covered the ipo

SPEAKER_144: when they raised uh just over 13 billion and here's what i said about their valuation okay this is a

SPEAKER_165: 34 second clip we'll see you on the other side rivian should be worth if i uh gave them just an incredible

SPEAKER_369: amount of credit if you gave rivian uh a million dollars in valuation for every truck they'd sold that would be 50 billion that'd be kind of crazy because you don't make a million dollars off each one so if you gave them a hundred thousand in value it would be worth five billion i think five billion would be a fine valuation for rivian right now uh but obviously they've raised all this money so they have to have a valuation over 17 billion because that's how much cash they have so maybe double that 40 billion even there it doesn't make much sense so what i'm trying to do there molly is

SPEAKER_17: back of the envelope math trying to come up with my own unique valuation techniques to explain to

SPEAKER_00: people how to look at these things you have a certain amount of cash in the company i think their cash holdings was up to 17 billion they raised some in the ipo they had some from funding before then so if you net out the cash right because if you were worth i don't know if you had 17 billion dollars in a bank account and you had no ideas and a company name would be 17 billion dollars would be the value of the company the value of the cash so you have to separate the cash out so if you net out the cash how do you value a company with you know however many pre-orders they have i put 100 000 in value on each one uh maybe that means each car if they made 10 000 in profit on each car each car

SPEAKER_17: represents 10 more cars in the future that they'll eventually get to what you can come up with all different ways to do division uh into valuations but i think it's a 25 billion company maybe 30 and that's one of the big problems right now in the market is this disconnection from what you've actually

SPEAKER_42: done yeah and how your company is valued and so i knew that anybody buying at these high prices would lose half their money i will say this now if you were my if like molly if you had if you were like should i buy the stock jason we weren't on air i would say uh if you really love the company i would wait a year uh because they're so overvalued that maybe in the next year they're gonna grow into their valuation uh but i could see it also losing not just half but i could see it losing 75 of its value now yeah i could see it going half from here and then half again one of the which remains

Jason Calacanis: that i found so fast i will say when i saw it in the wild after listening to i had listened to that

SPEAKER_25: episode where you did the back of the envelope math because we both talked about rivian on our two shows that day and i when it drove by i told my son like that's a billion dollar truck based on their valuation um one of the things i found so fascinating about rivian and the reason i 100 agree with you which is wait a year and see what happens is that right after it went public days later because one of the things you talked about was the weirdness of the ford deal ford having this big deal with rivian despite making the f-150 lightning an electric pickup truck that it's really pushing as a mainstream pickup so like why would ford be in bed with rivian maybe it's a negligible amount of money they don't care it's like how gm is still invested in what is the one nicola um yes because it's like they don't care right they're just putting placing bets and maybe one of them will pay off but almost immediately after rivian went public ford announced the dissolution of that deal said oh right by the way now that we made all our money on the spo yeah we're not going to be making trucks with rivian anymore which i found borderline legal feeling but also i'm

SPEAKER_17: guessing we'll find they'll have to disclose that in the future we'll find out i'm guessing you know

SPEAKER_00: listen if ford had sold you know somewhere near the peak now that it's got cut in half um they would still have their entire ownership theoretically in what their current value is now plus all that cash right so the right move for ford uh would be and for shareholders would be to sell every single

SPEAKER_08: share of rivian right now as quick as possible even at half the value they should sell every share and they should redeploy that money into the f-150 since they are competitors and by the way if you look at ford's economics the f-150 and trucks are their profit center they barely make money or they lose money on other cars trucks are the profit center and trucks are their franchise like trucks are to ford what like hamburgers are to mcdonald's like it's just is their product so they have to defeat rivian

SPEAKER_17: so you know sometimes a strategic will place a bet on a company to get close to it because they know it's a threat and that's what you see when these companies do it which is why speaking to being investors at some point we will invest in a company and that company will say oh one of the banks wants to invest and we'll say they can invest you know do you have other funding sources if so take that money because this uh investment means they're just trying to get information get

SPEAKER_42: closer to us and they're trying to get the pole position on an acquisition it really isn't what you want as a venture capitalist or as a founder right you want uh an auction for the company or for the company to go public so you want people competing for the company so ford you know is gm going to buy a

SPEAKER_17: company and then give ford ten percent of the returns or ford maybe had the right to block a sale who knows what the rights were this does not mean i don't think rivian is qualified people who made a beautiful car we're strictly talking about here the disconnect between the price of the company

SPEAKER_380: and the actual uh performance right amazon also owning 20 is crazy many their order is not yeah the

SPEAKER_25: order is not that big i was gonna say many people would make the same argument about tesla right the price to earnings ratio also does not yeah hold up when you consider the number of vehicles on the road now tesla obviously is in lots of other businesses yeah self-driving nevertheless price earning like if price earnings is the only thing we're talking about here like you could say that rivian and tesla are in sort of similar camps in terms of value but one of them does produce products

SPEAKER_17: so far i think one of them has a million cars on the road and one has 350 i mean that's a that's i mean there's a big jump between those two and i think if you look at the valuation in the beginning with tesla too tesla was worth like three billion yeah and there was the whole tesla short movement so people really didn't believe that tesla was going to go anywhere right and the amazon you know they never discussed this and i've tried to get the answer for maybe one of our

SPEAKER_45: fans has inside information you know uh has found the information on the web they can email

SPEAKER_42: producers at thisweekandstartups.com is that amazon order guaranteed and guaranteed at what milestones because nicola had all these orders for their vehicles that turned out to be a total fraud you know sec investigation doj investigation all this stuff and i when i had the founder on this pod i was like you know trying to figure out if it's real and it was just obviously not very real um and those orders typically cost they're called letters of intent in the industry a letter of intent is like basically the same as saying nothing nothing on a piece of paper like i will buy a billion cars signed ford signed amazon it means nothing and so what happens is in these structures they will ask

SPEAKER_00: the um company hey we'll let you invest in the company has this low price will you give us a letter of intent to buy this many vehicles it's not binding of course we just we need the social proof and so literally both parties are in on that because they're like oh i bought equity in the company now i layer on top of the equity a bogus order a non-binding order i would say bogus they would

SPEAKER_17: say it's just non-binding and then their stock goes up so if amazon says today we're going to up our hundred thousand to five hundred thousand and they own twenty percent of the company they just made

SPEAKER_25: tens of billions of dollars when the stock pops yeah which i think is exactly what ford just did but ford then announced our deal is over after they made the money yeah and yeah the other thing i would want to know from amazon is what cost center that money came from because if it came from because i i my my back channels suggest that amazon needs to start stashing that climate pledge money pretty much anywhere so if the rivian investment was made as part of the climate pledge then that to me makes it a tiny bit more suspect all right more back of the envelope math and i agree

SPEAKER_17: with that point at an 80 billion dollar market cap they're getting a million one in credit for their 71 000 deposits these are fully refundable deposits uh and cost a thousand dollars i will say getting a thousand dollars for somebody on a even a refundable order is a major deal um people don't part with a thousand dollars um you know for something that's going to come in years uh so i

SPEAKER_00: do think that's a real thing if you give rivian uh a hundred thousand dollars of credit for every single deposit and delivery the market cap would be 7.1 billion five billion less than what they raised at their ipo rivian pickup truck start at 67 500 so if they deliver 10 000 sold cars next year that'd be

SPEAKER_42: 675 million in booked revenue and a market cap of 80 billion the price to sales ratio would be 118 price when you say price to sales means the valuation of the company but for some reason they don't say

SPEAKER_48: valuation to sales they just say price it's implied it's the price of the company so that is put this

SPEAKER_398: way sas companies are valued at 20 to 50 times there's no way a physical product in the real world should be valued at 118 times yeah that's bizarre uh still way too high i would value it at

SPEAKER_17: i don't know let's say 10 times 20 times 30 times i mean if you want to be super gracious about it so if we went 30 times 700 million that's 21 billion something like that so uh this back of the envelope math something to get good at molly um when you're uh assessing startups and my producers were kind enough to do 25x i see here in my notes uh so to hit 25x uh they would need to do 3.2 billion in

SPEAKER_201: sales so they're far off from you know where they would need to be right they'd have to sell and deliver

SPEAKER_25: thank you producers 47 000 cars in 2022 and they have so far kind of whiffed at a couple hundred i mean look less than one percent of that yeah it is so easy for us to sit here right now i mean i will never discount how hard it is to spin up a domestic car company that had not in test until tesla did it that hadn't been done in america in a hundred years like it is a really hard job but if we were to go back in time to when tesla was just going public when tesla was just starting to produce cars i bet if you looked at the number of cars produced and the valuation like i would really be interested to see those charts plotted along the same line all the same skepticism was there they're not going to be able to make these things the valuation is absurd it's all like i i don't know that on a pure numbers and froth basis you can actually count rivian out based on how i think this is because this absurdity has happened before and produced a real car company here's the thing smart entrepreneurs

SPEAKER_17: when the market is hot raise money uh and as much as possible at as solid a valuation as you can so when founders come to me and they say we just raised six i literally had this conversation yesterday

SPEAKER_48: hey you invested you did our series a with us six months ago jacal we've got a lot done and people want to invest more uh but it's only been six months and i'm like so if the valuation was 30 million

SPEAKER_00: at the last round pick a valuation to sell 15 of the company if you think 100 million is the right number and you can tell people we don't need the money we have 30 months of runway or whatever it is in the bank but if you would like to put a term sheet in and do a preemptive we would love to have you as a partner and we could certainly build a plan that would put that capital together and accelerate our progress is that something you might be interested in and i think they will take it down so opportunistic fundraising is smart right and we see that all the time with a secondary i did amc and

SPEAKER_17: i don't know if amc or uh gamestop did secondaries after their stocks got uh run up but you know when

SPEAKER_02: they when this when the meme stocks amc yep and um the movie theater company and gamestop the selling cd

SPEAKER_17: dvd company in physical stores selling games and so amc actually did um a second they sold shares they did a a what's called a secondary offering you know like a public company that just sells more shares and

SPEAKER_42: they put 500 million in the bank so sometimes you could have something that isn't real and then manifest destiny you know fake it till you make it all of a sudden rivian's got all this money in

SPEAKER_13: the bank they're not going anywhere so right maybe they made it and i hope they do make it money can

SPEAKER_25: cover crap tons of money can cover for a multitude of sins for at least a while sure so they can use this crap time to make some trucks now we're talking i love i can't wait to see the battle between

SPEAKER_48: and by the way hey listen i don't want to pump my guy but i think cybertruck has a million deposits is that right uh i know we put it at a lower price i think it's only 500 bucks something like that yeah

SPEAKER_17: but i mean i think it has a million now and uh if half of those were to get actually claimed i mean ford's got a major problem yeah one million deposits for cybertruck i have been playing devil's

SPEAKER_246: advocate with respect to rivian and because you know maybe they'll succeed but listen like once

SPEAKER_25: known but the ford f-150 is the best-selling vehicle in america period full stop every year every single year more than the prius if i didn't live in northern california where like there's just not places to put trucks that size i would have a deposit on a ford f-150 right now like i am a montana girl that truck was announced i was like that's the one but what do they call lightning or something the lightning yeah when no i wanted so bad like i'm obsessed with the lightning it looks cool brands that people know and trucks they have been driving all their lives and cars they've been driving all their lives start making electric vehicles it is going to be so hard for anybody who's not a household name to come in so you know i'm being nice to ribian for the sake of like well it could happen or whatever but the fact is like a known brand is going to eat their lunch when there is an electric bmw that is worth owning and buying and has the range and has the infrastructure like

SPEAKER_425: my tesla is out your bmw girl yeah like that'll be interesting too because we'll see if the bm will

SPEAKER_17: the bmw have to be significantly better or as good as your model you have the model y or three and the

SPEAKER_48: y the y is incredible yeah i just got the dopest snow tires on it uh by the way from finland they're incredible i was just driving in the snow in tahoe and it's incredible i spun out like a little bit

SPEAKER_146: twice and it just gripped immediately it was such a great feeling that's awesome because it's all the

SPEAKER_13: drive and the roof rack i don't have the roof rack or anything like that but um i don't either but i keep seeing the roof rack on the y and i'm like that looks hot it does look pretty good it just

SPEAKER_17: looked good yeah i it kind of i kind of do have uh an affinity for that roof rack because i have this like dream of like the entire car having no bags in it and just being super spacious and you know our jackets thrown in the trunk you know but not you know everything's in the roof rack yeah um so tell me this would the bmw electric have to be as good or better or 10 percent worse let's put 20 20 better as good or 20 worse for you to pull the trigger on trading in your model y to go back to bmw

SPEAKER_25: as a bmw fangirl right i mean that and that's really we're talking about about brand affinity right so for me as a consumer it could definitely be 10 worse and i would still wow um see that would be like i know this car i love it i love how it drives i trust the brand i want you know there's a version there's a universe in which you want like tesla has pushed the envelope on what a car is and that's great but like i don't know what the rain sensing uh wipers are sensing but it's certainly not rain like there's that kind of like there are things that are solved a friend of mine just referred to this idea of brilliant basics like car makers have solved car stuff yes so if they also solve electric for uh for most sort of mainstream consumers that's going to be who have a favorite

SPEAKER_128: brand already that's going to be so see that's that's a point well said because i do think having

SPEAKER_17: had a tesla like being the 16th person to have one in california with the roadster because i'm the 16th

SPEAKER_00: roadster um and i do think like the basic things are things that they had to start from zero so you're correct about like windshield wipers like working properly in terms of like sensing rain like it's quite possible that like the steering column or the design of certain things in a bmw is more refined

SPEAKER_17: than a tesla because they're doing something different or they just haven't yeah they just haven't they've been making cars for longer right yeah and then i think self-driving is the key see this is where i think people are under uh valuing tesla's lead because right now self-driving works i would say flawlessly over 90 on a highway and maybe flawlessly 80 75 to 85 on what i'll call simple streets oh you're like arizona streets or something yeah but i don't use it on local streets because i just prefer to drive and i don't want to deal with the edge cases but on the highway i am

SPEAKER_42: addicted and i i was gonna buy i love corvettes i used to own a corvette and i was like maybe i should

SPEAKER_45: get the new corvette and i was like yeah i can't because it's a gas i don't want to burn gas ever again i care too much about the planet and my daughters will go crazy on me um and i kind of am addicted

SPEAKER_42: to self-driving because it's it's not just that i don't want to pay attention when i'm driving it's that the safety of self-driving and the smoothness of it is for me hard to go backwards on because i

SPEAKER_17: when i'm driving my daughters if i have it on autopilot on the road and i'm paying attention that's much safer than me not being on autopilot and that's what the statistics are showing yeah is that you know putting aside the people doing stupid things with self-driving technology the the majority of people are just getting better and better and better in terms of the number of

SPEAKER_48: accidents like it's really hard to crash a tesla on the highway if you have autopilot on it's just it would have to be some freak thing like a boulder falling from the sky in front of you

SPEAKER_25: like self-driving keeps i believe in the premise and purely as a solo as a one person case i have not had good luck with the software i've had a lot of auto braking on the freeway really now i don't yeah i

SPEAKER_458: don't use it i don't i actually don't never had an auto brake on the freeway i had an auto brake

SPEAKER_25: twice at like 75 miles an hour with my kid in the car like if somebody had been behind us we'd be dead

David Friedberg: and so now i'm just like i don't use it and there was nothing on the road it wasn't like a plastic bag kind of situation huh no the second time i saw a bird yeah but no car should slam on the brakes for a

SPEAKER_18: bird but again i mean again like this is my individual experience right yeah not everybody has

SPEAKER_25: had there are like forums where people talk about auto braking but i assume we're if i i have always had a magnetic field for technology if something can go wrong i'm going to be the person that it goes wrong with which is why i'm like a nightmare tech reviewer but i have had that experience with my

SPEAKER_45: why and here's the thing what's going to happen is we're quickly going to get to the point where i think people are going to start looking at this because self-driving technology is getting here

SPEAKER_409: from multiple venue vendors we're going to start looking at hey in aggregate how much safer are

SPEAKER_17: tesla drivers versus bmw drive you know and that's where or you know the new escalade has self-driving on it or some lane control and so if we see those self-driving systems make people 10 20 30 safer that's going to be like the mega the statistics are starting to show that it's just and i don't know if you saw in the latest tesla app they have the safety score did you turn on your safety score where it grades you so inside the tesla app um exactly but it tells you disengagements from autopilot uh hard stopping you know leaving your lane and it gives you a score out of 100. and so they're basically telling you how good of a driver you are and let's just say there's

SPEAKER_00: another person in my house who drives my car sometimes and um you know like i'm like up in the high 80s trying to get into the 90s and then all of a sudden my score goes down to 70 and then i look and it's like who was driving my car and it's at 55. and i'm terrified i'm just absolutely terrified

SPEAKER_12: to know what my safety score is it's just best if i don't know i'm just saying the car goes really fast

SPEAKER_17: it's zippy all right listen oh there it is so there's your safety score see that that's what it looks like in your tesla app you can go turn it on right now and this is going to be amazing well

SPEAKER_00: here's the thing tesla will say if you're over 90 we'll ensure your vehicle because we can replace your vehicle and so they'll just skim imagine if tesla skim the cream and just said anybody who's above 90 for the past year we'll ensure you please stay above 90. if you go below 90 we're

SPEAKER_17: gonna give you like a warning if you're below my 90 for i don't know 100 days you're gonna have to

SPEAKER_149: find a new insurance provider and i'm literally looking for this in the app right now i am listening

SPEAKER_17: you know so great there's some place where you turn on in settings i think but this is going to

SPEAKER_00: to if tesla does this the most prof this is going to just kill insurance companies because the insurance companies make their money from the most profitable drivers the safest drivers obviously and if you took all the safe drivers and you have the data proving they're safe not they said they're safe not their previous accidents but their real-time data imagine it said we're going to look at every month if you are above 90 you pay you know you pay a hundred dollars if you're in the 80s you pay two hundred dollars if you're in the 70s you pay three hundred dollars that would

SPEAKER_48: be incredible they would just give you your bill at the end of the month based on your score wow yeah

SPEAKER_20: that would be incredible that's only a matter that's yeah i wonder if that's gonna happen i wonder i

SPEAKER_17: wonder all right everybody this has been molly's first show um good job molly uh the producers were

SPEAKER_479: like this is really good we have a good we're we're good together yeah we're good together we're good

SPEAKER_25: together i have that podcasting eye right now though this is really a freaking delight you're smart we don't have to agree all the time as people are saying in the comments we're gonna have a really

SPEAKER_201: good time it'll be fun it's gonna be fun you know it'll be different than what you did in the last couple iterations but you and i have mutual respect and we're not going to agree on anything and it's

SPEAKER_00: gonna be i think it's also good for me it's like it's been lonely i'll be honest because doing the news alone people do like when i do it alone but it's kind of like this ben shapiro existence where like

SPEAKER_17: you know i kind of want to hear somebody challenge my you know opinion like when ben does his show

SPEAKER_08: unless he's a top five podcaster i think he's just like news item here's how you should think about it

SPEAKER_42: news item here's how you should think about it and that's what i do every day and i kind of want somebody else to say like is that true or you know uh we'll know that i say that to my phone when i'm

Jason Calacanis: on my walks all the time when i'm listening to the show so i'm like i'm ready i'm ready you're like no

SPEAKER_484: jacal that is not how the world works uh all right everybody we'll see you uh next time on

SPEAKER_45: this week in startups molly starts the week of january 3rd and uh you can reach all the producers

SPEAKER_17: at once by emailing producers at thisweekinstartups.com if you want to come to a local meetup thisweekinstartups.com meetups and we i think we're on pause because of the uh pandemic stuff for a couple weeks but i think people are going to start them up again in the end of january and that's just founders or founders by founders if you want to learn more you can join our slack which is where we talk just about this show and the meetups and being founders nothing else it's not a marketing

SPEAKER_388: channel for you uh if you're a marketer we will ban you uh every day we ban one person for posting to multiple slack channels um they're marketing nonsense thisweekinstartups.com so there you have it folks whoop whoop we'll see you in 2022 see you next year see you next year everybody